Dead Horizon (7 page)

Alan did his best to ignore the things he saw. He still refused to give up his house and his property by the lake, both symbols of all he’d worked so hard to provide for his family. If he had to live among freaks, so be it, because there was no way in hell he’d let them take his success.

“The neighborhood is falling apart, Alan,” Cora said one morning. “Do you really want to stay here?”

He was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the morning paper as he drank his second cup of coffee. “I’ve said it numerous times, dear, I will not let the riff-raff run me away from my home.”

He didn’t go to work that morning. He made a trip to the nearest big town, Fayetteville, and visited the library. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for at first. He began to dig through some old boxes in a dusty back room. He found a collection of old microfiche and sorted through it. Several of them were marked with the words
Jonesboro History.
Alan found the matronly librarian and asked how he could view the microfiche. She showed him to a back room equipped with an old phonograph, an outdated computer, and a microfiche reader. He thanked her and went to work viewing the microfiche sheets.

What he saw was a revelation to him. A shock to his system. He had not been aware of the dark and traumatic history of his precious Jonesville.

The truth unfolded before his eyes as he scanned old newspaper clippings and articles detailing the contamination of a town called Jonesboro. After several attempts to clean up the chemical contamination in Jonesboro, during which time many of the residents died of toxic infections, the state government declared the town a disaster area and ordered immediate evacuation.

The government eventually flooded Jonesboro, houses and dead residents alike. Signs posted around the outskirts of the massive man-made lake warned potential visitors of toxic contamination if they ventured beyond the posted signs. It was all neat and tidy. Problem taken care of.

And for twenty-five years, Jonesboro stayed that way, abandoned and dead, lying in peace beneath the lake. Only recently had land development started around the Jonesboro lake, leading to the community known as Jonesville, in which Alan had purchased his new home at such a outstanding price.

Alan took all of the incriminating microfiche with him and burned it. No sense letting the secret out. He didn’t need a town meeting being called and the government getting involved again. No way was he going to have his home taken away because of some mishap years ago. Far as he was concerned, those that couldn’t handle the living dead creeping around their backyards could just pack up and go, but Alan was holding his ground.

He wasn’t concerned with rotting corpses. The smell would take some getting used to, but at least the dead were fairly quiet. They shambled around, bumping into stuff, and if a man was unlucky enough to get close, one of them might take a bite from his skull, but by and large, living with the dead wasn’t bad.

* * *

The next few weeks brought a lull in walking dead activity. Besides the occasional ambling stiff that wandered out of the lake and onto Alan’s property (which he quickly dispatched with a shotgun), Alan didn’t see much of the corpses at all. He even thought the zombies were staying where they belonged, rotting at the bottom of the lake.

But the respite was brief. The calm before the storm, actually, though Alan didn’t realize it at the time. When the dead began to rise from the dark, murky depths of the lake with alarming frequency once again, the last of the living fled Jonesville, giving up their homes. Some of them even joined the ranks of the walking dead, but through it all, Alan held his ground. He wasn’t going to be driven away. No thoughtless neighbors were going to force him to give up his residency in Jonesville.

Alan began to lose sleep. He sat up late into the night, staring out at the lake, blasting any maggot-infested thing that rose from the cold black water. His shotgun never left his side. He even kept it with him when he answered nature’s call. He took it with him when he went for groceries too.

Old Jim Millstone, the owner of the only store in the community, had long since left Jonesville, leaving everything behind. The grocery supply dwindled, but Alan wasn’t deterred. He could pick his groceries up in Fayetteville when he needed to. The drive wasn’t all that bad when you got right down to it. Behind the wheel of his car, he could easily dispatch anything that ambled into his path.

Cora began to lose a grip on her sanity. She couldn’t take it any longer, and she finally came to the conclusion that leaving Alan was her only option. He was far beyond any help she could give. As far as she was concerned, Alan could stick around and defend his precious house, but she wasn’t about to continue with an effort that amounted to nothing more than useless. She tried once again to talk Alan into leaving everything behind, but when he refused to listen to reason, she told him she would be leaving and taking their child with her.

