The Reawakening (The Living Dead Trilogy, Book 1) (20 page)

“Better stick to writing novels. This life up here is too hard for a yuppie writer like you.”

“Believe me, Thorn, I’ll be happy as hell when this situation is over and I can sit at my comfortable desk and write.”

“Maybe you can write a novel about this whole ordeal afterwards. Have it made into a movie, too. Just make sure you get a good-looking actor to portray me. Maybe DiCaprio or one of them other studs.”

“Trust me, there’s no bigger asshole in Hollywood to play you.”

“Touché.”

“Besides, I don’t work in horror.”

“They say write what you know, bro.”

“Touché.” I backhanded him across the chest.

The truck began to move again as Rick steered it back onto the main road. He was about to accelerate when I heard a woman’s voice calling out. We looked over at the two-story brick apartment building across the street and saw a woman leaning out the window and waving her arms, calling out for us. Rick looked back out the window.

“Christ, not another one. Where did she come from?”

“Looks like you’ve got to take in another stray cat!” Thorn shouted.

“There’s not enough food and water for all of us to get through the winter.”

“You can’t just leave her here,” I said above the engine’s roar.

“We don’t have any more room!” he shouted back. “So it’s either you or her.”

“We’ve got plenty of room. And we can use the help with the kids and the cooking and all the damn cleaning,” Dar said.

The woman emerged from the first level and was now trudging across the top layer of powder on a pair of snowshoes. She speared the crust with ski poles to help navigate the tricky terrain. Two monsters filed out of the building behind her and began to wade through the snow. They howled hungrily, pawing and churning, but were thwarted by the thick blanket. The woman pumped her arms and legs furiously.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something strange. An object fell from the roof. It bounded off the edge and caught the snow-dusted air and momentarily rose up in the current. The woman didn’t see it until the last second, but when she did, she turned completely around and swung the ski post like a tennis racket, batting it away. But it jumped up and came at her again. Up on the roof, three more of them soared down and joined in on the attack. The woman fought them off as best she could, but the winged demons kept persisting, determined to sink their teeth into her flesh. Suddenly a series of gunshots filled the air, and before I knew what happened the four creatures lay dead in the snow. Exhausted, the woman regained her composure and began snowshoeing over to the truck, gliding rhythmically over the tender white crust. Her arms staggered the ski poles in intervals, pushing and pulling.

“Get in the back,” Rick shouted, standing on the running board, the smoking rifle in hand.

“Damn, that was some impressive shooting,” Thorn said, staring over at Rick. “Hitting a moving target in the head at over thirty yards. Goddamn, that was sick!”

“What the hell was coming down off that roof?” I asked.

“Hell if I know,” Thorn said. “Some kind of flying monkey. I thought I saw arms and legs on that little freak.”

The woman climbed in the truck with our help, and collapsed in the snow-covered bed. Rick got back behind the wheel and then steered the truck over to where the winged creatures lay. We idled next to their unmoving corpses. It shocked the hell out of me when they came into full view. Thorn stared down at them and mumbled in awe. They appeared to be winged children, no older than three years old, half their heads ripped asunder from the bullets. Their facial expressions looked like something out of a gothic fairy tale. Their noses had morphed into small beaks. Rick immediately turned the truck around and headed our cortège back to the farmhouse. We rode in silence the rest of the way, listening as the plow pushed and scraped the dead off to the side of the road.

Upon returning to the farm, we piled out somberly and headed inside. Thorn and I were shivering so badly I thought we might have suffered frostbite. After dropping us off, Rick set off to plow the snow towards the end of the driveway until it was piled high, creating a natural barrier designed to keep the dead out of the compound. Buried beneath the mound were all the dead corpses that had been vanquished, entombed in ice and frozen flesh.

We sat around the kitchen table, too frightened and cold to talk, drinking black coffee and trying to warm ourselves. Dar tossed some logs into the fireplace, and the flame licked and jumped back to life. Something about those infant mutations had spooked the hell out of me. Gunner asked what we’d seen, but no one wanted to talk about it. The expressions on our faces must have conveyed to him that we’d seen some terrible, unthinkable things. Rick barged in as we sat staring glumly at the table.

“What’s up? You all look like you’ve seen a ghost. Cheer up now. We made it out of there alive, is the way I see it. Live to fight another day,” Rick said.

“Don’t fuck with us, man. You saw those tiny baby freaks out there. That was some nasty shit,” Thorn said.

“Let me inform you people about something, those who are not already aware about what is happening in this neck of the woods. There is a contagion going around that is causing the animals to become sick and agitated, and attack every living thing. This contagion is somehow transmitted from animal to human by way of a bite, and now it has apparently spread throughout the region. For some unknown reason, the deceased’s brain regenerates after death. But that’s beside the point. What we do know is that the deceased’s body inherits a portion of the animal’s DNA. Each victim inherits a segment of the DNA from the species that made them contagious.”

“You mean they turn into the animal that bites them?” the new woman asked.

“More like a hybrid,” Rick replied. “Sorry, but we haven’t had the pleasure of an introduction.”

“Kate Burton. I’d been holed up in my apartment since this epidemic struck. The other tenants in my building either tried to leave or else got turned into one of those crazies, but I never opened my door. Kept it locked tight, and stayed put. That way I managed to keep those things at bay. As for those dead babies you saw.” Tears spilled from her eyes. “I recognized them after we pulled up to their bodies. I used to be their teacher down at the local daycare center.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry about that, Kate,” I said.

She shrugged and wiped her eyes.

“So what skills do you possess? We have an enormous amount of work that needs to be done here.”

