Fire Birds

• Title Page
  
• CHAPTER 1
  
• CHAPTER 2
  
• CHAPTER 3
  
• CHAPTER 4
  
• CHAPTER 5
  
• CHAPTER 6
  
• CHAPTER 7
  
• CHAPTER 8
  
• CHAPTER 9
  
• CHAPTER 10
  
• CHAPTER 11
  
• CHAPTER 12
  
• CHAPTER 13
  
• CHAPTER 14
  
• CHAPTER 15
  
• CHAPTER 16
  
• CHAPTER 17
  
• CHAPTER 18
  
• CHAPTER 19
  
• CHAPTER 20
  
• CHAPTER 21
  
• CHAPTER 22
  
• CHAPTER 23
  
• CHAPTER 24
  
• CHAPTER 25
  
• CHAPTER 26
  
• CHAPTER 27
  
• CHAPTER 28
  
• CHAPTER 29
  
• CHAPTER 30
  
• CHAPTER 31
  
• CHAPTER 32
  
• CHAPTER 33
  
• CHAPTER 34
  
• CHAPTER 35
  
• CHAPTER 36
  
• CHAPTER 37
  
• CHAPTER 38
  
• CHAPTER 39
  
• CHAPTER 40
  
• CHAPTER 41
  
• CHAPTER 42
  
• CHAPTER 43
  
• CHAPTER 44
  
• CHAPTER 45
  
• CHAPTER 46
  
• CHAPTER 47
  
• CHAPTER 48
  
• CHAPTER 49
  
• CHAPTER 50
  
• CHAPTER 51
  
• CHAPTER 52
  

A PERMUTED PRESS book

Published at Smashwords

Trade Paper ISBN: 978-1-61868-153-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61868-154-6

Fire Birds
copyright © 2013

by Shane Gregory

All Rights Reserved.

Cover art by Roy Migabon.

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

In memory of Julia Summers

It was June 9, late afternoon, and it was hot. There were a dozen human heads at my feet. Flies swarmed them, entering nostrils and open mouths. It puzzled me why they would be there in the road. I didn’t see their bodies nearby. They were baking on the asphalt of James Street on the north side of Clayfield, a residential street with only a few large, older homes with big yards. I pulled my pistol and looked around at the houses, wondering if this odd scene might be bait for an ambush. If it were a trap, then I had fallen for it when I had gotten out of my truck to investigate. These were not the only heads I had come across. I had been finding severed heads for about a week in different parts of town, but this was the most I had seen at one place at one time.

For several weeks, I had accepted the idea that Clayfield belonged to me…and the zombies. I knew of no other healthy person in town. However, these heads were evidence that there was at least one more person around. I couldn’t understand why they cut off the heads or why they would leave them in the street. Even though no one came out of hiding to greet or assault me, I felt like I was being watched. I returned to my truck, backed down the street, turned around in a driveway, and connected with North 7th.

It wasn’t just the heads; there were other things I had found. Four days before, I found a dump truck rammed through the front of the Christian bookstore. It had not been there before. Two days later, I’d noticed that someone had parked five yellow cars and trucks down the center line on East Broadway a block down from the courthouse. Also, the front doors of random houses were open all over town, and I usually tried to close up houses after I’d been in them to keep the zombies and weather out. Someone was out there, and they were careless, maybe a little bored, and maybe crazy.

I was driving my new, gray, Ford F-150 4x4. I’d had my eye on a truck just like this before Canton B had destroyed the world. I couldn’t afford it back then, but now I could have any vehicle I wanted. When I drove it off the lot a couple of weeks before, it only had thirty miles on the odometer.

I was blasting the air conditioning and listening to an audiobook on the stereo–a collection of short stories by Flannery O’Connor. I had trouble concentrating on the book, because I kept thinking about the heads. I drove south over Broadway, and looked east as I crossed the intersection. Those yellow vehicles were still there and seemed to scream at me. When I got to South Street, I took a left, then a right onto South 6th so I could connect with Braggusberg Road and go back to the Lassiter farm where I had been living.

I opened the gate to the long driveway then pulled inside. When I got out to shut it, I wrapped a logging chain around it and the post to hold it in place. I wasn’t too concerned about zombies coming on the property anymore. They hadn’t come inside since I had reinforced the fences. I wasn’t really afraid of them the way I used to be. They were very dangerous, but I’d grown accustomed to dealing with them. I knew what to expect from them. There were fast ones and slow ones, and I could differentiate between the two easily at a glance. Mostly, they were slow. The number of the fast, freshly-turned victims was dwindling, and I hadn’t seen one in weeks.

I parked close to the house and unloaded the luxury items I had collected that day–a bag of really good coffee beans, two boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates, a Stephen King novel I hadn’t read, and a cardboard box of Playboy Magazine issues spanning from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. I set everything on the porch then picked up the novel and looked at the photograph of the author on the back cover. I wondered what the Master of Horror would think of this 24/7 horror story I lived. Then I looked down into the box of Playboys and saw Raquel Welch staring at me (disapprovingly, I thought) in her red bathing suit.

“Don’t judge me, lady,” I said. I grinned and looked around me as if someone had actually heard me say it. I frowned and tossed Stephen in on top of her and carried it all inside.

I really had not needed to go out for supplies that day, but I needed to go out. Ordinarily, I did my supply runs in the morning, but that particular day I had gone out for a drive to enjoy some air conditioning and the stereo after having spent several hours in the garden. I stopped at a couple of houses for the hell of it. One of the houses had a secret room containing a huge pornography stash behind a home office. I found it only because the owner had left the secret door ajar. His (her?) skeletal remains were on the office floor. The bulk of the collection was movies–DVDs, VHS cassettes, and even a few 16 mm film reels. There were also several thumb drives and CDs in a small plastic tote. I had no way to see what was on them, but judging by how the movies, drives, and CDs were labeled, the Playboys I found in the corner were quite tame. I wasn’t sure what would possess a person to devote a special room just to porn, but I’m sure Raquel judged them for it every time they went in there.

Once I got my luxury items inside the house, I locked up, and then ate some beefaroni right out of the can. I had some chocolate, a little bourbon, and I let Raquel judge the hell out of me.

A few days later, on the morning of June 13, I got up right after sunrise. I put on my boots and strapped on my 9mm and my wristwatch. I washed my face in the basin of dirty water on the dresser and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair and beard had grown. My face was scarred and creased and tanned. I was slimmer than I had been before Canton B. I finally had those six-pack abs everyone was raving about before, and I didn’t even have to mail order any special exercise equipment or routines on DVD to get them.

I frowned. I thought I looked old. I was dirty, too. I hadn’t bathed in several days, because I didn’t want to use up my limited clean water supply.

I went downstairs then outside to take a leak off the front porch. I didn’t use the indoor toilet anymore, because I got tired of hauling in buckets of water from the pond to flush it. I had made a composting toilet that I kept on the back porch. It wasn’t much more than a toilet seat and a five-gallon bucket, but it served its purpose.