LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series

by Laszlo,Jeremy

  A decent man would lay on the horn to try and disperse them. I am not a decent man.

  I barely feel them smacking into the nose of the truck or the crunching of their bones under the tires or their screams filling the air, or the horrified shrieks of the surviving women and children as I pull out onto the street, smacking a few with the tail of my new ride, hurling them out into the street with me. They’re charging after me, but the doors are locked and I’m still going at full speed. I don’t know for sure. I counted five, maybe six or seven. That’s a good number to take with me on the way out. Fuck them all. Fuck Atlanta.

  Chapter Six

  Atlanta is an escapee’s wet dream. Everything that these psychopaths have done seems to be working perfectly for me now. The roads are empty, there’s not a single Zombie out there, and all the people who survived the assault have taken cover, fled, or are trying to flag me down. I quickly realize that my bloodlust for these fuckers is never going to be satisfied. I swerve and veer off the road for them, trying to take out as many as I can before I leave. One guy I catch with my fender and squish across the exterior of a parked car, leaving a blood smear across the car and the dead man lying in the road while a woman screams in horror and the others charge after me, throwing spears and axes at the back of the truck. There’s nothing they can do. They’re completely on the wrong side of this fight. I’ve won, they just don’t know it yet, or they do and they’re just too stupid to accept it.

  This is my city now.

  I run down another man who is just wandering in the middle of the street with blood spattered all over his white cloak, his hands outstretched, and his head tilted back, beseeching his cruel god for some sort of enlightenment. I suppose that I’m the answer to his prayer. Death is the only escape this world has left to offer. He smacks into the grill of the truck and his head splits upon the edge, splattering blood across the hood before he is sucked under the truck and vanishes. I don’t care. These aren’t my people. They aren’t anyone’s people. None of us are people. We just are.

  There aren’t very many of them left as I put distance between myself and their camp. I begin to notice that the streets are empty and abandoned by people entirely, so I pull over to the side of the road, parking next to the line of sabotaged cars moved over to the side of the street. I kill the ignition and step out, looking at the four story buildings all around me, completely clueless as to where I actually am. I don’t have a map and I haven’t been paying attention to any of the road signs. Stepping out of the truck, I look around, listening to the sounds of the vacant city. There are no horns any longer. There are no shouts or chanting prayers. There’s nothing but the dead city and its tomb-like silence.

  This is my city and it is mine to do with as I choose. I walk around to the back of the truck and wonder if I killed Dean when I fled the encampment, or if he’d died during the uprising. I’m assuming there’s still a fair amount of blood to be shed before Dean gets control of the survivors. There will inevitably be the power struggle of those who still side with the religious fanatics and then those who side with the more pragmatic Dean, who simply wants to be a tyrant, living out his days in comfort and pleasure before the end comes. He’s the kind of man that will probably be a cannibal by the end of the week. I figure that I should give them a hand.

  Climbing into the back of the truck, I grab one of the smaller, gallon containers of gas and drop down onto the street. Walking to the passenger side of the truck, I throw open the door and search though my pack for the lighter I’ve been carrying for what seems like ages. Stuffing it into my pocket, I cross the street and splash a quarter of the container’s contents onto the wooden door before lighting it and watching the door engulf itself in a wall of fire before moving back across the street to where the truck is parked. Turning, I lock my incendiary gaze on the pawnshop I’m parked next to. Again, I douse the wall and door with gasoline before igniting it and letting the street burn.

  Back inside the truck, I drive on, as a wall of heat and destruction rises in my rear view. I linger just long enough to see the fires begin to feed hungrily on the buildings, consuming the exteriors in enough fire to leave me confident that the whole block will burn. I drive several streets before stopping and repeating this, lighting two buildings on fire before driving on and doing it all again. I empty all of the gallon containers of gas before I’m satisfied that this whole city is going to go up in flames, a pyre to the god of madness and vengeance.

