“Fireworks,” I say, never taking my eyes off of Darlene. “Found some in Eddy’s Drug Store. Thought they’d be a distraction but wound up burning the whole town down.” After a pause, I continue. “It needed to be burnt down.” There’s iron in my voice — a confidence I’ve never heard before.
Just like I’d imagined Johnny Deadslayer to sound in my novel.
Norman laughs, causing me to look at him. It’s the laugh he used to laugh whenever he blamed something on me when we were kids.
No one talks for a moment until Abby breaks the silence. “Hi, I’m Abby by the way,” she says from near the bed. Her shoulders slump and her eyelids sag, but she waves. I think she may fall onto the bed and sleep for a solid eight to ten hours. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Darlene.”
Darlene smiles.
“I couldn’t have done it without Abby,” I say.
“Nice to see you,” Darlene says, then turns back to me. “You should’ve never gone. We should’ve never come here.” The words come out of her mouth like lines from a script she’s practiced constantly.
“She’s been saying that all night,” Norman says. “Good thing you came along. I was this close from dragging her out of here once I saw the fire.”
I stand up, squaring up with my older brother.
He’s got a few inches on me, and a few more pounds, not to mention the Magnum, but I don’t let that scare me.
Abby and Darlene look on like people who are about to witness something terrible.
I’ve described my older brother’s brutality to Darlene many times. She knows as well as I know how I’ve always wanted to punch him in the face, how I always wanted to retaliate for what he did to our family by leaving so many years ago.
But I don’t hit him.
I stick out my hand. He looks down at it like it’s an alien limb. Maybe he was expecting a punch, too. After a moment, he smiles and takes it. We shake hands. I make sure it’s a firm shake, one a military man could be proud of.
“Wow,” Norman says. “You’ve gotten a little stronger since you were thirteen.”
“Thank you, Norm,” I say. “Thank you so much.”
He shrugs. “It was nothing. We are family after all, right?”
“Right,” I agree.
The handshake turns into a hug, one overdue by ten years. Now it’s my turn to cry. I’ve missed my older brother. Him protecting Darlene, the love of my life, erases all he’s ever done to hurt me.
It only took a decade, but Norman Jupiter has finally done right by me.
He hands me the Magnum when we part. “You look like you can handle this better than I can.” He looks me up and down, probably noting the blood and guts and dirt caked to my skin and clothes. “You’ve been on the battlefield. This mission needs an experienced soldier. Think you can handle that?”
I’m hesitant. This is like a passing of the torch. Older brother finally respects little brother. A watershed moment.
“I can handle it,” I say.
Norman smiles a genuine smile I’ve not seen on his face in a long, long time. “Good,” he says, “because you’re gonna lead us out of this fuckin hellhole town.”
I look over my shoulder with the cold iron in my hand. Abby and Darlene have scooted closer together. They are so starkly different. Abby with her mess of brown hair and youthful face — the little sister I never had. Darlene with her ringlets of blonde and those deep, emerald pools for her eyes. The fear is no longer plastered on their faces.
Darlene nods to me, a faint smile on her lips.
“How?” I say, turning back to Norman. “How do we get out of here?”
The light from the fires cuts through the curtains. Smoke has been steadily drifting under the door, filling the room up with an acrid smell and a taste of destruction. The moans and groans of the dead rise to double-dying shrieks of alarm.
“I didn’t park far,” he says. “Had to leave the Jeep on Front Street because of the festival, but if they’re all in the square like it sounds, we shouldn’t have too much trouble getting there. It won’t be any trouble if you’re leading us.”
“We shouldn’t have any trouble as long as you don’t let him drive,” Abby says, smiling. Then she leans closer to Darlene and whispers, “Don’t ask,” as if they’ve known each other all their lives.
“Clock’s running,” Norman says.
