Day One (Book 1): Alive (25 page)

“Bye,” Johnny said as the nearest soldier cut him free and backed away with his M4 at the ready, in case the man decided to attack him. Johnny glared at him as he rubbed his wrists to try and erase the pain.

I had no intention of going anywhere with them. They could leave and never return and that wouldn’t hurt my feelings any. I had made it this far without them; I could make it a little longer. Those thoughts ran through my mind and I was about to express them when the side door glass shattered and three of those things came through. The soldier turned to fire but was overrun before he could get a single shot off. I pushed Kember forcefully into the bedroom and fired in rapid succession at the things. My ears rung like I had taken a baseball bat to the face. I had to cover my ears before shooting anymore or I’d permanently damage my hearing. The last thing I wanted in this new and exciting world was to be deaf.

Kember began to scream.

Johnny caught the soldier turning to fight and was able to disarmed him, pushing him out onto the front porch. He turned toward the side door and opened up with the M4 rifle. It wasn’t as loud as my SBR was, although to Kember it might as well have been. My ears rang even more.

The Captain pulled his Springfield Armory 1911 .45 and began firing as he retreated toward the front door to the safety of his troops and more weapons.

The situation had completely spiraled out of control and there was no way in hell that Johnny and I could fend off the horde of undead coming into my house. I had to make a decision that would benefit us all and it had to be made now, not minutes or hours from now. As the last of the three things fell out of the doorway and I had a second to breathe before the next wave shuffled through the broken door, I saw Anderson at the front door and I yelled to him. He stopped long enough to look back at me. “We’ll go… wait up!” I shouted, knowing exactly where my sudden change of heart had come from. I wasn’t sure that he had heard me at first, even though he was looking directly at me, and I was about to yell even louder when he motioned for me to advance.

Johnny stopped me as I passed him, grabbing me by my arm. “What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s either go with them or stay here and die,” I said. “This place is lost; they know where we are now!”

He watched me hurry through the open door before taking one last look at the living room, which was filling up with the undead. There was no denying anymore that we could hold them back, and even though he hated the idea as much as I did, dying wasn’t on his priority list at the moment. He gunned down two more undead and gave chase.

Moving across the porch, I was overtaken at how many of those things there were. They were everywhere. I didn’t have to force myself to shoot them, as my arm shouldered the SBR on its own and took care of every threat that approached me. With Kember not in my arms, but on foot being led by me, I was able to move and shoot without any constraints. Although I did stop and look back to make sure Johnny was right behind me. I covered him as he ran past me, grabbing Kember from my grasp, leaping off the stairs, across the garage, and out to a waiting HUMMV.

When they were both safely inside, I finished of the thirty round magazine with a wall of solid lead, reloaded on the run as I headed for the vehicle myself. Andrews was only a few feet in front of me when one of the undead blindsided him and he dropped his weapon. I raised and fired a single shot. The undead dropped and I pushed him forward. “Get the lead out of your ass and move!” I shouted over the deafening gunfire.

The Gunner on top of the HUMMV opened up with the M240 Bravo machine gun. The massive echo of the weapon thundered down into the cab of the vehicle and I had to cover my ears to keep from going deaf. Johnny had his shoulders hunched up and his head sunk down to cover his own ears as best he could, while he used his hands to cover Kember’s ears.

We began to move and I felt the adrenaline in my veins still pumping as if it were lighter fluid. I almost expected that if a spark from one of the spent shell casings landed too close to me, that I would explode in a ball of orange and yellowish death, rolling through the interior of the military vehicle and obliterating everyone within. I didn’t of course, but it sure felt like a possibility to me.

My door suddenly opened and as I turned to see a soldier maybe trying to get in, I was shocked to see one of those things grab me by my left arm and shoulder. Its grip was stout and I began to fear that I would be pulled out of the moving vehicle into the street and torn to pieces by a large group of them. “Get this damn thing off of me!” I screamed.

Johnny couldn’t help, as the gunner was still pounding away at those things in front of us and if he let go of Kember’s ears to help she could be injured.

It pulled with all its might and I teetered on the brink of falling out. My right hand gripped the seat as my left did its best to fight the thing off and keep it from coming into the vehicle with us or biting me. The foul odor of its decaying body and breath heaved at my stomach and I wanted to throw up, but doing so would give it more than enough time to pull me out. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Screw you, you piece of shit!” I shouted and used my legs to pry it off of me. It hit the street and rolled as I shut the door, looking for a locking mechanism to keep another one from trying the exact same thing. There wasn’t one, so I brought the SBR into my lap, barrel pointed toward the door, that way if another one tried I’d just blast it in the face. “Get us the fuck out of here!” I shouted to the driver.

The small town was over-run with the supposed dead. We fought our way up four blocks to Main Street, got a few seconds to breath before another large group attempted to attack us. We used the brush guard on the front of the HUMMV’s and plowed through them. Those that were not rundown were vented with the M240 Bravo and M4’s, although I kept my SBR in the vehicle and at the ready, never firing a shot as we sped through the small town.

Once again I found myself glancing at the places, which cast by in a blur – places I had known my entire life and would probably never see again. It was all too surreal to me. Nothing ever happened in my small town. There was never any real action, no police chases, and no muggings. It was like Mayberry in modern times. I hated it… and missed it already.

When we passed the city limit sign and the gunfire stopped, Johnny handed Kember to me, holding long enough near my ear to whisper. “Are you sure we did the right thing here?” he asked.

I could tell by the hint in his voice that he wasn’t sure. I couldn’t be absolutely sure myself, but I do know for a fact that we would have died if we hadn’t got in the HUMMV when we did. To that I am more certain than I have ever been about anything in my life, thus far.

