Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope Read online

  Darlene shudders next to me. “Creepy,” she says.

  “Yeah,” Abby agrees.

  They must not notice the tree.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Norm says, a sarcastic smile on his face. “We’re only staying until we all get rested, then we’re back on the road. Who knows? Maybe the previous owners of this place left us a car or some honest-to-God food. I’m sick of eating old Twinkie’s and stale potato chips.”

  “And bugs, don’t forget bugs,” Abby says, a disgusted look on her face.

  Yeah, Norm has been eating bugs. It was a habit he picked up in his military travels. Some foreign country or other where dinner’s main course is grasshopper soup and eating beef, pork, or chicken is frowned upon. I won’t knock it, but I won’t try it, either. I understand where he’s coming from. We haven’t had meat in awhile, and men need their meat. During the fall of American civilization, when there were more people than zombies (this was just a very short time, looking back) you could still find a pound or two of frozen hamburger, chicken breasts, a nice pot roast. Cook them over a fire, get some buns, barbecue sauce or ketchup and mustard, and enjoy. But now, every working freezer has probably stopped.

  So yeah, a man needs his meat, even if it is bug meat, and Florida has a lot of bugs.

  “Hey, if you guys ate some once in awhile, maybe you wouldn’t be so weak,” Norm says. “I mean, veggies can only take you so far.

  Abby rolls her eyes.

  Darlene is looking at me, ignoring all of this banter. “Jack, you don’t look all right,” she says. “Really.”

  “I’ll be okay once I get some sleep,” I say.

  I, and the rest of the gang, were lucky to not catch the virus that killed most of the world, but we’re never lucky enough to catch a full eight-hours. That kind of shit catches up to a guy, no joke.

  “Then let’s go,” Norm says.

  5

  The wilted crops watch us as we walk up the long, winding gravel driveway — or at least it seems like it. I can’t complain. I’d much rather deal with dead crops than dead people.

  Norm leads the way, the baseball bat in hand, but his Magnum not far off. One of the rules I’ve brought forth from my old zombie book (Sitting on dusty, abandoned shelves at a local bookstore near you!) is never shoot a zombie if you can bash its head in. They are attracted to sound. This is something I learned the hard way back in Woodhaven when I was still trying to get a feel for these creatures, still testing the waters. And like in my book The Deadslayer, this proved to be true, among other things: zombies craving human flesh, can only kill them by severing the brain, the putrid stink of rotting bodies, and much, much more.

  Norm goes up the stairs first. I am right behind him. Any other time, I’d be there neck in neck with my older brother, but he has the gun while Abby has the other, and I’m pretty beat.

  I glance over my shoulder at Darlene. Her fingers are up to her mouth, her teeth working on the nails she once cared so much about. I smile at her, letting her know it’s going to be okay.

  The front door isn’t locked, but it’s cracked. This is a good sign. If it was locked, whatever dead things inside of it would still be here.

  Norm pushes it open the rest of the way, eases it really. The hinges squeak. I’m not hit with the smell of rotting carcasses. Thank God for small favors, right? But I am hit with the smell of someone else’s house. You know what I’m talking about. The smell of home cooked meals and cheap candles from Bath & Body Works, and maybe even cigarette smoke and dog piss. A smell that hits you full-force once you enter, but then disappears about five minutes later only to resurface when you’re back in the comfort of your own house, peeling your clothes off while the shower is running, and you’re thinking, How the hell did I stomach that stench for so damn long?

  It’s that kind of smell, and in this farm house it’s the smell of decaying potatoes, old manure, and maybe rotten eggs and other foods leaking out from behind the closed doors of a refrigerator long since defunct. These are not pleasant smells, either, but I inhale deeply. It’s so much better than dead bodies.

  “I think it’s clear,” Norm says.

  I lean back to Abby and Darlene, give them a nod, letting them know they can come in. They do and they stay in the foyer area, closing the door to the outside world.

