ZOMBIES: "Chronicles of the Dead": A Zombie Novel (26 page)

It was another case of those strangely elusive lights that Frank had spoke of, and I had experienced on the river.

I turned back to the body in front of me, now only visible by the soft moonlight that fell upon the floor of the truck stop.

"What's going on?" I heard Gin ask.

"What's happening?" The sound of Billy's voice came through the darkness.

"An eater got in," I said.

"Is anybody hurt? Billy, Jacob, are you two all right?" Gin asked them.

"I'm fine," Billy answered.

"Me too," Jacob said.

"Mary how about you, are you all right?" Gin asked.

"I'm fine, did you kill it?" Mary responded.

Nobody had checked on Megan, and I didn't know how Mary was going to handle it, and I didn't know how I was going to handle Mary if things got ugly. But I was going to find out in a matter of moments.

"It's dead," I said, bracing myself for Mary's wrath. Because I knew who the dead zombie once was.

"Where's Megan? Is she still sleeping?" Mary asked.

"She's not on the counter, where is she?" Gin asked, with real concern in her voice.

"Someone look behind the counter, maybe she fell off. Megan where are you?" Mary called softly.

With no answer from Megan, the reality of the situation began to filter into everyone's consciousness. Mary slowly walked over to me, and the body at my feet.

Pulling a small flashlight from her pocket, she illuminated the corpse's face.

"Turn that light off, eaters will see us," I quickly scolded. "It's bad enough that I had to fire my gun."

"Is that Megan?" she gasped. "Did you kill Megan?"

"She turned, she was an eater!" I stressed, still holding my Glock 19 at my side. "It was either her or me, I chose me.

"You killed Megan!" Mary stated, staring down at her friends body.

Let's get one thing straight right now.
Eaters
get killed, we kill them. I killed Megan because she
needed killing
(funny how that term keeps popping up). If I die, or get bit and turn into one of those flesh eating killer cannibals, I expect every one of you to do the same for me!" I told them all emphatically.

"She must have died in the middle of the night," Billy said.

"How did she die?" Jacob asked.

Mary turned to Gin as she answered Jacob's question.

"Your mother killed her, she gave her too many sleeping pills, didn't you?" she said, looking at my wife.

"If I did, I didn't mean to, she was in pain, and I had to get that glass out of her eye. I was just trying to help her; I didn't mean to hurt her," Gin, now feeling guilty explained.

To my surprise, and I think to everyone's surprise, Mary shrugged her shoulders, turned, and walked back to where she had been sleeping, and coldly said. "I'm not going to clean up that mess in the dark; it'll have to wait till morning."

With that, Mary curled up in her blanket, closed her eyes, and in a moment was fast asleep again. She had evidently forgotten that she had volunteered to take the second watch.

We had thought that Megan was Mary's best friend, but she showed very little emotion over Megan's death. I wondered if she was just putting on a show for us. Maybe she felt outnumbered at the moment, and wanted to wait for a better opportunity to get even with Gin.

At daybreak, I would try to delve deeper into Mary's psyche in an effort to ascertain if she could be trusted to remain traveling with my family. Only time would tell, but I was going to watch her closely until I was sure she wasn't going to seek retaliation against Gin. So I took the second watch as well.

Everyone was awake at dawn, and Megan's body still laid by the front door. In the daylight, we could see the gruesome results of her termination, and my failed first attempt at that goal. Parts of her decaying yellow-gray brain were scatter on the floor next to her body among pieces of broken cranium and bloody strands of hair, as dark red goo seeped out from the portion of her head that my sickle had skinned, and a two-foot wide puddle of purplish ooze had pooled underneath her skull.

"Why do you think she died," Jacob asked, staring down at Megan's corpse, not directing his question to anyone specific.

Gin chose to answer his question as her eyes welled up with tears.

"She had lost a lot of blood; maybe her body couldn't handle the sleeping pills in her weakened conditioned."

Mary then calmly added.

"Don't forget the pain pills you gave her. Well, she's dead now, and I made a mistake last night. There's no reason to clean up the mess if we're not going to stay here."

This seemed like a good time for me to intervene.

"Mary, I thought Megan was your friend?" I asked.

"She was my friend," Mary answered, showing no emotion.

"You don't seem too broken up that she is dead," I remarked.

Mary moved over to where Megan had fallen asleep, pushed herself up, and sat on the counter.

"It's like this," she said. "It was my grandfather's birthday, he was ninety-four years old and not in very good health. The family didn't think he would last another year, so they decided to celebrate his birthday with a big party at my uncle David's house. The party just happened to be the same day of the outbreak.

On that day, I watched my ninety-four year old grandfather, who had been confined to a wheelchair for the last five years of his life, stand up and walk over to my six-year-old cousin Lucy, and rip her to pieces," Mary continued emotionless. "I was the only one at the party that left that house alive. Half of my relatives turned into zombies that day, and attacked the other half. It came as such a surprise to everyone, that most were killed or bitten before they could fight back. I had to kill my father, and baby brother who was only eleven, with the knife we had used to cut my grandfather's birthday cake. Since that day, I've seen countless people die, and had to kill at least fifty of the undead, and that's not even counting the one's I put down that night with you and Frank.

So, to answer your question, I'll be your friend, I'll watch your back, I'll fight with you, and I'll fight for you, but don't expect me to get emotionally attached to any of you. That's just the way it is, and that's just the way it's going to be, that's just the way it has to be."

