HALFWAY BACK
By Marios Amontaristos
Text copyright ©2013 Marios Amontaristos
All rights reserved
No copying or reproduction of any type, in any media, online or offline, unless written permission by the author has been provided.
Of course, if you want to copy this book, the above text won't stop you. But don't. I mean, come on. Don't. OK?
Marios writes and plays music, writes and makes films and says very interesting things. You can find him here:
https://twitter.com/amontaristos
Also, you can discuss with him about the book in the Facebook page and your feedback will be highly appreciated:
https://www.facebook.com/HalfwayBack
The picture of the cover is copyrighted by Perix Photography:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/perixphotography
Table of contents
CHAPTER ONE - Intro
CHAPTER TWO - First contact
CHAPTER THREE - What happened exactly?
CHAPTER FOUR - So, are we in danger or what?
CHAPTER FIVE - Just pretend that you don't know
CHAPTER SIX - Ah, it's not just us after all
CHAPTER SEVEN - They didn't take it so bad after all
CHAPTER EIGHT - Time to take some action already
CHAPTER NINE - Three are more than two
CHAPTER TEN - Too stupid to resist
CHAPTER ELEVEN - So, is this good news?
CHAPTER TWELVE - Let's do science stuff!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - How different are we, anyway?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN- Where did they all come from?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Kind of stuck now, are we?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Time to take the city back?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Jurassic what?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Let's not kill each other then
CHAPTER NINETEEN - Not so fast, funny guy
CHAPTER TWENTY - Are you sure this is safe?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - What a surprise!
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - So, we meet again
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - Flashback
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - So, what do we want now exactly?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - No, it can't go wrong
CHAPTER ONE
Intro
A delightful combination of broken English and broken French had just ended. The police officers came once again, they explained that they were just doing their job, Steve and Bruno said that they understood, even though after one year and half in Paris, they still couldn't understand more than 20% of what native people were telling them. But let's go a bit back.
Bruno Miranda Souza Carvalho Mineiro de Oliveira, or, for the sake of our sanity, Bruno, is a student of Biology at the university of Sorbonne. He arrived from Brazil almost 2 years ago and he is on his second year of his studies. He's not exactly white, neither black and this causes confusions among those who get anxious when they cannot categorize things and people. He doesn't like football and he hates it a bit more every time he meets someone whose first words towards him are in the range of “Brazil? Pele! Maradona better!”. He used to play back in high school but he took on running instead, so that he won't have to bear his teammates shouting “I'm Pele! I'm Ronaldo”. It seems that he just wanted to be Bruno. At least this is his official explanation. Or he didn't feel comfortable among celebrities. And he likes violent video games. The bloodier the better. And this is the link with Steve.
Steve Barnsley came from Australia and he's also on his second year of Biology. It came to a great surprise to his friends and family that he decided to come to France for studies, but as a fan of the “dolce vita”, he decided to go anyway. Only three months after his arrival did he realize that he wanted to go to Italy actually, but it was too late. His parents are quite wealthy and they could afford to help him begin in France, but a change so late? They said that looked like he didn't actually care for the studies! How dare they offend him like this!
So, Steve swallowed his pride, he swallowed the Parisian winters as well and decided to stay and finish his studies. He met Bruno after responding to his ad that was saying in broken English: “Roommate wanted, share rent. No smoke. Must likes video games with blood.” Steve likes video games with blood, so he decided to contact Bruno, even if he had no problem with money and no need to split the rent. He just wanted company to play violent video games. The fact of them being in the same year and class was a plain coincidence but helpful nevertheless.
That early October evening, as usual, Steve and Bruno had prepared some microwave pasta and started playing a new game on their PS3. Bruno prefers to kill zombies and other unreal creatures, while Steve is more of a Nazi hunter. But they have no problem killing both, so it's not like they do each other a favor. Their neighbor, Mr Etienne Simonnot, a 60-something divorced retired government employee, used to send them the cops almost every time his stuck-on-the-wall ear caught some noise a bit louder than what he believed to be acceptable. The cops couldn't do otherwise, but go, ask them to keep it a bit down and the same thing happened tonight.
“So, it seems like you are right,” Steve said. “Simonnot calls the police because this way he interacts with people.”
“I know. Do you want to try to befriend him?”
“Are you nuts? No! Do you?”
“Not at all. But maybe this way he will leave us alone... somehow...” Bruno's words faded out as he realized that what he proposed was impossible to happen. Even if Mr Simonnot accepted to be friends with them, what were they going to talk about? And in what language? So, they decided to quit looking for a solution right after this not particularly long conversation, which was not much shorter than all their usual conversations. And they continued playing.
CHAPTER TWO
First contact
It was about 2:00 AM when Bruno got up and heard some thumping on the door. Not knocking, just some slow, repetitive thumping with no sense of any kind of rhythm. He rushed to Steve's room and, without turning on the light, he sat next to him and woke him up by shaking him lightly but anxiously.
“Mmmm...? What?”
“Someone is outside.”
“OK, we're sleeping.” Steve turned to the other side.
