State of Decay (Omnibus (Parts 1-4)) (11 page)

W
e walked several miles until
we found an exit leading into a small, podunk, town named Pineville. As we moved quietly and quickly through the quiet town, I couldn’t help but have a small flash back to the day I’d done the same when I had made my way back into Midtown a few days after my dad was killed. This town felt the same except it was quieter and there were a ton of decomposing bodies in cars, bodies in the streets and an overall feeling of entering the twilight zone. I was not feeling very welcome in Pineville.

“Where are all the zombies?” I asked as we ducked behind a small car parked on the side of a burned-out gas station.

“Are you complaining about not finding any?” Jude asked softly. I shrugged.

“I just think it’s odd we have seen a single walking corpse in the entire town,” I said uneasily. Jude nodded and then glanced at the sky.

“Let’s find a place for the night. We’ll get out of here at first light,” he said quickly. Sounded good to me. I would be glad to leave Pineville far behind us.

“There,” I said. “That’s where we should stay.” I pointed my finger at the building a little ways down from us and Jude smiled broadly when he saw it.

“It’s perfect,” he agreed. “Let’s go.”

We approached the used bookstore quietly, waiting for something, anything really, to happen. When nothing did, we found a back entrance and entered the building warily. The place was a mess. Old blood was smeared across a wall and even splattered the old wooden floorboards, but the tiny bookstore was mostly clean and the windows were already boarded up. It was uninhabited, and more importantly, not likely to be raided by anyone looking to scavenge for supplies. As soon as we secured the back door and made sure the front was secure, we went to work making the room as fortified and safe as possible before we settled in for the night. It wasn’t long before the room was too dark to work in. Jude pulled three small candles out of his pack and put them on top of an over turned bookcase close to the ancient looking brown sofa we’d been ecstatic to find in the store. It’s the little things that cause excitement now.

Jude walked over to the front door and checked the area for the tenth time that night. We pushed a large bookshelf up against the door to be extra careful, but he still checked everything several times more before he came over and plopped down on the sofa next to me.

“I figure we have about six hours of walking ahead of us tomorrow,” Jude said. “That’s if we don’t run into any more major problems.” I unstrapped my gun and sat it on the floor close by, along with my backpack and other weapons. I didn’t dare take my boots off.

“Oh, I forgot!” I jumped off the sofa and pulled my treasure out of my backpack. “Look at what I found,” I said with a huge grin. Jude smiled and reached out, taking a can from me. One bottle of water, one can of coke, and one bag of skittles. 

“Where’d you find this?” he asked.

“Under the cash register there was a mini fridge. This was all that was in it,” I answered. I popped the top to the coke and sighed at the familiar sound. Jude started laughing when I moaned after taking a tiny sip. I held it out to him and he hesitated a second before taking the drink from me.

“I don’t have cooties,
Agent
,” I said sarcastically. Jude snorted and took a sip of the coke.

“
Mmm, I missed that,” he said softly. I grinned and rammed my shoulder into his.

“This is your lucky day. I don’t share my skittles with just any guy,” I said jokingly. Jude’s smile grew wicked as I handed him all the green and orange skittles.

“Glad to hear it, Mel.” His voice was husky and I refused to look at him. I couldn’t … not with the way things were. I just didn’t want to set myself up for more heartache. We finished sharing the soda and candy in silence. It wasn’t awkward though, it felt companionable and I was glad to have someone with me in the darkness for once. Jude shifted and sat forward. “We should probably get some rest,” he murmured. I nodded, already yawning behind my hand.

“How should we do this?” I asked softly. He glanced over at me and winked. I snorted and rolled my eyes, which only made him grin wider.

“I’ll take the floor, you can have the couch,” he said after a moment. I frowned.

“That hardly seems fair to you,” I said. Jude looked around himself and then took one of the throw pillows and situated it just right before laying back on the couch, in a half-sitting position. He crooked his finger at me. His eyes were half laughing, half mocking. Jerk. His eyes widened when I shifted my body and fit myself sideways into the crook of his arm, my head resting on his chest, my arm flung across his waist. His laugh rumbled his chest, which heated up my cheeks.

“You are full of surprises Melody Carter,” he murmured against the top of my head.

“What about you, Jude? What’s your story?” I asked. “Where were you when all the crap hit the fan?” Jude shifted beneath me and sighed.

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he muttered. I snorted.

“How old are you?” I countered.

“I just turned twenty-five,” he answered.

“Old man,” I joked. He huffed.

“And how old are you, Melody? About twenty-two?” he asked. I hissed.

“I’ll
be
twenty very soon,” I answered.

“Oh shit, you’re just a baby,” he gasped, sounding horrified. I smiled against his chest. Let him chew on that for a while.

“Sometimes I feel so much older,” I whispered seriously. His arm tightened around me. He was quiet for several moments.

