Darlene smiles.
“I couldn’t have done it without Abby,” I say.
“Nice to see you,” Darlene says, then turns back to me. “You should’ve never gone. We should’ve never come here.” The words come out of her mouth like lines from a script she’s practiced constantly.
“She’s been saying that all night,” Norman says. “Good thing you came along. I was this close from dragging her out of here once I saw the fire.”
I stand up, squaring up with my older brother.
He’s got a few inches on me, and a few more pounds, not to mention the Magnum, but I don’t let that scare me.
Abby and Darlene look on like people who are about to witness something terrible.
I’ve described my older brother’s brutality to Darlene many times. She knows as well as I know how I’ve always wanted to punch him in the face, how I’ve always wanted to retaliate for what he did to our family by leaving so many years ago.
But I don’t hit him.
I stick out my hand. He looks down at it like it’s an alien limb. Maybe he was expecting a punch, too. After a moment, he smiles and takes it. We shake. I make sure it’s a firm shake, one a military man could be proud of.
“Wow,” Norman says. “You’ve gotten a little stronger since you were thirteen.”
“Thank you, Norm,” I say. “Thank you so much.”
He shrugs. “It was nothing. We are family after all, right?”
“Right,” I agree.
The handshake turns into a hug, one overdue by many years. Now it’s my turn to cry. I’ve missed my older brother. Him protecting Darlene, the love of my life, erases all he’s ever done to hurt me.
It only took forever, but Norman Jupiter has finally done right by me.
He hands me the Magnum when we part. “You look like you can handle this better than I can.” He looks me up and down, probably noting the blood and guts and dirt caked to my skin and clothes. “You’ve been on the battlefield. This mission needs an experienced soldier. Think you can handle that?”
I’m hesitant. This is like a passing of the torch. Older brother finally respects little brother. A watershed moment.
“I can handle it,” I say.
Norman smiles a genuine smile I’ve not seen on his face in a long, long time. “Good,” he says, “because you’re gonna lead us out of this fuckin hellhole town.”
I look over my shoulder with the cold iron in my hand. Abby and Darlene have scooted closer together. They are so starkly different. Abby with her mess of brown hair and youthful face — the little sister I never had. Darlene with her ringlets of blonde and those deep, emerald pools for her eyes. The fear is no longer plastered on their faces.
Darlene nods to me, a faint smile on her lips.
“How?” I say, turning back to Norman. “How do we get out of here?”
The light from the fire cuts through the curtains. Smoke has been steadily drifting under the door, filling the room up with an acrid smell and a taste of destruction. The moans and groans of the dead rise to double-dying shrieks of alarm.
“I didn’t park far,” he says. “Had to leave the Jeep on Front Street because of the festival, but if they’re all in the square like it sounds, we shouldn’t have too much trouble getting there. It won’t be any trouble if you’re leading us.”
“We shouldn’t have any trouble as long as you don’t let him drive,” Abby says, smiling. Then she leans closer to Darlene and whispers, “Don’t ask,” as if they’ve known each other all their lives.
“Clock’s running,” Norman says.
I exhale a deep breath, walk over to Darlene, and kiss her more fiercely than I ever have. Then I am at the door, twisting the deadbolt. The group — Darlene, Abby, and Norman — line up behind me. Abby and Darlene each carry a suitcase; Norman has his keys in hand.
I open the door. A wave of heat and smoke wash over us. The group of the dead who almost heard me shout for Darlene earlier must not have liked the fire because they shamble back the way they came. It doesn’t matter, though. The fire is bigger than it has ever been. The flower shop is nothing but ashes. The Barn Door Diner will be next to nothing by the time we get to the car. Blackened bodies lie on the sidewalk, their hands outstretching in a last-ditch effort to claw away from the flames which consumed them. They are indistinguishable save for the shapes of their jaws and the lengths of their bodies. The small patch of trees in the square has lost most of their leaves, letting us see that the fire has no intention of stopping.
The night air glows a bloody red.
