Year of the Dead (Book 2)

by Ray Wallace

  YEAR OF THE DEAD: BOOK II

  Ray Wallace

  Copyright 2017 by Ray Wallace

  Fall

  Wednesday, September 23rd

  The Gatner brothers were racing along I-95 in a bright yellow Mustang when they heard the wailing of a police siren from behind them.

  “Now what have we got here?” said Charlie, hands on the wheel, gaze flicking to the rear-view mirror then back down to the road again.

  Joey, sitting in the passenger seat, turned his head to watch as the cop car, red and blue lights flashing in the afternoon sunlight, kept pace with them some twenty yards back. “Whaddaya think?” he asked, knowing what his older brother would say, running it by him just the same.

  Charlie shrugged then glanced at the mirror again. “Blast the sonsabitches.”

  Smiling, Joey opened the glove compartment and pulled out the matte-black handgun hidden within, checked the clip and disengaged the safety, all the while humming along with the Kid Rock song playing at low volume on the car stereo. Lowering the passenger side window, he positioned himself in a kneeling position on the seat, facing the rear of the vehicle. Leaning out the window, he took aim and started popping off shots, causing the police car to swerve back and forth, looking as though the driver had momentarily lost control of it.

  Charlie pushed the Mustang to over a hundred miles an hour, maneuvering with practiced ease around the vehicles that had been abandoned haphazardly along this stretch of interstate.

  After missing with three more shots, Joey got back inside the car, ejected the clip, and grabbed a fully loaded replacement from the glove box.

  “Come on, man,” said his brother with a scowl on his face. “Quit screwin’ around already.”

  “Just having a little fun, is all,” Joey told him.

  “Yeah, well, this goddamn hangover’s setting in on me something fierce and I—”

  The rear window exploded.

  That was when Sheila popped up from where she’d been sleeping in the back seat, looking around wildly, red hair stuck to the side of her face. “What the hell?!” When she figured out what was going on, she ducked as the police fired another shot. Lacking the precision of its predecessor, a number of pellets rattled off the rear bumper.

  “Damn it, Joey!” shouted Charlie. “Take these assholes out!”

  “Okay, okay, jeez,” said Joey, the smile remaining on his face despite his apologetic tone.

  Emerging from the window once again, he took aim at the officer—aviator glasses covering his eyes, shotgun in his hands—leaning out of the passenger side window of the pursuing cruiser. Before the other man could fire his weapon a third time, Joey pulled the trigger of his handgun, watched as the cop’s head snapped back and his sunglasses went flying, carried away by the rushing wind. After adjusting his aim, he squeezed off another shot, creating a web pattern across the cruiser’s windshield where there had not been one before. Then he watched as the car, lights still flashing, veered toward the median separating the interstate’s northbound and southbound lanes. Before it got there, however, it slammed into an abandoned pickup truck, resulting in a rather spectacular collision. When it had finished rolling several times, chunks of metal flying in all directions, the cruiser came to rest on its roof near the middle of the road, sirens silenced and lights extinguished.

  Joey laughed and slapped his hand on the Mustang’s door a couple of times before ducking back inside.

  “All right then,” said Charlie, hands on the wheel, eyes locked on the road like nothing out of the ordinary had taken place.

  While returning the gun to the glove compartment, Joey said, “What were they doing, anyway? With all that’s going on these days, you’d think they’d have more important things on their minds than trying to arrest a few troublemakers.”

  “I guess old habits die hard,” Charlie told him.

  “I guess so.”

  Nobody said anything for a while as the Kid Rock song played on.

  Thursday, September 24th

  By now, Rachel realized how badly she had screwed up. I should have kept my mouth shut, shouldn’t have answered any of their questions. Especially one in particular:

  “Have you, at any point since the outbreak, suffered any of the symptoms associated with the plague?”

  The disembodied woman’s voice had issued from a speaker set into the ceiling of the plain white interrogation room. Rachel had been escorted there immediately following her capture outside the military base. Except for a metal chair bolted to the floor, the room had been utterly devoid of furniture. Hands still zip tied behind her back, she had been directed to the chair by one of the men in the fatigues and the gas mask who had brought her there. Then she had been left alone for at least an hour before the voice spoke to her and the questions began.

  “What is your name?”

  “Rachel Ellison.”

  “What were you doing outside the gate?”

  “Just looking around.”

  “Were you aware that the base was occupied?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Are you or have you ever been affiliated with any branch of the armed forces?”

  “No.”

  “Are you or have you ever been affiliated with any known terrorist group?”

  “What?! No, of course not.”

  “Where were you when the outbreak first occurred?”

  And on and on…

  Throughout most of it, she had answered as truthfully as she could, knowing that she had done nothing wrong. The only time she hid the truth was when her inquisitor asked about her actions and whereabouts after she parted ways with Pastor Lewis’s “army.”

  “An opportunity to leave presented itself and I took it,” she had answered. “I don’t know what happened to Howard. I lost track of him in all the confusion.”

