Dead Coast: A Zombie Novel (Jack Zombie Book 4) Read online

  “Thank you!” one of the men say. The knife is ripped from my hands. I open my eyes and stare at them through a sheen of blood. My blood.

  There’s three of them, the fourth one took off after Klein.

  The man who took the blade is a thin fellow, more skeleton than meat. He has a beak for a nose and dirt smeared under his eyes like war paint. “What should we do with this one?” he says.

  “Kill him,” another man says. He is heavier, but a lot taller. No joke, if there was still an NBA, this guy would start on a championship team. “Kill him and put him over with the others. He doesn’t have much meat on him, but it’s better than squirrel.”

  “Damn right,” the third man says. He has long, dirty hair. Cheekbones that stick out from his face. They all three look like freaks, the type of bastards you’d expect to be cannibals. I’m not surprised this was Froggy’s crowd. Not surprised at all. Froggy was the king asshole, but these guys are a close second.

  “How you like dying, pal?” the thin one asks. “This blade looks too clean to me.”

  I’m not scared. I left all of my fear in Washington D.C.

  The large one grabs me around the collar. The stitching in my t-shirt stretches and twangs. He is rough. He pulls me up to my knees.

  And my hand acts on its own as it so often does these days. I only have one bullet left, but at least I get to take one of these bastards down with me. The gun frees from my waistband, index finger presses the safety, and then finds the trigger in one swift motion. This large man already has large eyes, but as he catches the muted gunmetal now glinting with fire, those eyes balloon to the size of this man’s cranium. And that’s pretty damn big.

  The gun cracks as loud as ever, but I hardly notice the noise. I’m too invested in seeing the top of the man’s head get blown off.

  The thin one screams, drops the knife and fumbles his own gun, which is some kind of rifle. I have no bullets left, but I don’t tell them this.

  “Drop it,” I say, pointing the gun at him.

  He has the rifle at waist-level.

  He studies my face. I can’t imagine I look anything less than menacing right now, covered in blood and black soot.

  The skinny one drops the rifle. The other man, the one with the sharp cheekbones, does the same, then he takes off running back the way he came.

  He watches his friend go. He looks to me and then down to the ground where his other friend is minus his scalp and bleeding out into the dirt. I see the front of his pants darken. He’s pissed himself.

  “Get on your knees,” I say.

  He does.

  I grab the guns. They’re both rifles. One has a strap and I put it over my shoulder. I spin the pistol on my finger and holster it back in my waistband. I point the other rifle at the skinny man.

  “Don’t kill me, please,” he says. His voice is oddly calm.

  “Depends,” I say.

  “On what?” he asks. He looks me dead in the eyes. I can respect that.

  “On whether you comply or not.”

  “I dunno what that means,” he says.

  I chuckle with no humor. It’s just reactionary. “It means whether you do what I tell you to do or not.”

  “Oh, mister, I’ll do whatever you want,” he says.

  There’s hope in his eyes and piss in his pants.

  “I’m looking for people,” I say. “Survivors.”

  “Well, they ain’t gonna be alive much longer.”

  “So you know who I’m talking about?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer fast. I put the barrel of the rifle on his forehead and then he answers a lot quicker.

  “I know because I know who you is,” he says.

  “What?” I say, jamming the gun against his face. He flinches hard once and almost falls.

  “They’re with Bea. She’s been waiting for ya.”

  “Bea? Who?” I ask.

  “Beatrice. She ran the raid. Said she got word from the big guys in — ”

  “D.C., yeah, I know,” I say. “I killed the big guys.”

  “Getting killed by ya would be an honor,” he says, smiling. “But I hate you, know that?”

  “The feeling is mutual,” I say. “I’m not going to kill you, though. Not yet.”

  “Why not?” He sounds disappointed.

  “Because you’re going to lead me to Beatrice,” I say.

  “Anything,” he answers. “But we won’t have to go far.”

  I hear their footsteps and then this asshole’s laughter.

  I spin around, I’m face to face with an army of cannibals. They have about ten guns pointed at me and in one dirty man’s grasp is Darlene. My heart flips, sinks, dies.

