Slow Burn: A Zombie Novel (27 page)

Whoever reads this, and hopefully it is someone I worked with, I, along with several other officers, have taken the vehicles to Terry Coleman’s cabin in Wisconsin. If you are reading this, and you don’t know where Terry’s place is, sucks to be you! Everyone we want up here knows the way.

It was signed by my other workout partner, Chad Evanston.

“
That bastard!” I muttered aloud with a chuckle. “He beat us to it!”

“
What did you find, Mike?” Mattie asked.

“
Well,” I replied, handing her the note, “Chad, and what looks like a bunch of the S.W.A.T guys, took all the trucks and supplies to Commander Coleman’s place in Wisconsin.”

After reading it herself, Mattie ripped off a string of curses that made me proud. Finally she calmed down and just stared at the paper.

"I don't know where Commander Coleman’s place is, do you?" she asked.

“
Very impressive string of curse words,” I replied. “And by the way, yes I do.”

Mattie just stuck her tongue out at me.

"Oh relax! His place is too far to realistically reach now anyway," I said with a wink.

After finally getting her to crack a smile, we walked back out to the truck empty handed. Seeing this Jamere gave us a questioning look.

“
Plan B?” he asked.

“
Yup.”

Assuming our prior seating arrangements, Jamere let us in on the fact that that he heard some gunshots back from Stephen’s general area while we were clearing the substation.

“
They definitely came from back by the area of Walgreens,” he added.

“
We were bound to run into trouble out here,” Mattie replied. “I hope they are okay.”

“
I’m sure they are fine,” I told Mattie reassuringly.

I figured it was as good a time as any to check on his status and let him know we were switching to Plan B. Hopefully they had better luck than us.

* * * * * * * *

Stephen wheeled a shopping cart down the aisles and started filling plastic bags with anything that looked useful on the shelves or ground. It was slim pickings but he managed to salvage some hygiene and first aid products. Paul, on the other hand, had hit pay dirt and tossed several boxes of the two different inhalers into his backpack. He also found several large bottles of antibiotics and pain killers and grabbed them as well.

As Stephen was finishing loading the cart and began to wheel it to the front of the store, his radio crackled to life. It was Mike, who gave him a rundown of what happened at the substation and that they were going to Plan B. He acknowledged and informed Mike that they were just finishing at the pharmacy and since they still had time, would head to the nearby grocery store.

“
Jamere said he heard some shooting,” Mike asked. “Was that you guys?”

“
10-4,” Stephen answered. “I heard Chris open up a few minutes ago, and I had to put down a zombie pharmacist I found hiding in the back. Scared the shit outta me, those bastards are sneaky!”

Exiting the store and piling the dozen bags of medication, bandages, antiseptics and such into the bed of Chris' truck, Stephen noticed that Chris had put down at least ten zombies in their absence.

“
Chris is fine, Mike,” he said into the radio. “I’ll get back to you in a bit.”

“
Roger,” Mike chirped. “Over and out.”

With a "Good job zombie slayer!" and a pat on the back, Stephen filled Chris in on their success with the inhalers and what he heard from Mike. Stephen and Chris both agreed that at least somebody they knew had gotten there first and were able to use the equipment.

“
Maybe it gives them a chance,” Stephen wondered aloud. “We are already a lot better off than most.”

“
I really didn’t think those trucks would still be there, but it was worth a shot,” Chris replied. “Can’t win them all.”

“
Yeah, having an armored personnel carrier would have been huge,” Stephen agreed. ”At least until it broke down.”

“
Let’s go hit the grocery store,” Paul said, joining the conversation. “The sooner we get the hell out of here, the better.”

Dan needed some air and stood up from the basement work bench, where Stephen had installed his HAM radio console, and grabbed the portable. On the way up the basement steps, he could hear the banter back and forth between Stephen and Mike, who were still in the process of their raids.

All seemed to be going pretty well so far. Pausing in the living room area, he called up to Robert and asked how things looked from his end.

“
Looks great,” Robert replied. “No rotting fuckers around that I can see.”

“
Outstanding. I’m going to head out back, take a piss and smoke a Cuban,” Dan acknowledged loudly. “If anything changes that’s where you’ll find me.”

Dan first peeked and then walked out the rear patio doors into the backyard. Taking a few moments to relieve his bladder in the corner, he sighed in relief. Now having finished the most pressing issue, he retrieved a nice fat Cuban cigar from his pocket and lit it. Savoring the fine smoke, Dan took a few moments to relax. He had been on high alert since he’d found his infected neighbor inside his home several days ago. As he was reflecting on how the world as he knew it had gone to shit, movement from his peripheral vision grabbed his attention. Walking towards him in almost a drunken way was a tall blonde woman. Dan walked in the direction of the fence on the back side of Stephen’s property to get a closer look. Nearing the woman, he could see that she was very attractive.

She appeared to have been in a struggle. Her shirt was torn open in the front, exposing a very impressive set of breasts. She was wearing a pair of tiny blue jean shorts that only enhanced her long, shapely legs. A pink sandal was on her left foot, the other was missing.

Today’s my lucky day!
he thought to himself.
Time to be a hero
.

When the beautiful woman stumbled nearer, Dan asked loudly, “Ma’am, are you alright?”

She didn’t reply as she grew ever closer.

Dan really could not get his eyes off the delicious sight of her wondrous chest jiggling to his delight before his hungry eyes. Scanning her from head to toe, he frowned at what he noticed then. On the woman’s right wrist was a small amount of blood. When she reached the fence and was brought up short of him, he got a really good view of her injured wrist when she reached out and attempted to grab him. There it was, waving a few feet from his face; an angry red and swollen bite mark.

