Life of the Dead (Book 1): Hell on Earth Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Tony Urban

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2016

  www.TonyUrbanAuthor.com

  Cover art by Rebecca Frank

  http://rebeccafrank.design/

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  “For my mother, who shared with me her loves of reading and horror movies and never stopped believing.”

  I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,

  I will smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,

  and will let the dead go up to eat the living!

  And the dead will outnumber the living!

  The Epic of Gilgamesh - 2100 BC

  The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

  - Cicero

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Hell on Earth

  Sneak Preview Book Two: Road of the Damned

  1

  Acknowledgments

  1

  The setting sun provided just enough of an orange glow for Wim to see the streets were clear of zombies. Well, ones up and walking anyway. The bodies of over four dozen men and women littered the small gridwork of streets which made up his hometown. He’d killed them all. After the first few, much of the shock wore off and it was little different than plowing the fields or harvesting the crops. Just another job, albeit a bloody one.

  It was time to return to the farm. He could finish this messy work tomorrow or the day after that. He had a feeling time didn’t matter much any more. Still, the day had been long and hot and he’d worked up quite a thirst. All he had at the farm was prune juice, spoiled milk and whatever water still remained in the holding tank. Wim felt it best to gather a few supplies before heading home and Bender’s store was the only choice in town. He knew Old Man Bender wouldn’t mind if he raided his little market. He knew Old Man Bender wouldn’t mind because he’d put a bullet through his liver-spotted, bald head three hours ago. Or was it four? The events of the day had blended together in a bloody, traumatic blur that he didn’t care to recollect upon.

  When Wim opened the door to the quaint, country store - the kind that only still existed in little villages such as this - the first thing he smelled was the rotten meat. Best to avoid the deli and meat counter, he thought. He grabbed a wobbly shopping card and filled it with cookies and chips and other junk food that would survive a thousand years without perishing. He then took a few jugs of water and added two cases of soda. Not the diet kind either.

  His cart was on the verge of overflowing and he was ready to turn back toward the exit when thoughts about ice cream overwhelmed him. His brain informed him that, if this really was the end of the world and the power was out everywhere, that would also mean the end of ice cream. That was a damned shame as far as he was concerned. Wim knew the store had a big, walk-in freezer in the back. Even though the power had been down for days, the notion that a few tubs of half-frozen ice cream might remain inside, his for the taking (and eating) proved too tempting to resist.

  Wim strolled to the rear of the store where he ended up walking by the deli and meat counter after all. He did his best to ignore the flies and maggots which covered the lunch meats, steaks, pork chops, and other food that would have made his mouth water just days earlier, but he couldn’t block out the awful odor.

  He found the freezer door closed. That was a good thing, he assumed, because it might have kept most of the cold inside. And preserved the ice cream, of course. He grabbed the silver handle of the freezer, gave it a hard jerk to the right, then pulled. The suction gave way with an audible pop as the door opened. A wave of cool-ish air washed over him and his stomach rumbled with hunger. Gosh, he hoped there was chocolate.

  He stepped into the freezer, careful to prop the door open with his cart. Four rows of shelving units were stocked full with boxes and goods. On the other side of the room, a few sides of beef hung from a row of meat hooks which dangled from the ceiling. It seemed, to Wim, an extraordinary amount of merchandise for a small shop in a blink and you’d miss it town and it would make locating the ice cream more complicated than he’d expected. He considered turning back, but the chill in the air and growling in his belly proved irresistible.

  Wim checked the first row and came up empty. Row two was a repeat but in the third he struck gold. Case after case of ice cream. The good stuff too, not the generic Tastee! kind he always bought because it was half the price. He pulled down a case of chocolate and when the box came free it revealed a zombie on the other side of the shelf.

  Wim instantly recognized her as Old Man Bender’s wife, a woman he never knew by name even though he’d seen her at least once a month since he was old enough to stand on his own. Her skin had taken on a blue, almost translucent color and a thin veneer of ice cloaked her eyeballs. Despite her frozen eyes, she saw Wim and when she did her arm shot through the opening in the shelf where the box had been. Her cold, hard hand caught Wim’s chin and her fingers scratched and dug into his flesh.

  He pushed against the shelf, felt it teeter, then shoved again. It toppled over, raining boxes, and cans, and buckets down onto the dead woman. She struggled to free herself and Wim spun away from her. The ice cream was forgotten. All he wanted was to get out.

  When he turned, he saw Old Man Bender’s two adult sons, their wives and their three combined children standing between him and the freezer door. All were zombies and all shared the matriarch’s cold, blue pallor. They appeared otherwise uninjured except for the oldest man, Doug Bender, who had several bite wounds of various sizes all over his face and arms. Wim could even see his tobacco-stained teeth through a ragged hole in his cheek.

