THE DEAD NATIONS’ARMY
DNA: Code Flesh
Part I
War within the War
between the Flesh
By Alan Dale
The DEAD NATIONS’ ARMY SERIES
© 2011, is the creative property of Alan Dale, and is registered with the Library of Congress. Any attempt to reproduce this product without consent from the author is prohibited and is subject to legal action.
DEDICATION:
I want to dedicate this first part of Dead Nations’ Army to those who have supported my zombie/social message cause. I can’t start without Andrea Stender who listened to parts of the story while working the late shift and now represents us in the national military. Bless you. Obviously, all my Facebook fans who helped keep me going, especially the guys from Zombie Apocalypse Preparation (Just got off the phone with you Scott!) Also, thanks to Dan Chek, Amy Durst, and Ken Policard. Special thanks to Thia Allen who is my best friend and the woman that may have to follow me anywhere I go…
INTRODUCTION
Feed me…
They never knew…they don’t know…how can they??
I can smell them. My mouth, what’s left of it, can still know what they taste like.
Barely.
Just barely.
I don’t really care about the taste anymore. I only need to feed. I have to soon. It won’t stop asking for more.
It consumes me.
Feed me…
I don’t even remember when it happened to me. Truly, I don’t. All I know is I am here. Here, in this destroyed land so many of us called home. A home that is now destroyed and left for dead is as gone as I am.
I am dead or so they said.
I died the day they came, or well, when what is now, “we,” came.
It is so hard to remember things.
So hard.
Didn’t I once have a wife? Two kids too, Brenda and Bobby. Billy? Bonnie?
My brain isn’t mine anymore, it is the damned Hell coursing through my veins even when there is no more blood in them. I lost my blood the first time when they bit me. They bit me so many times. I didn’t know if I should scream.
Cry.
Pray.
For now I prey.
Feed me…
The news. Yes! Television? Or was it the radio told me about the day the “scrats” arrived in New Jersey. A boat, boats, planes? How the fuck do you expect me to remember any of it. My brain is rotting. I am supposedly dead and I haven’t eaten in days.
I haven’t found you. I haven’t touched you. I haven’t grabbed you.
I haven’t eaten you yet.
Feed me…
God, what is happening to me?
To all of us?
God?
What God does this to me?
Plop.
What on earth was that? I look down and I see my right arm. It is on the ground. It is no longer a part of me anymore. When I don’t eat, I fall apart. When I fall apart it means it is not being sustained and it is making my body pay. My body is being killed by what keeps me moving, keeps me needing, forces me to move, to hunt.
To kill.
Feed me…
But they don’t get it. Those live ones don’t get it. They never get it. Even when they shot at me and those similar scrats like me, they never get it.
They are my food. I am their enemy. All those who “live” simply want me to die.
Again.
But they don’t get it. They don’t understand. I am not the enemy. I am them trapped in a body of a dead man. I am still here. Still knowing everything I am doing. What I do to you. What I did to your neighbor. When I ate her liver and chewed off her fingers.
I knew.
And it tasted so fucking good the whole time I hated myself for doing it.
But what can I do about it? I am dead, or so they say.
A scream.
I am near. It is a live one. It is someone who calls for me. They don’t even realize they are in my dish and I am the diner.
I am going to eat that scream.
Because you need me to…
Feed you…
I see others who were like me no longer like me because they lie on the roads I walk. Gone, rotted away bodies of the dead forever finished in their hunt to survive. They couldn’t find you. But I am. I am. I am. I am going to eat that screamer. Unless someone else like me beats me to it.
I am dying.
Again.
Why can’t I move faster? This thing. This Hell in my body consumes me. Pushes me. Tells me to keep going. To go get fat. To get fed.
Feed it…
How can I? I haven’t in days. And I am now slowing.
Plop.
I see at an angle. I feel like a see-saw. Of course that’s what happens when I see my left leg below the knee has fallen away. They bit me there a lot of times when I was still real. When people still cared about me. When I mattered. Now they only want me dead…
Again.
Those fucking DNA. They think I am the enemy. How can I be? It is not my fault this happened to me. It is not about me wanting to eat you.
I just really have to or I am going to stop being dead-alive.
So what if you taste good when I do eat you? It is not my fault.
None of this was our fault.
Well it was someone’s fault.
God damn it.
Feed me…
I can’t. The scream is too farcie hear more. Oh please, move closer, put your firm thigh across my lips so I can tear a heaping chunk of flesh off of it and stop the terror driving me. The hunger is not mine I am just the vessel. We are all the vessels of this evil thrown upon us.
Plop.
No arm. No leg. Just me. I have fallen. I don’t see you. I see nothing. I am fading. I am dying.
Again…
But I was never dead. I wasn’t dead. You didn’t get it. You didn’t get it. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t.
I won’t forgive you. I can’t forgive you. None of us should. No we shouldn’t. We will just keep being hungry. We will keep eating you. You will keep dying.
Like we never really did and you always wanted us to.
We will simply continue.
Feed me…
Scream!
