Life of the Dead (Book 1): Hell on Earth

by Tony Urban

  Wim couldn’t believe how close he’d come to dying and was surprised at how much the prospect of death had frightened him. Maybe he had something to live for after all.

  It was almost pitch black outside now and he checked each direction multiple times, like a little boy crossing the street, as he exited the store. Much to his relief, the streets were still empty. He transferred his groceries from the cart to the Bronco, then reloaded his pistol, just in case.

  Even though life was lonely on the farm with no one and nothing around, he couldn’t wait to go back. He’d deal with everything else tomorrow. If there was a tomorrow. Any more, he couldn’t be sure.

  27

  Ramey laid on her back, her eyes closed, and earbuds blocking out the sounds of the dying world. She knew when she left her bedroom she might find her mother dead on the couch. Or maybe she’d be unconscious with puke all over herself, the furniture, and floor. Or maybe she’d be high as hell, trying to make mac and cheese in the microwave even though the electricity was out. She was in no rush to see which scenario was true.

  She didn’t hear the first soft thud at her bedroom door. Or the second. The third was louder. Loud enough to draw her attention through the white noise of her earbuds. She pulled out one of them and listened. Soon enough, a fourth came.

  The next thud was louder and harder and followed by what sounded like a pencil breaking.

  “Mom?”

  Ramey removed the other earbud and dropped them to the bed. She stood and crossed the small room but when she reached the door, she held the knob in her hand but didn’t open it.

  “Mom?” she asked again.

  There came another thud and this time Ramey thought she heard a soft moan. She turned the doorknob and as soon as the latch cleared the strike plate the door pushed inward. Ramey stumbled as the door knocked her backward and she landed on her butt.

  When she looked up, she saw Loretta shuffling into the room. Her nose was smashed to the side and laid flat against her cheek like a chunk of raw chicken. So that’s what I heard snap, Ramey thought. A syringe hung from Loretta’s arm, the needle still embedded in her skin and a small trail of dried, brown blood traversed the leathery skin of her forearm.

  She’s dead.

  No, that couldn’t be true. Dead people don’t walk around. This was just some terrible reaction to the drugs. That’s what it had to be.

  Loretta lunged, or, more precisely, fell toward her with a gurgling growl. When Ramey rolled out of the way Loretta face planted on the shag carpet without making the slightest attempt to catch herself.

  Nope. Definitely dead.

  Loretta clawed at Ramey’s bare leg and her fingernails scraped off the top layer of skin but didn’t draw blood. Ramey reared back and kicked her mother in the face, her Sketchers connecting with Loretta’s jaw and resulting in a crack that Ramey both heard and felt. Loretta’s head snapped backward, then flopped forward again into the carpet.

  Ramey ran past her mother, out of the bedroom and to the kitchen. She jerked open the junk drawer and dug through the tools and bottle openers and hot pads and toothpicks as she searched for the keys to Loretta’s car but came up empty.

  “Shit!” Ramey said as she slammed the drawer closed. She checked the countertops but there were no keys to be found.

  Ramey looked up to see Loretta back on her feet and shambling into the living room. Her dislocated jaw jutted to the right, the opposite direction her nose faced and Ramey had a second to think that her dead mother looked like something out of a Picasso painting.

  Loretta was now between Ramey and the trailer door. Ramey returned to the junk drawer and looked for anything she could use. She shoved aside the pliers and cookie cutters and bolts and found something worthwhile - the meat tenderizer. She grabbed the rubber handle and turned back toward her mother.

  “Get out of my way, mom!”

  Loretta kept shuffling at her, oblivious to her daughter’s demands.

  Ramey tried to go around her but Loretta caught her shirt sleeve. She leaned into Ramey and tried to bite, but her jaw couldn’t close and she only drooled all over her.

  Ramey swung the silver tenderizer and it smashed into Loretta’s forehead, leaving a waffle pattern in her dead flesh. Ramey swung again, this time bringing the tool down on the top of her head.

