Hunger Driven: A Zombie Short Story Read online

  As I emptied the last of the ready magazines in my bag, I saw the little green car was barely making headway. I managed forty kills out of fifty rounds, which was pretty darned awesome at over a hundred yards on a moving target the size of a basketball.

  Find a place and hole up, I whispered as I broke away long enough to refill my bag with more loaded magazines. Crap, I was down to the last four of the twenty five rounders and six of the ten round magazines. By the time I ran back to the edge of the building, this time on the north facing side, I saw the last gasp of white smoke erupt into a plume and realized the smoke was from an engine fire and not a busted radiator. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

  Reloaded once again, I started potting zombies in the vicinity but took care not to expose them to over penetrating rounds. The two doors of the small car flew open and I watched in surprise as women started falling out, clown car style. One two, three…a staggering total of seven individuals emerged from a vehicle which I’m sure would have been uncomfortable for me to fit in one of those econobox seats.

  One looked to be holding a tire iron and another clutched a three foot long piece of chain. No firearms, no bladed weapons. I figured at that point they were all just going to die. I was going to be treated to a front row seat as the horror unfolded. Crap. That’s why I stick to killing zombies and let somebody else worry about the living.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Get out of the road!” I bellowed, but of course none of these ladies could hear me over the Led Zeppelin roaring out of the boombox. From where the car ground to a stop, the women had choices about where to fort up. On the left, a partially boarded up service station and attached mechanics shop offered some cover. On their right, I spied the only Chinese restaurant in town, a place with the word ‘Wok’ in the title was all I could remember. Oh, and it had floor to ceiling glass windows in front. For me, the service station was a no-brainer, but then I knew something these ladies did not.

  In the end, panic determined their choice as one of the women seemed to give a little shriek, at least, her face drew up in a mask of terror and darted towards the Chinese restaurant. She broke for the restaurant and the other women followed close on her heels.

  “Fuck” I murmured and kept shooting zombies, hoping to give them some cover for as long as the loaded magazines held out. At this range, my marksmanship wasn’t spectacular, but I managed to keep the lurching corpses off the women until the group disappeared out of sight through the front door, which, surprise, was still open. More likely, someone had already broken into the restaurant. Either seeking shelter or an order of Wonton soup. If I remembered right, their soup was pretty good, back in the day.

  As more zombies began to drift over in the direction of their next Happy Meal, I continued to cut down every one I could safely shoot. The problem being, as the dead drifted between my position and the restaurant, I had to be mindful of those glass windows. Even with a 22 LR round, over-penetration could still occur as a bullet passes through these rotted corpses.

  My strategy worked for a while, but eventually the leakers just got by me. For every one I dropped, two more showed up to shuffle right into the danger zone where I feared shooting. I estimated the total was still under four hundred now, but even with my boombox blaring, these zombies were drawn to the sound, and maybe scent, or live humans on the ground.

  Looking quickly around my rooftop lair, I decided I would need to handle the rest of these rotting dead heads from a different locale, namely the rooftop of the Happy Wok. Or Golden Wok. Or whatever.

  Shagging ass, I grabbed the box of empty magazines and dumped them into a duffle bag. Then, I stuffed four of the 10/22s in on top, since I could only get that many to fit. Then I snagged a prepacked backpack from the stack of items next to the tent and swung the load on my back. Looking around, I saw the two rifle cases, the stacks of ammo and the other gear and resolved right then that come hell or high water I was coming back for the rest of my stuff.

  For now, I horsed the ladder around until the legs were secured in the truck bed and I carefully climbed down the aluminum length, remembering yet again how much I detested heights. Standing on the roof was no problem, but hanging on the creaking ladder was a whole other deal.

