ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (20 page)

"Let's separate, mom and dad, you go that way and Billy and I will go this way, we can search the house faster that way," Jacob claimed.

I quickly countered.

"Never split up, haven't you ever seen any scary movies? They always split up, and then one by one, they manage to get themselves killed. We are not separating, we may need to leave at a moment's notice, and we don't want to have to go looking for the other group. They always have to do that too, in the scary movies, and then someone that would have gotten away gets killed.

As far as we're going to separate, is as far as we can see each other, no farther. In other words, we're not separating, not in this house, or any other, you get me?"

"We get you sir," the boy whispered in unison.

"Okay, enough of the movie references, let's find some food."

Upon locating the kitchen, which wasn't too hard in this relatively small ranch style home, we began our search for food.

"Billy you watch the door we came in through, and Jacob, you keep an eye on the door that leads into the other part of the house. That's your separation boys, you're separated across this room," I said, trying again to get my point across to them.

Gin and I began to rummage through the cabinets looking for any eatable food.

"Peanut butter is still a good choice, no refrigeration needed, and plenty of protein and calories," I needlessly reminded her.

Gin then added.

"Forget about things like cereal and bread, cereal will probably be stale, and any bread we find is going to be so moldy it will be unrecognizable, so let's look for mostly canned foods."

One of the lower cabinets was heavily stocked with many different kinds of canned vegetables and fruits and even a large box containing granola bars.

We had no sooner filled our satchels with the food from the cabinet, when we heard a voice coming from another room inside the house.

"Are you getting Pa his food, Pa is hungry again," the elderly sounding female voice announced.

The tone of the yet unseen woman suddenly changed from inquisitive to angry.

"Who are you, I'll get you," the voice challenged, as the shadowy figure of a frail old women emerged from the dark hallway and through the door that Jacob had been tasked to guard.

The woman looked to be in her late eighties or early nineties, and she was clutching a baseball bat with both hands and wielding it over her head like a samurai sword, almost losing her balance, as she was now unexpectedly top heavy.

Using a baseball bat in the middle of an outbreak of flesh eating homicidal maniacs is not at all a bad choice for a silent yet deadly efficient weapon to use for cracking skulls. Taking into consideration that zombies are generally slower and less coordinated than your average living human beings are; at least the ones that we've been unfortunate enough to have had to deal with have been.

Except for the ones that ended up in the water, then they move a lot faster than they normally would had they stayed dry.

With that said, it always amazed me, how so many people, mostly women I think, kept a baseball bat by their bed or by the front door of their home to fend off intruders.

I guess they thought that when the time came to use the clumsy weapon on someone that's more than likely, bigger, and stronger than they are, that they'd rise to the occasion and wallop the snot out of the larger aggressor. Even though they had never played baseball in their life, aren't familiar with the weight or balance of the sporting implement, and the only time that they really touched their bat was when they placed it in the corner umbrella stand in anticipation of the next formidable intruder.

The reality of such a situation is; people tend not to rise to the occasion, instead they tend to default to their training. Of course, their training consists of noticing the bat in the corner once or twice a week, or month, or year, maybe.

Therefore, the bat sits in the corner for months, sometimes years, collecting dust without being touched by the would-be home run hitter, giving them a serious false sense of security.

If the time ever would arrive and they needed to use their weapon of choice, the bad guy, usually, and without much effort, would take it away from the owner and bludgeon them half to death with their own weapon, and that is exactly what I did.

The hunched over old woman who was ravaged with osteoporosis, charged toward Jacob as fast as she could, of course at her age, if she'd been moving any slower she would have been going backwards. Jacob backed away from her and with a quick side step; he easily avoided her feeble attempt at attacking him.

I dropped my bag of pilfered goods and bum-rushed the old hag. She swung the bat downward, aiming at my head with as much force as she could gather with her aging atrophied muscles; which wasn't very much.

Using my left forearm, I blocked the bat forcing it to deflect to my left, and in one fluid motion, I grabbed the baseball bat close to the knob with my right hand, and grasped it tightly with my left hand just above the old woman's hands.

I stepped forward with my right foot, and swung my right elbow hard into the elderly woman's lips. As the old woman faltered backwards, her false teeth now crammed deep into her bleeding mouth, she released the bat quickly as I twisted it from her weak arthritic grip.

I now clasped the bat with the standard baseball players grip and twirled around. With the bat in hand, and with a powerful two hundred and seventy degree swing, I buried the barrel of the baseball bat into her temple, collapsing her left eye socket and cheekbone, forcing her left eyeball to bulge out onto her crushed cheek, somewhat resembling a blood-shot boiled egg dangling from her face.

The powerful blow from the baseball bat reduced the old woman to a twitching sack of bleeding skin and broken bones, as she softly whimpered while wallowing on the floor in a mixed puddle of her own urine and feces.

"Quick, let's check on Pa," I said, as I dropped the baseball bat beside the convulsive elder, and pulled my sickle from my belt.

Clutching my trusty sickle in my hand, I cautiously led our somewhat shocked little band into the hallway that the old woman had appeared from earlier.

"Pa might be armed," I whispered.

