New DEAD series (Book 2): DEAD (Alone)

by TW Brown

  Another round came from Miranda. Kolowicz jerked and then was still. A series of shouts came from everywhere and when I looked around, I saw many of those who’d just emerged from hiding in a furious sprint to get back to their hiding places. Shouts and screams came from several of those who were diving back behind whatever cover they could reach.

  “Another attack!”

  “Those strangers are in on it!”

  “Somebody get them!”

  I found that last one to be almost entertaining. Much faster than they’d emerged, this group had vanished from sight. It looked as if they’d even left behind those who were injured that they’d come out to help.

  “Wait!” Miranda was shouting over the din. “I was only taking down that girl who just turned and attacked Kolowicz.” She paused and then continued. “Katy…her name was Katy. She just took a chunk out of your friend. All I did was put her down and then end the other one’s suffering.”

  “Liar!” somebody screamed. “Katy was immune. She’s practically healed up from an attack that happened weeks ago. She doesn’t have the infection.”

  And that was true. I’d seen it with my own two eyes, but I’d also seen her rip out Kolowicz’s throat. Something wasn’t clicking. I tried to resolve the discrepancies in my head, but my brain was still too fogged over from the pain and the blood loss.

  “I’m telling you, that Katy girl was dead. She’d been shot…only she started moving and your friend Kolowicz tried to help her. She got her throat ripped out for her troubles. If you don’t believe me, then inspect the bodies,” I called down, my voice weak, but at least audible in the relative quiet.

  “Yeah, I bet you’d like that,” another voice challenged.

  I looked around and saw surprisingly few zombies starting to arrive on the scene in response to first all the gunfire, and now way too much hollering coming from up and down this whole block. I doubted that would hold for long. We needed to resolve this and clear the area.

  “Screw ‘em, Miranda,” I croaked, surprised at how weak my voice sounded—it was as if it might be getting worse. “Most of those idiots hid while a couple of people tried to fend off the attack. They’re scared, and are probably not ready to listen to reason. We need to get out of here.”

  “If you are just going to walk away, then why the hell did you drag us here to help them in the first place?” Miranda snarled in response.

  “I made a mistake. I thought the group wanted to survive. I had no idea it was just a select few and that the rest were mere lambs ready for slaughter.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Miranda stood up and moved out from behind the cover of her chimney. “You people want to survive…right?”

  There was a long silence. The few zombies that arrived on the scene had turned and were now staggering towards the corner of the roof under where Miranda stood, a few already clustering below with their arms extended, hands grasping futilely at the air.

  “Of course we want to survive,” came a tentative and almost whiny retort. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I believe my friend misspoke,” I corrected, drawing on whatever strength I could muster. “She made that sound like a question. It is a statement. And if you are going to be a survivor in this new world, then you are going to have to put aside everything from the past. You must understand that there won’t be any cops coming to save you when you are attacked. And in this new world, a lot of folks have just one thought…to survive at all costs. That means they will kill you to take what you have. That means you need to be prepared to respond…with violence if it is called for. You can’t think of it as murder. You are simply doing what the situation calls for, no matter what the old social norms might’ve been.”

  I used the chimney to help myself stand up so that the people hiding in the area could perhaps see me better. I saw a few bushes rustle, but as of yet, nobody was willing to be the first person to step out into the open.

  “This is happening, people,” I continued. I felt a little of my strength returning as adrenaline seeped into my being.

  I glanced down at the bodies sprawled everywhere. I spotted Arlo still slumped where I’d killed him. Katy and Kolowicz were almost side-by-side in final death. There were several others that I didn’t recognize, as well as an assortment of the walking dead. So far, the relatively small group clustered under Miranda were the only ones still mobile. They were shifting around and trying to wade through the hedge that ran between our two houses now that I was the current noise source.

  “You have to accept that things are never going to be the same again. I intend on surviving this madness. I am going to carve out something and make the most of what we have. If you want to be a part of it, then I invite you to join me.” I paused again, and a few bodies emerged from hiding. A couple of them glanced at the zombies now starting to gather under me. One of the women pulled a hammer from her belt and advanced. That acted as some sort of catalyst and a few others pulled weapons to help put down the remaining zombies.

  “But this won’t be easy.” I decided that now was as good a time as any to test these people’s resolve. It would not do me any good to have them fall in with me and Miranda, only to seize up again the next time we faced opposition. “I am returning to my people, but first, I want to try and put an end to the group that your attackers came from. They are not far away, and it would not do us any good to allow these people to continue with what they are doing. I’ve seen it firsthand, and now so have you. They are some of the worst sorts that humanity has to offer. And with the end of civilized society, there is nothing to stop them from pursuing their agenda.”

  I saw faces looking up at me; some with expectation, some with fear, and some with the grim determination I felt would be necessary if humanity was going to avoid extinction. I believed that these people needed to be reminded about Don Evans and his agenda. “They want to wipe out anybody who is not white.”

