Harvest of Ruin (Book 2): Dead of Winter

by Mongelli, Arthur

He became vaguely aware that someone was pulling him along the ice a moment later. He saw the ammo can drifting away and he snatched out quickly with his hand, grabbing the lip of the canister just before he was pulled away from it. He dropped the can on his lap and weakly slid the clip into the receiver of the M4 before lifting the barrel. A wall of undead greeted him, from horizon to horizon, as far as he could see in the dark on the black lake.

  Bjorn lifted the gun weakly in the general direction of the dead and emptied his clip into the mass of bodies. He dropped the gun, clattering to the ice and was confused for a moment at the sound of rushing water. Pulling his attention back to the dead, he reached into the ammo can, remembering the things he had spotted earlier, the things he hadn’t seen since the Humvee. He pulled out two hand grenades and deposited them onto his lap.

  “Soph, honey, it’s time to go,” he said, struggling to look back over his shoulder at his daughter but unable to see past Jen.

  “I am not leaving you!” Jen screamed at him.

  Even in the early gloom of dawn, she could see the pallor of his skin and knew that death was coming for him. She refused to be left alone, and so she pulled him along behind her with all she had. The ice started cracking beneath her feet and she could see the darker black of open water just ahead. She scrambled around to move away from the brittle ice, her feet crunching through the uppermost layer as she bore down to pull Bjorn’s limp form. The best she was able to manage was to match the pace of the undead who moved inexorably in pursuit of them, their hungry mouths opening to let out the low moans.

  Jen leaned ahead and put all her effort into trying to increase their speed and even managed to move at an awkward jog. An explosion from behind sent shockwaves through the ice underfoot, dropping her heavily onto her knees. Water from below began seeping up through the cracks that were forming on its formerly glass-like surface. Looking back as she rose, she could see the front ranks of the undead sinking into the dark depths of the lake, as the ice around them gave way under their combined weight.

  Bjorn’s arm cocked back and she saw him weakly toss a second-hand grenade to the left of the gaping hole in the ice. It skittered to a stop barely thirty feet from them. Jen threw herself back down to the wet ice as the second explosion roared through the air. She was up immediately after, grabbing the back of Bjorn’s collar and running. The ice underfoot was fragile and wet. The water continued to rise as the sheet of ice they moved across began to sink below the surface. The sky was lightening in the east, and she corrected her path a bit to the north. There was an inch of water on the ice and Bjorn was growing increasingly heavy as the water soaked into his clothing. She ran as far and as fast as her aching muscles allowed, eventually collapsing with the north shore about seventy-five yards in the distance.

  She rolled to the seated position, looking behind. The dead were no longer behind them.

  “You did it, Bjorn, the grenades sunk them!” she shouted in breathless, exhausted victory, pumping her fist weakly.

  When no response came, her heart sank. She didn’t need to look at the man to know that he had died. She cried in silence and despair for a few moments, as much for her own loneliness as for his passing.

  “Thank you,” she said as she rose to her feet, moving away from the man who had saved her.

  Her fears of Bjorn coming back as one of the undead spurred her to movement. Without his weight, she made it to the shoreline and up onto a pasture within a few moments. The next few miles were a bleary-eyed blur of emotion and stumbling through snowy pastures and rutted fields. She had no semblance of time as she ran, nor did she see nor hear the snowmobile as it pulled up next to her. Her next clear awareness was Will holding her by her shoulders, yelling into her face. She started to come back to reality to hear.

  “Are you okay? Where is Bjorn?”

  She shook her head vigorously to shake the cobwebs out and saw beyond Will’s shoulder that Christine was sitting on the back of the snowmobile. The girl had her head down and Jen charged over and punched her in the face. She continued to hit the girl until Will was able to pull her clear.

  “Do you know what you fucking did? Do you? You fucking coward!” she screamed at the girl.

  Will wrapped her up in his arms then, pulling her head into his chest.

  “Take it easy, Jen. The kid’s been through a lot. She told us about Nick.” He looked into her eyes until he could see focus return then continued. “Where is Bjorn?”