  As soon as I appeared, the zombies stumbling around my truck seemed to look up in unison and start that damned hissing. Before I set foot in the truck bed I counted at least twenty dead trying to join me there. They banged on the sides of the truck, arms flailing uselessly, as I barely slowed down to kill them. Pulling the trigger, pop, pop, pop, became almost instinctive as I tracked and dispatched one animated corpse after another. This noise and commotion drew more dead our way, which in a way was part of the plan. At least, I wanted to draw zombies off of their beeline to the Chinese restaurant and in my direction. As I saw another forty or fifty dead rounding the northwest corner of the building, I figured this was a definite mission accomplished.

  Resting my rifle across the roof of the truck, I started making headshots almost immediately. The range was under 40 yards, which meant these were chipshots, but down here on the ground I felt more vulnerable by far to the undead rabble in the streets. Even standing in the center of the big truck bed, I could imagine cold fingers and bloody mouths clutching at me from all sides. That it had happened before did nothing to calm my nerves.

  My nerves. What the hell was happening to me? I was a machine when it came to slaying the dead, and my bone deep depression kept me from getting too emotionally involved to overly worry about survival. That was how I felt up there, physically removed from the threat. Down here, I felt my adrenal glands working overtime to keep me pumped full of vitality.

  Worry about it later, I hissed, then once I’d managed to buy a little time I turned and broke down the ladder and fastening it to brackets I’d attached to the side of the truck bed. Before the ZA, I had only been marginally handy, but necessity meant read the freaking book and learn how to do stuff.

  So, for instance, I taught myself to weld, or at least do enough tack work to build a frame in the truck bed and then add the metal brackets. My work looked half assed and uneven, and I cared not in the least. Getting the task completed mattered more than doing it pretty. That applied to most things after the First Wave rose, where function beat the hell out of form.

  Climbing down from the truck bed, I paused to kill a pair of crawlers with shots from my Glock. Yes, I was just about covered with weapons, like what used to be referred to in some circles as a mall ninja. I had a Glock in 45ACP, and a long barreled Ruger in a chest rig chambered for 22 LR. The Glock was loud, the Ruger was quiet with the screw-on suppressor. Those little subsonic rounds used in the Ruger were not easy to find, so I reserved that one for special occasions. I had lots of 45ACP, and could reload for more.

  The truck had no trouble powering over the piled bodies on this, the back side of the store. Out front would have been hopeless since some of the places had piles of dead ten deep. It was a horrible, hellish scene, and I hoped to never see the like again, but I knew I would. This comes with the job. Hell, downtown Woodville and the attached hospital compound took weeks to fine clear even after I killed nearly four thousand. The pre-First Wave population was only about half that, but travelers added to the total. Just like here in Jasper. And the burning pits flamed the entire time, casting a horrible haze over everything.

  Steering around the bigger body piles, I approached the now fully engulfed getaway car, which I could now see was a Hyundai of some sort. The front of the car was burning nicely, and the cloud of smoke stank of scorched plastic and half burned fuel. Actually, the toxic odor seemed a welcome break from the stench of death that clung to everything in the vicinity. I noted a few dead wandering over to investigate the fire, which would of course mean flaming zombies in the vicinity before long.

  Wheeling into the Golden Wok’s parking lot, I noted my big Ford was the old vehicle present, so I hoped that meant the restaurant was empty. Those ladies, from my brie
f snapshot view, didn’t look capable of taking on more than one, maybe two, shamblers at the most. Not a comment on their sex or skills, simply based on how they were armed.

  In the early days, I remember seeing guys going after the dead with baseball bats and machetes. That worked, for a bit, until the blade got stuck in bone too deep to extract or the bat splintered or became too heavy to keep swinging. Then those guys died, screaming, as they were devoured alive.

  Yes, a machete doesn’t run out of ammo, as I’d read in a popular zombie book once. Practice showed they lose their edge quickly when trying to split a skull. I wasn’t a huge fan of the genre before, preferring mysteries or even sci-fi, but a friend had recommended it.

