In the Dead: Volume 1 (18 page)

“
Oh my God, it’s like a messed up video game,” Tyler said as the same wall that had lifted before lifted a second time and revealed eight zombies.

“
Two for one special,” Chris said. “Head’s up.”

Tyler started firing, Kelsey swinging and Chris did his best with the slash and hack. They were able to get half the zombies taken care of before the remaining four got into close range. Kelsey staggered back and Gus caught her elbow and steadied her while Chris slashed the zombie who had gotten near her. She quickly recovered and swung her bat to clear out another.

“
Nice shot,” Chris started when there was a thwack from Tyler’s crossbow and then Chris was thrown back against the wall. Searing pain exploded from his shoulder and he looked down to see what he already knew.

An arrow was sticking out of his shoulder.

“
Oh Christ!” Tyler screamed. “I’m sorry.”

“
Chris!” Gus said as he moved toward him.

“
Shoot you little fucker,” Kelsey shouted as she swung her bat at another of the circling zombies. She caught him, but though his forehead dented, he was still lucid enough to hurdle himself toward Chris and Gus on the ground.

He hit Gus with all his weight and the old man tumbled forward against the cement floor. He shouted and tried to flip over, but before he could the zombie sunk his teeth into Gus’s neck. Blood squirted from the wound and sprayed across the floor.

Kelsey screamed and brought her bat down on the zombie with all her might. He shuddered and then went still on Gus’s prone body. Tyler shot the final remaining living dead and all of them stared at each other, then Gus as the voice above crackled to life again.

“
Round two is over and it looks like Gus Hardwick, convicted child molester, is our first causality. When we come back, round three.”

Gus shook his head as he flopped onto his back. “Child molester? I would never- I could never-” His eyes welled with tears.

“
Shhh,” Kelsey whispered. “Of course you wouldn’t. They’re just trying to spike ratings and not let people know the truth. I’m sorry.”

Chris glared at Tyler. He could hardly see straight, his shoulder hurt so bad. The teenager swallowed hard before he turned his back and started a secondary search for fired arrows.

“
You shouldn’t be sorry,” Chris muttered. “Tyler should.”

The kid spun on him. “What?”

“
You shot me and that made Gus try to help me. He got attacked because of you.”

“
Speaking of that,” Kelsey said. She leaned over Gus and grabbed the arrow in Chris’s shoulder with both hands. “Sorry.”

Then she yanked. Chris screamed as the arrow slid from his body. Kelsey threw it toward Tyler and then reached out to cover the wound with her palm. “We need something to bind this before the next wave.”

Gus coughed and sat up. “Here, take my shirt,” he said and opened his orange jumpsuit. He pulled off the white undershirt beneath. “Wrap it up and then… well, you need to kill me.”

“
No!”Chris jerked his head toward the old man even as Kelsey started wrapping his shoulder.

“
You know you have to,” Gus insisted. “Kill me before the next wave comes or else you’re going to have one extra zombie on your hands.”

Kelsey tied her make-shift bandage and looked at Chris. “We have to.”

Chris swallowed. “Okay. Who should do it?”

Kelsey blinked and he could see her blue eyes had filled with tears. He reached for his machete, hand trembling and hesitated. “I-”

There was a thwack from Tyler’s crossbow and an arrow cut through the air and sliced through Gus’s temple. The old man let out his breath with a long sigh and went still.

“
What the fuck?” Chris asked, jumping to his feet to lunge for the kid.

Tyler backed up, crossbow already reloaded and ready to fire.

“
Look, he was going to be a zombie and since you two weren’t doing it, I had to. I had to.”

“
You little punk-” Chris started.

Before he could finish, the speaker voice came again. “Ready? Round three!”

The wall slid up a third time and Chris could see feet beneath it before it lifted entirely.

“
Get ready!” he said, forgetting his issues with Tyler, at least for now. “It could be sixteen if they double again.”

“
Oh God,” Kelsey sobbed. “Please don’t let it be sixteen.”

Of course it was. The wall cleared and there they stood, a pod of mindless, emotionless killing machine. They stared at the three remaining humans for a moment and there was a united cry of primal hunger from the zombies.

“
Oh shit,” Tyler screamed. Then he turned his crossbow around and fired it toward himself.

The arrow sliced through his skull like a hot knife through butter and the kid collapsed forward, sending the crossbow skidding across the cement floor toward the zombies.

“
Shit!” Kelsey said. “We could have used that.”

“
Just swing,” Chris shouted as he started doing the same. “Swing at everything.”

She dove behind him, put her back to his and both of them started to do exactly that. Zombie arms flew, blood and sludge made the concrete slick beneath their feet and occasionally a skull bounced away like a basketball.

“
Look at the technique!” the speaker voice said with enthusiasm. “Kelsey and Chris have killed six of the sixteen zombies in the span of three minutes. Amazing!”

“
It’s only amazing if we survive,” Chris shouted with a glare of annoyance at the cameras. “Keep swinging, you’re doing great!”

“
Thanks,” Kelsey grunted as she threw her entire body weight into her next pass of the bat. “You aren’t so bad yourself.”

They continued for another few minutes. And finally, zombies lay in piles all over the floor, dripping sludge and drool and festering bodily fluids to stain the porous concrete.

“
Is that it?” Kelsey panted.

“
We’ll be back!” the voice above them promised.

“
I guess that’s it,” Chris said, trying to catch his breath. He looked around. There were more bodies than spots of clean floor. He turned to Kelsey. “If we have a round four, it’s going to get hard to maneuver. What do you think of trying to move some bodies over in front of that door they come out of?”

