Forget The Zombies (Book 3): Forget America

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by

R.J. Spears

“Zombies!”

The shout bought me out of my semi-doze upon the roof of the school, jarring me to total wakefulness. My consciousness felt whiplashed; going from snoozing to sixty miles per hour in less than two seconds. I nearly fell out of my lawn chair, but righted it just before it tipped over. Adrenaline flood into my veins just like it has so many times before since our flight from San Antonio and subsequent narrow escape from the whole state of Texas. Some needling part of me deeply resented the word -- zombie, and the whole reason behind it.

“Can’t we call them something else? Like the ‘not so living’? Or the ‘not so dearly departed’? I asked.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Randell asked giving me the hairy eyeball as he aimed his rifle off into the distance.

“It’s just that I’m so sick of that word and I’m sick of them,” I said as I looked down from our perch on the roof of the school. Just like Randell said, there were zombies. (What else was new?) A small group of them clawed plaintively at the chainlink fence that surrounded the playground. They, of course, were after us. It was their way, but despite it being a nearly daily occurrence it wasn’t something you got used to. They were just as gruesome and frightening as ever with pieces and parts missing plus their overpowering stench. Some things never change, I guess.

“Aren’t you being a bit childish?” Randell asked.

“Maybe I’ve earned it,” I said.

“Get to the back of the line,” Randell said. “We’ve all earned it.”

I knew I was being petulant. So, there. I almost gave him the raspberry, but restrained myself. Wasn’t that a sign of maturity?

“Grant, there’s zombies at the fence!” Robbie shouted while pointing emphatically at the zombies as they bounced off the fence.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said. “Zombies. When aren’t there zombies at the fence?”

Robbie was an excitable kid in his twenties with bushy beard and moustache. He had one of these pinched faces with all of his facial features held tightly together in the center of his face. Whenever I looked at him, I couldn’t help but think of a dwarf from a Tolkien novel. He was our resident computer and electronics nerd. He wasn’t a stereotypical tech geek and avoided pocket protectors and the such. Despite the world going to hell in a handbasket, he had little experience with the undead. By this time, we were veterans when it came to zombies.

We found Robbie at the elementary school on our trek across Oklahoma. Just three weeks ago, we had barely escaped Texas with zombies hot on our tail. Of course, it didn’t help that the military tried to blow up the bridge we were running across to get the hell out of Texas, but that’s ancient history. Things move fast in the zombie apocalypse. Just a few short weeks before leaving Texas, we had made a narrow escape out of San Antonio. But we were stopped dead in the water.

The reasons for our hold up were three fold. Rosalita, our geriatric senorita, was laid up with what seemed to be a bad ankle sprain. She said it wasn’t broken, but the hole she had accidentally stepped in had felled her like a chainsawed tree. It was a nasty spill and I thought I heard the bone crack, but she insisted that she was fine.

The other pressing issue was the fact that our the truck had broken down and there was a limited supply of gas in the area. The only vehicle available to us was a school bus which guzzled gas like we living breathing humans take in air. There were numerous abandoned vehicles around us and we had drained them building up a meager supply of fuel. We had enough to make a good run of it, but some sort of deflation had hit the group when we stopped to help Rosalita. It was as if someone had let the wind out of our sails. Maybe it had to do with our non-stop drive to survive?

There was one other reason we were hanging on and that was because of Randell. He just couldn’t let go of Texas. He just couldn’t stand the idea that his beloved state of Texas was down for the count. Staying in a holding pattern just off the Texas border seemed to sustain him with some hope that Texas just might make a comeback. Every time we discussed the idea of moving on, he’d make an excuse about why we had to stay just one more day, but each day we all knew that Texas was lost. Even he did, but just couldn’t admit it publicly.

Currently, we were sheltering in Idabel, Oklahoma at their southside elementary school. Idabel was a quaint little town of just around eight thousand or so people. That is, when people were still living there. It was located just about sixty miles west of Texarkana and most of its residents had hightailed it out of town with a shitstorm of undead most likely on the way. They were the smart ones.

The school was a pleasant refuge and was safe for the time being, but the clock was ticking and the zombies encounters were becoming more and more frequent. I was beginning to think we had become magnets for the undead as we seemed to be only just ahead of the horde spreading up and out of Texas.

We had been skirting the Red River heading east. Like Texas, the entire state of Oklahoma was being evacuated. The military had been able to hold the undead throng back, but only for so long. The military’s line of defense was just too porous and, like the virus that caused the dead to reanimate, the zombies were spreading across the south almost unrestrained.

“Isn’t somebody going to do anything about the zombies?” Robbie asked, his voice rising an octave by the time he hit the end of the sentence.

No election had ever been held, but I had become the leader of our motley little crew. So, that left it up to me to dispatch these undead bastards. I was about to ask for a recount so somebody else could make these decisions, but I knew better. They’d just vote me in again.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Don’t have stroke, Robbie. I’ll take care of them.”

“Are we shooting them?” Randell asked, bringing his rifle up to take aim.

“No, don’t shoot them,” I said. “The shots will only bring more and we don’t need that.”

“You’re taking them on hand-to-hand?” Robbie asked.

“Not hand-to-hand, but we will be getting up close and personal,” I said. “You in?”

Robbie’s face went white and I thought he might faint at any second.

“Just kidding,” I said. “We’ll take care of them. Won’t we Randell?”

“I guess,” Randell said sighing. “Who's going with us.”

