Books of the Dead (Book 1): Sanctuary From The Dead Read online

  There were two sets of doors. The outer doors were glass, but it looked like most of the glass had been knocked out during the night. This allowed us to make our way into the alcove with ease but offered no protection as the zombies could follow us in. When we had first set-up shop at the church, we had torn out the original set of inner glass doors and replaced them with a set of sturdy metal doors.

  “Get that door open,” Kurtz said with an edge in his voice. “I’ve got enough bullets, but the way they’re coming, they’ll overwhelm us fast.”

  The locking mechanism was fairly simple, designed to be opened quickly in case of an emergency, but was complicated enough to keep any live intruders from easily figuring it out and definitely would befuddle a zombie. It consisted of three hasps with bolts through them. You had to unscrew each bolt. I started on the first one when it hit me that the door was probably locked from the inside and I froze.

  Kurtz fired shot after shot, the alcove filling with the smell of cordite. I heard the bullets hitting home and the thuds of zombie’s bodies falling onto the asphalt.

  “What the fuck’s taking so long,” he said.

  “I don’t know if the door is locked on the inside.”

  “What!? You didn’t think of that earlier?” he said continuing to fire.

  I was paralyzed by my own stupidity. While I didn’t want this guy inside, I didn’t want him shooting me in the back.

  “You’ve got ten seconds to open that door or else I’ll shoot you and leave you for the zombies.”

  I started on the second bolt at the bottom of the door and got it out. He continued firing, backing his legs in against my side. My workspace was getting tighter by the second.

  “Five seconds.” I heard him stop, reload, and start firing again. The guttural moans and hisses of the zombies were so close that I imagined their breath on my neck. The last bolt was being a real bitch. Whoever had put it in last had nearly stripped it. It took all my force to get it to budge and it turned as slowly as a windmill in a gentle breeze.

  “You’re out of time, Asswipe,” he said. I felt the pressure of one of his knees brush my back, as he rotated towards me. The zombies were closing in, but he might actually shoot off one of my kneecaps and leave me as a distraction as he made a run for it.

  The bolt made one last turn and I yanked it out, holding it up for him to see. I lunged forward putting my shoulder against the door, pushing it inward. He surged past me, knocking me to the floor as the door gave way letting us inside.

  I rolled over and jumped to my feet yelling at him, “Help me close the door!” The zombies were closing on the open door. He could have escaped into the interior of the church, but had to suspect that we probably still had people inside. I might be a good bargaining chip in a face-off. He added his substantial weight to the effort of closing the door. One zombie wedged his upper torso in the door, effectively stopping it from closing. Its one arm whipped about trying to get at us as it groaned a pitiful noise, sounding almost desperate.

  The soldier put the barrel of his gun against the side of the thing’s head and blew its brains out. It fell to the floor more, out of the door than in. Bony and mangled hands grabbed at the door trying to get some sort of purchase to pry the door open to get to us.

  “The dead one’s blocking the door,” I said. “Let up a little and I’ll pull it inside.” He banged the butt of his gun at the clutching hands knocking them away. I grabbed the undead thing by the arm and yanked it inside. I pulled so hard that the arm nearly detached from the thing’s body, bones breaking and separating at the shoulder socket, but the arm held on by a few tendons.

  Both of us put our backs against the door and pushed with our legs. Every couple seconds, he would smack the fingers of the zombies with the butt of his pistol. With one final Herculean push we got the door closed, taking off a half dozen zombie fingers in the effort. I pulled down the double latches, securing it.

  “Not too shabby,” he said, catching his breath. “I could use a man like you on the outside when we hit the road again. You should consider it because you sure as shit must not fit in with these holy rollers.”

  “I think I’ll stay,” I said, my breathing labored from the exertion of closing the door.

  “Is that your final answer?” he asked with a wry smile. Despite being a total asshole, there was something likable about this man and I could see why his men followed him. He had some sort of innate charisma. Then again, they said the same thing about Hitler and the devil.

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “I thought so. So, where are the guns, Asswipe?”

  I knew I was just playing for any chance I could break free to get back to Kara. There was no way I was taking him to one of bigger caches of weapons, so I pointed up the stairs towards the first floor. We had a very small set of weapons in one of the front rooms. I started up the stairs with him right behind me.

  Just as I reached the top of the stairs, I saw a shadow cross the end of the corridor and disappear into one of the Sunday school meeting rooms. I wondered if it was one of our people or maybe one of the undead. If it was one of our people, maybe they could get the drop on him. If it was one of the undead, maybe it would offer enough distraction I could make a run for it.

  The warriors kept several caches of arms around the church. The bigger stuff was down in the basement. I was hoping that our people had moved most of the guns there, but I held out equal hope that there were enough there to placate Kurtz.

  The air was thick with dust and the smell of cordite along with the stench of the undead. Shell casings littered the floor. There had been a heavy firefight in here during the night.

  As I reached the top of the steps, I saw three bodies on the floor outside the sanctuary entrance. Two of them were zombies. The last body was one of the church deacons. An elderly guy who always stood outside the sanctuary on Sundays, greeting people with a smile and a hand shake. Mr. Wood. He had chided me more than once on my lack of attendance. Something had taken a bite out of one of his arms and his neck was a bloody mess, large chunks of it missing.

