The Zombie Plagues (Book 1)

by Sweet, Dell

  Zombies: I thought Haiti, horror flicks...? What else is there? Dead people come back to life, or raised from the dead to be made into slaves. Those are the two things I knew and nothing else. Well, it's wrong, completely wrong. No, I can't tell you how they come to be Zombies initially, but I can tell you that the bite of a Zombie will make you a Zombie. The movies got that much right.

  I can't tell you why they haunt the fields across from this house. Why they have taken up residence in the old barn, but I can tell you that it might be you they come for next and if they do you goddamn well better realize that everything you thought you knew is bullshit. See, Lana didn't believe it and look what happened to her! Lana... Lana: I know, I know I didn't tell you about her, but I will. That's the whole point of writing this down before they get me too.

  See, in a little while I'm thinking I might just walk out the kitchen door and right out to the barn. I'll leave this here on the kitchen table. For you, whoever you are, who happened along into this kitchen.

  Goddamn Zombies. Ever lovin' Bastards! …

  I am losing control, I know I am, but...

  Anyway, it was August. Hot. Hotter they said than it had been in recorded time. I was not here in this kitchen in rural New York someplace, I was in L.A., outside the city up in the hills, a little farm. There was no wind. No rain. Seemed like no air to breath. Global Warming they said. Maybe... Changes coming, they said. Oh yeah, changes were coming. Changes right there on that wind, probably...

  It was on a Tuesday. I went to get the mail and there were six or seven dead crows by the box. I thought, Those goddamn Clark boys have been shooting their B.B guns again! So I resolved to call old man Clark and give him a piece of my mind, except I forgot. That happens to all of us: It's not unusual. I remembered about four o’clock the next morning when I got up. Well, I told myself, Mail comes at ten, I'll get that and then I'll call up and have that talk.

  I make deals like that with myself all the time. Sometimes it works out fine sometimes it doesn't. It didn't.

  Ten came and I forgot to get the mail. I remembered at eleven thirty, cursed myself and went for my walk to the box.

  I live alone. I have since Jane died. That was another hot summer when she went. I used to farm back then. I retired early a few years back. I rent out the fields. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

  I walked to the mail box cursing myself as I went. When I got there I realized the Clark boys had either turned to eating crows or they had nothing to do with the dead crows in the first place. There were dozens of dead crows, barn swallows, gulls. The dirt road leading up to my place was scattered with dead birds, dark sand where the blood had seeped in. Feathers everywhere, caught in the trees, bushes and the ditches at the side of the road. There were three fat, black crows sticking out of my mailbox: Feet first; half eaten.

  Some noise in the woods had made me turn, but I didn't turn fast enough. Whatever had made the noise was gone once I got turned in that direction, but there were bare footprints in the dry roadbed next to the box. They were not clear, draggy, as though the person had, had a bad leg. He had of course, but I had yet to meet the owner.

  Hold on...

  The day's getting away from me. My ears are playing tricks on me too. I thought I heard something upstairs, but there's nothing. I have the bottom floor boarded up. Those Zombies may be far from stupid, but it's goddamn hard to get dead limbs to help you climb up the side of a house and we took everything down they could hold onto...

  Where was I? The mailbox. The mail never came that day. In fact the mail never came again. Already Emma Watson, our local Mail carrier, was a Zombie. I just didn't know it.

  I tried Clark, but I got no answer. Later that day I heard a few shots, but we're rural folks. There's Deer wandering all over the place: Coy dogs too. Wouldn't be the first time one got shot without a tag or a proper season. Lana came later, upset, her boyfriend had run off somewhere she thought. It'll be okay I told her. She did the cleaning, ran some groceries from town and left. She seemed in better spirits to me.

  I seen him almost a week later.

  Lana usually came at the end of the week to help me with shopping, bills, she's a... She was a good girl. A good one. A good Zombie fearing girl. She was... She hadn't come as July had turned to August and I was sitting by the stove that night and heard a scrape on the porch.

  His leg was bad. Somebody had shot him, but her fella had worse things going on than that. He was dead. What was a bum leg when you were dead? Small problem. But it made him drag that leg. I'm getting ahead of myself again though.

  I picked up my old shot gun where it sat next to the door, eased the door open and flicked on the porch light. He jumped back into the shadows.

  “Step out into the light,” I tried not to sound as afraid as I was.

  “No,” he rasped

  “Step out here or I'll shoot,” I tried again.

  “Lana,” he whispered. His voice was gravelly.

  That stopped me cold. I squinted, but it was too dark to make out much: Still I had the idea it might be her boyfriend. Maybe he'd got himself into something bad. I couldn't get the name to come to me. “You Lana's boyfriend that went missing...?”

  Nothing but silence, and in that silence I got a bad feeling. Something was wrong. It came to me about the same time that he stepped into the light. There was no sound of breathing. It was dead quiet, that was what my panicked mind was trying to tell me. My own panicked breathing was the only sound until he stepped into the light dragging his leg.

  My heart staggered and nearly stopped.

