Dead Run_A Zombie Apocalypse Novel Read online

  Chapter 3

  On the Run

  Still Two Days Earlier

  “Better hurry up,” Jo said, craning her neck to look out the window. “Those helicopters are going to spot us if we stay out in the open.”

  Sergeant Nathaniel Jones kept a watchful eye skyward after hearing the tell-tale sounds of helicopters in the distance. Their blades beat the sky like frenetic dragon wings, echoing on the pre-dawn air. It sounded like they were miles away, but Jones thought they could be closer. It made him a little twitchy. He didn’t like being nervous at all.

  He was at the wheel of the lead military troop transport truck filled with people from the Manor. The Manor was the former safe harbor for a group of survivors from the Outbreak until zombies and a brutal military occupation ended their stay. The truck was one of three they had commandeered after a half-baked rebellion and firefight at the Manor. Their plan had been threadbare thin. It was only after a thirteen-year-old unexpectedly gunned down the troop’s leader in the surprising and shocking attack that the tide had turned in their favor, giving them just enough time to make an escape.

  Reinforcements had arrived faster than he had expected. Private Kepler hadn’t been lying when he said he had called back to the Wright-Patterson Air Base for help. His mayday had been answered posthaste and in force.

  Jones knew that couldn’t be a good thing. They had a handful of weapons and a slim supply of ammunition. Half of their dour group of escapees were over sixty or under fifteen. Most of the remaining group didn’t know about fighting. Against a trained fighting force, they wouldn’t last very long. Better put, it would be a massacre.

  Adding to their woes was the fact that their tiny escape fleet was running low on fuel. Supplies of all kinds had dwindled at the Manor, and there wasn’t enough time to refuel in their mad dash for freedom, so they left with the proverbial “shirts on their backs” and not much more.

  “We’ve got to find someplace we can get undercover,” Jo said. She was the de facto leader of the Manor contingent and Jones’ cab companion. She was also worse for the wear. Colonel Kilgore had pistol-whipped her just a couple days before, and the ugly purple bruise on the side of her head bore witness to that. It was a bad color combination with her wiry red hair.

  Jones replied, “We probably have some time before they find us. I would imagine they’ll get a sit-rep first, take care of the wounded, and make an assessment. It depends on how pissed they are. Your people took out a lot of their guys. Kepler isn’t in Lodwick’s league, but I’m guessing he’s pissed. If Kilgore returns, you can bet on them looking for us.”

  “How do we know he hasn’t come back?” Jo asked.

  “Well, we don’t.”

  Neither of them spoke for several minutes as they rolled along in the dull light of the dawn, jostled by the bumpy, unkempt county road. The troop transports were roomy but not built for comfort. Jones thought staying off the main state highways was the best course of action, and Jo agreed.

  For Jones, this new partnership wasn’t too comfortable. He had been with Colonel Kilgore and the troops when they had landed at the Manor. The Colonel had shown signs of being on the edge before the takeover, and in the short time they held the Manor and its people under their “supervision,” Kilgore had only gotten worse. It had gotten to a point where Jones felt that he had no choice but to act and remove the Colonel from leadership. That put him in a dangerous no-man’s-land -- not with the troops and not with the people of the Manor. In fact, it got him put under house arrest. In the end, he had lost everything he had known and trusted.

  He had made his choice and sided with protecting the people of the manor, but that didn’t mean any of them trusted him.

  “What should we do?” Jo asked, looking out of the window, trying to watch the skies, but knowing one of those helicopters could swoop down on them at any moment.

  “We need to find out what we have in terms of supplies, weapons, and capabilities,” Jones replied. “I mean, how many people do you have left that have any fighting skills?”

  Jo took a moment to make a mental inventory and said, “Not many. Besides, if they find us out in the open, with the firepower those choppers have, then we are as good as dead.”

