Storm of the Undead

by H. L. Murphy

  “Goddamn it,” I yelled as I pulled James within the relative safety of the vehicle. Just in time, too, as a pair of four hundred pound undead lard asses bounced off the right front fender and slid down the side of the Jeep teeth first. I say they bounced off, but really the first tons of love creature utterly shattered the plastic housing while the second enormously corpulent beast crushed the metal fender beneath. A shrieking noise I could feel in my fillings was the only indication we received before the right front fender separated from the frame and fell away. A glance in the rear view mirror defined the parameters of the new problem. Somehow the fender became lodged within the blubberous mass of the second zombie and had not only been torn from the Jeep as we sped away, but the jagged steel fender shrapnel had sliced cleanly through the first zombie upon release. Now the elephantine undead were merging into one massive coalition of cellulite and undead rage.

  “Thar she blows,” James laughed weakly, “a hump like a snow hill”

  “I am not stopping to find you a goddamn harpoon so put that out of your fucked up little brain,” I snapped, weaving back and forth to avoid another impact.

  “I already have a harpoon,” he spat bile from his mouth onto the floor. Somehow I knew if I looked over he'd be grabbing his crotch vigorously. Or, as vigorously as a man can after he's puked up his kidneys, spleen, and liver. “But my SCAR would probably work better.”

  This time I did look over to see James crawling into the back seat. Pulling a long, razor sharp knife from his load out, James sliced through the canvas around the back window until it fell away. With an unobstructed view, my friend started laying down fire.

  Hundreds of the undead filled the streets behind us, and all I could think as they filled the rear view mirror was that clapped out whore, Fate, and her cock juggling slut of a pal, Lady Luck, had decided to make up for the relative lack of zombies during my last foray into Stuart. My eyes began to water from the growing stench of rotting bodies and I wished, oh, how I wished, I had thought to bring a respirator, a dust mask, hell even a fucking shemagh I could wrap around my face and dump water over to help filter out the smell.

  “Hey, there's the county jail,” I screamed over the gunfire and roaring undead. In the grand tradition of south Florida, the Martin County jail complex was a white stucco box of a building surrounded by high chain link fences topped with razor wire because so long as the building blended in with the surrounding shopping malls no one would bother pointing out the fences or flesh shredding wire. “Holy shit, they pimped out their MRAP.”

  True enough, not content with simply possessing a virtual tank the Martin County Sheriff’s Department had paid for the armored vehicle to receive a customized paint job extolling the virtues of law and order, while also reenforcing the wages of unlawful behavior. The end result was, in its way, worse than the Peptomobile.

  “I wonder if they keep one in the garage for going out on drug raids?” I mused.

  “Who cares?” James shouted, then fired two rounds at the bulbous amalgam. “How the hell do we get to it without being eaten?”

  “Good question,” I admitted, knowing I didn't have the faintest idea. The attendant undead would likely overwhelm the fences eventually, but the presence of not just one, but two amalgams guaranteed the fences would come down long before either one of us figured out how to start the MRAP let along drive away. “I really wish the internet was still up.”

  “What?” James demanded, a took of panic in his normally cool tone. This time he sprayed half a dozen rounds at our pursuers.

  “Nothing,” I said over my shoulder. We needed a little breathing room between the undead and the jail. Actually, since the first amalgam had caught up, James and I desperately needed breathing room period. It was becoming increasingly difficult not to cough and gag with every passing second. “Would you mind terribly shooting that enormous stinking asshole in the head before the next millennium?”

  “Gee, thanks,” James snapped off three rounds, “never would have thought of that,” James snapped off another three rounds, “all on my own,” another three rounds, “what ever would I do without you?”

  “You would have died a horrible fucking death on Outbreak Day,” I shouted over the gunfire while swerving away from an overturned rice burning import racer, the half devoured driver laying beneath the wreckage. A voice in the back of my head insisted the driver was a man I knew despite the impossible odds. A second, longer glance revealed Taco Tim, an electrician who worked at the same helicopter manufacturer as I had though on a different line. The name Taco stuck to Tim due to his having been employed by Taco Bell immediately before coming to build helicopters. All the time and money he spent modifying cars in an unending quest for speed and that ephemeral joy that only exists on the razor’s edge between life and death. From what I could see, his quest had come to an abrupt, brutal climax. Not that Taco’s unfortunate ending made much difference to our continued existence.

  “Getting some mileage out of that,” James bitched. He triggered another three rounds and started hooting and hollering. “It's down. It's fucking down.”

  “What's down?”

  “Two ton Taffy, the wonder of the corpulent world,” he laughed, and changed magazines.

  “Two ton Taffy? That's not very politically sensitive,” I yelled over my shoulder. “Next thing you know, you'll be calling people ‘gimpy’, slut shaming, and demanding people pay their own goddamn way. You sexist, misogynist, genderist, economist bastard.”

  “Talk out your ass on your own time,” James spat, triggered three rounds and continued, “Get us the hell out of here. That thing’s making it impossible to breathe has some kind of growth protecting its heads. My rifle can't get through it.”