  “Here you go, Lindsay,” I say to myself. Maybe I’m praying. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just talking to her. Or at least, I hope she’s hearing me. “Here’s your funeral pyre, like the Vikings did. Like they did in the old days.”

  Smoke rises up in to the sky, a fragrant offering to the cruel and unforgiving gods that now hold sway over the world. I hope they like it. I park on an overpass that’s crowded and jammed with cars, watching the fires rise. I want to sit here and watch the whole damn city burn, so I do. I pull an MRE out of the back of the truck and climb up onto the bloody hood, watching the fires swell and grow with the awe of a child at the circus.

  At first, I can track my zigzag pattern I took to leave the city, watching a trail of fire grow for whoever wants to follow me. I’m sure someone will. I’m nearly certain that they’ll show up soon with a pack of killers looking to bury me. They probably won’t even care about their faith anymore. It’ll all be personal. I eat with my fingers, chicken pesto pasta, the greatest, tastiest thing that I have ever stuffed in my mouth. I watch from my seat as the trail begins to grow and spread, soon there are more and more buildings burning and a curtain of black smoke rises up toward the darkening skies of the stormy weather. The slate gray is quickly corrupted by the growing darkness of the smoke. I eat the entire MRE and open another. This one says that it’s buffalo chicken. It tastes like it and I thank God again for the armed forces and those geniuses whoever invented these.

  When the world is overwhelmingly quiet, I begin to feel that it’s time to leave. The fanatics haven’t cleared off the interstate, in fact, I’m sure they did the exact opposite. The more I drive, the more I’m beginning to suspect that they’ve been jamming up the roads with cars to funnel travelers into their territory to kill or convert. I try to find a way out, but it takes an hour just to find a passable road out and then another hour to bash my way through the parked car barrier at its entrance before I can actually leave the city. By this time, the inferno is growing more and more. Atlanta is going to be gone, just like Detroit. There’s no way that they’re going to quench the fires unless a monsoon happens to pass over the city.

  “Sorry, Dean,” I say as I’m passing a sign telling me that I am now leaving Atlanta.

  I drive for hours, before I decide that the silence is too much. I’m concentrating on avoiding parked cars and even more terrified of booby traps that the fanatics might have set up to stop invaders. Looking at the dash, I decide that the silence is killing me and that I need to at least try and find something on the radio. Most of the airwaves are dead, but I stumble upon something that makes me feel sick to my stomach.

  “Are you looking for sanctuary?” A woman’s voice that’s as soft as velvet and as sweet as honey speaks to me with an alluring tone. “Are you tired of the dangers out in the wide, deadly world? Then come to Atlanta. Come to the Faithful and we will offer you warmth and comfort. Come and rest your weary head. Come and find salvation. Come, to Atlanta.” That’s the last I hear of her before the Carter Family starts singing to me that I should keep on the sunny side of life. I leave it here, listening to them for a while as I drive down the road, smashing into cars that are strewn chaotically every which way they want. It seems to be on an hour long playlist of old time gospel and blue grass before the woman starts calling me back to Atlanta again. Eventually, she shuts up and I’m left to contemplate the sunny side of life again.

  I pass several towns, but I keep to the interstate. As I put distance between me
and Atlanta, the only way to truly see the road is to follow the parked and abandoned vehicles. Eventually, I’m left with the crooked and leaning power poles with their dangling, dead power lines as a guide to where I need to be going. There are half-submerged bodies in the hardening muck, who had either died a long time ago or were caught in the last series of storms. I don’t give them much thought. The dead can bury themselves. Hell, the world is taking care of that. I keep my foot on the gas and wind past another dead car and keep on traveling south, heading toward Florida.

  Whenever I pass the towns, there’s always a sinking feeling in my stomach that wonders if I’m going to be shot at, but I don’t think that there are very many people in the area with guns. I do see a small encampment on an off ramp, a bunch of dark and dingy faces looking over their shoulders, staring at my truck without a single word or intention to stop me. They don’t shoot at me and they don’t bother trying to wave me down. A small child stands next to a group of men and women around a campfire, he raises a hand and waves at me before I pass him. Part of me wants to stop and give him an MRE, but that would just encourage opportunists to follow after me and to slit my throat while I sleep.

