Box of Zombies: Rise of the Dead Volumes 1-3 (3 page)

SEVEN

SHACKED AND CHAINED

The world was a runny mess of blacks and blues. When she looked up, there was a wondrous golden blob. She blinked hard, twice, three times before realizing where she was and what she was seeing.

Savannah raised her head up and moved into a sitting position. The rough bark of a tree trunk needled into the flesh of her shoulder and back. Looking down, she realized she was nude, but for her panties. The chill night air bit at her flesh sharply, stinging, and she rubbed her arms to warm them. Her head throbbed as if her brain might start oozing from her ears at any moment. The left side of her face felt fat and hot.

A few feet from her, a gnarled and gnawed torso lay, partially covered in dirt. As the images came into focus, the moonlight danced over the pitiful display, the light splattering like white paint through the cover of the trees.

At the far side of her vision, a hunched over figure rocked back and forth.
It was nothing more than a suggestion of a human shape, but she knew what she was seeing. Her mind was gracious enough to fill in the blanks the darkness created. The wind rose, blowing a sick, rotten stink in her direction. It was a stink she knew from earlier. Some things wedged themselves into a person’s head and took up residence there. This smell was like that. It was the odor of death and decay.

Feeling as though her head was filled with molten lead, Savannah got to her feet. Cautious, she took a small step backward, but something held her fast. A metal cuff was fastened around her wrist, attached to a thick chain.

The same chain that kept undead Mikey from leaving the muddy backyard. She wet her lips and moved slowly, trying to stick to the heaviest shadows, to keep from being seen. She scanned the rest of the yard and then the back of the house. The windows appeared to be open, but were dark and the yard was deserted except for Mikey and her, and what was left of Morgan.

Mikey
remained where he was, hunched. A wet, smacking sound came from that direction, and Savannah made sure she didn’t look that way for too long. She wasn’t sure she could keep from screaming if she actually saw what Mikey was eating over there.

She tugged at the cuff on her wrist. It was looser than she had first realized. She’d always had scrawny arms, but up until now, it had never been an attribute. She worked at it, trying unsuccessfully to remain calm. Her heart pounded

against the walls of her chest and her hands shook. Worse, the cold night was getting to her. Her teeth chattered loudly, and she clenched her jaws to make them stop.

Working up as much saliva as she could, Savannah spit on her wrist, just above the cuff, and began working the metal back and forth, pushing it farther up and on to her hand.

For fuck’s sake! It’s stuck!

Her arms might have been unnaturally scrawny, but her hands were long and wide. No wonder everyone called her monster. All she needed was a suit and she could’ve been The Slender Man.

Determined, she pushed at the cuff again. It didn’t budge. Looking up, she realized Mikey had gotten his fill of Morgan’s shapely thigh. He stood, stooped and clumsy, and stared at her. His eyes appeared as a pair of black holes—even the moonlight didn’t reflect in them.

He took an uncertain step toward her.

Savannah tugged again at the cuff, this time with all the strength she had left. Her hand became a flaming agony under the metal, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t allow herself to be devoured alive by some B-movie reject. She’d seen them all. It wouldn’t be pretty and it certainly wouldn’t be pleasant.

Another mighty
pull at the cuff, and suddenly it gave. Along with her thumb. It popped neatly out of the socket with an audible snap. Savannah’s entire arm went limp for a moment and the world did a quick jig in front of her eyes.

Then she was free. The cuff and chain clattered to the ground. The sound must have jarred something in undead
Mikey’s rotted brain because he dashed at her, grunting like a wounded animal. Savannah cut to the right, Mikey’s ragged fingernails leaving a trio of deep grooves in the flesh of her shoulder.              

She leapt out of the way, falling headlong into the yard. Gravel and sticks nicked her naked

breasts and gouged her palms as she tried to stop her fall. Either way, Mikey wasn’t coming. His tether held him fast. He struggled against the chain, but couldn’t take another step closer.

“Fuck you, you sad freak,” Savannah muttered, climbing to her feet.