  To Wim it seemed clear what must have happened. The family got sick, then sicker, then started dying. With town in chaos and no one to help, Old Man Bender must have locked them away in the deep freeze. Only they came back, just like everyone else. Poor Doug must have been the last one alive and his reward was being the first to feed his newly undead kin. Wim’s ponderings about the Bender’s demise came to a quick halt when the clan staggered toward him.

  Wim backed away and tripped over a fallen box. He landed hard, cracking his elbow on the floor, and felt a flash of pain pulse through his arm. He pushed away the hurt and reached for the pistol holstered at his side, all the while trying to remember how many rounds he’d fired from it and how many he had left. His most optimistic guess was that four bullets remained in the magazine. He found that a disappointingly small number, especially with eight zombies in the freezer with him.

  Doug, with his collection of gaping bite wounds, was the closest t
o him. Wim fired at an upward angle and the bullet zipped through the man’s top lip and exploded out the back of his head, painting the ceiling with brains, bone, and coagulated, black blood.

  Doug collapsed and Wim aimed the gun at one of the children. The girl was maybe 6 years old and had her red tresses pulled back in pigtails. She snarled at Wim, baring her bloody teeth and revealing a gap in the front where she’d lost a baby tooth. Wim looked into her dull, milky eyes and shot her in the forehead.

  As he prepared to execute one of the Bender wives, cold hands grabbed him from behind, catching handfuls of his hair and jerking him backward. He fell on top of the old matriarch and could feel and smell her chilly, rotten breath on the nape of his neck. Her jaws clicked together, and the sound got closer and closer with every attempted bite. Wim pointed the gun over his shoulder, hoped for the best, and pulled the trigger.

  In the initial roar of the gunshot, he thought he might have gone deaf but soon enough sound came back into the world in the form of an incessant, ringing bell. He felt cold wetness slithering down his neck and when he reached back he came away with a handful of ripped flesh, pieces of shattered teeth, and clumps of gray hair. Wim dropped the gore and rolled off the now motionless body beneath him.

  He got to his feet just in time for another of the children to grab onto his leg. The boy was no more than 4 or 5 years old and Wim kicked out, trying to shake him off. The undead toddler held on like he was going for eight seconds on a bucking bronco. Rather than break loose, the boy darted his head like a snake striking at Wim’s leg. At his crotch. That was too close for comfort and Wim pressed the barrel of the pistol against the boy’s head. When he squeezed the trigger, the gun responded with nothing but a hollow click.

  “Well damn,” Wim said, even though no one alive was listening to what he had to say. He wished he would have reloaded the pistol before coming into the store. He looked from the undead tot to the other four zombies making their way toward him. “I should have passed on the ice cream.”

  One Week Earlier

  Wim lost track of how long he’d been trying to get an accurate count on the rats but he supposed it was at least half an hour. On farms, rats were ordinarily little more than an annoyance. He didn’t even bother putting out traps unless they got into the eggs or started nipping at the cow’s teats. But this wasn’t an ordinary rat or two in the grain or swimming in the shit-filled troughs that funneled the manure out of the barn. This was an abomination.

  He saw the thing as soon as he stepped into the barn. The setting sunlight dribbled through the gaps in the wood siding and painted warm, yellow streaks on the dusty floor. At first he thought it was a pile of rotting, moldy straw. Until it moved.

  From where he stood, in the bright expanse of the open barn door, the mass of rodents looked to be tied together at their tails. He wondered if some crazy person could have made this thing. Maybe a Boy Scout gone mad after trying too long to master sheepshanks and bowlines. As Wim inched closer, it became clear that some tails were indeed knotted but others were bound by matted hair, woven together into some obscene, breathing tapestry. Other rats had physically grown together, the way a tree limb will envelop a power line if they neighbor too close for too long. It made Wim wonder how long this thing had been becoming.

  A mischief of rats, Wim thought. He seemed to remember his Pa telling him that’s what a group of rats was called. It wasn’t as dramatic as a murder of crows, but it somehow felt right.

  The heap of filthy gray and brown fur stretched more than three feet across and once he counted all the way up to 37 before they moved and he lost track again. The way they moved bothered him the most. Much of the time they struggled against each other, squealing and shrieking in ratty frustration. But now and again, the whole of the group snapped into a singular mind-set and moved as one, skittering about on scores of tiny feet until it stumbled upon some old corn or spilled feed or anything it could gorge on.

  As they ate, they fought amongst themselves, biting and chewing on each other. Then, he realized some of them weren’t moving at all. Several were nothing more than lifeless husks, bound to the others, to be dragged endlessly to and fro. One rat sunk its yellow incisors into the face of its nearest neighbor and Wim saw the flesh peel away to reveal crisp, white bone underneath. The maimed rat squealed and pulled to escape but its tail was an anchor it was unable to escape.

