Heaven, Hell, or Houston

by Erb, Thom

  She was dead. But her body, and her deep, loving brown eyes stared up at me. Those beautiful, enrapturing eyes. I had no idea how long I sat there. I could hear Bellia screaming in the other room, and Stacy Jo trying to calm her...It… It was a nightmare I just couldn't face. I slowly traced the soft curve of Inez's cheek, watching as my tears splashed on her cold, pale skin, rolling down.

  “Tú eres el amor de mi vida, mi amor,” I heard my soft words roll, as I caressed her face. Pulling her close, death had stolen her from me. The fire still burned, and my rage was nowhere near ending.

  Acid filled my gut, and it felt like lava rolled through my veins. My temples throbbed as the rage and violent creature inside me clawed to escape...Again. This was all my fault. I should have been here. I never should have left you alone. I stared into her unblinking eyes and spoke to her through gritted teeth.

  “I am so sorry, baby. I always fuck things up. Always let you down. And now...Now.”

  Tears blinded me and splashed over Inez's face. I pulled her lifeless body against mine and squeezed. Just daring, cursing death to come take her from me.

  I was goddamn sure I'd fail at that, too.

  The desperate cries from Bellia filled my ears; they tore at me like a rusty knife. If I couldn't take care of Inez, how in the hell could I even hope to keep her safe? It's the end of the fucking world out there.

  I looked down into Inez's eyes, again.

  “Please, baby. Please tell me what to do. You always knew what's best. Tell me how to fix this...shit. My sweetness, I'm begging you, for Christ’s sake...Tell me what to do!” I heard myself screaming into her slack face.

  She answered. A soft-red glow in her eyes made me jump—almost piss myself.

  Her head turned, slowly, hungrily toward me. Her mouth moving and body twitching. I pulled her closer.

  “Child of Light?” Inez's undead lips whispered to me, in a voice that was not quite her own. She clawed at my throat as the orange sunlight of dawn bathed her pale face. Even in death she stole my heart.

  “Must find...Child of Light...Must...Kill it,” she said as she tore at my arms and tried to bite me.

  “Child..what the hell?” I fought her off and held her down.

  She kept repeating the same thing, over and over again, while trying to make me a fucking happy meal. I felt my tears rolling down my face. The burning in my gut was telling me the dark and sickening truth.

  “Child of Light...die.” She hissed and bit the cold air.

  I had no clue what the hell she was talking about, or, how the fuck she was able to talk at all. My instincts still seemed to be with me. I had no idea why. But while my left arm held her down and tears of guilt, sadness, and rage rained from my goddamned face, my right hand found purchase on my Gerber Mark II folding knife inside my boot.

  Inez moaned and kept growling about the damn, ‘Child of Light,’ shit. I had the knife in my hand.

  I held it above her snipping mouth, trying desperately to aim.

  My hand shook. I hesitated.

  Inez lunged for my throat.

  I cried out and watched my arm react—slice down with well-trained reflex reaction. I screamed.

  The six-inch blade tore deep into her eye socket, and I could feel her cold blood and flesh splash onto my hand as I pinned her to the floor.

  Inez lay still. Grief, self-loathing, and anger swallowed my sorry ass like a dark tide, pulling me down. My body shook with sobs and what blood she had left drained onto the carpet.

  Lost.

  In the distance I heard something.

  It started low at first, and slowly grew louder and shrill.

  Crying...A baby crying.

  Bellia!

  “Ranger!” The word came like a shotgun blast as I awoke.

  My head spun, and I turned to the source of the noise.

  “Time to put on your big Ranger pants, old man. This little girl here needs her daddy.” Stacy Jo stood in the hallway with Bellia in her arms. She wore that 'I ain't taking no shit' look on her face.

  I spent the next hour burying the love of my life. The one good thing about having a strong, tall palisade fence, it keeps the goddamn meat-eaters out. I had two constant companions:

  Grief and rage.