  “Dead,” was all she managed to utter before throwing her arms around him and sobbing heavily into his chest.

  Will had suspected as much when he saw Jen running alone through the field, but the simple finality of her statement still pierced his heart for Sophie. Jen’s body wracked with sobs; the emotional roller coaster of the night drained every bit of her fortitude. She had nothing left. They stood there holding one another for a long time while she had a full emotional letdown of the accumulated terror of the last few desperate hours. She held Will and squeezed him tightly. After a moment, she led Will, limping, over to Christine and pulled the young girl into their embrace as well, all of them sharing in their grief and terror.

  *

  A half mile out, on County Route 12, Tar and Daltry pulled up to the entrance to Triple D. Iron poles held aloft a plaque bearing the moniker along with four horseshoes. Daltry slowed the explorer in front of the gates, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel for a moment.

  “You’d best hang back a bit, Tar. There’s bad blood here, so let me do the talking.”

  Tar nodded in return, although his hand slipped instinctively to the grip of his pistol on his hip, making sure it was loose in case he needed it. He was in grim spirits from the remnants of the hangover, and part of him wanted nothing more than to put the whole Peterson clan in the ground for the threat they looked to pose to the people of Donner. All the same, he was glad to let someone else take the lead for once. He recognized the wisdom in parlaying an agreement, and as much as he doubted that Daltry could talk the men down, he was more than happy to let him try.

  The cattle grid buzzed under the tires as Daltry turned the explorer up the long-rutted road that led towards the Peterson house. The house was not visible from the road; rather, the driveway meandered across pastures and over the top of a hill to where the structures lay. The explorer bounced around the drive, the earthen path rutted by the passing of many vehicles. The heavy-packed snow was slick in many places, causing the police-issued Ford to fishtail often. When they crested the rise, the array of farm buildings splayed out before them. They drove down a short hill to where the ground flattened out. To the right was a large red-steel stable building. Straight ahead lay a four-bay garage and to the left lay the modular house the Peterson’s lived in. Smoke drifted up from a metal exhaust on the roof of the house. But for the smoke, everything was quiet and still in the drifting snow.

  Daltry guided the SUV to the end of the rutted path and stopped it about seventy feet from the buildings. He turned to Tar.

  “Better we approach on foot. That way they know our intentions.”

  “You lead, I’ll follow, Sheriff. Telling you now though, I don’t like it.”

  “Now that we are here, neither do I, Tar,” Daltry said with a wink.

  The sheriff left the car running and swung his door wide open, stepping out into the frigid mountain air after a moment. Tar flicked the safety off on his pistol and stepped out as well, pausing for a moment to stretch behind the safety of the door, before swinging it shut. Daltry moved to the front of the Explorer and Tar met him there. The two walked side by side up the drive, aiming towards the farmhouse when the barn door and the workshop door opened. A glimpse of movement came from the side of the barn and Tar turned to look when gunfire erupted.

  Tar threw himself sidelong down to the snow. White agony tore through his stomach as he landed. He grabbed at the pain and pulled his hand back to see the dark crimson covering his hand. He fought hard to think through the pain a
s bullets whizzed past. He rolled over to see where Daltry was and came face to face with the man, or at least what was left of his face.

  The sheriff’s dead face stared into oblivion beyond him as his lifeblood pooled around the gaping wound in the side of his head. Tar, with all the effort he could muster, rolled over the top of the sheriff’s body, trying to use it as some protection against the hail of gunfire. Another jolt of agony shot through Tar, coming from his upper thigh, then a third jolt of agony tore through his foot. Unconsciousness took him from the pain of his body, lying face down in the snow, behind the corpse of Aaron Daltry.

  Epilogue

  Twelve blessedly uneventful days later, they drove into Benoit, Wisconsin. Will edged to the front of the Subaru Tribeca they had liberated outside Clintonville, feeling hopeful.

