Elements of the Undead: Fire (Book One)

by Esmont, William

  Pollard launched into a rundown of the mission. Fort Huachuca was a sprawling base nestled up against a mountain range, providing a natural barrier for the undead swarms migrating from south to north. Still, the post was a scene of devastation. Abandoned vehicles, flattened fences, and burned-out buildings dominated the landscape. Expended shell casings glinting like discarded diamonds lay scattered across the sun-baked desert floor, evidence of futile battles against an army that never retreated.

  As with the military and police installations they had inspected as they traveled through Mexico, it appeared civilians had gravitated to the base in a last-ditch bid for protection. It had been the wrong choice. The soldiers were under orders to protect their base at all costs. Unfortunately for both parties, once the undead infection began spreading through a crowd, the chance of others in the crowd becoming infected grew exponentially. Everyone died. And then they came back.

  Weapons and ammunition were readily available, Pollard reported, as was food.

  The journey from decorated submarine captain to post-apocalypse survivor had not been without its challenges. When Hollister had grounded the Wyoming in Ensenada, she gave her crew the choice of either following her or going their own way. Most struck out on their own, embarking on personal suicide missions to find their families or die trying. Once the deserters were gone, Hollister had turned to her remaining crew and congratulated them on their decision. And then she laid down the new law of the land. She had executed all but seven of this original group within the first week, solidifying her role as alpha bitch of the new world. The remaining crew had fallen into line, afraid to question her, and now afraid to strike out on their own.

  Hollister had the beginnings of a new army. She followed this strategy with everyone they encountered, offering protection and support in the form of food and weapons in exchange for absolute loyalty. Word of mouth served as a powerful motivator for new recruits. She had only executed two others since that day.

  They reached the outside door of the warehouse, and she pushed through. Pollard followed, kicking a wedge of wood under the door to prop it open. Hollister fished a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and shook one out. She didn’t offer one to Pollard. She was excited by the potential of a base full of weapons, but also a little overwhelmed. The extent of the destruction was far greater than she had expected, and she worried about the challenges that lay ahead.

  She blew smoke in Pollard’s face and smiled as he winced. “It’s too fucking hot here,” she spat. “We need to get out of the desert.” Pollard looked as if he was about to speak, but said nothing.

  She sensed his mood. “Yeah, I know. Southern Arizona, and all that. I’ve got no one to blame but myself…”

  Pollard rewarded her with a thin smile. “We can be on the road in twenty-four hours,” he offered.

  “No.” She knew he meant well. They had adequate fuel and supplies. They had scavenged vehicles in Mexico, vintage cars and trucks built before the proliferation of EMP-sensitive electronics.

  Pollard raised his eyebrows. “No?”

  “I want to send a scouting team into Tucson before we head out, to see if there’s anything we can use.” Tucson hadn’t been on her sub’s targeting menu, and there was no guarantee another boat, or even a land-based missile, hadn’t been targeted at the city of a million. If, however, the city still existed, it would make their journey that much easier. They might even get lucky and find a military aircraft hardened against EMP. If it was gone, a barren crater, she would add one more ‘X’ to her map of dead zones.

  Pollard nodded. “Okay. Tucson it is. I’ll get things rolling.”

  Hollister finished her cigarette and flicked the butt toward a clump of prickly pear cactus where it became stuck on a spine, alongside dozens of others. She grinned, pleased with her aim.

  Things are coming together.

  Sixteen

  Taos, New Mexico

  Jack watched the candle in the center of the table flicker, the pool of wax around the wick glistening in the soft yellow light. He sighed and put his head in his hands. Across the room, Becka and Ellie were curled together, slumbering under a stained sleeping bag. He wore a dingy, blue t-shirt and jeans. His clothes were stiff with accumulated sweat and grime from the past few weeks. He didn’t care. At least he smelled better than the undead. His thoughts drifted to the moment when he realized how truly screwed humanity was.

