District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Read District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Online
Authors: Shawn Chesser
District:
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
By
Shawn
Chesser
KINDLE
EDITION
Kindle
Edition, License
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like
to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for
each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please go and buy your own copy. Thank you
for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any
similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any
references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights
reserved.
Shawn
Chesser Facebook Author Page
***
Acknowledgements
For Maureen, Raven, and Caden ... I couldn’t have done this
without your support. Thanks to all of our military, LE and first responders
for your service. To the people in the U.K. and elsewhere around the world who
have been in touch, thanks for reading! Lieutenant Colonel Michael Offe, thanks
for your service as well as your friendship. Shannon Walters, my top
Eagle
Eye
, thank you! Larry Eckels, thank you for helping me with some of the
military technical stuff. Any missing facts or errors are solely my fault. Beta
readers, you rock, and you know who you are. Thanks George Romero for
introducing me to zombies. Steve H., thanks for listening. All of my friends
and fellows at S@N and Monday Steps On Steele, thanks as well. Lastly, thanks
to Bill W. and Dr. Bob … you helped make this possible. I am going to sign up
for another 24.
Special thanks to John O’Brien, Mark Tufo, Joe McKinney,
Craig DiLouie, Armand Rosamilia, Heath Stallcup, James Cook, Saul Tanpepper,
Eric A. Shelman, and David P. Forsyth. I truly appreciate your continued
friendship and always invaluable advice. Thanks to Jason Swarr and
Straight 8 Custom Photography
for the awesome cover. Once again, extra special thanks to Monique Happy for
her work editing “District.” Mo, as always, you rose to the occasion! Working
with you has been a dream come true and nothing but a pleasure. If I have
accidentally left anyone out ... I am truly sorry.
***
Edited
by Monique Happy Editorial Services
Three things worked against Sid and Nancy as they traversed
the open range fronting the tree- and scrub-covered foothills to their
immediate left. First was the temperature, which had buoyed from well below
freezing to the mid-fifties in the span of just a couple of hours. Snow-covered
and firm underfoot when they’d taken flight from their captors in the dark early
morning hours, the grassy expanse stretching out before them, a never-ending
canvas of green and brown dotted with stubborn patches of snow, was now sucking
mercilessly at their oversized boots and stealing what precious little energy
they had built up overnight.
Then there was the problem of the clothing they’d taken from
their high-centered Volvo wagon and layered on after they had distanced
themselves from the string of headlights approaching from far off north on the
nearby state route. Amounting to virtually every stitch of cold weather gear
crowding their closets before the outbreak, the once thin and pliable high-dollar
items—all either touted as
GORE-TEX®
Treated
,
Thermal
Insulated
, or purported to possess
Wind Stopping Technology
—were now
heavy with sweat that had them bunching and pinching at the elbows and knees.
Lastly was the throng of dead angling in on them from the
direction of the road and, in the process, blocking the way to Nancy’s sole
objective: Securing anything tangible from the hulk of metal on the road that
might help her to remember her dead little boy.
* * *
Hours earlier, after having abandoned their overloaded car
on the state route, Sid and Nancy had hopped the barbed wire fence and fled
across a sparkling carpet of white toward the night-enshrouded tree line.
However, once they reached the perceived sanctuary the
darkened copse of firs and alders promised, Sid looked back and gasped audibly
upon seeing the laser-straight trail of shadowed footprints leading right to
their position. Thankfully, Nancy had anticipated the effect the diffuse
moonlight would have on the six-inch holes they’d stomped into the recent
accumulation and was already, literally and figuratively, one step ahead of her
husband. Without uttering a word, her breath coming out in great white plumes,
she mouthed: “Follow me,” and, grasping his elbow in a firm grip, led him to
their left, away from the damning footprints.
After a minute or two spent ducking low branches and fighting
through tangles of ankle-grabbing underbrush, the soft yellow glow of
approaching headlights crested a hill ahead and began to slow on the stretch of
two-lane to their left.
