Jake's Law: A Zombie Novel (3 page)

For
twelve years, Jake had been a Pima County Deputy Sheriff, dealing mostly with search and rescue situations. On the side, he had operated an online website for hunters and survivalists – preppers. He had also sold and repaired guns at local guns shows and often acted as a guide for area hunters. It never made him rich, but it kept him in beans and beer and off the grid. Now, there was no law but his law, Jake’s Law. Gun shows were a thing of the past, and no one hunted for sport anymore. Those who had survived the apocalypse needed no advice on surviving, and those who hadn’t were beyond caring. Now, he killed zombies and tried to survive.

E-Day
had come for Jake on June 6, 2015, at four p.m. Washington time when the President of the United States declared Martial Law and dispatched troops to control the growing civil unrest racking the country. It had been the last straw to an already distrustful populace. Armed militias fought the troops, local police fought the National Guard, and private citizens fought with one another. Cities burned and chaos ruled the land. No longer safe in the streets, people huddled in their homes and died of starvation. Now, one year later, only the undead walked the decaying streets of America.

After a breakfast of bacon, grits, and scrambled eggs
, he washed the dishes and puttered around the house for a while in a futile attempt to postpone his grisly chore. Finally, he could put it off no longer. The longer the bodies lay in the sun, the riper they would become. He washed his face in the sink, combed his too-long brown hair, and took his morning dose of Actos. Lean and muscular, his Type 2 diabetes had taken him completely by surprise at the age of twenty-three. His body’s cells no longer properly utilized the insulin his pancreas produced. Left untreated, attacks of hypoglycemia left him weak and dizzy. The Actos, or
Pioglitazone
, a
Thiazolidnedione
drug, kept his diabetes under control but sometimes caused edema. Thus, he often had to take Torsemide, a diuretic, to reduce swelling. It was a vicious cycle.

His disease had cost him his Army career. As a weapons specialist for a recon squad in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Afghanistan, he had thought being tired and achy had just been part of the job, the cost of
maintaining his country’s freedom, but one particularly severe dizzy spell had led to his diagnosis and subsequent discharge. It hadn’t been bad enough to prevent him from becoming a Pima County Deputy. It had taken the end of the world to end that career. Now, at thirty-two, he was just another survivor.

His small
ranch was more than his bastion of freedom from the grid. It was his fortress. It was his little slice of heaven, a
prepper’s
dream. Those who had called him paranoid were now either dead or dying. However, he took no comfort from their misery. To him, it had simply been a matter of being prepared for any emergency. A plague of zombies had been very low on his list of catastrophes. Luckily for him, like thirty percent of the population, he was immune to the virus, but he wasn’t immune to zombies.

As he strode to the door, he
strapped on his .45 and picked up his shotgun. His fingers lightly caressed the metal five-pointed star lying on the table, his great-grandfather’s Arizona Ranger badge. Its surface wore the patina of time, but bore a slightly shinier spot where a bullet had grazed it in 1886. He picked up the badge and clipped it to his shirt. He was no longer a deputy. There was no longer any law. He wore the badge as a reminder of
Jake’s Law #5 – In a lawless land the biggest gun makes the law.

Grabbing a can of kerosene, he trudged down the path to
the shed where he stored his ATV. After hooking up the small trailer to the Polaris Ranger, he drove down to the metal gate in the ten-foot-high stone wall which he had laboriously constructed across the canyon by hand. Working alone, it had been a gargantuan effort, but in hindsight, the fence had probably saved his life. He had since topped it with coils of razor wire. The canyon walls were too steep to easily climb and the terrain too rugged for casual hikers or unwanted visitors. He pressed the button on the remote and waited for the gate to roll open.

He
disliked getting near zombies, dead or alive. Immune or not, he still hated taking unnecessary risks. His attention was so focused on the two corpses in front of him, so dreading his task that he failed to see a third zombie hidden within the early morning shadows of the wall. He stopped the ATV and had taken only two steps from it, when the zombie, an emaciated scarecrow, lurched toward him, the low growl erupting from its throat his only warning.