“I was waiting for my fiancé at the airport the night everything went crazy,” he said sadly. I stiffened.

“I’m sorry, Jude,” I said gently.

“It’s okay. Sometimes it seems like so long ago now.” He sighed deeply. “We should get some sleep.” I nodded.

“Goodnight, Jude,” I murmured.

“Goodnight, Mel.” My eyelids grew heavy and I was almost immediately lulled to sleep by Jude’s warm embrace and his rhythmic heartbeat.

“Melody.” I groaned and turned over, pulling myself tighter into a ball. “Melody, we need to get moving,” Jude’s voice snapped me out of my left over sleep and I sprung from the couch. “Easy,” he whispered. “Everything’s okay.” I pushed my hair back out of my face and glanced up at Jude, standing next to the couch. He looked … different. I blinked and rubbed my eyes.

“Am I dreaming?” Jude sighed and threw a wad of clothing on my lap.

“Get dressed, smart ass. I hope I was right with the sizes,” he said. I raised a brow and finally noticed what it was he’d handed me. A pair of jeans, a dark green tee shirt with the Green Lantern insignia on the front, and a … bra? I raised a brow and blushed. Jude raked his hands through his hair. “I thought you might need a new one after getting drenched in zombie juices yesterday, so I went scavenging for us,” he muttered by way of explanation. His eyes were looking everywhere but at me. He was embarrassed.
How cute
, I thought.

“Thank you,” I said softly. He nodded and walked around toward the back of the room.

“I’ll wait over here for you.” I got dressed quickly, more than a little surprised that everything fit me well, including the cute, pale blue bra. I grabbed my backpack and met Jude a moment later. He had traded his army pants and tee for a pair of blue jeans and a black tee shirt. He almost looked normal … in a smoking hot sort of way.

“You realize once we make it to Charlotte, we will probably die,” Jude mentioned as he turned to me. My jaw tightened as I looked at him, searching his eyes.

“I’m not going to let that happen,” I answered truthfully. Jude’s eyes sparkled and his mouth turned up in a crooked grin.

“I didn’t think you would.” He nodded his head over his shoulder as he stepped closer to me. “There’s four undead right outside we’ll have to go through to get out of here,” he said seriously. I reached for my knife, but Jude grabbed my hand and pulled me against his chest. My eyes widened and my eyes immediately sought his.

“Don’t hit me, but there’s something I’ve been meaning to do,” he muttered just before his lips crashed down to mine. I stiffened in shock, but that didn’t last long, not with Jude working wicked, black magic on my lips. I melted into him, my hand going up to wrap around the back of his neck, to pull him closer. When he was done, he pulled back slowly, his eyes glazed in passion. I was breathing hard. “If I die now, I’ll die a happy man,” he whispered against my temple as he placed a gentle kiss there. He stepped back and left me standing there in a bit of a daze. “You ready to kill some zombies?” he asked after a second. Zombies? Sure, what the hell … get kissed senseless and then take on some undead. All in a normal day. I picked up my knife and felt its familiar weight in my hand. I felt anticipation rise.

“What do you think?” I asked with a cocky grin.

“Let’s do this, then.” Jude threw the door open and we both rushed out. The zombies never even had a chance.

T
he zombie activity grew increasingly
more pronounced as we came closer to the city limits of Charlotte. We had probably killed over two dozen zombies since we left Pineville in the early morning hours, no groups larger than four or five though, so they were easily enough dispatched between the two of us. We passed a larger group of zombies about an hour outside of Charlotte, but we avoided the group by keeping our movements as quiet as possible as we ducked behind a myriad of abandoned vehicles on the road leading out of Charlotte—a sinister reminder that we were definitely headed the wrong direction. Smarter people would have turned back at that point.

The coup de
grâce should have been the smell, the overwhelming, choking smog of death and putrefaction emanating from the city, but even if that didn’t deter people from entering the city … the sounds should have. The noise coming from the city at first sounded like a single sound, unified, like an enormous white noise emitter. But when we got closer to the city, we realized that what we were hearing was the sounds of thousands of shuffling feet, thousands of undead mouths open in a death scream, only to exude rattling moans and gurgles. It was a terrifying and sobering realization.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked once we made it passed another large group of wandering zombies, just inside of the city limits. Jude crouched down beside me and ran a hand through his hair.

“I’m not sure, Mel. Maybe this was a bad idea. I don’t want to get you killed on a mission that is doomed to failure,” he sighed and rammed his knife into the ground between his feet. “How the fuck can anyone be living in
that
?” he asked through gritted teeth, his eyes searching mine. I’d been thinking the same thing, but I didn’t want to be the one to say it.

“Where’s the base supposed to be located?” I asked instead.

