Year of the Dead (Book 2) Read online

  “Solar powered, more than likely,” said Charlie.

  He gave the car some gas, pulled through the intersection, maneuvered around a collection of derelict vehicles left in the road. It did not take long for them to reach the rest stop where they parked next to a minivan with a bumper sticker that read “My child kicked your honor student’s ass.”

  Arming themselves, the brothers got out and stood with Sheila in front of the car. Joey, dressed in jeans and a black tank top that revealed his thin, wiry arms, glanced around in that nervous way he had. Several days’ worth of facial hair did little to hide his boyish good looks. Sheila wore tight, pink shorts and a T-shirt tied at the midriff, her toned stomach and the gold hoop through her belly button on display. Her abundance of red hair had been pulled back in a ponytail. Without makeup and a slightly crooked nose that let you know it had been broken sometime in the past, she was still one of the best-looking women Charlie had ever laid eyes on.

  Charlie was glad Sheila was with them, glad they had been able to get out of the little Tennessee town where the three of them had grown up without becoming victims of either the plague or the undead. Throughout high school, Sheila had always talked about moving away, perhaps going to California, taking a shot at “the movie biz.” But that was all it had ever been. Talk. And once the outbreak had begun—the scope of the disaster that had struck California during the early stages had been widely televised—it became fairly evident that was all it would ever be.

  As for Charlie and Joey Gatner…

  Still in their early twenties, they had both done jail time—breaking and entering, drunk and disorderly, that sort of thing—had seemed to be well on their way to making career criminals of themselves. Then came the superflu. And for some reason, the Gatner boys had been spared its ravages when so many others had been overcome. Without any sort of plan whatsoever, they had decided to hit the road. Now here they were, at a rest stop near some lonely stretch of interstate—they were all pretty lonely these days—with no idea where they would be headed next. Just seeing what each day would bring in this crazy new world of dead cities and flesh-eating zombies.

  “Man, I have to go,” Charlie announced, circling around to the other side of the minivan where he unzipped his pants, sighing as he relieved himself. A few others cars sat in random spaces across the lot. There was no traffic along the nearby road. No sign of any people. From what Charlie had seen in recent months, the majority of folks seemed to be making an effort to stay off the roads, to remain somewhere fortified and defensible. Anyone out and about these days were either desperate or crazy, for the most part. Charlie didn’t like to think too much about which category he and his traveling companions fell into.

  Leaning back against the minivan’s driver side door, he closed his eyes and listened to the spattering sound of his urine hitting the pavement. And that's when something slammed against the window behind him. Startled, he cut off his stream in mid-flow and stepped into the rather sizable puddle he had created. While fumbling one-handed with the zipper of his pants, he thought it fortunate he had neither dropped nor accidentally fired the weapon he was carrying. Turning around, he aimed his gun at the window and the thing staring at him from the other side.

  The zombie’s face was close to the glass, giving Charlie an excellent view of its emaciated features and bulging red eyes, too-tight skin stretching its lips in a wide, monstrous grin. As he watched, the zombie head-butted the window, hard enough to rattle the glass but not break it.

  “Fuck’s sake,” muttered Charlie, trying to decide whether or not he should shoot the thing. He decided against it.

  Never know when I might really need that bullet.

  With that thought in mind, he gave the zombie one last look then made his way back to where Sheila and Joey were waiting.

  Saturday, October 3rd

  Barry stood in the street next to a burned-out automobile, staring at the zombie woman ten feet in front of him. While she was alive, he figured she must have been a real beauty. And if he was being honest with himself—and, really, he saw no point in not being honest with himself—she still had a lingering attractiveness about her despite… Well, despite the fact that she was dead. No, not dead. Un-dead. Sure, the blood red eyes, the mottled skin, the snarling mouth, and the badly tangled hair—not to mention her filthiness—all detracted from her former desirability. And even from ten feet away, the smell coming off of her did not help matters either. But, again, if he was being honest with himself… The way her clothes had been torn in a few rather revealing locations did manage to elicit a response, albeit a rather mild one, in his hyperactive sixteen-year-old libido. Not that he planned to act upon this response. He was not some sort of pervert, no matter what his mother may have said when she found the links to various porn sites on his computer. Attempts to assert his psychic influence over this particular undead woman had nothing to do with wanting to satiate any sexual desires that might be percolating within him. No, this was just the latest in a rather long line of experiments, one that seemed to be going as well as the dozen or so that had preceded it. In other words, not very well at all.

  “Okay, let’s try this again,” he said, wiping a hand across his sweaty brow.

  He clenched his hands into fists, tightened the muscles of his arms and back, like he was attempting to push an invisible mass. A little while ago, his efforts had gotten the zombie woman to stop moving, to stay in one place—at least, he was pretty sure they had. So why, as with previous subjects, was inciting her to move again proving to be so difficult?

  Maybe you need to relax a little, he told himself. All this straining and stressing out isn’t really getting you anywhere.

  He opened his fists and wiggled his arms to let the tension out of them, tilted his neck from side to side, stretching the muscles there. All the while, the zombie stared at him, a low growl emanating from its throat.

