State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin

by Martinez, P. S.

  I picked up Michael’s gun from the pavement, tucked in my pants, and stood over him, staring down.

  “Please kill me. Don’t leave me here like this. Let me die righteously,” he begged.

  His words made my stomach turn.

  Even in death the man thought he was some kind of big deal to God. I took my gun out of my pants and pointed it directly at his forehead. After a moment, when the zombies were closer, and when the gun hadn’t yet discharged, Michael opened his eyes to stare at me questioningly.

  “Naw,” I said, tucking my gun back in my pants.

  “I don’t think it is God’s will that I kill you.”

  Michael’s eyes frantically scanned the area, noticing the zombies that lurched in his direction. I threw my backpack in the still-running pick-up truck and climbed in.

  The zombies fell on Uncle Gus. I was sorry it couldn’t be different, but at least he was already gone. I waited until the last few zombies reached Michael where he was trying—unsuccessfully—to crawl away on his belly.

  I watched as they tore him apart and I felt nothing but relief.

  Rose would never have to worry about Michael Hatten again.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Auntie Melody Carter

  Something strange happened as Rose and I made our way out of town.

  We were just about a mile outside of the Army base when we stopped in the middle of the road. Ahead of us there were three undead making their way down the back road.

  Normally I would have sped up and dodged the trio, yet something in the way they looked, in the way they moved, caught my eye. I sat there for a moment watching the zombies, trying to figure out what it was that had caught my interest.

  I shook my head and put the truck in drive, ready to pass them up.

  I must have been imagining things.

  As soon as my foot left the brake, one of the zombies, a large man, so severely bloated that he could barely raise his foot to take a step, just… exploded.

  At first, I was in such complete and utter shock, that I convinced myself I must have misunderstood what I’d just witnessed.

  That perhaps one of the other zombies had somehow attacked the undead man, but they didn’t usually attack one another. Had someone shot the zombie and I’d been too distracted to notice?

  Not likely, and that wouldn’t explain how the corpse had quite literally erupted all over the street like a deranged piñata.

  The other zombies, unperturbed by the sudden demise of their rotting companion, continued their painfully slow progress across the asphalt. While I stared at the huge mess of guts and decaying flesh and bones that was once one of the undead, like rapid fire, two of the other zombies also met their end in a similar fashion.

  It was so sudden and random that I burst out laughing.

  Rose began giggling and clapping, encouraged by my inappropriate bout of hilarity.

  I glanced around the area, into the surrounding forest, and the mostly-empty highway.

  I almost expected to see a cameraman somewhere filming the whole thing, some kind of post-apocalyptic documentary where they go around punking people.

  As unlikely as it might have been, it still would’ve made more sense than zombies randomly and violently bursting apart in the middle of an empty country road.

  Whatever was going on, it might not have been a good thing.

  Who knew what was inside those zombies? If the parasite that started the whole outbreak could live outside of its host and what spewing insides could mean for what was left of humanity? Yeah, time to get Rose to safety. I put the truck back in drive and took off, avoiding the now major mass of carnage in the center of the road.

  When we finally pulled up to the Army base, I had so many emotions flowing through me that I was unable to sort through them. Relief, happiness, grief, and sorrow. Those and so many others.

  So much had happened since I’d left this place, and yet here I was again.

  I’d made it.

  I’d gotten Rose to a true sanctuary like I’d promised her mom.

  I cut the engine, aware of the quietness in the area, most definitely a sign for concern. Where were all the undead? Had they been more vigilant about cleaning out the area since I’d been gone? I got out of the truck, grabbed the baby and our backpack, and turned toward the doors of the office building that led to the underground Army bunker.

  To my left I saw what was left of a zombie. It looked like it had met its end recently and similarly to the ones I’d recently encountered.

  I hurried up to the front of the office and went inside. Nothing was moving. The hidden door in the back office swung open effortlessly. I walked down the steps, holding the baby tightly to my chest.

  My arms were aching and sweat was beading on my forehead.

  I was so tired after days of being on the run, fighting hundreds of the dead to survive another day. It had taken its toll on my body. I felt like something someone had scraped off the bottom of their boots. I punched in the code and sighed in relief when the door creaked open.

  The code still worked.

  I stepped inside, keenly aware of a flurry of activity coming to a complete and screeching halt. Then Melody Carter was standing in front of me. She looked about as rough as I felt.

  Her eyes bugged out of her head when she realized what I was carrying.

  “Tex?” Melody gasped.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” I said with a grin.

  “Ya miss me?”

  She walked over to me, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail and smudges all over her face and clothes.

  She looked like a mess.

  “You look like you’ve been outside,” I said to break the awkward and deafening silence.

  She glanced down at herself and waved a hand in dismissal. “We just got back in from a supply run,” she said, her eyes never leaving the baby, who stared back at her in equal fascination.

  “What about you?”

  “I got a new sidekick since I’ve been away,” I said with a grin.