Suddenly, and inexplicably, catching Sid by surprise, Nancy went
to ground, dragging him down with her. They lay there for a moment listening to
the sounds of engines laboring in four-wheel drive and breathing hard from the
exertion of breaking brush along the north/south-running tree line. Then, after
the trio of vehicles had passed from right to left on the state route and were drawing
near to their inert Volvo, she rose and helped Sid to stand. They gawked for a
minute, then, with the vehicles gearing down and their brake lights painting
the white stripe of road blood red, Nancy nodded for Sid to follow and started
off at low-sprint, leaving cover behind.
Attempting to conceal the evidence of their passage, Nancy
stepped only in the shadow of a raised feeder road and led them straight to the
hard-to-miss dark oval mouth of a galvanized culvert buried sidelong beneath it.
As the growl of engines softened to an easy idle, Nancy again
fell to her hands and knees, taking Sid along for the ride. Together, panting
and grunting, the two backed themselves into the drainage pipe and lay there as
the
thunk
of doors opening and closing and low murmur of hushed voices
carried back to them.
“Thank God they ate the dog,” Sid whispered to Nancy as the
backlit silhouettes conferred on the shoulder beside the high-clearance vehicles.
“What makes you so sure that was all they ate?” she
whispered as the dark forms crouched down and trained rifle muzzles on the
Volvo.
Sid stared at her stump, but made no reply. Expecting the imminent
braying of hounds finding their trail to shatter the night air, he buried his
face in Nancy’s parka-clad shoulder and began to weep.
Nancy shushed Sid and then directed him to look to the road
where a flashlight beam lanced out to illuminate the burgundy-red Volvo. “It’s
empty,” a voice called out. Then there was cussing. Next, accusations were thrown
back and forth for a minute or two. Finally, the voices died to nothing and a
half-dozen new beams of blue light painted the field a couple of hundred yards
south of their hiding place.
There was a shout, the words garbled, and then a disembodied
voice said, “Wait a second. I’ll get the cutters and snip the wire.”
And someone among the group did just that.
The voices rose in volume and pitch as the group poured
through the newly created opening. Nancy clutched Sid’s hand as their pursuers fanned
out and started heckling and calling them by name. The insults and threats of
violence continued as the five women and one man walked the length of the fresh
tracks and probed the tree line with their flashlight beams.
Soon the cussing was back as the posse fought the same
undergrowth Sid and Nancy had. The futile search lasted an hour and ended in
more arguing. Within ten minutes of the searchers giving up on searching the
tree line and crunching back through the snow towards their awaiting vehicles, doors
were thunking closed and motors were turning over.
After letting the rigs warm up for a spell, the two SUVs
pulled slowly around the lone 4x4 pickup and stopped single file in front of
the Volvo.
Teeth beginning to chatter, Sid said, “You fooled them.”
“No …
we
fooled them,” Nancy replied, absentmindedly
rubbing her bandaged stump.
As the first tendrils of dawn turned the sky to the west
from deep black to a harsh shade of purple, the last vehicle in the small
convoy, a squared-off black pickup truck, stopped alongside the Volvo. Without
warning a lick of red flame lit up the retreating night and a thunderous report
crashed across the countryside.
“There goes the window,” Sid exclaimed.
“We’ll get another car,” Nancy said consolingly.
Sid sighed. “What’s
she
doing?” he asked.
As if answering the question, where there had been darkness
between the vehicles, a bright red point of light spewing smoke and spark
suddenly appeared, illuminating the Swedish wagon in a lava-like red-orange
glow.
“A flare
,” Sid whispered, his already damaged night
vision etched further with red tracers as the truck driver swung the sputtering
and spitting item lazily back and forth a couple of times before tossing it
through the Volvo’s newly shot-out driver’s side window.
