The Great Wreck (Novella): Year of the Dead Read online

  Year of the Dead

  a Great Wreck novella

  By Jack Stewart

  Iron Cross Publishing

  www.ironcrosspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (especially the dead), events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Jack Stewart

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Iron Cross Publishing, Santa Fe.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-5136-0294-3

  Cover art by Ray Cornwell

  http://ronindude.deviantart.com

  https://www.patreon.com/RoninDude

  Dedications

  Oh, the Dead!

  How you make me laugh!

  Mother fuckers.

  Year of the Dead

  I won’t lie to you: I like to sleep in the nude. Having clothes on at night makes me feel itchy, dirty. And usually my clothes are covered with the gore of the dead that I have killed. So there’s that.

  At the end of a long day of scrambling through the Great Wreck, of putting as many bullets in as many of the heads of the undead (read it again, it rhymes!) that I can (while burying my axe in one or two just to keep sharp), and swinging a bat until my arms feel like lead, I strip off all of my clothes and throw them out of the tenth story window of the small apartment building I’ve been using as my base. I have quite the pile at the bottom of the tower but with all the trash and debris clogging up the streets below, I don’t think anyone will really notice. And if they do, who cares? It’s just a bunch of tee shirts, skirts, and jeans that any of the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls used to wear before everything collapsed into a pile of rubble, technically dead, and flames.

  Technically dead, you say?

  Walking dead, I say. Shufflers, walkers, sprinters. Other types I can’t identify.

  Shufflers have been dead a long time and their bodies are falling apart. They’re slow moving, not too bright, and easy to put down, like a retarded dog. They have one foot in the grave you might say. But then you might also say they have two feet in the grave and you’d be right. And that would make you a Smart Ass Bastard.

  But I digress.

  Don’t let that shuffling about fool you, though. Get spotted by a shuffler and he’ll let off a moan loud enough to attract others. Get cornered by a few hundred shufflers and your lunch. Maybe breakfast or dinner. Brunch perhaps? Or a midnight snack? I guess it depends on the time of day when you’re eaten and I don’t think your classification as a meal will matter much to you then as they nibble on (and by nibble on, I mean rip great chunks of flesh from) your sensitive pieces and parts.

  Walkers are a little more lively (ha, ha, zombie humor). Their bodies are in better shape, they can get up to a trot, maybe even a fast jog. Sometimes even a run. Not a real run, mind you, but maybe a Special Olympics run. I’m a winner!

  They also like to announce your presence to any and all of their surrounding friends. Zombie social networking in action. They are really loud and scream when they spot you bringing the whole fucking dead party down on your head. Still not too bright but if you get more than a few headed your way, you’re in trouble.

  Sprinters are the nasty ones. Alone, in pairs, in parks, in fairs, or…um…in groups, it doesn’t matter. They hone in on you with some weird radar in their head without ever having to actually see you. Then they hunt you down until you’re meat. It looks like they are really, really pissed off at being dead and they don’t just scream when they see you: they shriek with a rage like I’ve never heard before. That gets their buddies all wee wee’d up and every dead body within a few blocks will try to break zombie sprinting records racing to get their ass to the newly announced walking buffet. Even the shufflers move as fast as they can, which isn’t very fast given that they are usually missing legs and feet and such, but they do try.

  The Others, well fuck them. They scare the ever living shit out of me. They might look just like you and me: dirty, pale, scared, but when you get close to one, they start acting like a sprinter: pissed off, faster than fuck, and looking for a bite of your tender, living flesh. Finger licken’ good. Bump into one of these bastards and the next thing you know, you are now the newest member of Club Dead.

  Those dumb asses behind their big impressive wall in Burbank? They call them Ash Angels. What kind of asshole names fucking little child monsters Ash Angels? The kind that surround their All You Can Eat Buffet with a wall, light it up, and make all kinds of noise that tell the dead “Here we are! Come and get it!” Those kinds of assholes.

  Some of the folks I traveled with as I bounced from one group of survivors to the next think that the Others might have partial immunity or some shit, a reservoir for the virus as most of the normal dead decay away and can’t pass their viral load onto a new host. One egghead wanted to get a closer look at them. I said funny, they want to get a close look at you too. He wanted to talk to them. I said they wanted to eat him and save the dinner talk for later. He used a whole lot of hoity-toity words like viral adaptability, immunosuppression strategies, and in the end, oh my god their eating me! Dumbass.

  A bullet to the chest puts the Others down but a few minutes later, they are back up in pure sprinter form requiring a whole extra bullet preferably (actual, it’s a requirement) to the head to put them back down again. Or a well-placed axe blade to the noodle. Or a not so well placed blow to the brain pan with a bat. Either way it’s extra effort that you might not be able to afford if a committee of those things are looking to have a word with you.

  So, a very few of the infected are Others but everyone gets to be a sprinter if they are not too eaten up on their first date with the dead. They get to run around a bit, play the Alpha Monster, and grab a bite to eat. But most of the sprinters wind down after a while and become walkers, then shufflers as their bodies fall apart. Thank god! If they all stayed sprinters, we might as well just line up and let them have at us! I mean, really, have you seen those fuckers in action? Fat, thin, young, old: it doesn’t matter, they are coming after you like Wal Mart shoppers on Black Friday and if you are anything but an Olympic track star or maybe the Flash, you are about to find a few pounds of your flesh in one of those thing’s stomach.

