Dead Soil: A Zombie Series

by Alex Apostol

  “I don’t want any tea, though,” Ralph said. Marianne glared at him with dull, tiny eyes. “Maybe Jerry would like a cup.” Ralph smiled at her and waggled his eyebrows.

  “You stop that,” she said as she swatted at him. She carefully walked over to her round, bistro table for two and sat down.

  “I see the way he looks at you,” Ralph teased as he continued to stand by the counter.

  Marianne looked down at her cup and Ralph saw the slightest hint of blush on her liver-spotted cheeks. Suddenly, the vision of his mother-in-law and Jerry together in a sagging, wrinkled tangle popped into his mind and caused him to shudder. He averted his eyes to the floor and ran a hand through his short hair.

  “Well, I better get back upstairs. The baby’s awake and Sally promised me breakfast,” he said and shot straight for the door.

  “OK, dear!”

  Jerry was still in the hallway making a raucous. His eye caught Ralph’s at the last second. He smiled, but Ralph turned away and jogged up the stairs to his apartment, taking two steps at a time.

  “I think your mom and Jerry are having an affair,” Ralph said once he was inside. He heaved heavy breaths.

  “It’s not an affair if both their spouses are dead,” Sally laughed. She was in the kitchen stirring the gravy while the biscuits baked warm and golden in the oven. The smell of sausage wafted up Ralph’s nostrils and perked him up again.

  “Well they’re doing something hideous and unnatural, then,” he spat as he filled a mug with dark roast from his shitty coffee maker.

  XVII.

  With one push of the crowbar, Marianne Dunbar’s door swung open. The apartment was sunny and light, hot like the air outside. Ralph Sherman stepped into his mother-in-law’s apartment with his toes first and then lowered his foot slowly and quietly as he made his way further in. It only took three steps to make it past the entryway and into the living room.

  A long, gauzy curtain billowed up and out. Everyone snapped their heads, raised their weapons, and waited for something hideous to pop out from behind it. Another breeze blew and pushed the curtain into the room again to do its ghostly dance. The patio door was open.

  Without hesitation, Ralph ran over and threw the curtain behind him. He stopped on the other side, the curtain stuck to his back like a leech. His breath was caught in his lungs. He thought he had prepared himself for the worst, but what he saw out on the patio was more horrible than he could have imagined.

  Liam craned his neck and saw, lying on the concrete, bare, liver-spotted legs and one foamy sandal on an unmoving foot. He lowered himself back down and looked over his shoulder to the others behind him. He shook his head as his eyes softened, his brow pulled together.

  Luke rubbed the sides of his head with both hands and spun around, as if he’d been expecting to go in there and find the old woman knitting happily on the sofa. He tried to contain himself, but the sounds of soft weeping escaped his lips.

  Zack slowly lowered his sword to let it hang at his side as the tip grazed the fluffy, light carpet.

  Jerry stared in silence with his free hand shoved in his pocket, his shotgun rested on his shoulder.

  Ralph’s upper body shook as he lowered himself down to one knee and lightly touched Marianne’s arm. He said her name, but she didn’t move. He knew she wouldn’t. The back of her head had been blown away, nothing left but tender, red meat and brains that spilled out onto the hot surface. An overturned watering can lay next to her.

  XVIII.

  Back at the apartment, Christine sat at the window seat. She read a book she forgot she owned as she soaked in the sun’s warm rays through the glass. The only locked deadbolt clicked and the front door opened. She kept her eyes on the yellowed page until she was finished with the sentence she was reading.

  “How’d it go?” she asked with the casualty she might have used when asking “how was work”.

  Liam had stopped off at Zack’s apartment before he returned home to wash away the blood that streaked his face and hands, though there was no removing of the thick, dark blood that splattered his shirt and pants.

  When Christine looked up from her book and saw his clothes, she spray up and made her way to him with wide eyes.

