DEAD Series [Books 1-12]

by Brown, TW

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Patton said meekly. “But am I to believe that you are saying the members of our group that became ill were…coming back as...zombies? I believe that is the word that you used isn’t it? Zombies?”

  What rock had these people been hiding under?

  “Do you have a better term?” Billy leaned forward at his place in the table so he could look down and see Mr. Patton.

  “I imagine there are probably several if we were to have the opinion of an actual doctor,” Mr. Patton said with what actually sounded to me like disdain.

  “I am a real doctor.”

  Now you’ve done it, I thought as Dr. Zahn slipped into her normal seat at the table which happened to be right next to Mr. Dean Patton. Perhaps I wouldn’t need to say much at all.

  “Well then surely you can not expect us to believe that the dead are getting up like some sort of very bad movie and eating people. This has to be some sort of virus or biological weapon,” Mr. Patton almost laughed.

  “Where exactly have you been all this time?” Dr. Zahn asked as she folded her hands before her and turned her gaze fully on the seemingly ignorant Mr. Patton.

  “We have been living in our commune,” he said simply.

  “What sort of commune?” Melissa spoke up.

  “We are simply a group of people who left the material ways behind and sought a more simplistic and basic life,” Mr. Patton explained.

  “Like a religious cult?” Billy squinted and seemed to be on the verge of laughing. I shot him a stern look and he quickly straightened his expression.

  “Some of our members choose to follow certain faiths,” Mr. Patton explained. “We had all kinds. Some were atheists, and some kept it to themselves. Religion had nothing to do with our choice.”

  “So like a hippy commune,” Jake Beebe offered.

  The look on Mr. Patton’s face told me that he was starting to get really annoyed. I guess I could see why. Still, I was not really clear about him or his people, and if he wasn’t going to just offer it up, then I guess he would have to keep being asked questions that he didn’t like.

  “Some of our members are former bankers, corporate CEOs, we were made up of all kinds and classes.”

  “So then you don’t have television or radio in your…” I considered my next word and just decided to say ‘The hell with being delicate!’ “Compound?”

  “We chose to remove ourselves from society after our government had repeatedly failed us and practically wiped out our retirements, our jobs, caused many of us to lose our homes.”

  Okay, that I could get behind. I understood their logic…at least sort of anyways.

  “So you really don’t know what has happened?” I pressed.

  “Our deliveries of oil for our heating and cooking systems and our gardening supplies did not show up as scheduled. After several days, a few of our people went into La Grande to find out what was wrong.

  “When they returned, only two made it back and both were almost beyond understanding as they were delirious with fever. When one of them went into a catatonic state, we were preparing to send for a nearby doctor that comes out and does annual check-ups of our people—we aren’t crazy or solely reliant on nature or God to tend our needs,” he threw that last line in and glared around the table at all of us. I imagine we’d given him enough reason to feel defensive, so I wouldn’t hold it against him.

  “Only, just as we were about to do so, Trent came out of his coma. It was his crying that brought us all running. It was the most peculiar cry if you knew Trent. He’d been a welder in the shipyards before and that cry almost sounded like it came from—”

  “A baby?” Nickie blurted.

  “Yes,” Mr. Patton said. He got a far away look for a second, shuddered, and then continued his story.

  “When folks went in to check on him, he was up and out of bed…but he was obviously still very sick. His eyes were…wrong. And his tone was certainly off. He attacked people who tried to help him. Even managed to bite a few. When we finally got him restrained, that was when the other fella who had just slipped into his coma an hour earlier woke up. We got him tied down, but a few more ended up being bitten or scratched.”

  “You didn’t start to realize that there was a problem?” I asked. “I’m not doctor, but I have a pretty good handle on what dead is. Nobody noticed the lack of a pulse…breathing…some of the basics?”

  “We just thought we were missing something,” Mr. Patton insisted. “Nobody wants to be the one to say that a dead person is getting up.”

  Denial. There it was as plain as day.

  “But you started figuring out…some of you must have,” Jon spoke up. “The first time we came out, you had everybody that was infected either tied down or locked in a shed. So how come you folks didn’t start trying to find help?”

  “Honestly?” Mr. Patton looked up with red-rimmed eyes.

  “That would help,” Jon said with a nod.

  “By the time a majority of us were willing to accept the possibility…a few of our group had snuck away in the night. They took our only working vehicles and most of our canned food. We always had a pantry with dozens of shelves lined with jars. Our gardens were well-tended and everybody took part to ensure that we were always set just in case of any prolonged stretches of inclement weather.”

  “It sounds like there is more to this than you are sharing,” Jon pressed.

  “There was a fight. Only, none of us had guns. Well…none of us were supposed to,” Mr. Patton admitted. “The ones leaving had us outmatched. Even worse, they took a few against their will. That was when it got really ugly and a few of us tried to stop them.”

  “So why not just hike out of that place?” I asked.

