She hadn’t been allowed to see her father-in-law in well over a year, and she could only imagine how much the cancer had spread throughout his thin eighty-year-old body in that time. She agreed that perhaps it was best that her children were spared seeing their grandfather in such a withered, diminished state. Hamilton could continue to keep Thaddeus hidden away in the back bedroom, door locked, like a man on death row, and she would set her nurturing pride aside, yet be there to console her husband when the inevitable end arrived.
After coffee, Jef excused himself to a much-needed bath before an equally needed good night’s rest. Looking in the mirror, he could see he wore exhaustion like a tree wears bark—rough and weathered—but thankful that at least his bark wasn’t peeling.
He thought of his old friend Tom. It had been twelve months since Tom abandoned their mission to go be with his daughter in Rockford. That was last Christmas, and he never returned. Can’t blame him. I’d have done the same if my family were still alive. Even though it was his idea to spray the necromone serum from a crop duster, it’s not like he was flying the damn thing. It did help to have the extra pair of eyes up there scanning the ground, though.
Jef and Tom had carefully plotted out their plan of attack, map square by map square. They reasoned that they needed to stretch the serum to make it last by diluting it with water to fill the plane’s two-hundred-and-eighty-gallon hopper, but not to the point of minimizing the serum’s effectiveness. Then, because the flying range of the Cessna AG Truck is about three hundred and ninety miles, they puddle jumped to other airports to refuel and take batches of serum farther, covering a greater distance more effectively.
Tom had questioned if they could truly accomplish what they’d set out to do, but Jef had boasted that when he was younger he did a hundred and thirty-seven aerial application flights in twenty-three hours to beat a storm.
During their first three months they were able to cover the entire northeast portion of the country, even crossing into Canada, spraying any groups of survivors they spotted near the border.
They each felt pangs of sorrow for the occasional lone survivors who saw the plane as salvation.
“This stuff ain’t single serve portions. We have to go for the greatest impact,” Jef had advised, so after some debate they had agreed that targeting groups of four or more survivors was the most efficient option. Simply because they agreed didn’t make it any easier to exclude those scant few that fell short of the head count, flapping their arms wildly to be rescued, only to be deliberately passed over, doomed to face their demise, or cunning enough to stay alive a little longer.
Now, another December had come, and Jef began to feel the pull of sentiment over Tom, followed by sorrow over the loss of his own family. The search for survivors was a distraction, but these respites with feet on the ground gave him time to reflect on all he’s lost. He hoped sleep would come swiftly to keep his thoughts from wandering too far into melancholy.
Before turning in for the night, Hamilton Burke checked in on his father. Thaddeus’s frail frame covered a third of the mattress width. A hospital bed had been procured at the same time as the family’s generator by Hamilton and Jef many months ago. The bedroom’s solitary window was covered by thick curtains, curiously obscuring the view to the outside, but more accurately preventing any view into the room.
Hamilton stood at his father’s side, with a dour yet determined expression. He pulled aside the curtain, unlatched and opened the window to discover another live chicken that Jef had left tethered by its foot to a shrub. He leaned out and retrieved it.
A gurgling sound could be heard beneath the oxygen mask covering Thaddeus’s mouth. A mask not connected to any generator powered oxygen concentrator. It was there for appearances should Cora ever peek into the room while Hamilton tended to his father. It also helped muffle any sporadic growling sounds.
The hospital bed’s side rails were never really needed to prevent the elderly man from falling onto the floor. Merely another prop, although, the rails had come in handy for restraints before Jef began bringing back supplies of sedatives to keep Thaddeus docile.
Pulling the mask from his father’s mouth, the old man groaned, then growled in Hamilton’s direction. There was no acknowledgment that Hamilton was family at all, just a thing standing nearby. Thaddeus’s skin bore pustules along the jaw line where the mask and drool had irritated the necrotic flesh. His eyes were clouded, looking as if severe cataract or glaucoma had taken over the corneas.
