Zomblog: The Final Entry (28 page)

Hmmm.

I revved the engine.

“Put on your seatbelt,
señorita
.”

Without a word, Thalia did exactly what she was told. I heard the ‘click’ and fastened my own. I pulled away from the pumps and made a wide U-turn. A glance in the rearview…then side-view mirrors…now for a slight turn of the steering wheel to get things right. I shifted into reverse and stomped the gas.

Zombie Bowling.

I felt the impact and the ensuing bounces as I rolled over the bodies. Three of the four lay twitching on the ground. The fourth, Naked Lady, still stood. She turned towards me, arms outstretched, mouth open. Back into drive, and again I put the pedal to the floor. I swerved just enough to catch her with the driver’s side corner of the bumper. A satisfying thud and crunch rewarded the effort, coupled with the body flying several feet. Down, but not…dead? I briefly pondered the idea.

Twice-dead?

Fitting.

Thalia exclaimed her surprise when I slammed on the brakes and flung open the door. All of the zombies were in varied stages of struggling to their feet. On their backs they are a lot like turtles.

I approached the first downed policeman and was very disappointed. No gun. The second was my payoff, though. His wide, black leather belt held several toys for me to examine later once I had more time. I grabbed a window squeegee as I closed in on my target. With one swing I brought it down as hard as I could. My blow found an eye socket which exploded with thick jelly-like fluid. This thing began thrashing, arms flailing, hands grasping. A second swing…another…and another as the face shattered and the eye socket hole expanded. Finally the brass and hard plastic squeegee broke through to something softer. The thing at my feet quit struggling. Instantly. It’s like hitting an
off
switch.

I worked the belt off the
twice-dead
while watching the others. The other policeman and the Asian were back on their feet, headed my way. Naked Lady was bent almost entirely backwards. She was trying to pull her unnaturally vee-shaped self along the asphalt. Yuck. Prize in hand, I made it back to the truck with relative ease.

Dropping the gun belt on the seat, I closed the door and headed for the exit. A car zoomed past, heading for the interstate presumably. A screech of tires sounded as it slammed on the brakes, then sped back to us in reverse.

The car, a sporty foreign model by the looks…what can I say, I’m not much into cars…halted directly in front of us. I considered our chances of ramming the little car without taking too much damage ourselves, but decided to wait a second and see what this person wanted. He or she could be just like Thalia and me. Still, no sense in being stupid. I pulled the gun from the holster and glanced to see if it was loaded. Check. Safety off. Check. I’m savvy enough to know it is a nine millimeter. I glanced in the rearview. The zombies were still a fair distance away. Problem was that now there were seven. I had enough time to at least give this person in the car a moment. I wouldn’t waste time, but I also was not about to let my guard slip.

“Get down, Thalia.”

She obeyed without protest. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she slid to the floor on the passenger’s side, pulled her knees in tight, and wrapped her arms around them. Sort of like a tiny ball.

The door to the sports car opened. A tall, very attractive in an out-of-my-league sort of way, brunette emerged. My mind sped through several scenarios. All of which ended up with me as the hero and her falling into my arms. She proceeds to show her gratitude and admiration for my heroism...

“Thank God!” she screamed, and ran to my truck.

I rolled down the window, seeing no reason to open the door. I mean seriously, there are a bunch of walking dead shambling this way. Sure they’re still a ways off and moving slow, but my mind is still trying to process what’s happening.

“You
really
shouldn’t be out of your car.”  I glanced again at the group of undead closing the distance slowly and steadily. One of them was outdistancing the others and had his arms outstretched.

“My neighbor did this!” the pretty brunette said, holding up her left arm. Blood dripped from a shallow but jagged rip below the elbow.

My look must’ve given something away, because she hastily covered up. Her expression was a crazy mix of fear, embarrassment, and confusion. Without warning, she lunged at my door, pulling wildly on the handle. I went for the lock, but a shade too late as the door opened and I tumbled gracelessly to the ground.

Thalia screamed.

Scrambling up as quickly as I could with the wind only partially knocked out of me, I had no idea what to do. Was this lady one of
them
? Maybe the newly turned are different. Perhaps the brain died slowly, and they kept certain functions for a while. I really had no clue where the movie stuff was right or wrong. Hell, maybe it was
all
wrong. All of that jumbled around in my mind like rocks in a dryer as I came to my feet.

She was apologizing over and over. Maybe she was sorry she had to eat me now. All I truly knew at that exact moment was that she was beside me with a vise-like grip on my arm. There were several of those things about twenty feet or so away, and I was not ready to die.

I shoved her as hard as I could, sending my closest threat stumbling back towards the street. I snatched the gun from the cab where it had fallen to the floorboard in all this insanity. My finger curled around the trigger as I spun and fired.

She was in the process of climbing back to her feet. With an expression of astonishment, she looked down as a bloom of red spread across her blouse. Her eyes returned to mine in shock.

“Why?” She staggered sideways a step and fell…hard.

I still heard screaming. While I was shaking my head rapidly to clear it, something grabbed my shoulder. I whirled around face-to-face with the speed-walker of the bunch. It was a woman. Or had been. Her dark hair clung to her face, glued in place by dried blood. Most of the left cheek had been ripped away. Greyish gums and blood-smeared teeth greeted me in what looked like an exaggeratedly evil grin. I raised the pistol and fired. The bullet tore through its throat, jolting the upper body backwards. I felt the grip upon my shoulder tighten, and the head snapped back toward me with mouth open wide.

It’s strange, the little things that capture our attention in a crisis. I noticed that the flat, lifeless, black-blood veined eyes never changed expression. No anger, hunger, victory, desire, pain...just empty. Truly empty.

I jammed the barrel of the gun into the now gaping maw and fired. The creature simply dropped. Again, it was as if the plug were suddenly pulled, like on a radio.

Without waiting for more bad things to happen, I jumped into the truck, slamming the door, locking it, and rolling up the window seemingly all at once. I shifted into drive and launched the big truck into the street, clipping the sports car enough to turn it a little sideways. My hard right turn aimed us back towards the interstate.

***

I’ve risked my life a whole bunch of times since that night. But at no time was I as stupid or out-of-control as I was in the way I left that gas station parking lot. Six more inches to the left, and I catch enough of that sports car to probably end our ride.

***

Looking in my rearview mirror, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The zombies had fallen on the brunette. That could only mean one thing. Since they ignored, and even stepped over the zombie that I had just blown the back of its skull off, the brunette was not, at the time just before I shot her at least, dead.

Adding one plus one, I had just killed someone. My mind began to argue vigorously the varying points.

She was bitten.

It was only a matter of time.

You saved her much misery.

All the way to the interstate, and for the next several miles, my mind continued. It tried to offer me the solace that no other living, breathing human being would if they’d seen what I’d done.

Eventually, Thalia fell into a fitful sleep. If things were as I suspected, and if they had just started…this was only the ugly beginning.

It would get worse.

The unthinkable has happened. The dead are walking!

Humanity’s fragile thread may be reaching its bitter end.

Individuals and groups struggle to survive…some at any cost. Will there be anybody left?

Or, is this just…

The Ugly Beginning
?

DEAD: the 12 book series

The Dead Walk:

Samuel Todd is a regular guy:

...Failed husband...

...Loving father...

...Dutiful worker...

...Aspiring rock star.

He had no idea if anyone would care, or take the time, to read his daily blog entries about his late night observations. But what started as an open monologue of his day-to-day life became a running journal of the first-hand account detailing the rising of the dead and the downfall and degradation of mankind...

Catch all 3 books in the Zomblog Trilogy