Dead Stop
Authors: D. Nathan Hilliard
This book is dedicated to my wonderful and trusted
circle of proofreaders. It is through their diligent efforts the atrocities are
confined to the antagonists of this book as opposed to its text. I want to
thank…
Alex and Claire (Charlie) Paul
April Rood
Santanita Grogg
Stephanie Hilliard
And even my lovely wife, Karla, who has absolutely
drawn the line at reading a book with zombies in it, but has provided good
scientific and practical advice on many book related matters.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Silence.
Nothing.
Then…
Awareness came
to the thing that had once been Victoria Valdez.
Only awareness,
nothing more as it lay there in the darkness. Not awareness of anything in
particular, not even awareness of self…just the simple reception of stimuli
without any form of interpretation.
It ignored the
blackness and silence, since they were nothing but the absence of light and
sound and therefore unrecognized. And with no history of movement, all
sensation such as the wetness of the bottom of the casket remained the same as
when awareness first ignited, giving nothing to differentiate any of it. The
thing merely lay there, not even aware of the simple fact of its own existence.
It just was.
Things continued
in this state for an unknown duration, because even time has no meaning in a
world without thought.
Then it
came…something new.
Something
providing the first “newness” to the timeless existence of unrecognized
stimuli. That “something” faded to life like the faintest of sparks in the
eternal blackness, hovering within the awareness yet providing the first thing
for the awareness to turn to. It hung in the dark like a dim ember, slowly
filling the empty universe of the former Miss Valdez with itself.
That “something”
was called NEED.
It brought
focus, and provided a point for the awareness to latch onto. Something
tangible. And once this had been done, the most rudimentary form of self
awareness came into being. Not much. Not anything normally thought of as
such. There was no concept of “I” in the usual sense…the hardened lump resting
against the back of its brainpan couldn’t formulate anything near so
complex…but there now became an awareness of “other.” There now existed the
knowing that NEED should be filled, and something else existed to fill it.
No true
cognition had been involved in the arrival to this conclusion. It came more as
a form of recognition. But even at the most primitive of levels, one thing
leads to another.
Need requires
filling.
Filling requires
motion.
A basic reflex,
nothing more. This recognition came on a level any insect, or even some lower
life forms, could have matched.
But it was
enough.
Synapses
hardened by formaldehyde sparked for the first time in over two years. Shrunken
muscles twitched, and joints brittle from disuse cracked. Victoria’s body began
to jerk in its confined space…slowly at first, then with more violence as
larger muscles were brought into play. The corpse started to buck and flop,
filling the confined space with muffled thumps and wet squelches.
In reality, a
casket is not the dry place of bones and cobwebs so often depicted in the
horror movies. Over time, fluids settle and moisture from the surrounding soil
finds its way in as well. Many bodies lie on a layer of quilted cloth soaked in
a stew of embalming fluid, water, and bodily secretions. The humidity inside
often reaches a hundred percent.
The body
thrashed in wild seizures, ripping the soggy linens in its dank cocoon. The
crackle of its spine, as it flexed for the first time in years, mingled with
the smack of damp meat against wood. The coffin had become a noisy place, a new
stimuli now being recognized by the primitive awareness while its body
convulsed.
Even the smell,
stirred alive again by the thrashing in the mortician’s soup of formaldehyde
and decay, registered in the dim awareness.
The seizure-like
flailings continued for a few more minutes, as signals randomly flitted down
disused pathways then returned with the effect of their transmission. Once
again, recognition began to seep in. The most primal patterns stamped indelibly
in the wasted nervous system began to assert themselves. Movements became less
spasmodic, less random, and muscles began to act in conjunction as opposed to
fighting each other.
The body began
to remember how to move.
Not perfectly.
Not even well. But the behavior of a lifetime of motions still resided in the
nervous system itself.
Toes curled.
Knees bent and straightened. Hands began to clench and unclench, first together
then one at a time. Even a few breaths were taken, although the lung linings
and other systems needed to make use of the oxygen were long gone. The
thrashing subsided as control over movement was reasserted.
Now motion
existed alongside need…and the need had begun to grow.
It was time to
move…
…time to move
towards filling the need.
Purpose had
sprung into being.
Fill the need.
Go to where the need could be filled.
Rot stained
hands searched the coffin. They fumbled along the corpse’s sides, then gripped
and pulled the shredded linens on the walls of the casket. One tangled itself
in the long skirt Victoria had been buried in, but managed to tear itself free
after a few clumsy attempts before resuming its mission. They explored the
entire casket within easy reach.
No coherent
thought guided their action, but they did move with purpose. And as they moved,
the thing recognized it was
inside
. It was inside and it needed to get
out.
Out to where the need could be filled.
And outside
meant going
up
.
Once more the
hands moved with purpose. This time they attacked the top of the enclosure with
a power the deceased Victoria would have found surprising if she had been able
to witness it. But Victoria wasn’t here…not really. The flashes of activity now
happening in what remained of her nervous system had little to do with the
graceful young woman who played clarinet in the marching band, wrote poetry,
and dreamed of designing fashions before a bad dive off a high diving board had
brought all that to an end.
