The Undead World (Book 1): The Apocalypse (11 page)

When the military left Danville the first time they left a town, which had once been thriving, on the brink. It wasn't just the food, it was the attitude the soldiers had displayed. It left no doubt that they saw the people as little more than servants in the best of cases and slaves in the worst.

Sarah
's parents had their vast larder pared down to a week or two of food, and they were some of the lucky ones. A few people were arrested for resisting and had everything taken from them. And while an unknown number of women were rumored to have been raped, two other people were actually shot.

With all the killing in the world, those two deaths caused reverberations out of all proportion. Thousands of people panicked and fled the town, thinking incorrectly that they would find things better somewhere else. Among those that stayed a strong majority felt the overwhelming need to fortify the town and all remaining
fuel was used to operate a bulldozer night and day, digging what was in essence a huge moat around Danville. They even redirected the waters of the North Fork River into it, making a tremendous muddy mess out of the eastern side of the city.

And then they sat around passively waiting. Nothing in their staid, dull lives had prepared them to do anything else. Within a few days the moat proved its worth when the first real wave of zombies came at the town. The alarm sounded and the men went off, while the women, save for a hearty few, watched from the eastern buildings.

The firing went on for a long time as the men were slow to catch on that only headshots were effective and hundreds of rounds were wasted in a time when every shot counted. Eventually the moat was breached in a number of spots and the farmers fled to their homes, where they proved far more effective. Firing down from second floor windows where they were safe allowed them to aim with far greater accuracy, and though a number of homes were broken into and some two dozen townsmen were slain, the town lived to fight another day.

“
Was everyone checked for bites last night?” Denise asked at breakfast the following morning. In order to pool their dwindling recourses, Gary and Denise Rivers, had moved into their daughter's much smaller house. It was easier to heat and had only two entrances to defend in case of an emergency and one of these was blocked with a now useless refrigerator.

They were eating cold oatmeal with only a spoon full of sugar to sweeten it. Since the army had left, their meals had been dreadfully bland and Gary sighed with his spoon halfway to his mouth.
“Yeah. Johansson and Cargrave went around after the fight. Found a couple.”

“
Who were they?” Denise asked taking a small nibble of the grey paste.

“
Please,” Sarah said, shaking her head. She didn't want to know who they were. The list of dead and missing in her life was beginning to grow in length and just then she'd rather just believe her friends were alive someplace else; someplace nice.

“
Well what did they do?” Denise demanded. “We can't have people turning into monsters smack dab in the middle of Danville!”

“
Trust me, it was taken care of. In a respectful manner.”

The room went silent as the two women pondered what a
“respectful manner” entailed and in the silence the dread bell began to go off again. Denise's mouth started to quiver; she stared down at her bowl and said, “You better get going, dear.”

He had only just opened the door when someone ran by and yelled,
“The army's back. Hide what you can!” They didn't have much to hide, so it only took a few minutes, and that was all the time they had.

“
What is that noise?” Denise asked hurrying to the window and peeking out. “Oh my lord! They have tanks. Why would they have tanks?”

They found out moments later as a loudspeaker began issuing orders:
“Residents of Danville, remain indoors. Resistors will be shot. Remain indoors until further notice. Anyone on the street will be shot as a resistor. All weapons must be placed just outside your front door. Anyone found with a weapon indoors will be shot.”

This was repeated up and down the street.

Gary had gone upstairs to get a better look around and he came down in a sweat. “They've got four tanks and all sorts of armored humvees. They...” A tat-tat-tat of machine gun fire began. It ended quickly and everyone stood frozen, listening for more. Gary swallowed hard and asked, “What do we do?”

“
Put your gun outside!” Denise cried.

“
But they'll take it,” Gary said, clutching his shotgun with both hands, like a toddler with a toy. “We'll be defenseless.”

Sarah felt her insides cave as she said,
“They won't. I know the commander. Um, he uh...we have an understanding.”

Her father seemed puzzled by this.
“What sort of understanding?”

“
Just put the gun outside,” Sarah said, going to sit down at her kitchen table. She didn't think her legs would hold her up for long. “And hurry. They seem trigger happy and I couldn't stand for anything to happen to you.”

He did and then the three sat at the kitchen table with their oatmeal hardening in front of them. The tanks systematically went down each street, stopping at every house where their presence made the people feel small and vulnerable. When they finally came to Sarah
's house and a knock sounded at the door each of the three took a great fearful breath. “Come in,” she said and her voice cracked.

