Dead At Last

by Boyd Craven III

  In Dedication to Ashley. I know you’ll never get a chance to see this finished, but you are one of the greatest kids I’ve had the pleasure to know and help raise. Between Ash and my biological son, they both encouraged me to keep writing even when it felt I was stuck. Thank you for believing in me.

  I want to thank family and friends who helped me with the proof reading and pointing out the punctuation and other ways I’ve murdered the English language.

  Although many places in this book are described, I’ve taken liberties here and there. Many of you from the area will see them right off. For that I am sorry, writer’s privilege. All characters in this story are fictional, so any similarities to any real people in this book are purely circumstantial.

  This will be my first attempt at published fiction. All comments and feedback via Amazon is welcome.

  I Hope you have as much fun reading this, as I did writing it. Written for my kids and family; with love.

  Copyright © 2013, Boyd Craven III. All Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced in any way without the prior written consent of the author. You may not circulate this publication in any format.

  Dead At Last – Flint MI

  Prologue –

  Ok, growing up in Flint Michigan probably sucked in the 90’s and the 2000s but it really sucks now. No, seriously, it does.

  Late in 2004 something went wrong. Way wrong. Somebody probably dropped a beaker in a secret government lab, or maybe there have always been zombies and vampires. Who knows? Since 2004 things got really…. Weird. The TV and radio worked for a couple of weeks reporting first the disappearance of thousands and thousands of people, then the appearance of zombies walking openly during the daylight, it was much later when we figured the vampires were working behind the scenes.

  The lights went out in September 2004 for the last time, and nothing really worked well after that. I was 8 at the time, and if it wasn’t for my dad’s friend Brice, I’d either be dead or one of the undead like my parents. I always liked him, and my dad and Brice would watch football and the ultimate fighter with me every weekend. Someday I wanted to try out for the boxing team.

  When the sky fell though, my parents didn’t come home one night, and I was still at Brice’s while they had a date so I sort of never left. Well in a way I did, because the both of us moved.

  Chapter 1 – Happy Birthday

  “Hey kiddo, happy birthday. Here’s your present.”

  “Thanks! What is it?”

  “C’mon Tres, you know you’re going to have to open it first.”

  “I know I know. Just excited, because I think I know what it is.”

  “Ok kiddo, take a wild guess.”

  “It’s a crossbow, just like yours?”

  “Well……”

  I could hardly contain myself and tore open the packaging to find that there was indeed a crossbow. Tied together and tied off to the stock of the crossbow were 6 bolts. Sharpened stakes that the resistance uses if the vampires attack. It has been getting worse lately. The attacks are happening more and more, and for the most part, no one has any idea how they are figuring out where we are.

  Each person’s home is secret, and in our case, only a couple of other families even knew where we lived... And if somebody were to find us by chance, they would have to know how to disarm the traps to get to our front door almost 30 feet below the surface of the pavement that the cars used to run on regularly. Our place is an old bomb shelter in a sealed off sub basement under the Whiting Auditorium.

  Even in good times, that was a rough area of the city after dark. Now a days you wouldn’t be caught dead on the streets after dark. Wait, you’d be.. never mind, I didn’t mean to make a bad joke. The vampires seem to love the tall buildings that line Saginaw street blacking out the windows so they can sleep in it during the daytime. The zombies on the other hand...

  If you’ve seen one zombie, you’ve seen them all. Sort of. They are dead people that are somehow still alive. Just like with vampires, the bite of a zombie will turn a norm (regular humans) into another zombie. If you are killed before you are bitten, then you stay dead. So far that’s all we know about them besides the Hollywood stuff that isn’t true. You don’t have to shoot a zombie in the head to kill it, you just have to do enough damage that the body can’t move on from there. Vampires… Crosses, running water, being invited in first? That’s all crap. The only thing that Hollywood got right was a stake in the heart, and sunlight.

  “Hey kiddo, one, more ok?”

  “Wha…… Really? What is it?”

  “ha-ha, just open it.”

  Tres was looking over the long narrow box wrapped in old newspapers and tied off with twine. Getting excited he tore it open. Inside was a Mossberg shotgun, and in the bottom of the box he had to wiggle it out, was two boxes of shells. One box was slugs, and the other was Fletchette shells. Not knowing what the second was, I sort of put them to the back of my mind.

  “Thanks Brice!” Tres said. Brice took the shotgun for a moment and snapped on a shoulder harness and then opened the box of slugs and put one in the chamber and 4 in the tube.

  “You remember how to use mine right?”

  “Yes…….” Slightly irritated by the sound of it “The safety is by the thumb, shoot, pump the slide, aim and shoot. When you are done you put the safety back on.”

  “Ok, you remembered the basics. Now that second box of shells, don’t use those unless I tell you. That’s like lighting a stick of dynamite. It can cause more harm than they are worth if you don’t use them right.”

  “Ok.”

