The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8

by Flint Maxwell

  Lilly notices my eyes jumping back and forth from her to the small room. She snaps her fingers in front of my face, says, “Jack? Hello?”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says, grabbing my arm and dragging me out of the house. The door bangs behind us. The air is thick with the smell of smoke and burnt meat, but it’s a nice night: clear skies, bright moon, light breeze. I scan the horizon for the inevitable horde of zombies. There isn’t one.

  Maybe, I’m thinking to myself, things are starting to go my way for once. I mean, it’s been two years without much luck. Is it too much to ask for a little? I’m overdue.

  “You’re not leaving me behind,” Lilly says, again her voice snapping me back to the here and now. This is not what I expected her to say. “I’m not stupid, Jack. I know that’s what you intend to do.”

  Her clairvoyance is a bit alarming. Is it that obvious?

  I try to find the words to reply but can’t. I stand in front of Lilly and for the first time in a long time, I notice that my shoulders slump. Posture is everything, that’s what Norm always said. You stand up straight and you project this confidence about yourself. Right now, I pretty much project no confidence whatsoever, and I should, shouldn’t I? I just helped free a bunch of human lives, I helped take down a bunch of District scum, I’ve discovered that a long lost family member is still out there. So why do I feel so…bad?

  It’s not that you only feel bad, Jack, my mind says, it’s that you’re also scared. Scared shitless. Abby is alive, she’s out there, but she’s in District territory. That means Norm can still be alive, too. What makes you feel bad is that you know Darlene and Junior and Carmen and Tim aren’t out there. They’re dead and gone and this is somehow a brutal reminder of that. Talk about pessimism.

  Lilly snaps her fingers again. “Okay, next time you space out on me, Jack, I’m not snapping my fingers. I’m gonna smack you across the face instead.”

  I nod. “Probably deserve it.”

  We talk in hushed whispers. It’s a natural reaction to life on the road, staying quiet so zombies don’t hear you…all of that jazz. Really, staying quiet is the least of my worries.

  “Oh, shut up,” Lilly says. She tilts her head back and takes a long, exasperated sigh. “Snap out of this funk and tell me what is going on.”

  I inhale deeply. “Okay,” I say.

  Twenty-Three

  After I tell her why I don’t want her coming along, after I practically beg her to stay here, Lilly’s voice grows cold and much, much louder. “You’re not leaving me behind. I told you, I’m in this until the end. I hate the District as much as anyone.”

  “Not as much as me,” I say.

  “That may be true, but you’re not a special case. The District has destroyed countless families, countless homes. I’m sick of it. I don’t want to live in a world where I have to fear the zombies and the District.”

  “Lilly,” I say, “it’s dangerous. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know what will come of this.”

  “That’s the point,” she says. I’m surprised to see a smile on her lips. Then again, Lilly is pretty good at surprising me. “Danger is my middle name. Well, actually it’s Gertrude—”

  “Gertrude?”

  “Don’t ask,” Lilly says, putting up a hand. “Anyway, I’m coming with you. You need backup, and if you say no, I’m just going to follow you.”

  The front door opens. I imagine it is normally soundless, but since Bandit rammed through it during his failed escape it practically screams. Suzanna comes out, a dish towel over her shoulder. For someone who has been forced to manual labor and running from zombies for however long, she seems to be adjusting quite well.

  “Everything okay?” she asks.

  I nod and say yes, but Lilly cuts me off as she’s so apt to do and says, “No. No, it’s not.”

  Suzanna furrows her brow and tilts her head. “What’s wrong?”

  “Jack here thinks he can take on the entire District by himself,” Lilly answers.

  Sudden anger flares inside of me. “Lilly,” I say, feeling betrayed.

  “Oh, stop it, Jack. We can trust her. We saw her put a bullet in Bandit’s head.”

  “Yes, you can trust me. What is she talking about, Mr. Jupiter?” Suzanna asks me. She crosses her arms and looks at me in a very motherly way despite only being about a decade or so older.

  “It’s nothing, really,” I say. “And just call me Jack, please.”

  Lilly sighs. “You’re unbelievable, Jack.”

