Lord of the Dead Read online

  After striking out up north and deciding to avoid potential exposure to more radiation, we had to start heading our foraging crews west into the small towns along Route 32, which ran towards Cincinnati. The name of this one-stoplight town was Peebles. My best guess was that it had been a sleepy little farming community before the zombie outbreak, and it was terminally asleep now and forever.

  From a quick appraisal, I’d say the place was easily less than 2,000 people. Maybe 1,500. There was not one of those people around anymore. The town consisted of a main drag, originally named Main Street (very original, I know), and a handful of side streets. Like much of the area, it was surrounded with farm fields that had gone fallow and filled up with weeds.

  I had this mental habit of building up a visual dictionary for my life experiences. For instance, the visual reference for the term battle-ax always brought forth the image of my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Higgins. From my seven-year-old eyes, she looked to be a hundred years old and as grizzled as a hobo. She was also one of meanest individuals I encountered in my childhood, taking pleasure in the torture and humiliation of the students in her care. Ergo, why she was then and now and heretofore referred to as the battle-ax in my visual dictionary.

  When we were coming into Peebles, I had a new visual reference pop into my head. This time the phrase was ghost town, and Peebles slotted into that space. Then again, a lot of towns had been turned into ghost towns when the zombies showed up, but something seemed more moribund about this place than the other small burgs we had searched.

  Nothing moved in the town. There wasn’t a dog, cat, or even the undead. Maybe even the zombies had developed some brainpower and saw how dead end the place was and gotten out of Dodge?

  Why all the people left is beyond me, but we’d seen places just like this before. Totally empty towns, completely abandoned. Before the zombie apocalypse, these places held on by a thread, and now they just evaporated. I half expected tumbleweeds to blow through the street as we made our way into town.

  The downtown convenient store had been completely ransacked along with several other businesses. We did find some useful items in the hardware store and put them in the SUV. The houses along the main drag and the tributary streets had been picked over thoroughly, but we discovered small pockets of food supplies in some houses as we moved to the side streets. My best guess was that marauders or nomads coming through town took what they could easily get their hands on and moved on through as quickly as possible.

  Using a center-out search strategy, we moved from house-to-house, starting from the center of town and working our way out towards the fields. It took forever and was quite tedious, but we systematically carried it out. It was the safest and most thorough way to make sure we efficiently combed the town. Greg’s commands, drilled into me from countless searches just like this one, echoed through my head. “Stay vigilant. Be systematic. Take your time.”

  As much as my slacker-self resisted it, I knew it kept us alive. Until it didn’t.

  Our strategy paid off as we started picking up more and more caches of supplies in the houses well off the main street. We even found some weapons and ammo. None of this prepared us for what we found when we searched a small farmhouse near the end of a road on the outskirts the town.

  “Joel, you have to come down and take a look at this,” Brandon shouted from the basement. His tone didn’t convey fear or warning, but more surprise or even astonishment.

  “What is it?” I asked with some trepidation in my question. Travis moved up behind me.

  “No, it’s not Zs. It’s a fucking treasure trove of stuff we can use,” Brandon shouted up the stairs.

  “I want you to stay on point here,” I told Travis. “Chuck can take point in front of the house. Just because we haven’t seen any undead doesn’t mean that they won’t surprise us.”

  I started down the basement stairs but turned back to Travis. “If this is as good as Brandon’s says, I’ll have you bring the SUV around to the side of the house.” He nodded, and I went below.

  It was everything Brandon had said and more. My mouth fell open as I looked at two walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with cans of food and dry goods.

  “Hell, yeah,” Brandon said.

  The room was twenty by twenty with eight-foot ceilings with a plain wooden door leading off the back. We hadn’t seen anything like this in all of our searches. Off to the side of the room were boxes stacked to the ceiling. When we opened them, we discovered that they were filled with MREs.

  “Holy crap,” a voice behind me said.

  I turned and saw Chuck.

  “I asked Travis to tell you to watch the front of the house while we checked this out.”

  “He told me, but I had to come down to see what you’d found,” Chuck said. “Holy crap,” he said again, his voice borderlined on giddy as he walked over to one of the shelves and looked down at a can. “Pineapples. We haven’t had any canned fruit in weeks.”

  “Peaches,” Brandon said with the same dreamy enthusiasm as Chuck while holding up a can of peaches. “And I don’t even like peaches. I wonder if they have a can opener upstairs.”

  “You know if we open one can, we’ll want to open more, and that could lead to trouble,” I said.

  “But peaches,” Brandon said.

  “And pineapples,” Chuck added.

  Their eyes looked imploringly at me, and my resolve to stay on task became weak. And I asked myself when did I become the adult? And who was I to say, no?

  “Okay, I guess we can open one can,” I said.

  “One can for each of us?” Brandon asked.

  “You guys are killing me,” I said.

  I watched as Brandon galloped for the stairs. When I turned back around, I saw Chuck standing at a door at the back of the room, his hand on the doorknob, and an alarm went off inside my head. I had allowed the heady dizziness of our find to overwhelm me. Questions started shooting through my mind.

