Humanity's Death: A Zombie Epic (15 page)

And now we're down to the ammo in our magazines,
that's it. The arena is surrounded by the dead. There is no escape.
No way we could shoot our way out. There's just too goddamn many of
them. The other units either fled or were over ran. We held fast,
cause we all joined for love of country, duty, and honor. Do those
words mean anything now? We're down to the MREs in our packs. I
tell you, its not a lot. I don't know why I'm writing this letter.
No one will ever read it. Captain says we might just make a run for
it. That's a suicide run of course. There has to be at least ten
thousand roamers out there. May be if we'd made a run earlier, like
the other units did. They took off when things got bad. When it was
clear that we didn't stand a chance. When HQ stopped
responding.

I think the stench is the worst of it. I've been
around a lot of death. I've disposed of a lot of bodies over my
career. But that smell dies off, forgive the pun. The smell of
those things out there just lingers, and gets worse by the day.
They don't sleep. At least I don't think they do. They just wonder
around and wait...wait for someone to eat. A lot of them have army
fatigues on. Soldiers that got ran through. God its hard to look
at. Captain says if we can get out, we'll head towards North
Carolina and see if anything is left of Fort Bragg.

Something tells me it’s a lost cause. Something
tells me the human species is finished. Its only been a few weeks
since the Fever started.

What will be left of humanity in six months?

A year?

Chapter
Six: Tommy “Duras” Morrow

1

He pulled the
trigger of his Springfield and watched another dead bum drop to the
ground.
Look
at them, eating my sheeple, like that is their right, like that is
something they are allowed to do.

How will he ever secure this damn town now? And
where the hell is Barney with the 50 caliber?

“Do you see Barney yet?” Duras asked.

“Nope. The son of a bitch is taking his sweet
time.” Vice said.

How am I going to win this damn city back?
Must be over two thousand walkers. That bald fuck's gonna pay for
this.

The sound of Barney’s fifty caliber let loose
into the crowd below.

“
Barney is
finally showing his worth, don’t you think Vice?” Vice stood on the
edge of the roof, peering out and down at the stench ridden crowd
as Barney laid the demonic scum to rest. Duras thought it looked
like a video game. Or like that scene from
Predator
, when they mow down an entire section of forest,
but this time it was flesh that went flying, and heads, and arms,
and guts, followed by a stream of blood running through his clean,
well-manicured cobble streets.

The air was
humid and hot. The sky was a dark gray. The stench of death floated
up from the streets. He aimed his rifle out, and saw what once was
pretty young thing, all bloody with death, skin peeling, and a
big
USC
on her
cheerleader outfit, and her damn, god forsaken dead tittles jiggled
like loose coconuts hanging from a tree. He took the shot, and she
fell for the final time, with a split skull, but he doubts she ever
had much brain anyway. And how did she ever make it here? USC?
Columbia? These dead bums can walk, walk, and then walk some more.
Screams of death echoed all around. Dying kids. Dying adults. Just
a shit load of dying. The wonderful sounds of the New World. The
hymn they lived to now.

He continued firing into the crowd. Vice slapped
him on the shoulder. “Say Duras! We can trick em by shooting some
fire arrows into those trash cans with gas?” Vice was such a good
man, with such great ideas. Now, that is why he always kept him
close by, especially when death mulled around every corner. “Send
Rhino and the Ice Man down with some gas. Tell them not to get too
close to those dead things moving around down there. Or else I’ll
take their heads off from my wonderfully comfortable position here
on this god awfully beautiful roof top, underneath this magically,
hypnotically, burning fire of a sun.” He kept firing, killing one
dead bum after another, till he finally saw Rhino, with his
blackened skin, mouthing something off in his barely legible geisha
slang to his good buddy and compatriot, The Ice Man. Barry. He
thinks that’s what Ice Man’s real name is, but the moment Duras saw
him, looking so much like Vail Kilmer, he told him from that minute
forward, his new name is The Ice Man. He remembered he smiled, with
bright white teeth and his dirty blonde hair flickered in the hot
breeze.

