Terms Mystique: Z Is For Zombie 9 Read online

  Beth was worried about Hannah and Stevie, angry that she had not met this man who had married her daughter and was threatening to cut her more tender bodily parts off and feed them to the zombies. As furious as she was, she did feel that if Cory approved, then the man, Dave, had to be somewhat acceptable.

  Beth asked Jet about Dave, but he didn’t have a lot of helpful information except that Dave had been brave and loyal to his friends; Jet was doing his own mourning for Bella anyway.

  Beth hadn’t known Stevie was looking for a husband, and she wanted to approve the men her daughters married. Kim had reminded her that, in addition to what positives they did know, they might not like the situation, but at least their daughter was alive.

  Mark, who was always strong and had been Misty’s support, had seemingly aged overnight when he learned that Lexie was dead. He had gone from a strong, vibrant man who led Port A as Governor, to a shell of a man who seldom, if ever, spoke. Kim had stepped in with help from Matt and Len to lead the group, hoping that Mark would be normal again.

  “How’s Mark?” Len seemed to read Kimball’s mind.

  “The same. He’s sitting out there, watching the bridge, but I don’t think he sees it. Once in a while, he asks someone to do something such as asking him to go find Alex or Juan; then, he kind of remembers they died long ago. Misty goes and gets him after lunch for a nap, and then he goes back, sits, and watches, as if he’s waiting on something.”

  “Maybe he is.”

  “I think he’s waiting on ghosts: things that are long gone.”

  Steve, Beth’s brother and the resident doctor, had been there when Len read the letter aloud to everyone after he had read it several times to himself. While Misty had collapsed into Beth’s arms, crying hysterically, Mark had stood, and Kimball saw every bit of animation and emotion rush out, leaving nothing but emptiness.

  Steve bypassed the grieving mother as he, too, saw Mark’s face, and while he didn’t know what exactly had occurred and if it were physical or mental, he did say it was possible that the man had suffered a stroke.

  “And the bridge area?”

  “There are a few on that side nosing around; maybe they know they can’t get over here.”

  “They may know, but they also know we’re food; they won’t just stop waiting for us,” Len said.

  “They can just stand there and wait then.”

  With the bridge across the brackish lake blown up, the creatures couldn’t get across to the island, but they numbered in the thousands as they roamed the central area of Port Arthur proper, waiting for humans to come closer.

  Eliminating the bridge had cut off the only way to their island, but it also meant the people were cut-off from the mainland. They were self-sufficient here, but knowing they only could leave by boat was a little unnerving.

  “Why are you sitting out here; I get why Mark is staring out at nothing.”

  Len shifted his position a little. “What do you feel?”

  “Irritated that we’re doing this touchy-feeling shit. I feel worried about Stevie….”

  “Not that.” Len frowned. “Out here.” He held out his arms.

  “It’s windy. It’s cloudy. I guess it’s gonna rain?” Kim didn’t know what Len was asking him to understand.

  Len nodded. “It is very windy; see the white caps? And the swells are coming in faster. Two days ago, down there was dry. The water is up more than a dozen feet.” He saw Kimball was watching the waves more closely. “The barometer is falling.”

  “How long?”

  “Dunno. I don’t know a lot about this kind of thing…maybe twenty-four hours or so.”

  “We can’t get to the mainland except by boat, and if we do that, we have no cars that’ll run, no gasoline.” Johnny came up behind the men and sat down. “I’ve been thinking about it in my head, wondering if I’m right. We can’t make it without vehicles, and we’d need a lot of busses.”

  “We get a barge and somehow load it with the buses, and then we have what we need,” Kimball suggested. “We can do that.”

  Len shook his head, “With the waves white-capping? We’d never secure them enough to make them safe for that, and let’s say we got over there and say we have everyone and our supplies on buses and we’re good to go, where do we go?”

  “To the zoo. It’s safer there until we can think of a better plan.”

  Johnny sighed, “They can’t take all of us in, and it can’t be that safe there. We don’t know if they were over run after the letter was sent.

