Year Of The Dead: A Zombie Novel

by Ray Wallace

  YEAR OF THE DEAD

  Book One

  by Ray Wallace

  ALSO BY RAY WALLACE

  The Nameless

  The Hell Season

  Letting the Demons Out

  One Way Out Novels

  Escape from Zombie City

  Escape from Zombie Island

  Escape from Zomie Planet

  YEAR OF THE DEAD: BOOK ONE

  First Edition: February 2015

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 2015 Severed Press

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Summer

  Sunday, June 21st

  It started with a tearing, roaring sound and an impact that rattled windows.

  Eric Kelly stood up from the couch where he’d been relaxing and reading a book, looked around a bit wildly, wondered if the house was about to collapse on top of him. Within a couple of seconds, however, the commotion ended and, much to Eric’s relief, the walls of the room around him continued to stand.

  “What the hell was that?!”

  The voice belonged to his sister, Justine, who emerged from the hallway leading back to the bedrooms, tying the belt of the blue robe covering her down to her knees, eyes puffy with sleep. She gave Eric a look that said she somehow thought he had something to do with waking her up.

  A moment later, Justine’s husband, Bill, entered the room.

  Eric shrugged and forced a smile. “The end of the world?”

  Neither Justine nor Bill smiled in response, not that Eric expected them too. Justine had always been a serious person and she’d managed to find herself an equally serious man. Eric had always been the irresponsible one, the partier, the dreamer. Even though he was nearing thirty now and his partying days—well, his hard partying days, at least—were behind him, he knew he had a reputation he’d never be able to shake. Not that he really minded. So he hadn’t walked the straight and narrow path his parents had tried to set out for him, the one his sister—whom he loved in spite of her often less than sunny disposition—had been only too happy to follow. So he liked to stay up late and watch weird movies and read weird books and, yes, have a beer or three with his friends—and by himself on occasion. So what? It was his life. He could have some fun if he wanted to. And if he happened to screw things up a little along the way? If he needed to get out of Wisconsin, head down to Florida and stay with his older sister for a while? As far as Eric was concerned, a person couldn’t learn from his mistakes unless he made a few.

  Bill approached the living room’s bay window, opened the blinds and looked outside. “Can't see anything out of the ordinary.”

  Eric, dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, grabbed his tennis shoes from where he’d left them near the end of the couch and pulled them on. Then he crossed the room, unlocked and opened the front door.

  “I’ll go check it out,” he said as he stepped outside.

  “Wait up,” came Bill’s voice from behind him. “I’ll go with you.”

  Eric closed the door then followed the walkway through the yard and over to the driveway, saw some of the neighbors emerge from their houses. A woman called out to him from across the street, asked him if he knew what was going on.

  “No idea.”

  He made his way toward the stop sign at the end of the road. Once there, he heard raised voices from the next street over, just south of where his sister lived. So he turned in that direction and kept walking.

  “Eric! Hold on…”

  Looking back, Eric saw Bill jogging after him. He waited.

  “What’s the hurry?” asked Bill when the two men stood next to one another.

  “Just don’t want to miss all the excitement.”

  “Could be the kind of excitement that gets people hurt. Or killed.”

  They turned at the next street sign, still following the voices. Now Eric could see a crowd of people in the cul-de-sac directly ahead.

  “Holy shit,” said Eric as they reached the circle and saw what had drawn the people there.

  Thick tendrils of smoke and steam rose from a hole a couple of feet across in the center of the cul-de-sac. Something had punched its way straight through the black surface of the road, something emitting a dull, reddish glow and producing a smell remarkably like rotten eggs. Eric stopped about ten feet or so from the edge of the crater, deciding he’d gotten close enough.

  “A meteorite,” said an older fellow standing nearby. “Probably a small chunk of asteroid.”

  Eric cast a glance around the cul-de-sac. “Looks like most of the windows are intact. Seems like a miracle, considering all the noise that thing made when it came down.”

  The older guy grunted a laugh. “God bless hurricane proof glass.”

  A breeze picked up, did little to dispel the humidity infusing the air on this, the first night of summer. Although, it did manage to spread the smoke, the steam, and that rotten egg smell around a bit more. Eric used the neck of his shirt to cover his mouth and nose as the people around him started to cough.

  I really shouldn’t be breathing that stuff, whatever it is, he told himself as he, too, felt the onset of a coughing fit, one that took a while to pass.

  Monday, June 22nd

  The story got several minutes worth of coverage on the morning news.

  Amanda stood in front of the TV, cup of coffee in hand, watching as an elderly woman spoke about her experience.

  “It woke me out of a dead sleep. Shook the clock right off the table next to the bed. Since we don’t have earthquakes down here, I thought a gas line had exploded. Then I went outside and saw the hole in the ground. It was glowing. Smoke coming out of it. Didn’t really know what to make of it at first.”