  “Lana,” he rasped once more. He cocked his head sideways, the way a dog will when it's not sure of something. One eye was bright, but milky white, the other was a gooey mess hanging from the socket on the left side of his face.

  I found my old shot gun rising in my hands. I saw the alarm jump into his eyes and he was gone just that fast.

  I stood blinking, convinced that I had somehow dreamed the whole encounter, but I knew I hadn't. The smell of rotting flesh still hung heavy in the air. In the distance I heard the rustle of bushes and then silence. Zombies are not stupid, and they are not slow.

  The next day it seemed ridiculous. What an old fool, I thought. What had I imagined? But the next few days told me a different story.

  I drove into a nearby town around the middle of the week. I passed maybe two cars on the way, but neither driver would meet my eyes. That was wrong. Trash blew through the streets as I drove. The traffic lights were out on the four corners and no one was on the streets. I didn't see a state patrol car.

  The ShopMart strip mall was closed. The road into it barricaded. I found a little Mom-and-Pop place open on the way back, but there was next to nothing on the shelves. I got a jar of peanut butter that I didn't want, a package of crackers, there was no bread, and paid with the last of my cash.

  The store owner wore deep socketed eyes in a lined face. His attitude said, I will not speak to you, and he would not: After a brief attempt I gave up and went home. I never went back. By that next night I knew what the deal was when Lana showed up.

  She came around noon. I heard the sound of her engine revving long before she came into sight. She took out the mailbox and crashed into the porch and that was that. We were up most of the night talking about how much the world had changed. She knew more than I did. She knew there were no more police. She knew there were roving gangs of zombies on the streets of Los Angeles. She had met a man who had come from there. L.A. was a ruin. And she had spoken to another, this time a young woman from up toward Seattle; the same story there. The zombies, it seemed, owned the world.

  We stayed until eight weeks ago. I wouldn't have been able to get out my own. That was early, before we knew they would come out into the sunlight. Andy, that was her fellas name, came for her in the daylight when we were leaving the house. If not for the bad leg he would have got her. If not for the fact that we were close to the living room door he might have got her.
He might even have got her because we both froze. And when I realized I had to move she was still frozen, just looking at his ruined, rotted face.

  I got the shot gun up and blew his head off. I thought she was going to kill me, then I thought he was going to manage to get back to his feet even without his head and kill me. He finally stopped and I managed to drag her inside the house and shut the door.

  I had gone back out a short time later, after I got her laid down and sleeping off the shock in the back bedroom, to take a closer look at the body. There were five of them eating him where he lay up beside her car, and two watching the door: When I got out the two guarding the door were on me nearly that fast. I shot them both as fast as I could pull the trigger. My shot gun only holds four shells. Those two were gone and that had slowed them, but they were not deterred. I made it back inside, locked the door and began to wonder if my heart was going to explode.

  Later, before dusk, I went back outside. Andy's body was gone along with the other zombies. I decided that we had to try to get out, drive out and find help. She was carrying a child after all, the zombie fella’s baby, I suppose. Maybe there was a place outside of California where things were normal, okay, a zombie free zone. The problem was that I was on the wrong side of L.A., we would have to cut straight through the city to head east. There was no other way to do it.

  We planned it. I got my truck, drained the gas from her car and my old tractor. That gave us a full tank in the truck and almost ten gallons in cans strapped into the back of the cab. There wasn't much in the way of food, but we took what we had. We left early morning.

  L.A.: August 13th

  The trek east out of the city was harder than we had thought it would be. We had become mired down in traffic long before we had ever hit the city itself, and had been forced to give up the truck.

  It was close to noon before we reached Alameda, and decided to try to find some kind of four wheel drive vehicles, at one of the many car lots that dotted it.

  Once we had liberated a truck, it had still been slow going until we reached El Segundo Boulevard. The stalled traffic had been much lighter there, and we had been able to drive part of the way by cutting into the parking lots of fast food restaurants, that dotted almost the entire length of the highway. We had followed that to Willmington, and picked up another truck that had seen better days. Getting that truck had not been a problem; there were several used car lots along the road. We had used the parking lots to swing around the worst of the traffic, and that had worked well until we had intersected Compton Boulevard. It was hopelessly packed with stalled traffic. We had left the truck, which had sounded as if it was close to dying anyway, and struck out on foot again. Lana led the way as we cut cross lots through Compton Woodley Airport.

  Crossing the dead airfield had been unnerving for both of us. The runways had cracked, and either lifted skyward, or tilted down into the ground. Blackened skeletons of large aircraft dotted the airfield. Most of them were so badly burned that we had been unable to tell what they had been before. I thought a couple of them may have been military aircraft, but as badly twisted as they were it was impossible to be sure.

  Luggage, some burned, some untouched, was scattered across the airfield in every direction, and many of the suitcases were burst, with papers and clothing scattered everywhere along with other personal effects. There were bodies there too.

