There were two more races to go before the break to prepare for the main event, but his mind was no longer on the cars and trucks going around the track. He couldn’t get what he’d seen, and thoughts of sex with the brunette, out of his mind. Opening his last beer, he downed it in two large gulps.
Sam found his eyes drifting from the track to the woman more and more. He kept wondering what kind of underwear she was wearing and how it would feel to kiss her.
Bill tapped him on the shoulder and yelled in his ear to be heard over the sounds of the roaring engines, asking him if he wanted anything else to eat since he was going to the concession stand.
Sam said he wanted another beer. The dirt was thick in the air now and the crowd was enveloped in the cloud of fine dust. He could taste the grit in his mouth and he could feel it on his face and hair. He laughed to himself as he thought of a saying he’d heard once: “If you don’t have dirt in your beer, then you’re not at a real race!”
He watched the race for a few minutes as a car knocked another into the wall. The grinding of metal and the loud boom caught everyone’s attention. Noticing it was his buddy who’d just been slammed into the wall of wooden railroad ties, Sam jumped to his feet and yelled at the idiot who’d hit him. Finally, they got the cars separated; they were both too damaged to continue the race and were towed out by the tow-truck that had been sitting idly on the infield, waiting to be needed.
After the race started up again, he sat down and glanced over to where the women was sitting, or rather where she had been sitting. She was gone.
Sam’s heart jumped into his throat and he felt a moment of panic. Maybe she went to the bathroom, he thought. But he noticed her blanket and cooler were missing as well. He stood and spun in a circle, looking for her, jumping as one of the cars backfired. Normally it didn’t bother him, but since he was all of a sudden tense and wasn’t paying attention, the loud bang startled him.
He saw a flurry of movement behind him and turned to see if it was her – it wasn’t; it was some jerk motioning for him to sit down. He thrust his middle finger in the air at the man, grabbed his blanket and cooler, and headed for the parking lot, hoping to catch up with the object of his sexual fantasy.
He didn’t notice, nor did he care, that Bill was left standing behind him with two beers in his hands and a confused expression on his face. With a shrug, Bill sat down and turned his attention back to the track; he was more than content to drink for them both.
Sam made it to the top of the stands as fast as he could, getting annoyed with all the people who were in his way. He received a dirty look from a father who had to quickly move his young son to the side so Sam didn’t run him over. Normally, he would have felt bad about it, but not tonight. He was on a mission and nothing was going to stop him.
Making his way quickly out to the parking lot, he kept his eyes peeled for the woman. He didn’t know what she might be driving or where she’d parked, which made it hard for him to know where to go.
With a self-disgusted sigh, he went to his truck and put his cooler and blanket inside. Feeling the urge to pee again, he decided to go in the bushes – there was no point in going all the way back inside the fence for that.
He’d just finished and was zipping his pants when a loud boom sounded close-by. He jumped and spun around to see what had caused the noise. He’d thought it sounded like a shotgun blast, and sure enough, it was.
Three rows down, in the center of the parking lot stood the woman in the pink hat, holding a smoking shotgun.
Sam’s first thought was how awesome she looked. But then he realized that she’d shot someone – he could see their legs sticking out past the cars.
Spinning back around, he grabbed the door handle of his truck and prepared to get in, but before he could, a man came stumbling around the front of the truck and fell against the door, slamming it shut.
“What’s your problem, jerk-off?” Sam barked, grabbing the man by the collar of his shirt and throwing him down on the ground.
The man hissed and slowly tried to get up. By the boots he was wearing, Sam recognized him as the man who’d been mounting the woman behind the pot-a-potties. Something was off about him; his movements were slow and lumbered.
Sam watched the man for a moment, feeling sorry for him, thinking he was drunk. “Go sleep it off, man.”
