Zombie Fallout 5: Alive in a Dead World (42 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“We were about three or four streets over,” Gary said.

“By the Fredericks’ house?” Josh asked,
cutting through some hedges that had looked impenetrable.

“I don’t know; how would I know that?” Gary
asked.

“Did you see a bright, bright blue house?”
Josh said, extending his hands.

Gary couldn’t see how stretching your hands
equated to brightness, but he went along. He thought for a few
moments. He hadn’t really been taking in any qualities of the
neighborhood. Houses, even garish ones, tend to become less
important when one is looking for things that will possibly get
them killed. “I don’t…wait, I think it was further up the street. I
kept thinking that I hoped they got a good deal on the paint
because it was pretty ugly.”

“Do we know where we’re going?” BT asked,
clearly agitated.

“Yup.” Josh seemed to be reveling in this.
He’d probably played this game a hundred times before, hiding from
the enemy. It would have never been a real life scenario like it
was now, but practice does have a way of making things perfect.
Josh pulled two slats from the fence to the side so he could fit
his slender form. BT ripped another five off to get through. Josh
did not seem pleased, but he pressed on. Within a few minutes, they
were assailed with the smell.

“This is the place.” Gary said.

“What gave it away?” BT asked, wanting to
hold his nose.

Josh opened the gate from the homeowners’
backyard and was heading to the front when BT grabbed him by the
collar and lifted him off the ground.

“Hold on. Gary, go check,” BT said. “You’re
the fastest at the moment,” he added when Gary passed on by.

“I think that honor goes to Josh, but I’ll
check.”

“Any chance you’ll let me down now?” Josh
asked, his legs kicking in the air.

“Do not go anywhere, unless it is back to
your house,” BT said as he gently placed the boy on the ground.

Gary got up close to the side of the house
and inched himself around, taking a quick peek. He immediately
turned back to where Josh and BT were. “Send him home NOW!” Gary
yelled as quietly as he could.

“Now, kid, go home! Do not turn around! Do
you understand me!” BT yelled.

Gary had started firing his rifle. BT urged
Josh in the opposite direction as he brought his rifle to the
ready. He was wholly unprepared for what he witnessed as he turned
the corner to stand side by side with Gary.

Michael was completely surrounded by zombies.
His skin was the color of burnt hamburger and large curled flaps of
skin were peeling away from his singed chest and shoulders. These
were being torn off by zombies, struggling to get at the flesh.
Michael was screaming as pink, oozing, tender flesh was exposed
while the zombies tore off the blackened parts.

At least a dozen zombies were dropped by
Gary’s and BT’s rifles fire before Mike’s attackers took any
notice. At first, two or three went after the pair and were quickly
dispatched, but as Michael went to his knees and then his face, the
rest turned and went for the new meat.

Gary was dry firing, screaming in rage as the
zombies approached. BT was afraid that Gary was going to go into
berserk mode and just start swinging his rifle like a club. BT was
getting low on ammo. “Let’s go, Gary.”

“He’s my brother!” Gary yelled, looking up at
BT’s face with tears coming from his eyes.

“There’s nothing more we can do here.”

Gary took one final look back at his brother
who had not moved since his head made impact with the pavement. He
sobbed as he ran, tears so occluding his vision, he had to be
guided by BT.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“What is the purpose of waiting here, sister? Now is the time to
pull back and regroup. Michael is long gone now, yet we have wasted
days here.”

“We have wasted nothing,” Eliza hissed.
“While you have been having secret rendezvous’ with the enemy, I
have been summoning a vast zombie army to destroy everything in our
path toward getting Michael, starting with this little town.”

With Eliza’s human sympathizers out of the
way, Tomas had hoped his sister would give up her foolish quest, or
at least, postpone it. In the meantime, he had kept tabs on Michael
when he could. His former father was getting good at disguising his
presence. Mike had delivered a victorious blow, and for the life of
him, Tomas could not figure out why the man had not collected his
things and gone home. Even with the infection in BT, that should
have only delayed him a day at the most. And now his sister was
planning on bringing thousands upon thousands of zombies to this
town.

“What do you hope to accomplish here?” Tomas
asked his sister.

“Either you are still trying to cover for him
or you are not as powerful as you imagine yourself to be, but
Michael is still around. And even now, he uses his limited powers
to save himself. If only he would fully reveal himself to me, I
would finish him off myself.”

Tomas was taken aback, he had not known his
sister realized Michael was still here, but what was more
unsettling was he did not know Mike was in distress.

“Don’t be so confused, brother. I have
blocked you from him. This is one battle the great and mighty
Michael Talbot will need to finish on his own without any outside
help.” Eliza laughed as Tomas tried desperately to get around
whatever she had put in place to hinder his ability to talk to
him.

Tomas could feel the psychic push of
thousands of zombies as they closed the distance from their
original locations to get to where their mistress beckoned as he
extended his powers to try and encompass Mike.

“This is insanity, sister, he is gone from
here.”

Eliza was still for a moment as if she were
listening for a pin to drop on a faraway floor. “Perhaps you are
right for once, little brother,” she said as she turned to walk
away.

Tomas was relieved, maybe something could be
salvaged out of this after all. Then the barrier that had been
erected between Michael and himself crashed to the ground. Tomas
nearly fell to his knees as he felt the screams of Michael, and
then there was silence, soulless black silence. “What have you
done, Eliza!?” Tomas screamed, chasing his sister down.

“I have done nothing, dear brother.”

“Why did you let me hear that and then cut it
off again?” he demanded.

