Rise of the Dead

by Emir Skalonja

  “Very funny,” Jack said and took his eyes off the dead body for only a moment, but something caught his attention back at it. It couldn’t be … what he thought he had seen petrified him.

  Had the man moved?

  Yes, he had definitely seen him twitch or something.

  Well, it had definitely been more than a twitch, that was for damn sure.

  Disbelief set in quickly as he shook his head to tell himself that was just his imagination. He even blinked a couple of times to make sure that everything was as it should be.

  The man was still there, in the hole, all contorted and not moving.

  “Get a grip, man,” Jack told himself quietly, his voice but a whisper as the wind rustled the leaves and branches on that early Fall day. He didn’t smoke any weed that day; now that he thought of it, he hadn’t smoked any weed in a couple of days. He smacked his lips and all of a sudden, his mouth started to water. He could smell that sweet green right then and there and told himself that as soon as they got home, he would roll himself a nice, fat joint.

  “All done,” Jill’s voice came from behind.

  Jack finally got a hold of himself and turned to see her merrily skipping to him then wrapping her hands around his waist.

  “You know, it’s not that bad here,” she said and sat down on a decent looking patch of grass that had no glass shards on it. “I mean it’s not a vacation spot or anything, but it’s a quiet area, if nothing else. Look, we brought a dead body in broad daylight and … no one is here to say anything.”

  “Yeah, it’s not that bad,” Jack said and sat next to her.

  “Everything alright?” Jill asked as she adjusted her corset, making her breasts even more supple and perky.

  “Y-yeah I guess…” Jack answered, uncertain of that bizarre event that had transpired just moments ago.

  “Seriously?” Jill continued and made the face she usually did when she knew Jack was full of shit.

  “I-I’m pretty sure the guy moved,” he finally spit out. It was like removing a tiny log that was jammed there inside his throat. He felt better for what it was worth. Maybe he just needed Jill to tell him he was crazy.

  She rolled her eyes and said, “I’m pretty sure that was just like a post mortem spasm or something like that. I wouldn’t worry about it, really.”

  “This late? Hours after we’ve killed him?” Jack wondered in disbelief.

  “You are really overthinking this. It’s not even the overthinking, you’re creating something out of nothing. I don’t even know why we’re discussing this.” She gave him a stern look, held his eyes with it for a long moment, and then looked away.

  “You’re right, it’s probably nothing,” Jack said and sighed.

  “If it’ll make you feel better, go ahead and put another bullet into him. For good measure, you know.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was joking around but when she looked at him again, he realized she was serious. There was a moment of hesitation before he got to his feet. He fixed his shirt that was riding up his belly and walked over to the hole where he had dropped the homeless-looking man.

  This was all crazy. As he stood there on the edge of it, he realized how idiotic he sounded.

  “For good measure,” he finally said and fired the gun. The bulled ripped into the man’s chest and it didn’t make the corpse any deader than it had already been.

  “There. Happy?” Jill said and laughed. “I’m sure you showed him.”

  “You know what, it did feel good,” Jack said and sat back down next to her.

  This trivial little outburst that just happened made him realize that both he and Jill had their own roles and they each made up a half of an incredible whole. They were a team, he thought and smiled at her. She smiled back.

  Silence came over them once more as they looked at each other a little while longer. Jack leaned in for a kiss and she gave it to him. Just a little longer and they’d be home, then he could get himself on top of her. He had been craving her for a long time now but, with their busy schedules, they didn’t have that sort of time.

  But the good life was smiling upon them.

  They would have all the time they ever wanted.

  “You remember that girl who said my tits were small and she was talking shit about me behind my back?” Jill said, breaking the somewhat romantic silence.

  “Vaguely. Why?”

  “I would love to kill her.”

  “Yeah well, that’s alright I guess, but I don’t kill for free,” Jack said. He knew that having Jill kill that man would make her cocky. Well, cocky wasn’t the word he was looking for, but it fit for the time being. Calling her blood-thirsty was going just a bit too far.

  “I’d kill her for free, I don’t care. It’s like a one off, you know. Call it a freebie or something. One for the money, one for myself.”

  “I see,” Jack said and laughed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After he had left the wrecked truck and the mangled corpses behind, Dwight ran across a small field where he saw three men gathered around the corpse of a woman. They looked like those people who fell off the loading dock and then feasted on Steve’s corpse: sores and gashes covered their faces and arms, their skin was pale and even peeling in places.

  He took another few reluctant steps and then took his gas mask off to better see the grisly carnage unfolding before him.

  The woman was on her back, her lifeless eyes staring at the cloudy sky. The men gathered around her had ripped her stomach open and were now pulling the intestines out. Two of them started to gnaw on the innards, tearing off large chunks and letting the blood drip down their chins. The third man dug into the woman’s bicep, ripping a meaty chunk and chewing it hungrily like an animal.

  Seeing this ghastly ordeal, Dwight felt his stomach churn and almost vomited, yet he managed to keep it from coming up.

  One of them noticed him and started to get up.