  Other rats, sensing weakness or smelling blood or both, lunged onto their wounded companion and ate it alive. Bright red blood spurted and covered the vermin closest to it. That seemed to enrage them even more and soon the entire writhing mass was on the move again.

  Wim tried to remember if he’d ever seen anything on the farm more horrible than this. All that came to mind was a calf that was born when he was 6 or 7. Its body was normal and so was one head. Yet, jutting from the side of its neck like a goiter, grew a second malformed skull which hung lazily to the side like it was always half asleep. A thick, gray tongue lolled from its mouth and slimy drool leaked out near constant, like water from a worn out faucet.

  The eyes on that second head were closed most of the time, but now and again the lids would flutter and open part way and underneath they looked alert. The head would raise up a little bit and the eyes would lock on you and you could almost see it thinking and that made it all the worse. Wim had asked his Pa why they couldn’t cut off that second head and the old man only shook his.

  “Got to put ‘em down,” Pa said as he looked in the general direction of the freakish calf, but not at it. “It’s a portent.”

  Wim didn’t know what a portent was then, and he wasn’t entirely sure now, but that night he heard a gunshot and he never saw the calf and a half again. Later that summer the crops failed and they had to sell over eighty head of cattle to keep the mortgage current. The farm never recovered. Neither did Pa.

  The old man was pushing 70 and at six and a half feet tall looked like a skinny giant. Even the smallest clothes hung off his frame like from a scarecrow. He’d had another family when he was young but that broke apart after his first wife died and Wim only heard about his half-siblings in occasional dribs and drabs. Mama once told Wim that she was halfway to becoming an old maid when his Pa found her. She had long given up notions of being a mother but God was a trickster and, at the age of 54, Wim happened.

  They were as happy as any given family until that summer when things got dark. Suppers, which had previously been the highlight of their work-filled days, were now eaten in silence. Pa kept his face, with all its harsh angles, turned down toward his food as he shoveled it into his mouth. Wim saw more of the top of his bald head than his eyes and Mama bustled about the kitchen to avoid the quiet. When the food was all, Pa would disappear back into the barn. Mama washed the dishes and sometimes remembered to read Wim a story before bed, but most often she sat by the window and looked to the barn and waited. Wim never worked up the courage to ask her what she was waiting for.

  The rats neared the barn door and for a moment, Wim was tempted to let them flee. He could let them skedaddle into the field and disappear into the fading light of day and on to another farm where they’d become someone else’s problem. But his parents raised him to be responsible and he couldn’t let them down, even years after their deaths.

  Instead, he crossed to the wall where shovels and pitchforks and scythes hung unused and reached for his Pa’s old shotgun which guarded nothing but rusty junk. He couldn’t remember the last time the gun had been touched and when he took it down, he destroyed a heavy canopy of spiderwebs.

  Wim pumped a round of buckshot into the chamber and turned back to the mischief of rats which had stopped moving toward the open door, toward freedom, and stared at him.

  Do they know what’s coming?

  An army of black and red eyes watched him as he raised the gun. They didn’t make any attempt to flee. Didn’t react in any way at all. They only waited. Wim pondered that they had accepted their coming fate but doubted rats coul
d think about anything beyond their next meal, let alone their mortality. He thought again of the two-headed calf and wondered if they had stared at Pa the same way before he put it down.

  Then, Wim squeezed the trigger.

  2

  Over 8,000 people crowded the streets around City Hall but all Doc could concentrate on was the overwhelming smell of hot urine that filled the air. He’d been to Philadelphia countless times in his life but that olfactory assault never ceased to disgust him and each time he swore he’d never return. At least now he had a good reason.

  The President of the United States stood before the crowd and blathered on with his typical re-election nonsense. Build this. Change that. Blah, blah, blah. He mustered up an appropriate amount of zeal and faux sincerity and the onlookers ate it up like the sheep they were.

  Doc harbored no specific grudge against the President. He was another stuffed suit bought and paid for by the banks and corporations. The ones that controlled the country and its leaders. The President was a marionette, contorting when they pulled the strings and speaking canned lines fed to him by his owners. Doc didn’t blame the puppet for the puppeteer’s manipulations, but he had no respect for the man either.

  His disdain for politics was trumped only by his contempt for the worthless dregs that allowed themselves to be manipulated and misled. Those idiots thought they actually mattered. And thousands upon thousands of the fools stood there in almost 100-degree heat and gobbled up the President’s rhetoric with near frenzied glee.

  Doc tuned out the President, ignored the eau de piss, and turned his attention to those nearest to him. A lesbian couple, locked in an embrace, had scrawled the words “Love is” and “never wrong” in black marker on their foreheads. A cadre of senior citizens each held signs reading, “We are the greatest generation!” Some college students sang America the Beautiful and got most of the words wrong. Doc wished that he could call Guinness to see if this was a record-setting gathering of idiots.