The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse (17 page)

That afternoon, as Sarah and Veronica had talked nervously about how they were going to fake orgasms—not too loudly Veronica advised, the colonel would see right through it, if they sounded like a low budget porno—the river that parted around the Island was slate grey in color and was home only to a few catfish and a million minnows. That night it was a different story.

It was a literal river of zombies.

Thousands of them were swept along, fighting the current to get at the Island in their greed to devour human flesh. While just above them, on the now loose pontoon bridge, cold rain lashed at Sarah as she raced along the wood sections. Without support these heaved up and down as the zombies struggled to get at her, and with the slick wood and the yawing, bucking pontoons it was an inevitability that Sarah would go into the water. Mid-way across, the pontoon began to tip on its side. Her feet slid to the edge and she knew that her options had all disappeared and so, with her heart in her throat, she was forced to dive in over the arms of the nearest zombies.

Earlier, when the sun had been out and the day had been agreeable in its fall warmth, the water had felt like ice, now, however she didn
't even notice it. Her panic was too great to feel warmth or chill, or the inch-long splinters in her feet, or even the weight of the M16 in her hand. All she knew was a wild mindless terror to get out of that river before the zombies could tear her apart.

When she came for air she saw that the bridge had been taken by the current and
had swung down the river at a gaining speed and as it did it pulled the creatures along, creating a V shaped lane where the water was clear of the beasts. Immediately she swung the M16 across her shoulder and began to swim.

Her stroke was dreadfully inefficient and ugly. She had been taught to swim in the proper fashion: face down, body aligned to cut the water, toes pointed, arms spinning like twin water wheels. In that river form went out the window. Out of fear, she swam with her head held high out of the water and to keep the rifle in place she felt the need to swing her arms wide. All of this only had the zombies focusing on her and they came at her in a rush, clawing the water, raking it back to get at her.

They had her thirty feet from shore. Every zombie within sight ringed her and churned the river white in their mindless desire. Sarah screamed and tried to fight the gun from her shoulder, but it wouldn't come and the waste of effort only had her sinking lower in the water as the monsters came just within reach, and then a wave swept over her, and her panic became hysteria.

But it was only for a second.

Above the water the air was filled with soul tearing screams, and machine gun fire and the hateful hungry moans of the zombies, but below the water there was utter calm.

Sarah
took a big breath and ducked beneath the water, this time on purpose. She went deep, before angling to the second island where her parents were all but defenseless. In the dark she swam blind, kicking like a frog until her hand hit slime...and then a submerged log...and then sand. And then her head came up out of the water, and her panic returned. The great majority of the zombies were behind her searching the water for her, but there were still many more clawing their way through the coiled razor sharp concertina wire.

Three were just in front, but their focus was ahead and so she slunk
back down in the river and kicked off the bottom, moving to her left where the bridge had at one time been connected. The current had pushed her away from it, however now, as she yanked the M16 from her back she slogged along keeping as low as she could, trying not to draw attention to herself.

It was easy to do. The second island was utter chaos. Not even a tiny fraction of the zombies from the river had made it through the wire, still the people were practically defenseless. What few soldiers had been assigned to guard the perimeter were burning through their ammo and there
'd be no more coming. Where there weren’t any soldiers, the zombies came on unchecked and the non-essentials fought back with anything at hand: axes, shovels, even rakes.

It was clear to Sarah that the island would be overwhelmed in a matter of minutes, if not sooner. As well she knew that
for her to keep going was tantamount to suicide, but after failing to do anything about rescuing her daughter she couldn’t just leave her parents to die this way. With a glance down at the gun in her hand to check that the
saf
e had been switched to
fire
she slipped out of the water and ran up onto the island.

Her parents had been staying in a little green tent just off the far end of the island and she went that way, ducking from fleeing workers and hiding from zombies. Once she almost shot a human. It was man so covered in blood that she was sure it was one of the living corpses and her gun came up to his face before he screamed at her in what sounded like a foreign language. He tried to grab the gun, but fortunately his hand was slick and red, so that with a mighty tug she remained in control of it. The gun was her only chance.

