The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory

by Rich Restucci

  “Sleep?” Chloe asked. “Are you friggin’ crazy? You think anybody can sleep knowing those things are out there?”

  “Then there’s the noise,” Richy added. “They’re hella-loud.”

  He had me on that one.

  We hunkered down, and tried to sleep, but both kids were absolutely correct. If the noise wasn’t enough, the fact that there were a couple thousand zombies twenty feet away kept us up. The things broke into the lower rooms and the office in the middle of the night. We could hear them below us smashing shit and shuffling about on broken glass. They couldn’t know we were here, or get to us if they did, but the whole episode was still unnerving.

  I woke up at first light, one kid on each side of me on the shitty motel room bed. I guess I could sleep. The first thing I noticed upon waking up was that I was uncomfortable. I was drenched in sweat from the coastal Texas heat and humidity. I was sticky and it was hard to breathe in that horrible room with the heat and the smell of unwashed humans. Two other people on a bed with you in hundred degree temperatures is not conducive to keeping cool either. The second thing I noticed was that the sounds of the dead, while significantly diminished, were certainly not gone.

  Remo sat in a chair, leaning it back on its hind legs with his back to me. He surveyed the parking lot through the white curtains. I hadn’t made a sound, not a stretch or a shift on the bed. I truly believe this fucker had heard my eyes open. He didn’t look at me or acknowledge that he was speaking to me at all, but there was nobody else in the room other than the sleeping kids.

  “There are quite a few stragglers.”

  Now I did stretch. “How many?” I asked through a yawn.

  “Too many.”

  Both kids had woken up when I had spoken, but they stayed in bed as I sat up. I rubbed my eyes, digging out the accumulated crap from the eight seconds of sleep it felt like I got. I shimmied down the bed and tossed my feet off the end so as to disturb the kids as little as possible. Difficult, given three people in a twin bed. Donna looked at me, smiling, from her bed next to ours. Everyone else had picked different rooms, but I doubted they got too much sleep either.

  I slunk up next to Remo and he glanced at me and stated, “This could be problematic.”

  I had to agree. There were a couple hundred dead shuffling around the tarmac. They looked hungry. They also seemed to be searching for something. Three guesses as to what it was. I have no idea how they knew there was food about, but they did. From my vantage, I could see that they were rummaging through the office, and not a few of them had decided they wanted to take a peek in our truck. Our non-functional truck.

  Tim strode into our room, gnawing on some beef jerky. He peered at Dusty, who was on his back with his paws in the air and his lengthy, pink tongue flopping out. Tim tore a piece off a piece of jerky and tossed it to the dog, who wasted no time in hoarking it down. “Ship estimates that there are just over two hundred of them left from the two thousand or so that were out there last night. He thinks that the others, if they were moving at one point five miles per hour, and have been gone for eight hours, are twelve miles away given level terrain and no distractions.”

  I huffed, “Does Ship happen to have a phased plasma rifle in a forty-watt range?”

  Tim stared at me for a moment before he asked, “What?”

  I flaunted an absolutely epic eye-roll. “Never mind. We need to think about what to do here.”

  Tim brightened. He sure was chipper considering the circumstances. “Ship says we need a diversion.”

  “Full circle to the plasma rifle. My meager math skills tell me that without a diversion, we’re looking at about twenty head shots a piece.”

  “That’s no good,” Remo piped. “Too much ammo.”

  “Well,” I began, “I’ll—”

  Remo interrupted, “I’ll do it.” Obviously, he meant he would jump down from our safe place to create the diversion we needed.

  A car alarm began to sound from an indeterminate distance off.

  I looked at Remo, my eyebrows raised in disbelief, “What, are you a fucking Jedi, now?”

  The effect of the alarm on the swarm was immediate. The pus bags looked in the direction of the sound and began to slog off. Three forms, whom I hadn’t identified until then, shot off after the noise at full sprint as well. Two from the crowd, and one from out of a room underneath us. Hopefully, it was just me being tired, because mistaking a Runner for a pus bag was a deadly mistake. The rest of our group congregated in my room, everyone staring at the departing dead or trying for a glimpse of the source of the sound.

