DEAD: Reborn

by TW Brown

  Up on the porch, Ronni was moving away from the stairs as zombies stumbled up in pursuit. Her eyes met those of her father’s and she mouthed the words “I’m sorry, Daddy…I’m so sorry” just as hands clutched at her and she was pulled down by a group of five.

  Dustin launched himself at the rear of the zombie hoard sending bodies every which way. The zombies’ lack of coordination worked in his favor and several fell like a twisted parody of dominoes. Chad snapped to his senses enough to realize that an opening had been cleared for the most part. He charged into that opening.

  A few zombies remained between him and his daughter. Her scream of pain drove him forward with unnatural speed and strength. At some point, he’d lost his weapons and now resorted to grabbing bodies and tossing them aside. Meanwhile, Dustin had regained his feet and charged through the closed front door of the home. Screams of terror came from within, but Chad heard only the cries of his daughter and grabbed the last two zombies that were on top of her by the tops of their heads. He slammed them together and hurled them over the porch railing where they landed on the gathered crowd like inept stage divers.

  “Daddy!” a little girl’s voice sobbed.

  Chad looked down and felt his heart disintegrate. His daughter was covered in blood and filth. Her eyes were shiny with tears; the deep brown almost looking golden as the sun hit her face. He knelt and took her hands in his. With a single motion, he scooped her into his arms and turned.

  Zombies were regaining their feet and those that had not been knocked over were trying to climb over their downed comrades. Chad made for the open front door of the house. He took two steps when he stumbled just a bit and came to an awkward halt. He looked down at his daughter who was still staring up at him through the tears.

  Her eyes.

  They were normal!

  ***

  “I don’t think we will ever know what happened,” George said in a whisper.

  Jody had already made it clear that he could not handle a noise much louder than that the moment his eyes opened and Selina squealed with delight and relief. He had hugged her back once he had been able to take his hands from his temples.

  “Why kill his entire crew and burn the place to the ground?” Selina repeated what Kat was signing from beside Jody’s bed where neither woman had moved from except for quick bathroom breaks for the past several days.

  “And who were all the bikers?” Danny added.

  The discussion was one that would run in circles for the next several days. The entire time, Danny mulled over and sifted through everything that he’d seen after cutting the head off of Remar Jenks.

  He had pulled Jody from the burning home and been relieved to discover his friend was alive. He had backtracked to an old farm house just up the road a short distance. After making sure that the place was clear, he had returned to the now fully engulfed development. Many of the houses were starting to collapse and that is how he discovered the motorcycles. There had been a dozen bikes parked in the southwest corner of the development under a copse of trees that were now in the process of becoming giant candles.

  Gauging the situation and hoping his guess was right, Danny rushed in and checked the first chopper he came to. Throwing his leg over, he kick started the hog and roared out with flames seeming to chase him all the way through the open entry gate and back onto the road.

  He sat across the road for a few hours while the place continued to burn and waited to see if anybody came out. Other than the few zombies that managed to stumble out in varying stages of being burnt to a crisp, nothing stirred from within the inferno. Danny had not even noticed the approaching clouds until the first rain drops fell on his head.

  He remained on his vigil until the storm broke open with a fury that actually made it almost impossible to see more than a few yards because of the torrential rain. Coupled with the smoke that now came in hissing protest, there was no reason to remain.

  He returned to where he had left Danny propped up in a musty, moldy, mildewed bed. He watched over his friend and tried repeatedly to rouse him with no luck.

  The rain continued well into the night. Danny kept his vigil; alternating between checking on Jody and making sure that nothing nasty was coming for them in the dilapidated farm house. The next morning, he rode the chopper back to Cash. Jody was still out of it and he’d had to rig it so that they were basically tied together. He knew it was extremely dangerous, but he also knew that he could not carry the man on his back the eight or ten miles they needed to go.

  The big bike was heavy, awkward, and ran funny like it had molasses mixed in with the fuel. It would rumble and sputter and then cough with a burst of black smoke that spewed from the tailpipe, but it made it home.

  After Jody had been seen to, Danny spilled everything he knew, which really was not all that much when it came down to it. A few people grumbled that it all seemed too convenient for Remar to end up dead and the first one that did so in Danny’s earshot was still rubbing his jaw.

  “My friend almost died going out there thinking that we were trying to save that piece of crap!” Danny roared as he stood over the man with clenched fists.

  Thankfully—for the man on the ground, not Danny—George was on hand to calm the angry soldier down. That night as Danny sat next to Jody’s bed, his mind went back over everything from the events of the last part of that peculiar twenty-four hours. He was certain that something was brewing out there.

  Those bikers were not just some random encounter for Remar and his group. He’d driven through the burnt down development before wheeling it back to Cash. He could not be certain, but he was almost willing to swear that he had seen the remnants of a secured area. Somebody was setting up a home or a base in that place. Also, that night while the fire burned and battled with the rain in its losing war, he was almost certain that he’d heard what sounded like a bunch of firearms being fired at once—an ammunition cook off would be the likely culprit.

