Life Among The Dead (Book 2): A Castle Made of Sand

by Cotton, Daniel

  Dan has a brief flash of memory. “You did this when I was little. We were camping and I got scared by the thunder… It was odd then too.”

  “It isn’t odd for an uncle to care for his nephew.”

  “But this time you’re dead.”

  “Good point,” he concedes. “Trust me, when the time finally comes, and your number is up, your dad and I will meet you at the pearly gates. The three of us are going to kick in the doors of Valhalla and throw a party the likes of which the cosmos has never seen.

  “You can relax now. Your family is fine. You no longer have to worry about the future, or your kingdom. I love you, Dan.”

  “I love you too,” the suicide king says as shadows creep into his vision around the edges. The dead close in on him, and the hungry reptiles draw close.

  7

  The king of New Castle is dead. Daniel Williamson floats upon a cloud, bathed in soft warm light. He is tranquil for the first time in a long while. He knows neither fear nor worry, and he knows his loved ones are safe and sound in the world below him. The source of his enlightenment is beyond him, but he just knows.

  “His eyes are open!” a voice rends Dan from his higher plain and back into the cold world. The gentle sun that had shone down upon him has become a bright supernova in his eyes that splits his head with pain. “Get his family!”

  Faces and voices bombard him as he slowly realizes he is on a bed, covered by a thin and inadequate blanket. The words he is being inundated with crowd one another, making it impossible to track, let alone nail down, the one voice he needs to hear at the moment.

  “Heather?”

  “Yes,” she says next to his ear. Her hand covers the one he uses to shield his tightly sealed eyes from the lights above him. Dan forces them open to look into her brilliant green ones. “I’m here.”

  “What happened?”

  “The dead weren’t alone in the swamp. There were soldiers. They saw our raft and came to investigate.”

  “Everyone ok?” he asks.

  “The boys, Carla, and Oz are fine.”

  “Raleigh?”

  “They’re sending troops to pick them up,” Oz answers from the corner of the room. “How’re you feeling, boss?”

  “I feel good,” Dan says with surprise. “Why do I feel good?”

  “I can answer that, Mr. Williamson.” A stranger approaches from where he had retreated so that those dearest to Dan could surround the patient. “From what I’ve been told, the individual that bit you was quite unique--a girl born without any immunities. Her condition required her to live in complete isolation. She had no exposure to the reanimation virus that seems to have only surfaced six years ago, pupating in us all until that fateful day.”

  “Didn’t we already know that?” Carla asks her peers.

  Dan concurs with a nod, but he feels this man has more to tell. “Who are you?”

  “I’m from your neck of the woods, actually.” The young guy in the white lab coat smiles. “My name is Robert Smalls, or as the yokels of Poland Creek once knew me, Bob-o.”

  “And you’re an expert of some sort?”

  “No… I’m just a student of biochemistry. I’ve been researching this thing under a microscope since the onset. You probably noticed your attacker was different from the dead. That’s because she wasn’t dead. It isn’t the virus that kills us, it’s our own immune systems. Our bodies fight so hard they ultimately give out, and the organs shut down one by one. The disease is adaptive, so the harder we fight the stronger it becomes. In this girl it met no resistance, and could fulfill its goal with ease. It then reproduced in her as a weaker strain.”

  “That’s how I beat it?” Dan comprehends.

  “Not only beat, but created antibodies against it!” the scientist adds with excitement.

  Oz crosses his arms and cocks his head. “Are you saying Dan is the cure?”

  “Not exactly. But with his blood we can create a vaccine from the deactivated virus. The bite won’t cause the transformation. Most importantly our dead will stay… well… dead.”

  “Holy crap!” Carla says with amazement. “Now all we need is a vaccine against being eaten and life can go back to normal.”

  “It certainly can,” Robert says. “Our own dead are all we have to worry about here. Nothing can get through our walls.”

  Dan has heard that before, and he had even thought it once about his own safe haven. He looks around the room he had first believed to be a hospital suite, finding it looks more like a hotel room. The decor is cheap but nice, massively produced fare. Everything from the wallpaper to the lamp shades depict cartoon figures he recalls--happy cats and dogs frolicking together. “Where are we?”

  “You’ll never guess!” Carla happily bounds to the nearest window. She pulls the shade back to reveal a surreal world of bright colors and balloons; a rollercoaster whizzes past their view.

  “Storybook Land?”

  “The big one, in Florida!” her glee in announcing their new home causes her to embarrassingly forget that he already knows what state they are in. “Obviously.”

  “It makes sense.” Oz shrugs. “The walls are high and made of thick stone. The place is divided into sections that can be sealed off if need be. Plus, we have some help out in the parking lot.”

  “Who?”

  “Alligators,” Heather explains. “They have overrun the area. With the increase in food and lack of those that would drive them off, they’ve taken over. The military tell us that they’re breeding at an alarming rate too.”

  “Food supply? They’re eating the zombies! That’s great!” The idea brings joy to Dan’s heart, but despite his warranted happiness regarding the misfortune of his enemy he notices no one else is smiling with him. All the faces around his bed not only take on grim expressions, they break eye contact. “Ugh! Crap! What is it?”

  “We wanted to wait until you were back on your…” Heather begins.

  His wife looks to the others for help, so Carla picks up the thread. “You know, when you’re up and walking… Shit!”

