Life Among The Dead (Book 2): A Castle Made of Sand (37 page)

“Raleigh?”

“They’re sending troops to pick them up,” Oz
answers from the corner of the room. “How’re you feeling,
boss?”

“I feel good,” Dan says with surprise. “Why
do I feel good?”

“I can answer that, Mr. Williamson.” A
stranger approaches from where he had retreated so that those
dearest to Dan could surround the patient. “From what I’ve been
told, the individual that bit you was quite unique--a girl born
without any immunities. Her condition required her to live in
complete isolation. She had no exposure to the reanimation virus
that seems to have only surfaced six years ago, pupating in us all
until that fateful day.”

“Didn’t we already know that?” Carla asks her
peers.

Dan concurs with a nod, but he feels this man
has more to tell. “Who are you?”

“I’m from your neck of the woods, actually.”
The young guy in the white lab coat smiles. “My name is Robert
Smalls, or as the yokels of Poland Creek once knew me, Bob-o.”

“And you’re an expert of some sort?”

“No… I’m just a student of biochemistry. I’ve
been researching this thing under a microscope since the onset. You
probably noticed your attacker was different from the dead. That’s
because she wasn’t dead. It isn’t the virus that kills us, it’s our
own immune systems. Our bodies fight so hard they ultimately give
out, and the organs shut down one by one. The disease is adaptive,
so the harder we fight the stronger it becomes. In this girl it met
no resistance, and could fulfill its goal with ease. It then
reproduced in her as a weaker strain.”

“That’s how I beat it?” Dan comprehends.

“Not only beat, but created antibodies
against it!” the scientist adds with excitement.

Oz crosses his arms and cocks his head. “Are
you saying Dan is the cure?”

“Not exactly. But with his blood we can
create a vaccine from the deactivated virus. The bite won’t cause
the transformation. Most importantly our dead will stay… well…
dead.”

“Holy crap!” Carla says with amazement. “Now
all we need is a vaccine against being eaten and life can go back
to normal.”

“It certainly can,” Robert says. “Our own
dead are all we have to worry about here. Nothing can get through
our walls.”

Dan has heard that before, and he had even
thought it once about his own safe haven. He looks around the room
he had first believed to be a hospital suite, finding it looks more
like a hotel room. The decor is cheap but nice, massively produced
fare. Everything from the wallpaper to the lamp shades depict
cartoon figures he recalls--happy cats and dogs frolicking
together. “Where are we?”

“You’ll never guess!” Carla happily bounds to
the nearest window. She pulls the shade back to reveal a surreal
world of bright colors and balloons; a rollercoaster whizzes past
their view.

“Storybook Land?”

“The big one, in Florida!” her glee in
announcing their new home causes her to embarrassingly forget that
he already knows what state they are in. “Obviously.”

“It makes sense.” Oz shrugs. “The walls are
high and made of thick stone. The place is divided into sections
that can be sealed off if need be. Plus, we have some help out in
the parking lot.”

“Who?”

“Alligators,” Heather explains. “They have
overrun the area. With the increase in food and lack of those that
would drive them off, they’ve taken over. The military tell us that
they’re breeding at an alarming rate too.”

“Food supply? They’re eating the zombies!
That’s great!” The idea brings joy to Dan’s heart, but despite his
warranted happiness regarding the misfortune of his enemy he
notices no one else is smiling with him. All the faces around his
bed not only take on grim expressions, they break eye contact.
“Ugh! Crap! What is it?”

“We wanted to wait until you were back on
your…” Heather begins.

His wife looks to the others for help, so
Carla picks up the thread. “You know, when you’re up and walking…
Shit!”

“A gator ate your foot, boss,” Oz breaks the
news, forgoing the tact being attempted. “Well… not all of it.”

Dan looks along the topography of the blanket
that covers him, and where he should see two equal peaks he sees an
uneven pair of mountains.

Heather points out that the glass is in fact
half-full. “The soldiers got to you just in time.”

“I could argue they actually got there a few
minutes late.” Dan stares at his partially devoured left foot,
unable to remove the sheet that covers it. “But I’m alive. We all
are! And, from the sounds of things, I won’t need to run anytime
soon anyway.”

“I love this sand,” Dan Williamson says as he
digs a small plastic shovel into the sugar white granules of the
theme park’s private beach. It’s a perfect day, not too hot but
still sunny. He looks around at the other survivors enjoying the
setting.

