ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (31 page)

Reaching my family, I said. "We need to find another way to travel, this isn't working for me."

"It sure isn't working for me," Gin said, frowning and shaking her head.

Billy mounted his bike and added. "All that noise is going to attract more eaters, let's go."

Billy was right, the noise did attract more zombies, and it attracted something else.

The ambushers hadn't given up, they were still tracking us. Our bloody misdirection ruse had only served to delay the inevitable, and they were able to find our true direction of travel despite our best efforts.

Because the ambushers hadn't caught up to us yet, we had naively thought that our deception had worked and they had no idea where we had gone. That wrong assumption could have been our ultimate undoing.

Maybe the zombie attack that took a turn in a southerly direction was a blessing in disguise. It forced us almost immediately to realize that I had been wrong about traveling by bicycle, and compelled us to look urgently for a motorized form of transportation.

Setting out again, we pedaled hard to depart the area and distance ourselves from the epicenter of noise we had created during our most recent zombie encounter. Not realizing that we were also running for our lives from a group of men that were determined to catch us and get even for what, in their minds was the mass murder of their fellow comrades. Even though it was their effort to dry-gulch us at their roadblock, that had started the whole fiasco in the first place.

It's funny how that always seems to be the case, when it comes to revenge.

Our sprint to leave the area afforded us enough of a gap between both groups of killers. The group of homicidal maniacal zombies that were meandering around and following the sounds that their food was making. And the group of homicidal maniacal humans that were trailing us bent on justifying their misplaced vengeance. It was due to that gap that we were able to stop frequently and check for a suitable vehicle to replace our bicycles.

"We need to find a company that used a fleet of vehicles, like a taxi company, or a delivery service," I said, hoping we would find something before we ran into another large group of zombies.

We rode along for a while longer, checking cars and trucks to no avail. Then Gin announced she had solved our problem.

"I've found the answer to our vehicle quest," she said, pointing to a post office a half a block away.

"That should do the trick honey, plenty of trucks, plenty of gas, and most important, plenty of keys," I contended.

Arriving at the post office, we rode to the back of the building where the mail trucks were parked.

"Jackpot," Jacob yelled, pointing to a tractor-trailer rig.

"Keep your voice down," Gin scolded. "Eaters will hear you."

"Sorry, Jackpot!" Jacob said, this time whispering.

Jackpot it was, not only did the truck have a half-full tank of fuel; it also had the keys in the ignition and a charged battery.

"We're not going to get any luckier than this," Billy said, climbing behind the driver's seat. "No sleeper unit, but it's got an area back here, one or maybe two of us can sleep in."

"Gin, grab our stuff off of the bike's and put it in the truck, Jacob, come with me and I'll show you how to release the trailer from the fifth wheel," I directed, as I walked to the trailer.

I pointed out the crank on the trailer that raises and lowers the small steel wheels that allows the trailer to stand when you pull the tractor away.

"Crank this and lower these little wheels," I told Jacob. "They need to be lowered far enough to slightly raise the front of the trailer; that takes the pressure off of the fifth wheel."

"Are you the new drivers?" A voice blurted out from the loading dock. "I've been waiting for you to get here; we've got a lot of mail that has to go out."

A short rotund woman stepped close to the edge of the dock. She was dressed in an oversized letter carriers uniform that was
obviously
not issued to her. Her dirty brown hair hung down across half of her greasy pimple covered face. She swept it aside with her ink stained hand, only to have it fall back again impairing her vision on the right side.

"You need to get out of those civilian clothes and into your uniforms, you can't deliver the mail looking like that," she insisted, pushing her hair back again.

Billy and Gin stayed in the truck and said nothing, while Jacob and I walked slowly toward the woman.

"Yeah, we're going to get right on that," I answered.

"Well you need to hurry, the mails already late going out," she responded.

"She's crazy, just like that freak on the boat," Jacob whispered, trying not to move his lips.

"Indeed," I called to her, answering her and Jacob at the same time.

"Did they leave you to cover this shift by yourself?" I asked her, trying to see if she was alone.

"Yes they did, they let all of the slacker leave and told me to take care of everything, so now that you drivers are finally here, we'll get the mail moving. But you can't take those guns with you on your route, that's against the rules, you'll have to leave them here," she said, pulling her hair away from her eyes once more.

My tolerance for these roving nut-cases had reached its limit. I smiled, and walked over to the edge of the four-foot high loading dock, and as I climb up, I asked the obviously fake postal worker.

"Where do you keep the uniforms?"

"This way," she said, turning toward the door.

At that moment, I pulled my pistol from its holster, and stuck the barrel of the gun against the back of her head and pulled the trigger, firing one shot into the obese woman's brain execution style. Her dense oily hair blew away from her scalp as the blaze from the muzzle blast of my gun pushed it aside, and ignited the outer layers of her unwashed hair. The corpulent postal imposter fell forward, her arms at her side, and her hair now on fire.

"I didn't know that you could do that, must have been because of all the oil in her hair," I said, rejoining Jacob.

