The Dead Collection Box Set #1: Jack Zombie Books 1-4

by Flint Maxwell

  I’ll have to smash some brains in, that’s what.

  Doaks advances.

  “Do something, you big oaf!” Abby says — I’m assuming to Kevin.

  I throw the weight at Doaks’s feet.

  Nothing.

  I barely got it there.

  I am not Johnny Deadslayer.

  A chunk of tile shatters. Dust wafts into the air.

  A small chair is wedged under the couch. I pry it free and point it legs first at Doaks. Some of the barricade falls behind me. The moaning seems to increase.

  Doaks hits the legs, but they don’t slow him down. In fact, he’s stronger than I initially thought he’d be. He drives me into the brick wall near the doors. Something circular and metal digs into my back. I hear a beep-beep, then the sounds of motors whirring. The door next to me clicks over and over as it cracks open about half a foot, then closes, blocked by most of the stuff we stacked up here and the tied jump ropes. God forbid a handicapped person can’t open the doors when the power goes out. Really, it was only a matter of time. If one of us didn’t hit the button in here, then one of them would’ve out there. If we would’ve kept quiet long enough for the Army to show up, we might’ve survived.

  Oh, well.

  Shuffling feet scrape across the lobby carpet. The death rattles fill the air. A hand pops through the crack in the doors, then a face with its flesh melting off the bone. Teeth snap like an angry dog.

  Thanks, backup generator. Really, thanks a lot.

  Doaks’s hands swipe at my head. A finger brushes my cheek. I know a scratch will do it, too. I’m lucky he just tickles me.

  “Shit,” Isaiah says. He picks up another plate, raises it.

  A whistle sounds above.

  “Hey, ugly!” Pat yells from upstairs.

  I look up to see his face shrouded in darkness. He holds something silver and bulky in his hand.

  “Not you, Jupiter. I’m talking to your friend.”

  Doaks’s neck creaks as he looks up, fresh blood spills from the wound.

  Pat smiles. I see the flash of his eyes, the gleam of his white teeth. Then the gleam of the dumbbell as it comes careening over the side. It all happens so fast: the splat, the spray of scarlet and bones, and the lack of force pressed up against me.

  Doaks drops harder than the dumbbell. I see the 75 etched into each end of it, covered in sticky blood.

  I’m covered, too. Droplets roll off of my face, down my nose and onto the mess on the floor. “Thanks,” I say to Pat, shaking my head. I never thought I’d willingly thank a Huber in my life.

  “Yo, that’s nasty,” Isaiah says.

  I glance over my shoulder. The teeth are still snapping in my direction through the crack in the door triggered by the handicap assistance button.

  “We have to barricade the doors again,” I say.

  Isaiah throws his shoulder into the couch, trying to drive the thing back into the lobby. I hear more moans, more death rattles. The group from the outside is now inside the lobby. I risk a peek and see about fifty bodies all stumbling and bumbling about. It’s definitely a fire hazard because the sign on the wall, in the background above this snapping freak’s head says the lobby can only house thirty people.

  Isaiah grunts as the couch starts to slide forward. Knuckles and elbows and hands beat on the glass. Soon it won’t hold, no matter how many couches and jump ropes we use. I slide over, careful not to slip in the goo and brains from the thing that used to be Doaks and start pushing my hands up against the couch.

  A sweat breaks out on my forehead. I’m grunting, trying to will myself to get stronger, but it’s no use.

  The knocking grows rapid. To my left, I hear glass break.

  They’re almost in, and we’re almost screwed.

  Eighteen

  The group just stands there.

  “Any help would be nice,” Isaiah says — grunts, actually.

  Nobody moves until Pat moves.

  When Miss Fox raises a finger, points to the wall at the mess that was once Doaks, she screams. It seems to motivate the zombies. They push with a force that Isaiah and I can’t match. We almost fall.

  “We have to fight!” I say to Isaiah.

  He just shakes his head, already knowing it to be true. “Ain’t got much to fight with.”

  “Freddy, we have to fight,” I say to them. “Grab a weapon.”