  I tucked Rose’s toy elephant into her arm and she rewarded me with a smile and the incoherent baby talk that I’d come to love.

  Melody walked closer, reaching a tentative hand out to Rose, only to be treated to a smile.

  She smiled back and ran a hand over the baby’s head, clearly in awe.

  There were no babies in the Army base.

  “Her mother?” Melody asked softly. The question was a painful one to answer.

  “Maria died yesterday trying to make it here,” I said gruffly, swallowing down the lump that had formed in my throat.

  “Come on, Melody, don’t keep the poor man standing there all day. He looks like he could use a shower, some food, and a good rest,” Major Tillman’s voice cut through the silence, effectively breaking everyone out of their daze.

  I nodded my thanks to the Major, who nodded back and turned on his heel to bark orders out to people still standing about stupidly.

  “Sorry about that, Tex, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Melody said in apology.

  “It’s alright,” I said.

  Yet, the truth was, I was tired and I needed to get a shower as quickly as possible.

  I still had a lot I wanted to do before the day wasted away and one thing I’d learned over the past few days was that you had to get while the gettin’ was good, or you might miss out.

  I had a lot of gettin’ to do.

  “Tex, glad to see you, man,” Jude said, walking up.

  He too looked tired and ready to drop, but there was excitement in the air as well.

  “You guys know what’s been going on with the eruptin’ dead?” I asked.

  “Probably about as much as you,” Jude said.

  “While we were in the city doing a big supply run, we were about done for until a lot of the zombies just started self-destructing.”

  “The damndest thing I’ve ever seen,” I agreed.

  “You want me to get someone to watch
…?”

  My hand immediately tightened around the baby when Melody spoke.

  I was going to have to relax a little now that she was safe.

  “Rose,” I said.

  Melody and Jude stood in front of me.

  I saw them share a worried glance.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Her name is Rose. And yes, I’d like someone to take her while I get cleaned up.”

  I handed Jude her bag and her elephant. I held Rose out to Melody.

  I stood there a moment feeling an overwhelming need to snatch the baby back, but knowing I couldn’t. I had things to set to rights.

  “Just you, Melody,” I said roughly.

  “Just you and Jude. No one else.”

  It was a plea and Melody and Jude, both aware now that I was asking them to care for the baby personally, looked concerned and surprised.

  “Okay, Tex,” Melody said.

  “We’ll gladly watch Rose for you.”

  I nodded my thanks and headed away from the trio.

  I had to get my head clear.

  A cold shower would help that.

  And then… then I would do what I thought might be the hardest thing I’d ever done in my entire life, but the truth was, it was going to be the easiest.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Untethered

  I could smell the salty water and hear the waves crashing upon the beach. I smiled widely and leaned back, digging my toes into the damp sand.

  Was there anything better than this?

  A carefree laugh drew my attention away from my sandy feet and the feeling of cool water misting my face as I sat close to the ocean.

  Jessica Germain was there, and beside her was my wife, Alison. They were talking and walking along the beach, the picture of ease and contentment.

  Further up on the shore Maria was playing with Rose, building a sand castle complete with a moat and shovel draw-bridge. I got up off the ground and walked over to Jessica and Alison.

  “What are you ladies up to?” I asked.

  They didn’t seem to hear me and didn’t turn to me. They just continued walking and occasionally splashing the water at each other with their feet. I wondered why it was that they didn’t have anything to say to me, why it was they couldn’t hear my question, but I didn’t let it bother me.

  They seemed happy enough and I was relaxed and enjoying the beautiful day. I walked over to Maria and Rose and sat down beside them in the sand. I laughed when Maria screamed after a piece of seaweed tickled her foot.

  I never thought she’d be such a girly-girl.

  “Make it any higher and the baby won’t even be able to play with it,” I said with a laugh.

  Maria didn’t listen to me either, she just kept building, kept making the walls to the sand castle thicker and bigger. She was done playing with the baby after a few minutes and instead focused all her energy into building the sand castle.

  Rose played nearby by herself, looking up to watch her mom every few seconds. Maria dug frantically around the castle, making the moat around it deeper and deeper until I became concerned that the baby might tumble in and hurt herself.

  “You know, that’s probably deep enough,” I said to the back of Maria’s head.

  She dug, using the wet sand she removed to fortify the walls of her castle. The walls to the sand castle had to be at least a foot thick and the castle itself was big enough to play inside of like a fort.

  The more frantic Maria became, the more uneasy I felt.

  A boom of thunder sounded in the distance over the ocean, pulling my attention away from the sand castle and toward the darkening sky. Nasty looking storm clouds were beginning to roll in insanely quick.

  I turned back to Maria to tell her we needed to get Rose off of the beach and to safety, except Rose wasn’t where she’d been playing. I felt horror and panic wash over me before finding her sitting in the center of the enormous sand castle.

  The sand castle was now built up and reached over five feet or more off of the ground and

  Rose was crying as she sat up at the top, looking down at the beach.

