Read ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story) Online
Authors: Shawn Chesser
Tags: #Zombie Apocalypse
ocalypse (Book 10): Drawl (Duncan's Story)
Drawl:
Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse
Duncan’s
Story
By
Shawn
Chesser
KINDLE
EDITION
KINDLE
Edition, License
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like
to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for
each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was
not purchased for your use only, then please go and buy your own copy. Thank
you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any
similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references
to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.
Shawn
Chesser Facebook Author Page
***
Acknowledgements
For Maureen, Raven, and Caden ... I couldn’t have done this
without all of your support. Thanks to all of our military, LE and first
responders for your service. To the people in the U.K. and elsewhere around the
world who have been in touch, thanks for reading! Lieutenant Colonel Michael
Offe, thanks for your service as well as your friendship. Shannon Walters, my
top
Eagle Eye
, thank you! Larry Eckels, thank you for helping me with
some of the military technical stuff. Any missing facts or errors are solely my
fault. Beta readers, you rock, and you know who you are. Thanks George Romero
for introducing me to zombies. Steve H., thanks for listening. All of my
friends and fellows at S@N and Monday Steps On Steele, thanks as well. Lastly,
thanks to Bill W. and Dr. Bob … you helped make this possible. I am going to
sign up for another 24.
Special thanks to John O’Brien, Mark Tufo, Joe McKinney,
Craig DiLouie, Armand Rosamilia, Heath Stallcup, James Cook, Saul Tanpepper,
Eric A. Shelman, and David P. Forsyth. I truly appreciate your continued
friendship and always invaluable advice. Thanks to Jason Swarr and
Straight 8 Custom Photography
for the awesome cover. Once again, extra special thanks to Monique Happy for
her work editing “Drawl.” Mo, as always, you came through like a champ! Working
with you has been a dream come true and nothing but a pleasure. If I have
accidentally left anyone out ... I am truly sorry.
***
Edited
by Monique Happy Editorial Services
The man was dead or dying. There was no denying that. Ollie pried
open one of the man’s lids expecting to see a pupil contract, but saw no change
in the black pinpoints. Next, he tried and failed to find a pulse on the man’s wrist
or neck—the only two places he knew to check for the telltale fluttering just
under the skin.
Two long years spent living on the streets had exposed the
teenager to quite a few dead bodies. He had witnessed a lady wearing earbuds
and, oblivious to her surroundings, step out in front of a lumbering MAX train
and die kicking and screaming as she was slowly ground to a pulp under its
tonnage.
Dead body number two was a grizzled old wino who was quick
to buy for the minor street kids: cheap, fortified wine, forty-ounce bottles of
beer, or, on special occasion, hard liquor from the local package store. That
man, whose name Ollie couldn’t remember, had passed out drunk in the cold and
never came to in the morning. When Ollie had stumbled upon his corpse in the
bushes behind the 7-Eleven, the waxy slackened face poking out from the ratty
sleeping bag looked nothing like that of the Asian tourist at his feet.
Fresh
was what first came to mind when he had opened
the stall door and saw the syringe sticking out of the man’s arm. Face still
draining of color and lips drawn back into a thin blue line, the man in the track
suit hadn’t been killing himself slowly with a bottle for decades as the wino
had been. No, this one looked fit, was cleanly shaven and, judging from the
recent short buzz cut, had had no intention of dying today.
A flood of adrenaline blasted Ollie’s body. His senses suddenly
heightened, the underlying odor of bleach hit his nose. And though the
subterranean restroom was under who knew how many tons of red brick and cement
and separated by one ninety-degree bend and fifty feet of tiled walkway, the noises
of the crowd assembling outside in the Pioneer Courthouse Square was suddenly
clear to him. The steady beating of drums and low murmur of expectant voices echoed
faintly off the subway tiles.
Ollie knew he had to act quickly. He had no intention of having
the high-school-aged volunteer at the information desk call an ambulance. Nor
was he putting his face anywhere near this guy’s to provide CPR as he would if he
were a member of the
Family
—the tight-knit band of street kids Ollie was
allegiant to.
Being an opportunist, a trait necessary for survival on the
street, Ollie couldn’t let this one go to waste.
While casting furtive glances at the open door, he rifled
through the deep front pockets of the man’s navy blue sweat suit.
Nothing.
With the stall door trying to close on him, he shifted the
body on the toilet and snaked a hand under the man’s loose-fitting tee shirt
and into his back pocket, brushing his forearm against clammy cool skin in the
process.