  Danny sat by Jody’s bed all that first night…and the nights that followed. He refused to leave and practically sprinted there and back any time he had to use the restroom. On the fourth or fifth day, Selina insisted that he go take a shower. He agreed only if she promised to stay with Jody until he got back.

  He helped spoon mashed plates of unidentifiable stuff with the consistency of baby food into Jody’s mouth. He helped change out IV bags and even became proficient at sterilizing the old one and refilling it with the solution that Selina and another woman said he needed.

  On the eleventh day, Jody opened his eyes. The first words that he heard were from his friend Danny.

  “Sergeant Bill Pitts is alive.”

  18

  Geeks on Two Wheels

  Kevin turned to his group. They looked anxious, even a little scared. After the last several days, he could hardly blame them. Already they had lost five of their numbers. More than once, Kevin wondered if he was doing the right thing in bringing these children with him.

  The journey to Chicago had looked much easier on the map. However, they just had not planned for so much urban sprawl. They had stayed well south on their approach and, as it was, had not actually reached Chicago proper when they suffered the first of their losses. Yet, Kevin pressed on. He had made up his mind…or so he thought.

  Kevin took them north all the way to Interstate 90—the Indiana Toll Road according to the few signs that remained. With Lake Michigan to their right, they found a huge sporting goods store. Kevin had almost bypassed it due to the exterior damage. However, Catie had taken a small group in and come out in such a hurry that Kevin waited for an army of zombies to emerge like ants from a kicked anthill.

  “Not a weapon to be had…but the bicycles and camping gear are untouched!” she announced.

  They spent the day equipping themselves and making sure that every single bicycle was ready for the road. Kevin was very thorough in making sure that they would be able to repair or replace anything that might go wrong. By the time they
were back on the road, everybody was feeling as if Christmas had come.

  Kevin had not realized how ragged the children’s footwear was until one of them came up with a pair of hiking boots and asked if she could have them or if they were too expensive. It had taken him a moment to actually understand that the concept of their reality had perhaps not sunk in entirely.

  He gathered everybody around and told them that they could take anything they needed if they could pull it in his or her own trailer. He cautioned them that they would be needing food and that they would be taking only what they could carry as individuals.

  When they resumed their journey, Aleah had come up beside him. “So, are you sure about Chicago?”

  “I think the city itself is probably a gold mine,” Kevin said. “But I don’t think we are going to make it that far. The maps really do not show how dense the area was with people. I guess I never thought it out.”

  “Wait…am I hearing this correctly? The great mind of Kevin Dreon has made a…mistake?”

  “Happens to the best of us,” he said with a shrug.

  And so as they passed through the almost completely destroyed and burnt remains of Gary, Indiana, Kevin kept them on Interstate 90, where they passed what had to have been some sort of massive fuel depository. None of the huge tanks remained, and the ground had a glassy sheen to it as well as a lingering smell of fuel even after all this time.

  A huge neighborhood just to the west had been utterly wiped out by the resulting fire. Kevin could not begin to wrap his mind around the size of the blaze that had to have burned for perhaps months.

  They passed another, and then another tanker farm. Each having vanished in what had to have been a hellish conflagration. Each causing utter destruction to the surrounding landscape.

  They’d finally crossed a large lake and eventually passed through what had once been a massive toll gate complex that spanned the interstate. It looked like the military had done its best to make some sort of stand here. Leading up to the toll gate, the litter of corpses was horrifying. It was so bad that they had to actually leave the highway and travel along an access road that ran parallel.

  And just that suddenly, they cleared a wooded area and discovered themselves on the Indiana/Illinois State Line and an expansive neighborhood that looked like it went on forever. This community sat across from what one sign proclaimed to be ‘Eggers Woods Forest Preserve’.

  “This is the rally point,” Kevin had announced.

  He had divided them into groups. He took one, Aleah took one, Heather and Deanna took one and Sean was paired with Trent. They each were given twelve kids in their detail. They had been assigned a specific street and told to search one block at a time and return to the rally point with the gathered spoils and await the others.

  Looking down his street, Kevin saw very little activity. A few zombies could be seen, but not many. And considering that they were looking at an area with perhaps thousands of homes packed in tightly amongst one another, this was exactly the blessing he’d hoped for.

  Sure, there would still be a few zombies to deal with, but the ratio of houses to zombies looked to be very favorable. After one more lecture about being cautious and sticking together with your assigned group, Kevin wished everybody luck, kissed Aleah, and headed to his street. He would begin at the intersection of ‘E 112th ST’ and ‘S Avenue B’ according to the surprisingly intact signage.

  The first obstacle was a five car mess. It looked as if everybody had tried to exit the neighborhood at the exact same time. One car had the remains of the driver jutting through the windshield. The blood had long since been washed away, leaving a barely visible stain. This was proof that the undead had no interest in eating an already deceased individual. There were signs of trauma from the accident, but not so much as a single bite mark.

  Kevin chose to go down the left side of the street and then come up the right side so that they would end their search closest to the park. The first house was a disappointment. It appeared that the place had likely been up for sale because it was empty except for some now moldy furniture in the living room obviously meant as a display.

