Six Feet From Hell: Books 1 - 3

by Coley, Joseph

  Joe smiled and flung the chunks of brain matter and blood off the rebar as Jamie made his way back to the fence line where Joe had been killing zombies. Jamie let out a small grin as he approached.

  “So how are they?”

  Joe returned the grin. “Try it out and see, dude. We kill ‘em this way it’s quiet, we don’t attract more and we don’t waste ammo. Never know what else is gonna try and kick our ass today.”

  Jamie sauntered over to the fence and stabbed another one of the writhing undead trying to get through the fence, nailing it square in the head. Jamie was chagrined as he pulled it loose and promptly stabbed another zombie on the fence, this one wearing a Burger King uniform. “No more Whoppers now, you smelly motherfuckers.”

  Joe laughed at Jamie’s contempt for the Burger King zombie, much like Joe’s contempt for the Saints zombie. Taking out a little frustration on the unsuspecting ghouls that were slowly dwindling as Joe and Jamie took out a few more each was a good way to get rid of some much-needed stress. Curtis, Chris, and Amos soon joined up with Joe and Jamie in the zombie-slaying fiesta. Each man had one of Joe’s homemade zombie killers in his hand and started working on the more than three dozen zombies that had gathered. Each man that was taking care of the undead did so almost gleefully. Brains splattered, blood flowed, and the pungent smell of decay wafted through the air as more and more of the undead fell along the chain link fence.

  After nearly twenty minutes of killing zombies, all of the men were not only tired, but also not smelling the greatest either. The line of fallen zombies stretched the entire line from the edge of the runway all the way to the front gate. The rest of the runway was thankfully fenced in as well, though much further out and away from the terminal. The fence line surrounded the entire complex, but Joe did not take it for granted. The zombies they had taken care of had flexed the fence to its bending point, but it had held. Any more of the undead that might make their way down to their position, especially in great numbers, might be able to take out a whole section. If that happened, then they would have to fall back to the terminal, which was floor-to-ceiling glass in the front and made up of mostly aluminum siding. The whole steel building was not a fortress, but it would do for now.

  “So what do you think of the ‘zombie slayer 2000’ guys?” Joe said as he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Amos thrust the rebar into the last zombie and yanked it free, grunting in the process. “I think this will do just fine, Joe. Now if you could get Cooper’s lazy ass to do something then I would truly be impressed.” Amos let out a deep rumble of a laugh as he addressed Joe, pleased with the headway they had made in such a short time. Joe’s smile faded as he saw Cooper smoking outside the terminal, oblivious to work of any kind. Joe realized that he would have to deal with another asshole, this one not as off-kilter as James, but could be trouble nonetheless.

  Joe reached out, shook Amos’ large mitt, and exchanged high fives with the other men as they began walking away from their self-inflicted carnage. The group approached the terminal where Cooper was still standing, slowly dragging down a cigarette. As Joe approached him, Cooper flipped the cigarette out into the parking lot in front of them, harmlessly falling a few feet in front of Joe. Joe paused shortly before continuing.

  “Nice to see you busting your ass for everyone, there Cooper.”

  Cooper exhaled the smoke out of his lungs and let out a grunt of disdain. “Yeah, makin’ this place smell like the inside of an asshole was just what I needed today,” he said sarcastically.

  “Look, at least they won’t be attracted to here for a while. It worked for us when we were at home and…”

  “So does that make you the fucking zombie expert now, cowboy? As far as I'm concerned all this did was make us smell more like those rotting fuckers. You don’t know what that smell will do,” Cooper said.

  Joe’s brow furled. “What have you got against me, Cooper? I didn’t have to come help your sorry ass, but I did. I am taking a detour from my intended destination to help you out; least you can do is be a little more appreciative.”

  Cooper grunted again, turned his back to Joe, and walked away. “I didn’t ask for shit, there buddy. I'm goin’ back inside before I start smelling like you nasty bastards.”

