Z-Risen (Book 2): Outcasts (14 page)

Entry #17 - Rotted Flesh

10:30 hours approximate

Location: Near Clairemont, CA - Undead Central

“Joel! You scared the ever-loving shit out of me. Asshole.”

“What did you want me to do? Jump up and down to get your attention?”

“How long have you been watching us get our asses kicked?” I asked.

“Not long. I was near the rendezvous point, just hanging out, doing my hair, checking my nails, and wondering if you two were still alive. Then I saw you on the bikes with a dog in tow. I was about a hundred yards away and saw Anna take on that shuffler.”

Hanging out, my ass. Joel had probably constructed some kind of sniper hole and covered himself in weeds and dirt, and was sitting there, unmoving, while his Marine eyes never blinked.

“Fucker.” Anna looked back and grunted, leaning on me as we followed Joel at a quick pace. “But we got you, didn’t we?”

She gave the mangled corpse the finger.

“You did alright,” I said.

“We need to pull a disappearing act, then we can sort all this shit out. Just follow me and we’ll be out of this in no time. Nice dog,” he said after noticing that Frosty was still following us.

I didn’t argue with Joel. If he had a plan,
I was all ears, because nothing we’d done today had been anything worth bragging about.

“Dog’s great.
Her name’s Frosty. She’s smart.”

“Smart enough to keep quiet?”

“Yeah. I named her Frosty for a reason.”

Joel considered the dog.

Frosty sat, panting, while she stared back at Joel. She licked her chops and then thumped her tail a couple of times.

“Dog seems risky. Any barking...”

“Like I said, she’s smart.” I recounted how we’d first watched her tease a bunch of Z’s.

“Just keep her close and quiet,” Joel said.

He led us to the side of the road and then down the embankment. The ground was covered in refuse and luggage. Most of the bags had been ripped open, leaving the clothing and personal items of a dead world scattered on the grass and dirt. Joel pointed at a bunch of bushes.

“Push them aside, then cover up when you get in. I’ll lead that pack away.” He never took his eyes off the approaching group of Z’s.

They staggered in our direction, moaning and snarling. Flesh pulled tight against bone. Limbs rotting or altogether missing. If this bunch got too close, we’d have to haul ass. The wind shifted and carried their scent our way. Even after weeks of this shit, it still made me want to gag.

Anna moved to the little copse and tugged shrubs aside. Behind them lay a huge drainage tunnel that ran under the freeway. There had been a metal grate at some point, but most of the bars had been battered aside. Anna and I moved into the dark space. I couldn’t speak for Anna, but I was holding my breath. If the Z’s found us in here, they couldn’t come at us en masse, but I was beat and Anna couldn’t have much left after her fight with the shuffler.

Joel moved away from our position and waited for the Z’s. They stalked toward him in an unorganized group of hungry mouths and milky white eyes.

“
Yo, dead fucks. Come here often?”

They started snarling and groaning when they got sight of fresh meat. Joel was a rock.

Once they began to focus on him, Joel backed up a few steps. The grisly parade marched after him.

He waited until the first straggler was upon him, then whipped the butt of his gun around and smashed the Z in the head. It dropped, but a second one was just a step behind. Joel backed up again and then struck that one. The blow was glancing, spinning the Z to the side. Joel moved in and hit it one more time.

Joel moved back another step and clobbered the next one so hard it dropped like a rock.

The fresher Z’s bunched up on each other, and some went down in a tangle of limbs. He had their full attention now.

I moved in the tunnel but Anna put her hand on my arm and squeezed. I looked at her in the dark and could only see her shaking her head. I knew that Joel was capable of taking care of himself, but damn.

Frosty sat next to me and growled gently. I put my hand on her snout and then patted her head. She didn’t relax, but she was smart enough not to bark.

Joel turned and moved away from the bunch. Of the dozen that had been after him, only half were on their feet. He whistled at them and they came on, staggering over their fallen comrades. They moaned for Joel’s flesh.

He again turned and moved away, and they followed.

“Stay here,” I said.

Anna shook her head. “Don’t. He said he’d take care of it, Jackson.”

“It looks like he’s trying to take out the entire bunch by himself.”

“He’s thinning the herd. Making it easier to run if he has to.”

“Looks more like he’s trying to kill them all.”

“Can’t kill the dead,” she whispered.

Joel tugged his big knife out of the sheath. When the first Z was within reach, Joel slid to the man’s side, slammed his blade into the rotting neck, and yanked it out just as quickly. Gurgling, the Z went down.

Joel moved toward the second one. He knocked her hands down and then thrust his blade into the woman’s head.

