The Zombie Theories (Book 3): Conversion Theory Read online

  Another Runner howl sent chills down my spine, but it was far off. I wiped my sweaty forehead and made a radio call. “Alvarez, you should be fine, but keep an eye out, those fast fuckers can climb.”

  Copy that. There are two more of the fast ones, at least. They ran past the barn and toward the house a few minutes ago, so be careful.

  “Will do. You two okay up there?”

  It’s fuckin’ hot.

  “It’s fuckin’ Texas.”

  Copy. Alvarez out.

  The outside slapping and pounding had lessened considerably, as had the wails and moans. I heard gunshots and concern began to edge its way into my brain. The radio told me it was Deek, Dix, and Kelly, on the roof of the farmer’s porch, shooting stragglers.

  It was about five in the morning when the shots stopped and I couldn’t hear any more of the things outside.

  Darcy came into the great room, and Deek saw the look on her face. “Any word from Mike?” he asked her.

  She shook her head no. “I haven’t been able to reach Clint, Jake, James, or Daniel either, but it isn’t time for them to check in yet.”

  Deek kept talking, but I’m so tired right now I don’t remember what he said. I sat down next to Remo on the couch and sighed the sigh of the weary. He had his boot off and his foot up. I had totally forgotten about his messed-up ankle, and he had never uttered a single complaint.

  “Still swollen?”

  He glanced at me then at his foot. “Yeah, but I can walk fine.” He looked at me hard. “I could walk a few thousand miles if I had to. How’s that?”

  He had pointed at my arm, where Captain Bob had removed a chunk. I could see the tiniest dot of blood through the bandage. It had been a considerable time, and it was still bleeding.

  Ship sat down in one of the armchairs, and it creaked, threatening to spill him onto the floor. He leaned back and his joints complained as loudly as the chair had. I could walk too, he signed.

  Everybody came into the room, and we all looked around at each other. There was no cheer, but we had won. I didn’t yet know if we had suffered losses, as not everyone was accounted for, but other than one Runner, nothing had gained entrance to the house.

  I heard Deek behind me. “Alvarez, how you situated?”

  I don’t see any, but we’re not climbing down just yet.

  “Y’all should get back in the loft. The sun will be up in a few minutes, and it’s gonna get hotter than Kelly’s chili up on that roof.”

  Copy that, it’s already hot.

  James and Daniel had been out on a run for whatever and weren’t around when the horde hit us. They checked in at eight in the morning. Mike and Clint, were attacked while they were on guard duty. They had climbed into the tower at the front gate, and got low so the dead couldn’t see them. They waited until most of the dead were gone before they eliminated stragglers and made a radio call. Jake had been on a roving patrol on his horse and we still hadn’t heard from him. Deek was furious, as nobody was supposed to go anywhere alone. We never saw Jake again.

  We found and killed eighteen more infected roaming the Double Hoof the morning following the siege. One of them, a Runner, got close to Matt before he killed it. The bastard made no sounds at all, it just leapt at Matt from atop one of the backhoes. Fucker. Matt drew his six gun and drilled the infected asshole before it could get to him. He fired twice more very quickly, all three shots center mass, before Javi ventilated its cranium. There were one hundred and eight infected corpses that we piled onto a flatbed trailer and towed out to the back of the ranch. Deek thought it would be a good use of resources to use five gallons of diesel and burn the things. The resulting smoke plume was greasy and gross, and I wondered if anything a few miles away would see it and come looking.

  The zombies had gained entrance the same way they always did. A portion of the earth wall had collapsed and filled a five-foot section of the dry moat. Lucky pus bags had found that section and come sniffing. Didn’t make a lot of sense, but there it is.

  All horses were accounted for as well, other than the one Jake had been riding. One mare had a bite on her leg, and she got sick that night. She died early the third morning. There was nothing we could do. It was the first time I had seen a horse with a bite. She didn’t reanimate, thank God.

  The night after the battle, my original group, minus Kat, Alvarez, and Dusty the dog, sat in the living room of the guest house. We had called a meeting. When everyone was situated, I leaned forward on my chair, putting my elbows on my knees.

