Beyond Dead | Book 2 | The Day The Whole World Went Away Read online

  Forrest had been cutting through traffic on his dirt bike faster than he had ever ridden in his life. Back in his garage, left behind, were his helmet on the shelf and his riding gear. The only thing he took with him was a backpack.

  All he wanted, when he found out about the quarantine zone, was Rebel.

  Even as the world began to burn and die, Rebel would never be anything more than a fantasy.

  He took a hit from the joint, palmed the tears from his eyes, “Fucking pussy,” he told himself.

  Forrest continued up the trail with only Mary Jane for company. Hitting it harder than he could remember ever doing before. The heels of his palms pushing away the tears as fast as they came. He knew he was far enough away from Rebel that she wouldn’t hear him crying, wouldn’t be able to think less of him then she already did. His feet were kicking at pebbles on the trail when he wound up and kicked a good one up into the air. He tried to watch it, keep his eye on it and see how far it had gone, and as the pebble came down and struck a zombie in the side of its face. It turned. Eyes –what was left of them – falling on him. That one zombie wasn’t alone either. There were a group of them. Forrest didn’t bother to count. He turned around, digging his sneakers into the dirt to dart off, when he collided with one of the dead and fell flat on his ass. He scrambled back, unable to get to his feet, his eyes darting for an escape. Instead he only saw the dead.

  The zombies were coming out of the woods from all directions and dragging their dead bodies and hungry mouths toward him.

  Chapter 9

  Zombies were everywhere.

  Forrest had gotten to his feet, he was surrounded, but there was room. They weren’t on him yet but closing fast. In every direction he looked he didn’t see an escape. When he lunged for an opening – even the smallest – they closed the gap extinguishing any chance of escape. Forrest was frantic. His eyes darting onto the dark earth floor for any kind of weapon. There would be no shotgun or high caliber machine gun like in a video game. Something he could use to just sit back and laugh as he plowed them down with a hailstorm of bullets. The best he had – hands reaching out and clasping around its cool surface – a rock, just a hair larger than a softball.

  Rebel, he thought. Why? Why the hell was he thinking about her after all the shit she had put him through in the last day? The thought of thinking about Rebel at the end of his life made him want to vomit. That bitch had her talons into him deep. She had his heart. Now all he could hope to do was to not scream when the time came. To hold it in as the zombie horde descended on him and he made his last stand with nothing more than a rock. All he could do was to try and protect her with his final moments. If he screamed, if she heard, well there was a chance she wouldn’t even come, but if she did, she would die. And even now, after everything, he loved her too much to want her to suffer the same fate.

  With all his force he slammed that rock as hard as he could into the temple of the first zombie to lunge at him. The monster dropped to the ground. Forrest turned and struck another one. There was a surging pain going up his arm from the force it took to strike them and break the skull. He had only struck two and already the rock felt three times heavier in his hand.

  As another zombie came for him, he kicked it in the chest, it fell back, bumped into another and they both tumbled over. Forrest saw an opening to escape. He ran toward the zombies, now tangled amongst themselves on the ground, and leapt over them. The rock fell from his hand as he turned and ran. The zombies had turned too but they were sluggish. He may not have had the strength to fight them like a hungry barbarian but he had youth on his side and speed.

  So he ran.

  “We gotta go! We gotta go!” Forrest screamed as he approached the camp. He couldn’t see Rebel yet but he hoped the panic in his voice was enough to startle her into getting their shit together and ready to move.

  “Rebel?”

  “I’m here.” She crashed into him, her arms enveloping him, the backpack tugged around her shoulders.

  Forrest grabbed her hand and together they jumped on the dirt bike. He started the bike and gripped the throttle. It was as dark as when they had first stopped. Now he didn’t have to only worry about treacherous terrain but the zombies that were out there, on the path, blocking their way.

  Her arms squeezed him, her lips against his ear as her words flooded through him, “You’ve got this.”