“I hear children playing in the other room. As I said, I worked at the daycare center down the street, so I know how to handle young kids. Went back to community college last year and got an associate’s in early education. Other than that I can cook, clean, whatever else you need done.”

“Good, because you’ll need to pull your weight around here if you’re going to stay. Any of you who can’t handle taking orders from me are free to move on.”

“I know this is your house and your food, professor, but why do you get to make every single decision around here? We all have a stake in this,” Thorn said.

“Because I’ve been preparing for this crisis my entire life, and if you don’t defer to me, then you’ll all die. It’s as simple as that.” Rick glanced around at our faces. “Now that we have that fact established, there’s one other thing about these creatures that you need to know. Soon after they die, and just before they transmogrify into one of these flesh-eaters, they exhibit an odd behavior.”

“What kind of behavior?” Kate asked.

“It’s almost as if they’re trying to tell us something. Or warn us. They speak of an afterlife,” I said.

“That’s the natural storyteller in my brother, America’s famous novelist,” Rick said, smiling in a patronizing manner. “The truth of the matter is that this behavior they exhibit is a brilliant evolutionary trap. They require flesh, particularly from the human brain, which is the first part of the body they go for as soon as they change. We don’t yet know why they consume the brain, other than that it must somehow rejuvenate their own brain cells. Could be that their long-term survival depends on a constant supply of it.”

“It’s too depraved to even think about,” Kate said, shaking her head.

“Yes, but it is what it is.”

“The more I think about it, the more I agree with Thom,” Thorn said, addressing Kate directly. “My brother told me he loved me, something he’d never before admitted. He’d been shot and paralyzed in the Iraq War, and was very bitter about being disabled. He said some shit about the chosen ones, whatever the hell that meant. The more I think about it, the more I believe that he was trying to tell me something about his after-death experience.”

“Forget that spiritual crap! I don’t really care about what comes after this mortal coil. The only thing we need to worry about right now is taking care of each other and wasting any of those nasty fuckers whenever they show their faces. I care about the here and now, and not some fantasyland we might or might not go to after we die,” Dar said.

“Take it easy, everyone. Let’s not jump to any conclusions. We’ve got enough food and gas, and plenty of firewood to get us through the winter. We need to make sure we have someone keeping watch at all times in case these things decide to go on the attack,” Rick said, rubbing his hands together. “So regardless of your religious beliefs, we all share a common goal.”

“If these fuckers can fly, we’re going to have to keep a lookout from above and below,” Dar said.

“Those flying babies that attacked Kate were an aberration,” Rick said. “And they weren’t flying as much as they were falling from the top of that building. The weight of the adults will preclude them from flying for very long, if at all. All the same, we need to be mindful of them. Now if you’ll all excuse me, I have some important business to finish downstairs.”

Rick walked into the other room and disappeared down into his basement. Only I knew what horrible secret he kept down there. And for the sake of the group, I decided that I would keep that secret close to the vest.

“Does he always act like that?” Kate asked.

“Only when the dead walk the earth,” I said, chuckling nervously.

“Then I suppose it’s okay. I’ve heard a lot worse reasons for being a complete asshole.”

“You have?”

“Of course. Besides, I have a far better excuse than him for being upset with our plight.”

“I’d certainly like to hear this one,” Dar said.

“How about I show you instead.” Kate reached into her pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. Then she thumped it down on the table.

“A lottery ticket?”

“A winning lottery ticket. I won four hundred and fifty thousand dollars last week. It’s the first time I’ve ever won anything in my life.” She stared at me. “But what good is a winning lottery ticket now?”

“Maybe you can use it to wipe your ass,” Dar said.

“I thought my life would change as soon as I matched up the numbers and saw that I had a winner. Boy, was I ever right.”

Kate picked up the ticket, ripped it into tiny shreds, and then released the pieces, letting them flutter onto the table.

Chapter 14

T
HE SNOW DIDN’T STOP.
I
T WAS
relentless and unforgiving. Once it started that first day, it kept on coming, which meant that Dar and I stood no chance of returning to Boston until the roads had cleared. Every couple of days, we received a fresh coat of powder. It glistened and radiated in the sun’s sallow glow, obscuring the debris that lay strewn across the hardening crust. We took turns shoveling in order to keep clear the path between the doorway and the barn. Every day Rick plowed the snow until the banks built up like a massive wall in front of the driveway. He plowed it up all around the farmhouse so as to provide a natural barrier from the creatures. Other than the flying ones, it would be difficult for the dead to reach us. We made sure to have two sharpshooters tag along with the people shoveling just in case the dead flew down from the roof.

The power died and never returned, which meant that we had to rely strictly on the generator. Rick turned the generator on for about two hours a night. At around nine, we lit candles and read or played cards by the flickering light. He’d insulated the house a few years back by spraying foam in the walls and laying loose insulation along the attic floor. That combined with the fireplace kept us relatively warm and dry. We ate cereal and canned goods for breakfast and lunch, and we took turns preparing hot meals for dinner. Coffee in the morning got reheated over the fireplace.

We learned to live with each other, to put up with each other’s idiosyncrasies and help deal with the post-traumatic stress we suffered on account of living among such cruel demons. As a result, we worked to tolerate each other’s needs as best we could. The children behaved relatively well, considering the situation we found ourselves in, but they acted up like most children do. Gunner had his hands full taking care of them, especially when Emily cried out for her mother. We all tried to help out as much as possible, but there was only so much any of us could do. Thorn was the exception when it came to the kids. He didn’t want anything to do with them. He did, however, make up for it by performing many of the laborious tasks that no one else wanted to do. In his defense, he claimed he’d rather fight hand-to-hand combat against five flesh-eaters than have to deal with kids.