In the Dead: Volume 1

by Jesse Petersen

  “Are those zombies?” Ryan asked.

  James nodded. “They move like them, that’s for sure.”

  Ryan flipped his phone open and pressed a button. “Hey Mom?” he said after a pause.

  James could hear her squealing and yelling. Apparently word had gotten out about the zoo thing.

  “No, we’re okay. No we got out. No we’re not bitten. We had to abandon the car and James twisted his ankle…. Cortez Tower. We’ll wait. Just be careful. I love you too.”

  He closed the phone and looked at James.

  “She’s on her way.”

  “I figured.” James stared down over the city again.

  “So do you remember when we were little and Mom and Dad took us to the zoo every month?” Ryan asked.

  James nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I always went for the bugs and the monkeys,” his brother continued. “But you wanted the lions and the poisonous snakes. I asked you why once.”

  James stared at him. “Jeez, I don’t even remember that. What did I say?”

  Ryan shook his head. “You said that unless something could kill you, unless you could see it plotting against you… it wasn’t that interesting to you.”

  James laughed. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.” They both stared out at the zoo parking lot. There were bodies laying there. Not moving.

  “They’re the lions now,” Ryan said softly.

  James shivered. “Yeah. And now I wish I’d just been happy looking at the bugs.”

  Mr. MacGyver

  The camp smelled like a toilet and looked like the county fairgrounds after all the festivities were packed up. Dirty, beaten up and overly used. Only here there were more people.

  Meghan sighed as she grabbed for her sister’s hand and dragged her toward the big board in the middle of the camp.

  “You look on one side, I’ll look on the other.”

  Ashley didn’t answer, but just took her place at the message board like she had a dozen times before at a dozen different camps. Meghan squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them before she started scanning the bulletins from the top to the bottom. She was so tired of this.

  “Anything?” Ashley’s voice came softly from the other side. Her sad tone told Meghan that she didn’t see any messages from their parents.

  “Nope.” Meghan rubbed her eyes. She tried to smile as Ashley came back around the message board but her sister was fifteen, not stupid. She didn’t return the expression.

  “How many times have we done this?” Ashley asked.

  Meghan shook her head. “I’ve lost count.”

  They linked arms and started toward the center of the camp where they could apply for a tent for the night and see if there was any food to share. Meghan tried to think about anything else but their predicament, but it was impossible.

  In September she should have been going to college, so in August, she and her sister had flown to California in order to spend a last week as kids with their grandmother. And two days into the trip the worst thing had happened. The Outbreak. Z-Day. Grandma had died of a heart attack when the first zombies tried to break into the house. And the two of them… well, they’d been running ever since. Trying to get home. Trying to find their Mom and Dad.

  And knowing that in Colorado, just like everywhere else, the grey menace had come and maybe… probably…. taken everything they’d ever known.

  But they still looked.

  “The motorcycle isn’t going to work much longer for us,” Ashley said as Meghan wrote their names to claim a tent for the night.

  “I know. It’s just getting too cold for it.” Meghan shook her head. “And the further north and west we get, the colder it’s going to get. So we need to figure out a car situation and then I think we should really consider the cabin.”

  Ashley stiffened. “But it’s not near anything.”

  Meghan squeezed her hand. “That’s why it would be the perfect place to go, Ashley. Mom and Dad loved that place, they dragged us up there every summer. If they were going to run somewhere, that’s where they would go. And if we can get enough supplies together, even if they aren’t there, it would be a good winter hole up spot.”

  Ashley shook her head. “But there have been three different times when the only reason one or both of us hasn’t been eaten by zombies is because other people have swooped in to save us. Up there, there won’t be anybody.”

  Meghan motioned to the chow tent and followed her sister inside. There were a few people milling around and seated in makeshift cafeteria-style tables. They grabbed plates and stood in a short line for a very lean selection of stale breakfast bars and warm juice. Meghan sighed as they sat down. It was going to be a hungry night. Again.

