Elements of the Undead - Omnibus Edition (Books One - Three)

by William Esmont

  “Where’s Luke?” Ryan demanded.

  “At the truck,” Jack said between gasps. “He’s with Archie.”

  Ryan positioned the light so he could see their faces. “Good. I don’t want him to see this.”

  “Oh, no!” Megan said, her hand flying to her mouth. “You found her?”

  Ryan dropped his chin to his chest and let the beam of light fall to his feet. “Yeah.”

  Megan reached out to him, but he shrugged her off and stepped out of reach. He didn’t want to be touched. Not then.

  Jack held out his hand. “Can I see the light?”

  Ryan reluctantly passed it over. Jack crept to the edge.

  “Close to the wall,” Ryan muttered.

  “Damn it,” Jack whispered after a few seconds. “I’m sorry, Ryan.”

  “Maybe…” Megan said, her voice full of forced optimism.

  “No,” Ryan said with a resigned shake of his head. “She’s gone.” He took a step away from the edge and put his hands to his face. He sucked in a great gulp of sweet desert air, and a sob hitched in his throat as his eyes flooded with tears.

  As much as he wanted to be shocked by Paige’s death, wanted to be outraged and indignant at the senselessness of it all, he couldn’t help but feel a guilty twinge of relief. Relief that what had been brewing for years had finally come to pass. Relief that it had happened when Luke was not around. Relief that Paige was finally out of her misery.

  Wiping his face on his sleeve, Ryan shuffled toward the void. He stared into the darkness, allowing himself to become lost in the low drone of the wind. “We’ll hike down in the morning. Luke and I will bury her.”

  “Of course,” Megan said.

  Jack cleared his throat. “We’ve got about three more hours until daylight.”

  Ryan placed a finger first over one nostril, and then the other, blowing the dusty congestion from his nose onto the ground. “I’d like a few minutes alone.”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “Take as long as you need. We’ll be at the truck.”

  He and Megan retreated into the brush and vanished into the night.

  Ryan thought of Luke and how he would react to the news of his mother’s death. The boy wasn’t stupid, not by a long shot. On more than one occasion while they’d been in the bunker, Luke had made comments about his mother’s condition, painful insights couched in the language of a child teetering on the edge of adulthood. He knew his mother was sick, and like Ryan, he had been intent on doing what he could to help her cope. As their only child, Luke probably felt some level of guilt over Paige’s condition, some misplaced blame for his own inability to solve her problems. Ryan’s only hope was that whatever had affected Paige would not also manifest in his son. He couldn’t imagine a life without Luke, especially after losing Paige.

  He remained on the ledge for a few more minutes, plotting how he would break the news, how he would deal with the immediate aftermath as well as the long-term ramifications. In the end, he decided the best approach would be to lay it all out, to tell Luke in blunt terms what had happened to his mother, how she had been sick since before he was born. Anything else would be an insult to Luke’s intelligence.

  A faint rustling in the nearby brush brought Ryan back to the present. He raised his gun and shone his flashlight across the scrub, trying to find the source. The sound came again, but a little farther away, followed by a short burst of high-pitched squeaks. Relief flooded through him as he realized it wasn’t a zombie.

  Out of ideas and with his drying sweat starting to give him a chill, Ryan holstered his gun and set off on the long hike back to the truck.

  Seventeen

  Dawn

  Ryan and Luke set out for Paige’s body at first light, before the others awoke. Each carried only a single bottle of water and a granola bar. In the light of day, Ryan quickly identified a narrow, rocky trail snaking into the depths of the canyon.

  A thick veil of silence cloaked their descent, as both he and Luke focused on the footing and the gruesome task awaiting them. Ryan led, grateful Luke wasn’t witness to the endless procession of tears flowing from his eyes. Periodically, he thought he heard Luke sniffling behind him, but he forced himself not to look, partly out of respect, but mostly because he couldn’t bear the thought of Luke seeing him in such a state.