I exhale a deep breath, walk over to Darlene, and kiss her more fiercely than I ever have. Then I am at the door, twisting the deadbolt. The group — Darlene, Abby, and Norman — line up behind me. Abby and Darlene each carry a suitcase; Norman has his keys in hand.
I open the door. A wave of heat and smoke wash over us. The group of the dead who almost heard me shout for Darlene earlier must not have liked the fire because they shamble back the way they came. It doesn’t matter, though. The fire is bigger than it has ever been. The flower shop is nothing but ashes. The Barn Door Diner will be next to nothing by the time we get to the car. Blackened bodies lay on the sidewalk, their hands outstretching in a last-ditch effort to claw away from the flames which consumed them. They are indistinguishable save for the shapes of their jaws and the lengths of their bodies. The small patch of trees in the square has lost most of their leaves, letting us see that the fire has no intention of stopping.
The night air glows a bloody red.
“Over there!” Norman shouts, stifling a cough.
I cut through the motel’s parking lot. My eyes squint in an attempt to shield them from the smoke. Darlene’s right hand is latched to my elastic waistband, Abby to hers with Norman straggling behind. We are almost a human chain. Stronger together.
The dead untouched by the flames see us through the haze of smoke, their eyes glinting yellow like gold coins in the sun, and speed up their ragged pace. I raise the Magnum and let loose three shots which are loud enough to topple over the rest of the town. One takes a bullet to the chest. It blows a hole about a foot in diameter in his middle. I can see the charred front of a building right through him. The other shots take off the tops of the rest of the group’s heads. The one with his heart on his sleeve falls to his knees a few inches shorter than he was half a second ago, and slaps the sidewalk wetly.
“That was Billy Francona!” Norman shouts. I barely hear him over the roar of the flames and the ringing in my ears.
“Not anymore!” I shout back.
My shooting arm vibrates with pain. The gun has a hell of a kickback.
When I see the flashing taillights of Norm’s Jeep, I launch Darlene and Abby forward. “Go! Get to the car, I’ll cover you guys!”
Another building falls in on itself, covering the three dead I just shot and giving me a clear view of the hill which Abby and I came down from. Beyond that is the top of the Woodhaven Recreation Center. I see the faint outlines of the flags whipping in the wind.
I hope the fire doesn’t stops until it reaches there, too. I hope the bodies of Isaiah, Earl, Miss Fox, Ryan, and even Pat are cremated, their ashes scattered in the wind. I hope they rest in peace.
Norm passes me, grabbing a hold of my sleeve as he goes by. I shrug him off. The chaos is almost picture-perfect. Something so beautiful, yet so sad. I can’t stop looking at what I’ve done.
“Come on!” Darlene shouts. “I don’t want to lose you again!”
That snaps me out of it, and I head to the car.
Norm is in the driver’s seat, Abby in the front, Darlene in the back, her door still open. The dark road ahead of us is empty except for a few straggling shadows on the horizon — undoubtedly more of the dead drawn out by the allure of bright flames.
“Where are we going?” Norm says. He turns the key in the ignition and the Jeep hums to life.
“Anywhere but here,” Abby says.
“We’ll go through Indiana. It’s where I live, then we’ll hit Chicago. See if this thing has hit the whole country yet,” he says.
I barely hear them because I’m staring at the town square again, watchi
ng the flames dance and consume the buildings and the people I once knew.
Where I grew up is now gone. All that’s left is a graveyard of bones, rotting flesh, and ashes.
Darlene tugs at my sleeve. “Come on,” she says, a hint of panic in her voice.
I crawl into the car, close the door, and she wraps her arms around me. As the Jeep lurches forward, I look out the back window and smile. What our futures hold, I don’t know, but I do know I am with my family, and we have survived. For now.
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the second book in the Jack Zombie series!
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Dead Hope
Chapter 1 -
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It’s been six months since we left Woodhaven. I don’t want to remember any of it, but I know I’ll never forget what happened, not completely.
