The Dead Hunger Series: Books 1 through 5 (55 page)

“So how are you different than a stalker?” Hemp asked, smiling.

“Shut up,” said Charlie, laughing.  “So this is it, Hemp.  Sitting here, watching those two getting ready to do this, I wished silently that you’d ask me.  And my wish came true.  Right away.  So I love you, Hemp Chatsworth, and I’ll become Charlie Chatsworth for you.  Forever.  Because, as amazing as it sounds even to me, I fucking love you.”

“Skip the other part,” said Charlie.  “I do.”

“So do I,” said Hemp.

“Then I pronounce you husband and wife.  Kiss her, Hemp!”

Hemp did.  I thought our kiss was long.  Dave wasn’t finished.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Flex –”

Dave turned and whispered.  “Flex what?”

“Sheridan,” said Flex, smiling. 

“And Hemp’s last name?”

“Chatsworth,” I whispered back.

Dave turned back to the crowd, his arms spread wide, an embarrassed smile on his face. 

“I introduce Mr. and Mrs. Flex Sheridan, and Mr. and Mrs. Hemp Chatsworth!”

The applause in the tiny church was deafening.

EPILOGUE

Late that evening, we were able to awaken the remainder of our new mobile community of survivors.  Despite their forced slumber, after we got food and water into them and explained who we were, where we were going, and why, they found they were exhausted.

We’d taken all the bedding and pillows from the steel supply, so were pretty well set for spending the night in the church, plus we found what must have been the church’s camping gear for youth getaways.  There were about ten adult sized sleeping bags and some useful camping stoves and lanterns, as well as several more canisters of propane to fuel them.

The man I just call Preacher is actually Father Jim Hoover.  The little boy is Justin Hoover, his nephew, and he’s eleven years old.  The three women that were in the pile of bodies outside the church were named Kimberly Dodd, Victoria Hansen, and Vikki Solms.  The three were sisters, which explained their common immunity.  Victoria and Kimberly had been married, but their husbands had turned.  Vikki’s husband was an alcoholic and had died of liver disease after they divorced years ago.

The two men that had been outdoors were unknown to any of the people in the church.  They seemed to have shown up at some point after the zombie attack.

Flex and I decided we would have a talk with them soon, after everybody got used to the road trip to which we’d involuntarily committed them.

Our caravan, a converted RV with trailer, a ballistic steel-sheathed Crown
Victoria, a brand spanking new Chevy Silverado Crew Cab, and a short, yellow school bus rolled on down the highway, snaking our way northeast toward Concord, New Hampshire.

What we’d find or what we’d do when we got there was anybody’s guess.  For now it was a plan, and that seemed to be how things got done in the new, dead world in which we lived.

On the way, Flex and I discussed just how to break much of the news to our new friends, and quite possibly, family.  That dead people were digging out of their graves would be hard to swallow for most people who hadn’t seen it for themselves.  That some sort of gas was coming out of almost every surface of the earth, and might continue for a million years, was possibly even harder to comprehend, considering what its effects were.

And lastly, the hardest thing to swallow was that we could ever overcome this apocalypse; that we could ever fight the walking dead and win.

But as I reached over and felt Flexy’s fingers wrap around my four unbandaged ones, and heard my daughter Trina begin to sing the chorus of Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” from Lion King, I knew one thing for certain:

We would win.

Wait a minute.  Flexy just started singing along with Trina.  Then I joined in.  Fuck what I said before. 

We’d already won.

THE END

BOOK THREE OF THE DEAD HUNGER SERIES

Dead Hunger III

The Chatsworth
Chronicles

A Flex Sheridan Adventure

By Eric A. Shelman

Dead Hunger II
I: The Chatsworth Chronicles

is a work of fiction by

Eric A. Shelman

All characters contained herein are fictional, and all similarities to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, except for use in professional reviews.