Jack’s
Law #12 – Stay Focused
. His wandering mind had almost cost him his life. He swung the barrel of the shotgun and fired from the hip as he fell backwards, taking no time to properly aim. From less than six feet away, the .36-inch diameter triple-ought buckshot pellets tore through the zombie’s torso like a scythe, ripping open his abdomen and sending him spinning to the ground. Severely damaged, it continued to reach for him with one outstretched hand, dragging its body behind it as it crawled toward him. Jake cursed himself for his stupidity and fired another round into the creature’s head. Brains and skull fragments splattered the ground, as the head disintegrated from the barrage of steel pellets.

He picked himself up, dusted off, and set about his distasteful task.
The mask he wore over his mouth and nose helped reduce the stench, but even live zombies stank of rotting flesh as outer layers of flesh decayed and sloughed away. Dead ones smelled worse. Using latex gloves, he rolled the three corpses in plastic sheets and loaded them onto the trailer. On the dirt where the zombies lay, tiny black worms no larger than snips of sewing thread wriggled in pools of rapidly congealing blood, the Stagger’s culprit, the adult parasite. Jake suppressed a shudder of revulsion and splashed kerosene over the ground. He ignited it with a match and watched the tiny parasites shrivel and burn.

Satisfied he had killed them all, he
drove two miles to a gully, and dumped the corpses over the edge. They rolled down the embankment to join the dozen or so skeletal remains of previous visitors. He poured a liberal amount of kerosene over them, lit a rolled up piece of newspaper, and dropped it into the gully. The flames spread quickly, engulfing the zombie corpses. He preferred to incinerate the corpses rather than risk scavengers eating them. He knew that heat killed the parasitic worms, but he didn’t know if it destroyed the encapsulated sporazoa through which the disease spread.

He
backed away from the acrid cloud of thick, black smoke, but lingered for a while to assure total cremation. While he waited, he climbed atop a ridge and scanned the horizon toward San Manuel through his binoculars. The small city once had a population of 3500, evenly split between Hispanic and whites, but had been hemorrhaging people since the closing of the copper mine in 2003. He had shopped there, picked up his mail at the local post office, ate at the Subway and the
Las Casas
Restaurant, and drank a few beers at Michael’s Bar, but he had never considered himself a part of the town.

A loner
by nature, the people of San Manuel were as foreign to him as the population of Mexico or India. He understood their language and their customs, but not their need to congregate in large numbers or their zeal of a lifetime’s pursuit of the almighty dollar simply to die at an early age, exhausted by life and slightly less poor than before. His solitary life didn’t appeal to many. Perhaps he was lacking an empathy gene or suffered from a lack of whatever chemical drove people to seek human companionship. Whatever its cause, it had made him fit to survive in the new world rising from the ashes of the old.

A pall of smoke rose over the town
, as it had for the past two days. Some large building was burning, or maybe it was an out-of-control grass fire. With no firefighters remaining, a grass fire could rage for weeks. He had watched one burn the north slopes of the San Galiuros a few months earlier, covering almost three hundred acres. He was safe enough in his remote canyon, but the smoke had made breathing difficult. From the amount of smoke visible, perhaps the entire town was in flames. Briefly, he considered the possibility that the army had arrived and was burning bodies as he was doing, but the chances were remote. Last, he had heard, the U. S Army had disintegrated into a dozen regional armies trying to eradicate the zombie threat and restore order in confined areas, like Phoenix, Portland, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta. His curiosity begged him to investigate, but his common sense told him to wait. Whatever the cause, he could do nothing about it.
Jake’s Law #2 – Long noses often get lopped off.

By the time he returned to his
ranch, the sun had topped seven-thousand-foot Basset Peak a dozen miles to the southeast. He thought he saw a brief glint of metal from the B-24 bomber that had crashed there in 1943, killing the entire crew, but it was probably just his imagination. Soon, the cool shadows would evaporate in the mounting heat, introducing the start of another smoldering day to his canyon.

