Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3) (27 page)

Their loved ones who
did
survive, and even strangers who’d never known their names, came away from witnessing such bravery forever changed. Wives, girlfriends, aunts, even grandmothers in some cases, when faced with no alternative, transformed into frightful defenders. The “mother” instinct inherent to the female half of humanity was always a sight to behold and—if one had any sense at all—feared, so when it came time for them to take up arms, females proved just as able and dangerous as males. More-so in some cases. Many went to their local gun range on a regular basis, to keep from throttling their husbands/boyfriends for their bad habits prior to the Apocalypse. Not rinsing out their coffee mugs, aversions to vacuum cleaners, leaving the toilet seat up... Things like
that.

“Everybody calm down.” Jake wanted to nip any potential panic in the bud, before it spread to the other members of the town’s guard force. “There’s eight of us, we’re reasonably safe up here, and those things are dumb as turnips.”

To emphasize the fact and stiffen the guard’s spines, O’Connor—followed by Sampson and Penny—took a knee, readying his weapon.

While he normally carried an M-4 beyond Langley’s borders, the unruly-haired man currently only had his crowbar and go-to Hammer pistol that traveled with him everywhere. The Hammer—as George dubbed it—stood for “high-impact, mulch-caliber repeater” and was the most vicious looking handgun Jake had ever seen. The weapon weighed a good five pounds, had air vents all along the slide, could fire .45 slugs or any 12 gauge ammo from the large over/under barrels, and the upper one was compatible with the silencer Foster had custom made. While it only held ten rounds and was accurate to just fifty yards: if it bled, the double action Hammer could kill it.

Either that, or make whatever you shot hurt so bad it’d
wish
it was dead.

“Wait until they’re at thirty yards, then pick your targets and shoot slowly,” Jake reassured the shaken guards. “This will be just like we practiced. Breath, aim, squeeze, repeat. Just take your time and I doubt we’ll even go through one magazine each putting those things down.”

“There must be a hundred—” One of the women, a brunette with curly hair and a face made for easy smiles prior to the zombies, began.

Penny cut her off. “So? That’s only, what? Twelve each?”

That surprised the brunette. Blinking at Carson’s easy reply, she knelt, raised her weapon, and sighted carefully downrange at the approaching creatures.

Jake smiled thinly and acquired a sight picture of his own between the eyes of one of the things closing in. “Fire on three.”

He counted in a loud, clear voice then pulled the Hammer’s trigger. Seven guns echoed his, sending hollow-pointed projectiles into the small herd at high speeds. Not every shot scored a skull. Jake and his companions were far more accurate than the other guards, but even they still missed occasionally as well. Moving targets
were
more difficult to hit, after all.

Strangely enough, Jake found ventilating zombie heads was almost soothing, in a disturbing and twisted way. Fear and horror could eventually cripple a normal person emotionally, causing their psyche to fracture—or even shut down—and leaving them unable to function. To avoid such trauma, the survivors made it a practice to daily engage in some sort of recreational amusement. Be that a “girls night” as the ladies had the evening prior, cards, board games, or even—Foster’s Favorite—target practice. Many an evening after dinner George, Elle, and her nineteen year old boyfriend, Leo Salazar, could be found at one of Langley’s walls taking pot shots at the occasional distant zombie. The aged fixer made it a point to drag along two or three of Mooney’s people—even if they’d been on guard duty prior that day—and that habit paid off now.

Your average person doesn’t realize that effectively using a firearm is a skill. If you don’t practice it on a regular basis (at least weekly, if not daily), that skill deteriorates. Once that happens, you lose your muscle memory and—when you get dropped into the shit storm—you get
crapped up
.

George had been quite firm with Jake and the other members of their group at least partially developing their abilities, prior to them leaving his Ohio safe house. He’d put them all through a grueling, forty-five day crash course in his subterranean motor pool/gun range, beginning with the basics of weapon safety and moving on to stress shooting. When they failed—and fail they did—the survivors got to do push-ups, or sit-ups, or run another ten laps around the motor pool. This not only encouraged them to become highly aware of their surroundings and their companions positions, but also drastically improved their physiques. The combination of high-calorie food-stuffs and rigorous exercise had caused them to shed much of their “baby fat” and built lean muscle at an accelerated rate. While upping their endurance and strength levels exponentially, this also—at least in Jake’s private opinion—
really
made a difference when it came to simple physical attractiveness. Especially when it came to the more appealing parts of the female anatomy.

