Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

by Shawn Chesser

  Her eyes darted to the trio of satellite phones sitting silent on the shelf near the mirror. For the third time in an hour a quick once-over confirmed they were powered on and plugged in, charging. Not wanting to risk another missed call, she picked up each phone individually and confirmed all of their ringers were turned on.

  “You still there?” came Charlie’s voice, sounding distant in the confined space.

  Snapping out of her funk, Heidi keyed to talk and said, “You be careful out there, Charlie. I guess I just wanted to thank you for saving my life and reuniting me with Daymon.” Up on the monitor she saw Charlie stick his hand out the window and wave. Then Phillip stepped back and the Tahoe started a slow roll east down the state route. As the engine rumble and soft hiss of tires faded away, Charlie said, “To serve and protect.” That he was chasing ghosts and had a better chance of being struck by lightning than finding his daughter alive wasn’t lost on Heidi as she wiped away a stray tear and watched the Tahoe crest the rise and disappear altogether.

  Chapter 3

  Weeks had gone by since Air Force Major Freda Nash had indulged in a drink. In fact, since the hell of a bender she went on after learning of the loss of her good friend, Delta Force Commander Mike Desantos, she’d all but sworn off the stuff. But the satisfied feeling of victory was diminishing. Softening around the edges. True, the nukes stolen from Minot Air Force Base were now back in the custody of the United States Air Force. And as a byproduct of that successful mission, thanks to a tip from Cade “Wyatt” Grayson—one of her boys—the perpetrators threatening the survival of the United States had been, to a man, eradicated. But that was then and this was now. Due to circumstances beyond her control a monumental decision had to be made. And the monkey wrench thrown into her machine was the temporary stand-down orders President Valerie Clay had recently dropped onto her and newly promoted General Cornelius Shrill’s collective laps.

  She kicked off her shoes and pushed her chair away from her desk. She had purposefully turned off all but the red phone—the direct land line connecting Schriever with the new White House deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, the old NORAD facility twenty miles to the southwest. Sequestered in her cramped little office over the last six hours mulling over the pros and cons of actually following through with her foolhardy plan had left her hungry, angry, tired, and lonely. But not necessarily in that order. Mostly she was lonely and had been since Z-Day plus one. The last three hundred and sixty some odd minutes, every second of which saw her locked in a battle of self will, had done nothing to ease the feeling of emptiness. Instead it had brought her to the doorstep of a conclusion to the detriment of her mind, body, and spirit. She was fighting a monumental headache that had her neck muscles corded and looking like twisted cables beneath the skin.

  “Hell, Freda,” she said to herself. “I think it’s five o’clock somewhere. Prime time to self-medicate.” A little liquid pain killer, she reasoned, wasn’t far from whatever tranquilizer her own doctor would have prescribed—had he not perished along with the thousands upon thousands of other Colorado Springs residents. She rose and retrieved the tequila bottle from its hiding place. Closing the filing cabinet, she cast her gaze on the photo of her and her daughter Nadia. It was the first day of college and the USC freshman was on the receiving end of a kiss from her doting mom. Nash closed her eyes and relived the moment. There had been a breeze from the east, possibly the stirrings of a Santa Ana. It had been spring, but since it was dry and eighty degrees Freda had been uncomfortable in her uniform. It didn’t show in the picture on the wall. Both women wore smiles. Nash’s a little tight, like her smartly ironed and rarely worn dress blues. And Nadia’s was toothy and wide, the prospect of autonomy and boys no doubt the culprit.

  Nash placed the bottle, a squat rocks glass and a pair of shot glasses on her desk blotter.

  She retrieved a tripod from next to the filing cabinet, extended the legs, and powered on the attached video camera. Placed it a few feet from her desk and checked that the autofocus was engaged.

  “Fuck it.” She twisted the cap and crinkled her nose. If this tequila was made from agave somebody had wiped their ass with it first. It definitely was not Patron. And it certainly smelled like ass.

  Three fingers went neat into the rocks glass. She didn’t bother lining shots up for the fallen. Since Z-Day there were just too many for her to acknowledge. So she poured another two count into her glass in honor of Mike “Cowboy” Desantos.

