by Jaime Horio
Land of the Zombies
Jaime Horio
LAND OF THE ZOMBIES
December 2016
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are pure fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Jaime Horio
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.jaimeh.com
Contents
Land of the Zombies
Introduction
Land of the Zombies
Introduction
I was recently looking through some old pictures on the computer when I came across this book. This was the novel I wrote back in 2010 as part of National Novel Writing Month. At the time I was all about zombies, so that was clearly what I had to write about. I’ve used parts of this as short stories at times, but here is the full thing in all its glory!
Land of the Zombies
I look at the calendar and realize it’s been six months since the world ended. Six months since anything has been normal. Six months since the dead came back.
It didn’t happen the way it did in the movies. It wasn’t an overnight terror with riots and the military and everything going to shit in a matter of hours. The end of the world took weeks, maybe even months. No one really knows.
The first we heard of it was in February. There was some sort of outbreak in our town, about a dozen people came down with some sort of flu. It wasn’t even the top story on the news, it only made waves because the CDC was being called in, and the CDC doesn’t come out to small towns like ours. Nothing else came of the story, we all just assumed the people got better.
But somehow it spread. Slowly.
And now I sit here in what’s left of an abandoned home. But fortunately I’m not alone. Others from the neighborhood are living here as well. There are eight of us.
There’s Terry Johnson. He’s not a huge man, just under six-feet tall, but he is strong. He used to work construction, so his knowledge of tools has been a huge help to all of us. His wife, Julie, was a teller at the bank. Her hobby was baking, so she has helped with a lot of the food preparation.
Maria Garza is a widow who did not work. Her husband was a doctor before a car accident seven years ago. They had always lived frugally, so she did not need to go out and work after he died. She spent her days working in her garden, growing both beautiful roses and flowers, as well as vegetables. It became clear very early that her gardening knowledge would be very useful for growing food.
Don Taylor was a delivery driver. His wife died during what we dubbed “the apocalypse.” There were no horsemen coming from the sky, but the world basically died to us, and apocalypse was the best word we could come up for it. Don never talked about what happened to his wife, only that she died. His daughter, Carrie, had been a star athlete at the local high school, and had a full athletic scholarship for college when all this happened. She spent the first week in the house almost without moving. With all that had happened, and losing her mom, Carrie just couldn’t find a way to cope. But after giving her time to grieve, the other women helped to pull her out. Maria taught her about gardening, and Julie showed her how to cook with the supplies we had. Carrie dove straight into it all, having found a way to cope with all that had happened.
Greg Stevens was a young guy who went to the local community college. He had known who Carrie was from his time in high school, but he wasn’t an athlete and was apparently below her radar. We found Greg wandering the neighborhood one day. Apparently he and his parents had managed to whole up with another group of people at a grocery store, but after a week or so, the horde managed to break in. Everyone had scattered, and Greg didn’t know what happened to his parents. There were around 20 people in the store, and at least that many infected had broken in. Greg just ran. His mom got lost in the crowd, and his dad had been up on the roof of the building, but Greg didn’t see him up there when he took off. He had come toward this neighborhood following the smoke that looked small enough to be a cooking fire.
Finally there was me and my roommate. Ben Sloan and I met at work. I worked for a local accountant, just answering phones and handling the everyday tasks of keeping the office running. Ben worked for a computer company, and he was the guy who came in to take care of our computers. We got to be good friends, just chatting about things as he worked in the office, then hanging out after work. I moved into his apartment when his rent went up and he couldn’t afford it on his own anymore, and I was just sick of my current roommate. We’d never been friends, just tolerated each other and accepted that we needed each other to cover rent. Ben and I managed to keep work talk out of the apartment, but when he came in to our office, we found plenty of time to talk trash about the latest high score one of us had posted on the XBox.
My name is Jay Holmes. I became the leader of our little group by default. Terry had just been a worker on his construction crew, so he was used to taking orders, not giving them. Don wasn’t much use as he kept himself closed off, not quite sure how to cope with what had happened. Greg was just a kid who was pretty sure he had just abandoned his parents and left them to die, so he wasn’t up for taking charge. Greg and I already had a hierarchy setup, from our team gaming days, I always took the lead, made the decisions, and he went with it. So that left me. I was used to having to make decisions: what type of toner to get, how much paper do we need? That sort of thing. Not deciding how to ration food. But I took the unspoken title, knowing that no one else was going to step up.
But what happened to bring us all here?
A couple of weeks after that first outbreak, we started hearing about more outbreaks around the country. An epidemic of rabies maybe. This isn’t a tiny town, but at a population of around 90,000, we certainly aren’t huge. But our location near a major highway left us just as vulnerable as bigger cities. Locally, it started with a second outbreak, but this time the CDC scientists were stretched too far to spare anyone to come here. Instead, the floor of the hospital was quarantined. Since the exact nature of the disease wasn’t known, the doctors and nurses on those floors were quarantined as well. Everyone had to stay on that floor, except for a small staging area near the elevator where food and supplies were brought up, and exchanged through a very high tech reverse-pressure system.
