Just Another Day
In the Zombie Apocalypse
Episode 2
L.C. Mortimer
Copyright: L.C. Mortimer
Published: 2016
Publisher: Amazon Kindle
The right of L. C. Mortimer to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
Alice, Mark, and Kyle don't have much going for them.
The dead have come back to life and the unlikely trio isn't sure what to do now. Their college degrees and job skills are useless in this new, broken world where survival is all that matters.
They have to find shelter.
Food.
Water.
Most of all, they need something to live for.
Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse is a 25,000 word episodic serial and should be read in order. Each episode ends in a cliffhanger and leads directly into the next story.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Author
More
Chapter 1
Alice wasn’t scared of anything.
She was brave and bold and courageous.
She would laugh in the face of danger and she wouldn’t take shit from anyone.
She was a badass.
She was incredible.
But that was before.
That was before the world went dark.
That was before everyone died.
That was before she found herself in the middle of the road lying trapped beneath her own bike, held down by the weight of the attached trailer.
That was before Alice thought she was going to die.
She realized she was going to fall even before the trailer tipped. She realized it as the Infected reached for her, as she got too close, as she was surrounded by them. She realized she was going to fall, and then the whole thing happened in slow motion.
She heard Kyle or Mark call her name. She wasn’t sure which one of them it was. She wasn’t sure of anything, really, except that there were probably a dozen Infected here and there was only one of her. She wasn’t sure of anything except that they were going to get her, eat her, devour her, and there was really nothing she could do about it.
She hit the pavement and cried out, but it only drew their attention to her. They had seen her. They had spotted her and they were moving toward her. She had to get up. She had to escape. She had to move or she was going to die.
And Alice was no quitter.
She’d survived her brother’s murder and her parents’ emotional abandonment of her. She’d survived moving to a new place and finding a new job and creating her own life. She’d survived a lot, and she was going to survive this.
She wasn’t going to let a motherfucking zombie be the way she died.
Not tonight.
Alice kicked the bike. Her pants were tangled in the spokes, but she used her other foot to free it and began to wiggle out just as the first creature touched her. She shivered as it did. The smell of death permeated her nostrils and Alice thought she might be sick. No, she couldn’t be sick. She had to get up, get off the ground, get away.
She kicked the bike away from her body and scooted backwards on her bottom until she hit something solid: another Infected.
This one made a noise at her, and she screeched and shot to her feet. Without looking, she turned, raising her leg as she did. She’d taken enough aerobic kickboxing classes to know that her roundhouse kick was unbelievable.
She pushed against the body, fully extending her leg, and the zombie was forced backward. It made a noise as it was pushed back: one of pain, of anguish, possibly even of surprise. The creature sounded as if it was dying, as if it’s heart was breaking.
Alice thought that sound might haunt her for the rest of her life.
“Move!” She heard Mark’s voice cutting through her thoughts. Mark. Mark was here. Kyle was here. They would help save her. They would help her get out of here. No matter what happened. They would help her.
She jumped out of the way just as Mark raised the rifle he’d pilfered from the house they spent the last two days at. She heard the shot, but it took a second to realize he’d struck home. A zombie went down, followed by another.
“Get out of the way,” Kyle said calmly, and Alice scurried away from the crowd of zombies, leaving her bike. She found herself standing on the grass a few yards away, watching as the men seemingly effortlessly took down the crowd of Infected.
They didn’t want to waste the bullets, she knew. Who knew how long it would be before they could find more? Still, it was incredible to watch the two men methodically take down the group of Infected as if nothing else mattered but getting her safely out of there.
It wasn’t because she was a girl.
Mark and Kyle didn’t have savior complexes. They didn’t think she was a damsel and they didn’t think she wasn’t good enough. She simply didn’t have a gun, and there were a lot of infected, and they had stupidly decided to try to go through the crowd instead of shooting them.
She knew why they weren’t going to shoot originally. Mark didn’t want to draw attention to them. Their goal was to have a nice, quiet escape from suburbia and the death it held. Their goal was to get the hell out of Holbrook, to find some nice, quiet place they could hole up, and to survive there, to live there.
Even their means of escape meant a silent exit. Bicycles weren’t loud. They weren’t noisy. Alice had found a can of WD-40 and made sure the trailers were oiled up and ready to go. Nothing squeaked. Nothing made excess noise. If zombies were attracted to sound, then their little group would be soundless. They would be quiet and they would be methodical and they would escape.
They hadn’t been expecting the crowd of undead, though.
They thought that the empty streets would be empty for awhile. They thought that when they were ready to go this morning, they’d be able to just go. They’d be able to flee the city and go find freedom.
That hadn’t happened though.
