State of Decay (Omnibus (Parts 1-4)) (2 page)

΅

“Come on, Mel, you know you want to.” I threw a fry at Jess and smirked when she ducked to dodge the greasy bomb sailing her way. I did want to go, but that was beside the point. She didn’t let up. “You know what they’re playing, don’t you?” she asked in a sing-song voice. The old movie theater in town was playing “Benny &
Joon”, one of my all-time favorite movies, for their Thursday Throwback feature show. All that awesomeness for a throwback ticket price of one dollar. “You probably also know Miguel will be there too, right?” My eyes widened and Jessica giggled. I hadn’t known that. All that sexiness and he’d be going to watch a chick flick? Swoon.

“I’d love to, Jess, but I probably shouldn’t tonight,” I said with a sigh. “I have tons of homework to catch up on and I’m supposed to spend some quality time with my dad making fun of Jerry Springer reruns.” I laughed when Jess choked and ranted because I’d used the terms “quality time” and “Jerry Springer” in the same sentence. But, when it came down to it, Jess didn’t push. She never did. She knew my real reason for not going out, but she understood that I didn’t want to talk about it, and that made her the best friend in the world. My mom’s surgery had failed and her brain tumor was more aggressive than ever and I spent all of my free time with her.

“Well, don’t blame me if Miguel has a hard time keeping his hands to himself … I am pretty fabulous, you know.” She flipped her long, blond hair and winked at me.

΅

God, I hoped she was going to be safe.

“Jesus,” my dad muttered as we drove into town. I snapped out of my memories, sat up quickly, and placed a hand on the gun strapped to my leg. The scene we drove into was so unbelievable that I was sure I was either having some sort of out-of-body experience, or that we had somehow driven onto the set of a horror film. Fires burned everywhere, people ran and screamed, some were bashing in store front windows … and mixed in with it all was tumultuous violence and the stench of death. Bodies lay haphazardly on sidewalks and out in the middle of the street, people fought off humans with eerie, vacant eyes, blood clotted around their mouths, and ripped skin hanging from their teeth as they tore into the remains of their latest victim.

“Dad?” I whispered as I swallowed the bile in my throat.

“Hold on, Mel. We are going to get out of here.” I gazed straight ahead and tried to block out all the violence and gore surrounding me, tried to see how my dad was going to get us out of the center of town … but the streets were becoming more and more congested and I couldn’t help but feel panic starting to claw at my chest. My dad gunned the gas and we began to weave dangerously through the streets, trying to get free of the madness. If we could just get off of the main drag in town, and make it to the main highway, we’d have a straight shot to the army base. A woman
ran out in the road and my dad swerved hard to the left. I screamed and grabbed the door handle, holding on for dear life. We missed the woman, but only by a few inches. My dad swerved again, this time trying to miss one of the lumbering corpses, but the jeep swiped him, causing the corpse to fly back in the street. I glanced back and saw the body get up like nothing had happened … and then attack the woman we had just missed a few seconds earlier. My hand immediately went to my gun, but we were speeding away and I couldn’t do anything. I had never felt so utterly wretched as I did driving out of that city and not doing a damned thing to help anyone. I could only hope help—in the form of police or military—would be on their way to help as soon as possible.

“How did this happen?” I asked after we were a few miles out of the city.

“I don’t know, but I am going to find out,” my dad promised vehemently.

The following hours of my memory aren’t much more than extremely realistic screen shots in my mind. I think I prefer it that way … glad that my mind chooses to try and protect me from the horrors of that first day. The day that my old life ended.

My dad was flipping through radio channels, finding none that were broadcasting anything about what was happening, and cursing under his breath … I remember that. I remember him saying we couldn’t be more than twenty minutes from the base and the next thing I remember was a flash. Not a flash of light, just a flash of red … a red shirt. The next thing I know the whole world was spinning. The whole world was red.

“Melody? Melody … are you okay?” His voice seemed so far away. My eyes cracked open and I saw my dad’s concerned face close to mine. “Thank God.” His voice echoed around me, like we had somehow ended up in a tunnel.

Blackness
.

An annoying dinging replaced my dad’s voice. My eyes fluttered open again. I reached up to touch my head. It felt abnormally inflated and my hand felt light and detached from the rest of my body. When I brought it back in front of me I saw that it was covered in blood. I was suddenly drowned in sounds … everything came rushing back so quickly that I nearly passed out from the sensory overload. I gazed around myself and realized I was alone in the jeep and my dad’s door was standing wide open. The dinging noise.
I must have hit my head on the dashboard
, I thought as I stumbled out of the jeep and into the damp grass. But, where was my dad? My hand rested on my gun as I made my way around to the back of the jeep, barely taking note that the front end of our vehicle was wrapped around a small tree.

