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

by H. L. Murphy

  “I don't live this way,” Madalina whined. My jaw clenched and the muscles in my cheek began to twitch rapidly. Lizzy once told me that I did that only when I was about ready to go off on somebody for being unjustifiably stupid.

  “I don't give a fuck where you live,” I growled slowly. Twitch, twitch, twitch. “I live this way, and my only concern is to get to my family. You had your chance to go your own way. You chose to come with me so sit there, enjoy the ride, and shut the unholy fuck up.”

  Bottom lip aquiver, Madalina flung her face away from me. Being black as pitch within the cab, the effect of her hair as it swung out and around her face was utterly lost. Remember what I said about how women just needed to bawl out a few buckets and then move on? In my humble opinion Madalina had began operating within the moving on zone. Worse, it very much seemed she had fallen back on her tried and true tactics, all of which belonged in high school.

  “I,” big sniff,”I just want,” big sniff, “to go home.”

  Cue the waterworks.

  As far as faux tears went, it wasn't a bad show. She didn't go overboard with the sobbing and kept her face turned away so I wouldn't be able to see that not one blessed, salty tear had fallen. The thing was, I had a two year old daughter that could cry on command to get her way. Believe me, Hermione could pour tears to fill the oceans and had a healthy set of lungs to fuel her scream machine. My general response was to put Hermione into her crib to cry it out, which was when she really kicked her production into overdrive. I listened for a few more minutes before I jumped onto the brakes.

  Shrieks. Flailing arms. Truly obscene epitaphs in two languages. The truck came to a shuddering halt, the tail broke loose of the asphalt. Madalina spun around to face me, the fire in her eyes a mirror image of the fire she gave me just before she kicked me off the framework. Our eyes, kind of, met for just a few seconds before I swung my forty-five into her face. Even in the near complete darkness Madalina could see the total oblivion represented by the muzzle of my pistol. The fire in her eyes sputtered, and then died as the cold, black aperture which stared at her explained what I never could.

  “It's real simple,” I explained. I thumbed back the hammer. “You come with me, or you walk from here. Either way, shut the fuck up. In case you've missed it, I just shot and killed five men. Killed them, get it? They are fucking dead, and never ever coming back. I did that. I did it to save you from something I feel to be unspeakably evil, despite the fact you tried to kill me you fucking cunt.”

  Madalina stuttered at me, unable to form a response.

  ‘Your choice,” I declared with finality. “You come with me, or you walk. Now.”

  Interlude Four

  Eric “Sweet Daddy” Linner lay in the middle of the asphalt, he bled profusely from two very serious bullet wounds. His breathing had become labored, but he refused to give in to the pain and the pressure in his chest as it mounted. To make matters worse, Eric’s face throbbed unbearably with every beat of his heart. Moments earlier, Linner had managed to depress his panic button, which should have brought the rest of his team running.

  Only they hadn't shown.

  Something had told him they would never be coming.

  Slowly, Linner brought a hand up to his throat to activate the radio.

  “R,r,r,raven fo-o-o-our,” he gasped out, blood ran from the corner of his mouth. “R-raven four to Blackbird…Code Zulu. C-c-c-ode Zulu. Code Zulu…”

  His efforts had drained Eric of much of his strength, and his voice trailed off. In his minds eye, Eric replayed the instants before the thunderous impact in his left side. In the fifteen years Linner had been traipsing around the globe killing people for ridiculous sums he had been shot before, though rarely had it been this bad. He decided it must have been some kind of hollow point round. Not that it seemed to matter all that much, the placement of the rounds had been the deciding factor in their effectiveness.

  His mind was drifting, and Eric refocused on the memories. He and Jace had just checked out a civilian target vehicle, as they had walked away they had talked about the quiff at the wildlife management cabin, and then the shots rang out. He was pretty sure Jace had bought it with the first shot, but Eric still had enough life in him that he rolled onto his back. His blurring vision had showed him the impossible, the chump, the dead chump, in the Jeep had stepped onto the road with a fucking hand canon. Blood bubbled up into his mouth as the dead chump pumped a round into Jace’s skull. Unable to move, Linner had been forced to watch as the dead chump stepped over to him. As he looked up from the asphalt, Eric looked straight into the eyes of a walking dead man and shat himself at what he saw. It wasn't like the movies where the good guy, and Eric still thought of himself as the good guy, looked into the eyes of some poor bastard that had been possessed by the devil, alien creature, or whatever and seeing images of destruction, conquest, whatever. No, Eric simply saw death. Death in all its inescapable and unending glory.

