Jake's Law: A Zombie Novel (5 page)

After the meal, Reed tidied up quickly, as he seemed in a hurry to leave.
Jake visually inspected Reed’s trailer while Reed washed the dishes. Boxes of ammunition and a pair of binoculars lay beside the two guns on the sofa. A trashcan overflowing with empty cans, water bottles, and short pieces of metal pipe was pushed up against the sink. Together with the pieces of pipe on the floor, it looked as if Reed was doing a little plumbing. The cases of food and water were neatly stacked, but the bed down the short hallway was unmade. Clothes were strewn on the floor.

“There! Finished,” Reed announced as he dried his hands on a dish towel.

As they drove south, they passed many vehicles abandoned when their drivers succumbed to the disease. Most of the zombies had ambled into the nearest towns or wandered into the desert to die of starvation. They were forced to drive around a jack-knifed semi blocking most of both lanes near Biosphere 2. The rear door had been forced open and the contents scattered. Instead of the hoped for food someone had expected, the truck’s cargo had been cell phones and electronic devices. Discarded boxes of them lay scattered in the ditch.

A
t one point, Reed swerved his Toyota onto the shoulder at forty miles per hour to take out a female zombie clad only in panties and slippers. The woman turned at the sound of the truck but showed no awareness of her immediate danger. As the truck’s right front fender crushed her chest, she spiraled into the air, and landed in a broken heap in the ditch. Jake shook his head in dismay. Reed’s personal vendetta against zombies could get him killed. A simple flat tire could strand him out in the open miles from shelter. He understood the former teacher’s hatred for the creatures, but he refrained from foolish actions.
Jack’s Law #3 – A fool and his life are soon parted.

Catalina was a small town
flowing along both sides of the highway. One strip mall where Jake had sometimes eaten breakfast was now only blackened ruins in a sea of cracked asphalt and rusting automobiles. Many other buildings had suffered similar fates, as unattended stoves and ovens had ignited gas leaks or other flammable material. Some fires had been deliberately set by vandals or looters. Zombies roamed the parking lot of the
Basha’s
grocery store where he had once shopped and attempted to pursue the two vehicles, but moved too slowly to present a problem. As one of the creatures rushed down the hill on which the grocery store was situated, it stumbled and rolled head-over-heels to the bottom. It picked itself up, looked around as if searching for whoever had tripped it, and continued toward the highway. Freshly turned zombies or zombies who had just fed, Runners, could move swiftly, but the longer they existed without feeding, the slower and weaker they became, Shamblers. He didn’t know how long they could survive without eating, but so far, he had encountered no zombies dead from natural causes.

In Oro Valley,
beyond the pass between the Tortalita and the Catalina mountains, the devastation was less severe, but vehicles filled the parking lots of the Oro Valley Marketplace Mall, including military trucks and police squad cars. Jake frowned at the empty squad cars. He might have known some of the officers that had driven them, not friends but at least acquaintances. The remains of a FEMA medical tent city in the open area between parking lots lay scattered by the wind. The shattered chain link fence that had protected it and the weathered skeletons dotting the asphalt around the tent reminded him of the confusion and misery of those final days when he had still been a cop. He had helped ferry the sick to the FEMA facility after the Oro Valley Hospital had become overwhelmed with patients. Some had gone willingly. Others had gone in handcuffs. None had survived. They had simply died away from home and loved ones. His participation in such acts of forced incarceration had been one of the turning points in his decision to quit the force. His dwindling faith in the government’s ability to solve the problem wasn’t as strong as his faith in himself.

Zombies roamed the empty stores and parking lot
s in search of food. Many turned their heads in his direction at the sound of the jeep and the truck, but even with their limited mental capacity, they knew the vehicle was too far away to chase after them.

