State of Ruin
A “State Of” Novel
by Peggy Martinez
ONE DARK HORSE PRESS
STATE OF RUIN
A “State Of” book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © P.S. Martinez/Peggy Martinez 2014
Cover design by Dean Samed
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used fictionally. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Table of Contents
Prologue: Hell in a Hand Basket
Chapter One: Zombies in Dreamland
Chapter Two: Pineville Welcomes You
Chapter Three: Camp Victory
Chapter Four: Not Again
Chapter Five: Welcome to the 19th Century
Chapter Six: Cult Mingle.com
Chapter Seven: Little Chapel of Horrors
Chapter Eight: Run. Run. Fast as You Can
Chapter Nine: A Huntin’ We Will Go
Chapter Ten: No Other Way
Chapter Eleven: Escape Plan
Chapter Twelve: Final Supper
Chapter Thirteen: One Bad Mother
Chapter Fourteen: Zombies Go Splat
Chapter Fifteen: It Could Be Worse, Right?
Chapter Sixteen: We Do What We Have to Do
Chapter Seventeen: We All Die in the End
Chapter Eighteen: Apocalyptic Kiddie Brigade
Chapter Nineteen: Warren. . . Peace?
Chapter Twenty: Loot, Shoot, and Scoot
Chapter Twenty-One: Welcome to the New World
Chapter Twenty-Two: What Comes Next?
Chapter Twenty-Three: Hope Against the Odds
Chapter Twenty-Four: Into the Belly of the Beast
Chapter Twenty-Five: Never Have Been Lucky
Chapter Twenty-Six: Midtown, North Carolina
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Auntie Melody-Carter
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Untethered
Chapter Twenty-Nine: To Die is Easy
Chapter Thirty: The Hard Part
Chapter Thirty-One: Promises, Promises
Chapter Thirty-Two: Texas Pink, Texas Tough
Epilogue
Prologue
Hell in a Handbasket
Zombies here. Zombies there. Zombies everywhere.
I was tired of all the death and tired of all the killing, but what choice did I have when the entire world had gone to Hell in a handbasket? It was kill or be killed.
A man-eat-man world now. And if that ain’t screwed up enough, it’s a living-take-advantage-of-the-living world as well.
It’s been nearly a year since the world changed.
A year since a man on a trip to a remote South African jungle with the Peace Corps unknowingly brought a microscopic, organ-feasting organism into the US.
Patient 001, a cancer patient, and unaware of his deadly hitchhiker, went through a series of chemotherapy treatments, causing the parasite to mutate and spread. Fueled by the direct exposure to the chemo and helped along by the electromagnetic chaos emitted by technology on every city corner in Chicago, the organism spread out of control and killed off nearly eighty percent of the population.
The worst was yet to come though.
Once the host died, the parasites were able to act as a stimuli in the corpses’ brainstem, causing the host to “reanimate”, thus turning them into mindless, flesh-eating marionettes.
Some people would say this is the beginning of the end for humanity. That fighting a losing battle isn’t worth the trouble.
They’d be wrong.
I might be from a tiny, Podunk town in Texas, but I’m smart enough to realize the odds of survival ain’t so great for the living. That doesn’t mean I’ll go down without a fight. The world might end.
Humanity could cease to exist. But if I’m sure of anything, it is that any life worth living is worth fighting for… and I plan to do exactly that.
That was back when I still had hope.
When I still thought the world could be saved. Back before I lost so many people I cared about. Before I realized that death was a cruel bitch, not caring who or what she destroyed.
I miss the noise more than anything else.
Funny how the one thing I absolutely hated and frequently complained about is the one thing I miss the most now that the world has come to an end. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t wish for everything to stop, for all the useless noise to just… cease.
And now that it has, I find the silence that has filled the void the noise left behind to be the most disturbing thing of all. Now that the world has ended, I miss those things. Those things that let me know life was happening all around me.
Cars have stopped zooming, phones have stopped ringing, music has stopped playing, and children have stopped laughing.
The only thing left behind is silence.
Silence is not a good companion for the living.
Even more disturbing than the surrounding silence are the sounds that have replaced the echoes of life in this terrible new world: the macabre impersonation of the sounds of the living. Instead of an exhalation of breath, there is a sort of rattling of air. Instead of talking and laughing, whispering and singing, there is moaning, snapping teeth, and gurgling. Instead of walking, driving, skipping, and running, there is dragging and crunching, shuffling and scraping.
There is movement and there are even noises, but there is no life.
Where there is no life, there is no hope.
I have found that my hope has all but deserted me.
And without hope, what is there worth living for?
It was when I realized I had no reason left to live and no reason left to fight that I found myself wondering if it would be better to cease to exist entirely. It would be easier, certainly. Peaceful even.