  So enough talk.

  I head out into the wreck first thing every morning after the sun clears the eastern mountains. Never at night. And I never stay out after dark. The dead don’t need light to hunt you down, at least the fast ones don’t and they lead the rest of shufflers to you once they have you pinned. I’ve seen it happen too many times. So as the sun begins to drop in the west, I begin to make my way home. Sometimes I only have a few of the shufflers trailing along behind me and I can send them to a permanent grave quickly. Sometimes I’ll have a whole fucking cheerleading squad following me and I’ll have to go round and round until I lose them. Only then do I head in to my building and make my way carefully up to the tenth floor.

  I say carefully because, even after six months of clearing out the area around the building, a few drifters have managed to wander in from time to time. I even found a sprinter in the bottom floor once but it came to me as soon as it sensed I was near. This one was a real cutie, just a teenager like me when he was turned. I could tell because his face was mostly intact when he tore around the corner screaming in that crazy rage that fills the sprinters when they lock on to you. I hesitated for only a second wondering what he was like when he was not, technically spea
king, dead, then smashed his brains across the lobby of the apartment building as he rushed at me. What a waste.

  The apartment I use is one of four at the top of the building. I’ve completely boarded up two of them and the one I use for decontamination and supplies has a nice, solid steel door that I can lock on my way out and bolt shut once I am in. I enter that apartment, drop all of my gear, strip off my filthy and usually gore splattered clothes, and shower making sure all of the goop, blood, and viscera are washed away, then I wash again with pure chlorine bleach, then wash again with soap. This way I hope to clear off any of the virus or bacteria or whatever it was that started this whole mess off in the first place.

  After that, I clean my gear and set it up for the next day: filling my pack with water, packing in as much ammo as I can, reloading all my weapons, sharpening the blade of the axe I carry, and notching the bat to keep count of all the home runs I have scored. And by home runs (for the slower readers out there), I mean dead craniums that I have crushed in. Then and only then, I crawl through the smallest hole in the wall I could cut into the back of a closet into the adjacent apartment I call home. Once in, I push a large rolling safe in front of the hole and lock the wheels to keep anything that might breach the other apartment out. It’s completely sealed up: every door and window, every possible way in except the three large bay windows that overlook the ocean to the west, the shore to the south, and the Wreck to the east. I am not going to live whatever life I have sealed up in a black box. A girl has standards, you know.

  I don’t think the dead can get to me through the big windows. The apartment overhangs the floor beneath mine in all directions and if the dead can start scaling walls or leaping up ten stories, well, I’m pretty fucking screwed anyways. So I left these windows open and watch every night as the smoke blows over the nearly dead city and the sun slips into the ocean. I usually fall sleep with a shotgun cradled in my arms. I may be secured in my little hole atop an empty building, but I keep it close just the same.

  I wake up the next day, pull on panties, a sports bra, long sleeve shirt, sometimes jeans, sometimes a skirt if I’m feeling frisky. Then my leather bite armor goes on around my arms, legs, and neck wrapped and tied tight. It keeps the most determined bites at bay. If more than one gets on top of me though, it’s all over anyway.

  In the beginning, I strapped on a full face respirator but it gave me headaches and cut off my peripheral vision so I tried a half face. After a few months I ditched that as well though I keep it hung around my neck in case the air is still and the overpowering rotten stench builds up in the L.A. basin. Or if I am in the middle of a head smashing festival. Then I’ll pull it on to keep the splattering from getting into my mouth. Yech.

  And then it’s off into the Wreck again where much fun and death is to be found. For six months I’ve been doing this. Six months from the day I turned sixteen.

  ɸ

  Today is your birthday! Da na na na nana nana! It’s my birthday too!

  Things had already been going apeshit in the city for a few months, but my parents were trying to keep things normal for me, Cerra, their one and only girl with my dark brown hair, pale skin, large puppy eyes, wide (but not too wide) Latina nose, and pouty, large lips. Yep, just like in your fantasies, pervert.

  Way too pretty at way to young an age. I was trouble from the time I hit puberty. I knew it, my mom knew it, and my dad knew it. He also knew he wouldn’t be able to beat off the hordes of young men who were already starting to sniff around me like dogs after a biscuit when I was much younger so he sent me to karate classes. I got my black belt when I was twelve and he was satisfied I’d be able to beat off the hordes of suitors myself if they got out of hand.

  That didn’t sound right, did it? Whatever, you know what I mean.

  Turns out I was as good at karate as I was at the gymnastics class my mom had indentured me to when I was six. Karate and gymnastics! I was a bona fide fucking teenage superhero.

  I also have a foul mouth.

  That thanks to my grandpa who served in the navy and never failed to find great hilarity at my parents’ reaction when he’d fire off a filthy gem at the dinner table. Like most children, I absorbed every single foul word and deployed them effectively every chance I could. So pay attention cocksuckers and pole queens ‘cause here is where things get interesting.

