“Guys!” Lucas shouted. “I don’t think they’re gonna stop sending these things until we’re dead.”
“Well, they best not hold their breath,” Lucas shouted with a laugh as he took aim at the coming horde.
Three more surrounded me, and I knew then that it wasn’t going to end. They were going to keep sending zombies out until we were dead, just like Lucas said, the sick freaks. They shouted and cheered the zombies on, and I couldn’t believe it. What happened to the America I believed in? The one my brother and Lucas fought for?
I assumed a combat fighting stance and immediately went for the closest zombie. He had scraggly red hair and was missing his right arm. He was also shirtless and flat-out nasty. I wanted to gag at the missing chunks of skin that had left a hole in his bulbous stomach. Ropes of intestines dangled and dragged behind him with every lumbering step. With my left hand open and palm out, I struck him hard in the nose, sending the shattered bone up into the thing’s brain. The creature slumped to the ground, releasing a sickening, unforgettable gurgle from his throat.
Spinning around as fast as I could, I delivered a vicious sidekick to the head of some tattooed skinhead who had a gaping hole where his nose used to be, sending him reeling into the grass. I then rushed the third zombie, a naked, elderly woman who was missing so much flesh from her physique that it was difficult to tell she once was female.
I hit her with another palm strike directly to the face, but that only knocked her down on her back. I brought my foot down hard on the back of her skull and felt it give way as the heel of my boot sank into the slippery goo of her brain matter. I then turned back to the skinhead, who was still rolling around on the grass like a turtle caught on his back. With a crunch, I sank the high heel deep into its skull, but the heel snapped off the shoe from the blow, which wasn’t good at all since it was my only weapon.
Another member of the rotted masses caught me by surprise and managed to grab a fistful of my hair. I quickly reached up behind me, clasped the thing’s wrist, and ducked backward while twisting the man’s arm up behind him. I released his twisted arm just long enough to grab the top of his head with one hand and then his jaw with the other, then immediately wrenched his neck hard to the right, causing the thing to collapse to the blood-soaked turf. I didn’t like hand-to-hand combat because there was always the risk of infection, but I was fresh out of options.
Shots echoed around us, and I turned just in time to see Nick kill a number of zombies, one by one. The bad thing was, his ammo wasn’t going to last, and we had no real weapons. A horrible thought came into my head as I stared at one of the zombie’s decomposing legs. Sometimes you have to be creative and use whatever tricks you’ve got up your sleeves to tip the scales in your favor. The leg was pretty much rotted to the point of falling off the unmoving ghoul. His entire femur was exposed, gleaming white in the morning sun.
I gazed around, only now noticing that all three zombies had been maintenance workers. I ran over to one of them and retrieved a pair of thick leather gloves from his pocket. The other two had the same gloves, so I assumed they must’ve been on a job when things turned ugly; they were certainly the most decomposed of the dead I’d seen. I slipped on the gloves and prepared to perform one of the most repulsive acts of my life, out of absolute necessity, of course.
Sucking in a deep breath, I reached for my gleaming white prize and easily wrenched the loose bone out. I nearly vomited, but it didn’t matter. Now I had a real weapon. I choked up on the femur like it was a Louisville Slugger and proceeded to raise it high and point it to the crowd of stunned and confused townspeople, like I was Babe Ruth, about to send one more over the fence.
“Nick, Lucas! We can use the bones,” I said.
Nick glanced over. “Dude, that’s just…sick!”
“I don’t care! We either fight or crawl into a fetal position and hope they mistake us for a football.”
“You didn’t let me finish,” my brother said. “It’s sick, gross, and insane, but it’s brilliant. Stephen King himself couldn’t have come up with something that twisted.”
“I ain’t puttin’ my hands inside one of those things!” Lucas barked. “I don’t wanna risk contamination.”
I pointed down to the gloves on another worker. “It’s do-or-die time, Lucas! Glove up and start swingin’, man!”
Lucas smiled and rushed over. “Swing, batter-batter!” he shouted, pumping me up as I stared straight ahead into the zombie-infested battlefield. “Hold up! I’ve got an idea,” he shouted.
