Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #2 | September 2015) (3 page)

The new pain had forced his eyes away from the zombie now gnawing on his femur. The wrist his hand had once been attached to was ragged and gushing. The pink flesh torn as easily as paper and just as jagged edged. The shock of white from his exposed bone was soon stained scarlet. The hand that had pulled the trigger was gone. Lee couldn’t hold back the hysterical laughter that bubbled up from his painfully raw throat.

The crack of breaking bone told him that his unclean hand was no more. The crunching from the zombie that was eating his hand was more than he could handle. It had all been too much the second he pulled the trigger. When the zombie on his thigh buried a hand in his stomach and twisted his guts painfully, Lee escaped into his subconscious. His mind went hazy, not fully unconscious, but not fully there. Lee could still feel each tear and wretched burn as he was eaten alive. His only thought: I deserve this.

“Grabbing Take-Out”

Story #3

By

Christopher D. Hartpence

“On the left! On the left!” Milo screamed as he ran frantically in that direction. There were just too damned many of them.

“We make it out of this, I’m never going on a take-out run again!” Jasper yelled as he brought his machete down on another zombie intent on eating his face off. Blood and gore spraying over him when the blade hit home. It got lodged there, and he actually had to stick his hand in the muck to help pry it loose. He tried not to think about the thick, blackish liquid now coating his left hand to the forearm. Sticky, disgusting, it smelled like a mixture of feces and death.

Rebecca, who was on the left, and in danger of getting overwhelmed by a trio of them, dodged away just in time to avoid the snapping of jaws that were way too close to her exposed neck. Milo shouldered past her and sent a knife into the brain of that one, and like Jasper, found his knife hand coated in that nasty, viscous black goo that was zombie blood. One down, but the two that remained wasted no time closing on him. He couldn’t knife one without risking a bite, so he had to grapple with both until ‘Becca pulled it back together.

“Any day now, ‘Bec!” He shouted, cringing inwardly at the raw fear in his voice as they pressed relentlessly closer. After what felt like way too long, she finally pulled it together and used her rebar to put another one down with a vicious overhanded strike that shattered the zombie’s skull and sent rotting grey matter flying in all directions, coating both of them with a fine spray of filth and gore. Milo couldn’t help but notice the triumphant gleam in her eyes. Having been driven back a moment before, she almost seemed to enjoy it.

“Where the hell is Frank?” Jasper asked as he untangled himself from his latest kill and ran for the door of the IGA, where three more were shambling inside.

Frank was supposedly on guard duty in the parking lot to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening. Not counting the three new arrivals, Jasper could see at least eight more in the parking lot, so wherever Frank was, he was either dead or hiding and pissing himself in terror. In either case, it didn’t look like the cavalry was coming.

‘Becca and Milo finished off the last one they had between them, with Milo holding the zombie’s arms and ‘Bec finishing him with the head shot. Rebar through the eye. Gets ‘em every time, then, the two of them rushed to the front of the store to help Jasper with the new arrivals.

Zombies are mean. They’re relentless and they never get tired or have to sleep, but also, they’re stupid and usually fairly slow, so in a three on three match up, the humans won handily, putting them all down in a matter of seconds.

There were more coming, of course, and now that the humans huddled at the front of the IGA, they weren’t distracted by the tooth and nail fight for their next breath. They could see that there were about a dozen more, but scattered all over the parking lot, so they’d be arriving in ones and twos.

Milo, ‘Becca and Jasper braced for it and waited. Sure, they could have rushed into the parking lot, but that would have meant having to fight more of them at a time, and closer together. Better to just wait it out and use the storefront defensively, so they did.

In less than five minutes, they had a respectable pile of rotting corpses in front of the store, and silence reclaimed the day.

“Okay.” Milo said wearily. ‘Becca, you get back to gathering the supplies. Jasper, you scout around and see if you can find out what happened to Frank. I’m going to head back to the office and see if there’s anything worth salvaging.

The back office. The door that had caused all the problems to begin with.

Who would have thought that six months after the world ended, there’d still be an active alarm system? They hadn’t run across functioning systems in more than two months, but this one either had batteries from hell in it, or was kept active by some kind of backup power source somewhere. All they knew was, when Milo tried to force the door, the alarm went nuts, and every zombie within two hundred yards had come a running, or…well, whatever passed for “running” in the Zombie Olympics. Anyway, the unexpected sound of the alarm had sent their pretty standard supply run sideways in a hurry. A lot more trouble than it was worth. Pickings looked to be pretty slim here.

“Grabbing Take-Out” was the term they’d coined for it. Hell, all of them missed the old days…the days before, when they could jump in the car and hit the closest Micky D’s or Jack-In-The-Box and grab some dinner. These days, “take out” meant going scrounging around in burnt-out and ruined places like this one, sifting through the debris for anything that might be even vaguely useful. Today, pickings were slim. They’d be lucky if they scored a couple dozen cans of assorted food and…

Milo hadn’t quite made his way back to the office door when he heard Jasper’s cry of agony. Fearing more zombies, he forgot about the back office and ran for the sound of that scream.

“Keep loading.” He told ‘Becca as he passed her. “I’ll sing out if we’re in trouble. When you’re done here, head to the back office.”

She nodded and continued gathering what few useful items she could find.

Fortunately, there were no additional zombies inbound.

