Josh shuddered to think of the number of possible failures and how that testing had went about.
“Second,” Lorenzo continued. “We will need complete medical histories from all of you. We are not as strict as past military branches, but we do want healthy and fit men out there helping us fight the good fight. So fill out these forms that my sergeant is handing out and get them back to me ASAP.”
He paused and took a deep breath, clicking the remote that was in his hands. A picture of a zombie filled the screen. It was a dated picture, one when the plague first took place. The rotting face didn’t come close to how the dead heads looked present day.
“We all know what has happened. Somehow the dead mutated into the living dead. The shit straight from TV and our nightmares. The world has been at war for five years now. We are finally getting back to where we need to be. We must keep it that way, though. Since travel across seas has been suspended, the virus was mainly confined to North America. There were reports in the northern part of South America, but that’s another story.
“What was left of all branches of the United States military formed an alliance with Canada to create a special branch of our own in this new world. We are the North American Survivors Elite or NASE for short. To date, we have eradicated most major cities of the zombies, with the exception of the West Coast ones. Each of you, after your training, will be sent off to one of the cities in that area to help eliminate the Zs there.
“It’s obvious you guys know how to survive. We haven’t run across a survivor camp as large as yours in a while. So in advance, I thank each of you. We will win and begin to rebuild this country to what it used to be.”
He clicked another button and slideshow began on the screen. Dozens of images flashed across the projector screen; soldiers fighting the zombies, rescuing people from abandoned buildings and homes.
They showed one clip where a huge pile of carcasses rose into the sky. All zombies. Josh felt hope for the first time in a long time.
Maybe they would live to see the world start again.
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
One &A Half Years Later—East Texas
Fog rolled in across the fields and then slowly across the house, covering it in its haze. Mari sat outside on the porch, wrapped in a frayed flannel blanket. It was chilly, and even though the blanket didn’t provide much warmth, she still used it. It was her favorite and was one of the few things that had survived from her previous life. Her dad had packed it before they took off to East Texas.
She let out a heavy sigh. She missed her dad. It had been close to two years since she’d seen him last. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but she believed in being positive, so she thought of him in the present tense. His hugs, and the way he tweaked her nose at night, were some of the things she missed most.
The mug of coffee warmed her hands. Joan made her drink decaf after they finally gave up on persuading her not to drink it. She may have only been a pre-teen, but her soul had aged too fast. The adults and vampires still wanted to treat her like a child sometimes, but Mari proved them wrong. She was an adult; she had been for a while. While she had never stepped foot in a classroom, she was smart, smarter than most children her age would have been.
The front door creaked, and Mari looked up. Sarai’s sweet smile greeted her.
“Good morning, cute girl.”
“Morning, Sarai.”
“It sure is foggy out.”
“Yeah it’s probably going to rain.”
Winter was a wet one that year. Wet and cold did not mix. Most the time it was a few degrees above freezing, so the rain stayed water, but sometimes it snowed. Those were Mari’s favorite, although the older people like Joan and Peter complained that it affected their joints. Or arthritis, whichever, Mari wasn’t sure. She loved the snow days. They set up a fire and camped around the living room area. Mari consumed books like there was no tomorrow. And in her mind, there wasn’t going to be a tomorrow.
“Well, maybe if it does it won’t last all day,” Sarai said absentmindedly. Mari felt her eyes on her. Sarai was sometimes a mystery. One of the most soft-spoken people she had ever been around, Sarai was quiet and sweet. Very nurturing and loving. Their relationship had taken to a big-sister little-sister route.
Yes, a lot had changed in the year and a half that Mari’s dad and the other men left. Things had turned bad at one point. So much so, that Mari thought it was the end. A zombie attack early in the daylight last fall nearly crumbled their base. Peter had killed as many as he could, fighting alongside Sarai, Van, and Makayla. Joan had held Mari inside, against her will, as they watched helplessly from the window. It had been the closest the dead heads had ever gotten to the house.
Peter had struggled with one rotten corpse, half of its face hanging off in chunks of moldy flesh as one came up behind him and bit into his shoulder. The surprise attack let the other corpses get the gain on him. Tears fell and Joan sobbed as they watched him fall to his knees, and more dead heads came, covering his body, ripping him open. Van had appeared seconds too late and butchered the offender. After she decapitated the group on Peter’s body, all that was left of Peter on the ground were lumps of flesh and intestines. His face was gone, and blood was everywhere.
Joan immediately shielded Mari’s eyes while loud sobs escaped. Mari ripped Joan’s fingers away and saw the scene. She screamed until she was hoarse and passed out.
When she came to, they had already buried him and burned the dead heads, a whole hill of them. More than they had seen in months. Nobody else had been attacked. But their indestructible fortress was gone. Fences were broken, the years of wear and tear finally breaking them.
Van and Makayla tried their best to fix it up, but the compound family was scared. They had been lucky thus far, and had grown spoiled by their refuge. That night the vampires mourned Peter’s death and fixed up traps on the other side of the fence. They set long poles that zig-zagged outward, something that looked medieval.