Now Mark and Kyle shot the Infected one-by-one. She was calming down enough to be able to appreciate their marksmanship. They didn’t waste their bullets. They aimed and fired, carefully breathing to ensure their shots were spot on. Proper breathing didn’t make their shots flawless, but she thought breathing correctly helped. Her dad had sworn by it and he’d taught Alice to be aware of how each little part of her body could affect her precision.
Alice was good with a gun, too. She wasn’t the biggest fan of the weapons, to be fair, but she could use a gun when she had to. Her dad had taught her to shoot as a kid, but ever since her brother’s death, she hadn’t wanted to shoot. There hadn’t been a point. The idea of shooting to relax no longer made sense to her. Guns reminded her of Timothy, and he was a ghost she didn’t want haunting her any longer.
She tried to focus on what was happening, tried to center her mind on what was going on in front of her. She wasn’t going to die today, she realized. She wasn’t going
to be killed by a zombie. The guys had saved her. They had rescued her. They had bailed her out and now she was going to be just fine.
She was going to be fine.
She looked to where the guys were standing a few feet apart. Their faces were unreadable masks. Mark looked steady in the face of danger and surprisingly enough, Kyle did, too.
She had always considered him to be a little more relaxed and friendly than Mark, but he was really owning this battle. He was taking out the creatures right alongside Mark and he didn’t even seem to be breaking a sweat.
Alice watched them from the sideline. She didn’t bother pulling her bat out, didn’t bother attacking the zombies closest to her. The guns were too quick, too effective for her to waste time with a smaller weapon.
In only a couple of minutes, the battle was over, and the men looked at her.
“Are you okay?” Kyle asked.
“Any cuts?” Mark wanted to know.
“I’m fine. Sorry. Thanks for saving my ass,” she mumbled. She quickly hurried back to the road and righted the trailer. She pulled up her bike and made sure everything was still attached, then climbed on. “I’m ready to try again,” she said. She was embarrassed that they had saved her and that she had caused them to be put in danger. She should have been more careful with the bike. She should have known there would be zombies, should have been more cautious.
Alice took a deep breath. She had never considered herself to be especially good in crisis situations, but she thought she’d done okay today, for the most part. Aside from the entire falling-on-her-ass-in-front-of-everyone, she hadn’t freaked out. She’d gotten up when Kyle and Mark told her to. She’d gotten out of the way while they did their thing. Besides, she’d gotten in a good kick with that one Infected. Now her shoes were stained with blood and gore, but she didn’t much care.
The guys had helped her out, but she felt like she’d done a good job. She wasn’t just some legal office drone. She was more than that. She was going to be okay.
They were a team, and they were going to be okay.
Chapter 2
They rode side-by-side. Maybe they should have ridden in a single-file line, but the roads were empty in this part of town.
It made Kyle uneasy.
There had been such an unexpected grouping of Infected right outside their little house that he had started to think the roads would be packed. They weren’t, though. They were just…empty.
The three of them rode in silence. Every so often they’d notice an Infected and sometimes, one of them would point it out to the others. They’d do it quietly, so as to not be noticed. They didn’t want to be followed or chased by anyone: alive or dead.
The world sounded too quiet. It was eerie and a bit disconcerting. Kyle had grown used to the noise of the city. He had grown used to the sounds of cars and laughter and yelling. He had gotten used to the buses and the crowds and the chatting. He had gotten used to it.
He wasn’t just the boy from small-town Colorado anymore, he reminded himself. He’d come to Kansas to do something else, something more. He didn’t want to be famous or a celebrity or a rock star. He didn’t want anything crazy like that.
No, what Kyle wanted was to be himself.
He wanted to prove that he was more than his asthma, more than his family, more than his reputation back home. He didn’t like being labeled as a loser. He didn’t like being thought of as a nerd.
Oh, he tried not to let it bother him as much as the next guy, but the truth was that trying to escape his childhood had been impossible in Colorado, so Kyle had left.
And life had changed.
In Holbrook, he could be whoever he wanted to be.
He didn’t have to be the geek or the loner. He didn’t have to be the sick kid. He didn’t have to be anything he didn’t want to be. He was an adult. He was strong. He was determined.
He’d gotten a good job and an apartment and he’d grown up. He still loved his family and he still missed them more than they would ever know, but there was something good about being his own man.
There was something worthwhile about making his own way in the world.
“Look,” Mark slowed his bike, then stopped. He pointed down a side road. Kyle and Alice stopped next to him and turned to see what he’d spotted.
“Sick,” Alice said.
Kyle felt sick.
They watched a group of Infected tearing into a body. He couldn’t tell who or what it was. He couldn’t even tell if the body was human anymore. All he could see was the blood, the growing sea of red that surrounded them.
Mark and Alice seemed undisturbed by the display of madness happening. Neither one of them looked like they were going to puke. Their stomachs weren’t swimming the way Kyle’s was, and once again, he felt weak, betrayed by his own body.
