The Living and the Dead

  The Living and the Dead

  Books of the Dead 5

  By R.J. Spears

  Books of the Dead

  Sanctuary from the Dead

  Lord of the Dead

  Dead Man's Land

  Into the Deadlands

  Cover Art by: R.J. Spears

  Copyright. R.J. Spears ©2017, R.J. Spears

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book, including the cover and photos, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. All rights reserved. Any resemblance to persons, places living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  Chapter 1

  The Story Up to Now

  Just over a year ago, I was what many called an underachiever. A slacker with no real direction and no life plans. Fast food, Netflix, and online games were my life. I did read a book every once in a while, so I maintained some semblance of an intellectual life. Boy, did I have everyone fooled.

  I was living the easy life. Then the world turned upside-down when the dead rose from their graves and other resting places and decided to eat the living. Let me tell you, those were fun times.

  The hits just kept coming as those living and breathing human survivors decided that banding together against a common enemy wasn’t the best strategy. Not only were we fighting against the undead, we were fighting each other for the last can of corn or the last drink of water. Isn’t that just our way?

  And that wasn’t all that was going on. There was an epic struggle between good and evil happening in the background of all these events with the fate of humanity at stake. Not like that like that was important or anything.

  To top it all off, for some unknown and completely mysterious reason, God had selected me to receive cryptic messages. Some people called them visions. Some people called me prophet. I shuddered any time I heard that. I was barely able to survive, let alone be a prophet of anything but doom.

  Anyway, they were like little mystery movies or even more cryptic text messages. Sometimes these mini-movies made sense. Sometimes they didn’t. At least, not at first. The text messages I received from God were always direct, but always cryptic.

  The icing on the cake was I was charged with taking on a mission that could save the human race. On top of that was that I wanted to make sure me and my friends survived. Is that too much to ask? It usually was as I had seen more than my fair share of friends not make it.

  It was the stuff of myths and fables. My charge was to deliver a young man who was immune to the zombie virus to a research lab in Columbus, Ohio. All because I had been given a vision from God. Really.

  How I went from having to decide whether to go to McDonald’s or Taco Bell for dinner to saving the world was beyond me. But there I was.

  Along the way, I had joined a collective of people who fought alongside me against the dead and the living. All the missions and fighting took their toll though. We had lost too many good people along the way. I sometimes feared if I took a moment to truly count the human costs, I might just melt into a puddle of tears that turned into a river that swept me away. So, I avoided introspection like the plague.

  My traveling companions were a motley crew. They consisted of my girlfriend, Kara, my unofficially adopted daughter, Naveen, Brother Ed, and Jason.

  Before the apocalypse, I doubted whether Kara would have given me the time of day. Don’t get me wrong. She is a nice and gentle person but was way out of my league. Naveen came into our midst after her family was killed by zombies. I had saved her off the street when a zombie horde was about to wash over her. Brother Ed was a dour man, who, at first, seemed determined to making my life a living hell, but over time, he seemed to have grown on me. I might say I even liked the man.

  Jason was the most special member in our group. He was immune to the zombie virus. Before coming into our company, he had been experimented on by the military. The experiments ruined his voice box, leaving him mute. This same military was in search of us.

  Just the day before, we had barely escaped an attack helicopter and a small swarm of zombies who had taken up residence in a field of abandoned mobile homes. God had sent a swarm of birds upon the helicopter and they had knocked it out of the sky. As for the zombies, we took a set of them out and the helicopter had taken out the rest. That was before the heilcopter fell from the sky, nearly crushing us.

  Good times. Good times.

  I was the first one awake in our little party. The sun had just peeked over the horizon, giving the world a light pinkish-yellow glow. Our resting place was an abandoned gas station. It had gone out of business before the world had ended. (Or maybe the owner had his own vision, shut it down, and gotten the hell out of Dodge before the undead decided to roam the earth?)

  Brother Ed and I scrounged some old moving pads from a back room, and they had served as our beds. They certainly weren’t as comfortable as a Serta mattress, but they were better than the hard concrete floor. After the trials of the previous day, we needed a decent night’s rest.

  After taking leadership of our group of zombie refugees back at our previous home at the Manor, sleep had become a luxury I couldn’t afford. Lives were at stake and every minute of my attention mattered every day. Now, that we were on the road, with exception of the brief respite we had taken with a group of survivalists, sleep remained elusive.

  Ergo, why I was awake before everyone else.

  In the dim light, I could see Kara just a foot away from me. She had her body wrapped around Naveen’s, keeping her safe and warm. Brother Ed was closest to the doorway. It looked as if he had his body wrapped around his rifle. Certainly not as appealing as a live human, but Brother Ed was the sober type who didn’t fool around. Jason looked the most relaxed of our group, curled up behind Kara, Naveen, and me, against the back wall.