The staggering fool didn’t respond, causing Sam to frown, usually if someone was drunk they would at least laugh or get angry. Stepping forward, he helped the man to his feet, thinking maybe something more serious was wrong. As he did so, another loud shotgun blast sounded, closer. Sam looked over his shoulder, still holding the man by the elbow, to see blood spray through the air in a fine mist as a man’s head flew apart. The top of his skull flapped over and hung from the skin of his cheek; the rest of his head was gone.
She must be using deer slugs, Sam thought fleetingly.
His attention was drawn quickly back to the man in front of him when he realized he was trying to claw and bite him.
“What’s your deal, man?” he asked with disgust and anger.
Just then a light attached to a pole a couple of cars over flickered and came on, and Sam saw that the strange man was covered in blood. He also saw that one of the man’s eyes was hanging out of its socket, and his remaining eye was clouded and unfocused.
“Holy shit!” Sam yelled, and pushed the man down again. He hurriedly opened the door of his truck and grabbed the locked box from underneath the seat. Glancing back down at the man – who this time managed to grab ahold of the neighboring vehicle’s tire and was pulling himself up – Sam quickly turned the dials on the combination lock and extracted his .45. Cursing the state laws, Sam slammed the door, kicked the man down again and rushed around to the other side of the truck to retrieved two full clips from the locked box in the glove compartment.
Sliding one into the gun, he went back over and pressed the barrel to the back of the man’s skull, pulling the trigger. The man’s face flew off in a smattering of red gore all over the silver paint of the car he’d been facing.
No sooner had he lowered the pistol than the woman he’d seen with the downed man earlier came stumbling out of the bushes. Her throat was gone. All Sam could see of a neck was the spinal cord and the tattered, bloody flesh of her nape.
I guess she wasn’t wiggling in pleasure, Sam thought with disgust. These are freakin’ zombies!
She stumbled forward, shuffling in the gravel. Apparently she didn’t notice that her “friend” from earlier was already lying on the ground, because she tripped over him and fell.
Sam jumped back as her gnashing teeth snapped repeatedly less than an inch from his ankle.
“Die, bitch,” he said as he raised his gun and put a round in the back of her head as well.
He stood there for a moment, breathing heavily. He couldn’t believe he’d just been attacked by zombies.
As his focus came back to reality, he heard more gun blasts and screaming. People were pouring out of the stands, just to run into the arms of a blood thirsty zombie; their panic was their undoing. If they would have calmed down, they would have easily seen the zombies were too slow and stupid to actually catch them.
He watched as people went down: men, women, and even a couple of children. They lay in dead piles across fences, over chairs, and dangled from railing. Blood ran freely down the steps of the stands, slowly dripping onto the dirt of the track . . . and the cars – the liquid buffeted by the draft of the cars in front of them.
Scanning the parking lot, Sam looked for zombies close to his position. There weren’t any, at least not that he could see. But there was one closing in behind the woman in the pink hat. She was distracted by three shambling, decaying zombies who were advancing from her front and didn’t know there was one behind her as well.
He took off at a run, heading straight for the sneaking zombie. His shoulder connected with its midsection, taking it off its feet; its body snapped in half and its gu
ts spilled out onto the ground.
Sam had a hard time getting traction in the gooey, wet mess of innards, but finally he pulled his gun up and blew the zombie away. In the gore that was already bathing the ground more brain matter only added to the color.
Glancing up, he noted the woman was struggling with a male zombie who was missing an arm, but had grabbed her shotgun with the remaining one and was preventing her from reloading. She was using a 20-gauge single shot with a break open barrel – not the best, but not the worst weapon in the situation.
At least she’s using deer slugs and not shot, he thought, getting to his feet.
In two long strides Sam was beside the one-armed ghoul. Pressing the barrel of his pistol to the zombie’s forehead, he pulled the trigger. Skull fragments exploded outwards and dinged off the metal light pole as they struck with force.
“Thanks,” the woman said breathlessly, wiping blood and sweat from her face.
Sam nodded as he heard the click of her gun barrel opening and the dull pop of the spent shell ejecting. “How many slugs do you have?”
