by Key, Thomas
The Long Road Ahead:
A Zombie Tale
By: Thomas Key
In loving memory of Steven Antonio Alfaro
August 30th, 1989 - September 30th, 2011.
Rest in peace, brother.
The Long Road Ahead: A Zombie Tale
By Thomas Key
2018, Thomas Key
Self-Published
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or a database and or published in any form or by any means; electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Prologue
I brought my boot down onto a pile of ash in a lot that had previously housed a local grocery store. It had been nearly three weeks to the day that I had shed my past life and joined the cause to save humankind. Of all the things that I could have been, I was formerly a grocery store manager when everything had gone down. I thought on that for a moment before snapping back to the here and now. I surveyed the destruction of what used to be the very store that I had managed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The ‘Sandia heights’ used to be more upscale living, with homes worth more than I could afford in 10 years dotting the foothills of the mountains to the east. This one grocery store serviced nearly the entire northeast section of the city. For those that used to live here, everyone knew the competitors in the area were crap and this was the store to shop at. I had spent the past thirteen years of my life working my way up to this lofty position. Now all that stood of my second home was a withered American flag on the pole out front of my former workplace. The headlights from a pickup truck behind me illuminated my shadow and the pole before me in the pitch-black night. A voice broke me out of my reverie; "Shep, are you alright?" I turned and saw Rachel fast approaching. Who is Shep? Well that’s me in case you didn’t guess it right away. Who am I? I’ll give you, the reader a quick run-down. I’m about six feet tall, with short brown hair and a beard that was now starting to turn a little bit of grey. Not grey from age mind you, it just runs in my family. My brown eyes are gorgeous if I do say so myself. However, my mother had always told me that the only reason I had brown eyes was because I was so full of shit. Good times. I had one of those dad bods before the world as I knew it ended. Now I’m about 160lbs, with not a hint of a gut. Rachel on the other hand was one of my team members, and one of my closest friends. She was fairly short and petite at a height of 4’11 and weighing a buck even soaking wet. She was one of those small but dangerous kinds of women. They make great friends but piss them off and they'll eat your soul. Of course, none of my friends or family from before the fall had made it through the apocalypse. Or at least that I knew of anyway. Maybe someday somewhere I’ll run into one. The question is, will we even recognize each other then? After the cell towers had gone offline, all communication with nearly everyone that I had ever known ended abruptly. Those few that I was able to communicate with met a horrible array of demises that frankly, I don’t care to revisit right now. Before that though, the local power grid had gone out and so it was only a matter of time for life to swirl down the proverbial toilet. Tonight, it was just myself and my partner doing a short scavenging mission. Scavenging was now a way of life, but it was not for the faint of heart. No matter what anyone says, no one ever truly gets used to seeing the worst that humankind is capable of. Scavengers also don’t get used to the sheer joy of finding a can opener in a world where pretty much everything left behind is canned. I slowly nodded and pointed to the remains of the store. "This was where I worked… before everything happened," I told her, looking over the large pile of debris. She came over and stood beside me with a slight grin growing on her lips. "All suit and tie, huh?" she asked. "Yeah. I spent over a decade working my way up the ladder, and for what? It’s dust now, and the world is chest deep in shit." I moved a charred 4x4 with my boot to emphasize my consternation. "It’s too bad. We could have survived for weeks on what was inside," she responded, also looking over the pile or ash. Several melted shelving units stuck out of the pile here or there, and a couple of the store’s carts were still left unattended in the parking lot. She patted my shoulder and began to walk back to the truck. As she almost arrived at the vehicle, she turned and spoke, "We’ve got work to do, Shep. Shall we?" She turned back around and jumped up into the passenger side of the truck. I sighed inwardly and walked to the flagpole and using the crank in the pole, I lowered the old frayed and withered flag until it was in my hands. I took it off the rope and slid it carefully into my backpack. I then spent a couple of minutes remembering an easier time as I walked from cart to cart, pushing them into the scattered cart corrals. I don’t know why I felt like I was compelled to do that. Maybe it was that I knew I’d never see the place again, and it was the least I could do. I then walked to the pickup truck and hopped up into the driver seat. The tires kicked up rubble as the Ford F150 XLT took off down the shopping center toward the police command center, just up the street.