  Throughout the night, my inner consciences wrestled with our mission. The selfish part of it shouted that we should hit the road, head west, and leave all our troubles behind. The better angels tugged in the opposite direction, telling me that I had to stay on mission.

  Complicating the matter was the lingering aftermath of my last vision. It was the type that felled me, knocking me senseless for several seconds. Those were the ones that shook me to my core, like an earthquake. Its seismic psychic aftershock still rippled in my brain, even days later.

  Through this last night, it echoed in my psyche like a bad nightmare. In the midst of sleeping, snapshots from it flashed in my mind. While this vision was vivid in details, it was just as cryptic as every one of the past visions. For some reason, God just couldn’t come out and say what He wanted. It was like he was just hinting at something as if some rule precluded a direct message. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure that one out. I mean, He is God. Doesn’t He make the rules?

  Anyway, in the vision, we were in a prison cell or holding room of some sort. Kara was not with us. There were strangers sharing the room with us; a man, a woman, and a young girl. I had no idea who they were. Then the vision decided to focus on one of my boots. Crazy, right?

  Did God have some sort of footwear fetish? Maybe that was in the book of Lamentations somewhere between all the admonitions against molds and fungus?

  The whole vivid production was replaced with an even more cryptic element. I called them God’s Text Messages. Bold black letters hung against a white, never ending, limbo background. The black letter said this, “MAKE THE CALL.”

/>   What the hell did that mean? Should I renew my cell phone contract with Verizon or go with Sprint? Should I call my mother? (She was long dead, a victim of the zombie outbreak, so that was out.) Should I call my broker? I mean, the zombie apocalypse had to be playing hell with my stock portfolio.

  You see what I mean? Frustrating, right?

  The only thing I knew was that something big, bad, and ugly was coming our way. I guessed that the vision would come clear then, but it felt sort of like someone had given me snapshots of a mystery novel and told me that one day, all will be revealed.

  I took very little comfort in that.

  I started to stretch when I heard some rustling behind me. When I looked back, I saw Jason stirring. From what I could tell, he always slept like a rock. His eyes still looked heavy though as if he could just roll over and go back to sleep. It looked like he was about to do that when he spotted me awake. He sat up and pantomimed a series of gestures telling me that he wanted to talk.

  I was hoping for a few minutes alone to contemplate our next steps, but there was no avoiding a conversation if Jason wanted to one. Not that he would say anything, but he could scribble quite fast and was definitely more legible than me when I wrote at the speed he did. Even at a slow pace, my writing looked like a preschooler.

  He followed up this request with another, motioning for the two of us to head outside.

  We both deliberately and quietly got to our feet and headed for the entrance. Just before leaving the building, I took a look back and saw that the rest of our little party still remained asleep.

  Jason passed by me, stretching his arms broadly while letting out a huge yawn. As they were contagious, I was overcome with the urge to yawn, too. I resisted the compulsion for several seconds but then gave into it, following him out.

  There was a chill in the early morning air. The dew hung on the grass, and a thin layer of mist drifted over it. The night creatures were shutting down and birds chirped away in the trees, heralding in the morning light. I wondered for a moment if any of these were the same ones that massed around the helicopter.

  This thought didn’t get too far as Jason dangled a note toward me. God, he had gotten fast with those notes.

  I took it and read it over. It said, “I’ve been seeing things in my vision. We’re going to make it to Columbus. At least, that’s what I think my vision means.”

  I hadn’t had this specific vision. I knew Naveen was having different visions, too. One of her’s spoke of bad things in store for us.

  For the most part, our visions were similar. A few were different depending on who had it, but usually, we were in sync.

  I sometimes wondered if these visions were like Scrooges’ dreams of Christmas future? Were our visions of what was to be or what could be? Could we have some effect on them and our future? That was a tale only to be told of the future as we lived it out, I guess -- which really sucks.

  As I finished reading that note, he handed over another.

  It said, “I did see the doctor we’re supposed to meet up with. He starts his experiments on me. I think they work, but a darkness falls over me. Or the place. I don’t know.”

  He didn’t need to write more. We both knew where he was going.

  “These visions we have,” I said, “they aren’t always clear. We can’t always guess what they mean.”

  He put a gentle hand on my arm. He released it a moment later and started writing another note. This one came fast as it was only three words.

  It read, “I’m not afraid.”

  “Well, I am.”

  A small flock of birds let out from a tree near the road, spooked by something only they saw or thought they saw. Birds were that way.

  I cleared my throat and said, “You know, Jason, we don’t have to do this thing. We could just leave. Head west or east or south. I’ve seen things too. Some things possibly very bad.”

  The expression on Jason’s face shifted to a serious one as he slowly shook his head. He turned his attention to his notepad and jotted down a new note.

  “There is no turning around or going back. This mission is a divine one. We must follow through.”

