Zombie Apocalypse Series (Book 3): Ashes in the Mouth Read online

  The back of one of her shoulders was suddenly sore, and she knew she must have pulled it in her commotion. She bent down and picked up one of the crutches that she dropped and made sure her balance was stable. She looked down at the floor, wondering what had made her slip, and she saw that there was a puddle of water on the tile. The puddle was moving and splashing, and her eyes traced up and saw a leak in the ceiling above her caused by the heavy rain that had bled into the morning.

  There was also a trail of old blood running along the floor. One end of it disappeared around the corner into the next aisle ahead, and she peeked down it to find another pile of zombies, long dead. The other end of the trail went down the side of the store in front of her and disappeared off into a dark loading bay.

  All of the zombies in the store had been killed with crude methods, and there was none among them that had been killed by bullets. They just had their heads brutally hacked, stabbed or crushed. It was a mysterious scene as to who did all of it, and one that she unfortunately didn't think she would get the answer to. The apocalypse made a lot of people do a lot of strange things. It made people who had perhaps once been sane turn crazy. She thought of everyone she had run into since the very start of it all, and she thought of the killer.

  That same mad smile floated through her memory, and she still couldn't comprehend it. He didn't seem human, like he shared nothing in common with a normal person other than the outside shell. But inside, it was all different. It was like there was nothing there at all except for an inexplicable drive to destroy her. She didn't know why. She didn't even know if there was a why.

  The more she thought about the killer, the more anxious she became. When she caught herself starting to shake, she forced her mind off the subject, staring at random items on the shelf next to her and running her fingers along their surfaces, as if feeling the texture of each one would distract her brain until she calmed down again.

  The stench in the store was still just as bad as it had been when they entered, and she suddenly wished more than ever the Dale would hurry up and finish what he was doing.

  "Are you almost done?" she called across the store.

  "Yeah," he said distractedly before making more noise in the distance.

  Sarah carried on toward the loading bay at the back, scared, but curious all the same. It was dark back there, and it was hard to see anything, but there had been no noises at all in the store, and if anything was still alive in there with them, it would have come out to greet them by now.

  Still though, she wasn't stupid, and she didn't want to go completely wandering off out of Dale's sight and into the darkness considering that she had a maniac following her.

  A set of double doors sat in the wall at the end leading into the loading bay. The doors hung half-open, and Sarah cautiously poked her head through. The blood trail got thicker by the doors and ran through her feet into the darkness. It took a little bit for her eyes to adjust to the blackness inside what seemed to be a fairly big room. The smell got worse when she stuck her head past the doors, and she held her arm over her face again.

  As her eyes adjusted, strange shapes started to come into view, most notably a large pile of something in the middle of the room. When she saw what it was she immediately started to withdraw her head and step back from the loading bay.

  A huge pile of dead zombies lay inside. A few offensive tools were still lodged into some of their skulls, and every other one either had their head caved in or some other unseen life-ending injury. They all lay completely motionlessly, all of them summarily executed and dumped. Why this had happened, she couldn't even begin to guess, but something didn't sit right with her, and it wasn't just the churning feeling in her stomach from the acrid smell.

  Sarah turned around and headed back for the entrance of the store. She decided she would wait for Dale there, maybe even standing outside in the rain that was now just lightly sprinkling. On her way there, she glanced down one of the aisles that she hadn't seen before and spotted something that made her stop.

  A single zombie lay crumpled up three-quarters of the way up the aisle. It should have been just a lump of dead flesh to her, but there was something about it that caught her attention. She couldn't say what it was at first, but she felt an inexorable pull toward it.

  She looked from the zombie to the entrance of the store and considered what she was going to do. Dale was still rummaging around not too far off at the other end of the store, and her curiosity got the better of her.

  Sarah slowly moved forward on her crutches along the aisle, keeping her eyes on the slumped shape. When she got closer, realization dawned on her as to why the zombie had been calling to her. Something deep and primal within her came to the surface, a feeling that she hadn't experienced in many months. It was motherly.

  She saw the shape of the zombie get bigger in her view with each swing of her leg forward. She saw the short brown hair coming out the back of its head. She saw the size of the zombie and the approximate age. It looked to be a boy, about eight years old, and there was something very familiar about him.

  Her heart thumped in large swoops and a tightness swelled in her chest. She tried to take a deep breath, but with every one she expelled, her lungs would constrict, allowing a smaller amount of air in each time. Her skin broke out into a sweat and the panic raced through her. She inadvertently started to mumble under her breath, quiet at first, but then it grew louder until she was repeating her son's name between sobs.

  Sarah reached the rotting corpse and stood in front of it, not sure if she wanted to turn it over to see all of it, or if she wanted to leave. Tears streamed down her face and blurred her vision. She repeated her son's name until it became a raspy squeak.

  She bent down onto one knee, shifting one of her crutches into her other arm and reaching out for the body. She grabbed onto its shirt and gently tugged on it, pulling the dead weight until it slowly shifted and rolled over onto its back.

  Its right arm flopped over its torso and smacked the tile floor with a terrible sound. Its face stared up at the ceiling, still intact, with its milky white eyes mirroring the white ceiling tiles above. Its hair was short and its face young, and it had the same innocence of her son.