  A brief burst of panic clawed at him as he neared the bottom. What if she’s still alive? What if she was paralyzed from the fall, and she’s been conscious and suffering all night? He tried to convince himself it was impossible, that the shattered body he had spied the night before could in no way have harbored life. Yet try as he might, he couldn’t shake the thought.

  They reached Paige’s corpse a few minutes later.

  One look at the battered remains that used to be his wife told Ryan his fears had been unfounded. Paige lay draped over a jagged boulder, her neck folded at an impossible angle and a thick line of congealed blood tracing a course from her mouth to the ground. Her eyes, blank and filmed white, were forever fixated on the cloudless strip of sky far above.

  Ryan put his fingers to Paige’s eyes and pressed lightly on the lids, trying to draw them closed as he had seen done a million times in the movies. Her skin was cool to the touch, her eyeballs spongy, yet surprisingly firm. As soon as he removed his fingertips, her eyelids crept open again. She stared at him, unseeing. Ryan cursed under his breath and tried again. The lids wouldn’t stay closed. He turned to Luke in desperation, only to find him watching in mute horror. “They won’t—”

  Luke averted his gaze. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s okay…”

  Ryan set to work on removing Paige’s body from its resting place. It was time to do what they had come to do.

  It was time to bury his wife.

  Without a shovel, he and Luke were forced to improvise. They moved Paige a few yards down the slope, out of the shadows and into the warm, early morning sunlight. Once she was in position, and he did as much as he could to make her look natural, they set about covering her with fist-sized rocks collected from the base of the cliff. Stone by stone, they constructed a mound over her body from head to toe, entombing her in a makeshift memorial that would last far beyond their last days on earth.

  When they were done, Ryan took a solemn step back to inspect their work.

  “Did you want to say a few words?”

  Luke mumbled something unintelligible and shuffled his feet. Looking down at him, Ryan saw that Luke was trembling. Whether from exhaustion or from raw emotion, Ryan couldn’t tell, but he guessed a mix of the two. He ached to be able to reach out and offer some timely pearls of wisdom, but he had nothing left to give.

  Luke opened his mouth, but the words wouldn’t come. He closed it and stared at Ryan, his expression dissolving into the soul-crushing grief and sorrow of a terrified child. “Did…”

  “It’s okay,” Ryan murmured. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “Did Mom kill herself?”

  The words hung in the air like a toxic cloud. It was a question Ryan had expected, although he had thought he would have time to prepare for it.

  “Dad?”

  “I… I don’t know.” He met his son’s gaze. “You know your mother was really sick…”

  Luke said something, his voice too faint for Ryan to hear.

  “What was that?”

  “I said I know. I know she was sick. She was sick for a long time.”

  Ryan’s shoulders sagged. “Since before you were born.”

  Luke stared at him, wide-eyed. “Really?”

  Ryan nodded.

  Luke’s face screwed up in concern. “Am I going to get sick too?”

  The question rocked Ryan to his core. He and Paige had discussed that possibility at length during her healthy periods, but neither had an answer. Only time would tell. “Not if I can help it.”

  Luke frowned, but the tension seemed to ease from his face. He bent over and pried a small stone from the ground. It went on the top of the pile co
vering Paige.

  Ryan sensed an opportunity to buy some time to come up with better answers to Luke’s impossible questions. “How about we give your mom a moment of silence? I think she’d like that.”

  Luke smiled. He sniffled and wiped at his nose. “Yeah. She would. She’d like that a lot.”

  They moved to the edge of the mound, and Ryan put his arm on Luke’s shoulder. Luke flinched, and then relaxed.

  A minute passed. Then another.

  Ryan brought his hand to his mouth and forced a small cough. “Well?”

  Luke knelt and placed his hand on the rock nearest Paige’s head. “Goodbye, Mom. You can rest—” His last words were swallowed by a sob.

  A fresh round of tears welled in Ryan’s eyes. He was only able to manage a choked whisper. “Goodbye, Paige. I love you.”