Further south,
across from a large shopping center, several corpses littered the CVS parking lot. Jake didn’t bother to check if they had been zombies or victims of zombies. The unmoving dead no longer mattered. As Reed had said, the store had been looted of most food items, narcotics, medical supplies, and oddly enough, cosmetics. The odor of rotten food spilled from open cooler doors. The stringent smell of vinegar rose from a broken case of soured apple juice. As he walked deeper into the store, glass from broken bottles of wine and liquor crunched beneath the sole of his boots. The corpse of a young man lay on the floor between aisles. He had been dead many weeks. His decaying body had almost mummified in the dry heat. From his withered arm protruded a hypodermic syringe.

“Poor bastard couldn’t even wait to get
home before shooting up,” Reed observed.

“Small loss,”
Jake replied, stepping over the body, instantly dismissing it. He had witnessed many similar scenes as a deputy. To him, drugs were a pipeline to death, and dead junkies didn’t bother him. He had become apathetic to people willing to commit slow suicide. It was their families he felt sorry for, not the junkies.

In the pharmacy
section, the shelves been thoroughly ransacked, especially of aspirin, cough syrup, and disinfectants. Some bottles had been deliberately broken in anger, spilling their contents across the floor. Tablets were crushed to a fine powder by the tread of many feet. Reed searched through a pile of rubble and grabbed three boxes of inhalers that looters had missed and stuffed them into a bag he carried. Jake located a large bottle of Torsemide, but only two bottles of Actos, enough for sixty days.

“I can’t find the
Millipred,” Reed mumbled, as he tossed aside boxes in his search.

J
ake scraped up a large handful of aspirin that had spilled from a broken bottle and shoved them into his pocket. “Try the customer Will Call,” he suggested, as he picked up a box of bandages and antiseptic ointment.

Heeding
his advice, Reed checked the packages that had been waiting for customers who would never pick them up. “Yes!” he cried in triumph, holding aloft two vials of Millipred. He read from the package label. “Thank you Mr. Dexter Ellis for your generous donation to the Alton Reed Medical Fund.”

At the sound of broken glass crunching,
Jake motioned Reed to silence. Laying his supplies on the counter, he edged toward the noise. He had taken only two steps toward the customer counter, when a zombie thrust its head through the glass, smashing it. Broken shards stuck in the creature’s head, as well as Jake’s arm. He leaped backwards to avoid the zombie’s clutching hands. He plucked the glass from his arm and wiped the blood on his pants. Reed dropped his load of supplies and pointed his rifle at the creature. Fearing the noise would attract more zombies, Jake cautioned him with a wave of his hand to wait.

This zombie was no
Shambler. It was a Runner, fresh from a kill, eager for more flesh. Barely dried blood coated its mouth and upper torso. It tilted its head to one side and sniffed the air, keening at the smell of Jake’s blood. He had left his knife in the jeep. Keeping his body away from the zombie’s flailing arms, he picked up a long sliver of broken glass, and wrapped one end in a white pharmacist’s smock hanging on a hook. Leaping forward quickly, he jabbed the glass into the back of the creature’s neck between the third and fourth vertebrae and twisted until the shard snapped in his hands. The zombie groaned and died, the glass severing its spinal column.

“That was close,”
Reed said.

Jake
took a deep breath and nodded. “Too damn close. It’s time to leave.” He tossed the bloody smock on the floor and took a closer look at the zombie, a middle-aged male whose clothing was surprisingly clean except for the fresh blood stains. He had turned only recently and fed even more recently. “There’s bound to be more around.”  

Reed pointed to Jake’s arm. “You had better see to that.”

Jake glanced at the wound. Already, the blood flow was slowing. He dismissed Reed’s concern with, “I’ll be fine,” but he did apply some of the antiseptic ointment to prevent infection. With no doctors, prevention was tantamount to survival.

On the way out,
he picked up a collapsible water hose to add to his irrigation system. Reed grinned but said nothing. Satisfied with his haul, Reed was ready to return to his RV, but Jake decided to look around. It had been many weeks since he had last ventured so far from home, and he wanted to discover what was happening in the dead city, and to see if the military had managed to secure the area.

