ZOMBIE'S DOOM? "Chronicles of Jack Doom" (40 page)

As the sun broke the crest of the horizon the next morning, Derek and I began what I hoped would be the last leg of my long journey to apprehend my former Marine Corps buddy.

The Caucasian had slipped in a ringer just before we were to depart his compound and forced us to take two of his men with us by decreeing a standing order of
groups only
outside the safety of the fortress at night.

Normally I would have dispatched both men as soon as we were out of sight of the compound.

However, shortly after leaving the building, the men reveled to us that their main job was tracking down what they called
misguided
people that had seen fit to leave the safety and security of the compound.

Although one of the men had given us the general direction that the Sarge had gone when he had left the building, I felt that it certainly couldn't hurt to have a couple of experienced
manhunters
guiding our little venture.

I would deal with them later, once they had led me to my prey.

We headed out in a direction that was a few degrees off the course that would take us directly back to Beth and Jolene's hideout.

I hoped that the Sarge's trail wouldn't lead us too near the girl's hideout. They were only a mile or so away from the compound, and if the Sarge and his men were that close, it most likely meant that they were closing in on the girls. If that were the case, having the two girls with us would double our force, but it might still complicate matters slightly in one way or another.

The population of the undead hadn't diminished any in the few hours that we had taken our uneasy refuge in the high school facilities.

The four of us weren't even off the parking lot before we were accosted by three of the decomposing decadents that we saw bounding toward us from some distance away.

After disposing of the terrible trifecta with our edged weapons, we cleaned them off on the soiled clothes of the downed zombies as usual, before continuing on our quest.

That's when one of our escorts made the comment.

"I think they're a little faster than they used to be. Those three were on us faster than Mr. Chain Blue Lightning
his
self."

"I don't remember them being that fast either," the other man remarked.

"It started a few days ago; it seemed to happen all at once. They were pretty slow, some were almost dawdling, and then all of the sudden they began to come on like gangbusters," I informed the two trackers. "You guys should get out more, you know, see the world."

"No thanks," said one tracker.

"I'm with him," Derek chimed in, smiling as usual.

The Sarge's trail led us into a residential neighborhood that had a multitude of fenced backyards, and was heavily treed.

Following the Sarge and his men was easy in those surroundings as pieces of wooden fences and the carcasses of butchered zombies littered the landscape where they had been.

As we closed the gap between them and us, the trail of twitching cadavers we followed were more active as their nerve endings had not had time to deteriorate under the relentless feeding of the larvae they hosted.

Hoping to obtain some valuable intelligence and begin formulating a plan for dealing with the group that we were quickly gaining on, I pointed out the obvious trail of rotting corpses in our path and asked our guides.

"They're leaving a lot of carnage in their wake, how many people does the Sarge have with him that they could do so much damage?"

"I don't know for sure how many people Ron took with him, but I know that he wanted to catch up to those women as fast as possible, so he would have been traveling light. My guess is five or six people, seven at the most," the lead tracker answered. "We should catch up to them soon, we just have to follow their trail, they have to check every house, and any other place they think the girls could be hiding.

One advantage to following a group of
seasoned
zombie killers was that they had a tendency to clear a wide swath of zombie free real estate in front of you, creating a zombie-free zone

However, one disadvantage, at least in our case, is we were trailing a group of
seasoned
zombie killers that are being led by a
seasoned
combat veteran, and when we catch up to them we are going to have to deal with all of them in one way or another.

In a zombie-infested world, there's really no such thing as a zombie-free zone, sooner or later the undead will find their way into that zone. This is especially true in the Indiana Badlands where the zombie count had increased exponentially over your normal everyday bloodthirsty monster arena.

"We're getting closer; these twitchers are shivering so much, it's all the flies can do just to land on them," the lead tracker noticed.

"I see that," I said, shooing some of the distressed flies away from my face.

I had barely uttered those words when our lead tracker stepped through a gap in one of the broken fences and was immediately preyed upon by two obese female zombies with the usual murderous rage in their eyes.

The two hungry man-eaters had ambled along the fence line sometime after the Sarge and his bunch had passed, and were inches away from the hole in the fence when the man stepped through the narrow opening. They were on him so fast that he stood no chance of surviving their brutal attack.

He was drug to the side so quickly that by the time any of the three of us could see passed the fence, which was obstructing us from getting a clear shot at either of the two monstrosities, his frantic screams had stopped, and the starving rotund ones had already chewed off most of his face and scalp. Their hunger pangs were apparently just as strong in the afterlife as they were in their pre-zombie existence. The only difference was that their metabolism was much slower now than before, so even as zombies roaming through a zombie apocalypse, they continued to have a weight problem. On the other hand, maybe they were just
big boned
or had a
gland
problem?

Because of our alleged close proximity to the troop we were trailing, at least according to the latest update from our tracker whose face was now missing, without asking permission from our remaining chaperone, I decided to send the two bloated behemoth carnivores back to the fat farm with a little less weight attached to their heads.

In short, I blew their fucking brains out of their skulls with my Glock, at the same time hoping to send a signal to the Sarge that other people were in the area, and lead him away from Beth and Jolene if he were somewhere near them.

"Are you trying to get us killed?" The surviving tracker reeled. "The dead will hear us!"

