Living Legacy: Among the Dead (Zombie Apocalypse)

by RWK Clark

  “Take one of those into the bathroom and get cleaned up if you like,” Jace told me. “I’m going to use this juice pitcher to fill the still back up. It’s only half-gallon, so it will take a few trips. You may as well take advantage of the time. I’ll go after you.”

  I had never been more grateful, and thanking him, I grabbed one of the bottles and made my way to the hall closet, where I grabbed a washcloth and towel from the shelves. “I’ll be out soon,” I told him.

  “Take your time, Alicia. Don’t rush. Lord knows I’m not going to.” He smiled again and carried his second pitcher of water to the back bedroom, giggling “Our lab”.

  I washed my hair, using very little soap so rinsing would not be an issue. I then cleaned my body thoroughly by wetting the cloth and soaping it up with a bottle of body wash Belinda had owned. It was cucumber scented. I felt sad using it and thinking about this dead woman who enjoyed the scent of cucumbers, just like I did.

  When I was finished I emerged from the bathroom with a towel around me. The thought of putting the same filthy clothes back on was repugnant, and I simply refused. “Did you bring anything to wear that might fit me? A t-shirt maybe?” Jace was sitting in the rocker I had fallen asleep in, and he jumped up immediately.

  “Absolutely, yep. I have a t-shirt and sweats. You will have to go without underwear, that is, unless you want to wear a pair of my Jockeys.”

  I burst out laughing. It felt so good to really laugh. “I think I’ll pass, but thanks anyway.” He made his way to the master bedroom and when he came out he had the clean clothes. As he handed them to me his fingers brushed against mine, giving me goosebumps. I blushed and he smiled. As I held the clothing to my chest his face got serious and he came nearer to me. Before I knew it his soft lips were on mine, his tongue licking, seeking out mine. I gave it to him; the kiss lasted forever, and it eliminated the fear and stress we had been burdened with for hours.

  “I’m going to wash up,” Jace whispered. I saw that he was blushing too, and as he made his way to the bathroom he walked backward, keeping his eyes on me and the smile on his face.

  “Watch the end table, Jace!” He moved in the nick of time, avoiding a good bruise by only seconds.

  “Don’t go anywhere, Alicia,” he winked at me. “I’ll be back soon.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Regardless of our circumstances that night with Jace in that little country house was easily the best night of my life. While he got cleaned up I heated up a can of beef stew, which we ate in silence with mp3 music playing softly from Jace’s little unit. We stared at each other with visual caresses; words were not needed.

  Afterward we went into the living room and sat on the sofa at the far end. I took an afghan, which hung over the back of the couch, and covered up a bit with it, snuggling against Jace as a hint that I needed some human contact. He wrapped his left arm around me and kissed my forehead. I closed my eyes and reveled in the pleasure his lips gave. He began to gently kiss my entire face with sweet, light kisses which felt like feathers brushing against my skin. A soft moan escaped my lips, and I melted into his arms.

  He began to caress me gently with his hands, stroking my arms and neck, finally making his way to my breasts. My nipples were already rock hard with anticipation. I felt him smile when his fingers touched them. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He looked back at me and slowly removed my t-shirt, maintaining our look the entire time.

  “I love you, Alicia. I would die for you.” He kissed me full on the mouth, and there was no hesitation when my mouth opened to receive it. After a moment he began to kiss my neck, my chest, my breasts. My entire body was on fire, my hips arching involuntarily, looking for something that wasn’t yet there. As if on cue his hand found its way between my legs. He gently stroked me through the sweat pants.

  “Oh, Jace, I love you too,” I realized my hips were moving with a bit of frenzy, and I reached down to give the string on the sweat pants a tug. They needed to come off.

  Jace beat me to it, and in seconds we were both enjoying each other’s nakedness with bare-faced ecstasy. I felt him thrust gently, and he was inside of me. I groaned with pleasure. Surely I should feel guilty for enjoying my life when the world was falling apart around me, but I felt no such emotion. I didn’t want this to ever end.