“Not far from here, but it might as well be miles with all these undead fuckers walking around.” His eyes searched the area around us, making sure we weren’t going to be spotted. “Jesus, the sound alone would have driven me insane a long time ago.” I agreed, but there had to be a somewhat safe way to enter the base, or they would have tried to move the survivors from there a long time back. Of course, even if we did happen to make it to the base, who’s to say the people there would even let us in? For all we knew, they’d leave us out in the open and ring a dinner bell for the zombies.

“We have to try,” I said after a moment. Jude’s jaw tightened as he jerked his knife out of the ground. “Even if there is only the slimmest chance that there are soldiers or civilian survivors there being held captive … we have to try and help them. My dad would have helped them.” Jude watched me as I spoke. I lifted my chin. “I have to try,” I said resolutely. Jude nodded, but he didn’t like it. That’s okay, he didn’t have to like it.

“Alright, G. I. Jane.”

Jude chuckled under his breath when I punched him in the arm. “Let’s go and try not to get killed, okay?”

“I’ll do my best, Agent,” I answered softly.

“The building is supposed to be exactly half a mile that way,” Jude said as he pointed into the city. I poked my head over the hood of the car we were squatted behind and winced. Right into the center of a mess of zombies. Vehicles were bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see, on every street, bodies lay strewn all over the place, and zombies walked in between it all … some of them were shoulder-to-shoulder with what looked like hundreds of their undead brethren. The further you looked into the city, the zombie population became even denser.

“The secret base is located beneath an old toy factory there.” What was with all the secret locations and toys? I grimaced. Creepy.

“So, what’s the plan again?” I asked.

“Run like hell?” Jude offered. That might actually be closer to the truth than either of us wanted to admit.

“You see how they’re clustered?” I asked as I squinted against the sun. Jude nodded.

“Some are in small groups or loners, but most of them are clustered in larger groups of twenty or more,” he said. I shook my head and pointed at the group closest to us.

“Yeah, but do you see
where
the larger groups are clustered?” I asked. Jude looked from group to group, his forehead crinkling in thought. His eyes widened fractionally.

“They are grouped together in the shadiest areas,” he murmured, thoughtfully. He moved to the other end of the vehicle and searched over the trunk of the vehicle, scoping out the area. “We might have a better chance if we can find areas like that one.” He pointed to a long spot of road and abandoned cars where only a few straggler zombies milled about in the heat of the day. “If we can move quickly, kill quickly, and get really fucking lucky, we might be able to make it to the factory by keeping to the sunniest areas.” I nodded my head. It was the best plan we had. I joined Jude at the back of the car and peeked over to the spot we were going to be running for. There were still half a dozen zombie between us and the first stretch of zombie-free zones. Not only that, once the zombies in the shade caught sight of us, being in the sunlight wouldn’t save us. We had to move quickly and there would be no room for error.

Jude held up a hand and counted down from three. Three … two … one … and we were running. My heart tripped out a frantic beat, the noise of the zombies in the city was drowned out by the blood rushing in my ears as we began our dangerous game of Russian roulette with zombies instead of bullets. Jude ran ahead of me, his knife finding the skull of a lumbering zombie halfway to the first patch of sunlight. Two more came after him and we both drove our knives into their skulls as quickly as possible before resuming our sprint across the road, weaving between cars and bodies. I didn’t dare look behind me as we ran, I couldn’t risk taking my eyes off of where we were going and I didn’t really want to know if any zombies were already following us.

Jude jumped up onto the top of a small car and landed on the other side to take down a female zombie who looked like it hadn’t fed since she’d been turned. I jumped on the roof, but my foot got caught halfway across. I landed hard on the roof, wondering how in the hell I’d gotten tripped up. I hadn’t. A zombie who must have been nearby or even in the car had grabbed my leg and was pulling me with the strength of a linebacker toward him, his mouth open with slushy green juices oozing down the front of his torn and tattered button up shirt. I raised my free booted foot and kicked him in the face three times, hearing bones crunch and rotten flesh squish, before his hold on me faltered. When he let go, I nearly screamed when Jude grabbed me by my arms to pull me the rest of the way across the little car.

“Are you done playing with the nice zombie?” Jude asked, breathing hard. I snorted as we began running once again. We ran full out, only pausing when a zombie got in our way. Run. Kill. Run. Kill. We were moving along quickly, but we were still pretty far from our destination. Jude drove his knife across the throat of a zombie as I rammed mine into the skull of one of his buddies. Another zombie materialized from behind a van and made his way toward Jude. I opened my mouth to tell him to watch out when, like out of the scene of a horror movie, zombies began pouring out from behind the van. Jude swiveled and I saw his eyes widen. I kicked the zombie off of my blade and stabbed a zombie close to me in the back of the neck. Jude sliced into a zombie and removed his knife just in time to ram it into the eye of another zombie. I made it to his side in time to find ourselves being corralled by a dozen or more zombies.

