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

by Flint Maxwell

  Maybe this place didn’t have as clean of a break as I’d originally thought. Aw, well, doesn’t surprise me. Makes my heart a little heavier than before, but doesn’t completely surprise me. I don’t think anything in this messed up world can anymore.

  “Seriously?” Lilly says. “That place? It looks like the Battle of the Bulge was fought here.”

  “Do you even know what the Battle of the Bulge was?” Abby asks.

  “It’s a porno, isn’t it?” I add.

  They both roll their eyes at me. Hard.

  “Typical male response,” Lilly says, shaking her head. “But seriously, this place is, like, probably riddled with bodies.”

  “Doubt it,” Abby says.

  The truck pulls into the driveway, up the sloping concrete. Glass crunches beneath the tires, but like the body, the tires are armored. Rather, they’re self-inflating; if a bullet hits the tire, a system within the tire will keep it inflated until we can patch it up or change it.

  Crazy, I know.

  When Abby told me about it, I didn’t believe it. I got this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, too, because that meant the District had quite a few gadgets up their sleeves—things I wouldn’t expect. All that tech had just been sitting in army bunkers and weapon plants for years, collecting dust. I guess someone had to go for it. Sucks that it was the District.

  On top of all that, the engine basically makes no noise. The truck runs as quietly as an electric car.

  Abby kills the quiet engine. We sit there for a moment, listening to the night. It’s silent without the rumbling under the hood. Then she kills the headlights, and now it’s almost pitch-black, the moon coming through a break in the dark clouds above.

  I’m the first to get out. I got my rifle clutched to my side, a sidearm in a holster on my hip, a hunting knife in my belt. I pull the hunting knife out. If zombies are around, I doubt they’re hanging in a pack; they only ever do that when they know there’s food nearby. Monkey see, monkey eat, right?

  Still, I can’t be too careful. A gunshot would only alert them of our presence, of their food, and right now, all I want is a good night’s sleep, one that involves not being covered in brains and guts. So I pull the knife free from my belt, and approach the front door. Abby and Lilly are on my flank.

  Abby drifts off to the side of the garage door. The white paint has yellowed and hangs in thick chips, revealing the bare metal beneath. I wonder if there’s a car inside. I bet it’s a nice one…or at least it was once nice, before all this stuff happened. Now it’s probably just a rusty bucket of bolts with deflated tires and a dried up gas tank. Useless. Like everything these days.

  Abby peers around the garage, looks back at us, shakes her head. Lilly goes around the other side. She stands on her tiptoes to look over the fence into the backyard. She shakes her head, too. Slowly, not making a noise, I walk up the porch steps. I feel that one of the boards is loose. If I put any more weight on it, it’ll creak; a creak will be loud in the quiet of this town, so I ease off of it, decide to skip that step all together. On the porch, I smell nothing but mildew and old wood. No rotting corpses. No blood. No opened bodies.

  That’s good, I think to myself. Real good.

  The front door doesn’t have a screen in front of it. It’s just a towering slab of oak. There’s a gold knocker, still pretty resplendent. Below the knocker, there’s no doorknob, but an iron handle with a thumb latch.

  I try the thumb latch.

  It’s so quiet, the silence feels like it’s pressing down on me, like I’m suffocating. I try ignoring my rapid heartbeat. Fail.

  The door is locked. I give it a slight jimmy, but it doesn’t budge.

  Back down the porch steps I go, avoiding that creaky board.

  “Locked,” I whisper.

  “That’s a sign,” Lilly says. “A sign we should go back to that parking deck.”

  Abby ignores her. “You two go around the back, try the other doors.” She says this like she knows for a fact this place is going to have other unlocked doors.

  “What are you gonna do?” I ask her. I’m still holding my knife. Holding it pretty tightly. I see the whites of my knuckles shining through my sunburned flesh.

  “I’m gonna check out that Humvee,” she replies.

  “By yourself?” Lilly says, surprised.

