Alive in a Dead World Read online

  Paul sat up to get a better shot, the pain in his ankle throbbing with every beat of his heart, which at this moment, meant it was pretty much a continuous pain. “Gotcha now, bitch!” Paul screamed as his well placed shot slammed the woman in her calf. Her immeasurable bulk slammed to the ground as the bottom half of her right leg snapped in two.

  The zombie woman landed on her face, and her teeth broke out as she made hard contact with the ground. As she rose, Paul noticed white jagged pieces of her shattered incisors poking through her bottom lip like shards of glass used on top of rock walls. She looked in sorry shape, but yet she rose. Paul sat there, watching her in stunned silence as she got to her feet. Her knee-high skirt did little to hide the hideous sight Paul was gazing at. The zombie advanced slowly, her left foot landing normally on her sneaker-clad appendage, her right foot and a full six inches of her lower leg folded away at a ninety degree angle as it came down. Paul could hear the bones in her leg as she cut through her calf muscles and made contact with the pavement. The sound was mind-numbingly sickening. It sounded like a wet fish being slapped down on a marble table, Paul was mesmerized with the horror of it. The zombie cared little for the irreparable damage she was committing as she approached. Blood spurted from the veins and arteries in her leg as she ripped through the tender vessels.

  Paul pulled up his rifle, realizing at this distance even he would have a hard time missing. He pulled the trigger, or more correctly “tried” to pull the trigger. He was not even rewarded with the satisfaction of a dry fire. He tried the trigger again, nothing. He turned the rifle over, an expended brass cartridge was lodged half in and half out of his rifle. Paul pulled back repeatedly on his bolt, the piece would not move and Stumpy was gaining.

  Paul turned over and used his gun as a makeshift cane to prop himself up. He thought sourly that this would be the time it shot, while it was firmly entrenched in his armpit. How many horror movies have I seen like this? Paul asked himself as he limped away, the injured zombie nearly on his heels. His ankle was swelling. He could feel it testing out the boundaries of the boot he was wearing. If he took it off now, he’d be lucky if he could get a sock to stretch over it.

  Paul nearly spilled a second time as he paused to look over his shoulder. Stumpy was losing ground and height as she continually splintered the bone in her calf. A little while longer and she’ll be down to her knee, Paul thought. Would she keep trying to walk with an exaggerated swaying gait? Or would she drop to her knees and come after him that way? Paul really didn’t want to wait, fearful that at any moment, he would run into another zombie, and with no other weapons than an unwieldy club, he wisely decided that confrontation would not be in his best interests.

  It was another two hundred yards before Stumpy fell over. Paul heard the thud and possibly a low soft moan, of that he was not sure. The zombie opted for the crawling mode of transportation. Paul was relieved; the savage pain in his ankle was impeding his forward progress. He could slow his pace down now, he was in much less danger from her now than he had been moments earlier, but he was still a long way away from safe.

  When Paul pulled his gaze from his traveling companion, he realized that he was on the fringes of a residential area. The house on his immediate left had been abandoned long before the zombies had come. Signs warning of danger and to not trespass were displayed prominently on the front door. It looked to Paul like the only thing holding the house up was force of habit.

  The house on the right did not look much better, but as of yet, had not been officially condemned. He thought about going into that house, but it looked eerily similar to a house that a young couple had gotten trapped in, in some zombie movie Mike had made him watch. Paul was under the impression that if a movie didn’t star Charles Bronson, it wasn’t much worth watching. He had suffered through it to appease Mike, but mostly because Tracy had made some unbelievably good queso dipping sauce and he had brought with him a near insatiable case of the munchies.

  He limped further down the road. The next house on his left looked like it could stop half the Mexican army. And if they couldn’t get in, what would be his odds?

  “I’m going to the next one,” Paul said as he turned to look at his pursuer. Her arms and hands were bloodied, but yet she still came. “It’d be way cooler if you’d stop,” Paul told her, but she paid him no heed.

