Generation Dead Book 2: What You Fear (28 page)

When I opened the
door, a huge hand hit my chest and shoved me backwards, sending me across the room.  I lost my footing but rolled over, getting to my feet to meet the giant who streaked across the room after me.

Uncle Charlie slammed into me and knocked me into a wall.  His left hand was on my throat and his right was holding one of his tomahawks.  His hand was high up on the handle, a good grip for precision cutting and punching with the blade.  I knew this because Charlie had taught it to me.

“Going to marry my daughter, are you?  Think you’re good enough?” Charlie asked, glaring into my eyes.

I didn’t see any sign
that he was kidding around, so I did what I thought was best.  I grabbed his right hand and twisted towards the wall, slamming his shoulder into it and loosening his grip on my throat.  I leaned to the side to slam an elbow back into his forehead, and then jumped forward to avoid the down stroke of his ‘hawk.  I spun around and faced my uncle Charlie.

“I don’t plan on doing anything but lovin
g your daughter, you damn fool! Knock this off before someone gets hurt,” I said, circling around to where my pack and weapons were.

“Yeah, you were loving her all the while I was gone, not waiting to face me
,” Charlie snarled.

“You were gone!” I shouted. “Dad was gone! We had no one but each other!  You want to fight, fine, but by
God, you aren’t going to get it for free!”  I was mad now and pulled my own tomahawk out of my pack.  I held it back in my right hand, keeping my left out in front to wait for his attack.

Charlie stepped forward, and pulled his second ‘hawk out.  “It’s about time.”  He took a step then the
axes dropped to his side.  He started laughing and I stood there, waiting for some trick.  When he looked at me again, he laughed some more, then fell over on his side, laughing harder.  I straightened up and frowned as my Dad walked through the door, laughing hard himself.

“What the hell?”  I asked to no one in particular.

Dad helped Charlie to his feet, and explained as he wiped away a tear.  “Charlie and I couldn’t be happier, Aaron.  We knew you two would likely get together at some point. It was just natural.  Charlie was worried Julia would fall for some townie and want to settle in a community.  It’s all right.”

Charlie rubbed his forehead and thumped my dad on the arm.  “The things I have to go through to get a good son-in law.’

“You’re lucky.  He would have taken you to school,” Dad said.

Charlie nodded.  “That’s for sure.”

Chapter 68

Julia and I were married in town with her father giving her away.  Kayla was the maid of honor, and Jake was my best man.  Once we were finished, Jake, Kayla, Julia and I switched places and Jake and Kayla got married.  Duncan walked his daughter down the aisle after Uncle Tommy checked his pockets for explosives.

The six of us travelled back to the lodge, and for a
week, neither couple left their rooms for much besides eating. 

Two weeks
after Jake and I were on the back porch, looking out over the tree tops as they lost their last leaves for winter. Distant growls and snarls made us smile as our forest guardians fought over winter food.

“What’s the plan, Jake?” I asked suddenly.

“That obvious, is it?” Jake replied.

“Yeah.  When are you leaving?” I asked. 

“Likely after winter.  We’ll be heading down the river a ways, then out across the plains.  I need to see those mountains, Aaron.  I can’t explain why.” Jake looked west and I could see he was seeing those Rocky Mountains in his mind.

“Well, in order to keep you out of trouble, Julia and I should likely come with you
,” I said.

Jake turned and faced me.  “I can’t ask you or her to do that, Aaron.”

“You didn’t.” I grinned. “I told you.  Now let’s go tell the ladies.”

“Dad’s going to be pissed
,” Jake said.

“He and Uncle Charlie have no room to complain.  Besides, we’ll be back.”

“True.”

We walked into the main room and called everyone in.  When we broke the news Julia and Kayla hugged, and our fathers looked thoughtful. 
Finally, my dad broke the silence.

“You coming back?” he said.

“Depends,” I said.

“On?” Charlie asked.

“How much we might be needed out there,” Jake said.

Dad looked at Charlie and they both shrugged. 

“Stay in touch,” Charlie said.

“Any reason why you’re going too, Aaron?” My dad asked.

I smiled.  “It’s what I do.”

The End

Read on for a free sample of “The Road
To Hell Is Paved With Zombies”

Chapter1:

Zombies Need No Introductions.

Jango peeked out the door of his room at the Prescott Sierra Inn in Prescott, Arizona, and then quickly closed it again. “Those sure look like zombies,” he mumbled to himself, as he lifted a corner of the curtain to look out the window. “But then again,” he thought, “this IS Prescott. It could just be a bunch of Liberal Arts students dicking around and doing some kind of fucked up performance art.” Jango coughed into the crook of his arm, and hoped he wasn’t coming down sick with the flu or something.

He continued watching through the window as what appeared to be three blood-covered people, two men and a woman, played tug-of-war with a dead looking fourth person. There was something wrong with the way the three people moved; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Their limbs moved with a stiff, marionette-like quality that he found funny, creepy and off-putting all at the same time.

Jango hadn’t left the hotel room in several days, and since there was no television in the ratty little room, he had no idea that a real Zombie Apocalypse had started two days before. 