EIGHT

MONSTER MANS-UP

She padded toward the back
porch, unsure of what exactly she was going to do. She had to get away from there, but she couldn’t go very far wearing only a pair of panties. She was already freezing. And the south was supposed to be warm and balmy. Bullshit to that.

The old stairs sighed under her weight and she stopped, waiting. The windows remained dark.

The door to the kitchen was open. This didn’t surprise Savannah in the least. Who would actually steal from these people anyway? They had nothing worth taking, and their watch-zombie was much more effective than ADT.

She slipped into the kitchen and was immediately struck by the stench of overused, burnt fat. Mamma must have fried everything they ate. Healthy eating wasn’t at the top of her list of concerns, obviously. The floors creaked under her again. With every other step, Savannah stopped and waited to see if she heard anyone.

In the living room, she padded around the sofa, careful to stay on the nasty braided throw rugs in order to stifle any sound of her walking. Grit dug into her bare feet; she might as well have been on the dirt outside. The heavy, salty metallic odor of copious amounts of blood hung in the air. Towels covered the pools left where Morgan had died, soaked through with black blood.

Shadows were as thick as ink in the corners, but the moonlight bled silver through the windows, offering just enough light for Savannah to see her way around without smashing her toes or tripping. On the far end table, something glinted like a treasure. It was Johnny’s truck keys. She held these up to the window—three keys. One that had the inscription “Ford” on the base, a rusted house key, and a smaller one. This one had to be for the padlock that kept
Mikey in his chains in the backyard.

Draped over the back of Mamma’s recliner was a flannel shirt. Savannah grabbed it up and slipped it on, relishing the warmth, but wanting to gag from the smell. It clearly belonged to good
ol’ Uncle Levi. Still, it was better than parading around in the nude.              

“
Whatcha doin?”

Savannah stiffened and slowly turned around. Lacy stood in the hallway, a spooky little figure in pale thermals and halo of tangled air.

“Lacy. You scared me.”

“What happened to your friend?”

“Shh. You don’t want your family to know you’re out of bed, do you?” Savannah whispered.

The little girl shook her head slowly. “Uncle
Levi’ll whip my legs with a belt. He did last time.”

Frowning, Savannah took the kid’s warm hand. “We don’t want that to happen, do we?”

“No.”

“Listen to me. I want you to go out to your brother’s truck and wait there. Can you do that for me?”

“How come?”

“I thought we could go somewhere. Maybe get some shakes and fries. You like shakes and fries, don’t you?”

Lacy face crinkled into a confused grin. “Sure, I do. Daisy Queen. Nobody ever takes me there, though.”

“Well, your mamma said it would be okay. As long as we don’t stay gone too long.”

“Do I need to change my clothes?”

Savannah knelt down in front of the girl. “N-no. Just grab your coat and go on out. Okay?”

Lacy nodded and started to run toward the door. “Remember. Quiet,” Savannah reminded her softy.

Savannah stood a
moment, waiting, certain someone was going to wake and find her in the house, alive and uneaten. She tiptoed through the kitchen and to the back door. In the yard, Mikey still strained against his chain, lowly grunting.

Just out of
Mikey’s reach, Savannah sprinted toward the tree where the zombie’s chain was anchored. Thumbing the smallest key up, she plunged the key into the padlock.

“Hell yeah,” she said under her breath as the key slid home and turned. The padlock fell away, the chain following.
Mikey was free.

But he was also fucking
quick! He was on her in an instant. Savannah darted under his lunging arms, leaving him hugging air for a moment. She hustled toward the house, turning at the steps and waiting.

“Come on,
Mikey, you ugly bastard. Come and get me!”

Mikey
loped after her, growling like a mad dog. He stumbled up the porch steps behind her, closing, his cold, fetid breath bathing the back of her neck. Again, she ducked away from him and sprinted through the kitchen to the living room.              

He stood in the doorway, sniffing the air, obviously unable to locate her in the shadows. Savannah stepped around the sofa, careful to keep the furniture between her and
Mikey. “I’m right here,” she said. She moved toward the front door, turned the deadbolt and then placed her hand on the handle.

