Dying Days: Death Sentence

by Brent Abell

  “No,” Harry whispered. “They were children.”

  “No, not anymore. No more birthdays, ball games, or school. They’re dead and, when we do this, we release their souls. Would you want to live like that?” George asked.

  Harry stood in silence for a moment. “No, I’d want you to send me off. I don’t want to be like them.”

  “I guess we have a deal, I don’t want to go on like that either,” George replied. He thought back to his Sally in the basement with a bullet hole in her head and he fought back the tears. They never had a proper agreement like he had just made with Harry, but he knew she would’ve wanted him to end her suffering.

  “Let’s see if they have bikes,” Harry flatly said and entered the garage.

  George followed Harry in and scanned the walls. He smiled when he saw four mountain bikes hanging from the ceiling.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Harry got out of his mouth before he rushed out of the garage.

  George turned and saw Harry double over and vomit between the zombie corpses. “Are you…,” he began to ask when Harry waved him away.

  George noticed the car door to the Audi was slightly ajar and the stench wafting from it was foul. He made the same mistake Harry made and peered inside. He felt the bile rise in his throat, but he managed to push it back down.

  The daughter was still buckled in her seat. If it wasn’t for the floral dress and pig-tails in her scalp, he wouldn’t have known it was a girl. Her face had been ripped away and her skull caved in. Nothing remained inside her head and, from the blood covering her dress, it appeared it had all spilled down her front. Her arms and legs were covered in bite marks and he could tell chunks of her flesh had been torn away.

  “They fed on her,” George said and turned away in disgust.

  Quickly, he unhooked two of the mountain bikes from the ceiling beams and rolled them out to the driveway, one by one. Harry sat down with his back to the garage and didn’t say anything. George didn’t blame him; he wanted to do the same.

  “Let’s get out of here,” George said.

  Harry looked up and his eyes were wet. “They ate her.”

  “I don’t think they knew if they turned first. At least she didn’t have to suffer as one of them,” George tried to comfort Harry.

  “I don’t know if this world is for me.”

  “Harry, you haven’t survived this long to quit now.”

  “George, I didn’t know it had come to this,” Harry sobbed. “Even when I ventured out of the house, I never saw anything like it.”

  “What would make you feel better?” George inquired.

  Harry thought for a minute. “When we go through Orlando, I want to see if we can scavenge anything from Milton Mouse World.”

  “Deal, now let’s get on the road,” George said and mounted his bike.

  Harry silently followed suit. George saw a smile on his face for a fleeting moment, but the frown and vacant look soon returned. He felt sorry for the kid, but they had to survive. They had to reach St. Augustine.

  3

  The interstate was littered with the burned out husks of vehicles and the skeletal remains of countless people. Riding the bikes on the shoulder of the highway was bumpy and made George’s ass hurt, but it beat trying to maneuver around the cars and bodies in the road. He’d tried to strike up a conversation with Harry the whole morning, but he hadn’t responded and rode in silence. He really liked the kid, but he needed to cheer up. George felt Harry needed the trip to Milton Mouse World. Even if they didn’t find anything useful, maybe the remains of the amusement park would get him out of the dumps.

  George wondered which one affected Harry more, killing the boys or seeing the girl in the car. Killing anyone didn’t sit well with him, but he knew it was the reality they lived in now. If you couldn’t protect yourself, you would die. It was that plain and simple.

  “Harry?” George asked and pulled up beside him.

  Harry pressed on the hand-brakes and slowed to a stop. “What?”

  George stopped next to him and rolled his sore shoulder around. “Want to stop and grab some lunch? I need to stop; my shoulder and knee are killing me.”

  Harry stepped off his bike and laid it down on the ground. He sat on the guard rail and sighed loudly. “I’m sorry. It’s just… it’s just seeing that girl. I haven’t seen where they’d done something like that.”

  “You haven’t seen something they’d eaten on?”

  “No.”

