Undead War (Dead Guns Press)

by Thompson, John

  He returned to the corpse. He chose not to take any chances and found a large bundle of plastic sheets in a janitor’s closet in one of the adjoining rooms and tipped the chair containing the corpse over onto it. He then dragged the plastic outside near the wall. He hated the idea of it but there was nothing else he could do for the old guard. The entire compound grounds were paved in asphalt so that left out a decent burial. That left only one option. He climbed on top of one armored truck parked near the wall, dragging the corpse with him, then rolled it over the top of the wall to where it fell with a heavy thump on the other side. He promised, when the epidemic was over, he would see to it the old man’s body would be buried properly. He then said a prayer that the man’s soul would rest easy now that he had passed away from the horrors of the new world and that God would take him in regardless of the man’s beliefs. Afterwards, he looked around the outside of the vault building and decided to investigate the mechanics shop in the corner of the lot.

  In the adjoining outbuilding he found that it was an old garage that had one armored car parked inside with the hood open. A mechanics toolbox sat nearby with several drawers sitting open indicating that the former owner must have left in a hurry. In the old days before the epidemic, he had gone to school to learn the trade of being a diesel mechanic. He had worked at a couple of truck stop shops and applied that trade on the various types of highway tractor and trailers that hauled freight from one end of the country to the other. He hated the work for the most part but it had put food on the table. He would be able to get the armored trucks running and make some material gathering excursions beyond the realm of the industrial area.

  Next to the shop was a single stand-alone fuel dispensing station. He found the gauge that read the amount of fuel in the in ground tank and it read nearly full. This was not unusual in that in the final days of humanity, most businesses purchased large quantities of fuel to keep their operations running. In the end though, the zombies won the main part of the war and everyone abandoned everything and left the stores of fuel. In the far corner of the room he saw a large industrial Cummins generator motor perched in a steel cradle bolted to the concrete floor. He quickly examined the generator set; saw the fuel tank was at three quarters full and his jaw dropped open.

  A generator!

  For months he had suffered from an inability to take a hot shower, eat cooked food or just to have the security of having a light on in the middle of the night. If it started then he could at least have some light and cook for a change. He found the control panel, flipped the switch over to ‘on’ and engaged the starter button. The generator turned over, slow at first because of the low state of charge in the battery then quickly fired over after several revolutions. His eyes widened in disbelief as the garage lights flickered to life. It was the first time in a long time he had felt this jubilant about anything.

  He spent the following hours, in the fully lit, air-conditioned office vault building searching out the rooms. With the generator running, he was able to flip a light switch on in each room and search more cautiously with his Sterling SMG. On the second floor, where the main office area was located, he found some food in the adjoining kitchenette. He found a case of potato chips and a vending machine that had a few packages of burritos and a coke machine but there was not enough to sustain for a prolonged siege. There was also a restroom with a small shower stall and the bonus to this was that the compound had its own water well system. For the first time in a long time he was looking forward to taking a hot shower. It was an oasis within a dead city.

  In another room he found it stockpiled with uniforms, bulletproof vests and a vault that had been left ajar. Inspecting that further he found that it held a stockpile of automatic pistols and shotguns, several hundred boxes of 9mm and shotgun ammunition. He whistled through his teeth and realized life was going to get better even if there was a large pack of zombies wandering around outside the walled compound. He retrieved his backpack and fumbled through it for the cigarettes he had found earlier and opened it. Placing one of the cigarettes between his smiling lips, he lit up and inhaled deep of the smoke then thought on what needed to be done. He was going to have to venture out and get food, water and some entertainment. Having nothing to do or eat would, after some time, wear thin and he would retreat further into himself. For the night though, he would feast on the packaged burritos, sodas and potato chips. He took up his backpack and went straight for the shower room, stripped and for the first time in eighteen months, felt the luxury of a hot shower.

  The next morning saw a blazing bright sun rise over the Sandia Mountains in the East. Jackson stepped outside, stretched and yawned before placing a cigarette between his lips. He lit up then sucked deep of the acrid smoke and contemplated the day ahead. After he refilled the generator’s fuel tanks, he would take an armored truck and venture to outside the industrial area. If he was fortunate, he would find food, bottled water and things that would help pass the time until the zombie epidemic passed. He saw the armored trucks parked inside the bay loading area and the idea came to him. He slid behind the steering wheel and found the keys dangling from the ignition. The truck started up after a few slow cranks then he backed out of the loading garage after opening the door. He then spent a few moments driving around outside to get the feel of how the armored truck would handle before opening the main gate. It had been sometime since he had driven anything and was amazed at how his driving skills had deteriorated. Mounted on the dash were a couple of switches for opening the compound gates to the outside world and also to open and close the garage doors to the main building.

  He opened the main gate then pulled the armored truck out onto the street then checked to make sure the gates automatically closed behind him. A small crowd of zombies appeared at the end of the street aroused to life at the sound of the International diesel motor. He mashed the accelerator pedal to the floor. The diesel engine roared and the heavy armored truck lurched forward. The group also charged forward but the armored truck’s heavy steel brush guard caught several of the undead while others in the group fell and were ground under the wheels. The windshield exploded in a blinding mist of dark blood and chunks of brain and flesh. He remedied the problem by turning on the windshield washers and wipers.