  I found the book interesting in that the author really seemed to hate firearms but felt somehow obligated to include them somewhere at the edges of the story. Mainly as tools of oppression used by rogue soldiers who wanted to take over the world, taking advantage of the zombie plague. Well, here in our little corner of the world the military was playing nice, but I was sure there were some bad elements out there. It was just human nature.

  I cut off the woolgathering as I eased to a stop just in front of the doubled front doors. Though initially made of glass, someone had bolted sheets of plywood onto the metal frames. That would help, locally, but do nothing to protect the large glass windows facing the parking lot.

  I hesitated before stopping, both because I really didn’t want to attract the remaining zeds to this location and because I just didn’t want to have to mess with these people and their problems. Did that make me an asshole? Probably, I decided even as I killed the engine and cracked the door.

  As I pulled myself out of the comfy driver’s seat, I noted two corpses laid out on the concrete apron at the restaurant entrance. The black ichor let me know these were zombies freshly laid to rest. And not by me. Well, maybe these ladies possessed hidden resources.

  I wondered if I should try to make contact but the parking lot was beginning to fill with shuffling corpses, the dregs of the horde I’d been hired to eradicate. One thing at a time, I decided. Gathering up my bags and the heavy backpack, I clambered up into the back of the truck.

  The big Ford pickup featured a nice sound system and plenty of cup holders, as well as a full crew cab with plenty of room in the back seat. Cool touches, but the real reason I’d jacked the vehicle off a used car in overrun Livingston had nothing to do with the amenities. With a modest lift kit and some oversized tires, my truck stood high off the ground, and with the metal brackets emplaced on both sides, I had a nice shooting platform to work from. Not as good as a rooftop, and I still dreaded some overachieving zombie managing to flop over the tailgate and get me from behind. Still, I could use this.

  Leaning over the roof of the truck, I set up the four little rifles and opened the backpack to withdraw extra filled magazines. In addition to the ones I routinely used, these twenty loaded magazines represented my ready reserve. I rotated through the various mags regularly, careful to prevent the springs from setting up from being left loaded for too long.

  In seconds, I was up and shooting, cutting down the approaching dead with practiced accuracy. With this number, I just worked in an arc, killing everything that crossed my sights. Some leakers still managed to close on the truck and I would pause every magazine change to pick off these threats before they got close to my firing platform. With the Golden Wok at my back, I had no worry of hitting survivors by accident.

  Losing track of time, I steadily mowed down the hapless stragglers. When I entered this state, I felt no emotion, suffered no doubts and harbored no regrets. This was the real, secret reason I did this job. When I was in the zone, nothing could hurt me. I could die, of course, but that would come soon enough no matter what. But, with my mind fully engaged in this fugue, I think it was called, I didn’t feel the death of my family quite as much. So that was something.

  Four hundred, more or less, meant I took a little over an hour to knock down the walking dead. For the time being, I generally ignored the crawlers. They were mainly outside my sight line and not part of the grim equation. Six a minute. Firing every ten seconds. Three hundred sixty in an hour. At this range I really didn’t even need the little scopes as I moved from one target to the next. Squeeze, bang. Squeeze, bang. Squeeze, bang.

  Before I finished, two of the rifles suffered jams that I couldn't spare the time to clear, so they went to the side. Problems to be dealt with later. I continued to check my surroundings every mag change, and ended up carefully cutting down a handful of grasping zombies who managed to work their way up to the tailgate unseen. No fear touched me as I killed them, the tallest one’s grasping thin air within a foot of my back before I noticed his presence. Crap, that kid must have been nearly seven feet tall, I thought coldly as I shot him between the eyes. Had to have been the starting center for their basketball team. Might have done good in college, if not for the whole zombie apocalypse thing.

  Of course, that could be said for all of us, zombie and living alike. What might have been, if not for the end of our civilization. The end of the world as we knew it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After dropping the last tottering dead man in front of me, I released the rifle and rolled my head to the side checked the area that way. Clear. Repeating the motion to the other side, I saw the same. Surely there would be crawlers but the walking dead seemed to be handled. For the moment.