  She engaged in a staring contest with the golden-hued liquid. Just as she was about to nod off the AC unit grumbled to life and the unexpected blast of cooled air had her wide awake and the tasks awaiting completion were once again front and center in her mind.

  On her desk, sitting amid stacks of unfiled paperwork inches high, was her Panasonic laptop. Frozen on the screen was the compilation of satellite video footage she’d been watching on and off over the last six hours.

  She looked at her watch. It was nearing noon and she realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday—whatever day that had been.

  “Fuck it,” she said again. “Use ‘em or lose ‘em.” Simultaneously she set the video to moving on the laptop and downed half of the triple shot.

  Chapter 4

  Brook spread the white sheet out on the ground before her. Conveniently, the grass had been crushed down days before by Daymon, Lev, and Duncan. There were several spokes running off perpendicular from the landing-pad-sized circle and capped off, like antenna on a cartoon alien, by smaller car-sized circles of their own. Seven hours spent on a failed practical joke. She shook her head remembering the look on Cade’s face when he first saw the manufactured crop circles. The first words from his mouth would stick with her forever. He gazed at the trio of survivors responsible, locked eyes with Duncan and said: Why in the hell didn’t they take you with them? To which the funk they’d all been in from having to exhume and move Jordan’s corpse to the makeshift cemetery on the hill was immediately lifted as laughter filled the clearing and the tears of joy flowed.

  Still smiling from the memory, Brook cast a cursory glance over the two-foot wall of grass, located Raven on her bike in the distance, and only then did she proceed to break down her stubby Colt carbine.

  She arranged the parts carefully, trying her best not to lose any of the small pieces as she’d done in the past.

  But slow movements and due diligence weren’t enough, and once again a small spring, integral to the operation of the bolt carrier group, squirted from her grasp and skittered a couple of feet before normal friction brought it to a complete halt, in plain sight—black on white—on the corner of the sheet.

  “Fuck you, Murphy,” she said quietly, policing up the part. She placed it close to her and wet a scrap of tee shirt with Hoppes #9 and proceeded to clean and oil all of the applicable components. There was no instruction taking place. All of the younger survivors, Raven included, could now just about breakdown and reassemble any of the firearms in the group’s arsenal, in the dark. So she worked quickly and, using an old toothbrush on the bigger items, scoured them free of cordite residue and small particles of dirt and whatever else had found its way into the weapon’s internals.

  Ten minutes later she had finished the necessary maintenance, and while she put the M4 back together her attention was divided between Raven, who was making lazy laps of the clearing, a shirtless Cade, who was stretching pre-run, and Sasha, Taryn, and Wilson, who were in a far corner near the tree line taking turns with Daymon’s crossbow, firing it time and again at the upper half of a store mannequin they’d brought back from the quarry compound. Though Cade’s newly honed upper body was easy on her eyes, the latter scene held the most appeal. For every time the arrow hit its mark, the flesh-colored upper torso, which was perched atop a long metal pole jammed into the ground, would shake and shimmy like a drunk at a club doing the ‘white guy’ dance. And much to Brook’s amusement, by the time the shooter crossed the open ground to retrieve their arrows—hits and misses ali
ke—the target, as if beckoning the shooter onto the dance floor, would invariably still be moving at a metronomic pace somewhere between a Sashay and a half-assed Charleston. That the creepy armless department store fixture had been hidden in a footlocker along with its stand and anatomically correct lower half complete with shapely legs and a taut gravity defying rear end made Brook wonder not only who had stashed it away there in the first place, but why. The most logical conclusion was someone planned on making their own clothes sometime down the road. But the most unsettling, she conceded after a little deeper introspection, was that whomever had taken pains to squirrel it away in a box and then place that box in a footlocker and in turn hide the footlocker in a dark corner of the buried Conex container had to be a little embarrassed by its mere presence, and most likely had planned on using it in place of human companionship down the road when the need arose.

