Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series

by Bryan Cassiday

  “You’ll change your mind fast when one of those things tries to take a piece out of you,” said Reno, hefting his shotgun out of his shopping cart.

  He tried to cram another cartridge into the shotgun, but the magazine was already full, he found out.

  “I’m not a killer,” said Parnell. “I can’t take another human life. I’m not wired for that.”

  “They’re not human and they’re not alive,” said Halverson.

  “They are human. They’re infected with a disease that turns them into cannibals.”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Look at them. They look just like us.”

  Reno eyeballed the walking dead as they wended their herky-jerky way through the parked cars abandoned on the street ahead. “Man, if I looked as ugly as those Calibans, I’d kill myself.”

  “We don’t have time to hold a discussion,” said Halverson. “Those things are gonna block the road before we can get to the boat. We’ll have to fight them.”

  “We could hole up somewhere and wait for the things to disperse,” suggested Parnell.

  “What if they don’t disperse?” said Reno. “What if more of them show up, instead?”

  “What if they board our boat and capsize it?” put in Victoria.

  “There are too many things that can go wrong if we wait.”

  “We’ve got to go at them now,” said Halverson. “We go in hard.”

  He held his shotgun at the ready in one hand. It was going to be difficult to wheel the shopping basket and wield the shotgun at the same time, he knew. He had to try though. They needed to stock the boat with supplies.

  He clambered toward the intersection where the ghouls would cut them off.

  Victoria put her foot through her crossbow’s metal stirrup, cocked the bowstring, and inserted a bolt into the crossbow.

  “You’d be better off with a shotgun,” said Reno, watching her. “You won’t have enough time to reload that bow when we come under attack.”

  “There’s only one problem. I don’t have a shotgun.”

  “You could take Parnell’s. I doubt he’ll be able to use it.” Reno studied Parnell, who was pushing his shopping cart after Halverson. “I’m betting he chokes when push comes to shove.”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” said Victoria.

  Steering their shopping carts Reno and Victoria hustled after Parnell and Halverson.

  The ghouls were congregating in the intersection. They had spotted the group of four and were marching toward them with scuffing steps.

  Chapter 19

  Halverson waded into the throng of ghouls.

  He rammed his metal shopping basket into the lead ghoul’s stomach then kept plowing ahead.

  The seventyish male ghoul with white hair styled in a comb-over on its decomposing pate scowled at Halverson as the cart smashed into its belly. The creature was dressed in a Giorgio Armani navy blue suit with a powder blue silk tie and John Lobb oxfords to complete the stylish effect. But the silk tie hung askew, and the pricy unbuttoned wool and cashmere suit was mired with filth and ripped apart with the lining hanging out. The once-gleaming oxfords looked liked they had just tramped through a swamp.

  Not only that, the creature stank like a swamp as well, Halverson noted.

  The creature took a swipe at Halverson’s head, but Halverson stood outside the creature’s reach.

  Halverson kept shoving his shopping basket into the creature then aimed his Mossberg at the creature’s head and atomized it with a point-blank blast. Virtually headless, the creature collapsed to the asphalt.

  Halverson kept slamming his cart forward into the forest of scrabbling ghouls that descended on him. The cart kept the creatures in front of him at bay, while he blew away the ones that were assailing him on his exposed flank.

  The problem was he needed two hands to pump the shotgun. Every time he jacked a shell into the shotgun’s chamber he had to release the shopping cart’s handle, which was proving awkward at best. He couldn’t keep staving off the ghouls with the cart whenever he let go of it to reload. It was only a matter of time before they overwhelmed him.

  He saw Parnell bustling up behind him.

  Parnell was holding his shotgun and pushing his shopping cart, but wasn’t firing the shotgun. Instead, he was using the shotgun like a stick and staving off the ghouls with it.

  Halverson didn’t think Parnell could last much longer like that without the ghouls biting him.

  Halverson ushered Parnell ahead of him. “Take my cart and go ahead.”

  Parnell nodded.

