Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope

by Flint Maxwell

  DEAD HOPE

  JACK ZOMBIE #2

  FLINT MAXWELL

  Copyright © 2017 by Flint Maxwell

  Cover design by CRD

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  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions email: fm@flintmaxwell.com

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work.

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  People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse.

  There is hope, therefore I live.

  STEPHEN KING, REVIVAL

  1

  It’s been six months since we left Woodhaven. I don’t want to remember any of it, but every time I close my eyes, I see the burning town, the dead friends, the people I once knew and cared about turned to walking corpses, and I know I'll never forget. That’s just the way the world is now. I have to accept that.

  We have been traveling ever since then. It’s been three days since we’ve seen a car. We sleep in the back of Norm’s Jeep, back seats down, no blanket, no pillow besides our hands. One of us keeps watch, Norm’s big gun, or the Glock I pulled off a dead police officer in a town called Paris, in hand.

  Those not infected by this disease have taken to looting, running, and hiding. My group is no different. We do what we have to do to survive.

  We have to.

  I am on watch this morning. The sun rises in a bloody, red haze. There’s fog outside of the window, almost no visibility. It’s as thick as the darkness that came before it, but I am not as scared as I used to be on these watches. Mainly, I’m tired. Mainly, I’m fed up. Fed up because the way we live is not life. I’m tired of having to watch my back, having to make sure no one does anything stupid. I’m tired of scavenging for my food like a caveman. I’m tired, just too damn tired.

  We are parked off some country road in a field, never too far from the pavement. Most of the dead are not out here. Mostly, they are in the big cities, like Indianapolis and Chicago. Each day we have a goal. Something small like, get food, find gas, find medicine, find shelter. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we succeed.

  The long term goal has been to find Eden. We are so close.

  I just hope Eden is not a myth. I hope it’s real. For all of our sakes.

  I take a few deep breaths to calm myself. Behind me, the light snores of Abby, Darlene, and Norm drone on intermittently. That in itself is calming, knowing my friends, my family are still alive.

  We first heard of Eden outside of Chicago. From a man who’d signed his death certificate not long before we stumbled upon him. He had been shot in the gut, and left for the crows, but I think the zombies would have gotten to him first if we hadn’t.

  Norm slowed the Jeep to a crawl when we saw his signal. In the empty road, painted in blood-red was the word HELP. There was a trail from the end of the P, and at the end of the trail laid a man named Richard. His face was swollen, black and blue. He’d been shot twice, once in the stomach and once in the shoulder. His wounds were already festering, the flies and the maggots surely not far off.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t cry or scream for God. He just smiled.

  “The End happened. It came fast, too, took society with it. All sense of right and wrong.”

  The man spoke true. It did come fast, almost in the blink of an eye. There’s an old saying: Your life can turn on a dime. I never fully understood that saying until I watched our society fall. It toppled over like dominoes, each major city ravaged and ransacked, too fucked for the government to implement quarantines or blockades. I remember hearing about Los Angeles, how it was so overrun, they had to drop bombs on the city. Then it was D.C., New York, Dallas….everywhere. So yeah, The End happened, all right.

  But that’s not what we wanted to know.

  “What happened to you?” Norm asked.

  Darlene buried her face into my shoulder. Abby stood as still as a deer about to be mowed down by a semi.

  “Couple young men like yourself took what I had, shot me, left me for dead. That’s the short of it. Said they were going to a place called Eden. A place where it’s safe. I laughed at them. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, but sometimes an old man can’t help himself. Nowhere is safe.”

  He pulled his shirt up, completely soaked through with blood, and showed me his wounds. I remember gagging.

  “Little did they know they did me a favor,” Richard said. I remembered getting a bitter taste in my mouth because there is always hope. Even if the world has gone to shit, there is still hope.

  Now, my hope is dwindling.

  Norm and I took Abby and Darlene aside, and Darlene asked if there was anyway to help him. I knew there wasn’t. The only way to help him was to put him down, put him out of his misery, forget about it, and move on. But I couldn’t say it.

  Luckily, Norm could.

  He patted the Magnum on his hip. “Yeah, darling.”

  “No,” Darlene said. “No, we can’t do that. We aren’t murderers.”

  “Would you call vet who stick a death needle into a sick dog a murderer?”

  Darlene didn’t answer, but eyed my older brother as if she hated him.

  “Yeah, thought not,” Norm said. He looked to me, then to Abby. “All settled then?”

  “You can’t!” Darlene shouted.

  I put my hand on her arm, and gave her a solemn nod.

  “It’d be worse of us to just leave him here, Darlene. He’d suffer. We can’t let him suffer,” I said.

  “Always the brains of the family,” Norm said. “Guess it’s settled.” He turned to head back to the side of the road where a man named Richard slowly bled out from multiple gunshot wounds.

  “Wait,” I said. “Let me do it.”