  I lower my weapon.

  “Greetings,” a woman says to me as she walks closer.

  I don’t have time to answer. I’m hit from behind. Hard. Very hard.

  Darlene is the last thing I see before blackness takes me.

  5

  “Jack Jupiter,” a voice says.

  A woman. The same woman.

  I open my eyes, see the med center. It’s not burning any longer and it’s still standing. Black smoke drifts lazily from the structure. A blemish against the clear, blue sky.

  I look to the people last. They surround me, all large and looming and shadowy in the hazy, morning sunlight. They wear their raggedy clothes, hold their guns. Most of them grin.

  God, help me.

  “Glad you’re awake,” the woman says.

  I’m on my knees. My hands are tied behind my back. There’s dried blood in my eyes. Dirt in my nostrils. The smell of fire is still in the air, so is the smell of death.

  “I’m B — ”

  “Beatrice. I know,” I say. And I really don’t care who she is. I’m going to kill her regardless.

  She smiles. She is missing most of her teeth. How she eats human flesh, I don’t know. In the distance is the sound of gunfire. Rotters from the woods come to join the party, I think, and they’re out there defending the ruined village just so the cannibals can put on their little show. Well, I’ve been through it all. Nothing can surprise me anymore.

  “And you are Jack Jupiter, slayer of my people,” Beatrice says.

  I snarl at her. “You shouldn’t be able to call yourself people because people don’t kill people with no remorse, people don’t eat other people. You’re monsters.”

  She just keeps on grinning. “We can call ourselves whatever we want,” she says. “There are no more rules in this world. Surely you are aware of that.”

  “Where is my family?” I’m trying not to show it to the grinning monsters all around me, but I’m scared. Scared as hell.

  “Bring them out,” Beatrice says, leaning to the side and shouting toward the smoking med center.

  Herb is the first to be pushed out, dragged by four men. Big men. Herb doesn’t put up a fight. He never has and I envy him for that. Putting up a fight just gets you where I’m at. Next is Norm. He smiles as he sees me, then shakes his head as if to say, Oh, here we go again, little brother. I find myself smiling back despite not feeling smiley at all.

  Then it’s Abby. She is weak. Her face is pale. The medicine I have for her is in the Hummer I left somewhere in the dense woods…or gone, thanks to the asshole Klein. God, I’m so stupid. She doesn’t smile when she sees me. She seems too out of it for that. It hurts. I can’t see her like that.

  My heart really starts to hammer my chest because Darlene doesn’t immediately follow. I saw her before they knocked me out. At least, I think I did. Was it a hallucination?

  “Don’t worry,” Norm shouts. “She’s in there, Jack. She’s okay!” He knows me so well. I feel better despite my circumstances. But if I could just see her…

  Then, the man dragging my older brother backhands him. Norm’s head snaps to the left. I see a stream of blood run from his nose.

  “How cute,” Beatrice says. “It’s such a shame.” She titters and then the titters turn to cackles, the cackles of a w
itch. The more I look at her, the more she turns into one. Her skin is already a pukish green. I wonder if that is an effect of eating human meat.

  Darlene finally comes out and my heart speeds up faster. Thank God. That’s all I need to feel hope. She is a little bloody but otherwise beautiful. “Jack!” she screams. I almost scream back, almost jump up and run to her, but I can’t because the men holding her are already rough and I don’t want to risk them hurting Darlene any more. But she bucks and kicks, puts up a good fight, actually. They lift her off the ground. “Let go of me, you assholes!” she says.

  They don’t and she just keeps on fighting.

  Ah, that’s my girl. I missed her.

  “Line them up,” Beatrice says.

  The men listen to her.

  “Line them up right in front of our residential celebrity,” she says. She talks like an educated woman, though from one look at her, you wouldn’t think that’s the case.

