Dead Series (Book 2): A Little More Dead: Gunfire & Sunshine (22 page)

Rebecca grabbed
his arm and spun him around. “Wait, why did you come back?”

His eyes drifted
over her shoulder to the photo albums lying on the bed, heart lodging in his
throat. “I…”

Something broke
out in the living room, or maybe the kitchen, snapping Paul’s attention to the
hallway behind him.

“Too late,” Billy
whispered.

Wendy darted into
the hallway and the subsequent blast of her handgun made Paul cringe. They were
already inside the house. She glanced back into the bedroom. “I think I just
killed your mailman.”

“They’re all over
the place,” Stephanie said, peeking out the broken window Curtis just shot out
– which must’ve rang the dinner bell loud enough for the entire neighborhood to
hear.

Paul stuck the M4
in his shoulder and turned to Rebecca, heart racing. “You stay right behind me!
We have a Suburban out in the…”

Glass broke and
Stephanie screamed. He turned just in time to see her legs getting sucked out
the window.

Curtis rushed
across the room in slow motion, bringing the shotgun up and around. “Steph!” he
cried, shooting at something out the window and then climbing through.

“Curtis!” Paul
screamed.

But Curtis was
already gone.

Another handgun
blast thundered down the hallway.

Then another.

“Come on!” Paul
yelled, throwing the dresser back and darting down the hallway with Rebecca and
Billy in hot pursuit. In the living room, he found Wendy staring at three new
bodies lying on the floor. Movement off to the side drew his gaze. A man he
recognized as the neighbor across the street with the dog that never stopped
barking limped into the dining room. Paul peppered him with the M4, cutting his
head off and shooting out the bay window behind him.

“Let’s move!” he
cried, hurriedly unlocking the deadbolt and throwing back the front door. His
eyes bulged in their sockets when he saw how many of them were outside. Raising
the M4, he held down the trigger. The machine gun jack-hammered against his
shoulder, spraying the dead with hot lead and dropping them like flies. Wendy
and Billy joined him on the front porch and opened fire, unleashing hell upon
the rancid wave of corpses shambling closer through the falling snow. Paul
locked in on the fat ones coming at a quick clip, taking out a heavyset grandma
before blowing the head off a chubby little boy who couldn’t have been older
than nine or ten. It was a cluster-fuck of gunfire and sunshine, the prior as
deafening as the other was blinding.

Paul saw
everything in explosive pulses. Corpses staggered out from the houses and bushes.
The M4 jumped in his hands. The dead fell while more blocked the path to the
Suburban.

Screams.

Moans.

Panic.

“Stephanie!” he
yelled over the mayhem, barely having time to see that she and Curtis were
nowhere in sight.

“Goddamn!” Billy
popped one ghoul in the face only to have another take its place. “There’s too
many of them!”

The M4 started dry
firing. “Shit!” Paul hissed, swinging the buttstock into the jaw of a bearded
man trying to tear into Rebecca’s arm and knocking him down the porch steps.

“My gun’s jammed!”
Wendy cried, sending a shudder rolling through Paul as he fumbled for the new magazine
tucked in his back pocket.

Everything slowed
down in his mind and he had time to clearly see the bloody gashes and festering
soars in the faces coming at him. Billy’s gunshots grew quieter in his ears as
he realized there had to be over fifty of those dead things closing in.
Slapping in the new mag, Paul fired at will, understanding that he’d come full
circle and nothing more than dumb luck had kept him alive this long because he
was just an average man and average men don’t survive something like this.

Today was his turn
to open that door.

As the dead limped
closer and he recklessly spent his magazine, it was all so clear to him now. Paul
had come home to see her and see her he would. And a part of him couldn’t
fucking wait because, as it turns out, dying was the only true escape from this
scourge.

This nightmare.

This plague.

This
was his swan song…and it might just be the
darkest one played yet.

To
be continued…

Thank you for reading
A Little More Dead: Gunfire & Sunshine
!

Before you go, I hope you’ll turn the page
and leave a quick review. In a world where an indie author such as myself can
sometimes get lost in the crowd, I appreciate every honest review I can get and
thank you in advance. Look for book 3 in the
A Little More Dead
series in the summer of 2016 and be sure to like
my
Facebook
page for release
dates, special offers, end of the world forecasts, and safe-house locations.

In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for
my new Supernatural Thriller,
The Hunting
of Malin
, coming very soon. Thank you again!

If you are reading this, you are the
resistance...