  George agreed with how Harry viewed it. Seeing the remains of their savagery was jarring. Pondering it, he wondered if it was something hiding deep within all human DNA anyway. Before the dead rose, humanity was on a downward spiral anyway. He didn’t think he could ever forget the story from Miami when a man was eating another guy’s face of on the highway. Riots, shootings, and the hate everyone exhibited to each other were disheartening. George didn’t think the zombies were that much of a step back.

  “Well, let’s eat and get back on the move. We need to get to an exit or something where we can stay overnight,” George said.

  Harry opened his bag and pulled out a package of peanut butter crackers. George watched him and finally opened a granola bar and ate the scant meal. He wanted to conserve his food in case they couldn’t find supplies easily. So far he hadn’t seen anything that made him believe they’d find anything. To George, it looked more and more like their best shot was the camps in St. Augustine.

  They sat and ate in silence. George finished his granola bar and watched Harry slowly chew through his. George wadded up his wrapper and put it in the front pocket of his pack. Harry tossed his on the side of the road and went about putting the pack back on.

  George opened his mouth to say something about the littering, but thought better about it. The kid had been through a lot and he didn’t want to start a fight or anything.

  “Ready, George?” Harry finally broke his silence.

  George grinned and pointed up the interstate. “Ride on and straight on till morning.”

  “I’m not sure I want to go till morning, I’m not Peter Pan,” Harry retorted.

  George let out a deep belly-laugh. “Let’s just peddle till nightfall then.”

  Harry nodded and began to peddle off on the shoulder. George watched Harry’s bike jackhammer across the rumble strips and his own teeth kept slamming together as he followed behind him. Looking over at I-4 to see if the cars had cleared out any, George decided to risk it. He turned the front wheel to the right and merged onto the interstate between the graveyard of cars and trucks.

  ***

  The afternoon Florida sun beat down on them, baking their skin in the heat and humidity. George felt his skin grow warm where he knew he was getting sunburned. He did like I-4 clearing up. The cars were spaced far enough apart he tried to ride on the pavement instead. They had enough room to maneuver around the wreckage and skeletal bodies strewn and scattered across both sides of the interstate. Some of the bodies showed signs of being eaten and George couldn’t tell if it was the zombies or the gators that had gotten them. Surveying the landscape, he pictured how it had probably gone down.

  In his mind’s eye, he could envision the first cars slamming into a suddenly stopping car on the interstate. The others behind them were tightly packed from the evacuation orders and didn’t have enough time to react. George wondered which side of the road they swarmed the stalled cars from. The people sitting in their vehicles were easy pickings for the zombies. He could see most of them being bitten or eaten before most of the people trapped in the jam could even assess what was happening.

  And here they were.

  They were two men on bikes making their way to an amusement park during the zombie apocalypse.

  And George didn’t see anything odd or fucked up with that at all.

  “Can we take a break? This sun is so damn hot,” Harry said.

  George was relieved he had spoken again; he was getting tired of thinking about what had happened on the inte
rstate. The gory images in his head were sickening and he couldn’t scrub them from his mind if he didn’t have anyone to talk to. In the house, after he came from a quick search around the block, Sally was always the rock tethering him to reality. His knee began to ache and he dropped back a few feet behind Harry.

  Harry navigated the bodies and cars with little effort. George, meanwhile, wasn’t having much fun. Each time he pedaled, pain shot up through his knee and into his side. He pedaled a few times and then tried to coast through the wreckage. He lamented the fact the interstate was flat with no place to coast for a while. George saw Harry glance back over his shoulder and then he went down.

  George pedaled faster as Harry’s bike flipped. The bike rolled over Harry’s body as he flew over the handle bars and landed on the road. George stopped and dismounted his bike once he saw what had happened. Writhing on the pavement were body parts. Some of the people were nothing but torsos and heads, but those upper bodies had enough left of them to have been zombies. Their arms reached for Harry and George forged ahead burying the knee pain deep within.