  Suzanna walks down the steps and comes toward us. She takes the dish towel off of her shoulder and leaves it on the railing. “You can talk to me, Jack,” she says. “I know more about the District than I ever wanted to. Working here for all this time has done that for me.” She puts her arm around my shoulders. In a way, she reminds me of Eve, Darlene’s mother. Even up until the cancer took her, Eve had all the traits of a true leader, just as Suzanna does. She makes me feel welcome, comfortable. “Let’s take a walk and discuss what’s troubling you.”

  And what am I to do? Refuse her, run away? No, I can’t do that. As much as I don’t want to discuss these things with Suzanna—or anyone for that matter—I do realize that her knowledge may help me on my journey.

  She leads me to the duck pond. The water is smooth, calm, and dark. The moon reflects off of its surface. Somewhere at the bottom, Bandit’s body rots. He won’t be coming back as a zombie, not after the shots that took him to his death landed. The image of his eviscerated face jumps into my mind. A chilling voice says That could be you, Jack…if you don’t listen, if you don’t plan this right.

  I shake my head slightly in an attempt to make the voice go away. It doesn’t. That voice is always there, always will be. It’s the voice of doubt and fear, one that has grown from a barely audible whisper into a yell.

  “We heard a voice over the radio right when Bandit ran out of the house,” Lilly says.

  Suzanna nods with sagely wisdom. She no longer has her arm around my shoulders; now her hands are buried deep in the pockets of her borrowed pants.

  “Jack knew the voice. It’s one of his old friends from Haven,” Lilly says.

  Suzanna pauses in her steps and looks at me curiously. “Haven?” she says.

  I close my eyes and slowly nod.

  “Horrific thing that happened there,” Suzanna says. “But let’s not harp on the past. I’ll tell you what your friend is doing with the District. You may not believe me, you may not think it’s the most logical answer, but I will tell you anyway.”

  Twenty-Four

  The door opens back at the house, the hinges screeching. We all turn to look and there’s Marco coming out on the porch with his rifle in hand.

  “What’s up?” Suzanna calls to him.

  “Everyone’s hitting the hay. I volunteered to take first watch,” Marco calls back.

  Suzanna wears a motherly smile on her face. She puts her hand up and says, “Nonsense, Marco. You get yourself to bed. I’ll keep watch.” Marco opens his mouth to protest, but Suzanna continues on. “If anything happens, I’ll wake you.”

  Marco’s mouth closes. “Of course, ma’am,” he says after a moment. Then he’s mumbling, barely audible, “A bed. Man, an actual bed.”

  The door opens again and eases closed.

  Suzanna turns back to Lilly and I. “I have witnessed terrible things firsthand, as I’m sure we all have. But I’ve also witnessed things not even I believe.”

  “Like what?” Lilly asks.

  “In a moment, Lilly,” Suzanna says. “Come, let us go to a place more private.”

  She leads us to the barn. In the moonlight, the sludge-like blood from the zombies still stains the grass in patches. The air still smells like burnt meat and I imagine it will for a long time. Of all the private places on this farm, I did not think the barn would be near the top of the list, especially with Suzanna’s history. She pulls up two overturned buckets for Lilly and I to sit on an
d then plops down herself on stacked bags of feed or fertilizer. An array of farming equipment hovers over her head—hoes, rakes, spades, all of which would be decent weapons for when the ammunition runs out.

  The inside of the barn does not smell pleasant. It is a sickening sweet mixture of hay, the outdoors, and the dead. Not to mention the stink coming from the cell Suzanna and the rest of her people came from. They didn’t exactly have plumbing in there.

  Suzanna sighs longingly. Lilly and I exchange a glance. Worry overtakes me. Have we misjudged this woman? Has being locked in here, beaten by District soldiers, driven her mad? I sure hope not, but I clutch my rifle a little closer to my side, ready to bring it up at a moment’s notice. It’s now that I notice just how bare my back feels without my sword and sheath attached to it. My cloak is inside, though, that might be what’s doing it. Also, it’s not a particularly warm night despite the smoldering ashes of the cremation fire nearby.

  “Brainwashing,” Suzanna says abruptly, the maternal quality of her voice gone.