  “Well, I think I have a solution, but it's going to add time to our outing,” I answered, mentally reviewing the immediate area. If that filthy clapped out, slack jawed whore, Lady Luck, could just postpone anally violating us a little longer I knew a place not far from our current location where there might just be some heavier artillery.

  “Who gives a damn?” James yelled over the sound of his rifle spitting rounds at the amalgam. “Wait, do you mean a few hours, or a few days? Because last time you were gone for a week.”

  “I was fucking dead you insensitive prick,” I rejoined. “What did you expect?”

  “I expect you to be prompt,” James answered. “Two fucking decades I've known you, and you hate being late more than anyone I've ever known. I expect you to come back when you say you will.”

  Like a ton of bricks it hit me, James was angry. He was angry with me for dying to protect our his withdrawal back to the Churchill, angry with me for leaving the fate our group in his hands, angry with me because the three of us, Carroll, James and I were brothers in all but blood, and I had committed suicide by staying behind. He had lost one brother, me, and then lost a second, Carroll, when he fucked off to parts unknown with arguably the dumbest piece of ass ever minted. In all the time I'd known James he'd always kept his own counsel, and no man that had ever known him could call him weak. There were, however, limits to every man’s ability to cope with the unimaginable. James was angry with me because I had died and seemed to be staying dead. In his book, I was post living, I was fertilizer, and I had given my life to provide for our people only to have that future slip from between his fingers. So it wasn't just me James was so pissed at, but also himself for, in his eyes only, failing to meet some imagined standard. This I understood, because, just between you and me, it's something I did every day of my life. Judging myself by some ridiculously impossible standard of behavior and coming up short every single time.

  “If you find yourself going through hell,” I yelled, remembering a quote from one of my favorite speakers, “keep going.”

  With this I hauled the Jeep onto state road seventy-six and made for the Palm City bridge.

  “What are you talking about?” James appeared next to me, looking a tad disconcerted.

&nb
sp; “Winston Churchill, you uneducated fucking hillbilly,” I snapped. “It means if you're knee deep in trouble the only way out is to stop whining and push through. We take the bridge and put distance between it and us.”

  “Yes, distance, lots of distance because that thing makes me feel like that time we drank a fifth of tequila and I puked my fucking spleen up the next day,” James coughed out, looking more than a little green.

  “Then get away from me if you're going to upchuck,” I shouted, edging as far from James as possible in the small interior of the Jeep. Thankfully the bridge was clear of debris and the Jeep proved its worth as it accelerated away from the closing horde. We'd have to drop into Palm City long enough to make a wide circuit back to Stuart, and then to an old friends house. I just hoped Maxwell Wyse still had a trick or two hidden away.

  I was certain we were home free, which, naturally, is when I spotted the attack helicopter.

  Interlude Three

  Dane and Gaunt, despite having just acquired fuel, decided to scout out a new location on Bee Line Highway, not terribly far from their former employer. The small gas station located on Bee Line had been a favorite after work hang out for the better part of twenty years for helicopter mechanics, jet engine manufacturers, and general blue collar workers, though few outside the regulars even knew the place existed. The two were counting on this relative obscurity to deliver an untouched source of food and fuel. So it was with some surprise the two men came upon the station in a state of complete disarray, at least so far as the shop interior was concerned. The exterior of the shop was entirely vacant, the usual abandoned cars missing entirely. Even the perennial import tuners parked behind the station at the specialty shops were missing.

  “Want to bother looking through the store?” Gaunt asked, dismounting his motorcycle and glancing about for problems.

  “May as well,” Dane mumbled as he passed by his friend. “We’re here after all.”

  Dane Kincaid moved into the small storefront slowly, IWI Jericho at the ready. To the immediate left lay the two register sales counter, and just beyond the registers was the industrial grade oven and food case. To the right sat two rows of shoulder height shelves, mostly bare now, with coolers bordering the rear and side of the shelves. Even the coolers seemed to be nearly empty, save for greatly expired dairy products and cases of Budweiser. Both were equally useless to Kincaid as he neither drank alcohol nor curdled milk. On closer inspection, Dane scrounged up a package of instant oatmeal, two tins of spam, and a vacuum sealed bag of ground coffee. All useful, though not nearly what they had hoped to find.

  Behind the counter was a different story. Here Dane pulled two cartons of cigarettes and a bundle of twenty unbranded cigars from beneath the counter. He was all set to exit the shop when a glint of metal shown in the light of his flashlight. It could easily have been anything, or nothing, but in these small moments could often be found significance. Back came the beam of light, settling upon a small stainless steel pistol. Hardly the earth shaking game changer Dane was hoping for, but welcome nonetheless.

  Search finished, Dane stepped out the disheveled store front to offer up the goods for inspection.

  “Pickings getting pretty slim around here,” Gaunt stated flatly as he pocketed a tin of spam and looked over the pistol, a hammerless Colt chambered in thirty-two. “We may have to relocate further south.”