  Joe looked to Curtis who only shrugged his shoulders, the international sign for “I don’t know what to do with him, either.” Joe closed his eyes and shook his head. He knew what kind of man Cooper was and had bigger fish to fry. He walked back inside and took up real estate on a comfortable chair that was evidently part of the small waiting area for planes in and out of the small airport. He folded his arms, hung his head, and took a deep breath. The sleep from the night before on the train was waning already, and it was now only nearly four in the afternoon according to his worn and dirty watch. Joe wiped the face of the watch off and stared at it. The world had gone by in a blur for the last few days and he had not had time to catch up with it. He had made the choice to escape from Rural Retreat and try to get to the Gulf Coast, which now seemed like a less viable idea. They did not have ample transportation for the trip and now had more people to haul and take care of than they had options. The only vehicle was their Humvee as far as he could tell. He needed to round up the guys again and get them working on scoping out the airport fully. The ample supply of rebar would take care of the zombies that would eventually come back to the fence line. He figured that there would be a generator and a supply of fuel to run it with, hopefully one that ran on diesel. The Humvee was still sitting at three-quarters of a tank of fuel and would not be making too many long trips, so using the five-gallon jerry cans of diesel would work for the time being.

  Joe was contemplating all of his new plans when Buffey walked into the room. Her worn and tired face showed a few years of aging in just the few days since the end of the world. She sat down next to him and mimicked his seated position. Joe looked over to her as she stared forward.

  “I know that you don’t agree with the way that I’ve been running things so far, and I can’t really say I blame you. All I'm asking for is for you to have my support throughout all this and to keep me relatively sane as much as possible. I don’t expect you to like what I have to do, but it is what I have to do.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what has happened the last few days and the road that we’re taking is not going to be easy, and I don’t think that I can handle too much more of this, Joe. Between Lori and Ronnie dying and me having to take care of Dakota, it’s all just a little too much for me to handle right now. I only have one child left, Joe. I figure that I have to eliminate some of my stress level, and I don’t think there is any easy way to say this, so I'm just gonna blurt it out,” Buffey’s eyes began welling up as she spoke, still not taking her gaze off the floor in front of her.

  Joe frowned. He did not expect to hear the kind of rhetoric that Buffey was speaking of. She had been under quite a bit of stress so far and had held together so far admirably well. When Joe was in school for paramedic, one of the things they taught was that you had to hold yourself together no matter the situation. If you had a dying two-year-old in your arms, you did your job; you could always fall apart later. Buffey had evidently had enough of trying to hold it together and was not starting to fall apart at the seams. She looked to Joe and met his eyes; a very somber look crossed her face. Joe nearly passed out when she spoke.

  “I think we should consider ourselves divorced from now on.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Joe had a hard time trying to digest what he had just been told. His skin was cold and clammy, and he felt like one of the undead as he began his thousand-yard stare into nothingness. Buffey kept on talking and Joe did not hear any of it. She pleaded with him to try to take this in stride and take care of the group, including her. Joe did not hear any of the pleading. He stared forward and kept his hollow expression. Brittany and Rodger passed in front of him, MRE’s in hand to eat. Joe thought about the food in the MRE’s and th
e combination of thoughts with his current situation made him vomit what little contents he had in his stomach. He heaved several times, stopped, and tried to catch his breath as the dry heaving continued. His vision became blurry, the world’s sounds came as if in a barrel, and he fell forward face first into the floor.

  “Oh my God! Somebody help!” Buffey cried out.

  Curtis, Ashleigh, Rickey, and all of the available help within shouting range came over to aid her as she tried to wake Joe. The only person in range that did not move an inch was Cooper, who stayed cemented in place, not giving a damn about what happened to the new group’s so-called leader. He grunted in disgust as his fellow survivors flocked to help Joe, who was still helplessly passed out on the floor.

  Joe’s eyes were rolled back in his head, mouth agape, and his breathing labored. Chris came running up and upon seeing Joe passed out, ran back to their medical supplies, and fished out an ammonia inhalant. Chris grabbed it and crushed the ampoule, trotting back to Joe’s side as he did. He knelt down and waved the capsule under Joe’s nose. Joe shook his head and slowly moved his hands to his face to move it away from his nose.

