Zombies!
Book 3
“Violence Solves Everything”
R S Merritt
Text Copyright © 2019 Randall Scott Merritt
All Rights Reserved
This book is dedicated to my beautiful (extremely patient and understanding) wife and family.
Cover Design By:
Harry Lamb
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Laughter of Children
Chapter 2: Long is the Road and Short is the Life
Chapter 3: It’s Electric!
Chapter 4: The Lake House
Chapter 5: Sort of Volunteering
Chapter 6: Coming in Hot
Chapter 7: Better Living Through Pharmaceuticals
Chapter 8: Any Port in a Storm
Chapter 9: No Such Thing as Too Much Ammo
Chapter 10: The Deep End
Chapter 11: Spies Like Us
Chapter 12: Maximum Carnage
Chapter 13: Death is Harder on those Left Behind
Chapter 14: Deep Cover
Chapter 15: Home Sweet Home
Chapter 16: Bride School
Chapter 17: Herd Reversal
Chapter 18: Hide and Seek
Chapter 19: Solitary
Chapter 20: Custards Last Stand
Chapter 21: The Best Laid Plans
Chapter 22: Spare the Rod
Chapter 23: So Now What?
Chapter 24: The Brotherhood
Chapter 25: Good Girls
Chapter 26: To Thine Own Self Be True
Chapter 27: Ain’t No Mountain Tall Enough
Chapter 28: Swarmed
Chapter 29: Trailer Trash
Chapter 30: Ohana
Chapter 31: Honey I’m Home
Epilogue
Authors Notes
Other Books by R S Merritt
Chapter 1: The Laughter of Children
Eric recognized he was completely paranoid at this point. His ulcers probably had ulcers. Never the less he pushed his aching body up from the floor where they were playing chutes and ladders and excused himself to make a quick round of the house. The board game had the girls all excited and laughing. Eric loved to see them being children for once. Especially in light of how recently they’d lost Brenda and how close they’d all come to being taken away to some sort of concentration camp setup by the apocalyptic red necks running this part of the world.
Knees creaking and back kinking up Eric walked slowly around the inside of the house. He stopped to peer out into the darkness that had settled over them like a thick dark comforter. He was looking for anything that might give away enemies moving in on them. They’d chosen this house pretty much at random. He was hoping the men who’d tried to take the girls had all died back at the other house they’d abandoned. The last time he’d seen the house it’d looked like the Zombies had completely surrounded it. Most of the time once that happened the occupants had a high probability of becoming Zombie chow. Especially with all the noise they’d made in that final shoot out. They must’ve attracted Zombies from half the county.
Not seeing anything when he peeked out the windows Eric quietly padded up the stairs to the loft. He tried to avoid breathing when he got to the musty, mold-covered room at the top of the stairs. A window had broken in the loft and enough rain had poured in sideways during the frequent Florida afternoon thunderstorms to gradually soak the floor of the entire room.
The aftermath was a squishy, moldy mess that had him wondering again about the health hazards of inhaling mold spores. He walked across the waterlogged carpet to where the window was on the far side of the loft. They’d pulled the curtains tight on the window earlier when they’d cleared the house. It was standard practice to make sure no Zombies were sitting around waiting to surprise them. It only took a Zombie sitting up in the shower beside you the first time you were trying to relieve yourself in a dark bathroom to get you in the habit of checking houses thoroughly before relaxing in them. Eric was trying to avoid creaky spots in the floor but with all the water damage that was pretty much impossible. Cussing under his breath at the amount of noise the floor was making Eric posted up by the window. Standing there as quietly as possible he looked out into the front yard and over at the two-lane road in front of the house.
He looked around for about a minute. When he still didn’t see anything, he began to back away from the window. The top of the hedges down by the road twitched momentarily. It happened so fast Eric wasn’t positive he’d even seen anything happen. If something had happened then most likely it was a squirrel, an errant draft of wind or even a lone Zombie stuck in the shrubbery. Eric stared hard for another minute at the spot he thought he’d seen the motion but nothing else happened. Wracked with indecision he took the stairs down to the ground level as quickly as he could without making a lot of noise.
When he walked into the living room the look on his face must’ve tipped the girls off. He watched as the laughter died down and the smiles melted from their faces. He walked to the front of the room and ducked down to take a look out of that window to see if he saw anything. From this lower angle he could barely tell where he thought the hedge had moved before. He didn’t see anything that looked out of place, but he couldn’t get over that little movement he’d picked up on. He motioned for Caitlyn and Myriah to crawl over to where he was.
“I thought I saw something when I was upstairs. I think you should take the girls and fade back a few hundred feet into the woods while I go and check. If you hear gunshots make a run for the lake house.” Eric whispered out his plan. The only rendezvous point he could think of being the one they’d decided to leave in the messages to their parents in the letters to be dropped off at their old house.