  We began to pack what little stuff we had, and when the last infected had been gone from sight for a few minutes, I moved out on to the elevated walkway to assess the situation. I got on my belly and leaned over the closest stairway that we had demolished. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard a clippity-clop and directed my gaze toward this new and unusual sound. A man and a woman, each on horseback trotted across the asphalt, stopped short of the truck, and looked at me.

  “Got maybe, five, ten minutes before that alarm stops,” the man said up to me.

  “Morning to you too,” I replied, my eyes giving away my wariness.

  “Y’all got kids with you,” the woman said. “Says to me you ain’t lookin’ for trouble.”

  “We’re not.” The rest of my group, dog included, came out onto the walkway. Everyone was armed.

  The man looked at the woman, and she nodded. “Y’all can come with us,” he told us. “We got a place that’s as safe as any.”

  “Not giving up our weapons,” Remo stated matter-of-factly.

  Both of the newcomers smiled huge Texas smiles. “Son, I would think less of you if you did, but I wouldn’t ask in the first place. Name’s Matt, and this here’s Stacy. We been watchin’ you since you got into town. Sorry about your truck, but she’s prolly like the rest of the world: dead.”

  “Y’all are welcome to come back with us,” Stacy offered, “but we should leave soon.”

  Matt looked to where the pus bags and their speedier cousins had moved on down the road, “Don’t want them followin’ us. Besides, if the bigger herd comes back and follows them to our place, we’re in some trouble. Gonna have to fight off some stragglers in the scrub as it is.”

  That didn’t sound fun, but trapped in a shitty motel, with wallpaper that was just itching to drag us all into an abyss full of fire and torture, sounded even less fun.

  The group looked to me for a decision. Me. They wanted me to choose life or death. What had come to pass to make these people think I had any idea what the hell I was doing? This kind of resolution should be handled by Remo, or Ship. Both of them were looking at me expectantly.

  I gave a nervous sigh, “We’ll come with you… If you’re sure…” I let the sentiment hang.

  Stacy tore her eyes away from staring after the dead and squinted through the sun at me. “Wouldn’t have asked you if we weren’t.”

  We moved as a group back into the motel rooms, grabbed our stuff, and brought it out to the walkway. Matt was off his horse, Stacy holding the reins. There was a brained pus-bag on the ground not far away. “Drop me your stuff and I’ll pile it up for ya,” he said.

  I dropped him my duffel, hung from the hole where the stairs used to be, and dropped the few feet to the ground. Alvarez dropped me a bag, and followed suit. My group passed the rest of our shit to the three of us on the ground, and we piled it up. The humans were next, and they came down one at a time, Ship doing a final walk-through to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind.

  When he was down, we divvied up our considerable supplies and doled them out to people by strength. Matt offered to take some of our stuff, but Remo wouldn’t part with the ammo or the weapons, and Ship said he would carry the food. The food bags alone had to weigh a hundred pounds.

  “It’s three miles from here,” Stacy said to Ship. The big guy just nodded, shouldering the duffels.

  “Don’t say much, d
oes he?” she asked no one in particular.

  The nine of us plus two horses and their riders moved off to the northwest at a moderate pace for summer Texas weather. It was faster than I would have liked, but slower than we could move. I may have mentioned it was hot. I tried to think of snow to cool my ass down. That shit didn’t work.

  Matt leaned over his horse to ask me a question. “What did you think of the wallpaper in there?” He thumbed back over his horse’s ass to the Sleepy Times Motel.

  I gave a mock shudder. “Damned evil. Who thinks that kind of shit up? And who would put it in a motel?”

  Matt smiled another huge, toothy smile and nodded. “We’re gonna get along just fine.”

  Two Miles of Death

  It was still hot and I hadn’t had a shower in a while so you can imagine what I smelled like. I was taking a selfie-sniff when I noticed Matt pull a small radio from his belt. We were about a half mile into our trek. “Darcy, this is Matt. We got some strays we’re bringin’ back.”

  How many? I heard from the other end.

  “Nine, plus a dog.” He looked us over for a sec. “They look competent.”

