Life of the Dead (Book 1): Hell on Earth

by Tony Urban

  Wim slid his hand free and took a hickory stick he’d been using as a poker and stirred the coals. They blazed crimson momentarily before fading back down. “All right. But stay in Mama’s room tonight. The linens might be a little musty, but the bed’s soft and I suspect you need your rest.”

  She looked up at him and smiled. He felt gooseflesh prickle his forearms, and it wasn’t because of the cool, May air.

  “I’ll do that.” Ramey stared at him so long he broke eye contact and looked away.

  “Are you happy here, Wim?”

  He didn’t meet her gaze as he tried to answer the question, both to himself and aloud to her. “I was. I won’t lie, it got lonesome at times, but that never bothered me all that much. Now…” His eyes drifted up and he saw she still examined him. “I guess I’m not sure about a lot of things any more. What made you ask?”

  “I couldn’t understand why someone like you is all alone in the world. I figured it must be by choice.”

  She covered her mouth to hide a yawn. “I think you’re right about needing rest.” Ramey stood and stretched and he couldn’t help but notice how the remaining light of the fire silhouetted her figure.

  “Thank you, Wim, for saving my life and for bringing me in to your home.” She bent at the waist and gave him a soft kiss on his cheekbone, just below his right eye. “And for not letting me be all alone tonight.”

  He opened his mouth to say ‘You’re welcome’ but before he could work out the words, she skipped toward the house.

  He sat there for a long while and watched the fire wither, then die out completely. It occurred to him he’d spent more time talking to this girl he’d known for only a few hours, than he’d spent talking to his neighbors in several years. It surprised him how much he enjoyed it.

  Wim retreated to the house and checked the bedroom. The door hung half open and he saw Ramey sprawled on the bed. She looked to have fallen asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow and hadn’t even covered herself. Her breaths came out in soft puffs. Wim tiptoed into the room and took a blanket from the cedar chest. She didn’t wake when he cloaked her in it.

  In the morning, she was gone.

  Even without the roosters around to cock-a-doodle-do, Wim woke before sunrise. Long habits were hard to break. He hadn’t undressed the night before and didn’t bother changing clothes. After he made his bed, he eased out of the room and into the hall.

  The bedroom door hung ajar and when he peeked inside the bed was empty. The blanket he’d covered Ramey with the night before was folded neatly at the foot of the bed. It surprised him that the girl was up so early. He was also disappointed as he’d hoped to fix something passing for breakfast for her before she awoke.

  He found the kitchen as empty as the bedroom, and when he looked out the window he saw that his Bronco sat alone at the end of the dirt driveway. The only sign of her truck were some fresh tracks in the soft earth.

  “Well. Damn.”

  He liked the girl. He enjoyed her silly stories and her sense of humor. But more than that, he liked her company, even if he’d only shared it for half a day. He also felt sick with worry. It was one thing being alone on the farm. It was another altogether being alone out there, on the road where any number of awful things could happen.

  His appetite had disappeared but he sat at the kitchen table until the sky transitioned from navy to robin’s egg blue. Then he moved outside where he saw a note tucked under the windshield wiper of his Bronco. There were only four lines of pretty, loopy script.

  “Thank you again for everything and for understanding why I have to leave. I took a box of bullets. Now I know the gun can fit six.”

  She signed off with a lopsided heart and the letter ‘R’.

  Wim folded the note into fourths and slid it into his back pocket.

  “I never expected this would happen, but I’m leaving the farm.”

  Wim sat facing his parents’ tombstone. He’d gathered a clump of yellow tulips and held them in his hand. He looked from the silky petals to the grave, then back and forth again.

  All morning long doubt and worry filled him to the brim. He knew the opportunity to find Ramey had likely vanished. She’d shown him the map to her father’s supposed residence, and he remembered the general location in southern West Virginia, but there were a dozen or more possible routes to get there.

