State of (Book 1): State of Decay

by Martinez, P. S.

  My dad moved quickly, but not before the large dead man sunk his teeth into his shoulder. I grabbed my gun and ran to help him, but in my absolute terror, I didn’t notice the small figure lunging for me.

  In an instant and before I could process the movement, I landed on the asphalt with an umph, my gun hitting the ground about a foot away from me, and way too far away from dad. I looked up into the crazed, colorless eyes of a little girl about five or six years old, with blonde pigtails and gnashing teeth.

  Her brown eyes were glazed over in a milky film, her tiny, wiry arms unnaturally strong as she grabbed at me, thrashing wildly. Her small mouth gnashed close to my face, her putrid breath caressing my cheek.

  I held onto the girl by her neck, using all my strength to keep her teeth from getting close enough to rip a chunk out of my skin. It wasn’t easy, she was a lot stronger than any normal kindergartener should have been. I turned my head and reached frantically for my gun. My arm trembled with the effort it took to hold the little demon off of me as I strained to reach the handle of my handgun.

  When my fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun, I caught a glimpse of my dad wrestling with the huge monster on top of him. He bellowed out his anger and pain as the man ripped into the soft flesh of his neck.

  “Dad, no!” I screamed, tears coursing down my face. I brought my gun up with my free hand and pointed it right in the face of the miniature monster on top of me. Even then, my hand wavered, my trigger finger stiffened.

  She was a little girl, someone’s baby, still wearing hair bows and a Disney Princess tee shirt.

  “Take the shot.” I turned my head and found my dad’s beautiful blue eyes narrowed on me, his words coming out in wet gasps. His hand shot out and my eyes fixated on the tattoo he’d had done on his left ring finger in honor of mom. I bit back a sob.

  “Take. . . the . . . fucking . . . head . . . shot, Mel. You . . . will . . . live, baby girl.”

  I turned and put the gun up to the little girl’s head and pulled the trigger.

  I sobbed, closing my eyes.

  The little body fell limply on me as blood and brain matter and miniscule chunks of skull pelted my face.

  It took a second for me to regain my composure enough to roll the little girl’s body off from on top of me. As soon as I was free from her, I ran over to where the monster still pinned my dad and put on bullet through his temple. I heard my dad grunt when the overweight zombie landed on him. I let out a sob as I sat my gun aside to try and roll the man and free my dad.

  “Daddy,” I wailed, caressing the side of his face. His eyes were losing focus and I kept saying don’t over and over again. I begged him not to leave me. I wiped and wiped at his face, trying to clear the blood off, but my ministrations only seemed to smear it more.

  I wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve and sucked in a deep breath. I grabbed my dad by the arms and shoulders, intending to lift him off the pavement so we could go get help. Blood was pooling out from and around his body more quickly now.

  “Let’s go,” I urged, my voice steel. I yanked hard, but his shoulders and upper body barely registered the movement.

  My dad’s eyes softened a bit as he held onto my arm, squeezing lightly. I shook my head.

  “No,” I answered what he was trying to say. I shook my head again. “You can do this. We can move and go get help,” I insisted.

  “Mel . . .” His voice came out rough and wet sounding and it stopped me cold. Tears were flowing freely now, blurring my vision and mixing in with the blood splatters. I turned to my dad and lifted his head, cradling it in my lap. I ran my hand over his hair, caressing it lightly as I began to hum a little tune my mom used to sing to me when I was little. I felt my dad’s grip loosen on my arm.

  My own grip tightened on him and tears flowed even quicker.

  “Proud . . . of . . . you,” he gasped out. “Love . . . you . . . baby girl.” His words cost him and as he wheezed in, he coughed roughly, blood spraying through his lips as he did.

  “I love you too, daddy,” I whispered, hugging his head tightly.

  It wasn’t long at all before his hand went completely lax and fell away from me. I cried for what seemed like hours but must have only been minutes. I held onto him savoring the heat of his body for as long as I could. I knew I was on borrowed time though.