  The second house was picked pretty clean as was the next few. Kevin was beginning to doubt his logic. He had simply assumed that a majority of the former residents would have evacuated to an area shelter or FEMA center. The likelihood that the zombie population in this sort of area would be fairly dense would have dissuaded most looters…or at least that was his logic going in.

  The long row of brick homes was starting to look like a bust by the time he reached the sixth home on the street. It looked just like all the others. Graffiti scrawled on the front, a busted front window. But when he opened the front door (not all of the homes had intact front doors, but this one just happened to), he saw a stack of boxes just down the entry hall. They had been knocked over and some of their contents had spilled on the floor.

  Cans! He hurried inside. Looking back, he saw the children staring back. They were hesitant and scared. That was when he smelled it.

  At almost the same moment, a strange howl came from somewhere behind one of the closed doors down the dark hallway that led off from the main entrance. Everybody already had weapons in hand, but a few of the kids were backing away.

  “It’s okay,” Kevin whispered. “There are probably only one or two. I will go down and deal with them. You guys get this stuff outside and start loading it into the trailers. Don’t worry about what goes where for now…we will sort everything out once we get back to the rally point.”

  “Don’t go in there,” one of the kids pleaded.

  “It’s no big deal,” Kevin said dismissively. “You guys act like you have never seen a zombie before.”

  He could not believe that these same kids who had been ready to turn him into a human pin cushion were suddenly so scared.

  “That doesn’t sound like a zombie,” one of the kids whispered.

  The sound came again. It sounded like a mix of a howl and a wet sort of growling. He cocked his head and listened carefully. The sounds came once more, and this time there was obviously more than one of whatever the hell was making that noise.

  “You guys just get the food. I’ll go check it out.” Kevin headed down the hallway, not bothering to see if his group did as they were told.

  The noise continued, but when he stepped on a loose floorboard and a high squeak pierced the air, it stopped instantly. A second later there was a terrible crash from behind the second door on the left.

  As he moved down the hallway, he could smell something foul, like rot and ammonia swirled together. It was bad enough that it made him gag and his eyes started to water. He pulled his shirt up over his nose, but it did little to block the pungent stench from invading his olfactory sense.

  He reached the door and listened. He thought he heard a scuttling sound, but his own heart was suddenly beating louder than any ambient noise…or at least that is how it seemed. He looked back up the hallway. The children were clustered close; none of them had yet started to pack out the boxes of supplies that the residence’s former owners had so generously left for them.

  Taking one more deep breath and bringing his machete up and ready to swing, Kevin threw the door open and jumped back. More than a dozen feral cats bolted from the room, bringing with them a stink so thick that it caused his eyes to physically burn. As one, the children all shrieked and bolted for the front door.

  Kevin looked in the room and discovered that it had basically become a nest. Animal carcasses were strewn about, along with…Kevin felt his gorge rise. The room was littered with random body parts. A hand here, a foot there…and was that an entire head stripped almost clean down to the skull?

  Kevin staggered back down the hall. He made it three steps when a yowl and hiss caused him to jump back. One of the cats was apparently not afraid of this sudden intrusion and was prepared to do battle. The feline crouched low and sprung, its claws seeking purchase in the protective welder’s le
athers that he wore over his jeans. On reflex, Kevin went to bat the animal away and it latched onto his gloves. The mesh inside was effective at repelling human teeth, but did little to stop the needle-like fangs of the angry cat.

  Kevin yelped in pain and slung his arm, slamming the cat attached to his fingers hard against the wall. This did little more than cause the creature to bite down harder. Kevin slammed it again and fumbled for one of the knives at his belt.

  Seeming to be able to sense the coming attack, the cat let go and darted away. The shouts of surprise from the children let him know it had exited the house. Seconds later, several of the children shrieked again. Kevin rounded the corner and stared out the front door. Just in the narrow field of vision that he had of the outside, at least a dozen walkers were in view as well as creepers that were emerging from under some of the defunct vehicles that littered the street.

  “Don’t wait for them to get up on us!” Kevin barked. “Take them down…closest first and work your way out.”

  As Kevin stepped outside, he quickly discovered that the problem was not too serious. At most, forty undead were converging on them. He had a private interior chuckle at that thought before planting his machete in the crown of the closest zombie.

  He was scanning the undead as they were killed, searching for any signs that they may either be relatively fresh or having a recent meal…or whatever it was when zombies ate people. These were all old and ragged. Many had missing digits, multiple signs of having been shot, stabbed, or hacked at, and their clothing was almost non-existent.

  “There’s something old George missed,” Kevin sighed as he plunged his knife into the temple of a nude woman that had probably been in her twenties, but now looked well over fifty the way her skin was all sagging and loose, thinking back to what now felt like a ridiculous obsession with all things zombie related.

  It only took a few minutes and all the zombies had been put down. Kevin noticed with just a bit of unease that cats peered at them from all around. Some perched on cars, others under shrubs, and the more brazen, right out in the middle of the street. They showed no fear, just apparent annoyance at having been disturbed.