  “No way,” Ryan, the janitor says. “Those doors open, and I’m gone, I’m running all the way up to Northington to check on my mom and dog.”

  I grit my teeth as a weight plate drives into the heel of my shoe. “Be my guest,” I say. “But good luck, because if this many are attacking us, think of how many are out there just waiting for a snack. The festival brings in like twenty-thousand people. Do you like your chances out there on your own? At least wait until we can group up and fight our way out together.”

  Ryan’s face goes a little pale at that. He knows I’m right.

  “We fight,” Pat agrees, and again I never thought a Huber would agree with me. He holds a barbell in one hand. It’s a shorter one, mainly used for working out your biceps. It has grooves in the middle for your hands. Not too heavy. Not too light. A genius idea. “Everyone go get a weapon,” he says, then looks at Miss Fox with her head in her lap as if she’s going to be sick. “Yes, you, too, Fiona.”

  “We can’t hold it much longer, man,” Isaiah says.

  “Everyone go get weapons!” Pat’s voice booms.

  They rush up the steps. A few moments later, they’re back. Kevin holds a barbell, one of the big ones used for benching and squatting. I think they weigh close to fifty pounds, and he holds it like it weighs five. Abby has a kettle bell in each hand. They don’t look heavy, but they look hard enough to smash a skull. The old basketball player has a couple of the colored dumbbells that virtually weigh next to nothing. Ryan has a broomstick, go figure, but the end looks sharpened to a very fine point. Kind of surprising, and also kind of alarming. Like how long has this creep been sharpening a broom stick, and for what unholy reason? Miss Fox slinks back behind the rest of them, empty-handed.

  “Ready?” I shout as if we have a choice. “We let go, then you and I get armed, and we defend this gym.” I know the gun is somewhere nearby and my fingers itch to use it, but I also know it would be a bad idea. I’m inexperienced. Untrained. An XBOX controller is not a gun, I’m old enough to know that. Besides, together we can hold this group off without bullets.

  “Ready,” Isaiah says.

  I spring forward away from the doors, Isaiah follows. I’m about five steps away before I turn around and look at the carnage. Arms and legs and faces poke through the fractured glass. The doors swell as if they are about ready to explode. The rattles from deep in the back of their throats get louder. “Cover us!” I run up the steps, not looking over my shoulder — too afraid to look over my shoulder.

  The weight room looks like it’s been ransacked. Plates and bars are on the floor, scattered. A couple of benches are overturned. A treadmill belt looks to be off its track. The ellipticals are stacked against each other like fallen dominoes.

  I find one of those twisted barbells with the grooves for your hands.

  Isaiah picks up a set of dumbbells, scooting them over to the edge of the guardrail, ready to drop them on the crowd when they break in.

  Me, well, I run back down the stairs, of course. I don’t want to, but I have to. Even if we all die, I don’t want to die afraid. I don’t want to die knowing that everyone here knew I was afraid. I want them to see me fight until the end. I want to die fighting my way to Darlene, and I’m ready to die for her. I just hope she knows this.

  People scream, and I’m not sure exactly who it is. It’s like a conglomeration of all the survivors’ screams.

  “They’re coming!” Pat says. “Stay calm!”

  Glass shatters. Something that sounds like the couch toppling over and rolling a few feet follows. Then comes the moans, the rattles, all amplified tenfol
d.

  “Heads up!” Isaiah says. He throws over a fifty-pound dumbbell. A fat woman with a Nike visor take the brunt of the weight on the side of her head and left shoulder. She falls to the floor like a heap of bricks. The rest of the dead walk over her as if nothing happened.

  Next goes a thirty-five pounder which misses badly.

  They keep coming.

  Isaiah now comes down the stairs with two of the curled barbells in hand.

  Kevin grunts as he swings his barbell into the face of about five of those things. The blur of metal is nauseating to look at, and the spray of blood even more so.

  Pat is near the front desk, and he’s raising his bar like a wizard raises a staff, bringing it down on the soft skull of the woman who’d been hit with the fifty-pound dumbbell.