“Lay it on us,” Nick yelled back.
“Remember that firefight in Fallujah?” Lucas asked. “We were pinned down behind those dead insurgents, and I started stacking the bodies on top of one another to create a bunker so we could return fire?”
“Speaking of sick and twisted,” Nick said through a smirk.
“We keep knocking them out and create a wall, of sorts—layers and layers of dead zombies. They’ll try to climb over it and just fall flat on their faces. That’s when we bash their brains in.”
“I love it!” I shouted. “They’re definitely too stupid to walk around, and we know they can’t climb.”
Nick clapped Lucas on the shoulder. “I like it!”
We stood side by side as the next wave of undead came streaming across the field.
A rotted skater boy wearing kneepads, elbow pads, and a red helmet limped toward me, and I swung the femur with the speed of a lightweight bat. The sound seemed to reverberate throughout the field. I watched him tumble forward, then tore off his helmet and brought my boot heel down hard on his head. I had never even killed a fly before this zombie thing had ever happened, and there I was going all gladiator as I bashed in the skulls of one zombie after another. An ocean of emotions flooded through me. I was proud that I was fighting back, yet angry that I was forced to kill people whom I was sure I could eventually save. The booing crowd fueled my rage even more. It was kill or be killed, and I didn’t plan to die anytime soon.
Feeling like I could breathe fire and smoke, I whacked another softball-sized dent in another zombie’s head. Have I become a cold killing machine like Nick and Lucas? I didn’t want to be that person, but I couldn’t stop. I had to keep fighting, or I was as good as dead. How long can we keep fighting them? All I knew was that adrenaline was still pumping strong through every vein and artery, and I had to kill anything coming at me. I had become heartless, and I couldn’t turn it off.
Chapter 12
A long line of zombie carcasses began to form as I slugged away and Nick and Lucas stacked. When I got tired of swinging, we reversed roles. Lucas’s plan worked brilliantly, as the mindless horde began to tumble over the giant pile. Others just kept walking into the pile over and over again, too stupid to know that all they had to do was walk around.
I brought the gore-streaked femur down on yet another rotting face, but a sudden piercing pain exploded in my back. I spun around and ducked as a beer bottle whizzed past my head. I looked up at the townspeople in awe and hatred. “You pathetic jerks! You’re actually rooting for zombies over humankind? How much killing do you need to see before you determine enough is enough?”
Of course, my rant fell on deaf ears. I shouldn’t have expected anything else from the raving lunatics. It was then that a large group of townspeople walked onto the field. I thought about charging and grabbing one of them for leverage, but they pointed their guns at us. A femur, a couple shoe heels, and an empty pistol were no match for the armed posse. One group pointed guns at us while the other cleared a pathway for the zombies, and I couldn’t freaking believe it!
“Nick, they’re making an opening for them!” I yelled.
“How is this even fair?” Lucas screamed in our captors’ faces.
“We gonna make it fair,” one of the men promised.
Another nudged him in laughter. “Yeah. We’re gonna put another player on your team. She’s a tough one too. I’m sure you’ll find her useful.”
&nb
sp; Shouts from behind our captors made me look. A tall man carried a screaming woman over his shoulders. He set the lady down and shoved her toward us. “Here ya go,” he said, as if he was delivering some package we’d ordered.
My eyes flickered in recognition at Kate, the girl who’d been passing out the missing flyers when we first arrived. We had talked to her by the barbed wire fence when military trucks came and she darted off to hide. I hadn’t seen her since. Her black jeans and white sweater were crumbled and ripped, her blonde hair in disarray. Her face was bruised, and there was blood oozing from her swollen lip. I held out my hand to her, but she didn’t reach for it. She met my gaze as shock and confusion washed over my face.
“You wanna know what happened to your sister?” the man snapped. “Well, now you know! And you can die with closure.”
“You heartless jerk!” Kate yelled, spinning around and lunging at them.
Nick pulled her back just as the guy prepared to hit her with the butt of his rifle. “Getting knocked out isn’t gonna help you one tiny bit out here,” he said. “Save that energy for what we’re about to face.”
