Generation Dead (Book 3): Beyond The Gates (25 page)

Chapter 64

We pulled out of town, following the same path that had brought us here.  The only difference was we made our way south to Interstate 80.  Back in the day, my dad had insisted that several main highways be cleared of abandoned cars and zombies. The point was to make sure that if an outbreak occurred, the army could get there quickly without delay.  Off the highway, you were on your own.  But the highway itself was straight, clear, and without things you needed to avoid.  There were the occasional potholes, but other than that, we were able to make good time.

Three days out of Jerome, we crossed the Mississippi into Illinois.  Julia and Kayla were as anxious as I was to just get home after all the crap we had gone through.  My skull still bore the scars of that freak’s bullet, but the salve from the Doc really worked wonders. 

Another day, and we were home, pulling up to the Lodge and greeting our fathers.  I expected no better hello than the one I got.

“What did you do with the van?” my dad asked. “And what the heck happened to your head?”

I put my arm around my dad’s shoulders and steered him inside. “Dad, do I have a story for you.”

Three days later I finished my report to the president and gave it to Julia.  She was going into the capital for some supplies with Kayla, and she wanted to see one of the doctors there.  She hadn’t been feeling well, and I wanted her to make sure everything was okay.  I wished we had brought that country doctor home with us, but we can’t uproot everybody for our convenience.

Dad was appreciative of what we had done, and he and Uncle Charlie wanted every detail Jake and I could give him.  A day later, on the stone patio outside the lodge, he listened with rapt attention as I described the gates, the communities, and the valley of Enterprise.

“I had to make a choice,” Dad said.  “Put the gates up on the east side of the mountains, or take the army through and put them up on the west side.” Dad shrugged.  “If I had thought at the time there was going to be communities in there I might have made a different choice.”

“No way you could have known,” I said. 

Jake agreed.  “Half the towns in there seemed to be doing fine, and if they wanted to set up gates themselves, no one is stopping them.”

Uncle Charlie looked thoughtful.  “Maybe it’s time to clear out those mountains and get some more states added to the union.”

Dad nodded. “Could be a trip is in order.”

I rolled my eyes.  “You two need a hobby.”

Everyone laughed, and then went quiet as we heard a boat returning to the docks.  I patted my dad on the shoulder and walked with Jake down the long stairway to greet our wives.  In the woods, we could hear the cougars growling and fighting with each other.  Over the years the number had grown to more than fifteen.  It was a getting a little crowded out on the trails.

Julia and Kayla came walking up the trail holding hands.  When she saw me, she broke away and ran up, jumping into my arms. She held me tight and whispered in my ear.  Kayla hugged Jake and gave him the news.

We all went back up to the patio where our fathers were looking over a map, studying the mountains and marking where good places would be to set up new gates.

“You guys can’t go anywhere,” I said firmly, standing with my feet apart and my arms crossed.

“And why, pray tell?” My dad asked, giving me the You’d-better-have-a-damn-good-reason-for-speaking-to-me-that-way look.

“Well, I would prefer it if your grandchild knew his grandfather better than I knew mine,” I said.

Uncle Charlie looked at his daughter and then swept her up in his big arms, hugging her and smiling his joy.  My dad wrapped me up in a hug as well, and if I didn’t know better, I’d swear the old zombie fighter had a tear in his eye as well.

“Any thoughts on names?” Uncle Charlie asked, after putting Julia down.

Julia smiled shyly.  “Aaron and I had talked about this before, and we wanted to know what you thought.  If it’s a girl, Sarah Ellen, and if it’s a boy, then Jonathon Charles.”

Dad smiled.  “Perfect.”

Uncle Charlie raised a hand.  “Why not Charles Jonathon?”

I shook my head.  “You two fight it out, we’ll name the baby after the winner.”

“Deal?”

Read on for a free sample of Year Of The Dead

Sunday, June 21st

It started with a tearing, roaring sound, and an impact that rattled windows.

Eric Kelly stood up from the couch where he’d been relaxing and reading a book, looking around a bit wildly, wondering if the house was about to collapse on top of him. Within a couple of seconds, however, the commotion ended, and much to Eric’s relief, the walls of the room around him continued to stand.

“What the hell was that?!”

The voice belonged to his sister, Justine, who emerged from the hallway leading back to the bedrooms, tying the belt of the blue robe covering her down to her knees, eyes puffy with sleep. She gave Eric a look that said she somehow thought he had something to do with waking her up.

Moments later, Justine’s husband, Bill, entered into the room.

Eric shrugged, and forced a smile. “The end of the world?”