Chapter 1
The blue pickup truck pulled into the parking lot of what was once the Eastern Albuquerque Police Command Center. Rachel and I jumped out quietly. By jumping, I mean more of a climbing down from the cab, as I had previously gotten a hold of some wicked looking 33-inch tires. The last thing that I wanted was one of the infected getting trapped in my truck’s undercarriage. Holding my AR15 at the ready and with her on my six o’clock, we slowly approached the hopefully abandoned building. No one from our home base had been in this area since everything went to hell in a handbasket. Speaking of which, what kind of analogy is that? I’ve seen some pretty crazy crap working at a grocery store, but never have I seen anything in a handbasket worthy of the title of ‘hell.’ As this is my story, I’d like to take a moment to let anyone reading this know that my mind occasionally gets sidetracked. Or my train of thought gets completely derailed. I have no idea why, it could even quite possibly be some kind of medical condition. Sometimes though, even I believe it’s entertaining and I think that I’m funny as hell. I had spent many an hour, making grocery puns at my store for my employees. Many times, it seemed like they wanted to throw themselves down the stairs by the end of their shifts. It was incredibly hard for me to see a bottle of Dawn dish detergent come down the belt without me turning to anyone in earshot and saying something like, "Today is the ‘DAWN of a new era,’" holding the bottle up as if it were the pride and joy of my day. Which it sometimes was to be completely honest. I just realized I went off track again, my bad.
Our group had heard of former police officers taking refuge in government buildings after the fall and we had no real way of knowing if this one was occupied or not. There were no lights that we could discern but light discipline these days was as natural as breathing. The building from the outside was in complete disarray, although it was still in much better condition than the other area commands. Rachel brought a set of bolt cutters to the gate that was still in place to protect the back of the building. She cut the links slowly until the gap was large enough to fit through. I covered her with my rifle as she moved through the gap and brought up her own weapon. She waited as I moved through and we hugged the building as we looked for the back door. Sure enough, the door was locked. I spotted a police van and a half dozen cruisers sitting in disarray in the back-parking lot. Rachel, with her many skills, pulled a lock pick set out of her vest pocket and begun to work the lock. I glanced at her as she was working and asked her quietly, "Did an ex-boyfriend teach you how to do that?" I whispered. She shook her head slowly and whispered back. "Nope. Ex-girlfriend." A grin grew on my face and I could tell she was grinning too. After roughly a minute, we heard a cli
ck as the lock disengaged. She held the door handle and slowly opened it, shining a flashlight into the dark corridor. She saw no movement and tapped my shoulder for me to follow her into the hallway. Closing the door behind me, I left it unlocked in case we needed to make a speedy exit. We slowly made our way down the hallway, checking each door as we went. The first of the two doors on the right were locked and marked ‘Evidence and Armory’ respectively. As tempting as that was, clearing the building was our first priority.
We came across several offices, and eventually arrived at the front desk. As this was an area command, it was much smaller than the main command center in downtown Albuquerque. In our case, we hoped this would work to our advantage. This was not a crime-ridden area by any means. In fact, they kept such a small staff here because calls in this part of town were few and far between. We found no one in the building and found nothing useful in the waiting area. The station was a mess, as if everyone left in a hurry. Most likely in the opening days of the apocalypse, this place had been absolute bedlam. We came across three Glock handguns in some of the office desks and pocketed them. We headed quietly back down the hallway towards the evidence room. Rachel picked the locks and she went in to clear it. A moment later, there was a whispered “clear.” I went into the room to see if there was anything to salvage. A few drugs, and not the antibiotics kind. There were a few more rifles, as well as personal items which lay on the shelving in the small room. Each had an evidence tag on them. We pocketed everything useful then moved to the Armory. This one room was the one reason for our trip out to this location. We gained entry and found a small cache of small arms. There were mostly pistols and a few more rifles. We did see some crowd control equipment left over, but they were of little use to us.