  Herb is the first to be put in line, then Darlene, Norm, and Abby. Abby can barely stay up by herself. The bandage around her stump is slick with blood. For a second, I’m brought back to Eden. Instead of a dirt arena and a cage that comes up from the ground full of zombies, I’m surrounded by cannibals and the ruined remains of a place I might’ve once been able to call home. This hurts me more than I care to admit.

  “Abby!” I say, seeing her eyes roll to the back of her head. Oh shit, not good. I’ve seen that look before. She has one foot in Death’s doorway. I have to help her. I have to stop this.

  Beatrice starts chuckling.

  “Help her!” Darlene shrieks. “You bastards! You’re killing her!”

  “That’s the point, sweetheart,” one of the men says. He pats her on the head. He is dressed in a dirty jean jacket and a pair of denim pants almost the exact same shade.

  “Don’t let them move,” Beatrice says.

  I don’t think any one of them can move. They are too defeated. I feel their pain. My eyes are scanning for a way out of this. I’m finding nothing and something tells me this woman isn’t overly cocky like Spike or Butch Hazard were. She’s not going to let me buy some time. That’s what not having testicles will do to you. It makes you smarter, more levelheaded.

  “What do you want?” I say. I realize my body is shaking both with anger and fear but mostly fear. “If you’re going to kill me then do it!”

  Beatrice grins with her hole-y smile. “I fully intend to do that, Jack Jupiter.” She titters again. It’s like nails on a chalkboard. “Oh, I intend to kill you all. It’s such a shame, really.” She does a three-sixty degree spin, her arms out. “This place was so…pleasant, and we had to ransack it just to find you.” Her face loses all semblance of happiness. “You can imagine how disappointed I was to find out you had left. So disappointed, in fact, I had to start these fires and hope you’d see the smoke from D.C. It was a long shot, I know, but,” she leans down right in front of my face, her breath is horrendous, I don’t think she knows what a toothbrush is, “here we are,” she finishes. I’d never punch a woman, but I’d punch her if my hands weren’t tied behind my back.

  With a grimy hand, she pinches my cheek much the same way my grandmother used to. I shudder at her clamminess.

  “I’m so glad we got to meet. I’ve heard the stories. You’ve become quite famous in the short span of just a week. More famous than Blade was,” she says.

  Blade, now there’s a blast from the past. The fiancé-groping son of a bitch. I wish I had a gun, I’d do to this wench what I did to him in a heartbeat. Screw morality.

  Instead, I just say, “If you’re going to kill me, just kill me. Beating around the bush never works out for the bad guys.”

  She smiles wider. “Not yet,” she says. “You look like a man who is ready to die.” She turns to Abby, Darlene, Norm, and Herb in line. “But they don’t,” she says.

  All of a sudden, I can’t swallow. My throat is dryer than the Mojave Desert. “Leave them out of this,” I say. “This is between you and I.”

  She shakes her head, still smiling. “No, no, no, Jack. In the old world, accomplices get punished too, remember?”

  “This isn’t the old world,” I say.

  “No, it’s not. You’re right,” she says. “That’s why the whole village was punished.”

  You piece of shit That was between you and me, not the village.

  The men standing guard over my family all grin. They loved it, loved every minute of murder and destruction. This ain’t the old world, that’s for sure.

  She pulls a gun free from the back of her pants. It’s a shiny pistol, something from the village’s armory, no doubt. Her other hand digs into the front of her pocket, pulls something small and white from it. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s a six-sided die. “Now we are going to have some fun,” she says.

  The men behind my family lose their smiles. They seem to go the color of ash. One even looks like he’s going to throw up. Norm shakes his head. I know what he must be thinking because I’m thinking the same thing. It’s always the same with these villains. They always want to turn death into a game. I think you must get bored when you’re evil, when you don’t live by any morals. It’s a sad fact of the apocalyptic life, I’m afraid. Then again, without morals, you don’t have guilt. No guilt like the guilt I’m feeling right now as I look around the ruined remains of the village, as I look at my family on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs and pain written on their faces. This is all my fault. So many things had to happen for me to get in this position. So many bad things.

  I should’ve killed Froggy, I should’ve never went to D.C., I should’ve never saved Klein.

