One Nation Under Zombies (Book 2): FrostBITTEN

by Raymond Lee

  Sky’s sweet cherubic face appeared before her, followed by the image of mangled limbs in the street outside their hotel. Tears escaped and she buried her head inside her sleeping bag, trying to wipe her eyes on the fabric and sniff discreetly.

  “What’s wrong?” Cruz whispered near her head.

  “Nothing.” She squeezed her eyes closed and willed her emotions to get back under her control. The last thing she needed was an overly concerned Cruz trying to comfort her. She realized she was failing miserably at appearing fine as she felt him lean over her to check.

  A loud rumble vibrated against the front of her, followed by the scent of wide open ass.

  “My bad,” Damian apologized, entirely too much amusement in his tone.

  “Sonofa—“Cruz rolled back, squeezing himself as far against the side of the truck as he could.

  “Damn it, Damian!” Raven wrestled her arm out of the sleeping bag to smack him in the back. “I freaking felt that!”

  Damian laughed out loud. “You two were talking too much. Thought you might need some sleeping gas.”

  “Damn, man!” Elijah complained from where he sat at the other side of the garage, starting a round of grumbles and complaints from the others. Someone gagged.

  “I don’t stink that bad,” Damian said.

  “Do that again and you’re sleeping outside with the zombies,” Hal warned.

  “That’s cold, man. You’d send a brother out to the zombies for a little gas?”

  “Nothing little about that bomb you just dropped on us,” Hal answered, “and I think you’d survive. The rotting corpses out there smell better than you right now.”

  Everyone laughed, including Raven. For the moment, the horrible image of her sister’s mauled body was again secure in the back of her mind, her eyes were dry of tears, and her eyelids grew heavy. Whether Damian’s flatulence knocked her out or she succumbed to the exertion of the day, she fell into a peaceful sleep.

  “The End,” Leah said before flexing her cramped fingers and pulling the sheet of paper from the typewriter. She placed it on top of the stack to her right and sighed. With no video games to play, thanks to no electricity, and no women to chase, thanks to zombies chasing everybody, she’d managed to find the time to write three full length novels. Thanks to the prehistoric typewriter she’d found in the attic and absolutely nothing else to do to escape the horror that was currently reality.

  Of course she couldn’t do anything with the manuscripts. The internet was dead. Publishing was dead. Her cousin was dead and to her knowledge, everyone in the general area but her was dead. Some days she thought maybe she had died and this was her own version of hell. It was almost ironic given the number of zombie apocalypse novels she’d written, the many hours she’d spent before her computer playing apocalypse themed games. Ah, the apocalypse was all chuckles and fun until it jumped off the page.

  There was nothing fun about being in a strange place worrying about the family and friends you’d left behind. There was nothing fun about watching animated corpses roam the streets outside the house you couldn’t leave, or even worse, watch them eat people who did venture out. No one did that anymore. There had been so many screams in the beginning, but Leah hadn’t heard anything for over a month. She’d grown accustomed to the smell of rot, and the weather had blessedly erased a fair deal of the carnage. Blood had seemed to pour through the streets after the first rain. As gruesome as the sight was, she was thankful for the removal of any blood or gore nature provided. The snow seemed a gift. It had been falling steadily the whole day, covering the bodies and … parts… that remained in the streets, repainting the scene in a much prettier aesthetic.

  “A beautiful view for a slow death,” she said, if for no other reason than to hear her own voice in the overwhelming silence. She almost wished she hadn’t finally killed Elizabeth. It would have been selfish to keep her cousin alive, or undead, as it were, but at least she’d have some form of company.

  She stood from the desk chair and stretched, loosening the kinks in her body. The temptation to raid the kitchen hit, as it always did, but she knew what she’d find: Two granola bars, a box of stale Cheerios, a bottle of ketchup, and a sleeve of saltines. Her stomach grumbled. She rubbed her belly, unable to find any joy in the weight loss she’d experienced since visiting her cousin, and steeled her will against wiping out the last of her food supply.

  She had to leave the house. She was going to starve to death if she didn’t.

  “It would probably hurt less than getting eaten,” she said to herself as she sat back down at the desk, “but then again, getting ripped to shreds by a zombie would most likely be quicker.”

  She looked out the attic window to see if any lurked nearby and noticed movement. Her cousin’s house sat near the base of a large hill, but from the third floor window she could see the top of it.

  A small group of shuffling figures moved away from a garage, their clumsy shuffle revealing them to be zombies. They moved slower than usual, almost as if they were struggling to move their legs.

  Leaning closer, Leah attempted to see what had drawn their attention to the garage. She hadn’t seen any living people in the area in at least a month. The majority of people in the immediate area had been slaughtered when a large herd of zombies devoured the neighborhood. That was when Elizabeth had gotten bit.

  Light flickered in the windows lining the top of the garage walls. Leah blinked, sure she’d seen incorrectly. It flickered again, maybe flashed was a better word. She strained her eyes for a clearer look but the block-shaped windows were small and the garage was all the way up the hill.

