Chronicles of the Undead | Book 1 | Urban Gridlock

by Hernandez, Jaime

Before the news channel could cut from the video back to the studio, the camera caught the young blonde reporter’s screams of horror. In the newsroom, the two anchors wore expressions of utter disbelief and shock. Anna felt that her expression must match theirs and she had to look away for a moment to process what she had just seen. She glanced to her side at Damon and Camille and knew from their faces that they had been watching as well.

  Tears flowed down Camille’s face and Damon had stopped eating, his mouth closed, and his jaw clenched tight. As much as Anna wanted to protect her children and what innocence they still held, she felt they had every right to see exactly what was going on out there. They had to be prepared for whatever might come later. She knew that shielding them was more likely to hurt them than benefit them, so she let them continue watching.

  “I’m going to go do a perimeter check,” Anna said, breaking the silence. “I’ll take my phone with me on silent mode. Don’t message me unless it’s urgent. I’ll message you if anything is happening. Got it?”

  Camille nodded while Damon sat quietly for a moment. “I’m going with you, Mom,” He said. “It’s safe inside the house, but we don’t know if it’s safe out there. I’m not letting you go alone.”

  His intent didn’t surprise Anna, but she insisted that he stay inside. “If I see any danger in or around our yard, I’ll message you and come right back in. But you’re not coming with me, kiddo.” Her tone was final.

  There were a couple of drawbacks to how they had secured their house. They had zero visibility from inside their home except along the tops of the windows at the rear of the house where they had placed holes to allow natural light in. The placement of those holes didn’t allow them any kind of view of the back yard around the pool. The rest of the windows and doors on the front and sides of the house were covered completely. The dead could be quietly surrounding the front of their home and they would have no idea.

  With nearly everything double boarded and barred, they also had a lack of natural light in the house. As long as they had electricity they would be fine. Once the power went out, Anna had half of a closet full of scented decorative jar candles that would provide enough light for a while, but the house would still be unnaturally dark with everything boarded so heavily.

  Her mind made up; Anna walked back over to her kids. “Damon, you’re coming with me. We’ll check the perimeter. Then get as much duct tape from the garage as you can find. We’ll drill some holes through some of the boards to let in a little natural light during the day and so we can keep watch to make sure we’re not surprised by any of the dead. We’ll cover the holes with duct tape to at night to keep any light from being visible from outside. Even small circles glowing in the evening could catch their attention,” Anna said.

  “Camille, you stay inside. Place some candles around the house for when the power goes out. There are a bunch of candle lighters in the closet. Put a few in the main areas and the rest on the kitchen counter.” Anna thought for a moment before adding, “Take down a panel of the blackout curtains from my room. Cut them into foot long strips. We can use those to cover holes at night, so no light shows outside.”

  “What is going to keep us safe here is the dead never realizing that we’re here. We have to keep things quiet and everything has to be dark from the outside,” Anna finished. She carefully looked at Camille and Damon’s expressions to make sure they fully understood. When she felt confident that her message had fully sunken in, she turned and beckoned Damon to follow her to the front door.

  Chapter 14

  Day 2

  Michelle drove forward, seeing only a few of the dead scattered about. Most of them were off to the sides while one slowly shuffled toward them down the middle of the street a couple hundred yards away. The zombies that were off to the sides slowly and awkwardly turned toward the noise and the sight of the SUV driving past. Without fail, each and every one of them lumbered toward the road to begin their slow pursuit of the vehicle as it quickly fell out of reach.

  She took the first left turn down a side street. Surprisingly, there were more of the dead here than had been on the secondary road. She had assumed that the short, intertwined little side streets would have far fewer zombies on them. There were at least a dozen of them wandering aimlessly across lush green lawns, driveways and sidewalks. Very few were on the actual street. As expected, every one of the dead turned toward the SUV but Michelle’s steady twenty miles an hour was plenty fast enough for them to fall behind quickly. She didn’t dare to drive any faster because they had no windshield and they no longer had a spare tire. She couldn’t risk hitting any of them head-on or squashing another skull with one of the tires.