Two soldiers came in pointing mean looking assault weapons at the three and right behind them came the colonel and now his
nametag was visible: Williams. He spoke pleasantly, “Good morning. Don't get up, enjoy your breakfast.”

“
Are you going to take my gun?” Gary asked quickly.

The
colonel's eyes went to Sarah first and she found that she couldn't look him in the face. “That all depends,” he said, slowly. He then raised his eyebrows to one of the soldiers who had come in with them.

The man read aloud from a piece of notebook paper,
“By command of the military governor in compliance with Executive order 7249. Section one: In order to fairly and properly defend the people of Danville, all weapons and ammunition are to be turned over immediately. They will be redistributed as warranted by circumstance.”

Sarah
's father gasped and began, “That's outrageous. You can't take our guns! Our second amendment rights...”

Williams held up a hand and cut Gary
's words off with the simple gesture. “I can actually. Forget the executive order, those tanks out there say I can.”

“
You'll leave us defenseless!”

Colonel Williams sighed and nodded. He pointed to the two soldiers.
“Wait outside please,” he ordered and when they had left he went on, “I wish it weren't so, but the cold reality is that many of you will die. Hell, all of us may die for that matter. It's a sad truth. Our lines were broken in four spots and most of my men are dead or run off. The remainder, about two-thousand are on an island in the Illinois river, fortifying it as we speak.”

“
But how are
we
supposed to live?” Gary demanded. “Taking away our guns is the same as murdering us!”

“
Right now I have to look out for the greater good,” Williams replied. “Communications with my superiors have ceased, we're no longer supplied, and every major city is categorized as black. That's the paradigm in which I have to base my decisions. America has fallen. That's the truth. And even if I let you keep your guns, you'll all die, very soon. This town is essentially defenseless and now that the army has failed, there's nothing between you and close on a million stiffs. From my point of view it makes no sense not to take what can be saved and leave the rest.”

The room went quiet at the news and from outside screams could be heard. Sarah listened to them and they sunk in, going right to her heart
; they were the screams of Mrs. Hayes, one of her neighbors. The sound made her oatmeal want to come back up. 

She swallowed hard, forcing the sensation of nausea from her mind and then stood. With a forced smile she went to the colonel and put her hand out and he took it.
“Thankfully, the colonel and I have an understanding.”

He
r father had been ghost-white and staring blankly, now he came alive. “That's what you said before, and I ask again, what sort of understanding?”

Williams glanced down at Sarah and then put an arm around her.
“Nothing nefarious I assure you. I am somewhat smitten with your daughter and I can't stand the idea of something happening to her. Somehow she was able to pick up on it.”

“
Somehow,” Sarah agreed with a barely repressed shiver. The colonel's hand had slid down her back and now he was gently massaging her ass. “And you'll bring my parents with us back to this island?”

“
How could I say no?” he replied. “Though I have to warn you, I'll expect a lot out of you on a
daily
basis.”

“
You won't be disappointed,” Sarah said, agreeing to become his whore.

Slinging his M16 across his back and raising his hands, Ram moved toward the barricade of cars, and as he went he was forced to step on rotting bodies. They carpeted the road two deep and just to the side was a sharp edged drainage ditch where bodies were piled in the hundreds. As gingerly as possible, Ram stepped on the ones in the road and still they shifted and squished beneath his feet, letting out horrid yawns of putrid gases that had his head feeling light.

“
That's close enough,” a voice from behind the cars said. Ram felt the world begin to spin and he stumbled forward gagging against the smell. The men behind the barricades made threats, and still he staggered on until he had his hands on the passenger side window of a four-runner.

Across the car from him, pointing a
short-barreled shotgun was what he at first thought was a large chubby hispanic. Then Ram' eyes began to focus and he saw that it was a man who didn't seem to belong in the heat of that desert. He was sumo wrestler, right down to the odd ducked haircut.

“
What, are you bit?” the wrestler asked in such a thick accent that it took a moment before Ram realized that it had been a form of English. He started to shake his head and the sumo was pushed aside by a much smaller man. He was white, but with such a deep and permanent tan that he was darker than Ram.

“
You bit?” he asked.

Ram shook his head and said,
“No, it's the smell. You know you gotta move these bodies or you're going to get some diseases.”

“
We ain't worried about no diseases much. It's the fucking zombies that we worry on. So what you got to trade? We got all the guns we can use. It's the bullets we need. You got any? Or alcohol. Or some good food. Not just rice and beans, and that crap. Something good, like some Pringles. But mostly we need bullets.”

“
Bullets? No, I got a girl.”