The hen tugged against the thin rope still around its foot, and Thaddeus detected the whiff of fresh meat. Dutifully, Hamilton quickly snapped the hen’s neck lest its distressed clucking be heard by the rest of the family, then held the meal to his father’s mouth so that he could feed on what this version of him innately craved.
Hamilton didn’t want this version of his father, but at least he was still a version of alive—six months longer than his doctors gave him. Caring for his father in his altered state was an internal struggle. Not between morality and immorality, but between selfishness and mercy. He wasn’t able to define it as such until Jef came to him after the first flight he and Tom had flown, which they dubbed their initial serum sortie.
“Rev. I know this thing Tom and I are doing is a good thing, but I gotta tell ya, I don’t feel any closer to redemption.”
“Redemption? How do you mean?” Hamilton wondered. “Confession is good for the soul, you know,” the good reverend tried to put Jef at ease, sensing that he was trying to open up.
Hamilton listened as Jef spoke of killing the officers in their Icelandic bunker whom he’d condemned for their horrific offenses. The guilty remorse of doing something in the name of perceived justice. How he was as culpable as those officers by flying zombie cargo around the globe, but never having the courage to disobey orders as a conscientious objector.
“Doing this good thing now to make up for... well, that’s supposed to ease my conscience about it, right?”
“No,” Hamilton had told him flatly. “We never forget. We’re not supposed to. God is the redeemer. Lay your burdens at his feet, for through Him comes true redemption. God is still in control, even though it doesn’t look like it these days.”
It wasn’t until Jef continued and spoke of his friends, the airmen that had been turned to zombies, and how he thought keeping them in an airplane hanger in some weird way seemed like the right thing to do, but in the end was only a selfish act, that Hamilton felt empathy and began to make his own confession.
Days before the cataclysmic end of society, while Hamilton was taking his father for a routine chemo treatment, an infected patient transformed and had bitten Thaddeus in the hospital parking lot. Hamilton prayed for an answer, but the only answer that stuck with Hamilton came out of human selfishness. He would keep his father in the back bedroom; keep the secret from his wife and children.
He had been relieved to finally tell someone without fear of being judged. Jef understood, and he assured Hamilton that Tom would too. There was no reason Cora and the children should know the truth.
The reverend cleaned his father after his meal and prayed by his bedside as usual. Praying to God for salvation for his family and cursing the devil for the hell on earth that he has wrought. He remained ever thankful that he had found in Jef someone who understood his desire to hang on. Dead or living dead, letting go is never easy. He knew that subjecting Cora and the children to this atrocity was something they didn’t deserve. No. This was something Hamilton knew he must endure alone, and perhaps the Lord will make it right in the end.
Part 2
One year ago.
Snapping twigs and the frantic rustling through leaves under foot, disturbed the tranquility of the Anna Page Forest Preserve in Rockford, Illinois.
Even in her haste, the woman tried to take care to not stumble over woodland debris. When branches poked and flicked her as she skirted by trees, their sharpness intensified by the winter cold.
W
rapped tight for warmth, and held even tighter to her body, was a baby.
The woman’s breathing was heavy. Faint clouds of her own exhaled breath dissipated around her head. A moment’s pause to listen for anyone—or anything—in pursuit. She wasn’t sure, but maybe she heard something. Maybe. Couldn’t take the chance. Had to keep moving. Up ahead, a thick tree caught her eye. She could use it as a visual marker. Once she’d passed it, she could look back and gauge how much distance she was putting behind her with each sprint.
The thick trunk was within reach. Her calves were starting to cramp. She told herself that she could afford a longer pause at this tree, to rest and check the bundled baby. She was running on the fuel of sheer instinct.
She touched the tree, but her sigh of relief turned into a gasp of terror as a face appeared. A crudely hewn Jack-O-Lantern seemingly carved from the tree itself. Teeth fully exposed, eyes darkly rimmed, huge patches of skin peeling away, gaping to reveal its rotted pulp. The woman instantly let go a blood-curdling scream in the face of this monster, close enough to touch. A split second instinctual impulse of self-preservation caused her to throw the baby at the monster and take off running.