Alan wouldn’t hear of it. The nerve of her, thinking she could up and abandon him after he’d worked so hard to give her and their son a better life. What about the wedding vows? What about all that for-better-or-worse bullshit?

They fought. There was a lot of screaming. When Cora grabbed her bags and
his
son, Alan brought out his shotgun, trusty and handy as it was, and blew her head off. He dragged her to the lake and tossed her into the water.

No chance she’d be coming back. Not with her head all but gone. The movies had gotten that part right. A bullet in the head kept the dead from rising again.

It was the least he could do for Cora.

Killing his son wasn’t so easy. Alan hated to do it, he really did, but the boy was better off with his mother. A kid needed his mother. It made no sense that he hadn’t let them leave together, if that were truly the case, but this way they were still here, on the property Alan had bought for them.

Alan boarded up the house after Cora was gone. He secured the windows, set traps, and nailed the doors shut. He dug a tunnel leading outside from the basement and fashioned a metal plate over it that could be locked from inside and out, then he camouflaged it. As stupid as the walking dead were, there was little chance of one of them stumbling upon the only working entrance to the house.

Alan stocked his fortress with the last of the supplies he bought in Fayetteville. He went to the little bait shop operated by Ed, who also had a sporting goods store. There were a few guns in the back room of the bait shop—Ed’s personal weapons, Alan guessed—and Alan took them, along with as much ammunition as he could find.

Ed certainly wouldn’t be needing the stuff anymore. Alan had found him lying on the floor behind the cash register. His neck had a hole in one side where something had been chewing at him. Maybe a rat, maybe another one of those dead neighbors. It was a damn shame, really. It made Alan feel a sudden loss for things past.

Alan put a bullet in Ed’s head for good measure. Ed had been a pretty good guy. He deserved better than to come back as one of those things.

* * *

Life for Alan went on at a snail’s pace. He was pretty much alone now, if you didn’t count the walking dead. They were everywhere these days, coming out of the lake faster than they ever had before. Alan killed them as fast as they appeared, but it did no good. The corpses were taking over, and fuck if Alan was going to be driven from his home.

Alan took a proactive stance with the zombies. He went on regular missions to dispatch his rotting neighbors. Search and destroy missions that almost always seemed fruitless. There were more of them than he’d first thought. And there was a good mix now, some from the old Jonesboro, others from the more recent Jonesville community.

One night Alan came home from one of his nightly assault missions and found a couple of shambling corpses making themselves at home in his house. He recognized all of them as recent living neighbors, friends even, and now they were invading his space. He’d forgotten to lock the door. That pissed him off. Being that careless could cost him.

He blasted the zombie intruders one by one. He dragged them outside, but not all the way to the lake. He was simply too tired. Keeping the neighbors at bay was wearing him thin, wreaking havoc on his health.

But this house and property was his lifelong dream. He’d worked hard to get where he was. He was here for the long haul, by God. Let the community fall apart around him, but he would die before he’d let the zombies take over. They could eat his brains, and he’d come back to defend his home and property.

When his supplies ran low, Alan had to make another trip to Fayetteville. It had been some time since he’d ventured away from Jonesville, but if he planned to continue dealing with the bad elements corroding his neighborhood, he was going to have to replenish his supplies, no two ways about it. Only God could say what he might find when he reached Fayetteville, but there was no other option.

He decided to do it during daylight hours. He needed to rest before attempting the journey. The night before the trip to Fayetteville, he slept as he always did, sitting with his back against the wall, a shotgun across his lap. He was in the dozing stage when the sound of something scuffling around in the kitchen snapped him awake.

The son of a bitches were in his house again.

It bothered him to know the dead things were inside his house, invading his personal space. It was bad enough they had to move into his neighborhood, worse still that they dared to trespass on his property, but this . . . actually invading his home . . . was the ultimate sin.