  She realized that she was about to concede a great degree of control to this man who had been their enemy, but she was near the point of exhaustion. “Sergeant, what should we do?” She figured that he was on their side, whether he liked it or not. Plus, he had more skills in his pinkie than she had altogether.

  “Let’s find a farm or some big structure to hide these trucks in. I don’t want us spotted from the eyes in the sky.”

  Jo reached for the radio and relayed that information to the other two trucks, and the search for a new, but temporary, safe harbor started. She didn’t like the idea of not getting further away, but the risk was too great to stay out and exposed like they were. The downside was that it meant they were trapped in the middle of nowhere with limited food and almost no supplies.

  Chapter 4

  Where is a CVS When You Need It?

  Brent’s face creased with lines of worry when he pulled me out of the room and away from Kara. I already knew his check of Kara wasn’t going to bring any good news.

  “How is she?” I asked, looking over his shoulder to Kara, who lay way too still on the couch.

  “Not good,” he said, not meeting my eyes. That only made it worse. “I think she has an infection from the wound in her side.”

  When Marlow had done what he had done to her, he had stabbed her in the side with a knife. She had put up a fight, and he didn’t very well like it. The wound was life threatening and didn’t look serious, but its aftermath was proving to be serious.

  “What can you do for her?”

  “Not much,” he said. “When we left, it wasn’t like I could pick up my medical supplies. We found some aspirin in a drawer in the bathroom, but that won’t do anything to the infection.”

  Brent was a part of our breakout from Marlow’s compound. He was a general practitioner before the Outbreak, and he, his wife and daughter had been traveling south before Marlow nabbed them, much like he did us. Marlow turned him into the compound’s E.R. and urgent care. Brent, along with his wife and daughter, were being held captive in the same room we were. They were in there as punishment because Brent failed to treat one of Marlow’s henchman.

  I hesitated to tell him the next bit of my news. While I trusted Brent, there was something about it that I felt ashamed of, like I had done something dirty.

  “Brent, I need to tell you this. Kara is pregnant,” I said.

  If his face could have become any grimmer, I’m not sure how. He rubbed a hand across his face as if to rub off the worry. It didn’t work.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “It doesn’t change how bad she is one way or the other. For the baby and her to be well, I need some antibiotics for her.”

  “We can try the houses around this neighborhood and see if anyone left some behind.”

  “That sounds like a plan, but you know there are zombies out there wandering around,” he replied as if it was something really serious.

  “Zombies, schombies, the world’s full of them,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “I’ve been killing them since I was knee-high to a fence post. I’ll get Brother Ed and we’ll start canvassing the houses around here.”

  I sensed movement behind me and turned just as Naveen moved in beside me. She was my unofficial adopted daughter. Like all of us, she was a refugee, but her story was more tragic than some. Her father was a medical researcher, and when the Outbreak hit, the family tried to escape but ended up trapped in a country house with a farm family who lived there. After trying to escape in a car, they got overwhelmed by the dead. She was the only one to make it out. After a harrowing journey, I rescued her off the street with a zombie horde hot on her trail.

  “Is Kara going to be all right?” she asked, looking past me to where
Kara was resting. I hated to see the worry on her face. Like I was her “unofficial” dad, Kara was her mom. As much as I wanted to protect Naveen from this undead world, there was no way of really doing that.

  Brent looked to me for some sort of cue, but I didn’t feel well-equipped to answer her question. Telling the blunt truth would only scare her, so I did what my parents always did for me and lied.

  “She’s going to be okay. Brent thinks it will only be a matter of time. Right, Brent?”

  He looked off-balance for a moment then nodded and said, “Yes, I think so, as long as we get some good medicine, and Joel’s getting ready to do that.”

  I gave them my best, “Oh geez, I sure can do that” smile. She bought it, but he knew better.

  “Okay,” Naveen said then added, “just let me know if I can do anything.”

  “Sure,” I said as she walked to the kitchen where Linda, Brent’s wife, and their young daughter, Chelsea, were.