  “We had everything we needed except for food. We had a little…just not enough to last very long. Plus…” His voice trailed off. After a few deep breaths, he continued. “We were afraid. And we’d already lost so many of our community. Plus, the snow started. Then we were truly trapped. Honestly, we believed that we could hunt. Only, it just seemed like the game had left. Sometimes we would go days without even hearing birds. That was when it started to sink in that there might be problems. And then we realized something that, looking back, is kind of embarrassing.”

  “What’s that?” Jon prompted after another of Mr. Patton’s long pauses.

  “The sky,” he said with a shrug. “Not one single contrail. And none of us could recall when it was that we’d last seen one. And then there was that night when a few of the…” Once again Mr. Patton grew silent. Finally, he spoke, and that first word came out like he was trying to spit a foul taste from his mouth. “Zombies came…they attacked a few of us. That was when we decided to build a fence around part of the commune.”

  “So who decided that it was time to start eating each other?” Jake blurted. He looked around the room at us and seemed embarrassed for a second. “You know that you were thinking it,” he finally said to me and Jon.

  Mr. Patton sighed again. This one was different, though. He closed his eyes and you could see him wince and flinch. It was almost like he’d developed some sort of facial tick. Tears started to roll down his cheeks, and I honestly did not think that he was going to answer Jake’s question.

  “We got so hungry.” His voice was barely above a whisper and he kept this eyes squeezed shut. “We’d actually buried some of our dead. But then some of the others began to fall. Not from being bitten—we’d secured all of them. The ground became too hard to be able to dig graves. Since it was so cold, we just decided to put them in one of the unused yurts. We would take care of them come the spring.

  “But eventually our food was gone. Twice we sent a few volunteers out to try and find something…anything. None of them ever came back.”

  I tried to imagine what that little bit of Hell must have felt like for those poor people. After all, it was hard enough those first days…weeks. What must it have been like for them to walk out into the world several mon
ths into it and discover everything was gone? Couple it with their obvious denial, and they were like zombie room service.

  “…when Gail mentioned something about that soccer team that had crashed in the mountains back in the Seventies or something,” Mr. Patton said.

  I snapped my attention back to him. I was actually curious about how that whole thing had come about. I guess you can’t judge somebody unless you have walked a mile in their shoes, but I could not even remotely imagine where things would have to go where I would be able to rationalize eating Melissa…or Thalia. My mind immediately flashed the image of that little girl we’d found frozen to the fence outside their compound. Great.

  “She tried to laugh it off, but nobody else was laughing. We were all so hungry. And we didn’t have anything left for the few children that were still alive. That night, after the little ones were asleep, we went into the yurt and pulled out the first body. After some discussion, we agreed to wrap the heads in burlap so that we didn’t have to look at the faces. We removed the clothing and wrapped all of them that night. Then we moved them all around. We went so far as to have each of us go in after the others and move the bodies so that we would hopefully not know who we were choosing…it didn’t work.”

  I looked around the room and saw a lot of expressions. Some were horrified, others simply fascinated. But everybody was paying attention.

  “Once we started…it is hard to explain,” Mr. Patton finally opened his eyes. “That first day that nobody was hungry…the children weren’t crying…”

  I’d heard enough. I looked at Mr. Patton and felt something even more profound than pity. It wasn’t embarrassment. Whatever it was, I couldn’t put a word to it, but this man had seen the bottom.

  “I think we’ve heard enough,” I announced. Heads turned my way, some with very visible expressions of relief. “Look, you’re welcome to stay. However, you need to understand that things work a little bit differently here than what you might be used to. We have watches, patrols. If you are going to stay, then you will be expected to pull your weight. We have a school program for the children…and also train them how to deal with this new world. That means going outside and learning how to deal with the zombies.”

  I noticed a few eyebrows raise at that last statement. It was a reality that I could not ignore. Yes, Thalia was better equipped to deal with what was happening than say, Misty. But there was more that she needed to know if she was going to have a chance at a future.

  I looked around the room and gave a nod that this was over. It was time to eat and then tend to the daily tasks. One of those tasks would undoubtedly be Emily.

  After breakfast, I went in and checked on her. She was drenched in sweat and the smell had actually gotten worse. Sunshine had her heavily sedated. Billy was sitting in a chair a few feet away. Thalia had already taken her spot beside the bed. I was a little surprised to discover the other two children that we’d “inherited” from that group of Muslims that had been here just a short time ago before deciding to just walk out into the woods with several members of their group infected and on the verge of turning.

  “Can we sit here, Mister Steve?” Levent asked.

  “Of course,” I said with a nod. I noticed that Rabia had remained silent and kept her gaze at the floor while waiting for my answer. De-programming wasn’t the word, but I hoped that, eventually, she would shed some of that “second-class citizen” mentality that seemed to be imprinted in her head.

  “She been awake at all?” I asked Billy as I walked over to stand beside him for a minute and take in the scene. I can’t lie, I guess I keep hoping that she would shake this off like a bad case of the flu and be okay.

  “She was sorta awake about an hour ago, but she started crying almost immediately and I had Sunshine come in and give her some more stuff for the pain,” Billy replied.

