THE BUZZARD ZONE
By Ronald Kelly
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 Ronald Kelly
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
Ronald Kelly was born November 20, 1959 in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended Pegram Elementary School and Cheatham County Central High School before starting his writing career.
Ronald Kelly began his writing career in 1986 and quickly sold his first short story, “Breakfast Serial,” to Terror Time Again magazine. His first novel, Hindsight was released by Zebra Books in 1990. His audiobook collection, Dark Dixie: Tales of Southern Horror, was on the nominating ballot of the 1992 Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Album. Zebra published seven of Ronald Kelly’s novels from 1990 to 1996. Ronald’s short fiction work has been published by Cemetery Dance, Borderlands 3, Deathrealm, Dark at Heart, Hot Blood: Seeds of Fear, and many more. After selling hundreds of thousands of books, the bottom dropped out of the horror market in 1996. So, when Zebra dropped their horror line in October 1996, Ronald Kelly stopped writing for almost ten years and worked various jobs including welder, factory worker, production manager, drugstore manager, and custodian.
In 2006, Ronald Kelly started writing again. In early 2008, Croatoan Publishing released his work Flesh Welder as a standalone chapbook, and it quickly sold out. In early 2009 Cemetery Dance Publications released a limited edition hardcover of his fist short story collection, Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors. Also in 2010, Cemetery Dance is planning on releasing his first novel in over ten years called, Hell Hollow as a limited edition hardcover. Ronald’s Zebra/Pinnacle horror novels are being released by Thunderstorm Books as The Essential Ronald Kelly series. Each book contains a new novella related to the novel’s original storyline.
Ronald Kelly currently lives in a backwoods hollow in Brush Creek, Tennessee, with his wife, Joyce, and their three children.
Book List
Novels
Blood Kin
Father’s Little Helper (re-released as Twelve Gauge)
Fear
Hell Hollow
Hindsight
Moon of the Werewolf (re-released as Undertaker’s Moon)
Pitfall
Restless Shadows
Something Out There (re-released as The Dark’Un)
The Buzzard Zone
The China Doll
The Possession (re-released as Burnt Magnolia)
Timber Gray
Novellas
Flesh Welder
Collections
After the Burn
Cumberland Furnace and Other Fear Forged Fables
Dark Dixie
Dark Dixie II
Long Chills
Midnight Tide & Other Seaside Stories
Mister Glow-Bones & Other Halloween Tales
The Sick Stuff
Twilight Hankerings
Unhinged
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To the late George A. Romero
who showed me that zombies could be both frightening and fun when I was 14 years old
&
Brian Keene
who reinforced (and reinvented) that dark, shambling apocalyptic dream years afterward.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 1
The sky darkened, black and oily; swirling, turbulent, impregnated with vigilance. It was not a bad turn of the weather promising rain or storm or tornado. It was keenly alive.
Silent, yet ever moving, ever alert for what was commonplace in those dark and dangerous days.
Always with its ravenous eye upon death.
Levi Hobbs stood on the front porch of the old house his granddaddy built on the western face of the Smoky Mountains in 1906, his eyes on the sky. The gray pall that had fallen across the panes of the windows—ones that normally gleamed bright with sunlight at that hour of the day—had brought him to the railing and drawn his gaze upward.
Just looking at that sky—the constant swirling and swooping—caused a man to feel dizzy and disoriented, displaced on the ground upon which he stood… or, in Levi’s case, the weathered boards of the porch. It was nearly hypnotic to gaze upon.
He flinched when he felt a delicate hand rest upon the crook of his right elbow. He relaxed, but not completely, for he recognized it as belonging to the woman he had been married to for nearly thirty-five years.
“The nasty things are thicker than thieves today,” she said. Nell’s voice, once cheerful and full of faith and optimism, sounded weary and lackluster. “We’d best stay clear of town today.”
Levi turned and regarded her. Despite the lines on her face and the gray in her strawberry-blonde hair, she was still as pretty as the day they’d been wed. “We’re going down,” he told her flatly and turned his attention back toward the sky.
Nell’s skyward gaze matched her husband’s. “You know what that means when they gather so close and drift so slowly. You know you can track those blasted zombies—and how many there are—by how many buzzards follow them overhead.”
“I know that. But we no longer have a choice. We’ve put it off too long… two weeks too long. No beans or taters. Down to the last spoonful of flour and meal. There’s no hunting to be done. Ev
ery living thing—deer, squirrel, rabbit, possum—have fled across the mountain in the wake of that horrible stench.” Levi swallowed dryly. “The children are growing leaner and so are we.”