“Over there!” Norman shouts, stifling a cough.
I cut through the motel’s parking lot. My eyes squint in an attempt to shield them from the smoke. Darlene’s right hand is latched to my elastic waistband, Abby to hers with Norman straggling behind. We are almost a human chain. Stronger together.
The dead untouched by the flames see us through the haze of smoke, their eyes glinting yellow like gold coins in the sun, and speed up their ragged pace. I raise the Magnum and let loose three shots which are loud enough to topple over the rest of the town. One takes a bullet to the chest. It blows a hole about a foot in diameter in his middle. I can see the charred front of a building right through him. The other shots take off the tops of their heads. The one with his heart on his sleeve falls to his knees a few inches shorter than he was half a second ago, and slaps the sidewalk wetly.
“That was Billy Francona!” Norman shouts. I barely hear him over the roar of the flames and the ringing in my ears.
“Not anymore!” I shout back.
My shooting arm vibrates with pain. The gun has a hell of a kick.
When I see the flashing taillights of Norm’s Jeep, I launch Darlene and Abby forward. “Go! Get to the car, I’ll cover you guys!”
Another building falls in on itself, burying the three dead I just shot and giving me a clear view of the hill which Abby and I came down from. Beyond that is the top of the Woodhaven Recreation Center. I see the faint outlines of the flags whipping in the wind.
I hope the fire doesn’t stop until it reaches there, too. I hope the bodies of Isaiah, Earl, Miss Fox, Ryan, and even Pat are cremated, their ashes scattered in the wind. I hope they rest in peace.
Norm passes me, grabbing ahold of my sleeve as he goes by. I shrug him off. The chaos is almost picture-perfect. Something so beautiful, yet so sad. I can’t stop looking at what I’ve done.
“Come on!” Darlene shouts. “I don’t want to lose you again!”
That snaps me out of it, and I head to the car.
Norm is in the driver’s seat, Abby in the front, Darlene in the back, her door still open. The dark road ahead of us is empty except for a few straggling shadows on the horizon — undoubtedly more of the dead drawn out by the allure of bright flames.
“Where are we going?” Norm says. He turns the key in the ignition and the Jeep hums to life.
“Anywhere but here,” Abby says.
“We’ll go through Indiana. It’s where I live, then we’ll hit Chicago. See if this thing has hit the whole country yet,” he says.
I barely hear them because I’m staring at the town square again, watching the flames dance and consume the buildings and the people I once knew.
Where I grew up is now gone. All that’s left is a graveyard of bones, rotting flesh, and ashes.
Darlene tugs at my sleeve. “Come on,” she says, a hint of panic in her voice.
I crawl into the car, close the door, and she wraps her arms around me. As the Jeep lurches forward, I look out the back window and smile. What our futures hold, I don’t know, but I do know I am with my family, and we have survived. For now.
Dead Hope
Jack Zombie #2
People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse.
There is hope, therefore I live.
Stephen King, Revival
One
It’s been si
x months since we left Woodhaven, and I don’t want to remember any of it — the chaos, the dead friends, the enemies, or the pain. But I know I’ll never forget. Never truly forget. Every part of this crumbling world is a reminder.
We haven’t stopped traveling, haven’t stopped searching for a new home. It’s been three days since we’ve seen a working car. We sleep in Norm’s Jeep, back seats down, no blanket, no pillow besides our hands. One of us keeps watch, Norm’s big gun or the Glock I pulled off a dead police officer from a town called Paris nearby.
Those not infected by this disease have taken to looting, running, and hiding. My group is no different. We do what we have to do to survive.
We have to.
I am on watch this morning. The sun rises in a bloody, red haze. There’s fog outside of the window, almost no visibility. It’s as thick as the darkness that came before it, but I am not as scared as I used to be on these watches. Mainly, I’m tired. Mainly, I’m fed up. Fed up because the way we live is not life. I’m tired of having to watch my back, having to make sure no one does anything stupid. I’m tired of scavenging for my food like a caveman. I’m tired, just too damn tired.