She ran, bent over and low until she came to where the tents were; thankfully her parents weren't there. The people hiding in the tents were fools, trusting to a shell of thin nylon to save them. They were “safe” at the moment, however in a short time they would become easy meals.

A shout that sounded more like an order than a panicked scream brought her head around and there
, sixty feet away, were a gathering of the nonessentials trying to form a perimeter of picnic benches. Her father was with the group, straining to keep one of the benches on its side as zombies tried to pull it down. Sarah charged the beasts from behind and at point blank range fired into the back of their heads sending brain and gore sheeting across the tabletop.

“
Sarah!” Gary Rivers cried at seeing her. “Get in here.”

She ducked around the bench and breathed a sigh of relief at seeing her mom a few feet away in the middle of the perilously upended tables. The relief could not last;
Sarah had seen their danger from the outside and it was far worse than they knew. “We can't stay here,” she yelled over the din, before rushing to grab her mother's arm. “Come on, this whole island is about to be overrun.”

Denise pulled back against her daughter. Her face was white and the skin of it so drawn in fear that she hardly looked like herself.
“There's nowhere to go! They've cut the bridge and the river is full of zombies.”

This was true, and yet when Sarah looked around and saw the undead trampling over their brothers struggling in the wire, using them to bridge the emplacements she knew that the little perimeter wouldn
't hold for more than a few minutes. She wasn't the only who saw all of this. Already the people closest to the river were beginning to run and this began a general stampede of the non-essentials.

The picnic benches were allowed to fall one after another and the people took off north. When her parents saw this they gave up on the perimeter they were just fighting for and wanted to run along with everyone else.

Sarah pulled them back. Having just come from the north side of the island she knew that it was going to be even worse than where they were, and yet the zombies were coming so thick that they couldn't stay. With a quick idea coming to her, she yanked her parents around and pulled them to where the tents sat. There had been only a few zombies sniffing around minutes before and she hoped that would still be the case.

Even before she got there she saw it wasn
't. The easy meals were screaming as they were eaten alive and this only drew more of the monsters on. “Sarah! Behind your mother,” her father yelled. A stiff had come up out of nowhere to grab Denise and Sarah shot it from inches away.

“
To the river,” Sarah said. “It's our only chance.” Hoping they would follow she ran to the river, shot more of the undead and then stopped just as the land sloped down to the wire and the river beyond. There was no going that way—it had become a wall of zombies. There was no going in any direction. People screamed and ran about mindlessly going from one danger to the next.

“
The trees!” Gary cried. “Help me get your mother up.”

It was a slim hope. Most of the trees on the little slab of an island were thin pines and those that could bear some weight weren
't easy to climb as their branches started so high up. One that could be used by her mother was close to a steep edge of the island—they pushed her up into the tree and she scrambled as best she could.

“
You next, Sarah,” her father ordered.

“
Don't wait for me,” she said slinging the rifle. “Get in that tree over there.” He went to climb it and she leapt for the lowest branch of the pine. It bent under her grip and she clung to the trunk with her bare thighs, feeling the bark burn. Had she been in another time or place she would've dropped with a scream but the zombies had caught sight of the little group off on their own and were rushing at them.

“
Hurry!” Denise screamed. “They're right behind you.”

Sarah reached for another branch and pulled and shimmied her way higher, while her mother went on screaming in horror
—it was a moment before Sarah realized the screams weren't for her. Her father was only seven or eight feet off the ground, just within reach of the tallest of the zombies. One of them had a hold of his ankle and would not let go, while Gary's grip grew weaker with every passing second.

Now her mother was grabbing Sarah by the shirt and yanking and screaming for her to help her father, however stuck in a tree like that it took too long to get the rifle off her back, and in a position to shoot. By the time she did, Gary had been pulled down. He fought with a rage and a strength he hadn
't known in years. He'd been carrying a hoe, which he had laid aside to climb the tree, but now as he dropped he grabbed it up and swung it all around with great vigor.