I can’t feed you. It is too far away. We are so far away because none of us really got it did we. I am going now. I am finally getting rid of you. I won’t be hungry anymore. Sad to think my last two thoughts are.
What the fuck did we do to ourselves? Do we really hate ourselves this much?
And…
Yummy, I bet you would taste real good…
Feed…
I. What We Are
“Taste it? Yes. We do. We do. We are. We exist. What was it we were supposed to be? What was it we ultimately became? We like this. We do, we do, we do. They were so silly. So silly. Stupid little people…”
The scream.
Loud.
Intense.
Full of fear.
Immersed with desperation.
No hope. No help. No one.
But them.
“Roxanne, knock that shit off,” the man, presumably her husband, boyfriend, lover, told her, asked her, recommended. He tried to pull her close, the obviously pregnant and screaming woman. He tried. Things had changed so much. Maybe now they were changed too. She wanted nothing to do with him. All she wanted, this Roxanne, was to scream.
So she did, again.
This time her response was silence from near.
Not from below, however. Not at all.
She stood on t
op of a roof of a two-story condominium inside Heavenly Gates community living.
Heavenly Gates. The irony. The joke. Could make anyone scream. So she did and all it did was bring about the chorus, the punctuating response of those on the other side, the ones they tried to survive every day. To not get eaten by a rotting, animated corpse, had become the newest and biggest fad since the iPOD.
And the iPOD didn’t have teeth even.
Roxanne had been screaming for over ten minutes and all it was doing, maybe, was make her feel better, but it also brought at least five, six, ten, forty, new scrats to the gate. Now instead of 45 or 50 walking dead seeking a good meal before they dropped for good they saw a nice sized concert of flesh seekers ready to hear a new song.
Ripping of flesh, noshing of teeth against bone. Human bone. Living human bone. Deli of the undead.
“Roxanne, please,” he pleaded again and looked down off the roof and onto the adjoining street below. This particular building was the furthest one toward the entrance/exit of Heavenly Gates. Literally separated by three feet of air and the walls of the home they stood upon were a cast iron fence, 10-feet-high, with spaces of three inches between bars.
And rotting, growling, hungry, scrats on the other side of it.
It was now over a week since the DNA arrived to refill their supplies. A week? A fucking week?! Really??!! How do people survive without medications, food, clean water, first aid, and bullets in a world gone dead?
Roxanne screamed again, the man, her man stood back a bit further, shaking his head. The woman was officially lost.
Below the two sat an elderly man, quiet, thoughtful, despite his obvious worn and hungry visage. He bowed his head as the younger man, her man, finally accepted defeat and moved toward the elder already sitting, seemingly accepting Roxanne was mentally gone.
Roxanne screamed again.
“Darryl,” the older man began, as the young man, maybe 30-years-old at most, sat down on the black top ceiling. A woman from within the gated community could be heard yelling an expletive at Roxanne. The two men heard it. Roxanne didn’t.
Roxanne screamed again.
“Darryl, it’s not going to help,” the other man said. “This is where we are heading. We started with what? 40 survivors? 50? Now we have maybe half that?”
Darryl reached into his breast pocket on his well-worn, soiled, shirt and grabbed a pack of cigarettes from it. He took one of the last few out, offered one, was rejected, and put the box away. Lighting up, he exhaled the smoke and eyed the other man.
“Abe…they aren’t coming,” Darryl said.
“They are. They are. You have to keep confident they are.”
Another drag. A longer exhale.
“It’s been over a week. Three days late. We are starving and sick.”
Abe heard something from the horde of mangled, decomposing bodies below, took a brief look and just stared, mouth open.
His eyes locked on one particular…thing…Michael Jordan t-shirt, torn blue jeans, half his face rotten off, a piece of rotted flesh stuck between his middle, upper teeth, and that look. The look that sees nothing but only a meal.
Filet Mig Abe.
“We are starving. We are sick, Darryl. Yes,” Abe said with the back of his head to the other man, not losing focus on Meaty Teeth. “But they are fighting. They are the ones going to dozens of communities. They have to go through those things every day I bet,” Abe finally turned back around to face the younger man. “We are what we are, but so are they. If it weren’t for the DNA so far, we wouldn’t even still be a we.”
Darryl needed one, two, three, drags, and said nothing, only looking solemnly at Abe. Considering. Realizing. Yes, it sucked in here.
Another drag.
But, I bet it sucks worse out there.
“She’s going to lose it,” Darryl said looking up at Roxanne. She stopped screaming but stood there appearing as if watching a good television show. Head tilted upright, mouth agape, eyes wide, swaying a bit. Recharging her batteries for another fit of long-gone lunacy?
“Going to?” Abe asked with no attempt to veil his sarcasm. “You sure you haven’t missed a few of the signs.”
Darryl took another drag and chuckled. Laughter was hard. In this world it was harder than ever. “Not her mind.” Darryl leaned backwards, straightening his spine, showing off his Obama Is Atheist shirt in full splendor. He rubbed his belly. “Our baby. Three months to go. This stress will kill our baby.”
