The Dead Series (Book 2): Dead Is All You Get

Contents

Dead Is All You Get

Complete Table of Contents

A Simple Ask

Acknowledgments

The Playlist

About the Author

It was that kid
—the “explorer.” The guy dressed in an Oxford shirt, skinny jeans and Tiger shoes and wearing Google Glass. He was the one I was worried about. I could’ve gone to Pappy’s, but that place is way too crowded. So I ended up at this greasehole. He had come in a little while ago and sat at the counter. I was sitting way in the back, choking down a grilled cheese that tasted like burnt cardboard. I wanted to stay invisible—needed to make sure I did nothing to draw his attention. Or he’d turn around and start recording me.

And I didn’t want to be captured.

The other people in there—the locals—they were okay. Or maybe not. Some of them could have been undead. Only you wouldn’t know it right away because they weren’t like the ones we encountered in the beginning. Lumbering and flat-eyed, coming at you to get a piece of your face or your neck. These little beauties were smart. They only showed themselves when they wanted to. And at this particular moment, they didn’t look like they were in the mood.

You think I’m crazy. I’m not. Just cautious. Want to know why? Sure, you do. Don’t make me tell you. Because to tell you is to remember. And I don’t want to remember any of it. The people I lost. The pain I suffered—both physical and spiritual. That I’m even alive is a miracle. Yeah, about that. You see, the thing is with miracles? You only get one. And miracles were in short supply during those last dark days when we thought we had a way out but didn’t. When a few of us—a brave few—banded together to take it all back. Not only for us but for all the survivors. Don’t make me tell you.

But you’ll insist, won’t you? Like a kid begging for a toy. As if this is some kind of campfire for Webelos and you’re craving a good story.
Tell us,
you’ll say. And you’ll hassle me till I do because foolishly I already recounted the facts as I remembered them up to now. How I lost my best friend to a vicious, creeping plague, and how I was a miserable coward who not only cheated on his wife but left the other woman—the bad woman—to die out there when I could have saved her. And she needed saving, trust me, but I wasn’t up for it.

I didn’t stop there, did I? I told you how our town of Tres Marias became infested by an evil no one could have imagined. Normal, everyday people turning into dead—not dead—
undead
grasping things that hungered for the living, who didn’t quit till everything was cored out and soulless, like them. And how some who remained human—if that’s what you want to call them—fought to make slaves of the rest of us in a desperate attempt to reinvent the world in the image of a cool, fork-tongued madman. I don’t know why I told you all those things, but I did. Maybe it was because I’m a drunk, and sometimes drunks like to confess. Especially when we’re loaded. But I’m not loaded now. The constant pain keeps me sharp. Somehow you knew, didn’t you, that I would still have a need to purge myself of the writhing pestilence eating out my insides like a gale of guinea worms.

Okay, that damned kid was walking over here—coming straight towards me. Probably had to use the toilet. It was too late to get up and move past him. That might make him suspicious. Then he’d turn on the camera and go to town. I had to think of something fast—he was looking right at me.

I tripped him.

His skinny body went flying—arms all over the place—and as he tried to catch himself, his head hit the corner of my table, snapping his headgear in two. There you go. Fifteen hundred bucks gone to shit. Groaning, he got to his feet and glared at me. I had already left money on the table, and when I slid out of the booth I made sure to crush his camera with my boot.

“Hey!” he said and took a swing.

I weaved and hit him in the gut hard, making him double over, and walked out of the coffee shop without looking back. No one tried to stop me. They were too busy looking at the explorer leaning against the table, holding what was left of his busted cool. All they would remember is some faceless guy wearing a Giants baseball cap. My truck was parked a few blocks away. No one followed me as I climbed in and headed back to the motel. Time to hit the road again.

Dead. Not dead. Undead. Doesn’t begin to cover it. Because what I learned—what
we
learned, I think—is that everyone is dead in one way or another. Dead morals, dead conscience. Dead heart. We found a few you could trust—people like my wife Holly and my friends Warnick, Springer, Griffin and Fabian. But most of the other suckholes you couldn’t. Because for them it was about the lizard brain in all of us that will survive any way it can, even if it has to make you adapt and turn into something from a child’s night terror. But don’t kid yourself—it’s not nature and it’s not natural.

