Books of the Dead (Book 2): Lord of the Dead

by R. J. Spears

  Rex had a sub-master control panel, one that allowed him to access the shock collars that the new recruits wore. He figured now was as good a time as any to try it out, and Anthony was surprised Rex had waited this long.

  Rex depressed a couple of buttons on the control panel, and Felix shrieked and fell to his knees, clutching at his neck. His face went beet red from the pain and the veins in his forehead seemed ready to burst open.

  “Do I have your attention now, asshole?” Rex shouted. “You going to let your soldiers fall out of formation again, Asswipe?”

  Rex let up on the electricity, and Felix went on all fours, gasping in large breaths of air. “No.”

  “No, what?” Rex asked and gave the shock button a quick press, making Felix’s body jerk again.

  “No, sir,” Felix said, his voice hoarse and weak.

  “That’s right, pansy. Now, get back up and get those soldiers back in line.”

  Anthony watched from the front seat of the bus just twenty yards away, and he couldn’t help but smile a little. This was going better than expected. The town was effectively his. He had wiped out the two most concentrated threats: the group on the hill and the church people. Yes, some rogues still existed in pockets around town, but they offered no credible threat. The real threat was sure to come sometime soon. The ones that had split off from the church people would come back to town if their pattern played out. That was inevitable, and he would have to be ready because they looked to be quite capable; plus, their numbers might have grown.

  He knew his troops weren’t ready, but they would be in time.

  Chapter 34

  Desperate Measures

  Doc Wilson groaned when he saw the bite mark on Hub’s wrist. The wound was angry and red with black veins starting to spread up Hub’s arm. He was already carrying a fever of a 101.

  “Come on, Doc,” Travis said, “there’s got to be something you can do.” His face was almost as pale as Hub’s.

  “We can try a broad spectrum antibiotic, but that has only worked to delay the virus. It would only buy us time, and I don’t like using it in....” Doc broke off. We knew he was going to say “in lost causes.” Or something such as that.

  We drove like bats out of hell back to The Manor. Travis rode in the back of the SUV with Hub sprawled across the bags of seed. We left Steve Hampton, Devin, and Jo behind to burn down the swine barn with all the zombies still in it. Kara and I both were concerned whether Steve and Devin were up to the task, but we knew Jo would hold their feet to the fire – literally, if she had to. She was tough that way.

  Kara had done what she could, placing a tourniquet on Hub’s arm before we left the farm in an effort to possibly stave off the spread of the infection, but we knew that was about as effective as a band aid on a gunshot wound. Just after helping load Hub into the SUV, she took me aside, and we had a very brief discussion about whether we should just cut off Hub’s arm at the elbow, considering maybe that would stop the spread, but even that was a long shot. On top of that, there was no way we were amputating Hub’s arm with only a slim chance it would do anything and an even greater chance he would bleed out. No one we knew had ever tried that. She rode in the back to calm both Travis and Hub as I put the pedal to the metal. Even at 100 mile per hour and greater, the trip seemed as if it took forever. I radioed ahead, and our group had the gates open, and Doc was ready for us, for all the good that would do.

  “Don’t waste any antibiotics on me,” Hub said, sweat rolling down his face and neck.

  “But Dad, that may be the only thing that helps,” Travis said.

  “There’s nothing that will help,” Hub said, placing his good hand on Travis’ arm.

  Travis pulled away abruptly. “Well, I can’t accept that. I’m damn well not losing you to these damn zombies.”

  “Travis,” Kara said in a calming tone, “sometimes there aren’t any options.”

  Greg ran into the room, and all eyes went to him. “I just heard. How bad is it?”

  I walked toward him and pitched my voice low, “Bad.”

  Greg’s expression turned to a question mark.

  “Hub’s got the infection,” I said with my back turned to the others. Greg’s face fell, and his hand went to his holster.

  “No!” Travis shouted.

  “There’s no other way,” Greg said softly.