  This was a big guy; thick head, bushy beard and all. The white shirt he wore was torn in at least a dozen places and mostly stained red. Dwight shot at him, hitting him in the chest but only slowing him down. The man didn’t fall down until Dwight sent the bullet ripping through his skull. At that point, the brain exploded through the back and the man went down like a tree.

  The other two got up and started shambling toward him. He shot the first one through the eye and the other one through the mouth.

  They both went down and fell on top of each other.

  He saw the woman twitch and before he could even remember to put his finger back on the trigger, she was propping herself up, her guts sloshing out of the hole in her stomach and onto the grass. He was sure he saw her liver fall out and then watched her step on it as she took her first step toward him.

  He didn’t bother shooting her. He just ran.

  He made his way away from the field and got onto a narrow street with three houses on the left side. Of the three homes that were there, only two appeared to be habitable, though this didn’t mean that either of them appeared to be inviting.

  Both had seen better days.

  The third house, and the one that was closest to him, was rather derelict; it looked like it had been to Hell and back, with its peeling façade, crumbling roof, and nearly a ton of garbage in the front yard. Whoever had lived here was long gone, that was rather safe to assume.

  Dwight went to the house next to it, the one that didn’t look like a fucking warzone.

  He knocked on the door several times, but no one answered.

  Someone definitely lived there, he thought as he explored around it. They were probably inside and didn’t want to open the door to a man in a military uniform. Well, paramilitary uniform, but what the Hell was the difference? Most people couldn’t even tell apart different uniforms. To an untrained eye, it was all the same.

  As he walked back to the front yard, Dwight noticed that someone had just closed the curtains on the window of the house next to it. They were still swaying back and for
th, so whoever did it, it had just happened.

  “Hey!” Dwight yelled and waved his arm in the air to the person on the other side.

  Switching his M4 assault rifle from one hand to the other, he ran to the house and knocked on the door.

  “Hello?” he called and then put his ear to the door. There was someone in there, he knew it.

  “If you could open the door, that’d be great. I’ve run…into a bit of trouble.”

  No response came from the other side, though he could sense someone inside, standing there and waiting to see what he was going to do.

  “Go away,” the voice finally came. It was slow, deliberate, and cold. It was a man’s voice. “Leave if you know what’s good for ya.”

  “There’s been some trouble, please… I’ve been separated from my unit.”

  “Don’t give me that shit.” The voice came stronger this time, almost to the point of anger. The man on the other side snarled. “You ain’t military. I know an American soldier when I see one. Now, I’m gonna count to three, and you better be at least fifty feet away when I’m done with my count or I will pump you so full of twelve gauge shells your own mother won’t recognize your sorry ass.”

  The man, who spoke in somewhat of a southern drawl, truly meant what he said as Dwight then heard him lock and load the weapon then tap it on the door. He found himself in a dilemma as he could have just put his M4 to the door and chance it by squeezing the trigger. Yet, by the time a single bullet came out, the man would have blasted him back to his mother’s womb.

  “Alright, alright…” Dwight said and started to walk backwards, not taking his eyes from door. “I’m walking away.”

  “And don’t you come back,” the voice warned, though it sounded more muffled and distant now.

  “Everyone has lost it in this damned place,” Dwight heard himself say out loud as he broke into a run. But he only ran to the dilapidated house and found his way over the dunes of trash. He walked into a garage that was anything but that. There were old bags of cat food thrown about; an old, mostly rusted range sat in the corner where the garage and the rusty old wire fence met. There were a few car tires stacked on top of each other, a shopping cart, and an overturned grill.

  The small pile of bones he saw on the steps that led to the back door of the house, were definitely those of a cat or some other small house critter.

  He quickly surveyed the rest of the area to make sure no one was there, and then looked at the other house to check that lunatic with a shotgun didn’t decide to actually come out and deal with him.

  The street was empty.

  When he was sure he was the only one there, he decided to take a quick break and plan out his course of action. He didn’t have his radio anymore. He reminded himself of that when he reached for the clip that was hooked to his belt but realized noting was in it. To go back to the truck would be a suicide, so that was out of the question.

  Clearing a spot on the ground with his boot as he swept the garbage and dust side to side, he sat his rifle up right against the wall, then sat down himself. He quickly went over the events that had transpired thus far and the more he thought of it all, the more it seemed to be nothing more than a nightmare. It was surreal.

  For a long moment, he didn’t want to believe this shit was happening. He had seen people who had lived through a lot less be taken to a loony bin. And this was just out of this world. What would he say when he got out? What happened to the others? No one was going to believe him that he saw the dead come to life and slaughter Steve. They’d put a bullet in his head before believing any of it.

  The leader of the mercenary group he was in was a real hard ass, but that was the nature of the business. They weren’t there to be friends or to hold each other’s hands and pick fucking daisies in the field. No, sir, these guys would slit your throat if you even looked at them the wrong way.

  But that was all under the assumption that he managed to get out of Love Canal alive.

  Why wouldn’t he? He had a weapon. He got himself out of equally messy situations before, so why would this time be any different. Well, all the other times didn’t have the dead walking around freely and looking at him like he was a three-course meal.