  The skin split open to reveal gleaming, white bone underneath. Ramey hit her a third time and this time the tool caught her in the temple and Loretta crashed to the floor in an unmoving heap. Ramey jumped over her body and ran out of the trailer.

  Outside, the park was in chaos. It seemed as if all of her neighbors were either chasing someone or being chased.

  Ramey stood on the porch and watched the 8-year-old Sutton twins run down Mr. Reese, the retiree who lived three trailers down. They pounced on him as he fell and started eating him. He kept screaming until one of the twins chewed his throat out.

  Joan Saylor, who sometimes cut Ramey’s hair for free when she couldn’t afford to go to the Walmart salon, sat in her front yard and munched on the arm of a man Ramey assumed to be Mr. Saylor. She couldn’t tell because his face was gone.

  Drea, a butch, biker chick who was always tinkering with her vintage Harley Davidson trike used her wrench to knock out the teeth of Louie Fritz, a creeper who Loretta fancied and once invited in for lunch. Only he spent most of the time trying to look down Ramey’s shirt or up her shorts instead of paying attention to Loretta.

  Ramey rather enjoyed watching his teeth go flying through the air like a handful of chiclets, but as soon as he was incapacitated, another zombie grabbed Drea from behind and chomped into her shoulder. The biker was big, over six feet and Ramey always suspected she was a man in drag, and she hurled the zombie over her broad shoulders and onto the gravel driveway.

  Drea raised the wrench to hit Louie again but before she could act her body spasmed and she collapsed to her knees. She dropped her weapon and when the convulsions stopped, she stood back up and chased after a girl Ramey used to go to school with, but who had dropped out after getting pregnant at 14.

  Ramey stepped off the porch and rushed to Loretta’s old Dodge. She opened the door as quietly as possible and dropped into the driver’s seat where she checked the ignition for keys that weren’t there.

  When Ramey looked back up, she saw Louie the Creeper looking through the windshield at her. His comb-over was pushed askew from his earlier tumble and it stuck almost straight up in a thinning, gray mohawk.

  Ramey scrambled out of the car and waited for him to make the first move. When he ran at her, she swung the meat tenderizer and it hit the bridge of his nose with a pleasant crunch that reminded her of cracking open a fortune cookie.

  Confucius say zombie no match for girl with hammer.

  She could hear the sound of an engine running and sprinted around the trailer to the opposite lane where a jacked up pick up painted primer gray and with as much putty as metal idled in the middle of the road. The driver’s side door hung ajar, but the cab was empty.

  Ramey ran to it, passing by Adele Miller, the park’s office manager who lumbered along dragging a dog leash with no dog at the other end. Ramey jumped into the truck and pulled the door shut.

  She threw the truck into gear, thankful that they were too poor for an automatic and she’d learned to drive a stick, and gunned the engine. As she did, a burly man with an American flag bandanna tied around his forehead and carrying a flat screen TV ran out of the closest trailer.

  “That’s my truck!”

  Ramey slammed the gas and the almost bald tires squealed as the truck took off.

  “You bitch, bring back my truck!”

  Ramey checked the rear-view mirror and saw him toss down the TV. He chased after for a few paces, but gave up as she gained ground.

  She was almost to the exit when she saw Bobby Mack, the de-virginizer, stumble into her path. Bobby’s white wife beater tank top was red with blood and his right arm looked like half-eaten hamburger.
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  Ramey didn’t slow down and the chrome bumper hit Bobby at 30 miles an hour. He bounced a few feet into the air allowing her one last look at his dim face before he crashed back down. She heard bones break as the truck rolled over him. She may have even smiled a little.

  28

  Mead never made it back to his apartment. As he drove away from the buffet, it became clear the world had turned to shit over the last few hours. He saw zombies in the streets, zombies trapped inside cars, and zombies eating humans. The few live and uninjured people he saw were running for their lives. He saw no first responders or anyone interested in coming to the rescue, a fact that did not surprise him. There wasn’t anyone in Johnstown worth saving, anyway.

  As he drove, he passed a small sporting goods store, saw the plate-glass window shattered and stopped. He crawled through the opening and was careful to not impale himself on any of the larger shards which clung to the frame like jagged teeth.

