“You fuckers!” I shouted. “Eat me while I’m unconscious like a bunch of pussies!”
This felt like the ending of a video game that just wasn’t fair. Like when the game glitches, and you can’t fight back no matter how hard you press the X button. The final boss is programmed to fight you, and he doesn’t care that you are half stuck in the floor and can’t move or attack. It was just infuriating to think that this is how I go out.
My hands were now completely gone, and my legs and torso were rapidly fading now too.
Would they eat my entire body? Would they eat enough, so that I can’t come back?
Then I remembered Carl, who was pretty much just a head in my front lawn. If I don’t want to turn into a zombie, they are going to have to eat my brain. I highly doubt they would be able to get into my brain bucket, so chances were pretty good that I was going to turn.
Well, who knows? Maybe being a zombie is the greatest feeling in the world. Maybe it’s like a constant orgasm. Then a new thought hit me. What if you are still conscious inside the zombie? What if you just watch through the eyes but have no control? Well, that might be interesting.
Now I was simply floating eyeballs in the darkness of this space that I was inhabiting. I had no body. But if I had no body, why was I feeling pain in my shoulder? I didn’t have a shoulder anymore, so this shouldn’t be happening.
My eyes popped open, and fire ripped through my body. I was confused, in pain, and had no idea what the living fuck was going on. A massive hand pushed me back down onto the mattress that I was now laying on. It was Jack.
“Don’t move, man,” he said. “We’re safe now, but you can’t move that arm for a while.” I looked at my left arm, and it was wrapped in about six inches of bedsheets.
“What…?” I started.
“I had to fish out that bullet, and you lost a lot of blood. I’m not a doctor, Jeff, so I don’t know how bad the damage really is. Just don’t move it for a while.”
Then something odd happened. I had a quick jolt of concern race across the surface of my skin. Before I had a chance to suppress it, I blurted out, “Where’s Rex?”
“Right there,” Jack said, pointing into the bed next to me. I turned my head and apparently that head movement used shoulder muscles because it hurt…a lot. But there, sleeping right next to me, was a little tan and white ball of fur. His eyes were closed, and his little brow was furrowed. I guess even dogs have bad dreams.
“He hasn’t moved since I put you down here.”
“How long have we been here?”
“Five days.”
“Five?” I asked.
“You slept the whole time.”
There was a long moment of silence before I asked, “Did I go five days without peeing?”
He waited a long second before answering, “I changed you once a day.”
Well…now this was awkward. I looked around the room trying to get a sense of my surroundings, and they started to look familiar. The first thing that really looked familiar was the candles next to the bed, and then I noticed the restraints hanging from the bed post. We’re in Pete the Zombie Rapist’s house!
“You brought us back here?!” I half screamed as I started to get up. Jack pushed me back down.
“They aren’t going to be coming back here looking for us,” he said, trying to reassure me. “It’s the safest place I could think of. Now, go back to sleep.”
“I just slept for five days…”
“The body heals faster when you’re asleep. You need to sleep.” There was a long pause between us before I asked the real question of the hour.
“Were you staring at my penis when you changed me?”
Jack laughed and put his hand on my good shoulder. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it, man. Now go to sleep.”
I thought about arguing more about staying in the bed, but my eyes got fuzzy. I put my head back down on the pillow, and I could feel Rex nestling tighter against me as he slept. He took a deep breath and let out a long sigh mixed with a tiny snore. I looked at him, and his forehead was still furrowed from whatever stressful dream he was having. I watched as my hand moved without instruction to the sleeping dog. The involuntary gesture continued with my thumb gently massaging his tiny furrowed brow. I could feel the tension in his head instantly release like I was pouring hot water over ice. I didn’t think about what I was doing; this was just happening. But only briefly. The darkness returned, and I was once again in my old familiar dreamless sleep.
Chapter 27
I slept a lot over the next two days, only waking occasionally to take a pain pill or some antibiotic that Jack found in the medicine cabinet. I was right in the middle of one of my dreamless sleeps when something unusual happened. I started to dream.
A pin prick of blue light poked into the blackness of my unconscious. The small light seemed to get larger and larger until I realized that it wasn’t growing in size… it was growing closer.
She was about one hundred yards away when I recognized her. It was the blue fairy in all her grotesque beauty. She got just close enough that I could see the look of old faded wood on her skin, and her eyes that seemed more decorative than functional. Her gaze was cold and lifeless.
She was about twenty yards away when she raised her cold wooden hand towards me. What was the reason for this second visit? Why return now? Her fingers exploded with a sound loud enough to wake me from my sleep. I found myself dripping with sweat and shaking.
What the fuck was that all about?
The bedroom door burst open, and Jack ran in holding a smoking rifle.