  “George!” Harry shouted and tried to stand. One of the torsos had Harry’s shoe and pulled its self within reach. Harry could hear the loose gravel on the road peel the rotted flesh away from the zombie and he kicked at it. It snapped its broken teeth and snarled with its twisted mouth.

  George squared up his foot and kicked the zombie’s head like a soccer ball. The skull exploded and showered Harry in rancid blood. It covered his shirt and he picked bits of brain and shards of its skull from his shirt.

  “That is fucking gross,” Harry muttered.

  “Sorry,” George apologized.

  The groans from the other legless zombies grew louder and they heard more of them try to pull themselves along the pavement. The lead rose up and George felt disgusted by it. The skin on its chest looked like someone had taken a cheese grater to it.

  “Kill them,” Harry asked.

  George looked at them and how close they were to the swamps along the interstate. “Let the gators get them. They need to eat too.”

  “What about your bike?”

  “Shit, what about yours?” George asked back.

  Harry looked down at the bent rim and he noticed the hand brake line hung limply to the side. “Well, I can’t ride on that rim and, even if I did, the brake line is fucked.”

  “Let’s get moving, the rest stop is close and we can hole up there for the night.”

  “Okay,” Harry said.

  “You talking again?”

  Harry got to his feet and brushed himself off. Grabbing his pack, he flipped off the torso zombies and turned his back to them. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  The sun slipped below the horizon as George and Harry trudged up the exit to the rest area. The hike had been brutal. George’s age reared its ugly head and he ached all-over. Harry felt the bruises from his bike wreck. His elbows were raw and the scabs irritated him. Luckily, his knees had escaped being scraped along the pavement during the wreck. Harry hoped the half-zombies would be food for a gator.

  A few cars were in the parking lot and the tall grass obscured the walkway to the building. The playground equipment had collapsed from the conditions and from a lack of upkeep. A breeze blew the still humid air around. It provided a few seconds of relief, but once it died down they began to sweat profusely again.

  “I hope to hell the Coke machines still have a can or two in them,” George said and sat down on a bench along the walkway. He wanted to go to the picnic table, but the grass was too tall and he didn’t trust tall grass.

  “The grass makes all this real,” Harry said and sat down next to George. He set down his pack, and leaned back.

  “Why’s that?”

  “The grass. I used to watch this zombie apocalypse show before it became reality. Now get this, even months after the fall of society…the grass was still mowed.”

  “Seriously?” George laughed.

  George leaned back too and gazed off into the stars. The night was clear and, without all the light pollution, he could see millions of stars scattered in space. He felt small inside. People were few and far between and the few he’d encountered really weren’t people in his book.

  “What are you thinking about, George?”

  “How small we are in the scheme of things. Look up at the stars; there are so many possibilities out there and here we are trying to survive the cards we’ve been dealt.”

  “That’s pretty deep.”

  “I’ll be out there,” George said and pointed up to space, “soon.”

  Harry glanced over at George and saw the serious expression on his face. “Soon?”

  George sniffed and wiped his eyes. “I could never tell her.”

  “Sally?”

  “The day the world went to shit, I got the results of my biopsy back.”

  “I guess it wasn’t good news?” Harry asked.

  “It wasn’t a good day all around.”

  “Tell me and then, maybe tomorrow night, I’ll give you the rundown on my first few days.”

  “Okay, here we go.”

  And George began.

  ***

  George slowly closed the mailbox and sighed heavily. In amongst the bills and ads usually haunting his mailbox on Tuesdays hid the letter from the doctor’s office. Knowing the envelope contained the lab reports he’d been dreading, and he didn’t want to open it. The oncologist was a friend of his and agreed he didn’t need to see George for an appointment. They decided a letter would do the same trick as a face-to-face. If the news were bad, they didn’t want the uncomfortable silence between them in the office. George figured if it were bad, he could process it and then they could have a beer to discuss it as friends instead.

