by Hunt, Jack
The Renegades
Jack Hunt
Direct Response Publishing
Copyright © 2015 by Jack Hunt
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
THE RENEGADES is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Dax, Matt, Baja, Specs, Jess and Izzy
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
Synopsis
The Renegades
“The pages turn themselves in this crazy post-apocalyptic horror. Full of fun, laughter, memorable characters and a strong zombie story. Its amazing action and adventure will keep you glued until the end!”
When a deadly virus overruns the small town of Castle Rock, Nevada, a group of misfits must band together to defend their town from Zombies.
Prologue
Ready? I guess this is the part where I’m meant to tell you how everyone died. You know, how some out-of-control disease went crazy and started turning everyone into flesh-eating, blood-spewing cannibals.
Oh, excuse me, I mean zombies.
In fact, that reminds me — let’s get something out of the way real quick. You’re probably thinking shit, man, are these the slow suckers, or fast ones that break the rules?
Rules? Whatever rules existed, died the moment humans did.
And to be honest, I’m kind of glad, as I’ve never really been a fan of rules.
I can’t stand them. I would rather chew down on my overweight neighbor’s dirty underpants than get in line behind a bunch of mindless zombies.
Oh, hold on a minute. Did I say zombies? I meant Z’s. Or maybe walkers, crawlers, biters, roamers, skin-eaters, the undead, monsters… ah shit, does it really matter?
These bitches will tear your head off and rip you a new one, and I don’t think they really care what they’re called. By all accounts they shouldn’t even be moving.
Because when you see a decapitated head still trying to bite you…you kind of rule out what these suckers should or shouldn’t be doing.
But, for the super anal, uptight individuals that fill up wastepaper baskets with sticky tissues, can recite every Star Wars dialogue, and have forced the world to use the eye roll.
Let me lay it out for you.
The world as you and I know it, is no longer as you and I know it. Yeah, kiss goodbye to school graduations, getting laid at work parties, watching award shows, and finding your place inside a pecking order.
As the playing field just got leveled.
How? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m still stuck in shitville, trying to stay alive.
But here’s what I do know.
It’s kill or be killed now. And believe me, I don’t like it any better than you. There’s nothing more I would rather be doing than binge watching a show on Netflix, cozying up to some honey, and sucking down a few brews.
But that ship sailed, my friend, the moment I had to pull the trigger on my best friend. Well, theoretically, he was no longer my friend. He was a zombie, I mean a Z, oh shit, are we back to that again?
ZOMBIEGEDDON
A Day Earlier…
At the crack of the pistol, my best friend shit his pants.
No, I’m not kidding.
So my name is Johnny Goode, but my pals call me Johnny B. Goode after that god-awful song by Chuck Berry. To be fair to Chuck, I actually liked it, at least until I lost count of the number of times my friends had sung it.
Now, I can’t fault them, it was Dax who first started calling me that. Dax is my older brother and the bane of my existence.
Dax is twenty-two, four years older than me, and in comparison, larger than life in more ways than one. As we are ex-military brats, our father had high expectations on both of us. Dax excelled and joined the Marines. He lasted four years, not that it mattered to my father. He’d always been the golden child. Me, not so, I’m more like the black sheep of the family. A freak.
But I’m not. A freak, I mean. I just don’t ascribe to all the macho bullshit that other kids my age are into. Don’t get me wrong, I am known to play a mean game of baseball from time to time, but you won’t find me holed away watching sports every weekend, or hollering like a lunatic on Super Bowl night. I have better things to do with my time.
Seeking out adventure being one, not that I’ve stumbled across much of it in this town.
So we create it. Or at least we try to. Yeah, perhaps that’s why he calls me a freak; though to be honest I think it has more to do with those I hang out with, than me. But I could be wrong.
“Go, go, go, Johnny, go, go.” the others crooned as they raced forward elbowing their way through the crowd of runners.
“Hey, guys, wait up!” Matt yelled, waddling behind us desperately trying to keep up while juggling brown slosh that was probably now making its way down his pant leg.
We were in tears laughing. It happened every year.
Matt’s father owns the gun store. When Matt was eight, in a strange attempt to turn his kid into a man, his father took him out to Cottonwood Gully just beyond the town to fire off a few rounds. Seems pretty normal, right? Trouble was, Matt shot himself in the ass before he even had a chance to aim. Since then, any sudden loud sounds can cause his bowels to barf.
Trust me, it’s not a pretty sight, or smell for that matter.
Racing our way down Main Street, dodging the sad excuses for the undead, who were making feeble attempts to rip blood-red tags velcroed around our waist, I wondered how much longer we would do this. Confused?
Let me explain.
We live in a small town in the western part of the United States, at least we did until the shit storm of the century happened. We’re still not sure when it started, just that it made its way here.