Months after that, the army moved in. It was the same unit that the men had left with. A United States and Canada outfit. They declared that they needed part of their land to set up a base for the southern country. Joan argued with them. Technically, since they weren’t sure if Brendan and Nathan were still alive, the land belonged to Mari. They couldn’t just come and take whatever they wanted.
“Ma’am, we have to do what we can to help save this world. We aren’t taking the land, we are using it. That’s how it’s going to be,” was their reply.
A house meeting was called before they moved in. Everyone agreed to keep the vampires a secret. They couldn’t afford to lose more of their family. They filled Lexi, Miguel, Luna, Sienna, and Lukas in on what was going on, and the precautions they needed to take before the army made their camp.
Mari started interning with Sarai as a nurse. She was very passionate about nursing. And when the army moved in, she stepped up. She became the head nurse over their medical unit.
Lexi and Mari had grown very close, Mari considering her a mother figure since she could barely remember her own mother. Lexi was there when Mari had started her changes, helping her like a mother would. She was there when Mari needed someone to talk to, cry to, or vent to. Lexi knew all of Mari’s dreams; the ones where the world was right again, where she could go to a real school and meet a boy, fall in love, go to college, get married, and have a baby. Even though Mari thought those dreams were stupid, Lexi never chastised her. She was warm and loving. Selfishly, Mari was glad she was a vampire, because she would live forever and never leave her. She had too many people leave her and she was tired of it. So Mari vowed she would never let the army people find out about her friends. She would protect them no matter what.
In exchange for using their land, the army promised them food, new clothes, and pr
otection. Even if they could turn the offer down, they wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t make sense. Their food supply wasn’t what it used to be. Van had taken Brendan’s place hunting game, but there wasn’t much left. Mostly they ate squirrels, rabbits, and other small animals. One time Van caught a deer, but it was small, its bones jutting out; the world was hard for the animals, as well. Their garden was what kept them alive. They tended to it with great detail so the plants wouldn’t die off. If they did, they were doomed. So the day the army set up, bringing in large trucks full of men, Mari couldn’t wait to get their reward. Joan, the matriarch of the humans, helped meet the men while Makayla and Van brought in the food.
There had been big bags of flour, salt, and sugar, along with bushels of green beans, and corn. They even had loaves of bread. Mari hadn’t had bread in a long time. Happiness spread like wildfire as the women put up their bounty. Their pantry was full—so full that they stored some food in the upstairs bedrooms.
The army men introduced themselves. There were twenty in all. Men of every size and color. Many of them had accents, foreign-sounding to Mari’s southern upbringing. They talked fast, in code, and she found herself developing a headache from it all.
She excused herself to her bedroom, the one she used to share with her dad. She huddled underneath the covers, trying to drown out the sound of outside. All the newness was upsetting. She prayed until she fell asleep.
Even then her dreams weren’t nice.
She dreamt of her mother. The look she vaguely remembered that was in her eyes right before she attacked them. It felt like her real mother was trapped and wanting to get out. Yelling for help stuck inside the new vampire body she had. She dreamt of her dad wherever he was. Was she ever going to see him again? She dreamt of dead heads, their nasty, shriveled up bodies lurching after her, the stink choking her. Why was she even alive in this place? This place was no kind of place for a kid to be raised.
The next morning she stood outside on the porch and watched as army men walked past in every direction. Some were in groups, some were alone. One guy had a card table up against the garage portion of the house with maps and radios lying on top of it. This was the new compound. How long would they be there? Was her dad ever going to come home? She didn’t like being here; it felt like she was stuck in the prison of a house, with wardens watching her every move. Finally, she decided to find West and go play a game of cards.
Chapter Twenty-Four
California
Josh had decided he hated the West Coast. All except the weather; he liked that just fine. If the South could have the same mild temperatures, then he would be in heaven. He ran a hand through his hair; it was getting too long.
They didn’t have to go through a regular boot camp when they first joined NASE, but their missions and all the running around and lifting they had to do had sculpted their bodies to be leaner and stronger.
In the past year and a half, they had seen a lot of action. Lots of fighting, blood, and loss. When they were first picked up by the battalion, Josh and Will went with one group and Nathan and Brendan went with the other. They hadn’t seen them since.
Josh had asked how long they had to serve. The answer had chilled him to the bone, either until the war was won or death. This was a voluntary program, but not in some ways. So Josh prayed. He prayed every night and every morning and often throughout the day. He prayed that with every battle, it would be their last, and when that didn’t happen he prayed that the next one would.
The last two months, the fights had slowed. The herds had become considerably smaller. The ones who had survived this long were rotten, skeletal beings. The smell that radiated from them was the nastiest thing Josh had ever smelled. The skin had molded almost, either hanging on by threads or completely gone.
