Possession of the Dead: A Zombie Novel (Undead World Trilogy, Book Two)

by Fuchs, A. P.

  Other gun shots echoed on the air and Michelle wondered who else was out shooting the undead.

  Mark stopped, seeming to have heard the gunshots, too.

  “Could be another crew,” Michelle said.

  The two walked on.

  A few zombies roamed the streets. Michelle only shot them if they got too close. Some were far enough away that she decided not to waste any ammo on them.

  Mark started to cry again. “Sorry,” he said.

  Hope he doesn’t think— “Don’t be. Just try and stay focused until we get home. I know it’s hard, but you can do it.”

  He wiped his nose, pinched back more tears, and kept moving.

  Low, heavy footfalls droned in Michelle’s ears. Quickly, the ground shook.

  “Run!” she said as a massive zombie some fifteen stories high came out from behind the rubble of the fallen Richardson Building.

  The creature’s frame was thick, its gut hanging nearly to its knees, its double-chinned face covered in filth and blood. Short, black spiky hair sat atop its head. It only had one eye, the other seeming to have been burned until all that was left was a crusty crater of skin and flesh. Its bloated nakedness turned her stomach.

  Stopping herself from throwing up, Michelle pulled Mark by the arm as they tried to outrun the creature.

  Its giant strides quickly caught up with them.

  31

  Huge, Dead Fat Guy

  Mark had seen the giant zombies before, but always at a distance, even if that distance was a few hundred meters. Seeing it up close and personal like this forced his heart into this throat as panic flooded through him. His legs pumped hard and fast beneath him and he was only partially aware of how quick he found himself able to run, his body super-charged on adrenaline.

  “Shoot it, Michelle, come on!” he said.

  “Think these bullets’ll make a difference?”

  “Got anything else?”

  “Couple of knives.”

  “Not good.”

  They ran in between abandoned vehicles, the act of doing so giving Mark sharp reminders of the parkade and the loss of his mother.

  A giant zombie fist came down behind them, flattening a van they just passed. The zombie withdrew its hand and slammed it down again, the shockwave of it hitting the pavement enough to send Mark and Michelle off their feet and onto their knees.

  “Get up!” Michelle said, and jerked him up by the hand.

  They kept going.

  The giant zombie howled. A loud, explosive crash sounded behind them as, glancing back over his shoulder, Mark watched the creature punch out the side of a building that used to house a dance studio.

  Michelle pulled out her gun.

  “I thought you weren’t going to use that thing?” Mark said.

  “Don’t have a choice.” She threw her arm behind her and fired off a couple of shots. The mammoth undead didn’t even acknowledge the bullets. Only two black dots spraying a fine squirt of blood manifested on the creature’s thigh for her efforts.

  Michelle pulled Mark to the right so hard he thought his shoulder was going to fly out of its socket. Quickly, she pulled him up the steps of the Concert Hall. The museum was beside it along with the planetarium, the dome of which was more in the fore of the two.

  “Might be able to lose it in here,” she said.

  Mark didn’t care. Well, he cared, but whatever she was going to do to ensure their survival, that part didn’t matter to him. They went to the front of the Concert Hall then in behind the planetarium’s dome.

  Mark yelled without meaning to.

  The zombie kicked up a couple of cars and stepped down onto the planetarium’s dome. The big half-circle structure popped underneath the creature’s foot like someone stepping on an egg. The monster’s colossal foot went right down below ground to where the planetarium seating was; the sudden shift in footing was enough for the creature to trip. It came crashing down with a resounding boom, the creature throwing its arms out in an effort to stop its descent. Its gigantic fingers scraped along the side of the museum, bringing glass and concrete down with it, its other hand landing on the Concert Hall and knocking down part of that building as well. The ground shook so bad, Mark and Michelle’s legs gave out from under them and they hit the ground just shy of where the zombie’s head smashed into the pavement.

  A bit of blood gushed out from the zombie’s skull, but the wound seemed superficial as the creature was already trying to figure out a way to stand again.

  “We can’t let it follow us home,” Mark said.

  “This way,” Michelle said, and the two stood.

  They rounded the back of the museum, then went along its side, stopping at the corner where it faced Main Street. The creature was still down, but already getting its legs underneath itself.

  “I wonder if we could—” Michelle started, but didn’t finish.

  “What?”

  She aimed her gun down the street and fired. A gray Sedan exploded by the giant zombie’s feet. She fired again and hit a big silver truck, but nothing happened. Another shot, and the truck exploded.

  Quickly, Michelle worked her way up the street, aiming at cars. Some blew, others didn’t.

  “Good idea,” Mark said.

  The zombie howled as it got to its feet and started looking around for the cause of all the explosions.