I spotted my dad hunched over a body several yards away, I started to walk that way, but before I could make it … a large figure scuffled from behind an over turned Impala and fell on top of my dad. I screamed out, my voice cutting through the morning like a wayward piece of shrapnel finding its mark. My dad moved quickly, but not before the large, dead
man sunk his teeth into his shoulder. I grabbed my gun and ran to help him, but in my absolute terror, I didn’t notice the small figure lunging for me.

The next thing I remembered was landing on the pavement with an
umph
and my gun hitting the ground about a foot away from me … and
way
too far away from dad. I looked up into the crazed, colorless eyes of a little girl, about seven or eight years old, with blond pigtails and gnashing teeth. I held onto the girl’s neck and used all my strength to keep her teeth from getting too close to my face. It wasn’t easy … she was a lot stronger than any normal seven year old should have been. I turned my head and reached frantically for my gun. My arm began to tremble with the effort it took to hold the little demon off of me as I strained to reach the handle of my handgun. When my fingers wrapped around the butt of the gun, I caught a glimpse of my dad wrestling with the huge monster on top of him. He bellowed out his anger and pain as the man ripped into the soft flesh of his neck.

“Dad … no!” I screamed as tears began coursing down my face. I brought my gun up with my free hand and pointed it right in the face of the miniature monster on top of me. Even then, my hand wavered, my trigger finger stiffened. She was a little girl … someone’s baby … still wearing hair bows and a Disney Princess tee.

“Take the … shot.” I turned my head and found my dad’s eyes narrowed on me, his words coming out in wet gasps. “Take … the … fucking … head… shot, Mel. You … will … live, baby girl.”  A sob escaped my chest as I turned and put the gun up to the little girl’s head and pulled the trigger. I closed my eyes as the little body fell limply on me and blood and brain matter and miniscule chunks of skull pelted my face.

I don’t remember much else of what happened, none of the details, thankfully. But I do know that my gun was missing three bullets when I was lucid enough to check later. I know I not only killed a little girl that day, but I also put down her dad … and my own father before his body ever had a chance to change. It was the only thing I could for him, the only way I could think to let him die with his dignity. He deserved that at the very least.

I grabbed my backpack and the rucksack out of the back of the jeep and added a few of my dad’s weapons and ammo to the bag I had packed. I ran into the tree line of the woods on the side of the road that we had been driving on. I walked without stopping, I walked without thinking, and I walked with my eyes on the road, making sure I wouldn’t run into more dead, and trying to avoid running into any living people. I knew without a shadow of doubt that I would have been an easy target for people trying to survive. A teenage girl carrying supplies and weapons. I was a sitting duck in a world gone crazy. My only goal was to survive … and to survive meant getting to the army base.

I heard the gun fire before I saw the base. Hell, I heard the screams and the groans before I saw the base. And when I was finally close enough to see it from the cover of the woods, I realized with a sinking heart that there would be no survival and no safe haven there. The army base was overrun
with dead and dying. I sat my rucksack down on the ground and just stood there listening to the deafening sounds of chaos all around me. What was I supposed to do? What would my Dad have done? A tear tracked down my cheek and I quickly wiped it away and clenched my fist. There would be time for that later … right then I had to make a decision. Acting rashly could get me killed. I breathed deeply through my nose and picked my bag up off the forest floor and turned to move deeper into the woods, away from the base, away from the roads, and away from everything.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do in the long run, but I did know one thing … I was going to live. If I had to, I’d taking the fucking head shot over and over again, but you better bet your sweet ass, I wasn’t going down without fight.

I was going to survive.

I
could almost pretend everything
was normal. If I closed my eyes tight enough and long enough I could even imagine my dad was just gone to catch us some fish for dinner and we were on a normal father-daughter camping trip … just like always. My reality was too harsh. The reality was that my dad was gone and that fucking hurt like someone had stuck a knife up under my breast bone and was twisting it harder and plunging it deeper every second. The pain took my breath away and I was reminded of my loss every time I tried to breathe in … something had broken off inside me and I wasn’t sure it could ever be repaired.

I sat on my bedroll and looked over all the supplies I’d carried out to the woods in my rucksack. It wasn’t a lot, but I had a feeling it was a ton more than a lot of other people ended up with three days ago. Most importantly, I was checking for the things I was most in danger of running out of, and the things I didn’t have. As far as food went, I was doing pretty well. My dad had stored seven MRE’s, Meals Ready-to-Eat, in the
rucksack, and I had added a box of granola bars, a bag of apples, crackers, peanut butter, beef jerky, and a few other odds and ends to the bags before we left. If I was very frugal with my eating, I was pretty positive I could last at the very least three to four weeks on the supplies I had, and that didn’t include any fish I might catch for a meal.