  He kept his eyes forward as he dropped into the building, watching for both zombies and looters. He came down on a chunk of concrete, the source of the destroyed window, and went sprawling into the broken glass.

  “Fuck!” He climbed to his knees and wiped bits of glass from his arms and legs. Aside from a few minor scrapes, he was fine. Be more careful, dumbass, he thought as he stood. His ankle was sore but not sprained.

  A torn ligament or broken leg in a situation like this would be the end of him. He knew that. Mead wasn’t stupid, even if most of his teachers and his parents would have said otherwise. He knew he could survive this.

  He had always been a zombie fanatic, whether they were piece of shit Italian gore fests by guys like Fulci, Lenzi and Mattei or the more cerebral Romero movies. Mead watched them all and, sadly, he now thought, he always rooted for the zombies.

  It wasn’t that he hated everyone although in real life he loathed his fair share. No, in the movies, the heroes were always idiots. They deserved to die because they did stupid things like try to save babies or old people. Or they didn’t look where they were going and stumbled right into the zombies. Or they holed up inside a building where they ended up surrounded and trapped. He’d be smart.

  A large display case by the cash register was also smashed open and emptied. Mead had never been in that store in his life, but he could tell by the price tags that it had housed the firearms. That was okay, he didn’t want a gun. The closest he’d ever come to firing a pistol was playing Duck Hunt on his old school Nintendo and more often than not he missed the ducks and the damned dog laughed at him. Besides, guns jammed. Or you ran out of bullets and had to go hunting for more ammo. He wouldn’t fall into that trap. That was just another easy way to die.

  Mead examined the store and found it empty of anything currently or formerly human. As he searched, he grabbed a few buck knives, but he wanted something he could use without getting so up close and personal. He sorted through a rack of wooden and aluminum baseball bats. He considered one, but they also seemed too short. The bows and arrows he came across next were even more useless to him than guns.

  He’d almost given up hope and decided to make his stand with one of the bats when a rack of hockey sticks caught his eye. A sign above them read “The first truly unbreakable sticks” and beneath that, a price sign listed them as “Starting at only $149”.

  “Jesus. Who has that kind of money for a stick?” he said to himself. When he picked up one of the sticks, he was amazed at how light it was. Maybe a pound if that. The shaft and blade were metal. It seemed impossible that something that felt so inconsequential in hand could be unbreakable. It must be some sort of modern day alchemy.

  To test this out, Mead stepped to the cash register, the drawer of which hung open and empty. Idiots, Mead thought. Money was worthless now.

  He raised the stick above his head and swung down as hard as he could manage. The metal whistled through the air like a sword before crashing into the plastic machine. Mead felt electric shock waves fire through his arms. The plastic frame of the cash register shattered into large chunks. And the hockey stick remained in one piece without so much as a dent.

  “Well holy shit!” Screw the Ark of the Covenant, Mead had just found something much more practical. The stick was five feet long, well beyond arm’s reach and would be exactly what he needed, with a little customization.

  Mead scavenged the store. When he finished, he felt he was more than adequately suited for going to war against some zombie bastards. He taped large knives to the butt ends of two hockey sticks, then followed that up with taping two ice skate blades around the blade of the stick. He checked their sharpness by lightly touching the blade against his forearm and opened an inch-long gash. Perfect.

  He used heavy duty backpack straps to fasten the double bladed hockey sticks crisscross over his back. He wrapped his arms and legs in duct tape, only allowing enough empty space for his joints to bend. He found a lacrosse helmet which even had a cage to protect his face. He slid a variety of knives into a utility belt, then finished off the outfit with a pair of heavy duty, steel-toed boots and thick, leather gloves. He’d gained about 30 pounds’ worth of armor, but had a feeling it would be more than worth its weight.

  Mead crawled back out the window and hopped down to the street. A dilapidated duplex further up the block was ablaze and orange-yellow flames clawed out open windows. A woman, half her skin charred black, wandered down the street. An elderly man, so stooped over he looked like a hunchback, loped toward her.

