In Harm’s Way:
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
By
Shawn Chesser
SMASHWORDS EDITION
***
In Harm’s Way:
Surviving the Zombie
Apocalypse
Copyright 2012
Shawn Chesser
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Smashwords Edition, License
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.
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***
Acknowledgements
For Mo, Raven, and Caden, you three mean the world to me...love you. And thanks for putting up with me clacking away at all hours. I owe everything to my parents for bringing me up the right way. Mom, thanks for reading… although it is not your genre. Dad, aka Mountain Man Dan, thanks for your ear and influence. Cliff Kane, RIP. Daymon, thanks for taking me all over the slopes in Jackson Hole! Thanks to all of the men and women in the military, past and present, especially those of you in harm’s way. Thanks to all LE personnel for your service. To the people in the U.K. who have been in touch, thanks for reading! Beta readers, you rock and you know who you are. Thanks George Romero for introducing me to zombies. Steve H. thanks for listening. All of my friends and fellows at S@N, thanks as well. Lastly, thanks to Bill W. and Dr. Bob… you helped make this possible. I am going to sign up for another 24.
My idea for the cover was interpreted and designed by Craig Overbey to perfection. Thank you sir! Contact Craig
Special thanks to Craig DiLouie, Gary Mountjoy, John O’Brien, and Mark Tufo. One way or another all of you have helped me and provided me with invaluable advice.
Once again, extra special thanks to Monique Happy for taking In Harm’s Way and giving it some special attention and TLC while polishing its rough edges. Working with you, Mo, has been a seamless experience and nothing but a pleasure. You are the best!
*****
Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services
[email protected]
Chapter 1
Outbreak - Day 8
Schriever Air Force Base
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Daymon stomped his feet and heckled the nearest zombies. He wanted to lure all of the creatures in the immediate vicinity to the barrier in front of him.
The creep of panic brought on by his claustrophobia was brewing internally. Even in the pitch black he could sense the twelve foot chain-link topped with coiled razor wire pressing in on him. Since childhood he had had a profound fear of enclosed spaces and fought like a wolverine when cornered. More than one former schoolyard bully could attest to that.
If another human had been present the flash of steel would have been lost on them. Daymon was lightning quick; the largest of the walkers wavered and then folded sideways, crumpling in a heap. Ten inches of pointed tent stake to the eye made sure the corpse would stay down for good. The sharpened steel was the only weapon Daymon could scrounge up and would have to do until he found something more lethal.
The sudden burst of movement drew the walking corpses nearer. They clambered over their brother’s unmoving body to get to the living. Cold white fingers probed the honeycomb-shaped openings as their combined weight pressed the fence inward.
“Come and get me,” Daymon chided the ghouls in a singsong voice, barely audible over the shuffling of their lifeless feet. Gaunt faces pressed closer, bringing their stench with them. Their demonic guttural moaning commenced. The man in black was afraid of neither the walkers nor what one bite could do to him. He had been dead inside since the day he was discarded, like so much trash, in the dumpster behind the community hospital where his biological mom spit him out.
A small helping of patience was all it took. One by one the foul smelling abominations moved up a space in line. Curiosity didn’t motivate them; it was their unstoppable desire to consume his flesh. He lured them near until all but one lay in a heap, victims of the tent stake. An old saying that he once heard popped into his head, an eye for an eye leaves a room full of blind men. This whole apocalypse thing was to his liking; he tolerated very few people and loved no one now that the lady that adopted him, the one that actually deserved to be called Mom, was gone.
Daymon raked the cold steel back and forth across the chain links. The ensuing tink-tink-tink failed to get the remaining zombie’s attention. It was a very old specimen, gnarled and hunched over. It had probably been prisoner in an assisted living facility, lonely and waiting to die, before being infected and mercifully released to join the hungry ranks of the walking dead. The man in black watched the monster pan its shriveled head back and forth, like a ravenous lion, smelling the air for prey.
Daymon scaled the first few feet of fence, and when he was within arm’s reach of the coiled razor wire, he tugged the burlap potato sacks free from where they had been hanging, like a tail, jammed between the small of his back and his wide leather belt. He had liberated the sacks from behind the twenty-four hour mess tent where some anal individual had left them neatly stacked amongst a myriad of other recyclables. Old habits died hard. Who the hell do they think they are saving the planet for now? he mused.
Hanging on perilously with one hand grasping the rusted fence, Daymon lofted the first of the sacks over his head and steered it, as gravity pulled it down, to the spot where he wanted it to land.
From his high perch he witnessed the elderly zombie stagger twenty feet to the south and perform another sniff test on the air. Daymon had a feeling that its other senses were compromised. Did somebody forget their contacts on Judgment Day? He quietly snickered.
