Invasion of the Dead (Book 1): Treasure Coast Zombies

by H. L. Murphy

  A low, barely audible moaning floated through the air to me. Shit, I say barely audible, but I’ve spent the past ten years in aviation so I can’t really say with any truth how inaudible the moaning was or wasn’t. Pneumatic tools, rivet guns, and engine run ups have taken their toll on my hearing. Great for avoiding any part of a conversation I don’t care for. Not so great right now.

  “Finn,” Pee Wee spoke directly into my ear, his body hovering a fraction of an inch from mine. His proximity to me creeped me out more than whatever the hell was around the corner. “Did you hear that moaning?”

  “Yeah, I just thought you were reliving your days in the Corps.,” I said as innocently as possible while trying to gently shrugging Pee Wee off. “I thought the navy guys were supposed to be the fruity ones.”

  Thank Christ he got the message. Pee Wee took a step back, allowing me to feel a little less like his date to the prom. Or whatever formal dance occasions the Marines have.

  “Sorry,” Pee Wee whispered.

  “It’s okay, brother,” I whispered back. Just because I’m freaked out is no excuse to be an asshole to Pee Wee. I edged forward, my eyes flitting back and forth between the floor and the corner. Right about now I was really hating the corporate decision to ban firearms from the facility. It was entirely based upon Connecticut politics, the home office being located there. Goddamn anti-gun cry babies, terrified of everyone around them. It wasn’t just about fear, though. It was about control. Controlling the actions of everyone, judged by the standards of a few politically empowered individuals.

  Funny, huh? Wasn’t Connecticut one of the more aggressive colonial states so far as independence was concerned? Now, it’s like, kneel before your masters plebeian swine.

  I’m busy digressing in the face of possible danger. Excuse the hell out of me, I’m just an aircraft mechanic. No, fuck that. Pee Wee was in the Marine Corps. for eight years, and he’s every bit as freaked as me so either I’m way more courageous than I thought or Pee Wee is a giant pussy. Given the choice between the two, I want to go with the former rather than the latter. Pee Wee and I both come out better.

  On impulse I reverse my grip on my knife so the blade lays along my forearm. The corner loomed ahead, the sloshing sound now joined by a slurping noise. I kept praying it was Nick Depoa eating some kind of disreputable pasta dish. That would be so awesome. I could spend the next six months giving him shit about it. Air rushed in and out of my lungs at an accelerated rate as I rounded the corner, my heart thundered so loudly I swear Pee Wee could set cadence to its pounding. I swallowed forcefully as gallons of saliva coated my throat in preparation of my stomach evacuating its contents.

  I decided to take fate by the throat and leapt around the corner, for some unfathomable reason my face was drawn into a fierce grimace while my knife bearing hand drew back in anticipation of striking out. Instead of a Stallone-esque tough guy response, you know, gun blazing, razor sharp combat knives gleaming in the half light, I projectile vomited eggs-in-a-basket into the bloated, pustule covered, gray skinned face of Nick Depoa as he slurped brain matter from the cracked skull of Liesel Tomminggen.

  Manly? Not especially.

  Truthful? You bet your sorry ass.

  I puked all over Nick Depoa as his blood red eyes turned on me. Nick’s eyes weren’t bloodshot, they had actually turned blood red. The blood vessels in his eyes appeared to have burst, entirely and completely. Crimson spheres stared back at me as the scene before me burned itself into my memory. It doesn’t matter how long I live, I will never lose the clarity and definition of Nick Depoa devouring Liesel Tomminggen alive. In the blink of a blood red eye, my entire world shifted from generally okay to wildly fucked up. How else does one describe the circumstances I found myself in?

  Then Nick attacked.

  Chapter Two

  “Shit.”

  I said the word with a combination of dread and calmness, utterly belying the swelling panic rising in my soul. Short, fat Nick Depao was lunging up at me from the bloody remains of his coworker, brain matter caked his teeth, lips, and the piss poor excuse for a goatee Nick sported. Unlike a real man, who might grow face fuzz to fill Grizzly Adams with pride, Nick would grow his goatee out only to trim it back to stubble indistinguishable from a five o’clock shadow. Why fucking bother? Just shave it all off and be done with it. That shit annoys the living fuck out of me. Grown fucking men trimming and plucking their facial hair in some pathetic attempt at “manscaping”. I’m fucking ashamed I even know that term, let alone what it means.