  Eventually, I’m out of range for the broadcast and I’m left in silence. I’m abandoned with my thoughts and as I drive, I can’t help but think of Lindsay. I think about her dying in my arms and leaving her at the mercy of those killers. What kind of a friend was I to her? I let her die. If she’d just abandoned me, I would have been the one left for dead and she would have been well away from the city, on her own, and more importantly, alive. It weighs on my heart, how everything turned out. Keeping my foot on the gas, I drive until my eyelids grow too heavy and I decide that it’s time for me to pull off somewhere.

  I spot a house that has collapsed over, but the barn next to it looks as stable and steady as the day it had been built. Veering off the road, I cut across what was probably a farm once, but now, it’s my road. I pull up in front of the barn and I sit there, looking over at the house that has a tractor rammed into its side. This appears to be the source of the collapse and leaves me with a dozen questions that I fear will never be answered. Most of all is the question as to who the fuck drives a tractor into the side of a house? But eventually, I turn my gaze to the barn and I can’t help but wish that she was here with me. I wish we’d both made off like bandits, without food and without water, rather than to make it this far with all this food and water on my own.

  Did I do this to her? Am I the reason why she’s dead and not still alive in Bellbrook? I pull the truck slowly off the road as the pain hits me. I did this. I had to be the one who took the blame. After all, I’m all that’s left. Even if the psychopathic fanatics somehow track me all the way this far south, I’m the one left standing. I’m the last player. The queen surrounded by pawns. Looking around all that I’ve done, I can’t help but wonder how this all came to the breaking point. We were good together. We were an excellent team. We made it almost across America together. We could have made it all the way. How did all of this happen? What kind of luck exists in the world still? The kind that just robs me of every last shred of hope I have. It’s enough for me to wonder whether I should be looking for higher meaning in the fact that terrible shit keeps happening to me and I keep getting back up.

  I step out of the truck and feel the hardening earth beneath my feet. Whatever nutrients were still in the soil are vanishing, running off, leaving us with this hard concrete. Soon, it won’t matter if we find ways to make new soil. The whole earth will be too hard to keep us alive. Going around to the passenger side of the truck, I take out my pack and a pair of bolt cutters from under the seat. I’m going to need them. I approach the old barn, looking at it for a moment, wondering if I open those doors, will unspeakable horrors come pouring out? I figure it doesn’t matter. They’ll come out, I’ll run, something terrible will happen to me, I’ll wake up, and I’ll keep moving. Life is set in this cycle. I approach the old barn without any fear. If death is waiting for me on the other side, so be it. I’ve been waiting for death. He’s been a little out of touch with me lately. I figure we should get reacquainted soon enough.

  None of this is going to end well.

  I can feel it in my stomach.

  Taking out the bolt cutters, I cut the rusting chain around the handles. The side with the lock slithers down, tightening the slack. I give the chain a little help and it falls to the earth, thumping and coiling together in a heap. I stare at the chain for a moment, lost in my thoughts and worries. How much longer? How much longer until I’m dead? It’s not that I want to die. It’s that I know that it’s coming. Am I going to make it all the way to Florida, or am I going to end up dead after so far and so long? Is this my fate? I push the doors open and look inside the barn. Thankfully, it’s nearly vacant. It stinks of rotten straw and the long stale odor of rotten animals. After the unknown months of abandonment, there’s probably nothing left but bones and skin. I don’t bother looking. It’s not that bad. I’ll leave the doors open for a while, let the place air out.

  Making my way back to the truck, I kill the ignition and sit in the cab, staring at the barn for a moment, watching the clouds lazily move across the sky in the distance. I don’t know what it is about the clouds, but they seem like the last relics of the past. I watch them and try not to think about anything. It’s the thinking that hurts the most, the loss sneaking in through my thoughts. I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this alone.