  Not much later, after my dad’s body had become cool and clammy to the touch, I felt a slight twitch in his fingertips. In the back of my conscience, I knew what was happening. I didn’t want to know, though, and I hated myself for the very small tug of hope in my chest when I felt the movement, but there it was.

  I found myself hoping my dad was somehow going to be okay but fully aware of -and yet completely detached from- the reality of what I was about to have to do.

  As gently as possible, I moved my dad’s head from off of my lap and reached for my gun. On my knees, I sat in vigil. It didn’t take long. I sucked in a sharp breath and pointed my gun at my father’s head. His eyes moved behind his eyelids and I could already see a change in his face and skin.

  The life had been sucked completely free of his body and all that was left was a corpse.

  My daddy was truly and fully gone.

  What was happening now was that the monster inside him was waking up. I wanted to remember my dad’s eyes as they had been before—full of life, clear and as bright blue as a summer sky, not marred by the milky film of the undead monsters. Before I could change my mind or falter, I shot the monster who was waking up before he could use my father’s body to hurt others.

  I sunk to my knees and emptied my soul right there on the asphalt in the middle of nowhere. It could have been a few minutes or a few hours before I was able to pull myself off the ground and regroup. I got up on wobbly legs and began the arduous task of moving my dad’s body off of the road.

  When I was finished and had covered my dad with a tarp from the back of our Jeep, I grabbed my backpack and the rucksack, added a few of my dad’s weapons and ammo to the bag I had packed, and then I ran into the dark tree line on the side of the abandoned road.

  Wind whipped through the trees creating an eerily normal rustling sound. Any other time the sound would have comforted me, but now it just heightened my anxiety.

  I walked without stopping, without thinking, and I walked with my eyes on the road, making sure I wouldn’t run into more dead, also trying to avoid running into any living people. I knew without a shadow of doubt that I would have been an easy target for people trying to survive. A teenage girl carrying supplies and weapons. I was a sitting duck in a world gone crazy.

  My only goal was to survive. And survival meant getting to the Army base.

  I don’t know how long I walked with my body completely numb. I knew I was likely in shock, but steadily putting one foot in front of the other kept me tethered to the ground, so I kept moving at a steady clip.

  The only thing I was aware of was how the tips of my fingers were tingling and how crustiness of the blood that was drying into my hair and clothing was chaffing. The slightly coppery, but mostly spoiled meat smell of the blood and gore wafted to my nostrils every step or so. I ignored it all.

  It wasn’t long before the forest began thinning out in front of, the trees becoming more and more sparse. As I came to the top of a hill, I could see the fences of the Army base.

  Of course, I had heard the gunfire before I ever saw the base.

  And with the gunfire came the screams and groans.

  I trudged down the hill to get a better look, keeping close to the cover of the trees, yet close enough to really figure out if I could make it into the base and to safety. I skirted the perimeter of the base, daring to move closer and out of the cover of the woods a few times to find an opening to enter. What I found stopped me cold each time.

  The dead and dying had overrun the base and worse, a lot of them were soldiers in full gear. It was hard to see who was dead and who wasn’t from behind. Reaching out or calling out co
uld get me killed. It wasn’t even an option.

  Even worse yet, the survivors I observed from outside the base had gone batshit crazy. People were turning on each other trying to enter the buildings of the base. Survivors shut other survivors outside, leaving them to the dead closing around them. Others waited until zombies were contentedly tearing into their friends, neighbors, fellow humans, and then took the supplies dropped in the chaos.

  I sat my rucksack down on the ground and sat down roughly near it, listening to the deafening sounds of chaos all around me. What was I supposed to do? What would my Dad have done? A tear tracked down my cheek and I quickly wiped it away, clenching my jaw to keep the rest at bay. There would be time for that later. Right then I had to make a decision. Acting rashly could get me killed.