  Life had finally dealt him a fair hand and he intended to keep it that way.

  He rarely had to venture out from the compound. It had taken several weeks to gather up materials due to most of the supermarkets and other stores having already been looted or burned. Although his quest had taken him from one end of town to the other and he loaded the armored truck up as much as he could with each excursion. He had everything he would ever need. When he did venture out it was for some trivial matter or chasing some thought of a thing that had entered his mind. During these moments he would venture out with an armored truck and go searching for survivors or other things that might have use for him to survive. He had used the armored trucks as a portable siege weapon and had run over countless zombies throughout the city. The armored trucks had numerous gun ports so it was easy enough to poke a gun out and blast a zombie or two.

  On one excursion into the City of Rio Rancho, adjacent to Albuquerque, he was driving through a side road and spotted something that looked unnatural to the new world of the dead. He jammed on the brakes, threw the armored truck into reverse and slammed on the brakes again to look down one of the neighborhood streets. There were two men walking down the street towards him but had rifles slung on their shoulders. They saw the armored truck backing up and ran for cover. Jackson could not believe that he was seeing two living human beings. He jumped out and ran around the front of the truck. “Hey!”

  The two men could be seen moving away from him across a lawn with trash blowing across it. He called again but the two men kept running.

  He held his hands up. “Hey! You ever seen a zombie driving an armored truck?”

  One of the men looked back then hid behind a tree. “Go on!”


  He shook his head. “What? We’re on the same team! We‘re the living! We be soul brothers!”

  “Fuck if we are. Now get to going before the dead come on back around here. Your yelling like a bitch will bring ’em all here fuck head!”

  He still could not believe that these two men wanted nothing to do with him. He took a step forward and the men took off running further down the street. He thought about chasing them down with the truck but the street was too cluttered with downed trees and cars. What would be the point anyway? “It’s because I’m black right? What the fuck are you? White? Who the fuck cares about skin color? We survivors!”

  The sound of guns being cocked sang out from the shrubs.

  Anger seized him and he yelled out. “You got to be kidding me! You dumb motherfuckers! Go on and get eaten then bitches!” He stormed back to the armored truck, slid behind the wheel and drove off. He had hoped for a better ending. He had wanted to find someone to talk with but the ways of the old world seemed to die-hard.

  The following week he had drove to some upscale neighborhood in Albuquerque, scouting and looking for any possible survivors when he saw an American flag blowing in the breeze in front of one house. There was nothing uncommon with that. In the final days of humanity, everyone flew the American flag but here he felt something was here he might be able to use.

  The street was a tangled mess of barricades, dried, crusty bodies and burned houses. He surmised that the neighborhood had banded together for a last stand against a horde of zombies and had failed. He hopped over the barricades, carefully holding his Sterling at the ready in case there were zombies still in the area. He came closer to the house and stopped at the end of the driveway and saw an old German World War Two era MG-42 that had been set up in a garage on a tripod pointing downward. He knew exactly what it was as he had always watched cable in the evenings and preferred the History or Military channels. There were countless documentaries dealing with the Germans using this gun to great effect against allied forces during World War Two.

  A few dozen dead zombies had found out this fact first hand and were laying outside in the driveway and front lawn. Spent shell casings by the hundreds surrounded the old machine gun and told a story of the frantic outcome of the battle.

  Old dried blood was smeared on the concrete garage floors leading away from the residence and he knew that the guns former owner had been overwhelmed. He looked around further and also found an old World War Two German Mauser sniper bolt action rifle that had also seen its share of the battle. This he could use to some advantage. The zombies that occasionally swarmed the outside walls of his compound were becoming a nuisance and this rifle could very well be utilized to cut the number of zombies down. Looking cautiously deeper inside the home, he found the family or at least what was left of them. Again, like so many other times before, there would be no survivors. He picked up the MG-42 and also the few thousand rounds of 8mm Mauser ammunition still packed in ammo cans and loaded them up in the armored truck and left the area.

  In his spare time, Max worked on the tandem axel armored truck to keep busy and keep his mind off of his current situation. He had drug the armored truck into the garage area and contemplated what he was going to do with it. In the event he had to bug out, the armored truck would serve well to get him out of the city and sustain him over the long haul also. Within the truck was an arsenal locker with several AR15 rifles, several Smith and Wesson 9mm handguns and several hundred rounds of ammunition. He drew up plans for some added protection and defenses and set about to working on the unit.

  He spent a month crafting an opening hatch to the top side and then made an open air gun turret that fit around the opening and would turn in a full circle easily. On one of his excursions into the far North East Heights he found several abandoned military vehicles with their .50 calibers M2’s still mounted in place. He took one and added this to the topside but not after adding extra support braces to the rooftop to accommodate the punishing recoil the M2 was capable of. With the M2 in place, it would add a substantial amount of firepower. The .50 caliber round could easily blow through any zombie horde, kicking ass Rambo style.