For a long while they remained silent and watched their car burn,
their meager belongings—mostly boxes full of memories: curling pictures of
their tow-headed boy, the certificate of live birth with his tiny footprints
stamped in blue ink, and moldy toddler’s clothes Nancy hadn’t been able to part
with after his death at the hands of the rotting dead—going up with it.
Nancy stared stone-faced. She was cried out. Had been for a
long while. Sid, on the other hand, was not. He cried for a long while as
tendrils of smoke curled from the smoldering Volvo. And while he did, a driving
sleet started up and the snow began to melt.
Thankfully, their combined body heat was trapped in the
culvert with them and Sid finally cried himself to sleep.
Nancy spent the next three hours staring at the bloody stump
where her dominant hand used to be. The makeshift dressing was holding, but the
cauterized wound had begun to seep again, the new yellow and red splotches
mingling with the ground-in grass and mud.
After the first hour the sleet turned to a cold, hard
driving rain—the water streaming in the culvert making things even more
miserable.
Hour two saw the rain slow and the pewter clouds cruise off
to the southeast.
By the third hour Nancy still had not heard so much as a
single exhaust note from the direction of the state route—south or north. The
temperature was also rising quickly, and as a result trees to the left were
shedding snow at a quick pace—the thumps startling at first, then welcome as
their true source became known. At the end of the three hours, as if a switch
had been flicked, the storm had been usurped and to the west was brilliant blue
sky as far as the eye could see.
Smiling broadly, Nancy shook Sid, urging him to wake up. Her
simple moment of joy was quickly shattered when she looked down and realized
that the red slush his hand had been resting in was melted fully, which meant
the dead would be thawing out, too—a death warrant for sure, if they didn’t
find shelter soon.
Feeling the sun warming her face, Nancy told Sid to stay
put. After shimmying from the culvert, she commando-crawled a few feet down the
ditch in the direction of the road and lay still in the shallow water pooled
there. After listening hard for a moment and hearing only a steady dripping and
occasional
whoosh-bang
of more snow calving off the tall trees behind
her, she rose up slowly, her head barely breaking cover of the ditch, and
regarded the dense forest that had saved their lives. It was much closer than
she remembered. In the dark the sprint from the forest’s edge to the drainage pipe
had seemed like a forty-yard dash with lions snapping at their heels. In
reality, the lush green wall behind her was less than thirty feet away.
Dead ahead, Nancy’s vantage was mostly blocked by long tufts
of grass slowly springing back after being knuckled under the snow for a day
and a half.
“I’m going to take a better look,” she whispered over her
shoulder to Sid. He muttered something a little louder than she would’ve liked,
and she winced. Then, rearing up off the ground in a pose never attempted
outside of a yoga studio, she got an unobstructed look at the burned-out
windowless shell that had been their Volvo. Craning left, then right, she saw
only a steaming ribbon of road spooling away from the charred hulk in both
directions.
“Clear,” she called over her shoulder. Which was a little
white lie, because though their pursuers were nowhere to be seen, a small group
of undead had keyed in on Sid’s plaintive voice and were ambling onto the
pasture through the breach in the barbed wire fence. The lie had been enough to
get Sid moving and out of the pipe.
In the light of day, Nancy saw that Sid’s clothing, like
hers, was drenched and sluicing water as he stood.
So much for manufacturer’s
promises
, she mused, grabbing hold of her man and pulling him stammering
and flailing in the general direction of the slow-moving zombies.
“Hell are we going that way for?” he asked, his voice gone
hoarse.
“Because everything we had was in that car.
Everything
.”
And by “
everything
” she meant all of her dead son’s
belongings, some of which she hoped had survived the fire. His favorite spoon,
hopefully. Perhaps some of his Hot Wheel cars … at least the metal bodies.
Anything tangible to have and to hold would be better than the memories that
seemed to get fuzzier around the edges the farther she got from that horrific
day in late July when she had lost him.