After fully covering a two foot wide section with all of the burlap potato sacks, he gingerly began to inch his way over while his body weight compressed the coils. At first he didn’t feel the
scalpel sharp barbs as they bit into his skin. However, he did sense the hot sticky fluid soaking into his thermal undershirt. Dismayed by the sheer volume of his own coppery-smelling blood, he wondered whimsically if he was going to die before he even made it out of the base. Once he was on the ground, outside of the wire, he quickly assessed the damage. The cuts weren’t as bad as he had initially suspected and they would stop bleeding eventually. The tough firefighter had been cut to the bone before and survived so he wasn’t about to let a few superficial gashes slow him down now.
Daymon triaged his situation as he warily eyed the walker deliberately shuffling along the fence in his direction. The creature would have to be dealt with first and then the wounds to his torso.
He already knew the odds of completing this foolhardy excursion weren’t favorable. But the thought of spending another second inside the Air Force base, unarmed, feeling like a neutered dog, was out of the question.
***
An hour before dark, Daymon had taken a long meandering walk around the north and west sides of the base searching for the right spot to scale the fence. The first thing he noticed was that there were very few walkers near the perimeter. The snipers had been engaging the flesh eaters with surgical precision since they began arriving outside the perimeter a week ago. The massive mounds of dead still awaiting burial stood testament to the shooters’ lethality. He returned to his billet two hours later, confident he could escape the base; whether he would find what he was looking for once outside the wire was another story.
***
Schriever Security Pod
The airman tasked with monitoring the northeast perimeter cameras during the early morning hours was distracted, to say the least. He was trying to listen in on the action in downtown Springs in one ear and watch the multi-camera feeds on the monitor at the same time. The rooftop snipers were constantly calling for ammunition and relaying body counts. The drama being played out over the radio was enough of a diversion to make the airman miss the melee taking place in the lower corner of the flat panel monitor. The ethereal shadow lunged and hacked at the group of zombies until they were a dark unmoving pile of bodies at the bottom of the screen. He also missed the dark shape leg sweep the last standing zombie and deliver a final fatal blow, pinning the thing’s head to the ground.
By the time the sleep-deprived sentry turned his attention to the eight separate camera feeds on the divided LCD screen, Daymon had already melted away into the darkness.
***
Outside the wire
Daymon pulled consistent five minute miles when he ran cross-country for the Teton High Redskins. That was over a decade ago, and in track shoes, not leather boots. The steady breeze caressing his back was calming and helped push him along, more mentally than physically. Late afternoon thunderstorms the day before had softened the ground, lessening the strain on his knees. Large mountain ranges like the Rockies had more of an effect on the weather than most people realized. Nearly every day like clockwork, the angry dark clouds would pull in from the west, form up like soldiers awaiting marching orders, spill over the craggy peaks and violently roll across the high desert. The summer weather was the same back home: both the Wasatch front in Utah, where his mom used to live, and the Tetons in Wyoming, where he spent most of his childhood. After high school Daymon followed his parents to the Salt Lake suburb of South Jordan, where he rented a studio apartment and worked loss prevention at a number of different electronics stores. He quickly found that the work was neither challenging nor rewarding. The city was too vanilla for his liking, and as much as it pained him he decided to move back to Driggs, the poor man’s Jackson Hole, and get a job with the BLM fighting forest fires. Before long the lanky young man worked his way out of the heavy fire crews and up the government pay grade, eventually finding his true calling--jumping out of perfectly good airplanes into dangerous situations.
Before the outbreak Daymon was enjoying a one week stand down; late July had seen fewer forest fires than usual so he risked a quick trip to South Jordan to see his “Moms” as he liked to call her. He had left the fire station in Jackson Hole early Saturday morning and was on his way to Salt Lake when he heard the first Department of Homeland Security alert announced on the radio. He vividly remembered the first tingles of caution he sensed when he couldn’t get a call through to Chief Kyle at the station. His cell phone wasn’t one of the new “smart” models--those kind usually didn’t last long when he was jumping out of airplanes or hacking through heavy brush and setting backfires. Cursing his bad luck, he tossed the chunky Ericsson phone into the glove box of the Suburban, chalking the lack of reception up to a cellular dead spot. He only made it as far north as Provo, Utah before he was repulsed by the living dead. Grudgingly he made the difficult decision to head back to Jackson Hole, leaving his Mom’s whereabouts seemingly forever unknown. It was during the return trip, in the little town of Hannah, Utah, where he met Cade Grayson and they embarked together on the dangerous trek that eventually delivered them to Schriever Air Force Base on the outskirts of Colorado Springs.