“Jude. On top of the cars,” I shouted. Jude nodded and as he slid his knife across the throat of two zombies and then pushed a huge zombie into four more closing in on us.

“Go!” he shouted. I jumped at his command and propelled myself up on the hood of a rusty, blue car. Jude shoved his knife into the skull of another zombie and I kicked one coming up behind him in the face, caving in its mushy face.

“Jude, now!” I screamed. I began running, jumping from hood to bumper, hoping Jude was right behind me. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t glance back, afraid I’d lose my footing and land on the ground at the feet of the zombie horde. I could hear the zombies, their tormented sounds getting closer, their shuffling growing louder as they worked themselves into a frenzy at the prospect of a fresh, midday meal.

Up ahead, I saw a large, run-down, factory and nearly wept from the sight. My elation was quickly grounded though, when I realized the entire perimeter of the factory was closed off by a high chain link fence with barbed wire gracing the top. I came to a spot in my car jumping where I wouldn’t be able to make the next jump. When I got to it, I jump down to the asphalt and quickly turned, glad to find Jude just a car jump behind me. His eyes scanned the factory behind me and I knew the moment his eyes found what I had. Absolute devastation was plain to read on his face.

“Keep moving, Mel,” Jude shouted as he jumped down from the car. I turned quickly and kept the gate to the factory in my line of vision, praying to God we’d be able to find a way in … and quickly. I cleared the corner of the only building left between us and the factory, my legs trembling from
the pace we’d run at, when a zombie flew out of nowhere and knocked me to the ground. I scrambled back, pulling my gun out of its sheath on my leg. I held the tiny zombie off of me, but didn’t realize for a few precious seconds that I’d begun crying as soon as I realized that the zombie now trying to tear my throat out was a toddler, no older than three or four when he’d been turned. His body was a grotesque reminder of everything that was wrong in my new world, of everything that I’d tried to block from my mind and memories the last two years. The tiny tot-zombie gnashed his teeth in agitation and hunger as it strained against my hold. I lifted my gun and a sob escaped my throat. The zombie was ripped off me as I lay there, useless for the first time in a very long time. I turned my head as Jude put the undead child down. Jude pulled me to my feet and shook me.

“Are you okay?” I nodded. “Good, cause we have problems,” Jude said as he grabbed my hand and jerked me toward the fence. We both landed against the shut the gate, hoping the chains would be faulty, or someone would come out of nowhere and let us in. Instead, just around the corner, in an alleyway we couldn’t have seen from the direction we’d just come from, dozens upon dozens of zombies stood in an almost-silent stupor in the shade of the building. Their rattling breaths and moans were the only things that gave them away.

“Oh shit,” I whispered.

“Yeah, that about sums it up,” Jude whispered back. I pulled my gun out and put my knife in my left hand. “Melody … move quietly and slowly. See the side of the fence down that alleyway behind us?” I nodded, my breathing growing labored as I realized exactly how far up a creek we really were. And
now it looked like were going to try and get into the factory perimeter through a side gate. Of course, the gate was down a little alleyway, which would make us cornered if the gate didn’t open there. We didn’t even have to make the choice. Dozens of zombies approached the area from where we had run and their frenzied noise and movement immediately roused the slumbering zombies in the shadow-darkened alleyway.

“Move!” Jude yelled. I didn’t hesitate. I ran full out, my legs pumping for everything I was worth, one hand gripping my blade, the other gripping my handgun. We ran up against the smaller gate and rebounded off of it. Locked.

I turned in time to see my greatest nightmare come to visit me in broad daylight. Zombies poured into the alleyway, blocking out our only escape and blocking out our only hope.

“I’m sorry, Mel,” Jude said as he pulled his gun off of his back.

“Don’t be,” I said softly, blinking back my tears. “The kiss wasn’t that bad,” I said with a grin. Jude snorted, shook his head, and then propped his gun up on his shoulder. I began squeezing off rounds, standing next to Jude as he made head shots one after another. Ten, twenty, thirty, undead dropped before us, but they seemed to multiply rather than diminish in numbers. When my gun was empty, I dropped it and pulled my knife out in front of me, waiting. It wasn’t long before the zombies advanced further and Jude dropped his empty gun next to mine.

If anything would be said of us when we were gone, it would have been that we went out kicking undead ass and not caring about taking names. As a team we were something beautifully terrifying to behold. I lost count of
how many face, necks, and skulls my blade sliced through. Eventually my arm was numb of feeling and I only slashed out purely out of habit. I couldn’t feel where my blade ended and my arm began. The pile of undead in front of us grew large and somewhere in the back of my addled mind, I wondered if we would become buried beneath the rotting corpses and smothered to death rather than getting bitten. Wouldn’t that just suck? About that time I began laughing. Jude jumped beside me, the sound foreign and out of place in our world of slicing and dicing.