  I could hear it in his voice. He was possibly even closer to crying than I was at the moment. There was never going to be an easy way to handle this situation no matter who happened to be lying on that bed.

  “How long you been in here on watch?” I asked Billy.

  “Just a while,” he said with a shrug.

  “Go ahead and take a break, I’ll stay.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. I imagine nobody wants to be sitting in this room when Emily turns.

  I took a seat and watched the kids as they sat beside Emily’s bed. There was a lot of whispering, and I would normally have been very curious about what was being said. However, at the moment, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do about taking care of that little girl in the end.

  The door opened and Dr. Zahn stepped inside. There was something about her expression that told me I was not going to like what she was about to say.

  “Potter and the ones that are conscious are leaving.” Her voice was thick with a tone that I almost swore was relief. That was puzzling.

  “Leaving where?” I asked. Truthfully, I didn’t have a better question.

  “Don’t know. He just said that he couldn’t stay here. Misty refuses to accept that you didn’t kill her mother and all the others.”

  “I guess we can’t make them stay.”

  Now I understood her tone. I was not sure how I really felt about this situation. Sure, we had gone through an ordeal to go get them, but there was just something off about them and their whole set up. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but these were the type of people like that one guy in Day of the Dead, the one who gets bit and has his arm chopped off. This was the type of guy who would open the door and let the zombie horde in if he felt he was on his way out. I couldn’t say exactly why I felt that way; it was just a vibe.

  “A few people are trying to talk them out of it,” Dr. Zahn added.

  “What about the members of their group that aren’t conscious?” I asked.

  “Patton refused to talk about them, but he and the ones that were mobile had a little meeting as soon as you left the room.”

  “The only thing I don’t like about this is the child.”

  “Misty?”

  “Yeah, she doesn’t know any better.”

  The door flew open and Jon stormed in. He glanced at the doctor, and then turned to me. “You okay with this?”

  “We can’t hold anybody against their will,” I said.

  “But that child has no business being taken out there by these idiots!”

  It seemed that we were all on the same page. I considered the situation for a moment and came to a decision. This could backfire in a hurry. Still, it was time to do something and act like the leader of this group.

  “Doc, can you stay in here with Emily for a few minutes?” I asked. She gave me a nod after a brief pause.

  I headed out into the entry area to find all of my people standing in little clusters. Everybody was talking quietly, but I saw a lot of the same expressions on people’s faces.

  I considered for a moment what I was about to do. If things went off with the best case scenario as a result, I might only piss off and alienate a few of my group. And that was when it came down on top of my head. These were my people. For some reason that I will never understand, this group of survivors had decided that I was their leader. None of us probably anticipated days like this or decisions along the lines of the one I was about to make. Still, good or bad, I was the one that they were waiting on.

  I caught DeAngelo’s eye. He had a very grim look about him. Considering how he had stepped in when it came to Levent and Rabia, I was confident that he would support me. Jesus and Jake were on either side of Jon. I could tell that they were agitated. Jesus saw me and I guess read something in my expression. He gave me a curt nod and elbowed the other two.

  “Mr. Patton,” I called across the room.

  He jumped, obviously startled. He had been in the process of stuffing the few things we could spare him and his group into a pack. The two adults and Misty were clustered around looking more lost than anything else.

  “Wha
t is it, Mr. Hobart?” he said, clutching a hand to his chest like he was about to have a heart attack. If I already had him this spooked, he was in for a world of trouble.

  “I will only make this offer one last time.” I let my gaze drift across the other two adults that were leaving. “Stay here…at least until things thaw out. It is gonna be tight, and food is a concern, but we have a pretty good set up here. I think we will make it through the winter.”

  Mr. Patton didn’t even wait to see if the others were willing to discuss it. “That is just not possible, Mr. Hobart. You can’t possibly understand—”

  “You’re right,” I cut him off. “I think there is something about your little story that you aren’t telling. It doesn’t seem to connect at all the dots. But I can put that aside and offer you a much better chance at survival than you will get if you leave now. What you are doing does not make any sense.”

  “Let’s just say that our beliefs are not the same and leave it at that. We appreciate all that you have done…you and your people. But I really think this is best,” Mr. Patton said. He glanced at the other two adults, a man and woman, who looked as if they would fall over at the first heavy breeze. Still, they nodded!

  “And what about the ones that are still unconscious?” I asked. “What do I tell them when they awake?”

  “They won’t,” Mr. Patton said with a sigh.

  I was reminded of that television program, Meerkat Manor. Several heads around the room popped up at that last statement. Jesus pushed himself away from the wall and headed into the back.

  “Let me save you the trip,” Mr. Patton called. “They are dead.”

  Jesus took off at a run. I was about to lay into this lunatic, but something that Jesus said over his shoulder changed everything.

  “One of them was bit!”

  Everybody scrambled. Whoever wasn’t carrying a weapon moved away from the arch that led to the back rooms. All those who were able, drew whatever they had. It seemed like overkill for just one zombie, but it showed a lot about how ingrained our reactions had become.