Two down.

The remaining Z’s were still coming at him, so Joel turned and moved off another twenty feet until he was in a small cluster of trees. He was out of sight, but – even from our hiding place – I heard the dead falling.

The dog’s entire body was tense. I put my hand on her neck and rubbed her. She growled again.

“Stay,” I told Frosty.

I tugged free of Anna and pushed aside bushes to leave our hiding spot. Anna hissed after me but I ignored her.

With aching and battered body somewhat under my command, I advanced on the slowest Z and took him out with one swing. The next one fell against a third staggering dead dickhead, and they both tumbled away. I briefly rested my hands on my knees
to catch my breath, then hefted the wrench and brought it down on the third Z, which was struggling to disentangle from his blood-covered comrade.

I moved behind Z’s like the world’s noisiest ninja. The wrench went up, and another Z got the thick side. I whirled again and caught one across the shoulder, then corrected on the follow-through and turned his head into mush with a backswing. Each ‘
thunk’ brought blood and brains.

I followed the noise of Joel taking out Z’s and managed to drop two more. Anna was then standing beside me. She didn’t say a
word, just shot me a nasty look. I ignored it and advanced on another poor bastard.

Anna took one out with her blade while I bashed another to the ground. The trail of bodies led us right to Joel.

I’d been fearful he would be surrounded, maybe overwhelmed, but he was very calm as he pushed one over to tangle up with a big guy dressed in rags. The Z’s scalp was torn and bloody. It had so many wounds, I wondered how he was still on his feet. One of his calves had been ripped almost to the bone but he staggered on, arms up, hands clawing toward me.

I bashed in his head and he went down in a heap. Joel moved in on another and stabbed deep into its eye-socket.

Then it became a mop-up operation as we finished them off. The work was gruesome. It was one thing to take them out from a distance; it was another being this close to their rotted flesh and stinking, pus-filled wounds. They were some of the nastiest Z’s I’d seen since San Diego and that was saying something, considering we’d spent part of yesterday next to a pile of putrid corpses.

The last one was a kid that couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. I moved behind him and pushed him to the ground. He tried to get up, so I leaned over and pressed my hand against his back. The wrench went high as I concentrated on my target. I couldn’t swing. I wanted to, but the world was suddenly swimming before my eyes. The Z tried to turn over, but he couldn’t have weighed more than fifty pounds. What there was of the kid had been eaten away by the virus, the elements, and other Z’s before he turned.

Joel shouldered me aside and plunged his blade through the back of the kid’s skull.

“Why are you hesitating?”

When had Joel come up alongside me?

“Dizzy,” was all I got out before I went to one knee.

“Jesus. You’re a mess. Let’s get you safe.”

“Sounds good to me,” I muttered.

“Thought I told you idiots to stay out of sight.”

“There were so many. I got worried about you. Sue me.”

“Idiot. I was going to loop back after I lost them in the trees.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.”

“There wasn’t time to draw you a map of my battle plan. Plus I’m all out of crayons and construction paper,” Joel said.

“Very funny, smart ass.”

“I learned from the best.” Joel patted my shoulder.

On my feet again, I was grateful for Anna’s help. I draped an arm over her shoulders and we staggered after Joel. I felt as much a zombie as any one of the
group we’d just put down.

###

10:50 hours approximate

Location: Near Clairemont, CA - Undead Central

The trees were sparse when we first left the highway, but as we moved farther away, they grew closer together. Undergrowth snagged our feet as we crunched over twigs, soggy leaves and soft ground. There was no beaten path to follow.

Joel paused to check on us. I nodded at him, so he pressed on. Frosty had taken a liking to Joel right away and moved beside him. She broke away to sniff at trees and to push up piles of leaves. She found a spot she liked and took a crap. We averted our eyes until she was done. She walked around in a circle then dashed back to Joel’s side. She looked proud of her shit spot.

“Must be the beans,” Anna said.

“Did you just make a joke?”

“No. She probably hasn’t had anything decent to eat for days and we gave her baked beans.”

“I don’t give a shit what we fed her,” I said.

“Stop.”

“Just saying. It’s a shitty location.”

“Ugh.”

“I wasn’t trying to give you crap,” I pressed on.

“Are you five?”

“Poop jokes never get old. It’s a scientific fact.”

“I think you’re the one who’s full of shit, Jackson,” she said and poked me in the side.

We broke out of the tree line and came upon a long section of chain-link fence. On the other side lay a deep pool of water. A mallard was chasing around a smaller duck, no doubt trying to get laid.

