Undead Ultra (Book 3): Lost Coast

by Picott, Camille

  “Amen to that,” Ben mutters. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Wait, I have one more thing to show you guys.” Jesus fishes a thick gold chain out from around his neck. Dangling from the end is an even thicker gold pendant. “I found this yesterday on a zombie in the locker room.”

  Everyone leans forward to look at the pendant. It’s a haloed man in a robe with a dog at his feet. He looks like every other saint image I’ve ever seen.

  “Is that a saint?” Jenna asks.

  “Bingo.” Jesus grins. “This is St. Roch. He was the patron saint of dogs, the falsely accused, bachelors, and—get this—he’s invoked during times of the plague.”

  His words hang in the air.

  A plague saint? It never occurred to me such a thing existed, but why not?

  “St. Roch is going to look over the Creekside crew from now on.” Jesus tucks the necklace back into his shirt. “I’m going to build a shrine for him.”

  “Dude, “ Reed says, “you and your shrines. You already have two in our room.”

  “Those are for our mother, Guadalupe,” Jesus replies. “This one needs to be in a central location. I’m going to build in it in the kitchen.”

  “You’ll have to clear it with Lila,” Reed replies. “The kitchen is her domain.”

  Jesus waves a dismissive hand. “I got her number, bro. All I have to do I pretend to like her food.”

  Ben frowns. “You’re going to lie to her to get something you want.”

  “I’m doing her a favor,” Jesus replies. “Lies are okay when they make someone feel good.”

  “She’ll see through your bullshit,” Ben says. “You haven’t said a single nice thing to Lila about her food since you got here.”

  “Don’t hate me for playing the system, man.”

  Ben’s expression darkens. Everyone knows he gets prickly around insults to Lila’s kitchen experiments. I find this sweet, even if I can’t understand it. Lila’s food makes me gag on a good day.

  I decide to break up the banter before things go south between Jesus and Ben. “Jesus, you can take up this conversation with Lila when we get back. Everyone, outside. We’re leaving now.”

  No one argues. We troop outside, locking the door behind us. What was once a swinging glass door has since been converted in what Lila likes to call a wood-and-metal monstrosity, built to withstand zombies and humans alike.

  I lead the way, my people spreading around me in a loose circle. Ben shadows me much the way Caleb shadows Ash. He’s been doing this for a while now. Jenna says it’s because he’s taken it upon himself to look out for me. I pretend not to notice. Unfortunately, feigning ignorance with Ben is easier than having a conversation with him.

  We’ve cleared the campus as much as possible. We hunt zombies every time we leave Creekside, killing those we come across. One day, the campus will be completely free of zombies. Hell, maybe St. Roch will be up to helping us with the task.

  As we pass the university bookstore and enter one of the campus quads, we find a cluster of zombies. They squat around the remains of some poor animal, likely a cat or a raccoon.

  I hold up a fist to signal silence. Not that my people talk or make a lot of noise. They know better than to do anything that might draw attention to us out here.

  I draw to a halt, counting the undead. Seven in all, against ten of us. I like those odds.

  I flick my fingers, indicating we’re to separate into two groups. Ben and Jesus instantly glue themselves to me. The two of them have a protective streak when we’re out here. Eric and Johnny join us. The five of us circle around to the right side of the zombies. The rest of the group circles left.

  This is a maneuver we’ve rehearsed countless times. Split up, come at the zoms from two sides, and take them out. It’s not flawless, but it’s effective.

  A zombie near the edge of the group straightens as we approach, head cocked in our direction. Its blind white eyes roll in the sockets, as though searching for us. Longish brown hair is ratty and matted with dried blood. Its nostrils flare, neck craning in our direction as it sniffs the air.

  I pause, the rubber soles of my running shoes poised on the concrete. My group stills with me. I watch the zoms, well aware of the keen hearing they possess.

  On the other side of the quad, Caleb leads the other group. They ease closer to the zombies with weapons in hand. Ash and Jenna both have their new baseball bats out. I follow suit, pulling out my bat.