  The hand cannon fired, and Eric went blind from the flash then lost consciousness. Since he woke, Eric hadn't dared touch his shattered face in case something…delicate had been exposed.

  Linner realized he had blacked out when he focused on the face of the unit’s medic as he leaned over him, yelling questions at him. His eyes, no, just one eye, blinked several times as he struggled to focus on the medics face, and identity.

  “Do you hear me, Linner?” The medic yelled over the whump whump of a helicopters rotors. Was that Carl Knox?

  “Yeah,” Eric gasped out. “I hear you, cocksucker.”

  “He’s conscious,” Knox yelled over his shoulder.

  “Good,” Commander Uhlanis leaned into Linner’s face. “What the fuck happened here?”

  “Jeep, black, dead chump,” Eric Linner forced out from between clenched teeth. A stuttering cough wracked Linner’s body. “Dead chump shot me, shot Jace. Dead chump…”

  “Sir, I need to get him out of here,” Knox pulled his commanding officer back. Both men were professionals, and understood the necessity of their work. “His left lung has collapsed. And he’s bleeding internally. I think I can stabilize him for transport.”

  “Do it,” Commander Uhlanis shouted, then ordered two very large, very fit men to assist the medic in any and all capacities. “Apache, right here.”

  A tall, dark skinned man bounded from the helicopter to stand before Uhlanis. Apache,a code name for Eduardo Hernandez, stood at attention, his face adorned not with Hollywood war paint, but grease paint. A hand forged tomahawk hung at his waist next to his Glock 17, and a series of M67 fragmentation grenades. Cradled in his powerful arms, Apache carried an AA-12 automatic shotgun. Eduardo was granted the code name Apache because of his remarkable to track anything, anywhere.

  “Black Jeep, find it. Tell me where the occupant went,” Uhlanis ordered. “Time is an issue.”

  Not wasting a second to speak, Apache loped into the black of night. The big man, half Mexican, half Apache, didn't have any kind of spiritual insight into the workings of man, but he possessed a highly refined set of skills first learned as a boy in south Texas as he hunted from necessity. Later, the military had spent a lot of money to increase his skill sets until Sergeant Hernandez had been among the five best trackers in the army. Finding the Jeep had presented no great challenge. Interpreting the information before him, however, had proven interesting. It took only seconds to locate the driver’s bloody boot prints as they led up the road to the check in cabin. Apache ran the distance much, much faster than Finnegan had earlier. Again the indications were far more confused than they should have been. A mortally wounded man had not only shot two members of the infamous Raven Team, he had killed one outright and severely injured, perhaps crippled the other, it appeared this same man had slaughtered the remainder of the team.

  The cabin was something Apache wished he could unsee. From all he gathered from the cabin, Raven Team’s reputation for ruthlessness was well founded. It troubled the professional to have been associated wi
th such men as these. The problem needed to be contained before it got out of hand, the entire world might depend on their containment efforts, but employing this kind of scum to do so had been a mistake. The men of Raven had been far more interested in what they could get away with than being merciful.

  Not that it mattered one bit any longer, the walking dead man extracted a long overdue measure of justice. Moreover, the interloper had been swift to end lives, he had not lingered over the job. Seeing all that could be seen, Apache double timed back to the Commander.

  “Report,” Uhlanis shouted, and leaned in to hear better.

  “Black Jeep, twenty yards that way,” Apache kept it simple. “Driver took at least three rounds from an aerial assault. These two walked up to the vehicle, checked the body, and as they walked away the driver shot both men. He fell out of the vehicle, stumbled over to the bodies, and shot each man once in the head. He then went back to the vehicle, collected some kind of gear, and then went up the road to the cabin. Everybody there is dead. Whole team was wiped out. Shooter climbed into a big truck and tore ass north.”