  We aren’t even inside and he thinks it’s clear, that’s how good we’ve gotten at this. We are human after all. Humans adapt. I swear my sense of smell is heightened, I can see better in the dark, and I’m almost impervious to fear — almost. That’s cool and all, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the old way of life. Staying up in an air conditioned house, writing, watching TV shows and movies that were once regarded as fiction but have since become the real world, eating whatever I like at whatever time I wanted it (Craving cheeseburgers? McDonald’s is open twenty-four hours and it’s just down the road). What I miss most of all is the docility. How people weren’t always so high strung all the time. You could walk around (at least around my neighborhood in Chicago) without having to worry about people robbing you for your car, your food, your weapons, or your women.

  I miss not being a killer. I miss my mother, too, and it’s not that if she was still alive I would go see her; it’s just that it was nice knowing she was still here, and I could talk to her whenever I wanted to, even if that was only on birthdays and Christmas.

  We walk inside, past the little foyer area where the mud caked on the boots next to the door has turned into piles of dust. There’s a coat rack with light jackets, workman’s gloves, a John Deere hat, then we are in a hallway. There is a washing machine with a load of moldy, mildewy clothes still inside of it. Pictures of Christ on the walls, behind these pictures, a striped wallpaper of earthy colors: brown, a red clay, land-green. Norm takes the left, I take the right.

  The right is a family room. The left is the kitchen. There’s more though, this place is huge. Apparently farmers make bank and I definitely pursued the wrong career by going into writing. Doesn’t matter any more, though.

  Darlene trails behind me, grabs my hand. We walk together in this strange house, both of us on edge, our eyes narrowed, looking for any sudden movement, our breathing low so, we can hear every creak and groan.

  Inside of the family room is one of those wrap around couches. It stretches wall to wall. There’s a folded blanket over the arm. Pillows in the corners, picture-perfect, like a display couch. A film of dust covers the blank screen of the television. It’s got to be around fifty inches, and it will most likely never be watched again. There’s a large cobblestone fireplace that takes up the bulk of the right side of the room, the type of fireplace I always wanted when I was younger. On the mantle is a framed picture.

  They are this house’s last owners. God knows where they are now. I take one off of the mantle, the smallest one. The frame is golden and jagged. This was a happy family. An older man in a button-up shirt and black slacks, the shirt tucked in, with his arm around a woman in her mid-fifties wearing a flowery dress, both with deep suntans, both looking like they’d never worn formal wear in their entire lives. Next to them, locked at the elbows is a pair of twins, young men in their caps and gowns, perfect white teeth on their faces. A billowing water fountain is behind them in the shape of an open rose bud. The little stenciled date in the corner of the picture says FSU 2013. They graduated from Florida State. This moment, frozen in time, is now in my hand, and I feel like crying.

  Maybe they’re still happy. Maybe they’re out there somewhere, doing what Darlene, Abby, Norm, and I are doing. Surviving.

  Darlene’s hand is on my back. I feel the slight tremors going through her body as if she’s holding in sobs.

  I turn to her. “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  I know it’s not.

  “They sat here,” she says. “They sat right in here and laughed, watched TV, opened presents on Christmas.”

  “I know, Darlene, but they’re in a better place, now,�
�� I say.

  “How do you know they’ve gone to a better place?” Her eyes are glistening.

  I don’t answer. She just hugs me, wraps her arms tight around my neck. Her hair no longer smells like cherries, but that’s okay. I am home when I am with her, that’s all that matters.

  “Uh, you guys want some privacy?” Norm says from the doorway. Abby is right behind him, a smirk on her face.

  There’s no longer any privacy among us, and even if me and Darlene went upstairs to an empty room, locked the door, and got our privacy, I wouldn’t like it. It’s too quiet in here. No hum of air conditioning, no sounds of cars going down the road. Norm and Abby would hear everything. Besides, this is not our house. It belongs to the family forever frozen in happiness in my hand. I don’t care if they never come back to claim it. It's just not right.

  “No, it’s okay,” I say. I go to the couch, sit down. The cushions are rigid as if no one has ever sat where I sat, but a smell of stale body odor and old manure wheezes out. “Everything clear?”