  The next house had some promise, scary promise, but promise all the same. The front door was intact, however, it was wide open. That was not a common sight these days. “Well,” Paul reasoned, “whatever got in at least had a way out.” That reasoning held sway with a zombie, but if humans had ransacked it, little of any value would be left for Paul to use. “At this point all I want is a chair and two aspirins. That would be just about the best thing I could think of right now. Twenty-four Mapledog Lane it is,” Paul said as he made way for the door. Stumpy changed her course to match Paul. “I’ll get us some tea ready,” Paul told her.

  The house was pitched in darkness; Paul expected no less. He did a quick scan of the entry room and then immediately opened up the drawn shades to let in some much needed diffused curtain light. Dried blood coated the far wall and even abundantly dotted the ceiling. Bits of matter, the origin of which he cared not to dwell upon, littered the small throw rug and wood floor.

  Paul looked out the door. His traveling companion was still making her way towards him, but was still an extremely safe distance off. Paul still felt a powerful urge to shut the door though and try his best to put her out of his mind. But he feared that a much more mobile threat might still be lurking in the household and he wanted to be able to get out as soon as possible. Against his better judgment, he left the front door open.

  “You make sure to ring the bell before you come in!” he shouted at the zombie.

  She did not either confirm or deny her intention.

  Paul kept his rifle out in front of him as he went from room to room. At this point, it was no more than an early detection system as the barrel would strike something first, but as a weapon, it was almost useless. He wouldn’t even be able to get a good full extension on his swing in these tight quarters. The house was a disaster, but from the looks of it, not by looters. A battle had been waged here, but the chunks of fingers and bits of bone scattered around led him to rightly believe that the zombies had come out victorious in this round. Animals had done a fair amount of damage also, getting to anything in a carton or box, Paul laughed a little as he stepped on a small pile of Sugar Smacks.

  “I guess even raccoons have enough sense to stay away from that stuff,” he said to the empty room. As he got past the kitchen and further into the house, the smell of disuse became prevalent. It wasn’t the overwhelming stink of the dead or the undead, just stagnant water, mold, mildew and old food. He never thought he would be thankful for those odors. Blood was the dominant color as he entered into the aptly named dining room.

  “This must have been the last stand,” he said reverently. A small candelabra was on the ground, with matted bloody hair stuck to the bottom. “About as good a weapon as my own,” he said as he made sure to step around it. The copious amount of blood on the floor was strewn with footprints and animal tracks. Some were hand-like, paw prints of raccoons, but the more disturbing were the various sized prints of dogs. Paul had a healthy fear of dogs since he had been bitten as a youth. But they all looked old, human, zombie and animal alike. The blood had dried long ago and it appeared that nothing currently shared the house with him.

  He did one more run-through of the entire first floor of the ranch. Thankful that the small home did not have a second floor. He locked the basement door on the first pass by. He blamed his sprained ankle and the pain it would cause to go downstairs on his decision to lock the door, but mostly he was just afraid of going down there. The basement from his vantage point on the top of the stairs, did not appear to have any ambient lighting coming in and he couldn’t see the point in stumbling around in the dark looking for anything, especially whe
n he didn’t know what was down there, if anything worthwhile.

  Paul went into the bathroom. The medicine cabinet was opened, but surprisingly it looked like everything was still there. He pulled down a bottle of aspirin and immediately gulped down three of them, sticking the rest of the bottle in his pocket. Stomach pills, flu medicine, cough syrup, hemorrhoid cream, most of it was standard fare and everything but the cream ended up in his pockets.

  “Come on, everyone has unused meds somewhere,” he said. Paul shut the mirror on the cabinet, completely confident that he would suffer the same fate as every horror movie ever produced in the last fifty years. Something would be behind him as the mirror shut. His heart almost stopped when he realized the cliché he was performing. “Not enough scary shit going on, I’ve got to see if I can drum up a few more quarts of adrenaline.” Nothing was there, but his fear wasn’t quite abated, he knew that you could not see the reflections of vampires. He turned as quickly as his injured ankle would allow, it was not fast enough. Whatever had been behind him was now gone, even if it was all only in his imagination.