©2012 Dolphin Moon Publishing

(Individual ISBN)

ISBN 978-0-9669400-9-1

Cover Art By Gary McCluskey

Edited By Suzanne Anderson

DEDICATIONS

To my wife, Linda – thank you for your sacrifices through the years as
I have pursued this goal of writing books that thirty or so people are very interested in reading.  You have always understood this passion I have for writing, and you’ve always been the first ear to hear the tales.  I love you.

And … to my brother, Don – thanks for letting me bounce ideas off your highly sophisticated reader’s mind – one that can comprehend authors much more complex than myself.  The brainstorming sessions
we have had over this zombie series have been priceless, and it allowed me to spend some unique, crazy time with my only remaining brother.

And
finally … to my late brother, Gary.  Dude, you are the very reason I fired up my computer back in the 1990s and began to write again.  I have known that to be true since you walked in with your short story, The Gift.  I love and miss you, man.  Hope it’s not too hot there.( Just fuckin’ with you, man.
 

)

PROLOGUE

People seem nicer these days.  Most of them, anyway.  It’s as though anyone who doesn’t see you as a threat or a meal is immediately accepted as a friend.

I suppose that’s the way it should be.  Perhaps the way it should have always been, minus the meal bit.  That’s something that should never have entered the equation.

Oh, but it has. 

It certainly has.

My name is Hemphill Chatsworth.  My friends call me Hemp.  And pretty much everyone who hasn’t given me reason to feel otherwise, is my friend these days.

These days of zombies.   We avoided saying the word as long as we could, but these are reanimated corpses and deteriorating human beings without pulmonary functions or any other vital signs, who are actively seeking us for a food source.  And isn’t that the very definition of the once fictional zombie?  Of course it is.  It works.

The one piece of their anatomy that still functions in any way is the brain.  And it’s making frightening judgments that affect those of us who are still alive in a horrid way.  It tells them they are ravenously hungry, and that flesh is the solution to their craving.

Human flesh.  Our flesh.

We’ve discovered, over time, there are two types of zombies, as I alluded to.  The ones who contracted the disease while living and those who were buried and exposed to an element coming out of what I believe to be the earth’s core.  I’ve come up with a hypothesis, through my observations and subsequent testing, that a fissure formed in the very nucleus of the planet, and a gaseous element of unknown origin has begun to emit from nearly ever surface of the planet.

You may ask why I say it’s of unknown origin when I also stated its most likely source is the earth’s core.  Because as the planet formed, any number of things could’ve happened to insert or create this vapor.  The fact is we’ll never know.  It will remain unknown.

But we know what we have to do.  We all realize what is necessary to put this planet right again, if it’s even possible.

We have to kill them all.  Each and every one of them.  And because I’ve made a well-educated guess as to how many of them there are versus how many of us there are, I can tell you with some level of certainty that there are ten of them to every one of us. 

That directly translates to the odds against us in no uncertain terms.  And that’s why people say
ten to one
this
, and ten to one
that
.
  Ten to one odds suck if you’re on the one side.  You’re very sure of yourself if you’re on the ten side.

Let me interrupt myself for a brief moment to tell you this:  Don’t dare bet against us, because every time we run into a large group of them, each of us takes down our ten. 

Whittling away.  That’s how it’s going to have to be done.  The odds get better for us with every dead ghoul and digger. 

I have no idea, nor do Flex, Gem or Charlie, how well other survivors are doing out there bringing them down.  I hope our belief that they’re figuring out how to defend against the creatures and how to eradicate them is accurate, because unless they do, the aforementioned ratio of zombies to uninfecteds isn’t going to move in our favor very quickly.

So as Flex and Gem did in their chronicles, I’ll begin by telling you a bit about me and how I got to where they found me, in that jail cell in Tallahassee.  I believe Flex mentioned what I said about heading down from Atlanta to see Kennedy Space Center for the first time, and it’s on that trip that I became permanently sidetracked.

I suppose I’m lucky I ended up where I did.  Had I not, I never would’ve met my best friends in the world, which means I never would’ve met my wife.