  At the same time, he knew nothing remained for him here. No farm. No animals. No town. And even though he frequently talked to his parents’ headstones, they were long gone too. Staying on the farm might be the safe choice, but it was a pointless one. A choice with no future. He was tired of simply existing. He needed to know what was happening in the world around him and if there was any point in going on.

  Wim set the tulips in front of the marker and traced his fingers over the “Mother” engraving. “I’ll miss you so much, but this is something I have to do. I know you’d understand, but that doesn’t make it much easier.”

  Wim leaned in and kissed the tombstone. “I love you, Mama.”

  He left the only home he’d ever known and took nothing more than the guns, ammunition, and a small family photo album. He realized, with everyone dead, the album contained not only his memories, but the only proof he and his family had ever existed.

  Wim locked the front door behind him and resisted the urge to look back as he climbed into the Bronco and drove away. He turned left at the end of the driveway and headed down the empty, two lane road.

  “Goodbye,” he said to himself because he had no one else to talk to. He hoped his days of being alone were nearing an end.

  Hell on Earth

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  SNEAK PREVIEW

  BOOK Two: ROAD OF THE DAMNED

  1

  Juli thought what happened in her picture perfect suburban home was Hell, but that opinion changed when she reached the city. She’d planned to go to the police station and turn herself in. What exactly she would say was still something of a mystery even though she’d been rehearsing it as she drove.

  “Well, you see, officer, my husband murdered our daughter. Then he tried to murder me, but I killed him first. Then I went to check on my son and he was a zombie. No, officer, I’m not psychotic. No, I’m not taking hallucinogens. That’s really what happened.”

  No one would believe that, of course. Juli herself barely believed it and she lived through it. Maybe she had lost her mind. In some ways that might be for the best because she didn’t know how she could live through what happened.

  She wavered between hysteria, confusion, and uncontrollable sobbing, the latter of which dominating the moment. Through her tear-blurred eyes, she saw the night sky glowing as she neared the city. It wasn’t the sea of streetlights that lit up the skyline as usual. Orange, shimmery smoke danced through the air like Baryshnikov and the closer she came to the city, the brighter the night grew.

  Even for a city, the streets seemed unusually occupied considering the time of night. People dashed frantically in every direction, carrying everything from TVs and stereos to toilet paper and jugs of water.

  I’m driving straight into a riot, Juli thought. That there might be a correlation between the carnage in her home and the chaos in the city didn’t even cross her mind at first.

  A teenage Asian boy ran past the front of her SUV and if she’d have been going five miles per hour faster, she’d have hit him. She slammed on her brakes and he glanced back over his shoulder and mimed slitting his throat.

  “Watch where you going, whore!”

  You little punk she thought, but didn’t say, not even from behind the safety of her locked doors and windows. The teen ran off and Juli kept driving.

  She saw a few people staggering about in a manner that reminde
d her of Mark, but tried to ignore them. She couldn’t allow herself to believe that possible. They’re old or hurt. That’s all.

  The haze grew thicker as she closed in on a block of Government housing units. She saw smoke leaking from the windows in the upper floors but there weren’t any fire trucks on the scene. Instead there stood a row of military vehicles. A few soldiers brandished big, black guns as they held guard outside the entryways. They stared at Juli as she passed by but didn’t move to stop her.

  When she reached the next brick complex she saw more soldiers, only instead of guns they had tanks strapped to their backs. Juli thought they must be some sort of firefighters. When two African American men ran out of the building, she realized the soldiers weren’t fighting the fires, they were starting them.

  The soldiers spun toward the fleeing black men and aimed their nozzles at them. What came next was something Juli knew she’d never forget as long as she lived. From the nozzles gushed long sprays of fire which rained down on the two men and coated their bodies in flames. They ran another 10 feet, staggered and stumbled for five more, then fell to the ground, arms and legs flailing. Juli could hear their screams which were high and strangely feminine, even with the windows up. The soldiers turned to her and waved her on. Nothing to see here, Ma’am. She drove on.