  “There ya go, buddy. Come on back to the land of the living…so to speak,” Chris said as he removed the ammonia inhalant from Joe’s face as he woke. Joe swatted the strong-smelling inhalant away and slowly sat up.

  “What the hell happened? I remember throwing up and everything got fuzzy,” Joe said, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. He sat himself up and slowly looked around the room, spotting Buffey standing off by herself. Joe suddenly recalled what exactly he did not want to remember. His wife of nearly a decade had told him that they should now consider themselves divorced. Joe had fought tooth and nail for his family for the past few days, only to have his wife seemingly give up on everything that he had worked for. He did not stop to think about anything she had said, mostly because the haze of passing out from the news had stopped him dead in his tracks, nearly literally.

  Shaking off the haze some more he was slowly helped to his feet but Curtis and Chris. He glared over to where Buffey was standing. He did not have the words yet for what he wanted to say to her, but it would not be pretty so he held his tongue. He did not want to tell his cohort about what had actually transpired so he tried to make a story of what was bothering him.

  “I think I just need something to eat and a little rest, I've not had much of either so far this week,” Joe said as he semi-staggered towards where the MRE’s were stashed. Most of his people, including his new friends were all watching his movements with much concern. He walked over to the counter and fumbled through the MRE’s until he found one that suited him. Truthfully, he as very hungry and did need something to eat in spite of hurling up what few stomach contents he had. All the people in the room stared at him as he sauntered over to a table and pulled up a chair.

  Joe let out a smile in spite of himself. “I’m fine ya’ll, really just need something to eat and some sleep. I promise I will be good to go in the morning.” He did not want to shake their confidence in him, so he played it off as exhaustion. There were a lot more people looking for him to make the right decisions, and they did not need to know that his personal life and problems were going to possibly affect his judgment when it came to protecting them and possibly saving their lives. He knew from experience that if you did not have faith in the people in charge, then that was a huge blow to anything else that needed to be accomplished. If they knew that his wife was basically going to leave him in the middle of the zombie apocalypse then it could complicate things.

  Greatly complicate things.

  Joe took out his pocketknife and opened the MRE as his cohorts began to file out and go back to whatever they were doing before. He tore open the MRE and sat the knife down on the table as Buffey approached him and sat down next to him. He stopped opening his meal and addressed her as best he could, considering the circumstances.

  “Whatever you have to say, just save it. I only have one request if you really want to do this,” he said, not making eye contact or looking up from his MRE.

  Buffey sniffled, obviously upset at Joe’s initial reaction to her dropping a bombshell on him. “What is that?”

  Joe now turned and lowered his voice and moved closer to her. “We keep this between you and me, no one else needs to know about this.” Buffey frowned as Joe continued. “Look, these people are looking to me to make the right decisions and I can’t rightly do that if they think that I'm falling apart or that I'm letting my family fall apart. If this is going to work, then we will just keep busy doing other things. I don’t seem to have a problem finding shit to do and I'm damn sure that I can find something to do around here for a good while. You take care of the sick people that Curtis has, and I will do whatever is asked of me.”

  Buffey was speechless as Joe explained himself. “And we absolutely do not tell Rickey about this. If and when the time comes, we will figure it out but until then we say nothing.” Buffey silently nodded and brushed away a tear as he directed his attention elsewhere.

  Joe silently went back to his eating of his MRE, oblivious to the world around him. He steeled his mindset for survival and little else. There was the possibility of a generator and maybe returning power and heat for a limited time. There was the necessity of getting more medical supplies for the sick and injured. Speaking of injured, there was still the matter of the woman who quite likely was some measure of immune. The odds of her being completely immune to the toxin that caused the dead to rise would not be a large stretch. Nearly every major outbreak and disease had at least a small percentage of the population that was not affected.

