Year Of The Dead: A Zombie Novel

by Ray Wallace

  “I know, I know...” she muttered.

  The very idea of it, though.

  Is it worth it? Any of it? Is it worth going on?

  Here was a question she'd asked herself on various occasions throughout her life. Like a lot of people, she'd had her share of tough times. Money problems. Boyfriend problems. Work problems. The unexpected deaths of people she held dear. And there were moments when she'd asked herself, What's the point? Depression ran in her family. It had turned her mother into a barely functioning alcoholic by the time she was thirty. Knowing this, Irene had sought help in recent years whenever she felt as though the world was crashing down around her, whenever she managed to convince herself that things would never get any better. Each time, she'd managed to fight through it, to find the will to keep on living.

  One day at a time, she'd read in a book recommended by her psychiatrist a few months back. One hour at a time. One minute when necessary. Whatever gets you through.

  As a nurse at a major hospital, Irene found it difficult to keep some of the things she saw from getting her down. At those occasions, when the depression tried to get its hooks into her, even the simple act of smiling would require an effort, let alone offering words of encouragement to those who needed them. But she kept trying, kept fighting, and eventually, surprisingly, something inside of her had changed for the better. The sadness that had been her companion for so long had begun to morph into something else entirely, something that resembled happiness. Something like hope.

  In the weeks leading up to the outbreak, she'd felt better than she had in longer than she cared to remember, had started to really enjoy her job for the first time, to take pride in the fact that she was able to help people on a daily basis.

  Then the asteroid came.

  And the dead decided not to stay dead anymore.

  She'd avoided getting sick—she still had no idea how—which meant she’d been able to continue doing her job much longer than the majority of her coworkers, to continue offering whatever aid she could. In the end, though, she’d been able to do very little.

  With the onset of the plague, the dying had shown up in droves. When the doctors and the nurses themselves fell ill, the battle against such a terrible disease had been lost before it had even begun.

  The horrors she'd seen...

  The hospital had become an abattoir, a scene straight out of hell as the dead had risen up to attack and feed upon the living. Floors and walls were spattered with blood. Body parts littered the hallways.

  All too quickly, there was nothing she could do to help anybody.

  In a terror, she'd run through the hospital, ducked into one of the patient's rooms—Empty. Thank God.—went into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned off the light. And there she'd remained for... She wasn't exactly sure.

  A week? Longer?

  It had felt like an eternity.

  I can't stay in here any longer. If I want to live I have to find something to eat. Which means I have to go out there.

  Again, though, did she really want to continue living? Especially now, with all that was going on in the world?

  Sitting there in the dark, the depression had settled over her like a thick, poisonous fog. So it came as a bit of a surprise when she reached for the doorknob and gave it turn, when she opened the door and stood there blinking against the light, when she realized:

  Yes, apparently I do.

  Tuesday, July 28th

  Feeling something akin to amazement, Eric realized hadn't seen a single zombie in an hour or so. The journey from his sister's house had proven more trying and torturous than the one that had brought him there, considerably so.

  At a neighbor's house, he'd found a car with the keys in it, had managed to drive it out of the subdivision and head north for a couple of miles before he'd been forced to stop. Directly before him, a tank had sat parked across the road. Night had fallen and he hadn't seen the pair of soldiers sitting on top of it, pointing their weapons in his direction until he was right up next to the formidable looking machine. It was also at that moment he heard the crack! of a rifle. Then three things happened simultaneously: Another shot rang out in the darkness; a small hole appeared in the car's windshield; and pain unlike anything he'd ever experienced before exploded in his left shoulder.

  Without quite realizing what he was doing, he threw open the driver side door and tumbled out of the car to the ground below, screaming incoherently all the while.

  "Hold your fire!" he heard someone shout. "Deadheads don't drive fuckin' cars!"

  "Yeah, well," said another voice. "He could be infected."

  "I'm not infected," Eric managed to say, the words coming out in a rush.

  "You shouldn't be here," he heard the first voice say. "This is an official military operation. I'm going to have to ask you to move along."

  "You fucking shot me!"

  The ground seemed to tilt from side to side beneath him as he used his good arm to push himself up to his knees. He felt light-headed. Sick. The pain in his shoulder was a terrible thing, a searing, white-hot agony. He was afraid to look at the wound, to see how badly he’d been injured.

  "And we're really sorry about that," said the first voice. "Aren't we, private?"

  "Sure. Yeah. Sorry about that."

  "See, everyone's sorry. And so now I'm going to have to ask you, once again, to move along."

  "I need medical attention!" Eric couldn't believe any of this was happening.

  "Do you see an ambulance here? A triage unit? No. It's just us. And our medical supplies were used up long ago."

  At that point, Eric had just wanted to get away from the trigger-happy assholes. Later, he'd realize they’d probably had good reason to be a little quick on the draw. At the moment, however, he’d felt somewhat less than charitable on that front. So he'd moved toward the car, ready to get in and drive away when he heard a hissing sound, saw the steam rising up from under the hood, realized that the first shot had hit the engine.