  “I said, no,” Travis said, squaring up his shoulders and facing down Greg. Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, they did.

  “At the church, we had a rule no one bitten could stay with us,” Greg said.

  “We’re not at the church!” Travis shouted. “You’re here because we let you be here.”

  Kara moved in between the two men, “Hey, hey, let’s calm down and talk this through.”

  “Travis, please calm down, son,” Hub said, his voice breathy and weak.

  Travis turned back to his father, and he looked to be on the edge of tears.

  Doc Wilson stepped away from Hub’s bedside and moved beside Greg and me. “Greg, the bite wasn’t that bad, but Hub’s infected. From cases I’ve seen in the past, he could succumb to it in twelve hours, but it looks to be moving slowly, so I’m guessing twenty-four hours. On the outside, forty-eight hours”

  “We can’t have one of those things inside here,” Greg said.

  “He’s not one of them,” Doc said.

  “Yet,” Greg said.

  I was with Greg on this debate, but I knew that there was probably no need to rush anything. We waited, and Doc monitored Hub’s vitals for the next ten minutes.

  Travis paced across the infirmary. After several back and forth routes he huddled up with Greg, Kara, and me. “There’s got to be something we can do,” Travis said.

  “Sometimes we have to just let go. It’s....” Kara said, but Travis cut her off with a hard stare.

  “Don’t say that again,” Travis said. “Doc said we could use antibiotics to stave it off. I’ll go wherever I have to go to get some.”

  “But it won’t stop it,” Kara said.

  “What would you do to get another hour with Naveen or Madison?” Travis asked.

  That shut the conversation down, but then we heard a tapping noise of metal against metal and turned to the back of infirmary where we saw Jason tapping his dry erase board against the side of his bed. When he saw that he had our full attention, he held up his board and it read, “What about me?”

  He quickly erased the board and wrote, “I’m immune.”

  Travis spun around and walked to Doc and said, “What about him? Can’t he help?”

  Doc stood and looked down at Hub, who had his eyes closed, and then motioned for Travis to follow him away from the bed. We joined them, and, as a group, we walked to the back of the room and gathered around Jason’s bed.

  “It’s not like I can just whip up some serum or antidote,” Doc said. “Making a vaccine is something that’s done in a lab after years of research and testing.”

  “We don’t have years,” Travis said.

  “I know that,” Doc said, his patience wearing thin, “I don’t have a lot of options.”

  “What about a blood transfusion?” Kara asked.

  “We don’t even know the boy’s type and have no way of testing it,” Doc said.

  Once again, Jason tapped on his bed with his board and then wrote on the board. “I’m Type O negative.”

  “That’s the universal donor,” Kara said.

  “But,” Doc started, his hand in the air, using his index finger to accentuate his following words, “We have no way of doing an antibody screening or any cross matching. Plus, Hub would probably need a total transfusion, and that would mean....” he paused for a moment, “would mean draining the boy.”

  He didn’t need to go any farther with that because we were all smart enough to make the inevitable conclusion.

  “But would a partial transfusion work” Travis asked. “You could use the antibiotics to stave it off, and we could find
some other way.”

  “There are any number of things that could go wrong,” Doc said. “Hub could have an allergic reaction. He could develop an infection.”

  “But he’s going to die anyway if we don’t do anything,” I said.

  “Well, and I don’t mean any disrespect to you,” Doc said, looking at Jason, “but we have had no way to confirm you are really immune.”

  Jason scribbled furiously on his board and held it up. “Trust me; I am immune.” He sat the board down and lifted his arm and displayed the bite mark on the back of it.

  “What have we got to lose?” Travis asked.

  Doc stood still and rubbed his face with his hand as he pondered the choices. “There’s no way in hell I’m doing a direct transfusion,” he said, but he seemed to be talking to himself. “I don’t have any anticoagulant, so we can’t mess around with the blood when it’s outside the body. So, that leaves a syringe transfusion.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kara asked.