  Luke got to his feet and, with a final longing glance at his mother’s grave, turned for the trail. Ryan fell in behind him, numb to the world, not quite sure how or what to feel anymore.

  Eighteen

  Approaching Houston

  Late Morning, The Next Day

  The landscape grew barren and monotonous as Megan piloted the lumbering SUV across Texas, the hills melting away bit by bit until finally they vanished altogether, replaced by pancake-flat vistas of brown and dull green stretching to infinity. Jack rode shotgun, his nose buried in one of Luke’s books. Ryan and Luke sat in the center row. Neither had said much since returning from burying Paige, and Megan was happy to leave them to their thoughts. Archie was stretched out in the rear of the truck, seemingly relieved to have an entire seat to himself.

  For the most part, the road was clear, and the undead were few and far between. Every once in awhile, a snarl of wreckage would materialize on the horizon, a random collection of vehicles entombed like prehistoric insects frozen in amber. Rather than deal with the possibility of a zombie encounter, Megan took advantage of the four-wheel drive and swung wide around each obstruction.

  They passed through San Antonio around dawn. Like El Paso, the city had been obliterated, blasted into a charred wasteland by the government’s bungled attempt to cauterize the spreading plague. It took two hours to find a safe way around, two hours in which everyone was on the edge of their seat, weapons primed, prepared for the worst. In the end, the dead city was a non-event, and they all breathed a collective sigh of relief as the road to the east opened up again.

  It was almost too easy.

  Megan yawned and stared at the horizon. “Those clouds sure do look ugly.”

  Jack grunted and closed his book. “Yep. It’s gonna be a whopper of a storm.” He gestured at the towering wall of inky blackness roiling the heavens as far as the eye could see. “I haven’t seen anything like this in years.”

  Megan couldn’t tear her gaze away from the approaching storm. She was struck by the difference of scale in the weather system compared to what she was accustomed to. “I guess we’ll have to get used to it, the rain, I mean.”

  “Guess so,” Jack said with a wry grin. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it, though.”

  Megan laughed. “Tell me about it.” She sobered. “Do you think we should stop soon, maybe find somewhere to ride it out?”

  Jack shook his head. “Nah. I think we should try to get around Houston first.”

  Megan gave the clouds a nervous glance. “Are you sure? I don’t want to get pinned down…”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. We’ll reach the outskirts in another hour or so, and then we’ll scoot around and find a dry place to set up camp on the other side.”

  Megan glanced in the rearview mirror. She hated the thought of shattering the fragile calm that had settled over the group. Jack had a good point. If they could make it around Houston, it would mean one less time setting up and breaking down camp, one less opportunity for something else to go wrong. Still, their experiences in El Paso and San Antonio weighed on her. Scooting around the city was fine in theory, but so far, that tactic had proven more difficult in practice than any of them had expected.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s get a little closer and see what the city looks like before we make that call. If it’s anything like El Paso…”

  Jack thumbed open his book. “Fair enough. I think we can make it, but we can wait to decide if you want.”

  Megan gave him a thin smile. “Thanks.”

  As Jack turned his attention back to his book, Megan pressed down on the gas pedal and watched in satisfaction as the speedometer needle inched to the right. They would have their answer soon enough.

  Nineteen

  A little while later

  Megan drummed her hands on the steering wheel, keeping a mental beat with a barely remembered song whose name eluded her. The monotony of the road was wearing on her, and with Jack engrossed in his book, she was having a hard time maintaining her concentration. They were closing in on the far western suburbs of Houston, and while they had not yet encountered any significant blockages, she suspected it was only a matter of time. Until that point, though, her job was simple. Drive straight and don’t fall asleep.

  A large shape loomed on the horizon. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing, but as they drew closer, the shape resolved into a faded black trailer parked perpendicular to the freeway. That’s odd. The trailer appeared to be in good condition, as if it had only recently rolled off an assembly line.