  We moved together in perfect rhythm until the warmth of my climax encompassed me. I heard him catch his breath, his body going tense. We came together, holding hands and breathing hard. I fell asleep almost immediately, with Jace still inside of me, his warm, damp skin touching mine.

  ∞

  I woke with a start; Jace was gone. “Jace? Jace!” I jumped up, wrapping the afghan around my nakedness. “Where are you?”

  Jace appeared in the hallway, smiling. “Sorry, Alicia. I couldn’t sleep; so much to do, so much on my mind. You were sleeping like a baby. I didn’t have the heart to wake you.” I fell to the couch and tears of relief seeped from under my eyelids.

  “Don’t do that again, Jace. I can’t lose you…” My voice was a bit racked, my tears obvious in it.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry!” He quickly came to my side and sat down next to me, wrapping his arms around me in a secure embrace. “I would never leave without waking you and telling you what I was doing. I’m not going to leave you to deal with these things alone. I love you, Alicia.” It took a bit for me to gather myself. Once I felt emotionally stable I told him I was going to get dressed.

  “I’ve been in the back room…er, the ‘lab’” He grinned. I was taking advantage of the time to look over those samples I took while I was gone, as well as the water from here and… Belinda.”

  I grimaced. “Have you found anything new?”

  “I’m not sure ‘new is the word, but different definitely fits,” he was still smiling as he spoke, which eased my stress quite a bit. “Go ahead and get dressed. Meet you back there.”

  He left the room and I put my sweats and t-shirt back on. I stopped in the bathroom and ran a comb through my hair which I found next to the washbasin. When I felt a bit more satisfied with my appearance I went to the back room to find out what Jace had discovered.

  When I entered the bedroom I noticed that Jace had clearly set up a pretty functional workspace. He removed all the knickknacks and freed the shelves now line with tubes, beakers and equipment… wow Jace you brought all this from you apartment? He had a small desk lamp illuminating a card table which held his microscope, slides, and other equipment he felt we might need. He had pushed a small nightstand over to a position on his right, and on it he had several notebooks, as well as a couple of heavy volumes I could not make out the titles to. He had our laptop set op on the desk with notebooks and plenty of pencils and a stack of more heavy volumes.

  “I’m definitely going to need you,” he said with smiling enthusiasm. “I’m able to identify and recognize chemical reaction, but as to its potential effect on living tissue, well, I’m at a loss.”

  “What do you have?”

  The look on his face told me he was not sure where to begin. “For starters I tested the tissue from the zombie I saw die. I was unable to identify any bacteria of any kind; it’s almost like the flesh is… sterile.”

  “Sterile?” I turned this over in my mind. The only way I could see this being is by comparing their dead flesh to ash, or possibly dust, but I was leaning toward ash. “What about Belinda’s tissue? Did you find anything there?”

  He nodded vigorously. “I did. There are low levels of the bacteria in her tissue. This tells me that when we turned the water off the gray-faces began to seek out living organisms who could provide them with the maintenance ‘fix’ they so needed.”

  I was apt to agree with him. No other explanation made any sense. Could they smell it in their victims? Had Belinda ingested enough of the bad water for it to build up before she could take no more of it, driving her to stop drinking it? Had we? I thought back to when I began to notice the putridity of the water. How much had I actuall
y drank before resigning myself to the fact that, for me, the water was undrinkable? I couldn’t recall. At the time I didn’t think it mattered.

  Jace continued. “So I have an idea that may help us clear things up a bit. It’s dangerous, and you’re probably not going to like it, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the only way to gain the clarity we are looking for.”

  I was afraid to ask. I took a deep breath, but I was already sure I knew what Jace was going to say. “Go ahead.”