Well, that explains the sound, I thought.
Rex squirmed past Jack and ran straight to the window; the fur on the back of his neck made him look like he was over starched. A small guttural growl rested in the back of his throat as he stared at the window.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s…” Before Jack could answer, the window shattered. I looked over and there was a zombie perched in the window in a crouched position that resembled something I saw in a Spiderman comic.
How the hell did he get up to the second floor?
Rex barked and jumped back a half a step, but the zombie only gave him a glance before looking up at Jack and me. I guess this one wasn’t distracted by the tasty looking dog. He wanted something more substantial…Like us.
Now, what I’m about to tell you is going to sound like complete and utter bullshit, but IF I believed in a higher power and magic, I would swear this on a stack of your holy bibles.
The zombie licked his fucking lips at me.
No shit.
He looked at me sitting up in the bed, and actually licked his god damned lips like I was a pig in a blanket. Then he did something else I never would have thought possible…He jumped through the air at me. With his arms stretched out towards me, and his legs splayed out behind him, he transformed from Spiderman to Superman. Oh, damn. I thought. This is how I go out.
Then, Jack fired his rifle at the airborne zombie about a foot away from my head. Sure, I was glad that he was trying to save my life, but maybe he could have done it from a few feet further away from my eardrums.
The bullet caught the zombie in his shoulder blade, and it had just enough force to stop his forward progress. The zombie hit the ground, and Rex jumped on his back and started to bite ferociously at the back of his neck. I wanted to vomit when I saw Rex pull away skin like a chunk of tree bark. The zombie jumped up quickly, and Rex fell harmlessly away. Then he turned his gaze back to me and screamed. This wasn’t a moan like we heard from the other zombies. This was a painful sounding throaty scream. Jack went to fire again, and this time there was no loud bang. The gun jammed.
Perfect.
“Shit!” Jack mumbled as he tried to clear the stuck cartridge that hadn’t ejected properly. The zombie turned and looked at Jack holding the gun, and he focused mainly on the object in Jack’s hands.
“Point it at him, Jack,” I s
aid through the side of my mouth.
“It’s jammed.”
“He doesn’t know that.”
Jack leveled the useless gun on the zombie, and it actually flinched at the threat.
“Holy shit,” Jack said taking a step forward.
I stood up on the bed, not wanting to be in a helpless position any longer. The zombie looked at me and then back to Jack. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot as he was weighing his options. He let out another scream. This one had a distinctly frustrated sound to it. He wanted his food, meaning me, but he was aware that what Jack was holding was dangerous. I reached out with my good arm and pulled a small handgun Jack had left for me. It wasn’t my glock, and I could thank Sara for that. This one was slightly larger and a hell of a lot heavier, but it would work. By the time I was able to raise the gun, the zombie ducked its ugly head, turned and bounded out the window. Jack and I ran to the window just in time to see it pick itself up off the lawn and turn back to us. It let out one final scream before racing down the road at a pace that would make an Olympic sprinter jealous. I turned to Jack and asked the only thing that I could think to ask.
“The fuck was that?!”
Chapter 28
“Last night, I saw someone running down the street,” Jack started. “I thought it was a survivor. Someone who might need help. So I opened the front door and whispered as loud as I could to get his attention without attracting the attention of whatever he was running from. He stopped running when he heard me… I waved my arms so he could see me, and then he started running towards me. He was moving so fast. I thought, ‘Jesus, he must be scared.’ Then, when he got closer, I could see he was one of them. I slammed the door and got away from it. I’ve never seen one move like that. They can’t move like that!”
“Apparently that one could,” I interjected. Jack didn’t even acknowledge my words before continuing.
“He got to the door and slammed into it hard enough to shake the frame. Then, I could hear the door knob being fiddled with.”
“He tried the door?!”
“Yeah…He actually started to open it. Once I realized he was getting in, I kicked that door shut and locked every lock.”
“Even the chain?”
He nodded.
“I looked through the peephole and saw him still trying to figure out the door. After a few seconds, he realized that wasn’t working, so he went to the window and started looking around.”
“Smart little bastard,” I said.
“He saw me,” Jack continued. “He looked at me through the window and smiled at me. He SMILED! Like he was happy to see me. He shoved his head through the window like it wasn’t there, and I didn’t have my gun. I grabbed the lamp off the coffee table and hit him with it as hard as I could.”
Jack is such a big guy, I would have loved to see him hit anything as hard as he could.
“The lamp broke over his face, and he backed away and looked at me like I surprised him. Then he ran away. I thought it was for good, but then I heard that scream. I looked out the peephole, and I could see him standing in the middle of the street screaming directly up into the sky. About a minute later, another runner came sprinting up.”
“Two of them?! So it wasn’t just one freak zombie?”
