Stay Dead 2: The Dead and The Dying (2 page)

He decided it was time to make some
calls and send a unit to the West Virginia Penitentiary.

1 ROAD
WARRIORS
(back to
top)

The mostly leafless Oak trees and cold
grey skies made the world seem all the more dead on its feet. The
sun hung in the air, but its heat could not be felt—it was a chilly
day and bitterly so. The wind howled through the trees, shaking
loose whatever resilient leaves still hung on by a thread. On one
tree, a small spindly Black Maple that looked almost sickly, a
beautiful red and orange Maple leaf hung on longer than all the
others. Its stem holding strong against the blustering breeze while
its brethren had given up and fallen to the ground, only to dry up
and be crunched underfoot of an animal and the dead things it
scurried from.

An abandoned Labrador with a black
collar and matching leash erratically ran through the woods away
from the dead things. She would stop and bark at them, attempting
to scare them off, but then she would run away again—as if she knew
they would not scare. Following the dog were several deaders as
lifeless as the leaves under their feet. The dog looked ragged and
wafer-thin. Its hair was beginning to fall out and like the leaves
on the trees its life wasn’t long for this world.

The chocolate Labrador labored heavily
to suck in enough oxygen to keep its legs pumping. Up ahead was a
road, she just had to push herself a little harder to get up the
hill, and then maybe she could loose them. She didn’t let up and
her legs carried her up the small hill and to the edge of the road
where she didn’t even bother to stop and look. She ran straight
across, hooked to the right, and then disappeared into the woods on
the other side.

“
Whoa! Did you guys see
that? It was a dog. Just ran across the road,” Dawn
said.

Dawn had been aching for a cigarette.
She had only a few left and couldn’t wait till they stopped so she
could have one. When she used to work late nights at the diner
she’d be outside smoking as often as possible. When she couldn’t
make it to work on account of the living dead, smoking and
surviving was all she had left.

Jon-Jon pointed to the woods and
struggling to get to the street were the several deaders that had
been chasing the dog, “Looks like those fuckers over there were
chasing it.”

“
Ugh. You think they’re
going after animals now, too?” Dawn asked, thinking one of the
deaders looked like one of the younger dishwashers.

“
I don’t see why not, but
maybe they were just chasing the noise? Maybe their eyeballs are
all gone? Who the fuck knows,” Jon said, returning his attention to
the road.

Dawn stared at the dead things in
disgust and anger. They raised their arms toward the van. Whether
or not their eyeballs were working they knew that something edible
was nearby. Dawn flipped them the bird and her look of anger
shifted into a look of pure hatred.

Jon-Jon turned the radio on
again.

“
It’s just going to be the
same thing,” Dawn protested.

“
Well, I like the way it
sounds—fella has a nice deep voice.”

…
those areas we will
reinstate the Emergency Transportation System to aid survivors in
getting to those locations.

We will continue repeating this
Emergency Alert System broadcast until we have new
information.

This is an Emergency Alert System
broadcast originating from the Mount Weather Special Facility in
West Virginia.

There is a worldwide phenomenon
occurring where clinically dead humans are reanimating and
attacking living humans in an attempt to eat living flesh. Early
attempts at dispatching the reanimated hostiles, destroying the
brain, seemed effective. However, new evidence suggests we now warn
that this is insufficient. Specimens assumed dead continue to
reanimate. There is no consistent timeframe for which a hostile
will reanimate. The only permanent way of dispatching the hostiles
is by incineration, or the use of a chemical agent to dissolve the
remains.

It is also safest to stay off the
roads and out of heavily populated areas. If you have found a safe
haven it is recommended you remain there. Specially equipped units
of the military are in the process of reclaiming key strategic
areas around the nation. Once we are able to reclaim those areas we
will reinstate the Emergency Transportation System to aid survivors
in getting to those locations.

We will continue repeating this
Emergency Alert System broadcast until we have new
information.

“
Looks like we got an
accident over here.”

“
Can we get through?” Eddie
asked from behind them.

“
Looks like no problem. I
don’t see any deaders either.”

Jon-Jon cautiously drove up to the
accident. A small sedan was wrecked by a larger SUV. The SUV had
smashed in the side of the car and most of its front. A third car
looked to have been unable to break in time and rear-ended the SUV.
There were no bodies in the cars, only a trail of old blood that
looked like dirt coming from the smaller sedan.

Eddie had moved forward from the back
and crouched down in front to peer out the windshield, “Guess if
there were any they’re long gone now.”

Dawn turned to him, “Looks that
way.”

Dawn looked worn out. Her cheeks had
sunken in over the course of the few days that they had come to
know each other. They hadn’t much food left, and the lack of sleep
and constant levels of elevated stress weren’t helping much. Dawn
could probably say the same thing for anyone in the van or in the
two vehicles behind them. Eddie himself, who had become somewhat of
a leader of the group, looked wild and ragged. His hair was all
over the place, his eyebrows looked crazy and his beard was growing
bigger by the day—and unevenly.

The van itself smelled like a gym
locker room—and that was with the windows down.

Chuck, who missed his home in sunny
Florida, fell asleep, though every time the van hit a bump his head
bounced off the window and he woke for a moment, only to fall back
to sleep again. Sitting next to him was Janice—Eddie and Joseph’s
mother—and though she wasn’t sleeping she looked catatonic and a
breath away from death. Losing her husband and two younger children
to the living dead seemed to take all but a sliver of life from
her. Chung-Hee sat on the floor and tried to stretch. His legs had
become cramped and he thought it was because he wasn’t drinking
enough water, and he was right. When he was holed-up at Mal-Mart he
hadn’t worried about that, there was plenty to be had.