Now, He watched him, through his Springfield’s
site, pushing, and filling trash cans with gasoline. Duras made
sure to kill any dead thing that wondered to close. And the hot gun
Barney fired off was still dropping them in crumbled fleshy rows,
all piled on top of each other, while the heavens poured their rays
down, cooking the filth, which Barney and company would have to
later burn.

Over to my right, Vice had strapped on his
quiver, all full of arrows tipped with sparkler shavings wrapped in
cheese cloth, and all held together with trusty Elmors glue and
thin gauge wire. He had taken the liberty of taping a few full
lendge sparklers around the tip. “Over kill Vice. And a damn waste
of some damn good sparklers.”

“We have plenty.” Vice said.

Vice sat a glass of kerosene on the roof’s ledge
and dipped the tip of the arrow, and left it there marinating for a
few minutes. Duras focused his attention back down to Ice Man and
Rhino, and they’d successfully placed the cans exactly where they
needed them, and did it all without getting bit.

Duras peered around with his scope, taking off a
few more dead heads, and then noticed a particular zombie milling
about all by himself, continually crashing into the fence line,
stumbling back, then crashing again. He wore a sweater vest, ripped
and torn, but none the less; it certainly was a fucking sweater
vest, with a red bow tie, a bloodstained bright blue stripped dress
shirt; and on his face was large, gaudy glasses like something a
librarian, or better yet, a professor would wear. Indeed. Duras
figured he must have been a professor at some school somewhere, may
be from USC up in Columbia; where he enjoyed porking the young
cheerleader whom he decided to follow down here in a death induced
delirium; and now that Duras had taken his love’s head clean from
her shoulders; the poor dead professor lost his mind, and his
bearings and now can could only crash against the cold steel of the
perimeter’s fence line.

“Ready to go!” Vice shouted. He moved the arrow
from the kerosene, struck a match, and lit it. Duras stood back as
Vice placed it in his bow, and pull back, and let it launch. It
flew through the air like a burning, sparkling bird, and landed
with a fiery explosion in the one of the cans.

“Damn good shot! Damn good sir!” Duras said and
removed a hand wrapped joint from his pocket, along with a Bic
lighter (compliments of numerous raids on gas stations). He lit it
and breathed in the sweet bud’s smoke, a purple haze blend he'd
grown in the garden area, and blew out of the smoke and coughed,
coughed, coughed.

“Let me have a hit.” He handed it to Vice, who
took a few tokes, before passing it back to Duras. The fires were
burning brightly down below, and Ice Man and Rhino had made their
way behind Barney; and Barney was still busy mowing down zombies,
who had become easy targets. Some of the dead mulled around the
newly lit fires; and Duras and Vice, stoned now, feeling quite
nice, took easy aim, Duras with his Springfield, Vice with his
scoped AR. Duras always enjoyed the spring and jiggle of his
Springfield after each and every shot. It felt like a reward for
being such a great killer of the already deceased.

The sun was coming up, and the smell of death
drafted high into the air. The streets were filled with the dead,
and now what was left of his men, led by Rhino and Ice Man, began
gathering them up, tossing them in the red pickup trucks and
hauling them off to the fire pits. They'd made those fire pits some
time ago, just for the occasional need for burning of bodies.

Then from behind Duras came the voice of Mary
Jane, “We made it into the shelters. About 100 of us made it. We
lost nearly 200 people.” Duras turned and saw her face. It was
covered in black smoot, and dried blood; but her bright blue eyes
still glimmered through the darkness. Her thin, firm frame, covered
in a tight fitting black shirt, her blue jeans, torn in all the
right spots, clung firmly against her legs. “What’s that?” He
asked.

“I thought you might be hungry. Give me a hit of
that.” Duras took a bowl of hot soup from her, and handed her a
finely wrapped joint. She lit it; and he sat down against the hard
ledge, his Springfield resting beside him, and fed his hungry belly
with the spicy soup she made so well; she sat silently beside him,
worn out from both fear and anxiety, and blew the sweet smelling
scent of marijuana high into the air. “I needed that.” She
said.

“I can tell.” He said.

Vice had disappeared, and Duras assumed he went
to oversee the disposal of the bodies; or more than likely to check
on his version of Mary Jane, her little sister Sarah Ann.