After loading up, we left the room, heading for the back door. I looked up just in time to see the door being flung open and a figure nearly falling through into the hallway. As it was, it landed nearly on top of me. With its teeth mashing at me, it took all my strength to hold it by the neck as it pressed down towards me. Slime oozed from its mouth and dripped onto my vest as I struggled against its incredible strength. "Close your eyes!" Rachel shouted at me. I did so and was rewarded with the feeling of cold liquid splattering my neck and face. After a moment, the weight I was holding was truly dead and I pushed it over beside me. I felt Rachel wipe my face down before I dared open my eyes or mouth. She stood next to me holding a bloody knife and offered me her other hand. I nodded to her and she helped me up. "Are you alright?" she asked. I nodded and looked at the figure on the floor. The abomination before me was one of the millions, if not billions of what some called zombies now roaming the world. No one knows for sure how this plague started. This virus, or whatever it was, infected nearly 90% of the local population. By our estimates, near 9% of the remaining survivors died from starvation, disease, or just died from the ensuing violence. We estimate only roughly 1% of the local population survived to leave the city or remain and hide. This particular zombie appeared to be a former police officer with a duty belt still on. The pistol was missing from the holster, unfortunately. I slowly shook off the near-death experience and we walked from the building, carrying full backpacks. We stopped to open the van and found only what looked to be surveillance equipment. The cruises offered a few first aid kits and other miscellaneous gear. We took everything and headed back to the truck. Once we were loaded up, we began our trip back to home base and were there in thirty minutes, just as the light began to color the skies with a dull orange hue and the ‘dawning’ of a new day. Get it? I crack myself up.
Chapter 2
Two sets of black wrought iron gates with a fence to match surrounded an old rugged apartment complex formally named Lucaya. As we waited to enter the parking lot, I thought back to what this place once was. The complex was formerly a cheap set of four-story apartment buildings off of Maple Ave. One of the buildings was about half a block long, running parallel to Lead Ave, with the other creating an L shape that ran along Coal Ave. We had taken every inch of dirt we could find and planted whatever seeds we could scavenge. A half-full pool sat dead center of the complex and was now used to store all our irrigation water. It wasn’t pretty or truly efficient, but it was the best that we could do. When the whole world is on its ass, it's hard to find the equipment or information to build exactly what we needed. We couldn’t google shit anymore. Apartments for every survivor were set up, all of which had been cleared room by room. We had a whopping grand total of 24 people that we’ve found or found us. Albuquerque had had over 550,000 people at one point. So, we obviously had enough room for hundreds more survivors, but after the outbreak, finding decent people became more and more difficult with each passing day. It seemed like the entire population of Albuquerque was either dead, undead or they left during the mass panic migrations. Two of the bottom floor apartments were used as food collection and storage rooms. We were able to rig up the office break room to make a small kitchen with several stoves and we all ate outside on folding tables. Power was a fairytale for us, as the noise of any large generator would attract more infected to our humble abode. All in all, it was not a bad setup or so I thought. Clearing each apartment had cost us two good people, but it had to be done, room by room and closet by closet. It had taken a full day of nonstop horror to retake the complex. When some people felt they had no way out, they got very imaginative about ways to end their lives. We had one hallway that all of the apartment windows had to be kept open at all times in an attempt to air it out. I couldn’t even describe the stench and until you’ve smelt rotting burnt human flesh up close, you wouldn’t even be able to imagine it properly. Serious props though for the paramedics and coroners who had to deal with it all the time before the fall. I sure as shit couldn’t do it over and over again. That building would be the last one we’d ever use. Some of the things I had to witness after kicking in those apartment doors still haunted me even today. The world is a cruel place, and nothing brings that to light more than an Apocalypse.