  We were having a little party for me pretending the end of the world had not arrived when they broke into the lower floors. And by “they” I mean zombies. Who did you think I meant? Jehovah’s Witnesses? Geez. Although I’m not sure which was worse (ha, ha, Jehovah’s Witness humor. Of course the dead were worse).

  We could hear the screaming as the dead swarmed through the flimsy barricades and into the flesh of the living quickly turning them into short lived (ha ha) sprinters with that weird radar in their head. My mom and dad looked at each other, then at me. I could see by the look in their eyes they knew we were dead. Six floors up off the street and all the hallways and stairs above us blocked up, there was absolutely nowhere for us to go. So we waited.

  They burst in through our front door ten minutes later. My dad got between them and my mom and I but that only gave us a second or two as they rolled over him biting and screaming. My mom pushed me back as they finished with my dad and descended on her. I stumbled backwards and felt myself trip over the coffee table. My arms pin-wheeled in the air as they bit into my mom. Her screams filled the whole apartment as I felt my hands go through the plate glass window that overlooked the street below. I fell through the glass and, as my lower back hit the bottom of the window frame, was flipped up, over, and out into the great wide open air. So out I went, heading towards the street with incredible speed. I had just a second to open my eyes and see the industrial trash dumpster, you know, the ones with the ten foot high steel sides they use for construction jobs and shit, that would become my grave as I hit the piles of garbage and debris at what must have been Mach 1. My last thoughts were “a clean death! Yay for me!” Then everything went black.

  I woke up with the sound of screaming outside the dumpster and a big old piece of metal rebar poking through my thigh. So much for a clean death. Now I had become spam in a can. Liverwurst in a tube? Corned beef hash in a sack? Whatever. The force of my body hitting the trash had brought the heavy metal lid down temporarily saving my life. I could hear the things outside scratching at the metal walls of the dumpster, hear the screaming of the sprinters as they tried and failed to breach my metal cocoon. Then the pain hit me. It felt as though I had broken every bone in my body. I bit down on my arm so hard to keep me from screaming in agony that I screamed in agony from the pain effectively nullifying my “try not scream” effort.

  I felt something sharp and hot buried deep in my thigh that was not, to my limited experience with getting impaled, rebar-like. I felt down my right side and my fingertips brushed a long shard of glass buried deep into the meat of my leg. I briefly wondered what other things had violated my teenage flesh as I impacted the rubble in the bin. It would be like an Easter Egg hunt finding them all!

  I tried to pull it out but it was hooked in good. I pulled hard and felt it drag out an inch. Biting into my arm didn’t help (as I noted before) and I screamed. The things outside the dumpster screamed with me as I pulled harder unit the entire length of glass slid out followed by a rush of blood. I pulled off my shirt and pressed it to the wound hoping the shard had not hit an artery. Then I lay back in the garbage and waited until I could work up the nerve to remove the rebar.

  The pain of the glass wound began to subside after a small eternity, then I propped myself up to look at my fancy new rebar piercing.

  Rebar. In my thigh. Take a minute to imagine that. Yes, it was as painful as it sounds.

  It poked out of my skin an inch or two like a middle finger telling me to, duh, fuck off. I lifted my leg a bit and looked at the underside The piece of rebar had run just under my skin. It didn’t look like it had gone into my muscle but was a couple
of feet long and lodged deeply under a ton of debris so the only way to get it out was to lift myself up. I knew the pain would be monstrous. I knew I’d bleed like a stuck pig and scream like…well…a stuck pig.

  It was and I did.

  I grabbed one of the rungs on the side of the dumpster, counted to three, and heaved myself up feeling the rebar tear out of my thigh the way it had come it. The wall of pain that crashed down on me was unlike anything I had ever had to endure. As a matter of fact, the only thing that had ever hurt nearly this much as when I technically lost my virginity in gym class when I was ten. What a slut, you say. Allow me to explain, I say.

  I had technically lost my virginity long ago to a balance beam when I misjudged my landing and got an eight foot long, six inch wide beam of wood to the crotch for my troubles. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Even at the tender age of ten, I knew what the blood in my crotch meant and cried to my mom telling her no one would ever love me because I was no longer a virgin. She laughed and explained to me just exactly what a virgin was and said it’d be OK as she washed my bloody tights. She said that in this day and age no man would ever notice. Just pretend it hurt the first time I had sex and everything would be all right. My mom knew just the right thing to say to mortify me and make me feel better at the same time.

  In short, the balance-beam-to-the-crotch hurt like ever loving hell but not like this. Oh no, not like this.

  I dropped myself back on to the pile of rubble careful not to land back on the rebar (and for a humorous note, lose my real virginity to a piece of metal. Ha, ha. Hey, if you can’t laugh in the middle of a zombie apocalypse about your vagina, then when can you?). I quickly tore off a wad of cloth from my shirt and wrapped it around the wound to stop the bleeding as I began to swim in and out of consciousness. I knew I had to get that bastard tied down before I passed out or I might bleed to death. I got my makeshift bandage wrapped and tied tight and then slipped into the black.