Yet it was not a sword and he was not a knight in armor. It struck dead the beast in front and a second, but it was a clumsy weapon and
fouled momentarily in the next zombie and before Sarah could untangle her weapon and find a way to hold on to her precarious perch and shoot at the same time, a horrid creature with most of its face missing launched itself upon her father. In a second Gary was dog piled.

“
Shoot...Shoot!” Denise screamed, pointing at the mesh of bodies.

Sarah sighted at the best target she had, the side of her father
's head. Shooting the monsters would be a waste of ammo. Dozens were converging on the helpless man and the fact that he was already bit, meant his time was up—the fever would destroy him even if she managed to shoot every single zombie on the island. She aimed and fired, and true to the teaching of the man she shot, she didn't blink or pull away. She didn't yank on the trigger or try to breathe through the shot.

She caressed the trigger and sent a bullet smashing through his head and then nearly dropped the gun as her hands went numb.

“You missed,” Denise said in a little voice. “Oh, God! Don't look.” She turned away, while Sarah never had any intention of looking. Nor would she look at any part of the island. Instead she stared at the hateful sky, letting the rain beat into her face, letting is wash away the tears and what was left of her soul and after a long time, many, many hours, she thought she was done with the pain.

“Don't shoot,” Ram pleaded. Julia had the gun twisting into her hair, digging it in, and her breathing was picking up. Sure signs that she was seconds from pulling the trigger.

“
You can have the house, Ram. And all the food and the trucks, just bury me. I don't want to be eaten.”

He threw down the shovel and said,
“I won't do it. I won't bury you. And…and it's a sin to kill yourself.”

Julia laughed and then cried.
“Is that all you have? That it's a sin? Do you think I care about hell anymore? I'm in hell already! That grave there,” she said pointing to the one on the left. “That's my husband, Jack. And the next one is Taylor, my little brother. And that's Papa, and that last one you know was Mama. That's all the love I have. Have you ever experienced that? All the love you have is buried in front of you. My love is just sitting under the dirt, rotting.”

“
No it's not all your love,” Ram said. “There's more love out there for you. You just have to live, and you just have to find it.”

She shook her head and the
gun dropped to her side. “Who am I going to love? You? Or maybe some other stranger who doesn't know the first thing about me?”

“
No. That's…that's not what I meant, I…” he flailed for words and she gave him cheerless smile.

“
See? There isn't any real reason to live. We just keep eating and breathing but there isn't any reason to it. We only go through the motions waiting until it's our turn to die.”

“
That was true before as well,” Ram said. “Nothing has changed except scale. The problems are basically the same: disease and hunger and war. Life has always been hard. That's why we look for happiness in it. And that hasn't changed either. We look for love and friendship, and we look for those things that make us smile or laugh. None of that has changed.”

“
But…it has,” Julia said through new tears. She pointed at the low mounds of dirt. “Look at them! They were everything to me. I wouldn't want to replace them even if I could.”

“
You're right, you shouldn't,” Ram agreed staring down at the graves and wondering if anyone would bury him when he died. Probably not; he'd be left to be eaten. He sighed and it was for himself. For just a few minutes there, as he had spoken, he felt like his old self. Julia was weak and needed someone strong and he had been…but now the feeling, like a lit match just sort of went out at the idea of being left alone to be eaten. “I don't know why I'm trying to talk you out of this. It's your choice, really, just like before. I'll bury you, I promise.”

“
Thanks, I appreciate that.” She didn't sound thankful; her words were hollow, devoid of thought or feeling. The gun went back up and Ram turned away, not wanting to watch.

When there was the briefest pause he said,
“I think I was lucky. My parents died a few years ago. I didn't think I was lucky at the time, but now, I think I am. My father had a heart attack and my mom had cancer. I never had any brothers or sisters.”

“
What about a wife?”

“
No, I had a girlfriend, but I never did consider marrying her. Now I'm pretty certain she's dead. She went to Mexico when all this started and every report I heard made it seem that places like Mexico or India or China are nightmares.”

“
Nightmares?” she scoffed. “They would have to be bad compared to here.”

