900 Miles (Book 2): 900 Minutes Page 2

  “Oh, you don’t have to fake it,”she said as she reached out to pull Tyler into her arms.“I know you didn’t get any sleep last night. Now give me that little man.”

  Lazily nodding, I reached up to a small bit of cream that I’d missed and wiped it away with my hand.“Well, good morning to you too, Deanna.”

  Deanna had been watching Tyler almost every day. She was a mother once, long ago, but never spoke of it. Luckily, the wrinkles on her face told me that her children were grown by the time the world went to shit. I knew that they weren’t here in Avalon, which by all accounts meant they were likely not of the living. She probably knew it too.

  In this world, deep down, we all feared the worst.

  Placing a hand on the doorframe, I noticed the slight limp that came with age as she stepped into the room. Her gray hair was pulled up into a bun, and she wore a multi-colored dress that fell loosely over her body.

  Deanna loved Tyler, and I always felt comfortable leaving him with her. She was that perfect grandmother type, and I’d often wondered how she’d even managed to survive the initial days. In the end, I just figured she was determined to live because she was too afraid to die…just like the rest of us.

  Picking up the bottle that I’d made earlier to find that it was empty, she shot me a“Thanks for the help, dick!”kinda look.

  Holding my hand out in front of me, I pointed at my face.“I can’t even find time to shave.”

  Shaking her head while walking over to replace the bottle, she looked out of the corner of her eye and asked,“What are you boys up to today?”

  She was always looking for little nuggets of dirt on the inner workings of Avalon.

  “Exterior defenses.”

  She looked blankly out into the room, thinking through it for a moment before responding.“Outside the wall?”

  “That’s what they tell me. Guess we’re gonna herd the Zs into the Dead Shed.”

  “I hate that place. Seems so dangerous…What if those things get loose?”

  Months ago, we’d made a conscious decision to construct a small compound outside the concrete walls of Avalon. The compound, made of mostly sturdy wooden planks, gave the appearance of an old oversized shed. Little would any would-be attackers know that it was filled to the brim with Zs that we’d been collecting in there for months. If anybody we couldn’t handle ever decided to storm our wall, the best defense would be an offense that started with letting those bastards loose to swarm the Yard.

  “That’s the point, Deanna. They’re supposed to get loose…when we want them to,”I said, trying to fake a little confidence.

  “I still don’t like it…”

  Nodding, I walking over to the closet and pulled out a scuffed-up black helmet which matched the black body armor I was wearing. Flipping a switch on my belt, I heard a tiny squelch through a two-way radio that rested on my shoulder as I thought back to the origin of the suit. A remnant left over from the fallen men that once guarded Avalon. I always felt a little strange knowing that someone had likely died in it.

  Reaching into my cabinet, I pulled out a nine mil that I’d been carrying around for the past few months. Having a gun is a funny thing, giving one a false sense of security. In the world of the dead, unless you were a crack shot, it was just a piece of metal that shot projectiles. Effective sometimes, yes, but it didn't let you feel the crunch of the skull to know you’d done the job right.

  For that, I needed my hammer.

  Holstering the gun, I reached my hand back down into the cabinet, emerging with the hammer I’d had at my side since the beginning. My trusted hammer. I’d trade it for any gun when going up against the Zs. It’s hard to look back now and know how many of the dead that metal head has taken out. One thing was for certain though; I had gotten damn good at killing them.

  In this new world, I’d become a dealer of death, and that hammer was my deck of cards.

  Chapter 3

  Pulling a breath of fire into my lungs, I looked up with my hammer drawn.

  Glancing at the red blinking alarm clock resting by the bed, I realized it was nearly time to meet up with my team topside, leaving my son behind. Leaning down, I lifted him up and held his tiny body out in front of my face, capturing one good memory in my mind before leaving the compound. I’d need it to get me through the horror out there.