Chapter
Nineteen

TWO DAYS BEFORE OUTBREAK

B
illy drove way too
fast, his boss’ words rattling around in his head like coins in a can.

I’m sorry, Billy, but your heart isn’t in this and
we’re going to have to let you go
.

Pounding the
steering wheel, he laughed sharply. How was his heart supposed to be in
something that was below him? And how was he going to tell Janet he couldn’t
even keep a job at fucking Jiffy Lube when their bills were piling up like late
autumn leaves. She’d already turned distant after losing the shop and,
subsequently, falling behind on their mortgage. Groaning, he went faster and
set his jaw. “Shit!” He cursed himself for settling for a shitty job like that
in the first place because he could do better. He had more to offer than that.
Slamming on the brakes for a red light, Billy released a pent-up breath,
terrified of getting a ticket and compounding their money woes. Leaning against
the door, he rubbed his forehead and blurred the intersection into a gray
moving blob. He needed a drink. No, make that several drinks. The bar around
the corner from his condo called to him like a mistress in the night, and, at
this point, what could it hurt?

The light turned
green and he mashed the accelerator to the floor, deciding that digging in
deeper wasn’t the best course of action. He could still fix this. Janet
wouldn’t get off work for three more hours and the best thing he could do right
now was go home, clean the place from top to bottom and start submitting
applications online. With his skill set, he could probably find another shitty
job by the day’s end.

Laughter took him
by surprise when he pictured himself rounding up carts in a Walmart parking lot
or flipping burgers on a greasy grill because that wasn’t him. Unfortunately,
most places didn’t give a flying fuck about blowing a neon sign in the shape of
a cowboy hat. No, there had to be something else, like making furniture or
designing t-shirts. Something with some meaning! He was good with his hands and
mind and missed his old shop. Losing that place was like losing a limb.

Goddamn LED
lights!

Turning onto his
street, he cringed when he saw Janet’s car in the driveway. “Damn,” he hissed,
pulling in and shutting off the engine. “She would get off early today.” He
dragged himself from the car, rounding up the right words to break the bad
news. His feet felt like cinderblocks as he climbed the front steps and the
right words were all wrong. Unlocking the door, he quietly slipped inside and
leaned against it, putting off facing her for as long as humanely possible. He
wasn’t ready for this but wanted to get it over with at the same time. She
would know something was off with him but maybe postponing the bad news until
tomorrow wasn’t such a bad idea in the short term. Give himself an extra day or
two to lock something else down. But she would know something was wrong. Would
smell it on his lies.

Brow folding, he
held his breath when he heard an odd sound coming from upstairs. Billy quietly
set his keys on the granite breakfast bar and crept up the carpeted staircase,
the odd sound getting louder as something banged against a wall upstairs.
Janet’s screams made him take the rest of the steps two at a time. Horrid
thoughts of murder dashed through his mind. He could handle losing the shop and
job but not her too. Not his Janet. Pulse racing, he grabbed a candlestick from
a hallway sofa table and skidded to a stop in the doorway to the master
bedroom, bracing for the massive amounts of blood spurting from her body that
would tell him he was way too late. The air left the room. He blinked to clear
his eyes. His legs turned to rubber and his heart fell out onto the floor as he
watched the headboard slam against the wall. Janet’s bare legs dangled in the
air and the naked black man lying between them wasn’t Billy. She screamed louder
as the man pumped his ass between her thighs, giving her the business with such
ferocity they didn’t even notice Billy standing in the doorway.

It wasn’t murder.

It was rape.

He stepped
forward, mind spinning.

“Don’t stop,
Charles! Oh God, don’t stop!”

Billy turned to
stone.

Charles
?

His head felt
dizzy and this couldn’t be happening, not to him. He could accept everything else
but not this. Not his beautiful wife. Charles tipped his head back and grunted,
pulling one last moan from Janet, who curled her toes and dug her nails into
the man’s back. Billy couldn’t breathe because this couldn’t be happening, not
on the same day he lost his job. No one was that unlucky.

His wife’s feet
slowly lowered back to the bed as she let out a long sigh.

Charles laughed
into her neck. “Damn, we gotta take a half day more often,” he panted.

“Half day? Next
time let’s make it a full day.”

He kissed her
before rolling onto his back and exhaling a winded breath to the ceiling fan
above. The candlestick slipped from Billy’s hand to the floor and Janet
screamed. Pulling the bed sheet up over her breasts, she scrambled to sit up.

“Billy!” she gasped,
brushing hair from her face. “What’re you doing here?”