Shit.
The man had no money clip and no wallet. Thus
there were no room service chits or restaurant receipts pointing to which hotel
he was staying in, which was moot because without an electronic pass key there
would be no hotel room ripe for the plucking.
Shuddering from the brush with death and perhaps just a hint
of his own dope sickness, Ollie rose and was again hit by the closing door. In
a fit of rage he threw an elbow, causing it to bang against the stall wall and
deposit a light windbreaker onto the tiled floor.
A half-smile creased Ollie’s face as he snatched up the
black item and tore through the pockets.
Coming out with a short glass vial containing a viscous
amber liquid, his smile went ear-to-ear as he turned it over in his hand.
“Thanks, bro.” Whistling a happy tune, Ollie made his way to
the open door where he peeked around the corner and, seeing the Information
Desk vacant, hustled to the left-hand bend and then strolled nonchalantly down
the fifty-foot-long walkway that took him outside.
Standing next to the Information Desk girl and flanked by
bubbling fountains, Ollie waved to get the attention of the five other Family
members he had come to the Square with.
No words were exchanged as the leather-clad young men filed
past the awestruck teenager who had temporarily abandoned her post. As the
rally spooled up outside the open glass doors, the drumbeats grew louder and
mixed with the heavy clomp of combat boots echoing in the enclosed space.
Once his five brethren were inside the vacant men’s room,
Ollie withdrew a handful of slender items wrapped in plastic and passed them
around. Given out freely by Central Portland Concern to combat HIV, the sterile
syringes were almost as important to surviving on the streets as what Ollie had
done upon finding the corpse a handful of minutes ago.
With the sound of crinkling wrappers filling the small
space, he took the
prize
from his pocket and handed it to Mikey, the
oldest and de facto leader of their little band.
“What’s this?”
“Morphine,” Ollie replied confidently. He opened the stall
and showed the others where he had gotten it. “Must be potent. Chinaman
couldn’t handle it.”
“Must not be used to
made in America
dope where he
comes from,” said a slender redheaded kid.
Laughter echoed off the walls as Mikey tilted the bottle
upside down and drew some of the liquid into the syringe.
“Save some for me,” another kid joked.
Mikey said nothing. He found a vein in the crook of his arm
and, in a move practiced successfully many hundreds of times over, pushed the
plunger in and felt the immediate burn. Eyes rolling into the back of his head,
he passed the bottle to his second in command.
***
Five minutes after Mikey fixed up it was Ollie’s turn. He
examined the remaining quarter-inch of liquid he thought to be morphine. Stuck
the needle through the rubber stopper and drew it down to the last cloudy drop.
As he was self-medicating he cast his gaze around and saw
his five partners in crime. All were sitting on the cold floor, backs against
the wall and wearing blissful looks on their faces.
Once the plunger hit the stop and the burn had commenced,
the fourteen-year-old runaway from Atlanta, Georgia let the bottle and syringe
slip from his grip. The last thing Ollie Dalton remembered before slipping into
unconsciousness was turning his head listlessly and witnessing the Chinese
tourist’s blue sneakers inexplicably begin to twitch.
One Hour Later
The squeal of tires against polished cement filtered up from
below. Charlie Hammond lifted his gaze from the crossword puzzle he’d been
working on and just like that the shiny white Mercedes was back and lurching to
a halt, the driver’s side window motoring down with a mechanical
whirr
that echoed about the tomb-like garage.
In the twenty minutes since the lady driving had wheeled off
of Fifth Avenue and ground her car to a similar impatient pause on the opposite
side of Charlie’s booth to get the ticket currently cutting the air inches from
his face, she had seemingly aged a decade.
Initially taut and bronzed from Portland’s summer sun, her
face was now slack and waxy and threw off a gray tint that was in no way attributable
to the softly flickering light cast off the pair of failing overhead
fluorescents.
Charlie knew the woman as a big-time reporter for a local left-leaning
television news station. However, since he liked his news Fair and Balanced, he
really didn’t give a rip about her lofty position. In fact, the only reason he
was on a first name basis with the petite brunette were the vanity plates
affixed to her luxury ride.
In her early-forties,
Gloria
had obviously benefitted—both
above the neck, and below—from her ongoing relationship with one of Portland’s
top plastic surgeons, who also happened to be a regular fixture in the swanky
Portland City Grill restaurant situated on the thirtieth floor of the Unico
building towering five hundred and thirty-five feet above the subterranean
parking garage.