  “What type of person has a stockpile of food like this?” The answer was quick, “Someone expecting the end of the world and is ready for it.” The next question hit me like an anvil: “Then where are the guns?” It was followed up by an even more frightening question, “And would they leave those guns unprotected?”

  I started to yell, but Chuck was already opening the door.

  In our zombie apocalypse reality, we always knew you could lose one of your party, and we had lost too many in town, each one taking a piece of us with them. Usually, it was the zombies who took them down. Or marauders. Maybe even an accident. This was something unexpected, but I should have known better.

  The explosion was deafening in the confines of the basement room with its concrete ceiling. Chuck came off his feet as he fell back into the room, a spray of blood shot from his upper torso and neck, painting the cans of food we had just marveled over.

  Brandon stood rooted to the stairs. My feet felt planted to the ground. The smell of gunpowder and blood filled my nostrils.

  Travis yelled down the stairs, but the sound was soft and muddy, lost in my mental confusion. Chuck’s head rolled to the side, and his mouth opened and closed, no words coming out. It was his eyes that caught me: full of fear but dimming at the same time. That’s what brought me out of it, and my feet went into motion.

  “Travis, get the med-kit from the SUV. Brandon, get some towels; we have to stop the bleeding.” I had learned some basic field medicine from being around Doc and Kara. I was down by Chuck’s side in two steps. His chest had taken the brunt of the blast with a large open wound dead center, but there were plenty of holes surrounding it, including one that was seeping blood in a copious stream. The loss of the Kevlar vests had cost more than we could have ever thought.

  I looked back into the room that Chuck had attempted to enter. A shotgun sat strapped onto the back of a chair, a thin stream of smoke leaked upward from its barrel. A length of rope dangled from the doorknob and led back into the shadows and onto some mechanism tha
t triggered the shotgun to fire.

  I looked back down at Chuck who grimaced in pain. “Help is on the way,” I said. “Just hold on. We’re getting the med kit.” There was a stampede of feet from above. “Brandon! Hurry up with those towels!”

  I looked into Chuck’s eyes. The light was going out behind them as if someone were turning down a dimmer switch somewhere inside him. “I’m so sorry, Chuck. I thought there was something wrong, but it was too late.”

  He reached up with his hand and grasped my shoulder, but there wasn’t much strength in his grip. He was trying to say something, but his voice was too weak, so with a gentle tug, he pulled my head down to his.

  In barely a whisper, he said, “Not your fault. I knew better. Just got….” He stopped and coughed, and blood splashed out on his chin. “Got sloppy.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Not going to make it. Tell everyone,” he stopped, his strength ebbing away. “Tell them I love them. I’ll see them on the other side.”

  His hand slipped from my shoulder. I turned to shout but saw both Brandon and Travis surging down the stairs with Brandon in the lead. Their faces were masks of fear and worry.

  I grabbed a towel from Brandon, wadded it up, and then looked for a place to apply pressure, but I got lost in all the holes. Blood was everywhere. There were more holes than I could count, but I selected the worst and pressed the towel into it.

  “Stay with us, Chuck,” I said, leaning down close to him.

  His face tightened into a grimace, but after about twenty seconds, his face went slack, and his eyes closed. I heard a slight raspy exhalation that wasn’t followed by another intake of breath. I waited and prayed for that next breath to come, but it didn’t.

  Travis shoved the med-kit into my face, but I batted it away. There was nothing in there that was going to help. Chuck was gone.

  The wind came out of the west, sharp and uncaring, stinging my face, but I really didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel much of anything, but an overwhelming numbness as if I were detached and floating from my body.

  I had to get out of that basement. The walls were closing in on me, suffocating me.

  Brandon and Travis had followed me outside, saying words that I really couldn’t hear, a thousand miles away.

  An open field was just behind the house with a stand of dormant trees off to our right. My hands were still slick with blood. Chuck’s blood. The wind blew across them, drying the blood slowly, making it tacky.

  How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I think faster? It was like some surreal cosmic joke. Zombies were our enemy. Marauders were our enemy. But to get one of our people killed by someone, most likely long dead, was like a cruel slap in the face by a God who was looking off in another direction.

  Brandon stepped up beside me, quiet for a moment and then said, “It’s not your fault.”

  “Whose fault is it? I was in charge of this mission.”

  “Any one of us could have opened that door,” Travis said from behind me.

  “But I should have seen it. The place was set up for long-term survival. We found the food stores, but I should have known that they’d had to have set up some way to protect their supplies. It just was so damn obvious.”

  “Where are the people that lived there?” Travis asked.

  “Long gone,” Brandon said, “but they probably left town for some reason, maybe to get to a relative and couldn’t make it back. Don’t you think, Joel?”

  “Yeah, that’s probably it, but it doesn’t matter. They’re gone, but their little trap killed our friend.”

  “It’s their fault,” Brandon said, “not yours.”

  “But I should have seen it!” My shout echoed across the field and got lost in the wind.

  All was quiet for the next few seconds as the three of us stood there, our backs to the house. Gray clouds drifted by the sun, leaving us in shadows, and I felt a chill pass through me, bringing on a wave of goose bumps running like a wave up my arms.