  “We’d have to draw blood from Jason with a large syringe and then use it to inject Jason’s blood into Hub’s blood stream.”

  “Will that even work?” Kara asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Doc said, “this procedure was used to help someone get more blood and not transfer any immunity. I doubt if it does a thing.”

  “What about bone marrow transplants? They work,” Kara said.

  “That’s an entirely different animal,” Doc said. “You have the person irradiated and his immune system is knocked on its ass.”

  “Have you ever done this procedure before?” Greg asked.

  “Hell no, this is battlefield or third world stuff. I read about it in med school,“ said Doc.”

  “So, this is a long shot?” Greg asked.

  “A moon shot,” Doc said.

  “But it’s worth a try, right, Doc?” Travis asked.

  “Anything’s worth it since we can’t do anything else,” Doc said, but he didn’t convey an ounce of optimism.

  It took about thirty minutes for Doc and Kara to prep for the procedure. The rest of us stayed out the way while Travis hovered nervously. The last part of the preparation was to push the two beds side-by-side.

  “Jason, are you sure you want to do this?” Doc asked. “There’s little risk, but I want to make sure.”

  Jason nodded his head.

  “Okay, here we go,” Doc said. “Kara, hand me the needle.”

  Kara reached onto a sterile tray, grabbed a syringe, and handed it to Doc. Doc grabbed it, took a quick breath, and then inserted into Jason’s arm at the elbow. Jason’s only reaction was a quick flinching in his face; then, he relaxed and went with it. I watched as the first vial filled with Jason’s blood. Once it was completely full, Doc pulled the vial and handed it to Kara. She handed him the next vial, and Doc inserted it in the syringe, and it filled quickly. They repeated this process two more times.

  “That’s enough for now,” Doc said. “Let’s move quickly; I don’t want to let the blood coagulate.”

  Hub’s fever was up to 103, and the black streaks that had been relegated to his forearm were now on his triceps and almost had reached his shoulder. He was partially delirious and sweating as if he were in a sauna.

  “You ready for this, Dad?” Travis asked from the opposite side of the bed from the Doc and Kara.

  “Uh huh,” Hub said, but he was mostly out of his head.

  “Okay, here goes nothing,” Doc said but then stopped. “Say a prayer folks because we’re really going to need it, but make it quick.” He gave us ten seconds to say whatever we wanted to the Man Upstairs. I looked around, and everybody had their eyes closed. I closed mine and joined in, and when I opened them, I saw Doc inserting the needle in Hub’s arm. If Hub felt anything, he certainly didn’t show it.

  They ran all four vials into him, and that started the waiting game.

  Chapter 35

  Hometown Troubles

  “You’re stalling,” Paige said as she watched Russell tinker with the alternator of an old Buick.

  “Paige, I’m not,” Russell said. “I swear to you. The battery’s dead, and if this alternator doesn’t work, there’s no way it’s going to charge the battery.”

  “Well, make it work.”

  “I’m trying, but I’m not an auto mechanic.”

  “Then, why don’t we try bikes?”

  Russell pulled his head out from under the hood and looked at Paige. “Okay, picture this: We’re riding along on our bikes when some backwoods goons come out of nowhere in a pickup truck and run us down like road meat. Or they have somebody with a rifle ready to blow our heads off.”

  Paige crossed her arms and exhaled loudly. “The alternative is staying put with that maniac and his army of the undead ready to kill us the first chance he gets.”

  “We’re staying under the radar and safe for now.”

  “How long is that going to last?”

  “Long enough for your friends to come back to town.”

  She brought a hand up to her mouth and started chewing at her fingernails, a habit Russell found supremely annoying. He went back to the alternator and spent more time looking at it than doing anything. What he knew about how cars worked couldn’t fill a thimble, but he felt he had to try something.

  “Why don’t we take the fight to him?”

