The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 (137 page)

PROLOGUE

My name is Dave Gammon.  I’m a relative late-comer to Flex and Gem’s family, but they welcomed me with open arms, and that’s all that’s important.  I think I’ve been an asset to them, and I plan to get back to where they are as soon as I can. 

That
really depends on what happens in California and it also depends on what happens with my Uncle Brett. 

Since I’ve never done this before – written a chronicle, that is – I suppose I should remind you that in June of 2012, the world went to crap.  I mean
really
went to crap.  According to Hemphill Chatsworth, a super smart scientist who is now a part of my family, a gas emitting from the earth’s core is responsible for transforming most of the people on this planet into the walking dead.

This is where I’d normally say “Seriously.”  It’s not necessary.  You know very well
what
happened, but depending on where this all goes from here, I’m not certain you know
how
it happened.

Hemp’s theory is that as the planet formed and fireballs and gasses of unimaginable kinds were being injected into the nucleus of the planet and outward, they were trapped there.  For as long as this planet has existed, there they were.

What released them is unclear.  Hemp figures a very deep earthquake or a secret, deep underground nuclear test caused a fissure in the planet’s core.  This, he hypothesizes, allowed one gas, or a combination of them, to escape and seep through the layers of the earth, up through the water and soil, eventually reaching our oxygen-enriched atmosphere.

The stuff we breathe became contaminated with it.  It literally emits from every surface in every part of the world.  It has changed 90% of the human population into dead things that walk around and try to eat the rest of us.

That’s the long and short of it.

Then there is the problem of the Ratz, but they seem to be dying off, though some still exist. 

Getting back to the purpose of our run to California.  My uncle’s name is Brett Ulrich Gammon, and he’s always been very cool to me.  He’s my dad’s brother.  His friends have always called him Bug, and I’ve only known him as Uncle Bug as long as I can remember.  I haven’t thrown that out before, because it just sounds weird, and everyone can relate to Uncle Brett.

We’ve always connected, even though I’ve thought
he was a total trip since I was old enough to notice that he
was
different.  And while he’s not like anyone else I’ve ever known, the guy’s pretty damned special to have predicted the apocalypse that bitchslapped the world.

Yeah, he did.  He really did.  I don’t know if it really counts, though.  I mean, Uncle Brett’s been predicting it for at least thirty years.  It had to come to pass eventually.  Even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then, if a zombie doesn’t eat it first. 

Not the nut. 
The squirrel
.

If I’m going to get really specific, I’d say how soon Serena, Nelson and I get back to our family – our other family, that is – depends mostly on who my uncle is these days – or if he
is
at all.

You may have determined that
Bug is a survivalist.  He’s been stockpiling food and weapons – and I mean not just dabbling at it;
really
stocking up – for double digit years.  The last time I saw Bug was around 1995.  Nineteen or so years ago, which blows my mind.  We’ve communicated via internet since then, but when I was at his place, I was just blown away at his stashes.  An underground poly tank with literally thousands of gallons of potable water, sealed and treated to remain drinkable indefinitely.  Guns and ammunition to put together his own small army, and vacuum-packed food stock that filled several rooms.  Generators, solar equipment (Nelson will be in Heaven) and even an entire room where he grows insane vegetables and marijuana hydroponically; without soil. 

Yeah, you heard me right.  Nelson
Moore, our resident, misguided environmentalist, is here.  I’ll get into that later, but first let me say that he’s not a bad asset.  The bastard can throw a Ninja star like no tomorrow, and to be honest, it’s fun to watch.  I have no interest in learning how to do it.  I’ve gotten comfortable with my traditional weapons, but I did consider and discard the idea of grabbing a crossbow in honor of Charlie.  In the end, it would’ve just been too much equipment for the bike, and more of a novelty for me.

So, w
e’re on the road, but we haven’t gotten very far yet.  We thought we were all set, for reasons I’ll explain later, but when Nelson showed up, all that changed.

We now plan to hit another Harley store, and when we get there, Nelson is dumping his damned scooter.  We aren’t going to be putt-putting around the country waiting for his ass.