  “Brainwashing?” I repeat.

  Lilly laughs. It’s an uncomfortable laugh.

  “Yes, brainwashing. I don’t know how one goes about brainwashing—it might be very easy or entirely beyond my own intellectual capabilities—but that’s what the District does. They brainwash their people. If it doesn’t work, then they kill them without hesitation,” Suzanna says.

  My mind reels. Brainwashing? Now, I’ve heard and read a lot of crazy things—seen even crazier things—but brainwashing? That’s something else.

  “I can tell by your face that you do not believe me, Jack,” Suzanna says. She doesn’t sound angry or disbelieving but perfectly natural instead. “I’ve seen it myself. These soldiers, Bandit had words for them, like dog trainers have for their dogs. He’d tell the soldier to jump and say the word and the soldier would ask how high.”

  “I’ve never heard of this,” Lilly says as if her knowledge of such things is the be-all, end-all of this matter.

  “Where do you come from?” Suzanna ask.

  “Freeland. A sometimes District-occupied place. We supplied arms and crop for their ‘protection.’ I was around District soldiers all the time, and I never heard of brainwashing—” A momentary spark of realization comes to Lilly’s eyes.

  Suzanna is nodding.

  Me—I’m confused as hell.

  “You see it now, yes?” Suzanna asks. “Now that I’ve pointed it out to you, you cannot unsee it.”

  Lilly whispers, “Holy shit. Oops, excuse me, Suze.”

  Suzanna waves a hand, turns to me. “And you, Jack?”

  “What am I looking for?” I ask. “What am I trying to realize here?”

  “Their faces,” Lilly says. “Their eyes. They all look like drugged-up puppies.”

  “I think that has more to do with their stupidity than it does being brainwashed,” I say.

  Suzanna chuckles. “Relative IQ score has a lot to do with it. It’s much easier to brainwash those of lesser intelligence. Those who are smart enough will just blindly follow orders for fear of their lives, but they are few and far between. The Shadow likes to keep his lackeys…lacking.”

  “The Shadow?” I ask. Brainwashing is one thing. I mean, I’ve heard of brainwashing, maybe even suspected it of the District soldiers at some base level, but I’ve never heard of The Shadow, or anything involving shadows when it comes to the District.

  Suzanna nods. “Yes, he is also known as the Overlord.”

  My stomach squirms. Inside of its pit is a snake of fear and loathing and anger and hate. “Also known as the one-eyed man.”

  “So you’ve seen him?” Suzanna says. “I never have. Bandit always made house calls. Slaves such as us wouldn’t have seen the light of day had it been the other way around.”

  I try to hide the anger on my face. Always simmering just below the surface is my hatred for the one-eyed man. These days, two years after my wife and son were taken from me, I have learned to control it slightly, to bury it a little deeper. Now, though, I can feel the heat baking my face, my hands shaking, my blood pressure spiking.

  “More than seen him then, hmm?” Suzanna muses. “He has wronged you personally. That is evident enough in your eyes.”

  I’m quiet for a moment, quiet and still, stewing in my own hatred and subtle panic. All my time on the road, I’ve wondered about this one-eyed man, this Overlord. I’ve heard a million different stories of who he is, but most of them were just that—stories. Some of the District soldiers I’ve come across during my travels did not even believe this Overlord existed, he was an urban legend to scare those into action as some shady government organization left over from the old days tried to put the pieces of the shattered world back together.

  “He did more than wrong him,” Lilly says in a low voice. I look up at her, my eyes blazing. She catches the hint. “Well…it’s not my story to tell.”

  “Not one I feel like telling, either,” I say.

  “That’s no problem. I understand,” Suzanna says.

  “What do you know about him?” I ask.

  “Not much. Only what I’ve heard over snippets of conversation from Bandit and his men.”

  “I’ve heard a lot of bull,” I say. “Why should I believe you?” I don’t mean this to sound harsh. It kind of does.

  She looks at me, not in the least bit offended. “Does it matter, Jack? All you’ve heard may be true, it may be not, but it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme. You only want one thing, I see it in your eyes as much as I see the pain and hurt in them.”

