Z-Risen (Book 5): Barriers

by Long, Timothy W.

  Z-Risen 5

  Barriers

  Timothy W Long

  Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Can’t Keep a Dead Man Down

  Cult of the Damned

  Hell of a Rescue

  No Knight in Shining Armor

  Loss of a Friend

  Home on the Range

  What Fresh Hell is This?

  Once more into the Breech

  I Hate Meeting New People

  A Shit Sandwich

  Drums of War

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  “Z-RISEN 6: BARRIERS”

  By Timothy W. Long

  Copyright 2017. Timothy W. Long

  All Rights Reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or undead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

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  Introduction

  In November of 2016, I was on track to release Z-Risen 5: Barriers. This was to be a quick follow up to Beyond the Barriers: Ghouls but would tell the next story of Jackson Creed, and Joel Kelly. It also gave me a chance to finally merge my Z-Risen world with the Beyond the Barriers characters, something I had been planning for about three years.

  The night of the presidential election, I had a little wine and went to bed. The next morning, I woke up and was horribly ill. As the day progressed, I felt like I was coming down with something serious. Then it hit me. Waves of dizziness. I found I had to lay down in bed if I wanted the world to stop swimming.

  A few hours later, I got up and that was all I remembered until my girlfriend, Katie, was slapping my face and screaming at me to wake up. I was laying on the bathroom floor completely out of it.

  She wouldn't listen to me when I assured her I was okay. I was just sick. Just needed to crawl into bed and sleep. She instead loaded me into the car and rushed me to the hospital. While they were checking me into the ER, I almost passed out again. I was genuinely at a loss as to what in the hell was wrong with me. I was confused, unable to stand, and I felt like I was going to faint at any minute.

  They drew some blood, and then next thing I knew I was in a hospital bed. I collapsed once again, but I don't remember this part. I was told, later on, that my heart had stopped beating for a minute.

  After doctors looked me over, nurses assured me everything would be alright, it was finally determined I was bleeding internally. I was also informed that I would need to have open abdominal surgery to remove a tumor. This was a shock to say the least. Up until the past week or two, I had felt fine. I had even attended a convention as a guest just a few days before I was taken to the ER. But I had ignored some strange signs. I was weak. Dizzy a lot. Confused at times. I woke up with my hands tingling in the morning. These were all things that really should have alarmed me.

  The next few days were a blur. I had 8 units of blood transfused and a surgeon opened me up and removed a tumor that was the size of a golf ball. Talk about real horror. They had to pull out my intestines and find it. I was in such bad shape, I signed a power of attorney before going under the knife because the reality was that I might not wake up.

  Well, I woke up in a morphine daze and spent the next four days so blasted by narcotics I thought I was floating around the hospital half of the time.

  But I got out, got home, and began the long process of recovering.

  Along the way, I had to cancel the pre-order for Z-Risen 5: Barriers. To all who had the book on pre-order, I apologize. I wish the book could have been done in time.

  This little incident took a lot out of me, and it wasn't until mid-January of 2017 that I felt recovered enough to begin writing with the same output I'd had before my surgery.

  Sorry this book was so delayed, but I hope it was worth the wait.

  In the event this log is found with my corpse, I'm Machinist Mate First Class Jackson Creed, and it's been six months since we arrived back in San Diego following the event. With me is Marine Sergeant Joel "Cruze" Kelly.

  We were both stationed on the USS McClusky, an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate out of San Diego. Our ship was overrun by the dead and we barely escaped with our lives.

  Fleeing Southern California and a massive horde of undead, we ended up at a home in Oregon that now serves as Fortress.

  Can’t Keep a Dead Man Down

  You can't keep a dead man down.

  The Z crashed out of the woods like a mental hospital escapee. Joel and I had been waiting for the shit to hit the fan. The trees had been quietly minding their own business for a half hour when we heard the moans in the near distance. Joel and I had crept along an old wooden fence that probably saw better days twenty years ago. It was moss-covered and ran in long horizontal slats that were cracked in places.

  Grass and weeds grew unopposed along its border, which would have made amazing cover. The problem was that Zs didn't care about tactics like hiding and waiting for the enemy. They see a live meatbag and want a bite. They crash through trees, thrash around homes, shuffle around in droves, and are generally big dumb brutes without a hint of manners. Not to mention the fact that it's been a while since this craziness broke out and ammo could be hard to find. Wasting a shot was becoming a serious liability, and I was terrible at shooting a moving target.

  I prefer simpler methods of taking out the undead. Something Joel was having a problem with over the last few weeks.

  Since we'd flown into Oregon, we had found more of the same shit we'd seen in California, and that was goddamn depressing. I'd half hoped the virus was contained to the south, but the minute we'd landed, Joel, Anna, Christy, and I had been faced with five freshly-turned dead who wanted to eat us. Even Frosty had been a little freaked out before we opened the plane doors. Her lips had pulled back and that snarl, like she wanted to rip the world a new asshole.