Jack shook his head. “No. I think we are looking at something new. But, once they were together, the one I hit ran back to the window where I hit him and just stared at me. The other one ran away…Well, I thought he did. I climbed up to the second floor to get my gun, and it’s actually lucky that I did. I heard a window break from the back side of the house downstairs. The second one ran around the back side and broke in while the first one had my attention…The one in the window was just a distraction. If I hadn’t climbed up to the second floor, I would have been dead.”
I had almost forgotten that Pete ripped up his stairs. I’m sure when he did it he wasn’t thinking about zombies that had been bitten by radioactive spiders.
“I grabbed my rifle, and Rex came running out to see what was going on. I looked down at the thing, and he was trying to climb onto the table by the stairs. He was trying to figure out how to get up to us. So I shot him through the top of his head, and when I looked back to the one in the window, he took off. That’s when I ran in here to get you.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “It wasn’t bad enough that we had countless shuffling zombies and rednecks to deal with. Now we have fast smart zombies too? This is bullshit!”
“What do we do?”
I rubbed my tender shoulder. Moving it around didn’t hurt so much when there was adrenaline pumping through me. But now it was starting to ache.
“Let’s wait here a few more days,” I said. “We can put everything in the attic and hide up there just in case anymore of these assholes figure out how to get in.”
“Then what? Where can we go?”
“We need to find other survivors. We have a better chance of surviving in a group.”
“What about Axel’s group?”
“I don’t think they will take us in,” I said sarcastically.
“No, I mean they are still out there looking for us.”
“They had to have moved on by now. Even if they are looking for us, it’s doubtful they’ll ever find us. There’s too much going on, and it’s a big city. We’re like a needle in a haystack.”
Jack nodded and went into the hall where he pulled the cord that brought the stairs to the attic down. “I’ll start moving stuff up here. We’re gonna need some blankets too. It’s getting colder outside, and it’s gonna get really cold up there.”
All that we had was the bag full of guns, so it didn’t take long for Jack to shove it through the opening. We grabbed blankets and pillows and took them up into the dark frigid attic. Jack pulled out a small LED flashlight and started looking around the attic for anything else we might need. The first thing I saw was a medium sized cardboard box. I opened it, hoping to find bags of candy, and all I found was a lifetime supply of cold and allergy medicine. Apparently, Pete not only raped zombies, but he was overly ready for allergy season.
“How well did you know this guy?” Jack asked, opening another box.
“Not very,” I said truthfully. “What did you find there?”
“Matchsticks…Lots and lots of matchsticks.” It didn’t take long to piece it together. Matchsticks and the cold and allergy medicine are two very important ingredients in crystal meth. Shining the light around the attic showed us a handful of cheap plastic sinks that Pete had installed himself, an old bedroom dresser full of glass jars and dirty vials, and a makeshift vent that was powered by a cheap plastic fan.
“We’re in a meth lab,” Jack said with a certain nonchalance that made it seem like it wasn’t his first time in a drug kitchen.
“This neighborhood just isn’t what it used to be,” I replied.
“We should leave now. There are a lot of supplies here, I couldn’t imagine them not coming back for it.”
“The sun’s going down,” I said. “Besides, do you really think they are still cooking meth? I can’t imagine the market is demanding crystal meth right now.”
“Good point. I just don’t like it.”
“I understand,” I reassured him.
“How about we leave first thing in the morning. We’ll have a better chance of finding survivors in the day light. I doubt very many people want to go out looking for supplies at night.”
“That sounds like a plan,” I said, grabbing the heaviest blanket in the pile for myself. To be honest, I don’t like the idea of going out and looking for survivors. It’s not that I’m worried about Axel or any others like him. I would just rather be alone and not have to continue this human charade. I was actually comfortable in my home and living the quiet life of an inhuman monster before that dog showed up.
As if on cue, Rex climbed the slanted ladder all by himself and plopped down in front of me. “Where have you been?” I asked him. He replied with a small squeaky
fart before closing his eyes and instantly falling asleep. I quickly dropped one of the blankets over him to trap his foulness in with him. I’d rather subject him to his own dutch oven than have that gas floating around here all night. Your average meth lab was already just a spark away from an epic explosion, we didn’t need any other flammable gasses floating around this place. Rex didn’t seem to mind that he was breathing in his own awful; in fact, a few seconds after I covered him, I could hear his heavy puppy snore coming from under the blanket. Off in the distance, we heard a scream like the once we heard from our new fast friend.
“I don’t like this new development,” I said to Jack who was pulling up the attic door.
“Me neither,” He said. “‘Since the day of my birth, death began its walk. It is walking toward me without hurrying.’”
The Inhuman Chronicles (Book 1): Inhuman Page 21