  Reluctantly passing Tyler back to Deanna, I stepped over to the mirror and reached back down into the sink to pick up the razor. Just as I reapplied a nice white lather of cream across my face, I heard a squelch through the speaker on my shoulder, followed by a panicked voice,“We’ve got a stumbler!”

  Nearly dropping the razor, I could feel my heart rate spike, beating across the chest plate of my body armor.

  Looking up from the couch, Deanna could see the alarm in my face reflecting in the mirror.“What’s wrong?”

  “We have an outbreak,”I hurriedly said while grabbing a brown towel to wipe the shaving cream from my chin.

  Sweat had already started to bead up across my forehead. I was getting ready to set off for the hunt, and it was never easy. When the creatures first turned, they would be quick, and it usually took the whole lot of us to put them down.

  Again, the speaker in my headset boomed,“It’s breaking out fast. It’s in the Med Center, and this bastard is tearing the place up.”

  You see, sometimes it seems like we don’t value life. People tend to die for the dumbest fucking reasons. In the first months of living in this sanctuary, we had ten people die or get killed. One was an old guy who died banging his wife. We think it was a heart attack, but we’ll never know. Two others died in construction-related accidents, crushed by a series of concrete walls which were erected to keep a small section of land safe outside. All the others died from internal fighting, meaning they got in fights and killed each other.

  In each circumstance, the people who died came back almost immediately and caused outbreaks within the walls of our little world…it was too easy for this to spread.

  Twisting around, I picked the helmet up off the bed and slid it back under my arm while reaching for the exit.

  “Keep the door shut. Don’t open it for any reason until I get back.”

  Eyes wide, she nodded in agreement and pulled Tyler close to her chest. Glancing through the crack in the steel door just as I pulled it shut, the last thing I saw was her rubbing a hand through the little bit of hair on Tyler’s head. He’d be safe with her. She’d give her life for that little guy, and I knew it.

  Another voice boomed from the microphone,“John, get your ass down here. You’re draggin’!”

  It was Kyle, the one man who’d stood by my side since the first day of the outbreak. I could tell he was pissed. What did he expect? I was on the other side of the facility.

  The iridescent bulbs hanging above provided a dim light that gave everything a greenish gray tint as I sprinted down a series of underground hallways. Passing a number of rooms, much like the one Tyler and I inhabited, I noticed all the steel doors were tightly shut. We were on lockdown, and everybody knew the drill. With thick smoke bellowing through the halls, I quickly realized we’d be dealing with more than the dead.

  I’d later be told that it was a malfunction in the cooling system. A small short that caused all this pain. The fact is, we really didn’t know what caused the fridge to catch on fire. With the thing completely burnt to pieces, a short seemed like more of a guess than anything else. The reality was that whatever happened, however it happened, it would have a crippling blow on all of us.

  Almost there. I could hear screams of pain echoing through the hallways.

  It was clear that there were more than one of those things running around in that Med Center. Whoever died had been kind enough to invite a few others across the chasm to death along with them. Now they were threatening the very fabric of our world. They were threatening the delicate balance between us being alive and there being seventy dead Zs roaming around, trapped in the giant underg
round bunker we called home.

  Hearing a set of squeaking boots tapping behind me, I turned my head to see one of my teammates sprinting after me. As he approached, he held out an oversized padded glove, which gave him the appearance of being bigger than he actually was.

  Before the apocalypse, he was booted from the military after assaulting an officer. Re-assimilation back into the“world”took a toll on him, and he wound up on some sort of anti-psychotic drugs, which I guess leveled him out. In fact, he was so calm that he wound up taking on the role of a substitute teacher. According to the guy, the meds helped him conform to the old world’s rules…and besides, he says the kids loved him.

  We called him Mr. Rodgers.

  Looking back, I guess it’s no surprise that so many people were taking some sort of medication. We were always“connected.”Mass media, cell phones, Internet access from wherever you happened to be. We couldn’t cut the umbilical cord to information. There was no shutting off, and the human brain was never supposed to operate at a hundred percent capacity all day, every day.

