Blood of the Dead: A Zombie Novel (Undead World Trilogy, Book One) (5 page)

He glanced to the floor and in his mind’s eye looked through it to the crawlspace beneath to where he had buried his family.

I’ll be with you soon.

The food was almost gone. They had gotten a six-month supply originally but had made it stretch. It stretched even more once there was only his mouth to feed.

Let’s see. I can probably make it a couple weeks without food. If I want to go sooner, I just won’t drink anything for a few days. Either that or . . .
He looked to the rifle leaning up against the door. There was one bullet in the chamber.

It was for him.

1

April

Joe Bailey entered his apartment just after dawn. He closed the door behind him, locked the knob, the two deadbolts and chained the top.

His dog, April, a white and brown Springer Spaniel-Collie cross he had rescued shortly after beginning his crusade to hunt the undead, came bounding from the living room.

“Hey, April,” he said.

Sitting at forty-five pounds, she wasn’t the fiercest animal in the world, but she knew what to do if anybody but him entered the apartment. For a long while, after he first got her, she’d bark and growl each time he came home. Now, she was able to recognize his footfalls in the hallway.

Joe made his way to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and pulled out a beer. Popping the cap off and letting it fall to join the others, he took off his trench coat and dumped it on the table. He hit the front room, not bothering to turn the lights on. The sickly gray sky brought enough light into the place and even that was more than he cared for.

Flopping down on the aged blue and gray sofa, he sat with legs out, fatigue filling his eyes and fuzzying his head. Staying up all night shouldn’t be taking the toll that it was, but his body said otherwise. He should be used to it. He’d always had trouble sleeping and used to fill the late-night hours writing comic books. Those days were gone, writing funny books, but he still should have been able to weather the night and catch what zees he could during the day.

He gulped a mouthful of beer, belched, then drank a little more. He’d need at least four more to get a buzz going and he only had three left in the fridge. For a time, he took what he could get from the vendors and liquor stores. Once those supplies were all looted, he began brewing his own. And now, even doing that was getting difficult because others, it seemed, had the same idea and raided every store that carried brew-it-yourself kits.

It was at home that things caught up to him, not when he was outside. Out there, prowling the streets, taking out the dead where and when he could—out there, there was freedom. In here, his place was swimming with memories.

Memories filled with April, the
girl
that he knew for only a weekend.

It had been a three-day blip on the radar, three days that changed his life.

He had never been in love before, and who would have thought the girl with the rich black hair and liquid-smooth gray eyes who’d plunked herself down across from him while he was scribbling in his notebook at Second Cup would change everything? At the time, she had only wanted to get away from her controlling boyfriend, Dan.

Joe—Joseph then—and April were never an item.

That weekend had been a one-off thing, but one that nailed him so deeply that he couldn’t help but write it all down and record every moment.

She had got to him that weekend, dug deep in a way no one else had. For a time afterward he thought he’d let her work out some of things she had going on, then, at some point, wait outside her apartment to see how she was doing. But that day never came. Each time he had thought of it, the fear of possible rejection consumed him. Instead, he found himself rereading the manuscript detailing their weekend together, a poetic memory that ripped his heart out each time.

When the dead began to rise and hell opened its gates, she was the first person he thought of. Not his family. Not his friends. Her.

Joseph had run through the rain from his place all the way to hers, the streets too cluttered with crashed cars and panicking people for him to get there by bus. The front glass door to her apartment building had been locked so, using his elbow, he smashed the glass, went in, and did the same to the second glass door beyond. He hadn’t known her apartment number, she never told him, so he shouted her name up and down the halls only to be met by screams, growls and the sick, sloppy sound of the dead feasting on flesh.

At the top floor, a little Spanish girl no more than six in a green and blue flower-patterned dress sat crying up against a wall in the hallway.

Joseph ran over to her. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said softly. “Where’s your mom and dad?”

The girl kept balling.

The door to the suite just beside her was open. When Joseph peered in, a pair of dismembered legs lay strewn on the floor in an L shape.

The dead Hispanic before him, probably the girl’s father, stared back with a pair of eyes that were fogged over white. The man snapped the child’s neck then bit into her throat.

“NO!” Joseph screamed.

The man sunk to his knees and feasted on Lila’s tiny body.

April . . .

He looked at Lila, her broken body limp in the man’s arms, blood running over her dress.

I’m sorry.

Joseph ran to the end of the hallway and kicked open April’s door.

His heart stopped in his chest and time stood still. This couldn’t be happening. Not her. Not like this. Girls like her grew up to be princesses. Girls like her deserved a fairy tale.

They didn’t deserve to die.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the landing was April. Her head was bowed; her normally wavy and shiny black hair was slicked with blood and goopy flesh. It hung like a beaded curtain over the corpse of an old woman in her lap.

The wet slurping sound of meat and skin being sucked on like noodles became Joseph’s only consciousness.

“April . . .” he whispered.