  As Parnell passed Halverson, Halverson snatched the shotgun from Parnell’s hand. Parnell relinquished the weapon without an argument, grabbed Halverson’s shopping cart with both hands, and forged ahead through the ghouls toward the jetty.

  Halverson watched Victoria aim her crossbow at a female blonde that looked to be pushing thirty. The creature’s hair had dark brown roots about an inch long. Its mouth hanging open, the creature was slouching toward Victoria, eager to clamp Victoria’s live young flesh between its green fangs.

  Victoria fired the bolt into the blonde’s forehead. The creature reeled backward, windmilling its arms, then fell on its back on the asphalt. Two creatures behind the corpse immediately trampled its face and chest on their way toward Victoria.

  Halverson knew Victoria didn’t have enough time to reload the bow before the oncoming ghouls would get to her. He tossed Parnell’s shotgun to her.

  She flicked her bow into her cart and caught the shotgun with both hands. She fired at the first creature in front of her and blew its head off. She pumped the shotgun and fired at the second creature, which was much shorter than the first and would have looked like an adolescent save for its wizened face. Victoria beheaded the creature with a shotgun blast.

  Clad in a meter maid’s grey uniform, a stocky black female ghoul waded toward her, stumbling over cadavers in its path. The creature wore its brunette hair up and wore spectacles with brown plastic bows.

  Victoria pumped the shotgun and blew off the creature’s thirtyish face from less than three feet away. Its featureless face now a stew of pulped brain and bone shards, the creature collapsed.

  “I can’t keep this up and push the cart at the same time,” she said.

  “I’m having the same problem,” said Halverson. “I gave my cart to Parnell.”

  Reno came running up to Halverson and Victoria, shotgunning a three-hundred-pound female ghoul that was wearing a crimson Windbreaker and lumbering toward him. The ghoul spun on its heels then hit the blacktop with a thud.

  “Let’s ditch the carts,” said Reno, pumping his Mossberg.

  “We don’t have much choice,” agreed Halverson.

  “Then our foraging was for nothing,” said Victoria.

  “Parnell still has my cart. He’s not armed anymore. He can concentrate on rolling the cart, while we take over defense.”

  “One cart is better than no carts,” said Reno.

  “It’s not like we have any options.” Halverson hung fire and analyzed the situation. The intersection was crawling with the walking dead. “The slower we go, the more ghouls we’ll attract. Forget the carts.”

  A middle-aged female ghoul wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat swiped at Victoria and missed her nose by a hair with its decomposing right hand as Victoria flinched out of the way. Victoria scragged the creature.

  “These things are getting too close for comfort,” she said.

  “Let’s band together,” said Halverson.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s stand with our backs to each other so we can guard each other against assaults from behind.”

  “Works for me,” said Reno.

  Continuing to make for the boat, they closed together to form a triskelion, discharging their shotguns into the attacking mobs of ghouls. Reno was at Halverson’s back, and Victoria was at Halverson’s side. Victoria had to sidestep to keep up with Halverson. Reno
had it even worse. He had to walk hastily backwards without seeing where he was going.

  “Next time I’ll take point,” said Reno, striking the back of his heel against a corpse’s arm that lay on the asphalt and stumbling.

  He managed to regain his equilibrium and maintain his grip on his shotgun before falling on the road.

  “I see daylight,” said Halverson. “I think we can make the boat from here at a dead run.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Reno.

  Halverson, Victoria, and Reno had a clear path to the jetty. Only Parnell and his shopping cart stood in their way to the boat. They stormed toward Parnell.

  Head down, Halverson thrust his legs like pistons, charged after Parnell, and overtook him on the dock. Pulling up to Parnell’s side Halverson helped him push the shopping cart along the ocean-eroded wooden jetty to the sailboat moored to the bollard.

  The cart clattered jerkily over the thick brown floorboards.

  Now that they were closer to the boat, Halverson could see that it indeed was the Costaguana.

  He also saw something else through the mist that had begun swirling onshore.

  What moved in the drifting mist chilled his spine.