The baby’s coo could be heard from beneath its covering. The creature snatched the bundle from the air, and with the other hand, deftly flung a Bowie knife through the woods, striking the fleeing woman between the shoulder blades.
Tom Dexter had no sympathy for the woman that lay writhing mortally wounded on the forest floor. The way he saw it, he saved the child from a worse fate than not having its mother. That woman would have jeopardized everything, Tom thought. Cowardice like that—to sacrifice a child to save your own miserable hide—had no place in the new world to come.
To Tom’s thinking, justice was served, and a crisis averted. He turned his attention to the baby, removed the swaddling to ensure it wasn’t injured, then re-wrapped it. A baby girl.
Tom’s mind went back twenty years to when his daughter was a baby. The world was better then. Even being behind on his bills was a better circumstance. Anything was better than now. But, the best feeling in the world was holding his little girl, Holly.
Tom saw this child as if she really were Holly, and he teetered between realities for a moment. Time shifted in his mind like liquid. One minute he was playing with wooden blocks on a summer afternoon, showing his little daughter how to stack them, and the next, a winter wind slapped him to reveal a bleeding baby Holly on the ground in the woods, with a knife in her back. He reared back at the horrifying vision, closed his eyes hard, then opened them again. Now the bloody body was the woman with his knife in her back.
Tom’s eyes darted around in their sockets, as if from behind a mask. Reality check. This... this was the real thing. No wait. Was it? He had to check. He had to be sure. Tom reached for the handle of the knife. It felt real. He slowly pulled it out. The woman writhed on the ground, barely clinging to life. This was the reality. He thrust the knife into the woman several more times until he was certain she was dead.
Now, he began to second guess his actions. Did I have to kill her? Couldn’t I have yelled after her to show her that she and her baby were both safe? Damn it! My thoughts or my altered thoughts... still my thoughts. My decision. Yes. Anybody who would sacrifice their baby... doesn’t deserve...
He wiped his knife on the woman’s clothing, then tucked it back into his coat pocket.
Tom knew his physical deterioration from the virus had been affecting his brain. That’s why he made the decision to leave Jef in Missouri. He had told him that it was strictly to be with Holly, but that was only partly true.
His brain was switching gears unpredictably. One minute he was rationally thinking through the grids on the map for which areas they’d need to fly over, and the next minute he was trying to convince Jef that a pack of zombie dogs was charging at them.
Many of the hallucinations he had kept to himself, ultimately realizing that it was only going to get worse. He was becoming of less and less usefulness to Jef and their whole purpose for bringing back the necromone serum.
Tom cradled the child in his arms. “Sorry little one. But you’re better off without her. I think we all are,” he acknowledged, then decided to hide the woman’s body from discovery. What if Holly or someone else from the group came out here and found her? There’d be questions. He laid the baby on the ground while he set about using a thick branch to dig a shallow grave. He dragged the body into it, scooped up any personal effects that had spilled out of her pockets, and made sure they were buried with her. Finally, he laid two thick logs across the top of the dirt for good measure.
#
Holly Dexter ran along the row of Leland cypress trees that bordered her mom’s cousin’s six-acre property. She kept a steady stride, checking over her shoulder every few yards. The trail of blood in her wake was a scent that was unmistakable, alluring, and meant to draw the two fast approaching near-skeletal, gurgling savages in pursuit.
The break in the tree line was coming up where she’d planned to swing wide into the opening. One more look behind her, slowing her pace just enough for the creepers to catch up.
Rounding the evergreens, Holly met a gruesome countenance, fixed with a permanent half snarl. Pale, mottled skin, made paler by each milky breath cloud exhaled into the cold air, was stark protruding from the collar of dark clothing. One more look over her shoulder before grabbing the midsection of the darkly clad body in front of her, slinging herself, and the freshly killed possum on a rope she’d been dragging, to safety behind the young goth woman with the zombie face.