  I saw a few faces shut down. The woman who had been the first to take down one of the zombies with her hammer now had a look of open skepticism. But there were a couple that made me nervous. I tried to commit them to memory. Those would be the ones I would expect to be the most likely to turn on me if I could somehow convince these people to join me in what I had planned.

  “Here is the situation, people.” I glanced over at Miranda and was encouraged when she gave me a nod. “This group is no more organized than you all are, I am willing to bet.” Okay, that was probably a lie, but if I was going to have them follow me, I needed to give them a reason to think we stood a chance. “But every single day that we let them be, they will gain strength. There are a scary number of people who subscribe to the type of gospel they are preaching. I was blind to it before. It was just a story that flitted past on the news every so often. But it was there…here. It exists around us. And now, these people don’t have any repercussions if they decide to embark on a campaign of terror. Maybe you won’t ever cross their paths in the future. But then again, who knows where these people will settle down. I can tell you after recently escaping from their camp that they plan on relocating. What if they just so happen to end up going in the same direction as you people?” I let my gaze linger on a young man who looked Hispanic and the woman beside him who was African-American. “If you’re lucky, they’ll just kill you where you stand. They let two people I was travelling with get bitten and turn, then they threw me in a room with them and made me kill them. That is the sort of mentality that you will be letting go if you choose to do nothing. And if they don’t find you, then can you be okay with knowing that they will do that sort of thing to others?”

  I knew I was pushing it. These people had all hidden during the attack. They had demonstrated that they were cowards…or just followers. Either way, I was now asking them to take a huge step off a ledge. I was encouraging them to kill other living beings. That was something I’d struggled with myself until basically just a few minutes ago.

  “If you want to live, then
follow me,” I implored. “Otherwise, I wish you luck, but it will take more than that.”

  I turned back and made my way off the roof. By the time I reached the ground, Miranda and a dozen others had all come to the back porch of the house where I’d given my speech.

  “You look horrible,” Miranda gasped.

  “Jesus, it looks like most of your eyelid is gone,” a male voice added, stepping forward into my field of vision and then physically grabbing me and peering under my makeshift bandage. He was the one I’d assumed to be the leader when we’d first met. “You need to get that cleaned up or you will lose your eye…if it isn’t already too late.”

  “What are you, a fucking doctor?” Miranda spat as she elbowed the man aside and leaned in to take a closer look.

  “No, I was a nurse,” the man shot back as he reasserted himself in front of me and gripped my chin in his hand so he could turn my head and resume his inspection.

  That seemed to be good enough to shut Miranda up, but the rest of the group gathered around all began to fire off various questions about what we were going to do next.

  “We are going to go up the road a ways and assess the location where the man who sent those people to attack you are holed up. If possible, and it seems like we have even the slightest chance at success, I plan to attack his group and put an end to the threat they represent.” I pulled away from the man inspecting me as I spoke, but I noticed that he didn’t move away from me, but instead crossed his arms and waited.

  “You aren’t doing anything until I at least clean that up properly,” the man said once I was done talking.

  “We don’t have a lot of time to waste,” I countered.

  “Be that as it may, you will lose that eye if you don’t get it cleaned up.”

  “And how do you propose I do that? Do you have antiseptic in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

  “No, but we do have some supplies in one of our vehicles. The people who chose not to follow you might not want to part with anything, but they are not going to put up a fight if we demand it.”

  “We won’t take everything,” I said. “Leave them their share, otherwise we are not much better than those people who attacked you.”

  “I am gonna check inside this house while you get cleaned up,” Miranda huffed, shoving past me and heading up onto the back porch.

  Great, I thought, I have no idea what has her panties in a bunch, but obviously something has pissed her off.

  A few of the other people who had chosen to join me looked back and forth between the nurse who was now heading out to the street where the remnants of their convoy still sat, me, and Miranda’s back as she set to breaking the sliding glass back door in order to get inside the house.

  I shrugged my shoulders and followed after the male nurse. I caught up to him just as he threw open the back doors of a white utility van. A few of those who had opted not to join me were standing aside and just watching. As I scanned their faces, I saw the same thing on each of them: defeat, hopelessness, emptiness. I tried to imagine a state of mind where I watched people rifle through belongings that might be mine or belong to those travelling with me and doing absolutely nothing about it.

  The reality was that those people were already dead. Whether by zombie or raider, it was just a matter of time for them. I edged past them and sat where the nurse indicated as he opened a box and produced a dark brown plastic bottle along with a pouch of cotton balls.

  “This is gonna sting,” the man said as he pressed a wad of the cotton balls against the opening of the bottle.

  “Then maybe you could tell me your name so I know who to properly curse,” I quipped.

  “Marshawn King.”

