Rage: Z Is For Zombie Book 5 Read online

  RAGE

  Z is for Zombie Book 3

  catt dahman

  1

  Zs

  He wasn’t a true soldier by the old rules or before the infection swept the world and wiped out most of the population with a cruel, nightmarish infection. He wasn’t professionally recruited and trained. He was a regular, hard-working truck driver, minding his own business, getting ready to propose to a lovely lady he loved, and preparing to start an exciting part of his adulthood since he owned his own home now, but then that all changed seemingly overnight.

  He was a newly trained soldier following Colonel Davis and was a certified, well-oiled, hardened zombie-killing machine, or he was a scared man who chopped up the shambling creatures to keep from being eaten, depending on how you might want to spin the details.

  He was a machine that still sometimes vomited when he killed them. Or smelled them. Or sometimes, when he just saw them coming at him with their milky, shark-like eyes, filthy hands groping, and rotting, shuffling bodies, he puked. The fear and disgust never left him.

  Joseph was a man with a gun, a plan, and soldiers behind him. They looked as green as he felt, green, as in nauseous, not unprepared.

  A time was when everyone constantly teased him about his zombie apocalypse fascination in real life, on Face Book, and all of the other Internet sites that he visited. He suspected no one thought it was so funny now, but he wasn’t glad he was right; he would rather be wrong about zombies being possible. Preppers of the apocalypse did only slightly better than the rest since they were no more immune to the infection than anyone else.

  His bug-out bag saved his life when he escaped from his neighborhood and joined up with the Colonel because he had the proper supplies. His water, matches, MREs, and gun made it possible for him to survive the new, violent world. He wished he had added a quart of vodka and some soothing nerve meds to the bag as well, but he didn’t, and here he was.

  “Heads up,” he called. Joseph watched the men with him raise their guns to fire at the little group of walking dead who shambled up the road toward their little roadblock.

  One was a female, naked and brutalized, with injuries; her skin was rubbed off in spots, bones smoothed, and toes torn off by the lifestyle or death style. In addition, she was missing most of her fingers and a big chunk of one leg that wept fluids down her legs, along with her feces and urine, making a horrible stench. Furthermore, she was missing an ear and parts of her hair, and her lips were torn off, showing her broken bottom teeth, filthy with rot and blood which made her look more frightening. Along with all of that, a flap of skin was long-dried and partially rotted; it hung from her neck, left after being ripped loose when she was attacked and infected. Fat showed beneath the flap, yellow and gooey. It was eye watering, despite the fact that the entire city reeked of rot, a cesspool of disease.

  A man with most of his messy face gnawed to the skull moaned as he clawed and clutched at the air, drooling as he saw the soldiers. His arms were basically just bones, dark red and black, with only tatters of flesh remaining and rotting. The hand of one was already gone, left to sit on some street, uncaringly left behind.

  The third shambler was probably a female but so torn up and eroded by the elements and the environment that it was hard to tell much about it except the person had been thin. In a few weeks, it wouldn’t be walking anymore as it was just too beaten up to move much more.

  All three must have been fighters to be that torn up, but they lost the battle since they were infected, moaning and shambling idiots, hungry for human flesh and blood.

  They once were people with thoughts and dreams. Now, they were puppets of rot used by the disease to multiply the infection.

  Joseph and the others fired at the ghouls, finding a strange happiness in seeing the blood and brains splatter out behind of them in slimy clumps and stomach-churning splatters. Every one of these dead was one less who could spread the horror.

  As all three fell over, finally dead, the men cheered, despite the stench. Three less were three less who could infect others. Joseph cocked his head; he still heard the moaning, and it was getting louder and closer. He knew right then what was about to round the corner and be on them within seconds.

  “Get ready. We have company,” he called to the other men.

  Several hundred Zs, coming around the corner, shambling, sprinting slowly, and working their way toward the men, were unnerving and frightening. Joseph knew he and the others couldn’t handle this many. When they came at people in a group, like this, the group was several thousand pounds of flesh that didn’t get tired or feel pain, never got bored or lost interest in prey, and wouldn’t pull away or be afraid. Ever.

  Unless the shamblers’ heads were blown off, they wouldn’t stop coming for any reason. In addition, they formed a loudly moaning phalanx as they funneled in and smelled worse than any spoiled meat or garbage dump; it was mentally challenging to face them.

  They were all reminded that these were once humans. They only fought to eat and share the infection; they had one drive: to bite.

  Getting a headshot was a lot more difficult than people imagined. Joseph always thought all it took was an AK-47, and they would be chewed up by the bullets and would fall dead to the ground. They were harder to hit in the head than he imagined, and when one went down, ten more were behind.

  They took a few shots, but no way could five men kill two hundred fast enough to survive.

  Joseph used one of the grenades he carried. “Fire in the hole,” he yelled, and they ducked behind the roadblock.

  Body parts, whole bodies, guts, and blood flew all over as they exploded. The front line of zombies went down, but some of the heads, attached or decapitated, still chomped and moaned. Joseph, gagging at the sight, threw another grenade at the next section, and they shot at the ones who got through.

  The five men were on edge, so only one shot was a headshot.

