Zombies! (Book 3): Violence Solves Everything

by Merritt, R. S.

  He couldn’t move. His skin was on fire. Around him a light rain was still drizzling down through what was left of the overhead canopy. He was in a hole that had a few inches of muddy water pooled up in it. He was shivering from the cold while being blistered all over from the heat. He found two water bottles in the bag beside him and slowly drank them both. His lips were cracked, and his face felt like his skin had been pulled hard to stretch over his skull. Every movement brought intense pain. The water burned the whole way down his throat. Every bit of his exposed skin was burnt.

  Everything hurt. He thought of how Tom and Pete had both died and he’d made it this far. Their bodies wouldn’t have survived the fire. Not that they’d ever be ready for an open casket after having their faces ripped apart by starving Zombies. Kyler put both hands on the ground and pushed himself up to his knees. The pain was intense. His body screamed at him to just lie back down and rest. To slip away into the blackness. What was he trying so hard for anyway?

  His body was wracked with coughing. He spit big wads of nasty multicolored bile into the muddy water he was kneeling in. He kept himself from puking by sheer force of will. He didn’t have any more water. He knew he couldn’t risk puking up the water he’d just finished drinking. He only hoped those two bottles would be enough to see him through. He didn’t know how long he was kneeling there staring into the muddy water and occasionally coughing. It crossed his mind that he could either stay there and die or get up and probably die anyway. He didn’t think he had it in him to literally die on his knees like that. If he was going to die anyway, he might as well do it wandering around randomly in the burnt-out woods surrounded by the Zombie survivors of the wildfire.

  He stood up. New sources of pain reared back and slapped him in the face. A solid wall of darkness descended over him. He wasn’t sure if he was standing up or not, but he stayed where he was and just focused on his breathing until his sight gradually returned. He was wicked dizzy, but he was still standing. He took a tentative step. Something felt wrong with his foot, so he sat down on the side of the hole to look. Sitting down felt wonderful but he wasn’t sure how he’d be able to summon the energy to stand back up. He forgot for a second why he’d sat down in the first place. Once he remembered he pulled his foot up to take a look.

  The soles were missing in a few places where the rubber had melted off. The whole shape of the bottom of his boots was warped. The soles of his feet were burnt and bloody. Not seeing how the boots were helping very much Kyler spent the next twenty minutes hacking them off his feet. They were melted on in some spots and he had to resort to hacking away at the sturdy leather with his Gerber knife. Tears of pain leapt unbidden into his eyes as he pulled off each boot. The rubber of the boot soles had melted to his feet in some places. It was like he was ripping the bottom of his foot off right along with the boots.

  He pulled his feet out of the mud after rinsing them around to get the mud off and attempt to cool them down some. He got the medical pack out of his bag and pulled out the one he’d taken from Pete’s bag too. He coated the soles of his feet with iodine and then wrapped them with gauze. He finished by taping them up as tightly as he could before sliding on an extra pair of thick socks he found in his pack. He also found another warm bottled water in the pack. He savored it slowly. It was some of the best water he’d ever had in his life. He used it to wash down a generic Oxy and the first two pills of a Z-Pack. The irony of an antibiotic being called a Z-Pack was lost on him in his pained condition.

  He gave the Oxy twenty minutes to kick in then stood up to start walking. Whatever little bit of numbness he thought he’d felt from the Oxy went away as soon as he put his weight on his feet. He squealed out in pain and sat back down hard on the ground. He let the rain hit him in the face for a minute. He heard something in the distance. It was a Zombie screech. His squeal of pain must’ve been louder than he thought. Not having much of a choice he considered the little pill bottle full of Oxy he had in front of him and palmed two more of the little white miracles. He dry-swallowed both of them.

  He sat still listening to the sound of the rain hitting the woods all around him. He heard other noises in the woods. There were things moving around out there. None came out directly for him though. The one who’d screeched had sounded within fifty yards, but nothing came of it. Kyler’s head was swimming pleasantly. The pain in his feet was forgotten. He’d never been one for drugs. He normally didn’t take more than one of the pain killers the dentist would give you for pain after a root canal or getting a wisdom tooth removed. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. His body was not ready for three of the strong pain killers he’d dumped into his system.

  He stumbled through the woods. Too buzzed to notice the smoldering barbecued bodies he passed. The bodies of the Zombies who’d gotten too close to the fire and been overwhelmed by the smoke and the flames. Covered in mud and stumbling painfully on his bandaged feet through the smoking ruins of the forest with the rain drizzling down he passed by a few Zombies. They didn’t even look at him twice. It was a journey he probably wouldn’t have survived sober and unhurt. His gait would’ve given him away as a normal human. At least one of the Zombies would’ve come at him to investigate and it would’ve been all over.

  He kept walking. He stumbled through the woods until he left behind the fire. He put one foot in front of the other in an extremely drugged state until his exhausted body threatened to give way. He stared at a tree that looked funny until he realized it was a telephone pole. He looked up and followed the wires. A few minutes later he was walking on a paved road. The drugs were wearing off. He felt like every step he took someone was shocking his feet. His pain had reached a level where his brain almost couldn’t deal with it anymore. An oversized mailbox with some sort of windmill thing on the top of it was right down the road.