  One of the zombies shuffling away sank straight down into the snow as it neared the edge of the hill. Shortly after, it crawled out of the snow at the bottom, dragging its broken legs behind it.

  “Absolutely sickening that creatures so stupid have managed to destroy the majority of the human race.” Leah shook her head and looked back at the garage where smoke now rose from a window.

  Her mouth dropped open and held for several minutes before turning into a smile. Where there was fire, there were people. Where there were people, there might be food. There might be enemies, too, but her growling stomach didn’t care.

  “You sure you aren’t tired, kid?”

  “I’m sure,” Elijah answered, annoyed that everyone there kept thinking of him as a kid, but he had bigger issues to focus on.

  Hal ran a hand down his face, scratched his chin hair. “All right. I’m going to get some rest. When you feel yourself getting drowsy tag somebody else in.”

  “I will.” Elijah stood and walked over to the place Hal vacated. It looked like a big wooden table, some kind of workbench. He sat in the spot Hal had cleaned off earlier and watched the older man fit his tall frame into a sleeping bag in between his father and Janjai.

  “Cruz or Damian should go next,” he suggested.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t forget to—”

  “I know how to keep the fire going,” he said. “I’ve watched you do it.”

  “OK.” Hal nodded, looking around as if searching for something else to remind him about.

  “I got this. Good night.”

  Hal opened his mouth to say something, then smiled, chuckled a little to himself. “Yeah, you got this. Good night, kid.”

  “Good night.” Elijah sat back as comfortably as he could, which wasn’t much given the shelves at his back, and waited, just as he’d been doing all night. Sleep eluded him, his desperation to enact his plan filling his body with adrenaline.

  He’d planned to lead the group to his house but his father had already caught on. Of course he would try to keep him away. Elijah shook his head in disgust and wondered what his father feared the most. Did he not want the visual reminder of the night he’d left his wife to die, or did he still fear the monsters themselves?

  He wasn’t giving up. As nice as it was hiding out from the zombie apocalypse inside Wally’s Club, Elijah ha
d never been as afraid as his father, nor had he been as delusional. His dad could bitch about being forced to leave the supercenter until he lost his voice, but the rest of them knew it would have happened eventually anyway. Like Hal had said earlier, this was a war. Russia was coming, if they hadn’t already. The food would have run out eventually. Wally’s Club was not the salvation his father thought it was. If anything it had been their crutch.

  They’d been acting like kids at a slumber party, eating popcorn and watching movies while everyone around them perished. Elijah wasn’t stupid. They should have never had that supercenter to themselves. It was the biggest store in the county. It should have been crowded with people.

  Everyone else had died. Family, friends … everyone too slow to get to the supercenter before they’d locked the doors and committed to doing absolutely nothing to help others. Except Kurt. They’d allowed that racist jerk asylum, even after he’d attempted to kill two innocent people. His father had did more to protect that bastard than he had his own wife. Kurt lived comfortably in a reasonably safe environment while the rest of the community died around them.

  Well, his father’s plan wasn’t as smart as he thought it was. They should have stocked up and left. They should have kept traveling. Instead, they’d hidden away in that building and allowed the zombie population around them to grow. It wasn’t that big of a county but the population was enough to create one hell of an undead army, an army that had been steadily growing while they hid inside Wally’s Club like cowards. They would have never made it past all those zombies in the parking lot if Damian hadn’t caused such a big commotion leaving, and the weather hadn’t slowed them down. He prayed it continued to slow them down when he made his escape.

  He wasn’t an idiot. He wanted to stay with the group, but his father would never allow them to go where he needed them to go. He would convince everyone it wasn’t safe and take them in another direction. With his precious superstore gone, the military base in Nebraska was his goal and he would not deviate from it, especially not to revisit the place where he’d shown his son how spineless he was. Elijah would have to go alone. He took a deep breath and looked around. His eyes had adjusted to the dim light hours before. He knew the others were deep asleep, so worn out not a one of them ever moved when Hal poked around the fire or added more wood. Even as he stepped around the ones on the floor to do so, they remained in a deep slumber. The fire provided enough heat that the cracked window above them didn’t cause anyone any discomfort. He knew the side door wouldn’t creak because it hadn’t when they’d entered it.

  Pimjai slept on the back seat inside the truck, closed in from any noise or drafts. The others on the floor wouldn’t feel a draft from the door because the truck would block the majority and they were a fair distance away. As for the three in the back of the truck, they were in the truck bed, shielded by the sides. Any cold air would blow over their heads.

  As long as he didn’t bump into or knock anything over on his way out, he should be fine. He had strategically placed his pack near the side door before he’d laid out his sleeping bag and his coat was easy to grab. He’d never taken his shoes off. No snow had gotten inside them and he’d known all along he wouldn’t be sleeping, not until what he wanted was in his hands. The heat from the fire and their sheer tiredness would keep the others asleep long enough to allow him to get to the house. Once the fire went out, which it would without anyone tending to it, the cold would creep back in and wake them. It wouldn’t take long for them to realize he was gone and for his father to figure out exactly where to find him so he wouldn’t be alone in an apocalyptic world long. He might be daring, but he wasn’t completely foolish. He would be reunited with the group once he had what he needed. At that point it would be too late for his father to do anything to foil his plan.