“I’m right here,” she said again, louder.

Mikey shambled toward her.

“I’m right here, you assholes,” she shouted at the top of her lungs.

A moment later, she heard doors creaking open and the shuffling around of confused, sleepy, inbred rednecks.

The overhead lights switched on and flooded the room in piss yellow light. At the hallway stood Uncle Levi in all his scrawny, Fruit of the Loomed glory.

“What’s that bitch doing—”

Before he could spit the words out,
Mikey turned and hurled himself at the old man. He tore into Uncle Levi’s birdcage middle with his fingers.

Savannah almost smiled as his intestines unraveled through
Mikey’s dead, filthy hands. She was out the door just as Mamma and Johnny appeared.

The old truck was slow to start, but it did after a moment of sheer panic. Lacy looked over at Savannah anticipating her trip to the Daisy Queen, oblivious to the screams coming from inside the house. They tore out of the yard in a spray of dirt and gravel.

Savannah turned on the radio to mask the cries, and twangy rockabilly music filled the cab of the truck. The headlights carved the black country night as Lacy sang along.

Dead Alive

Rise of the Dead Volume 2

Sam Clark knew he’d kept her locked in that back bedroom too long when she began to eat chunks of her own face
. They were pinched off with ragged nails, and when he peered in through the keyhole at her, he could see the hard white flashes of sharp cheekbone stark against her dusky complexion. She had taken her own top lip first off and now wore an awful permanent grin. Her speech was odd, like a person who had been loaded with Novocain. Her teeth were stained with her own blood.

He moved away from the keyhole and sat back down against the door
. He cried into his hands.

Should have done it when the first symptoms hit.

At the onset, she’d wanted to argue with him one moment, then the next, she wanted to make up, to make love. He was afraid of her. When he indicated that he did not want to touch her, she scratched his cheek with those ragged nails and called him a weak little fuck.

Later, she begged him to do it
—to put a bullet into her head. He promised he would do it as she slept. But it’s hard to shoot your first love in the head. No matter that she was becoming something from a cheap horror movie. And even harder when it was beginning to appear that he might well be completely alone in the world when Ellie was gone.

She later asked for the gun, so she could do it herself, but she had been in one of those irrational moods when she’d asked
. He was afraid to hand the gun over, lest she put a hole in his head instead.

Now he sat, a broken man, a weak man, smelling the scent of feces and blood and sickness wafting up from under the door.

***

The beginning of the end did not happen like in the movies
. There was no slow spreading, no sense of building dread. No media-generated suspense. It was the blink of an eye. An anticlimax, that was what it was. It was Christmas morning and realizing that there was really nothing there to be excited over. It was a trip to the doctor to check a lump that turned out to be a pimple. Most of the major cities along the eastern seaboard had fallen by the time the first headlines hit the streets.

He’d seen a segment about it on the evening news
. He’d been sitting at Kelsey’s Pub, overlooking the beach, drinking after work. Not that work was all that stressful. That weak thing, again. Four years of college only to end up teach little tourist kids to surf. He got paid—not very well, of course—to play on the beach. The television sat virtually ignored above the bar, the anchor’s voice muted out in favor of Buffet on the jukebox. Film footage—it was the end of the world, played out to the strains of “Come Monday.” The guy on the stool next to him stopped gnawing a buffalo wing long enough to comment, “Some government monkey must have dropped a vial.”He snorted bitterly and wiped away greasy orange smear of hot sauce from his chin.

“Must have,” Sam agreed. Then he thought nothing more of it
. He had a dozen sessions lined up for tomorrow. Besides, Maine was a long way from where he sat then. Government mistake or not, things would be back under control in no time.

He pulled up out front of his place
—a little beach cottage rental, just this side of falling in. Katy had locked the door and shut off all the lights, evidentially pissed that he was out so late. He fumbled clumsily with his keys in the dark, half-expecting the cool-leather touch of a snake or a lizard against his bare ankle.

