Death After Life: A Zombie Apocalypse Thriller (8 page)

Murphy figured that word must have gotten out. He knew better than to shit where he ate, but his range wasn’t vast. It was fair to say that for the last year, he’d been a holy terror in Kansas. People still needed to run supplies or visit relatives in one stronghold or another. The Interstates were reserved for official use and travel generally discouraged, but state highways and back roads still saw use by the brave or foolish.
 

Rumors flew about how Murphy was able to afford the homestead he outfitted. Trading machine parts and Army surplus gear, his ostensible means of making a living, didn’t explain everything.

He remembered how easy it seemed, at first. Going out on his ATV, looting abandoned settlements and vehicles either left behind or overrun by feeders. There were worse people out there and he would go to ground when they came by.

But that could only take you so far, and as he got bolder and better at dispatching the living dead, he began to see himself as a predator in his own right. That first family was just asking for it. Holding down a little ranch house with little more than hunting rifles and teens at the trigger! He knew that if he didn’t take them, marauders would. It was simple Darwinism.

Sure, he still dreamt of that girl’s screams as he violated her, doing things he’d always fantasized about but never thought he would, but in the end he only strangled her. She would have fared worse if he hadn’t done her. The same went for the rest of them.

Mercy killing.

But the motherfucker hauling his carcass along, using him as zombie bait, this was a predator who was higher on the food chain. Murphy didn’t even hear him, let alone see him, until it was too late. One moment he was tucked into his little roadside blind, waiting for unwary travelers on the road, and the next he had an incendiary grenade rolling at his feet.

He scrambled out before the boom set his spider-hole ablaze, whipping out his old but reliable uzi. Of course he didn’t need to notice the red laserlight on him. He clocked the guy, posted in a tree like some special ops sniper, rifle aimed. Target zeroed.

“Drop the Israeli iron,” the man said in an amplified voice. It was metallic, soulless, inhuman. He was using some kind of built-in mic because both hands were on the rifle, unwavering, but his voice was more than loud enough to hear over the crackling flames.

“All right bro, no problem,” Murphy said, tossing the uzi and putting his hands up. “You National Guard, Army regular or what?”

“I want you to pretend you’re a rug. Right now,” the sniper instructed.

Murphy knew the guy had him dead to rights. He was hoping this was official business, precautionary measures before a little Q & A. Couldn’t be too careful these days. And he felt better having a spring-loaded combat knife as an ace up his sleeve (literally). So he complied.

It didn’t take long for the man to descend from his little aerie and circle around behind, but Murphy anticipated the zip-tie angling for his wrist. He popped the knife and slashed at where he knew ankles would be.
 

The blade cut only air. Maybe the guy saw Murphy’s elbow tense and maybe he was just that cobra-quick. But he hopped over the swing, jumped again and one combat boot landed solidly on Murphy’s elbow, pinning the knife arm to the ground. Hands tightened on Murphy’s wrist and twisted mercilessly. It was so sharp and sudden that the horrible pop told Murphy what had happened before the white-hot pain hit.

“Sorry Murphy, from here on out I’ll be doing the hurtin’.”

Before he knew what was coming, Murphy’s other arm was broken too.

The cuts came later, once he was chained to the tow-truck rig on the back of the squatty, heavily plated vehicle. The masked man methodically bared Murphy’s arms and legs, slicing him with an impossibly sharp tactical knife.

“Please bro,” he begged. “Can we make some kind of a deal? I’ve got lots of stuff—”
 

Rather than saying “shut up,” or anything at all, the large dude (he was at least twice Murphy’s size, and Murphy considered himself of average build) simply rammed the butt of the knife into his cheekbone, shattering it.
 

Murphy lost consciousness then. When he came to they were moving, and the harsh droning of the air raid siren was shattering the stillness of the wild. Summoning all feeders within earshot.

That was five, maybe six hours ago. Murphy felt weak, drained by blood loss and the trauma of multiple injuries, but his heart was still pumping.

Dawn was near. The first rosy trickles of color on the horizon and the lightening sky revealed more details of the dirt road they were on. Murphy figured they were heading south, out of his hunting zone and into unfamiliar territory.

