The Undead World (Book 2): The Apocalypse Survivors (3 page)

Don't do it,
Ipes warned.

But it was
too late. The monsters had their back to the girl and she took off in a sprint across the street, giving in to the desperate need, not only for food but for people, too. She wasn't like Ipes who could sit with Teddy and Todd the turtle for hours and be happy. A part of her needed actual human interaction.

This drove her in a sprint
—with her backpack bouncing and her legs flying—all the way to the Humvee, where she flattened against its side and then stared, with her eyes bugged, back to see if the monsters had seen her. They hadn't, however they had heard her slapping sneakers and now they turned her way. In a restoration of some sense, she slunk low and used the black vehicle to screen her as she scurried along the side of the house.

M
ovement in the house stopped her cold at a window. Going up on her tippy-toes, she peered in and nearly choked on her acorns. There was a man in the house! She had expected exactly that, and still the shock of seeing another human had her in a strange happy panic. It made her chest all a flutter.

As she watched he ran a hand through his black hair and put on a
thick leather coat.

"He's leaving, Ipes. What should I do?" Ipes did not answer. "Ipes!" she
demanded testily. Turning, she made to cast a fierce glance at him for being jealous, because that was the way he was with anything new, however the zebra wasn't in the side pocket where he had been only moments before.

"Ipes!" she hissed, staring all around at the ground. She then pulled off the pack and dug through it to see if he had climbed into the main pouch. He wasn't there either. Just then she heard
the throaty roar of a big engine start. She rushed to the corner not knowing what to do without Ipes there to help her—he always helped with the big decisions.

Should she flag
the man down? Should she continue to hide all by herself? Should she...the questions in her mind stopped cold as she finally saw her friend. The little zebra was sitting in the middle of the street and the Humvee was heading right for him.

"Ipes!" she cried
. Paralyzed with fear for him she could only stand there with her mouth open as the fat, black tires grazed his big zebra nose before turning to speed away.

Without thinking
—her main problem when Ipes wasn't around to help—she dashed to the middle of the street. Thankfully every zombie in the area had oriented on the Humvee and missed completely the little girl scampering low.

That wasn't too
smart,
Ipes scolded when she made it back to the safety of the house.
First you drop me and forget all about me. Then you risk everything to come get me. You never do that! The monsters won't hurt me, remember?

"Oh hush," Jillybean said. She didn't like to be told she was wrong, and certainly not by some silly stuffed animal. "Maybe they would've smelled me on you and eaten you
thinking you are tasty, which I'm sure you're not...speaking of smell, what is that?"

It was food.

The man had cooked something and the smell sent her stomach rumbling like a motor. She hurried to the back door of the place and was happy to find it unlocked. "Oh my gosh!" she said, rushing in, overcome by the odor of cooked food. There, next to the fireplace, was a frying pan; within it were the remains of the man's breakfast. It had been meat of some sort, fried in oil with a touch of teriyaki sauce.

The little girl spat out the bitter acorns
that she had been storing in her cheeks and ate the scraps greedily. The meat was strangely tangy, yet to her starved taste buds it was heaven. The scraps filled Jillybean's tummy nicely, and though it was still only mid-morning, she pulled a large comfortable chair close to the glowing embers in the fireplace and took a nap, curled up like cat.

Chapter 2

Ram

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Victor Ramirez stopped the Humvee in the middle of the street and clicked off the engine so that the silence of the new world clung to him, wrapping itself around the lone man. Though in truth he wasn't completely alone. A corpse, wearing the black rags that had at one time denoted it as a master chef, turned slowly on its spindly grey legs and gazed at the Humvee from sixty yards, its dull mind trying to remember if the vehicle had been there minutes before.

Sitting completely still, holding a long handled axe, Ram stared back
with deep brown eyes until the zombie turned its head—they were easily confused beasts and the fading echo of the Humvee's engine had the thing looking about in uncertainty.

When it began to shuffle on, Ram scarcely gave it another thought. Instead he flicked his eyes at the shadows beneath the eaves of the colonial houses
, He stared hard into the gloom below the tall trees and glanced into the open doors around him; it was in these dark places where the real threat lurked. It was always the ones you didn't see that were the most dangerous. They hung back, skulking like spiders, waiting for the unwary to become their next meal.

Nothing stirred.
Especially not the body lying on the street. It was this, which had stopped him.

Stepping out of the
Humvee, Ram glanced down at it with his hackles up, nervous at first. However when he saw that it was dead beyond any chance at reviving he relaxed. There was a bullet hole, neat as you please, right in the center of its head.

Another body, face down on the lawn of a brick home drew his attention.
With the axe in his right hand and his Beretta in his left he eased toward the house. Using his boot he kicked the body over; again dead and again a perfect shot between the eyes.