  Brent watched her go then said, “Naveen’s been great for Chelsea. It’s really bringing her out of her shell.”

  Chelsea had been brutalized and molested by Marlow, the compound’s leader. Marlow said he did it to keep Brent in check, but from what I could tell of Marlow, he did it because he liked it. But Marlow was long dead now, thanks to Kara. She had gotten her own revenge on him, not just for herself, but for every person he had tormented.

  “I’m glad it helps, and having another young girl around has helped Naveen, so it goes both ways.”

  Brent’s expression clouded over, and I could tell that he was reliving the horror that was their life at Marlow’s compound. To break him out of it, I asked, “So, what antibiotics should we look for?”

  He quickly shifted from tortured to his doctor’s clinical demeanor then listed ten or so antibiotics, making strong recommendations for a couple specific ones, but we both knew that beggars can’t be choosers. We had our shopping list, only we had no stores to shop in. So, that meant a house-by-house search, and that meant zombies.

  I almost couldn’t wait to get started.

  It was a simple plan. Get into any of the houses and bring back any prescription we could find. Oh yeah, and not get killed.

  Brother Ed was up for it, albeit with two black eyes and a swollen nose as a result of some rough treatment from Marlow’s men. Jason volunteered, too, but he was still shaky from a blow he took from Marlow. I convinced him to stay behind to guard Kara and Naveen.

  The big debate was whether Brother Ed and I would work as a team or split up. We could make more ground if we worked separately, but that increased the risk. We decided on speed, but determined we would only work in houses side-by-side and not spread out any further than that. Five minutes inside, then both of us would come out and check with each other then re-enter if we felt the need.

  Like I said, simple. Easy peasy.

  We had purposefully selected a house a couple blocks off the main drag to stay out of view from any potential marauders. It was a simple one-story house, painted green, with a tall pine tree and some bushes out in front. The bushes were in competition with the knee-high grass.

  The owners had put a nice expansion on the back with a three-season porch and a deluxe kitchen. It gave us all the modern conveniences of the fallen world. The extra space allowed our small crew to spread out and gave us some breathing room.

  Brother Ed hadn’t been the most chatty fellow in the world, but lately, he seemed almost morose. Of course, he had seen some ugly shit lately. I wasn’t the most convivial companion either, since I was worried sick about Kara.

  So, after devising the plan, we didn’t say much and went about our task in a workmanlike fashion.

  When I said South Bloomfield was small, I wasn’t kidding. The town proper couldn’t have been more than a hundred and fifty homes, maybe not even that many. The main strip had five fast food restaurants, three gas stations, and a handful of businesses. It did have two stop lights just to slow people down.

  There was a development south of town that could have been called a “suburb,” but that would have been stretching it a bit in my humble opinion. If not, there should be a law against a town of less than 2,000 people having a suburb. If society ever gets back on its feet, I’ll lead the charge.

  The northernmost eatery was a Dairy Queen. Despite my sour mood, when I thought of ice cream, my mouth watered a little, and my soul ached for days gone by. Simpler times of dip cones, milkshakes, and hot dogs with chili sauce. Sigh.

  Unfortunately for us, there was no pharmacy, which could have made our lives easier. So, we had to do it the hard way with a house-by-house search. The truth of the matter was that the pharmacy would have been looted long ago, anyway.

  Since we were keeping it simple, we moved to the two houses to the south of where we were camped out. He took the first one, which was similar to the one we were in, only it was painted a drab light gray color and had a driveway with a rusted out pickup truck sitting idle in it. We had watched this house and not seen any movement, but you never knew what horrors could be inside, sitting quiet and ready to launch at us.

  I took the next house, which was painted a pleasant yellow color. It was one story, like the others, only a tad longer with an attached garage and a covered porch. The lawn was overgrown, like all the houses, and an American flag hung off the side of the porch, mostly in tatters after months of exposure to the weather. A satellite dish edged out and above the tall grass that covered most of the yard.