  “You call this a town?” Jen snorted, peering out of the windshield at the rambling pastures, rolling off into the distance.

  Will ignored her. He knew that he had it coming with all the Jersey girl jokes he had been poking her with over the last leg of their journey. He even took to calling her “Snookie” on occasion, usually earning him a hard punch to the shoulder or stomach. Tim and his family, which now included Sophie, were in the back seat. Laura and Tim napped while the kids played quietly on the floor. Christine sat in the far rear, staring blankly at the endless fields as they rolled past into the distance. The girl had withdrawn since Nick died and Jen felt largely responsible for it after her poor reaction on seeing her. Once they got settled at Will’s house, they would work on getting her back out of her shell.

  “Need to make a left ahead onto Keystone Road,” he chirped back, ignoring her barb.

  In truth, their arrival was something he had been nervous about since they all had agreed to make the journey. He had been so convinced at the onset that his hometown would be spared due to its being in the middle of nowhere. The past month of travel had shown him the scope and scale of the devastation the undead had wrought. Now, more than ever before, he dreaded being here, dreaded what might lay beyond the front door of his childhood home. The butterflies crawled into his stomach as they drove down Keystone Road, drawing ever nearer to his home. The memories of growing up in and around Benoit flooded back to him, seeping over him in a deluge of emotions. His outlook was growing bleaker as they had not yet seen anyone, living or dead, west of Kingsford.

  “Left here,” he barked through a frog in his throat.

  Jen steered the Subaru up across the other lane and onto a snow-covered driveway. At the top of the drive, a workshop sat to the left, a barn straight ahead, and a simple farmhouse to the right. Jen slid the shifter into park and looked concernedly into Will’s eyes as the screen door at the side of the house slammed open, then shut in the stiff winter wind, the insulated door to the inside wide open, staring back at them ominously.

  *

  Grayson slid behind the passenger’s seat in the steel gray SUV, next to his man, Pablo. He cringed at the pain in his back as he leaned back in the seat. He had thought for many days that something in his back was broken from the gunshot, but Pablo reassured him time and again that it was just a nasty bruise. The vest had saved his life; it had not saved him from agony though. Grayson leaned forwards, poking his head between the two front seats.

  “I want to thank y’all for picking us up. I, for one, know that things are not safe anymore and really appreciate y’all giving us a chance,” he said in his most charming southern drawl.

  “It’s no problem at all, Mr. Grayson; I can tell a gentleman when I see one.”

  The man in the driver’s seat looked nervously at the woman, but kept his thoughts to himself.

  “Why thank you, Amber, and you as well, Mark.”

  Fin

  Read on for a free sample of Destiny Nowhere: A Zombie Novel

  Chapter 1: Now

  The Zombie Apocalypse started two months ago, and it started exactly where you’d expect it to--on television. Or, more to the point, on Facebook.

  It went viral on the internet only slightly faster than it did in real life, and lucky for me, it happened on a Friday night so being a socially phobic shut-in saved my life.

  While everyone is blabbing about undead bullshit on their social media feed, I’m lubed up and kneeling in front of my computer, whacking off to Sativa Rose and Lorena Sanchez having steamy, raunchy sex with some guy who looks like he stepped out of Duck Dynasty.

  Before mankind ended, the AC Nielson Company reported that the “average” American watched 5.2 hours of television per day. That’s 36.4 hours per week, one and a half days straight, staring at the idiot box! So if they lived to the ripe age of 80, that means 16 years of their life were spent living vicariously through celebrities, being told what to buy and who to be. A nation of consumer cyborgs whose brains were equal parts Kardashian-ized, Monsanto addled, and pharmaceutically stunted in a 24/7 online shopping, social media, virtual reality orgy porgy. America runs on High Fructose Corn Whiz and McMeat, and humans were retarded by Candy Crush long before the zombie plague actually devoured their brains.

  But none of that really matters now: TV doesn’t exist anymore; neither do the mentally handicapped, the government, or the status quo. And when civilization died, I was 38, chronically single, and jacking off to Lewd Contact #29, so who am I to really talk shit about everyone else? I’ll tell you who--I’m the smug asshole who’s alive to record history.