  “Oh God, miss! We need to get you help!” the man said.

  What a fool, Mead thought. When the old fart grabbed hold of the burned woman’s uninjured side and she responded by jumping on him and tearing open his throat, his skepticism was proved correct. The geezer didn’t even have time to scream.

  Mead ignored them both and retreated to his Cavalier. He deposited one of the hockey sticks in the back seat and went to follow up with the second, but paused. Mead glanced back at the burned zombie who had moved on from the geezer’s neck and was now dining on his face like it was an Easter ham.

  He moved up the sidewalk, walking at first, then changing gears to a quick jog as he got closer. He was in a full sprint by the time he reached them.

  “Head’s up, bitch!”

  She looked up, a ragged piece of flesh dangling from her mouth. Mead swung the end of the hockey stick with the skate blade attached. The blade hit her in the temple and tore through the front of her face, slicing through her right eye, the bridge of her nose, then the left eye before ripping free at the opposite end of her head. She tumbled backward and remained motionless on the sidewalk.

  Who needs Sidney Crosby? Mead thought, and he fought hard to suppress a primal scream of victory. Got to be careful, you don’t know how many zombies are out there.

  The hunchback on the ground had stopped bleeding and when Mead looked down at him, he saw his dead eyes open. The lifeless thing tried to growl but with most of the bottom half of its face missing, it came out in more of a gurgle. It reached up, swatting at Mead but only caught air.

  Mead straddled the zombie and spun the hockey stick around (like a ninja, he thought with glee). Now, the knife end faced downward. He clenched the shaft with both hands and guided the knife into the zombie’s eye. He stopped pushing when he felt resistance from hitting the back of the monster’s skull. Mead gave the stick a quick jerk from side to side to make sure the creature’s brains were scrambled. The zombie went limp.

  Mead stepped off it and jogged back to his car. He set the now bloody stick in the passenger seat for easy access. The Cavalier started with a loud backfire and as Mead drove away, several zombies, drawn to the sound, followed.

  29

  The relief officer never arrived and three days later Aben was still handcuffed to the toilet. He gave up and drank from the bowl halfway through day two. Even for a man who had slept in gutters and eaten from restaurant dumpsters, he felt that was a new low point.

  Dolan’s decomposing body la
id where it fell in the center of the room. The smell of his rotting corpse filled the hot, cramped office. His exposed belly had swelled to three times its normal size and Aben half expected it to burst like an overfilled water balloon.

  The officer’s skin had first gone pale white and more recently turned a putrid gray-green. His eyes bulged like they would pop from their sockets and his black tongue jutted from his mouth like he was giving an undead raspberry.

  Watching the decomposition process up close and personal was a fascinating, if revolting, way to pass the time but what really bothered Aben were the flies. Thousands of them. They invaded the room about ten minutes after Dolan died, like they had some sort of death sonar. Maybe they did. They landed on the body and the splattered blood and brains to eat and lay their eggs.

  The next day he saw the first maggots. He tried to tell himself his eyes were playing tricks on him. That it was hunger and dehydration and he wasn’t seeing what he thought he was. But toward the afternoon they were large enough he couldn’t deny it any longer. The tiny, writhing worms crawled over the body, eating and burrowing into the dead flesh. He could see Dolan’s skin pulsing and rippling as the worms ate him from the inside out.

  Forget ashes to ashes, dust to dust, this was what happens when you die. You get eaten up and shit out by maggots then more flies show up to eat their shit and lay more eggs and round and round she goes. This was the circle of life. Hakuna matata.

  Aben tried off and on to slip the cuff but all he ended up with was a bloody and sore wrist. He’d seen prisoners break their thumbs to get out of handcuffs in the movies, but his were squeezed on so tight he doubted that would do any good. Sooner or later someone had to show up and when they did, at least he’d have ten working fingers. There were two in particular he looked forward to showing them.

  One thing he was not was hungry and that surprised him as the last thing he’d eaten was the shitty pizza. Of course, it was hard to work up much of an appetite with a festering corpse 12 feet away.