“It's been some time now. They make some strange noise. I want to see what's going on.”
“OK, see.” Steve started snoring again before even he stopped talking.
“Thanks for the permission,” Bruno said to himself, since nobody was awake to hear him. He took off his slippers, moved silently towards the door and he checked outside through the eye. What he saw was very weird. Three men and a woman were standing outside, slowly thumping against the doors of the other apartments with their palms open or even bumping against the doors with their shoulders but they weren't trying to push the doors open. They looked like they were just walking towards the doors until they were stopped by them. The man standing in front of Bruno looked strangely terrible. His clothes were torn, his black hair was messed up, like he hadn't combed it or washed it for days but other than that he looked perfectly healthy, even with this look on his face and the inexplicable expression that combined something between fear and absent-mindedness. Suddenly he turned his face towards Bruno, which caused him to go back and leave a scared “whoa”, even if he knew that he couldn't be seen. The rest of the strange company heard it and they all started focusing their thumping at the door, although not v
iolently enough to bring it down. Bruno rushed to Steve and shook him quite more violently. He shouldn't sleep again, no way.
“Hey! Hey! What are you doing?” Steve asked while wondering if he was still dreaming.
“We have a problem. 4 people are outside and I think that they are trying to get in.”
“You think? Wha... What's going on?”
“Some strange guys and a girl are out. They were punching slowly the other doors and one of them turned to me and I thought that he saw me and I got scared and they heard me and now they are trying to come in here. What do we do if they come?”
“Ummm...” Steve realized that some people were at the door. “Maybe we should put a chair at the door.”
“Great idea. I'm going!” Bruno left, took a chair and put it against the door. More reassured, he checked again outside. He was able to see the visitors more clearly when he realized that their eyes were very clear. Besides the first guy, the others were also quite messed up, with their torn clothes and hair in desperate need of some styling, with their mysterious expressions, but besides that, they looked perfectly normal. Steve came behind Bruno and touched him on the shoulder, something that made Bruno jump like he was on the moon. Only faster. When he landed on his ass, he got up, he grabbed Steve by the back of his neck and they went to Bruno's room.
“What are you doing? Are you trying to kill me or something?” Bruno said, whispering loudly. It would be more discreet if he had just said it in a normal tone.
“I wanted to ask you what's going on but I didn't want them to hear.”
“Good! A heart attack for me is better than those blind guys hearing you!”
“Blind, you said?”
“Their eyes are very strange. Very white. And they look like they cannot focus somewhere specifically.” Bruno turned his face to his right, trying to remember more details. “If they had this green skin and the wounds all over, they would look like the zombies on President Evil.”
“Hah! Relax! You play way too much!”
“I didn't say that they are zombies, stupid ass. They look like zombies,” Bruno said, annoyed by the calmness of Steve. Suddenly they heard noises from outside their apartment. Mr Simonnot had opened the door and he was shouting in French. His usual nagging turned into terrified screams. “Au secours! Aidez moi!”
“What is he saying?” Steve asked.
“I think that he's asking for help.”
“What do we do?”
“We call the police?” Bruno wasn't very sure.
“Yes! The police!” Steve reached for his phone.
“Wait! We have no time! We must go and help him.”
“Why...?”
“Because this way he will stop calling the police every time we play Pedal of honor!” Bruno exclaimed, almost excited.
Steve seemed to like the idea, but he had his doubts. “You know that there are four guys in there, right?”
“I know.” Bruno went to his room and unscrewed the bar he uses for pull-ups from the door frame. He returned to Steve and gave it to him. He went back to his room and took his 5-kilos. “Let's go.” He wanted to sound bad-ass, but his Brazilian accent made Steve laugh a bit before going. “What?” Bruno asked annoyed.
“Nothing, Arnold! I'm covering you!”
They opened the door of their apartment and they checked outside. Mr Simonnot's door was left open and there was noise coming from inside. Bruno and Steve entered the apartment and saw Mr Simonnot surrounded by the strangers, with a rifle in hands, pushing them away and cursing. Steve stepped up. “Laissez lui seul!” he said with an accent that only caused Mr Simonnot to look at him curiously. The visitors turned to them. Steve and Bruno could now see them clearly. Their posture was almost identical to the posture of the zombies in all those games they spent half their teenage years and their whole (2-year) adult life playing. Fall of cutie, Tomb painter, President evil (the whole trilogy), all were nothing in front of this new, real-life challenge that appeared in front of them. They looked at each other in amazement. One man and the woman stayed with Mr Simonnot and managed to bite him on the shoulders and arms. Steve screamed “Noooo!” and hit his opponent with the bar with a diagonal hit on the head, throwing him down. Bruno stroke the zombie (how else could he describe this abomination that appeared out of the blue tonight?) with his fivers and, as an experienced zombie hunter, he went straight for the head. A successful move. After 5 quick but heavy blows from Bruno's well-built arms and the heavy metallic training tools he was carrying, the weird guy was not moving any more. Mr Simonnot was still struggling when Steve and Bruno went near. Steve used the bar against the knee of the female intruder, which caused her to kneel and scream in pain. The second hit was on the neck and caused her head to turn a bit, but another strike on the neck was what was needed to break it and render the disturbing opponent unable to move.