  After the first week of the apocalypse, Rodgers’ meds ran out. This was a problem, but not for him. The rage and anger that he had been suppressing for so many years came out tenfold, and he used it on the bastards trying to eat his flesh.

  By the time we ran into Rodgers, you could tell he wasn’t quite right. There was a look in his eye, a mix between distant and manic. You didn’t know whether he was going to tell a joke or slice your stomach open. He’d do both with a smile. In the end, though, he was a good guy to have on our side. He’d saved my life more than once. I shuddered at the thought of him being against us.

  Reaching up, I bumped his glove with my fist, feeling a little foolish at the act, and then reached down to pull the hammer from my belt. Heading down the hallway together at top speed, I could feel my lungs fighting for oxygen as the thickening black smoke bellowed out of the now-visible door to the Med Center.

  As we approached the entrance, I did a quick count, cringing at the realization that at least seven creatures were manically tearing the Med Center to pieces. Sliding to a stop at the doorframe, I froze as fourteen of those distinct red eyes, all glowing against the dancing flames engulfing the far wall, paused and slowly landed directly upon Rodgers and me.

  With the exception of the raging fire, I didn’t have a clue how it got so bad in there. Usually we’d move in, take a few shots to drop the dead, and be done with this sort of thing. I’d later learn that two of the others in our group had decided they’d go in on their own to try to save a child before the rest of us showed up. They were in the thick of it when Kyle arrived, and he couldn’t risk their lives with a firefight.

  We were well beyond that now.

  Briefly wondering why so many people were packed into the room, I had to remind myself that this was the apocalypse. People got hurt. People got sick. And no matter who they were, when someone's not feeling great, they always seemed to wind up at in the same place.

  Only on that day, the doc wasn’t exactly trading lollipops for smiles.

  Leaping through the doorway, we entered the Med Center ready to exchange blows. With almost no time to react, a woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform charged toward me with her mouth spread open. Seeing a chunk of mutilated flesh hanging loosely from her teeth, I lifted the nine mil and slammed my finger across the trigger. The bullet spiraled toward her skull, blowing a hole through the back of her dark, matted hair. Taking a half a step back, I watched the woman stumble to the floor, nearly sliding into my boots, before my eyes lifted to find a splatter of dark red gore dripping down Rodgers’s faceplate.

  “What the fuck!”he shouted. Wiping the blood from his faceplate with his oversized glove, he then looked back at the cylindrical metal door.“Close that thing. Let’s make sure none of them escape!”

  Not questioning the thought, I started to shut the door as he dove into the mix. I had to put my feet up against a wall just to get the thing moving. All the doors in Avalon were giant like this. After all, the place was built as a bunker in case of nuclear war. For the zombie apocalypse…it felt a bit overdone.

  The room itself had vents, which sucked up some of the smoke. However, feeling the tears crawling down through my shitty beard, I could tell it wasn’t enough.

  Looking over to the fire, I watched as one of the creatures stepped a tad too close and caught ablaze. Spinning through the Med Center, it let out a primordial scream as its melting flesh splashed the flames across the room.

  Pulling a breath of fire into my lungs, I looked up with my hammer drawn. Kyle was tearing the place up, taking two of the creatures on with his bare hands. One of them was wearing the same black body armor the rest of us were. I couldn’t tell who it was, but clearly one of our team had been turned and was after Kyle.

  Shooting my focus back to the spinning, fiery Z, my eyes went wide as I realized the direction it was heading. I had to stop it…

  “Enough of this shit!”I screamed out as I charged in.

  Nine mil in one hand and my hammer in my other, I could feel the gun come to life as it spit bullets toward the creatures between the flaming Z and me. After a few obvious misses, I was able to take down three of the monsters before the clip emptied. Throwing it to the side, I dove into the mix, shifting sideways across a Z dressed in a chef’s apron, which was now more red than white.

  The chef was a big bastard, and I recognized him immediately. It was Earl. He’d served me on more than one occasion, and I hated that I had to put him down. However, at the end of the day, he was already dead…I was just finishing the job.

