Life of the Dead (Book 2): Road of the Damned Page 6

  If only I had two hands, he thought. I could get out of this if I still had two damned hands.

  But he didn’t. His stump had stopped oozing and copious amounts of ibuprofen held the pain at bay, but his left arm was little more than a club, especially in situations like this, when it mattered. Nearly two decades in the Marines and another 20 plus years hitching around the country at the mercy of truckers and potential serial killers, and here he was, ready to get taken out by a Brown Santa and a pop music groupie. It was almost funny.

  The tension in his arm from holding her hair suddenly vanished and Aben’s hand came free with a clump of her brunette curls and a hunk of skin from her scalp. She dove onto him and he fell back against the teen. The three of them went down in a pile of flailing limbs. The UPS driver’s face was against his own cheek when a blur of yellow flew by Aben’s eyes and the female zombie toppled off him.

  Aben heard the snarling and gasping and rolled free of the pile. He found the hammer sledge under the Maroon 5 fan and yanked it free. The boy tried to get up but, before he could, Aben brought the angled end of the hammer down on his head. It sunk into the skull and the resulting sound reminded Aben of cracking a hard-boiled egg. It felt good.

  He spun sideways and scrambled to his knees with the hammer ready to strike whatever was within reach. That was when he saw the dog. The mongrel tore at the throat of the UPS zombie which swung its arms, trying to get free. Aben watched for a moment. Long tendrils of shredded flesh stretched from the zombie’s mangled throat to the dogs snarling jaws.

  When the zombie grabbed on to the dog’s floppy ear, it yelped in pain and Aben quickly raised the hammer and smashed it into the dead woman’s forehead. Her previously pretty face collapsed inward in a black pit of coagulated blood, bone, and cartilage. The monster stopped moving, and the dog released the torn, rotting skin.

  Aben reached for the animal, moving too fast despite knowing better, and the dog bolted away from him. It ran ten yards before pausing and looking back.

  “You’re okay. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  It hunkered coiled like a spring, every muscle in its body tensed and ready to flee.

  Aben backed away slowly, retreating to his bag. He ruffled through the contents and came out with half a package of beef jerky. He threw one piece to the dog and watched as it first jumped back, then inched forward and took it in its mouth. The dog chewed it up in three quick bites, then looked up to Aben. He thought it looked wary and expectant at the same time. He threw another piece but made sure that one landed a few yards short. The dog belly crawled to it, then ate it.

  They repeated that toss and eat game four more rounds and soon the dog was within five feet. That time Aben didn't throw the jerky. Instead he held it in his extended palm and waited for the dog to come to him. After about a minute, it did just that. It backed away after taking it, out of reach, but didn’t run. After it swallowed, Aben set the last piece on the ground at his feet.

  “You don’t have to be scared of me. Come on and get it.”

  The dog did and when it finished eating it sat at Aben’s feet and looked up at his bearded and scarred face. Its tail flopped back and forth, thudding against the pavement, and Aben smiled. He extended his arm and scratched the dog behind the ear. He could feel its fur was dirty and matted and the pungent odor wasn’t as bad as the zombies, but it was close. That was okay. Aben knew he didn’t smell like rosewater either. The more he scratched, the faster the dog’s tail wagged.

  He saw the brown spot on the dog’s hindquarter was dried blood. When he pushed apart the fur to get a better look, the dog tensed but didn’t run. Aben found a wound the size of a half dollar which was bright red and festering pus. A handful of maggots writhed in the gash. Again with the maggots, he thought. If he never saw maggots again as long as he lived, it would be too soon.

  “You’ll be okay. You saved me. Now I’ll return the favor.”

  The dog crawled on to his lap and licked his face. It felt good to not be alone.

  13

  Juli thought what happened in her picture perfect suburban home was Hell, but that opinion changed when she reached the city. She’d planned to go to the police station and turn herself in. What exactly she would say was still something of a mystery even though she’d been rehearsing it as she drove.