  “Yeah, by myself. Might be some weapons or something in there we can use.”

  We’re always needing weapons. I had thought about checking out the Humvee earlier, but it seemed like finding a place to crash for the night was a lot more important.

  Until now.

  “Just wait until we get inside,” Lilly is saying. “We’ll settle down, and then go check the Humvee together.”

  She makes a good point, and I can see the fire this starts, simmering in Abby’s eyes. She wants to prove Lilly wrong about this place, she wants to show her that it’s safe.

  Lilly looks at me for help, but I step back and put my hands up. I’m staying out of their arguments from now on. No reason to make enemies out of either of them. Hopefully they’ll learn to get along. Hopefully it’ll be sooner rather than later. But who knows? Just as long as we stay alive, I don’t care if they fight.

  I guess.

  Abby decides there’s no point in arguing. She just turns her back on us and crosses the street.

  Lilly stands, shaking her head.

  “C’mon,” I urge her. “If we stay here staring at her, she’ll never budge. She’s one of the most stubborn people I know.”

  She sighs. “Where do you find these people, Jack?”

  “Same place we’re going, Woodhaven,” I say. I pat her on the back, and she finally turns.

  We go around the garage. The backyard is pretty normal, considering the circumstances, and is one of the better backyards I’ve seen since the apocalypse began. It’s pretty big, about fifty yards. Fenced in. We go through the gate, which is standing open, the hinges rusted and frozen in time. Near the back fence are a couple of trees. They’re standing sentinel over the empty house, waiting for the owners to come back. About smack dab in the middle of the yard is a swing set featuring a white slide, and covered with old leaves and pine needles. One of the swings’ chains has snapped—it sits in the tall grass like a preying snake. The metal is rusty.

  I wonder what happened to whoever this set was built for. I wonder if they were grown up before all this shit happened. If they got out alive.

  Lilly leads the way to the backdoor. It’s a sliding glass thing. The curtains on the inside are parted. Flowery. She approaches the glass and cups her hand around her face as she peers in.

  “Anything?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she answers.

  She reaches for the door handle, and begins pulling it open. It’s not locked. I grab her shoulder before she can open it any farther.

  “Huh?” she says.

  “Wait,” I say.

  With the handle of the hunting knife, I tap the glass. First softly, then a little louder. We can barely hear it.

  Lilly looks at me, understanding finally coming over her face, and she frowns.

  To her, this is the worst part of the apocalypse, I think.

  To me, it’s not; it’s just necessary. Like breathing. If you want to survive and continue surviving, then you have to be careful. Simple as that.

  Back in the day, I wasn’t as careful as I should’ve been, but somehow, I survived. Now that I’m in my forties, I’ve learned my lesson. Mostly the hard way.

  What is the worst part of the apocalypse, you ask?

  Pretty much everything…from the lack of food, to the quiet, the crazy people who’ve gone gun-crazy, and the way the world stinks with death. But the worst worst, for me, is losing the ones you love.

  I’ve lost too many. I won’t lose any more.

  Someone answers my tap. I hear the zombie’s death-rattling loudly through the glass. It’s a woman. She’s wearing an open robe, and she’s naked beneath. There’s not muc
h of anything left to see, though. Thank God. Her breastbone juts out, yellow-red, and her stomach looks like it’s been gutted open by a knife like mine.

  My guess: she got hungry, trapped in that house all by herself, and decided to see what she tasted like. Ate her stomach to fill her stomach. Talk about a Catch-22.

  Lilly raises her own blade, a disgusted look on her face. She pulls on the door, but I stop her again.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Let’s see if anyone else wants to join the party.”

  I’m exercising caution, though I doubt it’s necessary. If there was anyone left in there with her, she would’ve devoured them before the virus ran its course.

  Sure enough, no one else comes, and the zombie woman presses her face up against the glass. She smears blood and bits of black gunk all over the door, streaks that Windex wouldn’t even be able to wipe clean.

  “Open it and spin out of the way. Let her come to me,” I say.