We have been traveling ever since then. It’s been three days since we’ve seen a car. We sleep in the back of Norm’s Jeep, back seats down, no blanket, no pillow besides our hands. One of us keeps watch, Norm’s big gun, or the Glock I pulled off a dead police officer in a town called Paris, in hand.
We loot like the rest of the uninfected. We hide like them. We run. We fight when we have to.
We survive.
I am on watch this morning. The sun rises in a bloody, red haze. There’s fog outside of the window, almost no visibility. It’s as thick as the darkness that came before it. But I am not as scared as I used to be on these watches. Mainly, I’m tired. Mainly, I’m fed up.
We are parked off some country road in a field, never too far from the pavement. Most of the dead are not out here. Mostly, they are in the big cities, like Indianapolis and Chicago. Each day we have a goal. Something small like, get food, find gas, find medicine, find shelter. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we succeed.
The long term goal has been to find Eden. We are so close.
I just hope Eden is not a myth. I hope it’s real. For all of our sakes.
I take a few deep breaths to calm myself. Behind me, the light snores of Abby, Darlene, and Norm drone on intermittently. That in itself is calming, knowing my friends, my family are still alive.
We first heard of Eden outside of Chicago. From a dying man, not the type of dead who crave human flesh, but a man who’d been gunned down and left as a zombie snack.
Norm slowed the Jeep to a crawl when we saw his signal. In the empty road, painted in blood-red was the word HELP. There was a trail from the end of the P, and at the end of the trail laid a man named Richard. His face was swollen, black and blue. He’d been shot twice in the stomach, and I remember thinking, he’d been shot a long time ago by how festered the wounds had been.
“What happened?” I asked him.
He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t cry or scream for God. He just smiled.
“The End happened. It came fast, too, took society with it. All sense of right and wrong.”
“What happened to you?” Norm asked.
Darlene buried her face into my shoulder. Abby stood as still as a deer about to be mowed down by a semi.
“Couple young men like yourself took what I had, shot me, left me for dead. That’s the short of it. Said they were going to a place called Eden. A place where it’s safe. I laughed at them. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but sometimes an old man can’t help himself. Nowhere is safe.”
He pulled his shirt up, completely soaked through with blood, and showed me his wounds. The maggots squirmed around in the sticky gore. I remember gagging.
“Little did they know they did me a favor,” Richard said.
Norm shot him in the head. I couldn’t do it, and Norm knew that. The man practically begged for it in the end. All that talking and moving got to him, it seemed. We did him a favor, too. No more suffering. No more feeling the maggots getting fat on your blood and open tissue.
Norm and I buried him under some big rocks and a fallen log so the dead couldn’t get to him. It was the least we could do.
Sometimes I wonder if Richard had the right idea. Maybe nowhere was safe anymore, maybe dying was a blessing more than a curse.
I wonder that now as I gaze through the window at the the fog. I see a glint of yellow about fifty feet in front of the Jeep, but that’s all I see, and it’s all I need to see to know what it is.
It’s one of them. The big Z word. Zombie, Dead, Infected, Deadhead, Pus-bag, and on and on.
They are the only ones with eyes like that.
I tighten my grip on the gun. Our ammo is sparse, the thunderclap of the weapon only draws more of them, but if I have no other choice, I will blast this thing to kingdom come.
The engine is not running. The lights are not on. It has no reason to come this way other than sheer curiosity.
I slink lower in the seat until my eyes are barely visible over the dashboard. The yellow glow disappears. It might’ve turned around, might be going the other direction.
The second time we heard of Eden was in Kentucky. We were in a small town with a name I can’t remember — something that ended in ‘ville,’ and not Louisville. The power was still on in this town. This was before The End really took on its full meaning, when the government was still trying to do something about the spread, before the military was completely overrun, before the President and his cabinet were moved to some bunker miles underground — as if it mattered anymore, whenever this disease runs its course, the world leaders will be the leaders of nothing but mass graves.