"Hmmm," he said. On a whim Ram entered the house and
ghosted around the lower floor, seeing nothing of note but a ball of snot hawked up on a wall.

The snot
was old, maybe a day, maybe two; it was hard to tell in this new world of theirs. Other than the relics of cities and towns and the empty rivers of concrete that had once been highways, the earth was quickly reverting to its pre-human form and the recent activities of men seemed to stand out and linger against the backdrop of nature. Cooking meat could be smelled for miles; cars or gunshots would waft along the air further than any thought possible, at least until it was experienced; and the sight of a person—a real live person was like a lighthouse beacon on a black night.

Coming north from the CDC
, Ram had seen only thirteen people, none of whom had heard the first thing about the killer he hunted. These thirteen had varied in terms of friendliness. Some had come forward, grinning and eager to shake his hand, while others kept their weapons at the ready. All had the same questions:

Where was the government? Where were people? Where was food? Where was it safe?

He pointed them south to Atlanta, while they warned him about going further north. They wasted their breath.
She
had gone north. Cassie. The murderer.

Outside the little town of Braselton, Georgia, north of the CDC, he had found the Suburban she had stolen after killing Julia. It had been weathered by the winter, yet he had recognized it immediately by all the bullet holes. Three days later, just across the border into South Carolina he discovered where Cassie had squirreled herself away for at least part of the winter: a well constructed barn close to a medium sized farming community.

It hadn't taken any of his skills in law enforcement to figure out it had been Cassie staying there. In her boredom she had scrawled messages of hate on almost every surface, with his name being one of the most pronounced.

And now ten days later in the suburbs of Philadelphia he stood eyeing the
snot. It was the third hint of humanity that he had come across in the last five days. Had she been here? Was that her shoeprint in dried mud by the front door? Were these her sooty fingerprints on the mantle? The snot on the wall had his gut telling him this was Cassie's handiwork; she had always been casually vulgar, and yet he had no way of really knowing if she'd been here.

Still it was these faint rumors of her passing that kept him going north, though he had nearly abandoned the search after Washington DC. That city had been a running hell, one that even a demon such as Cassie would not have stomached. If there were humans
left in that sad city, they were deep in its brick bowels and perhaps forever lost to the world.

Phil
adelphia was different. The zombies weren't nearly as numerous. Ram laid aside his axe and holstered his weapon before pulling out his battered Rand McNally. After marking his present location in red ink, he studied the map and its three red Xs, looking for a pattern. Each represented some sort of human activity, and if they all had been made by the same person then that person was clearly searching for something and not trying to bypass the city...but what were they searching for?

Food? Weapons? A last vestige of humanity? These were what everyone was searching for, which didn't help him at all.

"If I was Cassie where would I go?" Ram said and then sighed, turning the map. The flat cartoonish nature of it: streets in white, water in blue "other than city" in green, wasn't much help. He decided to get a better lay of the land and tromped up to the second floor where he spied a pull down ladder to an attic. Without thinking anything of it, he gave the hanging rope a sturdy yank.

The stairs opened like a black mouth and out of it tumbled a pile of human corpses—they had been gnawed down to the bone,
with little left but shreds of skin and tissue clinging to the remains. They rained down on him and the smell had him going dizzy.

“Oh
...oh, that’s horrible,” he moaned. Gagging, he almost hurled up his breakfast, however, it was at that moment when the zombie which had done all the gnawing fell down the attic ladder, practically on top of him.

It had once been the owner of the home; a man with a family
, a large mortgage and a ballooning gut. Now it was a sly zombie with only nine teeth left in its dank mouth. Its skin was grey and aged: puckered, wrinkled, and fissured. Its claws, on the other hand, were long and sharp.

As it fell
, it flung out a hand and raked Ram, catching his shirt and shredding it at the neck. “Jesus!” he cried. One hand went to his neck, feeling the skin intact and breathing a sigh of relief, while his other hand casually went to his hip holster and pulled the Beretta housed there.

He was too casual by half, while the zombie was far quicker than
he expected. It looked to have come down in a jumbled heap, however it had landed in a crouch and now it sprung at Ram, who flung himself backwards firing the pistol, running a nasty groove diagonally through the thing’s face from left to right. The burning hunk of lead made a horrible gaping hole, but that didn’t stop the zombie from attacking Ram with everything in its vicious arsenal.

Claws slashed at him and
its jaws snapped crazily. Before Ram knew what was going on, the zombie had bowled into him, knocking him off his feet and only years of training saved him. He pivoted as he fell—letting the left side of his body drop back while powering with his right, effectively turning the tables and landing atop the zombie.

This
made only the barest of improvements.

Any time a man was within arm’s reach of a zombie, it meant he was within arm’s reach of death. Ram pulled back, gathering his feet beneath him and standing in a single quick move. As he did
the zombie's claws made a scritching sound as they tore down his jacketed arm; the sound drew his attention away from what really mattered. The zombie’s other hand reached out and just managed to graze the bare skin of Ram’s throat.