  Lilly nods, her hand seizing the handle.

  “Okay, now!” I say.

  The door slides on its track easily. No squeaking.

  The zombie woman stumbles out, but she’s forgotten about the raised lip at the bottom of the frame; her dragging foot catches on it. I see this almost in slow motion, and I step out of the way. She hits the patio concrete hard. Busts her face and convulses.

  It may have done the trick.

  I can’t say for sure, and I don’t want to get close enough to find out, so I put my blade in the back of her head for good measure. She convulses again then lies still.

  Dead. Again.

  I wipe the blade off in the long grass as Lilly steps into the place, then she immediately takes a step back, holding her nose. I’m not inside, but I don’t need to be for the smell to find me. It’s rank. The smell of death and rot. The smell of a graveyard in a suburban house.

  “You seriously want to stay here?” Lilly asks.

  I shrug. “We’ll get used to the smell.”

  She rolls her eyes at me, covers her mouth and nose with the collar of her shirt, and goes in. I follow.

  The house’s interior is pretty nice, once you look past all the blood and broken glass. I walk into the kitchen, and a few big bugs scuttle out of the way, hide under the refrigerator. Lilly takes the upstairs. She has her gun drawn.

  I’m in the hallway now. I enter what looks like a master bedroom. It’s clean. The sheets on the bed are faded and a little dingy, but there aren’t any impressions on them from sleeping bodies. The floor is covered in a thick layer of dust; no footsteps in the dust but mine.

  I keep going.

  Off the hallway, I find a family room. Big TV, pictures on the mantel, bigger fireplace. A couch with holes in it. Abandoned birds’ nests in the curtains. An old TV guide with Jimmy Fallon on the cover dated from 2016.

  No bodies. No blood.

  That’s when Lilly calls my name… Her voice quavers. She’s scared.

  I drop the TV guide, and rush up the steps, not caring that my boots are making thunderous noise. Lilly is standing in a short hall, looking into a bedroom. I see rocket ships on the walls. A race car bed.

  Lilly has her head in her hands, her gun lowered.

  “Don’t look, c’mon,” I’m telling her, trying to usher her out of the hallway and back downstairs where it’s at least semi-respectable. She’s not budging, though.

  “I already saw them,” she says. “I can’t unsee them.”

  “I wish you could.”

  She hugs me tight. This surprises me, and for a second I’m not really sure what to do. Human contact has been minimal since Darlene and Junior were taken from me.

  Gently, I hug her. Over her head, which is buried into my chest, I see what she saw.

  It’s not a pretty sight.

  Torn up clothes with superheroes and princesses on them. And small bones, gleaming white, as if slobbered on.

  Nine

  We go back downstairs. A couple of times, Lilly sways like she’s drunk, and I think she’s about to fall, so I reach out and grab her before she can.

  “We should’ve stayed in the parking deck,” she’s saying. “Should’ve slept there and drove on out of this town. Forgot we ever came through.”

  I’m beginning to think she has a point. I wasn’t prepared to see those small bones. To see what a mother, infected with the disease, could do to her children. It will stick with me for a long time, I think. I’ll have nightmares about it. I’ll wake up covered in sweat.

  I always tell myself I’ve seen it all.

  I’m always wrong.

  Lilly plops down at an old piano. There’s a glass sitting on top of it, the contents long evaporated. I go and open the front door.

  Abby’s standing outside on the porch. Her eyes are darting all over the neighborhood. She looks like a nervous cat.

  “About time,” she says. “I thought I was gonna have to break a window.”

  I nod to the Humvee. “Any luck?”

  She shakes her head. “The house cleared?”

  “It is now,” I answer.

  Abby wipes her feet off on the welcome mat. Certainly an odd gesture. I guess whoever said ‘old habits die hard’ wasn’t kidding. She looks into the side room and sees Lilly sitting on the piano bench with her head against the covered keys.

  “What’s her problem?”

  Raising my eyebrows, I say, “Don’t go upstairs.”