Jemma Straight swung an aluminum baseball bat upwards, striking the first zombie Holly had lured to its demise. The bat cracked across the nasal bone, straight through the frontal ethmoid, and sphenoid bones, crushed the side temporal bones, knocking the brain out of the back of the head, blowing the parietal bone off like a cap.
From the opposite tree flanking the perimeter opening, Mark Spencer reared back with an axe, clutching the helve, waiting until the second zombie was in position. As soon as it took one step past him, Mark chopped the air only nicking the monster’s shoulder.
“Damn!” He blurted, as his two friends shot him looks of disbelief. “Hold on. I got this,” Mark said assuredly.
Mark came from behind for his second swing, on the zombie’s right side, as the nicked creature scanned the ground, focusing on the scent of blood and fresh possum carcass that lay near Holly’s feet. This time Mark made contact, lopping off the rancid head. The decapitated body stumbled forward a few steps before collapsing to the ground. Its head rolled a few yards, stopping next to the possum.
Mark breathed exuberantly, feeling the need to offer an excuse. “Ah. Yeah... see I’m left handed,” he said hefting the axe in demonstration. “If we had switched sides I’da had him with the first swing.” Jemma and Holly smirked to each other.
“Bugger off. Next time, you can drag the possum, then,” Jemma chided.
A pickup truck came roaring up. “What the hell are you all doing?!” Kenny Matthews shouted before bringing the vehicle to a complete stop.
The trio stood, watching the angry man stomp up to them, as if they were caught smoking in the school bathroom. “And who said you could borrow my axe?” Kenny yanked the implement turned weapon from Mark’s hand. He trained his eyes on Holly. “Your dad brought us that serum, so we don’t need to be worrying about killing these things any more. And especially, not so close to my damn house!”
Holly spoke up, “Remember, my dad said that even with the serum, there’s no telling if the supply will run out before the zombies die off. So...,” she looked to her group to secure moral support for her statements. “So, we feel we need to be ready for when we run out of serum.” Her compatriots nodded in agreement.
“Well, if your daddy didn’t dole out the bulk of the stuff to try and save the world with his sky-jockey buddy, we wouldn’t have to worry about runnin’ out, now would we?” Holly had heard his rants
on that subject ever since they’d arrived and knew debating the issue was a moot point.
Over the past six months, Holly had come to question her mother’s cousin Sherry’s choice in marrying Kenny. She recalled overhearing murmurings between her parents years ago over her dad’s concerns for Sherry, but Paula Dexter always seemed to end up defending Kenny. “Say what you want about the man, Tom, but bottom line is he loves her, and would lay down his life for her if it ever came down to it.”
Holly accepted that Kenny’s primary objective was everyone’s safety and well-being. He was the de facto father figure since Tom had taken it upon himself to become absent from the group; often staying gone for days—even weeks. Holly had a feeling she knew why her father was becoming more and more reclusive, but never confronted him to confirm it.
“You get rid of that possum before any more creepers catch a whiff,” Kenny sternly instructed, handing her a shovel from the back of his truck. “We may be immune, but that don’t mean I want zombies camped on my property.”
“Right. And we’ll get this bit sorted,” Jemma said, waving her hand at the bodies on the ground.
“No. Mark and I can take care of this mess. Mark, give me a hand getting them in the truck bed.”
Jemma acknowledged the personal snub Kenny was giving her, by excluding her every chance he got ever since she arrived. Her features were a loathsome oddity to Kenny. All he saw was her illness and was as fearful of it as people in the eighties were of AIDS.
He didn’t have to say anything. His looks of disgust spoke volumes every time they rationed out food and other supplies. She’s using up supplies. Supplies that real people could use. She’s dying, and food rations were meant for the living, Kenny would think—often out loud.
The Tale of Tom Zombie (Book 5): Zombie Survival Page 2