Dead Flesh: Stories of the Living Dead (3 page)

              Swing and a miss!

              That was the first reaction which stomped through Dana’s mind when she saw the kid with the club. He was carrying a club, probably a pre-plague baseball bat, heavily modified with rebar and leather reinforcement over the last twenty years. She watched him swing for the head of the groaning mess trying to get a grip on his young and juicy body.

              She had to give the kid credit for guts, even though as he missed with his first clumsy attack he simply backed up a few paces and tried again. This time the weapon connected with the right shoulder of the monster trundling toward the boy. The full motion reminded her of Zane back in the early days.

              Dana winced as she heard the snap and crack of bones being held together by skin that was more leather than flesh break under the force of the impact. The sound was one she was intimately acquainted with. The creature had once been a human being. Dana studied the shreds of clothing still clinging to the gaunt form and realized this one had been a soldier at one time. The fatigues were still identifiable under the layers of dried mud and gore. It stumbled under the blow but did not go down.

              “Shit!” the kid cried in frustration, his voice was a little high and had the slight breaking of someone just beginning to enter his manhood. He stepped back three more steps and readied to swing again. She could see the runnels of sweat gleaming on his heavily tanned skin and his long brown hair blowing in the gentle breeze gave him a slightly ethereal quality. She was painfully reminded of Zane as she watched the kid refuse to give up and flee the zombie before him.

              “Boy has guts,” Dana said to herself. She never took her eyes off of him as she unslung the rifle from her back and worked the lever action driving a round into the chamber. A voice in the back of her mind gave a tusking noise when she realized that the kid had not heard the snacking of the lever and bolt. He was brave but not nearly observant enough for her liking. Zane would have smacked her on the back of her head for having so little situational awareness.

              She was surprised when she realized the boy was not preparing to swing for the head which was a good six inches higher than his own this time. The angle of his stance showed he was aiming somewhere a good deal south of the creature’s skull. He swung and connected solidly with the knee of the zombie. There was a loud popping noise as the lower leg was dislocated from the upper leg and the creature, that should have been dead maybe twenty years ago but was not, fell to the ground leaving the dislocated section flopping and useless. The thing was persistent though and it began to crawl toward the boy. Its skeletal fingers were digging into the cracked and busted asphalt that was once the parking lot of a burned out shopping complex, moaning and reaching.

              Dana shivered.

              No matter how many times she heard it, the hunting moan all zombies employed to call their brethren to the feast never failed to give her the creeps. She began to scan the tree line for movement, if they were lucky there wouldn’t be too many of the things within easy hearing distance, but then she heard the answering moans and knew luck was not with her today.

              The boy did hear the moans of the dead and his head shot up as he spun around looking in all directions to see if any of the former residents of Wayne, Michigan were about to put in an appearance. As his eyes scanned the over turned semi trailer Dana was leaning against, he jumped back half a step in surprise. He looked at the rifle braced across her forearm and cocked his head in a silent question. “Is that gonna be used on me?”

              Dana shook her head and nodded toward the former soldier now less than five feet from the kids cracked and faded engineer’s boots. He looked down, raised his war club, and swung it down into the withered skull. There was the sound of a pumpkin splitting open and the creature stopped moving for good this time.

              He started to walk toward Dana when motion in the old shopping center caught both of their eyes. Three figures were heading toward them reaching and moaning in anticipation of a warm meal.

              “Come on kid,” Dana called out abandoning the noise discipline that had served her so well for the majority of her life. Now that they’d been made by the locals speed was more important than stealth. Zane would not have approved of this, she thought to herself as she raised the carefully maintained rifle and took aim on the closest zombie.

              CRACK!

              The head of the first zombie exploded and the creature dropped to the ground.

              She worked the lever, ejecting the spent round and chambering the next… CRACK!

              And the next one fell.

              One more time she manipulated the weapon Zane had carried for fifteen years, beginning in Vancouver, British Columbia and ending in a nameless little town in West Virginia… CRACK!

              And the final one was dispatched.

              “Wow,” the kid breathed as he closed the last dozen yards between them. “Where did you learn to shoot like that?” Dana was uncomfortable with the worshipful look she saw in his bright green eyes. She thought Zane may have seen the same thing when he found her trapped in the RV outside of Calgary.

              “A friend taught me,” she replied slinging the weapon over her shoulder. For a full minute neither spoke as they scanned the area for more visitors. To anyone living in the post plague world it was an action which had become second nature over the years.