  My heart lifts a little when I see the doors. Out of the six, only two are breached beyond repair. The glass is gone and most of the barricade is scattered about, but we can barricade it again. Another good thing about this is that it constricts the flow of zombies to only two doors. Against the backdrop of the waning, yellow sun, I see there’s a lot more than I expected, but if the other doors hold and we continue to fight, we can hold out for a little while.

  My first swing is a large miss. I aim for the head and wind up hitting the hard torso of a guy about my age. He has a smeared American flag painted on his face. Blood runs from his eyes, and his features don’t change when the metal connects with his chest. The hit was hard enough to crack the sternum, and as a matter of fact, I do hear a crack, but it’s as if I never touched him.

  He keeps coming.

  Behind him, three more are walking in my direction. I cock the barbell back again, this time like a man throwing a javelin instead of a baseball player swinging a bat. The end of the dumbbell is round, but it’s still metal. And I crack Face-Paint square in the forehead. His skull splits open. Pink goo oozes from the wound, and he stumbles around like a drunk, before falling over.

  Wow, I really did it, and I’m laughing. I’m officially in one of my own damn books. How surreal. How freaking surreal. I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream.

  Abby rushes past me. “Look out,” she says, both kettle bells in hand. She pirouettes over the crumpled body of Face-Paint. A rush of wind slaps me in the face, followed by a smell of sweat and death.

  The kettle bells come together. It’s a dead man sandwich on iron bread. The old dude who was about three steps from tearing my throat out doesn’t have a face anymore. A spurt of blood flies at me, one that I barely dodge. Then the old zombie crumples to the floor.

  More bodies walk over him, their tennis shoes and flip-flopped feet stomp out the rest of his brains. A guy in a cowboy hat Frankensteins toward me — you know, arms out, mouth hanging open, dead noises coming from the back of his throat — and I swing the barbell up with a metal uppercut. His teeth turn to powder, and he’s lifted off his feet. It’s not bloody or messy, but it’s enough. He falls next to his old friend, unmoving.

  More glass shatters. The ones who can’t fit in through the broken entrance doors now try to squeeze in through the barrier we made against the four exit doors.

  I rush over there, giving Abby a nod. She nods back, spins, and cracks a woman in a bloody tank top.

  Kevin grunts; it echoes high in the rafters. He swings the barbell like a great knight wielding a sword. Metal clashes against tile and wood, and most importantly, skulls.

  A rotten smell is in the air, and at that moment I long for Darlene’s cherry-scented shampoo. Hell, I’d even take her morning breath over the graveyard of piling bodies in the lobby.

  “Push them toward the doors,” Abby says somewhere away from me.

  Isaiah runs over to me. He has the gun, now. “I’m gonna shoot them!” he yells.

  “No bullets,” I say. We’ve come this far without them, we can keep going.

  A face pokes through the shattered window. Black spit oozes from the corners of their mouth. It is a man, maybe age thirty, but it could also be a woman with short hair. At this point, I’m not sure because they all look like each other. They all look dead.

  Isaiah nods, then he flips the gun around and starts hammering that gross face with the butt of the gun. A squishy, squelching sound follows.

  “Now you got the idea,” I say, raising the barbell, poking it through the crack. It’s like playing a horrid game of pool and the heads who stick their hungry, emaciated faces near the window are the cue balls. Blood sprays here, blood sprays there, and the bodies fall. Still, the doors swell as the bulk of the townspeople press against the frames and the couches.

  I glance over my shoulder at the carnage behind us. Lots of bodies lie in pools of blood and sprinkled brains. It looks like a battlefield.

  Fiona stands on the steps, no weapon in hand, like a woman on a chair trying to avoid a mouse in the house. Her face is as white as a piece of paper. For a moment, I feel bad for her.

  Kevin brings the barbell up high enough to almost knock the dead lights hanging above us. Something like a foot stuck in mud fills my ears. I can’t see who he hits, but I see the spray of blood against the glass divider, hear him cry out in horror. Zombie killing is a messy business.

  “Help us!” I shout.

  This time, they all come over.

  Abby swipes the back of her arm across her forehead, smearing red. Kevin jogs.