  Besides, there are thousands of zeds over there just waiting and being herded by the Berserkers. They’d be all over us when we hit the ground there. We can’t handle that many, and we have children and sorry, we ain’t as young as we used to be, Kimball.”

  “But it’s what we do; we hunker down, then we go to the next safe place, and set it up.”

  Kim tried to reason it out. Even if they could get across the bridge with vehicles, there was too large of a mass on the other side for them to survive. It was possible that a few could hide and sneak past some and make it, but there were too many children to do that.

  They could get boats and evacuate, but which way would they go to avoid a storm, not knowing where it would hit? The waters were already a little dangerous, and wherever they landed could be over-run with zombies.

  “Oh.”

  Johnny chuckled. “I just saw the wheels in your head spinning, Kimball. I’ve been doing the same thing, trying to think of what to do.”

  “The cabins have been here a while, we know at least fifteen years, so this may be perfectly safe, right?”

  “It maybe,” Len said. “I don’t know that the crops will do well with the sea spray. We’ll lose the animals if it floods, and we have to assume the waves may flood the whole island.”

  “If we lose all the animals….”

  “We’re back to square one,” Johnny nodded.

  “And we don’t know how bad it’ll be; it could be a mild one, Category One, they used to say? Or it could be a whopper and a Category Five.”

  “You think…you’re saying it’s a hurricane for sure?” Kim stared at his friend.

  “I don’t know. It’s the season for one, and we’ve been lucky a long time. My gut says it is.”

  Kim shook his head with frustration. “It may be a bad rain storm, and if it is, then we’re fine. But it may be a nasty, big hurricane, and chances are the island will flood, and we’ll lose our animals: chance it in the cabins and swim if everything goes under, is that about right?”

  “Sounds about right to me,” Len said, “remember when we talked before, Kim? I told you I knew then.”

  “You predicted a hurricane?” Johnny asked.

  “No, he was about George’s terms and that he knew we didn’t have a chance from second one but kept us fighting and busy anyway but that….”

  “It would all come down to something like this,” Len finished the sentence. “That’s what George was saying: that we were all on borrowed time and would have to pick our own terms along the way. It hit me. When I saw Nick all eaten up, I asked myself why his brother, as the President of the United States, had our cites bombed and then went crazy and joined with the Reconstruction Army.

  Why did he embrace death at the end? But see, he fought back and tried to win against those things, and when he failed, he lost his mind and just survived, and then he met his terms and went gladly….”

  “I don’t want to go,” Johnny complained.

  “I don’t either, but if it isn’t zeds, then it’s a hurricane, see? We can’t fight nature when she wants to balance herself. Humans made a mess of the world; we’re the infection.”

  “That’s pretty sad,” Kim said, “we’re not worth another chance? Really?”

  “If you believe in the Bible, you know it ain’t the first time people have been wiped out.”

  “A few survived that. They got another chance.”

  “Then, maybe mankind will, too. Hell,
there’s a lot of world left, and we’re only a speck of what is left. Ahhh, hell, I sound like a doomsday whiner; let’s get busy and get ready for this; maybe it’ll be just a bad rainstorm,” Len said.

  Johnny and Kim walked back to the cabins and asked everyone to send the children to the cabins and meet in the office so they could talk. Kim explained as best he could about their situation, frowning at Len to keep his friend from adding anything depressing to the discussion, but everyone could see the worry on his, Johnny’s and Len’s faces.

  “It may be a bad storm is all, right?” Julia asked, “Why do I get a hinky feeling about it?”

  “Welcome to the hinky world, Jules,” Len said.

  “It could be,” Kim said, “but it could be a bad one. Len is worried and says his gut says it’s bad. I guess we all feel hinky.”

  “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best?”

  Kim nodded. “I think that’s best. And when the water goes down, then we dry out, and we get busy on getting more supplies, back to supply runs.”

  “Oh, fun,” Julia rolled her eyes.

  With jobs to do, everyone began going off in different ways.