  “Should we stay or should we go? The Clash reference notwithstanding, I don’t know if we’re safer here than anywhere else. This place has its merits, but also its problems. We’re less than fifty miles from a combined population of probably a million people or more. I would think we’d be safe here from the infected, but who knows? Besides, eventually the living will find us, and that usually doesn’t go well.”

  “If we leave,” Remo began, “these people will have less fighters to protect them, but their consumption of food and supplies goes way down. We’ve already had a fight with the dead, so we know they can get in, but we won, so we know our fortifications are good.”

  Ship passed a note to me. I vote we stay. We shore up our defenses, apply some advanced engineering to the wall and gates, continue to grow food, go on supply runs, and live here. He reached for his notebook, added something, and passed it back to me. At least for now.

  “This place is good,” Chloe said, surprising us all. “The people are good and there’s food and water. I think we should stay.”

  “Me too,” Richy said quickly. “What she said.”

  Donna nodded. “I’m comfortable here.” She put her hand in mine. “But whatever you decide.”

  I yawned. Hey, I was friggin’ tired, shut it. “Vote then. Anybody who wants to stay, raise their hand.” Everybody but Remo and I raised their hands immediately. Remo thought for a moment more, then raised his hand too.

  “Then we stay,” I said.

  We should have left.

  Sixty Feet

  Four months passed before the next epic shit storm. In four months, Ship designed such wonders for the defense of this ranch, the likes of which were, as previously mentioned, wondrous. I felt a billion times safer.

  We averaged about sixteen telephone or power poles a day. Cut them down, cut them into three pieces, then dragged them back to the ranch with the backhoes and some flatbed trailers, or in the appropriated Edinburgh school bus. We drove the poles into the ground on the inward side of the dry moat about ten feet apart using posthole diggers and the backhoes (Deek calls them machines), then put up several two-by-twelves between each one. We pushed the dirt from the trench up against the barrier, and now there was a five-foot-deep channel with another five feet of board and dirt on the near side. A ten-foot barrier. Ship even had us dig out ramps so if the dead got in the moat, they could get back out and into the scrub.

  Deek owned about 850 acres of land, but we would only put the barrier around forty or so acres of it, encircling the farmland, water sources, power plant (wind and solar), and the structures. It was our main task during the day, and everybody who wasn’t doing something else worked on it. In four months, we had gotten the wall around twenty-nine acres of the forty.

  Ship had also rigged the batteries connected to the solar and wind arrays to output about twenty percent more power, and with his (and I’m spitballing here, I’m not Ship) rotating (not alternating!) current, he said that the batteries would last about thirty years.

  When the temperature reached Fuck-it, we worked on spike walls that formed yet another barrier on the interior of the compound. When we were done, this place would be a fortress. Actually, it was already a fortress, but would become a better fortress.

  Ship had to go and ruin it by passing me a note saying: Won’t deter armed human enemies enough. I’ll work on that.

  I have mentioned a few times in these journals how I have seen marvels to keep out the dead
, and this time I was helping make one. It felt damn good. I felt damn good, and I looked good too. I have absolutely no flab on me now, and one night, I was standing bare-ass, looking in the mirror at my awesome new body, puffing my chest and arms out, when my girl told me not to hog all the hotness. That was a good night.

  I’m feeling good, looking good, and have a great family that is now well protected. Of course it all has to go to shit.

  So the bus. We had removed all of the seats in the back except for the first set, and welded steel mesh over all the windows and both exits. An additional set of steel support rods were put into place to keep the door to my left locked and solid. The bus was sort of an armored transport vehicle for whatever. In this case, we were collecting more poles and we were going to store them in the back. We had a couple of flatbeds, but the rigs needed to pull them were in short supply, and the backhoes were way too slow.

  I was driving, with Javi and Remo in the seats behind me. Matt, Alvarez, Kat, and Dix were in the F350 in front of us. We were talking about soup. I used to get this miso soup from this Chinese place before I went to prison. It was great, and I was telling everybody it was my favorite when we reached the bridge over Arch Canyon about two miles south of a shitty town called Encino.