  Barry recalled the early days of the plague, when the sickness had gotten its hooks into him, when he had been convinced during his more lucid moments that he was going to die. But, unlike his parents and the few people he considered friends, he had escaped death. How or why, he still had no idea.

  The luck of the draw, I suppose.

  He had not emerged unaffected from the experience, however. While lying weak and whimpering within the superflu’s clutches, he had dreamed. Dark, human-shaped forms with red eyes had populated those dreams, spreading across the Earth, an unstoppable force. When they had set their sights on him, he discovered fear unlike any he had ever known, asleep or awake. But then he had discovered a power within himself, one that had let him control the hungry, hideous, red-eyed entities with his mind…

  After his recovery, once he had realized the zombies had no interest in him as a source of food, he had decided to undertake a series of experiments. They were inspired in large part by the dreams, of course. And simple boredom. The plague had done commendable work in either killing, transforming, or driving away the folks of the town where he lived. As far as he knew, he was the last living soul within in its borders. Barry had never been much of a people person, so the lack of human contact had not overly bothered him. But as time wore on, finding ways to entertain himself had become increasingly difficult. If nothing else, his little experiments helped to alleviate some of the boredom.

  More relaxed now, he ignored the dozen or so zombies milling around along this stretch of road, had eyes only for the woman standing before him, staring back at him with that blood-red gaze so clearly visible in the morning light.

  Come closer.

  He imagined the silent command flying outward, snaring the creature he wished to control.

  Closer…

  The zombie took a step toward him.

  Closer…

  Another step.

  He felt a rush of jubilation. Compared to his earlier effort, the one that had halted the undead woman in her meandering tracks—if, in fact, this was truly the reason she had become immobiliz
ed, that it had not been mere coincidence—this seemed like the simplest thing in the world. When the zombie stood within arm’s length of him, he issued a silent command for her to stop. And that was exactly what she did.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said with a smile. And in that moment, he could almost believe that instead of a snarl the dead woman offered a smile of her own.

  Sunday, October 4th

  “I’m sorry to have to put you through this,” said Major Daniels. “Truly, I am.”

  Rachel sat on the cot, glaring at the woman in the military uniform who had positioned herself near the closed doorway.

  “You have to understand the situation, though.”

  Rachel said nothing as thoughts of rushing the major and beating her senseless danced through her head. Thoughts she would not act upon because of the guards outside the door, not to mention the major’s military training and Rachel’s lack of hand-to-hand fighting experience. The mild state of confusion in which Rachel found herself would only put her at a further disadvantage, she knew. The drug she had been administered on a daily basis for more than a week now made organizing her thoughts a challenge.

  “After what happened in Michigan,” the major went on, “we decided that a new approach might be required in order to achieve victory over the forces of the undead.”

  Rachel had heard it all before. Michigan. The Zone. The surprising levels of organization displayed by the zombies there. The military’s need to find a way to counteract this previously unsuspected ability of their enemy. The words “I’m sorry” were new, though. But as far as Rachel was concerned, the major could shove her apology somewhere guaranteed to cause a lot of pain.

  “Nothing less than the survival of our species may very well depend on what we’re doing here,” Major Daniels added. “I really do hope you realize this.”

  I should have kept my mouth shut, Rachel told herself for what had to be the thousandth time since her initial interrogation. Better yet, I should have never come anywhere near this place to begin with.

  Not that any of it mattered now. She had come here and she had answered their questions.

  What’s done is done.

  While Major Daniels continued to talk, Rachel’s mind wandered as it tended to do these days. From somewhere in the murky depths of her psyche, a voice seemed to speak to her, distracting her, the voice of “the Other” as she had come to think of it. Ever since they had started giving her the drug, it had spoken to her.

  As to the nature of the drug they had put into her body, Rachel had been given little information. All she knew was that it was some sort of hallucinogen, one that helped to “open her mind,” to make her more receptive to “a variety of stimuli” and “forms of communication beyond those normally associated with conscious thought.” While under the drug’s influence, reality seemed to warp around her, made her see things that were not there, things she could never quite recall once her head had cleared and she had returned from whatever particular trip she had been on. According to Major Daniels, the drug also brought the Other out from wherever it had been hiding within Rachel’s subconscious mind, introduced there by the disease that had entered her body, the very same disease that had hideously transformed the vast majority of its victims.

  But not Rachel.

  “We believe 'the Other,' as you refer to it, is the voice of the zombie hive mind,” Major Daniels had told her during one of their earlier conversations. “The drug allows you to hear it, for lack of a better term. To eavesdrop on it. And, with any luck, to learn its plans. With such intel at our disposal, we hope to prevent another Michigan from ever happening again.”

  As Rachel listened to the voice of the Other, speaking as it did in its rambling and rudimentary way—like an infant struggling to unlock the secrets of language—she noticed that what it had to say made a little more sense each day. As opposed to the simplistic images and commands it used with its undead hosts, the Other was being forced to learn a wide variety of words in order to communicate on a higher level—apparently, for the first time—with a fully functioning, living mind. Words she could imagine it plucking from wherever such information was stored within her brain.