While Jake admitted he was most certainly what was termed a nice guy, he was still a guy. And he wasn’t blind either.

It wasn’t long before the hundred horrors outside the wall lay rotting on the humid August pavement, no longer mobile. Jake was pleased that his prediction had
almost
been accurate. Some of them had found it necessary to change out magazines once or twice during the short, one-sided firefight. Penny and Sampson hadn’t, but two of the five other defenders had, along with Jake himself. In his defense however, the Hammer did only hold ten rounds.

“Not bad.” Foster said.

O’Connor nearly jumped out of his skin. “
Jesus!
When the hell…?

“I been standin’ here for the last few minutes, boy.” George sucked at his Cuban then sent a lazy smoke ring over his right shoulder. “Thought I’d have a look at how y’all been holdin’ up when it came to what I taught ya’.”

Jake worked on getting his heart-rate under control again. “Dammit, it’s bad enough Kat does that to me! Every, damn day! Next time cough or something! I almost soiled myself...”

“Don’t be a pansy,” The older man motioned beyond the wall, “You’re a grown-ass man. Come on. If you can clench yer’ sphincter up again, I’ll hold yer’ hand an’ help out with the mop-work.”

This was a necessary practice more often than not. Inevitably, there were always a few of the creatures who’d had their legs blown away—or their spinal cords severed by a round—and either attempted to drag themselves onward or lay there, mouths snapping like awful, stinky paperweights. While not serious threats, it was never a good idea to leave a still-active ghoul anywhere near their defenses. Not only could the stray ribcage or femur puncture the tire of a civilian vehicle, someone
could
conceivably still fall victim to a “dragger.” Granted, you’d have to be moving quite slowly, likely with your eyes closed, but it was still possible.

So at Foster’s recommendation, every other day—if anyone “snuffed a maggot-head”, as he so eloquently put it—Mooney had a team of at least five individuals who would venture beyond Langley’s walls to deal with any bodies. After donning raincoats, boots, and bright yellow dish washing gloves, two would stand guard while the others made speedy work of the pacified dead. Taking into account that Langley was virtually an island (thanks to the Pensacola Dam), this was a brief process. The volunteers would simply tote them across two lanes comprising the road, heft them over the southern lip, and toss the dead over the edge into the spillway waters far below. While it wasn’t the most dignified way to dispose of what had once been a human being, there was no choice. Some days it would’ve been necessary to dig a dozen—or more—graves. The survivors couldn’t maintain such a pace, let alone bear the awful chore month after month. So the Neosho River carried the inert bodies south to wherever their final resting place might be, and Langley in general tried to ignore the growing discoloration on the southern wall of Pensacola Dam.

They couldn’t toss the bodies very far, and the nasty things tended to scrape down the concrete surface on the way down.

While the Langley defenders had done well, Foster instructed them to stay on the wall while he, Jake, Sampson, and Penny took care of the clean-up. That would provide them with a bit of security and give the townsfolk a break. Unlike the crew of the Mimi, they hadn’t seen as much up-close combat with the dead, and—while no more could be see approaching just then—they looked a little green around the gills after witnessing eight dozen ghouls stumping up to chew on their livers. The four women remained in place above; Oliver climbed into the dump truck cab and brought the engine to life. After spewing a little blueish smoke from its chromed stack, Keen put the truck into reverse and opened a three-foot opening in the barricade.

Sampson had to turn sideways to push his massive frame through the gap, but that was fine with him. If more creatures arrived, such a small opening could be defended if need be until they could seal it up.

Taking care not to slip in the pooling body fluids—or stray chunks of tissue—Jake and Henry began checking the bodies while George and Penny circled around the killing ground to cover their backs. This didn’t involve anything ridiculous, like say checking for a pulse. There was no point. Zombies, you know? It entailed making damn-sure everybody they approached would never rise again by destroying the ol’ brain-holder: O’Connor, with the chisel point of his crowbar and Sampson, with his awful sledge.

It was hard, nerve-wracking,
messy
work, especially since Henry had a tendency to swing his heavy hammer like he was trying to “ring the bell” at a town fair to win a cheap stuffed walrus or something.