I bit my lip as I sorted through the rest of my supplies … small first aid kit, small flash light with batteries, waterproof matches, a can of lighter fluid, a small, collapsible fishing pole, and miscellaneous personal hygiene supplies. I had four water bottles on me … two were empty and two were full. I could simply refill the bottles, since I’d already scouted a water source, but it would be easier if I had a jug or two.

I stood up and began pacing around the place I’d claimed as my own and then glanced up into the blue sky above my head. Nothing. The first forty-eight hours that I’d kept moving further and further into the woods, I’d heard the sound of helicopters flying overhead several times. Once I even began to second guess myself and wonder if I should head back into town … that maybe I had overreacted and things were already getting better. But I had a feeling deep down that the best thing for me to do was to keep moving and to get as far away as possible from any other humans—dead or alive. I squatted down again and ran a hand over my weary eyes.

“Daddy … what should I do?” I whispered. A tear tracked down my cheek, followed by another and then another. Pretty soon the flood gate
that I’d kept so diligently locked for the past three days, came crashing open and I sunk to the ground and …
unraveled
.

΅

I
t wasn’t until the next
morning that I had the will to pull myself off of my bedroll and make my way over to the stream to wash off. I changed my top and threw my two tank tops over on the ground. I’d burn those … even if I could get all the blood and other bits that had seeped in a dried for three days straight after that first night … I’d never be able to wear them again.

I packed away all my things, except for a small pack of essentials—those I put into a smaller, lighter weight backpack that I’d take with me into town. I found a spot under thick foliage and hid all my things and then took the time to brush the ground with branches … to make my little camping spot less conspicuous. When I was finished, I checked my pack one last time and made sure I had my weapons on me … this time along with my handgun strapped to my leg, and my dad’s M4 across my back, I added a twelve inch recon knife. The blade was wicked sharp and deadly and just the thing to have if you found yourself in a tight spot, but didn’t want to make too much noise. I sat down and pulled out some beef jerky and a power bar. It was going to be a long hike, but I had to make it. I
wanted to see what had happened in the past several days, but I also had to make sure I had made the right choice. Not only that … but I needed to do one other thing, something personal. I finished off my breakfast and filled my water bottles. This was going to suck on so many levels. I grabbed my backpack and began making my way back to the place of nightmares and monsters.

΅

T
he edge of the woods came
faster than I thought possible. I’m sure it had taken the same amount of time to leave my camp site that it did for me to get to it … but as I was heading toward chaos and death, I sincerely wished it would have taken a lot longer. The two day hike had passed in a blur. I exited the woods several miles south of where I’d entered them near the army base. I’d made sure to give the place that my dad had died a wide berth and found myself probably a mile south of the spot where is body still lay … close to the jeep where it was wrapped around the tree we had hit. I stayed close to the edge of the woods as I walked along the road, just in case I had to duck and cover or make a run for it. Plus, the trees made me feel safer … like I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. I walked for several hours before I knew I would be coming up on Midtown.

It took me several pep talks before I was actually able to run across the highway and duck behind an Ace Hardware store just skirting the edge of town.  It was early morning and the sun was just really beginning to rise and shine its rays on everything …
living and dead
… in town.

The scent of the dead slapped me in the face like an over saturated blanket of smog. I gasped and choked as I tried to breathe in through my mouth instead of my nose … but breathing through my mouth only made it worse. Have you ever tasted the scent of rot and decay on the back of your tongue? It’s no palate pleaser, that’s for sure. And let’s not mention the amount of gnats a person can consume in a single inhale.
Bleck!

With my heart pounding frantically in my chest I made my way slowly around the building until I was sure I could make a run for the shadow of another building. I kept that up for the next thirty minutes … ducking, hiding, and darting to the back of buildings, from shadow to shadow, until I was closer to the main part of town. When I finally reached the center of town, I knew things were even worse than I imagined and that I had been right to take sanctuary in the woods.

I’d just pressed myself against the wall of a Starbucks, the only one in town, when a wave of zombies decided to come lurching into view. I’d see the dead before, the ones that we drove by from the safety of our jeep, the one that killed my dad, and the little girl who had attacked me that first day … but nothing had prepared me for the sight of so many corpses walking down the street in the middle of broad daylight. I squeezed myself as tightly as I could against the brick wall behind me, trying to make myself as small as possible. I held my breath and cursed my heart for pounding so loudly in my chest, sure it would draw their attention to me.

