Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series

by Bryan Cassiday

  “Where’s Becker?” Felix asked Victoria.

  She looked over her shoulder out the back of the cart at Becker. “He’s staying back there, it looks like.”

  “Doesn’t want to get his hands dirty like the rest of us, does he? After all, he might break into a sweat.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Me either. I’ve always pegged politicians for freeloading bums.”

  “I wish those things would stop making that noise,” Reba said, wincing.

  “I’ll make ’em stop,” said Felix.

  He halted the cart in front of the fence. He grabbed his shotgun from the console in the middle of the cart and sprang to the asphalt.

  He trained the Mossberg on one of the lead ghouls spread-eagled against the fence. He squeezed the trigger and fired. The blast tore a gaping hole in the ghoul’s stomach. Entrails spilled out of the creature’s bulging, shredded stomach. The creature was overweight to begin with and seemed to have an endless intestine that uncoiled onto the grass verge in a malodorous heap of putrescent, necrotic tissue.

  But the creature kept pressing its mutilated body against the fence, exhibiting no signs of letup. The creature had a bald head and an unkempt three-inch-long black beard infested with twigs and blades of grass, looking like a bird’s nest.

  In the beams of the headlights an earthworm could be seen writhing through the creature’s tangled beard, completing the bird’s-nest effect.

  “What are you doing?” Halverson yelled at Felix.

  “I’m shooting those monsters,” said Felix.

  “You’re wasting ammo. It’s pointless to shoot at those things now.”

  “I can’t stand that noise they’re making,” said Felix, brandishing his shotgun.

  “Shooting them will just rile them up more.”

  “Then let’s start torching them.”

  Halverson strode over to Felix. “I’ve been thinking about that. We need to change our plan.”

  “You mean we’re not going to burn them?” snapped Felix.

  “I mean, we need to create the diversion somewhere else.”

  “Why?” asked Felix, settling down.

  “Once we drive out of the entrance, we’ll be heading toward the freeway over here as we go to the ocean. We don’t want to run into these things after we break out on the other side of the cemetery.”

  “I see your point.”

  “We’ll draw those things down toward the shed at the north end of the cemetery.”

  “What’s up?” asked Victoria from her vehicle.

  “Change of venue,” answered Halverson.

  He and Felix returned to their respective carts.

  Halverson led the way to the fence’s northern perimeter.

  Attracted to the shining headlights, some of the creatures gradually began shuffling north.

  Halverson knew it would take more than lit headlights to attract all of the creatures. He figured a bonfire should do the trick.

  Meanwhile, the starving creatures continued their blood-chilling ululation.

  Halverson caught sight of Becker watching in puzzlement from the middle of the graveyard as Halverson and the others changed course.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Halverson parked his cart in front of the chain-link fence beyond the shack and kept his headlights leveled at the fence.

  Felix and Victoria followed suit.

  The three vehicles now stood side by side with their headlights illuminating the fence.

  Fitfully, creatures gathered in the wash cast by the lights.

  Not all of the creatures, however, Halverson could see, were homing in on the headlights. The fence was still surrounded by ranks of the creatures, which looked to be at least three deep around its entire perimeter, though it was difficult for him to see in the twilight. The creatures didn’t seem to be in any hurry to converge on the headlights.

  “We need to burn ’em,” he said.

  Felix cheered. “Let’s do it!”

  Halverson heard scuffling behind him. He whirled around.

  He could make out a lone figure pegging toward them down the cemetery road.

  Felix belted to his cart and retrieved his shotgun. “Christ, they’re in the cemetery.”

  “Maybe it crawled out of a grave like that other one,” said Victoria.

  Felix leveled his shotgun at the dark figure.

  “Don’t leave without me!” cried Becker, hustling toward them, waving his hands.

  Felix lowered the shotgun.

  Gasping for breath, Becker charged up to them. He halted, leaned forward, and clutched his knees, trying to regain his breath.