  “No more mirrors,” he said, chiding himself. “Kitchen cabinet or nightstand?” Paul headed for the master bedroom in the small two-bedroom house. The first thing that struck him was how neat the room was, even the bed was made. “Who makes their bed in a zombie invasion?” Paul wished Mike were here to share this moment. They’d definitely get a good laugh over it.

  Paul shuffled over to the nightstand. A molded-over mug of coffee stood alongside a lamp as the only inhabitants on the top of the small nightstand. Paul pulled out a book called Indian Hill by Mark Tufo that looked to be about half read, judging by the bookmark. “Doesn’t look like they’ll ever finish that,” he said as he tossed the book onto the bed.

  “Bingo!” Paul said excitedly as he grabbed four prescription bottles. The first was full of thumb tacks. “Okay that’s not going to work,” he said, tossing it beside the discarded book. The second was Xanax. He knew it was for anti-anxiety and didn’t know how it was going to help in this present situation, but he stuck it in his pocket. The whole world is one giant anxiety now, he thought. The third contained painkillers. He opened up the bottle and shook them out in his hand. “Eight, that should be enough,” he said as he popped two in his mouth.

  “Perfect!” he yelled sarcastically as he shook the lone pill around in the bottle labeled Amoxicillin. It was the right drug but the wrong quantity. “I do not want to do this shit all day,” he complained. He quickly went into the kitchen. Besides a lot of canned goods, there was nothing there that would do him any good in his present situation. He grabbed a small screwdriver he had seen in one of the drawers and sat down at the table to see if he could get the jam in his rifle out. “Might have been a good idea to do this first,” he said. He then moved his chair when he realized he had his back to the front door. Paul had just finished prying out the jammed cartridge when the first effects of the painkillers began to take effect. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” he said as he stood, testing out his new not-caringness on his injured ankle, for that’s all that painkillers truly do, they numb the mind, not the injury.

  Paul debated heading back to Brian with the one antibiotic or setting out again to look for more. Would one pill do anything? Or would it be akin to pissing on a forest fire? He decided to keep looking. It would take him too long to hobble back and then out again, and that’s if he didn’t need to take a nap somewhere in the meantime. Paul was deep into the effects of his prescription meds as he stepped out of the house. His first footfall out of the house landed squarely in Stumpy’s mouth. Paul toppled over as the zombie bit down hard on the toe of his boot. Paul was halfway to meeting the pavement before his lagging mind was able to catch up to the situation. He was thankful that it was not his injured ankle in the zombie’s mouth, but that was about it for the pros as his face raced to meet her injured leg.

  His mouth opened in the exclamatory O shape as he got a face full of zombie calf. He knew without a doubt you got the zombie virus from being bitten, but what are the repercussions from the other way around? he thought as he tasted her vileness upon his lips. Paul twisted around and over, as did Stumpy. She had a good hold of his boot top and was not going to yield her prize. “Fucking bitch!” Paul yelled as he brought his right foot down on the top of her head. He immediately regretted his decision, three more pain pills would not have been able to mask the intense pain his ankle brought from the jolting contact with her skull.

  Pain was his all-consuming thought as he swayed from side to side on the ground. Stumpy stayed with him, move for move. As the pain level came to a manageable point, he tried to crawl away, but the zombie was having no part of it. Her mouth had not left his boot as she tried to gnash her way through the heavy material, but her arms had come up and she wrapped her hands around the bottom of his leg. Death by crawler, Paul thought, Mike’s going to love this.

  The rifle! The idea ripped into his thoughts. But I can’t even swing it, like this. Paul whined in response to himself. Even Paul’s psyche was let down by his inability to reason together a workable escape plan. “Oh yeah, I fixed the jam!” Paul said with elation. Paul’s subconscious did a small, sarcastic jig in celebration. It would be tough to miss from this distance even for Paul, but whether from lack of judgment or impeded painkiller judgment, Paul did not take into account what was on the other side of Stumpy’s head, namely his boot. The relief of having Stumpy fall to the side was immediately replaced by the pain in his foot where he had just lodged his bullet.