  She threw a shudder thinking about being all alone in the world with only the dead and her thoughts keeping her company. Like Charlton Heston in the ‘70s movie Omega Man, she knew she’d be talking to herself first. Then, before long, maybe an imaginary friend or two would come into play. In the blink of an eye the nightmarish scenario played out in her head. And unlike Heston in the film and the person whose mannequin was taking a beating, shot through with scores of pinpricks of light to the point of becoming nearly see through, she had a feeling had she lost Cade and Raven she’d jump right past the mannequin stand in for company and instead suck on the Glock and end it all. That would shoot her chances of going to Heaven all to hell if her long-held beliefs rang true. But anything—even Hell or purgatory for that matter—would be preferable to living out her remaining days without her family.

  Just as Brook was securing the carbine’s upper receiver to its lower half, a shrill scream pierced the air. She lunged for a loaded magazine, slapped it home and was on her feet just in time to see Cade running an arm’s length behind Raven’s juddering mountain bike and playfully batting at her windblown pigtails.

  The scream dissipated to nothing. Then, carried on the light breeze, Brook heard giggling and Raven hollering, “Stop it, Daddy. No fair. You’re faster than me.”

  For a moment, the walking dead be damned, time stood still for Brook and most everything was alright in her world—or at least in this little corner of Utah she and her family now considered home.

  A contented smile on her face, Brook set the carbine aside and went to work emptying the three polymer magazines, thumbing all of the rounds into a jangling pile in front of her crossed legs. After wiping an errant bead of sweat off on her white tank, she shook them one by one, rattling any loose dirt free and then blew sharply into each one before finally finger testing the spring’s movement. Finally satisfied her rifle was squared away, as Cade would say, she began the time consuming process of loading the trio of magazines with the ninety loose cartridges.

  Chapter 5

  Glenda Gladson looked at herself in the mirror. Eyes the color of jade peered back. Her face had gone gaunt since the event, a good thing considering her plan. And though she didn’t have a scale in the house—like every female Gladson who came before her she abhorred the things, especially the new unfudgeable digital models—she knew by her reflection, and the way her hips and ankles no longer hurt upon waking, that she’d probably dropped a good forty or fifty pounds since daily forays to the marina for an ice cream cone became a luxury of the past. Scattered atop the white oak vanity and collecting in a small pile around her bare feet were wispy curls of her gray-streaked auburn hair.

  Fighting weight, she thought to herself, wincing as another lock lost out to her scissors and drifted feather-like to the hardwood floor. She figured she was now under a buck fifty sopping wet and all it had taken to get there was an extinction-level event followed by her town being besieged by both the dead and a group of local have-nots turned lawless hedonists.

  Thankfully almost a month back a squad of soldiers in black helicopters had arrived unannounced and decimated the undesirables. The attack lasted less than ten minutes, and by the time she’d fetched the binoculars to watch the action up on the hill the helicopters were taking off again. But the Gods still weren’t done challenging her and Louie. And apparently it wasn’t their time either when the conflagration that first cleansed Eden jumped to Huntsville, driven by a hot summer wind, and burned ninety percent of the town but not nearly enough of the walking dead.

  Eventually the fire burned out leaving the old Queen Anne and a couple of other older homes standing on the hill looking west over a sea of charred timbers and poured concrete foundations, last testaments to the town founded in 1860.

  With all of the homes she was planning on raiding for supplies gone and her stores of food and water dwindling rapidly, she came to the conclusion she better get now while she still possessed enough energy to move and forage. “Yep, old girl,” she mused aloud, still looking at herself in the mirror. “You’re down to the same svelte chassis you flaunted sophomore year at Yale.” She cocked her head and smiled, flashing her straight white teeth. “Look out Skull and Bones boys, here comes Glenda.”

  More hair lost the battle to sharpened surgical-grade steel as a dry rasp emanated from the room beyond.

  “It’s going to be alright real soon, Louie. No more hungering for my flesh every time I walk by.” She opened a clamshell-shaped compact and dabbed the cotton ball in circular motions in the bluish-tinted compound inside. “God knows if I put your current condition out of my mind I start to tingle in all the right places. Hell, Bub, it’s been a decade or more since you’ve shown me this much attention. You hit fifty and your old libido switch got thrown into the not now honey position.”

