DEAD Series [Books 1-12]

by Brown, TW

  Not waiting for a reply, Vix started off. For a while, she almost thought that the duo had chosen to go off on their own. Then she overheard Gemma whisper.

  “…promise not to tell her I was bit.”

  ***

  “You waited to tell me this now?” Juan barked. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Just hold on,” Keith shot back, holding his hands up in a physical gesture to get Juan to calm down. “For one, you have not been in any condition to really do much good. And for another, we already have a plan and I was just letting you know. You are the person folks see as the leader. It would be pretty shitty of me to enact some sort of plan and not fill you in.” Keith saw something in Juan’s face and added hastily. “We are not asking you to be a part of it. As it is, we have been planning for a few days and I honestly don’t want to take the time to try and get you up to speed. Besides, you need to remain here.”

  “Wait…you’re leaving?” Juan asked with a shake of his head. “Why would you leave? You have the benefit here of being on an island for one…and for another…” Juan paused and then shook his head. “Nope, that’s pretty much it. You are here on an island. Whoever this is, they would have to come to us. We hold the advantage.”

  “There is one problem with your idea,” Keith countered. “We have kids here on this island. They have been through and seen enough. We slip out, we get a good look at their numbers and determine if we feel they are coming here with good intent or bad.”

  “You make it sound simple, but it never is, you know,” Juan said, clasping the man’s shoulder.

  “Look, if this force is anything to worry about, we will be coming back on the run. But if we can either assess them and bring them in as new members of the community or, if need be, hit them hard and make them think coming here is a bad idea…then that is what we will do.”

  “And is anything being done here to ready the island in the event of the worst case scenario?”

  “That is why I wanted to talk to you. We had some guys working on it, but after seeing the size of the smoke pillar yesterday, we have concerns about the size of the group. We needed to enlist some more help. We have been keeping this from everybody and did not want to start raising alarms. When you were obviously up and about, we decided that we needed to fill you in and then have you see to getting this place ready.”

  Juan felt his stomach churning. Part of him would much rather go out and see what the hell was out there. But by the same token, Mackenzie had made it clear on more than one occasion that his presence here was vital. He needed to be the one to get the citizens informed and prepared just in case it came to something nasty.

  “Fine,” Juan agreed, “but when are you leaving?”

  “Actually, we would have left this morning, but we all felt that it was important to stay for the sentencing. Also, the guys who took the boat will be staying up river. If things go badly, they are sort of the last ditch escape plan.”

  Juan nodded. “Sounds like you have given this a lot of thought.”

  “I think you and I both know what sorts of people can be out there. We have a good thing here. There are going to be folks who want it. Some will want to join, but others will want to take it. That is the way of things.”

  Keith reached out his hand and Juan accepted it. The two men shared a knowing nod. Juan turned to leave, but Keith kept his grip. “You can fix this with Mack. She is a good girl. She thinks the world of you and loves you like crazy. Just give it time. She’ll come around.”

  Juan gave another nod and walked away. His mind was going over everything from the past several weeks. Maybe he didn’t belong here. All his life he had been out for himself. Had it been any different when things were stripped down to their barest parts?

  He’d killed Donna and Frank…left them in a basement to be eaten by zombies. It didn’t matter that such a thing had not been his intent. When that gate did not shut, he had sealed their fate. He had been set on killing April when she told him that she knew about his criminal past. He had relented, but hadn’t that just been a case of him trying to prove to himself that he was a changed man? Did that make it real?

  Juan walked into the house and flopped down on the couch. A big black head came and rested on his knee. Reaching down, Juan gave Tigah a scratch behind one ear. The dog’s head tilted to allow for more and Juan obliged. Pretty soon, there was a huge wet spot on his pants from the copious drool of the massive Newfoundland. It seemed like the dog doubled in size every other week, and with it, the pools of slobber that were now reaching a point where a person could slip and break a leg if they were not watching their step in the house.

  The house, Juan thought. How odd was it that he was living in Mackenzie’s home and she was staying someplace else? That was one of about a million things that did not make any sense. And while he might not be able to do much about some of these things, he could damn well do something about this. Getting to his feet, he patted the dog and then headed for the door with Tigah in his wake.

  The pair were cutting across the neat rows of the farm that were already starting to show sprouts of whatever it was that had been planted. He saw a few people run past, but they didn’t wave or try to talk to him so he didn’t give them any thought.

  He reached the house he had sought and flipped open the latch on the gate, He thought that he saw some rustling behind the curtains and was not at all surprised when the door opened and a woman stepped out, quickly shutting the door behind her.

  “I want to talk to Mackenzie,” Juan said calmly. He could already tell by this woman’s pursed lips that it was not going to be as easy as that.

  “She does not wish to see you at the moment,” the woman replied with a crisp curtness.

  “Listen, lady, I don’t know who you are, and honestly, I really don’t care. I came to talk to Mackenzie. I am going to talk to her. So…you can either move aside, call her down, or else I will move you out of the way.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” the woman huffed.