  Again, Russell stopped and stared. “You saw what he did at the church. I was there when, all by his lonesome, he killed everyone I ever cared about. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “At least we’d be doing something.”

  “You can try that I’d rather go down fighting stuff all you want, but I’m surviving.”

  He went back to the engine, tried to disengage the alternator from its mount, but instead, ended up busting his knuckles against the damn thing when the wrench slipped off the nut he was working on. That’s when he started cursing.

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” she asked.

  “My mother is dead.” That shut her up but didn’t get them any closer to resurrecting the Buick. It took a few more times of tearing the skin off his knuckles before he threw the wrench through the window of the house where the car was parked. The window shattered, spewing broken glass into the house.

  “That really helped,” she said.

  He nursed his bleeding knuckles by sucking on them and wondered why he hadn’t just left her at the church. He contemplated just finding her a bike and sending her north for a few seconds, but that thought was interrupted when he caught something out of the corner of his eye.

  “Did you learn that technique in shop class?” she asked in a chiding tone.

  He pulled his hand away from his mouth and looked down the street. Something was coming, but whatever it was had been blocked by an overturned UPS truck sitting about a half block away.

  “Shhhh,” he hissed.

  “Don’t tell me to be quiet....” she started, but he shot out a hand, striking her shoulder.

  She was more stunned by the blow mentally than she was physically, and it took her a moment to recover.

  “You can’t hit me,” she said with some venom.

  “Shut up,” he said, all of his attention focused on the front of the UPS truck. They came around the back of the truck at their customary shuffle. Five zombies shambling along the street. The broken window must have been their dinner bell, and he regretted losing his cool now.

  She started to talk again, but he reached down and pulled out his pistol and said, “We’ve got company.”

  She jerked her head in the direction where he was focused and saw the shambling forms coming their way.

  “Are they normal ones?”

  “Normal ones?” he asked incredulously.

  “Are they some of his? Do they have collars?”

  He got it now. “Normal.”

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment as the zombies closed in on them. These zombies looked worse f
or the wear. Their clothes were nothing more than tattered cloth, barely covering any of their gray and black skin. A couple of them were missing limbs, and some had bullet holes in them.

  “Shooting them will make a helluva a lot of noise,” he said. “That will just bring more or get his attention.”

  “So, we’re going to run?” she asked, her tone both annoyed and resigned.

  “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  She eyed their escape path through the side yard. She was confident they could get through and close the house’s side gate, effectively blocking the zombies’ pursuit, but she was so tired of running. But she also knew they had no other choice.

  “This is getting so old,” she said and headed for the gate. Russell followed, and they were through the side gate, closing it behind them as they escaped out the back yard and into the alley.

  The slow-footed undead made it to the gate about a minute later, pawed at it and made their plaintive moans, wanting what they couldn’t have. Wanting just one more bite. And then wanting another and another.

  Chapter 36

  A Ray of Hope

  “Doc, what are the chances?” I asked for the umpteenth time but wanting a different answer.

  “Astronomical,” Doc said, not meeting my eyes.

  He wanted it, too. I knew that, but he wouldn’t let himself hope like the rest of us. I envied his physician’s ability to distance himself from the patient. Or maybe that was a façade? All I knew was that I was as anxious as I could be, and the waiting game was killing me. Travis was almost out of his mind with worry. He hadn’t sat down the entire time, either pacing or standing beside the bed. Kara was there, too, swabbing Hub’s forehead with cool towels, wiping away the rivers of sweat he was producing.

  Hub had taken the injections of Jason’s blood about two hours ago, but it looked as if the virus were continuing to works its way with him unabated. His temperature was at 105, and we could see those black veins extending past his shoulder and into the base of his neck.

  And the worst was yet to come. If this didn’t work, someone was going to have to shoot this pleasant old guy in the head. My mind played with this for minutes on end. What if it ended up being me? Could I put a bullet in Hub’s brain? This zombie-apocalypse-cold-equation shit was getting old.