  The camera panned back to the handsome young man conducting the interview.

  “These are the types of stories we’ve been hearing all morning. A scary evening, indeed, for those living near the impact sites...”

  According to the lead-in report, twenty-three of these impact sites had been located so far across the central Florida area. A fast food restaurant had taken a direct hit, killing three people inside.

  Death by space rock. What a way to go.

  Some of the “space rocks” had landed within a few miles of where Amanda lived. A little too close for comfort. The thought of one of those asteroid fragments slamming down through the roof of her apartment building, killing her or, God forbid, her son Mitchell as he lay sleeping in his bed…

  She shook her head, forcing the grisly thought from her mind, and took a sip of coffee.

  Nectar of the gods.

  It took two cups to get her going in the morning, a habit she’d developed in college, the whole year and a half she attended. Community college. Never took it all that seriously to begin with. Had done it more to appease her parents than anything else. There had been too many late nights drinking with her friends to ever really stand a chance of graduating. Coffee had become her main hangover remedy.

  Her college days had officially ended once she met Jonah. She was nineteen at the time. He was twenty-two, owned a nice car, his own house. They’d been seeing each other for all of about two months when she moved in with him. A few months later, she found out she was pregnant, wound up back at her parents’ house before she had the baby. Turned out Jonah, despite appearances to the contrary, wasn’t such a great guy once you really got to know him.

  Not long after Mitchell was born, she
found a decent paying job at a call center and got her own apartment, which she could afford thanks to the money Jonah sent her for child support. The payments were always on time which had initially surprised her. Until she realized he probably just wanted to make sure the police stayed out of his affairs. She’d always had her suspicions about the things he did to afford his lifestyle.

  Five years later, here she was in a different, nicer apartment, working two jobs to make sure Mitchell had everything he needed. She’d quit drinking, rarely even went out anymore, hadn’t been in any sort of significant relationship in over a year. Sure, she went on the occasional date, but hadn’t felt the urge to get serious and settle down with anyone. Mitchell was all that mattered. He was the center of her world. All she wanted was for him to be the happiest little five year old boy in the world.

  A five year old boy who needs to get his butt out of bed.

  She needed to be at work by eight-thirty, had to drop him off at daycare along the way. As she finished her coffee, the newscast moved on to another story, this one detailing a series of convenience store robberies taking place throughout the Tampa Bay area over the past several weeks. Amanda still found herself thinking about the asteroid story, though, and the people who’d been killed.

  Just a few miles from here...

  She was fine, though, and more importantly, so was Mitchell.

  “It’s not like those space rocks can hurt him now,” she muttered as she crossed the room and went down the hallway to the room where her son lay sleeping.

  Tuesday, June 23rd

  The crater was gone.

  Eric stood at the edge of where it had been the other night. Now he saw nothing but a wide, circular discoloration on the surface of the road where the hole had been, filled in and covered over with new asphalt. He recalled the smoke and the steam rising out it, the smell of it, along with the sound of people coughing. More than a little freaked out by the idea of inhaling those awful fumes, he hadn’t stuck around long. No telling what that damned rock may have released into the air.

  I sure picked a hell of a time for a vacation.

  A week in sunny Florida had seemed like exactly what he needed when he rather hastily decided to leave Wisconsin. Due to a cancellation, he’d gotten a good price on a plane ticket through a website specializing in those sorts of transactions, which had been fortunate considering he’d had no steady employment over the past couple of months. He’d been living off his savings account and the odd job he’d been able to find through a temp agency. The local economy sucked, a fact that had become all the more apparent once he’d been laid off and begun searching for new employment. Then, to top it all off, Danielle, the woman he’d been dating for going on two years, the same woman he’d been seriously considering buying a ring for sometime in the near future—when he had the money, of course—had told him completely out of the blue she wasn’t sure she loved him anymore. And, even worse, she’d started seeing someone else on the side.

  So, yeah, it had definitely been a good time to get away from it all for a little while, try to clear his head, figure out what he could do to get things back on track again. When Justine told him that he could stay in the spare bedroom at her place for a week or so, he’d jumped at the offer, even though it meant sharing space with what might possibly be the most boring couple alive. Who knew he’d be putting himself near such a major news story? An asteroid, for God’s sake. Pieces of it raining down across central Florida, one of them landing dangerously close to his sister's house.

  “They showed up in the middle of the night and took everyone away,” said a voice from behind him.

  Startled, Eric turned around to see the older guy from the other evening, the one who’d first informed him of the meteorite.

  “Excuse me?”

  The guy wore a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, had a full head of curly, brown hair, and a beard gone mostly to gray.

  “The people who live there... and there... and there... and there... and there.” He pointed his finger at each of the houses encircling the cul-de-sac, one after the next. “All gone.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “They’ve been taken away. All of those houses are empty.”