It made sense now, Mary's lack of emotion, her cold comments; I probably would do the same, had I seen my whole family killed, not to mention having to kill some of them myself.

However, I thought, now it is my turn to turn off the emotion.

"Well Mary, I'm sorry to hear that you've had it so rough, but everybody's had it rough. We killed our neighbor's in our own kitchen; that was quite a gruesome mess. Then we had to fight our way out of our house, and watch our friends and neighbors battling eaters in their front yard as we left them behind. The list goes on and on, so everyone has had a hard time from the start," I told her.

"I know," she said. "Let's find a ride."

With her last comment, I decided it was a good time to drop the subject and get the hell out of there.

The good news was, there were no feral dogs around, the bad news was, zombies had wondered into the parking lot and were close to the vehicles we needed.

One might think that in an apocalypse like the one that we were enduring, transportation would not be an issue. Just find a car or truck with the keys still in it, and off you go. It wasn't that simple.

It's true that there was a multitude of abandon vehicles, some wrecked, some not. People had jumped from their cars in a panic and ran, or died inside them from starvation, or the elements waiting for help. The problem was, most of those that ran away left their cars running, and at some point the car either ran out of gas, or over heated and rendered the engine useless.

The cars that the people died in had plenty of gas, but they also still had a rotting dead body in them. A rotting dead body that will kill and eat you given half the chance. One that has decomposed enough to make the car stink to high hell and attract a multitude of harassing flies, and who knows what diseases they're carrying after feeding on the zombie hordes, therefore making the vehicle uninhabitable even if you could release the zombie within back into the wild.

We had already had our fill of the smell of death on the river. Maybe in two or three years you could toss out the skeletal remains and the smell might have dissipated, that is unless zombies rot slow enough to still be active after two or three years, but nobody knew the natural life span of a zombie at that time.

We did know that the undead were slowly rotting, but we had no idea how long it took before they ceased to be a threat in their menacing quest to eat flesh. It had been less than a month since the beginning of the outbreak, and the abandon cars with their windows rolled up and the sun shining in were like convection ovens, and the living corpses inside were too stupid to open the door and escape the vehicles on their own, so they were becoming exceedingly ripe, yet still very dangerous.

We didn't have two or three years to wait for a new vehicle, we had to begin the search immediately, so with our weapons in hand, we stealthily left the safety of the truck stop building to dispatch the zombies walking among the abandon trucks.

I led the way into the parking lot but was quickly overtaken by Mary, who promptly hewed the head off a little girl who looked to have been about ten years old when she was alive. The little girl was the first living corpse in the pack that was within our killing radius, and Mary, without forethought, kicked the still snapping head clear to get to the second zombie in the bunch.

With one eye on Mary, I pursued the rolling head, and as I caught up to it, I stomped down hard on it several times with the heel of my boot, crushing the cranial cavit
y
flat upon the asphalt, and leaving a bloody impression of my boot heel imprinted on the temple of the lifeless girls head.

Mary took care of the second threat as quick as she had the first, however, more efficiently the second time around as she didn't decapitate the zombie, she chose the more traditional method of splitting the skull down the middle, and instantly killing it. Then jerking her machete sideways, she widened the gap in the zombie's head and smoothly slid her weapon out.

Billy and Jacob dealt with a few eaters that were flanking us, and Gin acted as the rear guard.

"Look in the one's that have the big sleeper units first," I ordered. "Knock on the doors before you open them, if there are any eaters inside that should get them riled up."

"Will do," Mary said, as she jumped onto the running board of a red tractor-trailer and tapped on the driver's door with the handle of her machete.

Gin kept watch as we checked the lot; we were having no luck at first, but in the last row sat a big blue tractor with a huge sleeper.

"Jackpot," Billy yelled, waiving to the rest of us through the open drivers window, as he heard the powerful diesel engine start up.

We gather by the truck's cab, and Billy informed us that the gas tanks were full and it looked like there would be plenty of room for everyone.

"The trucker that owned this rig must have been getting ready for a long haul somewhere," I said, thinking the driver must have gotten killed just before he was about to leave the truck stop.

The only thing left to do now was to check some trailers, stock up on any food and water we could find, and get back on the road again.

"Anyone find any bolt cutters in any of these trucks?" Billy asked, sticking his head out the window. "Every trailer I saw had a lock on it."

Pulling a small pair of bolt cutters from behind his back, Jacob answered with a smile on his face.

"Do you mean like these?"

"Those are kind of small, but they'll probably do. I doubt if we have to open every trailer," I said, patting Jacob on the back.

"Let's try that one over there," I suggested, pointing to a trailer that had the logo of a national food chain plastered all over it.

After Jacob tried numerous times to cut the lock off of the back door of the chosen trailer, and found that he lacked the strength to squeeze the bolt cutters together hard enough. Billy wrenched the cutters from his hands, and moments later, we were in the trailer.

"I could have done it," Jacob complained.

"We didn't have all day," Billy, answered sarcastically.

"I probably weakened it for you," Jacob hinted, implying his brother couldn't have done it without his help.

"Enough bickering," Gin scolded, from outside the trailer. "Is there anything in there we can use?"

"I think there's lots of stuff we can take with us, maybe we should hook up this trailer and take the whole thing with us dad?" Jacob suggested.

"I don't think we'd get too far hauling this or any trailer for that matter, remember we need to be maneuverable, and trying to get around all of the vehicles that are parked all over the road, would be hard for a seasoned truck driver, impossible for any of us," I explained.

"There's some bottled water back here," Mary shouted.