  A butterfly chose at that moment to fly directly in front of me and I smiled widely and reached out a muck-covered hand. I wondered, vaguely, if the dead would have appreciated such a small pleasure. I shook my head. My limbs suddenly felt so very heavy. A nap would have been nice. A nap in the wide open with the sunlight warming my body. I sighed. My eyes fluttered, closing against my will.

  The snap of a branch nearby jarred me back to reality. I jumped up, but only saw a small rabbit making its way further into the woods. I fished a water bottle out of my bag, took a sip and then splashed a bit in my face. Suddenly, I was terrified. Terrified I was somehow skirting the edge of a mental breakdown, the edge of panic and insanity.

  I was exhausted. I was grieving internally. I couldn’t allow those things to get me killed. I couldn’t let those things happen out here in the open where I was more vulnerable. Vulnerable to the dead and living alike.

  I breathed deeply through my nose, picked my bag up off the forest floor, and turned to move deeper into the woods, away from the base, away from the roads, and away from everything.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do in the long run, but I did know one thing. I was going to live.

  If I had to, I’d taking the fucking head shot over and over again. You better bet your sweet ass I wasn’t going down without a fight.

  I was going to survive.

  Undiluted Zombie B.O.

  I could almost pretend everything was normal.

  If I closed my eyes tightly enough, and long enough, I could imagine my dad was just gone to catch us some fish for dinner, and that we were on a normal father-daughter camping trip, like always. Reality was too harsh.

  The reality was that my dad was gone, and that fucking hurt like someone had stuck a knife up under my breastbone and was twisting it harder and plunging it deeper every second. The pain took my breath away and I was reminded of my loss every time I tried to inhale. Something had broken off inside me, and I wasn’t entirely sure it could be repaired. Ever.

  The morning after my dad died, I sat in the woods on my bedroll and looked over all the supplies I’d packed in my rucksack. It wasn’t a lot, but I had a feeling it was a ton more than a lot of other people ended up with. Most importantly, I was checking for the things I was most in danger of running out of, and the things I didn’t have.

  Where food was concerned, I was doing pretty well. My dad had seven MREs, Meals Ready-to-Eat, in the rucksack, and I had added a box of granola bars, a bag of apples, crackers, peanut butter, beef jerky, and a few other odds and ends to the bags before we left. If I was very frugal, I was pretty positive I could last at the very least two to three weeks on the supplies I had, and that didn’t include any fish I might catch.

  I bit my lip and sorted through the rest of my supplies: small first aid kit, flashlight with batteries, waterproof matches, a can of lighter fluid, a collapsible fishing pole, and miscellaneous personal hygiene supplies. I had four water bottles on me, two were empty and two were full. I could simply refill the bottles, since I’d already scouted a water source, but it would be easier if I had a jug or two.

  I paced around the place I’d claimed as my own, close to a small stream and far enough away from any main road so as not to be spotted by any random group of survivors that may stick to main roads. I glanced up into the blue sky above my head. The first eight hours that I’d kept moving further and further into the woods, I’d heard the sound of helicopters flying overhead several times.

  Once, I had even started to second guess myself and wonder if I should head back into town, that maybe I had overreacted and things were already getting better. I had a feeling deep down that the best thing for me to do was to keep moving and to get as far away as possible from any other humans—dead or alive. I squatted down again and ran a hand over my weary eyes.

  “Daddy, what should I do?” I whispered. A tear tracked down my cheek, followed by another and then another. Pretty soon the floodgate that I’d kept so diligently locked for the past three days came crashing open and I sunk to the ground and unraveled.

  *****

  It wasn’t until later that morning that I had the will to pull myself off of my bedroll and make my way over to the stream to wash off. I changed my top and threw my two tank tops on the ground. I’d burn those. Even if I could get all the blood and other bits that had seeped in and dried for three days straight after that first night, I’d never be able to wear them again.

