DEAD: Snapshot (Book 3): Liberty, South Carolina

by TW Brown

  “Crap,” Kevin muttered as he brought up a booted foot and kicked the Business Suit Zombie away.

  Taking a step back and gripping the weapon with both hands, he raised his arms and then brought them down hard with an overhead chop. The blade split the skull at enough of angle that the left third of the zombie’s head came away, exposing the dark gore of its putrefying brain.

  It took the four of them just about five minutes, but eventually the entire little mob was sprawled all over the entrance to the parking lot of a Lowe’s. The alarm had continued to ring the entire time and now shadowy figures could be seen wading out of some nearby trees as well as coming from both directions along the two lane road that the signs called Issaqueena Trail.

  “Mount up!” Kevin called.

  “But there’s more of them things coming,” Joe complained.

  “Dude, I don’t think we’ll be running out of zombies any time soon,” Mark guffawed as he swung a leg over and brought his bike alive with a roar.

  Bob walked past Joe, not even bothering to glance at the man as he wiped off his bat and slid it into its place before mounting his bike and starting the engine. Easing forward until he was next to Mark and Kevin, Bob paused to grab a band from his wrist and pull his hair back into a ponytail.

  Joe looked around, his eyes almost seeming to give off a longing as he watched the approaching zombies. Kevin didn’t think that the man had ever been quite the same after that one had grabbed him by the arm and bit down on his shoulder while they were looting that senior center.

  Kevin also believed that the only thing that had saved Joe was the fact that the old man hadn’t been wearing his teeth. The gums had nibbled ineffectively on Joe’s denim shirt, leaving a gross stain of drool, but that had been the extent of the damage. Ever since that incident, Joe had been on some sort of mission where he gave the impression that he wanted to single-handedly rid the world of every zombie.

  Twice the man had peeled away from the formation when he spied a small cluster of the walking dead. Kevin and the others had always gone after him and stepped in to help with the kill, but Kevin didn’t think the man noticed…or cared. He was so solely focused on bringing destruction.

  That had been demonstrated to the fullest one time in particular. Joe had pulled away and actually just dropped his bike on its side to go wade into a group of eleven walkers. Kevin had sighed and then turned his own bike to go render assistance. He parked and was just climbing off when a hand grabbed him. It was Mark. The big man shook his head.

  “Just let him do his thing,” Mark Trees had rumbled.

  Kevin had pulled away and taken a step towards the melee, but then stopped and found himself waiting and watching. Joe had been like a very tall Tasmanian Devil as his arms whipped around in a flurry of head strikes and crippling shots that would take a zombie off its feet so that he could move in for a killing blow. When it was over, the man hadn’t even acknowledged the trio who had stood by watching the ordeal. He had simply walked to his bike, pulled out a fresh batch of wipes and given himself a good cleanup.

  As they drove down the highway now, distant specks on the horizon marked their quarry. The little convoy seemed to be driving the speed limit. Kevin’s smile widened as they drew closer by the minute.

  “Slow down!” Mark yelled, pulling up close to Kevin. “We might spook them. I don’t care what the TV shows say, a motorcycle doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Hell against a truck.”

  Kevin nodded and let off the throttle. He hadn’t survived that breakout from the jail’s intake center, a shootout with a handful of state troopers, and a very large horde of the undead that had surrounded them in that diner (where they had crashed for the night that one time) just to become road kill for a bunch of scared little country mice that took off at the first sound of a useless burglar alarm and a small mob of zombies that numbered fewer than a hundred.

  Yes, Kevin Staley thought as he smiled big despite the bug that had just flown into his teeth with a crunchy splat, I have the whole zombie apocalypse in front of me, and I’m going to milk it for all the chaos I can manage.

  9

  “Where neighbors become friends.”

  Chief Gilstrap kept his lips pressed tight in order to keep himself from saying “I told you so.” Jamie was pacing back and forth in the small counselor’s office that had been converted into their new version of city hall. This room was plastered with maps of the area and showed the regularly updated progress of the outer defenses.

  “…like he was in charge of the whole thing,” Jamie ranted. She took another pull on the bottle that had been pulled from the drawer. “This was my operation. How would you like it if he just ran roughshod over you on one of your excursions out there?”

  She seemed to consider the bottle in her hand. She held it out to the chief with a nod. He accepted it and allowed a small sip. He handed it back, expecting her to cap it and shove it back in the desk. What he hadn’t anticipated was her taking a few more large gulps.

  There was an uncomfortably long silence; and that is when the chief realized that she had actually posed that to him as a question. He spoke slow, making sure to pick and choose his words with care. He was of two minds on the subject. Part of him agreed that Stephen shouldn’t volunteer for somebody else’s op and then take charge, but he also needed to stress to Jamie that this was a new world and things changed on the fly.

  People needed to be able to accept input in all situations if somebody might have a valid understanding of what needed to be done. He had recently learned that lesson when a boy young enough to be his grandson offered up what proved to be the most doable and reasonable defense plan for the city.

  “I’ll talk to him, but you need to be more open to outside input, Jamie.”

