Dead Last
Jack Zombie #8
Flint Maxwell
Copyright © 2019 by Flint Maxwell
Cover Design © 2019 by Carmen DeVeau
Edited by Jen McDonnell
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions email: [email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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This one is for all the readers who’ve stuck with Jack Jupiter over the past two years.
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So it goes.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Previously in the Jack Zombie Series…
Jack, along with Lilly and now regrouped with Abby Cage, one of his oldest and most loyal companions, attack one of the Overlord’s gas mining operations on their way east…with middling results and maximum bloodshed.
Back on the road, they come upon an abandoned town save for an old man with an affinity to store mannequins. This man, Bruce, sells them out to the Black Knights—the Overlord’s best group of cold, calculated killers.
Now captured, Jack, Lilly, and Abby are held in a ruined subway station/radioactive prison in a city destroyed by a nuclear blast. Within the prison, Jack finds three new allies—Roland, a skinny and noble man; Nacho, a former Air Force pilot; and Mandy, a towering tech genius. Together, the six of them manage to escape with the intent of disabling the Overlord’s own nuclear armory. However, Jack learns the one-eyed man himself will be personally flying to the city to execute the rebels.
Thinking he can end the conflict and get revenge for the murder of his family, Jack heads to the landing zone, but not before a failsafe measure releases hundreds of zombies meant to purge the city of Jack and company. But, with the help of his friends, Jack makes it safely to the helicopter pad, ready for a last battle.
Except it’s not the Overlord Jack meets, but his brainwashed brother Norm instead. A fight ensues between the long lost siblings and Jack is tragically forced to kill Norm. Before his brother dies, Norm gives Jack a mysterious electronic device Mandy calls ‘the key to the kingdom.’
As the zombies close in, Nacho commandeers the District helicopter, and with Norm’s body in tow, our six heroes escape the radioactive city and are back on course for revenge.
1
A warning alarm blares through the helicopter.
Nacho curses loud enough to be heard over the chuck-chuck of the blades. I barely hear it because I’m holding on to my dead brother’s hand, my mind far away. His skin is cold now, so cold.
We have been flying for I don’t know how long. It feels like hours, but it might only have been minutes. All I know is that we left that ruined, radioactive city behind us a long time ago.
The stench of the zombies is still in my nostrils, yes, but that, too, is far from my mind.
At the forefront is Norm.
He is dead. He is gone.
I killed him. Stabbed him with a knife. Watched the life leave his eyes. It was only when he was on his way out of this world and heading into the abyss of the afterlife that he changed back to his normal self. His flinty eyes relaxed, and the corners of his mouth curled up into his perpetually sarcastic smile.
And then he bled all over me.
And he bled because of me.
Abby sits across from Norm and I. Roland is in the front passenger’s seat; Mandy and Lilly surround me. Lilly is looking out of the window, her hands over her ears.
The landscape below is scarred and burned and empty, yet it’s rising up closer and closer to meet us.
“I gotta put her down,” Nacho says in his thick Spanish accent. “We’re almost out of fuel. We’ll drop out of the sky and die if I don’t.”
“Field over there,” Roland says, pointing.
My stomach lurches as we descend.
The landing isn’t smooth. We come down roughly, everyone jostling around, me nearly falling out of my seat.
Above us, the whirring blades begin to slow.
“Any idea where we’re at?” Abby asks.
Nacho takes off his headset and turns. “I got latitude and longitude, but that means jackshit to me without a real map.”
I look around. We’re in an overgrown field. Some kind of farmland. I see no buildings on the horizon, but that’s not saying much, because the dark is heavy and closing in on us. Most importantly, I see no glowing eyes bobbing in the distance—the eyes of the dead.
It’s only a matter of time, though, before they come, drawn by the sounds of the helicopter, the rustling of the branches created by the windstorm the blades have made.
“We’re closer,” Lilly says. “That’s all that matters. We were lucky enough to find a way out of that shithole. And we’re alive.”
Most of us, I think, looking down at Norm.
I still remember, as if it only happened minutes ago, the night he told me the truth, the reason he left my mom and me and joined the army. How he was gay and had been too afraid to tell anyone, even his own brother, for years. I remember how it didn’t mean a damn thing to me. He was my brother no matter if he liked men, women, or aliens.
I remember standing on the beach next to Norm on a sunny day, the tide lapping calmly, the smell of sea salt in the air. I remember seeing Tim’s face—Timothy Lancaster, Norm’s best friend and lover for years. I remember him smiling, the adoration in his eyes. We were all dressed in tuxedos, simple black and white; the girls, even Abby, wore dresses of frill and bold colors. It was Norm and Tim’s wedding, officiated by a woman from Haven who’d been an ordained minister since the nineties. It was the second wedding at Haven in less than six months, the first one being mine. Cupcake sat between Darlene’s legs, wagging his tail whenever I looked at him. I remember how angelic and beautiful, how radiant, she looked. Her belly was swollen, pregnant with Herb Junior, and she rested both hands on it, watching the ceremony in peace.