The sudden burning sensation focused him quick. “Oh, no,” he whispered, touching himself gingerly and feeling suddenly vulnerable and soft…and jittery. His hands began to shake.

In front of him, the zombie clambered to its feet and despite still toting a loaded pistol, Ram panicked. He took one step back, and then another as the zombie lunged again, looking suddenly much larger and fiercer than it had only seconds before.

Unbelievably Ram fled from it. He raced down the stairs, his eyes blinking largely as if his ability to perceive reality had come unglued, while his mind could not get past the concept that he had been scratched. He was bleeding! It was just a trickle, but because of the virility of the zombie disease it meant so much more. It meant he was a dead man.

“This isn’t happening,” he moaned as he ran, heading out the door and into the yard with the zombie right behind. It stretched out a long arm and grabbed Ram, who could hear its eagerness, its insatiable hatred and hunger. The sound made him jerk and dodge away. Only then did he raise the pistol once more; though he was still sufficiently freaked out that his shot went awry.

The bullet missed low, striking
the creature below the left eye; there was no exit wound. Staggered, the zombie took a step back giving Ram time to take better aim. This time he used two hands to steady the gun and it spat out the blazing lead, forming a neat hole in the zombie’s forehead.

Ram
didn't see the thing fall over. Nor did he notice that all up and down the street a horde had begun to swell, attracted to the sound of the shooting. The beasts came charging at the lone human who all but ignored them. Instead Ram jumped up on the hood of the Humvee and began to dig in one of the pieces of luggage that he had tied to the roof rack. In it was a med box and in that box was a bottle of rubbing alcohol.

He had no idea if what he was planning would do a damned bit of good, but he felt that he had no choice. Ram poured the alcohol on his neck, and despite the
swift sharp pain he worked the clear liquid into the wound and prayed silently as he did.

Other men had turned with lesser wounds. There had been a man in Glendale who’d had his hand nicked with the tiniest nick. It had been so small
that a fear had sprung up among the men that he had contracted the virus through the air. People had shunned him, even more than they normally would have—no one wanted to be so close to an infected man, ever. But this was far worse.

“I was scratched,”
the man had moaned. He had stood apart, trembling with the chills of his fever and with his overwhelming fear.
“Look.”
He held out his hand, showing a wound that looked smaller than a cat’s scratch.

No one had much sympathy. The fact was
, that in many people's minds, a person ceased to exist once the fever kicked in. The man was urged to kill himself and be done.

Ram would cease to exist as well. It was this realization that had him staring with unseeing eyes as the zombies began to close in. He only had hours left as a person.
The idea of becoming one of these horrible creatures he hated with such an intense loathing was a strange feeling indeed.

One of them grabbed his ankle and pulled. Ram shot it in the top of the head and again the unknowable variances in bullet trajectories caused the spinning lead to blast out the front of its face, sending grey teeth and brain splattering onto Ram’s shoe. Sickened by the sight, he groaned, sounding like the monster he would eventually turn into.

When he heard himself, he cried, “No, this can’t be happening.”

Yet it was. Another beast—a tall, skinny zombie with long arms
, got a hold of his belt at the hip and pulled hard. Ram slid down from the Humvee, practically into the bosom of the monster. He shot it as it craned its open mouth toward him. Flinching from the rain of blood, Ram staggered away.

He became
like a pin ball—bouncing from zombie to zombie, killing each but never with any purpose or plan of escape. He shot until the barrel of his pistol was scalding and the clip empty. With the same uncaring attitude he loaded the first of his three spares and began again the same slow killing. One after another they fell at his feet and he wondered why he bothered.

What was the use? He had maybe
ten hours left…and that last hour didn’t even count. The last hour would be spent in a delirium and the one before that would zip by as he cried, clutching his pistol and hoping to find the courage to use it on himself. The hour before that one would be spent alternating between pleading to God for mercy and cursing his name as the heat of his fever began to bake his brain.

So how many hours did that
really
leave him? Six? Seven?

The bolt of the
Beretta clunked back and Ram blinked stupidly while his index finger pulled uselessly on the trigger. Slowly he came to realize he had shot himself dry. Automatically he grabbed the second clip from his belt as he stared at the zombie horde that had coalesced all around him. It was small as far as hordes went; maybe a hundred tops. Still it was enough. In his fugue state he had managed to trap himself.

The front yard of the house was bordered by an impressive run of shrubbery standing at about six foot. There was no getting over it, or through it. Worse, some two dozen zombies had managed to get between him and the house, while the driveway, the only opening in the hedge, was practically clogged with the
beasts. Cursing at his stupidity, Ram slowly fired each bullet with deadly accuracy as he backed to the green wall behind him.