by TW Brown
“Get down, Thalia.”
She obeyed without protest. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she slid to the floor on the passenger’s side, pulled her knees in tight, and wrapped her arms around them. Sort of like a tiny ball.
The door to the sports car opened. A tall, very attractive in an out-of-my-league sort of way, brunette emerged. My mind sped through several scenarios. All of which ended up with me as the hero and her falling into my arms. She proceeds to show her gratitude and admiration for my heroism...
“Thank God!” she screamed, and ran to my truck.
I rolled down the window, seeing no reason to open the door. I mean seriously, there are a bunch of walking dead shambling this way. Sure they’re still a ways off and moving slow, but my mind is still trying to process what’s happening.
“Ummm…you probably shouldn’t be out of your car.”
I am so smooth.
“Please help me! What the hell is going on?”
“You really shouldn’t be out of your car.” I glanced again at the group of undead closing the distance slowly and steadily. One of them was outdistancing the others and had his arms outstretched.
“My neighbor did this!” the pretty brunette said, holding up her left arm. Blood dripped from a shallow but jagged rip below the elbow.
My look must’ve given something away, because she hastily covered up. Her expression was a crazy mix of fear, embarrassment, and confusion. Without warning, she lunged at my door, pulling wildly on the handle. I went for the lock, but a shade too late as the door opened and I tumbled gracelessly to the ground.
Thalia screamed.
Scrambling up as quickly as I could with the wind only partially knocked out of me, I had no idea what to do. Was this lady one of them? Maybe the newly turned are different. Perhaps the brain died slowly, and they kept certain functions for a while. I really had no clue where the movie stuff was right or wrong. Hell, maybe it was all wrong. All of that jumbled around in my mind like rocks in a dryer as I came to my feet.
She was apologizing over and over. Maybe she was sorry she had to eat me now. All I truly knew at that exact moment was that she was beside me with a vise-like grip on my arm. There were several of those things about twenty feet or so away, and I was not ready to die.
I shoved her as hard as I could, sending my closest threat stumbling back towards the street. I snatched the gun from the cab where it had fallen to the floorboard in all this insanity. My finger curled around the trigger as I spun and fired.
She was in the process of climbing back to her feet. With an expression of astonishment, she looked down as a bloom of red spread across her blouse. Her eyes returned to mine in shock.
“Why?” She staggered sideways a step and fell…hard.
I still heard screaming. While I was shaking my head rapidly to clear it, something grabbed my shoulder. I whirled around face-to-face with the speed-walker of the bunch. It was a woman. Or had been. Her dark hair clung to her face, glued in place by dried blood. Most of the left cheek had been ripped away. Greyish gums and blood-smeared teeth greeted me in what looked like an exaggeratedly evil grin. I raised the pistol and fired. The bullet tore through its throat, jolting the upper body backwards. I felt the grip upon my shoulder tighten, and the head snapped back toward me with mouth open wide.
It’s strange, the little things that capture our attention in a crisis. I noticed that the flat, lifeless, black-blood veined eyes never changed expression. No anger, hunger, victory, desire, pain...just empty. Truly empty.
I jammed the barrel of the gun into the now gaping maw and fired. The creature simply dropped. Again, it was as if the plug were suddenly pulled, like on a radio.
Without waiting for more bad things to happen, I jumped into the truck, slamming the door, locking it, and rolling up the window seemingly all at once. I shifted into drive and launched the big truck into the street, clipping the sports car enough to turn it a little sideways. My hard right turn aimed us back towards the interstate.
***
I’ve risked my life a whole bunch of times since that night. But at no time was I as stupid or out-of-control as I was in the way I left that gas station parking lot. Six more inches to the left, and I catch enough of that sports car to probably end our ride.
***
Looking in my rearview mirror, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The zombies had fallen on the brunette. That could only mean one thing. Since they ignored, and even stepped over the zombie that I had just blown the back of its skull off, the brunette was not, at the time just before I shot her at least, dead.
Adding one plus one, I had just killed someone. My mind began to argue vigorously the varying points.
She was bitten.
It was only a matter of time.
You saved her much misery.
All the way to the interstate, and for the next several miles, my mind continued. It tried to offer me the solace that no other living, breathing human being would if they’d seen what I’d done.
Eventually, Thalia fell into a fitful sleep. If things were as I suspected, and if they had just started…this was only the ugly beginning.
It would get worse.
The unthinkable has happened. The dead are walking!
Humanity’s fragile thread may be reaching its bitter end.
Individuals and groups struggle to survive…some at any cost. Will there be anybody left?
Or, is this just…
The Ugly Beginning?
DEAD: the 12 book series
The Dead Walk:
Samuel Todd is a regular guy:
...Failed husband...
...Loving father...
...Dutiful worker...
...Aspiring rock star.
He had no idea if anyone would care, or take the time, to read his daily blog entries about his late night observations. But what started as an open monologue of his day-to-day life became a running journal of the first-hand account detailing the rising of the dead and the downfall and degradation of mankind...
Catch all 3 books in the Zomblog Trilogy
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Fury puts the bite back in the vampire. This horror-noir novel follows a gang of thieves who rob vampire clans in the seedy underbelly of New York City, circa 1998. Featuring crooks and vampires, mythical beasts and dirty cops, gangsters and porn stars, Fury is the first novel in Tony Monchinski's new series,
I Kill Monsters.
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TW Brown is the author of the Zomblog series and the Dead series. He is deeply immersed in the multiple sequels of each franchise while trying to balance the duties of husband, father, friend, and band member as well as keeping busy reading and editing the numerous submissions for a variety of upcoming anthologies and full-length titles for May December Publications. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and has had short stories published by Pill Hill Press , Living Dead Press, and in the NoTreeBooks.com anthology, Vampires, Zombies, and Ghosts, Oh My!
You can contact him at [email protected] or visit his website at www.maydecemberpublications.com. You can follow him on twitter @maydecpub and on facebook under Todd Brown and also under May December Publications.