Gin and Billy had witnessed my impromptu execution of the woman and chose to mostly ignore it. The only comment made, was by Gin, who said. "Did you have to use your gun? Now we need to hurry and get away from here."

Jacob had also watched the demise of the fat lady, and as usual added his two cents.

"Wow dad, that reminded me of Mary," he said, shaking his head to show his disapproval.

Not of me killing the fat girl at the post office, and setting her hair on fire, but as a reminder of what I had done to Mary.

"Killing Mary was an accident, Jake, I told you, I was sure she had been bitten," I responded. "What I just did here was a mercy killing, partly for her, and partly for us.

I'm tired of dealing with these people that have gone insane, and having to wonder when they're going to completely snap, or if they already have snapped and are hiding some grisly secret that they've decided to share with us just before they make us their next victims."

"I get it dad, mister nice guy has left the building," Jacob mumbled, as he stopped turning the trailer's crank and stated. "That should be high enough."

I finished the lesson on unhooking a trailer from a tractor by showing him the latch handle on the fifth wheel.

"Now all you have to do is pull this, and drive away," I instructed.

With the truck packed and the trailer released, we pulled away from the post office.

The woman I had killed was now totally engulfed in flames, her burning hair had caught her uniform on fire, and as it burned, it was acting as a candlewick. As the heat from the fire melted the copious amounts of blubber on her body, the cotton strands in her outfit absorbed the melted lard, which continued to feed the flames. A column of black sooty smoke rose into the air from her burning body and unknown to us, signaling our whereabouts to the trailing ambushers.

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AMBUSHERS

Their flatbed truck was parked in the middle of twenty or so dead zombies that were being consumed by six other undead zombies that had been drawn to them by the sound of the gunfire that had put them down.

"Take care of these zombs!" A man ordered.

Several men immediately jumped from the truck and engaged the feasting zombies, prematurely ending their ghastly dining experience.

"These punks aren't too hard to track; they leave dead bodies everywhere they go. I bet if we follow that pillar of smoke in the distance, we'll find more of their handy work," said Russell, the leader of the group of trailing ambushers.

"Make sure all of these things are brain dead before we leave. Never forget Al." Russell reminded his men.

Al was a lifelong friend of Russell's; they had met in the fourth grade, and became close friends, and they maintained their friendship all through school and beyond.

After the outbreak, Al and Russell were killing zombies and trying to survive just like everyone else. They were forced out of their hometown by large drove zombies, and had found themselves in a small one-horse town looking for a place to spend the night.

A local church was a prime candidate for their needs, but it was infested with victims of the virus. They decided to rid the church of its unholy visitors, and use it for their own safe refuge.

However, in the process of clearing out the covey of the dead, Al put down one without a clean head shot, only stunning the beast. The two of them dragged all of the bodies out of the church, and stacked them at the side of the building.

The next morning, while Al was enjoying his breakfast while sitting on the church steps, he was attacked and bitten by the same stunned zombie he thought he had killed the day before.

When Al turned, Russell was forced to stick a butcher knife through his best friends eye socket to destroy his brain, and since then, Russell had become anal retentive about making sure every dead body was truly dead. So he always reminded his men of Al.

"All done boss, one of them, a girl, never was infected, someone just killed her," one of Russell's trusted minions reported.

"These people are a real class act," Russell replied.

"I saw another shadow, well, I didn't really see it, you know, when I turned my head it wasn't there anymore," the man reporting added.

"Just like the night lights, they're there when your eyes are closed, but seem to disappear as soon as you open your eyes, we've all seen them, well almost seen them," Russell acknowledged. "Everybody on the truck!" he yelled.

Once his men were on the truck, Russell tapped on the roof, leaned over to the driver's window and said. "Let's go find out what that smoke is all about."

"We've been tracking them for quite some time, Russell. What are you going to do to them when we catch up to them?" asked Lonnie, Russell's right hand man.

"I'm not sure yet, but if you have a weak stomach you might not want to watch," Russell warned, staring hard into Lonnie's eyes. "Those people, whoever they are, killed my cousin Bobby. That was Bobby's first time out on a retrieval run, and they killed him," Russell stated, as tears began to flood his eyes. "I loved my cousin Bobby, and they're going to pay dearly for what they did."

The ambushers, guided by the rising smoke from the burning carcass of the fake postal worker, found their way to the post office quickly, and seeing the source of the smoke, Russell's blank expression turned to a scowl.

"Here we go again, was this one a zomb? Or did they just kill another citizen?" Russell asked, his body language showing his displeasure.

Lonnie jumped from the truck to check on the burning body.

"It's too burnt to tell boss, could have been a zomb, or maybe not," Lonnie answered, as he dodged the smoke changing directions in the wind.

"Doesn't matter, the same people did this, and we're getting close," Russell said, determined to catch the people that killed his cousin.

"Look at those bicycle's over there, one has blood all over it, I'd say they rode them here after killing the girl we found in the street back there," Lonnie surmised.