So what’s it like here? How do I put this tactfully? Find the largest desert in the United States, surround it with mountains, stick a few wooden shacks in the middle with only one road in and out, and it still wouldn’t come close to how isolated it feels to live here.
We are eighty miles of dirt road from civilization.
And we live above a bar. Go figure!
That’s right, after my father retired from the military, he bought a bar called the Black Dog Saloon. He called it a savvy investment. I think it was just a way for him to get free liquor. That guy could drink like a fish, and still stand upright at the end of a night.
As for our mother, she passed away from cancer when I was just ten.
It’s unfair. I wish she’d got more years. But that’s life. At least the way I see it.
Anyway, this town is like a scene from a John Wayne movie. I kid you not. Wooden sidewalks, historic buildings, gaudy saloons, an eclectic collection of stores selling everything including your mother’s underpants.
It’s truly the Wild West in modern times.
And, with an ever-decreasing population of just over nine hundred idiots, at least that’s what it was the last time anyone counted heads, you could say we are one hair away from being labeled a ghost town. In fact it’s the reason why you won’t find big chain superstores or fast food joints here, well, that’s not exactly the truth, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
You see, our town is one of the last remnants of the Gold Rush. A min
ing town, built on a large network of mines that at one time offered promises of riches, now all it offers is fuck all besides the odd sandstorm that blows up in your face. But, it does have three museums, and offers mine tours every weekend. Which keeps history alive, and us bored out of our skulls.
Yep, Castle Rock is a shithole in the middle of Nevada, run by assholes who thought it would be fun to keep it that way. Nah, I’m not jaded, well, maybe just a little. But when they open a McDonald’s after you have put in eighteen years of living here, and everyone treats it like a mall, you kinda know it’s time to get the hell out. I just never imagined it would go down quite like this.
A crawler stumbled towards us, blood gushing from his mouth.
“Fuck, this stuff tastes like shit,” he said.
Now you’re probably wondering why the undead is speaking.
Like I said, we live in a small town.
The only time the population ever increases beyond a thousand is around Halloween, at which point it swells to almost three thousand people. You see, our town, being considered one of the most haunted places in Nevada, draws in every whack job in the state wanting to hang out in a cemetery. And beyond that, every October for the past nine years the good folks of Castle Rock have held an annual run called Zombiegeddon.
Until all hell broke loose, that was the closest we came to facing the undead.
Eight miles of running down Main Street, around cemeteries, railway tunnels, mining bunkers, and other creepy ass uninhabited buildings while being chased by morons in zombie outfits.
So yeah, you could say we perfected the art of dodging and fighting zombies long before the real thing hit. How many others can say that?
Of course, every year the organizers try and up the ante, changing the course and whatnot, throwing in new obstacles all with the intent of throwing you off your game.
So what’s the point of busting your ass around ancient landmarks?
Well, if your team happens to get over the finish line with one blood flag, you get a victory medal and a T-shirt. Whoop-de-doo. Sounds like a blast, right?
But it’s not all fun and games. You see they have rules. Of course they do, I mean what better way to crush all the fun, than to throw in a few whoppers here and there?
No Pets
No Drugs
No Alcohol
No Tackling
No Weapons
Like, are you serious?
Why don’t we just go ahead throw in…No Running?
Without stopping for a second, Baja pulled out a pair of nunchucks from behind his back and took out the legs of a wannabe Z. The kid landed hard, spitting dirt.
“The rules said no weapons, dipshit.”
“Suck it,” Baja tossed him the bird before bursting into laughter and rushing on by him.
Like I said, we aren’t ones for rules. And by we, I mean the Renegades.
Now, hold on… I know… sounds crazy, but we didn’t come up with that ourselves. It was the name of our Little League team. Yeah, that’s how we met. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly Little League. It was more of a way for our parents who owned stores to keep us out of trouble, while they drank themselves into a stupor.
Toss a few seven-year-olds a ball, a bat and give them a few letterman-type jackets with the letter R on them, and they’ll believe anything. At least we did, until we reached an age where we found better ways to spend our time.
That’s when the real shenanigans started.
I guess the name stuck, as people still call us by it, eleven years later. So who are we?
First, there’s my best friend, Matt Callen, the guy who shit his pants. Yeah, then there is Nick Halliway, or as we like to call him, Baja. He’s the only African American living in Castle Rock. Well, besides his family. He earned the nickname Baja after taking his parents’ vintage 1979 Country Squire station wagon for an off-road joyride at age twelve. I’m pretty sure he got the idea after watching National Lampoon’s Vacation. Anyway, the local boys in blue chased him for four miles before he flipped it. Since then, even the cops call him Baja.