  I stepped over his body. “We have some weapons up this way,” I said, turning the corner and leading him towards the nursery. The hallway was a mess. Part of the ceiling had collapsed onto the floor, no doubt from their big gun. The front entrance had held, but there were major cracks in the reinforced doors. Desiccated fingers worked the cracks, looking for anyway to get inside, their efforts accompanied by moaning.

  The hallway was only about forty feet long. On the right side were two doors, one leading into a meeting room and one leading into the Pastor’s office. The single door on the left side led to the nursery. I edged around the chunks of the ceiling, nearly tripping on an overturned chair. Kurtz was a little more graceful.

  “Drop the gun,” a voice called out behind us. It was Kara. She aimed around the corner with half her body exposed. That turned out to be her first mistake.

  Asking was her second mistake. She should have shot first and asked questions later. Kurtz spun without hesitation and fired three quick shots in her direction. She fell backwards and out of view, her rifle clattering to the floor.

  Without thinking, I lowered my shoulder rammed into his side, sending him sprawling face first across the pile of collapsed ceiling debris. For that brief moment, I had the advantage and decided to press it for all it was worth. I reared back and gave him two hard kidney punches. His muscles were so thick and tight it felt like I was hitting a concrete wall. It must have made an impact though because he groaned. He kicked back at me, but I moved just in time to avoid his foot impacting with my family jewels. Still, the kick knocked me off balance as it glanced off my inner thigh.

  He started to roll over, bringing the pistol in a dangerous arc towards me. At the last millisecond, I kicked at his hand, striking the gun and sending it down the corridor toward the sanctuary. Before I knew it, one of his giant fists hit me on the hip knocking me backwards. He used that time to jump to his fee
t.

  In a hand-to-hand face-off, there was no question I was toast. He had size, strength, and training advantages along with his brutal nature.

  When I stumbled backwards I ended up down on one knee, my hand out behind me braced on the broken chair. I held that pose looking up at him as he closed in on me, a confident smile spreading across his face. He was going to enjoy this. Or, at least, thought he was.

  I had only one shot at this. Just as he reared back to get the most into his next punch, I pulled the chair free from the debris and brought it forward, smashing it across his midsection, knocking him backwards. The chair broke in two. I hoisted what was left of it in both hands and swung for the fences. It broke across his face, sending him against the wall. The rest of the chair broke away on impact leaving me only one leg, but it was enough. Moving in, I battered his head and neck with the chair leg again and again, not stopping until the leg splintered and broke into pieces, sending him to the floor with a bloody pulp for a face. For good measure, I kicked him in the side.

  “Payback is a bitch, isn’t it?” I shouted.

  My vision swam with pinpricks of orange light and I could feel blood pulsing in my ears. Before this night, I had never felt blood lust before, even with the zombies, but now in just the span of a few short hours, I certainly knew it. First with the soldiers in the high school and now with Kurtz.

  The only reason I stopped at all is that I remembered Kara had been shot. I dropped what was left of the chair leg and ran to her. Her body was laying half around the corner in front of the sanctuary, looking lifeless. Her shoulder was bloody from a gunshot wound.

  I fell beside her, a knot in my stomach forming, and reached out to touch her neck, feeling for a pulse. As soon as I touched her, her eyes fluttered open and her hand came up to grab mine.

  “You’re okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, my vision starting to cloud with tears. “But what about you?

  “It’s not too bad, but it hurts to move,” she said, her voice soft.

  “Then don’t move.”

  She gave me a weak smile.

  “How’d you get back here?” I asked.

  “With that...that...asshole throwing hand grenades at me, I had to find another exit out of the school. By the time I got out, I saw him leading you away, but I got tangled up with a load of zombies. I caught up with in the church. All your shooting brought a lot of zombies down on that entrance, so I had to go around to the other side. I was able to sneak past the zombies on the east side. That’s when I saw you.”

  “That’s enough of an explanation. We’ve got to get you some medical attention.”

  “Doc Wilson can patch me up.”

  “Yes,” I said starting to stand when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. “Won’t that bastard ever die?”

  CHAPTER 32

  Sanctuary from the Dead

  It was as if I had entered the worst horror film of my life and life in the past few months had been pretty horrific. This was horror of a level of magnitude. Kurtz, his face nothing but a bloody mess, was crawling across the floor toward the pistol I had kicked away.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said.

  I quickly calculated that he’d reach that gun before I could reach him. I looked to Kara’s rifle, but she stopped me.

  “It’s empty,” she said.

  “You were trying to bluff him?”

  She nodded her head.

  He had the gun and was struggling to get to his feet. I grabbed Kara and pulled her into the Adult Sunday School room, shut the door behind me and decided to head into the sanctuary. I had to get him to track me and not Kara.

  When I considered bugging out during my days of exile I created a stash of supplies, including a pistol, under the choir loft. If I could get to the loft, maybe I could finish this.

  I heard his footfalls, uneven and plodding, his breathing labored, coming down the hall after me.