  “Oh my God. What happened?” she asked frantically. The tears were already welling in her big, blue eyes. “Are you OK? Are you hurt?” Her bottom lip trembled.

  Liam nodded his head and leaned his bow and quiver up against the coat closet. “I’m all right.” His voice was drawn out and exhausted. He blinked and forced a meager smile for Christine’s sake.

  She exhaled and smiled back, oblivious to the pain just beneath the surface of his sparkling eyes. “Well, let me wash those clothes. I’ll see if I can save them.”

  Her choice of words made Liam’s eyes sting profusely. His throat clenched shut. He hadn’t been able to save anyone that day. He peeled off his shirt, dropped his pants, and handed them over to his fiancée. As their hands met, his eyes looked past the side of Christine’s head, unable to focus on her. He was afraid that if she looked him in the eyes she might be able to see what he’d done, see all the people he murdered and the bodies that had fallen under his arrows.

  “Excuse me. I’m just going to wash up,” he said softly.

  Liam shut himself in the bathroom and rested his hands on the counter. Each breath he took was a stab to his lungs, quick and sharp. His vision blurred as he looked up at the mirror. A wave of heat rose through him and burned his face. His cheeks matched the color of his ginger hair. He couldn’t keep it inside any longer.

  His shoulders shook while he sobbed, as quietly as he could, over the sink. The tears dripped from his chin and fell onto the porcelain before they slid down the deep, dark abyss of the drain.

  When emerged from the bathroom, Christine was rearranging the pillows on the couch—picking them up, fluffing them, and then setting them back down just so. She looked up at him with a smile that said she hadn’t heard a thing.

  He loved her even more for pretending that.

  Part Two

  “As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates.”

  —Nathanael West

  I.

  A young woman walked through the woods of the Dunes State Park with her head constantly turning to keep watch. In the twenty-eight hours since Anita fled her dad’s house, she came in contact with three different monsters hungry for her flesh. Luckily, she was quick and was able to make a run for it before they could grasp her in their cold, hard hands. During the last escape she had to climb a tree and wait for the thing to lose interest and move on. She waited up there for fourteen hours. Her mouth had been so dry that she thought she was going to die of thirst in the summer heat as the sun beat down and burnt her skin.

  “I need to find somewhere to hide. I need shelter,” she said to herself as she walked with awkward footsteps in red high heels along one of the dirt trails. “I need…other people.”

  Her legs felt like cooked spaghetti noodles and her knees buckled at random. When she fell it was a struggle to pick herself up again. Her arms shook as her hands pressed into the dirt and twigs. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t have it in her. She smacked her ruby red lips together. Her tongue clicked on the parched roof of her mouth. She ripped the blue bandanna from her pinned up retro hairdo and dabbed at her drenched face, her liquid liner ran down her cheeks like black rivers.

  “Where is everybody?” she asked aloud. “They can’t all be dead. I can’t be the only one left.”

  The woods were silent and dark. Anita couldn’t see two inches in front of her nose for the first few hours. Eventually, her eyes adjusted to the lack of light and she was, at the very least, able to navigate around the trees with her arms outstretched like one of the infected. She couldn’t continue that way and survive. She had to find somewhere safe to lay low, even if it was only for a few hours.

&nb
sp; She took her heels off and attempted to tread lightly in her bare feet. She clutched the red shoes in her hands with the heels pointed outward, the best weapon she had on her. “Thank God it’s summer,” she whispered as softly as she could. The sound of her own voice was comforting against the chirping of crickets and the rustling of the trees.

  The animals didn’t seem to notice that the world was at its end. A raccoon walked lazily across the trail at Anita’s feet. When she felt the fur brush against her skin she jumped. The raccoon stopped for a second to sniff her toes before it moved on. She let out a burst of air from her nostrils, a quick and quiet laugh. In all the times she’d hiked the Dunes trails with her dad, never once had she seen an animal up close like that, let alone have one sniff her and decide she wasn’t worth their time.