Now there was a main group of 40, maybe 50 feeders doggedly pursuing their prize. They’d left many slower ones behind but in the dawn’s light, he could still see them in the distance. Not giving up. There was no quit in a corpse. So the real herd here numbered in the hundreds.

Murphy had a feeling he wasn’t the only one about to have a very bad day.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

THE LAST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

MORNING DAWNED PALE and rosy in the Pacific Northwest. Sluggish clouds drifted in an overcast sky.

A procession of cars trickled westward on a state highway. The road divided rows of modest houses from a swathe of forested hills, draped in cold mist. The air was perfectly still.

On the outskirts of the high ground, a THERE IS NO CURE billboard loomed over a small graveyard. Though its monuments were crumbling and mossy, traditional images of willows, funeral urns and angels endured.
 

Behind the wrought-iron bars of the rear fence was a stucco house. A raven alit on the fence, cawed, and cast a beady eye toward the kitchen window.
 

Inside, a small TV glowed from the counter, which was cluttered with toast crumbs and a breakfast-littered plate. “Meet the Press” was on and the guest was a former White House Chief of Staff, a man who resigned in disgrace earlier in the year.

“There is no coherent strategy for combating the virus,” the droopy-eyed, burnt-out looking man said. “The administration is simply trying to maintain the status quo, which people have learned to accept rather than aggressively seeking any solutions.”

“Let me draw your attention to something you told the New York Times in April of last year….” David Gregory said as a quotation appeared on the screen.

Darla King passed in and out of the kitchen, paying little attention to the TV. A pretty brunette in a blue running suit and yellow headphones, Darla was more involved in the hip-hop music on her iPod. She took a last sip of orange juice and fished light gloves from a drawer.
 

Darla ran three miles every other day. Her favorite route took her on a loop through the hills, a quietly scenic course. That was her plan this morning.

Something outside caught Darla’s eye and she paused at the kitchen window. On the sidewalk, a girl in an oversized plaid coat took a running slide across a patch of ice. A beaming, blond-headed boy watched from the other side.
 

Darla winced when the girl lost her balance at the end of the slide, her feet flying out from under her. But the boy dashed forward to catch his friend, sister, whoever she was to him.

The children looked up at the faint but booming sound of a gunshot, just a few blocks away. It was immediately answered by two more, in a different register. A smaller caliber, in fact. POP! POP!

A plump woman Darla guessed must be their mother appeared on the porch of the nearest house. She beckoned to them and the little ones obediently ran home. The woman cut a worried glance down the street, toward the Safeway store from which the gunshots came.
 

“There they go again!” Darla’s father called from the bathroom. “Got your gun, honey?”
 

The sound of shots being fired was not terribly uncommon in any populated area; it was merely a reminder to be wary.

Darla glanced at her right ankle. A tiny .22 caliber gun was Velcroed just above her pink Nike shoe.

“Thanks, Dad,” she replied in singsong. “I’m twenty-three years old, but I guess I don’t know how to take care of myself.”

While Darla was polishing off her pre-run Gatorade inside, she didn’t see a sporty, silver Acura weave erratically down the street. It sideswiped an old truck parked at the curb and the driver’s side panel crunched.

Moments later, Darla left her house and ran down the driveway at a brisk pace. She started off down the sidewalk toward the hills.

Unknowingly, she was heading in the same direction as the Acura.
 

She noted a fragmented reflector on the pavement as she passed the truck but thought nothing of it. A new dent on the neighbor’s old heap was no cause for alarm.

Her breath pluming in the crisp air, Darla ran confidently ahead. She knew this route like the back of her hand. The two-lane road was bracketed by towering evergreen trees as it wound along the slope of the hill. There was a nice view as she reached the summit and entered the forest.

Were it not for her music, Darla might have detected a wail of sirens rushing toward the Safeway, but their sound was blotted by canopies of branches reaching over the road from both sides. The farther from civilization she went, the closer the woods crept to the road.