She broke free from Nick and nodded.
As quickly as the men had come out, they scurried away through the entrance and locked it behind them so we couldn’t follow.
“This is absolutely ludicrous!” Kate said.
My thoughts exactly. If I somehow survive this ordeal, I don’t think a living soul would believe me!
“They made me watch you take down those zombies,” Kate said, her voice wavering. “Who does that kind of thing?”
I wanted to give her words of encouragement, but nothing I could say would alleviate the situation, and there wasn’t any time to make anything up. I clapped her shoulder. “Can you fight?”
“Heck yeah!” she responded.
“Good…because we’re gonna need you.”
She wiped the blood from her lip with the sleeve of her sweater.
“Are you okay?” Lucas asked.
“They made me battle a few zombies for practice so I’d be prepared for the game. At the time, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was pretty sure they weren’t talking about Monopoly.”
I shook my head. “They’re flipping crazy.”
She stared up at the crowd in the stands. “I swear I’m gonna make them all pay for killing my sister.”
“You and me both,” Nick said. “They killed our friends, the girls traveling with us.”
“So sorry for your loss,” Kate said over the yells and murmurs of the crowd around us. “I hate those murderers. They’re worse than the zombies.”
I nodded, knowing how she felt. The pain of seeing Jackie and Claire murdered right before my very eyes was almost too much to take.
“Wait! I just thought of something.” Nick frantically felt through his pockets. “Didn’t you hand me a vial back at Tahoe’s house?”
My eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, I did! I completely forgot about that.”
“Me too,” he said. “How much of the cure will we need for to make it work?”
“The doc said just a drop. It’s apparently very potent.”
“Do you have it?” Lucas asked.
Nick pulled out a small, clear container filled with fluid, and my jaw dropped in disbelief. Unbelievably, the plastic vial was still there. After I’d given it to him back at Tahoe’s house, he’d never returned it to me in all the drama that followed, and I’d completely forgotten about it. We all had. It was so small of a vial that the police had missed it when they’d frisked him for weapons.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe he held it in his hands.
“Where did you get that?” Kate asked, her eyes wide. “Is it poison?”
“Long story,” Nick said. “And no, it’s not poison.”
The crowd suddenly cheered, chanted, and howled with delight as more of their undead heroes began flooding through the gate on the other side of the field. Will this nightmare never end? I wondered. I stared straight ahead at the approaching zombies, their moans and hisses filling the air. My adrenaline surged as I prepared to fight. My rage and anger were exactly what I needed to survive, and we would have to fight with everything we had.
“What’s the plan?” Kate asked, her eyes focused ahead on impending doom.
“I’ll hold them off at the breach and try not let them pass more than one at a time,” Lucas said.
Nick nodded. “Kate and I will hold ‘em down. Dean, you get a drop into their mouths.”
It would be easier said than done, but at that point, I was ready to try anything. “Okay,” I said, grabbing the vial.
Lucas immediately went to work on the undead horde. One by one, the mass of rotting people were kicked to the ground. Before he’d stomped the brains out of one, he was already tossing the next to the ground. He stopped the first four from clearing the breach, but the fifth zombie tumbled past him and came right for us.
I kept my eyes on the shambling female. Her stomach had been torn open, emptied of all its contents. Clearly, she’d once been a beautiful woman with blonde hair and legs that went on forever. Now, she was nothing more than a mindless death machine in a torn white blouse and black slacks. Nick threw her to the ground in one swift move and held her down. It was easy to give her the formula with her mouth wide open and snapping. I waited until her mouth snapped open, then I allowed one drop to fall straight into the back of her throat.
She hissed through gritted teeth, and then her milky-white eyes fluttered closed. White foam poured out of her mouth as her body went limp, and I wondered if the formula had killed her. Oh no! It didn’t work! My heart lurched as I came to the realization that there was no hope for Val—that there never had been. “It doesn’t work!” I screamed.
“Maybe it won’t heal ‘em, but it sure kills ‘em pretty fast,” Nick said. “Let another one through.”
