Dead: Winter (6 page)

“Juan, where should we stack the firewood?”

“Juan, can we build a church?”

“Juan, should we have patrols walking the fence at night?”

If these people knew where he’d been when all this deader crap started—homeless, and living in the back of his car—or that he had a long and documented history of being in trouble with the police for everything from drugs, to that brief stint where he thought he was going to be a pimp…they wouldn’t be asking him a damn thing.

“Yo, Juan!” Thad elbowed the larger man in the ribs. “You want to go check that out or not?”

Juan blinked his eyes against the cold and brought his focus back to the situation at hand. He gave Thad a questioning look.

“You didn’t hear that?” Thad huffed. “That wasn’t a zo
m
bie; I’d be willing to bet on it.”

“Not unless they’ve learned to make a new sound,” Keith added. “That was a giggle, no doubt about it.”

Juan listened. Other than the nearby deaders that they would have to deal with in a few minutes, he didn’t hear anyth—

A giggle.

In the low-lying mist of the morning, it was almost impossible to tell which way the sound came from, but he’d definitely heard it. He pulled the long blade from over his shoulder and started towards the crumbling walkway that led from the water’s edge to the heavily overgrown park that they would have to cross to reach the little neighborhood they were currently sca
v
enging.

“You two take those few out,” Juan nodded to the approaching zombies, “and I will see if I can narrow down where that sound is coming from.”

“You think it is a good idea to split up?” Keith asked.

“We ain’t splitting up,” Juan whispered. “I’m just going to the edge of the park. I won’t even cross the street until you two catch up, but if whoever is making that noise hears you take down the deaders, they might get spooked and run. Hopefully, I can figure out which way they run.”

“What makes you think they’d run?” Thad asked.

Juan stopped and turned back to face the pair. “Because that’s what I would do if a gang of three guys looking like us got close.”

Thad seemed to consider the comment for a second, then shrugged and turned to deal with the zombie tugging on his jacket. Keith had already taken his five-pound sledge to one and was facing off with the next.

Juan waded through the waist-high grass, careful to stay on the three foot wide or so path they’d cleared. He knew what sorts of things could lurk unseen in the weeds. He reached the sid
e
walk and smelled it immediately: smoke. More importantly, somebody was cooking. It had a hint of onions and something spicy.

His eyes scanned the row of houses facing him. A dozen had big black Xs painted on the fronts. Those had been stripped of anything useful. It wasn’t a very sophisticated system, but it worked for their purposes. He blinked a few times to be certain, but he was sure he’d found the source of the smoke, and perhaps the giggling. It was tough to make out against the gray of the morning, but a wisp of smoke was rising from beyond the hou
s
es further back in to the neighborhood.

“Anything?” Thad asked as the two men caught up with him at the park’s edge; Juan pointed.

“We going in?” Keith sounded like he’d rather not.

“Be foolish not to,” Thad replied. Juan didn’t say a word; he simply started across the street.

They had to navigate through three yards—front and back—as they made as much of a beeline as possible to the source of the smoke. When they reached the last yard, Juan pulled himself up on the fence and took a look.

“Tight like a tigah,” he hissed appreciatively.



Chad brought the axe down with all the strength he had. The piece of wood split with a satisfying crack. The sounds of others involved in the daily chores—washing clothes, splitting wood, building barricades—filled his ears. Amongst it, there was a
n
other sound.

Children playing…laughing…yelling.

It had taken a few weeks for everybody to stop talking in whispers for fear of what it might bring. Slowly, things had become almost normal. Out in the middle of nowhere, Yosemite Village had c
a
tered to tourists from around the world who came to gawk at the park’s wonders. Now it was the site of another wonder: civilization.

The group was settling in nicely. The few hotels and resta
u
rants had yielded a bounty of food, and the surrounding streams and rivers had taken any concerns about water and washed them away.

The first days had been busy. The place hadn’t been entirely empty. They had gone room-to-room in the hotels, and it hadn’t gone off without a couple of casualties. Worse, a small mob had come in the night just a few days ago and found their way inside an RV that an older couple lived in and r
e
fused to vacate in exchange for one of the rooms in the hotel that everybody else was now calling home.

The morning had come, and most everybody had been jolted awake by the screams of Jerri Sue Baker, the young woman u
n
fortunate enough to be an early riser who had to start each day with yoga and a jog. She’d had very little direct contact with the undead in the months since they had risen and wiped out most of humanity. Jerri had been on a solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail and only come down because she’d run out of—of all things—feminine hygiene products. That is also why she froze at the sight of the elderly couple sitting up with fresh rips that allowed their insides to spill on the ground in steaming piles of gore. She went to the ground under five of the undead, her scream ending a
b
ruptly when her throat was ripped out.