  Since Howard had made it abundantly clear he wanted nothing to do with the base, it would have felt like a betrayal to drag him into this on any level. Thus, the lone deception. In the ensuing days, she would come to regret that she had not offered a few more.

  When the interrogation had finally ended, she had been led from the room, through a series of hallways to another room with a cot and a toilet and a door that locked from the outside.

  The next day, she had been brought to the white room again. And the day after that. The questions kept circling back to the time she had spent in her condominium, sick with the plague.

  How long, exactly, had she been ill?

  What were the symptoms she had experienced?

  After her recovery, when did she realize the zombies had no interest in her?

  “I’ve already explained all of this to you!” she had shouted. “Why won’t you let me go?”

  They took two vials of her blood along with a swab of saliva. Now she found herself pacing back and forth in the tiny room with the cot where they had been keeping her, feeling more than a little bit stir crazy. Earlier, a soldier had brought her breakfast: scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice. Aside from that, she had been left alone.

  Maybe they’ve gotten everything they needed. Maybe now they’ll set me free. I’m of no use to them. They have to realize that.

  “Please move away from the door,” came a voice from outside. “Sit on the cot and do not move.”

  Once Rachel had complied with this command, the door swung open and a guard stepped into the room, hand hovering near the gun at his hip. He was followed by the doctor—a bespectacled, middle-aged man carrying a white plastic case with a handle attached to it—who had taken her blood. Another guard waited outside, visible through the doorway.

  “What is this?” asked Rachel.

  “Nothing to worry about,” said t
he doctor as he opened the case and removed a syringe half-filled with a clear liquid. “A little experiment, that’s all.”

  “Oh, hell no,” said Rachel, rising to her feet.

  The guard closest to her moved forward.

  “Sit,” he said. “Or I’ll be forced to restrain you.”

  After that, everything happened quickly. The doctor used the syringe to inject its contents into Rachel’s arm. When he was done, he told her to relax. “No harm will come to you.” Then she was alone again, a cold wave of dread washing over her.

  Relax?

  She wanted to scream, to pound her fists on the walls, to tear down the door and fight her way out of the building with her bare hands. Instead, she stood up and began pacing again, the mounting anxiety inside of her crackling along her nervous system like pure electricity. “I need to get out of here,” she murmured over and over, trying desperately to formulate some sort of escape plan, coming up empty. She was in mid-step when the floor opened up beneath her, plummeting her into an ever-widening hole that seemed intent on devouring the universe.

  Friday, September 25th

  Simon stood on the small porch behind the house, looking out into the backyard and listening to the rain. It had been a clear, sunny day until the clouds had rolled in a few hours earlier and unleashed a deluge that had yet to let up. The weather reminded him of his time spent with Eric, Amanda, and Mitchell, the days spent holed up in that house—they more so than he—as the rain had fallen, seeming as though it might never end. But it had ended, as did his time with his three traveling companions. It may not have ended the way he had wanted it to. No, not by a long shot. The entire affair felt like a story with chapters yet to be written.

  One more chapter, at least.

  He found himself thinking about Amanda, picturing her face, imagining what it would be like to make her his own. Nothing new there. He thought about her fairly regularly. Eric, too. Although, the imagery associated with him was quite different.

  One day, the final chapter will be written.

  Until then, he had other concerns he needed to address. The world may have changed in ways that made his particular appetites easier to satiate, but that did not mean the danger involved with fulfilling them had gone away.

  Earlier, Simon had placed a bowl on the ground outside to collect the falling rain. Retrieving it, he returned to the porch and set the bowl on top of a table standing near the doorway leading into the house. Also on the table were a pair of scissors, a can of shaving cream, a pack of disposable razors, and a small, circular mirror attached to an adjustable stand—all taken from the house’s upstairs bathroom. Since the place had no electricity, Simon would have to use the dreary outside lighting to accomplish what he had in mind. A wooden privacy fence surrounded the backyard. Not that he was all that concerned with anyone watching him. One of the first things he had noticed was the neighborhood's air of desertion when he had chanced upon it that morning.

  He used the scissors first, hacking away at his thick, dark hair which had grown long enough to cover his ears in recent months. Chunks of it fell to the floor, forming a small pile at his booted feet. When he had cut enough of it away, he dampened his scalp with rainwater. Then he applied the shaving cream, removing it and the hair underneath with the disposable razors, requiring three of them to finish the job.

  I look like a new man, he thought, staring into the mirror, taking in this sudden and fairly dramatic change to his appearance. Running a hand over the stubble covering his cheeks and chin, he figured that in a week or so he’d have a full beard, further adding to his disguise. Throw on a pair of sunglasses and he would be all but unrecognizable to anyone with whom he had recently come into contact. At the very least, they would not recognize him right away, giving him time to get the upper hand in any potential confrontation. If—no, when—he did run across Eric and Amanda again, this new look of his should offer an advantage in any number of scenarios that might play out.