              “What were you doing out here?” Dana asked after she was relatively sure they were safe for the moment. You were never a hundred percent safe in the open and on the ground, but it had been more than a year since Dana had encountered a real horde.

              “What do you mean?” he asked strapping his club to his hip. The kid was all ropey muscles and tight sinew. He had the hard look all survivors had these days. But he was grinning like the cat that got the cream.

              “You were playing with that thing. When you encounter a ghoul you put it down, it’s not a toy it’s death,” she said coldly.

              “I’m training,” he said. He was looking at her again and now she realized he was probably only thirteen or fourteen years old.

              He wasn’t even born when the world was right, she thought and shook her head sadly.

              “If I don’t practice hunting and killing them how the fuck will I protect myself when I get cornered by a pack?” he asked cocking his head curiously.

              They began to walk toward the road together. Neither was conscious that they were following the other. It was a gorgeous sunny June day. The last two years had been something approaching normal, the ashes from the dead cities burning had finally begun falling from the upper atmosphere allowing the globe to warm again.

              A hawk cried out in the distance.

              “Where do you live?” Dana asked. She unhooked the ancient canteen from her belt and took a hard pull then offered it to the boy who gulped down half the contents.

              “Me and my mom live with a group,” he replied not giving details. Dana approved, they had just met and she had no need to know where he lived. He was so calm and confident. It had been a long time since Dana had met anyone who seemed to have a hopeful outlook on life.

              “What do you do?” he suddenly asked her.

              Dana broke out laughing. It was the last question she would have ever guessed the boy would ask. “I travel,” she said giggling.

              “Well yeah,” he said, “but what do you do?”

              Dana thought about it for a second. The kid was so like she had been as a kid. They stopped and she reached into her bag and brought out a fat notebook. She handed it to him.

              “Can you read?” she asked.

              “Yep, mom says I have to understand the world if I am going to live in it. She was a teacher,” he replied smiling. “What is this?” he asked.

              “My journal, I record everything I see and do on the road. Tonight I will write about you.” She didn’t know why she added that last part but the grin that split his face made her heart sore.

              “Really? That is totally cool!” he said. “Why do you do it?” he asked and his genuine interest was infectious.

              “One day this will all be over. The dead will be nothing more than a nuisance, if they are even still around. Then we will rebuild and people will want to know what happened during the dark years,” she said. It had been Zane who had started the first of the six journals she carried. She had made copies of them and hidden them around North America just in case she never had an opportunity to hand them off.

              “Wow,” he said again and began flipping through the pages. Dana smiled. He was really a good kid.

              “I gotta get moving kiddo,” she said after a minute.

              The disappointment on his face hurt her but she had nowhere to stay and the closest community was a three day hike. She needed to find a place to hold up for the night.

              “Um…” he started, “do you want to come back to my house? My mom would love to see your books,” he said shyly.

              Dana grinned. “I would love to,” she said.

              The boy yipped with joy and they headed off together. Placing one foot in front of the other and the sun setting behind them, the world full of new possibilities.

              This is the story of the Christmas that almost wasn’t. The Christmas when the question of whether there is a Santa Claus was finally decided in Virginia. The Christmas when the dead rose to devour the living and only one person had the strength to rally humanity and lead us to victory. This is the story of the Christmas when Santa Claus fought the Zombies.

              Very few people were aware of the coming danger.

              When the outbreaks of Ebola occurred in Western Africa a year earlier, nations panicked. When the American Centers for Disease Control contained and eliminated the threat it was logical to assume the citizenry would calm down.

              This was not the case.

              A wise person once said that an individual human is rational and smart, while the human race as a whole is composed of frightened ignorant beings that’d trample their own mother for a buck. The same could be said for the human desire for power and control over one another. The idea was the brainchild of a cadre of the world’s ultra rich and their global political lackey’s. It’d seemed so obvious, use the global fear of Ebola to seize total control of the world.

              The plan was simple.

              First they would release a highly contagious but mostly harmless virus in isolated areas causing the citizens of the first world to panic. Then once the population was properly terrified they’d quietly declare a state of emergency and offer free vaccinations for everyone. But what the people believed to be vaccinations would be a new virus designed to render them docile and open to suggestion. Meanwhile, the chosen elite would be vaccinated against the real virus.

              Does this seem like an overly complex and stupid plan to you?

              It was and like every overly complex plan—the creators screwed it up.

              For ninety percent of the population given the “Vaccination” nothing happened. They were protected from nothing and they were not rendered passive or easily controlled. The remaining ten percent seemed to be affected in the intended way. They became passive and easily swayed.

