State of (Book 1): State of Decay

by Martinez, P. S.

  “Mel, get the keys to the Jeep and put your bags inside. Get in and wait for me, I’m going to grab my gun and then we’ll leave.” His jaw clenched, the same defiant, sharp jawline I saw in the mirror each morning. His hand balled tightly into a fist.

  “I’ve got the gun, Dad, it’s in my bag, just like you told me.” I picked up the rucksack and walked around the coffee table to stand in front of him. His eyes hardened and he strode past me, toward the back of the house.

  “Not that gun, baby girl,” he murmured harshly under his breath.

  I knew my dad owned other guns, guns he didn’t normally use for protection. He collected them and used them at shooting ranges and for hunting, and some he still had from his Army days. I knew those days haunted him, and I knew he wouldn’t be bringing those guns out unless something was seriously wrong.

  I wiped my damp palms on my pants and ran to the kitchen to grab the keys out of the cookie jar and then went into the garage to put the bags in the back seat. When my dad came back out he was wearing full Army camo and was carrying a very large duffel bag and his sniper rifle over his shoulder.

  My heart hammered, drowning out some of the sounds outside, but my shaking legs threatened to buckle as I climbed into the passenger seat of our Jeep. My dad put his bag in the back seat and then brought his rifle in the front with him. He started up the vehicle and then just sat there, staring blankly into the windshield for a few seconds before he spoke.

  “There’s something going on. I’m not sure what exactly, but it’s serious, Melody.” He glanced over at me. I swallowed and licked my suddenly dry lips. I could see the fear behind the ocean-blue of his eyes, the tick in his jaw, and if my dad was scared. I really didn’t want to contemplate what could be happening.

  “Where’s the gun I told you to grab?” he asked gruffly.

  “In the back,” I answered.

  He reached into the back seat and pulled the handgun from his rucksack. His face was a mask of stone, his years of Army training taking over, and I was actually relieved to see it.

  This was the version of my dad I could handle in the face of whatever was going on.

  He clicked off the safety and checked the gun over, nodding in approval that it was loaded, then he pulled two extra magazines out of the bag and handed them to me.

  “Keep the safety off. Keep your gun where you can have easy access to it and be careful. You’ve been handling guns for a long time and I know you’ll act responsibly. I can’t take you out of this house without knowing you are fully armed. If anything were to happen to me . . .”

  “Daddy, I—”

  He held up a hand and turned to face me. His face was granite, his eyes hard and unyielding.

  “If anything were to happen to me, you’d have a good chance to survive. I’ve taught you how to shoot, how to take care of yourself, everything I know.”

  He paused a moment, his hands tightening on the steering wheel.

  “I know I wasn’t able to do the things your mom may have been able to while she was alive. The girly stuff . . . the pink stuff,” he said with a crooked grin. I smiled at that. Didn’t matter to me. I wouldn’t have traded my dad and his ways of bonding with me for anything in the world. He nodded to himself and continued.

  “Don’t trust anyone and always remember, survival means being smart.”

  “Acting rashly is what gets people killed.”

  I blinked furiously, trying to keep the threatening tears from spilling over. What was he saying? What was going on beyond the plane crash in our neighborhood?

  I swallowed hard and nodded my head sharply as I looked my father in the eye.

  “I’ll remember, Daddy,” I promised.

  My dad’s eyes softened a fraction and he cupped my cheek gently before he handed me the Colt 1911 handgun and a black leg holster. I took the gun with a shaking hand and attached it to my right leg while my dad backed the Jeep out of the garage.

  The moment we pulled out onto our cul-de-sac, I was immediately, unequivocally sure that my life as I knew it was over.

  My first real glimpse of my neighborhood in the soft morning light took my breath away and left a gaping hole in the center of my chest. Over half of the houses in my line of vision had been completely demolished, fires burned in every direction, and debris littered the entire area.

  We moved slowly down the street, trying to avoid chunks of metal and wandering people.