  Chapter 20

  At the end of the damp jetty a figure was hunkering down over a body. The figure was a thirtysomething male with Asian features, a hairless waxlike face, and a bald head. Whatever eyebrows he had were sparse to nonexistent.

  He was wearing an olive drab wife-beater. Tattoos clustered on his arms.

  When Halverson saw what the Asian was doing he knew it could not be human.

  A twentyish green-eyed male with tousled blond hair was lying motionless in blood-splattered clothing on the dock’s floorboards beside the Asian.

  Crouching in Bermuda shorts, the ghoul was using its fingers to pry open the mouth of the young man. Once it had the mouth open, the creature plucked out the tongue, leaned down, wrapped its green teeth around the tongue, and tore it out of the young man’s mouth.

  Halverson cringed in disgust as blood poured from the severed tongue that dangled out of the ghoul’s mouth. The blood dripped onto the youth’s face.

  The semiconscious youth groaned in pain as blood spouted out of the stub of tongue left in his mouth, onto his chin, and down his throat.

  The ghoul finished chewing on the tongue and swallowed it, leaned over the youth’s throat, bit into it, and tore a hole out of it, mutilating the jugular.

  The youth’s body trembled as he bled out.

  Its mouth full of flesh and blood from the youth’s throat, the ghoul heard Halverson’s shopping cart clattering on the wharf, looked up, and caught sight of Halverson and Parnell as they approached on the jetty.

  The ghoul stood up, eager to find more victims. It knew the youth had bled out beneath it and could not escape. The creature could finish gorging on him later. Now fresh meat beckoned.

  The creature shuffled toward Halverson.

  Gritting his teeth Halverson trained the Mossberg on the ghoul, squeezed the trigger, and pulped the ghoul’s head with a Remington Slugger.

  The ghoul tottered around on the dock then pitched into the ocean beside the bobbing sailboat, hitting the water hard and splashing the dock.

  Halverson turned to Parnell. “How can you not shoot those things after seeing that?”

  Appalled at the massacre of the youth, Parnell stood nonplussed.

  Halverson kept plowing ahead with the shopping basket.

  Parnell shook off his funk and hurried after him.

  They pulled up at the Costaguana.

  “I’m not judge, jury, and executioner,” said Parnell.

  “I’m not asking you to be,” said Halverson.

  “You’re telling me I should kill diseased people.”

  “I’m telling you to kill dead people. I know that doesn’t make any sense. How can you kill someone that’s already dead? Just think of ‘killing’ them as putting the dead to sleep.”

  “They’re plague-infected living people,” objected Parnell.

  “They’re not living.”

  “Then how come they’re walking? If a living thing can move around, it’s still alive.”

  There was no arguing with Parnell, Halverson realized.

  Halverson started unloading the supplies from the cart onto the sailboat. Parnell pitched in.

  Unable to break free from the ghouls’ siege in the street, Reno and Victoria were still whacking ghouls right and left.

  Its sixtyish haggard face twisted into a sneer, a six two male with grizzled hair came at Reno with jerking steps. One of its knees was cut up, bruised, and swollen to the size of a grapefruit, suggesting the creature had been involved in some kind of accident. Most likely before the creature had become infected with plague, decided Reno.

  The ghoul was wearing dark shorts cut two inches above the knee, a white T with the logo for Tommy Bahama splashed across its chest, and slipshod black jogging shoes with their laces untied.

  Reno like to took a swing at the creature’s face.

  Instead, unable to bridle his disgust for the creature, Reno blew the jaw out of the ghoul.

  Minus its jaw, the ghoul was still streeling toward Reno. The blast hadn’t penetrated the creature’s brain.

  Reno didn’t know how the ghoul was going to eat without teeth and a mouth. For all intents and purposes, he had rendered the ghoul harmless.

  Nevertheless, unaware of its disability, the creature kept coming at Reno, clawing the air with its shriveled hands. Its wrist, in fact, was so shrunken away it could barely keep its Rolex wristwatch from falling off.