  And that’s how my 13th birthday went. We cooked a small dinner over a Coleman stove we scavenged soon after the lights went out for good. For dessert we had ding dongs. One of the rarities left in our place.

  Chapter Two – Scrounging

  October 3rd, 2009 – Today Brice and I went out early in the morning looking for food, supplies and to meet up with the FSG. The FSG is a fancy name for the flint survivors group. I get to go to the meetings sometimes. They are usually held over by the old University of Michigan, in the large parking lot. It is so open there that any of the wandering zombies are usually picked off from a distance and we can all talk together for 20-30 minutes or so. We do this about once a week.

  This morning we decided to go after food first. The old grocery stores in Flint are pretty picked clean, so we loaded up in an old panel van that Brice used in his old job as a plumber. Anytime we go to a new area, if we have time, we try to siphon off as much fuel as we can. Gasoline, diesel, kerosene.. There is even a way he figured out how to get it out of the gas stations without the power working. Sometimes getting gas takes more time than getting food, so it is usually a job in itself. This time it wasn’t all that bad and we set out towards Burton straight south from Saginaw Street.

  “So where are we heading this morning?”

  “We’re going back to Rockies, and then we’ll hit the Kroger that’s over that way off Bristol road.”

  Sound confusing to you? It wasn’t that bad for me. See, I had to learn how to drive last year, and his van is big, and more than that, I had to learn the streets in case something happens to him someday. His idea, not mine really.

  So off we went, and luckily we didn’t have to swerve too much. The zombies were out and about, but Brice had a way of driving that felt like a roller coaster. We swerved side to side, sped up, slowed down, but we got to wherever we were going. The windows at Rockies were broken out, and a lot of the stuff there in front was ruined, but what we wanted was farther back.

  Cammo clothing, we just grabbed everything and threw it into carts, gas for the Coleman lantern and stove. Then we hit the boot section and went to our sizes and grabbed everything we coul
d. For some reason the store wasn’t all that picked over. This pretty much filled three carts and we ran them towards the front of the store and the panel van.

  Apparently our presence here stirred the locals. The zombies at least. When we got to the van we could see them moving in from each side of the van. Since I needed to stay loose and quick I had left my shotgun in the rack in the van. The door was open in the back of the van, but it looked a mile away. Brice pulled out his trademark colt pistols and started firing with both of them. The noise left my ears ringing, but it was pretty obvious he could shoot well. I knew it, but I figured I’d tell you.

  “Go get the last cart, I’m going to climb up on top of the van and make sure these were the only ones.”

  I ran back in and grabbed the third cart and pushed it towards the front. Thank goodness for an army surplus store, we had enough supplies in these three carts to last us months if not years. I think we’ll probably be coming back sooner or later to stock up on the rest of it before anyone else figures out what we are doing. It only took me a minute or two to unload the cart of shoes into the back. I could hear the metal of the van roof make a noise as Brice moved around so I hurried. I put my shotgun across my back with the straps, and then grabbed the gas can to make sure we were topped off while Brice jumped off the roof and made sure nothing was sneaking up on me.

  It was something we had done hundreds of times, and the only difference today was I had my new birthday present with me.

  “Good job kiddo, you should have trained for NASCAR.”

  Laughing “yeah but you always say that.”

  he hopped off and pulled the door down the tracks and locked it.

  That’s when the swarm came towards us. Brice’s colts came back out and started singing their thunderous song of death and destruction. I dropped the can and pulled the shotgun off my shoulder and took aim.

  “Tres, wait a sec”

  BOOM chich chock BOOM.

  Yeah, I know I got two shots off before I realized he told me to wait. Something magical happened with those two shots though. I was aiming at the front man in a group of twenty zombies who rushed us from the backside of the building and with two shots they were all dying and twitching on the cracked parking lot.

  “Whoa Tres, you a bad mother!”

  “What happened Brice?”

  “I reloaded your shotgun with those fletchette rounds before we left.”

  “They did this?”

  “Well, it’s basically a magnum shotgun shell loaded with needles, well they’re more like nails. They pack a huge hit, but they are only good for really close work.”

  “So if I aimed a little more to my right…”

  “Yeah, I’d have been cut in half. As it was look ……”

  There were two little pinpricks of blood on the side of his white T shirt. It looked like he was grazed.

  “Brice, I’m sorry… I didn’t…”

  “Hold on kiddo, you reacted. No kid your age could have done that. It was my fault for not warning you.”

  “So you’re not mad at me?”

  “I will be if you don’t remember to top off your tube on that shotgun. Didn’t I tell you about that kiddo?”

  “Yeah, sorry I just got…”

  “No worries!! Just giving you some flack. Lets finish filling the tank and we’ll go grocery shopping.”

  Laughing “I wouldn’t really call it shopping, we don’t pay for anything.”

