Gary was dry firing, screaming in rage as the zombies approached. BT was afraid that Gary was going to go into berserk mode and just start swinging his rifle like a club. BT was getting low on ammo. “Let’s go, Gary.”
“He’s my brother!” Gary yelled, looking up at BT’s face with tears coming from his eyes.
“There’s nothing more we can do here.”
Gary took one final look back at his brother who had not moved since his head made impact with the pavement. He sobbed as he ran, tears so occluding his vision, he had to be guided by BT.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What is the purpose of waiting here, sister? Now is the time to pull back and regroup. Michael is long gone now, yet we have wasted days here.”
“We have wasted nothing,” Eliza hissed. “While you have been having secret rendezvous’ with the enemy, I have been summoning a vast zombie army to destroy everything in our path toward getting Michael, starting with this little town.”
With Eliza’s human sympathizers out of the way, Tomas had hoped his sister would give up her foolish quest, or at least, postpone it. In the meantime, he had kept tabs on Michael when he could. His former father was getting good at disguising his presence. Mike had delivered a victorious blow, and for the life of him, Tomas could not figure out why the man had not collected his things and gone home. Even with the infection in BT, that should have only delayed him a day at the most. And now his sister was planning on bringing thousands upon thousands of zombies to this town.
“What do you hope to accomplish here?” Tomas asked his sister.
“Either you are still trying to cover for him or you are not as powerful as you imagine yourself to be, but Michael is still around. And even now, he uses his limited powers to save himself. If only he would fully reveal himself to me, I would finish him off myself.”
Tomas was taken aback, he had not known his sister realized Michael was still here, but what was more unsettling was he did not know Mike was in distress.
“Don’t be so confused, brother. I have blocked you from him. This is one battle the great and mighty Michael Talbot will need to finish on his own without any outside help.” Eliza laughed as Tomas tried desperately to get around whatever she had put in place to hinder his ability to talk to him.
Tomas could feel the psychic push of thousands of zombies as they closed the distance from their original locations to get to where their mistress beckoned as he extended his powers to try and encompass Mike.
“This is insanity, sister, he is gone from here.”
Eliza was still for a moment as if she were listening for a pin to drop on a faraway floor. “Perhaps you are right for once, little brother,” she said as she turned to walk away.
Tomas was relieved, maybe something could be salvaged out of this after all. Then the barrier that had been erected between Michael and himself crashed to the ground. Tomas nearly fell to his knees as he felt the screams of Michael, and then there was silence, soulless black silence. “What have you done, Eliza!?” Tomas screamed, chasing his sister down.
“I have done nothing, dear brother.”
“Why did you let me hear that and then cut it off again?” he demanded.
“I wanted you to hear that, but I most certainly did not cut it off at the end. That was the end. Michael Talbot is no more. He is no longer alive in a dead world!”
Prologue
Story takes place December, near Christmas 2009, written December 27th 2010.
Excerpt taken from a journal discovered in Vona, Colorado. Its location was a center console in a red Jeep Wrangler. The reader found the story humorous and decided to hold onto it, where it was finally paired together with the original writer’s works.
***
I’ve been feeling down as of late. We are on the run from zombies. This has not turned out to be the adventure I had hoped it would be. My hope was that I would make a lasting stand at my household with all my rifles, ammo, food and water. Yet, three weeks after the invasion I had been preparing for almost my entire life, my home has fallen into enemy hands. We’re cold, scared, and are draining through hope like a wino through Mad Dog 20/20. My ability to keep my family, friends, and to a lesser extent, our other traveling companions safe weighs heavily on me. My goal with these next lines is just an attempt to bring a smile in a deepening dark that is gathering.
In a time before there were zombies, we lived our lives like the vast amount of Americans in December. We overate, overspent and waited until the last minute to do our shopping around the holiday. This year was no different. I had just cashed my meager check this morning and my wife felt that we had to get a few more gifts for the kids.
“Go ahead,” I told her. Yeah, that went over about as well as you think it did.
“Talbot, get your ass up off that couch,” she said. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t threatening, but to not act on those words would have been tantamount to suicide. Kind of like the criminally insane do when they point a gun at the cops and then the cops have no option but to open fire. It was the same premise here.
So I got my ass up off the couch and off to the mall we went. Yippeee! The mall at Christmas time. I’d rather go to a drunk dentist for a root canal; it was a lot less painful. The mall was so packed, there was no place to park. They had to plow the snow off a distant field and offer a free shuttle service.
“Recession, my ass,” I grumbled as I parked the car. The mall was a distant pinpoint of light, off in the distance. “Maybe that’s where the baby Jesus lays,” I said sarcastically.
“Talbot!” My wife smacked my arm.
We walked up to the sign that said “Shuttle” just as a white tin can, packed with holiday revelers left.
“It’s friggin’ cold out here,” I said, stamping my feet.
“Maybe if you had worn your heavy coat like I told you to, you wouldn’t be so cold,” Tracy said, with the all knowing “I told you so” lilt.
I opened my mouth to argue the point, but she looked much more ready to do battle than I. So just a little background and you decide if I had a valid point or not, not that Tracy would have agreed anyway.
By ’09, Tracy and I had been married somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-something years. Now, NEVER, ever will I claim to know what makes a woman tick, but I’ve been around this particular model long enough to know some of its quirks. I might have written this down in one of my earlier journals. but it’s worth reiterating. My wife researches and buys her cars on the recommendation of other folks’ opinions about how the heater works. So when we go auto shopping, we have to look for heaters that have an extra setting called “lava,” and until molten magma is pouring from the vents, my wife is not happy. I’ve actually lost the bottoms from more than one pair of sneakers as the glue has melted, and the soles have become un-adhered from the rest of the shoe.
There have been days when the temperature outside is zero or less and I have dressed in shorts and a windbreaker for long car rides, because I know that most likely, my face will, at some point, melt. This trip was no different, but it was a shorter ride so I actually had pants on and a light jacket, not in any way rated for the inclement weather we were in the midst of, but still I was not going to argue the point with her. It would have been a lot colder if I had to walk home.
So I waited, gritting my teeth, feeling my nasal passages beginning to freeze up. My wife looked fairly toasty in her heavy sweater and full-length jacket, scarf around her neck and leather gloves.
The shuttle showed up seventeen teeth-chattering minutes later. I had to rip my planted feet from the ground. Seems the melted glue had frozen fast to the ice slicked surface. Tracy entered before me and then I came in after. I stepped up on the stoop and looked to the left. Seems the shuttle had stopped to pick up half the state of Wisconsin before it got to our stop. An older gentleman gave up his seat when he saw Tracy approach him and somehow the seat next to her was vacant. I was about to plant my ass in it when it looked like someone had spilled half of an Orange Julius in the plastic bucket seat. At least, I hoped it was an Orange Julius.
Tracy shrugged her shoulders as if to say “What are you going to do?”
My next option was the large, silver, hand-hold poles that went from floor to ceiling on the shuttle. I was near to placing bare hand on metal when I spotted what looked like the world’s largest nose nugget wrapped around the