Now, things were settling back down. Also, they had regular patrols at night to keep an eye out for the possible lone straggler or mob that might come their way. One of the better finds had been the sporting goods store. Not much bigger than a mini-mart, the place had yielded a plethora of fishing equi
p
ment…along with a variety of guns and ammo.

“Dad!” Ronni yelled from the window on the third floor of the hotel they now called home.

“Yeah?” Chad shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun reflecting off the several inches of snow that coated the roofs of the buildings.

“A bunch of people are going down to the falls to wash clothes, can I bring our stuff?”

Chad wasn’t stupid. That meant the Simmons boy was g
o
ing. Marty Simmons was nineteen, tall, and had that scrawny, emo look that young girls seemed to go for from what Chad had observed from his daughter and the girls she hung out with.

“Fine,” Chad consented, “but don’t forget the sheets and towels.”

“Whatever,” Ronni groaned. They’d had the discussion a few times. She seemed to think that since the hotel had closets full of linens and towels, they didn’t need to worry about actua
l
ly washing the ones they used.

She still didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation they faced. To her, the world was simply suffering a temporary inconvenience. She either didn’t fully realize, or, more likely, didn’t want to realize just how serious things had become in the past few months.

Bearing in mind all she had seen in just the past several weeks, he thought that maybe she was simply refusing to accept things as they were. That would mean she would have to accept the death of her mother…as well as a few of her friends. He knew she would have to come to grips sooner or later, he just couldn’t find it in his heart to make her do so right this moment. Consi
d
ering the fact that this would be her new reality, he didn’t see the harm in letting her live in a state of denial for a few more weeks.



CONUSHUB: NODE 3 OFFLINE; NODE 2 OFFLINE, NODE 1 NOT RESPONDING.

NODE 5, LINK SEVERED-SHUTDOWN INITIATED.

NODE 4 STILL ACTIVE>PING.



“Subject three showing no change,” Lena Borlavich said as she jotted notes on her clipboard. She stared in at the creature encased in the ten foot square room. The inch-thick glass was smeared with brownish fluid. Dried blood wasn’t nearly as red in real life as it was in the movies.

“Did she eat it?” Darlene Mensa asked through a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich.

“Nope.” Lena pushed the button that activated the sprinkler inside the observation chamber. “A
p
parently zombies don’t like chicken.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Darlene groaned.

“What would you have me call them, Doctor Mensa?”

“Subjects…test cases…”

“There is no denying that these
subjects
were living, we i
n
fected them with a fluid sample from a contaminated
test case
, which lead to their eventual death. In less than fifteen minutes, the dead
su
b
ject
opened its eyes,” Lena said, taking pains to e
m
phasize Darlene Mensa’s preferred names for the dead who were now standing inside observation chambers waiting for the chance to bite into a living person and eat them much like Da
r
lene was currently doing to the sandwich in her hand.

“But calling them zombies is so…”

“B-movie?” Lena offered.

“Are we having the zombie discussion again?” Samantha Black, the third scientist in their group asked as she stepped out of the decontamination chamber.

“Nice of you to join us,” Darlene quipped.

“Dock my pay,” Samantha said with a dismissive wave. She walked over to the chamber Lena still stood at with her clipboard in hand. “No luck with the chicken?”

“It seemed to follow it with its eyes for a few minutes,” Lena replied. “But it didn’t make any a
t
tempt to catch the chicken.”

“So we can cross that off the list.” Samantha plucked one of the peanut butter sandwiches off of Darlene’s plate. “I see you left the chicken in there during the wash down.”

“Darlene was in the garden and I won’t open those cha
m
bers without one of you present.”

All three women shuddered at the memory of how close they’d come to losing Darlene. You could be as careful as you wanted, but accidents happen…people trip, slip, and stumble.

“And what about Fido?” Samantha asked.

All three women moved to the next chamber and peeked in. The dark figure huddled in the corner did not seem to notice. Lena tapped the glass and the large head of the Rottweiler lifted. The white filmed eyes stood out in stark contrast. Only a few feet away, a chicken lay…untouched.

“Wanna toss in another kitten?” Samantha asked with far too much enthusiasm.

“You are one sick individual?” Darlene scowled, tossing the uneaten remains of her sandwich in a nearby garbage can.

“You say individual…but what you really mean is bitch,” Samantha said with a smirk. “An
y
ways, I actually came with some news; the computer just kicked out a message. It seems that we are the only node still active.”

“When did number five go down?” Darlene asked.

“Sometime in the past few hours, I guess.”