  Juan felt some of his “old” self flare up. Did this woman have any idea who she was talking to? He’d seen it back before the world got dumped upside-down. Some folks would run off at the mouth, thinking that they were safe. The thing was, unless the cop was standing right there…nobody was safe from a damn thing. He had always enjoyed that look on some clown’s face who gave some lip and got knocked on his ass. How had that commercial put it? Oh yeah…priceless.

  “Lady, there ain’t nothing in this world that can stop me from getting to Mackenzie. So unless you got some special sort of sukiyaki training and can karate chop me into unconsciousness…you don’t stand a chance of stopping me.”

  Juan took a step forward and the woman took three quick steps back, turned, and then bolted into her house screaming like some folks had done the first time they’d seen a zombie eat somebody.

  He was on the porch when the door opened and Mackenzie stepped out. She gave a look over her shoulder and then turned her gaze to Juan. He expected anger, maybe fear, but he sure didn’t expect…

  “What’s so funny?” Juan asked dubiously.

  “That was not nice…scaring Miss Schaeffer like that. She is a nice little old lady,” Mackenzie answered with a smile. Still, Juan could see the fatigue in her eyes.

  “Yeah…well she told me that I couldn’t see you.”

  “So you’ve seen me…now what?”

  Juan opened his mouth and then shut it with a click. This was not going at all like he had imagined. He was confused and at a complete loss for words. Tigah flopped down between the two and made a huff that fluttered his jowls as if he was annoyed that this might take a while.

  “It’s just…” Juan began, and then it came in a flood, “…it is stupid for you to not be in your house. If anybody should find another place to stay, it should be me. As for why you are pissed…I get it. But I didn’t do it for one, and for another, things ain’t like they used to be. If somebody were to endanger you, y
ou can bet that I would have them gone before they could blink.”

  “I know, Juan.” Mackenzie laid a hand on Juan’s arm. “I just hate that it has come to this. Miss Schaeffer was saying almost the exact same thing you were before you barged up and frightened her out of her wits.”

  Juan scratched his head and shot a glance at the curtained windows. He was almost positive he saw them flutter again. Looking back down at Mackenzie, he was relieved to see her smiling up at him. The words “I love you” were on the tip of his tongue when an explosion sounded, followed by the clanging of metal on metal.

  Every one of the watch towers had a set of brass tubes and a piece of metal to bang them with. The towers were close enough that once one sounded the alarm, the others would take it up. Juan turned and looked skyward. Wherever the alarm originated, a signal flare would be fired so that the community knew where the threat was located.

  Sure enough, a sputtering flare was drifting down, just to the left and a little ways behind it, a small column of black smoke was rolling skyward. It was the direction of where the bridge had once existed.

  ***

  Glenn slipped along the side of the house. The grass and weeds crunched underfoot. He was pretty sure that this was not a place where people were ever supposed to settle and call home. The water was next to non-existent and the only thing that really flourished, as far as he could tell, were the cacti.

  A single zombie stood in the middle of the street just ahead. It actually looked confused; as if it wanted to go somewhere but simply could not decide which direction to walk. It would turn one direction and then the other. He was seeing this a lot from the singles out and about. It only seemed to happen after midday when the temperature skyrocketed.

  Shaking his head of the distracting thought, he crouched down and eased around, using the car still in the driveway and the closed garage door as his alley to slip past and into the yard of this house. It was bordered by a four-foot brick fence that had a wall of thick, brown, dead brush which would allow him to creep unseen to the next yard.

  That yard was his goal, and now that he was so close, he began to worry. Once he got there, things were going to escalate fast and get exponentially dangerous when the time was right. Cynthia would start things into motion as soon as she was prepared once he gave her the signal that he was ready.

  As fast as he could, Glenn scurried along the front bumper of the car and actually dove into the yard, coming up to his knees after a nice tuck-and-roll. Duck walking to the fence, he peered over and scanned the area through the dead foliage.

  To the left, the road was almost entirely clear; empty of undead activity. However, to the right, about two blocks up, sat the high school. For whatever reason, the street was packed with undead. From his vantage point, it looked as if the zombies had the entire school surrounded. Why would anybody want their location to be entirely ringed with those things?

  His eyes drifted along until he spied what he was looking for. A long piece of red cloth was fluttering in the breeze of the late afternoon. It was tied to a small sapling tree that had died like so much of the area vegetation. In this desert, once the owners of the home where this tree sat on one side of the entrance to the driveway had stopped being able to water it, it had withered and died like the rest of the world.

  Of course that breeze felt like it was coming off of a blast furnace. Glenn cursed, and not for the first time, the amount of protective gear that they had to wear as he felt sweat rolling down from his neck and pooling in the small of his back.

  Reaching into his pocket, he produced a similar strand of cloth and reached through the dead, dried up bush. Tying it to a branch and flicking it with his fingers so it was hanging out where it could be seen from the street, Glenn took a deep breath and waited for the next part of the plan.

  He looked up at the sky and tried to guess what time it might be. It was well after the hour of noon judging by the sun. The flaming orb was about a third of the way down to the western horizon. That meant that he had a while. Cynthia had made it clear that, while she was prepared to die if it came to that, she was not in any hurry to do so.