***
Two miles outside of the wire
Daymon had spotted the Rocky Mountain Outdoor Store near a boarded up strip mall the night before while riding shotgun in the Wells Fargo armored car. It looked, from a distance, like the entire block and parking lot had been surrounded with chain link fencing. Even though it had been dark and the vehicle he was riding in had been moving at a decent clip, it appeared as if the stores had been spared from looting. The close proximity to Schriever, with its large military presence, was probably its saving grace.
Daymon stopped to surveil his surroundings, getting his bearings while he racked his brain, striving to remember where he had seen the cluster of stores.
After a moment’s rest he decided to keep looking and resumed running, picking up the same fast pace. The early morning high desert air had a crisp edge to it, allowing him to see his breath with each hard earned exhale. Daymon was just hitting his stride, long legs propelling him smoothly forward, when the ground under his boots suddenly disappeared. The instantaneous sensation of weightlessness compelled his stomach to take temporary residence in his throat as he plunged into the abyss. The impact that followed was as startling as the realization that the ground had seemingly been yanked out from under him. He sensed something sharp poking his knee through his thick dungarees and his right hand rested on a cold smooth surface with a small amount of give. The makeshift weapon in his other hand had become embedded in something solid.
As Daymon’s eyes adjusted to the new environs a pallid face, inches from his, came into sharp focus. The zombie’s death mask, stretched tight across its skull, thin waxy lips riding over a picket of ivory incisors, stared blankly back at him. Thankfully, worms squirmed from a gaping, fist-sized cavity in the thing’s temple, confirming that it was really dead.
Daymon recoiled and removed the tent stake from the thing’s shoulder. As he shifted his weight to avoid the inadvertent kiss of death, his hand plunged into something sticky, releasing a burst of noxious gasses. Elbow deep in entrails, he detected a shifting within the sea of carrion. Frantically he scrabbled to his knees, pulling his right arm from the gore. Mercifully it was dark and the true horror of his predicament wasn’t fully revealed. Once again he sensed something moving underneath him, whether it was a bunch of zombies or just the result of his added weight was moot, he wanted out.
The Gods taunted him as the moon briefly appeared, shining golden light down the middle of the mass grave that he had unwittingly tumbled into. Hundreds of dead bodies surrounded him, and like the faces in a madman’s nightmare, they silently snarled and laughed at his misfortune. Daymon found out the hard way that it was impossible to retch and breathe through his mouth at the same time. Acid-laced bile backed up and sluiced from his mouth and nostrils. Each heave of his body was answered by more subtle movements from just under the surface layer of decaying corpses.
Daymon shakily arose w
hile nervously eyeing the area near his feet. A shiver coursed up his spine and the small hairs on his neck stood at attention when the muffled wanting moans began to resonate from deep inside the grave. Daymon slipped and slogged through the pit of corpses and once he finally made it to the edge, like he had done hundreds of times while skiing in the backcountry, he kicked postholes into the mud wall and slowly made his way up the slippery seventy-five degree incline.
Daymon sat on the edge of the muddy wound that had been gouged into the earth and contemplated his latest brush with death. He knew it was going to happen sooner or later... death was inevitable. The Grim Reaper was going to have to wait though, because Daymon still had a few hundred things left to do on his bucket list. Snapping back to the present, his eyes were drawn to the distant sky show. The sweeping spotlights in downtown Springs, twenty miles to the west, were dwarfed by the backdrop of Pikes Peak and the southern Rockies. The mountains rose to 14,000 feet, jutting like sharks teeth into the inky night sky. Good idea, he thought. Even though the noisy transport planes bringing the soldiers back from places around the globe had stopped arriving hourly, the hungry dead kept showing up outside the wire. Utilizing the intense spotlights to draw the monsters away from the base and back into the metro area was ingenious. But just how long it was going to take to kill all of the zombies once they amassed was the sixty-four thousand dollar question.
***
With the ordeal of the pit fresh in his mind, Daymon loped at a slow trot northwest while keeping a wary eye on the ground. He jaywalked diagonally across the street towards a darkened Texaco gas station and happened upon two zombies trapped inside a 1970s Cadillac Eldorado. The car was adorned with the full luxury package, including the faux gold plated spare tire kit on the trunk; it had been a regal car when it was shiny and new, but now the once white interior was streaked with dried blood and a milky film of unidentifiable fluids fouled the insides of the glass. The creatures hadn’t seen him yet and he didn’t want to give them a reason to moan, so he kept out of sight and quietly snuck around the rear of the gold Caddie. No way, he thought to himself when he spied the red and blue Grateful Dead sticker proudly displayed on the car’s rear bumper. Don Henley would have been proud, he mused, as the Eagles’ lyrics began to resonate in his head.
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