Eddie left the front of the van to sit
back at his brother’s side. Joseph, who was physically larger, and
stronger than his older brother, looked just as tired as everyone
else, but maybe his age allowed him to deal with it better. His
disposition seemed better every day, as did his resolve. He was
pulling a strength from some place unseen whilst just about
everyone else was losing it. Next to him was Frankie, who had been
one of Eddie’s closest friends since middle school, and Frankie
just looked sucked dry of color and emotion. He had that
two-thousand-yard stare that veterans would often talk about; the
look from Thomas Lea’s painting of the same name, the one with the
soldier staring right at you with his eyes so wide and his mouth
only slightly agape.

Driving cautiously behind them was
Abdul-Ba’ith whose face never seemed to change even in the
slightest manor. He looked dead serious and tight-lipped with an
unmoving pair of bushy eyebrows. He’d joined up with the convoy
after a chance meeting at a gas station, which they left in flames.
He drove with both hands on the wheel and though he must’ve been
just as tired as the others he made a point to sit up straight and
stay alert.

To his right was Carrie, who’d been
hiding out at the gas station with Abdul Ba’ith and several others
days ago, the ever anxious and always annoying chubby dyke who
turned out not to be a dyke at all. She chewed on her knuckles and
fingernails as if they were snacks and even caused a few of them to
bleed.

Alexis in the backseat had fallen
asleep with the children. She was a young woman who’d dreamed of
being a mother one day, like so many others, and found herself with
a nightmare version of that dream. The children had fallen asleep
on the drive, and seeing no reason not too Alexis closed her eyes
and joined them. Leela, Chris, Nick, Stacey, and Yussef all slept
together with crisscrossing limbs that would shift every few
minutes to try to get comfortable. Some had parents that were lost
along the way, while others were saved during the convoy’s
travels.

Holding the back of the line was Scott
and Judy, a quirky married couple that owned and operated their own
Funeral Home. They were used to dealing with dead people on a daily
basis, but the living dead had proven to be a whole different beast
altogether. They were talking about the good times: vacations,
parties, and their honeymoon. Scott usually wasn’t much for taking
trips down memory lane, but Judy loved it and it put a smile on her
face and if that’s what it took for Scott to see that smile then
that’s what he’d do. It was that smile of hers that kept him
going.

“
You think we’re doing the
right thing?”

“
I don’t know babe. Going
North seems like a good move. The broadcast could be a false hope.
We could get down there and find ourselves in a worse situation.
Just think of how many people might be trying to get
there.”

She thought about that for a
moment…

What if everyone who’d heard the
broadcast decided to try and get to West Virginia? It would just be
chaos. She could picture the streets already clogged with abandoned
vehicles and other obstacles, and now to picture them with other
survivors trying to get to a safe haven. It would be just as bad as
the first few days. The fights, the violence, only now it was
harder to get anywhere because you had to go through all of the
ruin that remained from those early days, and the dead. The first
days were hard because of the living, now it was the living dead
that complicated matters.

Scott turned the volume up on the
broadcast.

--tent timeframe for which a hostile
will reanimate. The only permanent way of dispatching the hostiles
is by incineration, or the use of a chemical agent to dissolve the
remains.

It is also safest to stay off the
roads and out of heavily populated areas. If you have found a safe
haven it is recommended you remain there. Specially equipped units
of the military are in the process of reclaiming key strategic
areas around the nation. Once we are able to reclaim those areas we
will reinstate the Emergency Transportation System to aid survivors
in getting to those locations.

We will continue repeating—

Then he abruptly turned it
off. He was already sick of hearing it.
***

The blood from the dead man’s body
emptied onto the cold tile floor. It was dark, almost muddy, and
oozed like old motor oil from a lawnmower that should’ve been
changed seasons ago. Danni couldn’t help but stare at it. Aside
from the walls, and floor it was the next best thing to focus on.
Everything else was too gruesome—too maddening—and just too damn
hopeless to look at let alone think about.

Sherriff Bruce Davis, the man who was
going to save New Haven by walling off the town, sat with his back
against the wall and his eyes staring up at the ceiling. Though the
town was probably dead, he was still thinking of a way out. He
refused to resign himself to a fate so ironic—if only the dead
grasping between the bars were people he himself had put away it
would be almost poetic. Davis didn’t like poetry, irony, and he
sure as shit didn’t like the idea of wasting away in a holding cell
surrounded by the dead.

Clem on the other hand, looked ready
for death. He had that far away look of resignation that Davis so
adamantly refused to wear. It was written in his face. His eyes
said ‘take me now’, and so did the crease in his forehead. He
longed to be with his wife again. Back at their apartment before
all this had happened. Before he found Danni on his rooftop. Before
they tried to leave. Before he lost Lorraine. He stared at the dead
things, all those thoughts running through his mind, looking at
them with sad eyes and the taste of empathy in the back of his
throat.

Topher, whom Davis and his men rescued
while investigating the power station, was a sniveling mess. He
kept murmuring to himself and wiping the tears from his eyes. He
sat against the wall with his legs pulled in tight. He wanted to
roll up into a ball and disappear. Sitting next to him, and just
growing aggravated by Topher, was Keith. His face was stone and his
knuckles were white. He wanted to beat Topher to death. All he
could think about was Jones, his dead brother in blue, and knew
that he was somewhere in the room beyond the bars and trying to get
inside to eat him like all the other dead things were. The thought
of it pissed him off big time.

“
What the fuck are we going
to do Bruce?”

“
We’re not going to do
anything. We’re going to sit and wait…and see what happens, unless
you got a better idea.”