Now I should mention, he’s a bit of a Bruce Lee nut. Every year for the run he shows up in a yellow and black jumpsuit like the one seen in Game of Death. All the rest of the time he resembles a normal guy. As normal as you could get for someone who wears Bruce Lee T-shirts, owns every movie he made, and can recite dialogue on command. Now I would like to say he’s good at martial arts but I’ve seen my mother be more effective with a flyswatter than he is with a pair of nunchucks. No, he’s not insane, just a few sandwiches short of a picnic. But if you needed a wingman, it would be him. He is as loyal as they come. Anyway his parents run the museum directly across the road from my old man’s saloon.
Then there is Wayland Rudd. Or Specs. He’s a smart guy, maybe a little too smart. He has a knack of creating the weirdest shit you’ve ever seen. If you needed something blown up, melted, or generally wired together like something out of the A-Team, he was your man. That’s because his parents were preppers.
They owned a military surplus store in junkyard alley. I would often go over to his house and find him watching TV in a hazmat suit. The kid had serious issues. He was paranoid about a chemical attack. But that’s only because his father filled his head with end of the world stories. Trust me, even you would act a little crazy if you heard what they told him at age five.
But man, were they on the ball.
Sleeping over at Specs’s house when I was a kid, was like a guide to living like a caveman. You see, they didn’t cook on ordinary stoves. No, when they did anything, they had to do everything Rambo style and use various collapsible stoves, and indistinguishable items that the modern day family wouldn’t even have in their camper.
Hell, his folks made the Boy Scouts look like amateurs. Yeah, they were weird. I have to be honest; like most in the town I thought they had lost the plot. Now, I know they were the only sane people in Castle Rock.
“Hey Johnny,” Jessica shouted from behind the barriers. I only turned my head for a few seconds, but it was long enough to find another one of my blood tags ripped from my waist.
“Shit.”
These suckers were fast. And even harder to dodge when Jessica was swinging her double D’s at me. Jessica Wright was my girlfriend. At least she had been for the past two years. She was new to the town. At least, two years was considered new around here. So like any caring citizen I offered to be her tour guide. Oh, her father’s a cop. And he doesn’t exactly like me.
Anyway, back to the fake Z’s, before the real ones showed up.
There were three types of idiots dressed as zombies running around every October.
Fresh – they spread them out throughout the initial part of the race. There were hardly any of them. They were meant to be the ones that had just resurrected. So you could say, none of their bits were falling off…you know…little decay and whatnot… oh and they could run. Yeah, these bitches were fast.
Next you had the mature – please! You’d think they could have come up with a better name for them than mature. But… no. These ones have been walking around a while. Let’s say their appearance of decay had reached the… oh shit, you just dropped your balls on the floor level. There are a lot of those, but thankfully they are not as fast as the fresh ones.
Then of course, we have the rotted, or as we called them — the hordes. They are the slowest ones. They move in large groups. They can barely move but they take up so much space, you pretty much had to use distractions and work as a team to get past them.
The organizers said it promoted community spirit.
We just plowed through them swinging a baseball bat and nunchucks and waving a stick of fake dynamite that we just so happened to sneak into the event. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what they meant by community spirit. But we got a kick out of seeing the horror on their faces.
Now, I can’t say they wanted us to be in the race. In fact they tried to ban us from it multiple times over t
he past four years, but Specs’s parents had some close ties with the mayor of the town, who was also as mad as shit. And was just as liable to show up in a hazmat suit as they were. So, yeah, we were fortunate to have the mayor on our side.
So that’s all of us. A bit of a motley crew, and liable to create some havoc in a small town, but nothing outrageous. We didn’t imagine we would stay this way forever. We were in our last year of high school. This was meant to be our last time together.
Our one last fuck you to the man.
Soon we would all head off to college. Grow brains and join the rest of the mindless zombies that made up society. Maybe that would have been a good thing if what took place next, hadn’t happened.
* * *
It all started for us, the moment we entered the train tunnel. Castle Rock had one of the most famous railways that had ever been built. It was full of abandoned train cars that dated back to 1868. Rusted and burnt out. A number of movie production companies came up here on a regular basis to film horror movies.
The railway line stretched beyond our town to Reno, and Carson City. The further you went out of the city, the less you saw railway lines as they had pulled up the infrastructure. There had originally been seven tunnels, but six of them had been buried, this was the only one that remained open. However, our town had clung to this little piece with the help of a few wealthy investors. It was history.
A moment earlier, we had been out in the blinding afternoon sun. Now, we were inside and the sound of rocks crunching beneath our boots echoed down the tunnel.
It was pitch-black inside.
The idea of making you go through the tunnel was to freak you out by surrounding you in darkness and then either having Z’s jump out at you, or having what they called the living insane grab you and throw you into the Z’s. In previous years, we just went around the tunnel, as our goal was always trying to get to the end of the race and win. This year, however, we were feeling a little courageous.