We are parked off some country road in a field, never too far from the pavement. Most of the dead are not out here. Mostly, they are in the big cities, like Indianapolis and Chicago. Each day we have a goal. Something small like get food, find gas, find medicine, find shelter. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we succeed.
The long term goal has been to find Eden. We are so close.
I just hope Eden is not a myth. I hope it’s real. For all of our sakes.
I take a few deep breaths to calm myself. Behind me, the light snores of Abby, Darlene, and Norm drone on intermittently. That in itself is calming, knowing my friends, my family, are still alive.
We first heard of Eden outside of Chicago. From a man who’d signed his death certificate not long before we stumbled upon him. He had been shot in the gut, and left for the crows, but I think the zombies would have gotten to him first if we hadn’t.
Norm slowed the Jeep to a crawl when we saw his signal. In the empty road, painted in blood-red was the word HELP. There was a trail from the end of the P, and at the end of the trail laid a man named Richard. His face was swollen, black and blue. He’d been shot twice, once in the stomach and once in the shoulder. His wounds were already festering, the flies and the maggots surely not far off.
“What happened?” I asked him.
He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t cry or scream for God. He just smiled.
“The End happened. It came fast, too, took society with it. All sense of right and wrong.”
The man spoke true. It did come fast, almost in the blink of an eye. There’s an old saying: Your life can turn on a dime. I never fully understood that saying until I watched our society fall. It toppled over like dominoes, each major city ravaged and ransacked, too fucked for the government to implement quarantines or blockades. I remember hearing about Los Angeles, how it was so overrun, they had to drop bombs on the city. Then it was D.C., New York, Dallas….everywhere. So yeah, The End happened, all right.
But that’s not what we wanted to know.
“What happened to you?” Norm asked.
Darlene buried her face into my shoulder. Abby stood as still as a deer about to be mowed down by a semi.
“Couple young men like yourself took what I had, shot me, left me for dead. That’s the short of it. Said they were going to a place called Eden. A place where it’s safe. I laughed at them. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but sometimes an old man can’t help himself. Nowhere is safe.”
He pulled his shirt up, completely soaked through with blood, and showed me his wounds. I remember gagging.
“Little did they know they did me a favor,” Richard said. I remembered getting a bitter taste in my mouth because there is always hope. Even if the world has gone to shit, there is still hope.
Now, my hope is dwindling.
Norm and I took Abby and Darlene aside, and Darlene asked if there was anyway to help him. I knew there wasn’t. The only way to help him was to put him down, put him out of his misery, forget about it, and move on. But I couldn’t say it.
Luckily, Norm could.
He patted the Magnum on his hip. “Yeah, darling.”
“No,” Darlene said. “No, we can’t do that. We aren’t murderers.”
“Would you call a vet who sticks a death-needle into a sick dog a murderer?”
Darlene didn’t answer, but eyed my older brother as if she hated him.
“Yeah, thought not,” Norm said. He looked to me, then to Abby. “All settled then?”
“You can’t!” Darlene shouted.
I put my hand on her arm, and gave her a solemn nod.
“It’d be worse of us to just leave him here, Darlene. He’d suffer. We can’t let him suffer,” I said.
“Always the brains of the family,” Norm said. “Guess it’s settled.” He turned to head back to the side of the road where a man named Richard slowly bled out from multiple gunshot wounds.
“Wait,” I said. “Let me do it.”
Norm gave me a half-smile as if he was both proud and a little unsettled. “All right, little brother.” He handed me the Magnum. I took it and I swear it never felt heavier than it did in that moment. The deaths before all of this, those had be justified. Pat Huber was a murderer, his son was a zombie. This? Well, this was a first step into a very dark world.
I went over to Richard, my legs quivering, my arm feeling like it held a fifty-pound dumbbell in hand. He looked up at me as I aimed the barrel at his head. The waning sun illuminated the dried blood on the corners of his mouth. “Thank you,” he said and closed his eyes.