The man tilted his head like a puzzled dog.
“A girl? What do you mean? To trade? You wanna trade a girl?” he pulled back from his side of the car and yelled to his right. “He wants to trade us a girl.”

Another man squinted from between two of the piled cars and said,
“That's fucked up, mister. We don't buy and sell people. You can just take that shit somewhere else.”

“
No, you don't understand me,” Ram said. “I want to get rid of this girl. She's, uh...she's getting passed around, if you know what I mean.”

“
I do,” the man between the cars said. “And that's just as fucked up.”

Ram couldn
't agree more. “That's why I want to give her to you. But those assholes think I'm here to trade so I'm going to need something to bring back. Like some water, do you have any?”

The man with a tan made a face and shook his head.
“Look we don't want the girl.”

“
Maybe she's cute,” another voice put in. “Is she cute?”

She wasn
't, not in Ram's eyes. He made a face and was about to put it as nicely as possible, but the tan man spoke over him, “We don't need no more girls here. We got too many and not a one of them can shoot for shit. Just waste bullets is all they ever do. So, no. We don't want the girl. But if you're good with that there rifle we can talk about bringing you on. Can you shoot?”

Standing among the bodies of the dead had Ram feeling the cold, familiar dread that he had lived with for so long, and he was sure, just as the black girl back in the car was, that this barricade wouldn
't hold, and even if it did, would the other parts of the town? It looked wide open on the south with just a highway fence to keep the stiffs out.

“
No I can't. I'm not the best. And I don't have a lot of rounds left.”

The man shrugged.
“You get some bullets and come on back, but leave the girl somewheres else, we don't want her. And don't give me that crap look. We got eight-hundred hungry mouths in this town and can barely feed them, so sorry. If you don't like how she's being treated you go and do something about it.”

Ram started to argue, but the man
's face made it clear that his decision had been made. Ram went back to the Subaru and said, “They don't want her. Though they don't seem like bad guys. I bet if we just leave her here they'd take her.”

“
That's dumb, Yo,” one of the gang-bangers said. “I'm not going to just leave a piece of ass on the side of the road, not for nothing.”

This was agreed to by the rest and then another had an idea, one that sent chills down Ram
's spine. “Maybe we can pretend to do some trading and then when they think everything's cool, we can pop a few of them? How many were there?”

“
I saw seven,” Ram lied, quickly. “And heard another dude. And that's just the guys here. There's a town just down the road and he said there's eight hundred people living there. We try anything and it'll end badly.”

Thankfully common sense prevailed and they took the detour around the town and although it was only a mile or two out of their way it was enough to begin to knock some sense into them. As they passed car after car, each stranded without gas and the people begging for water, the eight of them began to talk about rationing what they had left.

This started with the girl. They refused to give her a drop and though she whined at first, she accepted her place eventually. Because there was so little room in the Subaru, two of the gang-bangers rode on top, and so Ram drove slowly along the desert highway, stopping at every broken down car, searching for gas and water or really anything they could use.

For the most part this was a waste of time, and the sun
went down before they found a thing. That night was cold and none of them were prepared with blankets or tent. They talked about starting a fire which thankfully they didn't do. Ram had argued against it and when the votes had gone against him at first, he had for the briefest moment, felt the desire to leave the pathetic group.

His new cowardice swept it away, but it had been there and it had him thinking that maybe, in a few days, he could leave this group behind. His old self wouldn
't have put up with them for a minute, because the truth was that they were zombie magnets with all the ruckus they made, and had they been anywhere other than in one of the most desolate areas on earth, they would've been killed long before.

But just then, the idea of firing his gun or facing the smallest zombie made him go queer inside. He slept in the car, with the seat pushed way back
and was better off than the others because he had on a woman's pink parka that he had found in a car earlier that day. The gang-bangers had laughed, but now they shivered and pulled their light hoods over their heads to hold in their heat. With the seats folded down in the back, the Subaru held five of them; one in the front with Ram and three in back. The girl was in the back. She might have been thirsty, but she was snug, acting as an anti-gay buffer between two of the men who pressed in on her for warmth.

The three men outside, with their foolish machismo
, kept their distance from each other, and at about two in the morning one of them was killed by a pack of undead dogs. They came out of the night in utter silence and just tore into the first man they came to. Ripping into the flesh of his face and hands and then when he was crawling around blind and crying blood, more of the pack came up and tore out his belly.

Ram couldn
't watch and he was not alone. The others, in a state of near hysteria demanded that he drive away. He went on for another hour with all seven of them crammed in the car and the heat turned up high and that was how they slept, folded on each other like cats. By morning they were stiff and in a foul mood from lack of water. Ram still had a third of his bottle left, which he kept hidden from the others, figuring it was their fault that they couldn't ration properly. The group drove on and the lucky bangers got lucky again.