  Across the quad comes a snapping sound. Carter grimaces, shifting away from a tiny twig.

  The ratty-haired zombie jerks in the direction of Carter. Its mouth opens, emitting a series of keens and clicks.

  Then something happens that I’ve never seen before. The other zombies straighten and turn toward the ratty-haired one as it continues to click and keen.

  Its head turns in the direction of Carter. The rest of the zombie heads follow suit. Seven sets of dead white eyes home in on my son. A chorus of moans and hisses drifts up from the group.

  My eyes involuntarily flick in Ben’s direction. He exchanges a tight-lipped look with me.

  The lead zombie clicks again, then lets loose a long, low keen.

  It charges straight at Carter. The rest of the zombie follow, all of them snarling as they surge after their leader.

  Fuck. I break into a sprint, the bat raised over my head as I rush across the quad. Ben, Eric, Johnny, and Jesus are hard on my heels.

  We don’t make a lot of noise, but we aren’t completely silent, either.

  The lead zombie releases another string of keens and clicks. Half the zombies spin in our direction.

  My new bat smashes through the skull of the first one. The others fall in with their weapons, cutting and smashing with knives, bats, and screwdrivers. Carter’s group attacks from the other side, also closing in with bats and knives.

  The battle is over in less than ninety seconds. I suck in gulps of air, hands sweaty around the handle of my bat. We stand in a loose circle, staring down at the dead zombies.

  Caleb is the first to break the silence. “What the fuck was that?”

  No one replies. I approach the lead zombie, the ratty-haired man with the blood-stained head. Using my bat, I flip over the body. The face is a mess, having been smashed in by Ash’s baseball bat.

  Ben eases up beside me, scanning the body. “He doesn’t look any different than the others.”

  But he was different. We all saw it.

  I swallow, trying to work moisture into my mouth. “It ... communicated with the others.”

  “It issued orders,” Ben states.

  The back of my spine prickles. It’s bad enough that we’re outnumbered by the undead. But up until two minutes ago, we had the advantage of organization. Of skilled counterattacks.

  “They acted as a unit,” I say at last. “Like a hunting pack.”

  “A fluke,” Reed says. “We’ve never seen them organize before. That’s not how they work.”

  “That’s not how they’ve worked up until now,” Johnny counters. “We may be witnessing an evolution.”

  “Evolution?” Eric asks. “Fuck that. This was a fluke.”

  “Maybe,” Johnny says. “But let’s take a brief walk through the history of man. We started as apes. Over the years, we learned how to hunt, talk, and organize. Who’s to say zombies won’t undergo a similar evolution?”

  “The explanation might be even simpler than that,” Jenna says. “Maybe the virus mutated differently in a small percentage of those who have turned. Maybe there’s a small percentage who are intelligent.”

  “St. Roch looked after us.” Jesus fishes the saint out of his shirt and plants a kiss on it. “He kept us safe.”

  “We need to get on the ham,” Ben says. “Find out if this is an isolated problem or if other people are seeing the same thing. We’re in serious fucking shit if this is happening in other places.”

  “I don’t buy any of that,” Reed says. “I’m not freaking o
ut over one incident.”

  “No one is freaking out.” I wipe my bat clean on the shirt of one of the dead zombies. “We’ll have Johnny reach out to his contacts on the ham. In the meantime, we need to be vigilant. This may or may not be a fluke. We need to be prepared for anything.”

  “Amen to that,” Ben says.

  4

  Practice

  BEN

  Ben finds comfort in psst-psst of the handguns as they spit bullets on the zombies below. To him, it’s the sound of self-preservation. Of survival.

  College Creek dorm, for all the bad memories it holds, has proven to be a perfect place for target practice. The long balcony across the second floor, connecting three dorm suites, is perfectly positioned above the athletic field. There are plenty of zoms to shoot without fear of being bitten or swarmed in the process.

  “You’re leaning backwards. Your shots are punching holes in the clouds,” Ben tells Kate. “Bend forward at the waist and lower your arms. Better. Try again.”