  He set his goal as the mailbox. He made it to the mailbox and turned down the winding dirt road beside it. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other. He stared at his legs like they belonged to another person. His force of will the only thing keeping him up and moving. A trailer stood in a clearing with a small driveway branching off to it from the dirt road he was on. Kyler set his eyes on the trailer and kept moving. He somehow made it up the stairs and tried the door. It opened easily. The desiccated corpse of an obese woman was draped across the couch in the single wide’s living room.

  Kyler barely spared the cadaver a second glance. There was so much death in his world now that it barely even registered with him. A small part of him realized how messed up that was. Mostly he just hoped the bedroom didn’t have a dead body in it. He poked around in the kitchen until he found a jug of water. Ignoring the cockroaches and spiders he stumbled past his new roommate on the couch down to a door that opened into a crappy bedroom. The woman could’ve stared in any of the reality hoarding TV shows.

  Ignoring how filthy everything in the room was Kyler crawled into the oversized bed with the broken mattress springs. He opened up the jug of water and drank as much of it as he could stomach. Then he lay down and coughed for a few minutes. When the coughing subsided, he drank some more of the warm water. He knew he should try and change the bandages on his feet, but he didn’t have the energy. He put his head back on one of the pillows in the musty bed and fell asleep. His last waking thought being to wonder if he’d ever wake up again or if he was just going to die in his sleep. He figured it was even odds either way.

  He woke up. He wished he hadn’t. He wanted more than anything to go back to sleep. His skin burned. His lungs ached from the harsh coughing that’d been the reason he ended up awake. It was pitch black in the trailer. The place smelled like mold and death. He couldn’t tell if he was covered in bugs or if it was just his skin that felt like he was. He felt around until he found his backpack. He fumbled around with it until he had some pills out. Not entirely sure exactly what he was talking he shoved pills in his mouth then drank as much of the water as he could without puking and lie back down. T
he Oxy kicked in and he floated off into slumber land again.

  He continued that process until he was out of water. He ate the granola bars in his pack. He kept himself comfortably numb with the pill supply he had in the bag. The pill supply was getting close to gone as well. He’d taken the whole Z-pack and started another. He wasn’t sure if he’d been in the trailer for one night or a week. He was assuming it’d been about two days based on how much of the water he’d drank. His feet and face were tender to the touch. He lay in the bed killing off the last of the water.

  He pondered his next move now that it seemed like he might actually survive. His throat was raw. He kept having to shove his face into a musty pillow every time he had a coughing fit to keep the sound from carrying. He didn’t think the noise would carry far enough to be heard by a group of ravenous Zombies but being paranoid was being alive in this new normal. If a gang of ravenous Zombies did show up, he had enough ammunition to take care of the first one or two of them then he’d be Zombie food. His body was in no shape to deal with going toe to toe with any of those insane flesh eaters. He was pretty sure the average seven-year-old girl could kick his ass at this stage.

  He rested. He couldn’t find any more water in the house, so he made do with a collection of two-liter sodas he found. He named the dead woman on the couch Becky and amused himself coming up with reasons she hadn’t ever made it out of the trailer. He marveled at the fact that he was ok with crashing on a dead woman’s bed while her corpse decayed away on a couch less than twenty feet away from him. It was the kind of unbelievably traumatic events people used to make horror movies out of. Now it was what you did on a Tuesday.

  He gradually got better. His goal had been to survive when he dragged himself into the trailer. Now that it looked like he was going to actually live a little longer he found himself contemplating what he should do next. He guessed he could go back to spying but that’d lost a lot of its luster when he’d found out he wasn’t invading the evil empire. It was just another group of survivors trying to survive as far as he could tell. At least that’s all it was based on the group he’d been hanging out with so far. He knew it could be a different story in different parts of Georgia or Florida but what was he really going to accomplish by wandering around spying on people? How was that going to help him?

  The fact that he’d risked his life to come down and spy on these people based on rumors and hearsay now seemed pretty ridiculous to him. What did he owe the group to the north? He owed them nothing really. They’d taken him in and taught him some valuable skills, but he’d repaid them by scavenging and then fighting for them. He’d done the same thing with this group down here in Georgia. The more he thought about it the less he knew what he wanted to do.

  The real problem was all the free time he found himself with to think. It turned out sitting around in a dilapidated singlewide with a rotting corpse in it waiting to see if you lived or died from your extremely painful burns led to a lot of introspection. Up until this point he’d been on the go constantly. He hadn’t had a ton of time to spend thinking about his future. He hadn’t really thought he had a future. Based on how everyone around him kept dying he’d assumed his card could get punched at any minute. Based on his current situation he still wasn’t too sure about lasting out the week.