  Mark backed away, the heat from the flames getting too hot for comfort.

  Black smoked billowed up into the sky: the perfect cover. The zombie wouldn’t be able to see them through it.

  As fast as they could, they headed toward the bridge, always checking back to see if the massive zombie was following them.

  32

  The Reason for Time Travel

  Billie yawned as she tried to keep up with the two angels, her short legs not serving her as well as she’d like before the men’s longer ones. Michael walked in front of her, Nathaniel behind. It was strange to see Nathaniel in a position of meekness after his awesome displays of power earlier. She couldn’t help but wonder if Michael was the alpha-angel and every other angelic being was not as powerful.

  “You have much to learn, Billie,” Michael said.

  “So you can read my mind?” she asked, hands at her hips.

  “Not exactly, our Father relays certain messages to us, those He deems you need correcting on.”

  “Does He really have to snoop?”

  “It’s not snooping. It’s just staying informed. He needs to keep things in account. That’s who He is and He doesn’t change,” Nathaniel said.

  “The reason for the corrections,” Michael said, “is we don’t have time to sit you down and preach at you. We’re only correcting things that’ll be of service to you and us later. Part of what we need you to do is understand certain things so you can stand your ground when the time comes.”

  “I still don’t get what you mean by that, the whole ‘when the time comes’ thing,” she said.

  “Do you remember the other world?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Of course, I do,” Billie said. “It was my home.”

  “I remember it as well.”

  “Obviously.”

  Without missing a beat, he said, “That day at the bank, you remember what happened?”

  “Yeah, we wound up in the past.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “Demons. Loads of demons, all flying out of the ground and going into the sky.”

  “Did you know they saw you, too?” Michael said.

  Billie stopped walking. Nathaniel side-stepped and came up beside her. Hearing Michael say that—they saw you, too—sent a pang of shock through her heart. She remembered them attacking her and the others, but she took that as more reflex than recognition.

  “That’s why they kidnapped August and me,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “The other world. You guys changed the past by witnessing Hell’s attack on Earth.”

  “But . . . so do you mean t
hat if we weren’t there, none of this would have happened?”

  “No, because your future, your original future, had the undead in it. This future—this place—happened as a result of you being in the past.”

  “They saw you,” Michael said, “and in turn, it seems, interpreted your presence there as a sign of strength and Divine blessing on your part. Instead of infecting the planet in the way you originally witnessed before you went to the past, they changed their plan and infused supernatural evil into your world so not only did the dead rise like before, but they were able to mutate some of them and grow them to spectacular heights. However, to them, there was never the future you originally were a part of.”

  Billie reran the information in her head. It kind of made sense. “But how do you know about the ‘old way,’ you know, where I’m from?”

  “Angels are eternal. We exist outside of Time.”

  “But demons are fallen angels, right?”

  Nathaniel nodded.

  “So don’t they exist outside of Time, too?”

  “No,” Michael said. “They exist outside of Time in the context that they, too, are eternal, but all angels are the same in this regard: we cannot travel through Time nor can we predict the future. Any future event we know about is because of what has been revealed to us by the One who made us.”

  “Therefore I first met you over a year ago,” Nathaniel said, “but it is only now we are reunited.”

  The information made her head spin, but Billie understood enough that things were beginning to line up.

  “So had we not traveled back in Time,” she said, “then it would just be a ‘regular’ zombie fight, for lack of a better word?”

  Michael nodded.

  Billie sighed. “We really messed up, didn’t we?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “No, because, again, you were allowed to go back in Time. In fact, you were sent there.”

  “Why? To make things worse?” She remembered the storm, the flashes of lightning and skulls in the sky as her, Joe and August rode the helicopter from one point in Time to another. Were the demons trying to stop them from going back? Did the attack happen in linear Time or did it only seem that way?

  “Let us keep going,” Michael said. “Billie will need to rest and, Nathaniel, you and I have much to go over.”

  33

  Dead Grass, Dead Forest

  The El Camino ran out of gas not forty-five minutes after Joe and Tracy left Andrew’s headless corpse alongside the highway. They didn’t pass a gas station as planned. The only hope for getting back behind the El Camino’s wheel would be if they found a gas station within reasonable walking distance and were able to get fuel and carry it back.

  But that was an hour ago.

  Joe and Tracy kept to the side of the road, searching up and down the highway and the surrounding trees and open fields for any undead that might stumble out. So far, only one had shown its ugly face and Joe quickly dispatched it with a bullet to the brain.

  Time went on.

  Tracy yawned.

  “Tired?” Joe said, her yawn contagious enough to make him let out one of his own.

  “Getting there.” She raised her wrist, folded back the cover on her black watch. “Past eleven.”