  Mr. Howe, from a street over, was sitting on the edge of our sidewalk, still wearing his pajamas and missing a shoe. His wrinkled face was blackened and smudged with what looked like soot. Blood had dripped down his face, obscuring one light brown eye, and splattering all over his white tee shirt from a large wound on his head.

  He was staring off into the distance like he was waiting for something to happen. I didn’t see his wife or daughter anywhere and I suddenly didn’t want to know why that was.

  There were a dozen or more people, some hurt more badly than others, some not hurt at all, but they all were either screaming and crying or completely emotionless.

  In the far distance, I heard a rat-tat-tat and the only thing I could think was, Why would there be shooting at a plane crash site?

  A shiver slithered down my spine.

  “Should we be leaving?” I asked my dad. “We could stay and help out everyone. They’re our neighbors, our friends,” I pleaded.

  My dad’s hands clenched the steering wheel tightly as he drove off the street to avoid a large piece of Mrs. Jones’s beautiful privacy fence in the middle of the road before driving out of our cul-de-sac.

  “We have to leave. We have to get out of here and get to the base.” I searched his face, wondering why he wanted us to get to a military base. Surely we could go after we helped our neighborhood.

  “Why, Dad? What’s going on? I need to know. I need to be prepared.” Dad clenched his jaw.

  We were just about to pull out of our cul-de-sac when I saw Mrs. Sanchez stumble into the road. Her dark brown hair was in a mass of curly tangles all over her head, disrupting my view of her face, but what I did see froze the blood in my veins.

  She was missing an arm. At her shoulder where an arm should have been there was only a gaping wound and a bloody mess of bones, skin, and stringy sinew hanging.

  I blinked once and then twice wondering if I was even awake. This had to be a dream. But it wasn’t. My hand tightened on the door handle of the Jeep and I knew I couldn’t just drive away. Maybe she could still be saved.

  In a flash of reckless abandon and compassion for the neighbor who had made us a homemade flan when we’d moved into the neighborhood, I jumped out of the rolling vehicle.

  “Melody!”

  I heard my dad shouting for me just outside of the buzzing in my ears. My heart was pounding so hard everything else seemed like it was in the peripheral. When I reached Mrs. Sanchez, I held out a shaking hand.

  Up close, she looked so much worse than I had seen from our Jeep. Some of her wild, tangled hair was matted and stuck to the gaping would where her arm had been.

  Her white tank top and green plaid pajama bottoms were covered in blood and soot. Her left leg looked to have been burned severely because as she shifted towards the sound of my voice I saw that a large portion of her thigh had been burned away, the pajama pant melted and burned into the wound. I could see bone and smell the scent of what could only be burning flesh.

  My eyes widened. I stumbled back a step.

  How was she still standing?

  “Mel!” My dad shouted again. I could hear his boots pounding on the pavement behind me as he ran in my direction.

  My arm was still outstretched towards Mrs. Sanchez when she lunged in my direction.

  She latched onto my arm with a clawed grasp, yanking me toward her. It was then that her hair shifted back away from her face.

  When I saw what had become of Mrs. Sanchez’s face.

  Half of her face had melted off and pooled into a mess of flesh that
dangled from her chin. Her once deep brown eyes were now covered in a milky film and dark circles highlighted her eye sockets and stood stark against her too pale skin.

  Out of some god and dad given sense of self preservation, I yanked my arm free just as she gnashed her teeth in my direction, missing my shoulder by inches.

  I stumbled back in shock and backed right into the circle of my dad’s arms.

  His arm raised and barely registered the gun in his hand before I hear the sound of a bullet leaving it and striking Mrs. Sanchez right between her eyes.

  I gasped as dad yanked me around and into a run toward the open door of our Jeep.

  Oh my god. Oh my god. I thought, my mind clattering to understand what had just happened.

  My dad pulled out onto a main road that would lead into our local, small town of Light Oak, North Carolina. And suddenly we were speeding out of our neighborhood.