Serena.  Wow.  After what happened to me in Florida, I guess I didn’t think I’d be able to be with another woman for a long time.  But Serena isn’t just another woman.  She saw me through one of the hardest times of my life; when my sis Lisa died.  I was powerless to stop it, and I honestly could have seen myself taking my own life when I was trapped in that little, cinderblock building with Serena, under attack by a huge horde of abnormals … and a couple of red-eyes besides.

Serena had been my rock then.  She’d been the one to tell me to go ahead and grieve, but for God’s sake, don’t throw everything away.

I know now what she meant, I think.  She didn’t want me throwing
her
away.  She wasn’t done with me yet.  In fact, I now know that she hadn’t really even begun with me yet.

I’m glad I listened to her and let her help me through that time when I was right on the edge.  She did it with a gentle touch and the love she offered me at that desperate moment.  She’s reminded me in the months since that we
never really had the opportunity to say a quiet good bye to Lisa.  That time will come.  Probably when we get back home to our family – and hopefully with my uncle beside me.

Beauty still exists.  You just have to be fully prepared to wipe out any ugly that shows up to muck it all up.

And we are.

Let me tell you how I see Serena Casteneda.  She’s around 5’11” tall.  Her eyes are brown, her hair is almost jet black, and I’m not dumb enough to put her weight down in this chronicle.  But it’s kind of the point.  When I met her, she was living in the Zombie-Free-Zone house in
Shelburne, Vermont with Tony Mallette, Nick and Jason DeSante, and others.  They didn’t eat well, and the girl was wasting away, but still fiery and determined.

During the brief period of relative peace and beauty in
Concord, she began eating well, and I saw Serena settle back into what I assume was her natural weight.

My woman has curves, and I like them.  When I put my arms around her waist, it’s like I have a woman in my arms, and she’s as solid as a rock, too. 

And gorgeous.  Did I mention that?  Sometimes when I tell a story, it’s almost like I expect you to just know what I know.  Imagine Penelope Cruz, plus twenty or so pounds.  Then you’ll have some idea of the beauty of Serena Casteneda.

We were stoked to see little Flexy born before we left our friends.  Cute kid, and big!  I swear that little guy could already bench press a large can of tomato sauce by the time we hit the road.  I wonder if he’ll be walking when we get back.

I wonder more if it will take us that long.  I hope not.  If my uncle is alive, and you’re probably wondering why I would even give him the benefit of the doubt, there’s no guarantee he’ll want to come back with us.  And if he does, it will depend on who he has become since this all happened.  A little more than a year in this crazy ass world can really tweak you.

And he was already tweaked, a bit.  In a good way.

So here’s why I think he might be okay.  I need to let you know I’m not just nuts, because if I didn’t know this, then I really wouldn’t be going at all.

By now, if you’ve read everyone else’s chronicles – and I hope you have – you know that Hemp discovered if you have an immunity to something called urushiol, then you are also immune to the zombie gas that is jetting from every pore of the earth.  This oil is the stuff in poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, cashew shells and mango skins.  It gives those who aren’t immune to it anything from a severe, red rash, to angry huge blisters – at least that used to be the worst of it.  Now, without ever having seen or touched it, the lack of an immunity can give you stuff like no heartbeat, blackish-red blood and a taste for human flesh.

I don’t get any of those things, and neither do Serena or Nelson.  I also know from many camping trips with my Uncle Brett that he does not get it, either.  The bastard used to show off by eating the stuff.

He
never let me touch it, but as it turns out, he could have.  I was as immune as he was.

So if Uncle Brett was as ready as he professed to be, and he was on top of this crazy, zombie apocalypse, then it’s my bet that he’s fine.

We shall see what we shall see.  He’s near the Oregon border in northern California.  A place on the outskirts of Dunsmuir.  It’s all I remember from my last trip, but I’m hoping when we get there, more will come back to me.  If not, with Uncle Bug’s big personality, I’m fairly certain that some survivors there will know who he is and will be willing and able to direct us to his place.

So that’s where we’re headed.  Sure glad it’s spring.

