The Adventures of Steve and Terry: The Zombie Chronicles (21 page)

“You guys can help yourselves to
the stores,” Orville said.

Terry rushed to the pantry while
Steve ran to the refrigerator. “Candy!” Terry exclaimed.

“Mountain Dew!” Steve cried. “And
it’s cold!”

They both grabbed handfuls of each
and met at the kitchen table. Steve split the Mountain Dews between them and
Terry divided up the candy. The opened their cans, toasted, and drank.

“Oh heaven above,” Steve after his
drink.

“Nectar of the gods,” Terry said,
nodding.

Within minutes several cans of
mountain Dew lay empty and both men sat back with contented sighs. Orville just
sat smiling the whole time.

“Oh, hey, doc, you wouldn’t happen
to have any firearms, would you?” Terry asked.

“Have I!” Orville exclaimed.
“Follow me.”

Orville led them down into the
basement. There were two doors. Orville led them through the one on the left,
clicking on a light.

“Whoooaa,” Steve said.

“I’m a bit of a collector,”
Orville said, smiling.

The room was filled with racks
containing rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, RPGs, grenades, pretty much
every type of hand held modern weapon available.

“Help yourselves,” Orville said.

Steve and Terry were like kids in
a candy store, very fat kids in a very large candy store. They each grabbed
vests and loaded down with pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and grenades.

“What are you grabbin grenades
for?” Terry asked. “They’re useless as tits on a bull against zombies.”

“True, but we have to worry about
vampires, now, too,” Steve said, as if it were obvious.

Terry thought about it and then
grabbed some grenades himself.

“Night’s falling,” Orville said.
“Time to batton down the hatches.”

They followed Orville around as he
closed all the massive steel shutters. He then showed them to a room. Steve and
Terry set their cache of weapons down and sat on the beds as Orville left. They
both climbed into the beds with sighs. It wasn’t long, though, before they
heard the groaning cries. These were not zombie groans, they were drawn out,
sounds from the pit of hell itself.

“Terry?” Steve asked from his bed.

“Yeah?”

“That’s really freakin me out,
man.”

“Yeah, me too,” Terry said,
pulling the covers up higher.

The groaning went on all night.
The next morning Terry got out of bed, stiff and exhausted. He looked over at
Steve to see him lying half out of bed, fast asleep. He walked over and flicked
Steve in the forehead. Steve’s eye’s snapped open and he started to flail,
falling completely out of the bed.

“Whoa, what?! What is it?!” he
asked, bewildered.

“Morning, genius,” Terry said.

“Oh,” Steve said, looking around.

“How have you survived this long,”
Terry asked, shaking his head.

“My keen wits and killer
instinct,” Steve said in all seriousness.

Terry just shook his head again.
They made their way down stairs to find Orville sitting at the table, eating
eggs.

“Ooh, eggs!” Terry exclaimed.

They both sat down and quickly
dished themselves some. Terry took a bite, but then suddenly stopped chewing.
He quickly spit the eggs back out.

“Ugh! They’re—”

“Quite rotten,” Orville said with
a smile.

Terry looked over at Steve to see
him still shoveling the eggs into his mouth. “What?” he asked.

Terry just shook his head again.
“What’s on the agenda for the day?” Terry asked.

“What do you guys normally do?”
Orville asked.

“Run around, scream, run away,
shoot stuff,” Steve said, around a mouthful of eggs.

“We’ve never really stayed in one
place too long,” Terry said. “Never been a place safe enough.”

“Oh my house is quite safe,”
Orville assured them.

“So what do we do?”

“Scavenge,” Orville said.

“Scavenge?” Terry asked.

Orville just nodded. After
breakfast they climbed into the SUV and drove out into the city. After a while
Steve and Terry noticed something.

“Where are all the zombies?” Steve
asked.

“The vampires killed most of
them,” Orville said with a smile.

Steve and Terry just looked at
each other. Finally Orville stopped in front of a large apartment building.
They climbed out and he led them inside. They searched the apartments one by
one, looking for any supplies. They found a few things and moved on. They were
driving down the road, when Orville suddenly slammed on the breaks.

“Max!” he yelled, jumping out of
the car.

“What?” Terry yelled after him. He
looked at Steve, who shrugged.

They finally both climbed out.
Steve grabbed an RPG.

“What in the hell are you gonna
need that for?” Terry asked.

Steve just shrugged. Terry shook
his head and they followed Orville. He was running, yelling “Max,” over and
over. Finally he ran into a dark building under construction. Steve and Terry
hesitated only briefly. They switched on the tac lights on their guns and then
followed him.

“Orville,” they called as they
followed him through the darkness.

Finally they caught him. “What are
you doing?” Terry asked angrily.

“My dog, Max,” Orville said.

“You have a dog?” Steve asked.

Orville started to nod, but then
shook his head. “You don’t have a dog?” Terry asked.

“No,” Orville said.

“Then what the hell were you
chasing?”

“I was chasing something?”

Terry turned to Steve. “Good god,
it’s like there are two of you now.”

“Oh, whatever!” Steve said
angrily. “I am no way near as bad as—”

An inhuman scream suddenly cut
through the darkness.

“Vampire,” Orville hissed,
shouldering his gun.

They all spun, their lights tiny
beacons in the darkness. Finally Orville turned and his light fell on a group
of at least ten vampires. They were pale, with dark splotches covering their
bodies. They were hairless with hard, dark, red-rimmed eyes. The leader opened
his mouth and roared, his jaw extending much farther than a human’s could.