  The silence was jarring in the aftermath of the gunshot still ringing in my ears. I opened my mouth several times to ask my dad what the hell had just happened. I tightened my shaking hands into a ball in my lap and wiped the trickle of sweat that rolled down my temple.

  I tried to relax back into my seat, but my body was tense, my mind racing a hundred miles a minute, waiting for my dad to explain. When my dad finally spoke, I flinched at the sound, suddenly unsure I wanted to know.

  “There have been reports . . . reports that most civilians were not supposed to hear. It was being kept under wraps to keep panic at bay. I wouldn’t have heard, except some of the officers from the base were helping with the wounded at the crash site and recognized me and broke protocol to tell me.” He ran a hand roughly over his face and shook his head.

  “I didn’t believe it completely, but if you had seen the look on their faces, you wouldn’t have doubted them. I realize that now. And then when the bodies—the bodies that weren’t incinerated in the explosion or the crash—began . . . twitching . . .”

  My dad swallowed loudly and then cleared his throat. My hand spasmed around the door handle and I tightened my grip, preparing myself for whatever he was about to say.

  “At first, even after what the soldiers told me, I thought that they had somehow survived, somehow pulled through. I ran to the person nearest to me, who was making horrible gurgling sounds and writhing around on the ground like a wild person, and tried to pull them from the wreckage, only to have a soldier come up behind me and point-blank shoot the survivor right between the eyes.”

  I gasped, my chest painfully tight, my mind trying to close itself off from the impossible reality my dad spoke of.

  My dad’s story was far from finished.

  “I screamed at the soldier and got in his face, telling him he was a disgrace to America, but then all of a sudden, like a demented orchestra, bodies were thrashing around, and the moaning. . . God, the moaning and gurgling. Soldiers started shooting, and I still didn’t understand. It wasn’t until a volunteer who had been helping us with survivors through the early morning hours ran over and knelt beside one of the bodies right next to me to help them . . . and the body—the thing—sank its teeth into the volunteer’s neck and blood sprayed from his carotid artery, did I finally get it through my skull. We weren’t dealing with survivors. We were dealing with monsters. Monsters who live inside of dead bodies.”

  Monsters who live inside of dead bodies.

  I let that phrase rattle around my mind and meld together with the fresh memory of what had just happened with our neighbor, Mrs. Sanchez. I still didn’t want to believe it.

  My dad drove for a few minutes in silence and I tried to digest everything he had just told me. The government obviously knew something, but the general public had no idea what was going on. The dead were somehow reviving and killing humans.

  It all sounded so surreal, so completely insane, that if anyone else had told me, there was no way in hell I would have believed them. But my dad was the strongest and most down-to-earth person I’d ever met. There was no way he’d be exaggerating or could have mistaken something so serious as this. He may not know everything, but he knew enough to realize the shit was about to hit the fan and we needed to get to the best place possible if we were going to be safe. I just hoped things hadn’t progressed too far past what we could handle.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and tried to send my best friend, Jess, a text.

  It wouldn’t go through.

  I hadn’t seen Jess since we’d moved right after graduation nearly a year ago. Dad felt we needed a change of scenery after all that we had been through the past two years. While I didn’t want to leave Jess, I’d agreed with him. Jessica had gotten me through so much and I could only hope she would be okay.

  God, I hoped she was going to be safe.

  “Jesus,” my dad muttered as we drove into town. I snapped out of my memories, sat up, and placed a hand on the gun strapped to my leg.

  Fires burned everywhere, people ran and screamed, some were bashing in store front windows, and mixed in with it all was tumultuous violence and the stench of death. Bodies lay haphazardly on sidewalks. Glass littered the area, crunching beneath the feet of the living and the undead alike. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Town Hall’s American flag billowing in the morning breeze, flapping slowly and majestically as if it were just any other day.