I watched as a dozen or more of them shuffled past the front of the store moaning and making gurgling noises that had the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. Even more disturbing was the normalcy of their appearance. Zombie movies featured the undead wearing clothing that was shredded and either gray, tan, or some varying shade of dirt. The undead
were
dirty … their clothing
was
torn in some places … but underneath the blood stains and the gore was the clothing of your everyday, average American—bright and cheery clothing made macabre by the things that wore them and the current state of the world. The colors were now harsh and surreal, giving them a creepy IT circus-y
freak show
feel.  A woman who struggled to move along with the others was wearing a bright purple tank top and a jean skirt, a man wearing khakis and a light blue button up shirt walked close to her … and the children—dear God, the children—they were the worst. Some wore pajamas with happy cartoon characters depicted on them, but Elmo didn’t look quite as endearing when he was covered in leftover bits of human flesh from the zombie kid’s most recent meal. I shuddered and shrunk even further into my hiding spot.

After the last zombie had gone by and several minutes had passed, I stepped closer to the front of the building to see what had become of the main street leading into and out of town. The word
apocalypse
came to mind immediately, but even that word seemed too tame of a description for what I saw. Smoke rose from a pile of bodies close by, cars and debris lined the streets, decomposing bodies, stripped of almost everything but the bones, lay scattered about. Splashes of dark reddish-brown muck and blood splattered the street, the sidewalk, cars, storefronts, and to top it all off—walking corpses were
everywhere
. There was no way any living could be left in the town … it had been infested with the undead.

And so I found myself in a conundrum … I was in the middle of town with zombies crawling all over the place. I didn’t know which way to turn. I knew at least a dozen zombies had gone back the way I had just come from and I knew if I got cornered by that many of them, I’d be a goner. I just didn’t know what move to make next. I glanced around the streets at the cars that littered the roads. Most of them probably had a full tank of gas and keys left inside. It made sense … people were caught off guard … they had no idea what to expect. They weren’t even warned. The only problem was the zombies. It would be impossible for me to get to a car without being seen. Not only that, but I might choose a car that just happened to not have keys in the ignition and I had no idea how to hotwire a car. I’d be trapped in a car with zombies gnashing their teeth to get to me. I crouched down and tried to formulate a plan.

I happened to glance up and catch a reflection of myself in the glass of a window across the street. I could barely make out my own shape. But, I also to happen to notice the reflection of the Starbucks I was hiding next to, and it had its entire front window busted out. It was then that an insane, makeshift plan began tickling the back of my mind. With my mind made up, I got up and edged around the building just enough to see if I even had a chance. I glanced up and down the road and counted over fifty lumbering dead before I gave up counting and rounded it up to seventy-five to be safe. I quickly calculated everything I had on me and knew I’d be pushing my luck to carry out my idea and I knew that if I survived, I’d have to catch quite a few lucky breaks. And yet I still decided it was my best option.

As soon as I was pretty sure most of the zombies were unaware of my presence, I swallowed the huge lump of fear threatening to choke me and ran around the building—out into the open—and jumped into the busted out window of the local Starbucks. I immediately flattened myself against the inner wall and held my breath. My heart was pounding so hard, I could feel the vein in my temple throbbing wildly, and I was concerned it was about to burst from the pressure. When I’d entered the store, my boots crunched the broken glass and I could swear the sound echoed into the furthest reaches of outer space. A minute passed and then several, before I exhaled a relieved breath. Looked like I’d live to see my plan through. Oh joy.

I glanced around the interior of the store and felt a tinge of remorse for what I was about to do. I remembered when my dad and I had just moved into this town a few weeks back. The Starbucks was brand spanking new and it was a source of pride for the locals … they had just opened their first Starbucks in one of the renovated storefront spaces ... a true testament to the fact that the town was growing. The building was as ancient as the town and I had loved the old world feel of it as soon as we stepped inside. My dad had done some work on his laptop that day as he drank a latte with a double shot of espresso and I had plugged in my ipod and sat near him, people watching through the large glass window up front as I sipped my iced caramel coffee. It had been a good day.

Fortunately for me, I also had paid attention to the little tour they had given us as well and knew that this particular store had a second story that was used as an attic for storage and that the attic had a place with a ladder you could climb and exit out to the roof. I was banking on the fact that if the Starbucks had that feature, maybe several of the other old storefronts would as well.

I moved slowly along the edge of the store until I reached the front counter. I slid my backpack off and sat it on the counter as quietly as possible. I pulled out the bottle of lighter fluid I’d brought with me and grimaced when I realized how badly this whole thing could go, but there was no backing out now. I opened the lighter fluid and started soaking the walls and tables and floors as thoroughly as I could. I crept up to the front of the store and made sure I sprayed a line of the fluid out onto the side walk in front of the store as well. I took a wad of paper towels from a dispenser on the floor and twisted them tightly into a nice, thick rope before I used the remaining lighter fluid to soak the rope. I took the rope back with me to the front counter and sat it down.