They found a minivan that not only had gas, but also a gallon of water in an unopened plastic jug. Unfortunately the van came complete with a pair of zombies who were trapped inside. The pair must have been there for days, baking in the
closed van, and Ram had never seen anything more disgusting. The heat of the desert sun had bloated them and there were deep fissures in their shiny grey skin.

Ram
's disgust turned to outright nausea when one of the bangers got up the nerve to open the van door. The smell hammered his senses and he reeled, but when one of the men shot the first zombie and it literally burst like an erupting zit, Ram hurled up the little he had eaten for breakfast.

He wasn
't the only one. All the men were in various degrees of sickness, however the girl only made a face and said, “Oh that's nasty.” When the second zombie had been killed, thankfully with a clean head shot, the girl braved the smell and came away with the prized water.

She drank until one of the
bangers noticed and took it from her. Though Ram wanted to drain the van of its gas and use the Subaru because of its better gas mileage, the others wanted the extra room that the minivan afforded. He was over-ruled and then he was again an hour later when he wanted to leave I-15. It led straight to Las Vegas and Ram didn't want to go anywhere near another big city, where the stiffs seemed to breed.

He was vindicated when a few miles later the road became impassable and not just with stalled cars, but also with zombies by the scores. They turned the minivan around and took the first main road that went east. A few hours of steady driving later, he was again vindicated: the van sputtered and ran out of gas.

The Subaru would've lasted another fifty or sixty miles.

They spent another night cramped beyond reason and in the morning, with no other recourse they began walking down the middle of the two-lane road. If zombies came at them in any numbers they
'd be in deep trouble, but again the bangers were lucky and all day they saw few stiffs and those that they did were the slower type.

Ram had seen enough of them to be able to categorize them as either fast/strong or slow/weak.

The strength and speed of the zombie was mainly due to its size and its overall state of health—child zombies or those with missing limbs or injuries to major muscle groups were relatively weak. Another factor in their strength and speed was how they were feeding. The better fed they were the more dangerous they were. The heat of the desert seemed to sap a little of the strength of the creatures and those that came at the group came on slowly in ones and twos. Still this was a drain of resources.

By sundown, Ram was beginning to get nervous. The land was no longer as bitterly dry as it had been a hundred miles west, but it was still mainly scrub and there was no cover whatsoever. But as always the
bangers had another spurt of luck. Just as the sun dropped below the horizon and twilight made an appearance they saw a brief light a few miles away. It had been manmade.

Excitedly the group hurried across the empty land and saw a house sitting along a dusty little road. It was a pretty, two-story home in the middle of nowhere and Ram
's anxiety grew. There were two cars in the drive way and the bangers began to check their weapons.

With his stomach suddenly going queasy, Ram hung back with the black girl. He had no taste for what was to come. Though he tried to tell himself that the
bangers would just bluster and threaten to get what they wanted from the people in the house, in his heart, he knew differently. He knew their kind: fatherless gangbangers raised on the streets where morals were essentially boiled down to: if it feels good do it, and if someone gets hurt in the process of me getting mine, well that's just their too bad.

They had been killers before the zombies and now they were ten times worse. The five remaining
bangers spread out as they approached the house and the girl next to Ram scoffed at him, “You is such a pussy. What do you think is all up in there? A house full of zombies? Shit, it's probably just a couple of crackers.”

She was very likely right, still that didn
't stop Ram's heart from beating any less thunderous. He didn't want to go near the house. It would mean too many questions that he couldn't answer—would Ram allow more innocent people to get hurt? Would he just stand there and watch, impotently like he had when the black girl had been raped? Was he really a pussy now?

Before he had cracked, he had been the toughest of the tough. He had killed with a grim determination, he had a hardwired instinct to protect the weak, and a desire to do his duty. Now he wiped his hands upon the pink parka that he wore and wondered what had happened to him.

“Hey, pendejo!” one of the bangers hissed at Ram. “What you doing? Go around back.”

He could do that. He could go to the rear of the house and wait there, though he was certain that if anyone came out that way he wouldn
't be able to do anything. There wasn't a chance that he would do more than point his gun at them, and even that wasn't a guarantee.

Ram went around to the back and leaned against the white vinyl siding and tried to control his breathing. His lungs had begun to work like crazy as if he had just sprinted a mile.
“What the hell?” he asked himself as sweat stung his eyes.