But before I go on with this chronicle, I want to lead you through my beginning and tell you what happened before I found Lisa again and had to kill her dad.  There are lots of other things that were no less horrible than that, because before I beat that dead son-of-a-bitch with that chair, he had killed our mother.

And all of this all leads up to how we both got stuck in that little church in Knoxville, Tennessee, surrounded by zombies.  That wasn’t too long b
efore Flex, Gem, Charlie, Hemp, Trina and those huge, crazy dogs saved our lives and my sanity.

Before all of that, I was doing what everyone else was; I was hanging out with people I loved.
  And while this chronicle is about our journey to California to find Uncle Bug, it’s going to seem like
The Road To Knoxville
at first.

It’s okay.  It allows me to remember the time with Lisa – not the best of times, but a time when we grew closer, even if neither of us knew it then.  A time of terror, perhaps, but a time that made me realize how much I loved her.  Not that I’d forgotten.  Now I
never will.

So on with Dave Gammon’s story. 

It’s that awkward moment when you realize the chronicle is in your hands now, and you’re trying to fill some big ass shoes.

*****

Chapter One

Just like for everyone else, it was June, 2012.  It’s hard for me to write this, because Lisa is such a prominent driving force in what got me to where Flex, Gem and the others found us.  Oh, well. 

Here goes nothing.

Just before I realized that my life had taken a twist for the worse, I was sitting in my house in Panama City, Florida waiting for my girlfriend to get out of the shower.  That sounds perfectly normal, right?  Well, it was, except for the reason she got in the shower in the first place.

In the middle of sex, while I was down south and doing what I do so well,
I felt her body rippling with what I thought were shivers.  That would not have been out of the ordinary.

Then she screamed.  That might have been normal, aside from the intensity and shrillness of her scream.  It was spine chilling and eardrum piercing.  I actually jumped.

“Jesus, babe, what did I do?  Are you okay?”

“No!” she shouted, her hands down by her sides, clenched into fists, her body responding to what seemed to be rippling shivers, though I was no longer the cause.  Not by a long shot from the looks of it.

“What’s wrong, L?” I pleaded.  “Your … skin looks kinda strange, baby.”

“Head’s pounding
,” she said.  “All of a sudden.”

“Jeez.
 I’m sorry.  Want me to get you some aspirin or something?”  My hard on was a distant memory now, but it wasn’t at the top of my priority list anymore.

“
It’s not ... your fault, and yeah … maybe in a minute,” said Leona, her voice pained.  “I … I … fuck!”  Tears streamed from the corners of both her eyes.

I slid off her
and sat on the bed beside her.  “I’m calling 911.”

“No,” she said.
 “I ... I think maybe if I get in a cold shower or something.  Might make me feel better.”

I grabbed the phone anyway.  She didn’t open her eyes, so didn’t tell me to stop.  I used the house phone so they’d have the address right away.  It rang.  And rang.  On the tenth ring I almost hung up, but decided to give it five more.

I slammed the phone down and felt her head with my hand.  It was blazing hot, her face flushed bright red.  “Shit, babe.  Feels like you’re on fire.”

That was no lie.  I could feel the heat rising from her body, and as I looked at her, I saw her skin changing before my eyes.  I vaguely wondered if she had been bitten by a spider or something that was working its way through her bloodstream.

Leona Skye had been my woman for five years.  She was older than my 36 years, but not by much.  She was close to average height for a woman, maybe a bit on the shorter side, with dark hair and eyes that could tell a thousand stories with just a glance, depending on the look she chose. Leona’s facial features were soft, her smile subdued, but her love for me was more than I had ever imagined I would find.

She possessed shoulder-length, dark hair that made her brown eyes seem full of light, yet somehow even darker, and a smile that could tell someone that everything was as it should be … if it was.  If everything was not right – and
you
were the problem – her eyes would express that in no uncertain terms.  And her voice would follow to fill in the specifics.  Leona was not inhibited.

Her heritage was native Canadian, Ojibiwa/Mohawk, and if the Indian in her affected her in any way, it allowed her age-old wisdom to see into my soul and read it like a spiritualist reads tea leaves.  If you knew me, you would know this ability was necessary.  I’m not the most outgoing guy, and when I wasn’t working, I didn’t go out very much.  I pretty much lived for Leona, and almost never went anywhere without her.