  Standing up straight, I shrugged my shoulders and felt vertebrae shift uncomfortably. Jeez, I hoped I hadn’t done any permanent damage over the last few days. Low recoil did not mean no recoil, and hours of holding in an unnatural position while shooting was hard on muscles and tendons drawn taut.

  Well, worst case, I’d see what Dr. Singh prescribed. I’d scavenged plenty of muscle relaxants for my medical kit, but I wanted a doctor’s advice. Especially since my chiropractor was almost certainly stumbling around looking for fresh meat. Almost all of Houston ended up that way, after all.

  Pulling off my ear protectors, I sat them aside and sucked in a lung full of air, nearly choking. The air still stank of the putrefying dead as well as spent cordite and the annoying trace of burning car. At least I’d managed to put down the flaming zombies before they managed to set the rest of the town on fire.

  Switching rifles, I inserted one of the few remaining full magazines and chambered a round. My hands, especially my right hand, felt swollen under the gloves and again, I hoped against permanent damage. Carpal Tunnel was a real threat, too, I realized.

  As I scanned the surrounding township with my binoculars, I caught sight of a stray zombie here and there, usually so mobility damaged that even a stumbling step seemed too much. Those would be crawlers soon, I figured.

  Speaking of which, I nearly stepped on one, climbing down from the tailgate. Pausing in midstride, I looked down at the pathetic creature. Legs shorn off raggedly above the knees, the monster waved at me with hands bereft of fingers, apparently abraded away by the rough asphalt. One eye missing, the other milky orb seemed to be trying to track my presence.

  Sighing, I lowered the rife and absently sent a round through the creature’s forehead. I barely had to aim, and the only thing I noticed was the pain in my finger, radiating up my forearm, as I squeezed the trigger.

  Stepping around the now still corpse, I felt my body sag with exhaustion and slung the rifle over my shoulder. My other shoulder carried the messenger bag, now considerably lighter as the few remaining reloaded magazines rattled inside. Other than that faint metallic clicking, the area was now eerily quiet. So much so that I wondered if my hearing had been damaged as well.

  Add it to the list, I thought with a sigh, and forced myself over to inspect the two corpses I’d clocked when I first arrived. The first died, again, of what looked like blunt force trauma to the head. Part of the skull appeared to have been caved in from repeated blows. That was harder than the movies made it look, I had learned.

  The second sported a
cored out right eye, with the wound going all the way through to the brain. A small caliber pistol shot, I surmised, and from extremely close range judging from the powder tattoo around the entry wound. That meant somebody inside was packing more than a tire iron after all. So, I would need to brush up on my diplomatic skills.

  Using my hand to shield some of the early afternoon sun, I peered in through the glass window nearby, and spied a jumble of bamboo chairs and metal framed tables forming a crude barricade. Blocking my view and maybe giving the women inside a few minutes protection against a small pod surging against the weight.

  In their favor, I saw not one sign of recent habitation. Zombies were not primarily visual hunters, not with their messed up sight, but sometimes their eyes did register movement. No movement, no sound, and usually no more interest. That’s been the rule, and was one reason I was so shocked when the ghouls kept coming at me the other day. Almost none of them seemed capable of retaining even short-term memories of prey. If that was changing, we would suddenly have a whole lot more problems.

  And that would be a problem for tomorrow, and the tomorrows to come. Now I needed to do my bit here.

  The front door was barred from the inside, with what looked like a deadbolt engaged. I gave the frame a little shake and stepped back. I knocked, rapping out shave-and-a-haircut. Still no response.

  “Okay, ladies,” I said, loud enough my voice should carry inside, “my name is Brad and I am here to help. I work for the Texas Army National Guard as a civilian clearance specialist. I can provide directions and transportation assistance to the nearest Safe Zone if you are interested.”