  “Well, you see, officer, my husband murdered our daughter. Then he tried to murder me, but I killed him first. Then I went to check on my son and he was a zombie. No, officer, I’m not psychotic. No, I’m not taking hallucinogens. That’s really what happened.”

  No one would believe that, of course. Juli herself barely believed it and she lived through it. Maybe she had lost her mind. In some ways that might be for the best because she didn’t know how she could live through what happened.

  The night sky brightened as she neared the city but it wasn’t just the sea of streetlights that lit up the skyline as usual. Orange, shimmery smoke danced through the air like Baryshnikov and the closer she came to the city, the brighter the night grew.

  Even for a city, the streets seemed unusually occupied considering the time of night. People dashed aimlessly in every direction, carrying everything from TVs and stereos to toilet paper and jugs of water.

  I’m driving straight into a riot, Juli thought. That there might be a correlation between the carnage in her home and the chaos in the city didn’t even cross her mind.

  A small, teenage Asian boy ran past the front of her SUV and if she’d have been going five MPH faster, she’d have hit him. She slammed on her brakes and he glanced back over his shoulder and mimed slitting his throat.

  “Watch where you going, whore!”

  You little punk she thought, but didn’t say, not even behind the safety of her locked doors and windows. The teen ran off and she kept driving.

  She saw a few people staggering about in a manner that reminded her of Mark, but tried to ignore them. That’s not possible. They’re old or hurt. That’s all.

  The smoke grew thicker as she closed in on a block of Government housing units. She saw smoke leaking from the windows in the upper floors but there weren’t any fire trucks on the scene. Instead there stood a row of military vehicles. A few soldiers brandished big, black guns as they stood guard outside the entryways. They stared at Juli as she passed by but didn’t move to stop her.

  When she reached the next brick complex she saw more soldiers, only instead of guns they had tanks strapped to their backs. Juli thought they must be some sort of firefighters. When two black men ran out of the building, she quickly realized the soldiers weren’t fighting the fires, they were starting them.

  The soldiers spun toward the fleeing black men and aimed their nozzles. What came next was something Juli knew she’d never forget as long as she lived. From the nozzles gushed long sprays of fire and the fire rained down on the two black men and coated their bodies in flames. They ran another 10 feet, staggered and stumbled for five more, then fell to the ground, arms and legs flailing. Juli could hear their screams, which were high and strangely feminine, even with the windows up. The soldiers turned to her and waved her by. Nothing to see here. She drove on.

  A few streets down, she reached a roadblock. A Dodge Charger police cruiser sat upside down on its roof. The siren blared. Dozens of people rocked it back and forth. Some had climbed onto the upside down undercarriage and jumped up and down, gleeful. Juli watched as several men dragged two police officers through the car’s shattered windshield and into the streets where the crowd pummeled them.

  Juli made a hard right into an alley. As her headlights lit up the narrow tunnel, she saw another police officer kneeling over a homeless man. When she neared them, she saw the officer’s face buried in the man’s belly. When the noise of the SUV got the cop’s attention, it looked up and Juli saw blood and flesh dripping from its mouth.

  She screamed and hit the gas. The SUV vaulted forward and bounced over the cop’s legs. Juli checked the rear view mirror and saw
it had returned to eating the bum. She was still looking behind her when she exited the alley and it was only the chorus of screams that drew her attention forward.

  To her left she saw row after row of police SWAT officers clad head to toe in black uniforms and body armor. Most held Plexiglas shields in front of them. As chunks of bricks, glass bottles, and assorted debris soared through the air, the need for them became clear.

  To Juli’s right were hundreds of residents of the city. Most were young and black but several whites, Latinos and Asians were mixed in. They held weapons of all kinds, guns, rifles, bats, shovels. They shouted at the police and through the cacophony of voices, Juli heard their demands.

  "Let us out! Let us out!"

  “We have rights! You can’t keep us here!”

  “Fuck the pigs!”

  Ragged coughs and sneezes rang out from both sides of the impasse.