  What have I told you, Dear Reader, about bridges? The exact phrasing was: Stay the Fuck Off. In this case, there were only a few dead roaming around. Six to be exact. The stupid town of Encino had a population of nothing, and yet there were six dead fuckers on this bridge in the middle of nowhere. The only thing besides the dead, our vehicles, and us, were the poles we needed to cut down.

  The dead came for us and we took care of them. The bridge looked as dead as the infected, but we had to get across. We all got out of our vehicles to inspect the bridge, and it was hot. Like, really hot. I took a sip out of my water bottle and looked at the crack in the concrete. It went all the way across from east to west. There were a few more cracks and some chunks missing from the hundred-foot-long bridge. I took a peek over the side and was amazed to see that there was a skinny canyon, but it was very deep, maybe sixty feet, although I couldn’t see the bottom from where I was. We agreed we would take it easy, and got back in the vehicles. Matt drove across slowly and it was okay. I did the same. It looked shitty, but solid, this bridge was.

  We cut down eighteen creosote-covered power poles, cutting them into eight-foot sections with our chainsaws. 144 pieces was too much to carry, the sun was starting to go down, and the entire population of Encino was bearing down on us. Maybe fifty or sixty of them. We had loaded twenty-eight of the pole pieces into the back of the bus, and had stacked the others in a few piles along the road. We would come back tomorrow to pick them up. We didn’t want to deal with the dead, so we just took off.

  It had been a long day. I was hot, tired, and thirsty. It was the apocalypse. All of that together is probably why my mind wasn’t functioning properly. That and the fact that some powerful being has it out for me. Remo was now riding with Matt, and Javi was still with me.

  Matt was hauling twelve of the cut poles in the F350. He made it most of the way across then I began to follow. I got the bus half way over and the fucking bridge just straight-up broke. I don’t know, maybe two years of neglect after Armageddon began, coupled with about a billion years of neglect before the dead rose, and this bridge, which had been constructed while the builders had to be careful of a tyrannosaurus attack, just said, “Nope.”

  There was the quickest sound of rending metal and the section in front of me and to the right disappeared into the chasm underneath us. The split second decision to either floor it, or jam on the brakes and back up, took about eight years too long. Of course, you have to remember it’s me, so whichever decision I made was going to be wrong anyway. It was very wrong. Like epically wrong. I jammed on the brakes, then floored it, yanking the wheel to the left to get around the hole. The hole got bigger, our right rear wheels fell in, and we started moving backwards. Now, moving backwards might not sound like a terrible feeling, but when the back of the bus began to sink into the road, and the nose of the bus went up and up and up, I got a bit scared.

  We teetered. We teetered long enough that I was thinking we would be fine if we just didn’t move, and said as much to Javi. He nodded, which by definition is movement, the poles shifted and slid back a bit fucking up the balance of our precariously perched vehicle. The added weight in one place on the edge of the broken concrete and asphalt broke off more of the concrete and asphalt, and the back of the bus began to slide further into the hole. The poles began to slip off and into the fissure, and for another split second, I thought we were going to be totally fine as the weight was off our ass end.

  Unfortunately, The Powers That Be decided today was FU day, and the whole bus upended backwards and I could now see the bottom of the canyon with crystal clarity.

  Javi began to yell, “Holy fuuuuuuuuccckkkk!” as bits scraped off the bottom of the bus with a screech and we fell into oblivion.

  Sixty feet might not sound like a lot to you, but you can suck it. You try looking into a hole that deep with the realization that you are going to impact the bottom of said hole at 120 feet per second while inside a twenty-thousand-pound bus.

  The fall was interesting. I was as serene as one could be with the absolute certain knowledge they are about to be dead. I had survived so much shit to now get killed by a fucking hole in the ground.

  The one other thing I did notice before the gut-wrenching impact was that the canyon was full of about thirty zombies. Sixty more feet.

  Perfect.

  Still Not Dead

  Growling. A muffled hiss. And was that… was that the clink of chains I heard? Like something was chained up? I opened my eyes to the dancing shadows of a room lit by a candle. The room was made out of barn board, and the best way to describe the place was ramshackle. Twenty by twenty, potbellied stove in the corner, rotten old cot, some supplies, a hunting rifle, and a zombie. One window, but it was dark outside, or the window was covered.