  Yeah, I’m digressing again, but its only because what came next still bothers me.

  Cracked teeth flashed as Nick threw his head forward, my knife hand shot out the razor edge of the blade sliced through Nick’s cheeks, tongue, and bit deep into his gums. Teeth clamped down hard on the steel blade, the hair on my fingers felt the brush of porcelain and gold plating. Nick began to thrash his head back and forth violently, something primitive in the back of my subconscious sprung forth to seize absolute control of my body. My free hand lashed out to grab Nick by the throat, his folds of cold fat felt unnatural against my fingers. I squeezed as hard as I could, while I struggled to pull my blade from Nick’s mouth. Black fluid poured from Nick’s face where my knife split muscle, sinew, and lots and lots of cellulite. My jaw clenched so hard I could feel my teeth grinding against my fillings. A sickening crunch informed me I had crushed Nick’s larynx. That should have stopped Nick dead in his tracks, instead the fat bastard bellowed at me. Which was great for getting my knife free, but seeing the diseased maw of what had once been Nick Depao ratchet open to an impossible degree was, and remains, nightmare fuel to haunt my sleeping mind. Once his jaw had distended well past human dimensions, Nick angled his head in a wild attempt to bite my hand off. My knife hand swung around with adrenaline fueled terror driving it, piercing Nick in the throat just below the jaw. The tip of blade drove up into Nick’s too open mouth.

  I have never stabbed anyone in my life, and would have been only too happy to never have been put in this position. In the hierarchy of ways I don’t want to die, death by knife is in the top three. Beat out by burning to death and being eaten alive. Which, given my current circumstances, trumps my distaste for using a knife against flesh and blood. Nick flailed about wildly, his movements causing a sawing motion on the edge of my blade. His cracked teeth edged closer to my hand, so close I could feel his viscous saliva dripping onto my hand.

  “Jesus fuck,” I screamed, my steel toed boot came up to plant squarely in Nick’s chest. The fat diseased bastard fell back, taking my knife along with him. Disengaged from Nick I went to run, and came up short as I ran face first into Pee Wee. The mass of muscle molecules that coalesced into a human being simply stood there watching, instead of running. “Move, goddamn it.”

  Pee Wee’s eyes were unfocused and staring straight ahead, I could hear Nick struggling to his feet despite suffering two mortal wounds. My friend had checked out from the horror before us, and couldn’t seem to reconnect mind and body. I swore profusely, and then I tackled Pee Wee around the waist, physically relocating the man. I made it three steps before something in Pee Wee snapped. Every muscle in his body convulsed at once, and we went down in a heap of flailing arms and legs. When a fitness demigod like Pee Wee starts throwing his appendages back and forth it’s nothing to sneeze at. His forearm struck me on the side of the head, and suddenly I couldn’t see straight, a second blow threw me from his body. My head swam and out of the corner of my eye I spotted Nick fall onto Pee Wee, teeth first. Bells were ringing, but I forced my body to move. A hand closed over one of the attendants crowbars and a thought battled to make itself understood. Three feet of hardened steel lay within my clenched fist. What the bloody hell do I need with three feet of hardened steel?

  Crimson erupted into the air as Nick’s teeth found Pee Wee’s throat. The too vivid color of blood flying through the air, punctuated by a gurgled scream from Pee Wee, cleared my head enough for t
he crowbar to register. I leapt to my feet and swung the crowbar up and over my head, straight down onto the back of Nick’s head. The crunch of Nick’s larynx was nothing compared to the shattering of his skull. I swung again, and again, and again. Each blow caving his skull in further, blood encrusted brain matter shot from under shattered bone with every impact.

  After the seventh blow I finally stopped swinging, my breathing ragged. Depao lay still, though Pee Wee still twitched beneath the fat man. It was only then I noticed the twisted, abnormal growth of flesh that seemed to be growing out of Liesel Tomminggen’s body. The bizarre, pulsing growth snaked around discarded debris to terminate in a hardened protrusion piercing Pee Wee’s leg. The skinless, ropey flesh pulsed rhythmically, as though it were pumping something into Pee Wee’s system. More even than Nick’s blood red eyes, the pulsating flesh freaked me the fuck out. I could literally feel my balls retracting into my abdomen as I watched. My eyes nearly came out of their sockets as the fleshy thing pulled free of Pee Wee, only to rise up like a cobra about to strike. Black viscous fluid dripped from the tip of the protrusion, the oily liquid steamed as it struck bare concrete. Fear ratcheted up the production of adrenaline in my already on edge system so much that I barely felt the sharp sting at the base of my neck.