  They would serve me well.

  After all, it was the end of the world. And something told me that this whole Child of Light thing might be important.

  I stood with Stacy Jo and baby Bellia looking out the picture window of our house. The tears never stopped, and the pain still burned in my gut.

  “What now, old man?” the girl asked as she checked the pistol in her hands.

  The morning sun wasn't as warm as usual this time of year, but its rays still covered us in light.

  “Hell. Here's what I think. First, I get myself a drink, then we load up the truck with as much shit as it can handle, and we go find out what this whole Child of Light shit is about.” I kissed Bellia's forehead and looked out on the cul-de-sac, filled with burned out cars, bodies, and of course... Zombies.

  “Sounds good to me, Ranger.” Stacy Jo nodded, looking out the window.

  “Good. Let's do this,” was all I said, and handed Bellia to Stacy Jo and headed to the garage. After all, it was the end of the world.

  I never could take a damn day off.

  -End-

  Read on for a free sample of The Road To Hell Is Paved With Zombies

  Chapter1:

  Zombies Need No Introductions.

  Jango peeked out the door of his room at the Prescott Sierra Inn in Prescott, Arizona, and then quickly closed it again. “Those sure look like zombies,” he mumbled to himself, as he lifted a corner of the curtain to look out the window. “But then again,” he thought, “this IS Prescott. It could just be a bunch of Liberal Arts students dicking around and doing some kind of fucked up performance art.” Jango coughed into the crook of his arm, and hoped he wasn’t coming down sick with the flu or something.

  He continued watching through the window as what appeared to be three blood-covered people, two men and a woman, played tug-of-war with a dead looking fourth person. There was something wrong with the way the three people moved; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Their limbs moved with a stiff, marionette-like quality that he found funny, creepy and off-putting all at the same time.

  Jango hadn’t left the hotel room in several days, and since there was no television in the ratty little room, he had no idea that a real Zombie Apocalypse had started two days before.

  Everything he knew about zombies came from movies and books, so the information he had on hand was Hollywood sketchy, “But damn,” he thought, “They sure look like zombies to me!” Their hair looked matted with clotted blood, twigs, and dirt. Their clothing had probably been expensive at one time, but was now torn to shreds. One male, he noticed, seemed to be missing his right cheek and ear, and the other male seemed to be chewing on the un-moving person. The female was gripping one of the maybe-dead-body’s arms in her teeth and hands, while savagely jerking her head side to side, like a wolf does when it wants a piece of meat to go. “Probably definitely zombies,” he thought to himself with the kind of simple acceptance usually only found in children and the seriously mentally ill.

  Jango noticed movement from the direction of the hotel office. The foul-mouthed older lady who worked at the front desk had run out of the office in a pink bathrobe and pink, fluffy slippers. She waved an aluminum baseball bat above her head and shouted, “You get away from my guest, you nasty hippy assholes!” She ran toward the three zombie/liberal arts students with the wobbly, hunch-backed, shuffling gait so common with older people.

  The zombies heard her shout, noticed her slow-motion advance, and raised their heads. They sniffed at the air, and then rose like marionettes being pulled up by invisible strings. The creatures started hissing and moaning. Saliva ran from their slack lips as they all began making a high-pitched keening sound, “Rhheeeeeeeeee-EEeeeeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee.” T
hen, in a blur of motion, the zombies charged at the old lady.

  The zombies’ upper bodies didn’t coordinate well with the speed of their churning legs, so the high speed movement was almost comical as their torsos swayed around atop their legs, and their arms trailed behind them like the tassels on a kid’s bicycle handle-bars.

  The old woman suddenly seemed to realize that the creatures were not a bunch of hippies. She dropped the baseball bat, screamed in terror, and turned to run back inside. The zombies, though, were less than fifty feet away from her, and it was obvious that they would catch her before she could shuffle halfway to the office door.