  “I need tissue from a mobile, ‘living’ zombie. We need to find out if they have active bacteria in or on them, and if so, what the levels are. It would be ideal to have two or three varying samples for the sake of comparison.” I was staring hard at him, trying to deduce whether or not this gorgeous man before me had completely lost his mind. I knew he had not.

  “Jace, how in the hell do you propose we are going to get these samples? Pick them up on sale at the Super ZeroMart?” I could taste the panic rising up in my throat. Was he serious?

  He got up and walked over to me, where he knelt before the wooden chair I was seated in. He put his hands on my knees and looked me in the eye. “Alicia, we have to. If we can determine with certainty that the bacteria is the problem, we can look for a way not only to eradicate it, but we may be able to develop some sort of a vaccine that can help those who are not too far gone yet. I mean, when you look at the big picture it’s sort of our responsibility, don’t you think?”

  I stood. His hands fell limply from my lap as it disappeared. I stared into space turning over everything he had said to me in my brain. “So do you have any bright ideas as to how we are going to get these coveted samples?” He was right; it was our responsibility. What he said was true. I saw no other way.

  “Well, I plan to drive around until I am able to get one of the gray-faces alone. If I can bash them in the head just to knock them over that would be perfect. Then I could get a ‘living’ sample. As living as it could be, anyway.” He was smiling with absolutely no humor.

  I shook my head. “You are not going to attempt this venture alone, Jace. This is most definitely a two-man job. I will have to help, and there is no two ways about it. That way if you have one down and he tries to attack while you gather the sample I can take him out completely.” I got quite with thought. “Wait a minute. The zombie who you took the sample from that ‘died’. He had been going without water for the last day and a half. If we bash the heads of the living ones in and harvest samples immediately we should be safe to get quality tissue samples. Maybe we can even get lucky enough to get one who has just fed on a human.”

  “We can take a cooler with ice to keep the samples fresh. Belinda has a small beer cooler in the garage. We will need to make some clean ice; we don’t want to use anything that has been contaminated in any way.” He was nodding, more to himself than to me.

  “We can get started when evening falls. I will have a look at the things you already have and see if I can pick up anything you may have missed. I need to get started. We can rest throughout the daylight hours.” I walked over to the chair at the card table and had a seat. “Okay, Jace. Tell me what is what, and show me your notes. Catch me up to where you are.”

  He pulled the wooden chair over beside me and started explaining his research from the beginning. It was good, but biologically speaking he had missed some tricks. I guess it was more than mere coincidence that two zombie survivors were chemistry and biology majors. I was beginning to believe in destiny more and more, and it filled me with courage and a sense of purpose.

  It was time for me to step into my destiny.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next night we followed through with our plan to gather tissue samples from actual active gray-faces. We left our new homestead at 8:30 pm on the nose, and we drove around the outskirts of L.A., working our way inward and looking for any lone zombies we could find. Someone was smiling on us, because we ended up with seven different samples from seven zombies. Not only did we get to bash their brains in, we got two samples from each one: skin and tissue, for a total of fourteen. We packed each properly using household items from Belinda’s, and we put them on ice in a little cooler to keep until we got back to the house.

  Our testing validated our suspicions: The bacteria levels in each zombie varied. The ones who had managed to find, and eat, living people had much higher levels than those who we found wandering or who had not found pray in recent hours. We both agreed that the bacteria was indeed the culprit. Dumping the water supply had been a smart move. Dead zombies littered the city like so much waste. Most of those remaining were covered in either blood-stains or fresh blood from eating recently. There were also more remains of living humans than we would have liked to see. They all must have panicked and gone into hiding. That would explain why neither of us saw, or came into any kind of contact with, any of them.

  ∞

  The next six weeks were spent mostly within the confines of the house, reading research books we had taken from the public library and conducting a variety of experiments as we tried to find both a cure for those who were still walking around as well as develop a chemical to battle the existing bacteria. The rivers and lakes were highly polluted with the nasty little monster, as we had quickly learned during our research. We deduced that developing the right chemical mixture, which would have to be non-toxic to humans and wildlife, and then putting it into the water in L.A. would help us to get a leg up and begin to set things right again.