  Really? What kind of dog?

  “Focus, Darcy”

  Oh, right. We’ll be ready for ya. Got some chicken grillin’ up now.

  “Alrighty. I’ll check in again when we see the gate.”

  Gotcha.

  They didn’t use any overs or outs and they knew what each other was saying. Screw that military shit. I glared at Remo, but he didn’t care and was focused on his toothpick chewing. No idea where he had gotten another fang-splinter, but this was Remo. He had probably fashioned it out of a telephone pole when I had my head turned.

  My mind began to wander as we traipsed across our second mile of scrub. To keep my thoughts occupied, I began to talk to Tim about Baldy Mountain, his family, and the Majestik Maersk. We slogged on, conversing in the oppressive Texas heat, until the first squish.

  Horse shit. Really, when you think of it, you think shit from a horse. I guess that’s what it is, but I’ve gotta tell you: horses have it made. Horses can poop on the fly. What other domesticated animal in North America can do that? Can you imagine just battling some undead, and they literally scare the shit out of you, but you don’t hesitate and just drop a deuce during the battle? No squatting or wiping or stink? Epic.

  Until you step in it. Even the dog had the foresight to step around the poop.

  There I was, talking to Tim while we trudged across our second mile of scrub toward Matt and Stacy’s place, and I looked forward to see a horse’s ass. The beast was swishing its tail, and I could see poop just dropping from his butt. What I didn’t realize was that this was the end of his movement, the rest of it being on the ground in front of me. Horse excrement isn’t as bad as any other type of feces I can think of, but who wants to put their boot in it?

  The short answer is: not me.

  Know what other super-power horses have besides the poop thing? They can smell zombies. I’m standing there, leaning over with one arm on a chuckling Tim for support, using a small stick to dig the shit out of the grooves in my boot sole, when the stallion in front of me makes a weird noise. I pause in my cleaning to look up, and notice the creature is looking in all directions with his ears straight up. He’s giving nervous snorts and begins pawing at the ground with his hoof.

  “Where is it, Beast?” Matt asks him. “Which way?”

  This beautiful animal began to furiously nod its nose toward the west. The damn horse was talking to Matt! The horses had beaten Dusty to the punch on the scent thing too, but now he was alert.

  Tim and I looked in the direction indicated, and I could see a solitary figure making its way toward us on an intercept path. I was having a hard time believing it was luck.

  Matt saw it too, and he decided it needed to go. “I got this one.”

  He rode off toward it, and came back in a few minutes. “There’s a few more in a washout over there. Might need some help with ‘em.”

  I furrowed my brow. “How many?”

  “Bout a hunnert.” (He meant a hundred, but that’s how he had pronounced it.) The pus bags crested the walls of the gulley they were in and started toward us, spread out both in front and to the right in a long line.

  “Should we just leave them and go?” asked Tim.

  Stacy shook her head in the negative. “Naw. They’ll just follow us home. Once they see you, or get your scent, they don’t give up. We used to pour bleach on the ground to kill our trail, but we ran out some time ago. ‘Sides, y’all won’t get through them on foot.” She pointed and I could see she was right. Somehow, the bastards had cut us off from the north and east.

  “Get ready,” Remo said while he checked his rifle. The sounds of magazines ejecting and weapon actions were now commonplace. We all did as instructed and triple checked our gear. Beast, the big, black stallion with white socks, currently walking under Matt’s balls, began to do that pawing thing, and started nodding his gorgeous head really fast again.

  “We know, Beasty,” Stacy said from atop her brown and white Pinto. The Pinto also began to wag its head and make those cool sounds horses make.

  Matt stood up in the saddle and looked back the way we had come, “Oh.”

  I put my hand up to shade my eyes as I squinted east. I couldn’t see anything. “What is it?”

  “More,” was all he said. He looked at Stacy and she nodded. He was on the radio lickety-split.

  “Darcy, we might need some assistance on this one. Got a good crowd of ‘em headin’ our way. Dunno how we can lose ‘em. Prolly end up bringin’ ‘em all the way home. We’re gonna need two trucks I think, and a couple more guns.”