  “Bye, Mr. Raccoon,” she said with a small wave of her fingers.

  The fat raccoon walked off and disappeared into the brush on the other side of the trail.

  Anita was alone again, but the silence that once weighed on her shoulders heavily didn’t seem so ominous anymore. The brief interaction with the raccoon had given her hope. She wasn’t the last survivor. She couldn’t be.

  She stood on the trail and stared blankly ahead, letting her ears tune in to the world around her to give her strained eyes a break. Her lids were heavy. But the minute she let her eyes close, her dad’s face flashed before her. His arms reached for her longingly, his teeth ready to tear the colorful tattooed flesh from her thin arms. Her eyes burst open as her heart thumped loudly.

  “Come on!” a voice echoed from somewhere in the darkness.

  Anita blinked a few times as she stood perfectly still. Did she really just hear someone or was she going crazy? She’d only been alone for one day. “I can’t be going crazy already,” she mouthed silently.

  “It’s this way,” another voice whined. She squinted her eyes and saw a tiny white dot of light up ahead.

  People! They were really there! The whites of her eyes were visible as her mouth split into a toothy grin. She broke out into a run, as if her life depended on it. Her feet made almost no sound as they barely touched the soft ground.

  Suddenly, all her exhaustion was gone.

  Suddenly, hope had been restored and she could breathe again.

  Suddenly, she wasn’t alone anymore.

  She slowed to a walk once she could make out the two figures in the dark. They both held flashlights and were approaching an abandoned park building. Anita had been there before. It was the visitor’s center. She used to watch the birds from the glass room while her dad read all the plaques on the walls.

  “Shh,” the fatter of the two men hissed as he whirled around and shined the flashlight in Anita’s direction, but she was concealed by a large, leafy bush where she crouched and observed.

  “I didn’t hear nothin’,” the other man said in his normal, slightly loud volume. “Let’s go already. I’m tired and I’d like to give this to my old lady.” He held something up for a quick second and then lowered it to his side again.

  It was too dark for Anita to see what it was that he held loosely in his hand—something round, like bowling ball.

  The two men turned towards the building again. The fat man reached out for the door while the taller, older man stood waiting to disappear inside. They were leaving.

  Anita’s breathing sped up. She had to make a decision. Sweat ran down her face. Was she going to approach them, maybe find shelter with them, or was she going to hide in the bushes like a wild animal and live alone for the rest of her short, miserable life?

  She stepped out from behind the bush and stood in the middle of the open trail.

  The two men whipped around at the sound of movement. They both had long knives gripped in their hands, raised and ready to stab whatever lacked the common sense to sneak up on them. “I told ya I heard somethin’,” the rotund man who held the door said with a sneer. He released his grip on the handle and let it shut slowly and softly behind him.

  “Please,” Anita begged. “I need somewhere to sleep.”

  The two men smirked at each other. They holstered their knives in the sheaths on their belts and walked toward Anita casually. As they approached, her heart pounded in her ears. The overweight man in overalls and a flannel shirt let out a low laugh through his crooked teeth.

  Anita wanted to run away, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t abandon the thought of civilization, of coexisting with other people. She needed them, no matter what they were like. What kind of life would she have without them? Even if they made her feel uncomfortable. She wouldn’t last long out there by herself.

  With the way they looked at her she expected them to flirt with her, kiss her, touch her, demand sex in exchange for shelter. She already had it made up in her mind that she would do whatever it took to receive shelter.

  She never saw the first punch coming.

  Once she was down on the ground, the two men kicked at her with no direction or precision. Anywhere their feet made contact was a win for them. Anita’s body demanded she cough and gasp for air, but every time she tried another foot found its way into her chest or kidneys. She felt like she was drowning as her mouth opened and closed fruitlessly.

  “I’ll take those, thank ya very much” The older of the two men said as he snatched Anita’s high heels from the ground next to her. He turned them over in his hand. “Mary Beth will love ‘em!” he said, his stained teeth the only part of his face visible from underneath his dirty, old baseball cap.