  A few streets down she came to the roadblock. A Dodge Charger police cruiser sat rolled onto its roof, the siren still blaed albeit a little off key. Dozens of people rocked it back and forth. Some had climbed onto the upside down undercarriage and jumped up and down, manic. Juli watched as several men dragged two police officers through the car’s shattered windshield and into the streets where they pummeled them with their fists and feet and whatever weapons close enough to utilize.

  Afraid of drawing their ire, Juli made a hard right down and alley. As her headlights lit up the narrow tunnel, she spotted another police officer, this one kneeling over a homeless man. As she neared them, she saw the officer’s face buried in the man’s back, When the noise of the SUV got the cop’s attention, it looked up and Juli saw blood and flesh dripping from its mouth. She screamed and hit the gas. The SUV vaulted forward and bounced over the cop’s legs. Juli checked the rear-view mirror and saw it had already resumed eating the bum.

  She was still looking behind her when she exited the alley and it was only the chorus of screams that again drew her attention forward. To her left she saw row after row of police SWAT officers clad head to toe in black uniforms and body armor. Most held Plexiglas shields in front of them and, as chunks of bricks, glass bottles and assorted debris soared through the air, the need for them became clear.

  To Juli’s right, hundreds of residents of the city grouped together. Most were young and black but there were a good number of whites, Latinos and Asians mixed in. They held weapons of all kinds, guns, rifles, bats, shovels. They shouted at the police and through the cacophony of voices, Juli could make out a few of the screams.

  “Let us out! Let us out!

  “We have rights! You can’t keep us here!”

  “Fuck the pigs!”

  Ragged coughs and sneezes rang out from both sides of the impasse.

  The crowd of city dwellers moved forward. There were only 20 yards separating them from the police. Juli shut off the lights of the SUV and put it in reverse, letting it drift soundlessly back into the cover of the alleyway, but she stayed close enough to watch.

  A teen ran to the front of the crowd and launched a 40-ounce beer bottle at the police. It somersaulted through the air and smashed into the face of a beefy cop who had picked the wrong time to look to the side instead of straight ahead. He collapsed like he’d been shot and the two officers beside him raised their rifles, ready to shoot.

  “Hold your fire! That’s an order!” a blond-haired cop who tried to retain control screamed into a bullhorn. Then he turned toward the crowd. “There is a curfew in effect! Go back to your homes! You’re safe there!”

  “The fuck we are! Fucking pigs just want to make it easier to butcher us!” That came from a giant black man with a shaved head and bushy gray beard. He held a shotgun, and he had it leveled at the rows of police. “We ain’t stupid!”

  The giant cocked the shotgun and held his finger to the trigger.

  “Put down the weapon!” the cop in charge shouted.

  The stand-off lasted maybe three seconds but felt like a minute. And then the giant fired.

  Buckshot whistled through the air and bounced off of and into the police officers. Most received minor wounds if injured at all but one officer caught a BB in the eye and went to his knees holding his face. Blood seeped out from his fingers.

  “Don’t shoot! Hold your fire!”

  One officer threw a can of tear gas into the rioters. Two more followed. Any chance of the stalemate ending peacefully went up in thick, yellow smoke.

  Someone started shooting. Juli couldn’t tell which group fired first, but it didn’t matter because more shots immediately rang out in both directions. Bodies hit the ground on each side. And then the two groups raced toward each other. The battle was on.

  Two teens beat a cop to death with baseball bats.

  An officer with a rifle fired again and again and again, dropping half a dozen people in mere seconds.

  Someone tossed Molotov cocktails and a trio of cops burst aflame.

  A cop shot a boy who looked to be no more than 10 in the throat then, as the boy laid dying in front of him, the cop put the pistol to his own temple and blew the top half of his head off.