That's when the refreshing smell of the fresh air left us, and the stink of rotting zombies that we were so accustom to, along with the subtle hum of hundreds of flies buzzing replaced it.

"There's the smell, I knew we couldn't get away from it for long," Gin stated, wrinkling up her nose.

"I think Pa might be an eater, look at that," Jacob said, pointing to a door that had towels stuffed against the crack at the bottom. "And listen, remember that sound."

The closer to the door we came, the stronger the smell of rotting flesh was present, and the louder the muffled sound of the flies buzzing behind the door became.

"I can hear growling too, it's coming from inside that room for sure," Gin concluded confidently. "The one with the towels stuffed along the bottom of the door."

"No reason to open the door. We got what we came for, and I don't feel like fighting my way through a swarm of nasty flies that are tending to their larva that's busy feeding on Pa's decaying carcass. Not just to croak an eater that's not a threat to us anyway. Let's get back to the Hummer and get the hell out of here," I ordered, motioning for everyone to turn around.

We hurried out of the house, pausing only briefly to pick up the canned food we had scavenged, and long enough for Jacob to make a somewhat sick joke.

Pointing to the baseball bat that I had used to beat down the old woman, he said. "An old bat, for the old bat!"

Then with a swift vertical downward swing, he dug the point of his sickle into the deep gash on the left side of her face that I had provided with the baseball bat, and with a rapid twist, ended her convulsions along with her future will to eat flesh.

Gin didn't find Jacob's humor at all funny, however, Billy and I had to hide our smirks from her as we walked single file out of the house.

Even though I found Jacob's callous demeanor slightly disturbing at the time, the old bat (no pun intended) had to be terminated with head trauma, or she was going to be
zombiefied
at some point. Jacob had just preformed that duty flawlessly without blinking an eye, just seconds after making a joke about the weapon used to bludgeon her. Well after all, what did I expect? Only moments earlier he had watched me break several bones in the arthritis stricken elderly woman, and leave her bleeding and squirming in pain on her own kitchen floor.

Therefore, I couldn't help but smile at his timely attempt at humor, thinking that it was probably his way of dealing with the stress of the situation.

Back onboard the Hummer, Gin wondered.

"Are we going to the hospital now?"

"I think we've had enough adventure for today, don't you?" I answered, while fastening my seatbelt.

Gin leaned over and locked her door, looking out her window for any signs of zombies.

"Yes I do," she said. "There'll be other hospitals along the way; we can look for medicine somewhere else."

We spotted several groups of zombies walking through the neighborhood as we pulled away from the old woman's house, and one by one as they too spotted us, would begin a fruitless attempt to close the gap that separated our groups.

Out of the town and back onto interstate twenty, we drove west, systematically dodging abandoned and wrecked cars and trucks along the way. We found that the highway wasn't as clogged as we thought it might be, but tractor trailer rigs posed definite problems at times.

Our speed was moderate, but constant for the most part. Zombies were present most of the time. The ones that were a threat to us were the ones that were huddled around some of the derelict vehicles we passed; many times they blocked the road, forcing us to slow down as we maneuvered by them, giving the zombies a chance to stumble our way. However, the Hummer sat high enough off the ground, and our speed was still fast enough that the undead corpses that did manage to get close were handled with a quick close range head shot from our small arms, or we just swerved around them altogether.

Of course, there was always the exception to the rule, which was the occasional felony hit and run that was dealt out to over aggressive zombies that staggered into our path, and we couldn't shoot or avoid hitting. However, most of the zombies we saw, could be seen loitering around distant houses and buildings and were not an immediate threat to us.

We drove for hours, and when we weren't avoiding or shooting zombies, we talked about many things, many things except the spontaneous pounding that I had given to the old woman back in Tallulah. I wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not.

The woman had attacked Jacob, and she was keeping and apparently feeding a zombie she called Pa, probably her husband, which she had locked up in one of the rooms. We could smell Pa as we approached that room, so Pa was getting overly ripe and had been attracting flies for quite awhile, and at some point in time would have probably over powered the feeble female, and made a meal out of her, or at the very least turned her into one of his cannibalistic ilk.

So we most likely did her a favor, me by giving her a righteous beat down, and Jake finishing her off with the point of his rusty sickle. Obviously, she had lost her mind, just like the man on the river that had eaten his family. Although, not as much of a threat as the maniac on the river, in my mind she still needed to be handled in a like manner.

It's just too bad that she attacked us with a baseball bat and not a "
Maceball
" bat!

Maceball bat [mayssball bat]

1. A baseball bat with long spikes driven through the end of the barrel of a bat so that the pointed end of the spikes protrude several inches out of the other side.

2. A medieval apparatus used in conjunction with playing deadly war games in ancient times, and usually incorporated by a nine-man uniformed team on the field of battle.

For had I hit her with the sharp metal obtrusions on a maceball bat, it would have terminated her instantly, and saved her the embarrassment of flopping around on her kitchen floor, floundering in her own waste products.

Not to mention it would have spared Jacob the trouble of spearing her brain with his sickle, and putting her out of everybody's misery.