  His thoughts went to the group of people he had encountered only a few days back. Traveling in a caravan of three vehicles, they had been kind enough to offer him a ride. After a few hours of driving, they had been forced to pull over due to a flat tire. When one of their number, a teenage girl, had wandered a short distance from the group, Simon had taken the opportunity to whisk her away.

  “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” he had heard one of the men shouting upon discovering both the girl and Simon had gone missing. “I'll fucking kill you!”

  Simon had not doubted the man's sincerity, that he would have acted upon the threat if given the chance. Undoubtedly, he still would.

  “Better safe than sorry,” Simon told the altered version of himself staring back at him from the mirror as the rain continued to fall.

  Saturday, September 26th

  Dear Diary,

  It’s amazing the way you find yourself falling into the daily rhythms of a new place, a new community, how quickly we all have. We’ve been here for nearly two weeks already. Where does the time go? Is it because we’re safe here, as safe as we can hope to be, that I find myself losing track of the days? Is it due to the lack of near constant danger that the hours all seem to blur together? When I think back to the outbreak… The time I spent in isolation, starving, convinced I was going to die… It all seems to take up more space in my memory than the easier, happier moments spent here among these houses in the trees. I remember hearing once (it must have been on TV) that more painful experiences get imprinted in greater detail on our memories than the normal, everyday ones. I guess I can’t argue with that.

  I’ve been able to do some reading lately, Diary, forgot how much I missed sitting down with a book and getting lost in a good story. The people who built this place (Vicky and the others) keep a small library in one of the houses. It’s got history and science books, thrillers and romance novels, and textbooks (math and English and the like) for the children. It’s also got some of the books my father used to sit down and read with me when I was younger: A Wrinkle in Time, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Hobbit. I teared up when I saw them. I couldn’t help it. For a few seconds, I was sure I could hear his voice once again as we journeyed through Middle Earth together…

  Living here, there’s always one chore or another that needs doing. They’ve got me helping with the cooking, washing clothes, watching (and, yes, reading to) the children, counting and organizing supplies. But there’s always an hour or two in the evening when I’m able to grab a book and a flashlight, sit outside on the porch and visit some imaginary world for a little while. I’ve also had time to do some writing (I mean, besides writing these entries, Diary). When I was younger, back when Dad and I used to read together, I remember thinking how great it would be to create my own stories, to invent such wonderful places like the ones found in those books. And you know what? It is wonderful! I’ve written two stories since I’ve gotten here. They’re not very long and probably not very good. Luke keeps asking me to let him read them but I’m too embarrassed. Maybe when I’ve gotten better. For now, they’re just for me, Diary. Places of my very own I can go for a little while when I want to get away, when I don’t want to think about all that’s gone on, what happened to Mom and Dad…

  One of the stories takes place in an elven village. Not all that surprising, I suppose, living up here among the trees, bridges connecting one house to another. And with some of the books I’ve been reading lately… I recently finished The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, just started The Elfstones. They’re a lot like The Lord of the Rings. Evil threatens the land and a hero, pretty much the last person you’d expect to be a hero, has to find a way to save the world. If only someone like that existed in our world, someone with a magic sword or a powerful amulet that could destroy all the zombies, put an end to all the horrible things that have been going on since the outbreak began. Unfortunately, that only happens in the pages of a fantasy book. In the real world, all you can do is help each other however you can and
hope for the best.

  As long as there’s hope, I guess we have a chance.

  Sunday, September 27th

  Eric guided the boat in close to shore, paying attention to the on-board sonar as he did so, wanting to avoid grounding the vessel at all costs. After bringing it in as far as he dared, he killed the engine and dropped the anchor then stood there for a minute or so, staring at the strip of land a short distance away, little more than a silhouette in the wan lighting of the stars and the crescent moon above. He wondered what dangers might await him there, the most obvious of them immediately coming to mind:

  Zombies.

  He had to assume his chances of encountering some of the awful creatures were good, told himself it would be foolhardy not to take the potential threat they posed as seriously as possible. Sure, the night would provide cover. And the damn things were slow, not to mention rather dim-witted. If there were only a few of them in the area, he should be able to avoid them easily enough. But where there were two or three, there could always be plenty more ready to corner him, trap him…

  Devour him.

  Of course, danger of the undead variety was not his only concern. The living, he knew, could be just as vicious as the zombies, driven by needs and hungers of their own. And with the laws and rules of civilization put on hold—for how long was anybody’s guess—in the wake of the outbreak, there were those more than willing to give in to those needs and hungers as that lunatic Simon had so perfectly demonstrated.

  A noise from behind Eric interrupted his ruminations, had him turning to see Amanda and the smaller figure of her son, Mitchell, emerging from below deck.

  “How does it look?” asked Amanda walking over to stand next to him.

  “Hard to say,” he told her. “Can’t see much in this light.”

  Not for the first time, he fantasized about finding a pair of night vision binoculars, knowing they would help him better prepare for these expeditions that required him to leave the safety of the boat. As to where he could find that kind of equipment, he was not sure. A military surplus store, maybe? Not that he had any clue where such an establishment might be located.