  His conscience stabbed at him a little as he imagined the fear that would go through his father when he woke to find him missing, the images that would undoubtedly flood his mind. He told himself to get over it. He needed to go to the house again. He needed to see if she was there and if she was, he needed to put her to rest. And he needed something. A picture, a shirt … he needed something more than a memory that would continue to fade with time.

  A steady, soft rumble rose from the floor. He looked to see Hal sleeping, and waited with his heart in his throat to see if the sound of the man’s snoring disturbed the others. Several minutes passed and other than Janjai rolling onto her other side inside her sleeping bag and his father shifting a bit, no one appeared to be bothered.

  The windows lining the upper part of the garage walls showed a lightening sky. He didn’t have much time left to carry out his plan.

  Elijah carefully stepped around the three slumbering on the floor and grabbed a block of wood from the pile, taking extra care not to disturb the other pieces or bump into the assorted boxes also filling the space.

  He positioned the wood in the metal garbage can, poking around a bit to feed the flames, providing the others with warmth and buying himself some time. To get his coat, he stretched his upper body over his sleeping father and scooped it up with one hand, carefully raising it high enough before he straightened so that he would not hit his father with it. He plunged his arms in the sleeves, made quick work of the zipper and tiptoed over to the side door, holding his breath as he squeezed between the front of the truck and a row of stacked boxes to do so.

  He quietly lifted his pack, slid the straps over his arms and pulled on the gloves he’d stored in his coat pockets after they’d dried. He patted one large pocket, reassuring himself the gun he’d kept there was still within easy grabbing distance if needed, and gripped the door handle.

  The bolt slid open easily and the door handle turned quietly with a slight twist of his wrist. He took in a deep breath, exhaled and opened the door, ready to dash out into the cold before too much of the frigid air entered the shelter, waking the group.

  “Do you really think I am so dumb that I wouldn’t know you would try to sneak out?”

  Elijah froze, turned. His father sat up inside his sleeping bag, his eyes tired but not as if he had just awakened. “How long have you been awake?”

  “Most of the night. Now close the door. You’re letting the heat out.”

  Elijah looked outside and tried to do the math on how far he would make it before his father sounded the alarm. There was a carport next to the garage which had kept the snow from piling up against the door. The property was at the edge of the hilltop they’d crested the night before. Beyond it, the valley was blanketed in at least two feet of snow. He couldn’t even see the streets, just miles and miles of fluffy, endless white.

  “Do not go out that door!” Carlos yelled.

  “What’s happening?” Damian grumbled, followed by the others’ grumblings as they stirred from sleep.

  Elijah slammed the door closed and turned on his father. “I am going back to that house!”

  “Your mother is dead, Elijah. There is nothing left for you there.”

  “Maybe you can forget she ever existed but I can’t! I loved her!”

  Carlos unzipped the sleeping bag and stood, pointing his finger at Elijah. “Don’t ever say I didn’t love your mother. She was my wife.”

  “You let her die.”

  “We did what was necessary to save you! Once she was bitten there was nothing that could be done. I could still save you. She wanted me to save you.”

  “Really?” Elijah tightened his hands into fists, his eyes burned with angry tears he refused to let fall. “Is that what she told you? I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her screaming!”

  Carlos surged forward. Hal quickly rose and blocked him as the others started to rise and pull on shoes, the idea of sleep clearly over for the day.

  “Let’s all calm down,” Hal suggested. “Emotions are running high. This is dangerous.”

  “Just being around my father is dangerous. He won’t defend anyone. He would let every one of you die.”
<
br />   “I kept you alive!”

  “By dragging me away from my mother when I could have helped her?”

  “Nobody could help her! She was already dead and she is long gone. You are not putting us all at risk going back to that house and you’re not going back on your own. It is foolish!”

  “Everybody shut up for a minute,” Raven snapped, standing in the truck bed. “Elijah, why do you want to go back to your house?”

  “Because,” he answered, shrugging.

  “Because isn’t going to cut it,” she replied. “I’m trying to help you out here. Why do you need to go back to that house? What are you looking for?”

  “What he’s looking for isn’t there any longer,” Carlos interjected, “and if she is… she is not who or what he remembered.”

  “Carlos.” Raven raised her hand, silencing him. “Elijah needs to answer. Answer me, Elijah. What do you want in that house?”

  “I don’t have anything of hers,” he mumbled, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “I left my cell phone there with all the pictures. The internet went down forever ago. I need something to remember her by, to show her grandchildren if we live long enough that she even has grandchildren. I … I need something so I don’t forget her smile or the color of her eyes.”

  “We’re going there,” Raven announced.

  “We need to get to Nebraska,” Carlos argued. “That house was swarming with monsters when we left it. We barely got out. No one on that street could have survived.”

  “That was months ago,” Raven reminded him. “If everyone died, that means there was no one left for them to eat so they would move on, and we aren’t going to make it to Nebraska today anyway. We already said we’ll have to pretty much house-hop until we make it. It is too cold to travel far distances at once.”