While Henry played yet another round of Whack-a-Mole Jake speared the next cranium nearby, absently wishing he’d found a moment before they’d begun the disgusting chore to wrap a Vape-o-Rub smeared bandana over the lower half of his face.

Fun, little piece of trivia: The Apocalypse in general—and zombies specifically—
stank.
Literally. The nearest comparison Jake could come up with was if someone left a pig carcass in the sun to rot for a few days, covered it in warm, spoiled, pickle-flavored yogurt, and then dropped it into a vat of fresh human excrement. And it never went away. It was as if some inventive chemist had crop-dusted the whole world with the most awful perfume ever.

Eau de’ Butt-cheek.
O’Connor grinned wryly at the thought, and gritted his teeth so he wouldn’t puke at the vile smell wafting up from goop coating the chisel end of his crowbar.

That was something else no-one took into account when it came to Zombie Doomsday scenarios. The dead weren’t particularly sanitary creatures to begin with. One: they were corpses, so they were each slowly decomposing in unpleasant and repugnant ways. Two: all of them were covered with various types of yuck. Blood, body fluids, pus from their rotting death wounds, that kind of thing. Three: every, single, one of them had a load in their shorts. Consider how badly a single person can stink up a public bathroom. Then, think about the most memorable and foulest aroma you’ve ever had the bad luck encounter in one.

Now. Multiply that by a hundred. A thousand.
Ten
thousand.

That’s what living—with a working olfactory sense—was like surrounded by corpses, mobile or non. Needless to say, a bottle of Fabreze was a coveted item. And in short supply.

“Watch that one on your left.” Henry bashed in another skull, sending its eyeballs bulging from their sockets to hang down the horrors now-truly dead, slack face.

Jake glanced over his shoulder and saw a one-armed ghoul attempting to claw its way over the bodies of its fellows. From what he could tell, a round had passed through the creature’s spine just below the sternum, which was why the thing couldn’t rise. This also inhibited its ability to roll, effectively limiting the zombie’s movement to a pair of snapping jaws and a vainly fumbling arm.

Stepping closer, O’Connor inspected the pathetic thing. The zombie registered his approach but, while it attempted to advance, couldn’t find purchase with only one weak and grey-fleshed limb. It had been a youngish woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, with long brown hair and a slim build. He supposed the creature had been pretty in life, though it was hard to tell now. Its eyes were colorless with yellowed pupils, its long hair matted from months of exposure and filth, and the things desiccated face held absolutely nothing resembling humanity. Whatever dwelled inside the husk at his feet wasn’t a person. If pressed, Jake couldn’t even say whether or not it was really aware, or simply acting on commands somehow programmed genetically into its bug-simple brain. He squatted before it on impulse and looked inquisitively into the things milky eyes.

“Can you understand me? Are you in there at all?”

The creature continued its attempts to reach him.

“I don’t know how this happened.” Jake told it. “I don’t know if what killed you is a crazy super-virus cooked up in a government lab somewhere, or what. It could’ve been caused by a naturally occurring bacteria or disease from the Amazon I suppose. Hell, it could’ve fallen to Earth on a meteor for all we know. Or even been dispersed planet-wide by a race of super-intelligent space-badgers, who just got sick of watching us ruin the world for other life forms and decided they didn’t want the crazy humans eventually roaming around the galaxy, shitting all over other planets or something...”

Only moans came in reply.

He shook his head. “I’m feeling pretty silly here. Talking to what I pretty much
know
is a dead person so, if you wouldn’t mind? Don’t tell anyone. It’s just that Kat pointed out a couple months ago that we’ve never tried communicating with any of you, so I though what the hell. It’s not like you’re really that dangerous just now.”

The dead woman snapped her teeth at him.

“Oh. That wasn’t really... Well. Anyway. What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry.” Jake sighed. “I’m sorry you’re like this. I’m sorry we don’t have any way to help you. I mean, you’re dead. There’s no cure for that. No flu shot is going to help, that’s for sure. And if gene therapy has progressed far enough to do you any good, none of us know about it. I kind of doubt there’s such a thing as working Nanobots at the moment either. They’d just begun to explore that technology when all this happened anyway.”