  She glanced at her sister. Ashley had been thin before the breakout. Now she was bordering on unhealthy. They really needed to find a place to stay for more than a day or two. Parents would be awesome, but a home and a regular routine would help, too.

  “Look, Ashley, the first two times we almost bit… er, got bitten the big one it was at the very beginning of the Outbreak.” She sighed as she tried not to think of zombies swarming, jumping, growling, chewing. “So I don’t think we can count those as real attacks, we know a lot better now.”

  “And what about Reno?” Ashley asked as she picked at her breakfast bar without looking at her sister. “That was last week.”

  Meghan shut her eyes. There was that.

  “I was distracted. It wasn’t the norm. And we learned from it, right?”

  “I think ‘never go into a warehouse without a light’ is probably one we should have known before that afternoon.” Her sister shrugged. “But whatever.”

  Whatever. Meghan hated that word. She actually felt for her parents more than ever after playing parent to her sister for the past couple of months. Teens sucked. She didn’t feel like one anymore, so she was sure she could say that with a straight face.

  “I know you don’t like this idea, but in my mind, the further we are from people, the more likely we’re going to avoid zombies all together. And since we need a place to stay for the winter anyway, well I’m more interested in going to the cabin where we might find our parents than say… searching through houses of dead people we don’t know.”

  Ashley shrugged. “You’re the brrrraaaaains of this operation.”

  Meghan rolled her eyes, but if her sister was cracking zombie jokes, she knew it was ok. For the moment anyway. She pulled out a notebook from her pocket. “Then let’s make a list of the kinds of supplies we’d need for this operation, okay?”

  They moved closer together and started scribbling items on the list. Everything from food to weapons to a trailer to haul stuff up to the cabin. When they were done, there were two sheets of notebook paper filled.

  “Some of this stuff is going to be hard to find,” Ashley said with a sigh.

  Meghan nodded. “Some of this stuff doesn’t even exist anymore.”

  “You could always go see Mr. MacGyver.”

  Meghan and Ashley turned and found that an older woman was sitting at the table behind them, staring at them. She was probably their Mom’s age. Her brown hair had little hints of gray in it and was pulled back in a tight ponytail. Her face was dirty. Their Mom wouldn’t have run around with a dirty face, even in an apocalypse.

  “Who?” Ashley asked.

  “Mr. MacGyver. He lives just outside the camp in a house down about fifteen miles south of Highway 40 near Vernal, Utah.”

  Meghan took her backpack off her shoulders and pulled the map they carried from it. They had a highlighted route that led them into Colorado. A quick check showed that the woman’s direction wasn’t too far off their beaten path. But still…

  “So who is this guy?” Meghan asked. “Why would we want to go see him?”

  “He has access to a lot of things that don’t exist anymore.” The woman smiled. “And of course he can build anything out of practically nothing. No one knows his real name.”

  �
�His real name isn’t Mr. MacGyver?” Ashley asked with a blank expression. “I thought that was what you said.”

  The woman blinked twice. “No! Everyone just calls him that after the show.”

  Ashley and Meghan looked at each other, then Ashley shrugged. “What show?”

  “MacGyver? The 80s show?” the woman said, her eyes wide with disbelief. “Richard Dean Anderson?”

  “I was born in 1995,” Ashley said with a shrug. “Sorry.”

  “God,” the woman muttered, more to herself than to the girls. “I feel ancient.”

  “So this MacGyver guy,” Meghan interrupted. She didn’t want to get off track… well, any more off track than they already were. “He can find things-”

  “No,” the woman corrected her. “He doesn’t leave his place so he doesn’t find things. He collects things people bring him and makes stuff out of it. It’s sort of a barter system.”

  Meghan shrugged. “Okay, so he builds things. He isn’t like… creepy is he?”

  “What do you mean, creepy?” the woman asked.

  Ashley folded her arms to cover her breasts just like Meghan wanted to do. “I mean, that over near Sacramento, we found a guy willing to ‘help’ us too. He just wanted to see us naked first. That kind of creepy.”