  “Yeah,” Norm says. “Downstairs is good. Abby checked upstairs. Basement is locked, but I’m not about to break the door down to find out what’s down there. This place isn’t our home, it’s just a temporary haven, and it’s as empty as a graveyard, far as I’m concerned.” He smiles at me.

  That’s one of our inside jokes. As empty as a graveyard. It means that all the dead have risen and nowadays people don’t die. Therefore, no more graveyards. The whole world is one.

  “Were there any…” I trail off.

  Norm shakes his head.

  Abby does the same. “Nothing,” she says.

  I want to ask if she found the family from the pictures, but I don’t for Darlene’s sake. When the plague swept the nation, then the world, it did so with brutal force. The government didn’t do what you’d expect, what they do in every zombie movie and book from here to China. They didn’t declare a quarantine because it was too late. They didn’t develop a vaccine as quick as possible because they couldn’t. By the time they realized how far this disease spread, it was everywhere. So they pretty much said, ‘Hey, well I guess we’re all fucked. So you’re on your own!’

  Anyway, when the news broke, a lot of people — families like the family who owned this house — took to solving the crisis themselves. Some of them fought, and maybe ended up in places like Eden, but some of them put the barrel of a shotgun in their mouths.

  Sad but true.

  “Well, what do we do now?” Abby says.

  “We rest,” Norm says. “Until we’re ready to get back on the road again. I’ll do some scouting. See if they left anything of use.”

  “Let me help,” I say.

  Norm shakes his head. “No, little brother. You need to rest the most.”

  “I can rest when we get to Eden.” The images of orange groves and smiling people from my dreams come to me.

  “If you don’t rest now, you’ll never get to Eden,” Norm says.

  Also sad and also true.

  6

  Today, for the first time in a long time, Darlene and I will get to sleep by ourselves in an actual bed, mattress and all. No Norm. No Abby. No cramped and uncomfortable folded-down backseats of Norm’s long lost Jeep.

  We all get our own rooms, our own beds. These rooms are not what I expect. They seem lived-in. Ruffled blankets. Mattresses with the previous owner’s body imprinted in the sheets. I go into the bathroom of the one Darlene and I take. I think it might’ve belonged to one of the farmer’s twin sons because of the Star Wars posters on the walls. A dead video game console connected to the equally dead television. But in the bathroom my heart stops. Crest toothpaste, the blue kind with the thin squares of breath-freshening mint strips dispersed throughout, sits on the lip of the sink, its cap open. A toothbrush sits next to it. My heart stops for two reasons. The first is that maybe whoever was here before us is still here, only out and about on a supply run, and the second is that maybe this house has running water, maybe it comes through the pipes from a well somewhere nearby. God, I’d kill for a hot shower.

  Both of these reasons are proven wrong as I rub my finger across the toothpaste. It is dry, mummified. The head of the toothbrush is dryer than this, and the faucet only sputters and chokes when I turn the knob.

  Darlene pops her head around the door frame, her blonde hair no longer bouncy and voluminous, but now clinging to her scalp and face in clumps. “Everything okay?” she asks.

  I nod.

  But she knows. The rest of her body, noticeably thinner, yet still gorgeous enters the view. “No, it’s not, Jack. You look like you saw a ghost.”

  We’ve all seen ghosts.

  Darlene stares at me expecting an answer so I have to give her one. I say the first thing that pops into my head. “No. No ghost.”

  She nods as if she knows exactly what I’m talking about, and in a sense, she does. The last six months have been harder on her than the rest of us. She — unlike Norm, Abby, and me — had stakes in the old world. She had family and friends. Now they’re gone. Sometimes, I hear her sniffling in the night. Sometimes I hear her calling out for her mother or her sister in her sleep. It hurts me more than anything else to see her upset and broken. Sometimes, I don’t know what to do. I hold her and kiss her, but those gestures can only go so far.

  We leave the bathroom and head for the bed. The first angry grumbles from the storm begin to make themselves heard.

  I fell asleep at three in the afternoon, and I dream of Eden. Of walls and food and safety. Of seeing whoever wrote the sign on the roof we saw with a smile on their face. It’s a semblance of the old world, and it’s the reason I wake up. I have to get there for my family, for Darlene and Abby and Norm.