  At least on these little back streets she had multiple options. If she were unable to make a planned turn, she could loop around to another turn that would wind around to a different route or she could backtrack around a block or two. It seemed far safer than taking the secondary roads where they could face a roadblock of the dead.

  A small cluster of zombies shuffled around the small street about two blocks ahead, so Michelle took the next right to avoid them. Just a few houses down, there were several dozen dead blocking the road entirely.

  “Damn it,” Michelle cursed, seeing that her well thought out plan wasn’t going as planned at all. They couldn’t plow forward through or around the dead. There were just too many of them. “Can I please catch a fucking break?” she yelled.

  She slammed on the breaks, reversed, then turned around in the nearest driveway. At the stop sign she looked to the right and saw that the small cluster of dead they’d bypassed only a moment ago had made it nearly to the next block rendering that direction impassable. Her only other option was to turn left back in the direction they’d started from. She took another left which brought her to a new little set of intertwined streets.

  “Relax, Mom,” Joey said. “This was the plan. The first set of streets didn’t work, but they’re connected to at least six little mini developments. We’ve got lots of options,” he finished.

  Surprisingly, the calmly spoken words from her thirteen year old son were enough to get her refocused. She was again amazed at the level of maturity he had demonstrated in the past twenty-four hours.

  There was a fairly large group of zombies clustered around a house coming up ahead on the right. Michelle slowed slightly as they got closer to the home. Around two dozen of the dead were pushing against the entire front of the house and an unknown number surrounded the side and rear. Doors and windows seemed to be a concept that was beyond the grasp of this group. However, there were enough of them pushing against the door and the large picture window that inevitably they were going to break through.

  With no windshield to act as a barrier, sound crept into the car easily. They could clearly hear the raspy moans of the dead and the shuffling of many pairs of feet.

  “We have to help them,” Joey said.

  Caught by surprise Michelle simply responded, “What?”

  “There are people trapped inside that house. We have to distract the dead, so the people have a chance to get away,” Joey said simply.

  Michelle’s priority was getting her children to Anna and Max’s house safely. She couldn’t worry about the safety of strangers, especially not when her own family was still in harm’s way. She started to say that to Joey, but he knew what was coming and cut her off.

  “They are going to die if we don’t do something,” Joey said firmly. “Just stop the car, Mom.” Michelle slowed to a near stop. She was torn between doing her best as a mother to protect her children and doing the right thing in helping another family whose only hope might be whatever Michelle and her kids could do. Upon Joey’s insistence, she realized that she could do both.

  She looked in her rearview mirror at Lucia and saw that she was terrified. Her daughter didn’t have any kind of poker face and wore her heart on her sleeve. But Lucia had agreed with her brother that they had to do something to help the people trapped inside th
e house.

  Michelle backed the car up past several houses and they quickly formed a simple plan. For once the dead weren’t interested in them or their SUV but they were going to do their best to draw the zombies toward them. “Ready?” she asked Joey. He nodded affirmatively holding his gun steady in a two-handed grip. He had loaded an extended magazine and had two more sitting on his lap. As soon as Michelle pulled up in front of the house, he would brace himself against the door with the window down and fire directly at the dead.

  Lucia had never fired a gun before. Joey had planned to take her through an entire course of his own creation on gun safety before she had to use it, but as highly evidenced over the last twenty-four hours, plans had to constantly be adjusted or changed altogether. Once they were safe at Max and Anna’s, he was going to start teaching her everything he knew.