  The woman paled. “But you’re both so young!”

  Meghan gave a brittle smile. “Yeah, I think that was the point for him, unfortunately.”

  But he’d ended up with a very sore pair of balls thanks to a swift kick with a steel-toed boot and hadn’t gotten to see anything despite his shotgun. Asshole.

  The woman shook her head. “Um, no. I haven’t heard any stories like that about this guy. If he’s trading, it isn’t for that.”

  Meghan looked at her sister and Ashley shrugged. “Push comes to shove, we have guns, right? It’s worth a try.”

  Meghan nodded then smiled at the woman. “Thanks for your help.”

  The woman smiled and there was a sadness in her eyes that was all too familiar to Meghan. “No problem. If we don’t help each other, there’s really no point in any of this anyway. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And who you’re looking for.”

  The woman got up and left the tent. When she was gone, Ashley rested her head on Meghan’s shoulder. “Do you think we’ll ever get home?”

  Meghan put an arm around her. “We’re together. So we’re always home.”

  #

  Meghan leaned over the motorcycle and let off on the throttle a little as they turned down a long, grown up driveway that was almost hidden by the weeds and trees that had sprouted up, unchecked, since the Outbreak. She would have missed it altogether if they hadn’t asked around the camp a bit more about this MacGyver guy and found out that he had a big billboard on the side of the road just a quarter of a mile up from his driveway that he had sprayed with a red “X” to let people know they were close.

  She slid to a stop when they moved over a small hill and a house and barn came into view. Both were surrounded by a makeshift, but extremely strong-looking fence built from all kinds of junk.

  “I guess this is the place,” Ashley said as she leaned in from her seat behind Meghan. Ashley was terrible at driving a motorcycle, so they always shared. Plus, it was good to have someone to be in charge of weapons and firing when the zombies started in. Unlike a car, a motorcycle wasn’t terrific for one-handed driving.

  Meghan nodded. “Are you loaded?”

  Her sister lifted up the Glock she carried at her waist. “Full up. Ready to put down zombies or creeps who want to look at my boobies.”

  “Or both,” Meghan muttered as she drove off toward the house.

  When they reached the “gate” on the makeshift wall, she was surprised to see what appeared to be an intercom next to it that was propped up on a rusty bar which had once held a road sign. There was a sign pounded out of metal (it seemed to have once been a stop sign, so maybe it went with the bar at some point) that said, “push green to talk”.

  There was a green button below the speaker of the intercom, so she pressed it.

  “Um, hello?” she said into the speaker. She felt like an idiot doing it, since there was no way the thing worked.

  There was a moment’s hesitation and then a voice crackled over the line.

  “Can I help you?”

  The sound was like a telephone, which Meghan had all but forgotten, and she nearly fell off the bike.

  “Yeah,” she said. “We’re here to see MacGyver?”

  “Fuck,” the voice said. “I told them not to call me that.”

  “Are you him?” Ashley asked.

  “I guess. You two don’t look like too much of a threat.”

  Meghan glanced at her sister. “Look?”

  Ashley shrugged and then pointed up above them on a tree branch. “There are cameras.”

  “Four of them to be precise,” said the voice. “I’m opening the gate. Please drive through and park your motorcycle near the junkyard. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  Meghan glanced at her sister. “How the hell is he powering a gate and an intercom? There hasn’t been electric for months.”

  “Guess we’re going to find out,” Ashley said.

  The gate creaked and then with a bang and a whine, the metal swung inward. Meghan pulled inside, far enough that when the gate swung shut, it wasn’t going to hit the bike, then turned off the engine and got off. As she stretched and willed her ass to wake up, she looked around.

