The Golden Horde and the Zombies (Zombie Conflict Series Book 1)
Page 10
He got out of his car and approached the barn. The kid ran off inside.
“Hey!” Liam shouted, making a ruckus which, unbeknownst to him, had alerted not only the kid but also the pocket of zombies nearby. The kid realized this before Liam did and he ran into the dark barn. “Kid, come back! I ain’t gonna bite!”
But the kid didn’t turn around. Instead he entered the house through the barn’s connecting door. Liam followed, vexed by the kid’s lack of cooperation. He just wanted to talk, find out if he or his parents had any food or something else to spare. If they weren’t going to give it to him willingly then he was going to introduce them to his friend, his shotgun. With that thought in mind he followed the kid into the house. The windows had been boarded shut and the doors were locked and bolted. It was pitch black in the house, save for slivers of sunlight coming in through the cracks in the boards. Liam turned his flashlight on and looked around in one room after the other. What he didn’t realize was that there were zombies in the house, and this house didn’t belong to the kid or his parents, and that he had inadvertently led the kid into a den filled with hungry undead predators waiting for nightfall to go on the prowl. And he had provided them a ready-made feast.
He heard a scream in the farthest room. It was the kid. He went after the voice and to his horror found that a group of five zombies had surrounded him and were about to pulverize him.
“Mister, help!” the kid said. That was the first and last time he spoke. The next moment Liam was fending off two zombies who had leapt out of the floorboards at him. In the midst of saving his own life, he completely forgot about the kid, and ran back the way he’d come, out of the house. Behind him the bloodcurdling scream confirmed that the zombies had had their way with kid. The screams continued, but Liam didn’t turn back. He got in his car and locked all the doors. The pursuing zombies didn’t come out of the house. Instead, they turned back and joined in the feast on the adolescent child. His screams died down after his throat was torn out and devoured whole by the undead, the sweet oesophagus of a pre-teen kid.
It wasn’t exactly Liam’s fault. He had no way of knowing that zombies were in the house, or that the kid was all alone. What he felt for the rest of his life was survivor’s guilt. But he didn’t know that, and he blamed himself for the death of that kid. It was a nightmare that he relived everyday whenever he saw a dead body sprawled on the ground or a zombie prowling about.
I could’ve saved him. If I hadn’t created the ruckus that I did with my shouts and my car’s horn, the zombies wouldn’t have been alerted, he used to think, completely ignoring the fact that zombies could smell humans from far off and that they were probably lying in wait for the kid. If I had only used my senses in that moment, and used my gun too, hell, I would have saved the child. It’s all my fault, he thought to himself.
*
“I never got to know his name,” he said to Lady as they drove on the Arizona highway. “We could have become friends. I might have taken him aboard with me and we would have ridden across the country together. Don’t get me wrong, Lady, I love you and all, but having another human being for company’s a whole other thing, you wouldn’t understand. Hell, maybe you would. When was the last time you met a fellow dog?”
Lady whined a reply and put her head on her paws. She was lying on the backseat of the car, feeling rather dejected after Liam had forcefully closed the windows to stop the sand from seeping in the car, prohibiting her from sticking her tongue out in the open air.
After that incident, he changed. Instead of catering to himself, Liam figured that the only way to right his wrong was to find other survivors and help them however he could. And that’s exactly what he went out to do. So far, he hadn’t met a single soul. After the incident in Bakersfield, Liam became more thorough in his search. That’s why it had taken him this long to reach Arizona. He had checked every house, shop and building that he came across, in hopes of finding someone to save, someone to salvage and make everything right again.
Shortly after the start of his redemptive mission, he heard a radio message, the last radio message he’d ever hear, which said, “Whoever is hearing this message, we’re calling from Tucson in Pima County. This is a distress call. If you’re nearby, it’s urgent that you respond.” It had been four long months since that last message, and Liam suspected that the people who had sent the distress call had either died or fled, but he believed that he had to make for southern Arizona, because if there was a miniscule chance of survivors, they would be there. No message had been sent over the radio from anywhere else.
That’s where he was headed right now.