He stared dully at
her, numb from the eyes down and uncertain if he was asleep or awake. “I got
fired.”

She traded a
terrified look with the naked man lying next to her in Billy’s bed. “Fired? For
what?”

“Does it matter?”

“Listen Billy,
this isn’t what it looks like.”

The man started
sliding out of the bed and Billy pulled the snub-nose revolver from the holster
in the small of his back. When he got his CCW permit last year, he always
envisioned stopping a deranged shooter at the mall or a mugger after a late
night movie but not this. Even in his worst nightmares,
this
never crossed his mind.

“Stop,” he said
flatly, gesturing with the gun.

Charles held up
his hands and got back in bed. “Hey man, it’s cool, this doesn’t need to get
any uglier than it already is. I’m sorry, Billy.”

Billy swung the
gun to Janet, realizing he’d lost everything in the blink of an eye.
Everything. A lone tear slid over his cheek. “Why?”

She held the sheet
over her chest like a frightened child, like that purple bed sheet could
protect her from the six bullets in Billy’s gun. “I’m so sorry, William,” she
replied, using the name he hated and blinking some crocodile tears out for good
measure. “But you know why.”

He gave her a
shallow nod because he did. Over the past few months, the signs were there but
he chose to ignore them because he could fix this. He could bounce back higher
than ever before but that never happened. Another tear slid out and Billy shot
Charles in the chest. Janet screamed and he put a bullet through her heart,
killing her scream. Wide-eyed, Charles tried holding the blood inside his chest
and slipped out of bed. Wet sounding gurgling noises bubbled in his throat as
he stumbled to a chair with his slacks draped over the back. Digging a cell
phone from a pocket, blood dripped onto his bare feet. Billy watched him with a
strange fascination, unable to feel anything but the warm gun in his hand. The
naked man tapped at the screen and put the phone to his ear, meeting Billy’s
blank stare while holding his wounded chest.

“Yeah I’ve been
shot,” Charles panted in a surprisingly calm voice. He nodded like the person
on the other end could see him, a bloody bubble ballooning from one nostril.
His eyes dropped to the blood pooling around his feet, mouth opening and
closing. Looking up, he stared at Billy with the color draining from his face.
“What-What’s your address?”

Billy stared back
with the gun hanging limply in his hand, his world collapsing around him in
slow motion.

“Billy!” Charles
shouted, coughing up blood. “What’s your address?”

Billy snorted and
shot him again. And again. And again until the gun clicked dry. He studied the
dead man lying on his bedroom floor with his pulse pounding thickly in his ears
and time stopping around him. Faintly, he could hear the 911 operator saying
something through the cell phone on the carpet but it didn’t matter what she
was saying because the emergency was over now. After a few seconds or minutes –
he wasn’t sure which – he went to his wife’s side of the bed and stared at her
lifeless body for a while.

“I’m sorry, baby,”
he said, placing her hands over her chest to cover the blood painting her
breasts in red. Operating on some weird automatic pilot, he pulled his cell
phone out and snapped a picture of her he didn’t want. He examined the screen
for several seconds and then looked back to his dead wife. She was beautiful.
Even in death. Then her eyelids snapped back and she seized his wrist.

Billy awoke with a
jolt and stared at the ceiling. For a moment, he couldn’t move, his body
paralyzed from head to toe. It was suffocating being reduced to a pile of meat
like this. After some time, and with great effort, he forced his head to one
side to see Stephanie lying next to him a few feet away. His throat slowly
unclenched, releasing a sip of air into his lungs. When he noticed Curtis and
Paul gone from the room he pushed himself to his feet and followed a sliver of
moonlight to the bags sitting by the front door. Slowly sliding a zipper back,
Billy rifled inside a backpack he thought was Paul’s, using his hand for his
eyes.

“You looking for
this?”

Jumping, he turned
from the bags sitting by the front door to see Paul holding up the cell phone
he could barely see through the faint moonlight. “I thought you said you didn’t
find it,” he whispered, slowly rising to his feet and staring at him from
across the darkened room.

“What’s on here,
Billy?”

His lips pulled
down at the corners and Stephanie stirred on the floor. “Just some pictures. I
had a bad dream and wanted to see my family. I miss them.”

Paul studied him
through probing eyes, a quiet showdown stretching between them, and slipped the
phone back into his jeans. “I’ll hang onto it for ya. It’s dead anyway.”

Billy swallowed
thickly in the tension-filled silence bowing the walls. Slowly, he nodded back.
“Okay.”