Ram turned around and shook his head at her, and said,
“I had this professor and he couldn't say a sentence without sticking the word
relative
in it. Everything's relative. My misery? I thought I was doing bad, but compared to you, I guess I'm doing alright. And your pain? I don't want to diminish it at all, but I bet there are people out there in worse shape. I guess it's just how we deal with it.”

“
I'm not going to love again,” she declared in little clipped words. It was though she bit off the very end of each. “I can't.”

Ram smiled suddenly, remembering.
“I had this other teacher who said: In each of us is an infinite capacity to love, but only a finite capacity to hate. When he said it, the class all nodded along and I could see that they were thinking
Dude, that's deep
, but when I was a kid I had this friend. His family was very catholic, and every time his mom got pregnant, he would moan and groan and swear that he was just going to hate this next kid. He was the oldest of eight and each new brother or sister meant more work and a little less at Christmas or at the dinner table. But always he loved each one. He always found room in his heart.”

“
I can't get pregnant,” Julia said suddenly, perhaps looking for reasons to keep up the high tempo of her pain. “It's why Jack left me, or that's what he said. He only came back to sign the papers and then the airport in Vegas got closed and then he got bit and then he died.” She took a long shaking breath and added, “He said I was broken. Do you think that was the real reason he left me?”

“
Maybe,” Ram replied. He had never given much thought to having a child; he figured when the day came that would be that. “You never know with men. Some guys really want children, some would use your situation as an excuse. I don't know. Can I have the gun? It makes my stomach hurt to see you holding it.”

“
I could kill myself without it,” she said. “I thought about it a lot this last week. I thought about all the different ways. But I had my mother to think about, and now she's gone. I kind of feel like a boat that's lost its anchor, you know? I'm just drifting away.”

He came to her and put out his hand and said,
“That hasn't changed either. I think grief will always be like that.” She looked at the gun and shrugged at it before putting it into his hand.

“
For now,” she said, yet Ram guessed that her crisis peaked. Her pain wouldn't likely grow, rather it would diminish with each day until it became manageable. And if not? If she really wanted to kill herself, then she would and there really wasn’t much he could do about it. “Here comes your
friend
.” Cassie came strolling out of the house with a pistol in one hand and Ram's M16 in the other.

“
I told her that I would teach her how to shoot.”

“
Maybe you should hold off using guns for a while,” Julia suggested, forgetting her tears. “You're exhibiting all the classic signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

“
I don't think not using guns is possible anymore…I just need some rest.” Even as he said this, the broken feeling inside came stronger and he had to force the grimace off his face. “Want to stay and watch?”

This struck Julia as funny for some reason
and she laughed with tears still in her eyes. “Are you trying to get me killed? No…no I shouldn't. She's probably looking to have you all to herself.”

This turned out to be true. Ram wanted to set up targets, however Cassie had the idea that it was a waste of ammunition, when there were so many stiffs still walking about—a few, no more than twenty or so—meandered here and there on the dusty land. They started walking to the nearest one and as they did he explained the features of the Beretta 9MM.

He had to wonder if she was listening when she asked, “Were you guys talking about me?” When he told her, no, she followed up with, “You know she was getting divorced? Her man didn't want her. Must have been sucky in bed or whiney or something.”

Ram coughed into his hand and said,
“I don't know the truth. Ok, why don't you forget about her for a while and concentrate on that stiff.” He showed her the right stance and then had her dry fire the gun until the zombie was twenty feet away. At fifteen feet, when Ram was beginning to feel his heart begin to skip in his chest, she shot and holed the thing through the neck.

It still moved feebly, though it shouldn
't have been able to. “You got its spinal cord but it still moves,” he mentioned. “That's weird.” She went to finish it off, but he held her back. “Don't the waste the ammo.” There was a heavy rock nearby and he crushed its head with it. Again he felt strange through the chest, like he was on the verge of a heart attack.

“
Why you gots your face like that?”

He touched himself and felt the grimace.
“I don't know. Maybe the stress?”

This made her laugh.
“You don't need to stress, baby. You see that shot? I kilt that bad boy no problem. Let's do another.”