  You're probably laughing and thinking, "How could you not know the state of the rest of the world?"

  Well, assuming anyone ever reads this journal, I think it's safe to say that when all communications are down, the dead are everywhere, people are scraping by just to survive, about the last thing you get to hear about is what Vermont or Seattle is up to.

  So, we did what we did best. Stayed low and occasionally kicked some ass.

  It was all puppy dog farts and pissed off rainbows after we made our escape from the San Diego region. I should have written about our escape before, but I've been busy with the others, getting Fortress ready, as well as getting my life with Anna on track. So, here's how it all went down.

  The last few months have been nice. Real nice. Almost a dream-vacation following the shit we had to deal with in San Diego.

  After we'd flown out of Southern California, we'd been in the air for a few hours. Taking a break at night, we'd landed and slept. The next morning, we were back up there and heading north. Even flying low, it was hard to make out which cities we passed. Anna seemed to have some familiarity and called out a few locations, but they all looked the same to me. Cities were deserted or burned out. Open expanses of land without any lights. Eve
n some asshole on the ground who shot at us. Luckily, we were pretty high up and Joel said he couldn’t hit us. What in the hell was that guy thinking? I can't fly away, so why should you?

  I tell ya. The zombie apocalypse really brings out the worst in people.

  One thing that didn't change was how much abandonment we found. There was some small part of me that hoped, as soon as we got away from our area of operations, we'd find life. Maybe some parts of the state had been quarantined and there were safe zones. Maybe the infection wasn't that bad and entire parts of the country were safe from harm.

  I guess I'm a dreamer.

  All we found was death and desolation. We found roving bands of slow moving Zs that numbered from the dozens up to thousands. We found piles of bodies when we swept down far enough. We found a lot of armed civilians. Some waved but at least none of them shot at us again.

  On one occasion, we'd scouted an area from a few hundred feet up just skimming treetops and occasional buildings. A group of ten people, dressed in rags and looking like they were holocaust survivors, came out of hiding and stared up at us. A little boy, no more than five or six years old, lifted his hand and waved.

  Christy had choked back a sob.

  "We can't do anything for them," I said.

  "I know. It's just sad." She didn't elaborate after that.

  Then one of the men lifted his rifle and aimed it at us.

  "Seriously?" I said as Anna punched the throttle and made for the clouds.

  After passing over some very imposing mountains, we'd swept down to find that at some point we'd crossed into Oregon. Anna informed us of this thanks to a map she'd been following. She pointed out a few rivers and lakes as a sign. I looked out the window and saw nothing but empty land.

  Sure, we could set down around here and make a new home, but we'd already discussed the fact that we needed to be somewhere close to a major city. The problem was supplies. We had next to nothing, and that meant that if we tried to live off the land, we'd have to know how to live of the land. None of us had those skills.

  According to Anna we we'd be close to Portland soon. That was good because we were about to run out of fuel. But we'd had to find a field that was relatively clear to land in. Anna had spotted an airfield on our approach, but the place was covered in Zs like fleas on a mangy dog. So, she'd ranged out and found a strip of road that was mostly free of abandoned cars. Mostly.

  The field had been our best bet but, as she'd warned us, also a risk. Hitting one upturned rock or a log could have sent us flipping over.

  I'd clutched Christy's hand while we set down. Turned out my girl was good at a lot of things including landings.

  We pushed the plane off the road and used a small copse of trees for cover. After a few hours of hacking at branches, we'd been able to mask the craft from nosey people. If anyone bothered to go poking around, they'd find it with ease. Hiding in the open was sometimes our best bet, but when it came to our airplane, I felt pretty protective. We'd paid a high price to escape from southern California.

  Once we'd landed, our initial scouting revealed we were in a section of land that was sparsely populated. I wouldn't call the area farm land, but we did come across a few dairy farms. One of the fields had a lone cow who'd stuck around for God knew what. If the place had a herd of the beasts, they'd either already run off or been killed. How this lone white and black spotted gal had managed to stay in one place, and alive, was a mystery.

  Christy had taken a liking to the cow, and so had Frosty. The dog danced around the cow while it watched her with big eyes. We'd tried to milk it to no avail. So, we would have to improvise when it came time to turn her into hamburger. The problem was a lack of freezer space so we'd made due with what we had on hand. That or smoke the meat provided we had a lot of salt.

  The house we'd found was set back far enough from a road to allow us to stay hidden. Joel and I had recreated our work on the airplane and used brush to cover the road. It took us hours to erase signs of the roadway leading to the farmstead. Then we'd kicked dirt around until it looked more or less like the rest of the shoulder of the road.

  As for the cow, that was grisly.

  I told Joel we should just shoot her.