  The sun’s rays bathed him in its light and he soaked up the warmth to fight off the chill he felt inside. A few houses up the street, he heard kids playing and yelling. Some kids rode bikes and others tossed a baseball around in the street in front of the Cullen’s driveway, enjoying their time off from school. One girl stood oddly in the street and watched the others play. A horn blew loudly and all of them scattered when the Toyota came barreling down the block. Tires squealed and kids screamed after George heard the loud thump. Looking in the direction of the commotion, he watched the car speed off without checking on the crumpled heap in the pink sundress lying in the street. The mailman hurried over and knelt down next to the girl.

  George saw the little girl from down the street, her poor little body broken on the asphalt in her pink dress, tear into the mailman’s arm. Kevin Keyes had been his mailman for twelve years and watching the girl rip large chunks of flesh off with her teeth unsettled him. Kevin shrieked and it carried around the block. George heard about the guy eating off another person’s face in Miami, but he didn’t think a five year old girl was on the bath salts like that guy was. Kevin toppled from his knees and three more children rushed down the street. Once they were close enough, George watched them sniff the air and swarm the fallen mailman. One by one, they began to eat away at his exposed skin. One buried its face in his neck and tore away a piece of him. Blood sprayed like a geyser from the wound and the children lapped it up as it covered their faces and matted their hair.

  Around the block, George began to hear other people scream. Sirens wailed in the distance and, as quickly as they began, they faded into silence. Loud explosions shook the once quiet neighborhood he lived in and he ducked underneath the large picture window.

  “All I wanted to do was get the damn mail,” he muttered.

  Outside, Kevin had fallen silent and he figured his mailman had delivered his last piece and parcel. Dogs barked and more people yelled in the streets. Cars sped by and more explosions rocked the Tampa area. Once upon a time, he’d moved here with his wife Sally after retiring from thirty years as an investment banker. He’d made enough shrewd and profitable moves to allow him an early out from the work force. The two hated the cold Minnesota winter
s and wanted to be someplace where they could be outdoors and take off to the beach when they wanted. The house cost him a large part of the nest egg he’d put back, but it was worth every penny to watch the gleam in Sally’s eyes the first time she saw the Gulf of Mexico from their balcony.

  Now, he hoped she’d have the chance to see it again. He dug in his pocket for his cell phone and, when he freed it from his plaid cargo shorts, he dialed her number. All he heard in return was silence.

  The towers are already down? He thought and hung up.

  George began to really worry. Sally left an hour ago to go meet some friends of hers for lunch and he didn’t know where they were going. In the other room, he heard the long loud droning sound of the Emergency Broadcast System. The alarm stopped and he crawled to the living room to listen to the message.

  “This is a message from the Emergency Broadcast System. The governor’s office has declared a state of emergency for the state of Florida effective at 11:04 Eastern Standard Time. There are unsubstantiated reports of the dead returning to life and attacking the living. The President of the United States has taken to the air and is being moved to an undisclosed location as the situation on the ground unfolds. Information is sketchy and the government hasn’t disclosed if this is a biological attack or possibly a viral outbreak. The CDC and DHS are investigating the claims and are cautioning everyone to remain indoors and to avoid contact with anyone…”

  The television blinked out and fell silent. The screen flickered and filled with snow. It hissed and he grabbed the remote to turn it off. George was surprised how quickly society seemed to be coming apart at the seams. An hour ago, he had kissed his beautiful wife goodbye and now he found himself crawling to his office on a mission to get his Beretta and whatever clips and ammo he had. George scrambled on his hands and knees past the kitchen and heard a dog bark in the back yard. He thought about his golden retriever he had buried under the palm tree next to the fence. He’d seen the movies and the thought of Millie digging herself out of her dirt resting place unsettled him. A loud yelp broke his thoughts and he knew something had come into the yard. With renewed vigor, George moved faster to his office.