  Forrest revved the throttle, concentrated as best he could on the shadows of the power lines up ahead and released the clutch. The bike tire tore at the earth and they sprung forward like a battle-hardened knight on his most trusted steed.

  The two made it through the pack of zombies and into the darkness. Leaving the undead to wander aimlessly now that there was no scent of prey.

  The zombies walked through the remains of the camp, stepping on a pair of clothes that had been a makeshift bed, and a broken condom.

  Chapter 10

  The hockey stick sliced through the air with enough force to tear a large chunk of flesh from a zombie’s throat. Blood spewed up into the air like a burst waterline. The zombie paid no attention and continued its pursuit of Bob. He swung again. This time aiming for the zombie’s knees. That did the trick. Fucker’s knee blew out under the force and it collapsed. Only then to drag itself toward Bob. He used the heel of his boot to smash in its skull. Driving the heel down again and again, blood erupting from the blown out eye sockets, gushing from the nose, and spewing from the ears and mouth. Even after Bob took his foot away – convinced that had done the job – the zombie still twitched, its fingers clawing at the ground while dragging itself ever closer to him. Bashed skull and all, it still came.

  “Don’t you blasted things die?” Bob raised the hockey stick like an ax and brought it down on the vertebrae of the zombie, hoping to sever the spinal cord, and the blade of the stick cracked. The next strike broke it clean off, leaving him with only a long stick with a splintered end.

  Bob stood, looking down at the zombie that was persistently still coming for him, “They don’t die.”

  It made sense. The zombies were already dead. But weren’t they supposed to die when the brain was destroyed? That was what the myths guaranteed. Same as a silver bullet for a werewolf and a stake through the heart for a vampire. Lore promised these fairy tale endings to the monsters of the night.

  You’re fucked now, Bob.

  He did the only thing he could think of. Ran. He dashed as fast as his fifty-eight year old body would take him. Bob ran. The dead were everywhere. Coughing and hacking, their guttural howls echoing through the streets of Nashua, as Bob pushed and shoved his way through circles of dead as they wandered the streets sniffing out living flesh. His flesh. For as far as he could see he was the only living thing left in the world. He couldn’t know that for certain but he felt pretty damn sure that he was it. The final living human being. The rest of the world rotting with the dead.

  Up ahead, stopped on its tracks, was a train. As dead as the world. He ran for it, hoping that if he snuck through the gap between the cars he could get away from the horde that began to lurk after him. Their teeth – that incessant clattering – chattering away inside hungry mouths waiting to be filled. The shadow of the train was enormous ahead of him, but its bulk promised safety. He couldn’t see beyond it and prayed that neither could the dead. For all he knew he was crossing from one death into the mouth of another. Still he ran.

  Tired.

  Feeling his age.

  All at once he wished those daily walks he took had been daily jogs. His legs burned, his lungs gasped for oxygen, and was that a clenching in his chest?

  “Not like this,” he said as each step toward the train felt like he was slowing down, losing his pace, feeling that dead breath on the back of his neck.

  All of a sudden he was reaching out for a ladder on the side of one of the cars and clasping his fingers around the rungs for purchase. Bob’s feet skidded and slipped, trying to push against the wall of the car so he could
haul his tired old ass up the ladder. He began to climb. Finding that last bit of will to survive, he gripped those damn bars and did his first pull-up in over forty years.

  The dead crashed with such enormous force into the train’s car that it shook, swaying so hard that Bob was sure it had rocked off the track threatening to go over. It came back down with a crash that shook him like the aftershock of an earthquake and Bob lost his grip. He swung out over the horde of chomping zombies, their mass pressed against one another like one of those stampedes you see in soccer – football – games over in Europe. With only one hand on the rung he felt his fingers starting to slip.

  “I’ve got you! Hold on, hold on!” A strong hand clasped around Bob’s wrist holding him to the rung. He swung back and was able to get his other hand on the ladder. With the help of the stranger, he pushed and was pulled until he was resting face first on the roof of the train car and gasping for air.