  The zombies had a habit, one in which he had seen firsthand at the beginning of the outbreak. In a large horde-swarming situation, they would charge forth in a giant wave and over take their prey. If the prey was high up, say a second floor landing, the zombies in the front were trampled and the zombies in the rear clambered up over their bodies and so on until a large pile had built a ramp for the remaining zombie horde to rush forward. To help with this, he crafted a two foot steel mesh wire fence that encircled the large top to prevent zombies from climbing up to the top. The tires were a weak point but after rummaging around in the back of the garage, he found a full set of new run-flats, which meant that even though the tire was losing air the truck, could still keep rolling.

  On the front of the unit he had managed to custom build a large grill guard and bumper assembly that stuck out a full two foot and had a self-enclosed winch system. It easily weighed every bit of eight hundred pounds and took a couple of weeks to modify it to fit and wire in the electrical winch and lighting system.

  At the end of it all, the armored truck was going to be one tough bitch. It no longer carried currency from one bank to another but now instead would carry something more precious. His life or perhaps others, should he manage to locate any. The final touch was adding a name for the armored unit. He airbrushed on the words “The Beast” on the side of the hood.

  He had gone to some of the bookstores and libraries around Albuquerque and pilfered enough reading and video material to keep him busy. He carefully steered away from the porn stores. Not only were these too close to the downtown area, some areas were just too heavily packed with zombies. Also there was no point in watching those films anyway and having to deal with a raging hard-on and no female to help in matters. He had, before the viral outbreak, been into watching action films that were top heavy in guns and testosterone; but now he had had a belly full of that stuff since having to live daily with more guns, guts and zombie action than he cared to admit. The musicals though had caught his attention. Titles like Joseph and the Techni-colored Dream Coat, Miss Saigon or the Sound of Music took him far and away from his current troubles.

  There were other times though he would target practice from the rooftop of the vault building and considered it much needed exercise in survival. If he let down his gun skills completely, there would come a day that he would come to regret that so he made the effort to practice on the zombies that milled around outside the walled complex.

  “Aw…” He took another pull from the bottle of Crown Royal before settling back behind the scope of the sniper rifle. “…there you are.” He settled the cross hairs on his zombie victim, one that he had been searching for some time. He had found several cases of Crown Royal and some wine and had decided it had been awhile since he had tied one on. He also decided to practice a little with the Mauser sniper rifle even if he was a little drunk. A large CD stereo player he had bought up to the rooftop with him, played a disco beat from the speakers and he settled into his groove.

  The Hensoldt scope mounted on the Mauser bought her head into sharp focus and he studied her. Her face was thin, gaunt and he pictured what she must’ve looked like before the world turned to shit. The crosshairs moved up and down in rhythm with his breathing. She had been the zombie stripper that had chased him here and it looked like one of her breast implants had fallen out finally. Perhaps he should be grateful and spare the bullet but then again how many people or animals had she killed and ate?

  He took up the trigger slack and exhaled. Then again perhaps not. There could not be any possible way the bitch would spare him if the tables were reversed. No zombie would for that matter. He would be doing her a favor. The rifle bucked and the gunshot echoed within the compound. The bullet hit the stripper in the forehead, sending a geyser of dark clotted blood, brains and gristle out the back of he
r head. Her lifeless eyes blinked once, the milky orbs darkening as they filed with blood before she collapsed into a twitching heap. Laughing, he stood up. “Got you bitch!”

  The speakers began thumping “Born to be Alive” and he felt the sudden urge to just kill a few more zombies. Life was good and the alcoholic fumes clouded his mind. He picked up the MG-42 and feed a belt of a couple hundred rounds into the chambers, stood up on the ledge and aiming from the hip, let off a long burst. The MG-42 bucked and shook, the reports echoed throughout the compound and the surrounding buildings and spent brass spilled over the ledge. He felt like Rambo kicking ass and fucking bitches. The zombies milled around even though the bullets were ripping and slamming into them. Shot after shot flew into the small horde outside the wall and an occasional burst of red mist exploded through the air indicating headshots. When the belt ran empty, he laughed, held the MG up with one arm above his head. He had eradicated quite a few within a matter of seconds. Yes indeed he was born to be alive.

  ***

  The morning came as it always did. Jackson rolled over and drew the blanket closer to his face. He moaned and rolled over again and stared at the clock on the wall. Noon. He had slept in until noon. With a throbbing head, he swung his legs over the cot’s edge and sank his face into his hands. He craved a smoke and leaned over and grabbed the pack from the crate of toilet paper he used as bedside table and lit one up. So far he had stayed king of the compound for several months now and felt some twinge of anxiety in not having seen or heard from another human being.

  When the virus had taken hold of the world, he had been one of those who chose to stay behind and take his chances in the hopes that the government would come through with some cure at the last minute. Military and police officials urged the population to leave the city under escort to the northern city of Santa Fe then on towards Colorado Springs where an even large military presence had a hold. He had joined a small band of other men and women but slowly over the past year and a half they had fell off to venture out on their own or had died as a result of the zombie virus or to be food for them. He eventually found himself alone finally and had not seen another human being in the last eight months so far.