  Lucia moved to the passenger side holding the small handgun her mother had given to her yesterday. Before Michelle could say anything to Lucia, Joey pointed at the safety above the trigger of the gun. “Safety off, Lucia,” He watched as she flicked the safety off. “Keep the gun pointed down until you’re ready to fire. Make sure you only point it at the dead or at the floor, so you can’t accidentally fire off a round in here or at us,” he said emphatically. “Hold it with both hands. Aim for the zombies on the side of the house. We don’t want any missed shots to go through the front and hit whoever is hiding inside,” Joey instructed. His sister had no experience firing a gun and now wasn’t the time to start lessons. He didn’t expect her to reload or even to hit anything for that matter but firing the gun would help with their plan and would start to get Lucia familiar with the feel of the weight of the small gun in her hands.

  “You’ve got eleven rounds. As soon as your gun is empty, you climb right back over to the driver’s side. Keep an eye out on our left side and behind us. We’re probably going to draw a few of the dead from other houses,” Michelle told Lucia. “You’re going to be our eyes. If any zombies approach from the side or rear, you keep a close watch and let us know if they get within a dozen feet of us. As long as we’re clear, we’ll keep up the distraction.” Michelle finished.

  They lowered their windows as Michelle slowly drove closer to the house. Just before reaching the driveway, she put her foot on the brake and put the car in park. She leaned her petite body through the gaping hole where the windshield used to be and pumped her shotgun. She was going to fire all five shells in the general direction of the house just to add to the cacophony of noise they were about to create. She had to be ready to hit the gas as soon as the diversion worked, so she was unable to take a firm firing position herself.

  “On my signal,” Michelle said tersely.

  She took one last look at her kids to make sure they were ready then she fired the shotgun. Within a second or two of her first shot, she heard the sound of both weapons being fired by her kids. Watching the house, she saw body after body stumble or drop as Joey emptied his magazine and quickly reloaded. She wasn’t sure if Lucia was hitting anything or not, but it didn’t matter much as their goal was to create a diversion, not to use up large stores of their ammo to take out all of the dead.

  Lucia’s gun quickly emptied, she hurried back to the driver’s side to watch for any zombies coming up on their rear or side. Across the street about three houses down a family of dead slowly stumbled down the five steps from their front porch. Three of them fell down the steps becoming entangled with one another at the bottom which in turn tripped the remaining two.

  She checked behind their vehicle and saw just two of the dead shuffling in the middle of the street about fifty yards back. They were in the clear to continue their plan. She kept eyes on both areas ready to report any changes to her mom and brother.

  To their right, the crowd of the zombies was growing as more ambled out from behind the house in search of the source of the irresistible sound of gunfire. To the dead noise represented the possibility of a fresh meal. Michelle sat back down, flicked the safety on the shotgun and prepared to put her foot on the gas. The dead lost interest in whoever was inside the house and as a group they shuffled in the general direction of the SUV.

  Michelle was ready to hit the gas and it took every ounce of willpower she had to wait until the zombies started to step into the street. The wait was excruciating for the mom in her who wanted to quickly whisk her children off to safety. The house was clear. But the plan was to get the dead off the lawn and sidewalk. So she waited longer. They wanted the dead to follow them down the street to give the people in the house time to escape. When the first few zombies were about six feet away from the passenger side of the SUV, Michelle pressed down on the gas pedal lightly. She crept along at barely five miles an hour as Joey continued to shoot into the crowd. Michelle laid on the horn to help hold their attention. As soon as Joey said he needed to reload again, she sped up to ten miles an hour.

  The plan worked. The dead were trailing behind the SUV. In her rearview mirror, Michelle saw a family of five, including young children, hurry from their house and load into the car parked in the driveway in front of the house. The relief she felt was tremendous. The pride she felt in her kids couldn’t be surpassed. They led the zombies for another block before resuming their own route to safety.

  Chapter 15

  Day 2

  Five hundred yards. Max and Jesse were only five hundred yards away from the onramp to the interstate, but they might as well have been five miles away. Between them and the onramp were innumerous abandoned and wrecked vehicles. More concerning at the moment were the hundreds of dead shuffling along that same expanse.