She validated me.  When I was with her in public, I was suddenly not as shy or self-conscious.  In my mind, I know it was like,
Look at this beautiful, interesting woman.  If she thinks I’m a good guy, then I’m good enough for any of you.

It’s true.  As haphazard as it might appear, I think even my look is carefully crafted to make me seem more approachable to strangers.  The strangers I’d care to meet, anyway.

Hey, that guy with the blue eyes, long, wavy hair, mustache and kinky beard looks cool – probably even has weed on him.  And look at that chick he’s with … those are the kind of folks I’d like to hang out with.

I’m not muscular like Flex or Hemp.  I’m Flex’s height, around six feet, but I’m kind of skinny, actually.  Not as thin as Nelson Moore, because that guy’s a beanpole, despite the fact that on the day we met, he knocked me on my ass using his self-styled martial arts method,
Subdudo.

Still makes me shake my head and smile.

So anyway, hefting and firing all the damned automatic weapons has beefed me up a bit, as has all the running back and forth between danger and safety, so while I’m more toned, I’m not all that much thicker.  You tend to work off a lot of calories fighting zombies.  You just do.

I have a few tattoos, but nothing that really told any major stories in my life, just ones I thought were pretty cool.  So that was Leona, and that was me.  The odd couple and a perfect match.  We communicated without words, we loved one another.  Had this day never happened, I would have been with her until I took my last breath.

I hate speaking about her in the past tense.  Even as I look up and see Serena here with me now, realizing how I feel about her, I cry inside for my Leona.

But I digress.  Back to the story that worked out better for me than it did for her, at least from my current perspective.

She lay on the bed with the palms of her hands pressed hard against her eyes.

“
Leona, tell me what you need and I’ll do it.  Does this have anything to do with how you slept last night?  That was insane.  I couldn’t even wake you up.”

“Terrible dreams,” she managed.  Then:
“Help me up.”

I did. 
I put her arm over my shoulder walked her to the shower.  She stepped in, steadying herself on the tiled wall.  I reached in and turned on the water, adjusting the mixer valve to warm.

“No, not fucking warm!
 Cold!”

“Okay, sorry,
” I said.  I turned the knob all the way to cold.

“Close the curtain please,
” she said.  “I’ll be out in a little bit.”

I nodded, still naked, and closed the shower curtain.
Plodding into the bedroom, I threw on my underwear and jeans, leaving my shirt off.  It was summer, and it was hot in north Florida.  Not many people realize it, but even being in north Florida it’s hot.  In fact, if you look on a map and take notice, the entire state of Florida is south of the entire state of California.  That means it’s hot here. 

Fifteen minutes passed.
  The water ran.  I sat on the sofa and turned on the TV.  There was a news alert about some guy who walked into a 7-Eleven and attacked some shoppers.  

Not with a gun or anything; he bit and clawed at them.
 Then another story about an attack at a bank.  Same MO.  As I watched, the weird stories kept coming.
Then they had video.  This was from the bank.  Out by the ATM.  A woman had been standing there, a lineup of people behind her.  In the video, you see her turn, and her face is strange.  Even in the poor quality video, you can see that her eyes are flat. 

Her purse drops from her arm and she staggers toward the old woman in the line directly behind her.  At first, it appears she knows the woman and is hugging her.  But seconds later the old woman is beating at the bank patron whose mouth is now buried in the thin flesh of her cheek.

She knocks the woman to the ground as others watch in stunned horror.  The old woman’s legs are kicking outward as she lies on her back, the younger woman on top of her now clawing at her flesh.

The video is cut, and the newsroom comes into view.  As the camera focuses on the pretty blonde reporter, her pleasant face becomes confused.  Then Summer Storm, the weather girl who is in between segments, runs through the camera shot, screaming. 

The camera that was steady, rocks, and now the entire picture goes sideways as it apparently falls over.  Screaming fills the newsroom, and as the camera continues to capture the image of the shocked reporter, Allyson Terry, she raises her arms and a huge man with his cap on backward charges her, falling atop her and growling.