“We’d be dead right now had these guys not come along,” I replied. “Good or bad, I can’t honestly say right now, man. I did what was best for all of us… I hope.”

“They drew those things to where we were,” he stated, watching the driver and the front passenger busy trying to get them all out alive. “We hadn’t seen but a few of them the whole time we were at your place. That is until these trigger happy cowboys showed up.”

“Yeah, but it was just a matter of time before they found their way to us,” I stated. “We would eventually run out of supplies and have to go out looking. They could just as easily have followed us back then.” I wondered if those words held any truth. Johnny’s point was more than valid. We hadn’t seen very many of those things and one block past my house was nothing but woods and farm land. So those things had to have come to us due to the noise of their machinegun fire. I shrugged it all off, not going to worry about something that no longer held any bearing. We were safe for the moment and I wasn’t going to ruin that. Safety was safety… no matter how short or long term, and no matter where.

I watched through a small window in the rear of the vehicle as the small town faded into the obscure darkness. The faint orange tint in the sky put off by the flames of several houses and businesses burning were all that were left. As the darkness grew the small town seemed to be swallowed up, like it was sinking beneath the surface of the ocean, never to see the light of day again. In its watery grave it would forever hold the secrets of the people that went down with it. People that I had known, loved, couldn’t stand, and innocent.

I felt a sinking in my stomach, realizing how serious things had become and wondered if things would get any worse.
Of course they will!
My mind answered my rhetorical question. I felt sick to my stomach now, so I raised the small plexi-glass material that was supposed to be a window and stuck my head close to it. The cool night air, which poured in, soothed me for the moment. Kember curled up in my jacket and was quiet, more than likely traumatized by what she had just went through. I felt sorry for her and I held her close. The wind blew through her hair and my head leaned slowly against hers, trying to make her feel as safe as possible.

Chapter Ten.

I listened to the thunder in the distance, watching the lightning flicker through the window above the bed and create shadows upon the far wall. The gentle constant hum of the falling rain pounding on the roof was serene – like a tranquil paradise you could hear but not see. The bedside fan, set on low, flung cool soft air across my face and upper body. I was as comfortable as one person could be.

I felt her arm slide across the expanse of the bed and come to rest on my chest, followed by her voice almost in a whisper. “Are you asleep?”

“No,” I replied. “Are you?”

Without a word she slide over toward me and we were now lying next to each other. In the flash of lightning I could see her looking at me and I turned my body to face her, she did the same. “The storm keeping you awake?” I asked.

She shook her head, yet in the lame darkness I was unable to see her. She replied. “No, actually it’s not.”

“Then why are you awake?” I asked coyly.

“With both of us working crazy hours, and then caring for Kember when we are both home, I guess it’s just my need for quality time with my husband that’s keeping me awake,” she said softly and although I could not see her clearly, I knew that there was a smirk or some form of a grin upon her lips as she spoke.

“I totally agree with you,” I said wearing my own smirk and slipped my hand across to feel her warm bare skin. Her hands slid toward me and I rolled closer to her, kissing her a few times before taking a moment to look at her in the dark. The lightning flashed once more and to my surprise, the woman I had come to know, fall in love with, and eventually married was no longer beside me, or rather, the woman that was alive at one time no longer was.

“Why did you let her get me?” she demanded as I shot off the bed and she rose to chase me. “Why did you let me die? I could have been alive in that kitchen, yet all you could do was run! Run away like the no good coward that you are!”

I backed away from her, tripped over one of Kember’s unseen toys and landed on my butt. I tried to get to my feet but it was useless to even try, as she was upon me and jumped on me. Her dead weight knocked the wind from my lungs and I looked up into another flash of lightning to see her teeth coming at me.

I lurched forward abruptly to find that I had fallen asleep at some point and had been dreaming. I checked to make sure that I hadn’t woke Kember up, which I hadn’t and took a few deep breaths when I noticed Johnny looking at me with a peculiar look riding his face. “You alright?”

I nodded even though I wasn’t. I looked down to see the SBR in my lap and that’s when I realized we were stopped. Neither of the soldiers was in the HUMMV anymore. “Why are we stopped? What’s going on?”

“I don’t rightly know,” Johnny said looking toward the windshield. “They said something about the road being blocked. I couldn’t really tell, I was half asleep myself when it happened.”

I grabbed the SBR and prepared to fight, but Johnny held out a hand to me to try and calm me.

“You don’t need that, we’re with the military. You saw the firepower these boys packed back at your house, and that wasn’t even all their guns blazing. You’d have to be asking to get killed to mess with these guys.”

“In case you forgot, those things are already dead. I’m pretty sure they aren’t fearful of anything anymore,” I said to remind him, as I didn’t find his words very convincing and I think he was simply saying all of that to make himself feel better.

I turned to glance out the rear window, expecting the lights of the second HUMMV to blind me. There were no lights behind us; in fact there were no other vehicles behind us, military or civilian. “Where’s the other Hummer’s?”

“What?” Johnny asked.

I pointed out the back window. “There’s no other HUMVEE’s out there. When we left my house there were two others with us. Where did they go?”

The Gunner in our HUMMV was still above us scanning the darkness ahead and I could see the turret moving this way a few inches, and then that way so I knew he was at least still alive and on high alert. Why hadn’t he noticed the two missing vehicles and said something? That’s when my mind began to roam even further from the realms of reality into what could be.

              They could easily be bringing us into the middle of nowhere, where they could fake some kind of problem, and then when we both got out to help they would simply execute us and rejoin the others. I tightened the grip on my weapon. “Something’s not right,” I whispered to Johnny.