  Inside the perimeter of the wall was a tall pile of garbage and scrap metal, but it seemed to be sorted. In fact there were even labels. An old red farmhouse was about two hundred feet away, the doors and windows blocked by more metal sheeting. And a barn was down behind the house. It was reinforced but the sliding door was open and from it a man emerged. He lifted up what appeared to be binoculars and looked at them for a long moment. Then he wiped his hands off on a towel from his waistband and started down toward them.

  “Keep the safety off,” Meghan whispered.

  “Way ahead of you,” Ashley reassured her and her hand slipped behind her back where Meghan knew her sister was touching the handle of her gun in readiness.

  “You don’t have to keep a hand on the gun,” the man said as he got within earshot. “I don’t intend to pull mine.” He lifted a hand and pressed two fingers together. “Scout’s honor.”

  Meghan examined him as he got closer. He was older than her Dad, but not quite as old as her grandparents. Probably in his fifties or early sixties from the white that was beginning to creep through his brown hair. He had brown eyes that seemed nice enough, though Meghan had met enough weirdoes lately to know that the old saying, ‘the eyes are the window to the soul’ wasn’t exactly correct.

  Still, he wasn’t lying. He hadn’t made any move for the revolver at his waist, even though he had correctly guessed that Ashley was ready with her own weapon.

  Meghan shrugged at her sister. “Just don’t expect us to give our weapons up.”

  He nodded. “Why would I do that? This isn’t a camp, it’s civilized.” He looked them up and down. “Well, you’re younger than you looked up in the barn. Is it just you two?”

  Meghan hesitated. Sometimes it wasn’t best to advertise how alone in the world one was. Not in the zombie apocalypse. The people could be a bigger threat than the monsters.

  “You don’t have to tell me.” He shrugged. “Now since you called me by that name they gave me in the camps in this area, I have a feeling you didn’t come here by accident.”

  Ashley shook her head. “No. We’ve heard you can build things.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been known to put something together from time to time. There’s certainly plenty of material to choose from nowadays…” He hesitated. “When I find people to bring it over.”

  Meghan glanced at the trash heap. “Like that stuff?”

  He smiled with a gleam of pride in his eyes. “Yeah, exactly. And that’s just from the last couple of months. I
magine the selection I’ll have in six… or even a year. But I’m being rude. Why don’t you two come up to the house, we’ll have some iced tea and we can talk about what exactly you need from me.”

  Meghan blinked. “Iced tea?

  He nodded and again there was the pride. “If it makes the girl feel better, she can hold that pistol on me until she’s sure I’m not going to become the boogie man.”

  Ashley looked at Meghan, but she shook her head slightly. “Why don’t you lead the way, mister?”

  He nodded and headed up to the house. The sisters walked behind him and Ashley leaned over to whisper, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Meghan admitted. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”

  He opened the front door and stepped inside to motion them in. “Mind if you take off your shoes?”

  “Why?” Meghan asked as she glanced down at her feet. She was wearing boots and Ashley had on heavy sneakers made for hiking. They never took them off except for in bed at night or when they were changing. Zombies liked feet. Especially toes. Meghan sometimes caught herself wondering if they were tender, but always cut that thought off before she started feeling like eating brains.

  “New carpet,” he said as he motioned to the expensive beige carpeting that started after a square of ceramic tile at the door. “I’d hate to ruin it, it was trouble to come by the right kind, I can tell you.”

  Ashley blinked. “You put in new carpet since the Outbreak?”

  He shrugged. “Well, what else did I have to do? This place needed some fixing up, so I fixed it up.”

  Meghan blinked. She wasn’t sure what to think of that. Most people had been busy running like hell the past few months, not building walls of garbage and installing new carpeting.

  “Um, well it’s very nice carpet. But we’re looking for something a bit more practical. You see, we’re heading for a cabin in Colorado and we might be staying up there for a long time-”

  “And so you’re here.” He finished her thought as he turned and headed into the kitchen.”Because you heard I can make things.”

  The girls exchanged a look before they both toed off their shoes and followed him. The kitchen was a big place with granite countertops and all new appliances and cabinets. When he moved to the fridge of open it, the light went on.