The local news did a big piece on the exchange area, making sure to emphasize that it was the same type of system that some of those big metropolitan areas used.
Within a couple of days, the patients who were brought in passed away. But because of the quarantine, they couldn’t be taken to the morgue, so the bodies were kept as cool as possible. In the meantime, more patients came in with similar infections. Within a week, the hospital was reporting that the mortality rate was 100% among those who had come in, and the best they could do was offer some sedatives and fluids to the patients.
This turned out to be the worst thing they could say publicly. Once people knew this disease was a death sentence, they stopped going to the hospital. Everyone just stayed home, preferring to die in the comfort of their own homes.
It was one of these people who had stayed home that first alerted us to what was happening. It was a terribly sad story to watch. A young boy, about 8, had come down with flu-like symptoms. His mom kept him home from school, and quickly realized that he had the same disease as the people at the hospital. Knowing that the boy was going to die, his mother and father basically let him do whatever he wanted. He was too sick to get out of bed and move around for any extended period of time, but they moved the TV into his r
oom so he could play video games, and the whole family, including his older sister, sat in his room and watched his favorite movies. Apparently the disease moved quicker through him since he was a child, and within a day he had just closed his eyes and passed away.
The family mourned for a couple of hours before the police received a call. It was the boy’s older sister who called and told police a terrible tale. The family had been crying together over losing the youngest member of their family, and the sister had gone to the kitchen to get some water. While she was gone, she heard her mother cry out. She was yelling something about the brother not being dead, and the sister chalked it up to her mom being overrun with grief. But when she returned to the room, she saw that her brother had indeed sat up, and his eyes were open.
The girl stared in disbelief and her mother hugged the boy, crying and laughing at the same time. In an instant, the boy bit down on his mother’s neck, and the cries and laughter turned to screams. Blood sprayed from the mother’s neck, and the boy appeared to swallow what was in his mouth and bit down again. The mother’s screams quickly faded before the father could even react. He leapt up to pull his wife away, but when he reached out, the boy bit down onto his arm. The man pulled away, but the boy’s mouth stayed firmly attached until a chunk of flush was ripped away. The man could not grasp what had just happened, and just stood there as the boy pulled himself up to his feet, and standing on the bed bit into the man’s face.
Finally, the girl screamed, dropping her glass of water. The boy turned toward the sound and started to move forward. Somehow the girl managed to react and ran out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her.
She managed to tell this story to the police outside, and apparently a reporter was close enough to hear it all. The reported quickly filmed a clip relaying the story, and when the station wouldn’t air it, she posted it online, which was where Ben found it. At the time we all thought it was bogus, but clever. In hindsight, we know she was telling the truth.
What we did see on the news was that the same girl described in the reporter’s story had lost her entire family to a house fire. She was so traumatized that she stopped speaking. The reporter claimed on her blog that the police had come in and lost a couple of men in trying to apprehend who- or whatever was inside the house. They had called in for some help, and managed to get a couple of federal agents to come, and that was when the house went up in flames. The federal guys disappeared right after that, and no mention was made of them ever coming.
Looking back, it was a brilliant way to stop the infection that was taking place. Just lock everyone inside and burn the place. That could have happened at the hospital if everyone had gone in. Maybe a few infected would have been around the city, but the majority would have been contained in one spot and taken out in one quick move.
“What was that reporter’s name?”
Ben looks to me. “You mean Lani West?”
“Yeah, the one who had that report online from that crazy outbreak. I wonder what happened to her.”
“I hope she made it. She was hot.” Ben grins at his own joke.
“True. But she was aware of this before anyone else. And she wasn’t afraid to spread the information. I wonder what else she found out.” My voice trails off for a minute, and then I turn back to Ben. “Well, it’s probably a good time to head out.”
Every day we head out into the neighborhood and raid houses, looking for food and supplies. This house is in a pretty dense residential neighborhood, so there’s no shortage of houses. But we’ve got lots of mouths to feed, and the food we originally came with and found in the house started to run short a few months ago. We started with the houses closest to us and have worked out way out, marking the doors with some spray paint we found in one of the garages when we’re done.
We wait until mid morning to go out, so there’s plenty of sunlight. We lost electricity shortly after the real outbreak happened, and we want to preserve the external light sources we have, so we prefer to work when it’s nice and bright.
Ben and I each grab an aluminum baseball bat. Terry’s quite a bit stronger, so he has a large iron rod he found one day. Greg isn’t really that strong, so he just has a shovel, and the few times he has had to use it he just likes to clear some space and run rather than kill the creatures we face. Probably a smart idea, he’s nimble, and the creatures aren’t that fast or nimble. Why fight when you can just get away, right?