She looked up, a piece of trachea dangling from her mouth, blood dripping from her chin. Her white eyes softened, as if she recognized him, then she went back to her meal.

Heart pounding, sharp aches threatening to steal his soul away, Joseph just stood there, one dead man devouring his daughter in the hallway, the love of his life sitting before him eating another.

He didn’t know how long he stood there staring at her, but was soon drawn out of the bizarre mesmeric hold she had on him by a shadow in his right peripheral.

At first the bullet hole at the top of Dan’s forehead didn’t register. Neither did the blown-out portion of the front of his mouth. How Dan wound up like that, Joseph didn’t know and the fleeting thought of it being self-imposed before the dead began to rise crossed his mind.

Eyes glazed over, lower lip quivering, Joseph cursed himself and clenched his fists.

His heart broke then, the shards from its bursting apart spiraling out in a blast of glassy pain, stabbing him everywhere within.

Dan had killed April. Had turned her into one of
them
.

Limbs trembling, Joseph squeezed his eyes shut and let the tears leak out. There was nothing left for him. The hope of a future with April was gone.

His expression hardened and he turned and faced Dan. A stream of profanities raced through his mind and nearly spewed out of his lips. But Dan wasn’t worth it. Not even worth cursing at.

The second Dan moved to grab him, Joseph swatted his arms away, ran to April’s kitchen and ripped out each of the drawers in the hopes of finding a knife. Something hard dropped and smacked the linoleum with a loud
thunk!

A rolling pin.

Dan appeared in the kitchen doorway.

Joseph lunged at him and brought the rolling pin down on his head. Dan stumbled back a step and before he could regain his balance, Joseph struck him again. On the third blow, the skull split, and on the fourth, brain and blood began spattering out. Even after Dan’s body hit the floor, Joseph still wailed on him until his head was nothing more than a mishmash of bone, blood and brain.

Hard fingers grabbed him by the forearm and yanked him partway off Dan’s body. Instinctively, Joseph swung out with everything he had and it was only when his eyes made contact with the tip of the rolling pin did he watch its end strike April in the side of the head, sending her skull flying into the wall beside them. It hit with a wet
smack
, stuck there a moment, then slid off with a smear of blood. April’s body crumpled to the ground, a pool of dark blood gathering around her head.

“April! No! Please, no. Not her. Not you. No!”

He scrambled over to her body and grabbed her by the shoulders. When he picked her up and turned her over in his lap, her head lolled back, eyes open, blood gushing ever more from the side of her head and out the corners of her mouth.

Rage burst out of him in a stream of terror and he screamed at the top of his lungs until his voice went hoarse and he started to cough.

Then he screamed again, over and over, until his voice went raw and he could no longer breathe.

Joseph remained in April’s apartment well into the night, listening to the sirens outside and panicked screams from those in the building as they watched their loved ones butchered by the walking dead before they themselves were consumed.

It took him two days to finally come home. Two days of walking the city streets, lost in a haze of pain and confusion and fear. Two days of not eating but witnessing from afar the undead feasting on anyone they could get their hands on.

Two whole days in the rain.

When he finally arrived home, he locked the door, took a baseball bat to bed and cried himself to sleep, dreaming of killing April, waking, dreaming of killing her again.

Joe awoke the next evening, leaving
Joseph
behind in that place of nightmares.

Dead, like everyone else.

2

Midnight Meeting

The only thing Billie had to go on to distinguish night from day was the clock. Long gone was the time when day and night were divided by sunny skies and a moonlit black quilt.

It was 11:40 p.m.

Billie pulled her cereal bowl from the sink, gave it a quick rinse, then poured the last bit of Cap’n Crunch into it. She opened the fridge and pulled out the milk carton and began to pour it into the bowl. Only a drop came out.

She grunted. “Great. Just great.” She eyed the bowl of cereal and debated eating it dry, but this was Cap’n Crunch she was talking about. Without milk, it was like trying to crunch through tiny razor-edged blocks of wood.

She tossed the empty carton into the garbage bin by the door and went to her computer and logged onto a chat program, hoping her buddy was online. ZW1 was. She right-clicked on his name and sent him a private message:

i’m coming over. out of moo juice. be there in 15.

A moment later, ZW1 replied:
yep. knock 4 times. 2 stomps.

She typed:
gimme 3 stomps back and a slap.

ZW1:
k.

Billie padded her jean pockets and made sure she had her keys.

She left her apartment, locked up, and headed outside.

Before the plague hit—if a “plague” was what it was; the creatures just appeared the day of the gray rain—she used to go for late-night walks all the time. It was part of her pre-bed ritual, a time to clear her head and just have some alone time before coming back home and falling asleep. Nowadays, late-night walks were done only out of necessity and though, right now, she couldn’t call a milk run a matter of life or death, she could really use the company. It had been at least a month if not longer since she last saw anybody. All her communication was done online. And it’d been equally long since she heard another human’s voice, seeing as how the phone lines were no longer in service. She didn’t have a mike or headset for her computer.