POW! (Book 1): The Zombie Days (15 page)

"Yeah, babe, you really have a special way of getting through to people, huh?" Evelyn joked as she tried to soothe me.

"So, did y'all get the same treatment as me? Or am I the lucky one here, Bully?"

The kid looked at me and gave a little shrug.

"Since I'm the only one I see on the floor I'll go ahead and say that I'm just lucky. Good for them. If they hurt any of you I would smash these walls down and rip their heads off."

"Really, man? You can't even sit up right now. You think you'd smash through some concrete walls and start rippin' dudes' heads off?" retorted Mac.

"Well, after a few minutes. I didn't mean right this second. C’mon, Mac. Of course I'd need a little recovery time. How long have we been here, anyway?" I looked around the room for a clock.

"Only a few hours, but it feels like an eternity. I can only imagine how you're feeling, son," Carolina said, bowing her head in sadness. "I don't know what's wrong with Chad. He was always such a kind man. Something must have happened to him."

“So, where have you all been? You weren’t in here when Jumbotron came to get me a few minutes ago.”

“We’ve been in here since they brought us to this place. They took you and separated you because they said you might turn, even though we told them that you hadn’t been injured,” answered Evelyn.

"I see, I guess all of the doors in this place kind of look alike. Evelyn, you seemed to have a good grasp on what 'the device,' as your father called it, was intended for earlier. Do you have any idea as to what it possibly could have done to him?" I asked.

Evelyn sat in silence for a moment, thinking.

"You know, I didn't really even consider that that helmet could have done something to him until you mentioned it, Pete. You should really give yourself more credit sometimes. But, since you did mention it, I suppose it’s possible that, as my father was attempting to get into the minds of all of these zombies, some their thoughts could have also seeped into his own mind. Maybe that's how some of them were able to gain intelligence, even. Maybe in some cases the procedure goes the complete opposite direction than what he intended." She gasped as she came to this realization. "That is, of course, assuming zombies do have thoughts of their own."

"So, what you're saying is that some of the zombie thoughts may have been transferred over to your dad?" I summed up.

"It's possible. And, in case you haven't noticed, the zombies have a fairly one track mind, whereas my father is usually pretty reasonable for the most part. But now, he seems to only have a mind for testing his device, no matter what it may do to those he cares about, or how many people could be harmed as a result." She seemed to be in a bad place emotionally right now.

"So what you're saying is we need to get out of here and stop him. Got it."

"No, Peter, what I'm trying to tell you is tha-"

"Got it. Our first order of business would be getting the hell out of here. Who has an idea?" I said as I got to my feet, finally in a painful motion. "And where the hell is all of our stuff?"

"They took all our shit, homie. They said we wouldn't be needing it while we're here."

"How often do they visit? Have they given you guys any food or drinks? Usually in a place this high class and swanky there are plenty of free amenities," I said, still searching for anything of use.

"Now that you mention it, no. They haven't given us squat. I don't think I speak for just myself when I say I could use a little something to sip on," said Mac.

"They’ve made this too easy for me. I'll just pound on the door and demand better treatment, or some shit, and one of you guys will stand behind the door. When they open it up, you bust him in the head and we can get the hell out of here."

"Not bad. Let's get started," said Mac.

I began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" asked Evelyn.

"It's really not funny at all but, being trapped in here and trying to escape, I feel kind of like a prisoner of war."

"You're right, that's not even a little bit funny," she said, shaking her head in disgust.

Kyle chuckled. "Dude, now we can call you P.O.W."

"At least someone got it. Alright, without any further delay I'm going to get started. Mac, you're behind the door. Kyle, you're going to be my backup. Just stand next to me on this side of the door. You can help shout and knock, so they don't think something's up."

"Because one person knocking and shouting is somehow suspicious?" Kyle asked.

"Duh. Would I have mentioned it if it wasn't?" I began pounding on the wall. "Hey! We're hungry and thirsty! You can't treat us this way!"