  “Thank you,” Bob said between heavy swallows of oxygen, “For the love of God, thank you.”

  “I don’t know if I did you any favors, Sir.”

  “Huh?”

  The person that had saved Bob’s life was kneeling beside him with a ball cap tucked so low over his brow that his eyes were not visible in the dark shadow that crossed them. Between his clenched teeth was a single wooden match, and Bob saw the grim look on his face.

  “You…you saved me,” Bob told him.

  “That’s a matter of opinion, Sir.” The kid, Bob could hear it in his voice and see the youth, though he suspected the kid was probably in his mid to late twenties. He was a kid to him nonetheless. The kid stood up and pointed toward the bridge that crossed the Merrimack River. They were everywhere in the shadows. Lurking between the dead cars, tripping over the dead and mutilated bodies that had fed them never to rise again.

  “My God,” Bob said.

  “I think God’s sitting this one out.” The stranger tugged on his ball cap, drawing it even lower over his eyes. “Like I said, Sir, it’s all a matter of opinion.”

  Chapter 11

  Bob and the stranger – Kiefer— he had learned the young man’s name and found out that Kiefer was actually thirty-two – sat atop the rusted old train car. Well Bob sat, Kiefer lay down with that ball cap of his pulled down over his eyes looking up at the stars that were hidden under a blanket of clouds.

  “Feels like spring, doesn’t it?” Kiefer asked.

  “No. It feels like the end of the world.”

  “Suppose.” Kiefer switched the match from the left side of his mouth to the right, “Still, it kinda feels like spring is right around the corner. No more damn winter. Hell this is been the longest and coldest winter that I can remember.”

  “Seventy-eight.” Bob thought of the blizzard that had engulfed much of New Hampshire back in the late seventies, a time that Kiefer was a handful of years too late.

  “Ya. WMUR sure likes to plaster that on the news and remind everyone each time we get a nor’easter. It doesn’t matter how old you are or if you were there or not, the news blasts it so much during the winter that even us that weren’t born yet feel like we were there.”

  Bob doubted anyone who didn’t survive the blizzard of seventy-eight could truly appreciate what people went through, but he kept his mouth shut. Kiefer was mostly silent unless Bob stoked up a conversation and he was running out of subjects. Neither had mentioned the field of zombies on either side of the train car. After a long and uncomfortable silence – felt like hours had passed without Kiefer saying a word, not to mention hardly moving a muscle, except to switch that match from one side of his mouth to the other – Bob finally gave in. Fresh out of conversation material. He’d exhausted the icebreakers: Where you from? Up north. Do you have family? Not likely. The Any kids? question Bob left off the table, not wanting to answer it himself. Pets? Dog. Name? Atreyu. You like music? Who doesn’t? Beatles? Nah, not so much. Abbey Road isn’t half bad…and so on.

  Short answers.

  No elaboration.

  Bob huffed, his eyes out over the bridge, the sound of the Merrimack beneath muted by the hacking cough and chattering of the damn zombies, and he asked, how could he not, “Do you think they’re all dead?”

  Kiefer’s match stopped dancing between his lips and paused. His head rolled to the side, face masked by the shadow of that ball cap, his eyes on the sky Bob could only presume, and said, “Looks like it.”

  “I don’t mean – ” Bob sighed and dragged a hand over his face in frustration. Kiefer had saved his life but at that moment with his damn short answers and Amelia Bedelia responses, Bob was ready to push his ass off the roof of the damn car. “Not them, Jeezus. I know they’re dead.”

  “I know what you meant, Bobby. And truth be told I gave you my honest answer. There are probably stragglers out there like you and I, but at the end of the day our borrowed time on this planet just sent an IOU and someone means to collect.”

  “I can’t believe that. There…there just has to be something. Somewhere. A refugee camp or someplace doing better than us. The whole world can’t just be…dead.”