  Eric shook his head, not sure what the guy was getting at. “Who took them? And why?”

  A shrug. “I’m guessing military. I just happened to be up, getting something to drink, looking out the window when a couple of trucks drove by.” He pointed again. “That’s my house over there, third one down, other side of the street. Anyway… I went out onto the porch to get a better look, had a feeling I should stay out of sight, so I hid behind the hedges. After what happened, I’m glad I did. Those trucks—like big U-Hauls painted black—they pulled up right here.” He waved a hand, indicating the cul-de-sac. “A dozen or so guys got out. Dark uniforms. Helmets. Guns. Went house to house, banging on doors, rounding everybody up. People in their pajamas. Their kids. Corralled them into the trucks. And then they drove away. The whole operation took all of about fifteen minutes. The next morning when I came out, the crater had been filled in.”

  Eric stared at the guy, finding the story difficult to believe. He returned his attention to the houses surrounding him. Was it his imagination or did they have an air of abandonment to them?

  “So did you call anyone?” he asked. “The news, maybe? Did you tell anybody?”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  With that, the guy turned and walked away.

  Wednesday, June 24th

  Trevor awoke with a start, heart beating heavily in his chest, skin damp with sweat. He never remembered his dreams, not the strange but perfectly normal imaginings of the subconscious mind with which most people were familiar. No, when he rose from sleep with dream-like imagery drifting through his mind, he knew it was the result of something else entirely: a portent, a vision of startling clarity that would refuse to fade as the day wore on. They were fearsome things accompanied by feelings of dread, clinging to him as he departed the dark and unknowable lands of slumber.

  This latest vision was no exception. In fact, it was the worst he could ever recall experiencing in his life.

  Luckily for Trevor, the visions came to him rather infrequently. He first experienced them when he was quite young, not yet out of elementary school. All these years later, he could still recall that first time when he awoke shaking, crying, finding it difficult to breathe. His mother, who’d heard the sounds of his whimpering had come into the room, turned on the light, sat on the bed and held him, made soothing sounds until the fear and the panic started to fade. All the while she’d told him it was all right, she was there for him, that it was only a dream.

  “What was it about, anyway?” she had asked once he’d gotten himself under control. “Sharing it might make you feel better, might take some of its power away.”

  He’d taken a deep breath and told her.

  Two days later, Trevor had found her sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. It was a school day. The bus would arrive in forty-five minutes or so, enough time to eat a bowl of cereal, take a shower and get dressed, maybe watch a little TV.

  “Mom?”

  She had lowered the paper. Something about the way she sat there, the pinched expression on her face had worried him

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.” Part of a smile made its way onto her face. “Ready for breakfast?”

  Later on at school, though, he’d heard all about it. A fire at a local apartment complex. More than twenty people dead, one of them a kid named Albert Fitzsimmons who’d recently started attending Trevor’s school, according to some of his classmates.

  It all came rushing back to him, what he’d been shown a few nights earlier as he lay sleeping:

  The hallway of an unfamiliar building. Flames roaring along its length, flames that did not touch him. People shouting from behind closed doors.We’re too high up for them to go out the windows. H
ow he knew this, he had no idea. He just… knew. An old woman stumbled toward him, hair burning, nightgown on fire. She was screaming, hands out in front of her, batting at the flames, skin blistering, bubbling, peeling away…

  This was the first of the visions, but far from the last. Every several months, he’d arise from a deep sleep, trembling and afraid, his mind filled with the most terrible images. Plane crashes. Bombings. Shooting sprees. Like he’d been there, watching it all unfold around him. As he grew older, he’d see the stories on the news, or in the paper, or on the internet, usually within a few days of the vision’s appearance. For the most part, the impending tragedies revealed to him had taken place in other parts of the country, sometimes in other parts of the world. On one occasion, though, while in his early twenties, a close friend of his was killed in a car accident. Two nights beforehand, he’d watched it happen from the backseat of the car in which she rode. When he awoke the following morning, he’d called and asked her to stay off the roads for the next few days, had found himself begging her by the end of the conversation. Before they hung up she’d told him she would do as he asked. But she hadn’t. And she’d died, just like he knew she would.

  After college, the frequency of these visions had, thankfully, diminished. Following his twenty-seventh birthday, a little over five years ago, they’d stopped altogether.

  Forever?

  At some point, he’d let himself believe it.

  Looks like I was wrong.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, breathing slowly, deeply, thinking about what he’d been shown, going over it again and again in his mind. The sheer scale of it, the sheer absurdity of it…

  Maybe this time it was only a dream, nothing more.

  “There’s a first time for everything, I suppose,” he said in a low voice, not wanting to wake his wife who lay sleeping on the bed beside him. “A first time for everything…”