She frowned, sliding another yellow shell into the barrel before snapping it shut. “Ten, I think.”
Before Sam could say anything else two more of the shufflers came trudging their way.
The woman raised the gun to her shoulder, set up a line of sight on one of them, pulled back the hammer, and squeezed the trigger. Fire billowed from the barrel of the gun as it boomed, releasing a chunk of lead into the air. Her aim was true. She blew the zombie’s – a female this time – head off.
She cracked open the barrel again and Sam grinned.
“Hollow points?”
She laughed and nodded, loading again.
Before she snapped the barrel closed, Sam took aim and ended the second zombie’s forward motion; it fell in a heap beside the female the woman had just dispatched.
They turned together to look at the track as the sound of metal meeting metal filled the area.
“They must have made it onto the track,” the woman said.
As they watched, a man in a jumpsuit tried to climb the fence separating the track and stands. A group of six zombies stood below him – their blood-covered hands grabbed him and dragged him back down. In the next few seconds, a short, pain-filled scream rent the air and they saw his intestines and limbs being eaten.
“They work fast, don’t they?” Sam asked, raising his gun and shooting another zombie as it came out of the entrance gate and into the parking lot. “What’s your name anyway?”
The woman smiled and took a couple of steps forward to shoot yet another zombie as it stumbled around a fifty-five-gallon drum used as a trash can. “Brooke. Brooke Monroe. What’s yours?”
“Sam Pope,” he said with a crooked grin; they were in the middle of a zombie outbreak and were exchanging pleasantries, which he found highly amusing. “What’re you doing hauling a shotgun around anyway? It’s not deer season.”
Brooke laughed. “No, it’s not. But I just bought this thing and was going to do some target shooting to get used to it. That way I’d be ready when deer season started.”
“You’re defiantly getting some target practice,” he said.
While they were talking the dead bodies of the people who’d been killed by the zombies started to twitch. Their eyes opened and they rose up and began to walk around, slowly shuffling after the few remaining live people.
Sam was the first to notice, and nodded in the direction of the awakening zombies. “I think we should get out of here.”
“I agree,” Brooke said, motioning toward the entrance gate. “Where’d you park?”
He pointed down the hill with his gun. “My truck’s over there. I think we should take it since it’s further away from danger and is four-wheel drive.” His eyes scanned the two door sedan behind her as he spoke.
“Sounds good,” she said, slamming her car door shut with a backward kick of her foot, since it was still ajar from when she’d retrieved her gun earlier. She grinned at him and rested her shotgun barrel against her shoulder. “Lead the way.”
Sam took off down the hill with Brooke following close behind him. When they were almost to the truck, they encountered trouble. Zombies surrounded them, coming out from behind and between the parked cars and trucks that filled the lot. They stood back to back and surveyed the undead.
“How many shots do you have left?” Sam asked.
“Um, eight I think,” Brooke said. “How many do you have?”
“Three in this clip and eight in the other.”
Brooke counted the zombies that were slowly shambling forward, closing in on them. “There are only ten of them. We should be fine.”
“Yeah,” he said. “As long as we don’t attract more by the time we get these ones taken down. Try not to miss – then we might make it out of here alive.”
“Let’s get this done,” Brooke said and opened fire with a loud, resounding boom. Her aim was dead-on. She hit a zombie in the eye. Half of its head exploded as the slug made contact, throwing blood and membrane into the air. A large portion of its skull slapped the zombie beside it in the face; it moaned loudly, but otherwise gave no indication of the contact.
As the zombies grew closer, the sound of moaning and hissing drowned out all other noises. With the human population in the area dwindling rapidly there wasn’t much to compete with them.
Brooke began to get scared as the zombies got closer. She actually missed a couple of shots when she loaded and fired too fast, not taking the time to aim. The situation was finally breaking through to her mind and she realized what was actually happening. At first it had been fun, just like target practice. But now, as the zombies became more numerous and were actually posing a threat, it was wearing on her nerves.