“I’ll be along later
,” he told Reed.” Maybe I’ll see you in a day or two.” Having someone to talk with had been more pleasant than he had expected. Having met someone, he was reluctant to sever the relationship, but even more reluctant to commit himself.

Reed replied, “If
I have to move, I’ll be in Oracle Park.”

After
they had parted company, Jake continued south on Oracle Road. A barricade had been hastily thrown across the road at one intersection in an attempt to block incoming traffic in the mistaken belief that the Staggers was restricted to transmission by contact, rather than airborne through mosquitoes, flies, and other insects. Lines of abandoned vehicles filled all lanes. Several disintegrating corpses lying in and around the vehicles spoke of the determination with which the erecters of the barricade had fought to keep out strangers. In the end, their efforts had been futile. The city had died.

He detoured
along several smaller side roads to bypass the barricade, detecting signs of life in a few houses – fresh wash hanging on clotheslines, cars not covered by pollen or fallen leaves, indicating they had been driven recently, and subtle movement behind curtains as he passed. It could have been zombies, but the movements were so furtive that he believed frightened survivors lived there.

He saw many zombies, hundreds, in fact. He ran a few down with his jeep
when they stepped in front of him, but he didn’t go out of his way to kill those wise enough to remain off the road. Most of the houses had been ransacked or looted. Broken windows, smashed doors, and scattered debris were the calling cards of human scavengers; human skeletons, the leftovers of zombie attacks. Here and there, he saw signs that some people had banded together at schools, churches, or businesses to combat zombies or looters – chain link fences and walls constructed from metal freight containers or overturned vehicles; the bodies of looters hanging from trees and streetlights; piles of cremated zombies in empty lots or washes – but nowhere did he see groups of living people. They had either fled or had fallen victim to marauders both human and inhuman.

Parking atop a ridge south of Canada del Oro Wash, he had a sweeping vista of Tucson
with the backdrop of the Santa Rita Mountains towering to the south. The city certainly appeared dead. The streets were deserted of traffic. No smoke rose from chimneys. No sounds stirred the still air. Entire neighborhoods had been razed during riots or brush fires. Perhaps the clearest indications that the city was lost were the flocks of buzzards circling overhead and the packs of wild dogs and coyotes roaming the streets. All three groups of scavengers competed for the same food source, dead bodies. Murders of crows patrolled the parking lots and buildings, their ebony wings glistening in the sun. It was a city of the dead and the dying. Scavengers, winged, four-legged, and two-legged, ruled the city.

H
e had seen enough. The sight of the dead city depressed and sickened him. Further explorations would prove nothing. If anyone remained alive in Tucson, they were hiding and would soon become victims, or they were predators living off the bloated corpse of the city and the few remaining survivors that crawled through its innards like maggots. He turned away and started home.

3

June 7, 201
6   Oro valley, AZ –

Jake
was intent on reaching home, so intent that he almost failed to see the woman racing across the road, pursued by three fast zombies, Runners. He slammed on the brakes, sliding to a halt to miss her. One of the creatures focused its attention on him rather than the girl. Jake grabbed his crossbow and leaped from the jeep. His arrow struck the creature in the right side of its temple and passed completely through the skull in a fine spray of blood. The zombie took two faltering steps, teetered, and collapsed beside the road, rolling into a ditch. Before it hit the ground, Jake was in pursuit of the other two creatures.

The
woman was fast, but she was clearly tiring. She stumbled, righted herself, and then stumbled again, this time falling and rolling across the ground. She picked herself up and saw that her pursuers were gaining. Changing directions, she raced toward a nearby building, limping slightly.

Jake
stopped long enough to eliminate a second zombie with a bolt through its head, but the other Runner was too far away. He raced to catch up. The woman scrambled up on the flat roof of the building using a Palo Verde tree as a convenient ladder.
At least she has more sense than to get herself cornered inside a building
, he thought. When he got within range, he took steady aim and dropped the last Runner, who was intent on getting at the woman, clawing at the tree in rage. The woman noticed Jake but made no effort to vacate the roof.