Kyle soon joined in.

Chapter Nineteen

"Give us some water!" I shouted with a dry mouth.

"Pete, it's been like an hour, homie. I don't think they're gonna cave," said Kyle, who was now squatting next to me with his back against the wall, rather than knocking and shouting with me like he was supposed to.

"But now I'm really thirsty after all of that pounding."

"Are you idiots finished, yet? I've been out here just waiting for you to shut the hell up for even a second. Y'all want this water? Then I suggest you shut your mouths and get the hell away from the door," said a voice on the other side of the door. I knew it wasn't Vincent because this guy sounded like a little wiener. I signaled for Mac to back off. I wanted to play this a little differently than we had originally planned.

"Alright. We're good," I shouted back.

I heard a key enter the lock from the other side of the door. It swung open, revealing a scrawny little dude with a pitcher of water.

I snagged the pitcher from his hand. "Thanks," I said before taking a big gulp of the water, then passing it off. "Did you bring us any sandwiches or anything to eat? My friends haven't eaten in a while. At least get a little something for the kid."

"Alright, I'll see what I can do," the little guy said, looking at Bully with a bit of sadness in his eyes. It looked like he’d probably lost a boy he'd been close to before. I guessed it was probably a brother—he looked too young to be a father. He opened the door and stepped back out.

"What the hell was that, Pete?" asked Mac in a pissed off tone.

"I’ve got a new plan. This little dude might be able to help us out. Think about it, if we were to get out of here, we wouldn't know which way to go! Maybe I can sweet talk him into helping us get out of h-"

"Peter, you do know that you were the only one of us that had to be carried in here, right? The rest of us walked in and we know just how to get back out of here." Evelyn decided to inform me of this now rather than during the past hour I’d spent banging on the door.

"Right . . . Well . . . maybe he'll snag us some grub, then. I know I damn sure could use a bite to eat. So, you’re telling me that you know where they have all of our shit and where the exit is? That's fantastic news. Here's the newly revised plan. First, we'll knock homeboy out and take his rifle. Next, we'll have ourselves a nice lunch, assuming there is enough food to do so. After that, we'll go to the storage room and collect our personal effects. From there, we'll go ahead and split off into two separate groups. Alpha team will be Mac and me; together we'll go attempt to collect or destroy the device. Team two-"

"You mean Bravo?" inquired Carolina.

"If I meant Bravo then that's what I would have said. Anyway, team green will be led outside and out to safety by Kyle. Once you're out, you'll need to find a place to hide, but preferably still be able to see us. That way, you'll be able to signal us to your position. There still might be a high zombie presence out there, so you’ll really have to watch your asses."

As soon as I finished laying out my flawless plan, we could hear the key in the lock outside.

"No time for further explanation. It'll work itself out. It's go time," I said, getting into position.

The door swung open, only it wasn't the little wimp I was expecting. Instead, the ogre Vincent entered our room with a loaf of bread. He walked through the door right after the others scrambled into the same positions as before. From behind the door, Mac pounded his fist into the back of the guard's head. Vincent's head was forced forward from the blow. He took a few steps forward, but he didn’t go down quite so easily. He stood erect and turned to face Mac. As he cocked back his giant fist to clobber him, I shouted out, "Sorry Shrek!" and swept his legs out from under him, causing him to collapse to the side and hit his head on the floor. While he was down and stunned, I grabbed the door and slammed it on his head just hard enough to knock him out. After all, I didn't want to kill my newest friend. That just would have been bad manners.

I liberated his rifle and key ring from him before grabbing the loaf of bread and tossing it to Bully. Kyle and Mac both had to help me drag his enormous ass from the doorway and into the corner of our cell.

"Thanks, dude,” said Mac. “That motherfucker was about to ruin my day, man. That was a close one."