Don is a fairly strong man, but since he can’t focus, none of us really feel safe with him covering our backs, so he stays behind with his daughter.
It’s already starting to get warm, but we each pull on sweatshirts and some leather jackets we found in one of the houses. The creature’s bit can spread the infection, and while we have seen that some people seem to be immune, it’s not a chance any of us want to take. Better to be hot and have a couple of good layers of protection on your skin, than find out the hard way that you aren’t immune. Once the infection sets in, it’s only a matter of time before you die and come back as one of them. It’s probably a better fate to just be torn apart and eaten. At least then you don’t come back.
Once we’re all bundled up, we grab some backpacks and empty gas cans. It dawned on us a couple of weeks ago that it doesn’t seem reasonable to try to stay here forever, so we’ve been siphoning off what gas we can and storing it for when we leave. We have Don’s minivan and Terry’s big truck, so moving all of us and our supplies won’t be a problem, but we don’t know how far we’ll need to go. And this neighborhood must’ve gotten a good jump start, because there aren’t a lot of cars, and it seems like people took most of their clothes with them.
From the second story of the house, Greg scans the street immediately in front of us, and then comes down to let us know that the path appears to be clear. We remove the furniture we’ve piled in front of the door and start to head out.
“Wait!” It’s Don. “You don’t want to forget this.” He hands Terry a pistol.
“Thanks, I hope to God I don’t have to use this, but it’s always nice to know it’s there if we need it.” Terry lifts his jacket and puts the gun into his waistband.
Don looks at Terry like he wants to say something. Opens his mouth, then stops, hangs his head and turns away.
We go outside and hear the sound of the furniture being placed back in front of the door.
Greg has a disgusted look on his face. “That guys useless. You could see it in his face that he knows he should be helping us, but he just sits in there while we risk our skins to bring him food!”
Terry puts his arm around Greg’s shoulder and turns him toward the street. “Relax, young man. He’ll come around.”
Greg turns with him and mumbles something under his breath.
Terry always seems to be able to calm Greg. Something about his demeanor, or maybe his size, helps Greg to move on from his frustration.
We move quickly down the first block and take a right. This neighborhood is set up pretty simply, just rows of parallel streets, so it’s simple to keep track of where we’ve been. It’s not a huge neighborhood, and we’ve already cleared the first two streets. We head to the third and last street. The streets to our right and left are all cul-de-sacs, and we’ve already cleared all of the houses to our left. That leaves nine houses on our right. We can probably get through all of these today.
Most of the houses are pretty bare of useful supplies, so we can clear them out pretty quickly. The problem is the houses with the creatures. Ben calls them zombies. And I suppose they are. They’re people who have died, clinically anyway, and come back. But zombies are things in the movies, and this is real life. So I just have trouble calling them that. So I stick with creatures most of the time.
If you’re quiet, then they largely just leave you alone. But for some reason, they crave flesh. It wasn’t just human flesh either. Before we cleared the neighborhood out, you’d come around a corner and see one of them just standing there, completely oblivious to
anything. Then a squirrel would run by, and the creature would go stumbling after it. They had no chance of course. Imagine trying to catch a squirrel, or a feral cat. Now imagine that if your joints are all stiff and you have no real sense of coordination. That’s what it was like for these creatures.
So that leaves people, the easiest prey. Many people lost their lives because they saw a loved one, and were in denial that that thing wasn’t a person anymore.
Also, people panic, and once one person in a crowd trips or is pushed down, then more follow, and a person on the ground is easy pickings for a hungry zombie.
We rarely see the zombies on the street anymore. And when we do they tend to be alone. So there’s little danger of them swarming you, and we’re prepared. The movies did have it right that you want to aim for the head. Something in the brain or spinal column is what keeps them going, and when you give them a good enough jolt they just stop.
We look down the street, Everdeen Terrace and see nothing waiting for us in the street or any of the yards.
I walk toward the first house and mumble to Ben, “Well, here comes the fun part.”
Going into a house is the most dangerous part. While it’s true that this neighborhood is deserted, it’s also true that many people locked their infected family members inside the house when they left.
We walk up to the first house, and Greg keeps an eye on the street. Terry walks toward the front door, while I head to the left and check the front windows to see if I can see anything inside. I don’t see any signs of struggles or someone still inside. I head back to the front door to meet Terry. Ben is coming back from the right side where he peeked over the fence into the back yard. Nothing to report from his side either.
“This place looks like it’s abandoned. I couldn’t see the kitchen, but the rest of the house looked pretty intact. It’s probably clear, but stay focused.” Ben and Terry both nod at me. I’ve told them to stay focused dozens of times, but they both know that it’s always good to be reminded. Especially on the first house of the day.