  Julia took a second and hugged Beth. “You’re the best friend I ever had.”

  “We’re gonna beat this one, Jules. I love you though,” Beth told her.

  “I know. I was just saying.”

  “I dreamed about Alex last night. He was smiling, and I could see people behind him: Juan and Lexie, George, Tink….” She brushed away a tear. “We’ve lost so many people.”

  “I’m glad we got to know them though,” Julia said. “We’re being depressing….”

  “True. It’s not like us to get this way; maybe it’s the barometer falling; dunno how that works. I feel as if things are about to be bad. Give me zombies, and I’m cool, but storms, I can’t shoot them in the head.”

  “Did I hear that you crazy chicks are gonna shoot at the storm?” Kim laughed. “I knew you were both crazy, but….”

  Beth swatted his shoulder.

  Kim divided the chores and said that even the children could help with a few things that had to be done. Crops had to be brought in so they weren’t lost; ripe or green, they had to be brought in. Their autumn crops would be wiped out.

  Children helped with wrapping jars of food so they could be stored and kept unbroken and hopefully could be dug from the ruins and floodwaters, intact.While the under-fifteen group had never known a time without fresh vegetables and fruit and had never wanted for meat, the older people could remember eating canned foods.

  Some struggled to cover windows with boards and closed the shutters over the glass, wondering if they would hold. Using make-shift lifts so they didn’t have to keep trudging up the stairs with boxes and bags, they hoisted supplies to the lofts, but there was only so much room for the people, their clothing, bottles and containers of clean water, jarred foods, matches, weapons and ammo, and packs of everything they could think of.

  “I can’t stand to lose it all, “ Julia complained as she packed another box. “We worked too hard and took too many risks to get it in the first place.”

  Matt stopped and held her in his arms. “We’ll be okay as long as we have us and the kids. Hey, we’ve dealt with worse and made it so far; you even gave me a chance with you and that turned out okay.”

  He laughed, rubbing her face against his chest. She was ten years older than he was and let him tease her about being his old woman. She pulled away reluctantly, with a kiss for him and a curse in Mexican.

  “I know it’s just stuff, but….”

  “We worked hard for it, and it’s our stuff.” Matt laughed. He paused and stared at Julia.

  “What are you looking at me for?”

  Matt shrugged, “You’re pretty, Jules.”

  “Thanks. You’re pretty cute yourself.” She kissed him and went back to work.

  They put emergency rowboats and rafts up-top that they bolted to the roofs of the cabins, and then they added trap doors cut into the top of each cabin in case they had to get out. They might leak, but Len thought they were needed just in case they couldn’t get out any other way. Two of the cabins had them already, so it made sense they should all have them.

  Mark worked beside Misty, following her directions to nail wood over the windows. He didn’t look especially concerned or interested in the work but did as she asked him. She noted how thin he had become, his muscles just wasted away with lack of activity. Every day, she missed Lexie and mourned their daughter, but while she had picked herself up and continued to take care of the other children, Mark always seemed somewhere else, as if his mind weren’t working correctly and remembering things entirely.

  She got the most from him when, sometimes late at night, he would stroke her hair and almost smile; it made her shiver when she decided that in his mind, it was probably fifteen years before when they had hidden in the crumbled hospital. He was at his strongest a decade before.

  Len left his ocean gazing again to return to work beside the rest; the water was higher, waves were coming in faster, and the wind was blowing harder. He worked next to Jilly a while, relaxing as she sang softly, humming a tune that wasn’t familiar to him, but nice. “What are you humming, Jilly?”

  She turned and smiled as she worked. “One of my mother’s really old songs, ‘Storm of the Century.’ ” Her smile vanished at once, and she slapped a hand to her lips as she realized what she had been humming for a half an hour. Len’s eyes went wide.

  Kim looked at Len with his forehead a mass of worry lines. Goose bumps raced up his arms. “Len….”

  “Damnit, yanno,” Len said, “these sure as hell aren’t the terms I had planned. Damn.”