  The rest of that night had passed in a blur of anxiety and pain as he had hobbled down the street, made his way to a strip mall, managed to avoid several zombies along the way. He'd chanced upon a dollar store with the front door smashed in, found some gauze and a roll of tape amid the wreckage inside, dressed his wound which, as it turned out, wasn’t as bad as he'd feared—the bullet had passed through the muscle, missing the bone entirely. Then he'd hid behind some shelves in a far corner of the store, needing to rest. For a few minutes, he had told himself. But the longer he sat there, the less he’d wanted to go anywhere and ended up staying the night, falling into a deep and dreamless slumber despite the pain and the hard floor beneath him. When he'd awakened, he saw morning sunlight filtering in through the front of the store.

  Grabbing what supplies he could, he'd headed for the exit.

  In the days that followed, he found places to hide out, to sleep, and to scavenge food. He stayed away from the roads whenever possible as most of them were heavy with traffic of the undead variety. They were also littered with abandoned and burned out cars, reminding him why he'd approached his sister's house on foot in the first place.

  Along the way, he entered a small house to avoid detection by a large group of zombies, found himself trapped in there for several days when the flesh eaters refused to move on. During his time there, the pain in his shoulder had started to intensify. He'd found it increasingly difficult to sleep, became dizzy at times, noticed his concentration slipping.

  When it was finally safe to leave the house, he did so under the cover of a gray day, with a cool, intermittent rain helping to keep his head clear. And, eventually, he'd found himself following a road made out of hard packed dirt with trees standing to either side of it. A road free of zombies. The trees gave way to open fields and the road came to an end before a wide farmhouse.

  There might be food inside.

  He went up to the porch and stopped before one of the windows, trying to see through the glare refle
cting off the glass.

  There might be zombies inside, too.

  As he stood there, swaying slightly on his feet, feeling another bout of dizziness settling in, a piece of metal with a sharp edge was pushed up against his throat.

  A heartbeat later, a man's voice spoke from directly behind him:

  "I can't think of a single reason why I shouldn't kill you right now."

  Wednesday, July 29th

  One by one, a number of the feeds had gone dark in Lawrence's “control room.”

  He sat at a desk in the center of the room. Susanna stood behind him, sipping a glass of wine. Hi-def flat panel screens—three rows of seven—covered one long wall. A pair of monitors along with various other pieces of computer equipment sat atop the desk. Artfully hidden speakers filled the room with audio from whichever feed was selected.

  "It's all going to shit," said Lawrence matter-of-factly, as though he was commenting on nothing more important than the day’s weather. "There's no stopping it now."

  Most of the broadcasts showed widespread destruction and mayhem, streets littered with bodies, entire city blocks on fire. Footage shot from helicopters captured packs of zombies in action, attacking anyone unfortunate enough to get in their way.

  Some of the feeds were from overseas. London looked to be in the early stages of what many US cities had already gone through. There were also reports of the dead rising in such distant places as Cairo, Moscow, and Beijing.

  "As you’re well aware, we live in an intimately connected world," Lawrence went on. "Every day, thousands of intercontinental flights take to the air. Just think of the number of people who could have carried the disease out of the United States before anyone even realized it was a threat. Within a few days, it could have been anywhere. Anywhere at all."

  Susanna's fortune had continued to dwindle at an alarming rate since her time in the quarantine house. Lawrence's had fared no better. Earlier, while checking the global stock markets, Lawrence had laughed and said, “At least we’ll have plenty of company in the poor house."

  As she watched the screens, trying to get her head around everything she saw there, such concerns seemed fairly trivial to Susanna. At least she was protected in here, removed from the horrors afflicting so many across the country.

  With a touch of guilt, she took another sip of wine. Exquisite. No surprise there. Nothing less than the best for Lawrence.

  When the glass was empty, she decided she’d seen enough and left the room, knowing that her host would spend several more hours at his desk. "It's all so endlessly fascinating," he'd told her the first time he'd showed her the room, the images on all those screens chronicling the evident downfall of civilization. "Don't you think?"

  "I suppose so," she’d responded, thinking of a few other words she could have used to describe the situation—“sad” and “disturbing” among them.

  "One can only wonder if it can be rebuilt," Lawrence had mused. "Once it's all over—whenever that might be. If there will be enough people left to rebuild it."

  Along with the control room, a rather impressive arsenal of assorted weaponry and a first aid area were located underground beneath the main body of the house. There was another level further down, Susanna knew, a sub-basement where the reactor was located.

  "One of only twenty-five in existence," Lawrence had told her with pride when he'd given her the grand tour her first day inside. "It runs on a tiny amount of nuclear fuel and is capable of powering the entire compound for the next several centuries." Seeing her expression, he smiled. “I can assure it’s perfectly safe. As an added precaution, the entire room’s been encased in lead.”

  After leaving Lawrence to his TV's and computer equipment, Susanna took the elevator up to the third floor above ground where the bedrooms were located. Upon entering her room, she closed the door and went to one of the windows where she stared out past the greenhouse a hundred or so feet from where she stood, taking in the dense cluster of trees a short distance beyond the estate’s protective wall.