  The crowd of city dwellers moved forward. There were only 20 feet separating them from the police. Juli shut off the lights of the SUV and put it in reverse, letting it drift silently back into the cover of the alleyway. She stayed close enough to watch.

  A teen ran to the front of the crowd and launched a 40-ounce beer bottle at the police. It somersaulted through the air and smashed into the face of a beefy cop who had picked the wrong time to look sideways instead of straight ahead. He collapsed as if he’d been shot and two officers beside him raised their rifles, ready to shoot.

  “Hold your fire! That’s an order!” A blond-haired cop who tried to keep control screamed into a bullhorn. Then he turned toward the crowd. “There is a curfew in effect! Go back to your homes! You’re safe there!”

  “The fuck we are! Fucking pigs just want to make it easier to butcher us!” That came from a giant black man with a shaved head and bushy gray beard. He held a shotgun, and he had it leveled at the rows of police. “We ain’t stupid!”

  The giant cocked the shotgun and held his finger to the trigger.

  “Put down the weapon!” the cop in charge shouted.

  The stand-off lasted maybe three seconds, but felt like a minute. Then the giant fired.

  Birdshot slammed into police officers. Most received minor wounds if injured at all but one officer caught a BB in the eye and went to his knees holding his face. Blood seeped out from his fingers.

  “Don’t shoot! Hold your fire!”

  One officer threw a can of tear gas into the rioters. Two more followed. Any chance of the stalemate ending peacefully went up in thick, yellow smoke.

  Someone new shot. Juli couldn’t tell which group fired first, but it didn’t matter because more shots rang out in both directions. Bodies hit the ground on each side. Then the two groups raced toward each other. The battle was on.

  Two teens beat a cop to death with baseball bats.

  An officer with a rifle fired again and again and again, dropping half a dozen people in mere seconds.

  Someone tossed Molotov cocktails and a trio of cops went up in flames.

  A cop shot a boy in the throat. Then, as the boy lay dying in front of him, the cop put his pistol to his own temple and blew off the top half of his head.

  After that, Juli saw a rioter who had been sprawled dead on the pavement, jump to its feet and run at the cops. It tackled an officer to the ground, then leaned in and ate away the cop’s ear.

  “Oh, dear God,” Juli said to herself. She couldn’t believe it was happening. She wished she’d have stayed in her house and died with her family. That would have been better than being out here with these monsters, with nowhere to go. Just waiting to be killed. Out here she was going to die alone.

  The blond cop who'd been in charge tried to fight off another officer who had a knife sticking out of its throat. The blond cop beat it with the bullhorn but two other zombies joined in. Juli could hear him shrieking as he was eaten alive.

  Within minutes at least half the crowd were members of the undead and this new faction fought together to destroy the living. Cops attacked fellow cops. Rioters ate other rioters. So much blood flowed that Juli saw it gushing down the gutter and into the sewer grates.

  She stared out at the carnage unfolding before her, frozen until a zombie slammed into the grill of her SUV. It was a female police officer, her ginger ponytail twisted askew under her riot helmet. Her throat was torn out and Juli could see gristly tendons and veins exposed. The zombie pulled itself up the hood and grabbed onto the windshield wiper. Its face pressed against the glass smearing red splotches.

  “Get off!” Juli yelled. She hit the wipers which swished to and fro and dragged the zombie’s arm back and forth in an undead wave. Juli smacked her hand against the inside of the windshield. “Get off!” she tried again, not sure why she was even saying the pointless, useless words out loud.

  The zombie’s face was even with hers and she looked into its dull, gray eyes. There was nothing alive left inside those eyes. It made her think of the eyes of a swordfish Mark had caught on one of their vacations to Key West and later had mounted to hang on the wall of his man cave. As Juli stared into the dead woman’s eyes, the zombie’s head bounced off the windshield. The skin on its forehead split and blood poured out. Then it smashed into the windshield again and its eyes closed.