We repeated the process time and time again, creating a big pile of corpses. I was sure that at any moment, they’d send in armed police to take the vial from us.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer said over the speakers, “they seem to have found something to kill the zombies. This could be an excellent tool in our struggle against the plague walkers! We’ve agreed to let the games continue. We’re very curious to see how this plays out.”
“You monsters!” I shouted.
Lucas continued to pummel the zombies into submission, occasionally letting the next straggler through. The next walking corpse began shuffling toward us, and my eyes widened when I saw a face I could never forget. A cold chill shot through me.
“It’s…Val,” I said.
Nick met my gaze. “I know. Let’s end this. She didn’t want to be like this, and I promised her I’d take care of her if it ever happened.”
I nodded, unable to form the words as the tears welled up in my eyes. She was still wearing the same outfit, and her black hair swayed in the wind as she shuffled forward. There was no depth to her white eyes, glazed into an impenetrable fog. Her jaw snapped and bit at the air in some horrible rhythm, filling me with absolute hopelessness and terror.
Kate thrust her to the ground as Nick looked up at me. “Ready?” he asked.
I hesitated, my knees locked in place.
“Do it!” Nick shouted.
I crouched over her and lifted the vial to her lips. A tear slid from my chin and splashed against her forehead at the same moment the droplet tumbled from the lip of the vial into her mouth. I watched as she took her last breath. My chest tightened, and a lump lodged in my throat. Watching her die—again—was the most painful thing I’d ever done in my entire life.
“Don’t stop!” Kate yelled. “Keep going!”
For a moment, everything around me froze. I ignored the sounds of skulls shattering apart, the growling and snarling coming from the approaching mob, and the screams of the bloodthirsty crowd. I focused solely on my sister and leaned down and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I love you,
Val.” Slipping my arms under her lifeless body, I lifted her from the blood-soaked grass. I found an untouched patch away from the other dead and laid her gently on the ground. I touched her cheek and said a quick prayer. Knowing she was in a better place was the only thing that kept me from completely losing it. I wanted to destroy something, anything. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to claw my own eyes out.
“Dean!” Lucas shouted, snapping me back to reality as the next creature limped toward us.
Each zombie that made it passed Lucas’s own personal Thunderdome was subsequently laid out hard on the field by Nick, then put down with another drop from my vial. I’d lost count of our tally when I looked up and saw Claire.
“Just do it,” Nick said. “She wouldn’t want to be left like this.”
I did it, but I hated serving as her executioner. As her mouth filled with foam and her twitching ceased, I wondered if I would ever be the same after what I’d been forced to do that day.
We continued on for what seemed an eternity. After a while, I tried to tell myself that the vial was much more humane than piercing their skulls with a hammer, a pickaxe, or a heel from a shoe. I knew if I ever became a zombie, that would be the way I wanted to go: peaceful, almost like going to sleep.
I sucked in a trembling breath as Jackie came through. Her glazed-over eyes didn’t recognize me. I wanted to hold her in my arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, but I knew that would have been a lie. It was time to put her gently to sleep. My heart ached, but I knew it was the right thing to do. She wouldn’t have wanted to live like that either. No one would.
Nick and Kate wrestled her to the ground, and I held the vial over her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Jackie. Please forgive me.”
She snapped at me as I let the drop fall.
I watched her white eyes close, and then I laid her next to Val and Claire. I yanked off my class ring and slipped it gently onto her finger, though I wasn’t sure why. I guess I wanted her to have something from me. I vowed that one day, I would find her loved ones and tell them what had happened and how brave she had been through it all. I’d only known her a short time, but she had touched my heart in a way I could never explain. I imagined her smiling down from heaven, with a radiant light surrounding her, and I remembered our kiss. “Goodbye, Jackie,” I said softly as I turned my back on her, wishing I’d had a chance to give her, Claire, and Val a proper burial. It didn’t matter though. I was pretty sure I’d be with them soon. I wanted to stay strong, but I didn’t want to delude myself either.
The Zombie Chronicles - Book 3 - Deadly City (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series) Page 7