  Norm gave me a half-smile as if he was both proud and a little unsettled. “All right, little brother.” He handed me the Magnum. I took it and I swear it never felt heavier than it did in that moment. The deaths before all of this, those had be justified. Pat Huber was a murderer, his son was a zombie. This? Well, this was a first step into a very dark world.

  I went over to Richard, my legs quivering, my arm feeling like it held a fifty-pound dumbbell in hand. He looked up at me as I aimed the barrel at his head. The waning sun illuminated the dried blood on the corners of his mouth. “Thank you,” he said and closed his eyes.

  I closed my own eyes, felt the trigger brush up against my finger. That bad taste invaded my mouth again.

  Richard had begun praying, his lips moving fast, his eyes still closed. I couldn’t catch the words, just a series of hisses. The gun shook violently in my hand. I couldn’t do it. I could not kill a man who I didn’t know deserved to die. I let the gun fall and began to turn, but Norm was there as he was in Woodhaven. He took the Magnum out of my grip, gave me an understanding nod. I couldn’t even watch. I turned my back to the scene, looking at Darlene and Abby across the way, and when the gun clapped, my eyes didn’t even blink.

  Norm shot him in the head. I remember hearing the echo of the gun in the dead town down the road,
then I remember the thud of his body hitting the grass.

  Norm and I buried him under some big rocks and a fallen log so the dead couldn’t get to him.

  Sometimes I wonder if Richard had the right idea. Maybe nowhere is safe anymore, maybe dying was a blessing more than a curse. It’s one of those questions philosophers of this time will ponder for as long as the dead don’t eat them, I guess.

  I wonder about that question now as I gaze through the window.

  I see a glint of yellow, something like a dim flashlight winking on and off in the fog about fifty feet in front of the Jeep, but that’s all I see, and it’s all I need to see to know what it is.

  It’s one of them. The big Z word. Zombie, Dead, Infected, Deadhead, Pus-bag, and on and on.

  They are the only ones with eyes like that.

  I tighten my grip on the gun. Our ammo is sparse, the thunderclap of the weapon only draws more of them, but if I have no other choice, I will blast this thing to kingdom come.

  The engine is not running. The lights are not on. It has no reason to come this way other than out of sheer curiosity.

  I slink lower in the seat until my eyes are barely visible over the dashboard. The yellow glow disappears. It might’ve turned around, might be going the other direction.

  The second time we heard of Eden was in Kentucky. We were in a small town with a name I can’t remember — something that ended in ‘ville,’ and not Louisville. The power was still on in this town. This was before The End really took on its full meaning, when the government was still trying to do something about the spread, before the military was completely overrun, before the President and his cabinet were moved to some bunker miles underground — as if it matters anymore, whenever this disease runs its course, the world leaders will be the leaders of nothing but mass graves. But I think they will — or have already — become a part of those graves.

  We left Woodhaven without much of a plan. We stopped in Indiana en route to Chicago, where Norm lived. Indiana was lost. Not just Indianapolis, but the whole state. So was Chicago, my 65 inch flatscreen, my Honda CR-V, my collection of mint condition, first edition King hardbacks. Lost. The world, lost. Us, lost.

  Whatever they cooked up in the lab at the Leering Research Facility was potent. In six months, last I heard, it had spread across the entire world. Pat Huber was right about one thing. The disease was like wildfire and it wouldn’t stop until it consumed everything in its path. Believe me, they tried to stop it. North America was basically one large headstone. The country is mostly dark. The power plants don’t run without living bodies operating them. The planes don’t fly. The cars sit in the middle of the road, bumper to bumper, collecting dust. Money means nothing. Food is already getting hard to come by. They tried quarantines, cures, military involvement, but none of that worked. By the time international travel was banned, the United Kingdom was a mass graveyard. France had been in such a huge zombie war, they'd detonated bombs near the Eiffel Tower and it actually collapsed. I saw a photo before the internet went down. It was chilling.

  Of course, we weren’t as stupid as some of the other countries. Rumor had it, that North Korea dropped atomic bombs on themselves in an attempt to stop the disease from spreading. Their population is now close to zero, and the neighboring nations have been covered in their ashes. South America is sinking — at least that’s what a young man told me in Chicago. Whatever the hell that means. Some people we’ve met on our travels talked of going to Antartica. Stupid. Another one told me that the fighting near the San Andreas Fault in California had caused the whole damn state to break off and float to Hawaii. I didn’t tell Darlene that one, with her sister in San Francisco.

  In Kentucky, we saw the sign written on the roof of a barn. It was painted in a shocking white:

  GONE TO EDEN. OUTSIDE OF SHARON, FL. SAFE. HAPPY. JOIN US!

  This was almost three weeks after we met Richard on the side of the road. None of us had thought of Eden since then. We mostly just thought of survival. There’s a stat in advertising I remember learning in one of my college classes that states you have to see an ad seven times for a customer to actually buy your product. I call bullshit on that because I’d heard about Eden only twice and it was already tattooed on my brain. Twice. As we got closer, I heard about it more.