  “We don’t have to do everything He tells us to do. We do have this thing called free will. He gave us that.”

  He was writing before I finished my last sentence.

  “We have to go. There is no other way. If you don’t want to go, or are too afraid, then I can go on my own.”

  “There’s no need to talk that way. Where you go, we all go. I’m just saying we have options.”

  He started on another note when a voice spoke up behind us.

  “What are you two talking about?” It was Kara.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “It didn’t sound like nothing,” she said as she came out the door.

  “Jason had a vision about Columbus. There was darkness there. I said there are always alternatives. We don’t have to continue to Columbus.”

  “What are you saying, Joel?” Kara asked, and her expression was as serious as Jason’s.

  “Haven’t we done enough?” I asked. “Greg, Travis, Brandon, and so many more are dead. Haven’t we paid the price?”

  Kara moved up next to me and put an arm around my shoulder. “We can do this. I know we can. You’re not alone. God has said we have to do this.”

  “I know, I know, I know,” I said, knowing that I sounded more like a petulant child than a man leading his friends on a holy mission. But sometimes that “Mission from God” stuff got old.

  “We have your back,” she said, leaning her face toward mine. It felt good to have her this close. Running for your life from zombies and having attack helicopters tracking us down didn’t leave much time for snuggling. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and I felt some of my tension start to melt.

  Mind you, I had a glacier of tension and worry, so it was going to take a giant thaw to truly get me to lighten up on our mission. Still, I knew we had to keep moving no matter what. There was more than a good chance that there would be other military contingents after us.

  They just seemed peskily determined that way.

  “We have to keep moving anyway,” I said. “Besides the undead and the fact that we don’t have much food, I seriously doubt that the search for us is over. And we don’t want to be found.”

  Of course, that meant we had to get back on those damnable bicycles. I was beginning to think our tortures would never end.

  The truth of the matter, they were just beginning.

  Chapter 2

  Meanwhile...Back at the Castle

  Morale had been trending down among Colonel Kilgore’s men steadily as a result of his erratic behavior. If someone were to create a trend line for the soldiers at the Manor, the line would be heading down at a very quick descent.

  While they had been back at the Wright-Patterson Air Base in Dayton, the Colonel had held them together with strict military discipline. In fact, his leadership had been what kept them alive when the zombie hordes tried to take them down. But something had cracked within him, with small, but ever increasing fault lines coming to the surface in eruptions of anger. To make matters worse, he had forced a sizable contingent of soldiers off the base and then to occupy an enclave of survivors in Southern Ohio. He claimed it was a pursuit of a research subject that had escaped their hospital, but the soldiers that examined the Colonel and his actions didn’t buy that. Some didn’t care because he was their commander, despite being way off any conventional military script and plan. For others, it seemed as if he were teetering on insanity. Some didn’t care about what he did because they would follow him to the ends of the earth, driven by either a deep sense of loyalty or some dark craving for power.

  But even his most steadfast loyalists had doubts about their current course. They didn’t see the benefit of staying camped out with a bunch of civilians. Returning to their base in Dayton, where they had better rations, quality quarters, ammunition, and fuel seemed a much be
tter option. They also didn’t relish the role of guarding and punishing innocent civilians. That was with the exception of Corporal Lodwick who seemed to be in his element dealing out the punishment.

  The sniper attack of the previous day had them on edge as they had to guard the people in the Manor, watch for zombies, and cover their butts in case Kilgore got a wild hair up his ass. Add to that they had to keep from getting shot and you had a lot of men feeling edgy, anxious, and even a little more than pissed off. There was a lot of talk among the soldiers and they all knew about the desertions. Morale was at an all-time low and seemed to be sinking deeper into a morass of uncertainty and weariness.

  The loss of two helicopters in one mission didn’t help matters. The fact that the last report from Airman Moore said that he had been “overwhelmed” by a swarm of birds set the men even more on edge. Moore had to have lost his mind or something, most of them thought. Birds don’t swarm helicopters, they got the hell out of the way. Then again, the dead did rise up and try to kill everyone, so certainly there was an obvious change in the rules.

  The loss of the helicopters and men left them one older chopper with outdated technology and a spotty repair record. Fuel was another issue. With all the flights to find the escaped civilians, the supply at the Manor was thin.

  But they soldiered on. They maintained the course because that’s what good soldiers did. They followed orders. They had been through some tough scrapes with the Colonel, but he had always pulled them through.

  At least that’s what a lot of them thought. The others thought about getting the hell out of Dodge.

  Corporal Gary Kinsler was in the second camp but was more torn than others. That’s why he was standing inside the doorway to the room where Colonel Kilgore had ordered Sergeant Jones to be held. Kilgore had ordered that Jones’ room be cleaned out and all that was left was a bed and chair. The walls around the heavy metal door were concrete. Jones was a strong one, but he couldn’t break through concrete and metal.