  “Fuck,” Max yelled with frustration. “Nowhere to go but down.” He tried his door, but it was jammed. He hadn’t realized how much damage the driver’s side had taken when he had driven through the narrow lane of buses and cars. The buses on his side had been unforgiving.

  Jesse’s expression was one of unadulterated fury. They had been so close. There was no time to dwell on it because their SUV would be swarmed by the dead within the next two minutes if they didn’t get moving. “The bus. We can tie off the rope between the windshield and the door then rappel down.”

  The bus lay on its side with the windshield and windows broken out. They could feed the rope through the windshield, loop it through the door and tie it off. They both still wore their safety harnesses and had plenty of rope and carabiners. It would be similar to how they had gotten down from the parking garage roof, but this time they’d be going through trees, some slabs of concrete and open air. Not nearly as easy as rappelling down the side of a building.

  “Let’s go brother,” Max said as they shouldered their packs and grabbed the rope. He followed Jesse out the passenger side door. The SUV had come to a stop with its rear end sitting perpendicular to the bus and nearly touching the front of it. The front of the SUV sat nearly even with the concrete guardrail at the edge of the road. There was a small triangular pocket of empty road between the two vehicles. The zombies couldn’t come from behind or underneath the bus and so far had shown no inclination that they could climb. They had to do their slow shuffle all the way around to the front of the bus and then the SUV. There was just enough of a gap between the two vehicles that one or two of the dead could squeeze through at a time. Any zombies that tried to round the front of the SUV were likely to take a one-way trip over the edge of the low concrete barrier and fall to their second death.

  With hundreds of the dead slowly heading their way from the far side of the street and beyond, they didn’t have much time to put their plan in motion. That many zombies moving together could push the SUV, others could make their way over the hood, while others still could crawl underneath. Their small triangular pocket of safety was mostly protecting them from the dead behind and beyond the bus.

  Max went to the door of the overturned bus while Jesse headed to the gutted windshield. Having known each other for most of their lives and having worked together for nearly twenty years, each man
knew what the other was doing with little to no conversation. They worked together like a well-oiled machine. They had the rope ready to go in under a minute.

  “On your six,” yelled Max. Jesse turned with a yard to spare before one of the dead would be upon him. He quickly smashed through its skull with his hammer. Max meanwhile took out two of the dead that were slowly squeezing their way between the rear of the SUV and the front of the bus.

  The huge crowd of zombies was within feet of the driver’s side of the SUV. Max and Jesse rushed back to the rope and made sure their safety harnesses and carabiners were secure. As they were getting into position to start their descent, the SUV began to slide toward them in tiny increments. The sheer size of the crowd as it pushed forward carried enough weight to cause the small bits of movement.

  Jesse dropped over the side first, followed shortly after by Max. Sharing the rope while spaced so closely together wasn’t ideal but they were out of time and had to move. About sixty or seventy feet below were several sets of railroad tracks. There were five rails but not all were in use. One was old, rusted and hadn’t been used in years. Another was a turn off for maintenance. The final three were used with regularity which was a key point in their rapidly made plan to rappel down. There were two boxcars nearly directly below them. About one car length down and one track over sat an endless line of boxcars that were part of what had been an active train.

  They could rappel down to the two boxcars or directly to the tracks below. Then they would make their way to the train on the next set of tracks. Before they could think too much about that part of their plan, a body dropped from above, passing by Max and Jesse within mere inches.

  Max looked up to see another. And another. The dead had no sense of self preservation. They didn’t use their hands to try to break their fall. Their bodies fell limply. They didn’t do anything to try to protect themselves. They simply fell. They reached for Max and Jesse and fell forward over the concrete barrier and down to the ground below. Some somersaulted or cartwheeled on their way down. On the ground below, their bodies sat at twisted angles. Some had shattered arms or legs. Some crushed their skulls and found their second death. Others broke their backs or necks and lay paralyzed but still among the legions of the dead.