Charlie Sanders was her name before she married me in that little Alabama church.  She still cringes at the combination of her name and my last.  Charlene Chatsworth reminds one a bit less of the late silent film actor Charlie Chaplin, but that’s not her.

Charlie has changed me.  Not only my outlook on this new, very strange life we’re living, but my hope for the future.  She’s a firecracker with a lit fuse, and I’m the happiest
expat you’ll ever meet.

That woman transformed my heart and made me smile more in the last few months than I had since my first wife died in childbirth with my newborn son.

I won’t get into that part of my life because it’s not relevant.  If you’re reading this, then you want to know, I believe, what we did and how we survived.  How we interacted and how we dealt with this apocalypse. 

Apocalypse.  I’ve never called it that before.  And yet, that’s what it is.  A
bloody apocalypse if there ever was one.

The more I write, the more I wonder how Flex and Gem got through their chronicles.  There’s so much to share with you that I almost don’t know where to begin
, because my mind keeps skipping to other parts of the story.  I might have a touch of the Attention Deficit Disorder (I’d have just written ADD, but in print it just appears I wrote the word
add
with the caps lock key stuck on,) but when there is so much to consider and so many things to analyze, I think a bit of ADD is good.  (See?) 

Well, I suppose I’ll tell you a bit about myself.  I know you probably feel as though you know me, but here’s the thing.  I lied to Flex and Gem.  Charlie’s the only one who knows the truth.

Let me start a bit farther back, before the lie. 

There are some things you might wonder about.  It’s true that when I was six years old, my father used to pick up broken handguns from pawn shops in and around the area I lived, South Yorkshire, in the northern part of
England.

While it is true that pawn shops in
England do not sell firearms of any kind – at least not over the front counter, there is a black market, far beneath the visible one.  One should not believe for a moment that pawnbrokers are not approached with merchandise, both legal and illegal, of every kind.  And some of this merchandise could clearly use the assistance of a curious, and I’ll admit,
talented
boy.  My father realized right away that funds accumulated in this manner could build quickly, and would be a nice turnabout of money for our family.

He initially had some great difficulty in this regard, as guns are practically nonexistent in normal English society, and even many criminals have never actually seen or owned one.  So when a man – my father – who was not known for his underworld reputation or control over hired muscle began contacting the very men who ran in that shadowed world, saying his genius son could take one look at the weapons and know exactly what needed to be done to either convert or repair them, he was turned away.

It literally took over a year of effort before one crook named John Ahrens agreed to let my father take six replica guns made in Germany to convert into workable handguns.

It was the most fun I’d ever had at seven years old.  They’d had to provide a special grinder, but with that tool, I was engrossed, both before and after my school day was done, and the first guns were all successes.  The best part was, when they saw the results, they let me keep the grinder.

It wasn’t long before several CS gas firing guns were brought to me for conversion, after which, each was capable of accurately firing 9mm bulleted ammo.  Even in an area the size of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, people knew one another.  My father had taken me into the pawn shops many times to buy this or that, always negotiating everything down for me.  When he went in the back, well, that’s when I got most excited.

I knew that’s where the good stuff was hidden, out of sight of the authorities, and I knew someone had dropped off more inventory for him – and me.  As long as all the parts to a particular gun were there, even if just thrown in a box, I had the patience, even as a young fellow, to straighten, polish and reassemble them.  I never had bullets, which were almost as difficult to obtain as the weapons themselves, but I had no doubt they would operate perfectly.  Specification manuals, micrometers, calipers, a small air compressor and pneumatic tools for honing cylinders – all the tools of the trade – mostly purchased at my first supply stores, pawn shops.

So in my spare time that’s all I did, and I always had several guns in progress.   If there was no way to fabricate a part for a particular gun, then we’d just search for another of the same type, and eventually I’d find the part I needed in working order.