“It’s too dangerous. You can’t eat if you’re dead,” Nell told him.
Levi laughed. A sour smile peeked through the bristles of his black beard. “You know that ain’t true.”
The woman nodded. He was right.
“We’ll be careful,” he assured her. “Get in, get what we need, get out. Lickety-split. Besides, they move like molasses on a February morning.”
“What they lose in speed, they make up for in numbers.”
“Maybe. But we’re faster and smarter than they are… and probably a mite hungrier, too.”
Nell shook her head. “Nothing’s hungrier. It’s what drives them.”
Levi turned around, irritated. “Well, I’m driven, too. By desperation… by the nagging in my belly and the sight of my children slowly starving.” He looked away from her. “Gather the kids. We’re going down.”
Nell Hobbs nodded and turned to go in. She knew good and well not to push the subject when Levi got something set solid in his mind.
This time Levi did flinch, at the slapping of the screen door. He sighed and cast his eyes upon the lazy, counter-clockwise motion of the buzzards one last time. Then he set about preparing for the trip to the valley.
Chapter 2
They came down off Hobbs Ridge in the Smoky Mountains, along the old logging road to Highway 442, toward the cluttered jumble of buildings and hotels that made up Gatlinburg. The little mountain resort town was usually bumper-to-bumper with tourists out to see the fall colors at that time of year, or do some shopping and see a show. But now it was a ghost town. The four-lane street that stretched between gaudy museums, souvenir shops, and pancake restaurants was deserted. The traffic lights swung slowly in the breeze, their three vertical eyes blind and colorless. Only the carcasses of a dozen abandoned cars—as well as those of a few devoured humans—could be seen along the empty stretch of blacktop.
The Hobbs entered Gatlinburg slow and easy. Levi drove the big Ford flatbed logging truck, the vehicle of his chosen vocation… or so it had been before all hell had broken loose. Nell rode on the seat next to him, holding a shotgun—a Remington 870 twelve-gauge—tightly in her thin fingers. Levi had a big Ruger Blackhawk .44 in a holster on his right hip, a gift from his former son-in-law. He had thought the gun to be excessive and impractical… until just recently.
To either side of the logging truck were the twins, Jem and Avery, named after the boys in To Kill a Mockingbird and Charlotte’s Web, two of their mother’s favorite books. Jem straddled a big Honda four-wheeler, while the other drove a John Deere Gator. Both were tall, strapping, and cocky for going on sixteen, but then so had their father been at that age, and still was in his mid-fifties.
A yard or so behind the truck was a black GMC Yukon with white-letter tires and tinted windows. It was driven by Levi and Nell’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Kate. She sat in the cab, hands on the wheel—pale, freckled, her hair as red as rust on a gate hinge. Kate had left Hobbs Ridge after high school, married a blowhard redneck by the name of Bill Franklin, and had lived in the town of Pigeon Forge—a stone’s-throw from Gatlinburg, but a community that was equally smitten with the tourist dollar. Levi hadn’t cottoned to Bill at all. He had always suspected that the man had treated Katie badly and had confronted him on the subject several times. His daughter’s dream of going to college and becoming a nurse had dried up and died after their marriage and she had ended up making a meager wage selling tickets at Ripley’s Believe it or Not. When everything had gone haywire and Katie had seen Bill taken down by a pack of Biters, she had loaded every gun and box of ammunition from her husband’s three gun safes into the back of the Yukon and headed home to the Ridge to be with her kin.
They drove to the third traffic light from the state park entrance and stopped. The only movement they saw on the long, cluttered stretch of pavement was a couple of buzzards picking at a dead body lying on the center line in front of a shop that specialized in airbrushed t-shirts and license plates and cedar-hewn, hillbilly-themed knickknacks.
Their original intention was to roll into town, loot the various restaurants along the strip, and then head back for the hills. They had expected considerable opposition and had come armed to the teeth. They were no strangers to the damage that the Biters could inflict. Following the “end of civilization”—or so it had been called by the news media on radio, TV, and the Internet before the power had finally gone out for good—they had been visited by several of the flesh-eating zombies. Some of them had been neighbors and folks they had known all their lives, but whatever had infected them had changed them into something less than human. They had become things with only one goal… to sink their black teeth into you and eat until you were dead or disabled. And, if there was enough of you left, you would rise from the dead and do the same, mindlessly, without conscience or hesitation. Levi and the boys had killed a dozen or so, much to Nell’s anguish. After she grew accustomed to their ways and what they were setting out to do, she had taken a hatchet to a couple of them herself.