  “You get the plate number off the Jeep?” Uhlanis asked, taking everything in stride.

  “Yes, sir,” Apache answered, and handed over the number before going into the more delicate matter. “Sir, Raven set up shop in that cabin.”

  ‘I know. That was their orders. Set up in the cabin and prevent anyone escaping the quarantine zone,” Uhlanis snapped. He couldn't understand where Apache was going.

  “Yes, sir,” Apache hedged. Uhlanis turned his full attention to Apache, he knew something was troubling the best scout he had ever known.

  “Out with it, goddamn it. I don't have time to waste playing games,” Uhlanis demanded. He knew whatever it was would only complicate an already complicated situation.

  “I found Raven One out of uniform,” Apache began. “Covered in scratches and ripped up women's clothes.”

  Uhlanis’ lip curled as the picture came clear.

  “There was a stack of bodies outside the cabin,” Apache went on. “Some male, some not. The females were all in a similar state of pre mortem abuse.”

  “Alright, that's enough,” Uhlanis boiled. Old rumors about Raven’s actions in Singapore came rushing back to him. This was a brutal detail and Uhlanis had needed brutal men, but there were limits beyond which they were not authorized to exceed. But that had always been the trouble with Raven, hadn't it? A little too much enthusiasm for distasteful work. Commander Uhlanis could see spending weeks in senate subcommittees having to lie his ass off about what the animals of Raven Team had done, and what he prayed no one would ever discover they had actually done. It had happened before, Singapore, Bahrain, fucking Munich, Jesus H. Christ he had forgotten all about fucking Munich. Maybe, he silently begged, he would get lucky this time, and no one would escape the quarantine zone to report the incident. “Wait, what the fuck did you mean the driver took three rounds then killed Raven Team and drove off?”

  Apache was about to answer when a member of the security team screamed incoherently, gunshots rang out immediately after. Both men spun to locate the source of the gunfire, their eyes found a black clad contractor pouring rounds into the gut of a ragged looking civilian. Even in the dark of the night the civilian seemed pale and sickly, not that a gut full of five-five-six would have done him much good. The shooter, a former member of the French Foreign Legion by the name of Jaques LaVigne, spat a stream of obscenities while he changed out magazines.

  Another sickly pale man stepped into the circle of light cast by the helicopter, only to fall before the awesome firepower of the door gunner’s M240. The infected man twitched and spasmed as round after round punched through the grayed flesh and black viscous liquid sprayed into the night air. The light machine gun went silent and the infected man dropped onto his already prone companion.

  “No!” Uhlanis roared over the noise of the helicopter. “Keep shooting. Shoot those fuckers in the head.”

  Everyone turned to stare at the raving unit commander, not understanding the reason for the order or their commander’s fervor. They had only been briefed that an outbreak of a highly infectious disease with no known cure was being contained, not the true nature of that disease. Even Apache, in whom Uhlanis had placed considerably more trust, was at a loss to understand the command until it was almost too late.

  Uhlanis ran forward, drew his M1911A1 as he did so, as he watched the recently “killed” men’s bodies impossibly began to weave together. Corrupted muscle fibers twisted, intermingled, became one as Uhlanis raised and fired his pistol. Bullets slapped into throbbing, bunched muscle as the two corpses, now one huge corpse, rose upon three legs. The nightmarish creature before the rescue team bellowed an inhuman sound before it leapt upon LaVigne. Two mouths filled with cracked, jagged teeth clamped down on LaVigne’s flesh and began to rend and tear.

  Uhlanis’ forty-five thundered once, twice, and LaVigne’s head came apart, the old soldier spared a fate worse than death. Finally, broken free of the horror of the thing before them, the contractor opened fire upon the amalgamation of flesh and sinew. This time Apache rushed up to add to the carnage, his fully automatic shotgun spat unique explosive shells at the monstrosity. The thing exploded under the onslaught, rotting, diseased flesh showered any unfortunate enough to be too near.

  “NVGs,” Uhlanis screamed and reloaded his pistol. “Targets are infected, and transfer infection through bites. Do not allow yourself to be bitten. If you are bitten, you are infected. If you are infected, kill yourself. It's better than what will happen to you otherwise.”