              It all changed on Christmas Eve.

              Nobody knew the radiation was coming. In an invisible and virtually undetectable wave it washed across the planet in the blink of an eye. Was it from space? Was it from within the Earth itself? Nobody would ever know but that didn’t matter because the effects were instantaneous.

              Every one of the ten percent of the human race affected by the vaccination, almost three quarters of a billion, instantly dropped dead. They hemorrhaged from all openings, convulsed violently, and ceased to live.

              Then… they got back up.

              Like a bad horror movie the now reanimated dead attacked the living. They were driven by an unquenchable need to feed on the warm flesh of the living. Panic ensued and in a matter of hours the human race was brought to its knees.

              On that night, the snow fell on the American Midwest in buckets. Cities were shut down, interstates came to a halt, and for many the power ceased to flow. Despite the record amounts of white stuff pounding the center of the United States, children all over were excited for the Christmas holiday.

              While the dead were hungry and on the prowl.

Christmas Eve

Lucy’s House

              “Daddy I don’t want to go to sleep.” Lucy pouted, standing rooted in her bedroom doorway. “I want to stay up and see Santa!”

              “Lucy, if you stay up Santa won’t come,” Eli Jones said to his only daughter with a chuckle. “Now you need to get into bed.”

              Lucy hung her head in surrender. The little girl, just three months shy of six, had been waging a campaign to stay up late with the adults on Christmas Eve ever since Kindergarten had gotten out for the holidays. Her mother, aunt, uncle, and grandmother were all in the living room drinking adult drinks and talking and having fun without her.

              “Alright Daddy,” she said heavily.

              The lights flickered for the hundredth time that evening.

             
I’m glad Maria got me to top off the generator before the storm started,
Eli thought silently thanking his wife yet again for being the practical one in the family.

              Out loud he continued, “Now give me a hug and it’s off to bed with you.”

              Her mood returning to light and excited at the prospect of Santa coming, Lucy hugged her father then scampered off to bed. Once her light was off and the Eli was reasonably certain she was down for the night he headed back to join the rest of the family.

              The lights flickered again.

              “How’s the little Princess?” Maria asked when Eli came back into the living room. “Did she stop trying to convince you she should be allowed to stay up?”

              “She’s fine,” he laughed settling back next to his wife on the leather couch. “She tried every trick in her arsenal but in the end she went to bed happy.”

              Soft laughter filled the room.

              A fire crackled merrily in the fireplace and the wind whipped outside. Mark, Eli’s brother got up and stoked the fire. Then he went to the window and pushed the heavy curtains aside.

              “It’s really coming down out there, I can’t even see the cars,” he said turning back to the room. “Good thing we were all planning to stay here tonight anyways.”

              “When your father was alive he thought a heavy snow was the precursor to trouble,” Dianna Jones said sipping her coffee, which was liberally spiked with Kentucky bourbon. “But your father was also convinced our old neighbor, Mr. Ryerson, stole the Sunday newspaper from our porch every week—so take that as you will.”

              “Is that why he kept those binoculars by the front window?” Mark asked grinning. “I always thought it was so he could watch the neighbor lady across the street when she was sun bathing.”

              Mark’s wife Julie started laughing then coughed as she choked on her drink.

              “No dear that was me,” Dianna deadpanned.

              Everyone laughed.

              Then the lights went out.             

              One, two, three, four, five… the generator should kick on any second now, Eli thought as they all sat cloaked in the sudden darkness. Any second now the beast will turn over and we’ll have power once more.

             
“Umm Eli?” Maria asked in the fire illuminated darkness, “Shouldn’t the generator have kicked on by now?”

              Eli sighed and got to his feet. This wasn’t the first time the power had gone out and the automatic switchover had failed. Such events necessitated a trip to the shed behind the house where the generator was installed. For the hundredth time Eli wished he’d taken care of the problem last time it occurred.

              “Want me to come with you?” Mark asked moving from the window and into the glow of the fire.

              “I’ll never say no to some company,” Eli laughed.

              The two brothers, best friends since before they could read, headed into the blowing snow of the back yard without even donning coats. Even when they’d been young, the brothers had been notorious for not being properly dressed against the elements.

              “You two are gonna catch your deaths!” Dianna called out between laughs. She was used to the way her boys were, it was so much like the way their father had been.

              “I don’t think the two of them will every really grow up,” Julie laughed taking another sip of her drink.

              The wind blew even harder and none of the women heard the moaning.