  Where you at?

  “’Bout halfway between you and Ray-ville. Mile and a half southeast of The Double Hoof in the scrub.”

  A man’s voice came over the radio. How many, Matt?

  “Plenty. Couple hunnert maybe? They’re headin’ at us from the east and southwest too, so hurry. These folks ain’t got a ride.

  We’re comin’. If it gets bad, you get as many as you can on each mount and high-tail it out of there.

  Matt looked right at me.

  “Kids first,” I told him, “including the big one. The rest of us will be fine.”

  He swallowed hard and nodded, knowing if it got bad enough for him to run on his horse, the rest of us were all dead. I’m ashamed to write that it occurred to me, for the briefest of moments, that we could just take their horses and probably save six of the nine of us. The thought came and went as fast as a slap, and that’s just what it felt like. There was a little time to feel like shit, so I did.

  The group in front was two hundred yards away. They kept coming up over the rise and right at us. There were a shit load of them, and they were in all manner of disarray. They looked dry and rotten, which would make sense considering the temperature. There were too many to go hand to hand. Oh, and there was a clown in the bunch. This was my first zombie clown.

  “Firing line,” Remo barked. “Spread out ten feet apart. Pick your targets and fire. Richy and Chloe, pick a horse and climb on now.”

  Richy looked affronted. “But we can—”

  “Now,” said the jarhead in his not-to-be-fucked-with voice. Dusty began to growl.

  Matt and Stacy helped the kids up, and Stacy noticed something behind us. “Got a fast one comin’.”

  Matt stood in his saddle again and considered. He drew a partially brass lever-action rifle from a long holster attached to his saddle, sighted, and fired. “Done and done.” He was a good shot. He was using iron sights, and the Runner was far off.

  Kat’s rifle was scoped, and she fired when the things were four hundred feet out. She bolted in another round and fired again. Two targets down. Alvarez began firing his M4 and the infected began to fall. I heard the lever action rifle fire again, and again. I passed the EBR to Remo. I’m a decent shot, but I know he could shoot the wings off of a fly from here
even if that fly were on the international space station.

  “Quarter-mile behind,” Stacy said calmly over the gunfire.

  Ship joined the fray and began selectively firing his HK417. Donna and I were useless with MP5s until the infected were much closer. Tim fired his pistol twice before he realized he wasn’t going to hit anything from three hundred feet. The sexy sound of rifle fire kept up, but there were still plenty of dead. It was then that fear began to creep its way into me.

  Kat began to reload from her bandoleer, both Remo and Alvarez shouted Loading at the same time. At eighty feet or so, Donna began to fire, but she didn’t hit anything. “Not yet,” I told her.

  “When?” she demanded in a tiny, scared voice that was unlike her.

  “When they’re thirty feet or so away, I’ll fire first.”

  She nodded a bit too quickly, and I realized it wasn’t just me that was frightened. I heard engines, but they were far off. The seventy or so dead would reach us before the trucks did.

  “Matt,” I yelled over the din, “get the kids out of here. Kat, get on the horse with Stacy and Chloe.”

  Kat threw me that sideways glance as she reloaded again. “Fuck that!” She fired into the crowd twice more and was out. She slung her rifle and drew her .357 revolver.

  “Kat, now!”

  “We’ll be right behind you,” Alvarez told her and forced her over to Stacy. The three of them were tight on the Pinto as Kat climbed up, crying.

  “Hold on! Hyah!” Stacy grunted, and the horse looked relieved to be moving. They would be able to plow through the skinny line of infected ahead of them with ease on the horses. If someone fell off, they were in trouble though. Chloe was between the two bigger women, and Richy was holding on tight to Matt.

  Matt fired once more. “Good luck!” Beast took him and Richy off pretty fast.

  “Now is good, I think,” I told Donna, and began firing. She did too, and so did Tim. Between the six of us, we did pretty well. We began to back up, but I could hear the swarm behind us now, so eventually we were going to get pinched. The dead in front had reached the gear that we had dropped, but they didn’t give a shit about it. They wanted us and just stepped over or around it.