  The man flashed me a smile and nodded his head. He was tall and looked a bit like Denzel Washington. The stubble forming on his head led me to believe that he probably kept it shaved once upon a time when razors were handy and showers weren’t a luxury that I would just about give my left nut for at the moment. I saw a variety of tattoos on his dark-skinned arms and he had an ugly scar on the left arm that looked like somebody had tried to cut it off just below the elbow. I bet there was an interesting story to go along with it. His eyes were a chocolate brown, but there was a worn out look to them and I briefly wondered if we all had that same affliction…then he swabbed at my eyelid with the cotton and the only thing left in my mind was the desire to punch him square in the face.

  I let loose with an impressive string of profanity and tried to jerk away, but Marshawn had my arm in a vice-like grip that kept me in place. His eyes met mine and a look of concern was there for just a second before he resumed cleaning the area.

  “Stay put,” he muttered as he pulled out another bag and rifled through it until he found what he was looking for.

  A few minutes later, he’d doused some gauze with more of the stinging solution he’d used to clean me up and then pressed it over my eye and wrapped an Ace bandage around to hold it in place.

  “Am I going to lose my eye?” I asked once I was sure I could do so without my voice cracking.

  “Not sure…it looks pretty bad.” Marshawn stepped back to admire his work for a moment. “Okay, that should do it.”

  “Then we need to gather Miranda and the others. Daylight is burning.” I stood up and glanced around at the people who had chosen to join me. “Last chance to change your minds. It is going to likely end with one or more of us dead.”

  12

  Delaying the Inevitable

  Marshawn leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “If you aren’t careful, you will absolutely lose that eye. Are you sure you want to do this now?”

  I thought it over. I really didn’t want to lose my eye. That would really suck. I had just faced my mortality and I was not at all proud of how I’d acted. My selfishness and narrow-mindedness led to the deaths of people that might not have been murdered by me directly, but I could not say that my hands were clean.

  I’d read enough books and seen enough movies over the years. If you left the perceived “bad guy” alone instead of attacking when you had the chance, he would come around and make your existence a living hell. Your friends would die painful deaths and you would end up finding yourself taunted by semi-clever quips. Like, for instance, if I did end up losing my eye, he (or she to be fair) would say something like, “I bet you didn’t see that one coming.”

  “We are doing this now,” I insisted.

  “We got a shitload of undead coming this way!” a voice called from the roof of the house that Miranda had been on.

  “How about you hang back for this,” Marshawn said as he took a look at his bandaging work and then glanced at my wrapped-up arm. “And what’s the deal with that.” He gave a nod at the offending limb.

  “Supposedly its broken,” I replied. “The people I am heading back to helped set it. We didn’t have any proper cast material, so Betty, one of my friends, she wrapped it up pretty good and showed me how to keep it secure.”

  “And you’re running around, doing all this crap with a busted arm?” the man replied dubiously. “You trying to end up with just a single of everything? I mean, should we lob off one of your legs and maybe remove a testicle so you are uniform?”

  “Jesus!” I gasped. “What kind of question is that?”

  “The one that seems logical considering the amount of extra strain you are putting on that busted arm. There is no way it is healing properly. I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t done permanent damage to it.”

  “Yeah, well, to my credit, I didn’t think I would live to see it heal.”

  “We have them coming from every direction!” the same voice called down, this time sounding a bit more frantic.

  “We can discuss my health later,” I groaned as I stood up.

  Maybe it was all the talk about my so-called condition, but I was suddenly feeling really beat up. My arm felt like it had been run through a meat grinder from the inside, and the stinging around my right eye was
almost worse. Almost.

  “There won’t be much to discuss,” Marshawn grumbled as he pulled a small caliber pistol from the waist of his pants.

  “You sure about that?” I nodded to his weapon.

  “You don’t need to blow their heads away, just put a round in the brain and switch ‘em off.”

  “Doesn’t seem big enough to do the trick,” I snickered as I pulled my Glock and made sure it was fully loaded.

  “Why is it you white boys always start worrying about size when you’re around a brother?” Marshawn deadpanned.

  I felt my jaw start to ache from my mouth obviously opening so wide. I’d just met the guy, and not under the best of circumstances. I had no idea how to take this comment. Finally, his mouth split into a wide grin.

  “And y’all are even easier to mess with,” he chuckled, giving me a careful pat on the shoulder. “Now, let’s go kill some zombies.”

  “Did you ever think you would say those words without a video game controller in your hands?” I said, an ironic laugh rumbling in my throat.

  I took two steps and pulled up. Marshawn stopped as well as several of the others who had opted to join me. Now that we were all together, we started towards the approaching wall of zombies that were just rounding the corner at the end of the next block.

  “I’m still not convinced that I won’t wake up in my bed with all this rattling around in my head. If I do, I’m writing it down. I bet writing about zombies is a much easier life than dealing with their funky asses.”

  “Make sure you name a character after me.” I switched my pistol to my injured arm. I reached down and yanked the rusty and heavily stained machete that was jutting from the head of a downed zombie lying in the gutter. The smell of the horde was just starting to stain my nostrils with its foulness.