But there, smack dab in the middle of one of the busiest tourist towns west of the Smoky Mountains, there was no one to fight. The place seemed utterly deserted. There were no Biters to be found.
“What’s going on, Levi?” Nell asked him.
“I don’t know.” He laid his hand on the door handle of the truck.
His wife reached out and grabbed the sleeve of his shirt. “Be careful.”
Levi grinned. “Who… me? I ain’t ending up in no Biter’s rotten belly.”
He gently disengaged himself from his wife’s grasp, then opened the door and stood on the bottom ledge of the doorframe, peering over the roof of the truck, from right to left. Nervously, he shucked the big Blackhawk from its holster and held it loosely in his hand, his thumb on the spur of the hammer.
“Keep sharp, boys,” he warned his sons. “They’re bound to be here somewheres.”
Jem and Avery stepped off their vehicles, surveying the empty street. Jem disengaged a broad axe from two clamps mounted on the side of his four-wheeler, while Avery reached into the bed of the Gator and brought out a 4.7 horsepower Dolmar chainsaw.
“You know the sound of that confounded thing will bring ’em down on us like locusts on Egypt,” Nell said through the open window.
“I won’t crank ’er unless I have to, Ma,” Avery promised. He grasped the chainsaw firmly in one hand, while the other held the rubber pull handle, ready to yank.
“What’s the matter, Papa?”
Levi looked around to see Kate standing next to the Yukon.
“You get on back in there and shut the door, pumpkin. Let us menfolk handle this.”
The red-haired girl rolled her eyes. “Give me a break.” She continued to stand there, holding a Glock 9mm pistol in each freckled fist.
Levi wanted to argue the point, but decided not to. If they got swarmed by Biters, he could use every hand he could get. Besides, Kate was good with those guns. Damn good. And she could fire them both at once with deadly accuracy, if it came down to it. If her brief marriage to Blowhard Bill had reaped a single benefit, it was her familiarity with firearms, as well as her ability—and willingness—to use them.
“Are those buzzards still up there?” Nell asked.
Levi looked above him. The constant circling of large black birds, several dozen or so thick, continued directly overhead. “Yeah, we’re still in the Zone.” Puzzled, he looked at the two carnivorous birds picking at the naked arms of the corpse in the road. So why is it just the pair? Why isn’t the whole damn flock down here, fighting over that poor soul’s carcass?
Levi studied the pair carefully. They pecked and worried over the flayed arms of the dead body, but avoided its upper torso, neck, and head. He knew for a fact that scavengers like carrion crows and buzzards tended t
o work on the head of a dead animal first, especially the eyes. They regarded the tender orbs to be a sweet bonus, like eating dessert before the main course. But these two were keeping their distance from the dead man’s head.
Levi lifted his eyes from the two birds and looked off down the street. He squinted and thought he saw movement at the far end where the Ripley’s Aquarium was located. “Avery?”
“Yeah, Papa?”
“You got the binoculars?”
Avery shook his head. “Jem’s got ’em.”
“Here you go.” Jem tossed the pair over the cab of the truck to his father.
Levi laid the .44 Magnum on top the truck and took the rubberized binoculars in both hands.
He was lifting them to his eyes, when a car horn began to blare.
Chapter 3
Levi peered through the lenses of the binoculars, bringing the far end of the street into focus.
He knew now why they had encountered no Biters upon entering the town limits. They had congregated three hundred yards away… perhaps forty of them in all. They surrounded a small car—a silver Volkswagen Bug from the looks of it—and were clawing and gnawing at the metal and glass of the vehicle. A couple had butted their heads against the windshield and side windows, causing the safety glass to fissure in cloudy cobweb patterns. A few more blows and the barriers would give way.
Levi worked the focus adjust with the ball of his thumb, bringing the ugly picture a bit closer. Through the windshield, he could see the face of an elderly man—bearded, spectacled, and as pale as a bed sheet. In the seat next to him was a gray-haired woman. Her head was lolled back and her eyes were closed. She was either unconscious or dead.
Lowering the binoculars, he hopped down out of the truck, the rubber soles of his work boots slapping against the pavement. He looked through the open door at his wife. “Scoot over here and drive behind us, slow and easy. There are folks down there who need help.”
Nell said nothing, but the look in her eyes said the words that echoed in his own mind. Leave them be. Loot the restaurants while the Biters are occupied and let’s get back home. It was a natural thought, born of self-preservation, but it was also a selfish one.
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