Then my mama’s voice echoed inside my head telling me in no uncertain terms that she didn’t raise no coward, she didn’t raise her boy to give up when the goin’ got tough.
She didn’t raise no quitter.
I may have lost all my hope, but all hope was not lost. I may not have any hope left for myself, but I may have been someone else’s last hope. I just needed to move on. I needed to get back to the people who inspired me.
Back to the one place where I felt hope might still be alive.
I stepped back away from the ledge of the once beautiful two-story Victorian home and pulled the earplugs out of my ears. The sound of Johnny Cash’s voice was immediately replaced by the sounds of the horde of undead that reached out to me from below the ledge that I stood on, waiting for me to take that step that I had moments earlier been so close to taking.
The sounds of the zombies mingled with their putrid stench and wafted up to me. I took another step back, grabbed my bag, and pulled out my blade.
Keep fighting it was then.
Thanks, Mama.
I pushed the earphones back into my ears and let the sounds of Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ drown out the moans, scraping, and gurgling. I made my way down the stairs of the building I’d gone into to die and cranked up my music full blast.
Johnny came through for me once again as
I listened to him ramble about ‘the train a comin’, ‘rolling round the bend’ and how he ‘ain’t seen the sunshine since he don’t know when,’ he was stuck in Folsom Prison and time kept draggin’ on.
I let the music drown out everything; the sounds, the smells, and even the familiar feeling I’d get lately when I’d step out into the world with a knife in my hand and my jaw clenched in determination.
That feeling that this was all there was left.
Fighting. Killing. Surviving.
Lather, rinse, and repeat.
This couldn’t be all that there was left.
I shoved a knife into a faceless corpse.
It couldn’t be, I sent out as a whisper into the universe.
Chapter One
Zombies in Dreamland
“Thirty-three bottles of Jack on the wall, thirty-three bottles of Jack. Take one down, pass it around, thirty-two bottles of Jack on the wall.”
My off-key voice echoed through the truck as I drove down the deserted highway, the bottle of Jack Daniels that I’d scavenged from a convenience store about twenty miles back safely ensconced in the passenger’s seat.
Yeah buddy, me and Jack had a date tonight.
It had only been about six weeks since I’d left the group back at the Army base.
Six weeks that I’d been on my own out in the midst of the infected.
It felt like it had been an eternity. I like to think I was finding myself, that I was going to come out of this adventure and look back to see all the little things I’d learned about who I really am and used it to become a better person.
The truth was that I was lonely and I hadn’t learned a damned thing except the dead weren’t good company. I felt like a complete jackass.
So here I was headed back in the direction I never should have left.
Back to the Army base and back to my group.
It was getting late in the day and if I had learned anything over the last few weeks, it was that I didn’t want to be out and about, driving or otherwise, after dark. I drove twenty more minutes on the highway until I found a suitable turnoff.
When I pulled into a gas station right outside of the nearest town, I was glad to find only a handful of zombies and a store that still had its windows in place.
I didn’t have it in me to clear out a bunch of undead before bunking down for the night.
Before the truck had even come to a complete stop, several rambling corpses lurched in my direction. I pulled my knife from its sheath and opened my door, instantly moving toward the decaying zombies.
My arm swung in a killing arc, a movement as natural to me as breathing now. The blade caught the zombie in the left eye, stilling its reanimated body for good. When I yanked my hand back, the blade came free with a lot of crunching and sloshing, the sound of tiny bone fragments and decomposing organs coming free from the rotting layers of skin it had been a prisoner of.
“Son of a bitch,” I growled beneath my breath.
My stomach wanted to revolt, but I didn’t allow it. I clenched my jaw and dropped two more of the zombies before I had too much time to think about the sounds and the smells.
You think I’d be used to this shit by now.
You’d be wrong.
I hoped I never got used to it, I hoped my stomach would always revolt, and I hoped I always remembered how it used to be just a barely a year ago. Some days remembering was easier than others.
Today was not one of those days.
Three more dispatched zombies later, I pulled my pack out of my vehicle and shoved the bottle of Jack Daniels in it. The store was easy enough to break into seeing as how the door wasn’t even locked. It had been ransacked long ago by the looks of it.
I went to work immediately to make the building as secure as possible. I moved shelving against the glass door and large front window before cleaning out the space behind the register to sleep for the night. The back door to the store was still locked.
It would be an easy way out if zombies somehow got into the store and things got hairy.
When darkness finally fell, I sunk down onto my sleeping bag behind the register area. I took off the black cowboy hat I’d taken to wearing since I’d been on my own and sat it on a shelf nearby. I didn’t usually feel so sorry for myself and though I wasn’t a big drinker, I could handle my liquor.