Abe nodded. He knew Darryl may have meant the infant’s life was close to forfeit already or even if it were to survive to birth. Its life as a happy, growing, child, had already ran out its warranty.
Well honestly, whose warranty wasn’t already expired by now?
Whose?
Abe watched as Darryl continued to smoke and bowed his head. He met these two only a few months earlier. Alone. Now widowed. Presumably childless. Abe found a way to twist and dodge across the smaller towns of Illinois farmland until he finally edged into the further exterior suburbs of Chicago, still miles out. He had no idea where he was. Most of them still alive, didn’t. Many simply ended up here. Only Connie and Bill were residents.
Were.
Past tense.
He ended up pulling the trigger on her and then himself. The suicide note?
We are not a part of the buffet line.
Abe’s fabulous and well preserved Duster had finally run out of gas with nary a refill in sight. Or at least one which had not been drained off all fuel. It was time to get out on foot. After over 15 miles of walking, crawling, breathing hard, and shitting in bushes, Abe found The Heavenly Gates, and got a reprieve from facing Hell. At least for a little while longer.
Roxanne befriended the “new guy” and treated him like the father she desperately needed. Darryl was well-intentioned, but clutch under pressure was not in his resume.
Darryl and Abe locked eyes again. Cigarette pack in hand once more, Darryl offered, and Abe, considering smirk growing larger, began to reach out for one.
Roxanne hadn’t screamed in a while.
A whisper.
“What’s that?”
Both men looked up, Abe’s hand freezing in mid grab. They gazed at Roxanne still in that same pose, mouth open, but eyes wider.
A blink.
“What’s that?” Her left hand rose. Higher. Higher. Pointing, eventually, at the sky.
The two men followed her direction. It took Abe a while, his eyesight failing, and probably most available optometrists were probably looking for eyes to eat rather than fix.
A dot. A moving dot.
“It’s a bird.” Darryl beside him, whispering too.
Abe looked quickly over toward the other man ready to ask what the big deal would be about a pigeon, when he finally caught himself in mid-ignorance. A helicopter?
“But when did the DNA start going through the air?” Abe asked stiffly, cautiously.
Okay, hopefully. Darryl stood up and moved toward Roxanne. Mother of his child. He reached for one of her hands but she still pulled away, gaze not moving, mouth still wide. Eyes wider. Hand still raised. A sound. A sound. Wings beating.
The bird.
The helicopter.
“They’re coming,” she whispered again.
“They are.” Abe watched as the couple stood close by one another, hope slowly creeping into their expression. Something wasn’t right. His head spoke volumes while everything else around him swam in single syllables. A moan. A beat. A breath. The old man could hear the voices from below — on the good side of the gates.
Some of the others were becoming aware of the bird. The large black bird growing closer, more pronounced.
Here.
The DNA?
The DNA in a bird?
Since when did they use helicopters?
“Hey you two…,” Abe approached, slow, cautious. He didn’t want to be the skeptical one. No. He wanted to believe as much as anyone, younger or even older.
Abe heard the growls, desperate screeches, and gurgles from the bad side of the gates. They were aware of the bird too. Abe really didn’t want to be the skeptical one. But, honestly, he knew what else awaited them out there. And he wasn’t talking about the scrats.
The bird was close.
Real close.
Black.
Very black.
No obvious markings.
Paint job seemed new.
Figures inside.
Three? Four? Armed? Supplies? He couldn’t tell.
Darryl stepped back and turned around quickly and stopped short when he realized Abe was right beside him, the two almost knocking into one another.
“Abe! You were right,” his cigarette-stained teeth a glow, a smile beginning to creep onto his face. His breath smelled horribly but whose didn’t these days? “You believed and they came.”
He was so happy. So hopeful. Abe shook his head, Darryl tilted his in confusion.
“You don’t understand, Abe. They’re back. The DNA is here.”
Abe raised a hand to Darryl’s right shoulder and laid it there. Over to the left stood Roxanne. Her hand still raised, finger still pointed, eyes wider, mouth more agape.
“I don’t know, Darryl. A bird? A helicopter?” Abe stared into the man, widening his own eyes. Making his point.
“The DNA never used birds.”
Widening those eyes.
The talk below became louder.
Growls growing in intensity.
“Never. No talk about it on the Underwave.” He looked around. “Where are the ground supply vehicles?!”
He realized Darryl’s hope clouded his reason. He shook the boy.
“Never have they said anything about helicopters! Never!”
Wait…
Roxanne’s eyes!
Abe took a quick turn to look at the pregnant woman again. Her eyes were still transfixed, wide, but not wide as in hope, shock, or even glee.
The girl is terrified!
Closer.
The bird was closer. He could feel the air thumping down on them. The roofs were quite thick and extremely wide, a small bird like this one could land on it.
Abe could hear the sound of it slowly creeping lower.
Roxanne’s eyes! Following her gaze over Darryl’s shoulder,
Abe looked up and saw a man — no a soldier — leaning out the nearside opened door of the bird, one foot on the landing skid.
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