"You tall dudes usually go down easy enough. C’mon, guys, let's get out of here. Where are all of our bags and guns and stuff?" I asked.

"Follow me, man. Unlike you, I was born with a sense of direction," said Mac as he stepped out of the room. He turned the opposite way we would have gone to get to the doctor's office.

"My sense of direction is just fine, thank you," I informed him.

"Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure you'd be lost as shit even if you weren't knocked out when we all got to this place. You're just lucky you got an excuse this time."

"Tell me about it. Thank God for that initial butt strike to my cranium and all of the blows to my head and body that came thereafter. This is really my lucky day, isn’t it, you dingle berry?"

"Shut up man, why you always gotta say something?" he said with a hint of frustration.

"Because you love it so much. Duh."

He let out a small chuckle and turned his head to try to hide it. He turned around a corner and into another hallway which was much shorter than the one we were just in. He went to one of the doors on the left, turned the little silver knob, and the door popped open without needing one of the keys. We were lucky it wasn't locked and we didn’t have to wait for Mac to fumble around with the substantial key ring to find the right key. We all piled inside of the small storage room.

"How many doors deep are we, Pete?" Mac challenged me.

You bastard.
"Three. Why, you thought I wasn't counting?" I said confidently.

"Two, bro. I told you that you suck at directions."

Our assembled group began grabbing our things and getting ready for the next stage of our plan.

"You good, Kyle?” I asked. “Thanks for staying with the girls and the kid. Just try not to shoot anything before we meet up with you, okay? I don’t want to arouse any suspicion or attract any additional threats to be dealt with."

"I can't promise that, but I'll try not to get the urge," he said, grinning.

"Alright, I think we're all set. Good luck out there, guys," I said.

"Yeah, you too, man. Hopefully you won't need it," said Kyle as he and the others headed out of the storage closet.

"The last time you said something like that, you slapped a horse and almost got me killed. I think I’ll take the luck this time, man,” I mumbled, although he’d already left the room and couldn’t hear me. “Are you ready for this, Mac?"

"Let's get it, man. It’s no time for us to just be standing around."

I exited the door behind Carolina, broke off down the opposite way of the hall, and headed back to the doctor's office. Damn, it
was
only two doors to the storage room. I turned back into the main hallway and went to the door that had a nameplate on the wall.
Doctor Chad Korpiklaani
, it read with black lettering on gold plate. The hallway was still clear both ways. I looked back to make sure Mac was ready for anything. He gave me the nod and I tossed the door aside and raised my rifle. To my dismay, the office was totally empty.

I went to the desk where the device had been located when I was here earlier. There was no longer anything sitting atop the desk. I hoped that maybe he’d put the thing away somewhere in the room, so I ripped all of the drawers from the desk and emptied them out on the floor. No joy.

"Why you bein' so
loud
, man? Damn, what happened to noise discipline?" Mac asked.

"I guess you're right, but fuck this guy, Blackness. This doctor dude is a giant douchebag for what he’s been doing to the zombies. Help me look inside these cabinets and then flip them the hell over, too."

Mac shrugged and nodded as I started yanking the drawers out. He did the same thing to the cabinets on the other side of the room. After we’d destroyed the office, there was still no sign of the device.

"You want to start going room to room?" Mac asked.

"Nah, man. That would take just the two of us all night; this place is fucking huge. I think it might be too late for that now, anyhow. I think that us just showing up might have forced them to jump the gun on Operation Graveyard Earth. Let's go check on Kyle and the girls and see if we can come up with some more ideas on how to proceed with this." I reached for the door, but Mac grabbed my wrist to stop me.

"If they haven't gone to start testing, they could be off fuckin' with it more and makin' it even worse, Pete. I think we should try to look for this asshole."

"They aren't trying to fuck everything up on purpose, bro. The doctor just isn't in his right state of mind. Maybe a nice savage beating to the head and face could rattle free some sane thoughts, though. How about we go pay a visit to our replacement prisoner and try to get him on board?" I said with a smile on my face as I imagined the doctor getting a beating.