  “I suck at this shit.” Kate heaves a sigh. The dark circles under her eyes are more pronounced than usual today. He hadn’t noticed them in the smudged light of dawn this morning. She could have used a bigger thermos of coffee.

  “Like this.” He takes her by the shoulders and adjusts her stance. He does his best not to notice her warmth beneath his hands. “Try again.”

  Brow furrowed in concentration, she once again raises the Sig and takes aim. This time, she hits a zom right between the eyes. Granted, it’s only twenty yards away, but this is a vast improvement over a few weeks ago when all she could hit was dirt.

  “Good work, Kate. Keep it up.”

  She responds with a small, tired smile. A sense of contentment fills him. He likes knowing she won’t be defenseless if she ever gets caught in a bad place. With the way she plunges head first into things, that’s likely to happen sooner or later.

  He continues down the row, critiquing people as needed as they fire down into the athletic field.

  “Your thumb is too low on the grip,” he tells Reed. “It should be parallel to the ground.”

  “Two hands,” he tells Carter. “That shit you see in the movies with cops shooting one-handed is just that: shit. If you want to kill zombies, hold your gun with two hands.”

  “Feet shoulder-width apart,” he reminds Johnny. “You look like a frog.”

  The kids don’t argue. They take his instruction, do their best to make corrections, and keep practicing.

  Shooting practice is the only time they aren’t all flapping their jaws. Couple the lack of chatter with the silencers on the guns, and it’s bliss out here for Ben. No wonder he looks forward to practice sessions.

  The silencers were a score. Ben managed to scavenge several dozen sound suppressors when he first raided the army’s weapon’s cache. It was a good thing, too. Without those silencers, Kate would never have agreed to their weekly practice sessions.

  You’d think anyone who found herself in the middle of a zombie apocalypse would welcome guns and the chance to learn how to use them. Not Kate. Nope, she was happy with her knives and screwdrivers. And now, he supposes, her aluminum baseball bat. He wouldn’t put it past her to pick running shoes as a preferred form of defense over a firearm.

  But he’d won her over. Eventually. With lots of pestering that earned him frowns. In the end, he’d gotten his way. Sort of. She’d consented to target practice two days a week.

  “Our two-hour runs are scheduled on Wednesday and Friday,” Kate told him. “We can add target practice to those days.”

  Of course, she wouldn’t dream of cutting a running workout. He would have to make do. Consistent practice two days a week was better than nothing.

  Kate almost put the kibosh on the whole thing as soon as she figured out silencers don’t really make guns silent. Like most people, she’d been misled by the movies. Silencers drop the overall decibel of a weapon, but guns still make a healthy amount of noise. Enough that they attracted new zoms to the wrought iron fence around the field every practice session. It wasn’t until Ben convinced her the newcomers were good for long-range target practice that she reluctantly agreed to allow the lessons to continue.

  It was paying off, as evidenced by the fact that Jenna and Carter, who never held a gun before the apocalypse, were hitting their targets eighty-five percent of the time. Only half of those are headshots, but he doesn’t expect miracles.

  Ben stops beside Jenna as she fires at a senior citizen zombie on the athletic field below. “You’re flinching right before you pull the trigger. It’s messing with your aim. Don’t flinch.”

  She wrinkles her nose, raising the Berretta as she again takes aim at the senior zombie. This time, when she fires, her bullet sinks into the shoulder of the creature.

  “Nice work. Bend your knees a little. You’re too tense.” He takes her by the shoulders and adjusts her forward a few degrees. “You want a slight tilt at the waist. Try again. This time aim for the head.”

  Jenna nods, her body locked in place, and fires. Her shot brains a zom and drops it.

  “Nice. Keep it up.” Ben continues down the line.

  Jesus is a good shot. The man is open about his pre-apocalypse days as a drug dealer, which no doubt plays into his proficiency with firearms. Caleb and Ash are more than proficient, of course. They both had professional training.

  Then there’s Eric. Ben stops beside the young man. More than two dozen zombies lie dead on Eric’s end of the field, the result of the young man’s handiwork.