He took his second cup of coffee
of the morning on the balcony, dragging his favorite leather chair outside to sit in the sun. He pushed an errant lock of hair back under his University of Arizona baseball cap. Soon, he would have to use the clippers to chop it to a more manageable length. He shaved every other day more to retain the habit than a dislike of beards. Personal hygiene and grooming were often the first habits to disappear in a crisis situation. He refused to give in to such a slacker mentality. He had carefully prepared for an emergency, and he wasn’t going to let the small things ruin his plans.

His ranch reflected his
careful planning. A shallow wash ran the length of the block fault uplift canyon from Split Rock Falls at the head of the canyon to the desert beyond. During the summer monsoon season and the winter rains, the wash ran brown with muddy water. He had built a dam across the head of the wash from native stone, creating a small retention pond for irrigation. Now, the pond and the wash were bone dry, but his one-hundred-fifteen-feet-deep drilled well tapped a small aquifer and supplied more water than he needed in the dry seasons for his garden. His crops – mostly beans, peas, okra, carrots, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, and corn – thrived in the irrigated soil. Canned goods were growing scarcer and becoming more difficult to procure by scavenging. It was easier and healthier to grow fresh vegetables.

His small
ranch also housed four pigs, a chicken coop with fifteen hens and two roosters, and two goats, supplying him with meat, milk, and eggs. He hunted as often as possible to supplement his meat, but game was becoming scarce on the lower elevations. A large ironwood tree and a few sycamores provided some shade for the animals to escape the worst of the day’s heat. He had planted two lemon trees, an orange tree, and an avocado tree a year earlier. If he survived long enough, he would have fresh fruit to supplement his diet. A small smokehouse beside the original ranch house was filled with hanging slabs of bacon, ham, venison, and pork sausages.

The one thing he had not prepared for was the loneliness.
He had considered himself a hermit, seeking out companionship only on rare occasions and only on his terms, but at least he had been able to walk among people without the need to interact with them. Now, the lack of companionship was taking its toll on him. On his infrequent trips to scavenge for supplies or to raid a pharmacy for his medication, he saw many zombies but few living souls. Survivors had, like him, learned to hide. He often wondered if eyes watched him from behind curtained windows as eager for fellowship as he was. Only the fear of being greeted by a bullet prevented him from knocking on random doors. He found himself watching old movies on his DVD just to hear the sound of human voices. Lately, he had developed an unhealthy lust for Ingrid Bergman. He had once watched
For Whom the Bell Tolls
three times in a row just to gaze into her mesmerizing blue eyes.

A sudden sound tore his mind from his daydream
. He glanced down the canyon in alarm, but it was only the two roosters fighting for territory, not coyotes. Predators like coyotes and mountain lions were becoming more numerous and bolder and had made several attempts at his animals. The chickens quickly settled back down. It amazed him how much like chickens humans were. They staked out claims to small parcels of land and fought all comers for a few kernels of corn. That same lack of cooperation had doomed mankind. Now, the zombies ate humans like humans ate chickens. He wondered if they considered humans to be finger licking good.

The temperature
soared as the day wore on. By noon, his thermometer read 101. It was almost monsoon season, but he thought it would be weeks before the monsoons came, bringing with them a few clouds, a brief respite from the heat, and life-giving rain. He retreated to the relative coolness inside. He hadn’t installed air conditioning. That would have been too large a load for the solar panels, but he had fans. They moved sufficient air to keep the inside of the house comfortable. Part of the rear wall of the house was built into the solid cliff face, providing a heat sink that retained the heat of the day in the winter and the cool of the night in the summer.

His
roof-mounted solar panels provided electricity for a refrigerator to store food, but he kept his refrigerated supplies to a minimum in the event of several consecutive cloudy days. Mostly he used it for beer. A large pile of oak firewood chopped and split from trees higher up the slope was stacked beside the house. The wood fueled his fireplace, offering heat in the winter and doubling as a means of cooking if he ran out of propane for the stove.