  I sat up, noticing my hand was tied to one of the support posts of the shack. Then I noticed that I was really sore. Everything hurt. My weapons were right next to me, including my SOG, which I used to cut my bonds. I reached for the bottle of water that had been placed next to me and noticed a fresh bandage on my arm bite. There was also one on my head, which hurt, but not nearly as bad as in the past. I looked myself over in the mostly dark room, and was covered with bruises, contusions, and scrapes.

  I know what you’re thinking: What? But didn’t you just tell me there’s a zombie in the room? Yeah, you’re probably a bit scared at the proximity, but relax, it was quite well chained up. It also had a leather belt wrapped around its head and through its mouth. It was fresh.

  It really wanted a taste of me, and was struggling against the chains. I had to wonder who had put it here and why? Was it to guard me? If I were a threat, why had my weapons been within easy reach? Fear not, Dear Reader, all your answers are coming.

  A notebook sat next to the sleeping bag I was resting on. It was open and there was writing right there on the first page for me to see. First thing’s first though. I stared at the infected, who was wearing a collar and the collar was chained to another of the support posts. I stood, feeling a bit woozy. My plan had been to stick the SOG in this thing’s head, but I opted for a single suppressed shot to the dome. It collapsed, looking pathetic.

  I took a swig of the bottled water, noticing another half case of it nearby, then grabbed the notebook. I moved closer to the candle so I could read it.

  I had to get you out fast. They were all over the place in that canyon. They must have gotten trapped and couldn’t get out. I trap rabbits there. I got bit while getting you out of the bus. There were too many. Looks like you were already bit, but the bite looks old, so it couldn’t have been one of them. I bandaged you up. Used my last bandage. I won’t need it. I think I set your arm correctly. The dead chased us while I was carrying you, bu
t the bus wreckage and the rocks on the canyon floor slowed them down.

  I don’t have the balls to shoot myself, so if you live, please do it for me. I looked at the body on the floor with a bit of sadness. Take whatever you need out of this hunting shack. The other guy didn’t make it, sorry.

  He signed the note Travis. This guy had died saving my ass. I looked back at him again, “Thanks, Travis.”

  I looked at the thing that had been wearing Travis. Some evil fucking entity had taken this guy from me and I never even got to speak to him. We could have been buds. Maybe I would have gotten to save his life. I owe Travis, so I will pay it forward somehow.

  Plus, Javi was dead.

  The shack was sweltering and gloomy, and I didn’t know where I was. I searched the whole place for a map, but it was dark. Leaving now would be a terrible idea. I could stumble into a pack of the dead or fall down another hole in the dark. Travis had left my radio with my stuff, so I tried a call.

  My head hurt, and it was the first time I had spoken in a while, so the pain reminded me it was hanging about. “Double Hoof, this is Bus Rider, come in, over. Double Hoof? Darcy? Matt?”

  Nothing. No static, just nothing. The radio seemed to be functioning properly, just nobody was answering. I wondered if I was out of range. We had been a few miles shy of Encino, cutting poles down on Route 281. That would put me about twenty or so miles from home. I had been willing to try this little jaunt when I was by myself after The Devil Horse threw me in Edinburgh, but I had known how to get home, and I had known where I was.

  I had been checking my surroundings as I thought all of that shit above. The place was as secure as a shack could be. Might stop a stiff breeze, or an undetermined stray dog, but it wouldn’t stop an infected for long, and it certainly wouldn’t keep out a bunch of them. But this is what I had. The food and water Travis had was complimented by a scoped Marlin hunting rifle and two almost full boxes of 30/30 ammo. A big red-and-blue backpack that you could probably see from space, sat in the corner of the room. Travis had been prepared, but he didn’t look like he was prepared. Ha, Grey Man Principle. Too bad you can’t Google that. My Google is a seven-foot smarty-pants who I was really beginning to miss. I drew the strings and took a peek inside, pulling out items and setting them apart. A green poncho, some dry clothes, a heavy blanket, a box tent, matches, a giant first aid kit, a big knife, the list went on and on.