  7

  Zoo

  Dale kept his arm clasped to his chest, rocking with the pain. Out scavenging, he had been attacked by a half dozen zombies that ripped the flesh off his arm all the way to the bone.

  If Robert and Cory hadn’t been close, he would have been eaten alive, but they killed the creatures and got him back to the zoo, which was brave and caring of them, but was also folly. They should have shot him in his head.

  Dale had never imagined such pain.

  He had flat refused Robert’s offer to clean the wound (okay, let’s be honest, the stripped bone) and had settled for strips of a bed sheet to be bound about his arm so that he wouldn’t bleed all over the place. He had taken something for the pain that wasn’t even touching his agony. He didn’t know how Stevie had stood the pain of her surgery five months before.

  He had seen people being bitten and screaming with pain, but even seeing it, he didn’t have an understanding of how it felt with crushed and torn nerves, not clean cuts, but smashed, ripped flesh. There weren’t waves of pain; oh, it wasn’t that easy; it was a blaring blaze of continuous pain and made the abscessed tooth he had once suffered seem like a paper cut.

  He chewed pain pills and let Robert inject him with some numbing shit that was the only thing allowing him to breathe, instead of shrieking. In a few minutes, he guessed the medication helped some, or maybe it was shock or he was turning into a creature and couldn’t feel pain as much anymore. He didn’t care.

  “It was a good time, boys,” Dale said through gritted teeth to Robert and Cory. “You were the best friends ever, and I hate leaving you on your own, but it’s time to go. I wouldn’t be here if not for you guys, and you made the apocalypse a little better.”

  He understood why people didn’t fear death and checked out; hell, death didn’t hurt like this; death was a way out of the pain and much better than the pain he was suffering. People took their own lives or asked others to do it because they simply didn’t want to keep hurting. Honor, his ass, it was about stopping the pain. He chuckled to himself.

  Cory gave him a hug. “I wish you’d been there for the bloody Mary the day I met Robert; that was a good drink.”

  Robert laughed a little sadly. “I had the ingredients, and dumb ass here had to make a run
for some ice….”

  “Can’t have a bloody Mary without plenty of ice,” Cory said.

  “See? He’s still defending that!” Robert wiped tears away, from sadness or laughing. “That was the last friggin’ ice I ever tasted.”

  “And you can thank me,” Cory said.

  “I have thanked you a million times since.”

  Dale chuckled at his friends. “You boys are a riot. I would appreciate the humor if I didn’t hurt so bad.”

  “Being bitten hurts, huh? Gee, Dale, we never knew why people yelped so damned much.”

  Dale chuckled again. “You are so funny, Har, har. Yes, it friggin’ hurts something awful. Wonder why the end of the world came with teeth? Poets said fire and ice, but it was teeth. Ain’t that really tacky?”

  “Yep. We should have had a dignified end. Teeth suck.” Cory thought about the sharks that had killed the men and shivered a little.

  Robert sighed and got up and gave Dale another shot, and when he was done, he leaned back. “That should help the pain.” He wiped at tears.

  Dale winked. “I have no doubt my pain is about to stop. Hey, now don’t start crying like a baby, Rob, jeez, I love you boys; don’t be such cry babies,” he said as he smiled and then blinked. Cory made a little squeak.

  The animal tranquilizer stopped Dale’s heart.

  He didn’t blink again.

  “My turn, huh? Fine.” Cory inserted a long needle-like rod into Dale’s ear and shoved, making sure his friend wouldn’t come back. “Okay. It’s done. Be at peace, dude.”

  He put his face into his hands and cried a little while. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right to have to put friends down. It wasn’t fair to remove Stevie’s leg or for the crazy military to have won and taken Hannah. Nothing was fair, and it always seemed the good people got the short end of the stick.

  For a while he just cried, letting all come out in his tears.

  Dave opened the door and looked into the common room. He didn’t know what was going on. “What’s, hey, what’s wrong with Dale? Did you find anything? Dale?”