  Jango, who was a compulsive supporter of the underdog, would not stand by and watch a little old lady get eaten by zombies. Without thinking, he tore open the door to his room and shouted at the zombies, “Hey, you, over here!” The zombies all looked his way at once, and then, as one, they veered toward him like a group of top-heavy ostriches, and their keening wail became louder as they rushed toward him.

  Suddenly, he realized that he didn’t really have a plan for dealing with the un-dead, so, in a panic, he started running toward his car. His panic ended up saving his life.

  As a resident of Arizona, a modern version of the Wild West, Jango owned a gun. This being Arizona, he was not going to leave his gun in his hotel room for the maid to steal, so he had stashed his 9mm pistol in the welded lockbox under the driver’s seat of his 1990 Geo Metro hatchback.

  He reached his car well ahead of the zombies, got the keys out of his pocket, and opened the car door. He climbed in quickly, slammed the door shut, and locked it. By that time, the old lady had made it back to the hotel office and slammed the door shut behind her.

  Jango reached between his feet for his gun box, just as one of the zombies smashed into the side of his Metro. The small car lurched and rocked as the zombie tried to get to him. He fumbled his key into the key hole on the box, twisted the key, and the box popped open. Inside were a Ruger KP 89 pistol, four fully loaded fifteen-round magazines, and four spare fifty-round boxes of ammunition. Swiftly and smoothly, he fitted a magazine into the grip of his pistol, seated it, and worked the slide to chamber a round. He stuck the three remaining mags into his front pockets, and steadied himself.

  All three zombies were mindlessly bashing against his little car, arms swinging wildly, flailing with such force that the car’s frame was bending. The doors were buckling in, and the side windows were spider webbed with cracks. Even though it seemed they could not think clearly enough to just break a window and haul him out through the hole, it wouldn’t be long before they opened the tiny automobile like a piñata full of Jango treats.

  Jango began breathing faster, hyper-oxygenating his blood as he put his hand on the door handle, and then with a violent surge, he slammed the driver’s side door open and into one of the male zombies. The door rebounded, and closed behind him as he jumped out of the car. The zombie tumbled backward in a disjointed pile, but immediately got back up. He noticed the guy wearing a pinkie ring on his right hand. “Guys shouldn’t wear pinkie rings,” he quipped, half to himself, as he shot the zombie in its head.

  The zombie fell and started twitching, just as the other two came around the back of the car. Jango startle-jumped, let out a little scream, and ran around his car away from the zombies.

  He suddenly found himself in a high-speed Chinese fire-drill around his beat up car, with two wailing, undead creatures that were intent on eating him. Jango saw no way out of his predicament. He managed to keep perfectly even with the two zombies as they chased him pell-mell around the smashed up hatchback. His only desire was to keep the bulk of his vehicle between himself and the two slavering zombies.

  He fired two wild shots at them across the roof of his car while running, and missed both shots. “Shit,” he panted in frustration as he continued running. He had always thought it was bogus how people in movies made running head-shots on moving zombies, and there was his proof.

  Jango wracked his brains to find a way out of his predicament, and suddenly he had an idea. He poured on more speed, and started closing in on the still wailing undead from behind. He was getting winded, from fear as much as exertion, but he slowly drew closer to the zombies, and lap by lap, he closed the gap between himself and his pursuers. He came around the front of his car on the passenger side just as the screeching creatures passed the passenger side door. He stopped, steadied his hands on the pistol in a two handed grip, and started shooting at the female zombie’s head.

  With his first shot, he hit the female in the head, but his next three shots were wild. The remaining zombie finally noticed that its meal was much closer if it turned around. With an ear-splitting shriek, the thing turned toward Jango and charged. Its mouth gaped open and its tongue flailed around like an impaled earthworm, as it reached toward him.

  Jango got set, raised his gun, and fired all in one fluid motion; the bullet hit the monster in the center of its forehead and it collapsed instantly. As he stared at the creatures he had just killed, the full weight of his situation suddenly struck him.