  “Think … think,” he told himself as he put his face in the palms of his hands, then rubbed his eyes and slowly worked his way over to his temples. Then he grabbed his thick curly hair and held it in his hands as he looked at his feet.

  He wondered how there was no one here.

  He had shot his weapon … all the other soldiers had shot their weapons back at that compound. Then he had crashed the truck. How the hell wasn’t the National Guard or at least the local police department on top of things? Nothing made sense.

  He put his head back to the wall he sat against and felt the cold of the concrete. It felt good. Now if he could only have found some water, that would have been swell.

  His eyes were tired, the head throbbed as blood rushed to it, his temples pulsating as if his heart was somehow jumping into his head.

  “It’ll be alright,” he whispered as he heard rustling at the back of the garage. He jerked his head back and looked around the corner only to see a mouse scuttle across the pile of trash and debris.

  “Run while you can,” he told the creature as if the thing could understand him. The animal scurried off and Dwight went back to his thoughts.

  In theory, it shouldn’t have been this hard to get out of this wretched place. The area stretched about two to three miles in each direction, bordered by a highway, and three streets that lead into normal, habitable neighborhoods of Niagara Falls. The morbid silence that reigned over this desolate place seemed almost unnatural; the only noise that could be heard came from the cars that drove past on the LaSalle Expressway, and even they were distant and muted. It seemed as though this toxic dump was in its own world, its own time.

  In reality, Dwight knew that the task of getting out of there alive was anything but simple. He wasn’t sure if the soldier from the compound were still alive. The shots he had heard coming from there earlier were very quick and had subsided shortly after he had crashed the truck.

  Then, there were the dead coming back to life; how this was possible was beyond his wildest imagination. They were everywhere, too. He remembered the two he had hit with the truck, who had still come after him even withstanding that brutal collision. There had been the three that had been feeding on the girl in the field.

  These walking corpses were silent, for the most part (save for the occasional groans) and it looked like they moved in packs, like animals, feeding on warm flesh.

  If he wasn’t careful, he’d be their next meal, that was for sure.

  He thought of resting there for another moment and then make his way toward the highway. He remembered that underpass he had driven through when they first got to Love Canal that morning. It couldn’t have been that far from where he was at the moment.

  He’d run for it and rejoin civilization.

  He let out a long sigh as he settled on his decision, but in that very brief and frail moment of solitude, a loud and guttural moan came from behind him. Before Dwight could even turn, he felt a strong hand grab his shoulder and tug at his jacket.

  “Shit!” Dwight said as he tried to pull away and bend his arm backward to grab the gun, but found out this to be near impossible as he couldn’t reach back all the way. Pulling his body forward, he used the momentum to pull his attacker with him and then quickly got back to his feet. The hand left his shoulder and when he turned, he saw a man in dirty brown overalls. His face was covered in cuts and deep wounds, his eyes sunken deep in their sockets. One of them even looked like it would fall back into the skull at any moment as it was probably kicked in at some point and became loose.

  The man sprung on him and reached for his neck with both hands, but Dwight grabbed him by the wrist and began to wrestle him for control. For a dead man who looked as if he was about to fall apart, he sure was strong, Dwight th
ought as he was slammed into the wall.

  He banged his head hard and nearly passed out before he felt the foulness of the thing’s breath on his face. The stench was vomit-inducing, making Dwight turn his head sideways and hold his breath as he gave a strong push to knock the corpse back. But before he did, one of the man’s arms slipped out of his grasp and then immediately felt the nails dig into his neck.

  Dwight screamed in pain as he finally pushed the man off of him, then kicked him in the chest. The man fell on his back, then struggled to get back up until he simply rolled onto his side and began reaching for his prey.

  Whatever these people were infected with, Dwight was sure he now had it too, as he felt blood come down his neck and go under his shirt. It could have been paranoia kicking in, or perhaps it was common sense, as these things couldn’t come back to life on their own. There had to be something to reanimate the corpse, a parasite of some sorts. For all he knew, it was most likely all the shit in the ground that had been buried there for years.

  Rage filled him like a boiling pot. Without even thinking of his gun, he quickly grabbed the wooden plank by his foot and started hitting the man crawling at his feet. Bringing the makeshift weapon down on the thing’s head hard, he didn’t know if it was the wood breaking or the skull that started to give in.

  He brought it down three more times until the board broke in half and the dead man’s corpses subsided. The hand that was now mere inches from Dwight’s boot, twitched for a moment.

  “Destroying the head…” Dwight said absently as he stepped back and pressed down on his bleeding wound. “I guess that’s how you kill these fucks.”

  He quickly grabbed the gun, aimed it at the back of the already bloody and caved in skull and fired off a shot.

  “Won’t be getting back up from this, asshole,” Dwight said and kicked the mushy brains with force and pleasure. He wished he could bring the thing back to life just to kill it again.

  The infection was most likely running rampant though his blood right now, Dwight thought and clenched his teeth in anger. The sheer rage led him to start stomping on his dead attacker’s head until it was completely removed from the rest of its body. There was not much of it left, save for one of the eyeballs and a few teeth that were scattered about.