  “We weren’t leaving,” said Felix.

  Still gasping, Becker straightened up. “You mean I ran all the way here for nothing?”

  “I thought you were running over to help us,” said Felix.

  “My talents don’t run in that area.”

  “What talents?” Halverson heard Reba mutter.

  He knew Becker was out of earshot.

  “Then why’d you come over here?” asked Felix.

  “The question is, why did you all come over here?” said Becker.

  “We changed the venue of the diversion,” said Halverson.

  “Why does a journalist decide everything we do?” Becker asked everyone.

  “His plan sounds like a good idea to me,” said Felix. “What else can we do?”

  That wasn’t the answer Becker was looking for, Halverson could see.

  “Don’t answer a question with a question,” said Becker.

  Halverson figured Becker was trying to sow the seeds of dissension among the group. Nobody was nibbling at his bait, Halverson was relieved to see. Not yet, anyway. Things could change rapidly, he knew, especially with the situation deteriorating among increasingly desperate individuals.

  “You can help us burn these creatures,” said Halverson.

  Becker didn’t look interested in the prospect. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Who are you talking to?” asked Reba.

  Becker said nothing.

  Nobody moved.

  “Let’s douse the ghouls with gas,” said Halverson.

  He snagged one of the red metal cans of gasoline from his cart and strutted to the fence, which glinted in the headlights’ beams. The grimacing, drawn faces of the creatures pressed closer to the fence as he approached. Their rancid stench was overpowering.

  Agitated by the proximity of living human flesh, the creatures pressed harder against the fence, bending it inward toward the graveyard.

  A bare-chested, lean, twentysomething male double amputee amongst the creatures was biting a rusty chain link with its corroded, chipped teeth, attempting to tear a hole in the fence, it looked like to Halverson.

  The creature had inch-long stumps instead of arms connected to its shoulders. Halverson wondered if the thing had turned while it was in a hospital bed, as it had no means of bringing food to its mouth.

  It didn’t matter whether you were healthy or handicapped, Halverson realized. The plague didn’t play favorites. It took everyone exposed to it and turned them into ghouls.

  Halverson unscrewed the gas can’s cap. Glomming on to the can with both hands, Halverson swung the gas can toward the fence without releasing it. Gasoline spilled out of the can’s opening and splashed onto the creatures nearest the fence.

  The pungent, throat-constricting odor of the gasoline suffused the air, mixing with the sweetened-sewage stench of the walking dead.

  Halverson kept swinging the gas can until he had emptied its contents onto the creatures.

  “I need a gas mask,” said Felix and coughed as he followed Halverson’s example and doused the creatures with gasoline from another can.

  Halverson spilled his last can of gas on a tawny, shirtless male Hispanic ghoul that was short and stocky with long, lank grey hair that hung in snarls from its bullethead. Swatches of grey hair festooned its chest. The ghoul didn’t seem to realiz
e, or didn’t care, that it had but one eye and a string of mucus was streaming out of its nose onto its chest. Instead of an eye, a triangular shard of a windshield’s green-tinted safety glass protruded from the creature’s left socket.

  The proximity of living human flesh was stirring up more agitation among the ghouls than was the gasoline, Halverson noticed. Being immersed in gasoline cut no ice with them. They continued to trudge and lurch into the fence seeking to get past it to their prey.

  A goofy-looking ghoul wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a blue button-down shirt with its shirttails hanging out of its black baggy trousers was so hungry it seemed to be eating its own hand. Disliking the taste of its own wasted morbid flesh, it spat its hand out of its fungoid mouth and foraged elsewhere. Its mind was made up that it wanted to get inside the cemetery, Halverson could see.

  “Where’s your lighter?” he asked Reba.

  “Aren’t you glad I’m a smoker?” she said.

  She stepped up to him. She flicked open the lighter, spun the flint wheel, and ignited a flame. She was about to toss the lighter over the fence at the gas-sodden creatures when he stopped her.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “We better hold onto the lighter. It might come in handy later.”