  After a frantic race to his mother’s house to retrieve the children, he and Becka had spent the next four hours huddled in front of the television, unable to tear themselves away from the macabre images of people attacking and consuming each other in the streets. It was only when the screen went blank and the emergency broadcast tone started blaring that they were able to focus on their situation.

  The ski town of Taos, New Mexico was about as far from civilization as you could get and still have modern amenities, and that was its only saving grace. The message that had scrolled by on the bottom of the television screen instructing people to evacuate large cities and keep clear of the changed, even if they were family members, seemed surreal at the time, like something from a bad B-movie. Changed. That was what the media called the undead. Stupid name, Jack thought in hindsight. They were zombies, pure and simple. They were the very same creatures he and his friends in high school had laughed at as they consumed legions of hapless teenagers while stumbling around like brain-dead robots in all of those silly movies. He wasn’t laughing anymore, and he was sure his friends, if they were still alive, weren’t laughing either.

  These creatures were the real deal, worse than anything George Romero could have ever dreamed up. And they didn’t shamble. No, these sons of bitches could sprint when they wanted to, at least some of them. And sometimes they were even able to work doors and windows, just like when they had been alive. He felt a momentary twinge of pity for all of the people who had perished trying to reach safety by following the half-baked evacuation orders proposed by the government. Jack had always known in the back of his mind that the west was home to a large portion of the country’s strategic missile forces. But for some reason, he had assumed they were all up north somewhere—Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, maybe even Colorado, but not in New Mexico.

  But when the missiles lanced up on the horizon, bright plumes of fire defining their westward trajectories, the reality had smacked him in the face, forcing him to reevaluate everything he believed about the place he had called home. California, he thought. The big cities. Los Angeles. Sacramento. San Francisco. A few minutes later there were a series of chalky-white flashes to the far north, in Colorado—Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo, most likely. And there was at least one large flash to the southeast, Albuquerque. But none for Taos. For that, Jack was thankful.

  For everything else, he was furious—because the government’s plan didn’t work. The zombies still came. Only now, in addition to an insatiable hunger for human flesh, they were walking dirty bombs.

  He wondered about the rest of the world. According to the news before the power had failed, the undead were on the march across the globe. Europe. China. Africa. The Middle East. Everywhere. He supposed there were others like his family scattered about. Between the nuclear-armed countries, there weren’t enough missiles to destroy the entire world—or were there? He didn’t know anymore. Since the collapse of the cold war, he had stopped paying attention to the whole concept of nuclear Armageddon. Big mistake.

  The first zombie had arrived in Taos a week after the bombs fell. It came from somewhere near Albuquerque, maybe closer, and it was in remarkably good condition. In fact, Jack hadn’t even realized it was a zombie until it was almost too late. The creature had strolled down the long driveway to his house with its head swiveling left and right, as if looking for someone. His gait appeared normal enough. The thing that tipped Jack off was the man’s clothing, or lack thereof. He wore no shirt, a pair of cutoff jeans, and one flip-flop, as if he had wandered off from a backyard barbecue. How th
e flip-flop had stayed on the man’s foot for so long still puzzled Jack.

  Madeline had noticed him first. “Daddy. There’s a man outside.” Nothing in her voice indicated alarm. He and Becka had done their best to shield the twins from what was going on around them. They knew it couldn’t last forever, that things had changed irrevocably, but they wanted to delay it as long as possible. That was another mistake, it turned out.

  The man noticed them, and like a missile locking onto a target, he had changed direction, heading toward the back porch where they all sat.

  Jack stood. “Can I help you?”

  The man hadn’t said anything; he just kept coming.

  Then Jack saw it. There was a small hole in the man’s chest, a few inches below his left nipple. A line of dried blood snaked down his stomach and around to his back at his waistline.

  “Becka! Mom! Get the kids inside. Now!” he yelled. Becka hadn’t wasted a second in herding the girls through the front door.

  “Stop right there!” Jack commanded. The man was thirty feet out and accelerating—almost running. “I said stop!” Jack felt the world closing in around him. Time slowed to a crawl. He picked up his Benelli hunting rifle and brought it to his shoulder, leveled the barrel in the man’s direction and curled his finger around the trigger. It had been Becka’s idea to keep a gun close by at all times.