  “Puppies? Kittens?”

  “Children,” I say.

  “Oh, damn,” Abby says.

  “Yeah, the hungry mom is currently on the back patio.”

  “Dead?”

  I breathe on my grimy fingernails and wipe them off on my cloak.

  “Good,” Abby says. “But you can’t look cool in that thing.”

  We spend about an hour going through the house, looking for things of use. There’s not much. No weapons aside from rusty butcher knives and a pretty well preserved tool chest. The car in the garage doesn’t work, of course, but Abby tries it anyway. It’s a Nissan Versa. The inside still smells like old fast food, and there’s wrappers all over the floor and dashboard. Even after all these years.

  “Look,” Abby says. She’s sitting in the driver’s seat. The plastic casing under the wheel is torn off, and wires stick out everywhere. She had to try to hot wire it—the keys are long gone.

  I turn my head to see what she’s pointing at. In the sea of trash, there’s a boxed up Big Mac from McDonald’s. She picks it up. Opens it.

  You’d think it’d be covered in bugs, shrunken with age… It’s not. It looks just as it did fifteen years ago.

  “Dare you,” she says.

  “What’ll you give me?” I say.

  “A million dollars.”

  I snort. “A drop in the bucket now.”

  “You eat this, you’ll probably end up worse than the zombies. Geez, what did they put in this thing?”

  “Indestructible industrial ingredients, obviously,” I say. “That’s why they taste so good.” I sigh, look longingly at the burger. “Man, what I’d give for a fresh one.”

  Abby laughs and shakes her head, closes the box and throws it back on the floor.

  We leave the garage and the Nissan. Head back into the house.

  Lilly is asleep in the spare bedroom when we walk by.

  Abby chuckles. “Look at her now. Passed out. You think she’ll get mad if I say ‘I told you so’?”

  “Better not say that,” I whisper.

  Through the hall we go, toward the steps leading upstairs. Abby has moved the bones from the child’s room, and covered up the splotchy spot of old blood on the floor with a blanket. She means to sleep in the race car bed. She’s stripped the mattress of the old sheets. Doesn’t need a blanket or a pillow; when you spend most nights sleeping in a cramped truck, pillows and blankets become luxuries rather than necessities.

  The bedroom door is busted, hanging on half of its hinges. Though the bones aren’t there, the scene plays out in
my head. The children running from their mom, screaming. One watching the other, as the zombie version of the woman who raised them tore them apart.

  My stomach lurches.

  “Maybe you should get some sleep, Jack. You don’t look too good,” Abby says.

  “I never look good,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s true.” Abby smirks at me. “But now you really look shitty, my friend.”

  I shake my head, step backward out of the room, onto the spongy hall runner. “I won’t be able to sleep anyway. Maybe in a couple of hours. I’ll wake you up and you can take over.”

  “Wake Lilly up. I’m going for a full night’s sleep.”

  A full night’s sleep in the apocalypse is pretty much anything over four hours; if you get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, you’re doing pretty well for yourself. I don’t remember the last time that happened for me. Maybe back when I was in the town where I met Lilly for the first time. In that inn I stayed at. But that’s different, I wasn’t out on the road then. I was behind the safety of their walls.

  That isn’t a home, though, and neither is a life on the road.

  “We’ll see. Judging by how she looked, it won’t be easy to wake her up,” I say.

  “Throw some water on her. That always does the trick.” Abby winks, sits on the bed, and removes her hook. “Nothing like taking that off after a long day.”

  “I bet. Night, Ab.”

  “Night.”

  I head back downstairs for a few hours of sitting in silence with a gun across my lap.

  Welcome to the apocalypse.

  Ten

  The silence makes the night inch by. I am sitting in a wing-backed chair I dragged out of an office. It is pink with a diamond pattern. It smells old and musty, like everything smells these days. Once you get past the smell, though, it’s a pretty good chair. Probably got it at a local antique store or something—no, never mind. A house like this? They didn’t buy hand-me-downs.