  Pinning the chef to the ground, I brought the full force of the hammer down through the Z’s skull. As he was still violently twisting on the ground, I brought it down once again, feeling the metallic head crash through the monster’s face, hitting the concrete floor with an audible clank. Wiping my forearm across the plastic faceplate covering my eyes and mouth, I managed to smear away just enough of the blood splatter to see the fire continuing to waltz gracefully toward the medicine cabinet.

  Glancing at Rodgers, I watched as he moved in on the flaming Z. Roaring with an all-too-familiar scream as it charged, I couldn't help but think that the creature looked more like a pissed-off version of Satan than the undead.

  With rage screaming from his bloodshot eyes, Mr. Rodgers lifted a double-barreled shotgun from his hip and pulled the trigger, pumping a round of buckshot through the chest and skull of the Z. A perfect shot, with one exception. The creature hit the ground hard, but not before it fell backwards against the oversized cabinet that held the medication.

  Watching in horror, I stood helpless as the fire engulfed the entire cabinet in just seconds. Knowing we couldn’t let it spread, I turned my head from side to side, looking for an extinguisher before my eyes lifted to the ceiling. Why the hell hadn’t the emergency extinguisher gone off?

  With my eyes focused on the small metal sprinkler closest to the flaming wall, I darted toward it, took a running jump, and drove the head of my hammer through that malfunctioning piece of shit with an audible metal on metal crack.

  In the moment before I looked up to see Kyle drop one of the creatures across the room, I saw the metal sprinkler head hit the ground in front of me, sliding to a stop at the edge of the chef’s apron. An instant later, small drops of water began to rain from above.

  With that blow, the tides turned in that little skirmish, and our team made quick work of the rest of the Zs; the fire quickly extinguished to nothing more than a smoldering ash pile. The Med Center was a mess, and blood was spiraling into pools on the concrete floor. That shit never truly washed out of the concrete. If you looked close enough, you’d see light pink stains scattered throughout the halls of Avalon.

  A stain. It is all that is left of us once we’re gone.

  “Jesus, man, I thought Mr. Rodgers was nuts,”Kyle said as he walked up to me and patted my shoulder.

  Keeping my eyes fixed on the melted plas
tic and cracked glass of the medicine bottles, I didn’t respond. It hadn’t hit me yet…what this really meant. At the time, I thought we had some additional meds in storage.

  “We need to get you some cardio,”Kyle continued as he tapped two fingers against the armor across my stomach.

  I laughed but still didn’t respond to his quip. Hell, I was in better shape than I’d been in since high school. Before the apocalypse, I’d spent ten years sitting in front of a computer. The most exercise I would get in an average day was walking up and down the stairs in the parking garage, and that was only because it was an easier route than walking across the full length of the garage to get to the elevator. We were bred to be lazy back then.

  And I was as pathetic as the rest of them.

  Pulled from my introspection, Kyle caught my attention as he crossed the room toward a smaller sized cabinet. Nodding his head up toward me, then glancing back down at the metal handle just below, he motioned for me to walk over toward him. As I approached, he crouched down a bit and whispered that he’d seen someone crawl in there, but wasn’t sure if they'd been bitten or not.

  With the adrenaline still coursing through my veins, I lifted the hammer above my head, ready to strike while Kyle reached one arm down to the cabinet. Taking a deep breath, I nodded to him as he touched his hand to the handle and yanked.

  Stepping forward, ready to bring the weapon down, I pulled back as a small girl rolled out onto the floor. She wasn’t older than ten or twelve, and didn’t have a mark on her. With long blond hair and overly pale skin from living underground too long, she looked almost angelic.

  Putting my hammer back into my belt, and nodding at Kyle, I reached down and lifted her up with both hands. One small arm rolled across her chest, and she lifted her head slightly before falling back to sleep.

  I gave a huge sigh of relief. With all the death in that room, at least one person had made it.

  Chapter 4