  “A gator ate your foot, boss,” Oz breaks the news, forgoing the tact being attempted. “Well… not all of it.”

  Dan looks along the topography of the blanket that covers him, and where he should see two equal peaks he sees an uneven pair of mountains.

  Heather points out that the glass is in fact half-full. “The soldiers got to you just in time.”

  “I could argue they actually got there a few minutes late.” Dan stares at his partially devoured left foot, unable to remove the sheet that covers it. “But I’m alive. We all are! And, from the sounds of things, I won’t need to run anytime soon anyway.”

  8

  “I love this sand,” Dan Williamson says as he digs a small plastic shovel into the sugar white granules of the theme park’s private beach. It’s a perfect day, not too hot but still sunny. He looks around at the other survivors enjoying the setting.

  Oz and Carla chase each other along the water’s edge. Apart from a large age gap, the pair seem made for one another. They’re happy. Dan smiles at the frolicking couple. They deserve it. The one time sheriff of New Castle adjusts the string straps of her thin white bikini top, drawing the attention of male onlookers immediately. The sheer magnitude of the man with her snaps their eyes away just as fast.

  A man Dan had met only briefly, and like many survivors exchanged war stories with, is being buried by his blonde-haired little girl. He is begging to be let out, but she just giggles and shakes her head, allowing her single pigtail to whip back and forth. Dan had noted many similarities between his own tale and the man who is reluctantly being committed to the earth. Both started in Waterloo and in some way involved a purple Camaro. The man laughed as he recounted seeing his car being stolen by the same guy three times during the entire ordeal. The last case of grand theft occurred on an army base that had fallen to the dead. He had led his daughter and a few others out of the civilian sector when they got pinned down
, only to be rescued by the most unlikely hero.

  “Usually clowns give me the creeps,” Eli had said. “That day, I was never happier to see one.”

  The jester got them out of danger and somehow squeezed them all into his ice cream truck. From there they decided to head to Florida, since Eli’s folks have a house boat in the Gulf near Cape Coral that they had been living on since retirement. The refugees were lucky that the stubborn couple refused to go with the Coast Guard when asked to leave their floating abode. The sailors checked on them a few times a week and got to know them on a first name basis. It wasn’t until they became overwhelmed themselves by those seeking sanctuary from the Midwest that they decided to take the Coasties up on their offer, for the good of their granddaughter.

  Life feels like a vacation now to Dan and his family. He never wanted to be a leader, never chose to be the king. He doesn’t miss it in the least; his only duties now are being the very best father and husband he can be, and making bi-weekly blood donations. Between these responsibilities he has a lot of time to think, and he wonders if Bruce was simply a fever induced apparition, or was he really stopping by in the form of an angel--a cranky guardian angel.

  He also thinks a lot about fate. The indefinite bastion that New Castle was supposed to be turned out to merely be a stop along the way, a roadside attraction before coming here. All the survivors, strangers in the world before, find they are connected. Dan calls it the ‘zombie effect.’ Any actions taken by one offsets the longevity of someone else; food one scavenges robs another of the possibility, putting a zombie down saves the life of someone else it may have bitten, and any zombie permitted to walk away could kill its next target.

  Though a vaccine has been implemented, no one knows the true cause of the plague, with one exception. A very unlikely survivor was picked up by a patrol. The man was travelling on foot, and his unbelievable tale sparked many rumors throughout the walled society. They found him sowing seeds along to road, and when asked what he was doing he proudly proclaimed that he was ‘Spreading the love.’ He’d later elaborate that it was the least he could do for Mary Jane since she saved his life.

  Garfield Colt had an epiphany in that underground lab. Freeman Wilkes had given him the idea when he told him that he smelled like a rotting corpse. Gar realized it wasn’t his acting like a zombie that saved him from them but his odor. Living in his own subterranean lair, with so long between showers and clean laundry, had masked his human scent with that of the herb. He has been wandering the country side, planting the seeds for a greener tomorrow, doing good deeds, and all with the ultimate goal of bringing a test tube filled with a green substance to anyone who may be able to use it righteously. ‘God’s bugger’ as he calls it. Needless to say, nobody takes Gar very seriously.

  Today Dan tries to think of nothing. Not the virus or the cure, not the dead walking or otherwise, but of the sand and the people he loves the most; Heather, Vincent, Jack, and the newest on the list, Johnny, due in May. He sits with his family under the sun, building a castle made of sand.

  To the Reader

  Thank you for coming back! I hope you enjoyed this installment of the New Castle saga. Please feel free to let me know what you think. Reviews are always great, or contact me through my website: http://danielcotton.weebly.com/

  If you like my writing, check out my other books: Cloudy With a Chance of Zombies, Anthills, the Gifted, and She Hates Me: Now and then.

  Thanks again!

  Daniel Cotton

  About the Author

  Daniel Cotton is a New Hampshire native currently residing in Iowa with his lovely wife and two sons. He derives inspiration from his own life and over-active imagination, tapping into pains from his past as well as the current joys in his life, blending them into tales that are both dark and touching. Daniel delves into his own life experiences; his factory jobs, his time working on a psychiatric ward, his time as a Naval Hospital Corpsman, all of the places he has lived and people he’s known to make the worlds he creates seem more real. When you read one of his works, you are actually reading a piece of him.