  Juli looked past it to see a black woman in her sixties holding a baseball bat. A bloody baseball bat. She wore her hair in tight cornrows and had thick, horn-rimmed glasses. Behind her was a boy in an Orioles t-shirt. He held a rag against his head and had blood running down his face.

  The woman scurried to the passenger side door and leaned close to the glass barrier.

  “Let us in. Please.”

  Beyond them Juli saw the street was overrun by zombies. They descended upon the few living people, who were attacked, eaten, and reanimated.

  “I’m begging you! Please!”

  Juli hit the unlock button and the woman jerked open the rear passenger door. She pushed the boy in first, then climbed in behind him.

  “I’m Juli.”

  The woman peered at her through the gaps in the front seats.

  “That’s nice. Now, how about you get us the hell out of here.”

  Juli put the vehicle in reverse and backed up as quickly as she felt comfortable going between the narrow walls. In her mirror she saw the cop she’d earlier ran over. He crawled toward them, dragging himself along the pavement with his hands. The bum was now on his feet and sprinting toward them. Juli hit the cop first. The bumper connected with his face with a hard smack. Then she hit the bum, who careened off the SUV, hit the wall and bounced back into the path of the vehicle. The Audi bounced up and down, up and down, as the front and rear wheels rolled over him.

  Juli glanced at the woman. “Sorry about that.”

  The woman shook her head. “Honey, you ain’t got to apologize for nothing if you can get us out of the city.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  They exited the alley and Juli turned back in the direction from which she’d entered town. They passed by the same buildings, which were now fully engulfed in flames. Several burning zombies shambled along the streets. Two zombies, charred black like chicken after a grilling mishap, ate a soldier who still had a flame thrower strapped to his back.

  “It’s the end of days...” the woman whispered.

  “What?”

  She looked away from the death, to Juli. “Nothing. Don’t mind me, miss. I’m Helen.” She patted the boy on his thigh. “And this is Jeremy. My grandson.”

  Jeremy didn’t look up.

  “What happened to him?”

  Helen pulled Jeremy’s hand off the rag on his cheek but the rag stuck fast. She peeled it away and it ripped like Velcro.

  “Police whooped him a good one.” She gently pressed down on a bloody wound on the boy’s cheek. Juli thought she could see bone underneath it. He let his head rest against the window and took shallow, ragged breaths.

  “Should we go to a hospital? For help?”

  Helen stared out the wi
ndow to the city that was falling around them. “No… No, honey. I do believe we’re on our own now.”

  As Juli drove on, she realized the old woman was correct.

  14

  "I said drop your pants, bitch!"

  Ramey stared down the black barrel of the shotgun, then allowed her eyes to refocus beyond it and on the face of the man who wanted to rape and kill her, not necessarily in that order. She considered pleading, begging, trying to reason with him, the things she always saw people do on TV shows, but that seemed as pointless as her half eaten Snickers. Instead, she unbuckled her belt.

  Danny watched with fevered, glassy eyes. Yellow pus oozed from his tear ducts.

  Ramey pulled the belt free of the denim loops and let it drop to the floor.

  “That’s a good start. Now keep going.”

  Ramey took her time as she unzipped her jeans. With his eyes locked on her crotch, she watched Danny. His lips quivered and his mouth twisted into a sneer.

  “Hurry it up.”

  The zipper reached the end of the line. Her jeans sagged open in a yawning V that revealed her light pink panties.

  Danny scurried out from behind the glass counter. He was three feet away from her and Ramey felt heat coming off him like a radiator. He got closer, a foot away, and now Ramey could smell the air being expelled from his gaping mouth. It smelled sour, like spoiled hamburger. When he pushed himself against her, she had to fight off the urge to puke all over him. Maybe I should, she thought. But he still wielded the shotgun and angering him seemed unwise.

  Danny took his left hand and reached under her shirt. His hot, moist flesh groped the skin on her belly, then continued up as he squeezed her breast through her bra so hard she groaned.