  Four things they don’t tell you about zombies in the movies:

  1) They shit themselves when they change, so you can smell them a mile away.

  2) They aren’t actually dead; they’re just diseased, brain-dead cannibals, and you can kill a zombie all the same ways you can kill a regular person (burning, stabbing, Columbian Neck Tie, dropping in a pit of crocodiles, etc.), and not just by killing the brain.

  3) They eat almost anything, including vegetables and rotting garbage, they just prefer the taste of flesh. And they maliciously hate humans on sight. Like, if you see a zombie eating a deer, and you think it’s probably stuffed and won’t bother coming after you, you’re wrong: even if it’s not hungry, it still wants to bite you, almost like it’s jealous that you’re still a person.

  4) Humanity probably won’t survive this.

  If we get our shit together enough to destroy all the zombies, then maybe we can rebuild a newer and better civilization that isn’t brought to you by Nabisco. Most likely, you’ll find this notebook stashed with a bunch of mildewed porno mags in some discarded, blood-soaked backpack in the northeastern United States. Its owner will hopefully be nowhere in sight, having shambled off to look for warm fleshy people like yourself to chomp on.

  The Lazarus Virus, as the media so generically dubbed it before they were all devoured, supposedly began with a terrorist attack on New York City.

  There’s a lot of debate in the aftermath as to whether or not a bunch of goat-herding Islamic Fundamentalists actually had the capabilities to create such a virus. 15% of survivors believe that the US military created this biological weapon, and polls are split pretty evenly between those who believe it was released by the government as a form of population control, and those who believe it was released by some rogue faction.

  Just joking--survivors are so rare that we don’t really take polls of anything anymore, and those stats are just based on my conversations with the stragglers left alive. Do you remember all those ridiculous statistics that quantified every facet of our daily existence before everyone got eaten? 34% of Americans believe Candidate X didn’t grope Woman Z, while 56% of consumers preferred Coke to Pepsi, and 14% of American males have received a blowjob while driving a car (present company excluded).

  Those statistics hummed constantly in the background of our lives like a soundtrack, and nobody ever noticed it happening. Did you know that 67% of statistics were made up on the spot?

  OMG, WTF, LOL. Speaking of retardation, after ten thousand years of civilization, our very ability to communicate had diminish
ed to ‘textspeak.’ Like I said--we were zombies before there were zombies. How does anyone even explain something like Facebook to people born after the plague?

  What’s worse is how that idiotic silliness fills me with nostalgia now. Humans had reached an elevation of such playful, carefree wonder that they spent days on end reporting and categorizing what was popular, what was normal, what was new. Survival was our basic assumption, and death was so unexpected and shocking that it was reported on constantly. My mother would call me in a panic from 3,000 miles away to tell me whenever someone was murdered in my city.

  WTF Mom, you morbid weirdo! WTF means What The Fuck, for those of you born after the plague, or in Nebraska. I wonder how any kids today are even going to learn to read while they’re busy trying to escape from seven billion undead. Maybe this will be the last book ever written?

  I want you to know how good you have it now that civilization is dead. We were so bored as a species before this shit went down that people sat alone in their rooms, staring at a screen all day long and sharing pictures of our goddamn breakfast, our cats, and the cutesy lipstick keychain someone bought at the mall. Before the plague, we spent every single day of our lives trapped in a job somewhere, doing things we hated, so that they would give us money to buy this useless junk you see littering the wasteland. That was pretty much our entire lives.

  Those days are long dead and, unlike your grandma, probably won’t rise again. And I’m secretly glad of that, because I was dead then, shambling through my life, just like all the others. And now, whoever you are reading these words, you are truly alive, aren’t you, awake in every moment, aware how precious and fragile your life is? Nature found a way to kibosh humanity’s appetite for destruction. We’re like mice in the forest, seeing and listening intently in fear of the death that lurks around every corner.