  As the creature closed in on him, Reno could discern maggots and worms crawling out of the gaping hole in the creature’s throat directly below where the jaw used to be. Revolted, he pumped his 12-gauge shotgun, trained the muzzle on the creature’s travesty of a head, and blew its brains out.

  The creature hit the asphalt in a motionless heap.

  Cheek by jowl, more ghouls charged Reno and Victoria with their erratic shambling gait.

  Reno felt like an ocean of diseased flesh was suffocating him as the serried ranks of the creatures fell against him in a rising tide of death.

  He kept pumping and blasting his shotgun at the nearest creatures, dropping them one after the other.

  As soon as the shotgun clicked empty, he fished more cartridges out of his trouser pocket, crammed them into the magazine, and returned to jacking the shells into the chamber and firing away.

  “There’s too many of them,” he said, his face sweating. “We need to make a run for it before they hem us in.”

  Victoria spotted a plump, runty black female ghoul zeroing in on her. Clad in a fluorescent green dress, the creature had a screwed-up face and a protruding lower lip. The ghoul was pushing a baby carriage toward her.

  After Victoria dispatched the mother ghoul with a shotgun blast to the head, she saw the baby in the pram start crawling toward her. Instinctively, Victoria wanted to rush to the baby to help him. Instead, she recoiled in horror from the sight of the baby’s face.

  Its white-filmed eyes were popping out of what was left of its putrescent little head. White cheekbones stood out in stark contrast to the dark, rotting flesh that was sloughing off the skull even now.

  Victoria cried out in consternation.

  She peeled off for the dock.

  Reno fled with her, firing his shotgun behind him covering their retreat.

  Victoria balked.

  Reno stopped just in time before colliding into her. “What is it?”

  “Look,” was all she said, her eyes bulging.

  Chapter 21

  A ghoul had managed to block their path to the jetty.

  From behind them shoals of ghouls pressed toward them with a flurry of jerking arms and legs.

  A particularly heinous ghoul stood alone in front of Victoria and Reno.

  It was pushing sixty and had the drawn face of a bloodhound with drooping jowls. The creatur
e had a thick crop of white hair and wore khaki trousers and tan espadrilles.

  What made the creature stand out among the other ghouls was not only its lack of a shirt but its lack of a chest as well.

  Apparently, Victoria decided, other ghouls had fed on its chest, stomach, and internal organs when it had died. When the corpse had morphed into a ghoul, it was lacking its insides. Victoria could actually see the ghoul’s backbone. It was the only thing keeping the torso and hips together.

  Victoria froze and gagged at the sight of the creature.

  “Christ!” said Reno.

  Worms slithered along the creature’s spinal column up toward its head.

  Sickened, Victoria held her hand over her eyes. “Kill it,” she muttered.

  Reno wasted no time. He wheeled his shotgun around, strode up to the creature, and jammed the muzzle into the creature’s yawning mouth. The creature swung its emaciated arms at Reno, trying to claw him, but the length of the shotgun kept Reno out of the creature’s reach.

  Reno pulled the trigger.

  The creature’s head exploded off its neck and flew into the sand.

  Meanwhile, the throng of ghouls behind Victoria and Reno was narrowing the gap between them.

  Victoria and Reno pegged onto the jetty and over its creaking floorboards toward the Costaguana.

  Halverson and Parnell were just finishing offloading the supplies from the shopping cart into the sailboat.

  White mist was swirling around the palm trees on the beach like evanescent fingers dandling the palm fronds.

  The first of the pursuing ghouls set foot onto the jetty, its cohorts close behind.

  Reno clapped eyes on the young man’s motionless, bloody body on the dock not far from the boat. “Is he dead?”

  “Yeah,” said Halverson.

  Even as he spoke, the corpse opened its staring eyes and sat up awkwardly.

  Halverson heard the mast creaking above him as the boat bobbed in the breeze. He tossed the last of the supplies onto the deck.

  The ghouls were closing ground fast, spurred on by hunger and the proximity of living flesh.

  Halverson, Victoria, Reno, and Parnell piled into the boat.