THEM (Book 0): Invasion (6 page)

“Balls!” I shouted out as I reached for another magazine and realized I’d come outside without a spare. I dropped the M4 on my one-point harness and drew my Glock.

The guy was within a few paces of me when I drew a bead on his big ugly forehead. Up close I could see he was some type of office worker. He wore a short-sleeved oxford and a tie, both covered in gore that went all the way down to his cheap Walmart khakis. His knees were also covered in blood, which I assumed meant he’d been kneeling in it. He was missing one brown dress shoe, and I could see that he’d worn through a sock and most of the flesh on that foot. His other shoe, strangely, was polished to a high gloss, and besides some scuff marks on the toe, was more or less free of blood.

Weird, the things you notice when you think you’re about to die. I took all this in within a millisecond, and pulled the trigger twice. The first round made a nice neat hole in his forehead and snapped his head back, and the second one caught him in what would have been his windpipe. The freak fell at my feet immediately, dead as‌—‌well, a corpse. I shuffled back a bit anyway and kept my muzzle trained on him for a few seconds, listening to the sound of my heart beating out of my chest and the rapid rhythm of my impending hyperventilation.

I made a conscious effort to slow down my breathing so I didn’t pass out. Once the lightheadedness cleared, I shuffled forward in a shooting stance and nudged Stumpy with my toe. No response. I did it a few more times, then I set to kicking the shit out of him with my steel-toed combat boots while spewing a string of obscenities that would make a drunken sailor blush.

Once I’d gotten that out of my system, I bent over and vomited. I must have stayed there, hands on my knees and catching my breath, for‌—‌oh, maybe five minutes or so. Once or twice, I heaved again, noticing just how much this guy stank. He reeked of dead flesh. It was a smell I was intimately familiar with, and one I’d hoped to never experience again.

When I’d got back from the ‘Stan, I’d applied for a job with the Travis County Coroner’s office. After my interview, they took me on a tour of their autopsy room. It was the dead of summer, and they’d run out of space in their meat locker. Yeah, you think you could deal with that smell, but you’d be wrong. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

All quaint memories aside, I needed to regroup and rethink my plan. Thing was, if the reports I’d been hearing over the shortwave were correct and there really was some sort of zombie outbreak going down, I really couldn’t afford to waste time getting to Mom and Dad. Hell, this is bad. Really bad, I thought.

On that note, I crawled back under the house, locked that hatch up tight, double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked, and started slamming that six-pack of tall boys I’d snagged earlier from the gas station. After the fifth one, my nerves had settled and I was finally able to get back to sleep and catch a few more winks to prep for what was to come.

FIVE

ENGAGEMENT

I WOKE UP a few hours later, still a bit drunk and already feeling a minor hangover coming on. I sat up quickly, remembering the events of the night before. Despite the pounding in my skull, I got up and hopped over to the window. Yep, he was still there, clearly missing a limb, and clearly dead twice over.

“Piss,” I hissed quietly. I skulked over to the kitchen, slugged a glass of water and put a kettle on for coffee. Then, I went to the bathroom and carried out my morning routine, finding a clean change of clothes and taking the time to groom myself just like any other day. The routine was to help keep me sane, to keep my spirits up. I had a feeling I was going to need both before the week was over.

About the time that my kettle was whistling at me, the phone rang. I ran into the kitchen to pick it up, pulling the kettle off the stove at the same time. “Hello?”

“Aidan, Aidan is that you?” It was my mom, thank God. I could hear her chattering in the background to my dad, telling him it was me on the line. I heard his deep voice rumbling back, instructing my mother to tell me they were fine.

“Mom, tell Dad I heard him, and that I said to stay put until I get there.”

“Oh,
mijo
, everything is okay. Your dad has everything under control, and we’re safe as can be here outside of the city. He says to tell you‌—‌”

Click.
The line went dead. “Mom? Mom, hello?” I hit the receiver and tried to call back. All I got was the same busy signal I’d been getting for the last day or so.

“Damn it to hell!” I shouted, and nearly threw the phone across the kitchen. Instead, I took a few deep breaths and set it down in the cradle. Probably wouldn’t have hurt it, as that old bakelite phone had been through hell and back over the years, but I didn’t want to risk breaking my comms.

I leaned back against the counter and looked at my options. Option A: Wait to hear from my parents again and make sure they stayed put. Problem with that was there was no way of knowing when or if we’d be able to get through again. So, onto Option B, which was to sit tight and wait for my dad to load up whatever wheels he could find and get here. He would find a means of transport, that was for sure. So no dice. Him and my mom alone on the road, all the way from Austin to here? Uh-uh, no way, no how.

That left Option C. Pack my shit and get my ass in gear. Action over reaction. Now, there was an option I could live with. I made my coffee and fried some eggs, heating some toast up on the burners and making some bacon as well. Once I’d fueled up and tossed back some aspirin for good measure, I loaded everything I needed into the Toyota and did a once-over around the place to make sure everything was locked down. First order of business was switching the solar system over to start charging the battery bank. No telling how long I’d be gone, and by the time I got back the power might be out for good, so I figured I may as well prepare for that contingency.

It also meant putting the bear shutters on the cabin. My dad had decided to get them a few years back after black bear sightings started increasing in the Hill Country. Glad he did, because they’d do double-duty for fending off these‌—‌what, zombies? Living dead? I thought back to that guy I’d put down the night before, and how after I’d punched his ticket he was deader than dead.

“Deaders,” I said to myself. That was as good a term as any, and it didn’t freak me out quite so bad to think it or say it. Well, at least that was settled.