  Five men, Uhlanis and Apache included, stepped up to the edge of the circle of light, NVGs in place and looked straight into the face of hell on earth. When Finnegan had fled his place of employment, his thoughts had centered on his family, not his coworkers and the other people in the massive building. As profitable as his particular employer was, they could not have afforded to lease the entire structure, and so shared the building with a renown engine manufacturer. Thousands poured forth onto the asphalt in pursuit of one man. Not that any living soul had the faintest, foggiest clue why the undead were marching north. They only knew they were there, and orders had been issued to stop them.

  Uhlanis scooped up LaVigne’s Israeli made Tavor, and screamed,”Open fire!”

  Automatic fire lanced out, slamming into the oncoming horde of undead. Many undead fell away never to trouble the living ever again, though many more simply stumbled a few steps before they resumed their march forward. Round after round, magazine after magazine the contractors stood their ground until the Medic screamed in Uhlanis’ ear.

  “I have my patient stabilized and ready to go,” he shouted, his throat tore with the effort. “I need help to load him up.”

  “Fuck that asshole,” Uhlanis screamed, his feelings overrode his professionalism momentarily.

  “What?” The extremely confused medic asked.

  “Never mind,” Uhlamis corrected himself. “Everybody fall back to the chopper. Go, go ,go.”

  As men fell back Uhlanis held his ground, he fired controlled, single shots to the heads of his foe. Strong men hefted Linner from the ground into the Huey, but as Uhlanis changed magazines he realized he wasn't alone. Apache stood next to him, that ridiculous full auto shotgun blasted away.

  “Get to the chopper,” Uhlanis yelled.

  “Yes,sir.”

  Apache dropped his shotgun to hang on its single point sling, then pulled and threw four fragmentation grenades. Then Uhlanis saw the disobedient little shit switch magazines, and then he resumed firing.

  “Goddamn it, get to the chopper.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eduardo Hernandez laid down a withering fire, he knew the Huey had left the ground.

  “Goddamn it, Eddie, get on the fucking chopper before its too fucking late,” Uhlanis screamed, he dropped the Tavor and yanked his pistol free, the same pistol his grandfather had brought back from Europe, and his
father had carried in Vietnam.

  “Chopper’s gone, sir,” Eduardo called back, his AA-12 had finally run dry. He came up with his Glock, fired several rounds and displaced back ten feet. “Fall back, sir.”

  The two men dropped dropped ten feet at a time, waiting on a rescue they both knew was never coming. Both men knew they were going to die, yet determined to sell their lives at the highest cost to their foe.

  Against the unfeeling, relentless, assimilating zombies neither man stood a chance.

  “The wildlife management station,” Apache yelled. “If we can get there, I saw vehicles we can use to escape in.”

  “Damned good idea,” Uhlanis bellowed over the sound of his pistol thundering.

  Chapter Eight

  Strangely, the ride remained quiet after I laid down the law to Madalina. The strange part lay in the lack of speech from the Queen of the Gypsy harlots. Of course, having stuck my forty-five in her face probably helped to maintain the silence. When faced with the choice of walking away into a darkness proved to be filled with living nightmares, or sitting quietly while I drove through the moonless night Madalina had wisely chosen to keep her bitching to herself.

  Fifteen minutes into the ride, as I used the NVGs to see by, my head started to throb. I had read that people who were not accustomed to the use of NVGs could develop painful headaches. The pounding in my temples provided all the evidence I required to call that particular piece of information fact.

  Ten miles from the cabin I came to the intersection with State Road seventy-six, my foot came off the gas to coast rather than hit the brakes. The gas station on the corner had long been an after work gathering place for my fellow coworkers, and I felt a swell of joy at seeing it. When I left work, this station always stood as the halfway point. An idea struck me and I pulled into the gas station, surprised when I spotted three cars at the gas pumps. People needed gas at the most inopportune of times so cars at this out of the way station wasn't unusual. A car door stood open without a single person in sight, anywhere, right after what I hoped was the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, most certainly was unusual. Since the stations lights were still going I pulled off the NVGs, happy to be rid of them.