  I pushed my way through the grass and stepped up onto the porch, my boots sounding on the wood, causing me to pause and listen. Nothing stirred within the house, but I couldn’t be certain it was empty until I got inside.

  I made my way across the short porch and pulled open the screen door, which screeched loudly, causing me to grimace. Nothing came pounding at the door, so I decided to forge ahead and grabbed the doorknob. It was firmly locked.

  I leaned forward and pushed my face against the window in the door to see if anything moved inside. The room inside was shrouded in shadows, but I could make out the bulky, dark shapes of a couch, some chairs, and a small, thin table. It looked like a living room.

  Since the door was locked, I had the option of checking other entryways or breaking the glass in the door. I went with the path of least resistance and used my trusty ball bat to poke a neat arm-sized hole in the glass. I reached in, avoiding the sharp edges remaining, and was easily able to reach down and unlock the door.

  A moment later, I pushed the door open and was hit with the sweet but stale smell of decay. In the zombie apocalypse, that seemed to be one of the most common aromas -- the perfume of the dead. Whether these were long-dead folks no longer walking around or your common zombie, I didn’t know, so I got my bat ready for anything.

  We had decided to keep gunfire to a minimum for two reasons. The first and most obvious was that loud sounds attract other zombies. The other was that we were low on ammunition. We basically only had what Brother Ed and the others had scavenged off the bodies of Marlow’s men and a few extra clips and shells.

  I let my nose get used to the smell and let my eyes adjust to the dim lighting then edged into the living room. The room was clean with the exception of a patina of dust covering everything. There was an open entryway off to my left that led into what I guessed was the family room complete with a big screen TV that I assumed was connected to the satellite dish in the front yard.

  A little voice in my head said, we don’t need no stinking cable; we have the Dish Network.

  Now, they had nothing. No NBC, ABC, or CBS. No ESPN. No HBO. All were relics of a bygone era. The words, I want my MTV, flitted through my mind.

  I took three short steps toward the family room, surveyed it, and saw another comfy couch and a leather recliner with some wear on its arms. Obviously, it was for the man of the house. A spacious flat screen hung on the wall, the screen a dark void.

  Since there was a low likelihood of finding medicine in there, I skipp
ed it and moved into the recesses of the house, ending up in a short corridor with three doorways off it. The odor of decay increased the deeper I got within the house, and I tightened my grip on my bat.

  The first doorway was open, and from my skewed angle, I could see a tiled floor and what appeared to be a shower curtain. That had to be a bathroom.

  Bingo, I thought. Bathrooms have medicine chests with mirrors and hopefully medicine.

  But before I headed that way, I decided to check out the doorway to my right, where the door was closed tightly. Once I got outside the door, the stale smell of decay was quite powerful. Sickening and sweet, just like always. My stomach tightened, and I willed it to retain its contents.

  I reached out, took hold of the doorknob with my left hand, and readied my bat in my right. I steeled myself for whatever was to come then turned the knob and pushed the door open.

  Heavy curtains were drawn, leaving the room mostly in darkness, but I could see a king-sized bed sitting in the center of the room against the far wall. His and her bedside tables sat on each side of the bed. A comfy, overstuffed rocking chair was positioned in a corner covered in clothes. In the old days, people joked and called those type of chairs chairdrobes because people rarely sat in them but, instead, just piled clothes on them.

  But the real draw in the room were the two figures in the bed. One was completely covered, while the other one had an arm and its head exposed. Even in the dark light, I could see a dark stain where the head of whoever was covered lay. The other figure was an elderly man. Lying on the bed at about chest level of the man was a large handgun. From where I was standing, I could see a large hole in the side of his head and stains on the sheets.

  They had taken the easy way out.

  He must have done the person who was under the sheets and then shot himself. I guessed it was his wife, but I didn’t raise the covers to see. Some things can be left to mystery.