Jasper was standing next to an old Chevy Impala, hands on the trunk for support, shaking visibly and crying. His body wracked with sobs. When he heard Milo approaching, he fought to get himself under control and nodded down. “Found him.” He choked out thickly.

Milo moved around the trunk to get a better look. Almost wished he hadn’t.

Frank was long gone. His throat had been ripped open, which was probably the wound that killed him, but he died with his hands at his gut, trying gamely, but failing to keep his intestines in place. It took him a moment to put the pieces together, but he thought he understood what had happened.

When the alarm went off, Frank had come here to have a vehicle between him and some of the approaching zombies. There were three dead here, piled in a chaotic jumble near the rear, driver’s side door.

Apparently concerned about an attack from behind him, Frank had opened the driver’s side door to serve as a shield for his back.

He probably did it reflexively and without even thinking to check to see that the car was empty.

It wasn’t.

The gut wound was probably first, when the zombie in the car lunged for his middle, ripping him open and spilling his intestines onto the ground.

Frank managed to kill that one (it was completely beheaded – they found the head under the car, eyes burning, jaws opening and closing weakly), but the others approaching from the rear of the vehicle had done him in.

“I’ll take care of it.” Milo said quietly as he knelt beside Frank.

He had been the first person Milo had found when it all started. With him from the very beginning. Back when the power was still on in parts of the city. Good guy, smart fighter. To be killed like this was…

Milo bowed his head and let the tears come.

Death was a constant possibility. They all lived in its shadow. One misstep, one single mistake and things could go from okay to fatal in the blink of an eye.

He tried, but failed to tell himself that it wasn’t his fault. That nobody could have foreseen that the office door would be rigged to a still-functioning alarm. At the end of the day though, it had been his call that drew the zombies to them. His insistence on forcing that door. If he hadn’t done that, Frank would still be alive and well.

“Jesus Christ, Frank…I’m so sorry man.” He said through his tears as he plunged his knife into his friend’s skull to keep him from turning.

The worst part, at least from Milo’s perspective, was that they couldn’t even give him a proper burial. Out here, there was no time. They had nine people back at the camp, waiting for them. Counting on them to return with enough supplies to get them through another few days, and the living took priority over the dead. On a run, the fallen simply stayed where they lay. There was no other choice to make.

He remained where he was for a lingering moment, asking both an uncaring God and Frank to forgive him, then rose shakily to his feet, grabbed Jasper, and the two of them went back into the store to help Rebecca.

When all was said and done, they scored 38 cans of assorted food, two four-packs of toilet paper (toilet paper! That was pure gold), and about a dozen packets of flavored drink mix. The adults wouldn’t care much about that, but the kids would be thrilled.

The office wound up holding a nine millimeter in the desk, two boxes of ammo, a collection of working ink pens, and three partially unused spiral notebooks. All in all then, it was a decent, if somewhat light haul. It was not enough, however, to make up for the loss of one of their own.

Frank had been sharing a tent with Lisa Casselman, back at their base. They weren’t married, but they might as well have been. Milo dreaded having to break the news, but as their leader, and given that he felt as though it was his fault, he knew it had to be him.

The whole way back to camp, he steeled himself for it. Mentally and emotionally preparing.

Of course, no words were actually needed. Everyone could see as they approached that they were a man short, and Lisa was already sobbing uncontrollably by the time they reached the camp. Milo handed his share of the loot they’d gathered off to Mike Tomlinson, who took it to the supply tent, while he knelt down beside an inconsolable Lisa, putting a hand on one of her shoulders.

“He got three before they took him.” He told her. “It was…just a stupid accident. The whole run went sideways – none of it ever should have happened.”

She looked at him with fire and pain burning in her eyes. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” She asked acidly. “Knowing how many of those bastards he took out before they killed him? Knowing that it was “just a stupid accident? Because it doesn’t! It fucking doesn’t!”

Milo cast his eyes to the ground, unable to meet her fierce gaze. “It was my fault.” He told her sadly. “My fault.”

“They why aren’t YOU the one who’s dead!?” She asked him bitterly through her tears. “If it’s your fault, why can’t you be dead, and Frank be here with me now?”

Milo didn’t have an answer for that. He was crying again too, and pulled her into a gentle hug.

“Don’t…touch me!” She said as she beat her fists against him, but he held her anyway, and in a moment, she stopped protesting and just wept bitterly against his shirt.

They had all suffered losses like this. Six months may as well have been forever in the zombie apocalypse world, and in that time, they’d all witnessed countless, pointless deaths, but Frank had been one of the good ones. A rugged survivor. Nobody ever expected that he’d die like that. Not on a simple Take-Out run. What a waste. They all felt it.

Milo wasn’t sure how long he held her, or how long she cried into his shirt, but in time, she untangled herself from him and went back to the tent she had once shared with Frank.

He stood and sighed deeply as Jasper came toward him.

“What’s next?” He asked, and just like that, life in their little camp marched on. There was no time to mourn for the fallen. It was a disservice to the living.

Milo shook his head to clear it. “I figure those supplies bought us another two days, but if we want to stay ahead of things, we’ll need to go on another run tomorrow. Find out who’s fit to take Frank’s place and we’ll leave at first light.”

Jasper nodded and got to it. There was work to be done if any of them were to survive, and who knows? Maybe one day, they could even start turning the tide a little, but Milo seriously doubted if anyone currently in the camp with him would live to see that day. Even so, he knew they would do their best to stay alive. To fight back until they simply could fight no more.