  A snapping noise sounded off to our right from the small copse of trees. I turned and saw the silhouette of a shambling figure stumble from behind one of the larger trees.

  Oh, great. Just what we needed. Zombies.

  But it was alone. It stepped out of the trees and into the open field, its clothes in tatters with patches of flesh exposed. It wasn’t very big and was probably no more than a teenager when it was turned.

  My arms felt like lead, without vitality, but I reached down to my holster and unsnapped it, ready to pull my pistol. Brandon stepped past me and brought up his rifle.

  I looked to the pathetic creature heading our way and almost felt pity for it, but then the world shifted for me, reality sliding into the semi-dream realm.

  One time when I was a kid, I visited my grandparents on my father’s side. They lived in northern Ohio in a house that always smelled like stale toast and Bengay. My grandpa had this old picture-viewing device called a stereoscope. It had a handheld setup with two eyeholes and an arm that held a card with an image that was duplicated. The doubled images sat side-by-side, and when I looked at them through the viewer, I got this fuzzy 3D effect. When I did it, it warped out my eyes and gave me a slight headache. Anyway, that effect is what I felt as I looked across the field at the boy shambling our way. In this case, it was my very real in-the-moment time melding with my dream world. The two images were the same but different.

  The visual dissonance brought on a slight wave of vertigo, and I stumbled sideways and gently slid into Brandon, disturbing his aim.

  “Watch it,” he said, turning to face me. “What’s wrong, Joel? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  It wasn’t a ghost. Not at all. It was the boy from my dream.

  Brandon turned away from me and brought his rifle back up, taking dead aim. I willed myself out of my trance and shot out an arm just as he pulled the trigger. My hand hit the side of his gun, sending his shot off harmlessly into the trees.

  “What the hell, Joel?” Brandon asked.

  The boy trudged towards us, crashing through waist-high weeds, driven on by a single purpose: to get to me. I felt the same imperative and broke from Brandon and Travis and started at a fast walk towards the boy. I broke from my walking pace as the boy stumbled and started running.

  “Joel, what the hell are you doing? Brandon shouted.

  I ignored him and closed the distance between the boy and me. I could see the boy’s face now. His eyes were locked intently on me, and his face was very pale and gaunt. Curly bits of stubble dotted his chin. His mouth moved, opening and closing soundlessly as he tried to say something. I knew already what he was trying to say: my name.

  I heard footfalls behind me, telling me that Brandon and Travis were coming up quickly. The boy’s foot must have gotten caught in a hole or some irregular ground because he stumbled badly and went down hard, knocking up a small cloud of dust. He didn’t move again and I changed from running to an all-out sprint.

  What felt like hours, was really only seconds, but I made it to the boy’s side and rolled him over as quickly as I could. His eyes were closed, and his face was lifeless.

  Brandon and Travis made it to me about two seconds later, their breath coming out in gasps.

  “Joel, what is going on?” Brandon asked.

  My fingers felt for a pulse in the boy’s neck. It took me a few seconds, but I found it, weak but persistent. A sense of relief swept over me. A few seconds later, his eyes opened. Beyond the fatigue and the pain, I saw something akin to joy deep in those eyes, but as quickly as it came, it receded, and he went out like a light.

  “Joel!” Brandon said, “who the hell is this?”

  “His name is Jason,” I said.

  Chapter 19

  Of the Living and the Dead

  The boy lay on a couch in the farmhouse living room, looking pale and insubstantial as if he might melt away at any moment. We collected blankets to cover him, hoping to bring him out of the near state of shock. I asked Travis to ge
t a can of soup from the basement and asked Brandon to start a fire outside on the stone charcoal grill to warm the soup.

  They peppered me with questions I wasn’t able to answer as they went about their tasks. “Who is this kid?” “What are we doing with him?” I waved them off as I tended to Jason. If there were a phrase that reached below ‘skin and bones,’ I would have used it to describe him. Maybe absolute starvation. Or death.

  Travis came back into the living room and stared intently at me with more questions behind his expression. I knew if Brandon were in the room, he’d show no such restraint.

  How was I going to tell them I had had a vision of Jason without sounding like a total wacko? Then again, we were living through a zombie apocalypse. Certainly, that had to change some of the rules of what was normal? Maybe all the darkness of our new undead world had shifted us away from everything being explained in only rational terms? I hated considering the idea that we were possibly slipping towards a medieval perspective where people were cured with the eyes of newts and witches were burned at the stake. But I also had this feeling that back before the world turned upside down and the dead rose, our total adherence to a world explained only computational details down to the seventh decimal point had its own oppressive force. If rational and logical parameters were the only true measures, then how could anyone explain how our pre-apocalypse world had a near-worshipful fascination with the Kardashians?

  As I considered these weighty ideas, a hint of color drifted back to Jason’s cheeks, and he stirred slightly under the bundle of blankets we had heaped upon him, but he did not wake up. I considered trying to force him awake, but I sensed that his body was well past a breaking point, and disturbing him could do more harm than good.