  Hardened steel is one of the greatest human developments in history. I will go to my grave, hopefully many years in the future, holding this truth to be as sacred as the trinity. That crowbar smacked into the fleshy thing with bone crushing force, not that it seemed to mind initially. The second and third blow knocked the thing against a steel support beam, where I attempted to force the thing to meld with the beam. The ring of the crowbar occasionally hitting the support beam filled my ears, blocking out all other sounds. I lost myself in the motion, the violence of the moment blotting out my short term memory. Try as I might, even now, I can’t bring into focus anything more than that I beat the thing into an even more unrecognizable mound of bleeding, oozing flesh.

  Pain lanced up through my legs, the agony drawing my testicles further up into my body, into my chest and behind my eyes. My vision went pure white as every nerve ending in my body fired at once in a never ending cascade of blinding, shredding pain. Even as my nervous system seemed dipped in acid, my not inconsiderable musculature seized and contracted all at once. Blind already, I became deaf to all but the pounding of my blood as it raced through my brutalized body. The pain built and built, agony upon indescribable agony until finally, blessedly, my brain threw the numbing blanket of shock over everything, and I became lost in the infinity of the timeless void of unconsciousness.

  I floated in a nightmare miasma of color and sound, but color and sound as I had never known them. Shades and tones which should have been far beyond the ability of mortal man to see or hear, and in their inherent alienness they tortured my psyche as nothing before or since. To my dying day I will swear I saw the Flaming Sword of the Archangel Gabriel, but in its true form which no man was ever meant to see. The flames engulfing the blade were of a blue both burning hotter than a star and colder than the trackless depths of space where light had never shown. I can describe it no better than that, and even at that cannot promise what I saw was real and not the imaginings of an overstressed, possibly dying mind. The Flaming Sword sliced through the very substance of the earth itself, separating the land of the diseased from the realms of the pure. Blue-white flame erupted into the brilliance of a thousand stars as the blade bit into the earth, For some reason, I wept as the blade carved the Earth. It was not a mortal blow, but something about the finality of the act saddened me.

  A thousand years, or half a second, passed as I floated in absolute darkness before a pin prick of light blossomed into a non stop assault of incomprehensible images and words. Though I desperately wanted to turn away, to see anything else I couldn’t force myself to turn my gaze from the spectacle before me. I stared, mesmerized by the horror before me until my soul bled. What do souls bleed? Not sure I would tell you, even if I knew. I just knew that what I had endured, what I had seen made my very soul weep, and that couldn’t possibly be good. Slowly, or rapidly I just can’t say which it was, I fell away into darkness, possibly into true unconsciousness. Perhaps merely into a state of complete separation from my senses. Either way, I was free of both sight and sound, and I counted it as a blessing from on high.

  Was I hallucinating? Maybe, probably. What can you except, I was raised Irish Catholic. That I hadn’t stepped into a church, let alone a confessional, in many, many years meant nothing. These things ran very deep and cannot be simply cast off at whim.

  The first clear recollection I can summon is me standing over Nick’s body wondering where the fucking hell Pee Wee’s body was, since it most certainly wasn’t where it had been. Unlike the fairly discreet trail of blood that led me to the infected Nick, there was a lake of blood to hide which direction Pee Wee had been taken. I mean, there was literally more blood on the floor than could have been in Pee Wee.

  “What the unholy fuck?” I whispered. The true horror of this situation slowly sunk into my conscious mind as I stood there, crowbar still in hand. My ears still rung from the steel on steel, but not as badly as I thought it should. Sound from outside the parts crib drew my attention, giving me something other than poor Nick to focus on. I turned to walk to the gate, and felt my entire body ache all at once. It felt as though I had stood in place all day, but that couldn’t be the case. My head turned, and I heard and felt my vertebrae snap, crackle, and pop from remaining too rigid for too long. Not so much painful, nor pain in my muscles so much as simple stiffness. My entire body felt stiff.