There were recreational vehicles scattered around the area. I counted at least ten, and they were of all shapes and sizes, from giant brown land-cruisers to tow-behind campers with pop-up tents. An old silver Airstream sat next to a white Winnebago that had seen better days a decade ago.

The camp, as far as I could see, was surrounded by chain link fencing
. Our welcoming committee sat just outside.

As we walked toward the camp, the people came to their feet. The men and women were holding hammers, axes, and blades. All of the folks were old and older, wearing anxious looks. They studied us with interest. A couple nodded at Joel.

“They were supposed to help. I just needed to lead the last of the bunch here.”

“None left?” One of the men spoke to Joel with a slight accent that I couldn’t place.

He was dressed in shorts and a red and black-checkered shirt. He wore hiking boots and looked to be in better physical shape than I’d ever been. He also had to be in his seventies.

“This is Claude. He’s French, but he’s cool,” Joel said.

“Mon Dieu. I’m a gentleman. A French gentleman,” the guy said.

A woman stood next to him. She was younger, but not by much, and when he spoke, she wrapped her arm around his waist.

“That’s Belle. Annabelle, but she likes Belle.”

“Good. We already have an Anna,” I said.

Anna Sails shot me a look. “Already got one?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “Although I got you last night.”

“Jackson!”

I shrugged and moved in to shake hands with our new friends.

Friends. There’s a word in short supply these days. Our last companions were killed when McQuinn and his jackwads decided that they wanted our shit. We turned the tables on them, and I ended it with a fiery explosion that nearly cost me my life.

Now we had at least ten new friends. Make that ten well-armed new friends.

“You two need some rest and first-aid,” Claude said.

“How about the extra camper? It’s not much but
it’s got room for two,” Belle said.

“Anna, you can stay with Roz and Christy. We have a good-sized RV. I’ll bunk with Creed.”

“No need to kick you out. We survived out there. I don’t think one more night together will kill us,” Anna said.

I practically sighed with relief. Nothing against my buddy Joel Kelly, but Anna was a much sexier roommate.

Joel shrugged then winked at me as he turned his head in the direction of the camper.

“Over there. It’s the white one on top of the big ass truck.”

“As long as I don’t have to sleep under the truck, I’m good,” I said.

“Why the hell would you sleep under the truck?
Musta had the sense knocked out of you by that shuffler. You gonna be alright?”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, after I’ve slept for about eighteen hours.”

Joel nodded. “Just take it easy. We’ll rest up for the day and then move out late tomorrow night if the Z’s don’t gather.” He turned away and checked his assault rifle, pulling back on the receiver and inspecting the gun’s load. “Keep the noise down and stay inside. They’ve managed to survive by keeping indoors for a whole week. Damn good strategy.”

“Better than running around shooting stuff?”

“Much better plan.”

“How are you set for food?”

“They’re mostly travelers and they’ve done well with supplies. We lost one the other night because he got drunk and went to find his dead wife. His RV turned out to have a shit load of food in it. Ain’t gonna last forever, though.”

“Did he find her?”

“What?” Joel asked.

“Did he find his wife?”

“Let’s just say she found him.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Claude turned up his nose. “He was a bit of an asshole, but he was still one of us.”

I shrugged out of my backpack and put it on the ground.

“I can add to our supplies. Got a few dried goods, couple of cans of fruit for…”

“Jackson!”

I turned, and there was Christy. She and Roz stepped down from a big brown RV that looked like it cost more than I’d ever made in all my years in the United States Navy.

She broke from Roz’s side, ran toward me, and crashed into my chest. Her arms wrapped around my waist.

“Good to see you, dude,” I said and hugged her back.

Christy looked good. She had cleaned up and found a change of clothes. The haunted look had vanished from her eyes. What a difference a day makes when you aren’t running for your life.

“Don’t call me dude, dude.” She smiled.

“I brought you something,” I said and unsnapped my backpack.

I dug around and came up with a can of mandarin oranges.

Christy ignored me, her eyes on Frosty. The dog wagged her tail. She sniffed Christy’s hands. The two stared at each other like they were long lost best friends.

I held the oranges up lamely, then put them back in the bag for later.

“What’s her name?”

“I call her Frosty because she’s cool under pressure. She doesn’t bark at Z’s and she’s great in a fight. Saved Anna’s life.”

“She’s so cute!” Christy said and hugged the dog. Frosty looked back at me, tongue lolling out, then licked Christy’s face.

“Ah, dude. She’s got shuffler all over her face,” I groaned.

Frosty took to Christy quickly and followed her to their camper. I told her to remember to walk her and feed her only the best. Turkey and bacon were preferred, but she’d probably settle for anything canned.

###