I remember all the good times, and I remember all the bad times.
Like in any life, there is both good and bad, but that’s what makes a life worth living. To me, at least.
I hadn’t seen my brother in years, not since the Overlord, the one-eyed man, ravaged Haven and killed my wife and son right in front of me.
The others file out of the helicopter. I remain sitting for a long moment, just staring at Norm.
It’s Abby who comes in a few minutes later.
“We’re leaving, Jack. Heading east,” she says.
I nod.
Then she’s back in the seat across from me, looking down at Norm, too. She wears a somber smile on her face.
“Do you remember that Christmas when Norm got really drunk and sang karaoke in front of everyone at Haven?” she asks, her eyes hazy with the distant memory.
“Yeah.”
Of course I remember that. How could I forget? Junior was only three years old. He was sitting on my lap, dressed in a shirt that read ‘Santa’s Little Helper’. We—those of us ‘in charge’ at Haven—decided a Christmas party would be good to boost morale. Morale was always something we were worried about after the end o
f the world. In that year alone, we had three suicides and six others killed on supply runs.
“I didn’t wanna do it,” I say. “Throw that party.”
“Yeah, you were a real Grinch,” Abby says, smiling. “I thought, of all the people, Norm would’ve been the one who didn’t want to have it. He was always on us about supplies and energy usage.”
“I don’t think he would’ve if we hadn’t found that semi-truck full of beer.”
Abby rolls her eyes. “Oh, man. I almost forgot about that. Plus all the booze we’d already stockpiled.”
I nod, laughing. “It was fun.”
“What did he sing? I can’t remember.” She lifts her arm with the missing hand and the hook attached to the stump and motions like she’s drinking. “Glug-glug-glug myself, right?”
“Hey, I was no angel, either. We had all that gin, too, I remember. Ooh, boy, was that a headache the next morning.” I pause, trying to think of the song Norm sang.
A picture comes into my mind of that Christmas night. Norm is standing on the little stage we constructed for the singers and the game runners. He wears no shirt. A necktie is fastened around his forehead and rocks with him every time he busts out one of his silly dance moves.
The song coming through the speakers is…
“I got it!” I nearly shout. “It was ‘Play That Funky Music’ by Wild Cherry.”
Abby nearly doubles over with laughter; it’s a sweet sound in the grim silence of the world. I laugh with her. I never thought I’d laugh again.
“That’s it!” she says, wiping tears away with the back of her jacket sleeve. “He didn’t even remember the next day.”
“I wish we would’ve got it on video,” I say.
“Me, too.”
I look down at Norm. He is not smiling or laughing. His eyes are closed, his mouth and jaw are relaxed. He looks like he’s at peace.
I lean and place my hand on his cold chest, feel no heartbeat. I think it finally hits me then that he’s gone…really gone, never coming back.
“You did what you had to do,” Abby says. “You’re stronger than me.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.”
I sigh. “No, it’s not. We’re both strong, and we both make each other stronger.”
A silence falls over us for a moment. Outside, I hear the others talking. Roland says something about being glad his feet are on solid ground again, how he was never much of a flyer, and Lilly says that flying is better than dying, which we certainly would’ve done had we stayed in the radioactive city.
“Do you have plans?” Abby asks.
I smirk. It feels false on my face. “Do I ever have a plan? That was more Norm’s territory.”
“True.”
I stand up, crouched in the helicopter. It wobbles beneath my steps. I go outside, my soles flattening the overgrown grass. We are not in Ohio, I can tell just by the air. Growing up there, I know the heavy cloud of depression that hangs around the Buckeye State all too well. But we are close, probably somewhere in Indiana.
The others stop their talking when I look at them, and they look at me like they’re waiting for me to speak. I’m their leader, and that frightens me more than I care to admit. Any time I lead, it’s usually to death. Time and time again, those who follow me die, and I remain standing and hating myself for it.
“I only want to do one thing tonight,” I say. “I want to bury my brother.”
“We’ll help you,” Lilly says.
“Yeah,” Mandy agrees. She is nothing but a large shadow in the distance, standing around with Roland and Nacho.
The other two voice their assent.
“Thank you,” I say.
We leave the helicopter behind after we search it and strip it of anything useful—which is not much. A few rounds of ammunition, a small handgun, and a flimsy roadmap.
I alone carry Norm’s body. The others follow me into the distant woods. I spend too long trying to find the perfect resting place for my brother, knowing I’ll never truly find the perfect place, because such a place doesn’t exist. But if we’re in Indiana, which I am pretty sure we are, that’s a start. Norm lived here many years ago, before the outbreak of the virus, and he lived here by choice, on his own free will, after he got out of the service.