  I don’t even have a memento of her, outside of my dildo abomination that I have strapped to my stump. My life, I guess, that’s another little token that she’s given me. I close my eyes and try to picture her, but I can hardly even do that. All I feel is alone, empty, and forgotten. It’s almost as if I’m holding them responsible for leaving me. Them—everyone. Every last person on the planet. Where have all the sane, normal, rational people gone and why did they think that it was okay to leave me here? To abandon me with all the delusional psychopaths and cannibalistic freaks? How is any of this fair?

  I suppose I shouldn’t be demanding life to be fair, that’s not how it works. Life is what it is and that’s a nice philosophy to take until all the shit starts raining from the sky. It’s almost as if since there’s so few people left in the world, all the bad luck is being forced onto those of us who are too stupid or too unlucky to die. You get one bad day after another and then it’s all supposed to make you adapt to it, right? I’m supposed to just understand and be okay with everything? So when do I start getting used to all the misery and death? When do I get a reprieve and relish in that sweet, sweet apathy? Am I doing something wrong here? I’m not supposed to feel this way. I’m supposed to feel nothing. God, I wish I felt nothing.

  After a while, I turn the ignition on and pull the truck around and back into the barn, slowly letting the shadows consume the truck like a great, gaping mouth. I look out through the open doors at the flat, desolate world and wonder what it is I’m fighting for anymore. I want to see the girls so bad, but God, it’s such a wretched place. What if they’re mixed up in something like those nut jobs back in Atlanta? What if they’re in some sort of cult? How am I supposed to save them if that’s what I find?

  To the east, there are dark clouds on the horizon. Another storm is raging out there, but thankfully, the wind is headed east. I’m sick of the rain and the muck. I’ll take the heat for a while. Instead, I lean back in the seat and watch the storm raging. There’s nothing more beautiful than a summer storm on the horizon.

  I got her killed. That’s all I can think about, but it’s not an unnerving truth. It’s just the reality of the situation. I. Got. Her. Killed. I got Lindsay killed. I can almost feel her presence still, near me. I don’t believe in ghosts, other than myself, but if they were real, I’d like to think that she was near me. I‘d like to think that she would linger just long enough for me to be comforted. I didn’t love her in the way she wanted to be loved, but God, I needed her. I loved her in the way I
could, the only way I could. I loved her as a dear friend, even if she’d been in my life for little more than a few weeks. Everything is more precious in this world, including friends. Now I’m alone, in a barn, wondering where it all went bottoms up. I’m not comfortable without her. I sit in the darkness of the barn, staring out at the road and wonder how much longer until I reach Gainesville. How much longer until I can find someone else to be with. No one could replace Lindsay, but I’m beginning to think that I should get a pet. I need something. I need someone. I need to know that there is a creature or being in this universe that still gives a fuck about me. I know that it’s a little too demanding for this day and age, but it’s what I’ve got.

  Stepping out of the truck, I walk to the doors and pull them shut, locking out the storm and the desolation, leaving me in the gloom of the barn, the last normal person on this fucking planet in a barn full of dead animals.

  Chapter Seven

  I pick out the pork gravy with sausage for breakfast and as I eat it, I walk around the house, wondering what the hell happened here. Why did this man decide that it was a smart idea to drive his tractor into the side of his house and bring it down on top of him? Upon closer inspection, I discover that the man who drove the tractor into the house has, in fact, been dead since the adventure, the majority of the second story has collapsed down on top of the tractor and I can see his dirty jeans and his booted foot sticking out of the wreckage. I wonder if there was anything worth looking for through the house or if he pretty much took care of all of that and decided to go out in the fashion that best suited him. I’d like to think that this is what happened here. If the dumbass just lost control of his tractor, then that was a more tragic end to a rather perplexing scenario. I like my idea better. Suicide was a little more poetic to me and right now, I needed all the damn poetry that I could get my hands on. I head back to the barn, leaving the man alone.