  The young lady threw her arms across her body and cocked her left hip as she leveled her stare on him. She seemed to waver a bit on her feet. She opened her mouth twice to retort, but then snapped it shut.

  “You’ll really talk to him, Chief?” she slurred just slightly.

  Adam Gilstrap hadn’t noticed until Ivan pointed it out that pretty much everybody in town had dropped the use of titles. Even the mayor was simply called by name even when she was operating in an official capacity, but nobody had gotten to the point where they called him Adam.

  “Hell, you been chief here longer than some of these folks been alive,” Ivan had laughed when the chief had asked the man why he thought that might be.

  “As soon as I get the list of folks that are coming with me tomorrow. We are heading out first thing in the morning and I got a couple who keep putting their names on the list and…well…there’s just no way I’d bring ‘em out there with me. People’s lives are on the line and I’m not going to reduce our chances of survival by bringing along idiots who think this is just some giant video game.”

  He opened the door and almost ran into Jonathan Patterson. The kid still looked like crap. His right wrist was in a cast and his forehead was practically one giant scab from where he’d busted it open in the crash.

  “Hey, Chief,” Jonathan said, his eyes immediately going to the floor. “Umm…there’s some new folks just arrived.”

  “Okay?” He let that word drag out a bit to make it more of a question.

  Why was he being told this? There was a group that was in charge of new arrivals. They would get their information and find out what sorts of skills these people might have that could be of use. So far, they had only gotten a trickle of folks from up around Pickens, and they were all mostly just relatives of folks here in Liberty, so they weren’t exactly strangers.

  “These guys came in on Harleys. There is something about them that is kinda creepy. You may want to come see for yourself.”

  “Look, Jonathan, folks have probably been going through hell out there trying to survive.”

  The first night after all the madness, Adam Gilstrap had done something he hadn’t thought he would ever do. He had sat down and watched
a handful of zombie movies. He’d had no idea there were so many, but he’d gotten a list of recommended titles from Sophie Martin’s kid, Lawrence.

  “I still think you should come see for yourself.” Jonathan turned to go, his shoulders slumped and his head down.

  “I’ll give a look see, okay?” Chief Gilstrap did his best not to sound annoyed. He knew that Jonathan was still upset over losing his mom. He blamed himself for not telling people about the video files he’d gotten from that kid in Japan. The young man had the crazy notion that his telling somebody could have stopped this whole thing from happening.

  “I can go if you want to go check your list,” Jamie spoke up.

  He saw the glance from Jonathan. Well, that was just another thing that people were going to have to get used to in the new world. While he was not what some might consider a “liberated” male, he was cognizant enough of the situation to know that men and women were going to have to shift back to Pioneer days where both sexes busted their asses and did what it took to keep everybody alive.

  “Yeah, that would be a big help,” Chief Gilstrap said as he left the room before the young man could say anything.

  If Jonathan wanted to scowl, he could go right ahead; Jamie was not in the mood for any crap right now. She would tear him a new one in short order if he dared question her ability to function in his stead. And with a little bit of a buzz, her tolerance might be down a few more notches than normal.

  Walking outside, he could hear the sounds of approaching dusk almost as if he were camping. The world had grown so quiet so fast. He looked skyward and was not surprised to see the lack of any contrails. In fact, there hadn’t been any since the day it was reported that Air Force One went down. He figured the wisdom was probably along the lines of, if it can happen on the president’s plane, then it could certainly happen on a commercial aircraft.

  That thought gave him a shiver. Now that he’d seen those things up close a few times, he had to imagine that the smell in such close quarters would be worse than any elevator fart. And how would somebody take one down at thirty thousand feet? Unless there happened to be an armed sky marshal, he figured that folks would be pretty well screwed.

  Walking up to the row of sign-up booths he smiled and nodded appropriately at the greetings he received. He paused once to help Granny Criss into her scooter chair. As he did, he wondered how much longer they would have power. It was already spotty, and today it had gone out just before Jamie and her people returned and just come on a while ago.

  Too bad for her it hadn’t gone out while she was breaking in to that Lowe’s store, he thought.

  He picked up the list and sighed in relief when the two names he’d hoped would not be there were absent. Part of him felt bad, but he’d had issues with Reverend Jonah and his brother Chuck. The two seemed to constantly be on about how this was the “End Times” and people needed to stop building defenses against zombies and worry about defending their immortal soul.

  Heading to his car, he had just opened the door when everything went considerably darker. He glanced up at the street lights and saw that they were all off.

  “That’s what I get for thinking,” he said with a sigh as he climbed into his car and headed out to do his last drive around the perimeter for the day.

  ***

  Jamie followed Jonathan. She hid her annoyance at the man since she undeniably saw the look he gave her at Chief Gilstrap’s suggestion that she be the one to join him in checking out these new arrivals.

  She considered the bit of a buzz she felt growing, but shoved it aside. She was more than fine to go see four new arrivals. The fact that Jonathan had come and not one single member of the actual team assigned that task told her that it was probably just him being over-dramamtic.

  She walked outside and headed for the small north parking lot where they had determined that newcomers be brought back to when they arrived. That was when she had optimistically believed that they would become some sort of Mecca that people would flood to when the word got out that Liberty was shoring up a good section of town with the full intention of surviving this “zombie event” (as the media had coined it).