He dreamt about them more than he’d ever admit. Their nasty, lumbering bodies closing in on him. The sound of his skin ripping in two as they finished him off. He woke up covered in sweat, his heart thundering against his ribs. Will had them too, but he never admitted it. Josh would see him in the bunks, or wherever they had camped out. More often than not, Will was sitting up, his body slouched over, his back going in and out with the deep breaths he was taking.
They didn’t only hunt the zombies; sometimes they hunted rebel groups. Not on purpose, though. They had run-ins with some coverts that had been completely stripped of their humanity in the zombie plague. They had no sense of right or wrong, just self-preservation—and everyone was fair game.
The men were lonely. Especially Josh. He hadn’t touched another woman since Myra. It wasn’t on the forefront of his mind like other things were, until they joined NASE, that is. The first time was a mixed bag of emotions. He felt like he was cheating on Myra, but he knew he wasn’t. Where they travelled, they would sometimes stay in survivor camps. Sometimes these camps were as big as several cities. Josh couldn’t believe how many people had survived. Other times the survivor camps were small, like his back home. At a certain one in the deserts of Nevada, he met a girl named Lacy.
Lacy was beautiful, but scarred. Her surviving had changed her into someone that sat for hours without saying a word. Josh wasn’t sure about her, but he knew that they would never last; there was no future. The sex was good, though, and the first he had had since the plague had taken hold of the world.
Lacy had served the men coffee in the early morning the first week they had arrived. A ghetto cafe was set up, and she volunteered to work there. She was young, in her early twenties, but with an old soul. The first few weeks they barely talked except casual conversation. Then one night Josh came in and asked for some hard stuff he knew they had. She took him to the back room where they drank whiskey straight from the bottle and both loosened up.
He learned that she was from Phoenix. She had travelled with her cousins after she watched her parents turn. Her cousins later died, also in front of her. She had been in high school, and completely dependent on her parents for everything, so being thrown into the world of independence during the zombie plague wasn’t going well for her. She arrived in Nevada with another guy who had been crazy and brutal. She ran from their camp one night and found the owner of the cafe, who was hiding in the attic, and made her place here.
She was pretty, very thin with shoulder bones that were prominent on her skinny arms. She had crystal blue eyes, a little too wide on her small, elfin face. She wasn’t a knock-out, but she was pretty, and Josh felt himself get lost in her stories, her soft voice almost of magical quality.
The next night, he came in for another drinking session, and one thing led to another. He held her skinny body in his hands and on a yellowed mattress on the floor, he took her. They were both slick with sweat as they quickly did the deed, her fingers digging into his back. Josh had forgotten how good it felt, and after they both came with loud yells, he felt lighter and more at ease than ever before. It was like a million pounds had been lifted off his back and he collapsed on the nasty mattress, completely oblivious to the smell of piss and mildew that lifted into the air as he did so.
It continued like that for a while. Then the night he came to tell her he was leaving, she told him she loved him. And just like that his heart went cold. The world was too dangerous to be in love. He didn’t have it in him anymore to love anything. Not when it could be taken away from him so fast. He kissed her one last time and took off.
He sometimes wondered about her. Lacy was the kind that was too weak to be in this world. She was lonely and that loneliness sought out company of men like him. That wasn’t the right kind of mind frame to be at.
The last year and half had been hell. Sometimes he was worried about how the army operated. The men were ruthless, vicious. He was becoming more and more like them—like a trained killer—than he ever thought possible.
The winter on the West Coast was nice. He wondered if back home they had gotten a
ny snow. He and Will—and about five other men—were on a mission up the coast of California, trying to drive the zombies away from the water and kill them on land. It was a difficult task. But they were afraid that the zombies who died in the ocean would contaminate the water source whenever they had won the war.
They would begin another round of hunting in the morning. Josh sighed as he rolled his head back and forth, stretching his neck. Sometimes in the really dark times, he thought of death. It seemed pointless to continue on like this. He had no idea how many people had survived, but America would never be the same again.
What kind of life was this? Becoming so deep into killing, into hunting the enemy…
It wasn’t him, and he didn’t enjoy it. Life was meant to enjoy. To have adventures like the one him and Myra had dreamed about and planned for whenever the time was right.
In his darkest hours, he thought of Mari and Makayla. He worried about Mari like his own child. It hurt his heart to think of all the stuff she had missed, and had to witness because of this fucked-up world. Her dad was somewhere, maybe, and it was actually possible that she was an orphan. She was a survivor—that was one thing Josh knew for sure.
He caught an hour of sleep before they had to go. Mark, Paul, and Elijah marched in step with them. They were a part of their unit, from all around the country. Unlike Will and Josh, they had been scavengers, nomads, never having one place to stay for too long. Mark and Paul were brothers who went to every mission together. They were all each other had. Their family had been attacked on the road and Mark and Paul had watched on, young teenage boys unable to help.
Elijah was from up north, near Boston. He had walked all the way to Maine, because he had heard of a survivor camp there. He was missing his ring and pinkie finger from a fight with a rebel he had a run-in with. He had told them about the fight. Outside a grocery store in the early days, he had lost two digits for a case of water.
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