Inside, he weaved through the dark living room and into the bedroom where Katy
lay in the bed, the baby with her. Despite the fact that this was Katy’s little signal to him that the sofa was his spot for the night, he smiled drunkenly as he looked down at his little daughter in the pale moonlight. Then he shrugged and went back out into the living room.

He found another b
eer in the fridge and downed it before passing out to a grainy old science fiction movie.

It was just before 6:00 a.m. when he heard the screaming
. He sprang up, not even awake yet, his heart thudding inside his chest painfully. He stumbled over the cocktail table, fell sprawling and wracking both knees on the floor, and scrambled down the hall to his bedroom.

He stopped dead at the door.

Thinking back upon that moment now, as his childhood sweetheart ate the flesh of her own pretty face, he realized that was the precise moment he went a little mad.

Katy was kneeling on the bed
. One of baby Chance’s chubby eighteen month-old legs in each straining fist.

It took a horrible moment for him to register exactly what he was seeing
. Part of Chance’s torso gaped open. The child writhed, howling in agony. Blood gushed from the wound. It was painted on Katy’s mouth and up onto her fish-white cheeks like a clown’s smile.

“Katy?” he croaked
. “Katy, what the hell have you done?”

Katy glared at him through cloudy eyes
. Her always perfect blonde hair was now a tangled nest.

“Young meat is tender meat, but you’re next, you drunk motherfucker!” she snarled
. She tossed the baby to the floor. Chance landed with a terrible
thunk
and howled even louder, if that was possible.

Katy slid off the bed and shambled toward Sam
. She hiked up her blood-soaked cotton nightie and did a sick parody of seduction. “You know you want it, Sammy. Come and get it.”

He stepped
back, shaking his head. “No.”

“I’ll bite your little dick right the fuck off.”

He ran from her then, believing every word she said. He could not recall her ever using that type of language with him. She had never raised her voice to him before, not in their three years of marriage. Not even when he’d deserved it.

He fled the
room, screaming like a child running from the boogieman. “Oh God! Oh God!” And then sprinted out the door, clearing the front porch steps like a hurdle. He tugged the door of the Wrangler open and tore open the glove box. He kept a loaded .38 in there. He’d bought it after a failed carjacking attempt back when he was in school. He had never fired it.

Every few seconds, he glanced back toward the house to see if Katy was coming for him
. He waited a moment, but she never appeared.

***

Back inside the baby was silent. The entire house was silent, for that matter, except for that dratted leaking faucet he had promised to tighten. He held the gun out in front of him and he could not stop it from shaking. The thing felt too heavy and awkward in his fist.

He moved slowly through the little house, rubbing at his sleep-blurred eyes with the back of his hand
.

“Katy?”

Drip. Drip.

Outside the bedroom and he could smell the patchouli incense Katy burned sometimes
. But now it was mingled with a foul stench of waste--vomit or shit. And the metallic air of freshly spilled blood. A lot of it.

Closer and he could hear Katy
. Chewing.
Chewing on what?  Jesus!
  Lips smacking wet and loud.

He screamed again--could not help himself and plunged through the half-closed bedroom door
.

He shot his wife in the face three times before he ever realized he had actually pulled the trigger.

Katy fell back and Chance’s legs dropped from her dead grip. Katy had started in on the baby’s thick, soft thighs. Bone and muscle peeked through, glistening.

The baby twitched on the floor between the bed and her crib
. Then she twisted around to face him, a look of recognition in her clouding blue eyes. Blood was everywhere—on the walls, the bedcovers, the drapes. It pooled on the floor like spilled paint. The twitching worsened and then the baby began to howl again. Sam shot the baby, his lack of experience with the gun causing him to only graze her face. He moved the gun up a fraction of an inch and then he turned away.

He pulled the trigger again and all was silent except for the
drip
drip
of that fucking faucet. In a breath, his entire world was gone.

His knees turned to mush and he sank to the floor, too confused to know what to do
. Then he pressed the gun to his own head.

But he was weak
. So fucking weak.