  But it wasn't him.

  This boy's nose was different, and his eyes were inset too closely together. His hair was a little different than David's had been, and his eyebrows were a different shape.

  She had been entirely mistaken, seeing phantoms of the past in her mind and projecting them onto objects in front of her. She had made the mistake before, but never to this painful degree.

  As she stood up, a crushing disappointment came over her, and she didn't know if she was upset with herself or this random boy lying dead on the floor whom she suddenly felt nothing for.

  When she turned around, she came face-to-face with another zombie. But this one wasn't permanently dead; it stood in front of her, its eyes wide and its jaw hanging open. It reached out for her, and she instinctively fell backward, hitting the floor hard.

  She tried to crawl away from it, but she was paralyzed by her sudden shock and fear.

  Just before the zombie dove onto her, a pitchfork ran through the side of its head and shoved it against the wall between shelves, pinning it to the painted cinder block.

  Dale's large figure stood where the zombie's had been and he let go of the pitchfork as the life drained from the zombie's eyes. "I told you not to get near them," he said. "And to not wander off."

  Her mouth hung open, still shocked and unable to form a sentence.

  "Come on," he said, helping her up to her feet. He saw the tears in her eyes and assumed she had been hurt. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine," she said, finding her words at last.

  "You didn't twist your ankle, did you?"

  "No," she said. "I was just surprised and got scared. I'm sorry about that."

  "Don't worry about it," Dale said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "I got everything we need."
He held up the garbage bag that he had stuffed and smiled. "We can get going now."

  "Good," she said. "I'm starting to get a bad headache from this place."

  "I don't blame you," he said as he walked with her back toward the entrance. "Are you sure you were okay back there? You seemed like you were looking at that kid awful strange."

  "It was nothing," she said. "Nothing at all."

  They continued down Highway 50 for a couple miles, stopping to take a quick rest whenever Sarah got tired. But she tried to keep at it as much as possible so they could get to someplace safer. Dale had decided it was going to be the Crabtree Valley Mall on the edge of Raleigh. He told her he hadn't been to it in a few years, but it had been abandoned and mostly ransacked for longer than that.

  When the sun stretched across the sky into the late afternoon, they stopped to have some food and water. Dale pulled some jerky out of his pocket and they both ate it somewhat grudgingly, neither one of them wanting to admit that they had already gotten a little tired of it. But they were thankful to have food at all, and they knew they would have to find more soon. He poured almost the last of the water for them and they both drank quickly, but not quite as much as they needed, both of them wanting to make sure that the water lasted a little bit longer.

  When they finished with their late lunch, they got going again, still feeling lucky that they hadn't run into any trouble along the abandoned highway. The rifle rattled around on Dale's shoulder and he still kept a keen eye on their surroundings, looking for any sign of the killer stalking them. The fact that he hadn't seen so much as a single trace or heard the slightest noise that would indicate he was actually following them scared the hell out of Dale; if the killer were truly following them at all, something would have betrayed his presence by now, and the fact that it hadn't made Dale's skin crawl at how good of a stalker he was. It almost gave him the same false sense of security that Sarah had a couple nights before when she thought she had lost him before taking refuge in the suburbs for the night. But he knew better, and he was ever watchful.

  "I'm really sorry for what happened," Sarah said. The words had been on the tip of her tongue all day, but she hadn't found the courage to say them until now.

  "It's okay," Dale said. "It's not your fault."

  She looked at him with disbelief.

  "I know you think it is," he said, "but you have nothing to do with that maniac, and there's nothing we can do about the ills of this world except stomp them out when we come across them. It's just kill or be killed now. There's no blame and no excuses."

  She nodded, though he didn't see it. He didn't need to; she was doing it more for herself, acknowledging the truth behind his words. He summed it up simply and almost poetically in a way that she hadn't considered before. She'd always had hopes and dreams and thoughts that if people could come together and help each other, that maybe they could turn things around. But that wasn't it at all. It was kill or be killed and that was that.

  "He seemed like a good kid," Sarah added.

  "He was," Dale said. "He was my wife's nephew... my brother-in-law's kid. I was never too close to him, to be honest with you, but he took a real shine to hunting, and his dad wasn't really the type. It was actually only the second time I took him out in the woods when it all happened."

  "When what all happened?" Sarah asked.

  He motioned his arms around them. "All this. I took him out into the woods that day... he was still pretty green. But I enjoyed showing him the ropes, and I thought he could even sort of be the son I never had. At least when it came to hunting. He was a quick learner and he bagged his first deer that day. We got it up into the back of the truck and I drove him home back to my brother-in-law's, and that's when we figured out something was wrong. My wife was over visiting with them while we were out hunting, and we didn't think much of it when we went inside and started to take our gear off. Jimmy noticed it first when he saw his mom slumped over at the dining room table. Then he saw the blood and he started crying, running up and trying to help her. The whole thing was like being outside your own body watching it like you're watching a movie. I just stood there in the doorway of the kitchen, confused out of my mind. I saw Jimmy's dad behind him, walking up to him from the living room. His skin was gray and I'd never been so scared in my life seeing the way he looked at his own son. To this day I'm still glad that I pulled him away before he saw that look on his dad's face. We turned and ran back out the house, and it wasn't until we were right at the front door when I realized that I completely looked past my wife lying under the kitchen table.