  He leaned against the side of his dented, smashed, and otherwise thoroughly abused Geo Metro and sobbed. “What BULL-shit,” he whispered to himself. He leaned against his car, head hung, gasping for air. He was in excellent physical shape, but everyone has limits to their endurance; and the zombies had stretched his ability to endure almost to the breaking point.

  Unnoticed by him, several zombies had made their way up the road. The creatures had followed the sound of his gunshots and the wailing of the now dead-again zombies. Jango just leaned against his car, panting, and thinking. He was shell-shocked, unaware and unmoving.

  He was thirty-six years old, had no children, a bad case of P.T.S.D., and a built in paranoia that made a meth-head seem stable by comparison. He was average height, brown hair, soft hazel eyes, with big, callused, violent looking hands that looked as if someone who liked to kill had designed them for a strangler. His build was deceptive, average looking, until you looked closely and saw that he appeared to be made of cables and ropes, all hard, dense muscle made for use. All of his spare time was spent making himself into a killing machine, exercising, running, pounding a heavy bag, and practicing with every kind of weapon he could make or buy. He believed that the world was out to get him, and it was up to him to protect himself.

  As a child, he had suffered terrible abuse, and that suffering had left a permanent mark on his mind, body, and spirit. The pain and horror of abuse had wrought a change in him, all the way down to a cellular level.

  He had spent his entire life preparing for the worst to happen, and now that it had, he found himself shocked into a lethargic numbness.

  “Deeeeeee-aaahhhhhh-eeeeeeeeeeee!” a zombie screamed as it rushed at him from no more than fifteen feet away.

  Jango jumped like a scared cat, straight up in the air, legs already churning in a full-speed run before he hit the ground again. He ran around his car, and got into the driver’s seat, slammed the door, started his car, and began gnashing his teeth while growling at the zombies through his cracked windshield. Foam flecked his lips and a strange, feral light started glowing deep within his eyes as he continued growling and grinding his teeth.

  Jango saw more than two-dozen zombies rushing his way in a loose, swaying formation that made him think of a group of children running while wearing straightjackets. He felt a dam break loose in his mind from the strain of it all.

  Snarling and gnashing his teeth, he put his little car in gear, and started driving over his undead antagonists. Driving into them was probably more accurate since the tiny Geo Metro had the approximate ground clearance of a lawn mower, and about the same amount of horsepower as well.

  “Thump, thunk, crunch,” as he drove in circles and figure-eights, knocking over, and then running over the zombies until none were left standing. His knuckles were ghost-white from his death grip on the steering wheel as he slalomed around the parking lot on a slimy
slick of zombie juice and innards. Twenty minutes later, when Jango finally noticed that there was nothing left standing in the parking lot, he brought his car to a skidding stop, and put it in park. Looking around the parking lot, he was stunned at the level of carnage he had wrought. Mangled, wailing zombies littered the area; some with flattened body-parts stuck to the asphalt like snakes that had been ran over on the highway, but were still alive, doing that messed up, twisting crawl that went nowhere. And the blood…everywhere he looked was blood and guts. The zombie blood was thick, slimy, and an unhealthy shade of reddish-black interspersed with blotchy gray that looked like beef liver that had gone bad and begun to rot.

  Jango suppressed the urge to vomit, but just barely. He sat there for a moment, bile in the back of his mouth and in shock. Then suddenly his face split into a huge and genuine smile. “I knew it!!” he shouted out loud, “I just fucking knew it!” He pumped his arms up and down in the air, fists hitting the ceiling of his car.

  It had suddenly occurred to him that his psychologist had been wrong when he told Jango that it was pure fantasy to believe the world would just suddenly go to hell overnight, leaving only the strong to survive. All around him was proof that the wheels had come off of some very important shit, and that the meek were not going to get very much in Prescott right now.

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