  I packed away all my things except for a small pack of essentials—those I put into a smaller, lighter weight backpack that I’d take with me into town. I found a spot under thick foliage and hid all my things, and then I took the time to brush the ground with branches to make my little camping spot less conspicuous just like dad had always taught me.

  Those things had always been for fun, for bonding the only way he knew how but, man, I was so very glad for my unconventional upbringing now.

  When I was finished, I checked my pack one last time and made sure I had my weapons on me. Along with my handgun strapped to my leg, and my dad’s M4 across my back, I added a twelve-inch recon knife. The blade was wicked sharp and deadly, and just the thing to have if you found yourself in a tight spot but didn’t want to make too much noise.

  I sat down and pulled out some beef jerky and a power bar. It was going to be a long hike.

  I wanted to see if anything had changed in the past twenty-four hours, but I also had to make sure I had made the right choice. Now that my mind wasn’t quite so foggy with grief and exhaustion, maybe I would see things more clearly. Maybe the Army had rallied and were looking for and rescuing survivors.

  If so, I intended to be one of them. I also had to see if I could find a way to contact Jess. She was the only family I had left. The only other person in the world that mattered to me. I needed to make sure she was okay. Not only that, I needed to do one other thing . . . something personal.

  I finished off my breakfast and filled my water bottles. This was going to suck on so many levels. I grabbed my backpack and made my way back to the place of nightmares and monsters.

  *****

  The edge of the woods came faster than I thought possible. I’m sure it had taken the same amount of time to leave my campsite that it did for me to get to it, but when I was heading toward chaos and death, I sincerely wished it would have taken a lot longer. The hike in had passed in a blur.

  I exited the woods several miles south of where I’d entered them, near the Army base. I’d made sure to give the place that my dad had died a wide berth and found myself probably a mile south of the spot where his body still lay, close to the Jeep where it was wrapped around the tree we had hit.

  I walked along the road staying close to the edge of the woods just in case I had to duck and cover or make a run for it. Plus, the trees made me feel safer, like I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. I walked for a few hours, the sound of my footsteps crunching loudly in the now deafening silent world.

  Every little sound; the breeze catching the limbs of the trees, a lizard scurrying across the forest floor, even the voice of birds singing in the distance, ratcheted up my fear and anxiety of the unknown.

  The brand new sounds, those of
the living dead, mixed with the old, heralded my approach to Light Oak. Still the lack of voices raised in conversation, the lack of engines rumbling in the distance all sounded louder to my ears than I ever thought possible. How could a lack of something become so deafening?

  It took me several pep talks before I was actually able to run across the highway and duck behind an Ace Hardware store skirting the edge of town.

  The scent of the dead slapped me in the face like an oversaturated blanket of smog. I gasped and choked, trying to breathe in through my mouth instead of my nose, but breathing through my mouth only made it worse.

  Have you ever tasted the scent of rot and decay on the back of your tongue? It’s no palate pleaser, that’s for sure. And let’s not mention the amount of gnats a person can consume in a single inhale. Bleck!

  With my heart pounding frantically in my chest, I made my way slowly around the hardware store until I was sure I could make a run for the shadow of another building. I kept that up for the next thirty minutes, ducking, hiding, and darting to the back of buildings, from shadow to shadow, until I was closer to the main part of town.

  When I finally reached the center of town, I knew things were even worse than I imagined, and that I had been right to take sanctuary in the woods. I knew it was reckless to come here, but I didn’t think I could have moved on until I saw it for myself. No cops. No military. Just the silent, shuffling remains of what my dad and I drove out of.

  I was right to stay away—and now I just had to get back to the safety of my camp in the woods.

  Bodies were strewn everywhere. More than when I’d driven through with my dad, but less of each as a whole. There wasn’t much left on the individual corpses and I shuddered to think how many zombies there were roaming the town to consume that much flesh and blood like a swarm of undead vultures.

  I’d just pressed myself against the wall of a Starbucks, the only one in town, when a wave of zombies decided to come lurching into view.