Looking up, he saw the blood red eyes combined with the moans and felt the excitement drain out of him.

She’s a fucking zombie, just my luck
.

She couldn’t have been turned into one for more than a couple of hours, he determined, seeing that she still had the skin coloring of a living person and didn’t have the smell of an undead corpse.

“
Where were ya hiding out, baby?” Dan asked, knowing he would never get an answer.

Her only reply was feminine moaning, which sounded to Dan like she was having sex, and it was beginning to turn him on.

Taking in her good looks, smoking body and porn star caliber whimpers made him sit back and contemplate the unthinkable.

If he could restrain her and maybe put some tape around her mouth… he couldn’t believe he was even thinking it, but he just might hit that.

Going over in his head exactly what items he would need to do just that, all while wondering if the zombie virus could be transmitted sexually, he shook his head and decided he would definitely “glove up”.

Just when he had convinced himself to give it a shot, Dan was brought back to reality by the sharp crack of gunfire. That was followed instantly by the head of the female zombie disintegrating from a 12 gauge slug. Dan jumped in surprise, drew his pistol and spun around to see who had taken her out. Standing in the patio sliding doorway was Robert, who was still in the process of lowering the shotgun.

“
Wow, that was a close call!” Robert yelled out to Dan. “Glad I have this scope. Are you alright?”

“
Um yeah, I’m good,” Dan said dryly. “I was just teasing the disgusting critter.”

“
You’re fucking crazy!” Robert replied. “I’m going to head back upstairs. You’re damn lucky I came down to check on you.”

When Robert went back inside, Dan turned and looked at the corpse and shrugged. Turning back to the house, he stuck his cigar back in his mouth and walked inside.

Damn… she really was hot.

* * * * * * * *

Entering the grocery store parking lot, the trio was presented with a much different scenario than Walgreens. In a crisis, unprepared people always stripped the shelves of food at the grocery stores, and this is what had happened here as well. However, it appeared that dozens had gotten swept up in the frenzy and somehow became infected while they fought one another over the last boxes of Pop Tarts and TV dinners. Stephen observed a large group of zombies that were crowded around a small red Toyota Prius, attempting to get inside the vehicle. It looked like the small hybrid car was wedged up on a parking barrier, and apparently the driver was unable to free it from the concrete block. It looked like someone was alive in the car, and Stephen shook his head at the stupidity of the global warming idiots.

“
I bet whoever’s stuck in that pretty electric coffin wished they had a big gas guzzling Hemi right now!” Stephen joked as he and Chris devised an attack plan.

Chris told Stephen to distract the zombies, pull them away from the car and then assist him into forming an ‘L’ formation flanking maneuver to set up crossfire. Stephen nodded and took off running to the left side of the car and began to yell and wave his arms. It worked like a charm. The large moaning group quit trying to bite what appeared to be a young woman through the car windows, and started stumbling towards Stephen. Looking at the zombies up close still made Stephen’s blood run cold. You could tell they were no longer human by the unnatural way they moved, and instead reminded Stephen of the monsters all boys were afraid of growing up, the monsters that made you run into your parents’ room after a bad dream. Stephen shuddered slightly at the thought as he got down to business.

After making sure the woman in the car was out of their fields of fire, Stephen and Chris began to methodically pick off the zombies individually. The sound of gunfire again echoed throughout the surrounding neighborhood as the pair of rifles went to work. Head shot after head shot littered the pavement with a disgusting mixture of blood and brain matter. Stephen tried not to think of the zombies as once being human as he took down one female zombie in a mini-skirt, who probably was once a smoking hot MILF. The terrible injuries he saw, as well as the characteristic dead eyes, made this task easier to accomplish. As he terminated another threat, a little kid zombie wearing a Dora the Explorer t-shirt, Stephen allowed himself to think that maybe the kid belonged to the MILF, who left her daughter in the car while she ran into the store.

Within a short amount of time, Stephen and Chris had wiped out the disgusting creatures that had trapped the young woman in her car. Stephen observed that he had more rounds on target than during his hasty retreat from the housing projects days earlier.

“
No better training than live fire!” Stephen yelled over to Chris, who nodded in agreement.

Changing out another empty thirty-round AR-15 magazine, Stephen looked up when he heard a car door open. He watched a pretty redhead cautiously exit the tiny, useless car. She timidly tried to find a clean spot to step on and hopped from side to side to avoid the bigger piles of blood and filthy corpses.

“
Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!” she exclaimed as she hugged them both firmly and shook their hands. “I’ve been trapped in there for days. Thank God I had some groceries with me. I was forced to go to the bathroom in—”

“
It’s okay, we got you now,” Stephen said, politely interrupting her. “Just take a deep breath and relax.”

Chris opened a bottle of water from his pack and handed it to her. While she greedily gulped it down, they were able to piece together her story. Her name was Holly Gray, a local girl who lived in a nearby subdivision, who had just gotten a job as a teacher at Titan Middle School. She had arrived at the store to get a few things she needed when she ran low at home.

“
The man on the news said to stay home but all the pictures were from big cities,” Holly said with a shocked look on her face. “I figured it would never happen way out here.”

Holly told her tale of grabbing some food and panicking as several people in the store began attacking one another. She was too scared to even wait to pay for the items and barely made it to her car in time. The parking lot was in chaos by that time and her sad story ended with her being stuck in the parking lot surrounded by zombies. She got stuck trying to flee and eventually ran out of gas and battery power from using the lights, AC and radio.