Any southern boy worth his salt could.
I took a swig of Jack Daniels, ignoring how it burned as it went down.
Tonight I just wanted to forget. I just wanted to blur all the memories, all of the pain, and all of the death into a barely recognizable dream. I’d gotten a quarter of the way through the bottle before everything started getting fuzzy.
I got halfway through the bottle before I was numb enough to nod off into dreamland.
Dreamland sure as hell ain’t what it used to be.
*
It would be nice if a person could actually be aware that they were dreaming instead of becoming caught up in the panic and heart-racing events unfolding in front of their dream-self, unable to do anything to change them. It is especially hard when dreams morph different times, different people, and different events into one pulse-pounding nightmare.
My wife stood in front of me, her arms outstretched to me, beckoning me to come to her. She wore jeans and a white tee shirt with a pretty floral scarf around her neck. I smiled to myself.
She looked as beautiful as the day I married her. I raised my hand to her, but instead of strong arms opened to welcome her into them, as I had done so many times before, my arms were dirty and battered.
My fist clenched around a long, serrated blade coated in blood and chunks of rotting flesh.
I was running to her, wanting to protect her from the undead and the horrors of the world, but as I moved, my adrenaline surged in anticipation of the kill and… it brought a grin to my lips. My wife’s eyes widened in terror and her hands came up in a defensive pose, though not before a blade embedded itself into her skull.
I bellowed out my rage as her eyes went milky and blood poured down her face. I tried to reach out my hand to comfort her, to comfort myself, but it was already busy. I glanced up at the knife in my wife’s skull and realized instantly why I couldn’t move my hand to help her.
It was my hand gripping the handle of the blade protruding from my wife’s skull. It was my hand holding the weapon in a death grip and twisting it deeper into the place where I’d lodged it.
I could feel the wet and sticky blood as it still pumped from the fresh wound.
“This isn’t your fault.”
I dragged my gaze away from the scarlet wound that I’d created and found my wife’s undead gaze on me. I flinched, keeping my hand around the blade I’d used on her.
“It’s not your fault that I’m dead. It’s not your fault that I turned, Tex.”
Her breath whispered across my face. Instead of the cinnamon flavored toothpaste she was fond of, the scent of putrid innards assaulted my nostrils. My eyes widened though I kept my emotions in check.
I couldn’t break down.
Not now. Not ever.
“I failed you,” I whispered.
The blood oozed from the gaping wound in her frontal lobe.
When I looked back down at her, she was no longer there. Instead, Jessica Germain stood before me. I glanced down at myself and barely recognized the clean uniform I’d worn on a daily basis while working with her dad.
It seemed like another lifetime ago.
Jessica was just like she’d been back before she’d become the hardened militia leader that had taken over the Charlotte Army base. Her hair was long and blonde, hanging down her back. Her face was as carefree as any teenager’s should be and her clothing matched her girly demeanor.
“Everything could have been so different,” she said as she twisted her finger in her pale hair.
My jaw hardened. I’d failed her as well.
If I could’ve gotten her family into the base… if I could
have snuck them in or if I’d had a little more time before the base had gone on lockdown, maybe I could have helped them.
“You couldn’t have done anything, Tex. This is how it was all supposed to happen.”
Her eyes glazed over a bit just as a shot sounded and a bullet entered her forehead. I didn’t move, only watched the back of her skull explode behind her and blood pour across her nose and down her body.
“I didn’t want to have to do that.”
I turned just enough to see Melody Carter with a gun still pointed at Jessica approach me.
“I never wanted any of this,” she muttered in disgust.
“None of us did,” I answered.
“It’s the shitty hand we’ve been dealt.” She looked over at me and grinned.
“You look like hell, Tex.”
I grunted and glanced down at myself. I was back to wearing gore-splattered jeans, a tee shirt, and my black cowboy hat. A bottle of Jack Daniels was tipped over at our feet.
“I’ve felt better,” I admitted.
She put a hand out and touched my arm.
“Zombies and a bottle of Jack?” She raised a brow.
“Probably not your best idea,” she stated matter-of-factly.
I sputtered a laugh. “Probably not.”
“You need to get your crap together, Tex. The world needs men like you more than ever.”
I shook my head. Had she not been paying attention? I failed everyone. The world needed a whole lot better than what I had to offer.
“You’re wrong, Tex. You’re exactly the kind of man this world needs.”
She smiled again and took a step back. When I reached my hand out, she shook her head.
“Your problems, your journey. Your choice.”
I frowned down at the bottle on the ground and reached for my head. Noises were beginning to filter through my groggy brain and a hammer was battering mercilessly on my skull.
I flinched and glanced back up at Mel’s retreating form.
“Wake up, Tex. Now!”
State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin Page 1