  “Let’s go,” his swollen hick friend said with a laugh. “Nightie night!” he called over his shoulder as he raised his hand and waved. “Sleep tight. Don’t let them dead fuckers bite.”

  They both laughed heartily together as they went inside.

  Finally able to take in any sort of breath with them gone, Anita pushed herself up onto all fours. Her ribs felt like the bones had been pulverized to dust. Her face didn’t feel like it was hers anymore, or she wished it wasn’t with how badly it throbbed and stung. She started to sob, but each intake of air felt like it was ripping apart the muscles inside her stomach. Spit and blood fell from her mouth onto the dirt trail. Slowly, she raised herself to her feet, but was unable to stand upright.

  Hunched and holding her waist, she shuffled back into the woods before the men returned with reenforcement. She dropped to her knees in a cluster of thick bushes about a half a mile away. Edging her way in so the braches didn’t scratch her already bruised and beaten body, she immersed herself and then collapsed to the ground. Everything went dark.

  When the sun shone through the trees and onto her face, Anita awoke with a start. She sat up. Immediately, her head pounded something fierce, as if she had been beating it against a tree trunk all night. She took in a sharp breath through her teeth and raised a hand to her head. It hovered over her muddied, strawberry-blonde hair rather than touch it directly.

  The rhythmic thumping of footsteps in the distance made its way closer to where Anita sat. When the sound finally separated itself from the pounding of her head, Anita held her breath. Her lungs ached the longer she kept it in. Was it an animal? Was it one of the infected? Or was it more people? That last thought made tears rush to her eyes. She choked them back before she broke into a full on sob again. Her ribs wouldn’t be able to handle it.

  She could distinguish multiple footsteps and heard faint voices talking to each other. It was people. Her stomach dropped. They were practically on top of her, just a few short feet away as they walked the trail. She lowered her hand from her head to slowly cover her mouth. Coated in dirt, she pressed it against her busted lip which gave a sharp sting. She winced. With enormous eyes, she watched through the leaves as a group of six walked past her. They were too busy arguing to notice she was there. Anita shrank back further into the bushes.

  II.

  Four guys and two women walked together in a loosely knit group along the trail. The sun was fully in the sky and it brought the relentless heat of
an Indiana summer. Before the outbreak, the news had reported it as one of the hottest summers in forty-three years, and it was only the end of June.

  Lonnie Lands carried a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle in both of his thick, small hands, the barrel pointed out in front of him. He kept his stocky body crouched, knees bent, as he swept the woods. “I’m just sayin’,” he said loud enough to echo off the trees. “Every group needs a leader and it should be me. I’m in the Army and I know how to take apart and reassemble this rifle with my eyes closed in under a minute. Everything I did for the Army is top secret, so I can’t really talk about it, in case they actually clean this shit storm up and I return to…well I can’t say, but I can say that I’ve seen some shit and done some shit and it ain’t pretty.”

  Gale Lewis rolled her narrow brown eyes. She was a few paces behind the majority of the group and with every step they took they got further away from her, but she didn’t mind. She couldn’t listen to Lonnie go on about his supposed job in the Army. It was all bullshit. The way he was holding his gun made Gale laugh, like he was Rambo.

  When Gale walked she leaned side to side, unable to put too much pressure on either foot since they both throbbed from endless walking. It was Lonnie’s idea not to stay in one place too long and as a result she’d only sat down collectively for thirty minutes in the last twenty-four hours. Never mind that she was approaching her mid-fifties while he was barely the legal drinking age.

  “You alive back there, Big Bertha?” Lonnie called to Gale every so often. It was an unclever jab at her weight somehow, but she didn’t get it. That didn’t subside her desires to punch him in the mouth every time he said it, though. She watched the back of Lonnie’s white-blond, wide head turn on what little neck he had. His gun followed his every move.