The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 (164 page)

I nodded.  As we stood there, our hands in the air, two young men – they could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three – emerged from behind the corner of a farmhouse off to our left, one holding a small rifle of some kind, and the other holding a pistol.  They both wore the type of workout tank tops that weightlifters often wear, presumably to show off their massive pecks and guns.

As we watched, another three – a woman and two men – came out from behind a barn just west of the others.  They were all scrawny in comparison to the other two.

“See?” I said.  “Three stooges and two meatheads.”

“If they kill us, you’re going to feel like an idiot,” she said, smiling. 

“Then embarrassment won’t be the worst of my problems,” I said.  I wasn’t sure what had gotten into us, and I was willing to bet Serena didn’t know either.  It had just been so long since we’d faced an enemy that we could actually communicate with that this felt like a game show challenge more than any real danger.

“Tell those chicks to come out of the ditch.” said the girl, waving a shotgun at us.

“Lower your weapons, and we will,” said Serena.  “I don’t know who the hell you are or why you shot at us, but we don’t kill living human beings.”

“Well, bitch,” she said.  “You just killed our watchdogs, so I guess you just made it more dangerous for all of us.  It’s the same damned thing.”

Now that they were closer, I could see their clothing was in relatively good condition.  None of them looked to be starving, so it appeared they had provisions and food.  I saw a retention pond in the distance, and aside from the gas bubbling from the earth and sending its zombie-making element into our atmosphere, we’d found the water to be drinkable in most places.

The girl had short-cropped, red hair and was probably five and a half feet tall.  Her eyes were set close together, her nose small and straight, and her lips thin.

I notice these things because I’ve always found it fascinating.  Looks define us in many ways.  If you’re average looking, that neither helps nor hurts you.  If someone is extremely attractive, advantages go along with it.  If one is  unattractive, the reverse applies.

Let me interrupt this thought by saying that the zombies could give a shit about any of this.

Back to my thoughts:  Personality comes into play immediately, no matter the level of beauty.  We’ve all met those who were extremely attractive to us at first glance, but the moment they reveal the ugliness within, the physical beauty disappears and our visual assessment also shifts in that direction.

I was withholding judgment on the girl for now.  We were all under stress.  At that moment I would neither describe her as attractive nor unattractive.  She could drift in either direction and that now largely depended on how her personality unfolded. 

I saw what appeared to be a Superman logo tattooed on her right arm and below that were a series of letters, beginning with X.  Below that was an L, followed by a C.  They were clearly not professionally done.

They reached us and stopped in front of us now, and I was glad to see that as they approached, their weapons, while definitely still in hand, were no longer pointed at us.  The two twenty-something men who had been off to the left together appeared to be brothers, if not identical twins.  Their faces were not evil; they were scared if anything.  Both appeared to have shaved heads beneath their baseball caps.  One hat had a
Colorado Avalanche logo on the front, and the one was embroidered with the words,
It’s Beer-Thirty
.  Both had intense, azure blue eyes, and if you ever hear me describe a man’s eye color in a similar manner again, slap me and call me Nancy.

I’m just shooting for precise.

“Where did you get that fuckin’ whirlybird?” the girl asked.  She spat rather than said the words, her attitude aggressive and nasty.  My internal beauty scale needle decidedly shifted closer to the unattractive side.

My eye, however, was on the kid beside her.  He was a couple of inches taller than her, and his hair was ginger like hers.  His face was festooned with freckles that rivaled those on Rachel’s nose and cheeks, and he appeared to either have no eyebrows, or very lightly colored ones.  The kid was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old and he was staring at Serena’s
breasts. 

I felt a sudden anger well up inside me.  I ignored the girl’s question and the gun in the kid’s hand and said, “Do you fucking mind?” I said, looking directly at him.  “She’s with me, and even if she wasn’t, you’re being a disrespectful dick.”

The girl followed the young man’s gaze, then she punched him hard in the arm.  “Frankie, you jerkoff,” she said, then looked back to us.  “He’s my brother and he’s a damned pervert.”

“Good to know,” I said, feeling she had redeemed herself just a tad.

“Just a warning,” said Serena, matter-of-factly.  “If you come too close, Frankie, you’ll never want to look at another pair of tits again.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’ve been holed up here for like a year with my damned sister.  I guess
that
makes a little sense?” 

He looked at me.  “Then
you
come flyin’ in here with three women like some fuckin’ sultans or somethin’.”

“Three
hot
women,” said one of the twins.

Lola smiled a little.

“Yeah,” said Nelson, popping his head up from the ditch, holding his chest.  “That’s us.  A couple of King Tuts.”

“He was a Pharaoh,” said Rachel.  Ignoring our pseudo-captors, she turned her back on them, walked over to him and knelt down.  “How are you feeling, Nel?” she asked.

“I’m just glad they were so far away,” he said.  “I’m fine, I think.  Just sore.”  He crawled out and got to his feet.  An angry red mark in the shape of a Ninja star adorned his bare chest.  “Which one of you shot me?” he asked.

The man who hadn’t spoken yet, raised his hand.  He had shaggy, dirty blonde hair and a scraggly beard and mustache.  He was the thinnest of the group, but still not emaciated.  His brown, button-down shirt was clean, and his jeans looked dusty, but new.  He stood about an inch over six feet.  “Me, but I didn’t want to,” he said, pointing to the girl.  “She told me to shoot, and I didn’t even aim.”

“We’re not used to shooting from that kinda distance,” said the girl.  “We were just trying to scare you  guys off.”

“Plus we were pissed because you shot our guards,” said the other twin.

“Why do you call ‘em guards,” wheezed Nelson.  “They’re abnormals, zombies.”