  Except my right leg, which actually hurt like a bitch. I reached down to run a hand over my leg, and recoiled as I saw the lower half of my pants had been coated in semi-congealed blood. My lungs ached as if I haven’t drawn breath in forever. So long in fact I couldn't prevent myself from drawing in deep, deep lungfuls of blessed oxygen. The more oxygen I forced back into my system, the more visual focus returned. I hadn’t realized just how blurred my surroundings were, until the entire area came fully, and completely, into crystal clear focus.

  Looking through the ridiculous chain link gate facing onto the production line, shambling figures moved from left to right. Fading sunlight poured onto the production line, telling me the primary unloading gate was raised. It was the beginning of the shift, why were people acting like the clock just struck eleven? More figures shambled into view, moving with more speed, but less coordination. They moved as though their arms and legs were asleep, or they had been given a too strong dose of novocaine.

  “What the hell?” I croaked out. I tried to swallow, but my mouth, tongue, and throat were bone dry. In the corner sat a blessing from on high, a water cooler. Even though my body felt stiff from disuse, my muscles unlimbered soon enough. So much so that by the time I dropped to my knees before the cooler I felt normal again. It would be impossible to underscore the amount of sweet, cold water I poured down my gullet. I swear I drank an entire gallon of water, draining the remaining contents of the five gallon bottle. Even with so much in my stomach I wanted more, needed more. As I knelt, panting like a dog, I could feel the dissemination of revitalizing hydration permeating my entire body. “No, guys, it’s okay. Don’t bother coming to investigate the yelling and screaming.”

  The words came out more quietly than I had intended, but I felt considerably better having said them. With far more ease than I would have thought possible, I rose to my feet. The strange physical weakness and sense of stiffness had evaporated, and now I felt energized. I could still stand to guzzle another gallon of water, and maybe eat a little, though neither really seemed an immediate need.

  There seemed to be no clear indication, even this far away, which direction Pee Wee was taken. In fact, being fifty, sixty feet from the scene of Nick’s impromptu buffet it’s practically impossible to tell a grown man bled out recently. Maybe that’s why no one has bothered to come check on us.

>   Suddenly it dawned on me that I really needed to tell someone about Nick and Pee Wee. Whatever the fuck was wrong with Nick might be contagious, and I didn’t want to find myself going cannibal on people. Like my wife and daughter.

  “Aw, shit,” I growled out, heading for the door. I swiped my badge across the reader, and nothing happened. Well, that happened from time to time, so I swiped my badge again. Nothing. I took a closer look and noticed the omnipresent red glow indicating the door was locked was not there.

  That’s damned odd, I thought. Then tried to remember whether the door had been locked when I came in. Now that I actually thought about it, the door had been closed though not locked. I had swiped my badge, but couldn’t recalled the electronic tone signaling the lock release. I had been so preoccupied I failed to note the discrepancy. Damn. I twisted the door handle, and the door swung wide. That made me unhappy in ways I can’t really explain, except to say that locked doors give comfort to those on either side of the door. Whereas, a door that cannot be barred against intrusion is less than useless since it grants neither protection nor comfort.

  On a hunch I walked back to the water cooler and retrieved the crowbar. Whatever was going on would. Be easier to face armed, even if that armament comprised solely of a Wal-Mart special. It had worked well enough against Nick’s thick fucking skull. My exit from the parts crib was every bit as mediocre as my entrance, except for the two men with blood red eyes shambling towards me. Enormous pustules covered their faces, several had ruptured and were weeping a greenish black ooze. Their jaws distended to a similarly impossible degree, blood and bile poured from gaping maws. My stomach threatened to evacuate as I watched the majority of a finger, gaudy ring still in place, slip from between cracked teeth and plopped onto the ground. The ring was unfamiliar, though the regurgitating man was not. Tall, relatively in shape, with close cropped brown hair going prematurely white I couldn’t help but recognize the hydraulic tech from my work group, Chaz Nasty. Of course that wasn’t the name his mother gave him, but it was the name he went by. I don’t think I ever knew his real name, kind of sad really. Although my sense of emotional distress, such as it was, was tempered by the fact that Chaz appeared desperate to eat me.