  Pat, the old man, and Ryan don’t rush.

  I throw my back against the lower end of the couch to stay away from the hands that stick through the broken window, then wedge my feet against a couple of bodies in front of me.

  “Not gonna hold,” Pat says. He wipes away the gunk off the end of his barbell, stepping on dead limbs and faces, not even caring about his tennis shoes.

  “It will if we all help,” I say.

  “Yeah, asshole,” Abby says.

  I can’t help but smile. I wonder how long she’s been waiting for the right time to say that. Working here, she probably has to put up with his bullshit constantly. I give her an approving nod. She could be like the little sister I never had.

  “This is unholy,” the old man says. “In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this.” His eyes take up most of his wrinkled face. He could be in his sixties or possibly his nineties, there’s no middle ground.

  “We got this,” I say, waving him away. It’s hard to talk while pushing backward, but I manage it.

  “You sure, son?”

  “Yeah, just get up there with Miss Fox. Keep her company. Don’t worry, we’ll get this under control,” I say. I think he’s more use to us up there than down here, but I don’t say it aloud.

  To my left, Pat snorts and says, “Yeah, right,” under his breath.

  Ryan chuckles, nodding.

  Luckily, the old man is too old to hear it, or maybe he just chooses not to. I don’t know.

  “There,” Kevin says. I turn to look at him. He’s wedged the huge barbell diagonally under the frame, blocking the doors from opening. Then he runs off. “Hold it just a little bit longer,” he says.

  In about thirty seconds he’s back with three more in hand as if they weigh as much as toothpicks, and he wedges another under the brick arch to make an X, then takes his huge Nikes and kicks them until brick dust rains upon us.

  It’ll hold for the moment it seems, but we really need a plan.

  He does the X on the other set of doors, scooting the couches forward while Isaiah drops any of the zombies who put their faces near the broken glass with a pair of scissors he must’ve grabbed from the front counter.

  “Good idea, Kevin,” the old man says.

  “I guess I’m not as dumb as you say I am, huh, Earl?”

  Earl snickers.

  “All right. Now,” Kevin says, kicking the barbells until his face is beat red and his gelled hair is frazzled.

  We move away from the door. For a moment, there are no sounds at all besides the moaning of the crowd outside.

  Too good to be tr
ue.

  The doors clang off the bars. Bits of brick powder the gray iron, coating it in white, but it holds. The glass is broken and the few straggling dead inside the lobby pile up on the barbells quick. Kevin’s contraption creaks and groans, but again it holds.

  Isaiah comes forward with the scissors and stabs a few more. The little bit of life the monsters have in their eyes fizzle out. I think it’s all on the tip of our tongues that we know these people. I grew up with some of them. I recognized a teacher. A neighbor. An old friend. How much this hurts surprises me.

  But for a moment, it’s quiet.

  We all back away.

  Earl steps forward, claps Kevin on the back who smiles wide in return. “No, not as dumb as you look, son.” Then he says to no one in particular, “Think my wife is gonna be okay?” as he looks out the shattered windows, past the stumbling bodies. “She was making her world famous apple pie for the Bake-Off. I was supposed to see her win the ribbon. All these years and she’s never won. I always say, ’Now, Carol, this year’s the year, I promise,’ and she never gets discouraged when it’s not. I hope she’s okay. Please, God…”

  “Yeah, she is,” I say, thinking of my own future wife. “And so is mine. We are going to get out of here, and it’s all going to be okay.” This time, I mean it because I truly believe it.

  Pat snorts again.

  I try to ignore him.

  “Now let’s get out of this mess and get cleaned up,” I say to Earl.

  He nods, and steps toward Miss Fox.

  Abby looks at me and smiles, “Not a bad first workout, eh?”

  And right as I start to tell her she’s not as funny as she looks, Miss Fox screams. A gurgle of blood explodes out of the mouth of Cowboy Hat who’s supposed to be dead on the floor.

  Earl falls like a man who’s stepped into a bear trap. I can’t tear my eyes away from the wave of red that spurts from his leg.

  It’s too late.

  Nineteen