  He threw another grenade and another, but bodies rose with open cavities and lost parts; the horde didn’t stop with pain or fear. Joseph thought maybe less than a quarter was put down with grenades, maybe less. Some on the ground used broken arms and partially severed hands to keep crawling, their jaws still snapping; they left blood trails like the slime left behind snails.

  Joseph saw his men were ready to retreat; the zombies were practically on top of them. Psychologically, the men were beaten already. One man Tommy yelped as he beat at one of the Zs with the butt of his gun while trying to get to the vehicle. His eyes were huge with fear. Another jumped at him, clutching at his shirt and hair.

  One of the soldiers with Joseph and Tommy shot those two who attacked Tommy, but three or four took their places to grab and snap their jaws. Tommy screamed as one latched onto his arm with a huge bite force, trying to get through all the muscle and skin to tear off its food.

  Tommy jumped to the side with a huge section torn from his arm; the wound was splashing blood everywhere as he tried to get away. A child dove in for his fingers, and although Tommy pounded at its head and battered its face, it didn’t back off. It chewed off his fingers at the joints. He went down to the ground as two more leaped at him.

  Mack, the soldier, was on his back on the pavement, slapping and shoving them off of his neck, but more grabbed at him so that he was unable to get up. Mack slammed a gun down, but a woman got his elbow, crunching and swinging her head like a dog, tearing and ripping while he cried and screamed for help.

  There was no help for the screaming men.

  Joseph and the other two men ran toward the vehicles since this mission was lost to the Zs. “Fall back. Fall back.”

  More zombies came around the corner, moaning at their prey, hoping for food, b
ut the other two men were close to death and might be infected and gone before the others could feed.

  Another grenade flew to blow up Mack, Tommy, and the walking dead ghouls, which were uncaring about the pooling blood and screams of the dying men. Joseph jumped into the driver’s seat, but the Range Rover wouldn’t start; the gasoline had evaporated, and the new gasoline wasn’t working as the sludge ruined the engine. This was a common event.

  Jerome slapped the seat in front of him. “Why aren’t we moving? Go.”

  “It isn’t starting….” Joseph felt helpless as he watched the zombies crawl and walk, covering the vehicle, slapping hands on it, smashing fists into windows, and even chomping at the windows so that they left bloody, slimy greenish drool and rot on the glass.

  In seconds, at least a hundred were surrounding the Range Rover, pushing and battering to get inside Alan’s window first. He tried to lean away; he shot until a stray hand pulled his gun away. One zombie leaned over the glass, cutting its belly open without caring.

  Joseph’s ears were deafened by his own gunshot; the nasty thing, weighing two hundred pounds, fell into the passenger seat, pinning Alan in his seat. Alan could hardly manage to wipe away the body fluids that dripped onto him and into his eyes and mouth. The smell made them all gag, and they added vomit to the nauseating mess.

  Kicking her way in, a female squeezed through the broken window, her jaws snapping wildly; Alan tried to push her back out, losing fingers as he did. He screeched. “Get her off of me; Joe, do something.”

  Joseph again tried to start the engine as Jerome reached forward to beat at the female, but she slid in farther with the crush behind her and then popped inside.

  The woman clawed Joseph’s arm open and took a bite from his arm and swallowed, and for a second, she turned to Alan, still pinned, and darted her head to take off his ear.

  Then, the female lunged over, slamming her face into Joseph’s crotch where she bit, making him scream with pain. Blood covered his lap. Joseph fought back, crying, but the pain was searing in his lap area and in his thighs and stomach. He fired his gun randomly, in fear, panic, and confusion. Alan gurgled as a bullet opened up his throat.

  Joseph felt cold. Since his hands no longer seemed to be working, he sat and watched his ropey, grey intestines pulled out and chewed on. He was faintly aware they were his own.

  A man, coming in through the window, took the woman’s place, and pushed his way into the car. He held Alan’s arm and began gnawing frantically. At the same time, a hand snaked in, grabbed Alan’s hand, and began to pull and chew.

  With Alan no longer fighting back, a zombie pulled Alan’s arm partially through the window of the vehicle and bit until it ripped away. The man leaning into the car went for the bleeding throat and ripped the flesh away, gulping.

  From inside the vehicle, the noise of the moaning and screaming, plus the deafness from the shot, was over whelming. Blood flew everywhere. The creatures didn’t show any pleasure in the food, just bit and gulped as any great white shark would rip and swallow.

  Jerome tried to open his door, but the mass of flesh was too heavy against it. His window cracked into spider webs.

  Neither the man nor the woman had enough sense to understand how to get back out of the vehicle, so after their victims were dead and infected, they clawed at each other and then reanimated Alan and Joseph. All four wiggled without caring how they ruined their own bodies and eventually were able to get to Jerome.

  Another Z squirmed into the Range Rover to join in the feast. Jerome didn’t even fight back when they came after him. He couldn’t get away, and he used his knife to die before they tore him apart, but he wasn’t bleeding fast enough. The cut wrists poured blood, but the zombies got to him first, ripping their way into his body.