"Your dead buddy said we were close to catching up to the Sarge, if he was right then the Sarge also heard those two shots," I replied, pulling the trigger on my Glock one more time to end the faceless guides torment permanently.

"Sorry, three shots," I said, correcting myself.

The remaining tracker must have had some kind of relationship with his fallen companion, because he didn't take too kindly to my nonchalant attitude about putting my third bullet into the base of his partner's skull.

In fact, he was so upset by my final termination of his friend, that he made the mistake of pointing his rifle at me while I still had my pistol in my hand.

His spontaneous attempt to intimidate me, or kill me, was the last ill-advised thing that the man would ever do.

I didn't wait around to see which choice he was going to make with him pointing his loaded weapon at me.

As fast as my reflexes could make my muscles react to the threat, I aimed the four-inch barrel of the Austrian made handgun at the dead center of the man's torso and repeatedly pressed the trigger of the weapon to the rear. Five times, as fast as I could I squeezed the trigger, and five bullets sped the short distance down range and into the man's body.

The first two shots were so quick that the second bullet fired entered the man's body through the same hole that the first bullet had made, shattering his
xiphoid process,
and dropping him faster than I had dropped the Latin class that I'd mistakenly signed up for in 9th grade.

The following three projectiles walked themselves up the man's body as he collapsed to the ground, the fifth one tearing through his Adam's apple and ripping out the back of his neck.

"You put two full metal jackets right into his solar plexus," Derek said gleefully, as he watched our former guide squirming on the ground. "Right through the same hole."

"They were hollow points, but I get your drift."

Actually taking the time to aim my pistol, I pulled the trigger one more time.

"One more for good measure," I said quietly, as I ventilated the tracker's head, putting one final slug into his brain.

As predicted by the misguided companion that had pointed his gun at me, some rogue zombies were now narrowing the swath of zombie-free turf that the Sarge and his compadres had graciously, however, unknowingly left for us.

Amid the moans, groans, slurps, growls, and slobbering sounds made by the undead as they approached us and were each hacked to pieces one at a time, a single gunshot was heard in the distance.

"Did you hear that?" Derek asked, pulling the heavy blade of his chef's utensil out of the cranium of a gray-haired zombiefied Catholic Priest who was dressed in full regalia and had fallen prey to the Devil's handy work.

"No doubt that's the Sarge's bunch thinking the gunshots were from one of the Caucasian's clan," I answered speculating.

"Well they're half right, well they were half right, before our other half bought the farm," Derek attested with a grunt, and smiling as he jerked his cleaver from deep within the Father's diseased brain, before wiping the gore off his blade on the hem of the embellished hypocrite's black frock.

"It sounded like it came from that way," I said, pointing in the direction of the shot with my left hand as my right hand firmly gripped the handle of my tomahawk and twisted it out of the head it had just split.

We walked another hundred yards dodging the bomb craters and the clumps of twitching ex-humanity, not to mention the massive amount of harassing flies that they sponsored.

Just as I was about to let loose another round to signal to whoever it was that was ahead of us, and hopefully get the same response in return, a man's gruff voice warned.

"Don't do that again!"

Then the tone of the voice abruptly changed.

"Jack! Is that you Jack? Well I'll shit a brick house. It is you."

Peeking out through a rather large hole in the side of a once very expensive mansion, was a red haired man with a familiar face.

Putting on my best
I'm so glad to see you
face, which wasn't all that difficult to do considering that I'd been searching for this elusive man for quite some time, I answered enthusiastically.

"Sarge, buddy, is that you?"

Considering that I had no intention of going back to the Caucasian's fortress, and now that I had found the Sarge, I had no intention of letting him go back either, I saw no need to even mention the tall freak or his compound. After all, the weaklings that the albino's standing order had saddled us with sure weren't going to rat us out.

"What in the living hell are you doing in the heart of the Indiana Badlands?" I asked, hoping that Derek would go along with my ploy.

Fortunately, for us, Derek had no desire to return to the compound either, so he kept quiet and watched as I lied my way through the reunion with the Sarge.

"Holy shit Jack, I could ask you the same question, I mean after all this isn't exactly a vacation paradise you know," he answered.

"I took a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up here in... what did you call this place? The Indiana Wastelands?

"The Badlands, the Sarge corrected me.

"Yeah, well anyway, I met this guy here a couple of days ago, his name is Derek. He thought his family had headed up this way, and when we met, somehow he talked me into helping him try and find them, and then he was going to lead me out of this hellish countryside," I said pathetically. "We didn't have any luck finding them, all we found was a whole lot of eaters, so we decided to give up the chase and head back south, he's got a couple of friends waiting for him not too far from here. We were on our way to meet up with them and then get the hell out here."

I had no trouble at all showing my grief when the Sarge asked me about my family.

"Where's Gin and your boys, I hope you didn't bring them into this hellhole of a place?" Sarge asked.

The jovial attitude was quickly replaced by one of what I felt was false sorrow when I replied to his question.

"They didn't make it Sarge, after we got separated."

"
Abandoned is more like it!
"
I thought.

"We went north out of Texas and thought we were doing pretty good, you know, surviving.

Then one day outside a little town in Oklahoma, eaters took them away from me," I told him lying out my ass. "I really don't want to talk about it."