"You're the man with the plan. Let's do it, brother." He let go of my arm and I proceeded to open the door. We headed down the hall once more and made it to the turn. Once we went around the corner, I bumped into the little scrawny fella that proclaimed to be a guard as Mac slammed into my back, knocking the wormy dude to the floor. I promptly smashed my fist into his jaw and easily knocked him unconscious.

"It looks to me like we just got a new potential member of the good guy squad, Mac. Want to give me a hand dragging this fool into the cell?"

"For sure, man. I'm glad it's this little dude we have to drag and not that big motherfucker. I think he might have actually weighed a ton." We each grabbed the guard under his arms and began to drag him to our former prison cell.

We got to the room and tossed the puny guard inside. Lucky for us, Vincent was still knocked out cold. He was much easier to reason with in this state. I saw that they each had handcuffs on their belts, so I reached down and grabbed the set off the little dude’s belt and tossed them to Mac. Then, I walked over to put a set on Vincent myself.

I started lightly slapping Vincent across his face in attempt to wake him up without pissing him off too much. His eyes fluttered open and anger immediately filled his face. He lurched forward in an attempt to rip my head off. Considering our last meeting, I felt this was a totally reasonable reaction to seeing me. I must admit, I may have been slightly worried that he might rip the cuffs in half before tearing my head off.

"Sorry about earlier, buddy,” I said. “I hope you don't take it personally. Trust me, we're the good guys in all of this madness. How long have you been working with Doctor Dickhead?"

Through gritted teeth, the beast growled, "For about a year."

"And, in that time, have you noticed any changes in him? Because we're here thanks to his wife and daughter dragging us down here to save his sorry ass. And you know what? We all wound up thrown into a damn prison cell for our efforts. Does that sound like someone you would like to represent?"

The giant looked lost in thought . . . or maybe he was just still really pissed off at me. I couldn’t quite tell which.

"Doctor K said that he was going to get rid of all of them. He said that he was working on a device that could be deployed locally and sold around the world for a fortune. He said that if I worked with him and made sure everything went smoothly, then I would come out of this with all the money I could ever dream of spending."

"Oh sure, and it would have been fantastic for you if that was all that his magic hat did. But did you know that that thing alters the thoughts of the zombies? It actually puts some of his thoughts into their dead brains. And that doesn't always work out quite as well as the good doctor had intended, believe it or not. You see, sometimes the creatures are able to hold onto some of
his
thoughts and are able to gain intelligence and become able to learn and evolve into something even more terrible. Did you know that some of them can talk?"

"More terrible?” he asked. “That's not good. These things are a constant pain in my ass every single day as it is now."

"And that's not the worst part. Little did the doctor know, some of the zombies’ thoughts ended up seeping into
his
mind as well. That's why he seems like a bigger dick than usual . . . hopefully. That's where we were hoping you might come in to help us out a little bit. If you can get your massive hands on the doctor and smash his noggin around a little bit, maybe you can make him come to his senses and see what a fucked up mess he’s making of everything. Having been on the wrong side of those fists, I know it can change your mind about some shit
real
quick. And I can tell that you’re quite a big fan of hitting things, isn’t that right? What do you say, big guy?"

"I say fuck no!” he said without hesitation. “What are you, crazy or something? What if you're wrong and I lose out on my shot to be rich when this is all over?!"

"That's one way to look at it,” I began. “The other way would be, what if I'm right and he unleashes an altogether new terror upon this already hell of a planet? You think those dead dudes are a big pain in the ass now? Wait until they start to organize and plot out how to harvest us instead of being driven by pure instinct. What then? There's no amount of money that could save you in that scenario. You'll be fucked just like the rest of us. And in that case, there probably never would be a time when this is all over. It would be the end of life as we know it. We’d all be doomed."