Everything he knew about zombies came from movies and books, so the information he had on hand was Hollywood sketchy, “But damn,” he thought, “They sure look like zombies to me!” Their hair looked matted with clotted blood, twigs, and dirt. Their clothing had probably been expensive at one time, but was now torn to shreds. One male, he noticed, seemed to be missing his right cheek and ear, and the other male seemed to be chewing on the un-moving person. The female was gripping one of the maybe-dead-body’s arms in her teeth and hands, while savagely jerking her head side to side, like a wolf does when it wants a piece of meat to go. “Probably definitely zombies,” he thought to himself with the kind of simple acceptance usually only found in children and the seriously mentally ill.

Jango noticed movement from the direction of the hotel office. The foul-mouthed older lady who worked at the front desk had run out of the office in a pink bathrobe and pink, fluffy slippers. She waved an aluminum baseball bat above her head and shouted, “You get away from my guest, you nasty hippy assholes!” She ran toward the three zombie/liberal arts students with the wobbly, hunch-backed, shuffling gait so common with older people. 

The zombies heard her shout, noticed her slow-motion advance, and raised their heads. They sniffed at the air, and then rose like marionettes being pulled up by invisible strings. The creatures started hissing and moaning. Saliva ran from their slack lips as they all began making a high-pitched keening sound, “
Rhheeeeeeeeee-EEeeeeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee.” Then, in a blur of motion, the zombies charged at the old lady.

The zombies’ upper bodies didn’t coordinate well with the speed of their churning legs, so the high speed movement was almost comical as their torsos swayed around atop their legs, and their arms trailed behind them like the tassels on a kid’s bicycle handle-bars.  

The old woman suddenly seemed to realize that the creatures were not a bunch of hippies. She dropped the baseball bat, screamed in terror, and turned to run back inside. The zombies, though, were less than fifty feet away from her, and it was obvious that they would catch her before she could shuffle halfway to the office door.

Jango
, who was a compulsive supporter of the underdog, would not stand by and watch a little old lady get eaten by zombies. Without thinking, he tore open the door to his room and shouted at the zombies, “Hey, you, over here!” The zombies all looked his way at once, and then, as one, they veered toward him like a group of top-heavy ostriches, and their keening wail became louder as they rushed toward him.

Suddenly, he realized that he didn’t really have a plan for dealing with the un-dead, so, in a panic, he started running toward his car. His panic ended up saving his life.

As a resident of Arizona, a modern version of the Wild West, Jango owned a gun. This being Arizona, he was not going to leave his gun in his hotel room for the maid to steal, so he had stashed his 9mm pistol in the welded lockbox under the driver’s seat of his 1990 Geo Metro hatchback.

He reached his car well ahead of the zombies, got the keys out of his pocket, and opened the car door. He climbed in quickly, slammed the door shut, and locked it. By that time, the old lady had made it back to the hotel office and slammed the door shut behind her.

Jango reached between his feet for his gun box, just as one of the zombies smashed into the side of his Metro. The small car lurched and rocked as the zombie tried to get to him. He fumbled his key into the key hole on the box, twisted the key, and the box popped open. Inside were a Ruger KP 89 pistol, four fully loaded fifteen-round magazines, and four spare fifty-round boxes of ammunition. Swiftly and smoothly, he fitted a magazine into the grip of his pistol, seated it, and worked the slide to chamber a round. He stuck the three remaining mags into his front pockets, and steadied himself.

All three zombies were mindlessly bashing against his little car, arms swinging wildly, flailing with such force that the car’s frame was bending. The doors were buckling in, and the side windows were spider webbed with cracks. Even though it seemed they could not think clearly enough to just break a window and haul him out through the hole, it wouldn’t be long before they opened the tiny automobile like a piñata full of
Jango treats.

Jango
began breathing faster, hyper-oxygenating his blood as he put his hand on the door handle, and then with a violent surge, he slammed the driver’s side door open and into one of the male zombies. The door rebounded, and closed behind him as he jumped out of the car. The zombie tumbled backward in a disjointed pile, but immediately got back up. He noticed the guy wearing a pinkie ring on his right hand. “Guys shouldn’t wear pinkie rings,” he quipped, half to himself, as he shot the zombie in its head.

The zombie fell and started twitching, just as the other two came around the back of the car.
Jango startle-jumped, let out a little scream, and ran around his car away from the zombies.

He suddenly found himself in a high-speed Chinese fire-drill around his beat up car, with two wailing, undead creatures that were intent on eating him.
Jango saw no way out of his predicament. He managed to keep perfectly even with the two zombies as they chased him pell-mell around the smashed up hatchback. His only desire was to keep the bulk of his vehicle between himself and the two slavering zombies.

He fired two wild shots at them across the roof of his car while running, and missed both shots. “Shit,” he panted in frustration as he continued running. He had always thought it was bogus how people in movies made running head-shots on moving zombies, and there was his proof. 

Jango wracked his brains to find a way out of his predicament, and suddenly he had an idea. He poured on more speed, and started closing in on the still wailing undead from behind. He was getting winded, from fear as much as exertion, but he slowly drew closer to the zombies, and lap by lap, he closed the gap between himself and his pursuers. He came around the front of his car on the passenger side just as the screeching creatures passed the passenger side door. He stopped, steadied his hands on the pistol in a two handed grip, and started shooting at the female zombie’s head.

With his first shot, he hit the female in the head, but his next three shots were wild. The remaining zombie finally noticed that its meal was much closer if it turned around. With an ear-splitting shriek, the thing turned toward
Jango and charged. Its mouth gaped open and its tongue flailed around like an impaled earthworm, as it reached toward him.