Oz and Carla chase each other along the
water’s edge. Apart from a large age gap, the pair seem made for
one another.
They’re
happy
. Dan smiles at the
frolicking couple.
They
deserve
it
. The one
time sheriff of New Castle adjusts the string straps of her thin
white bikini top, drawing the attention of male onlookers
immediately. The sheer magnitude of the man with her snaps their
eyes away just as fast.

A man Dan had met only briefly, and like many
survivors exchanged war stories with, is being buried by his
blonde-haired little girl. He is begging to be let out, but she
just giggles and shakes her head, allowing her single pigtail to
whip back and forth. Dan had noted many similarities between his
own tale and the man who is reluctantly being committed to the
earth. Both started in Waterloo and in some way involved a purple
Camaro. The man laughed as he recounted seeing his car being stolen
by the same guy three times during the entire ordeal. The last case
of grand theft occurred on an army base that had fallen to the
dead. He had led his daughter and a few others out of the civilian
sector when they got pinned down, only to be rescued by the most
unlikely hero.

“Usually clowns give me the creeps,” Eli had
said. “That day, I was never happier to see one.”

The jester got them out of danger and somehow
squeezed them all into his ice cream truck. From there they decided
to head to Florida, since Eli’s folks have a house boat in the Gulf
near Cape Coral that they had been living on since retirement. The
refugees were lucky that the stubborn couple refused to go with the
Coast Guard when asked to leave their floating abode. The sailors
checked on them a few times a week and got to know them on a first
name basis. It wasn’t until they became overwhelmed themselves by
those seeking sanctuary from the Midwest that they decided to take
the Coasties up on their offer, for the good of their
granddaughter.

Life feels like a vacation now to Dan and his
family. He never wanted to be a leader, never chose to be the king.
He doesn’t miss it in the least; his only duties now are being the
very best father and husband he can be, and making bi-weekly blood
donations. Between these responsibilities he has a lot of time to
think, and he wonders if Bruce was simply a fever induced
apparition, or was he really stopping by in the form of an angel--a
cranky guardian angel.

He also thinks a lot about fate. The
indefinite bastion that New Castle was supposed to be turned out to
merely be a stop along the way, a roadside attraction before coming
here. All the survivors, strangers in the world before, find they
are connected. Dan calls it the ‘zombie effect.’ Any actions taken
by one offsets the longevity of someone else; food one scavenges
robs another of the possibility, putting a zombie down saves the
life of someone else it may have bitten, and any zombie permitted
to walk away could kill its next target.

Though a vaccine has been implemented, no one
knows the true cause of the plague, with one exception. A very
unlikely survivor was picked up by a patrol. The man was travelling
on foot, and his unbelievable tale sparked many rumors throughout
the walled society. They found him sowing seeds along to road, and
when asked what he was doing he proudly proclaimed that he was
‘Spreading the love.’ He’d later elaborate that it was the least he
could do for Mary Jane since she saved his life.

Garfield Colt had an epiphany in that
underground lab. Freeman Wilkes had given him the idea when he told
him that he smelled like a rotting corpse. Gar realized it wasn’t
his acting like a zombie that saved him from them but his odor.
Living in his own subterranean lair, with so long between showers
and clean laundry, had masked his human scent with that of the
herb. He has been wandering the country side, planting the seeds
for a greener tomorrow, doing good deeds, and all with the ultimate
goal of bringing a test tube filled with a green substance to
anyone who may be able to use it righteously. ‘God’s bugger’ as he
calls it. Needless to say, nobody takes Gar very seriously.

Today Dan tries to think of nothing. Not the
virus or the cure, not the dead walking or otherwise, but of the
sand and the people he loves the most; Heather, Vincent, Jack, and
the newest on the list, Johnny, due in May. He sits with his family
under the sun, building a castle made of sand.

Thank you for coming back! I hope you enjoyed
this installment of the New Castle saga. Please feel free to let me
know what you think. Reviews are always great, or contact me
through my website:
http://danielcotton.weebly.com/

If you like my writing, check out my other
books: Cloudy With a Chance of Zombies, Anthills, the Gifted, and
She Hates Me: Now and then.

Thanks again!

Daniel Cotton

Daniel Cotton is a New Hampshire native
currently residing in Iowa with his lovely wife and two sons. He
derives inspiration from his own life and over-active imagination,
tapping into pains from his past as well as the current joys in his
life, blending them into tales that are both dark and touching.
Daniel delves into his own life experiences; his factory jobs, his
time working on a psychiatric ward, his time as a Naval Hospital
Corpsman, all of the places he has lived and people he’s known to
make the worlds he creates seem more real. When you read one of his
works, you are actually reading a piece of him.