  I should’ve stayed with Darlene, with the rest of my family when they needed me the most.

  Shoulda, woulda, coulda, my mind says and I start thinking of Mother — not my mother, but the woman who was the leader of this village and who is undoubtedly dead somewhere, buried in the rubble.

  Beatrice scans the crowd. None of her followers are meeting her eyes. The hand holding the die sweeps over them. There’s only about twenty cannibals surrounding us, but now they seem to collapse inwardly on themselves. It reminds me of my college days where the professor would call on someone who didn’t volunteer to answer a question no one knew the answer to.

  “Matthew and Florence,” Beatrice says.

  The crowd lets out a collective sigh and seem to stand up straighter — well, all of those except for a young woman and an older man. Those two — and you can pick them out from the crowd with ease because everyone has stepped away from them like they’re carrying some disease or something — are still looking down at their feet.

  “Please step forward,” Beatrice says, “and fall in line with those on trial.”

  Matthew looks up. There is blood on his face. I don’t think it is his blood. The girl follows behind him. There’s a wild look about her, almost exotic.

  “The name of the game is called Death Roll,” Beatrice says. “I give each participant a number one through six, I roll, whoever’s number the die lands on gets a bullet. Understand, Jack?”

  I don’t nod or say anything. Fuck this woman. Fuck them all.

  “Matthew, insert yourself between the big black man and the blonde woman. Florence, please go to the front end. You will be number one,” she points to Darlene, “you’ll be number two,” then she continues on down the line. I don’t care about numbers one and three.

  Beatrice smiles. “The rules of the game are simple.”

  Someone in the crowd whistles. Another person hoots.

  “And, Jack, believe me, it is so fun,” Beatrice says.

  Darlene looks me dead in the eyes. Her lips tremble, cheeks sag. My heart trembles in response.

  Beatrice shakes the die in her hands, leans down closer to me, and says, “Would you like to blow on them for luck?”

  I keep my mouth closed, my jaw clamped.

  If I’m going to do something, I better do it fast.

>   6

  The die hangs in the air for what seems like much longer than the rope hung in the air back on the overpass in Washington D.C.; but like all things on this world, what goes up, must come down.

  It lands in the dirt, sending a small cloud up to cover it. I’m staring at the dust, trying to see the black dots on the white cube.

  Please, God, please, don’t be any of their numbers. Please.

  Beatrice bends down and waves her hand at the dust. It seems that no one is breathing, certainly not me.

  “Three!” she shouts when the dust clears.

  I look up at the line of people in front of me. Number three is the older man named Matthew.

  No way she kills him. This woman is just bluffing, all good gamblers are professional bluffers.

  She pockets the die and opens the pistol’s cylinder. From where I’m at, on my knees, I see there’s four bullets loaded.

  Matthew isn’t looking up. He’s looking at the dirt in front of him, his hands clasped at his waist.

  “Well, Matthew,” Beatrice says, “you lose…or do you win?”

  The crowd laughs, deep, belly-shaking laughs that might even rival Herb’s. The crowd’s laughter seems forced, though, as if this is a common phrase Beatrice uses when she plays this game. It’s almost as if it’s staged. I don’t know if that pisses me off more or if it frightens me to the point of no longer being able to feel.

  “Please step forward,” she says.

  Matthew doesn’t listen. He just goes on staring at the dirt. I see tears spill from the corners of his eyes, start running down the deep cracks and crevasses of his wrinkled, blood-speckled flesh.

  “Matthew,” Beatrice says again, sounding like a chastising authority figure.

  My skin is starting to crawl. I’m itching all over, but I can’t scratch with my hands behind my back. The luck of the roll has bought us time yet it’s gotten me nowhere. I’m still here, still staring death in the form of this hillbilly woman right in the face.

  Matthew finally starts moving. I can’t believe it, but I’m feeling bad for him. Darlene must be too, because her lips are slightly parted and her eyes are all quivery like she’s about to cry. Ironic, isn’t it? One of the men who helped do this to the village is about to get what he deserves and here we are shedding tears for him.