  “Not the whole world.” Kiefer pointed his finger just beyond Bob.

  If I don’t believe it...

  Strolling along the roof of the train cars, leaping effortlessly between the gap of each, was a mangy looking cat. A stray, Bob suspected.

  “Where the hell did you come from?”

  The cat stopped, sat down and stared at Bob with those metallic eyes that cats have in the night. Think they know more than you, have a secret their not willing to share. He’d always hated cats.

  “Hopped up there about twenty or so minutes ago. Been checking us out ever since. Guess he still hasn’t made up his mind about us,” Kiefer said.

  “You think he came through the –”

  Zombies.

  Bob almost spoke the word.

  “Zombies? Yep. Ran past him earlier when I was trying to get away from the choppers. Thought about grabbing him and taking him with me, but he was out of reach. Maybe that’s why he isn’t too smitten with me. Oh well. I’m more of a dog lover anyway.”

  Kiefer was right.

  The cat never did warm to him.

  Chapter 12

  “Forrest, you have to stop. I can’t see anything.”

  He ignored her. The sight of the zombies so close to him, ready to take him away to their undead world or simply feast on him, was too much to bare. He pulled on the throttle and thrust through the gears, swerving around telephone poles, getting air off the dips and ramps of the dirt path, bumping off of large stones jutting from the earth, but never stopping. To stop meant certain death. He knew that now. Had seen the cold look of the monsters as their dead eyes, blank hungry stares as if he wasn’t even there yet they sensed him, hungered for his flesh. No, he couldn’t do it. Forrest couldn’t stop and risk those things coming at him out of nowhere again. So he pushed on. Driving dangerously through the darkness, aware that to stop was more dangerous than to drive.

  When he heard Rebel pleading with him to stop for the third time in a row, as he accelerated even faster, he pushed her voice out of his head and listened to his own inner monologue.

  Go, go, go. Don’t stop until daylight.

  It would be better in the daylight. Nightmares always were. That was just common knowledge. This would all be over. He would wake up in his bed with a splitting headache from drinking too much – he had ended up showing up at the party Rebel was at – gotten piss ass drunk having to deal with his promiscuous girlfriend and went home blackout drunk.

  If Forrest could get to morning everything would be the way it was. He would forgive Rebel – for the hundredth time – pop some Excedrin and stop at McDonalds for some greasy food, the perfect recipe for a hangover. And that was all it would be. Just a hangover. He would go back to loving Rebel, her careless ways that excited and haunted him. The way he watched her unguarded in chemistry with her platinum hair and crimson lips, while she chewed on the corne
r of her bottom lip the way she did when she was trying to work through a problem in her head on a test. In that moment he would see the most beautiful girl he had ever known, one that wasn’t trying to be something else, but just a regular high school girl trying to take a test. That was his Rebel. And for now his heart belonged to her.

  Those were the thoughts he focused on as the Kawasaki’s engine screamed and the bumps came and went, the tires swerving, her crying out for him to stop. In his mind he only saw the dawn rising through classroom 401 on the second floor of the science building, and lighting Rebel like an angel.

  “Forrest, you’re scaring me!”

  He didn’t care. No. It wasn’t that. He did care. That was why he couldn’t stop. If Rebel had seen what he had seen, if she had been as close to them – surrounded by them – she would have had her hand over his jacking the throttle of the dirt bike. She needed to be scared. They both did. What were they thinking screwing in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, like it was just play-acting? It was stupid.

  Everything was over.

  Everything…was…over…

  Just like that.

  Snap.

  Gone.

  Bang!

  She was screaming in his ear. Forrest was trying to watch the dirt path but finding it increasingly difficult. His heart was thudding, his chest heaving, constricting. Vision began to blur and he was struggling to swallow his breath. First his fingers were tingling. The sensation crawling from his fingernails and weaving up his arms spreading goose bumps in its wake.