Read Blood of the Dead: A Zombie Novel (Undead World Trilogy, Book One) Online
Authors: A.P. Fuchs
Joe’s shoulder rocked in its socket as the metal crashed into the bone. His left arm immediately went numb, leaving only his gun-filled right hand available.
He aimed it at Des’s head.
“Go on, coward!” Des screamed. “Wanna cap me? Go right ahead. Got nothing to live for anyway.”
What?
He kept the shot squarely lined up. All it would take would be a simple squeeze of the trigger and a one-inch-round hole would materialize between Des’s eyes.
“Joe, stop it! Put the gun down!” Billie screamed.
“Why should I? He’ll only get us killed! Look what he’s done so far!”
The iron pipe was suddenly in the air then Joe felt as if his fingers had been torn off right along with the gun from his hand. He had to double check just to make sure. They were still attached but there was no feeling in them.
“GRRAAH!” Des screamed as he came in with another swipe of the pipe.
Joe ducked and the pipe smacked into the concrete next to his leg with a dull, metallic
clunk.
His boot was in the air and he kicked Des in the gut. The guy doubled over, wheezing and pawing at the air in front of his mouth, as if trying to scoop in handful after handful of sweet, sweet air.
He could barely be heard between panicky moans. “I . . . ca . . . bre . . .”
Fingers tingling, Joe forced them to curl into his palm. His fist was weak, but he didn’t care. He sent an uppercut flying into Des’s chin. The young man jerked backward and flipped over, landing backward on the pavement, the rear of his head smacking the ground.
He didn’t move.
Joe searched for his gun. It wasn’t on the ground.
“Good-bye, Joe,” Billie said. She cocked the hammer.
23
Just Leave Me Alone
August sat up, waking to the dark. He was back in the vault and had gone down for a nap after scouting the Square some more.
A chill swept through him, his sweat-soaked clothes clinging to his body. He remembered what he dreamed about: his family.
It had been Christmas and all of them were there: Eleanor, Jonathan, Lydia, David and Jan; the kids: Jon junior, Bella, Finch, Katie and Stewart. His wife had served the turkey. He stood from the table, all set to carve, about to deliver the story of Christ’s birth as he did so when, after he pulled off the lid of the turkey roaster, instead of a big and juicy, fat, old bird, there was his own zombified head, bloated, with oily gray skin, staring up at him with those awful white eyes. His family was gone from the table when he went to tell them what was in the roaster, each suddenly at his side as if materializing out of thin air, all dead—all
undead
—with clawing hands. August tried to ward them off with the electronic cutter, but Eleanor got to him first, grabbed the hand with the cutter and bit into it, tearing off first one finger then another, picking it clean like a turkey bone.
Screaming, August shouted at his own head in the roaster to help him. The dead head’s jaw popped open; pointy teeth sharper than razor blades shot out from its face and latched onto his throat. They tore out his jugular in a blaze of pain and instead of dropping dead like he expected, August was suddenly on his back on the floor beside the table, his family tearing the limbs from his body, chowing down, blood and ligaments dripping off their chins.
He couldn’t move and only awoke just as his wife bent at the waist and gave him a kiss, her breath hot and foul and filled with maggots.
Alone in the dark, August hugged his rifle to himself then, as if discovering the instrument of death anew, tossed it to the side.
He had killed his family. He had to. But he still killed them.
“How much longer?” he whispered.
Head throbbing, a thousand voices filling his brain and calling him a murderer, he lay back down, hugging himself.
“Just leave me alone.”
24
It Ain’t What it Used to Be
The look of concentration behind Billie’s icy blue eyes made Joe shudder. She wasn’t kidding. He had just dropped her best friend. No one in their right mind would stand for that.
He could only hope that after today’s ordeals, she wasn’t in her right mind. Yet at the same time, maybe this was a good thing. It’d been a long year, one that felt like a lifetime of dragging around the pain and memory of the girl that got away. The haunting and soul-wrenching conviction that he’d murdered somebody. Murdered so many. You could call it what you wanted: self-defense, self-preservation, righteous judgment, whatever. Still, death was death and who was he to administer it?
Maybe a bullet to the brain or heart would finally cure him of the pain he was so sick and tired of carrying around. Maybe finally—finally—he could let April go because death was the only way he would be
able
to let her go.
But you don’t live in a world where the dead stay dead
.
You could come back, if it rains again or if one of the creatures start gnawing on you.
He eyed Billie squarely. She didn’t flinch. Des was trying to say something but he was too low to the ground and too messed up to be coherent.
You could even still carry memory. April could still be with you.
“Do you really want to kill me, Billie?” he asked her.
The statement must have hit her like an arrow laced with realization because her eyes glazed over.
“If you want to, you can,” he said.
“You deserve it,” she said, her voice curt yet at the same time uncertain.
“For?”
“You’re a murderer. You were going to kill Des.”
“Des was going to kill me,” he said.
She didn’t reply to that. He took a step toward her.
“Don’t move,” she said and aimed the barrel of the X-09 squarely at his head.
He raised his hands. “Okay.”
Des muttered something else, coughed, then said, “Bill . . . don’t . . .”
She flinched at hearing her name. A single tear leaked out of the corner of one eye. Even now, ready to kill him, Joe couldn’t believe he thought she looked beautiful.
Stop it
, he told himself.
Don’t let her take you.
