Day 320 - Untitled Zombie Story Chapter 1.2 - (1,423 words)

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UNTITLED ZOMBIE STORY

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1.2

They had watched their grandfather kill his only daughter, their mother and all the while the law of the land stood by waiting to take over if need be. In three days the world had changed.

There was a certain amount of acceptance to it; the prevalence of zombie movies had prepared them somewhat for the oncoming apocalypse, they understood the basic rules but not the practicalities of living in a post living world. Most of the people they knew left town pretty quickly, headed to the city where walls and barricades were hastily erected and the sick were euthanized very quickly.

The major metropolitan areas were safe in one sense but from what they could gather they were also living on a knife’s edge and the powder keg that society had become was just a single match strike from disaster.

It had been a year since they had turned down citizenship and all that entailed, electing to survive on their own in the countryside that was almost devoid of life. On one hand they kind of knew that they were in an evolutionary dead end, a cul de sac where there was no chance to meet new people or continue their genetic lines.  They also knew that the risk and the lit fuse of a million people in a cityscape was a bloodbath waiting to happen.

The radio signals just stopped a few months after they made the choice not to go, and they knew based on the reports still coming in before the complete blackout, that people were fighting, dying and coming back in a scale that no one could deal with.

The Television broadcasts stopped, they were only on so many hours a day and then an unending library of old shows and movies were broadcast to keep the signal live twenty four seven. News came on the radio, updates and broadcasts from official and unofficial channels.

None of it was good, and they got steadily bleaker and more violent in the cataloguing of death and transformation.

Then static.

While they had made the right choice it was hardly heartening to know they had been correct in guessing that the million or so folk were going to self combust and take the innocent and the guilty in one giant pyre. The night sky though it was fifty miles away, was orange with the burning that lasted for weeks, but could not cross the plains, until it died down and the darkness set in on top of the silence.

Then Frank had died too, in his own terms at the end of a gun. He had been attacked and savaged quite badly in a scouting raid to a small fishing town a dozen or more miles off the beaten path where he hadn’t been in ages. There had been no one there and they had seen no sign of any life or of the undead, but they were not hiding so much as hidden. They had fallen into a trap of sorts, and Frank had fell in with them when scouting a gas station.

The tank had been hollowed out and a dozen or more of the once local residents died in there from fumes or the fall, it was hard to know which. Frank had hit a rock and taken a tumble into the hole and woken the comatose zombies lying the bottom, emaciated and down to teeth and bone wrapped in rotted skin. It was enough to start tearing at him and put the chances of not being infected at a very low rate.

Infection by bite was not all it took to become one of the undead, you needed to be sick enough, hurt enough to be on the edge of life and death and that was when the change would trigger. And a bite or scratch on it’s own was never enough. The reason so many people fell to the infection was two fold, firstly the assumption was that one bite was enough, it was somehow magic and once bitten you were going to turn. So loads of people were executed needlessly before anyone figured out that they just believed what they had seen on movies and TV.

The other problem was hordes; they moved in packs so usually if you were bitten it was just the start and there was a line of them waiting to take their turn on you. Like trying to stop the sea there was little you could do but get out of the way.

Frank was old and though not frail her could see from the squalid and fetid condition of the undead that bite and tore at him for a few minutes before he could fight them off were going to cause problems. His gunfire attacted the boys and they took care of the rest, levering the old man out of the hole before noise drew any new undead to the location. 

He’d lost a lot of blood and was pale and tired when they got him out.

“This is it boys, it’s my time to go.” He shook his grandson’s hands and they tried to talk him out of it, promising medications they had and secure places to heal that they really didn’t.

“Find me a boat and I’ll Bessie out for Hemmingway’s last kiss.” He had insisted on his fate being in his own hands. “Going out on my own terms, fuck the hanging on for dear life, there is a life after death boys.” He eyeballed them with watering eyes and the fear was not of death but what came after it these days. “I’m not shuffling through eternity all teeth and skin, I’ve lived long enough, I don’t want the resurrection. I want the black eternal.”

There was no arguing with him and they could see that he was much worse than they had ever seen him. On one hand they wanted the rock hard granddad that had helped them live and thrive in an empty world devoid of common sense and fairness. On the other hand they did not think themselves as strong as he was, they could not have pulled the trigger on their mother, and even less so on Frank.

He was going out on his own dime, and it was not only a expression of who he was, it was the last thing he could protect his boys from.

They watched his boat putter out, into the bay and far enough from shore for them to not make out the detail of his face, but close enough to see the puff of red followed by the slower sound of the blast coming a few seconds after wards. Before he had pulled the trigger on his life he had set fire to the boat, arranging his own Viking farewell and trying for a safety just in case the blast left him somehow clinging to the resurrection and rising up to claim his new calling for the blood of all things.

He was in the water, too deep to wade, in a boat on fire and a shotgun deep in his mouth, making him gag on the cold metal bite that pressed his tongue back and made him taste bile on top of it all.

He took no chances and took no prisoners.

And then he was gone.

Time had worn on and the boys changed the town to suit themselves, living mostly in silence and using the small roads in and out of town to set up a perimeter and a method of defense against any new incursions. They had cars and dumpsters blocking roads in and fences strung between houses to make walls that would turn away a zombie with no calling for attention.

Where they had made errors or attracted the hordes they had back up plans, sound traps they could set off to distract and move the undead to areas where they could be funneled or directed into death or just a new direction.

They were cut off and overwhelmed by sheer numbers this time and trapped on the roof and waiting for a plan to present it self or for the horde to be attracted to something elsewhere. Right now they were on the scent, they were haunting the area where they last heard the sounds of life. They would not be distracted until a new source was found and they were cut off from that in this position.

So they waited and hoped for a miracle to happen.