  Then, Juli saw a rioter who’d been collapsed, dead on the pavement, jump to its feet and run at the cops. It tackled an officer to the ground, then leaned in and ate away the cop’s face.

  “Oh, dear God,” Juli said to herself. She couldn’t believe it was happening. Why didn’t I stay in my house and swallow a bottle of pills? That would have been better than being out here with these monsters with nowhere to go. out here, she was waiting to be killed, probably painfully and horribly. Out here she was going to die alone.

  The blond cop who had been in charge, as if such a thing were possible, tried to fight off another cop who had a knife sticking out of its throat. The cop beat it with the bullhorn but two others zombies joined the fray. They overpowered him and Juli could hear him shrieking as he was eaten alive.

  Within minutes it seemed like half the crowd were members of the undead and this new faction fought together to annihilate the living. Cops attacked fellow cops. Rioters ate other rioters. So much blood flowed that Juli saw it gushing down the gutter and into the sewer grates.

  She was frozen, staring out at the carnage unfolding before her, when a zombie slammed into the grill of her SUV. It was a female police officer, her ginger ponytail twisted askew under her riot helmet. Her throat was torn out and Juli could see gristly tendons and arteries exposed. The zombie pulled itself up the hood and grabbed onto the windshield wiper. Its face pressed against the glass smearing red splotches across it.

  “Get off!” Juli yelled. She hit the wipers which swished to and fro and dragged the zombie’s hand back and forth with it like an undead wave. Juli smacked her hand against the inside of the windshield. “Get off!” she tried again, not sure why she was even saying the pointless words.

  The zombie’s face was even with hers and she looked into its dull, gray eyes. There was nothing alive left inside those eyes. It made her think of the eyes of a swordfish Mark had caught on one of their vacations to Key West and later had mounted on the wall of his man cave.

  As Juli stared, mesmerized, into the dead woman’s eyes, the zombie’s head bounced off the windshield. The skin on its forehead split and blood poured out. Then it smashed into the windshield again, the bones in its face shattered, and its eyes closed.

  Juli looked past it to see a black woman in her sixties holding a baseball bat. A bloody baseball bat. She wore her hair in tight cornrows and had thick, horn rimmed glasses. Behind her was a boy in an Orioles t-shirt. He held a rag
against his head and had blood running down his face.

  The woman scurried to the passenger side door and leaned close to the glass barrier.

  “Let us in, please.”

  Beyond them Juli saw the street was almost entirely occupied by zombies. The few living people were being attacked, eaten, and reanimating in blinding speed.

  “I’m begging you! Please!”

  Juli hit the unlock button and the woman jerked open the rear passenger door. She pushed the boy in first, then climbed in behind him.

  “I’m Juli.”

  The woman peered at her through the gaps in the front seats. “That’s nice. Now, how about you get us the hell out of here?”

  Juli put the vehicle in reverse and backed up as quickly as she felt comfortable going between the narrow walls. In her mirror she saw the cop she’d earlier ran over was now crawling toward her.

  The bum he’d been eating was now on his feet and sprinting toward them. She hit the cop first. The bumper connected with his face with a hard crunch. When she hit the bum, he careened off the SUV, hit the wall, and then bounced back into the path of the vehicle which rocked up and down, up and down as the front and rear wheels rolled over him.

  Juli glanced at the woman. “Sorry about that.”

  The woman shook her head. “Honey, you ain’t got to apologize for nothing if you can get us out of the city.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  They exited the alley and Juli turned back in the direction from which she’d entered town. They passed by the same buildings, which were now fully engulfed in flames. Several zombies were also on fire and shambled along the streets. Two zombies, charred completely black, ate a soldier with a flame thrower still strapped to his back.

  “It’s the end of days...” the woman whispered.

  “What?”

  She looked away from the death and to Juli. “Nothing. Don’t mind me, miss. I’m Helen.” She patted the boy on his thigh. “And this is Jeremy. My grandson.”