  “Or we could just pull our own spleens out through our nasal cavities,” Dane responded, sliding the second tin of spam into his jacket before holding up the oatmeal to his friend. Gaunt frowned briefly, oatmeal wasn't anywhere on his hierarchy of food, but knew better than to turn his nose up at anything in the zombie apocalypse. Instead, Gaunt ripped the box open and took half the single serving packages. The remainder he handed back to Dane, who stowed them in his saddle bags. “Good money says that horde we spotted outside Palm Beach Gardens is still there. Hell, ten-to-one those undead fucks heard us pull up to the station and are already on their way here.”

  “So what? The average dead head staggers at a rate of one and a half, maybe two, miles per hour,” Gaunt countered, leaning back against a concrete support pillar. “Which means we have something like five or six hours before those things get here. We’ll long gone before the first flesh eating monster stumbles into the neighborhood.”

  “What about the big ones?” Dane Kincaid challenged. At this, Gaunt, who’s eyes had slid closed, snapped upright. He hadn't considered those thundering nightmares.

  “No, we still have at least an hour, maybe two,” Gaunt concluded. While the big ones were certainly stronger, faster, and tougher than the ordinary shambler neither man had seen one move faster than seven miles per hour. That wasn't to say no such creature existed in the ranks of the undead, merely that neither man had laid eyes on it.

  “I have an idea,” Dane declared hesitantly.

  “No,” Gaunt said immediately. “What ever it is, no.”

  “You haven't even heard it yet,” Dane whined, a half hidden smile on his face.

  “I don't need to hear it to know it's a terrible idea,” Gaunt replied, closing his eyes again.

  “Alright, A: fuck you,” Kincaid flipped his friend the bird before lighting up a cigarette. “B: you're not going to sleep here. C: the plant is right down the road, and we both know there's a ton of food and water stored in the cafeteria kitchen.”

  “And a fuck ton of undead cannibals wandering the halls,” Gaunt exploded. Scenes of newly turned undead ravening through the hallways played out in his memory, sending chills throughout his body. Their escape had come early in the outbreak, but it hadn't come easy.

  “Not anymore there won't be,” Dane reasoned. “They must have wandered off by now. If for no other reason than a lack of edible food stuffs.”

  “What?”

  “You know,” Dane smiled. “No people, no Nibbles and Noses.”

  “That's fucked up,” Gaunt squinted sideways at Kincaid, clearly questioning the latter’s sanity.

  “Hey, we both know a zombies dietary standards can only be fulfilled by a people sandwich, hold the bread, lettuce, tomato, and mayo,” Dane continued, warming to his argument. “They won't have stuck around that place without anything to eat. And they certainly won't have bothered with the kitchen pantry.”

  “It's still a bad idea,” Gaunt said again, though less forcibly. If he remembered correctly, the plant had emergency generators and enough diesel to keep them going for weeks. Not to mention the showers within the gym. A hot shower. After all this time a hot shower sounded better than being dipped in honey and thrown to nymphomaniacal Norwegian swimsuit models. “I guess it wouldn't hurt to check the place out. And we could park the bikes inside the building if we really wanted to.”

  Taking the winding road from the stripped gas station Dane and Gaunt sped by burnt out wrecks and stacked, rotting corpses. The combination of the two weren’t new sights for either survivor, but it was usually something they only observed in this particular area. Even the scene of a massacre in Stuart, near the hospital, was the exception, and not the rule. Mostly the undead only left bones and stains behind after wiping out a group of the living. Which, Dane readily admitted, was somehow worse than seeing stacked bodies. At least with stacked corpses you knew the exact fate of the departed. They were dead. When the undead came through an area and left nothing behind but massive blood stains, you were left to wonder whether John Q Public had been eaten, converted, blew his own brains out and then been eaten, or if he had somehow been incapacitated, crippled, and then converted only to be absorbed into one those hellish big ones.

  Naw, Dane told himself, better to see the dead laying on the side of the road in stacks than not to know.

  The roar of motorcycle engines broke the silence pressing down on the factory grounds as Dane and Gaunt returned to work after several weeks hiatus. Both men powered through the long, curving approach to the sprawling complex. On the right, overgrown from long inattention, was the foliage pla
nted by the mega corporation in order to appear environmentally aware. The press ate it up while the ground level employees continued to work daily with toxic solvents, such as methyl ethyl ketone, and hexachromate based paints. Either of those nasty little jewels absorbed into the body long enough will produce shocking results in the cancerous growth or liver failure lines.

  “Hey, brother,” Dane yelled over the engine noise. “Hold up a second.”

  “What's up?” Gaunt asked, slowly braking to a stop.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Dane asked, pointing a lit cigarette towards the lot assigned to their former employer. Irritated, but curious nonetheless, Gaunt glanced over. His eyes went wide as he took in the nearly full lot, each space filled with a selectively modified vehicle.

  “Let's take a closer look,” Gaunt throttled up his engine and sped away before Dane could object.

  “Goddamn it,” Kincaid muttered. He should have known Gaunt would tear off into the heart of trouble, it was beyond the man not to slap trouble in the face. Dane brought his suppressed Ruger 10/22, around from his back and allowed it hang from its sling where he could access it quickly. As prepared as he was likely to get, Dane Kincaid advanced to join his friend who was, even then, poking around the redneck armored vehicles. “Okay, what have you found?”