DEAD (Book 12): End

by TW Brown

  Over and over, the zombie children moved in groups that forced the wolves to change directions. I must admit that I started to actually become annoyed by the reactions of all those cats. By reaction, I mean they simply continued to sunbathe and groom themselves. They went on about their business like they did not have a care in the world. Perhaps they didn’t. What I am certain of is that there is a definite relationship between the zombie children and the cats.

  Entry Twenty-four—

  A group of five people came through today. Okay, they didn’t actually come through, they sort of showed up, realized their mistake, and then tried to run for their lives. I want to have it on record that I was about to warn them off when Jim told me absolutely not. He insisted that this was a perfect opportunity to observe the zombie children reacting to the living without putting ourselves in danger.

  The people arrived a few hours after sunrise and looked like they were actually searching for something. They would cluster up, point to a few places and then split up. From our spot up on the roof, I could see several of the zombie children as they broke into small groups of eight to ten and, for lack of a better description, stalked these people. For a while, they made no attempt to contact the living intruders and simply looked content to follow them around, always just a little out of sight.

  I was also able to observe a large group of the zombie children as they moved to the center of town and clustered in the tall grass of the park. It was as if they were standing watch to ensure the safety of the cats.

  What happened next still chills me and I am having a difficult time dealing with the fact that I sat in my perch and did nothing. Of course, the only thing in mine and Jim’s defense is the fact that it happened so fast when it did occur that we had no chance to offer help or a warning.

  It was like a spring-loaded bear trap in its sudden violence. The whole thing started with a single child zombie. It stepped into an intersection so that it was easily spotted by the people. The people started for it and I think they were mostly just curious. I could tell that they were not taking it as a serious threat. After all, what harm could one lone zombie child cause?

  They were within about twenty or so feet when I saw the first group of zombie children step out from around the corner of the intersection behind the group of people. It was very obvious that the living had no idea that a sizeable group of the zombie children had taken a position behind them because they continued edging towards the lone child, all their attention and focus aimed in that direction.

  To make it clear, our position relative to this scene had us at the same end of the street as the little mob of zombies. So, when the next group rounded the distant corner where the single zombie child had been standing, it was as much of a surprise to us as it was to the people down there in the street. Still, I was in no way prepared for the groups that suddenly emerged from the broken down and dingy buildings on either side.

  As I said earlier, this was like a spring-loaded trap. It was sudden; it was also very violent. The children came at their fast walk, all of them reaching out, arms extended. The living never stood a chance as they fell under the onslaught. In moments there were screams and the pleas that would go unheard by the predatory zombie children as they came in at full force, numbering well over a couple of hundred.

  To see them not only all in one place, but also acting in concert with one another was perhaps one of the most brutal and chilling displays that I have ever witnessed. All Jim and I could do was to watch. I did try to turn away, but I was honestly just in shock at what I was witnessing.

  When the screaming finally came to its merciful end, another wrinkle to the whole thing took place. Cats started to slink from everywhere down on that street. They drifted in and out amidst the children, some being so bold as to sit in the middle of the feasting and join in, others crawling all over the children and licking them clean which made me realize that despite some of them looking weathered and old as far as being a zombie, they were otherwise mostly very clean.

  It is my belief that these two entities, the feral cats and the zombie children, are almost becoming a single, co-dependent organism. The closest that I can liken it to is the remora and the shark. I have read about how this little fish rides around on a shark and provides basically the same service in the cleaning and keeping the shark clear of parasites. In exchange, well, who is gonna try and attack a fish that is hitching a ride on a shark.

  Speaking of sharks, I have never actually been to or seen the ocean. I think it is on my list of things that I will need to experience before I die. I just can’t imagine a body of water so massive that you can’t see land on the other side. Also, in the pictures I have seen, the waves look so powerful to the point of scary. I wonder what it would feel like to have that much water slam into me at once.

  I just reviewed this entry and see how my mind is already forcing me to forget the events of earlier this afternoon. The brain is an amazing thing. I just wish there was some magical button I could press to erase certain things. I am not sure if I will ever make peace with the fact that I basically sat back and allowed those people to die.

  Jim has a completetly different take on things. He wants us to leave. He says that he now believes that the child zombies are aware that we are here and are just lulling us into a false sense of security so that they can set us up for an ambush. He believes that this is further proof that humanity should just throw in the towel. According to him, the zombies have won and we are on borrowed time. I wonder if maybe he is losing it just a bit. It is always hard to tell with him since his sense of humor is often at odds with everybody else on most occasions.

  Entry Twenty-six

  I wonder what Dr. Zahn will make of all of this. I know she supports my doing this research. Perhaps I have found my calling. I have given a lot of thought to things these past few days. I don’t want to be part of security. I don’t want to go outside the fences and patrol or get suited up to do battle with people.

  What I really want to do is to study things. I am finding myself more at peace with who I am now than any other time in the recent past, and that is after I basically let a bunch of people get eaten by child zombies.