***

He fled the island and headed back home to his parent’s place. The drive was perilous thing, the interstate an obstacle course, a scenic tour of horror.

Here and there vehicles were stalled and he kept expecting to finally reach a stretch that was impassable
. Along the way, he spotted a number of the shambling infected along the shoulder of the road. Some chased the Wrangler and others stood and screamed at him as he passed. He drove faster than he should have through the maze of twisted steel, but amazingly, he did not wreck.

There was a big pile-up about fifteen miles from his parent’s place and he managed to maneuver along the shoulder, the needle hovering at a steady five miles per hour for a quarter mile
. He thought he’d never get through it. The sun was up and already hot and he could smell death in some of those battered cars. As he crept gingerly past the last of the mess he thought he heard someone crying out for help. He did not dare stop.

He prayed he could make it back to Holly Hill before needing gas
. His parents lived only 60 miles inland, in a tiny rural community. He hoped the sparse population he had always loathed was a good thing after all.

He found himself dwelling on the events of the morning
. He thought he might be in shock. He felt mind-numb and outside of himself watching everything unfold as of he were watching a particularly terrifying flick one moment, and overcome with grief the next.

He wondered if he might have been able to save the baby
. Why hadn’t he tried?  Why hadn’t he tried to stop the blood?  Tears came again, blurring the road ahead.

He tried the radio and found static along most of the dial
. On AM, there were the faint, manic ramblings of an evangelist and Sam quickly discovered he preferred the static to that.

He squinted into the midmorning sun and wondered if the entire world was gone now
. And if so, why hadn’t he been infected yet?  How many others were out there beside the crazy evangelists and himself?

***

Holly Hill was indeed the ghost town he was expecting. He cruised slowly down Main Street, scanning the front of the little shops for any sign of life.

He turned up Fifth Avenue and passed Tanner’s Hardware
. The door stood ajar and he pulled to a stop out front and tried to see inside.

At the back of the store, he could see movement
. He turned off the Jeep and climbed out, taking the .38 and stuffing it into the waist of his jeans. He had been on that street a thousand times but this was the first time he had ever been afraid.

Cautiously, he approached the door of the old shop, turning slowly to check behind him
. He stood in the doorway, the sun pouring in and casting deep shadows along the aisles, and let his eyes adjust.

“Mr. Tanner?” he called
. “You in here?”

He stepped inside and walked slowly toward the back of the store. The shadowy figure continued to move
.

“It’s Sammy Walker, Mr. Tanner.”

He walked down the dusty aisles closer to the back counter. He pulled the gun from his jeans and held it ready. On either side of him were various types of screws, nails, bolts and washers, all in big glass pickle jars. Drill bits followed, then big angry looking saw blades hanging neatly on long pegs. Joe Tanner was a big proponent of organization, almost to the point of obsession.  

Sam could now make out Mr. Tanner’s sloping shoulders and shiny
bald head. The man’s back was to him and his movements seemed strange. Jerking and spastic. Sam’s finger danced over the trigger of his gun. He called out again.

Joe Tanner turned slowly. “Sammy,” he whispered
. Sam could see that Mr. Tanner’s left ear and part of his face on that side was missing.

“See this shit?” he asked
. “One of those bastards bit my face. Came right in into my fucking place and bit my face!”  He smiled and nodded at Sam. “Came back here, boy. I wanna show you something.”

Sam took a tentative step closer, but his heart sank as he watched Mr. Tanner’s head jerk spasmodically on his thick neck
.

“You okay?” 

“Hell no. Do I look okay?”  Tanner shouted. Then added more calmly, “Can’t get organized lately. Can’t get organized... Like my head’s not working like it was.”

Sam moved still closer, the gun shaking but ready
.

“Look at this, Sammy,” Tanner said
. Then he motioned to a line of jars that sat along the counter. Jars that Sam had not noticed until now. Blood had congealed on the old wood, pooling around the base. It had run under the register and was drying there, thick. Flies buzzed busily here and there. The smell sickened Sam and he tried to breathe through his mouth.