  The feel of the cool, slightly oily steel under his index finger sent a wave of calm through Jack’s shaking arms. “I can do this,” he said under his breath.

  “Stop right there!” he yelled. “This is your last warning!” He centered the man’s head in his crosshairs. The man opened his mouth and let loose a moan, a low, almost subsonic, guttural roar that made the hairs on Jack’s neck leap to attention.

  He squeezed. The gun boomed, and the recoil punched him in the shoulder. The man had stopped in his tracks as the bullet tore through his cranium, turning his head into an airborne mist of bone and congealed blood, fanning out across the yard behind him. He stumbled forward a few more steps before tumbling into the dirt less than five feet from the edge of the porch. Jack lowered the gun and exhaled. So this is it. Behind him, the girls wailed in terror.

  Jack had then descended the porch stairs, the boards he had laid so carefully the previous summer squeaking under each step. The man—no, the creature—wasn’t moving. Brain and skull fragments spread out behind its body, coating the grass with a glistening slick of red, black, and gray. Chunks of skull poked up like spring mushrooms after a rainstorm. Jack slung his rifle over his shoulder and grabbed the garden hoe from the porch railing.

  “Jack? Are you okay?” The door opened behind him, and Becka stepped out.

  He motioned for her to get back inside. “Yeah. Stay inside, Becka.”

  He approached the body. Circling around the corpse, he realized the man was in worse shape than he initially thought. He almost gagged at the putrid stench rising from the body, and had pulled his shirt over his nose to block the scent.

  The creature’s hand twitched, and Jack took a quick step back. As he stared, the fingers opened and closed, grasping at the air. Fuck…He leaned the hoe against the porch and put the gun back to his shoulder. Taking another step back, he fired another round into what was left of the creature’s head. He was ready for the kick that time. The body jerked once and then was still. There was nothing recognizable as a head above the neck then, only a bloody, dirty pulp.

  He retrieved the hoe and poked the corpse one more time to make sure it was really dead.

  What the hell do I do now? He didn’t know if the blood was contagious, but he thought it might be. He hadn’t really known anything. He sensed movement behind him and spun around.

  Becka was at the foot of the stairs. His mother and the twins were at the door with their mouths agape. Jack dropped the hoe and went to Becka, folding her into his arms.

  It hadn’t taken long for more ghouls to arrive. It started with a trickle and grew to an outright flood in no time, hundreds of them in every condition imaginable, swarming through Taos in search of a new food source.

  Jack had no way to check for radioactivity. Some were obviously carriers, burned and blackened, skin hanging in strips with bits of skeleton showing through. Those, he shot from a distance whenever possible. Then, miraculously, the wave had subsided. The undead passed them by. They had all breathed a mistaken sigh of relief and started trying to get their lives back to normal, whatever normal was after the end of the world.

  Jack cursed himself to this day for letting his guard down. It was only two weeks after the last zombies passed that he had lost his mother and Maddie. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to halt his recollection of that awful day.

  It had started off gray and overcast, colder than usual for late summer, but not unheard of. The twins, as usual, were cute balls of fleece and mittens playing under the watchful eyes of their mother and grandmother. Jack was in the cellar, taking inventory of their food. There were plenty of canned vegetables from Becka’s garden and ample dried food from their last run to Walmart. A generous neighbor had set them up with dried elk before the uprising, enough for the winter ahead. He was in the midst of calculating ration scenarios on a legal pad when he heard the first scream.

  Dropping the notebook, he took the stairs two at a time, hoping and praying it wasn’t what he thought it was. He was outside in a second, turning his head every which way, trying to find the source of the screams. Someone fired a small handgun, the pop pop pop sounds underscoring each scream. Becka.

  Drawing the SIG Sauer P-229 from the paddle holster attached to the small of his back, he raced to the rear of the house. As he rounded the south corner, he saw the cause of the commotion.