Bruno was in more trouble with the big guy, the one who was at their door first. He seemed too strong and Bruno's knocks didn't seem enough to stop him. Of course, he didn't want to stay near for long and risk being bitten. The zombie tried to grab Bruno but he got punched on the hands and he was baffled since he didn't know what to do. He turned to the bleeding Mr Simonnot who was on the floor, but Steve aimed for his mouth. He inserted one edge of the bar and he pushed him towards the wall. When he arrived there, he kept him immobilized until Bruno came. Two horizontal punches were all that was needed to crack his head open. Steve pulled the bar out of his big foe's throat while watching him sliding down. He looked at Bruno. “I hope that they were zombies. Otherwise, we just killed four people.”
“In any case, we were defending ourselves and Mr Simonnot,” Bruno answered while panting. They ran near him. He looked in a very bad shape, something expected for someone who was bitten various times and, besides being in pain, he was also pretty puzzled by the way his night was developing, with the four weird visitors and the two annoying neighbors who proved to be nice after all and they came and helped. And now they were over him and they were about to take him to the hospital and it seems that he was wrong after all, since they sure seem like they are good boys.
“He was bitten by the zombies, we must kill him now, before he becomes a zombie himself,” Steve whispered loudly a few meters away from Mr Simonnot. And he was very serious about it.
“Are you crazy? You can't go ahead and kill people like that, just because maybe he will be a zombie!”
“Well, what proof do you need? You saw their movements. You saw their eyes. They didn't speak. If they weren't new zombies, you would be able to see the decay on their skin, man. And their clothes got ripped when they came out of their graves. It's so obvious!”
“But what if it was just some virus that caused them to act like this?”, asked Bruno hesitantly, as he was starting to be convinced.
“It is a virus! And it turns them into zombies!” Steve checked at Mr Simonnot. He waved at them and they waved back awkwardly. “We need to ask him where he has the rest of his weapons and then shoot him in the head, before it's too late.”
“What? You know how to use a weapon?”
“We both know. It's time to use our experience for real!” Steve, who was starting to get excited, exclaimed.
“But... What are we gonna do after we kill him and take the weapons?”
“I have no idea! For now, we need to get rid of the Z-O-M-B-I-E and make sure that we are armed. In the morning we will think about what we will do.”
“I... I don't know. OK, let me handle it.” Bruno approached Mr Simonnot and asked him in French if he had any more weapons. Promptly, he went into a room and asked Steve to follow him. Bruno lifted the mattress and under the bed there was an impressive collection of various pistols and rifles.
“Look at that,” Steve exclaimed. “We must consider ourselves lucky that he didn't decide to use those instead of calling the cops!” Bruno didn't answer. Each of them took two pistols and one rifle and their bullets. They chose the ones that looked famili
ar, thanks to the bloody, violent games they knew how to play better than doing anything else. They loaded the weapons, they put the pistols in a plastic bag and took the rifles in their hands. “Let's do this,” Steve said but Bruno grabbed him by his shoulder.
“Wait. The shot will awake the neighbors. We cannot shoot him in the middle of the night.”
“If there is a zombie outbreak right now, a gunshot in the night is not one of anyone's main concerns,” was the answer by Steve. “Let's check a bit outside.”
“Take a look. I will check on Mr Simonnot.”
Steve opened the window and scanned the road. The apartment was on the third floor of a building that was completed in the 1960s, in Montmartre, at rue Darwin, a narrow little road. The cemetery lies only a couple of blocks to the south and Steve felt a sudden discomfort when he thought about it. On the road there were only two men walking slowly, about ten meters away from each other. They could easily be drunks, but their way of moving suggested that they could be intellectual relatives of the weird visitors of Mr Simonnot. Steve returned to Bruno who was trying to reassure their injured neighbor that everything will be fine. “There are more. I saw them on the street,” Steve said and he was dead serious, almost terrified. Bruno hadn't seen him like this before, but then, they never actually observed each other's reactions in real-life situations. Of course, being startled by a video game is one thing, but this was real and it had just happened in front of them. To them, actually. “We have to do it, now.”
Mr Simonnot wasn't paying attention. He was just sitting on the floor, covered in blood, exhausted, looking at nowhere. Steve aimed at him with the rifle he had chosen earlier. A brief moment of hesitation. Mr Simonnot didn't have the time to take notice. Next thing, his brains were all over the wall and the floor. Bruno was shocked and Steve was a few steps back, holding his shoulder after the weapon's recoil. “Fuck, this thing hit me!” No answer from Bruno, who was too busy staying astonished with his mouth half open. Steve continued trying to play it cool: “I should expect this. Remember those guns that go up every time you shoot them in Silent heel? It seems that this happens because the game is realistic after all.”
Halfway back - Bruno, Steve and Fiona's adventure against zombies that may not be zombies and the secret behind them Page 1