She nodded with a grin. “They’ll trip! Perfect. Hurry.”

Together they started dragging bodies off the main floor and toward the sliding section of wall. They piled them up, crisscrossing them to create the biggest road block they could manage.

“
I’m going to grab the crossbow,” Chris said and started across the room to where it had slid.

Kelsey bent to grab another body. “You know-” she started, then let out a blood curdling screen.

Chris spun around to find that the zombie she had been dragging hadn’t been dead after all. It had her wrist and had sunk its teeth into her flesh. It tugged, pulling her skin away from bone.

“
Fuck!” Chris bellowed as he loaded up the crossbow and fired. The zombie collapsed against the concrete and Kelsey yanked her hand free. She cradled it against her body and began to weep.

Chris hurried to her side. “Oh shit! I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

She sniffed. “I-It’s not your fault. I should have looked closer. I can’t believe I slipped up.”

He reached for her, but she slid away. “Don’t, please,” she whispered. “It will only make it harder when you have to-”

She broke off but she didn’t have to finish the sentence. He knew what she meant.

“
Kelsey.”

“
Will you do it before they come back from commercial?” she asked. “I don’t want to be executed live. They should at least have to go to the tape.”

Chris swallowed and nodded. “Close your eyes.”

She squeezed them shut and he fired the crossbow. She made a tiny gurgle before she flopped back on the concrete, her hands still clenched together against her chest.

Chris turned away. He felt sick. Behind the wall, it had been months since he saw death like this. Since he had to fight zombies. Since he had to kill a… well, they were friends in a way. Comrades in arms at the very least.

And now he was alone. And there was probably a “round 4” coming for this sick little battle.

As if on cue, the speaker above crackled. “Welcome back. During the commercial…”

There was a long silence and Chris could only imagine that Kelsey’s death was now being played live.

“
So now we are left with Chris. And our time is up for today’s episode. So Chris survives our first edition of Zombie Wars! Congratulations Chris. But as a murderer of several innocent people, we can’t allow you to run the streets. So your prize is to be released into the Badlands behind the Wall. You will be released unarmed.”

Chris shut his eyes. Unarmed. In the Badlands.

“
Tune in next week when we’ll unleash zombies on four more convicted criminals. Will any of them survive Zombie Wars?”

“
Hey!” Chris shouted as the voice went silent. “When do I get out? When do you let me go?”

The creaking from above that they had heard before came a second time and the shelf that had lowered for the weapons came down to shoulder height a second time. The speaker activated again and a new voice came on. A woman’s voice.

“
Deposit all the weapons onto the platform.”

Chris hesitated. “I can’t take anything?”

“
Deposit all weapons on the platform,
now
,” the voice repeated.

Chris tossed the bloody machete onto the shelf, found the crossbow and did the same. Finally he pried Kelsey’s bat from her dead fingers and placed it beside the others. The platform lifted away again.

“
Now what?” he asked the voice from above.

It didn’t answer, but instead a different wall panel in the cell began to slide upward. Chris tensed. Shit, if there were more zombies… well, he was dead.

Only when the wall finished lifting, there was nothing behind it but another wall.

“
Step inside. Once the wall closes, a door will open and that leads to the Badlands.”

Chris swallowed. “How do I know you aren’t just going to close me in there and let in more zombies?”

“
Those aren’t the rules,” the voice said. “Now go.”

Chris shrugged. Since he had no choice…

The wall moved shut behind him and he stood in pitch blackness for moment before there was a creak, a pop and a door flew open in front of him. Sunlight streamed in from outside. And he looked out over the barren desolation on the other side of the wall. There were zombies roaming around in pods here and there. They hadn’t noticed him yet. But he knew they would.

So he did the only thing he could.

He ran.

Enjoy these short stories? Be sure to check out Married With Zombies, the first in the “Living With the Dead” series! Here is Chapter One:

David and I became warriors in the zombie plague on the first day, but don’t think that means we were front line soldiers or something. In truth we stumbled into the zombie battle because it was a means for pure, physical survival.

But I never would have guessed that unlike therapy, unlike the self-help books that littered our apartment at the time, killing zombies would save my relationship.

But let me back up. It all started on August 10, 2010. Wednesday was couples therapy day. It had been for six months, although I was beginning to think that all this talking and sharing and role playing that our therapist Dr. Kelly preached was nothing but a bunch of bullshit.

Despite her advice, despite all our visits to her office, David and I were on the brink. I had even researched divorce lawyers in our area on the internet. The thing was when I put “divorce lawyer” into the search engine on our shared computer… well, let’s just say that I didn’t have to type the whole phrase before it popped up in the system memory as something that had been searched for before.

So by the time we were driving down I-5 South into the heart of downtown Seattle toward Dr. Erica Kelly’s tidy, sterile little office, I was just going through the motions of therapy and making a mental list of all the things I didn’t like anymore about my husband.

The item I added to my list on August 10th was the CDs. You see, we share the car and the deal we’d struck was that since six CDs can fit into the changer, I could pick three and he could pick three. But as I cycled through the changer, keeping one eye on the road ahead of me, I realized that every CD was his.

Every. Fucking. CD.

That probably seems like a little thing, and in retrospect it was. But I guess that just goes to show you how far off the track we’d gotten.

I switched the stereo off with a flick of my wrist and glared at David from the corner of my eye. As usual, he was so wrapped up in one of those handheld games he loved that he didn’t even notice my annoyance. Or maybe he was so used to it, he didn’t care anymore. Either way, it sucked.

“
Traffic seems pretty light,” he said without looking up.