Undead Advantage, a Zombie Chronicles Novel

the zombie kid, just to see what it would do. The kid flung his hand around ineffectively and let out a kind of moan.

'First thing kid, is I am gonna get you some food, once you are smart we are gonna start rounding up others, probably little ones, like you, I get a whole pack of you and we go after any hold outs we can find. I got a plan, a good plan to get into Mike's, and you are gonna help me do it. Holy…'

Only halfway through his planned speech Dave was interrupted by the flash of a nuclear blast many miles away, it caught the corner of his eye and drew his attention in as it grew. Dave quickly made himself look away and threw himself over the kid, knocking him down as well. He was not sure if he could go blind anymore, but nothing would be worse than being a blind zombie looking for food.

'The funny thing', Dave thought, 'is that I have never seen a nuclear blast before, yet I know what that was a nuclear bomb.' Thinking about it more Dave was curious as to why was the bomb dropped there? The bomb, as near as Dave could tell went off North of downtown Denver. He saw the light silhouetted by the large buildings. What was in that area to bomb? The airport? Going to the airport had not even occurred to Dave, maybe there were a lot of living out there and hence, enough zombies to make dropping a bomb worth it. Still a lot of people would die too and that did not seem like something the government would do. Or maybe it did. Now he had to think, how was this going to change his plans? 'Probably not at all', he thought, 'unless they drop more bombs, make the place a glass plain or something.' Dave sat up, pulling zombie boy with him. Dave looked the kid over, checking his eyes particularly carefully. 'Can you still see you little fuck? Answer me!'

The boy nodded slowly, really slowly. 'Goddamned retarded zombie, just what I need. We got to get you some food, I sure hope the gun trap works cause I can't stand having such an r-tard follow me around.' Pushing the kid away, Dave looked over to the ballooning mushroom cloud.

'Huh, you know you seen pictures in books and the film of the bombs and they just don't do it justice. No wonder all those peace-niks of the fifties wanted to ban these things. Look at how high the smoke goes. Shit.' Dave sat back on his well worn denim jeans and looked at the cloud for awhile. 'It just goes so high, it is beautiful, just beautiful.' he whispered to himself.

Chapter 24

'Let's go!' Juan yelled to Charlie, pulling Nanci along with them. They ran into the ER and Charlie yelled at some of the 'backup' men and women to go cover the entrance, something bad had just happened on the roof.

Running to the end of the hall Charlie hit the elevator button and one of the doors opened immediately, they hopped in and Charlie hit the top floor button and the elevator started to rise. Then, abruptly, the lights went out and the ride stopped.

'Shit!' Charlie screamed. 'I hate elevators! Why didn't we think about that? A bomb goes off on the roof and of course the electricity is going to go out.'

'I hope Jack it alright.' said Nanci, then she went into a litany of prayer in Spanish. Shrugging Juan joined her after she had completed two verses.

Charlie looked at them, 'What? What are you saying, I am not getting all the words, speak English.'

Juan stopped, 'Prayer Charlie, that's all, asking God to look out for Jack. Doesn't the hospital have automatic generators to power up when the grid goes off? Like if they were in surgery or something?'

It was Charlie's turn to shrug, 'I guess, they should, I mean they do surgeries here, maybe the elevators are not considered a medical necessity?' As he finished talking one of the lights flickered on, then the elevator alarm started buzzing. The buzzing stopped and the button light went off, then the elevator started moving up. It stopped faster than Juan thought it should and the doors opened, they were on the third floor. Not hesitating Juan jumped out, followed closely by Nanci and Charlie. 'Stairs okay?' Juan asked. No one objected and they were soon pounding their way up the remaining floors to the roof access. The roof door opened to the north and as they made it out onto the roof they stopped dead in their tracks.

'Madre de Dios.' Nanci gasped and crossed herself as she went to her knees.

Before them was a cloud they have never seen before, yet they all knew what it was from textbooks and old films. Someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on Denver, north of the downtown area, it looked more like they had bombed the airport. Juan put his arm around Nanci's shoulder and they stood staring dumbfounded for seconds which seemed to stretch into hours before they heard a voice behind them.

'Hey, I'm okay, thanks for checking man!'

Looking over his shoulder, Juan saw Jack, he was pale and looked like he had seen a ghost or worse yet kissed one.

The snappy retort Juan had been going to call out died on his lips, replaced with, 'Jack, what man? What is it?'

'Oh you mean aside from 'the man' bombing the working class to save themselves? Yeah it is worse. What's missing Juan?'

Looking around Juan couldn't tell, he saw the machine gun sitting up where he thought it might be, facing down slope to the north. The boxes of ammo were beside it and the whole mess had a tarp pulled halfway over it, probably to fend off the afternoon rains. It looked like the guys had set up their radio too, on a couple ammo boxes sat what looked like a satellite disk, pointed slightly south and west. Juan didn't see anything unusual and shrugged his shoulders slightly and shook his head at Jack.

'Maybe I should ask, 'Who is missing?''

A light went on in Juan's head, 'Ah! Where are the guardsmen?'

'Dead.' came Jack's flat reply.

'What?! What happened?' asked Juan, looking around for zombies or bodies or something to indicate what had happened, seeing nothing he repeated his question, 'What happened?'

Nanci and Charlie turned to look around and face Jack, who sat down on the boxes the satellite dish was on.

'I went with the guys back down, right? After the lesson on how to fire, reload the guns, they even gave us a primer on cleaning them too, though we didn't do that, they left us a manual. Anyway I headed downstairs, carrying this rifle and thinking, 'Why the heck am I going downstairs?' I mean I can't carry an ammo box by myself and we had an odd number of guys, so I am going along humping this gun as a guard? After we stopped for a bathroom break in the ER I told the others I would wait for them on the roof. So I get on the elevator and headed up here and the door is shut. We had propped it open with a piece of wood to make it easier to pull the boxes up here, right? So I was like, 'this is weird' and went to push the door open, no go. And I know that is wrong, because the door has a push handle, it cannot be locked from inside. I push harder and still nothing, so I thought they were fucking around with me, you know mess around with the wanna-be hippie or something, maybe a little military hazing to get their jollies. I hear Ted talking on the radio, he is speaking to somebody, only I can't hear what he is saying, he is talking kinda low. So I yell out, 'Hey, open the damn door!', they didn't, so I yelled louder, then started swearing, nothing. Well, I thought about it, this place has a couple of wings, so maybe there is another roof access door, only we haven't cleared the other side yet, so no way am I going through the stairs on the other side.'

Taking a breath, Jack continued, 'So I got a little harder on the door. Really pushing it, then hitting it and it started to give a little, I couldn't see out, but eventually I could work my hand through and felt a piece of wood they had propped under the door handle on the outside. A bit more shoving and I was able to work it free and get onto the roof.'

'Ted was the only one I saw, he was standing over there, heading towards the vents.' Jack stood up, he headed over to the venting and various pipes that snaked up through the roof. Walking around on the other side of them the group saw three ropes tied off on three different pipes, the ropes were taunt and led over the side of the