“Why don’t you just come with us?” Caitlyn asked.
“I need to be here to slow them down and give you time to get away.” Eric answered.
“No! We just lost our grandma. There’s no reason why you can’t just slip out the back with us. There might not even be anyone out there.” Caitlyn wasn’t giving in. She was horrified of the idea of going out alone with the kids. The idea of having to wait in some other moldy house to see if Eric showed up or not. The idea of that responsibility falling on her shoulders was just too much.
“There may be people moving in on this house right now. If we all go out the back they’re just going to come through and come right after us. I need you to get the kids and get a few minutes head start. I’ll come right behind you. I can move faster than you can with the kids in tow. The sooner you get out of here the sooner I can get out of here. Make sense?” Eric finished up emphatically. He felt like time was getting short.
Caitlyn must’ve felt the same. She started to try again to get him to come with them but then gave up and just started gathering the kids together. They all knew enough to keep their supplies in a manner that they could gather it up and be out of a house within minutes. In this case they’d started gathering their stuff as soon as Eric started talking to Caitlyn. They were all standing there now waiting for Caitlyn to gather her belongings so they could get rolling. Caitlyn angrily shoved her stuff in her bag. She was shaking with emotion. Her eyes were shiny with unshed tears.
Eric questioned himself. He looked over at the discarded chutes and ladders game. Had he really seen anything moving in the hedges? It’d happened so fast it really might not be anything. Did he want to make these kids troop out into the forest in the middle of the night? There were Zombies in the woods. They knew that for a fact. Did he send them out there while he stayed behind? Should he go try to see if it really was someone standing in the hedges that he’d seen. Looki
ng at the kids he knew he couldn’t risk it. If his gut told him there was danger, he had to roll with it.
“You guys listen to Cait ok? I’ll be right behind you. We’re going to go head for that nice house on the pond you told me about. The one you used to go to with your mom and swim in the pool. I love you guys. Go ahead and get going. I’ll be right behind you.” Eric was smiling as he ushered them out the sliding glass doors. He watched as they skirted the green pool in the back and disappeared through the plastic fence into the wooded area behind the home.
He let his smile fade from his face. He replaced it with his game face as he hoisted his own pack up on his back and made sure the magazine was slammed home in his rifle. With the ammunition he’d found on the Zombie he’d killed out in the woods he had enough to hold the house against a decently armed group of attackers for a few minutes at least. He really hoped he was wrong about someone being out there.
He quickly moved up the stairs in the house and back into the loft. His focus on the window drowning out any random concerns about mold spores this time. He moved low and fast over to the window to look out. He was praying he wouldn’t see anything. His plan was to stand his post in the loft for another minute and then head out to catch up to the girls. He was hoping to join up with them with no issues and then spend the night trekking over to the lake house they’d told him about. It’d be a miserable night spent stumbling through briars and muck but at the end of it they’d hopefully be in a safer location. Hopefully they could use it as a base for a little while. He’d just have to take a side mission to drop off the info at their parent’s old house like he’d promised.
Letting his eyes adjust to the ambient light in the room he gazed out the loft window down on the street below. The soft moonlight revealed a two-lane blacktop covered with the standard road litter of the apocalypse. Eric was on the verge of getting up and leaving when a party of men came riding down the road on bikes. In the dark from this distance he couldn’t tell much about them. The men were moving quietly. When they got close enough, they dismounted the bikes and dispersed quickly to approach the house. Eric lined up a shot and squeezed the trigger. The sound of the shot shattered the quiet like the first peal of thunder from an afternoon thunderstorm.
Not bothering to look to see if he’d hit his target Eric pulled the trigger twice more before turning and sprinting down the stairs. He smashed into the hallway wall opposite the bottom of the stairs and bounced off like a pinball being struck by one of the paddles. Careening down the hallway he slid into a firing position in front of the down stairs window. He fired off two random shots in rapid succession from the window before turning and hauling ass out the open sliding glass door leading into the backyard.
The sounds of shots fired kicked off behind him as the attackers went from stealth mode to attack mode. Eric was hoping the attackers would think at least two people were set up to shoot at them. One shooter on the top floor in the loft and one downstairs by the window he’d fired out of. He was hoping they’d shoot at the house for a few minutes before deciding to rush in. He planned on being long gone by the time the attackers had moved into the house and cleared it.
He ran out the open sliding glass doors so fast he almost ended up in the pool. Catching his balance before toppling into the nasty green water he spun to his right to run around the pool and out the fence for the woods. A man wearing camouflage stepped out from around the side of the house. He was sweeping a rifle barrel across the back porch. The barrel passed right over Eric without the man pulling the trigger. Eric and the man both realized what was going on at the same time. The man jerking his weapon back to aim at Eric while Eric pulled the trigger several times on his rifle. He had the weapon pointed in the general direction of the camouflage wearing attacker.