  “Rachel?”

  She blinked, forcing her attention back to the woman addressing her.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Major Daniels said when she was sure she had Rachel’s undivided attention, “how much we appreciate what you’re doing for us.”

  With that, the major knocked on the door, waited for it to open then left the room. All the while, Rachel could hear the voice of the Other murmuring inside her head. In the not so distant future, she felt reasonably confident she would be able to comprehend exactly what it was trying to say to her.

  And I might have a few things to say in return.

  Monday, October 5th

  The man sat with his legs dangling over the side of the bridge. Thirty feet below, a river flowed by, the random undulations across its surface visible in the light of the moon hovering in the clear sky above. The man had his arms crossed and resting atop a low guard rail in front of him, the only thing stopping him—or a car on the off chance one passed this way—from accidentally going over the edge. To his left lay the axe handle he had been carrying for self-defense along with the backpack in which he kept most of his earthly possessions. To his right lay the dog that had been his constant companion since the day his wife had died.

  “Beautiful night, isn’t it, Goldie?” He kept his voice low, let it mingle with the wind whispering through the trees lining either side of the river. “A night like this makes it kinda hard to believe the end of the world ever really happened.”

  The dog whined. The man reached over to scratch it behind the ears.

  “I know, I know… It’s just nice to pretend every once in a while, that’s all.”

  He stared at the moon, aware of its indifference regarding the trials and tribulations endured by the strange, sentient creatures inhabiting the blue world around which it traveled. A scattering of stars surrounded the moon, their light reaching the man’s eyes across unimaginable distances. From somewhere out there, the disease that had caused so much horror had taken form, resulting in the swift and inexorable downfall of human civilization.

  “They could be out there, Goldie, intelligent lifeforms, looking right back at us, seeing the light of our sun, as unaware of our existence as we are of theirs. Never knowing a thing about the lives we’ve led, all that we’ve accomplished. Completely oblivious to the hell we’ve all been put through.”

  The man fell silent, staring and wondering. Then:

  “Who knows? Maybe they’ve been through a similar hell.”

  He looked at the animal lying next to him.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? That maybe I lost my mind somewhere along the way.” A shrug. “Maybe you’re right.”

  The man returned his gaze to the river once again, considered what it would be like to be a piece of driftwood on its surface, carried away from the horror and the heartache of the world around him, out to the ocean and beyond…

  A growl from Goldie interrupted his musings, brought him back to the here and now, to the bridge where the two of them had stopped along the way toward some unknown—unknowable?—destination.

  “What is it, girl?”

  The dog stood and took a few tentative steps, her attention directed toward one end of the bridge.

  The man grabbed the axe handle and got to his feet, swung the backpack up and over his shoulder. As he watched, a lone figure stumbled into view out of the darkness, moving with a clumsy, lurching motion the man had witnessed too many times before.

  Zombie.

  A few seconds later, it was joined by a few more of its kind, the sound of their moaning carried on the cool evening breeze.

  “Okay, girl,” the man said, backing away from the approaching figures. “Time to go.”

  The end of the bridge opposite that from which the zombies ap
proached remained free of any imminent threat. If the creatures had come at them from both directions, man and dog would have been trapped on the bridge. It had been stupid, the man knew, to linger as long as they had. His fatigue and the beauty of the place had lulled him into making a bad decision, one that could have very easily cost him and Goldie their lives. In the future, he would have to be more careful.

  Leaving the bridge behind, man and dog fell into step beside one another, the two of them continuing the journey that had brought them to this place, toward whatever destination awaited when it was all finally over.

  Tuesday, October 6th

  Simon was continuously amazed at the gullibility of his fellow human beings. Largely, he knew, this was a consequence of operating under a number of disadvantages which did not affect him. Most of them experienced a strong feeling of revulsion at the very idea of maiming or killing another person. Also, there was that sense of empathy they were forced to deal with. He just couldn’t imagine it. How restricting. How debilitating. Not to mention their complete inability to notice a dangerous predator in their midst. The very fact that he could get as close to them as he could, that he could walk among them without attracting even so much as a curious glance… Of course, they had not been forced to develop the very specific abilities he had been required to hone in order to survive as long as he had. They had always been “normal,” accepted as part of the society around them. And it was that normality, Simon knew, that made them vulnerable. Especially now when so many rules of the “normal” world had been torn asunder.

  The meek shall inherit the Earth? Simon mused as he wandered among the oblivious—and blissfully so, it seemed—members of his particular species. Not if I can help it.

  Shortly after crossing the border into South Carolina, he had seen a sign pointing him in the direction of a town called New Hope. It had been late yesterday afternoon when he had arrived there. The first thing he had noticed was the lack of a protective fence surrounding the town, of any barricade preventing entrance. A few armed men had greeted him before he had gotten too far into town. After a brief and altogether friendly interrogation, they had let him pass, satisfied that he did not represent a threat.