  She nodded.

  Halverson cast around the ground for a fallen branch from a tree. He picked up a stray sprig that had dropped from the only eucalyptus tree in the cemetery. He removed a handkerchief from his rear trouser pocket, wrapped and fastened the handkerchief around one end of the twig, and ran the wadded handkerchief along the inner lip of an empty gasoline can. He figured there was enough residual gas left on the lip to permeate the handkerchief’s cotton and render the handkerchief flammable.

  He held the makeshift torch toward Reba, who was still holding the flaming lighter. She applied the flame to the gasoline-impregnated handkerchief.

  The balled handkerchief ignited as Halverson held the eucalyptus sprig. He strode toward the fence and hurled the flaming clump of handkerchief over the chain-link fence into the rows of zombies.

  The gasoline-drenched creatures burst into flames.

  “Bingo!” cried Felix with glee, reflections of the flames gleaming in his eyes.

  “Burn, baby, burn!” yelled Reba.

  The creature nearest to Halverson went up in flames. It was a blonde female zombie. Its blazing hair turned black and stuck out in spikes from its burning head. The decomposing, parchment-colored flesh on its sneering face melted under the intensity of the fire’s heat and resolved into a black slurry, which rilled down its skull.

  The stench of the creature’s burning hair added to the cloying reek of death that issued from the ghouls.

  Ten-foot-high cackling flames leapt from the burning creatures into the sky. The flames shot ever higher as the fire engulfed more zombies. Their bodies on fire, the creatures continued to plod heedlessly into the fence. Their flaming flesh liquefied and streamed off their skeletons to the ground. In minutes, nothing remained of these burning creatures except skeletons that continued traipsing forward until the very brains of the creatures were consumed in the flames and the skeletons crumpled.

  Halverson picked up on masses of the creatures shambling toward the bonfire as the zombies’ dead flesh burned and the flames leapt higher into the night air.

  He realized with alarm that thanks to the increasing number of creatures attracted to the bonfire the fence was bending farther inward. It would be only a matter of minutes before the fence collapsed under the weight of the throngs of the creatures pressed against it and they would trample it down on their way into the cemetery.

  “We need to leave through the gate now,” he said.

  He and the others piled into the motor carts.

  “I hope those things aren’t waiting for us there,” said Victoria, who took the seat next to his.

  The three motor carts drove toward the gate at the east end of the graveyard. Halverson found out to his dismay that his cart could barely get up to a measly 35 mph even when he floored the accelerator. The other carts ran no faster, he saw.

  There was nothing for it. He kept driving.

  It turned out to be worse at the gate than he had expected.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A knot of zombies was still standing outside of the gate. Heads down, they shuffled about aimlessly.

  “Damn,” said Halverson, driving up to the gate and clapping eyes on them.

  “The barbarians are at the gates,” said Becker, pulling up behind Halverson.

  Seeing that the beams from his headlights were stimulating the creatures, Halverson doused his lights. He waved to the other carts behind him.

  “Kill your lights,” he told them.

  The other drivers followed his example.

  There was only one problem now. They couldn’t see.

  “How can we see where we’re going?” asked Felix in one of the carts.

  “Stay close and follow me,” answered Halverson.

  Reba watched with mounting consternation the clutch of zombies milling outside the gate.

  “What do we do?” she asked. “If we go out there, we’ll head straight into their arms.”

  “We have no choice,” said Becker. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Do any of you play chess?” asked Halverson.

  “This is a great time to play chess,” said Reba.

  Halverson ignored her sarcasm. “This is what the Germans call being in zugzwang in chess.”

  “The clock’s ticking,” said Felix, glancing at his wristwatch.

  Then he gazed anxiously at the bonfire blazing out of control at the north side of the cemetery. The chain-link fence was burning red-hot at the edge of the fire, searing the flyblown decrepit flesh of any zombie that pressed against it. The zombies’ flesh smoked as it burned, polluting the air with a stink worse than that of burning hair.