They went on to the next, though if they had just stayed there the zombies would
've come to them, they oriented on sound and movement.

“
Was that where you were aiming?” he asked after she had plowed a red furrow through a zombie’s cheek. “Or were you aiming at center mass like I said? I didn't think so. It means you're jerking the trigger back. Make it gentle and steady. When you get good you can try for headshots, until then go with your best chance at slowing them down.”

She was better with the next and Ram was as well. It was easier to deal with the stiffs when he saw them as targets only and not as people. Shooting people was something the soul rebelled against.

The two of them made their way one after another until Julia's house was small in the distance, and then Cassie turned on Ram suddenly.

She was very close and somewhere in the last minute she had undone the buttons on her top.
“You ready to take a walk on the wild side?” she asked, moving her shoulders so that her breast swayed. “Where the colored girls say doo, do, doo, do? Huh? What do you say? No one's around. No one will know.” Before he could say anything she went on with her dance, singing, “Doo, do, doo, do…”

Ram went to tell her no, but just then he felt a twitch down below. Just a twitch but it was something and it likely would have grown into something considerably more, but Cassie said,
“That white stick ain't got nothing on me. I know how to rock your world. I do things to you that she ain't never done.”

It was her
need
that Ram discovered bothered him so. It wasn't a sexual need, it was a personal one. It was a need to be wanted, and a need to be loved and it was so over-powering that he feared she would drown him in it. Just then he could barely keep afloat himself and he shook his head.

“
Not yet.”

Her smile left and her full lips went tight against her teeth.
“A hug?”

“
I can do that.”

She grabbed him and crushed herself to him and it wasn
't enough. It would never be enough for her—nothing would be. She was a taker and he had nothing to give. When he stiffened, turning cool, she shoved him back and he went down on his butt. “I'd not waste no more time if I was you or I'm gonna take it somewheres else.”

He was sure that she would anyway. There
'd always be another man, smarter, better looking, perhaps even mentally stable; and then she'd leave him. She stomped away, buttoning her shirt as she went, ignoring the zombies who ambled her way. One was particularly aggressive and quick.

From the prone position, lying in the spare grass of the desert hill, Ram took up his M16, flicked off the safe and sighted on the man….no, the zombie…better yet, the target. At a hundred yards a head shot shouldn
't have been a problem. He knocked the right ear off the zombie, leaving an ugly grey hunk of flesh dangling.

Cassie turned and raised her gun—Ram was quicker. This shot sent the target flopping face down.
“Serviceable,” he whispered to himself, feeling the butterflies calm.

He felt more himself that afternoon and he was happy to see Julia no longer had the same lost look in her eyes she had earlier. Cassie acted as though she hadn
't been turned down yet again and constantly put herself between Ram and Julia, much to their hidden amusement. Her actions only brought them closer together since they shared a secret laugh every time the girl would accidentally pin Ram against a wall, or make an overt suggestion.

It wasn
't funny however when she came to Ram's bed in the middle of the night once again stripped down to nothing. This time Ram felt more than a twitch…and so did she.

“
That's more like it,” she said, gripping him, showing that her need wasn't just mental and emotional.

“
No,” he said taking her hand off him. A part of him rebelled—the part that just wanted a good fuck and be done with her. Only the thinking part of him knew that if he gave in to a night's pleasure that she would be like a leach. “I'm sorry, but you were right before, about Julia. I think I like her.”

“
Oh fuck this!” she screamed loud enough to get Julia out of bed and loud enough to alert the zombies outside. Cassie didn't care. She was in a full steam: “She just put her man in a hole and you think you're going to move in here and take over? You so dumb! She just using you, boy.”

Actually Ram was using her, just then for example as a buffer to keep Cassie away. And he used Julia to keep him sane. Her problems were so much easier to deal with than his own, and whenever she was around it was like a vacation from the stress that ate him up inside. It wasn
't that he didn't like her, he did. She was sweet as well as pretty, though a might bit skinny for his tastes, however he didn't think it would go anywhere, she had seen him weak.