We saw the sign written on the roof of a barn. It was painted in a shocking white:
GONE TO EDEN. OUTSIDE OF SHARON, FL.
This was almost three weeks after we met Richard on the side of the road. None of us had thought of Eden since then. We mostly just thought of survival.
And after a few stints in places not so overrun by the dead or choked up by perpetually stopped traffic, we had decided, like the birds, to head south for the winter, and nothing sounded as good as Florida in that moment.
“Why does it have to be fog?” I mutter to myself. “Anything but fog.”
Behind me, Norm twitches. His head points toward the dashboard while Abby and Darlene’s are near the back windshield. He thinks he’s being gentlemanly, but really I don’t think either of the ladies care.
“What?” Norm says.
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or if he’s suffering from one of the vivid dreams he so often has. Two tours in Iraq and a man can come back entirely different. So far, Norm’s been all right. Sometimes he vies for power. Sometimes he shouts, “My Jeep, my rules!” when we disagree with the route he’s taken to our next destination. “If you want to go that way then you can walk!” is another popular one, but mostly Norm is all right. Much better than I remember him being when we were younger and still living with Mother. And, if I’m being totally honest, it’s nice to have my older brother back.
“What is it, Jack?” Norm says.
I turn toward him, seeing the sleep in his eyes illuminated by the faint, morning light.
“You already know,” I whisper. I don’t want to disturb the girls.
“Already?” He sighs. “Can life get any shittier?”
I could answer, but we both know what it would be. It’s a resounding yes. Life can always get shittier when the dead have risen and are out for human flesh.
They were calling it The End before we lost touch with the outside world, before the radio turned to nothing but static and religious babble, before the internet went down, the twenty-four hour news networks lost their hosts and correspondents to this sickness.
The End.
It’s simple. Catchy. True.
I like it.
I only wish it wasn’t the
case.
We left Woodhaven without much of a plan. We stopped in Indiana en route to Chicago, where Norm lived. Indiana was lost. Not just Indianapolis, but the whole state. So was Chicago, my 65 inch flatscreen, my Honda CR-V, my collection of mint condition, first edition King hardbacks. Lost. The world, lost. Us, lost.
Whatever they cooked up in the lab at the Leering Research Facility was potent. In six months, last I heard, it had spread across the entire world. America is mostly dark. The power plants don’t run without living bodies operating them. The planes don’t fly. The cars sit in the middle of the road, bumper to bumper, collecting dust. Money means nothing. Food is already getting hard to come by.
“How many?” Norm asks.
I blink blearily. Lack of sleep is catching up to me. I can’t remember if I saw one set of those yellow eyes or two. I close my own, lean forward until my forehead rests against the rear sight of the Glock — rear sight is one of the words Norm has taught me since we’ve been on the road. “One,” I say, almost completely sure of myself.
Norm is no dummy. He reads my hesitation. “Shit,” he says. “One, two, or three. Doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a pack.” He pulls himself up, pats me on the shoulder. “You need to get some sleep, little bro.” He crawls into the driver’s seat. Next thing I know, he’s got a hand full of metal. It’s the big gun he greeted me with back at the Woodhaven Motel, the one Dirty Harry would carry around.
“What are you doing?” I ask. My voice is harsh.
Abby stirs, murmurs something in her sleep.
“I’m taking care of our little pal,” he says.
“He’s gone,” I say. “Let him go.”
Norm shakes his head. He pulls out the weapons he has in a small bag under his seat. These are the weapons which make no noise, which bring no attention to us. The hammer, the machete, the baseball bat, the tire iron. He pulls the bat out. The wood is chipped and stained a dull red. It’s only been six months, but Norm has gotten a lot of mileage out of it. The door opens and the dashboard dings. We have set the overhead light to not come on when the door opens, a lesson we learned the hard way back in Atlanta.
Dead Haven (Jack Zombie Book 1) Page 19