“Hey Lady, seeing this place here, it reminds me of a movie I saw once when I was a kid. Nothing major, it was just an old John Wayne western. I think El Diablo was the name,” he said. It was the only thing that kept him sane: talking to his dog. And she knew it. She responded. She decided to let go of her ill-feeling and listen to him. She showed it to him by perking up her ears and woofing a response every now and then. “So, there’s this song in the movie that I can’t forget. The guy in the sheriff’s office, he’s sitting there with a banjo in his hand and he’s singing and everyone’s joining in. I can’t remember the lyrics, but it goes something like ‘with my rifle, pony and me.’”
Lady blinked at him and wagged her tail. Liam reached over and patted her on the backseat. It would be evening soon, which meant the zombies would come out of the shadows. It wasn’t that they didn’t come out during the day; it was just that they seemed more potent and horrifying in the night as compared to regular good old daytime.
“I wonder if there’s any humans left in this giant shit storm,” he said. “Hell, Lady, I think maybe there’s some people holed up in a safe haven someplace far. Like maybe in the mountains. Or on an island somewhere. Honolulu maybe. Or the Dominican Islands. I’m going to check up on Arizona first and I promise you, if we don’t find anything here, we’re going to Hawaii.”
The slight trace of hope in his voice gave Lady a morale boost and she wagged her tail furiously, acknowledging his thought. She hopped on the front seat beside him and rested her head on his lap as he drove. She was a good dog, thought Liam. Old, withered and battered, just like he was. But she was good to him. And in a world where people had always been flipping him the bird, whether it was his mother, his absconding father, or every other conceited asshole who brought his car to the garage looking like he owned the place, it was good to have someone who had his back for a change.
Liam drove past an empty parking lot with a Coca Cola neon sign blinking on and off. The sun began to creep back from where it had come; behind the dunes in the horizon. Liam reversed the car and parked in the parking lot. He got out with his shotgun and Lady, and waited for her to show any signs of hostility. She didn’t. She wagged her tail and jogged around Liam. She was hungry and so was he. Neither had eaten since this morning.
“Alrighty, some dog food for you. It’s expired but it’s the best that you can have. Besides, all that expiration shit, it was capitalist agenda. You’re good to go, don’t worry,” he said as he poured her dog food in a bowl and placed it beside the car. He went to the back of the pickup truck and scrounged around for a tuna can. Today he felt like eating fish. One of the perks of the zombie apocalypse was that Liam had started eating healthy. Before this, he’d either order Chinese food from the deli downstairs, or eat the greasy cheeseburgers at the diner next to the garage. And those two things killed you faster than cigarettes or booze. Booze. That reminded him of the few bottles of beer in the back of the truck. He took one out and spun the cap off.
The two watched the sun go over the horizon as they ate their fill for the day. They’d stay there for the night and, as long as Lady didn’t bark, they’d be safe there. This parking lot was weirdly out of place without an abutting building. It might have been a development plot in another life. Or whatever. Liam did not care about such frivolities. He got to stay alive for another day and th
at for him was a blessing.
As he lay on the backseat of his vehicle with Lady on the front seat, he thought about the numerous close shaves he’d had with zombies over the course of the last months. And it was a miracle that he survived them all. Last he checked, he wasn’t a battle hardened veteran or a survivalist.
“Oh well, I guess I should be thankful for the little things,” he said to Lady and then dozed off to a dreamless sleep. Those were rare for him. On most nights, he dreamt of the kid. And even though he hadn’t seen him die, in his dreams, he always stood in the room as the zombies tore the child apart. And he watched and did nothing to stop them. Then he would look at his hands and realize that he too was a zombie. And then he’d wake up, sweating and crying. And sometimes there’d be traces of piss in his underwear.
But tonight was not one of those nights.
A Town Called Desperation
Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter One - A Touch of Malignancy
Chapter Two - When the Sun Shines
Chapter Three - Missing Subjects
Chapter Four - Please Pack Carefully
Chapter Five - Harry Houdini had it Easy
Chapter Six - A Scarred Childhood
Chapter Seven - Bunkers Last Longer
Chapter Eight - A Fool’s Paradise
Chapter Nine - Look at your Own Discretion
Chapter Ten - All Guests should be Revered
Chapter Eleven - March Madness
Chapter Twelve - Babies fall from a Stork’s Basket
Chapter Thirteen - Everyone needs Fresh Air
Chapter Fourteen - All Nights must End
About Jake Rothmore
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