  I think there is a lot about the zombies that we don’t know. That is especially true when it comes to the child zombie variety. Maybe if we knew more, we could eventually eliminate them as a threat. I don’t have any false illusions that they could be domesticated or anything crazy like that. However, if we can figure them out and come to a better understanding, then just maybe we could finally remove them from the threat list.

  Of course, then, we would still have to worry about the living. But at least we would be able to focus our energy in a single direction instead of being spread out and worrying about everything.

  Just a thought.

  ***

  Jim and I made our way through the long, dark aisles of what had once been a grocery store. Nothing we had found in any of the food aisles was even the slightest bit useable, but for me, it was a chance to sort of get a look at history.

  We were able to actually scoop some bandages and a few little things into our bags, but mostly it was just a chance for us to get inside out of the pouring rain. The weather turned about two days ago. Today seemed to be the worst of it and I jumped when a flash of lightning was immediately followed by the crack of thunder.

  “That one was close,” Jim whispered as we reached the back doors where the loading bay opened into an alley.

  It was actually that alley that was our goal. One of the people that had been ravaged by the zombie children’s ambush had eventually gotten up and stumbled into this alley. This one was wearing a backpack and had a long case over one shoulder that had Jim very interested.

  Since there was really nothing better to do, I had agreed to go on this little mission. I had regretted it the moment we emerged from the tarp and that first sheet of rain slammed into me, soaking me to the core almost instantly.

  However, thi
s had allowed me to make another observation about the zombie children; apparently they did not like the rain any more than we did. Almost all of them had withdrawn to the park and were under the trees where they were mostly protected from the weather.

  Jim opened the door to the alley and stuck his head out. When he brought it back in, he was sporting a huge smile. Since I hadn’t seen him smile much lately, it initially caught me off guard and I took a step back thinking that something horrible was waiting out in that alley.

  “We caught a break, cupcake,” he chuckled.

  I moved past him and stuck my own head out to take a look at what he was talking about. It was easy to see what he’d meant and why he was so happy. The zombie had gotten wedged in between two wooden poles.

  Jim slipped out into the alley and moved with a lot more caution than I am used to seeing from him as he approached the lone zombie. He had his knife in hand and made a wide circuit around it as if he expected it to suddenly free itself and come at him.

  “Just kill it, grab the case, and let’s get moving,” I hissed. I had a bad feeling about all of this, and after what I’d seen these past days with the child zombies, I no longer knew what to expect.

  Finally, Jim stuck the thing in the temple, grabbed the case as well as the dark blue knapsack still slung over its shoulders. We retreated back inside and Jim sat down on the floor in the small square of light coming in from outside. Considering the overcast skies, that little bit of light wasn’t much, but it was apparently enough for him to see what he wanted to see.

  He pulled out what looked like a very long rifle. It was a bit funky looking, and I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that this was different than normal guns (even if I discarded the tremendous size).

  “A Springfield replica,” Jim breathed in awe.

  “You gotta tell me what has you so excited, Jim,” I urged. “Sorry, but I just don’t follow. We haven’t had any ammo in years. Most of the guns are hanging up on display. The only reason we haven’t tossed them out is because of Billy insisting that we might someday discover a stockpile of ammunition that hasn’t been raided, but I doubt he even believes it to be possible anymore.”

  “This is a Springfield model 1861 replica. It’s a remade copy of the old rifled musket from the Civil War era. It uses percussion caps and fires a .58 caliber Minié ball. Believe it or not, a little practice to break off the rust, and I can make percussion caps basically by hand. We could have an actual rifle.”

  Jim was so excited that I did not want to burst his bubble by pointing out the obvious; that one point being how one single rifle did not suddenly make us a military power. As he opened the pack like a kid on Christmas morning and started pulling out a few tools and contraptions that looked like they’d been cobbled together from spare parts you would find in a junkyard, I went for a look around this old grocery store.

  As I wandered the litter filled, dirty aisles, I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk around and just put things in one of those ratty looking metal carts to take home for a family to cook and eat in their own residence. So much of this stuff just seemed so foreign. I could not imagine a huge truck loaded with just fruits and vegetables brought from miles away from some farm for other people who had no part in growing it to simply purchase and take home.

  I was just about to turn down another aisle when something on the floor caught my attention. I knelt, inspecting the dirty little square of cardboard with any picture that might have adorned it long since faded and washed away. But inside a little plastic shell was something that made me smile. I stuffed it into my hip pouch as I searched around to see if there might be any more wonderful treasures such as this that had managed to survive.

  “Okay, cupcake, let’s get this stuff back to Platypus Creek.” Rising to his feet, Jim was just putting the last of the tools in the knapsack when that back door suddenly swung open and slammed into the wall causing both of us to jump.