  Except for the white lettering on the side. The message was short and to the point. “Exit 776. Safe Zone.”

  “Jack?”

  Jack didn’t look up from his book. “What is it?”

  “Uh, you may want to see this.”

  He looked up, then sat bolt upright and closed his book with a snap.

  Megan brought them to a stop a few dozen yards from the trailer. Jack grabbed the road atlas and quickly flipped to the page detailing Houston. Tracing his finger along the thin orange ribbon of I-10, he tapped the far eastern edge of the city. “Found it. Looks like an industrial park. Shipbuilding.”

  Ryan called out from the rear. “What’s going on? Why’d we stop?”

  Jack gestured at the trailer. “Check it out.”

  His seat jostled as Ryan used the headrest to pull himself forward. “Well, I’ll be damned. More people.”

  Jack folded the atlas open and slid it onto the dashboard. “And just in time, too, with this storm coming.” As if to underscore his words, a spray of raindrops pelted the windshield, instantly turning to red, watery mud as they mixed with the layers of dust and road grime coating the glass.

  Megan turned on the wipers. “So what do you want to do?”

  Jack sighed. “We’ve still got time to make a run for it.”

  “I’m with Jack,” Ryan said, his voice rising in excitement. “That’s not far from here at all.”

  Megan raised her hand. “Whoa! Hold on a second.” She grabbed the map and held it up so the others could see it. She stabbed her finger at the shipyard. “Look how close this is to downtown Houston.” She scrutinized the legend in the bottom corner of the map. “It’s what… ten miles from city center?”

  “So?” Ryan shrugged.

  “So that means Houston didn’t get hit.”

  “Let me see that!” Ryan said, snatching the map from her hands. “Son of a bitch. You’re right. If Houston had been nuked, there’s no way people would be that close in.” He flipped to the next page, scanned it for a second, and then turned back to Houston.

  “So Houston wasn’t nuked,” Megan said. “That’s good news, but it also means the city is still probably full of corpses. How many people lived here before? A million? Two? That’s a couple of million undead.”

  Jack rubbed his jaw. “Maybe, but I’ll bet the roads are in much better shape than they were in San Antonio and El Paso. Plus, there are a ton of alternate routes around Houston. If we stay away from the city center, we can get on the other side in a flash.”

  There was a thump at the rear of the truck, and Archie squeezed i
nto the seat between Ryan and Luke. “Why are we even debating this?” He slapped the back of the Jack’s seat as he would slap a stubborn horse. “Let’s get moving!”

  Ryan held the map up again so everyone could see. “We can totally make this. Look. Here,” he said, tracing his finger in a path along the roads south of Houston. “I know this area. I used to come here for business a few times a year. If we go south on the Sam Houston, it’ll intersect with I-10 a few miles from this exit. That’ll keep us far enough from downtown that we can avoid any hordes.”

  Megan looked at Jack and chewed her lip as she considered their options.

  “What do we have to lose?” Ryan added. “I mean, how much worse can things get? If there are people there, we can at least get out of this goddamned truck for a while. Maybe they even know something about Tampa.”

  Ryan was the most animated Megan had seen him since Paige had died. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or frightened by the sudden burst of energy.

  “He does have a point,” Jack said. “We need to stop for the night and whether we do it here or there, or somewhere along the way, our situation is still tenuous at best. And besides,” he added, nodding at the storm clouds, “I’d rather be on the other side of Houston when that thing gets here.”

  Megan couldn’t argue with their logic. She understood zombies, knew how to fight them, when to stand her ground and when to run. The storm, the sheer magnitude of it, however, was a new and ominous variable, one for which she had no frame of reference.

  “Okay. I don’t like it, but I’m in.” She met Jack’s eyes and saw her own uncertainty reflected in them.

  Ryan passed the map back to the front seat. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry about the roads.”

  The engine roared, and Megan shifted into gear. As the acceleration pressed her into her seat, she couldn’t help but wonder if their situation was about to go from bad to worse.