  Maddie was on the ground, clutching her forearm and crying. Jack’s mother lay sprawled behind her, blood gushing from a tear in her throat. A few feet beyond, two zombies riddled with bullet holes lay on the ground. Becka was locked in a shooters stance with Ellie cowering behind her, one arm wrapped around her mother’s leg and the other clasping her favorite blue teddy bear. She was whimpering, peering around Becka’s leg at the dead ghouls.

  Jack raced to Maddie. Her arm was bleeding, but she was otherwise uninjured. “I need to check on Grandma,” he said. Maddie had nodded at him between sobs.

  His mother was already gone. Jack’s pulse, racing at a million miles an hour, had gone into overdrive. If it beat any faster, he feared it would burst from his chest and explode all over the room. She’s infected; she’ll turn any second now. He pushed the thought away and turned his attention back to his daughter. “Are you hurt, honey?” he asked. “Did they bite you?” Please don’t let her be bitten. Please. Please. “Let me see your arm.” She held it out reluctantly.

  Jack’s stomach dropped through the ground like a runaway elevator plunging into a pitch dark mineshaft. There was a perfect circular bite wound high on her right forearm. Bone glistened inside. Around the bite, the skin was an angry purple, bruised and crushed by human teeth. Becka came to his side, her pistol at the ready. She split her attention between Jack and Maddie and the surrounding yard, scanning for more zombies.

  “It hurts, Daddy,” Maddie cried through clenched teeth. “It hurts...” Jack didn’t know how long it would take for her to turn. But he knew it was inevitable. Bites were one hundred percent fatal.

  “Jack!” Becka said, a note of urgency in her voice. “Your mother.” He glanced over his shoulder and saw his mother’s hands and feet twitching. That was fast. Taking Maddie by her good arm, he guided her away, scooping Ellie up as he passed. As he walked by Becka, he mouthed the word “Please” and gestured at his mother’s body.

  Becka gave him an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement. As quickly as he could, Jack bundled the girls across the huge wraparound front porch and back inside the house. He had kicked the door closed with his heel just as Becka’s gun cracked.

  Jack felt a little piece of himself die with the sound. But at that moment, he didn�
�t have time to mourn. He had to figure out what to do about his daughter. And the clock was ticking.

  Becka had come inside a few minutes later, her face full of grim resolve. She placed her pistol on the dark mahogany table, the same table that was in Jack’s grandmother’s house when he was a child, and walked stiffly to the couch where Jack sat with the girls. Jack rubbed Maddie’s back and murmured soothing words to calm her. It wasn’t working. Ellie, meanwhile, stood a few feet away, unsure of what was going on.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” Becka whispered. Jack nodded and snorted back a tear. He would mourn his mother later.

  Becka knelt in front of Maddie, gazed into her eyes. “I’m here now, honey.”

  Maddie pulled from Jack’s arms and buried herself in her mother’s breast. Becka squirmed, angling her body in an attempt to avoid contact with her daughter’s infected blood.

  “I’m so cold, Mommy,” Maddie cried. “It hurts...”

  “My baby. Oh, my baby.” Becka sobbed into Maddie’s hair before regaining her composure and stiffening up. Jack saw hardness in her eyes that scared him to his core.

  “I don’t know how long we have,” he mouthed.

  Becka nodded, still unable to speak.

  “Is Maddie gonna to be okay?” Ellie squeaked. Becka looked at Jack with pleading eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to answer her daughter. Not yet.

  With a sudden jerk, Madeline grew stiff, as if stuck by lightning, and then she sagged in Becka’s arms, limp as a rag doll. Becka lowered her to the floor. “It’s happening.” Tears brimming in her eyes, her mouth set in a grim line, she looked up at Jack.

  Jack jumped to his feet, his mind struggling to comprehend how they had gotten to this place. He had no idea what to do, or even if there was anything he could do. He scanned the room, searching for some way to restrain Maddie, some way to avoid putting a bullet in her head like a diseased animal. Like Mom.