  Standing in the doorway was a tiny figure. It was sort of backlit, so all of its features were hidden in shadow, but I wasn’t stupid, I knew damn well what had apparently just found us. I had my blade coming free when there was a sound in the front of the store. I spun to see the double-doored entry full of small zombies stumbling through.

  “How?” I gasped.

  “Worry about that later,” Jim barked.

  He was already scrambling up onto one of the wall-mounted storage units. It looked pretty sturdy and ran the length of the aisle with a bunch of doors that had once offered a view of whatever goods sat on the shelves inside. As soon as he was on top of the unit, he reached down and grabbed my hand to pull me up.

  I had to walk hunched over, but we made our way to the end of this aisle which put us all the way in the front of the store and closest to the fifty or so zombie children that were flooding into the building. It only took me a few seconds to realize what he was doing as Jim knelt down and started banging on this huge metal storage compartment with a hammer that had been part of the tool set in the knapsack.

  Naturally, the zombies would all come to where the sound was originating. If he could get them all here in the front of the store, it would be an easy thing for us to hurry back to the rear and exit out that door that opened to the alley. That was my thinking until I saw another fifty or so of the zombie children filter in that back door where the one had first appeared and thrown open that door.

  “That lone zombie was the signal,” I breathed.

  Jim stopped pounding and turned to look at me with a questioning expression. “Remember how it threw that door open so hard that it slammed into the wall and made such a loud noise?” Jim nodded, his expression changing to one that was a mix of dubiousness and genuine concern. “I think it was signaling the ones in the front when it was time for them to make their move.”

  “If that’s the case, we may as well just do a swan dive into them now and be done with it,” Jim groused.

  “You first,” I said, making an ushering gesture with my arms.

  Jim glanced down at the zombie children gathered around our perch and then looked back at me. He shook his head and muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like, “Everybody likes a little ass…nobody likes a smart ass.” But I may have heard him wrong.

  The zombies in the front of the store did exactly what we had hoped and expected them to do; they all moved in close and gathered around where Jim and I were hunched over. The problem came with the reaction of those in the back of the store. To be more precise—the absolute lack of reaction.

  The zombies in the rear of the store continued to simply stand around; all of them just swaying a bit and shuffling their feet, but basically remaining in between us and any chance we had of escaping that way. I felt my level of panic starting to build.

  I don’t know why, but for some reason, I have always felt like I was somewhat invulnerable. The bad things have always happened to somebody else…never to me. Not that I have not had my fair share of bad things, but I have always considered myself smart. Zombies, by their nature, are stupid. Heck, they can’t even be called stupid. I think they are just drones that stumble about their business and, for the most part these days, do little more than trample fields and cause a certain degree of annoyance.

  So how did I get here? Trapped in an old ramshackle excuse for a building that was once a grocery store with Jim (who I also think is above average in the intellect department) by around a hundred zombies with no apparent escape.

  “Okay, cupcake, here is what we are gonna do,” Jim said as he sat down beside me. “I am going to use this musket and start bashing their little heads in. You use that crossbow of yours and see how many of the bastards you can plug. You got what…thirty bolts?” I nodded. “If we work fast and those little bastards in the rear of the store stay put like they have so far, then we can thin this group up front out enough to give us a chance. As soon as I say ‘now!’ I want you to scramble down and make a run for it. We don’t stop until we reach t
hat collapsed bridge a mile or so up the road.”

  It seemed like as good of a plan as any.

  ***

  “I swear to God those things must have known we were in that old store and planned that ambush,” Jim gasped as he waded out of the creek.

  “It sure did seem that way.” I was having enough trouble catching my breath. Part of it was due to the bat-out-of-hell sprint that Jim and I had done for almost a mile. The other part was due to the freezing cold water I was emerging from with my pack held up over my head so that my book would not get wet.

  I froze in my tracks as I looked at Jim closer. He had been behind me when we exited the store, insisting that I go first so he could cover our butts. He’d brandished a weird-shaped plastic bottle full of a clear liquid with a long fuse at the top and produced one of our torches which he quickly got lit. He had hurled that bottle at the remaining cluster of zombie children and it had burst into a bright orange ball of fire. That had sent any of the cats twining around the ankles of the zombie children running for the exit.

  I had jumped to the ground and run as fast as I could. I know I’d heard Jim hit the ground, but after that, I was so focused on running for my life that I had not paid attention.

  Jim had a nasty rip on his right arm that was bleeding freely. The blood was mixing with the water that was dripping from him, but if he had tried to rinse off and avoid me spotting his injury, he had failed; it was simply bleeding too profusely for him to be able to mask or hide it.

  “Oh, Jim…” I started to sob.

  He looked at me with confusion and then his eyes went to his injury. His eyes went wide and then he started shaking his head.

  “It’s not what you think, cupcake,” he started babbling fast. “I had a touch of bad luck is all. I caught my arm on a piece of metal sticking out from the shelf at the end of the checkout aisle we had to jump over to get out of the store.”