  The problem with a vaccine, we soon discovered, was that those who were already gray-faces, had decayed on such a rapid basis that ridding them of the bacteria would just kill them off. Their organs were no longer able to sustain life. The only hope for rebuilding this society would be to find those who had not turned, had not been eaten, and whose bodies had enough of the bacteria that it needed to be eradicated. Thus far neither Jace nor myself had come across anyone, and the bodies of the living were becoming harder and harder to find strewn about. This signified a definite lessening in the area population. We kept our focus on the chemical warfare that we believed would help us to set things right. We would pay more attention to the vaccine if, and when, the need arose.

  Both Jace and I had gone to exhaustive efforts to locate any of our family members who may have still been living, all to no avail. Cell phones went right to voice mail. House phones delivered nothing but rapid busy signals. We tried a new member daily, only to become more and more discouraged with each failed attempt. We took turns crying, venting, and otherwise being held by the other until the tears would disappear, only to repeat the process again in a day or two. It was beginning to look like the only hope for the world, and for its renewing, would be us, and so with all of that in mind we continued our research.

  ∞

  During our seventh week of study, on a Wednesday, I was reading up on various antibiotics and how they attack different bacterial life forms. I was in the living room, and Jace was experimenting with chemicals and infected water in our makeshift little lab. Suddenly he burst into the room.

  “Alicia, I think I’m really onto something here!” My heart began to beat so hard and fast I thought it would burst through my chest. We had been working nearly non-stop for so long, and lately I felt drained and tired. Jace had told me I looked pale, and I had even been struggling to hold down food. Finding the right mix would mean getting outside and getting some real sun, which is what I figured was my entire problem.

  I quickly sat up on the couch where I had been reading. “What did you find, Jace?” My voice was filled with hope.

  “I combined our chemical J675 with seven parts Erythromycin. At first it didn’t look like the two could sustain compatibility, but after ten minutes the Erythromycin levels had not only doubled, but the molecules seemed to… grow muscles!” I must have looked at him as though he were mad, because that was exactly what I was thinking. “Never mind that. I put the combination into a water sample, dropped it on a slide, and took a look. T
he water sample was loaded with bacteria, and nasty ones at that. Alicia, within thirty seconds every last trace of bacteria was wiped out completely!”

  I just stared at him, trying to see if all of our studies had driven him off the deep end. “I need to see the slide, Jace.”

  He led me excitedly to the back room where I sat at the card table and waited as he repositioned the slide. I took a hard look. The water was cleaner than any I had ever seen before. I could not even identify any medicinal molecular structures within the sample!

  “Jace, I need to see this for myself. Can you set up another raw sample?”

  He nodded eagerly. “I was hoping you’d ask.” He got out another set of slides and put a contaminated water sample on it. Sliding it under the viewer, he stated, “Take a look.”

  It had to be the most disgusting sample ever. Even the earlier samples from the very beginning were not this bad. Things had gotten progressively worse. Lord, how I hoped he was right!

  “Now, give me just a second,” said Jace. He removed the slide and exposed the sample. He took a dropper of light bluish liquid from a beaker on his home Bunsen burner and introduced not quite a drop onto the slide. Putting it back together he placed the sample under the viewer. “Quick, look again!” His eyes were on fire.

  I bent over and looked. The new molecules were simply feasting on the bacteria; it was literally disappearing, leaving nothing behind but clear, clean molecules of water. I sucked in a sharp breath.

  “Jace, I think you’re onto something, babe!” I looked again. The sample was completely clear of bacteria, and it had taken place in under two minutes.

  Jace nodded vigorously. “Now all we need to do is make sure the effect is lasting. Let’s get a bite to eat and come back in a while.” He left things at room temperature to simulate nature as best as possible, we didn’t want to deviate.