  “Are you fucking kidding me!” he spat. Paul rolled violently from side to side, not caring that half his movement brought him into contact with the newly departed Stumpy. “So much for Saturday night dancing!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. The endorphins released from the volume helped to diminish the pain, but not nearly enough. Paul finally looked down at his foot. Blood was pumping out from the bullet hole in the top of his boot at an alarming rate. I always thought if I died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, it would be something a little further north, he thought as he crawled back over to the front door so that he could sit on the stoop and access how much damage he really had incurred.

  As he pulled himself up, he reached into his pocket and immediately downed another two painkillers. He debated waiting for them to take effect before doing what needed to be done, but thought better of it because he could possibly bleed out before that happened. Paul undid the laces, feeling strangely detached as he did so. The boot came off without a hitch; it was the sock that was proving difficult. Not that it was stuck to anything, but rather he just didn’t want to see what lay hidden beneath it.

  “Ours is not to question why, but rather to do or to die. Why the hell am I quoting Tennyson?” Paul asked himself as he looked down on his blood-soaked sock. His next question to himself paralyzed him with fear. I just shot myself with a bullet that went through a zombie. Paul ripped the sock off, the webbing between his second and third toe had a nice round hole blown right through it. No bones, that’s good. Paul couldn’t figure out how he was going to get up and on which leg he could stand. He opted to crawl on his hands and knees to the fridge. The only thing reasonably viable in there were the cans of diet Sprite. “Can’t hurt any more than it does now,” he said, grabbing four of the cans. He moved over to the kitchen chair and opened the cans, dumping the entire contents on his injured foot, hoping that it would somehow disinfect the wound.

  “Does aspartame have any antiseptic qualities?” Paul asked his wound. It wept some foamy pinkish fluid onto the floor in response. “Doesn’t look like a wound that would be my undoing.”

  Paul was stuck in indecision. He was effectively hobbled with a right sprained ankle and a left foot with a bullet wound in it. A rifle with exactly two rounds, no antibiotics and enough pain pills that he might not even feel a bullet to the brain if he went down that road.

  “Whoa where’d that come from?” he asked the air. “Fuck! I’d
probably miss.” And then he started laughing; he almost choked, he was laughing so hard. “Okay what are my options? I can try to get back to Deneaux and let her know what happened.” He dwelled on that for a second. “No good, she’d shoot me as soon as I said I was infected. I could try to find Mike. He’d at least wait until I changed over before he shot me. No, I’m not doing that either. Plan C.” Paul gimped over to the front door, shut it securely, locked it tight and sat back at the kitchen table. “Hell, if I’m going to turn into a zombie, I’m doing it with some style.” He took one more pain killer, rationing the rest off for later that night.

  Chapter Eleven - Ron’s

  Travis had pulled up a recliner and fallen asleep by Ron’s shortwave radio. Tracy put down her cup of coffee to drape a small blanket around her son.

  “You should get some sleep too,” Ron said, coming into the room.

  Tracy grabbed her mug of coffee and walked to the other end of the room so as to not disturb her son.

  “They should have called in by now,” she said, staring out the large picture window at the pond, which was just beginning to reflect the morning light.

  Ron was all ready to pull out the standard responses. Maybe the radio is broken (likely possibility, knowing his brother’s penchant for breaking things), or maybe the batteries have died (possible, but not probable; Ron gave them enough batteries to last a year even if Mike had left the damn thing on all day, every day), or they were making such good time, they didn’t think to let anyone else know (also another possibility, considering Mike’s what-me-worry? attitude). But he was not so selfish as to not let his loved ones know what was happening. Ron didn’t even go with the standard, “Everything will be alright.” The lie died on his lips before he could even say it.

  Ron sat down at the living room table, looking at the same view as Tracy, occasionally remembering to drink his rapidly cooling coffee.