  “I’m coming for you, you son of a bitch,” he said, but his words were wet and mushy. I guess my beating had taken out a few of his teeth.

  I ran across the hallway intersection to get his attention on me. I saw his arm go up as he took a wild shot at me. I heard a whizzing sound as the bullet flew by me and a chunk of plaster came off the wall behind me.

  I yanked open the sanctuary door and entered. Once I was fully inside, I noticed three gaping holes in the east wall where the moon light was streaming in. Dust particles filled the air, dancing in the moonbeams. The sound of gunshots filtered in through the breaches in the wall. The shots were sporadic as if things were calming down outside. That or the dead were winning again.

  Up until this very moment, in this fucked-up, post-apocalyptic zombie-filled world, all the rules, be they truly warped, were explainable through rational processes, no matter how twisted those processes were. A virus or plague of unknown origin bringing the dead back to life was based on some messed up scientific principles and could be explained. Once you got used to the fact that the dead had risen and were attacking people, your latitude for the unexplainable or the extra-natural broadened greatly. Even in a world with such elastic rules, what happened next defied any rational explanation and changed my worldview in the most fundamental way.

  From the back of the sanctuary I could see people in the pews. People sitting calmly, barely moving, their backs to me. There were only a handful and they were spaced out in pews near the front of the sanctuary. Each one sat eerily quiet and unmoving as if meditating or praying. Despite their placidity, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and goosebumps ran down my arms -- and I had seen some strange shit in the past few months.

  In the hallway outside the sanctuary I heard Kurtz curse as he stumbled along.

  “Asswipe, I’m coming for you!” he shouted.

  I had little choice but to move toward the front of the sanctuary despite my instincts holding my feet in place.

  I moved into the sanctuary slowly and got parallel to the first person in the pew next to me and took a look in their direction. It was Mrs. Casey. She had taught my Sunday school class when I was a kid. A big piece of her face was missing and a flap of skin hung loosely from her neck. She was clearly a zombie now.

  In every context I had experienced since the Outbreak, the most predictable chain of events went like this; she would turn in my direction, launch herself off the pew at me with a snarl or groan and the rest of the zombies would follow in suit. In just a few short seconds, I would be ripped to pieces by their ravenous teeth and rending hands, dying in one of the most horrible ways imaginable.

  But none of this happened. I paused for several seconds waiting for some reaction, but she sat unmoving. I contemplated the idea that maybe something in her zombie brain was scrambled so badly that she was incapable of locomotion and decided to press on. Edging up beside the next pew, I looked over and saw Jake Tillson and a middle-aged lady whose name escaped me. She had been in the choir. Both of them showed signs of being attacked. Jake had a large wound across his forehead, congealed blood hanging down from his left eyebrow. The lady was missing an eye and had part of the skin gnawed away from her skull.

  Neither of them moved or even looked in my direction. This was something very strange. It was then that my mind had a little schism. I felt like I had stepped outside my body because this whole scene was so much like the dream or vision or whatever you wanted to call it, that I had experienced just a few nights ago. Was that dream some sort of precognition or was it a vision from above? I could have pondered these questions for hours but I came back to reality. Whatever was true, I was still sitting in a room full of the undead with a psychopath chasing me.

  The zombies knew I was there, yet they remained still and a quiet voice inside me told me that for some unknown or even supernatural reason that I was safe. Maybe it was my mind breaking with reality after all the shit that had gone down, but it didn’t feel that way.

  The sanctuary door flew open. Ducking do
wn, I hastened my way towards the choir loft. Even with this urgent push, I was nearly stopped in my tracks when I passed the first pew where Pastor Stevens was sitting as placidly as the others. He had been mauled badly. His right cheek had three deep tear wounds and the ear on that side of his head hung loosely from a chunk of torn flesh.

  “Where are you, you little bastard?” Kurtz shouted from the back of the sanctuary. His words came out like he was talking with a mouth full of spaghetti.

  I lowered myself to nearly a crawl and ascended the set of three stairs that led to the altar, passing Pastor Steven’s pulpit, and made my way into the choir loft.

  A gunshot exploded over my head and a chair flew over backwards just a few feet behind me. It was then that I moved to a full out crawl.

  “Who the fuck are these people?” The soldier asked with some perplexity in his voice. I had no idea what he was doing, but he didn’t shoot again and I couldn’t hear him moving. In my mind’s eye I imagined that we had done, and was looking at the silent congregation and wondering what the hell was up.

  While he pondered, I crawled. I made my way up the tiered choir loft to the third and final row of seats. My stash was tucked behind the fifth seat from the right. My hand groped in the dark and came upon the cloth bag containing some of my get-away items including a .45 automatic. I slowly pulled the bag out, but discovered I held the bag from its bottom. As soon as I got pulled completely out, gravity went into action, pulling the contents down towards the mouth of the bag, spilling them down into the darkness. The loudest noise came from the gun hitting the wooden floor.

  “There you are,” Kurtz said with a hint of satisfaction. Two shots came in my direction, one hitting a chair just above my head and the other knocking a hole in the mural on the back.

  My chances were next to nil of jumping behind the choir loft and finding my gun. The space was just too tight and too dark back there.