  "Shoot her in the heart?" I asked.

  "Creed, you know where a cow's heart is?" Anna had asked me.

  "Udder the rib cage," I'd tried to joke.

  "Oh, you're a real comedian," Joel said. "Go ahead and milk the one liners."

  Points for Joel.

  "The problem is we're shooting 5.56 here. It's a good round, but it probably won't kill the cow. Aim for the heart and I might hit the ribcage and just bounce around. Cow freaks and runs."

  "So what, want me to smack it across the head with my wrench?"

  "I hadn't thought of that. Not that I'm doubting your manliness, but it probably wouldn't work unless you took a few swings. Then we got the same problem with the cow running."

  "Manliness? I got your manliness right here," I taunted.

  "Big caliber handgun, right in the head."

  "Now you're talking. Think you can do it?" Joel asked.

  Anna Sails had been listening. She glanced down at her Smith & Wesson .357 R8.

  We escorted the cow, mangy smelly beast that she was, to a post and tied her up. She looked at us with sad eyes. I looked at her like the porterhouse she was about to become.

  She was scared, but she also seemed to be used to having humans around. I petted her on the snout so she lowered her head and looked for something to eat. The grass was cold and drawn up for the winter, but she picked at it anyway.

  "Draw straws for who does the deed?" I asked.

  "We can't do it. The noise might draw Zs." Joel said.

  "Well shit," I said.

  In the end, we settled on a solution. We had to tie the beast to a post so it's head was high. Then it was up to me to stun her. I lowered the wrench at looked at the pitiful bovine. She wasn't what I'd call cute, and she smelled to high heaven. I wasn't ever much for killing stuff before the zombie apocalypse, but things had changed. I wanted a steak, ribs, and a roast more than I wanted to look away from a killing.

  I readied the wrench while Joel got out his big Marine knife.

  "Wait." Christy interrupted. "What if we can figure out how to milk her? If we get a few more cows we'll have plenty of milk every morning.

  "But what about beef ribs? Man, I'm drooling just thinking about it," I said.

  "A roast. Bet we could find some potatoes around," Anna said.

  "I want a steak. Nothing fancy, just a big fucking steak," Joel said.

  "You guys are idiots. This can be a source of calcium and protein every day. Got a plan for all the meat?" Christy argued.

  "She's making a lot of sense," I said as I gazed into the cow’s eyes.

  "Okay, cow. Guess she gets a reprieve," I told Christy. "If you can't figure out how to get some milk, we'll need to finish her off."

  "We can always hunt deer," Joel said.

  "Yeah. How hard can that be?" Anna smirked. "You guys ever hunted game before?"

  "No, but cavemen had that shit down," I argued.

  "They did," Anna nodded. "And you're kind of like a caveman with that beard."

  "I thought you liked it?"

  "I didn't want to hurt your feelings," Anna said.

  "Too late now, I guess," I said, and ran my hands over my scruffy chin.

  "Look at it this way, man. That cow's huge. You know the first thing about carving out steaks?" Joel had said.

  "Nope. I was assuming you could hack it up with your knife. Whatever you hack off we toss on a fire and hope for the best."

  Easier said than done. We let the gal stick around for the time being.

  After a week, she started chugging out milk. Just took a while to get her glands back in working order. Now I get a white mustache every morning and couldn't be happier.

  It was a good thing we found the farm intact. The location itself was weird bec
ause we were in a place that had a lot of housing developments. There were also a lot of grocery stores, and even an industrial park no less than ten miles away.

  We'd ranged around to find a safe haven to call Fortress, but this house ended up being perfect. The others were either picked over or possibly occupied. Best not to go knocking on a door when there might be a heavily armed person behind it. After a day of walking, we found something we could use.

  There was also a serviceable garage in the back that I decided to call a barn because it fit the rustic vibe.

  One particular home even had a sign out front that kept us from approaching the front door. It was painted in black on an old piece of plywood and said, "Go the fuck away."

  The next house was completely picked over. There was a double wide garage. We poked around and came up empty until Joel noticed the roof was taller than the ceiling. We found a ladder in the back and crawled up into a space that had boxes full of crap we couldn't use, with the exception of some clothes. Then I shined a light in the back and spotted them. A pair of ATV's. After investigating the roof, I found where the floor could be slid away. Attached to the roof was a small winch. After fiddling around, we figured out how to get the little vehicles down. The problem was that there were only two. We didn't have gas and, for all we knew, if they had fuel, it might have gone bad by now.

  We put everything back the way we found it for later retrieval.

  The house we set up was a two story that was sky blue and had a pair of windows hanging over a triangular porch, giving the place a decidedly creepy, haunted house vibe. Vines snaked up one side of the building. The other side was connected to a large garage that contained an old but fully restored AMC pacer and a tractor. The tractor was cool. The Pacer was weird.