As for all my valuables, the gun safe would take a forklift to move and a blowtorch to cut through. No way anyone was getting what I had locked up in there. As far as the rest of my weapons and ammo‌—‌my real stock of SHTF stuff‌—‌that was all buried in caches all around the property and at my camps out in the sticks. Hell if I was going to be caught flat-footed during TEOTWAWKI. Screw that.

I looked around the cabin and supposed I was ready as ever. Then I remembered Stumpy. He was sure to draw animals and Lord knew what else to the cabin. I definitely needed to dispose of him before I left. I wrapped him in an old plastic sheet, taped him up with duct tape, and laid him across the lowered tailgate of my truck, after securing my gear with cargo netting. I’d drop him in a ravine right off the road on my way out of town.

I drove down the old cabin road and hit 336, stopping to lock the gate on the way out. I was about to drive off when I thought better of leaving it exposed. I cut some brush to hide the gate and that shiny brass and steel lock. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do for a short time. Then I got in the truck and boogied off down the road, heading south for Highway 83.

About a mile down the road I started running into trouble. Never mind the cars that had slowed me down on my first little excursion this way; I’d forgotten about that mob of “looters” that I’d seen coming up the road the day previous. Yeah, those looters turned out to be what looked like the entire population of Leakey, all milling up and down the road looking for somebody’s face to chomp on.

They were all deaders. All of them.

I figured out what they ate by observing several packs of them huddled around corpses like a school of piranha, tearing off bits of flesh and skin and fat with their teeth and hands. Those groups barely paid me any mind as I drove as fast as I could past them. However, if I slowed down too much I drew the swift attention of all those who did not have their own human snack pack to feed on. This resulted in my truck getting beaten on in a few instances, not to mention all the gore they left on the windows.
Nasty.

Before I even got to Leakey I could see that this wasn’t going to work. There were simply too many cars blocking the road, and too many deaders milling about to get through. I briefly considered just running them down, then I came to my senses and remembered what had happened to my dad’s full-size Ford truck when he hit a deer doing forty. I doubted that my little truck could take that much abuse, no matter how tough it was.

Moreover, I hated to think about what might happen if I got stuck on a pile of bodies. This truck had a lift kit and four-wheel drive, but I recalled a story a cop had once told me about a woman he arrested for murder. She had tried to run over another girl she had caught with her boyfriend
in flagrante
. The girl had gotten stuck under the car as she ran her over, and she’d dragged that girl three blocks before getting stuck on a curb. I could easily imagine getting two or three of these things stuck in my wheel well, and pictured what that might do to my axles and suspension. No thanks.

As soon as I got the space I hooked around and headed back north for Highway 41. I figured that away from town there’d be almost no cars blocking the roads, and a helluva lot less deaders. Nothing but ranches and hills out that way, so the chances that I’d run into a herd like this one were minimal at best.

Sure enough, I made good time all the way up to 41, and then it was more or less smooth sailing for the next eight or ten miles, up until 41 intersected with 83. Unfortunately, at 83 there was a four car pile-up with a small herd of deaders milling around and beating on an overturned minivan. I suspected that there were some survivors inside the vehicle, so I parked back up the road a few hundred meters and climbed on top of the camper with my rifle and a pair of binos.

I couldn’t see much inside the car, but I got busy straight away and started dropping corpses like Ash Williams on speed. Once I’d dropped all the deaders that were milling about the van, I hopped back inside the truck and pulled up close to the crash, leaving me some space to get out quick in case I needed to boogie. None of the corpses were moving, so I decided to jump out and see if there was anyone left alive inside.

As I crept closer to the van, I could see a couple of corpses sitting inside the vehicle. Both people, who I assumed to be husband and wife, were clearly dead. I snuck around the side to see what was causing the deaders to make all that fuss, and saw a tuft of white and brindle moving behind the window. Crouched down in the back amidst a pile of bags, suitcases, golf clubs, and other assorted crap was a large American Bulldog, shivering its ass off.

Lots of people don’t know that animals shiver like that to burn off adrenaline, and not necessarily because they’re cold or scared. So when your dog freaks out and they start to shiver, it’s because nature is telling them to burn that shit off before they screw their brains up. We as humans have lost that capability, therefore we routinely experience shit like nervous breakdowns and panic attacks. Nature got it right the first time, though. There was a guy on the base where I was stationed who worked with soldiers who had PTSD. He taught them a form of exercise that would cause your body to shiver and shake just like that dog was, and guys I knew who did it swore by it. Crazy.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to leave this dog here to starve. I went back to the truck, got some jerky and a bottle of water, and worked the back hatch on the van open. That freaked the dog out more, and it started shivering even worse. I knelt down by the hatch and started whispering to it, trying to soothe it and calm it down. Once it settled down a bit, I popped the top on the water and poured some out on the headliner of the vehicle. The dog gladly lapped it up. I poured out more and kept pouring until it was all gone.

I reached in and let it sniff me. Once I got a sniff and a lick, I gave it the jerky. After that, it was just a matter of a few more minutes to coax it out. Once the dog got out of the van, I could see that she was a beautiful example of the Scott standard. Long and lean, but muscular and athletic, these dogs could leap a six foot chain link fence, play chicken with a 1,200 pound bull, and run a mountain lion up a tree, all in a day’s work. Damned good dogs.

I just didn’t know if I had the ability to keep a dog and myself alive. Still, I couldn’t just leave her here, not with the way she was giving me puppy eyes and rubbing up against me. So, I led her over to the truck and let her jump up in the cab. She leaned over and gave me a big, sloppy kiss, and then plopped down on the seat with her chin on her paws, as if to say, “Alright, let’s get the hell out of here.”