  "The forest extends for several miles in nearly every direction," Lawrence had informed her as they strolled the grounds a few days back. "We're about as isolated as we could hope to be out here."

  All well and good, Susanna supposed, when one was trying to survive the End Times.

  Feeling a bit tipsy from the wine, she went to the bed and sat down, took off her shoes, then lay back with a sigh. The bed was spectacularly comfortable. Even though it was the middle of the day, she let her eyes slip shut, felt herself begin to drift away just as a soft but insistent knock at the bedroom door brought her back to wakefulness.

  Sitting up, she gathered her wits about her and said, "Come in."

  The door opened. And there he stood. Zander. One of the most attractive young men she'd ever seen in her life.

  Yes, Lawrence certainly had thought of everything.

  "Close the door, please,” she told him. “And come join me over here."

  Thursday, July 30th

  Red.

  Everywhere the zombie looked it saw red. The sky above. The ground beneath its feet. The walls of the buildings along the road it traveled. All of it tinged with the color of blood.

  "No. No!" screamed a man from the entranceway of the building where he'd been trapped. He pounded on the door, shouted for someone to open up. "Please, help me!"

  The door remained closed.

  The zombie reached for the man, intent upon having him, upon laying claim to his flesh and all the other red, juicy bits contained within the casing of his skin. The hunger demanded it. Nothing else mattered.

  The man fought as best he could. But it wasn't enough. He was badly outnumbered, had no weapon, nothing he could use to thwart the attack, to prevent the inevitable from happening. When he was pulled from the doorway, he lost his balance and fell to the pavement. The zombie knelt down next to him, leaned in, opened its mouth wide and took that first, wonderful bite.

  A half dozen or so of the others joined in as the man screamed incoherently and thrashed about. The dead did not fight one another nor did any of them try to claim the food for themselves. For now, at least, there was plenty to go around, more than enough to satiate the hunger inside of them.

  Over the next several minutes, the dead partook of their feast.

  When little remained but the bones of their prey, the zombies rose to their feet, overtaken by the confusion that always set in with the hunger's abatement. Without it—the thing that drove them, that ultimately defined them—they were lost, automatons bereft of their programming. A temporary matter, to be sure, because the hunger would return, the programming would kick back in, and the hunt would be underway once again. The hunt for human flesh. Warm, red, living human flesh.

  The zombie, the first of those to attack the man, wandered away from the scene of the killing, of the subsequent feast. With the need controlling it momentarily subdued, a word rose up from the murky depths of its decidedly limited consciousness:

  Casey.

  A simple word. A name. One that seemed to hold some importance.

  Casey.

  Like bubbles of gas released from the bottom of a swamp, brief flashes of imagery accompanied the name:

  Two rows of burning candles, a voice telling him, “Don't forget to make a wish...”

  A boy wearing a cap and a uniform, reaching back, kicking up his leg then hurling a small, white ball at him...

  A young woman with long, blonde hair, smiling and leaning toward him for a kiss…

  Casey.

  Try as it might, though, the zombie couldn't attach any real meaning to the memories or the name. By the time the hunger returned, they would be forgotten things, obliterated by the omnipresent demands of the zombie's body, of the organism that had crossed the vast reaches of outer space and usurped control of its mind. The undead creature would moan and growl along with the others of its kind, join in the hunt for sustenance as it meandered through a world of endless red. And each time it
fed, the strange word would re-emerge, the name it could only ponder in its limited way, to which it could attach no meaning, had no hope of ever understanding.

  Casey.

  With a shake of its head, the zombie wandered off into the crimson sunlight.

  Friday, July 31st

  The body of the zombie lay on the ground before him, the head several feet further away. He smiled, just a little, taking some joy in fact that another of Satan's creatures had been destroyed.

  Three days after they arrived at the church, Pastor Lewis's prayers had finally been answered. He'd spent the vast majority of that time on his knees before the altar in obeisance to the Lord, begging His forgiveness if he had in any way failed Him, asking that he be shown a sign.

  "I beg you, Lord." He’d spoken low enough so that none of the others could hear him. These words were not meant for them, were only to be heard by God Almighty Himself, the only one who could lead them from the terrible situation in which they'd found themselves. "Show me the way..."

  Three days. No sleep. No food. Just enough water to keep him from becoming dehydrated. And the occasional break to relieve himself, legs protesting on these rare occasions when he pushed himself up from the floor. Afterward, he'd get right back to it, lowering himself to his knees and clasping his hands before him.

  On that third day, nearly overwhelmed with exhaustion, he’d lost his balance and fell toward the altar, put his hands down to catch himself just in time, palms smacking the wooden floor.

  What was that?

  He had blinked in surprise, the shock of his sudden descent returning him to full consciousness. Wondering if he’d actually heard what he thought he heard, or if it had been a trick of his sleep deprived mind, he had lifted his right hand off the floor and brought it back down. Again. By then, he’d known for certain he hadn't imagined the hollow sound made by his hand coming into contact with the floor.