  He needed to make the most of the time he had though. He owed that to his mom and dad and Mike and all the others who’d raised him. He owed it to the millions of infected wandering the land cursed by a disease he’d managed to avoid. He owed it to himself. With those thoughts in his head he grabbed his stuff out of the bedroom and limped down the hallway to scavenge in the kitchen some more. He realized while he was brushing bugs off a bag of hardened sugar that he really didn’t even notice the smell of decaying flesh any more. The gelatinous blob of dead femininity draped over the cheap sofa barely even registered with him. She might as well be a lamp that smelled bad.

  Opening a pop top of generic canned corn, he sniffed it to make sure it smelled ok. It did so he drank the water out of it then absently chewed on the corn. He’d rummaged through the house looking for shoes he could wear and come up with multiple pairs of oversized socks with the soles of a pair of flip flops taped to the bottom of them. It was a fashion accessory that would’ve made the most flamboyant hobo snicker at him. It was better than walking around barefoot though. His feet were still extremely tender from the burns he’d gotten on them.

  He arranged his pack and his weapons as best he could with his various aches and pains and headed out into the night. His goal was to head south until he hit the road that led back to the base where they’d launched their ill-fated Zombie turning mission from. He was hoping he’d find a vehicle of some sort he could use before then. He didn’t think his feet were going to be able to handle a long hike any time soon. If he happened to find a nicer place to hang out for a while with more supplies in it that may become an option as well. For right now he just felt like he should get moving. He was getting nervous being in the same place for so long.

  He opened the door and cautiously made his way down the uneven concrete steps leading down to the weed infested brick patio. He was feeling pretty good about his flip flop, duct tape, big sock combo. Not only was it super comfortable it was also super quiet. He just wasn’t sure how durable his footwear was going to turn out to be. He hoped they’d last until he was able to find some better shoes in a different house. For such a big woman the lady who’d died on the couch had very petite feet.

  By the time Kyler got to the road he knew he was never going to be able to make it as an amateur cobbler. The foot wraps he’d made were no protection against the hard stones he stepped on. The taped together footwear seemed to reach out and grab every briar and weed he walked past. The tape that wasn’t trying to fall off his feet was busy grabbing dirt and leaves for him to carry along with him. By the time he made it to the paved road his feet were a huge mess. He stopped to cut some tape off his feet and consider the road in front of him.

  If he went left that was north and he’d theoretically end up back with the people from the settlements who’d sent him on this spy mission in the first place. If he went right it’d take him south into the land of the supposed enemy that he’d been sent to spy on. He decided he really didn’t have a huge preference between the two sides. He supposed the settlements had been more of a home to him for longer, so he felt like he owed them a higher degree of loyalty than he did the people down here in the south. Which meant he needed to fulfill his obligation to the people in the north by turning south and making sure the people down here weren’t up to anything nefarious. He also didn’t like the idea of going north and being questioned about why he’d turned around and returned so soon with no useful intel.

  Hoping there wasn’t any truly useful intel to worry about he turned right and started trudging along the paved road. Every step was a jolt of pain through his body, but the pavement was much better than walking through the dirt and the weeds had been. He kept his machete in his hand. His M-16 hung from a strap around his neck. He was down to half a magazine of bullets even after what he’d scavenged off of Pete. Every part of his body hurt but such was life in the apocalypse. He put one foot in front of the other and hoped that’d be enough to see him through.

  Chapter 27: Ain’t No Mountain Tall Enough

  Tony and Randy sat on the large couch in Captain O’Donnell’s office. The couch was a pleather that would’ve been uncomfortable if the typical Florida humidity had its way. The building they were in was covered in solar panels though. The local government having been the beneficiary of some government grants before the apocalypse to try and ease the global warming crisis. If they’d only known what was coming, they could’ve installed machine gun nests on every government building instead of solar panels. Although, Randy mused, the apocalypse probably was the best thing to have happened in thousands of years as far as the environment was concerned.

  With the factories shut down and the largest ci
ties turned into massive burial sites the amount of pollution humanity typically spewed into the atmosphere had been reduced to pretty much zero. This led to some great star gazing. The air also seemed cleaner everywhere. Randy would’ve traded in the pollution free air in a heartbeat to go back to the way things were before. Back to the days when the DVR screwing up and missing the show the whole family wanted to watch with their pizza delivery was a major catastrophe. If only they’d known.

  They’d been sleeping in houses with no power for so long that they’d gotten out of the habit of flipping on light switches when they walked into rooms. The captain had handed each of them a glass of ice water. Randy let the cold-water trickle down his throat in ecstasy. Looking over at Tony he saw that he seemed mesmerized by the ice cubes clinking around in his glass. The captain cleared his throat to get the two of them to look up at him. He looked bemused by their reaction to the ice water.

  “It’s amazing how quickly something like ice has become a luxury. This is the only place where we regularly have it. You guys having been out in the field for so long I can only imagine the kinds of things you’ve seen.” The captain stopped to take a long swig of his own water. Having seen the way Randy and Tony were treating their drinks had made the water taste even better to the captain. It reminded him how easy things like that could be lost. “I imagine you’re both wondering what’s next, right?”

  “Yes sir. I’m hoping it includes being reunited with my girls.” Randy answered respectfully.