Clearly affected by some recent event, Gloria was shaking
mightily, the tremors causing everything to jiggle from her waist on up—the
parking chit included. Charlie couldn’t help but get an eyeful of cleavage as
he gazed down on her from his elevated perch in the four-by-four cell he’d been
shoehorned inside of for the better part of ten hours.
With these kind of
perks,
he thought, suppressing a smile,
who needs a 401(k)?
“Morning, Gloria,” he said, hiding his crooked teeth behind
pursed lips. “Just getting a quick bite today? A little in-and-out?”
“Something like that,” she said gruffly, her voice wavering
and a little hoarse.
As Charlie shifted his eyes from her placid face to the
parking slip vibrating wildly like an autumn leaf in her dainty left hand, he
caught a whiff of her perfume and, riding her breath beneath its heady floral
scent, the peaty odor of aged single malt Scotch.
A little early to tie one
on
, crossed the parking attendant’s mind as he noticed her eyes sweep
forward and lock onto the rectangle of daylight dead ahead. He followed her
gaze up the shallow ramp to street level and saw clomping boots and flashes of
black leather and spikes as a clutch of Portland street youth hustled by with a
pair of squat and surly looking dogs in tow.
Charlie took the ticket and flipped it over with a twist of
the wrist. Seeing the restaurant’s validation stamp, he fed the chit into a
slot on the cash register and hit a sequence of keys. A second elapsed then the
register sputtered and spit out a length of thermal paper. When he turned back to
hand the still-warm slip over to the newslady, his eyes walked the black
shoulder-belt splitting the obviously
paid for
pair of breasts like one-half
of a Zapata-style bandolier. Her ample bosom was now heaving up and down like a
blacksmith’s bellows. Unable to resist the impulse, he lifted off his seat an
inch to get a better viewing angle.
Craning up and snatching at the receipt, Gloria barked,
“Finished?”
Flashing his coffee-stained picket of teeth at the woman, Charlie
released his grip. “Have a nice rest of your day,” he said, and then punched
the button that started the waist-high barrier arm on its upward swing.
The window motored up and, as the car pulled forward, Gloria’s
head swiveled forward, affording Charlie a split-second glimpse at the nape of
her neck where a pair of inch-long gashes climbed vertically from her collar to
her hairline. Two rivulets of blood, already drying, had leeched from the
wounds and into her shirt collar, which sported a brilliant crimson silver-dollar-sized
stain she had to be aware of.
“Have a nice day,
Gloria.
By the way … you’ve got
red
on ya,” he called after the retreating Mercedes, the last line having been
gleaned from an absurd horror comedy a previous girlfriend had forced him to
sit through. At least that had been in a theater that served strong drinks. God,
how he wanted one now.
Needed
was more like it. With a palsy rivaling
the reporter’s, he extracted a small silver flask. The smooth cool metal was
reassuring in his hand. Like it belonged there. He unscrewed the cap and took a
quick pull as he watched the white sedan crest the ramp.
There was a sharp horn blast and the kids passing by on the
sidewalk hurled obscenities at the eighty-thousand-dollar car as it sent them
diving out of the way. In response to the voiced threats, the engine roared and
tires chirped on the red bricks as the Benz turned right before swerving dangerously
across all three lanes of the busy transit mall.
“Four letter word for self-centered bitch. Starts with C and
ends with T,” muttered Charlie as he reburied his face in the New York Times crossword
puzzle.
***
One completed word block later, Charlie checked his watch.
Upon seeing that his sentence was about to be commuted by the big and little
hand’s impending rendezvous at the twelve o’clock position, he stowed the
square of newsprint in a pocket, stuck the No. 9 pencil behind his ear, and plucked
Gloria’s validated ticket off the blotter. Hands a little steadier now that the
belt of booze had worked its way into his empty stomach, he turned the ticket
over and punched the register’s
No Sale
key. There was a ding and rattle
of silver as the till sprang out and hit the stops just short of his ample gut.
He flipped up the spring-loaded arm and turned the ticket over. About to place
it under the neatly faced twenties, he noticed a dried smudge of blood on it.
You’ve got red on ya
, indeed.
Instantly edging the woman and her luxury problems from his
mind, he shut the cash drawer, plucked the handset off the company phone and, starting
with 9 to get an outside line, punched out an eleven-digit number.