  I swung around to look for Maria to tell her to grab the baby from the castle so we could all get to safety, but Maria was still digging her moat, which was now at least two feet wide and getting deeper and deeper.

  A huge wave roared from behind me.

  I turned, thinking that I had to warn Alison and Jessica when the wave hit the shore with a resounding crash. The waves left a mass of red, foamy water upon the once sparkling white sandy beach.

  Bodies littered the beach in different stages of decomposition.

  Some of the people I recognized. Friends and loved ones, soldiers and civilians. Some I didn’t know, not while they were alive, but they were the hundreds of walking dead that I’d come across and put down over the past two years.

  The ocean ran red with the blood of the dead. Vultures circled overhead and swooped down to feast upon the corpses. The beach looked like a massacre had occurred.

  And it had.

  Jessica Germain was slumped over the bodies of her fallen family. Her open, dead eyes blamed me. My wife was among the corpses as well, along with her mother and father on the beach.

  Another wave crashed upon the shore and the water, murky with blood and floating bodies, washed up around my legs. I stumbled back only to fall into the moat that Maria had been diligently digging.

  The muck reached my waist here. I whipped around to find a way out of the mess, to find a safe haven, but there was none.

  The baby was crying from atop her sand castle and Maria was no longer there to comfort her. She was like everything else on the beach.

  Dead and decaying.

  I held my hands out to Rose, telling her to come to me and let me hold onto her.

  The baby came willingly into my arms, but she wouldn’t stop crying.

  The waters rose up and threatened to swallow us whole as we stood at the tip top of the unstable sand castle. Someone was calling my name. Someone was shouting for me to turn around. I dragged my gaze away from the shore, away from the danger long enough to see that further up upon the shore, further inland was… safety.

  If I had just turned around, just looked past the shore, I might have seen it sooner.

  Melody Carter was there, yelling for me to run, yelling for me to get off of the beach. I couldn’t. No matter how much I wanted to and no matter how much I needed to for Rose, I couldn’t take the step that would’ve brought me off the beach and out of death’s reach.

  Jude walked up behind Melody, put a hand on her arm, and whispered into her ear.

  Melody nodded and with a sad smile, held her arms out to me. I could feel tears coursing down my cheeks.

  No shame in crying.

  No shame in wishing it could be different.

  I kissed the top of the baby’s head and held her out. As soon as I did, Melody was there to scoop her up safely into her arms and move back from the chaos of the shore.

  As the bloody waves crashed around me, pulling me further down into their murky depths, I stopped fighting. For the first time in over two years, I felt like it was okay to just… let go.

  When the waves swallowed me whole, I didn’t have a single thing keeping me tethered to the shore. The thin thread that had kept me there for two years was snapped long ago, and even though the responsibility and love I felt for Rose would never diminish, I knew as I watched her be carried away in Melody’s arms that she would be safe.

  She was going to be fine.

  And that’s all I cared about.

  The murky waters of death be damned.

  I coughed and choked, water sputtering out of my nose and throat.

  I rubbed my hand over my face roughly, shoving my sopping wet hair out of my eyes. Water poured all round me as I stood in the shower stall like an idiot trying to regain my composure.

  I guess it wasn’t enough to have nightmares and vivid memories haunting me while I s
lept at night, now I had to have them while I was semiconscious and taking a shower as well.

  I turned the shower handle until the water turned off completely and grabbed a towel off of the hook on the wall nearby.

  No time to contemplate the screwed up dream.

  I had things to do.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  To Die is Easy

  I sat at a round table finishing up the last few lines of what I was writing when Jude and Melody walked into the conference room.

  Even though I’d requested for them to meet me in the room, they still looked surprised to find me there in clean clothes and with papers spread out in front of me on the table. I folded the papers carefully and put them in an envelope, sealing it.

  “Where’s Rose?” I asked.

  “She’s out like a light,” Melody said, a smile softening her lips.

  “Good,” I said. Poor baby was probably exhausted.

  They both came in and took a seat across from me at the table.

  “What’s this all about, Tex?” Melody asked after a moment.

  Leave it to Melody Carter to cut the crap and get to the bottom of the matter.

  I pushed the envelope I’d sealed across the table toward Melody and Jude.

  “That’s for Rose. One day she’s going to want to read it.”

  Melody looked at the envelope with Rose’s name scrawled across it in my chicken scratch and then back up at me.

  “I don’t understand,” Melody said.

  “Why don’t you give it to her yourself when you’re ready?” she asked, looking to Jude for agreement. Jude’s eyes were on my face though and I knew that what I was asking was probably starting to set in.

  “I can’t, Mel,” I answered.

  “And I’m not only asking you to give that to her when the time is right, I’m asking you two to take her in, to love her as your own,.” I said, aware that my voice sounded rough, like the pain I was feeling was seeping through to my words.

  “To love her like her mother loved her and gave her life for her.”