Sam was in a zone. He was grinning like a maniac, watching his gun blow the brains out of the dead, rotting skulls in a plethora of spurting gore. The sickening sounds of guts and brains hitting the metal of cars reminded him of the zombie video game he’d recently purchased. That’s what all this felt like to him, a game. He figured he was quicker and smarter than the zombies trying to take his life, so he had nothing to worry about.
Finally all the zombies around them were down; a couple of them still twitched as their damaged brains stopped sending electrical signals to other parts of their undead bodies.
“Um, Sam,” Brooke said, pressing herself closer against his back. “I think we need to get out of here fast.”
He glanced over his shoulder and saw the horde of zombies shuffling toward them. Some tripped as they came over the top of the hill, moaning and falling to roll a few feet. They would try to rise, but were so slow that their companions would stumble over them and send them tumbling again. More kept coming. In his mind, Sam deduced there had probably been more than two hundred people attending the races, and it looked like they were the only two to have made it out alive. Now, all of the zombies they hadn’t blown away were after them.
“I agree,” Sam said taking Brooke’s arm and pulling her quickly after him. “Get in the truck.”
Brooke jogged around to the passenger’s side and hopped in, slamming the door tightly shut behind her just as Sam was turning the key in the ignition.
The engine roared as he slammed the shifter into reverse and stomped the gas pedal to the floor; gravel went flying as he backed out and the truck rocked as they ran over a couple of the zombies that were still rolling down the hill.
Brooke wrinkled her nose, imagining the heads and bodies bursting like pressurized water balloons, spraying the undercarriage with carnage.
“Buckle up, babe,” he said with a grin, yanking the shifter into drive. “It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.”
The tires spun in the pile of dead bodies that were slick and slimy from being run over, giving the undead enough time to reach the truck before it caught traction and took off. The truck slid sideways with a screech of tires as they hit the paved road, and two zombies who’d grabbed o
nto the tailgate went flying through the air into the ditch and woods. They were now armless, their limbs having been ripped off by the force of movement.
Sam saw the hands still clutching the tailgate in the rearview mirror and laughed.
“This is awesome! I’ve always wanted to battle zombies!” he exclaimed like an excited teenager.
Brooke looked at him and shook her head as she buckled her seat belt. She’d been thrown around the cabin of the truck during the rough driving and her forehead was bleeding because her gun had bounced up and smacked her in the head.
They were quiet as they navigated the quiet Ohio countryside. Houses were sparse and they had no eventful encounters.
“Where are we going?” Brooke asked, looking around. Fog had accumulated during the night, but they hadn’t noticed it until now because the disturbance of air at the track had kept it at bay.
“Coshocton,” Sam said. “I have a little place in the middle of nowhere. We should be able to hole up there and not be bothered. I think we could both use a shower. Besides, I have more guns and a bunch of ammo. I have a feeling we’ll need it.”
She nodded and sat back. “Sounds like a good plan. I live right outside Columbus, so your place is closer – makes more sense.”
“We should be there in twenty minutes to a half hour,” Sam said, rolling down his window, letting in the cool night air. Adrenaline was making him too warm, not to mention thoughts of Brooke in the shower.
I can tell I haven’t gotten any in a while, he thought with a chuckle. Zombies are trying to kill me and I’m still thinking about a naked woman.
“What’s so funny?” Brooke asked.
“Oh, uh, nothing,” he said, clearing his throat. “We’re gonna be going past a couple of twenty-four hour grocery stores. I was thinking about stopping to get supplies. Bottles of water and food, you know, just in case.”
Brooke nodded. “Makes sense. I wonder where the zombies came from . . .”
“Don’t know,” Sam said. “But I can almost guarantee we haven’t seen the last of them.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” she replied with a sigh, leaning her head back against the seat and closing her eyes.
Zombies Inside Page 5