  On our way through the city we had seen very few bodies. It had been unsettling for both of us. Fewer bodies meant more un-dead. We had both wondered aloud if the changing was happening that fast. Raising the dead faster as time slipped by. The bodies we had seen had not been killed by the Earthquakes. They bore head wounds, and appeared to have been dead for only a short period. Possibly only the last two or three days, we decided.

  The bodies at the airport were concentrated around the terminal building. The huge glass windows were peppered with holes as if a battle had taken place for the terminal. Most of the bodies inside were concentrated behind the long rows of seats in the main lobby where they had been trying to use the seats for cover. It had apparently done no good. We had paused only briefly, wondering what had occurred before we had moved on. The overwhelming stench in the shattered terminal building drove us out. The wrecked planes, where we had expected to see bodies scattered all around, were empty.

  Occasionally we had heard gunfire around us, and twice explosions from further north, behind us had startled us. We had hurried along fearing the sounds, but fearing more the possibility that the owners of the guns might find us. We walked in silence across the remainder of the shattered airfield, and we were both glad when we left it behind us and eventually came to 91. 91 was traffic packed and we had abandoned the truck, making our way across the steel roof tops once more, crossing under 91 on South Central and making our way along the sides of the road to E Del Amo Boulevard.

  There, like the Martin Luther King Highway, black topped parking areas fronted all manner of fast food restaurants, store chains and shops, which bordered both sides of the strip. It wouldn't necessarily assure a way around the stalled traffic, I had realized, but it appeared as though it would give us a much better chance of getting to 405.

  ~

  I set the pencil aside and listened to the noises outside the old frame house. Some other farmer's house, three thousand miles from my own home. Dark sounds, rustling, had to be the dead, but there was nothing for it. I picked the pencil up, flexed my fingers and began to write again...

  Yesterday I found an old bottle of whiskey in a locked cabinet in the living room and resolved to leave it be. Now I have changed my mind. I have been sipping at it while I sit here and write. Maybe it will help my resolve with the part I still have to play after I write this out. Maybe it won't, I don't know. But I do know it is helping my head right now, and that is enough for me.

  So, we had been trying to get to 405...

  TWO

  Leaving Los Angeles...

  Johnny led them towards the rear garage area of the dealership, where they found a full size four wheel drive Chevy pickup. Johnny had worked at a dealership before, and recognized the garage area as the prep shop.

  “When someone buys a new car,” Johnny said, “or truck, or whatever, they have to prep it. Take the plastic off the seats, fill the tank, wax it, sort of get it ready for the customer, you know?”

  “I thought they came from the factory all ready to go?” Lana said.

  “Well... they do, sort of,” Johnny agreed, “but they have plastic over the seats to protect them, and oil drips from the cars overhead on the transport trucks; dirt gets tracked into them when the guys move them around the lot. Sometimes they may have a scratch, or small dent that the body shop guys have to fix, and they get paint over-spray all over the car; dust in it, you name it. I used to have to prep cars, and it's not much fun. Minimum wage type of job and the salesman who sold the car is usually breathing down your neck all the time you're getting it ready. I hated it, but you do what you have to do to pay the bills. I figured if we're going to find a truck all ready to go, this would be the first place to look. Gassed up and the whole nine yards. They even waxed it for us.” Johnny finished, trying to break the somber mood that had set in as they crossed the airfield.

  His effort worked partially, Lana offered him a small smile as she spoke. “You know a lot of things don't you?”

  “Not really,” Johnny said. “I just worked at a lot of different jobs. Mainly just to keep the farm afloat, but also, I guess, because I believe you should learn as much as you possibly can. It worked for me. I grew up with a lot of guys who were constantly unemployed. Maybe they were carpenters, or roofers, or auto mechanics, farmers like me, whatever. When things would get bad, they'd get laid off, or the prices would drop for produce, it's always something. Not that things never got slow for me, they did, but I could go to work somewhere else fairly quickly. I can practically build a house from the ground up, and do all the rough and finish, electrical, plumbing, and c
arpentry. The same with cars. I just learn well, I guess and it paid off. Someday I'd like to build my own house.”

  “I've always wanted to own a house,” Lana said, the tentative smile had grown wider as she listened to Johnny talk. “I never thought I would live anywhere except that crummy apartment,” she laughed. “Manor la cucaracha,” She smiled at Johnny's puzzled look. “Cockroach manor... My nickname for the place. If I never own a house I guess that would be fine with me, as long as I never have to live in that dump again.”

  Johnny was nodding his head as she finished speaking. “I know what you mean. I had a crummy little place up in Seattle out of college. I used to take all the overtime I could get, so I wouldn't have to go back to it too soon. I really hated it, I mean completely. I had this dream of buying some land and building my own house, when this is over that's what I would like to do. Just find a nice place and build a house. Maybe have some cows again. I guess that sounds kind of stupid, but it really is what I want to do, and if I make it through this in one piece, I'm going to.”

  “It doesn't sound stupid to me at all,” Lana said, “in fact it sounds like a good plan, a good dream to hold on to. I've never really dared to dream. I guess now it's okay to dream. You think?”