I closed my own eyes, felt the trigger brush up against my finger. That bad taste invaded my mouth again.
Richard had begun praying, his lips moving fast, his eyes still closed. I couldn’t catch the words, just a series of hisses. The gun shook violently in my hand. I couldn’t do it. I could not kill a man who I didn’t know deserved to die. I let the gun fall and began to turn, but Norm was there as he was in Woodhaven. He took the Magnum out of my grip, gave me an understanding nod. I couldn’t even watch. I turned my back to the scene, looking at Darlene and Abby across the way, and when the gun clapped, my eyes didn’t even blink.
Norm shot him in the head. I remember hearing the echo of the gun in the dead town down the road, then I remember the thud of his body hitting the grass.
Norm and I buried him under some big rocks and a fallen log so the dead couldn’t get to him.
Sometimes I wonder if Richard had the right idea. Maybe nowhere is safe anymore, maybe dying was a blessing more than a curse. It’s one of those questions philosophers of this time will ponder for as long as the dead don’t eat them, I guess.
I wonder about that question now as I gaze through the window.
I see a glint of yellow, something like a dim flashlight winking on and off in the fog about fifty feet in front of the Jeep, but that’s all I see, and it’s all I need to see to know what it is.
It’s one of them. The big Z word. Zombie, Dead, Infected, Deadhead, Pus-bag, and on and on.
They are the only ones with eyes like that.
I tighten my grip on the gun. Our ammo is sparse, the thunderclap of the weapon only draws more of them, but if I have no other choice, I will blast this thing to kingdom come.
The engine is not running. The lights are not on. It has no reason to come this way other than out of sheer curiosity.
I slink lower in the seat until my eyes are barely visible over the dashboard. The yellow glow disappears. It might’ve turned around, might be going the other direction.
The second time we heard of Eden was in Kentucky. We were in a small town with a name I can’t remember — something that ended in ‘ville,’ and not Louisville. The power was still on in this town. This was before The End really took on its full meaning, when the government was still
trying to do something about the spread, before the military was completely overrun, before the President and his cabinet were moved to some bunker miles underground — as if it matters anymore, whenever this disease runs its course, the world leaders will be the leaders of nothing but mass graves. But I think they will — or have already — become a part of those graves.
We left Woodhaven without much of a plan. We stopped in Indiana en route to Chicago, where Norm lived. Indiana was lost. Not just Indianapolis, but the whole state. So was Chicago, my 65 inch flatscreen, my Honda CR-V, my collection of mint condition, first edition King hardbacks. Lost. The world, lost. Us, lost.
Whatever they cooked up in the lab at the Leering Research Facility was potent. In six months, last I heard, it had spread across the entire world. Pat Huber was right about one thing. The disease was like wildfire and it wouldn’t stop until it consumed everything in its path. Believe me, they tried to stop it. North America was basically one large headstone. The country is mostly dark. The power plants don’t run without living bodies operating them. The planes don’t fly. The cars sit in the middle of the road, bumper to bumper, collecting dust. Money means nothing. Food is already getting hard to come by. They tried quarantines, cures, military involvement, but none of that worked. By the time international travel was banned, the United Kingdom was a mass graveyard. France had been in such a huge zombie war, they'd detonated bombs near the Eiffel Tower and it actually collapsed. I saw a photo before the internet went down. It was chilling.
Of course, we weren’t as stupid as some of the other countries. Rumor had it, that North Korea dropped atomic bombs on themselves in an attempt to stop the disease from spreading. Their population is now close to zero, and the neighboring nations have been covered in their ashes. South America is sinking — at least that’s what a young man told me in Chicago. Whatever the hell that means. Some people we’ve met on our travels talked of going to Antartica. Stupid. Another one told me that the fighting near the San Andreas Fault in California had caused the whole damn state to break off and float to Hawaii. I didn’t tell Darlene that one, with her sister in San Francisco.
The Dead Collection Box Set #1: Jack Zombie Books 1-4 Page 19