  And after a few stints in places not so overrun by the dead or choked up by perpetually stopped traffic, we had decided, like the birds, to head south for the winter, and nothing sounded as good as Florida in that moment.

  “Why does it have to be fog?” I mutter to myself. “Anything but fog.”

  Behind me, Norm twitches. His head points toward the dashboard while Abby and Darlene’s are near the back windshield. He thinks he’s being gentlemanly, but really I don’t think either of the ladies care.

  “What?” Norm says.

  I don’t know if he’s talking to me or if he’s suffering from one of the vivid dreams he so often has. Two tours in Iraq and a man can come back entirely different. So far, Norm’s been all right. Sometimes he vies for power. Sometimes he shouts, “My Jeep, my rules!” when we disagree with the route he’s taken to our next destination. “If you want to go that way then you can walk!” is another popular one, but mostly Norm is all right. Much better than I remember him being when we were younger and still living with Mother. And, if I’m being totally honest, it’s nice to have my older brother back.

  “What is it, Jack?” Norm says.

  I turn toward him, seeing the sleep in his eyes.

  “You already know,” I whisper. I don’t want to disturb the girls.

  “Already?” He sighs. “Can life get any shittier?”

  I could answer, but we both know what it would be. It’s a resounding yes. Life can always get shittier when the dead have risen and are out for human flesh.

  They were calling it The End before we lost touch with the outside world, before the radio turned to nothing but static and religious babble, before the internet went down, before the twenty-four hour news networks lost their hosts and correspondents to this sickness.

  The End.

  I’m determined to not let that be the case. I’ll look at Darlene, get lost in her eyes, and I’ll think to myself, I never want that to end. I will do what I have to do to make this a new beginning.

  Anything but The End.

  “How many?” Norm asks.

  I blink blearily. Lack of sleep is catching up to me. I can’t remember if I saw one set of those yellow eyes or two. I close my own, lean forward until my forehead rests against the rear sight of the Glock — rear sight is one of the words Norm has taught me since we’ve been on the road. “One,” I say, almost completely sure of myself.

  Norm is no dummy. He reads my hesitation. “Shit,” he says. “One, two, or three. Doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a pack.” He pulls himself up, pats me on the shoulder. “You need to get some sleep, little bro.” He crawls into the driver’s seat. Next thing I know, he’s got a hand full of metal. It’s the big gun he greeted me with back at the Woodhaven Motel, the one Dirty Harry would carry around.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. My voice is harsh.

  Abby stirs, murmurs something in her sleep.

  “I’m taking care of our little pal,” he says.

  “He’s gone,” I say. “Let him go. We only kill when we have to.”

  It’s not worth dying over. We are completely safe in the Jeep. We have the upper-hand. Killing one — just one — does nothing.

  Norm shakes his head. He pulls out the weapons he has in a small bag under his seat. These are the weapons which make no noise, which bring no attention to us. The hammer, the machete, the baseball bat, the tire iron. He pulls the bat out. The wood is chipped and stained a dull red. It’s only been six months, but Norm has gotten a lot of mileage out of it. The door opens and the dashboard dings. We have set the overhead light to not come on when the door opens, a lesson we learned the hard way back in Atlanta.

  “Seriou
sly, Norm, let it go,” I say.

  “Nuh-uh,” he says. “We are too close to blow it now. I let this one go and next thing you know, it’s taking a bite out of my dick while I’m pissin in the woods. You stay here, keep the girls safe.”

  I almost laugh. The girls don’t need protection as long as Abby is around. She has since become quite the killer of the dead. She no longer fears, and I think that’s the first step to surviving in this world.

  Me, well, I’m constantly scared shitless. I just try not to show it, mainly for Darlene. Because she worries enough as it is. She doesn’t need to know her fiancé is worthless on top of all everything else. I love her, but love doesn’t bash in zombie brains.

  Norm points through the windshield. “There’s the son of a bitch,” he says. “I’ll be back before you can say bacon and eggs.”

  “Bacon and eggs, asshole,” I say.

  He glares at me. “Clever, Jack. Always clever.” He gets out.

  I watch as the fog swallows him up, and thirty seconds later, I’m shaking Abby awake and handing her the Glock. “I’m going to cover Norm,” I say, then I pull the machete free from the bag. I may be terrified, but I can’t let my older brother go out there alone, even if he can handle it.

  2

  “Norm,” I whisper. “Come back, you dummy. It’s not worth it.”

  I’m hunched down, a few feet from the Jeep. The fog is thicker outside than it seemed on the inside. I try to think back to where we were last night, the layout of the land. It was a field, what once might’ve been prime farmland before all this shit happened. Norm parked near the tree line. The dead never seem to wonder out this far in the sticks, away from civilization, but the living do. Sometimes, we have to fear the living more than we fear the dead. Another lesson we had learned the hard way.

  “Norm?” I say again, this time louder.