  I look away. I can’t help myself. It’s as if Suzanna isn’t looking at me so much as she’s looking through me. I feel exposed.

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” she continues. “What I’ve heard.”

  I almost stop her, almost raise my hand and say I don’t need to hear this. She’s right, you know. None of this matters. The Shadow, the Overlord, or the one-eyed man. He could be Ghandi reincarnated for all I care and I’m still going to get my revenge. Because what it comes down to is the fact that he took my wife and son away from me; he slit Darlene’s throat and stepped on Junior’s back as he shot him in the head; he ruined my life, all that I’ve built up, all that I had.

  “His name was Adam. He was an investment banker long ago, and those types of skills one learns in investment banking do not transition well into the zombie apocalypse. So him surviving is almost unheard of. But then something happened. The story goes he was on the run after his compound was flooded with rotters.”

  Lilly adds in, “A feeling we all know,” as I continue to look away from Suzanna, trying to force my mind anywhere else. But I can’t. I have to listen. For Darlene, for Junior, for Abby and Norm and Herb and Tim and Carmen.

  Suzanna doesn’t seem to notice Lilly’s comment and continues talking. “It was while on the run that Adam began to be haunted by what has come to be known as The Shadow.”

  “Like a ghost?” Lilly says skeptically.

  “Like a ghost,” Suzanna agrees. “This ghost or shadow or spirit—whatever it was—made Adam do terrible things. I’ve heard that by this point in time he had lost his wife on the road. Those among his group were his wife’s cousin and a friend from the camp they’d been driven out of. One night, Adam sat by the smoldering remains of their fire on watch. The voices inside his head were always there, I assume, but then they were so loud, he couldn’t avoid them. They told him to kill his wife’s cousin, to kill the friend. And he did it while they were sleeping. He took their lives for no apparent reason, and on that day a new alliance was forged between The Shadow and what was left of Adam’s mind.”

  “What is The Shadow besides a ghost?” Lilly asks. “Like, really?”

  “I—I don’t know. Does it matter?” Suzanna asks. “It is evil, whatever it is.”

  I let out a shaky breath, tune back into the conversation.

  “Holy shit,” Lilly is saying. “That just sounds…crazy.”

  Suzan
na shrugs. “It gets crazier still. This spirit so tormented Adam that he listened to its every word just to appease it. Even when The Shadow called for Adam to remove his eye. One of the men passing through Bandit’s farm claimed to know the soldier who walked in on Adam doing this. He did not use anything besides his own finger, digging and digging into the soft flesh until the eyeball came out with a suctioning pop. The man saw his eyeball hanging from one tangled and stretched optic nerve, saw the blood cascading down his face like red tears. The floor was soaked with puke and blood and pus, and Adam turned around, not Adam any longer for the transformation had been complete that night, and shrieked at the top of his lungs for the soldier to leave or it would be his eye that was removed next.”

  Lilly and I look on; her shocked, me unamused. Nothing seems to shock me anymore.

  “He didn’t require any medical attention. It is said The Shadow healed him in a matter of days. There was no infection or complications. He did not wear an eyepatch, either,” Suzanna says.

  I nod, the image of the man fresh in my mind. He hadn't wore an eyepatch when he murdered Darlene and Junior. The hole was a raw mess of red and pale-white flesh, twisted and pinched to look as unnatural as Suzanna’s story sounds. Thinking of that wound makes me want to scream in rage, to find him and pull his other eye out.

  I push myself up from the bucket, step out of the barn and into the cool, smoky night air.

  Suzanna pauses for the moment. I turn to look at her, the queasiness ramping up with the movement. “What does this have to do with Abby?” I ask.

  “Everything,” Suzanna says. Her face remains blank and stony. “Your friend is under the influence, to an extent, of The Shadow, and I’m afraid there is no possible way to save her. She is lost, lost forever.”

  Lilly hangs her head down. I don’t. This is bullshit, I know it is. Abby recognized my voice. If she is brainwashed and she recognized my voice once, that means it’s not too late to break that spell. Somewhere under her trance, she is the Abby of old, the sister I’ve never had.