The assault on
the coffin lid was clumsy, but it was also strong and relentless. Neither
fatigue nor despair ever entered as a factor. The hands clawed and pounded the
wood with no variation in their intensity, and within an hour the first trickle
of dirt fell into the fetid box. In another few minutes one of those hands tore
through the lid. The earth now poured into the casket, but it meant nothing to
the digger. It struggled and forced itself through the widened hole,
clawing its way up through the damp packed earth.
It was tight,
seemingly impossible work but now the outcome was inevitable.
The abomination
that had once been Victoria Valdez pulled itself out of the ground on the
afternoon of October 28
th
in a rural south Texas graveyard.
Armageddon had
arrived.
CHAPTER
ONE: AFTERNOON
Afternoon -
Deke
“Deke! Wait a
minute!”
Deke groaned,
and the boy’s wiry shoulders sagged as he pulled open the front door. His
mother’s shout cut like a bandsaw through the tiny house. Her timing couldn’t
have been worse, and he winced in the knowledge she could now probably be heard
by everybody on the block.
“Aw mom,” he
sighed loudly and hung his head, “I gotta go. Harley’s waiting.”
“Harley?” Her
voice floated in from the back bedroom over the chatter of an unseen TV.
“Harley Daughtry? What are you doing running around with him?”
Deke gritted
his teeth as he clutched the handle of the screen door. He really didn’t need
this on top of everything else.
Hell,
Mom…who else is there to hang out with? All my friends have gone to college or
got jobs in Houston or San Antonio while I’m still stuck in this shitty little
dump of a town.
“Harley’s
okay, Mom,” he pleaded. “Please don’t start this.”
He may as well
have been asking for the earth to stop turning.
“He’s a bum,
Deke. He’s just as shiftless as his old man, and he’ll probably end up the same
way, too. Besides, he’s older than you.”
“He’s only
five years older and he’s back from the Army, fer Pete’s sake…not prison. Give
the guy a break.”
“He’s no good!
He’s going to get in trouble some day, and I don’t want you around him when he
does.”
“Mom,” the boy
groaned, “he’s not his Dad. You can’t blame him for stuff he didn’t even do.”
“I worry,
Deke. I worry about you.”
“I’ll be fine.
I gotta go!” He pushed the screen door open.
“Well, where
are you going? When will you be back?” The voice now carried a hint of whine,
causing Deke’s jaw to clench. “You know I don’t like staying here alone with my
back what it is.”
I’m going
nowhere, Mom. Nowhere at all. And it ain’t much of a trip because I already
live there.
“We’re just
going to drive around for a while, then we’ll probably go hang out at the
Textro. I’ll be back by midnight.”
“Midnight!
There’s a storm coming in!”
“Maybe
sooner!” he called back over his shoulder as he stepped out. “I love you, Mom!”
“Deke! Don’t
just…”
The door
slammed shut, and he hustled across the small wooden porch towards the old
pickup truck. His boot heels made sharp reports on the old boards before
landing with a crunch in the gravel driveway. In Masonfield, concrete driveways
and sidewalks were for the people who could afford to build their houses since
the nineteen seventies. They had their own side of town…and this wasn’t it.
The youngster
ran across in front of the beat up Chevy and around to the passenger door. He
reached in through the window and pulled the inside handle to open it. There
was no outside handle, but Harley had only paid seven hundred dollars for the
vehicle so he seemed fine with it. Of course, Harley seemed fine with pretty
much everything.
Deke pulled
himself into the weathered vinyl seat and slammed the door closed behind him.
Free at last. He puffed his cheeks out and pulled down his straw cowboy hat,
then glanced over at Harley who grinned quizzically at him.
“Don’t worry
about it,” the boy grunted, “Let’s just get out of here.”
“You got it,
amigo,” Harley drawled and looked over his shoulder as he backed the pickup out
of the driveway and onto the cracked pavement of Terrance Street. “How far are
we heading?”
“How much gas
you got?”
“That bad,
huh?” Harley laughed and rested his elbow on the sill of his open window as
they drove down the street.
Some people
said Harley Daughtry was born with a smile on his face. Tall, rangy and laid
back, his white teeth were almost always cheerfully visible. Even in other than
happy circumstances, his smile usually remained…yet never in an inappropriate
way. His grin had different expressions the same way other people’s faces
wore theirs.
His flannel
shirt had the sleeves ripped off, revealing long arms that were hard with lean
muscle. His blue jeans and boots were staple wear for this neck of the woods,
and the small felt cowboy hat perched on his head was so beat up Deke had once
told him it looked like it had lost the Afghan war all by itself.
The second he
said it he had bit his lip, wondering if maybe he had crossed a line, but
Harley had only laughed. The man was just good natured and not prone to taking
insult.
Currently that
grin had a tinge of concern to it as he looked over at his younger passenger.
“You okay,
buddy?”
“Yeah,” Deke
sighed. He watched the line of small, five-room houses go by and
remembered how he thought they were the norm when he was a kid. Somehow the
memories of happily chasing and playing amongst them with his childhood friends
now depressed the hell out of him. “I’m fine. Just another glorious day in
Hooterville.”