  “Can we just figure out what we’re gonna do?” said Reba.

  At the end of her rope, she yanked a clump of hair out of her head. She screwed up her face at the pain in her scalp.

  “Things are bad enough, Reba, without you torturing yourself,” Victoria said, biting her lower lip.

  “Why are we playing chess at a time like this?”

  Her eyes popping out of her head, Reba inspected the bunch of hair in her hand then tossed the hair out of the cart.

  “To be in zugzwang is when no matter what move you make, it benefits your opponent,” said Halverson.

  “We’re between a rock and a hard place, you mean,” said Felix. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

  “Beautiful,” said Becker.

  “So what the hell do we do?” said Reba, getting ready to tear out another clump of her hair.

  Halverson contemplated the gate. Standing immediately outside it was a short thirtyish blonde female with wide hips, which made the creature look even shorter. The creature measured, at the most, five feet tall, if that. It wore a grey blouse that had one of its long sleeves ripped off at the shoulder.

  At the lower extremity of the creature’s putrefying exposed arm was a hand with three fingers missing. From what was left of the fingers, it looked to Halverson like the missing digits had been torn off the hand. For all Halverson knew, maybe the creature had tried to cannibalize itself and found out the hard way that necrotic, diseased flesh had no place in its diet.

  The ghoul had dyed blonde hair the better part of a foot long with two inches of brown hair visible at its roots. Despite the nightfall, the creature was wearing sunglasses with narrow black lenses ovoid in their lengths. It seemed to be sneering at Halverson with morbid, wizened lips.

  On account of the ghoul’s shades, Halverson could not discern its eyes. He could not tell if the orbs were layered with white film like those of the rest of the creatures. The decrepit, sere, peeling condition of the skin on the creature’s arm suggested the thing was infected like the creatures roaming beside it.

  “Hello,
” he said to it.

  “Why are you trying to talk to those things?” asked Reba. “Are you losing it?”

  “I can’t see her eyes to make sure she’s infected.”

  “So why talk to it?”

  “Those things can’t talk. If she can’t talk, she’s infected.”

  “She’s not talking.”

  The creature was shuffling toward the fence, moaning.

  “Just wanted to make sure,” said Halverson. “We’ll probably have to kill it if it doesn’t move away from the gate.”

  Reba lifted the Mossberg Persuader from the center console in the cart. “I guess we’re gonna be needing this.”

  “Eventually.”

  Halverson suddenly felt the ground shaking again. He braced himself in his cart by grabbing the steering wheel.

  “Aftershock,” said Felix.

  It wasn’t as strong as the earthquake, Halverson noted. And it didn’t last as long. Ten seconds at the most.

  “I’m getting sick of this zugzwank or whatever it is we’re in,” said Reba.

  Indeed, her face appeared green, Halverson realized. She must have been queasy from the aftershock.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a dark silhouette skulking across the graveyard toward them.

  He spun around to scope out the bonfire. “Did the fence break?”

  Becker checked it out, too. “Doesn’t look like it. It’s hard to tell from here in the dark.”

  The dark figure in the graveyard was lurking steadily, but with difficulty, toward them, wending its way around tombstones.

  “Then how did we get company?” asked Halverson.

  Becker and the others followed the direction of Halverson’s gaze.

  “Where’d that come from?” asked Becker. “Did it breach the fence somehow?”

  “Maybe there’s a hole in the fence we don’t know about,” said Reba.

  “Christ, it could’ve crawled out of a grave like that other thing we killed,” said Felix.

  Reba lifted the Mossberg Persuader from her cart. “I’ll send that thing back where it came from.”

  “No,” said Halverson. “We don’t want to make any noise yet. It’ll draw all the creatures from the bonfire here.” Halverson snagged a pitchfork from his cart. “I’ll take care of it.”