“Glad you’re alive, man,” said the shooter.  “How
are
you alive?”

Nelson pointed into the street where he’d apparently spotted his Ninja star.  “Right there!  I had a Ninja star in my shirt pocket.  It’s gonna be my lucky charm from now on.”

“Look,” I said.  “We’re not here to kill anyone who breathes.  We stopped here to refuel and that’s it.  Nothing else.  If you prefer, we can fly a couple of miles from here and try again.”

They all looked at one another, but said nothing.

“Can we put our hands down?” asked Serena.

“Yeah, but you’d better not try anything,” said the girl.

“We’re headed to California to find someone, and we haven’t intentionally hurt anyone yet,” I said.  “Like I said, we stopped to refuel and rest, and that’s it.”

“And we made a decision in that ditch right there that’ll change your lives,” said Serena.  “Improve your odds.”

“We got food, even livestock,” said what seemed like the nicer of the twins.  They were both about 5’10”, and looked like they spent most of their time in the gym before zombies made weightlifting seem just plain stupid.  “So what do
you
have that can make that big a difference to us?”

I looked at him and thought,
It’s that awkward moment when the zombie doesn’t notice your massive, oiled up pecks and just goes for your jugular. 

I almost laughed out loud.  As Dudley Moore said in a rerun of Arthur I’d caught at like two in the morning before all this crap started,
Sometimes I just think funny things.

“It’s called
urushiol,” said Serena.  “And it melts the bastards like butter in a hot pan.  Just a touch of it.”

“Hemp told me that one drop of
urushiol on the head of a pin could give 500 people a rash,” said Nelson.

Five pairs of eyebrows furrowed.

“I can probably demonstrate it on one of the dead ones,” said Serena.

“Don’t bother,” said the girl, her tone softened slightly.  “I know where more are.  Just on the other side of our fence.  You see there?” she asked, pointing to a distant fence.  “We put that up on the other side of the hospital.  We cleared that a long time ago so we could get to medical supplies if we needed them.  You landed inside it.”

“But why put the infecteds inside the fence?”

The tall, lanky one beside the girl and Frankie said, “We’ve been attacked before,” he said.  “And not by the biters.  By regular people like you.”

“Not like us,” said Rachel.  “If people like that showed up now, we’d help you fight them.”

“Okay,” said the girl.  “Then follow us.”

I saw the tension completely drain from her shoulders and neck.

“Nelson,” I said, going to him, “Are you okay?”

Nelson grunted as he leaned over and picked up his bag of supplies.  There was a slight wince on his face.  “I’m alright.  Lola, would you carry my gun?  I could probably  smoke a little bowl to kill the pain.”

“Dude,” said both twins together.  “You got weed?”

I knew at that moment.  We’d keep our urushiol.

We’d share the knowledge with them, but we’d be bartering with buds. 

So we
were
in Colorado, after all.

This time, as we followed them down the incline toward the fence, I did laugh out loud.

*****

We went to the fence line, and sure enough, there were at least ten abnormals there, staring with dead eyes toward us as we approached.

“This won’t take long,” said Serena.  “You want me to kill one of them or all of them?”

“Just one,” said the girl.  “We’ll need to let them in as a buffer zone.”

Serena walked up to the biggest male.  His right eye hung from its socket, but his left one stared down at her, and his skinless jaw revealed all the teeth that remained, gnashing and gurgling whatever bile bubbled up their nasty throats.

His arm shot toward her and she dodged backward, spraying the smallest amount of the urushiol on his hand, and it began.

The fingers dissolved instantly, and the rapid disintegration worked its way up his wrist, then all the way to his elbow.  Now that he was safely distant and had not thrown his other arm forward, Serena squirted a tiny bit into the center of his chest, then turned away.

The rest of us watched what Serena did not care to see; the abnormal’s chest ate itself away until his black-red insides became visible, then daylight behind him.  His chest split all the way up to his neck and his head collapsed into his chest where it also began popping and breaking down into cells of gore.

Moments later he was a bubbling pile of muck.

“Are you kidding me?” asked Lola.  I’d forgotten she hadn’t seen urushiol in action yet.

Another of the creatures stumbled into the downed zombie, apparently getting the oil on his bare foot.  In another fifteen seconds, that foot was gone up to the shin and he toppled over, too, clawing at the gravel path.

“So” I said.  “You like?”

“Fuckin’ A,” said the twins, followed by a high five.

I took it this was not the first time they had done that.

*****

We all sat in lawn chairs around a large camping table near a low window.  Seems they liked to keep an eye out.

With the news that Nelson had marijuana, everything changed.  Nelson packed a couple of nice-sized bowls and all five of them smoked, laughed and joked with him.  I couldn’t help but think that if they knew how little of his weed Nelson was probably willing to part with, their moods might have been a bit more somber.

We had gone through everything they needed to know about urushiol, and as it turned out, they all knew where some pretty substantial amounts of poison ivy grew.

“Another interesting tidbit I read in Hemp’s lab notes,” said Nelson.  “Urushiol stays effective and active for up to five years.  You can get the rash from dead poison ivy, just the same as when it’s alive.  So why not plant it all around wherever you set up your place?”

They all nodded.  “If we do that, we might not have to worry about extracting the actual oil.”

“It’s useful to have with you on the road,” said Serena.

They had indeed set up their living quarters in the buildings they were shooting at us from, and they did have quite a setup.  Full beds, a gravity-fed tank water system where they could even take showers, and they had a storage room stocked with a ton of dry and canned food.  They’d clearly raided a camping supply store, for they had a makeshift kitchen set up with every type of propane cooking device you could want.  They even had a garden in the back, and whatever they were growing, it clearly wasn’t marijuana.