“You’re going to have to make a decision, Billie. I can’t make it for you,” he said.
She sniffled . . .
. . . and pulled the trigger.
BOOM!
Air wisped passed his face and then instantly after a jolt shot him when the car some twenty feet away blasted into the air aflame then came crashing down in a shrill metallic
BANG!
Billie stood there, mouth hanging open.
Joe took two quick steps up to her, wrapped his hands around hers, grabbing the gun by the handle, pointing it upward. “Give me that.” He yanked it away and clicked the hammer back up so another shot wouldn’t go off.
Billie turned and put her face in her hands, sobbing.
Des exhaled what sounded like a breath of relief.
Joe went over and stood over him. “Are we done?”
Des nodded.
“Then let’s get moving. They’ll probably be here any moment.”
* * * *
When Joe and the others made their descent down the second hump of the Disraeli Overpass, he opted to take the lead, X-09 ready, the other two single file behind him. He toyed with the idea of Des leading the way and acting as a body shield should any more zombies show up, but he knew these streets and preferred to take the responsibility upon himself.
Downtown was his home. Its streets were where he used to spend hours just walking and thinking and dreaming up comic tales in his old life. He used to live out here. He could probably walk the majority of them blindfolded and know where he was. They were also his patrol ground, a concrete grid to hunt down the undead and wipe them off the face of the city.
The place of his redemption for killing April.
“So where were you when the rain fell, Joe?” Des asked from last in line.
“Home.”
“How exciting.”
Billie shooshed him.
“Why, where were you?” Joe asked.
“I’ll save it for when we settle down wherever we wind up and we’ll have a ‘Kumbaya’ moment.”
Look forward to it
, he thought facetiously.
As they approached the intersection of Logan, Lily and the Disraeli Freeway, Joe wondered what would be the best route to take. Go left, and they’d wind up behind the museum, concert hall and the old buildings that made up one side of the Exchange District. Go straight, and they’d land on Main. There would be buildings either way, but going straight would be more out in the open and not as confined as the zigzag route they’d have to take through the Exchange to get to Portage Avenue. He decided to head up to Main then turn left.
He informed the others.
“Works for me,” Billie said.
“Ditto,” Des said.
Weaving their way through and around the cars clogging up the road, they went up to Main Street and turned left, sticking to the sidewalk, it being the clearest path with only a handful of cars having driven up onto it on that terrible day long ago.
They walked in silence, which Joe found peaceful. After his and Des’s exchange on the bridge, he needed the break. First
real
human contact in months and it had to be with a loud-mouthed nerd who had a bad temper. Billie, though . . . . He hated the way his neck ached to glance back and steal a look at her. He had to keep reminding himself that the only reason he wanted to was because she reminded him of April. Put a long, black wig on her and, from the back, they’d probably look the same. Even in the face Billie bore a resemblance to her, the biggest difference only being the thick-framed glasses she wore.
Snap out of it, man. She’s no good for you. It’s misplaced affection, if “affection” is even what it is. You’re so messed up right now that you wouldn’t know affection even if it was dumped on you, so who do you think you are feeling this way?
And “feeling” wasn’t even the right way to describe it to himself either. It was more of a haunting notion, the
idea
of April that somehow Billie possessed, that got to him.
“Hmph,” he said.
That thing underneath.
“What?” Billie said.
“Nothing.” But it was
something.
“That thing underneath,” was what he called it back when he met April, that invisible quality that attracted one person to another, the one thing in all of human thought and feeling that was utterly intangible and completely indescribable yet was known all the same. It was like everyone was built with an invisible sensor, one designed for a single purpose: to detect that secret, hidden, amazing attractable quality in another person. Some would probably call it “chemistry” or some other dumb name, just a feeble attempt to rationalize what they didn’t understand. Joe didn’t understand it. He just knew it was there.
April had it.
He had thought that, maybe, he had had it, too, and that April had found it in him. But he had been proven wrong the morning after they spent the night lying side by side in his bed and April was gone. He hadn’t even had to roll over to confirm it. He just knew. She had left a note, one explaining she had some things to work out but that she’d never forget him.
So lost in his reverie, it took several pokes from Billie from behind to catch his attention.
“What?” he said.
“Over there.”
Her finger pointed over his shoulder to the staggering corpses walking down the front steps of the Centennial Concert Hall.
The three stopped.
Des drew out the iron pipe.
The four undead moved down the steps with much more control than Joe thought them capable of. There was purpose in their stride. Even from across the street, the hatred in their dull, white eyes was apparent. Four men. Two middle-aged, two younger, all dead for so long that their skin was completely gray, blotched with brown spots, eyes fully sunken into their sockets save for those awful whites. Only one of them had hair, just a touch of black and unruly strands on top of its head.
Once at the bottom of the steps, the undead locked them in their sights and picked up their speed.
“Joe . . . ?” Billie said. She was right beside him. He hadn’t even noticed her get so close.
One look told her to take a step back, which she did.
X-09 raised, Joe cocked the hammer and lined up his shot, picking off one of the zombies just as it crossed the median. Another loud crack of the gun and he took a second. Their bodies dropped to the pavement in dull, fleshy
thunks
, black blood oozing from their skulls.
Des had the iron pipe raised like a baseball bat.
Billie took a few quick steps backward.
The remaining two zombies ran for them, one for Billie, one for Des.