Neither Justine nor Bill smiled in response, not that Eric expected them too. Justine had always been a serious person, and she’d managed to find herself an equally serious man. Eric had always been the irresponsible one, the partier, the dreamer. Even though he was nearing thirty now and his partying days—well, his hard partying days, at least—were behind him, he knew he had a reputation he’d never be able to shake. Not that he really minded. So, he hadn’t walked the straight and narrow path his parents had tried to set out for him, the one his sister—who he loved in spite of her often less than sunny disposition—had been only too happy to follow. So he liked to stay up late and watch weird movies and read weird books and, yes, have a beer or three with his friends—and by himself on occasion. So what? It was his life. He could have some fun if he wanted to. And if he happened to screw things up a little along the way? If he needed to get out of Wisconsin, head down to Florida, and stay with his older sister for a while? As far as Eric was concerned, a person couldn’t learn from his mistakes unless he made a few.

Bill approached the living room’s bay window, opened the blinds, and looked outside. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he said with a shrug.

Eric, dressed in a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, grabbed his tennis shoes from where he’d left them near the end of the couch, and pulled them on. Then he crossed the room to the front door, unlocked it, and pulled it open.

“I’ll go check it out,” he said as he stepped outside.

“Wait up,” came Bill’s voice from behind him. “I’ll go with you.”

Eric stepped outside and closed the door. As he followed the walkway through the yard and over to the driveway, he saw some of the neighbors emerge from their houses. An older woman called out to him from across the street, asking him if he had any idea about what was going on.

“No idea.”

He made his way toward the stop sign at the end of the road. Once there, he heard raised voices from the next street over, south of where his sister lived. So he turned in that direction, and kept walking.

“Eric!”

Looking back, he saw Bill jogging to catch up to him.

“Come on. Wait up.”

This time Eric did. When Bill caught up to him he asked, “What’s the hurry?”

“Just don’t want to miss all the excitement.”

“Could be the kind of excitement that gets people hurt. Or killed.”

They turned at the next street sign, still following the sound of voices. Now Eric could see a growing crowd of people in the cul-de-sac at the end of the road.

“Holy shit,” said Eric as they reached the circle and saw what had drawn the people there.

Thick tendrils of smoke and steam rose from a hole a couple of feet across in the center of the cul-de-sac. Something had punched its way straight through the black surface of the road, something emitting a dull, reddish glow, and producing a smell remarkably like rotten eggs. Eric stopped about ten feet or so from the edge of the crater, deciding he’d gotten close enough.

“A meteorite,” said an older fellow standing nearby. “Probably a small chunk of asteroid.”

Eric cast a glance around the cul-de-sac. “Looks like most of the windows are still intact. Seems like a miracle, considering all the noise that thing made when it came down.”

The older guy grunted a laugh. “God bless hurricane proof glass.”

A breeze picked up, did little to dispel the humidity infusing the air on this, the first night of summer. However, it did manage to spread the smoke, the steam, and that rotten egg smell around a bit more. Eric lifted the neck of his shirt up to cover his mouth and nose as the people around him started to cough.

I really shouldn’t be breathing that shit, he told himself as he, too, began coughing. And it was a long time before he was able to stop.

Monday, June 22nd

The story got several minutes worth of coverage on the morning news.

Amanda stood in front of the TV, cup of coffee in hand, watching as an elderly woman spoke about her experience.

“It woke me out of a dead sleep. Shook the clock right off the table next to the bed. Since we don’t have earthquakes down here, I thought a gas line had exploded. Then I went outside and saw the hole in the ground. It was glowing. Smoke coming out of it. Didn’t really know what to make of it at first.”

The camera panned back to the handsome young man conducting the interview.

“These are the types of stories we’ve been hearing all morning. A scary evening, indeed, for those living near the impact sites...”

Sites, thought Amanda. As in plural. According to the lead-in report, twenty-three of them had been located across the central Florida area. A fast food restaurant had taken a direct hit, killing three people inside.

Death by space rock. What a way to go.

Some of the “space rocks” had landed within a few miles of where Amanda lived. A little too close for comfort. The thought of one of those asteroid fragments slamming down through the roof of her apartment building, killing her, or God forbid, killing Mitchell as he lay sleeping in his bed…

She shook her head, forcing the grisly thought from her mind, and took a sip of coffee.

Nectar of the gods.

It took two cups to get her going in the morning, a habit she’d developed in college, the whole year-and-a-half she attended. Community college. Never took it all that seriously to begin with. Had done it more to appease her parents than anything else. Too many late nights partying to ever really stand a chance of graduating. Had turned to coffee to help fight off the hangovers.

