The Zombie Chronicles - Book 6 - Revelation (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series) (2 page)

“
I’m glad she’s happy,” Lucas said, “but I don’t get it, Nick. You were willing to risk everything to save her life back at the nursing home, and now you’re just leaving her here, without ever looking back. Doesn’t make much sense to me, Romeo.”

“
That was different,” he said. “If I had left her at that nursing home, she would’ve died. Here, I know she’s safe and will be taken care of. They even gave her a fancy house, so her life will be close to normal, just like she wants—as normal as someone can get out here.”

The security guards opened the gates, and we turned left onto the main road. Nick pressed on the gas, and we took off with a jerk.

I couldn’t concentrate, and my thoughts were scattered as I stared at the passing scenery while Nick sped down the road. We hadn’t been on the road for more than a few minutes when all hell broke loose. As we turned the bend, there was a car crash, some kind of four-car pileup that blocked the southbound lanes. I hoped Nick could squeeze through the towering trees lining the roads and somehow maneuver around the crash site, but that didn’t seem possible, even for him. Screams echoed and zombies attacked.

Chapter 2

“
Drive around the cars!” Lucas yelled.

“
With a U-Haul?” Nick retorted. “We can’t!”

“
Move over and let me drive then.”

Val gripped Lucas’s shoulder. “Sit down, Lucas. If we get stuck, we’ll be worse off, caught in a zombie ambush.”

A tall man hobbled toward the front of the truck, holding his broken, bleeding nose. He stood directly in front of us on the road. I figured he wanted help, but I gasped when he whipped out a pistol and aimed it directly at our newly repaired windshield. The man panicked as moaning, decomposing bodies started to shamble toward us. “Gimme your truck!” he yelled, his eyes wild, like he was a stark-raving lunatic. “Get out and gimme the keys, or I’ll shoot you dead.”

Sometimes survivors of the apocalypse could be more deadly than the cannibal corpses themselves, but the man had completely underestimated my brother, who didn’t even flinch.

“
He’s gonna shoot, Nick!” I yelled.

“
Not after we just got this windshield fixed!” Lucas whipped out his rifle and pointed it straight ahead, out the window. He pulled the trigger and shot the skinny man in the shoulder, giving him a much bigger problem to contend with besides a nosebleed.

The man dropped his gun as he fell backward, and two zombies took full advantage and jumped on him like lions on a fallen gazelle.

“
Go, go, go!” Lucas yelled. “Back up! Turn around. We’ll find an alternate route.”

Like something out of some awful horror film, the screams of terrified children echoed through the air, and a cold chill shot down my spine. I saw them, a few cars ahead, huddled together in the back seat of a black vehicle. Apparently, Val heard and saw them too, because she quickly grabbed her door handle.

“
Stop!” Nick said.

Lucas snatched her hand, his voice stern. “You’re not going out there.”

She broke from his grasp. “Try and stop me.”

“
Nick, let’s go!” Lucas said. “Now! Before your sister gets any more crazy ideas.”

“
Those kids need us,” I chimed in. I couldn’t just leave them, and the whole thing was far too reminiscent of the RV in the deserted town.

“
He’s right, Lucas. We can’t leave ‘em. They’re just kids,” Nick said.

I was surprised that my brother still had a heart. He played tough, and he had no problem making the tough choices that even I didn’t agree with, but deep down, he shared the same compassion as Val and I had.

Nick started to honk the horn, obviously trying to draw the zombies toward us so the kids would have a fighting chance.

Three zombies looked up and began to stumble away from the black car, heading in our direction.

“
This is lame!” Val said. “Only a few are coming.”

“
Give it a sec’,” Nick calmly said.

“
Honk again!” Lucas yelled.

Nick laid on the horn, and a couple more zombies turned to walk toward us, but the rest of the corpses were too focused on the screaming people.

“
Screw this!” In a flash, Val jumped out of the truck with her gun drawn and bolted right toward the action.

“
Val!” Nick yelled. “What the…?”

“
That girl has a mind of her own,” Lucas said, shaking his head, “and if she ain’t careful, one of those things is gonna have it for dinner!”

“
Tell me about it,” Nick said, gritting his teeth. He shifted the truck into gear and eased closer to the pileup. “She’s always gotta do things her way, whenever she darn well feels like it.”

I stuffed extra ammo in my pockets, then slung my rifle over my shoulder. After Lucas jumped out, Nick and I followed. I slipped my gun out of my holster and aimed at the horrific scene before me: a zombie raking its long, dead fingernails down a man’s white t-shirt, cutting into his skin, causing blood to leak through the cotton. Val shot the thing in the head, then moved on into the battle with her gun drawn. Everywhere I looked, zombies wandered aimlessly around. The sounds and moans of the undead gave me chills, and the stench of death and rotting flesh made me gag. It was something I’d never get used to, but it wouldn’t deter me either.

The man who had tried to carjack us was flailing on the ground. His clothes had been torn to shreds, and bite marks lined his arms, legs, and chest. There were so many chunks of flesh missing from his neck and stomach that I couldn’t fathom how he was still alive, screaming in agony. I fired shot after shot into the crowd of zombies who were hovering and drooling over the would-be hijacker, and then Lucas put the poor man out of his misery. There was no way he would survive his wounds anyway, and watching anyone suffer like that was unbearable.