He had seen a body before this week. It wasn’t a funeral body. He didn’t think those really counted. When you went to a funeral, seeing a dead person was like looking at them in their sleep. It didn’t feel wrong or painful the way truly seeing a dead body felt. At the funeral, they had makeup and fancy clothes on. The person was still the one you loved. They didn’t seem truly dead, and crying was hard.
No, Kyle had seen a real dead body, one without makeup, one without fancy clothes, and it had changed him.
Uncle Roger had been a good man. He’d been fun. He always played basketball with Kyle in the driveway anytime he came for a visit, which wasn’t often. He’d made some shitty choices, though, and pissed off the wrong people a few too many times. When he ended up on a slab in the morgue, Kyle had been the one to identify the body.
Mom was in the hospital having his youngest little sister. Dad was with her. Instead of telling her during labor that the cops suspected her brother had been murdered, Dad asked Kyle if he could do the identification. Dad asked if Kyle could do this for his mother, for him, and he couldn’t say no. He wouldn’t.
He had just turned 18. He was old enough. He was a relative. He could do it.
Only after, when he was throwing up in the corner trash bin, when the cop was giving him a sad, understanding look, he wished he wasn’t old enough.
The cop told him sometimes they let people look at a photograph. Sometimes you didn’t even have to see the actual body, but because it was a murder, he had to actually look. He had to. He had to tell them about his uncle’s scars and birthmarks and anything else he knew, but all Kyle could think about was the fact that it didn’t seem like his uncle anymore.
Uncle Roger was broken.
All he kept thinking was how wrong, how maimed, how damaged he looked.
Kyle had the urge to fix him, to rush him to the doctor’s office before it was too late. Only, it was already too late. There would be no saving Uncle Roger. There was nothing Kyle or anyone else could do.
Kyle watched the creatures with Mark and Alice, but no one said anything else. After a minute, they kept pedaling, kept moving down the road, and Kyle was relieved.
Mark and Alice had been right about the bikes. They’d both been worried about Kyle’s asthma. They both thought he wouldn’t be able to walk the entire way out of town, especially carrying supplies. As much as he hated to admit it, they were right about that. They were right about everything.
They moved quickly once they got going. They didn’t see any other survivors, but as they neared the road out of town, they started to see more and more Infected.
“Shouldn’t it be the opposite?” Alice asked aloud.
“What do you mean?” Kyle asked, speeding up a little. A few of the zombies had noticed them and were slowly starting to follow them. He didn’t want trouble. He wasn’t sure if he could handle more trouble.
This weekend had brought enough stress to last him a lifetime. He was ready to relax now, ready to move forward with his life. He was ready to find something new to start living for. He didn’t want to keep dealing with dead people who couldn’t seem to stay dead.
He didn’t want to deal with
trying to survive in this kind of world.
“You know,” Alice said, keeping up with him. “Shouldn’t there be fewer zombies the farther we get from the city center?”
“Not if everyone tried to leave town when news of the virus hit,” Mark said.
“If everyone tried to pack up and get out of town, they probably created traffic jams,” Kyle added.
“Fuck. So we’re going to be seeing more of these?” She jerked her head toward a shambling Infected. It was slow, but it was covered in blood, so Kyle thought it must have been fast enough to catch something.
Maybe it had just gotten lucky.
“Keep your head up and your mouth shut,” Mark said briskly. Kyle cracked a smile at the typical remark from the former Army grunt, but Alice glared at him. She liked Mark just fine, Kyle knew, but she wasn’t used to his blunt comments or his no-bullshit attitude. She was used dealing with the prissy lawyers she worked with, so being around a real man was an adjustment.
Mark was right, Kyle knew. They had to keep going. There were more and more randomly abandoned cars as they neared the edge of town, and he began to worry they wouldn’t be able to get out after all.
The road they were headed toward turned into a small, two-lane highway. Kyle thought they might very well be fucked when it came down to it. Maybe they’d have to ditch the bikes and run. He couldn’t be sure until they got closer. The highway had oh-shit lanes, so they might be able to ride their bikes if the traffic wasn’t too backed up.
He tried not to worry about it too much.
Worrying meant stress and stress meant his asthma might start flaring up again. Kyle was trying his best to stay alive. The last thing he needed was his own body letting him down once again. He wished he had more cola. The soda Mark had given him yesterday had helped ease the tension in his lungs. The caffeine helped him feel like he could breathe.
Now, despite the fact that they were in the open air with clear skies, Kyle felt like the world was closing in on him and his chest felt tighter with every breath. It was the stress, he knew. It was the stress and the anxiety and the fact that dead people were fucking walking around, roaming free like they owned the whole damn world.
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