“What ’da we do?” Terry asked,
frozen with fear.

“I got him,” Steve said, pushing
between them and kneeling and shouldering his RPG. “Leeroy Jenkins!” he
screamed, firing.

The RPG hit the center of the
vampires and exploded in a fiery blast. The vampires screamed as they were
blown apart. Vampire body parts rained down around the three men for several
moments.

Steve stood with a nod. “Ya know,
that wasn’t so bad,” he said.

Terry nodded, too. “Yeah, I was
actually expecting them to be much tougher.” He looked at Steve and Orville.
“Well, shall we return to the car?”

“Yeah, I think that would be a
good idea,” Steve said.

They left the building and climbed
back into the SUV. As they drove, Steve rolled down the window and stuck his
head out, as if he hadn’t just killed ten vampires with one shot. They reached
the house and spent the rest of the day indoors. Steve and Terry watched movies
on Orville’s ridiculously huge TV, while Orville spent the day in the basement,
having gone through the other door this time.

The small group settled into a
routine as the days went by. It was the fifth day when Orville said he needed a
little help with a “collection problem.” They left the house and went to one of
the abandoned buildings that was known to house vampires. Steve brought along
the RPG just in case. Orville made an elaborate snare trap, using his own blood
as bait.

They heard a vampire scream and
then something tripped the snare. The vampire was pulled out of the building,
covered in a black tarp, screaming and struggling the whole time. Orville
quickly hit the thing to knock it out. As they went about hauling the vampire
to the SUV another roar sounded out. A massive male suddenly appeared in the
building doorway, its face burning as the sunlight hit it. It watched them for
several moments before disappearing back into the building.

“What the hell was that?” Terry
asked.

“I have no idea,” Steve said.

“What was what?” Orville asked
with a smile, completely oblivious.

“Never mind,” Terry said.

They got the vampire back to the
house and hauled it down into the basement. Orville led them through the other
door this time into a massive lab. They pulled the vampire out, a female, and
strapped her to a table. Orville gave her a sedative and then quickly went
about his work.

Steve nudged Terry who looked at
him. Steve motioned to the vampire woman and raised his eyebrows.

“What?” Terry asked.

“Dude, she has huge boobs,” Steve said
with a smile.

“You’re an idiot,” Terry said with
a shake of his head.

They left Orville to his work and
went back up stairs to keep watching movies. It was sometime later when Orville
burst into the living room, talking really fast and excitedly.

“Whoa, whoa, slow down,” Terry
said.

“I did it! I found the cure!”

Steve and Terry were immediately
off the couch. “You found a cure for vampirism?” Terry asked. Orville nodded.
“So, that, coupled with the zombie cure, means . . .”

“Means we won,” Orville said. “I
need to celebrate.”

Orville spent the rest of the day
drinking and rambling on about stuff neither Steve nor Terry knew anything
about. Unnoticed to them, night fell. It was sometime after dark when they
heard the vampire screams. Orville was going on about gene recombination, but
went very still.

“We didn’t close the shutters, did
we?” he said, seeming almost unconcerned.

“No,” Terry said.

“Well that means they saw the
lights on in the house,” Orville said, still seeming unconcerned.

“And that means . . .”

“That they are coming here to kill
us.”

“Shit!” Terry cried.

He and Steve jumped up from the
table and quickly went to the windows, shutting all the shutters. They watched
through small openings as a horde of vampires converged on the house.

“Don’t worry,” Orville said
drunkenly, stumbling over to them. He pulled out a small pad covered in red
switches. He casually flipped the switches.

The entire perimeter of the house
exploded in flames, destroying cars, trees, and many of the vampires. After the
explosions Steve and Terry stretched their jaws, trying to get the ringing out
of their ears.

“What the hell was that?” Terry
yelled.

“What?” Orville yelled back.

“What—was—that?”

“Claymores,” Orville said with a
smile.

They all looked back out to see
there were still well over fifty vampires out there. And then suddenly a black
clad figure was amongst the vampires, cutting them down with a sword.

“Hey!” Steve said excitedly. “Is
that the Ninja?”

“It looks like it,” Terry said,
smiling as well.

Steve and Terry loaded their guns
and prepared for a fight.

“No,” Orville yelled, since all of
them were still half deaf. “To the lab.”

Orville led them into the lab,
barring the door. He then led them into a glass room where they were storing
the female. There they all waited.

The vampires smashed through the
lab door and filed into the room. The massive male from earlier shoved his way
to the front. He got a running start and smashed into the glass, cracking it.

“I can save you!” Orville yelled
at them.

The vampire smashed into the glass
again. Orville grabbed a vial filled with yellow liquid from a nearby desk and
handed it to Terry. “This is the cure. Take it, save the people.”

“What are you gonna do?” Steve
asked.

“This is my destiny,” Orville said
with a smile.

“Why don’t I just shoot him?”
Terry asked, leveling his gun.

“No! This must be.”

Just then the glass shattered. The
vampire bulled into Orville and smashed him into the back wall. He ripped and
bit, literally tearing Orville to pieces. After he was done he stood breathing
heavily, covered in blood. Just then he spotted the female they had caught and
quietly approached her. As he looked down at her Terry casually walked up
behind him and stuck him in the neck with a syringe. The vampire howled and
fell to the floor, thrashing. His skin slowly changed from pale and splotchy to
a darker healthier hue and his hair almost magically sprouted. Within moments
he lay breathing heavily on the floor, completely cured.