A long scream echoed in the air as a heavyset zombie bit into a woman’s stomach and tore at her flesh, causing blood to gush from her wounds. Another zombie lurched for her face and sank its yellow, decaying teeth into her nose. I shot the zombies, and they crumbled down, lifeless, but the woman was left in absolute agony. I couldn’t bear to shoot her, but another man came up and ended her suffering. The woman’s eyes fluttered shut as she took her last breath.

Cool, calm, and collected, Val stood atop the roof of the black Dodge, shooting any zombie who came to close to the children inside. The men and women who were already there were giving it all they had, fighting zombies off with bats, crowbars, and anything else they could find. One was even smacking the undead with a hubcap, and another was using her huge, heavy designer leather purse like war hammer, mercilessly pounding the heads of zombies who had tripped and fallen in the scuffle; the buckles ripped into the zombie’s rotten flesh, removing scraps of it every time she swung. The harsh truth was, though, that their makeshift weapons and valiant efforts would not be enough to turn the tide in our favor though. The zombies were multiplying, staggering in from the forest. I glanced over at a man who was swatting zombies with an umbrella and poking them with the pointy end, and a woman was throwing rocks and logs. If we were to thwart the horrible horde and win the battle, we needed firepower. My only option was to hurry back to the U-Haul.

As I turned to head back to the truck, though, three zombies approached, each in a different stage of decomposition. I aimed at the closest one, the one with a twisted, mangled face. I squeezed off the first shot, and the bullet cut through the air, striking it straight in the head, just as I intended; it crashed to the ground, a heap of rotting flesh. I held my breath, focused, aimed, and let off another shot. More chunks of rotting flesh and gore sprayed everywhere. Finally, I let off my third and final shot. More decayed body parts splattered into the air like fleshy shrapnel, and the zombie slumped into the grass. Then, while shouts and moans echoed in the air like some Halloween choir concert, I ran to the back of the truck, threw open the doors, and grabbed as many guns as I could haul back to the battlefield at once. “Hey!” I yelled to a man with short white hair.

“
Yeah?” he said, spinning around.

I threw him a gun.

He threw down his tire iron, caught the gun, and nodded his thanks. As if he was some kind of expert military marksman, he immediately started firing, straight into the undead crowd that was howling for our blood. Nick had loaded all the guns, so they were ready to be fired in an emergency, which we definitely had on our hands.

One by one, I passed weapons to the human soldiers, and that gave us a definite advantage over our rotting and hungry opponents. Gunshots rang out all around me, and the zombies fell like flies.

Suddenly, a loud, shrill cry caught my attention, and I spun around in the direction it had come from. I fired at a zombie that was clamping down on a man’s leg with its powerful jaws.

“
Ah! I’m infected!” the man shouted.

I ran over to tell him. “It’s okay,” I started. “We have a serum that can—”

Bang
! Before I could get the words out, he had held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

“
No!” I screamed, but it was too late.

Everything was a blur as I let out shot after shot, taking down anything in my path. One particular zombie seemed to have a real taste for me, as it walked straight into the path of my barrel. I fired, and a shower of black gore exploded on the tree behind it and began oozing down the bark like thick maple syrup. More undead ghouls lumbered my way, but I carefully, calmly took aim and fired, dropping four of the monsters to the ground.

I scanned the area around me and saw a man in desperate need of help. Zombies had isolated him, and he was out of ammo and had no other choice but to try to beat them off with the butt of his gun. Just as a zombie lurched for his arm, I fired. It stopped dead in its tracks and fell over sideways. The man I’d helped darted off as more zombies came for me.

As I fired shots into the ghoulish group, I tripped over a partially devoured body. My heart sank, and my stomach churned when I looked down at the poor, gutted man, the one with short white hair, whom I’d given the first gun to. Suddenly, as if some alarm clock had stirred him from a deep sleep, he opened his white eyes and growled. His cold, dead fingers grasped my ankle, and he bit into my boot. I shot him in the head at close range, then finished off the others.

Val patted me on the back. “We got most of ‘em, and the kids are okay.” She smiled as her eyes lit up. “We saved them, Dean! Good thinking, grabbing those guns.”

Dead zombies littered the area. A few cars inhabited by survivors took off without even stopping to ask if we were okay or to thank us for risking our lives to save theirs. I didn’t see the kids, so I assumed they were in some of those cars. A few of the men and women who’d been fighting alongside us came over to thank us, and Nick let them keep the guns and even gave them a little bit of ammunition.

“
Let’s go!” Nick finally said, once everything had calmed down and we had a clear path to drive our truck out.

Just as Val and I were heading to the U-Haul, a red pickup swerved around the mangle of twisted cars, heading back to the gated community we’d just come from. The truck stopped, and the driver rolled down the window. The men and women sitting in the back of the truck started shouting and flailing their arms, demanding that the driver keep going. That was when I realized something was terribly wrong. When I rushed over, the driver had a stern warning for me.

“
Get in your vehicle! Get back on the road!” he said.

I leaned in. “What’s going on?”

Fear flashed across his face. “More of those things, that’s what! A whole horde is coming, and there’s no way you can fight them off, guns or not.”

Chapter 3

I swallowed hard as the man in the truck told us about the army of zombies heading our way.

“
There are hundreds of ‘em!” another man’s voice echoed from the cab. “We gotta get outta here! Drive, would ya? Step on it, man!”

The woman in the passenger seat leaned toward me, her eyes wide. “I’ve never seen so many!”

“
You folks best just turn around and go back the way you came,” the driver advised.