  Joe was used to staying out late. In the old days, night was when he went out and hunted the undead. Though the bright of day and the dark of night no longer existed in this new undead world, most people still adhered to their biological clocks and caught shut eye between ten in the evening and seven or eight in the morning. This meant less chance of regular folks on the street, in turn ensuring less casualties in case something went wrong. That, and also increasing the odds that anything Joe saw that moved was undead.

  “Going to have to find a place to hole up for the night,” Joe said.

  “Just trees and roadside. Take your pick.”

  “Trees would be better.”

  “Not on ground level.”

  “I don’t know. We’d be harder to spot and, so far, we’ve only had to defend ourselves once since the car swallowed the last of our gas.”

  “You want to sleep in a tree, be my guest.”

  It wasn’t that farfetched, sleeping in a tree. You just needed to be high enough and on a wide enough branch. You could probably just fit yourself in some of the natural V shapes, cross your arms and you’d be good. Unless you slept so heavy nothing waked you (and in a zombie-infested world, you learned to sleep light). Even if you started to tip your body’s instinct to stay alive would alert you that gravity was about to take over.

  “We can’t sleep out here,” Joe said.

  “Wasn’t suggesting it.”

  “But—”

  “Was being sarcastic.”

  They kept on. Every so often the small forests lining the side of the road would break to an open field. Roads ran off these fields, usually one that ran across the highway and down either side. A few hundred more meters then the forest would pick back up again. Joe didn’t think all of it was used for farmland; some people just liked having big properties. The roads that did lead into the forested parts most likely led to houses buried deep within. He had considered going to one of those, but should they be crawling with zombies, he didn’t want Tracy and him to be trapped in between a series of walls with only a few ways out.

  Open field houses would be the safer choice. At least there, if you had to run out, you saw what was in front of you and nothing was obscured by crowded rows of dead trees.

  A couple minutes later, Tracy pointed up ahead. “There’s a place over there.”

  Joe followed her finger to the boxy shape of a house that appeared to be a half kilometer off the gravel road up ahead, the one just after the block of trees they currently were making their way past.

  “Think it’s empty?” he asked.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  The two walked on and came to where the gravel road met the highway. They turned down it and started toward the house. The more the house came into view—faded white panels, an old roof in need of new shingles—the more uneasy Joe became. The dead grass surrounding the property was tall and unkempt, at least a couple feet in height. It was faded out to a light brown, the tops of the blades covered in gray from the Rain that originally caused the dead to rise. The grass was bent over, creating strange heaping mounds that looked like waves, making it difficult from their position to see the entire house accurately.

  Joe pulled out the X-09 and held it firm. Tracy must’ve noticed because he caught her eyeing the weapon before getting back to searching their surroundings again.

  “Don’t know if I’m up for barricading tonight,” she said as they drew nearer.

  “Don’t think you’ll have to,” Joe said and nodded in the direction of the house.

  Now, closer, the bottom of the house was visible as was those who stood near it. Zombies covered the property, a thick mass of the undead: at least around ten out front, about the same along the side, and a bunch in the back. Joe assumed the far side of the house was equally guarded.

  “There’s so many,” Tracy said. “Wish I had a working weapon.”

  “That’s only what we can see on the outside. Look at them: they aren’t trying to get in. Either the house is indeed empty and they know it, or they slaughtered whoever was within and are now just milling around before leaving.”

  “Either way, we can’t go there.”

  “I know.”

  “Any ideas?”

  Joe looked back over his shoulder. They could double back and get on the highway again and try somewhere else. It wasn’t his first option; they were tired enough already and his legs were getting sore from walking, but what choice was there?

  “Let’s go back,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  They turned on their heels and started in the other direction.

  The groans of the dead rose on the air. Joe checked over his shoulder. Back by the house, the zombies still hung about. Other
s were emerging from the field across the way, appearing out of the tall dead grass like spectres from behind a veil.

  Must be a fresh kill, he thought. Has to be. What else would draw out so many? Maybe out here was where they congregated and which was why they didn’t see any except one on the walk out this way.

  He put his eyes forward; Tracy and him kept going.

  A few minutes later, Tracy said, “I think we should run.”

  Joe glanced over his shoulder. Zombies stumbled up the road behind them, their arms already outstretched, plainly eager to grab them.

  Joe threw his arm back and plugged the two nearest dead—around forty feet away—dropping them. One was hit properly in the head; the other, it seemed, somewhere else because it got back up and kept moving toward them.

  Tracy and Joe ran, aiming for the main road.

  “We could probably lose them if we hit the grass,” he said. “I don’t see how the uneven terrain could help them.”

  “If you want to risk spraining your ankle . . .”

  “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. This way.” Joe darted off to the left; Tracy followed.