“I wanted you to hear that, but I most
certainly did not cut it off at the end. That was the end. Michael
Talbot is no more. He is no longer alive in a dead world!”

Prologue

Story takes place December, near Christmas
2009, written December 27
^th
2010.

Excerpt taken from a journal discovered in
Vona, Colorado. Its location was a center console in a red Jeep
Wrangler. The reader found the story humorous and decided to hold
onto it, where it was finally paired together with the original
writer’s works.

***

I’ve been feeling down as of late. We are on
the run from zombies. This has not turned out to be the adventure I
had hoped it would be. My hope was that I would make a lasting
stand at my household with all my rifles, ammo, food and water.
Yet, three weeks after the invasion I had been preparing for almost
my entire life, my home has fallen into enemy hands. We’re cold,
scared, and are draining through hope like a wino through Mad Dog
20/20. My ability to keep my family, friends, and to a lesser
extent, our other traveling companions safe weighs heavily on me.
My goal with these next lines is just an attempt to bring a smile
in a deepening dark that is gathering.

In a time before there were zombies, we lived
our lives like the vast amount of Americans in December. We
overate, overspent and waited until the last minute to do our
shopping around the holiday. This year was no different. I had just
cashed my meager check this morning and my wife felt that we had to
get a few more gifts for the kids.

“Go ahead,” I told her. Yeah, that went over
about as well as you think it did.

“Talbot, get your ass up off that couch,” she
said. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t threatening, but to not act on
those words would have been tantamount to suicide. Kind of like the
criminally insane do when they point a gun at the cops and then the
cops have no option but to open fire. It was the same premise
here.

So I got my ass up off the couch and off to
the mall we went. Yippeee! The mall at Christmas time. I’d rather
go to a drunk dentist for a root canal; it was a lot less painful.
The mall was so packed, there was no place to park. They had to
plow the snow off a distant field and offer a free shuttle
service.

“Recession, my ass,” I grumbled as I parked
the car. The mall was a distant pinpoint of light, off in the
distance. “Maybe that’s where the baby Jesus lays,” I said
sarcastically.

“Talbot!” My wife smacked my arm.

We walked up to the sign that said “Shuttle”
just as a white tin can, packed with holiday revelers left.

“It’s friggin’ cold out here,” I said,
stamping my feet.

“Maybe if you had worn your heavy coat like I
told you to, you wouldn’t be so cold,” Tracy said, with the all
knowing “I told you so” lilt.

I opened my mouth to argue the point, but she
looked much more ready to do battle than I. So just a little
background and you decide if I had a valid point or not, not that
Tracy would have agreed anyway.

By ’09, Tracy and I had been married
somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-something years. Now,
NEVER, ever will I claim to know what makes a woman tick, but I’ve
been around this particular model long enough to know some of its
quirks. I might have written this down in one of my earlier
journals. but it’s worth reiterating. My wife researches and buys
her cars on the recommendation of other folks’ opinions about how
the heater works. So when we go auto shopping, we have to look for
heaters that have an extra setting called “lava,” and until molten
magma is pouring from the vents, my wife is not happy. I’ve
actually lost the bottoms from more than one pair of sneakers as
the glue has melted, and the soles have become un-adhered from the
rest of the shoe.

There have been days when the temperature
outside is zero or less and I have dressed in shorts and a
windbreaker for long car rides, because I know that most likely, my
face will, at some point, melt. This trip was no different, but it
was a shorter ride so I actually had pants on and a light jacket,
not in any way rated for the inclement weather we were in the midst
of, but still I was not going to argue the point with her. It would
have been a lot colder if I had to walk home.

So I waited, gritting my teeth, feeling my
nasal passages beginning to freeze up. My wife looked fairly toasty
in her heavy sweater and full-length jacket, scarf around her neck
and leather gloves.

The shuttle showed up seventeen
teeth-chattering minutes later. I had to rip my planted feet from
the ground. Seems the melted glue had frozen fast to the ice
slicked surface. Tracy entered before me and then I came in after.
I stepped up on the stoop and looked to the left. Seems the shuttle
had stopped to pick up half the state of Wisconsin before it got to
our stop. An older gentleman gave up his seat when he saw Tracy
approach him and somehow the seat next to her was vacant. I was
about to plant my ass in it when it looked like someone had spilled
half of an Orange Julius in the plastic bucket seat. At least, I
hoped it was an Orange Julius.

Tracy shrugged her shoulders as if to say
“What are you going to do?”

My next option was the large, silver,
hand-hold poles that went from floor to ceiling on the shuttle. I
was near to placing bare hand on metal when I spotted what looked
like the world’s largest nose nugget wrapped around the bar twice.
The offending brown-green slime was oozing its way down the pole,
much like a low rent stripper. I was getting nauseous. Making it
through the throng to another pole was out of the question. A kid
of about twelve off to my left was sneezing like his mother was
shoving pepper up his nose. The friggin’ germ factory wasn’t even
covering his mouth. I felt like I was in a rolling Petri dish. And
our shuttle driver must have been a foreigner because he was paying
absolutely no heed to state and national laws in regards to load
limits.

He kept packing people in like he was getting
paid per pound delivered. I was being pressed closer and closer to
the pole with the snot snake wrapped around it. I was using what
minimal leverage I had trying to keep from pressing up against it.
Something or someone was touching my ass. I kept praying that it
was some hot Yugoslavian model, but the last time I had turned
around, I remember seeing an overweight man who looked like he had
just downed a bucket of fried chicken. I noted that his hands had
appeared greasy. Now I wasn’t so sure what was on his diet and why
his hands were greasy, but I was not feeling so good anymore.