“How's Sarah?” He asked.

“Yes. She made it. Too ornery to die, that one.
Think I saw Vice running her way on my way up.” She said.

“Oh yes. He'll do that. And, of course she made.
Of course you both made it. That’s what I love about you to.
Ornery, godless, and horny. Just the type of women I need to run a
post-apocalyptic religion.”

She said nothing, and blew pot smoke out in
different sized smoke rings. He finished off the soup; and stared
at her. “What are the people saying?” he asked.

“They're scared.”

“I'll talk with them soon. Give them the hope
they need.”

“What will we do now?”

“Rebuild the walls. Go after the people that did
this.”

“The tree folk?”

“
Yes. The
tree folk.
Okona
.”

“I wish I could come. Help you kill them. You've
never really told me about what all the beef is about.”

He motioned for her to come to him. She came,
sat beside him, and handed him the joint. He breathed in the hot
smoke, and she laid her head on his chest. Her hair smelled like a
fire pit; and he wrapped his arm around her, and brought the joint
to her lips. She smoked it, and he smoked it; and then they just
stared at the sun rising.

“I think I told you.”

“Nope. Just that you knew him and hated
him.”

“He was a cocky asshole. He bought the comic
store across from mine right after I'd beaten the store into the
ground. He's a bit younger even with that bald head and he enjoyed
using his endless amount of cash to take me on.”

“He owned other comic stores?”

“Nope.” He took another drag of weed, blew it
out, and continued. “He did stupid stunts and filmed them for
YouTube. A real sensation and must of made a lot of cash via the ad
revenue.”

“He ran you out of buness didn't he?” She said
as she took the joint from his fingers.

“Nope. But he would have, if the shit hadn't of
hit the fans. In the end, the dead put us and everyone else out of
business.”

Tommy “Duras” Morrow remembered the Old Days,
sitting in his Comic Haven, just off highway 17. Before the bald
bastard came and shook up everything and before the world went to
shit. The smell of new comics drafting, his wife's ass as she
stocked shelves, and the sound of the kids coming in after school.
He especially remembers his little girl, a sweet face blonde with
locks and blue ribbons. The nick name “Duras” came from his love of
Star Trek. He flew his wife and daughter to the Comic Cons and Trek
conventions, always dressed as Klingons, most specifically the
leader of the Klingon Empire (you guessed it, the klingon's name
was Duras. He even had a bat’leth custom made, and after the shit
hit the fans, he sharpened the edges and put it to damn good use.
Duras was always a no nonsense kind of guy, never taking shit from
anybody. His body big and strong, just over two thirty and right at
six foot five; Tommy “Duras” Morrow was a nerd nobody chose to pick
on. Comic Haven had been his dream and a dream he refused to lose,
even in the face of the competition across the street. The
competition, or Comic Land, was formerly owned by a donut eating
black man by the name of Andre and is brother Chris. That was, of
course, before the arrival of Okona. Tyler Okona. What a cocky
little shit. If there had ever been a neck that needed breaking,
Tommy thought, Okona was the guy that needed it the most. When
Duras opened Comic Haven he knew Comic Land was already on its last
leg. It didn't take him long to lure what few customers they had
over to his new and much larger and flashier store. This all made
possible by the added extra of having a coffee shop inside the
store, which also, much to the dislike of big black Andre, sold
donuts. Duras believed he'd won and certainly there was plenty of
evidence to back this up. After all, he'd turned a profit within
the first year and was now looking to not only put Comic Land out
of commission, but also to lease the store front and start his
comic empire. Then came Okona. That filthy, bald fuck. With his
boat loads of cash and ever so arrogant attitude, not too mention a
blistering hot wife that made Debbie Morrow look like a two dollar
bimbo. Well, may be not that bad, but she certainly had an hour
glass figure and a booty to go with it, and a pair of perfect tits
every man dreams about. And ever since society took a nose dive,
the dead walked, and ghosts started showing up (or so he's told,
he's yet to meet one), Duras has still had nothing but trouble from
Okona. A reckless bandit that one. An apocalyptic robin hood if
there ever was such a thing. Hit and runs.