“We can grab Dave and Jay. Maybe Jane,” I said. “Robbie, keep an eye out past the fences and let us know if you see any more of these undead bastards, okay?”

“Sure,” he said and he sounded relieved.

We climbed down and access ladder into one of the classrooms. Our party was dispersed in various classrooms across the building. We had come across the school almost by accident as it just happened to be situated where our truck had broken down. When we got there, Robbie was there with a janitor and three teachers. The janitor’s name was Chuck. He was a tough old African-American guy in his mid-fifties who rarely spoke and when he did, it was mostly a single word or two. Four words were a major declaration for him. He insisted on still wearing his dark gray work coveralls with his name monogrammed above the pocket. Maybe he thought we’d forget his name.

Two of the teachers took off not too soon after we got there leaving behind a Czechoslovakian immigrant who went by the name, Mo. (I think is real name was Mojmir. Or something like that.) He was in his forties and was rail thin with a shock of wiry black hair. Whereas Chuck was the silent type, Mo was a bit of a motor mouth.

Mo met at the bottom of the ladder, dancing excitedly back and forth.

“What is it?” he asked in his thick accent. “Are there more of those undead creatures?”

“Yes, Mo, there are some zombies,” I said.

“Will you plan to dispatch them by shooting them? Or will you bash them like we did before?”

“We will bash them,” I said.

“Oh. Do you want me to help?”

“Mo, have you ever killed a zombie?” I asked. I knew he hadn’t and he was way too high strung for me to teach at this time.

“No,” he said sheepishly as if he were embarrassed.

“Then today isn’t the time to learn. Maybe some other day. If you want to do something, go up and give Robbie company. Okay?”

“Sure. I would be so glad to help.” He climbed up the ladder like a spider up a web.

Less than a minute later, I stuck my head into on of the north facing classrooms where Dave, Joni, and their two kids, Martin and Jessica were staying. Joni and the kids had been with us from the start in San Antonio. She was the middle-aged mother of two kids who could drive any type of vehicle and one of the members of our crew whom I trusted with my life. Dave on the other hand was an entirely different story. He had escaped out of San Antonio when the shit hit the fan and the zombies started munching down on people. Through some twisted cosmic coincidence, we had stumbled upon him in our flight out of Texas.

Their reunion of was strained at best. It was my suspicion that Dave had abandoned his family in San Antonio without too much thought. He claimed otherwise. It didn’t help that the tense circumstances of our race for survival had led to a brief romantic moment between Joni and I. (I was still trying to sort that out by maintaining a safe assured distance.)

Dave lay on a standard issue cot in the corner of the room covered by what looked like a Oklahoma state flag. He barely stirred when we entered the room.

Martin, their precocious young son, saw me immediately. “Grant!” he yelled and ran across the room to give me a hug. We had been through some scary moments together since this had all come down and he had bonded with me. This was another source of tension between Dave and me.

Jessica was their nine year old and sat at a school desk coloring. She only looked up to say a distracted hello and then returned to her drawing.

Joni stood at the window looking out and brightened when she turned to see me, but then clouded just as quickly. Confusion was the watchword of our relationship. Not that you could call it relationship. One deep kiss does not constitute a relationship.

I gave her a weak wave, then spoke to Dave, “Hey Dave, we’ve got some deaders out back. We need to take them out without making too much noise. Can you help?”

He rolled slightly my way and said, “No can do. I’ve got a stomach flu or something.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah,” Dave said looking away from me. “I think it was some bad beans.”

“Oh well,” I said, knowing he was just dodging the task at hand.

“When are we getting out of this place?” Dave asked still facing away from me. “There’s more and more of those damn zombies every day.”

Randell spoke up this time, “As soon as we find out when the military takes back Texas.”

“Texas is toast,” Dave said and chuckled at his own bad joke, then added. “It is now owned by the undead.”

“I will not accept that,” Randell said, his facing coloring. “Texas will overcome.”

I didn’t want to break the news to Randell, but Dave was probably right. From the limited reports we were getting over the radio, the news out of Texas was bad. The military had closed down the border leaving us the only logical conclusion that they had given up on Texas.

“We’ll check with Jay and Jane,” I said not wanting to get into another argument with Dave.

I gently tugged Randell’s arm as he glared at Dave and led him toward the door. On my way out and against my better wishes, I took a quick look back at Joni. She returned the glance which only made things worse. She gave a slight shrug and I felt an undeniable pang of longing, but pushed it down.

“What an ass,” Randell said in a half whisper as soon as we entered the hallway.

“You’ll get no debate from me on that,” I said.

We walked in silence to a classroom at the end of the hall where Jay and Jane had set up their temporary living quarters. Jay was nice enough, but Jane was the brains of the operation. They seemed like a such a miss-matched pair as she had a buttoned-down corporate look while he was grunge. Somehow they made it work, and after losing their friend Huck on run out of Texas, they seemed even tighter.

They had selected a biology classroom complete with a small greenhouse for Jay to attempt to grow more of recreational pharmaceutical products as his supply was running low. I hated to tell him that we most likely would not be there long enough for his growing experiments to come to fruition.

Jay was standing next to greenhouse door, his rainbow colored beanie sat atop his head as constant fixture, inspecting the soil in one of the standing growing beds. In his traditional fashion, Jay beamed at us when we entered the room and said, “Grant, dude, I think I have some sprouts.” .