  "Me and Jimmy got out of there and got back in the truck and just drove away. I wanted to shoot his dad, because even though I didn't understand it, I started to figure out what happened, but I just couldn't do it in front of Jimmy. It didn't take much of a drive to see that the nightmare wasn't just in that house. And it's just been me and Jimmy ever since." Tears rolled down Dale's face and he wiped them away. "But that's all done with now, I guess."

  Sarah stopped, which caused him to do the same. She hobbled over and wrapped an arm around him. "You're a good man," she said.

  He turned and squeezed her. He held on tight and she could feel him silently sob as his body moved up and down. She let him take as long as he needed and he finally let go. "And you're a good lady," he said. "I barely know you, but I'm glad I do."

  They smiled at each other and then they continued on toward the mall.

  "So what's your story?" Dale asked. "Did you have any family?"

  Sarah didn't answer him at first and continued walking. After little bit of thought, she said, "No."

  "No husband? Kids?"

  "No," she lied. "I never married. Had a couple of old boyfriends but that was it."

  "That's probably for the best," he said. "I usually don't say this too often, but I find that the people who tend to stay alive these days are the ones that don't have to worry about anyone but themselves. I know it sounds cold, but it's the truth."

  Sarah weighed his words. They hurt her, and she was afraid that she believed them. She kept quiet after that and Dale didn't talk much, either.

  When dusk fell, they reached the mall, and their legs almost burst on the spot in excitement at the rest that awaited them. It was a fairly big mall, and the parking lot was filled with abandoned cars, but there was no one in sight. Sarah had worried about running into a horde of zombies when they arrived, but there were none.

  "There it is," he said. He threw a glance over his shoulder again and saw nothing but the empty road behind them. "We'll need to get in there and set up, the sooner, the better."

  They made their way across the large parking lot, careful not to get too close to any of the cars and be blindsided by something hiding behind them, zombie or otherwise. Dale tucked the nearly-empty jug of water under his arm and pulled the rifle off his shoulder, holding it at the ready just in case.

  They got to the closest entrance to the mall and pulled on one of the doors to find it locked. Dale tried another one, and then another one, but they were all locked and none of them budged. They walked along the edge of the mall to another entrance and were met with the same result.

  Dale eyed the glass in the doorframes that surprisingly hadn't been shattered and he looked around for a rock or something else to hurl through it. When he didn't see one, he set the water jug and the garbage bag of supplies down and turned his rifle around, raising the butt of it.

  "Don't you fucking move!" someone yelled.

  Sarah and Dale spun around.

  A group of three bandits stood behind them, aiming AK-47s at them.

  11

  FALSE ALARM

  "Drop it!" the bandit in the front of the pack screamed. There was craziness in his eyes and the corners of his mouth stretched back in a mix of eagerness and anger.

  Dale saw how itchy his trigger finger was and knew he didn't want to mess with him. He very slowly held his arms out and lowered the rifle onto the ground, then took a
step to the side and instinctively stood in front of Sarah.

  "Grab it!" the bandit yelled to one of the others. Another one behind him came up and snatched the rifle and went back to his spot behind the crazy one. Very slowly, the one in front lowered his AK-47, almost as if he was disappointed and looking for any excuse to shoot them.

  Out of nowhere, he took a few long strides forward and swung the butt of his rifle across his body.

  It struck Dale in the side of his jaw with a loud crack and he stumbled backward and fell onto the ground.

  "No!" Sarah yelled, crouching down over Dale's body.

  The bandit grabbed Sarah and yanked her off, throwing her into the doors of the mall and sending her crutches flying. A metal handle struck her in the spine and she grunted and doubled over. She inadvertently put her full weight down on her bad ankle as she stumbled, and the pain was intense, but it held out. Another bandit grabbed her and held her in place while the first bandit crouched over Dale, who was rubbing his jaw with his eyes squeezed shut.

  The bandit slung his assault rifle over his shoulder to free up his hands and started punching Dale in the face. Each whack was a strike to Sarah's heart as she stood by and watched helplessly.

  "Stop it!" she yelled.

  "Hey, Clint! The boss ain't gonna want you to rough him up so much!" the third bandit standing by said.

  The bandit crouched over Dale threw a look over his shoulder. "Yeah, I know!" he said angrily. "I'm just sayin' hello, is all." He held Dale by the scruff of his neck and raised his bloody fist in the air for another swing, but he paused, then he lowered it and shoved Dale's head as he stood up and turned his attention to Sarah.

  Dale rolled around on the ground, groaning from the pain and holding his hands up to his face.

  "And what do we have here?" Clint said as he approached Sarah. He looked her up and down, but didn't see as much as he would have liked in her thick coat. He grabbed the zipper and slowly slid it down, pulling one side of her coat away and getting a look underneath. "Mmm, not bad at all."