  “We do this close to dusk. That will give us shadows to hide in. Unless these people are using infrared or something high tech, then we should be fine,” she had explained.

  Sitting down against the brick wall, Glenn waited. Occasionally he could hear the moan or cry of a zombie. The sounds still gave him chills. He wished that they could just find someplace that the zombies weren’t and make a home of some sort.

  He had worked hard all his life to reach a point where he could provide an exceptional life for his wife. They had discussed children, but Cynthia had loved her job as a vet. Her love for animals was something that he had always known about…or so he had thought; what he had not realized was to what depths it existed. Some people were born to be caretakers, and that described his Cynthia and how she felt about her job.

  She did not want to give it up. Any time that they discussed children, she shut him down the moment that he mentioned hiring a nanny.

  “What is the point of bringing a child into this world if you are not going to see to taking care of that child? That is even more irresponsible than some of these idiots that get a dog, leave it locked up in the house for ten or twelve hours a day, and then are upset that the animal can’t hold in their bodily urges. I’d love to lock those people in a room for ten hours and then slap their faces when they wet themselves. See how they like it.” That was almost her exact statement, word for word.

  When it came to stories on the news of people hurting animals, it was not uncommon for Cynthia to actually shed a tear. If there was a fire, flood, or disaster, she would always voice out loud her concern for the pets in the area. If asked if she had the same concern for the people, she would shrug and say, “What did they expect would happen? They willingly moved into a place called “Tornado Alley” (or some other similar qualifier such as a flood plain, over-developed hillside, just to name a few). The animals never asked to live there.”

  What Glenn came to suspect was that Cynthia had a much softer spot in her heart for animals than she did for people. It was not that she did not love children, she just chose not to have any of her own.

  He had thought that perhaps she would soften her stance once Mel’s baby came. If anything, it made her more determined to hold that position against having a child herself. So, Baby Xander was the object of his aunt’s love and affection, and seemed to provide all that she needed to fulfill that part of her life. On more than one occasion, as they would be driving home from visiting her brother, his wife, and their new son, Cynthia would comment, “Children are nice in short doses.” She would laugh it off like she might be making a joke, but Glenn had begun to suspect otherwise.

  However, when all of this terrible business with the dead returning erupted, he had been grateful that they had not had a child of their own. He had even thought, only on occasion, and usually only when the child was fussy, that it would not be a terrible idea if the two couples parted. He had even concocted a plausible excuse.

  If something were to go wrong…having the brother and sister apart would improve the chance that at least one of them survived. Of course he knew that was a flimsy reason at best and not once had he ever suggested such a thing.

  Of course, now here he sat in some small Utah town, his brother-in-law and sister-in-law both dead; and he was about to try and assault a complex with an unknown number of people inside to rescue his toddler-aged nephew that may or may not be inside. To add to his unlikely scenario, he was going to rely on zombies to help him.

  Glancing up, he saw that the sun had slipped farther down the western horizon. He searched and quickly spied Cynthia’s signal. There were now two red pieces of cloth fluttering in the breeze. That was the signal. Glenn tied off his own piece as a silent acknowledgement.

  He crouched and gathered his courage. They had discussed this, and he had insisted very strongly that
he be the one to distract the undead. As he saw it, he was choosing between putting his head in the mouth of either a lion or a tiger. One choice was just as lethal as the other. However, the task that he had chosen involved a lot of potential for running. While her condition was greatly improved, he had noticed the slight limp when Cynthia walked. The bullet wound in her leg was not entirely healed There was one other factor that helped him make up his mind. He was convinced that Cynthia was not only capable, but somehow eager, to take the lives of these people. Whether it was for her brother or the baby, he did not know.

  Moving to the end of the brick wall, he peeked over one more time to see that there was nothing in his immediate proximity. The area was clear and he rose to stand, his body feeling the tightness from having been immobile for so long. Stepping out to the middle of the road, Glenn pulled the police baton free from his belt. He produced an empty coffee can aloft that they had found back in the house where they had left that man tied up to most likely die.

  “Come and get it!” Glenn hollered as he began to rattle the baton around the inside of the large can.

  ***

  Ronni sat beside the bed as she had almost every day since he had been brought home. Her father looked terrible. He was almost gray and sweat kept beading up on his face. She had a towel handy and kept wiping him down with it after dipping it in cool water.

  Sometimes, when nobody else was looking, she would peel his eyelids open. She kept expecting to see those ugly black squiggles. She knew he had been bitten, the time for him to turn had long passed; still, she was taking nothing for granted.

  “How is he?” Scott poked his head in the door. He had come around six or seven times just today.

  “Nothing has changed,” Ronni said with a hitch in her voice as she kept down the urge to cry.

  “Look, your dad is gonna be okay.” The man stepped into the room. He crossed and uncrossed his arms in front of his chest a few times and finally settled on leaning against the wall. “He is a tough mother. Just hang in there.” He looked like he wanted to say something else, but he finally just gave a little nod and exited.