Eric stumbled backwards and almost fell into the pool again when a bullet caught him in the wrist. It felt like someone had swung a hammer and hit him dead on right at the top of his left hand. He held on to his M-16 and grimaced through the pain. He knew he needed to keep moving or he was going to get caught and then his wrist would be the least of his worries. Holding the rifle in his right hand he pointed it in the direction of the man who’d just shot him. He didn’t see the guy standing there anymore so assumed he’d either shot him or the guy had ducked back around the side of the house.
Trying to avoid being shot Eric went the opposite way around the pool as fast as he could. Reaching the edge of the yard he ducked through the missing section of the fence to get to the woods. He stopped for a few seconds on the other side of the fence and waited to see if the pursuers would come barreling around the sides of the house. A flashlight beam cut through the darkness on the opposite side that he’d run around. Ignoring the pain in his wrist Eric waited to see if the man would be dumb enough to stick his head around and take a look. A second later the man with the flashlight stuck his head around to take a look.
Eric peeled off two fast shots in semi-automatic mode then turned and ran into the woods to catch up with the girls. The gunfire had died down enough that the screams of the Zombies were now clearly audible in the cool night air. The loud noises had woken them from whatever hole they’d dug themselves into to nest for the night. Now they’d be running full force towards the sound of the gunfire. Eric was hoping that’d force the men who’d just attacked them to take their ball and go home. To continue to attack at this point would just bring more Zombies and increase the likelihood of dying.
Eric ran another thirty yards in the general direction of the lake house. It wasn’t easy running through the briars and weeds at night. Every step seemed to include inhaling spider webs and stomping in a puddle. Briars and weeds tore at his clothes. It was a journey made even more miserable by his inability to use his left arm to move obstacles out of the way as he ran. After he’d made it deeper into the woods he turned and sat down. He tried pulling off his pack with the intent of bandaging up his wrist but the pain from his wrist was so bad he wasn’t able to get his pack pulled off. He knew he’d never be able to sit there and tighten a bandage around it.
Giving up on administering his own first aid he scrambled back to his feet and turned to continue to move in the direction of the lake house. His big hope now was to catch the girls. They were going to need him to defend them from the Zombies that were bound to be moving through the forest towards the sound of the gunshots. He needed the girls to help him get his wrist bandaged up. He took a look back the way he’d come but didn’t see any signs of pursuit. He was hopeful the rednecks would finally learn their lesson and just leave them alone. Hopeful but realizing that so far, their pursuers hadn’t shown a lot of common sense so he found he couldn’t be too optimistic. The best course of action was going to be to find the girls and get the hell out of Dodge.
He had run about ten more yards into the woods when he heard a different tone to the screeching coming from his left. Not really knowing why he was doing it he turned and ran in the direction of the Zombie cries that seemed different to him. Two steps into switching directions his instincts were validated when he heard the scream of a young girl in terror intermingled with the cries of the Zombies. He couldn’t tell who it was crying out, but he poured on the speed with a gigantic burst of energy fueled by his fear for the girls.
He burst through a wall of briars and forward rolled into a quarter inch of disgusting water covering an open muddy section of the woods. His tumble forward brought down a skinny, dirt covered Zombie who’d been howling at the girls. Eric grabbed the things head and shoved it under the water. He saw two more of the Zombies had turned from where they’d been fixated on the girls and were coming towards him now. Not having time to properly drown the demon he’d managed to accidentally take down Eric jumped to his feet in the mud and brought the stock of the M-16 hard down on the things head. That Zombie dropped back down into the water and didn’t seem to be a threat any longer.
Eric turned to face the two he’d seen coming at him when a third Zombie came o
ut of nowhere and tackled him to the ground from behind. Eric twisted in the air and landed hard on his back on a root. His left wrist was screaming in pain. His back joined his left wrist in screaming in pain from the collision with the hard root. He brought up his right hand to grab the Zombie on top of him by the neck. Face to face he could see the youth in the face of the maddened demon trying to snap at him. He had no clue where his rifle had gone. He was hoping he hadn’t broken it bringing the stock down so hard on that other Zombies skull.
He pushed up as hard as he could and tried to roll but the Zombie on top of him was moving along with his motions. The other Zombie would be on top of him any second now and it’d be all over anyway. From somewhere behind him he heard Caitlyn screaming at him, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying. Bracing himself for the onslaught of teeth and nails he waited for the other Zombies to fall on him and start ripping him apart. He was screaming now as loud as he could for the girls to run. He was hoping that if the Zombies were focused on eating him alive, they’d miss the girls making a quick exit.
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