He listened at his bedroom door for a moment, trying to gauge as much information about the intruders as possible. He wasn’t about to let them catch him by surprise. He judged by the scuffling and scraping noises that there were at least two, maybe more, of the walking dead outside the bedroom door.

The electricity had gone out some time ago. He grabbed a flashlight off his dresser, which would do him no good. He needed both hands for the shotgun. He’d made the mistake once of trying to fire it with one hand, and it had knocked him flat on his ass. Nearly cost him his life too. While he’d tried to regain his senses, a zombie had almost made a meal of him.

He stuck the flashlight in his back pocket, turned the doorknob, and slowly pulled the bedroom door open, cringing as it squeaked on its hinges. Surely the shambling intruders had heard that.

He heard a noise to his right, immediately upon stepping into the dark hallway. He saw it coming at him before he could react, a shadow of a thing just limping along. It got so close that Alan could see it even in the dark. One of its eyes hung from the socket, dangling like a bloody rubber ball, bouncing against the zombie’s cheek with every step the thing took. Its lower jaw hung loose, secured by just a few thin strips of stringy gray flesh. The rest of the face looked like hamburger that had gone bad.

Alan couldn’t get the shotgun up in time. There was no room between him and the reanimated corpse. He managed to raise it gut level and fired, blowing a hole through the zombie’s already-hollow midsection. The blast knocked the creature backward, sending it sprawling across the floor.

“Teach you to break into my fuckin’ house,” Alan said triumphantly.

He took a couple of steps toward the zombie and leveled his shotgun at its head. Just like in the movies, he’d blow its fucking brains all over the place, then he’d dance in the slime, reveling in his victory.

“Sleep tight, you walking abomi—”

John Miller from down the street, now minus his piss- and shit-stained undies, sporting a flaccid, nearly-rotten penis, came out of the darkness behind Alan. The dead Miller thing got one greenish-gray arm around Alan’s neck. The shotgun went off, splattering the head of the corpse on the ground, thank the Lord in Heaven for that much.

“Get off me . . .” Alan wailed, struggling to heft the reanimated corpse of Miller over his shoulder.

It surprised him how much strength these things had. Alan managed to break free of John Miller’s grasp. He took a swing, catching Miller in the cheek. A thick chunk of slimy skin sloughed off, clinging to Alan’s fist.

Another corpse came up behind Alan while he was getting ready to blast the dead corpse that used to be John Miller. This one bit Alan in the neck, and he could actually hear his skin ripping away. The shotgun went off one more time, then Alan was on the floor. Both Miller and the other corpse were on top of him, tearing him open, stringing his intestines out of his stomach like raw sausage . . .

They’re making a mess of my house,
Alan thought, then he blacked out.

* * *

Alan stepped onto the porch and looked toward the outskirts of Jonesville. There were vehicles there—helicopters flying overhead, a perimeter of trucks, men in green clothes with weapons, cars with flashing lights . . . sheer pandemonium.

Alan took it all in for a thoughtful moment, then he lumbered down the front steps and onto the sidewalk, his body canted to the right, his stomach gaping and hollow, with his ribcage exposed.

Some of the other neighbors had come out to see what all the commotion was about. Alan joined them as they made their slow trek toward the newcomers.

Alan already knew what was going on. There were new neighbors today. Intruders. The property values were going to take a nose dive.

No way in hell Alan was going to let that happen.

There was just no way. . . .

Zombie Shift

The radio crackled and sputtered as a voice from the control tower said, “Come in, Leon. You there?”

They’d been trying to raise him for damn near two hours. Billy was tired of hearing it. He figured he’d better try to find Leon on his own. He didn’t much like the idea of leaving the guard shack, but he knew it was either now, on his own terms, or later, when the boys in the control tower decided to start calling him on the radio instead of Leon. It wouldn’t take long anyway. He knew Leon would have his fat ass up in the quarry, catching a few winks in one of the company trucks.