A murder of crows watched her passage avidly, harsh caws more knowing than frightened. The only other sounds were Darla’s faintly audible music and her regular breathing.
 

She turned a bend and suddenly came upon the Acura. It was stopped at the side of the road, turned at an odd angle. The rear wheels were at least six inches into the road and the nose angled into a ditch.

More troubling was the fact that both doors were wide open with no one in the car.

Darla slowed, giving it a wide berth. She glanced around. When she killed her music, the sudden shift from jangling chords to nature’s stillness was jarring.

Darla glanced in passing at the Acura’s interior. She gasped. The white upholstery was spattered with blood. Quite a bit had pooled in the driver’s seat.

Darla turned and started, at a trot, back down the road toward home. She pulled a slim, miniature digital phone from her inside pocket and pressed a red button. After an agonizing pause, the display flashed “911 EMERGENCY” and a reassuring dialing sound began.

As she hurried away from the accident scene, Darla scanned the forbidding walls of trees. Though it was too dense to penetrate with her eyes, a disturbing rustling sound in the undergrowth froze her gaze on an area just ahead. She stopped and un-Velcroed her pistol. Its slight weight was reassuring in her palm.
 

The curt voice of the operator in Darla’s ear made her jump. “What is your emergency?”

Darla didn’t know how afraid she really was until she started to talk, and heard it in her own voice. “There’s an abandoned car on Black Loop Road, just outside Kenwood.”

The operator was all business, without a trace of concern or compassion in her voice. “Is anyone hurt?”

“There’s blood in the car. Like they were hurt… And then they left.”

The operator paused. They were thinking the same thing, Darla felt sure. When she spoke again, the note of urgency in the woman’s voice scared Darla more than anything she’d seen thus far.

“Ma’am, are you armed?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. Now I want you to walk carefully away from the car, as fast as you can, with your weapon in your hand and the safety off. Can you do that for me?”

“You bet your ass I can,” Darla said. She started moving again.

#

At the Safeway, Winter and Nic had responded to their first call of the morning. They were talking to a customer who witnessed the shooting. The store manager stood by, discussing the situation with another employee.

“I was walking to the store — it’s only a few blocks and I enjoy the exercise,” the woman said proudly. She was in her sixties, and did appear fit beneath her purple Washington Huskies sweatsuit. “This guy here was waiting for a parking spot…”

She pointed to a corpse slumped behind the wheel of a red Nissan pickup truck. It was still idling. The rear of the man’s bald pate had been perforated by a bullet entry, several inches north of the brain stem.
 

“This young couple zoomed in and stole the spot. The guy in the truck didn’t like it so he started hollering at them. The girl was screaming back at him. You know, ‘Eff you, we were here first….’ You get the idea. And he started shouting too. ‘I saw you pull up, that’s b.s.,’ blah blah blah. The girl called him a crazy Chink bastard. Terrible thing to say.”

She glanced uncomfortably at Winter, then pressed on. “Her boyfriend flashed his gun — if I had to guess, I’d say it was one of those black SIGs.”

Winter nodded. A popular choice was the police sidearm, the SIG Sauer P226. Even civvies recognized their distinctive look, nowadays.

“You know your stuff,” Nic commented dryly.

“Yeah, three years ago I couldn’t have told you the difference between an M-16 and an AK, but I got smart real fast,” the woman replied.

“What happened next?” Winter asked.

“The guy in the truck pulled a shotgun…looked like an old twelve-gauge, to me…and shot them. I think both kids caught some, but it mostly hit the boyfriend. He fired back, three times I think, and tagged the Asian gentleman in the throat. Looked like he was only using nine mils, but the kid was pretty accurate. They have good hand-eye coordination. Must be all the PlayStation, I guess.”

Nic tried to keep the witness on track. “And after the shots were exchanged?”

“The young couple took off. I came over to check on the guy in the truck…”

“You euthanized him?” Winter’s tone conveyed no judgment. It was apparent that the bullet in the back of the head was delivered at close range.

“He was bleeding to death. It was awful,” the woman said, apologetically. “There are a lot of families in this neighborhood….”