My father worked in the steel industry which was quite prominent back then in
Rotherham.  When I was lacking a tiny part, he’d bring home little remainders of steel in various shapes and sizes, and I’d choose from among them for my lump of clay, so to speak.  I would painstakingly grind and polish them until they were suited to my needs. 

When I was done refurbishing a handgun or any other type of gun for that matter, my father would pack it inside a secret compartment under the back seat of his car and run it back to the pawnbroker who had fed him the pieces, and was paid handsomely for my work.  My father was committed to keeping those funds separate for my education, and he was diligent about it.

So, when I was seventeen, having graduated from handguns, shotguns and rifles to semi-automatic and automatic weapons of various kinds, my educational fund was well filled. 

Of course we could not change the way we lived, for it would do nothing but draw undue attention.  So in a box, hidden in the floor, for years and years went my university fund.

Ultimately, we had claimed I had received a scholarship from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I would study mechanical engineering.  We carried that a bit further, also claiming the receipt of a scholarship at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where I eventually secured my epidemiology degree.

I was an excellent student, so nobody had any difficulty believing his story.  I was traveling to
America to attend University, and my family was proud.  My schooling involved years of effort and hard work.  But it was very worth it in retrospect.

As for my accent, I could have lost it.  The thing was, when I arrived in
America, I was far beyond where many students were, and for some reason my British accent seemed to inspire people to listen to me.  I’m not sure why.  Americans seem to have some fascination with those with British accents, attributing either intelligence or some sort of
coolness
to them. 

In my case I assume it was solely intelligence.  I didn’t fight it, for it was effective, so despite some teasing in my earlier years, the accent remains and it is beyond the point that I’d even worry about disguising it.

Now, the truth about my parents.  It’s not a big deal or a revelation, but I wanted to say it.

I was speaking on the phone with them the day before I met Flex and Gem.  The very morning before, in fact.

My mum and dad were describing the same horrible things that I would soon discover were going on here in America, only it began in the mines there a day or two before.  They explained to me that upon running a car of miners up from deep in the mine at Maltby in South Yorkshire, just seven miles from where they lived in Rotherham, something went terribly wrong.

They were the canaries in a coal mine.  Literally.  The forebears of all that we’ve see happen since.  Deeper underground than anyone else, subject to the zombie gas before the general population.

The men that came up in the car were no longer men.  Not anymore.  But it took a few precious minutes for the people waiting for them above ground to figure that out.  They were, as described by the miners on the surface, insane.  Vicious, attacking men with no concern with and no awareness  of anything around them.

They caught many of their coworkers on the surface by surprise.  Nobody knew their outstretch arms were to grab and attack people, pull them in and eat them.  With their black faces, it was not easy to tell their skin had become white-grey beneath; they looked like any other miners, except, people reported, for their eyes.  Something had definitely changed about
them
, but nobody noticed changes that they had no reason to look for.

Not until they began biting.  Before that they assumed that some hugs were needed after a long day in the mine, according to my mother.

When I had spoken to my mum, she told me the next day nothing else had been reported.  The news had gone silent on the miner story, and no public health warnings had been issued. 

When she told me the story it was with fascination, nothing else.  There was no concern, no fear.  Just a matter-of-fact, strange-but-true story.

And then she told me of her headache.  Her very, very bad headache.   Of course, good son that I am, I suggested she take a couple of aspirin or Tylenol and get some rest.

Turns out my mum wasn’t immune to urushiol.  That’s my guess anyway.  I had a mobile phone in that jail cell, too, and it worked for a while, even in there.  But calls to my mum and dad never resulted in an answer.

I left a message, that I fear will forever go unheard.  As for my father, either my mum attacked him or he wasn’t immune either.  While I don’t want to make any assumptions about whether they’re dead or alive, all I know is that I love and miss them terribly.  It had been nearly six years since I’d seen them before I locked myself in that jail cell in Tallahassee to escape people very similar to the zombie miners in Maltby, Sheffield.