  The makeup went on smooth, casting her already pasty white skin with a deathly pallor. Paying extra attention to the area around her eyes, she created faux-shadows from her crow’s feet to the bridge of her nose. Wiped a liberal amount on both cheeks, creating the perception that they were sunken even more than they actually were.

  “Perfect,” she exclaimed gleefully after a quick up close look in the compact’s miniature mirror. Snapping it shut, she craned towards the open French doors behind her, rose, and walked stiffly through them and onto the second story veranda to survey the streets below. The odor of burnt flesh so prevalent following the great fires was gone. However, the sickly sweet pong of carrion had replaced it tenfold. But Glenda had grown accustomed to it. And acclimatizing herself to the eye-watering stench was part of her plan and one of the reasons she’d kept Louie around even after it was abundantly clear that help—let alone a cure for the so-called Omega virus—was never coming.

  Thinking about how she came to this point in time, she walked back inside and sat down at the vanity. Unbeknownst to her, the normalcy bias that she and Louie had fallen victim to early on had saved their lives. In fact, when all of their neighbors were descending on the sole IGA store in downtown Huntsville to stock up, the false belief that everything was going to be back to normal—“As soon as the authorities intervene,” insisted Louie—kept them at home on the hill and had ultimately saved them from the roving groups of infected that appeared seemingly out of nowhere the first day of the outbreak.

  But it wasn’t until later that she’d figured out where all of the walking corpses had come from. The close proximity to Ogden and the natural conduit that was 39 was the main contributor to Huntsville’s downfall. First the waves of cars and SUVs full of families, some bringing along their infected, began showing up. Then the soldiers arrived on their heels and inexplicably sealed off the main roads in and out. But by then the damage had been done. The genie was out of the proverbial bottle and there was no putting it back in. So with the numbers of dead quickly multiplying, Glenda had crushed her rose-colored glasses and went with Louie on the foraging run that had sustained her to this point. And when they returned she had convinced the usually reserved Louie to forget about wood putty and repainting the damage and get off his ass and help her board up the wi
ndows and doors on the lower floor.

  That move had saved their lives for the second time in as many days.

  But two weeks ago Louie seemed to lose it. Started showing signs of dementia. Muttering about going to church. Resenting Glenda because of all of the Sunday drives he was missing out on.

  Nothing she’d been through in her life up to that point could have prepared her for the one-two punch coming next. In the dead of night, with the flesh-eaters roaming freely outside, Louie had locked her in their room and went on a stroll to the garage to start the car—“To keep the battery charged,” he’d said later. But all he’d accomplished during the foray was getting bit and somehow finding his way from the garage back to the house alone and confused and bleeding. How Louie escaped the dead was still a mystery to Glenda. And why none of them had followed him inside afterward she’d never know. Because by that point Louie couldn’t name the sitting President, let alone what can of food they’d last shared for dinner.

  Glenda had patched him up and hoped for the best. But the latter wasn’t in the cards. Such a small wound, she’d thought at the time. Louie lasted six hours. Once he ceased fighting Omega and died for the first time it took Glenda thirty seconds to tie him to the deathbed and begin planning her escape.

  Louie’s turn was horrific. He fought against his restraints and snapped at her. In that moment when he crossed the plane from her slack-faced peaceful Louie to hungering-for-human-flesh Louie she decided that he was going to help her survive the dead one last time.

  Glenda blinked away tears and stared at the photo of her sons. Pete and Oliver. Both good boys. When the outbreak started Peter was at his house in Salt Lake City with his small family. Last Glenda heard from him he was venturing out to the Lowes for supplies so he and his wife and their two young kids could ride the event out until help arrived. Oliver, the youngest at thirty, the odd bird in the family, had been habitually out of work and was allegedly hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, and for all she knew, was still alive—somewhere. Carefully, Glenda took the framed photo and laid it face down. She did the same with the most recent school pictures of her grandkids. The photo in which she and Louis were in their thirty-year-anniversary pose received the same treatment, leaving them destined to stare at the vanity top together—forever. Then she retrieved the letter she’d composed earlier and left it on the overturned frames, in plain sight, where it would be easily found.