Day 342 - Untitled Zombie Story Chapter 6 - (1,241 words)

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UNTITLED ZOMBIE STORY

By Wayne Webb

Chapter 6

Derek was in the car alone in the dark, the undead were milling around him, like the standing guard outside a VIP’s car. The devices that were at the four corners of the car park that they had stopped in making a tight 3 or four square meter area where they congregated and were attracted to the sound that it sent out.

Ben and his mother had left Derek there, the Zombies in attendance were passive as expected, and Derek could have easily left the car and walked through them with ease, unmolested and nothing stopping him.

Except his curiosity.

Ben had still not explained why he had elected to take him on this journey, whether it was because he was needed or there was a need to separate the brothers from each, perhaps guaranteeing each other’s cooperation? Derek did not know the answer to that particular riddle, but it beat being executed in a field near the bend in the road where they had all met up again.

He had a vague idea where they had taken James, voluntarily he had gone with them of course, but still he had the idea that he was in all essence ‘taken’. He knew the country pretty well and from the small tidbits that the ‘gang’ had put together, he had guessed where the city had to be, there was only so much open land around his home town, and somewhere with a well and within a few days walk of a large freshwater lake.

Yes he was sure he could find it easily enough and lead to springing his brother. The question was whether or not he wanted to, he was much more curious to know what Ben was up to and why he wanted Derek along for the ride.

James and he had fought silently for the day or so before they carried off out of their hometown in search of the mysterious group that left them with the wonder machines that pacified the undead.  Derek had wanted them to go, he did not trust them at all.

“If something looks too good to be true? It is.” That was his last word on the matter to James, but the look he got back told him all her needed to know about what his brother wanted.

James was lonely for company, male or female it did not matter to him because it was not about love or sex, he wanted to be with a person who was not family. By the same token he wanted to stay with his brother and keep the family together, relying on and believing in one another as they were raised to do. It was Derek that insisted that these ideals were mutually exclusive and all James wanted was to have a measure of both.

After a day of staring at each other in loaded silences, Derek relented and got the car ready for a trip. They figured that if they were searching cities on the road south then the obvious route would to take the interstate and make for the old border into the next set of towns a few dozen miles apart from each other less than half a day’s drive.

The first place was already visited and the sound devices that pacified the undead were in place, swathes of them had piled up in a funeral pyre of bodies and with no sign of any life locally. They drove in after agreeing on the strategy of catching up as soon as they could, but they were stunned by the desolation of a hundred piled and burning bodies.

The few undead that were still ambulatory were the ones that were coming into the town attracted by the devices sound waves. They walked into the mess that was a burning mass of flesh and bone, willingly walking into the flames and passively milling about waiting for the flame to burn away whatever it was that controlled the deceased bodies.  

A few stragglers were walking, shuffling human torches and they made no attempt to save themselves and did not react to the utter rending of their flesh off the bones by the intense and direct heart of the fire.

There were two options for ways out of town that would lead to new areas to scavenge or search for survivors and it was a fifty-fifty choice, which way Ben would have gone.

“Let’s take the nearest town D, then at least if it’s wrong then doubling back won’t be so far right?” James had reasoned, but Derek was not listening, he was still scoping out the once all too human bodies still walking around the fire behind him, walking to their deaths.

“Left or right?” Derek asked his brother and kept staring at the rearview mirror.

“Right. To North Haverbrook and then … we can always double back to Ogdenville.” James was pointing out the directions according to the map in his mind.

They drove on the road to North Haverbrook and only a few miles from the halfway mark they saw the barricade ahead of them and saw the mini van but from the view as they drove up the saw no Ben and no Margaret.

Now here he was in a car, inside a parking building in a City he did not know on the way to meet people he had never heard of and leave behind a woman that he guessed that Ben could neither live with easily or abandon totally. He knew something of the draw of family, and it had marked and scarred the people in both their lives. It had been the driving factor in James and Derek’s choice to look for Ben. It had been a life altering decision for Ben to take his mother on this trip. It had been almost the very death of Rusty, willing to go to the grave if necessary for the memory of what his brother had been like before the madness.

Family.

Can’t live with them, can’t kill them, can’t live without them.

So he waited and waited for Ben to return and see what was so special about this place that he wanted to leave his murderously intent mother here. A mother he obviously wanted to protect, no matter how much she pushed at everyone’s buttons, and how she had almost taken them down the road of mindless retribution.

The undead crowd parted, like a human zipper, peeling back as Ben walked through with a sound device, this one pulsing a purple colour and turning the undead away from him, like a repellent of some kind.

He was not alone but it was not Margaret that was with him, instead it was a much younger woman, nearing but not quite at middle age. Like one of those Soccer Moms, all make up and clothes before the ‘Change’ came.

The door opened and Ben took the driver’s seat, the woman taking the passengers side.

“You good?” Ben asked.

“Fine, who’s your friend?” James countered.

“This is Angela.” Ben looked at her and suggested “Ange?”

The woman’s response did not show sign off on the shortening of her name.

“Angela.” Ben said to Derek with a little more seriousness. “Knows how to turn of the Zombies.”

Derek opened his mouth to start asking the many questions he knew would follow, but Ben raised a hand to silence them before they made landfall.

“Permanently.”