  None of them could get out immediately, just stayed trapped until they finally crawled and finally fell out of the window, adding the men to their numbers. The horde was building; they kept moving to find more food, joined by hundreds more that followed them at times and went off in another direction at other times. It was an ever-changing mass of ruined zombies.

  Colonel Davis was forced to call that mission a failed attempt.

  It wasn’t the only mission that failed, and he wondered how Len at Hopetown took civilians and trained them to be efficient Z killers. Len’s people never backed down and seldom lost a fight with the Zs.

  They settled at the airport, training men and women to fight back, trying to get some sense of normalcy back in their lives, but the day after losing his best team (Joseph, the kid who seemed to be a bit prone to getting sick, but still with leadership capabilities), a new threat arrived.

  With the hair on his arms sticking straight up, Colonel Davis met the newcomers: a heavily tattooed man named Frank, a man with yellow-tinted glasses named Roy, a weird character called Lucas who dressed in black and talked oddly, and a child of no more than five or six who looked normal on one half of his face but who seemed to have melted features on the other side. The child was Pascal, and his one good eye was malevolent and glittered dangerously.

  Davis’ men immediately knew this group was trouble. He talked big and tried to sound confident; he tried to say the Reconstruction Army was a rag-tag bunch led by idiots, but the truth was that it had mad men leading them and the kid. Pascal giggled when he wasn’t glaring, and Lucas, his father, asked the child to put on a little show of what they called “tricks”, which were actually veiled threats.

  Pascal used zombies, whom he didn’t touch but who obeyed his orders, to move like puppets

  Davis, shrewd himself, could tell the child was hit-or-miss on his abilities, lost concentration easily, and could handle only a few for limited amounts of time. But then Pascal performed a last trick.

  Frank brought a woman forward, bound and bruised. She was dirty and had sad eyes. Without much fanfare, Lucas asked Pascal to show Colonel Davis what a plague of boils looked like, citing Biblical punishments.

  It wasn’t easy for Pascal; he looked bored but glared at the woman, his withered face set in concentration. Her skin began to bubble. Her face, arms, and legs broke out in big ulcerations of pus that made her drop to the ground with pain.

  Davis’ men stepped back a little and shivered.

  With a matter-of-fact tone, Frank explained that he and Lucas would take over the army and that anyone who objected would be dealt with quickly.

  David should have fought back then, but he was scared; he admitted that much. Frank moved his raggedy army in, the whores (women he kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves), his entertainment (people he meant to torture to death), his slaves, and his men in their pseudo-Nazi uniforms, their supplies, and junk.

  David didn’t think anything after that could shock him, but when he saw the former President of the United States, broken and thin, with the RA, he didn’t fight the take-over anymore. The leader of the great nation was just a shell of a man and periodically spouted President-sounding remarks.

  The country was lost.

  2

  Revenge

  The mechanics of the compound swore the vehicles wouldn’t fail to start and that there was no sludge in the gasoline tanks, but they predicted that the age of automobiles would soon put them in the past; in another year, cars would be the dinosaurs, and horses would be the choice for travel. Gradually going back to the old basic times was a hard change but wasn’t often complained about.

  It was a difficult vote for the members of the US Militia to choose their teams to go out on the hunt. Many wanted to go out and track down the woman and child who brought the infection into their camp and caused the deaths of so many.

  Each presented a case to be on a team going out, knowing it was very dangerous and wouldn’t be met by everyone’s approval in the world beyond the fence. But each had an interest in going to find the ones who caused so much distress.

  The woman and child inoculated and called hybrid because they were immune to the prions but highly con
tagious, were unable to contain their cravings for raw meat. So they ate one of the men of the compound and infected a few others. In the ensuing chaos, others were infected and killed, and the woman and child escaped.

  In one vehicle was Kimball since his interest was in killing the pair whom he befriended and brought into the compound, not knowing they were vaccinated against catching the infection but not against infecting others. They fooled him into their being a part of the community, and he was angry.

  Kim was beside Len who lost his girlfriend. He still couldn’t imagine the terror she went through when she was pushed into an oncoming horde of zombies and was unable to do anything to save herself since she was blind. She was unable to see the approaching horde, was knocked backwards, was attacked, torn apart, and infected before she was mercifully put down. His adopted daughter was also a victim.

  Matt was with them as well, his position earned through his own bravery, hard work, and valor in his last mission into the outside world. Although he was one of the youngest on the team, at nineteen, he was also one of the most dependable and hardest working people. Matt wanted to see the pair put down since he felt it was part of his duty to protect and serve the compound.

  Johnny was the only female on this team but was one of the original crew who hid in a hospital. Maryanne had been a close friend of hers; she carried all of the combined fury of the women who mourned the loss of a good person.

  In the second vehicle was Juan, who represented Beth in this venture since she was too pregnant to join in the mission; he was still beyond livid at the destruction that Carla and Robbie caused, risking Beth’s life at several points during the night as the infection was inside the compound. If Carla had been able to get to Beth, she would have infected her with malice.

  Big Bill was there, having won his place from his many battles that he never backed down from and that he never seemed to fear the danger of. He was always, somehow, the calming force that was needed in battles.