They disappear behind the news desk, and I’ve
never been happier to stop watching something in my life.

And that includes the Twilight movies.

Screw this
, I thought.  I jumped up and ran into the bathroom.  I heard the water still running, so I opened the door and went in.

The bathroom was L-shaped.  As you walked in, the shower was on the left, and down at the end, it hung a left and that is where the vanity and toilet area were.

The shower curtain was closed, and I thought I heard her moaning over the sound of cascading water.  I spoke without pulling back the curtain.

“
Leona, hurry,” I said.  “Something weird is going on.  You have to come see this.”

She didn’t answer.  I pulled open the curtain.  The shower was empty.  I looked at the falling water, and it didn’t register.  Why would she be out of the shower and leave it on?

I felt her, rather than saw her, as I reached in to turn off the water.  She was emerging from the corner, and came fully into view.  Her face had … well, changed.  It was so distorted, I hardly recognized her.  Leona’s eyes, once windows not only to her soul, but to mine, were rolled back and blank. 

As she stood there nude, blue-black veins, so tiny, streaked visibly across her face, down to her neck and all the way down to her toes.  I registered all of this in a split-second because she was staggering toward me and I caught her by the shoulders, holding her away so that I could look at her.

“L!  What’s wrong with you?” I asked, horrified.  Her arms both flailed out toward me, her long ago bitten off nails unable to scratch, which in retrospect is just lucky – I was the one with the long nails.

She growled and pushed forward.

“Leona!” I screamed, terrified.  She struggled to get close to me, but her mouth was open, her eyes dead, and her growls were completely unintelligible.

I felt myself crying, and I suddenly felt completely alone. 
Leona, my best friend and lover, stood before me like a wild animal.  She was, I could see at that moment, essentially insane, so I had nobody else to call.  If I had let her go she would’ve attacked me and I knew it.

Though she had just gotten out of a cold shower and was still wet, I could not shake the feeling that the coldness I felt as I held her away from me was from more than just the water temperature.  She had no body heat emanating from her as she had when I put her in the shower.

I moved backward through the door, my arms still holding Leona away from me.  She grew more frantic, and her mouth began to gnash and chew.

When she bit her tongue in half, I screamed.  She growled on, the blood pouring down her chin and onto her neck and chest, and I tripped on the woven rug on the floor of the kitchen and fell backward.

Leona came down on top of me.

It was official.  She was scaring the holy hell out of me, and I could no longer pretend that her intentions were anything else but to sink her teeth into me.  As much as I loved her and as devastated and sad as I was then, I wasn’t going to let that happen.  Incomprehensible thoughts slammed around inside my head, none of them gaining any traction but these: 

It was like the woman on the news at the ATM.

The cameraman at the news station.

“Leona!” I tried again.  She growled and snapped her jaws and bloody, destroyed tongue at me, and her breath now stank like decay.  That fast.  Her body was slick and wet with blood and water, and the floor beneath me was slippery as I pushed her hard off me and scrambled out from under her, charging into the living room.

I glanced at the television, and the cameraman had dragged the anchor from behind the desk.  He was beside the lens now, and he was eating her with satisfied snarls.  The image on the TV was now in a crimson hue and I guessed it was from blood that had splashed the camera lens.  Nobody had yet cut the feed, which at first surprised me.  I quickly reached the conclusion that there was nobody focusing on broadcasting excellence right about then.

Leona was on her feet and rounding the corner.  I felt a thousand chills streak down my body and I ran to the front door, yanked it open and charged outside, slamming it behind me.

I heard her slam into the closed door, but she did not open it and come out.  I stood on the porch and stared at the knob.  It didn’t turn.  There was scratching on the door and as I backed away, I heard something from the front yard.

It was Denny Steele.  My neighbor.  His arms hung down by his sides and he moved toward the porch.

“Denny, go home!” I yelled.  “There’s something going on, and you need to stay in your house!”

Denny kept coming.  I watched him as he bee-lined straight toward me, his movements clumsy.  “Stop!” I yelled.