  Joe sat and mulled over his thoughts as he picked at his MRE. Curtis came over and sat down next to him, patting him on the shoulder as he did.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  Joe tore open a packet of orange flavored cookies and began attempting to eat. He glanced up to Curtis and forced a smile. “Guess I left most of my ‘thoughts’ on the floor over there.”

  Curtis sat and chuckled. “Yeah I can see that. All seriousness, you doin’ okay?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinkin’ that it probably gets a little chilly in here at night. Any chance of getting us some power on in this place, like a generator or anything? There’s gotta be one around here somewhere I would think.”

  “I don’t know. To be honest when I got here I didn't intend to stay any kind of extended amount of time. While I was doin’ my scouting I kept looking for a way to try to get out of here. I did have an idea, but getting to it is a son of a bitch.”

  Joe sat down what little he was eating and turned to Curtis. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Well we needed something to get everybody around in and honestly before you guys got here I wanted to get either an armored truck or ambulance, but there ain’t any armored cars and the hospital here has been overrun since all this shit started.”

  Joe thought over Curtis’ proposition for a moment. The ambulance that he, Andrew, Donnie, and Jamie had started to use was a very good idea until J.W. and his band of goons had shot it up, effectively ending it’s use. Joe had a ‘light bulb’ moment as he suddenly came to the realization that he might be able to kill two birds with one stone.

  “Do you know of any nursing homes here in Monroeville?”

  Curtis shrugged. “I'm not sure, but we can get a phone book and find out. What are you thinkin’ about?”

  Joe’s face lit up a little bit as he explained, shrugging off some of his depression shortly. “Well the way I see it if the hospital is overrun then the next best thing is either a pharmacy or a nursing home. If we go to a nursing home, the chances of us running into any kind of threat will be a whole lot less than if we try to raid a store. Besides, most of the druggies will be raiding the pharmacies for the good shit like oxycontin, Percocet, fentanyl, and stuff like that.”

  “So we go to a nursing home and load up on what drugs we can find? Why a nursing home?”
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br />   “Think about it. The people that are gonna be there aren’t exactly really movin’ that quickly anyway. I don’t think we are gonna get taken over by a bunch of geriatric zombies. Do you?”

  Curtis laughed aloud. The more he thought about it, the more it made better sense than trying to raid a pharmacy or daring to go to the hospital. Curtis mulled over Joe’s idea for a moment. “So when do you want to get this going then?”

  “How long do you think your two sick people have got?”

  Curtis shrugged again. “If we leave now, we might get caught in the dark. Lemme go get a phone book or something and see if we can get the address. If it ain’t too far, then we can try and go now. If we wait until tomorrow morning then we have to worry about that asshole lieutenant showing up while we’re gone, and personally, I don’t wanna see that son of a bitch until we get some kind of game plan. Whatever he’s lookin’ for ain’t here, but I don’t think that’s gonna stop him from comin’ back by here, especially after he finds your train broke down. If you guys were supposed to meet up, then he’s gonna get suspicious.”

  “Go see what you can dig up; I will get a couple of the guys together to see if they wanna make a run with us. The way I see, if we take both of us we will need three more to get the job done. That’s two people on watch and three inside. I will get Balboa, Jamie, and Chris if you don’t mind me taking my guys”

  “Only problem is that leaves Cooper here with just Amos and Rodger to keep him in line. Amos is a big sumbitch but he’s not gonna want to babysit Cooper, and Rodger is a goody guy but he’s just a little…seasoned to be doin’ anything of use right now.”

  Curtis left to get a phonebook and once again Joe as left with his own thoughts. Joe’s heart sank a little; he knew what Curtis was getting at. They would unfortunately have to take Cooper with them, much to Joe and Curtis’ disdain. He didn't trust Cooper as far as he could throw him, and as far as he knew he couldn’t pick him up. He also did not want to have to force the issue of making Cooper go with them. It was a catch-22 either way they went but he sure as hell was not going to leave Cooper alone with all of the women. The possibilities of something going wrong went up exponentially once they left him there with them. Joe tossed the remains of his MRE aside and got up to go back outside when he met the very man that he did not want to see.