That lizard brain—our old brain—has an agenda.

I’m not crazy, I swear, but sometimes the dead speak to me. I hear them in my head. Asking questions. Offering advice. Sometimes I wish they’d shut the hell up. Mostly, they ask me how I’m doing. Great, I say. Couldn’t be better. Driving endlessly without sleep, surviving moment to moment, adrenaline rushing through my veins every time somebody blasts their car horn. Life is good. You believe me, right?

And God.

What do I even say to Him? That I am fallen but want to get better? That I hope I can be forgiven for all the wrongs—all the bad behavior? That despite all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, I think I deserve a chance? Would it matter? Will He throw me a bone?

Khalil Gibran wrote,
Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.
At this moment I’m staring at my twin, but it’s through a wall of suffering that makes me doubt he’s really there. Yet I continue to look, hoping. I am not who I was. Too much has happened. Death has washed over me like a blood rinse, taking with it my eyes, my ears and my heart. It’s what happens when Hell sets up camp and starts barbecuing the locals like Ball Park Franks.

It was getting dark. The 5 was a mess, so I decided to keep to the back roads, making sure to stay within the speed limit. There were a lot of cops around. Maybe they were looking for me. Who knows? I couldn’t afford to get pulled over—not in Bakersfield. Not with all these weapons. I had things to do.

Still here?

Don’t lie to me. Telling you this story won’t be cathartic—won’t be spiritually uplifting. Why? Because a good part of me has already died—in more ways than you could ever know. All I have left is sorrow. The kind that Time doesn’t heal because the wound is gangrenous and foul. The kind that is with you when you rise in an uncertain, fog-shrouded morning of another damn day you can’t face and when you close your eyes at night, with the blood-awful screaming of those soulless bastards still in your head. Whatever.

But I really haven’t convinced you, have I? I didn’t think so. You don’t care that I have this long road ahead, with bad food and little sleep, the nightmares chasing me like rabid dogs. You want to know everything, even if it means I will die a little more. I can’t. Don’t make me. Please.

All right, I’ll tell you.

The horde came
from the west, driving us deeper into the forest. Warnick went ahead of us through the fog, his face grim like the keynote speaker at a mortician’s convention. Springer remained at his side, his finger close to—but not on—the trigger of his battle-worn AR-15. Springer. That blonde kid from Santa Rosa, looking fresh out of high school, was born ready.

Both stood silent and still, as if willing themselves to become part of the forest, unseen and unheard. We’d spent so much time together these past few months, I felt they were my brothers. I relied on them completely, and I hoped I was of some small benefit to them, even though they were experienced soldiers who’d served in Afghanistan and I was an amateur who’d learned to kill using an axe and a gun.

I knew nothing about Warnick—not really—even though we had fought against draggers and the Red Militia. What I did know was that he was a man who put his trust in God. Around thirty, he was stocky and dad-like. He had saved me on many occasions, finally getting badly wounded himself. And with that worn, black, blood-soaked bible of his, he showed me the power of Faith, which—like miracles—was in short supply.

I knew even less about Springer, who seemed too young to have seen combat. Maybe
he
was the miracle. Shot in the neck to almost dead in a blind alley, somehow he’d made it to our base and revealed to Warnick and the others the location where I was being held captive by the Red Militia, halfway to dead myself.

So many debts to repay.

A crow cawed plaintively high in the trees above us, but it didn’t give away our position. My heart thudded like a punch press on Red Bull. I turned to my wife, Holly, who stood behind me with our “adopted daughter” Griffin. Our dog, Greta—her ears forward—watched intently the clump of undead as they paraded through the mist like bent robots. The dog’s black and tan face was alert, her body tensed and ready. If they attacked us, she would bite and tear at them and—though unable to kill them because they were already dead—she would at least hobble them long enough for us to get away.

Holly. I had almost lost her, not because of the craven stupidity of infidelity—although that would have been enough for any woman—but because I had in my “old life” demonstrated a cowardice she couldn’t fathom when I could have saved Missy, the adulterous young thing, from my undead friend Jim as he savaged her. Instead I chose to hide. In the months following that shameful act—when all this started—I had fought my way back to my wife on my belly like a legless dog—eating my own shit every inch of the way. And somehow I’d made her mine again, promising never to betray her or myself. Thank God she believed me.