Two large rocks lay in a clearing not far from a dirt road that is just past the field we landed in. The rocks glitter in the moonlight. My heart fills with hope and a deep sadness.
“There,” I say.
“It’s beautiful,” Abby says from behind.
Shovel-less, we’ll have to dig at the cold ground with flat rocks.
I say to the others, “You don’t have to do this. I can do it myself. He was my brother.”
But they all have stones in their hands, and Roland steps forward from their semicircle. He is a skinny man who looked on the cusp of death just hours ago as he rotted away in the underground prison, as the radiation and poison threatened to put an end to his working organs. He looks better now; healthier. Though it may just be the lack of light. Still, he’s smiling.
A smiling face can hide a thousand sicknesses, I think.
“Jack, you saved our lives. Without you, we’d be dying or dead in that prison. Your brother may not be our brother, but he’s close enough,” Roland says.
“Agreed,” Mandy says.
“Couldn’t have put it any better myself,” Lilly adds.
“Si, si,” Nacho says.
I look at Abby. She shrugs. “Don’t expect me to get all sappy again. I’ve been doing that too much lately.” Doing her famous eye roll, she continues, “Yeah, it’s gonna be a bitch digging, but I’ll help, too.”
I am overwhelmed with emotions. I feel on the verge of tears, and I don’t know if I can hold them back. With my dead brother in my arms and the last of my living family, full of faces both new and old, I decide it’s best to just let my emotions do what they have to do.
So I cry. I cry right there in front of all of them.
And it’s okay.
2
We dig a shallow grave. By the time we are done, our hands are sore and bloody.
Together, all of us, we lower Norm into the soil. I wipe blood and loose dirt away from his brow and I fold his hands over his chest. He looks different than how I remembered. He has no hair, his skin has wrinkled slightly with age, and his cheeks are without color, but he’s still my brother, still Norm.
Lilly helps me out of the grave.
Then, together, we bury him.
This takes until sunrise, and it’s a beautiful sunrise, the light purple-gold and resplendent. I think Norm would be glad to be buried on a morning like this.
“I could say a few things from the Good Book,” Roland says once the dirt is patted down, and the grave barely a visible scar on the land. “I memorized a few passages from my youth.”
I think to myself, Was Norm religious? Did he have a faith?
It’s a question I don’t know the answer to; Abby, either, judging by her silence. Thinking back, I recall Tim being religious—at least slightly—and as my brother and I grew up, we had our fair share of the Fear of God drilled into us. Did Norm follow that through in his adult life? I don’t think so, but I can’t say for sure.
Then another part of my mind asks if it really matters. God or no God, we all go to the same place; that I know for a fact, unless you have the misfortune of coming back as an undead monster, a zombie… and even then, who’s to say what becomes of our souls and consciousness?
So I tell Roland to go ahead. That it would be nice.
He smiles softly and steps forward. Then he begins reciting from his memory. I hear the words he speaks, but I don’t comprehend them. My mind is in a faraway place. The words, though, and the man’s tone with which he carries them, are sweet and powerful at the same time. Norm would’ve appreciated it.
When he’s done, he steps back, wiping tears from his cheeks, smearing dirt there. The others are cry
ing, too.
“I’d like to say a few words,” Abby says. “I’ll keep it short and simple.”
I nod at her. In the golden sunlight streaming through the trees, her eyes are red from crying, bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“Norm,” she begins in a soft voice I barely hear over the sighing of the wind, “you were a son-of-a-bitch sometimes, but you kept me grounded. You taught me a lot of useful shit, like how to start a campfire, how to debone a fish. You taught me a lot of dumb shit, too, things I still do in my day-to-day life. But most importantly, you taught me how to have fun. I don’t know how many times I hit you for talkin’ stupid or just being stupid, but I’d give anything on Earth to be able to hit you again.
“When I was in Chicago, doing all those bad things under the pretense of being brainwashed, I kept asking myself ‘What would Norm do? How would he get out of this?’ and I could never find the answer, especially knowing you were a couple states over, brainwashed out of your mind, bending your knee to the Overlord. But I had my memories of the past, all the stuff you taught me, and that helped me get through my time there. It helped more than you’d ever know. You know it isn’t easy for me to say this, but I love you, man, and I’ll miss the hell out of you.”
Abby steps away from the patted dirt. The tears flow stronger down her cheek. As she walks by me, I grab her hand and give it a reassuring squeeze.
She knows as well as I that life changed for the worse when the Overlord sent his army to Haven. Abby did what she had to do to survive, and so did Norm. But life is more than just survival—it’s about free will, and that free will was taken from all those murdered and mutilated, all those kidnapped and brainwashed.
This squeeze of Abby’s hand, I hope, communicates more than any words ever could. It tells her that this is not over, that I am here for her now, and that the Overlord will burn.
Dead Last: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 8) Page 1