  That was pretty much the end of the excitement for the morning. The store was pretty eerie. Either dead zombies or dead norms were everywhere. It was really hard to go up and down the aisles without running one over on the cart, so we ended up just throwing cans of food to whoever was driving the cart. We filled four cart loads of cans and a couple carts with all that was left in the snack section. Brice said back in the days before the lights went out, this was the worst food ever. Now we have it as a treat. It is full of sugar, MSG, and will outlast a nuclear war according to him.

  The back of the van was sagging by the time we got back to our sewer grate and spent a couple of hours resting before we finished lugging the heavy cans down. The clothes, boots and gas didn’t take as long as the food for some reason. Then I covered Brice as he went to stash the van in an old burnt out building. He just drives it right in, arms the traps inside it, and locks it. Then he hoofs it back to the Whiting where I am waiting. Somehow the zombies didn’t pay much attention to him this time, and all he had to do was run a zigzag before we were at the old steel door to the back of the building. We pulled it shut, chained it and started down.

  We took a roundabout way to the sewer grate we unloaded at (to make sure we weren’t followed through the tunnels under Flint) and then started lugging the stuff back to our hideaway. A massive steel door is the final touch. Sort of reminded me of the hideout in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That was a stupid movie, but it makes sense now.

  “Grab your shotgun and get some shells in your pockets kiddo, we’re going to the FSG together.”

  “Ok, what do you want me to Grab?”

  “The slugs. Put those Fletchette shells in your other pockets. The dead heads above are pretty slow today.”

  And he loaded up. He reloaded the clips for his colts, and grabbed a few extra clips. Strapped those on his waist, then he grabbed his hunting rifle. The big scope on it looked as deadly as the weapon it was strapped to. Then we headed out by the way of the sewer grate.

  The meeting of the Flint survivor group didn’t last too long. Apparently the vampire attacks were getting worse than we thought. Three of our norms weren’t there. In all, there was close to fifteen of us, with me being the youngest. Actually there was only one other teenager there, and she was 15. Mariah was probably the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Before the lights went out and after. She was also one of the biggest brats I’d ever run across. Other than that, everyone there was old. Well, not Brice, he was young compared to the others, they were like grandparent age. For some reason though they all asked his advice and he seemed wise beyond his age.

  It wasn’t unusual to talk about planning, strategy, or trying to get back at the vampires, but this time was really tense. 3 more gone and our numbers were shrinking. One member asked what it would take to get the radio station up and running so we could see who else was out there. Someone else pointed out we could do that in a car, or with a CB setup. Some of them had generators, but rarely ran them because the noise attracted suck heads as well as the deadheads.

  Then they talked about going on a hunting trip of their own.

  “Brice, you know more about this than the rest of us, how hard would it be to put a bad dent in the numbers around this area?”

  “Depends on how many deadheads you’re talking about, or you talking about the suck heads?”

  “The deadheads seem to be an easier target, but it’d be nice to light up some of the vampires too.”

  “I’ve been wondering the same” a mousy woman added.

  “Well, how much ammunition do we have saved?”

  “well, uh…..” “yeah, well I don’t have much of..” “I’m out of anything big.”

  “That’s what I figured” Brice said. “We need to stock up before we can mount any kind of hunting operation. I guess if you guys start stripping all the ammo from the police stations, pawn shops, gun shops and then start going door to door..”

  The crowd started an angry murmur. Apparently we had been the only two laying in extra rations of ammunition while everyone else just hunkered down in their holes.

  “Hey Brice” the mousy woman asked “do you have any can foods you can share with the group?”

  I was sort of thunderstruck. How come they needed food? I spoke at the meeting for the first time ever.

  “Hey, there’s lots of food around, all you have to do is go get it. It’s what we’ve been doing since the lights went out.”

  Once again the murmur of the crowd started and my buddy just gave me a sly smile. Something cau
ght our eye as we looked at each other and turned. Four deadheads were walking towards us but they were still a bit a ways out.

  “Well guys, this has been lively, but we gotta skeddaddle soon, they can smell us, and if I start picking them off, the noise will bring the others running.”

  “What about the food…..”

  “Later, we have to go now.”

  And we did. We tried to stick to the shadows of dying light. It had to be late afternoon by now, and as the group broke up, the zombies seemed confused as who to follow. We broke out into a trot and pretty much made it home without any scares.

  Chapter 3 – Knock Knock birthday boy……

  October 4th Midnight-

  We had both eaten and talked about the meeting. I was pretty vocal about hunting instead of being hunted. I’ve seen my bud shoot a zombie during the day with his hunting rifle from a long ways off. I’ve also seen him use his crossbow to take out a vampire that had tried to trap us one of the few times we found ourselves out after dark. If he wasn’t my buddy he’d be a scary guy.

  Basically we talked about taking our revenge out on the vampire lords and zombies, how to do it but we were lacking somehow. There were only so many hours in the day when the zombies seemed to slow down and that was when we did our collecting, and like everyone else, we had ammo, but not a large amount. And what do we use to kill the vampires other than the crossbows?