As we arrived at one of the gates, a not very cheerful guard opened it. It was originally an electric vehicle gate, but he had the unenviable task of opening it by pushing it back and forth along the rails. It must have been a total blast and for some reason he did not return my friendly wave. I backed into one of the vacant parking spaces, killing the engine. I then very gracefully jumped out, nearly catching my foot on the running boards. I swiveled my head back and forth quickly, making sure no one had seen me. Luckily it seemed that I was in the clear. Only one thing is scarier than the apocalypse and that is embarrassment. I heard Rachel unlatch the tailgate, so I quickly joined her. We pulled our day’s haul out of the back of the truck. We dragged our overfilled packs across the parking lot to the nearest building. An open window on the first floor had a very simple handwritten wooden sign above it. ‘Supplies.’ I knocked on the window frame and a head popped out. "Hey Shep. Whatcha got?" This guy was great. Joseph was a legit pack rat who had a spot for everything. From the useful to the 'are you serious?' he had a place for it all. He also just so happened to be the guy in charge of...you guessed it. The supplies. Safe to say, he truly loved his job. "Hey Joe," I said, nodding up to him. I lifted our packs and handed them over the lip of the window. We handed over our extra food and all the random items that we scavenged. After transferring everything over, we went back to the truck and got our personal packs out from the cab. The rules were that we could keep anything that we found. However, all of us knew the importance of sharing with our fellow survivors, so we only really kept what we really needed. Everything else was put into the supply room and issued to whoever needed whatever it was. It was because of this system that every adult had a weapon, and no one was starving. We then headed through a walk-in gate and stood before a large grey steel door. An intercom was placed in the wall to our left but was completely useless now without working power or phone lines. We knocked out our passcode and heard the locks being lifted.
As we entered we i
mmediately took a set of iron stairs up to the fourth floor. We walked quietly, trying not to wake the neighbors. I gently pulled my keys from my pocket and opened the door to 412. Rachel opened 411. I nodded to her and she smiled back at me as we both entered our respective apartments. Exhausted, I tossed down my pack onto the bed and sat to take off my boots. The apartment units at this complex were fairly small, with some of them being efficiencies. For those of you that have never had the misfortune of living in one, the entire apartment is one room minus the bathroom of course. Luckily the bathroom had a door, the only door in the whole place besides the front door. My humble abode was decorated sparsely with some video game posters hanging at random intervals, a propane lantern in one corner with a few candles in the bathroom and kitchen. I use the term kitchen loosely as there was a tiny stove, a sink, and enough counter space to place two plates side by side. I had refused to take a larger apartment in the off chance that we came across families that needed them. I lightly kicked my boots away and just as my back hit the mattress, there was a knock on the door. I sighed heavily and stood back up to open the door, grumbling as I did so. As I opened it I saw my friend, Kenneth standing with a huge shit eating grin on his face. Ken was a hell of a guy. He was a good six feet tall, with a football player build. Longer brown hair, with a nice beard growing. The kind that screamed ‘I’m a man!’. The dude almost always had a smile planted on his face. I had met him while he was running and gunning down Lomas Ave, with a mob of zombies on his tail. I had just finished looting a storefront, when I saw him heading straight for me. I called for him to jump into my truck and we tore off out of there. He had smiled and simply said "Sup." I took an instant liking to him. Survivors were hard to come by, and friends were almost impossible to find these days. Shortly after a few of our earlier adventures we became best of friends, which led to us becoming notorious for our shenanigans. Have you ever de-pants and spray painted a bullseye on a zombie's ass while it’s trapped in a fence? No? Well, it's a hoot. Some of my fondest memories are of sharing a beer while we nail that grey buttocks with whatever we had handy. To some, I'm sure this sounds cruel. Inhumane? Considering that they're undead and their sole goal in life is to kill and eat humans, it doesn't bother me one bit.