  Out in the middle of the street, people fought off their own fellow neighbors and family members with eerie, vacant eyes, blood clotting around their mouths, and ripped skin hanging from their teeth.

  “Dad?” I whispered, swallowing the bile in my throat.

  “Hold on, Mel. We are going to get out of here.”

  I gazed straight ahead and tried to block out all the violence and gore surrounding me, tried to see how my dad was going to get us out of the center of town. The streets were becoming more and more congested with abandoned cars, still-twitching bodies, and people wandering around shell-shocked from the situation in which they suddenly found themselves.

  I couldn’t help but feel panic starting to claw at my chest as I watched a little old lady, carrying a small, yapping puppy meander through the chaos.

  My dad gunned the gas and we had to weave dangerously through the streets, trying to get free of the madness. If we could just get off of the main drag, and make it to the highway, we’d have a straight shot to the Army base.

  A woman wearing a blood-stained bath robe ran out in the road, directly in our path. My dad swerved hard to the left. I screamed and grabbed the door handle, holding on for dear life. We missed the woman only by a few inches.

  My dad swerved again, this time trying to miss a teen boy wearing a black hoodie with the words NOPE printed across the front and missing half his face. His braces glinted eerily in the sunlight.

  Unable to avoid him, the Jeep swiped his body, causing the undead teenager to go pinwheeling back up onto the sidewalk. I glanced back and saw him get up like nothing had happened, and then lunge on all fours for the woman we had missed a few seconds earlier, her scream cutting off abruptly as he tore at her throat.

  My hand immediately went to my gun while we were speeding away and yet I couldn’t do anything. I had never felt so utterly wretched as I did when we were driving out of the city and not doing a damned thing to help anyone.

  I could only hope that help—in the form of police or military—would be on their way as soon as possible.

  Take the Fucking Head Shot

  “How did this happen?” I asked after we were a few miles out of the city. The quaint brick buildings of Light Oak gave way to long, winding roads surrounded by nothing but thick, green forests on either side. Usually my happy place, the woods reminded me of everything that had happened the past few hours. If anything happened, we’d be on foot. Being on foot didn’t exactly appeal to me after our close call in town.

  “I don’t know, but I am going to find out,” my dad promised vehemently.

  Dad was flipping through radio channels, finding none that wer
e broadcasting anything about what was happening, and cursing under his breath. He mentioned as almost a side note that we couldn’t be more than twenty minutes from the base and the next thing I remember was not much more than a flash.

  Not a flash of light, just a flash of red . . . a red shirt. The next thing I knew the whole world was spinning. The whole world was red.

  “Melody? Melody, are you okay?” Dad’s voice sounded so far away.

  My eyes cracked open and I saw his unshaven, sun-darkened, and concerned face close to mine.

  “Thank God.” His voice echoed around me, like we had somehow ended up in a tunnel.

  Blackness.

  An annoying mechanical dinging replaced my dad’s voice. My eyes fluttered open again. I reached up to touch my head. It felt abnormally inflated and my hand felt light and detached from the rest of my body. When I brought it back in front of me, I saw that it was covered in blood. I was suddenly drowned in sounds . . . everything came rushing back so fast that I nearly passed out from the sensory overload. I gazed around myself and realized I was alone in the Jeep and my dad’s door was standing wide open. The dinging noise.

  I must have hit my head on the dashboard, I thought, stumbling out of the Jeep and into the damp grass. I glanced around, aware of the tall trees of the forest looming close by, bits of sunlight streaming through and twinkling with the movement of the branches overhead.

  Where was my dad?

  My hand rested on my gun as I made my way around to the back of the Jeep, barely taking note that the front end of our vehicle was wrapped around a small tree.

  I spotted my dad hunched over a body several yards away. I started to walk that way, but before I could make it, a large figure shuffled from behind an overturned Impala and fell on top of my dad. I screamed out, my voice cutting through the morning like a wayward piece of shrapnel finding its mark.