  Not bad for two fifteen-round mags.

  “Nice work.” Ben gives him an approving nod. “I have something new for you to try.”

  Up until now, he’s kept their practice sessions to handguns. He wanted them to feel comfortable with smaller weapons before pulling out the rifles.

  Ben unslings the AR-15 from around his neck.

  “No way,” Caleb protests. “You’re letting the rookie fire the AR-15 before me and Ash?”

  Ben scowls at him. He’d prefer not to give Caleb any firearm and let the asshole test his luck.

  “Want to test yourself against the rookie?” Ben jerks a thumb at the tactical bag he carried here. “Knock yourself out.” Maybe he’ll get lucky and the shithead will shoot off his own foot.

  Caleb gives him a dirty look and resumes shooting with his Berretta.

  Ben spends the next fifteen minutes with Eric, showing him the ins and outs of the rifle. When the young man raises it to his shoulder and takes the first shot, the recoil rocks him backward. He adjusts his stance and tries again.

  “Keep practicing,” Ben says. “Try not to fall on your ass.”

  He continues his patrol up and down the second-floor balcony, eyes flicking out to survey the zoms in the field below.

  He tries not to recall why there are so many trapped there, but the memory shoves its way forward. Sometime in the early days of the outbreak, some genius had come up with the idea to lead a bunch of zombies into the field, which was surrounded by a wrought iron fence. Ben had watched the idiot First Sergeant do it. Right before he’d gotten himself swarmed and bitten.

  Ben feels the claws of a flashback creeping up on him. He forces himself to look away, to break from the memory

  His eyes land on Kate. Her incredible legs are enough to make him forget all about the overturned jeep and his long-lost First Sergeant. For a good ten seconds, he allows himself to absorb the sight of her.

  The way her brow wrinkles in concentration. The tight tank top. The damned tan line on her legs.

  Then he takes note of her hunched shoulders. Her posture has gone to shit in the five minutes since he last critiqued her. Irritation and anxiety prick him. She’s the worst shot out here. The idea of her failing to properly defend herself due to his poor training does not sit well with him.

  He steps up behind her, pressing down on both her shoulders with his hands. “You’re too tense. Drop your shoulders. All the way.”

  She ge
ts them in place.

  “You’re leaning over too far—” he begins.

  She fires mid-sentence, her bullet flying to the side and burying itself in the grass. “Dammit,” she snarls.

  Ben swallows back his impatience. “Just wait a sec. Your posture is all wrong.”

  “You said to bend my waist.”

  “I said slight bend.”

  “You never said slight. You said bend.”

  Her obvious annoyance irks him. Words run out of his mouth like a freight train on autopilot. It’s with an effort that he manages not to snap at her.

  “You make us run because you don’t want us to die out there. This is no different. I want you to survive whatever this fucking world throws at us.”

  He means that last part more than she knows. Just to cover his tracks—in case anyone is listening—he turns a glare on the rest of the pack. “I want all you little shitheads to survive, okay? Now get back to practice.”

  Said shitheads keep firing.

  Kate adjusts her body into a semblance of a proper stance. “Is this what you meant?”

  He swallows, doing his best to let go of his anger. “Almost. Straighten up another two degrees. There. That’s good. Try again.”

  This time, when she fires, her bullet hits a zombie in the lower sternum.

  “Nice,” he breathes. “Again.”

  She fires three more shots. The third one goes straight into the head of a zombie and drops it.

  Ben folds his arms in satisfaction. The tension within him eases. “Nice work. Just keep working on your stance. That’s half the battle.”

  Kate nods, giving him another small, tired smile. “Thanks.”

  Her exhaustion is evident. If he wasn’t afraid for her life, he’d tell her to skip practice and take a nap.

  He wants to say this to her, but has no idea how to shape these thoughts into words. So he does the next best thing. He gives her a curt nod and moves on.

  Maybe tomorrow he’ll make her another thermos of coffee and sneak in an extra spoonful of grounds for a caffeine boost.