  She was halfway there when the lights went out. Pausing, she reached inside her shirt and took out the small jogger’s light. It was an orange disc that clipped on to her shirt and allowed her to see at least the area directly in front of her. She had a head-mounted light back in her cubicle in the dorm where she now lived, but this would do for now. It took her a few times to get the button to work, but she was fine. And besides, it wasn’t like she had all that far to walk. Her new residence was literally a stone’s throw away.

  Jamie had given up her home to three families. She had wanted to show everybody that she was not going to ask the people of Liberty to make sacrifices that she was not willing to make her own self. That didn’t mean she liked it; she missed her house and hoped that maybe someday she would see a time when she could reclaim it.

  She hid a smirk when she heard Jonathan curse up ahead as he stubbed his foot and almost tripped over the small curb. Just as fast, she shoved her snarky thoughts away and tried to remind herself that Jonathan had been instrumental in helping show people just how bad this zombie event was on a global scale.

  When she arrived at the intake area, she was almost glad it was a bit dark. The four men who stood waiting under the glare of a few hanging Coleman lanterns looked like a cross between a heavy metal band and a biker gang. The long-haired one in particular gave her the shivers. His eyes looked deader than any zombie’s, and he didn’t seem to notice that there was a crowd of people standing in a small semi-circle examining them like they were slides under a microscope.

  Screwing up her courage a few notches and pasting her best smile onto her face, she dismissed the bad feelings as being influenced by a mix of Jonathan’s paranoia and the whiskey. Making every effort to conceal her slight inebriation, she stepped into the light of the lanterns to greet the strangers. “My name is Jamie Burns.” She extended a hand and thought she detected a hesitation in the heavily tattooed man closest to her.

  “Joe,” the man finally mumbled. “Joe Spencer.”

  “Kevin Staley,” one of the men almost shouted as he stepped past the man who had given his name as Joe.

  Jamie appraised this one and felt even sillier about her earlier concerns. This Kevin Staley person had the most charming smile. His hair looked like it was on fire in the glow of the lanterns and his teeth sparkled, adding perhaps just a bit more light to the scene. She liked this one right away and then fought off a blush as he reached out and took her hand.

  “So great to meet you,” the man said in a voice that sent a tingle up her arm and straight to her belly.

  “Welcome to Liberty, where neighbors become friends,” Jamie gushed, instantly scolding herself for being so corny as to spout the town’s slogan.

  “Liberty…” Mark said the word like it didn’t exactly fit in his mouth. “Never heard of it.” He looked around, squinting with apparent scrutiny. “Kinda small as far as towns go.”

  “Says the guy from Smyrna,” Kevin joked.

  “Hey, we moved to Spartanburg when I was five,” Mark shot back defensively.

  “I don’t think I got all your names,” Jamie piped in, her voice cracking just a little as she did. She simply could not take her eyes off the one who had introduced himself as Kevin Staley.

  “I’m Mark Trees,” the broad chested member of the group who had made the small town quip said, reaching out to shake her hand with a grip that was just on the edge of becoming painful. “The quiet one is Bob…Bob Capka.”

  Jamie glanced over at Bob and barely suppressed a shiver that was entirely different from the type that Kevin induced. Maybe it was a trick of the lanterns, but she could not get over how dead his eyes looked. The problem was, once she’d made eye contact, she found that she couldn’t tear her gaze away without considerable effort.

  “We will need to get you guys in to see
our medical staff.” Jamie knew that she was stretching things a bit. Sophie Martin and two volunteers that were being trained on the fly could hardly be considered a proper medical staff; perhaps the dig at Liberty’s small town status had hit her wrong.

  “We’re fine,” Kevin assured her.

  “Yes, but it is the protocol,” Jamie insisted.

  “Protocol,” Joe snickered in a way that made the hairs on the back of Jamie’s neck stand up, almost like how she would imagine a serpent to speak if it had the ability.

  “I think we would know if there was something wrong with us,” Mark growled. “We ain’t stupid. We’ve been out in this crap long enough to know what can turn ya into one of them things.”

  “Guys,” Kevin raised his hands in the air as he turned to face the other three members of his group, “these fine people are showing us hospitality. It wouldn’t be right for us to impose and ask them to break their protocols.”

  Jamie thought she saw a sneer try desperately to tug at the corners of the mouth of one named Bob. The barrel-chested man named Mark let a dismissive burst of air escape his lips, but he didn’t argue.

  Joe Spencer was a different story. “Maybe I’ll just sleep outside your little perimeter. I ain’t letting some stranger make me strip naked so they can look at my shit.”

  “We all seen ya naked, bro.” Kevin smiled big and then gave a wink to Jamie that reignited her blush. “It ain’t all that. How about we just let these people do what they feel they need to do. I think we will find that the rewards far outweigh such a minor inconvenience.”

  Jamie looked from one of the men’s faces to the next. There seemed to be something passing between them that was not spoken. She shoved that thought away, certain that she was imagining things. She blamed it on the alluring effect of Kevin Staley’s smile.