Her college days officially came to an end when she met Jonah. She was nineteen at the time. He was twenty-three, owned a nice car, his own house. They’d been seeing each other for all of about two months when she moved in with him. A few months later, she found out she was pregnant, wound up back at her parents’ house before she had the baby. Turned out Jonah, despite appearances to the contrary, wasn’t such a great guy once you really got to know him.

Not long after Mitchell was born, she found a decent paying job at a call center and got her own apartment, which she could afford thanks to the money Jonah sent her for child support. The payments were always on time which had, in fact, initially surprised her. Then she realized he probably just wanted to make sure the police stayed out of his affairs. She’d always had her suspicions about the things he did to afford his lifestyle.

Five years later, here she was in a different, nicer apartment, working two jobs to make sure Mitchell had everything he needed. She’d quit drinking, rarely even went out anymore, hadn’t been in any sort of significant relationship in over a year. Sure, she went on the occasional date, but hadn’t felt the urge to get serious and settle down with anyone. Mitchell was all that mattered. He was the center of her world. All she wanted was for him to be the happiest little five-year-old boy in the world.

A five-year-old boy who needs to get his butt out of bed.

She had to be at work by eight-thirty, drop him off at daycare along the way. As she finished her coffee, the newscast moved on to another story, this one detailing a series of convenience store robberies taking place throughout the Tampa Bay area over the past several weeks. Amanda still found herself thinking about the asteroid story, though, and the people who’d been killed.

Just a few miles from here...

She was fine, though, and more importantly, so was Mitchell.

“It’s not like those space rocks can hurt him now,” she muttered as she crossed the room and went down the hallway to the room where her son lay sleeping.

Tuesday, June 23rd

The crater was gone.

Eric stood at the edge of where it had been the other night. Now he saw nothing but a wide, circular discoloration on the surface of the road where the hole had been, filled in and covered over with new asphalt. He recalled the smoke and the steam rising out it, the smell of it, along with the sound of people coughing. More than a little freaked out by the idea of inhaling those awful fumes, he hadn’t stuck around long. The stuff could have been hazardous, after all. No telling what that damned rock may have released into the air.

I sure picked a hell of a time for a vacation.

A week in sunny Florida had seemed like exactly what he needed when he rather hastily made his plans to leave Wisconsin. Due to a cancellation, he’d gotten a good price on a plane ticket through a website specializing in those sorts of transactions, which had been fortunate considering he’d had no steady employment over the past couple of months. He’d been living off his savings account and the odd job he’d been able to find through a local temp agency. Yeah, the local economy sucked, a fact that had become all the more apparent once he’d been laid off and begun searching for new employment. Then, to top it all off, Danielle, the woman he’d been dating for going on two years, the same woman he’d been seriously considering buying a ring for sometime in the near future—when he had the money, of course—had told him completely out of the blue she wasn’t sure she loved him anymore. And, even worse, she’d started seeing someone else on the side.

So, yeah, it had definitely been a good time to get away from it all for a little while, to try and get his head clear, figure out what he could do to get things back on track again. When Justine had said he could stay in the spare bedroom at her place for a while, he’d jumped at the offer, even though it meant sharing space with what might possibly be the most boring couple alive. Who knew he’d be putting himself near such a major news story? An asteroid, for God’s sake. Pieces of it raining down across central Florida, one of them landing dangerously close to the house where he’d been “vacationing,” as he liked to think of it.

A voice from behind him: “They showed up in the middle of the night, and took them away.”

Startled, Eric turned around to see the older guy from the other night, the one who’d first informed him of the meteorite.

“Excuse me?”

The guy wore a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, had a full head of curly, brown hair, and a beard gone mostly to gray.

“The people who live there... and there... and there... and there... and there.” He pointed his finger at each of the houses circling the cul-de-sac, one after the next. “All gone.”

“I don’t follow.”

“They’ve been taken away. All of those houses are empty.”

Eric shook his head, not sure what the guy was getting at. “Who took them? And why?”

A shrug. “I’m guessing military. I just happened to be up, getting something to drink when I heard a truck go by, got to the window in time to see the second one. That’s my house there, third one down, other side of the street.” He pointed again. “Anyway, I went out on the porch, wanted to see what was going on, had a feeling I should stay out of sight, so I hid behind the hedges. After what happened, I’m glad I did. Those trucks—like big U-Hauls painted black— they pulled up right here.” He waved a hand, indicating the cul-de-sac. “A dozen or so guys got out. Dark uniforms. Helmets. Guns. Went house to house, banging on doors, rounding everybody up. People in their pajamas. Their kids. Corralled them into the trucks. And then they drove away. The whole operation took all of about fifteen minutes.”

Eric stared at the guy, finding the story difficult to believe.