  But for some reason, I wake up sweaty and scared.

  Outside, it is raining. The storm has passed. I have slept through the worst of it. Distant rumbles of thunder can be heard, streaks of lightning can be seen, but other than that, the field of dead crops and the surrounding woods are quiet and silent. I wake feeling rested, ready to take on the whole dead world by myself.

  Darlene is gone next to me, twitching softly every minute or so as I sit there looking out the window. I hear her murmur a name, but it’s impossible to tell who it belongs to. I lean over and kiss her on her sweaty cheek. I hope she is having pleasant dreams. I hope she is escaping this fucked-up world, if only just for a minute.

  I get up, head downstairs to use the restroom. The plumbing doesn’t work in the house as I discovered earlier, but I’ve not stooped low enough to take a piss in a waterless toilet bowl in a house that’s not mine. Plus the storm has settled down enough for me to see the surrounding fields. No fog. No yellow eyes.

  The air outside is fresh, that smell of wet soil and leaves. No rotting corpses drifting this way today. I reckon it’s around eleven at night. I’ve gotten my doctor recommended eight hours, but I also reckon I’ll sleep for eight more hours, barring a major setback.

  I do my business off the back porch where I can see the tops of trees swaying in the faint moonlight breaking through the dark storm clouds. It’s calm out here. It’s fresh. You can almost forget about all the bullshit you’ve been through over the past few months. All the hate. All the death. All the darkness. For this moment, the world is how it used to be. I stand, watching the leaves, hearing them rustle for what seems like only a short time.

  “You all right?” Norm says from behind me.

  I hear his voice through a wave of longing. I am at the bottom of the pool of my pleasant memories, drowning, and Norm is standing on the edge, shouting for me to grab his hand.

  “Huh?” I say, shaking my head.

  “You’ve been out here for ten minutes, man,” he says. “Can’t sleep?”

  “I slept like a rock,” I say.

  “I was getting worried,” Norm says. “You were a statue.”

  The sky has begun to take on a purplish, bruising color. The world is hurt. This disease has pummeled it, an
d no longer do we see the blackness. Now, we see its wounds.

  “I was just thinking,” I say, looking at the sky beyond the trees.

  “Yeah, about what?”

  I don’t answer. Norm is not the same guy I remember from my childhood. He doesn’t boss me around or hit me or bully me. He’s grown up. Still, I don’t dare spill my feelings to him. It would not be manly. It would be the kind of stuff only ‘pussies’ talk about. I don’t exactly know why I feel like this. We’ve both grown in ten years, and I like who we’ve become. Maybe I’m afraid if I say what’s on my mind, I’ll break that fragile illusion.

  “Jacky,” he says, waving his hand in front of my face. Without much light, I barely see it, just the gleam of the moon in his eyes.

  “I…was just thinking about what our next move is,” I say.

  A lie.

  “Easy,” Norm says. He walks up next to me, places his hands on the railing of the back porch. “We get to Eden.”

  “It’s not that easy anymore,” I say. “It’s so bad out there, and it gets worse every passing minute. There’s times when I don’t think we’re going to make it to the next town.”

  He claps me on the back. “But we do, little brother! Don’t we? Besides, we only need to make it to one more town and then we’re home.”

  He says home like we’ve been on an extended vacation, not like we are showing up to some fabled safe haven with our hands out expecting food, water, and shelter. We don’t even know where Eden is for sure. It’s like the lost city of Atlantis in this zombie-ravaged world. We just know it’s past Sharon or so we hope.

  “Together, Jack, we can do whatever the fuck we want. Screw these deadheads man. Screw them right up their rotten assholes.”

  I smile, let out a small chuckle. Norm has always had a way with words. I’m glad the military didn’t beat that out of him.

  He smiles back.

  “Think the girls are going to be okay?” I ask.

  Norm nods. “Yeah, they’ll come around. Abby already has. Darlene will, too. It might take some close call or tragedy — God forbid — to snap her out of the world we used to live in, but she’ll come around.”