Rise (Book 2): Age of the Dead Read online

  Age of the Dead (Rise Book 2)

  Title Page

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  Age of the Dead

  Gareth Wood

  Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

  Copyright 2012 Gareth Wood.

  www.PermutedPress.com

  Cover art by Zach McCain.

  Part One

  The stench of the dead permeates everything. The smell of rotten flesh makes me gag, and my stomach heaves and churns. Even after all this time, I haven’t gotten used to it. I have nightmares when I sleep, so I don’t sleep much, and what rest I do get is tormented by the faces of the walking dead. The end we thought was coming hasn’t yet materialised. The living dead still walk, still hunt us, and still feed on our warm flesh. The living people who die either rise up to join them, or don’t, and we still have no idea how or why.

  Our bastion of life has crumbled despite our best efforts, the effects of madness and entropy felt in all the remaining communities. The spring was good. We harvested food, gathered supplies, and coveted the illusion of safety. I learned to ride a motorcycle. Jess and I grew even closer. We felt normal again despite the fences, the weapons, and the ever present undead. The summer was bad. Outbreaks inside the fence had to be put down, supplies ran short and a few communities west and north of us were consumed in a wave of horror and rending that destroyed nearly five hundred lives.

  What are we going to do? The corpses encroach in ever increasing numbers. It’s like they know we are here, and come from miles and miles away to find us. The number of guards on the fences is low, the ammunition short. We hear rumours that there is no more food to be had in the nearest towns, and I know this is true. I lead a salvage team, and we have had to go further and further afield to find food, medical supplies, and ammunition. The situation is getting worse every day, despite our efforts to hold on. The fences will soon fail without guards to hold them, and the crowded conditions here will soon result in an uncontainable outbreak, once someone dies and it isn’t reported. Soon the undead will consume us all. I see no choice but to leave…

  We all take our turn on the fence, even me. Guard duty. Fence sitting. We sit in towers that are broiling in the sun, freezing in winter, and we shine our spotlights along the kilometres of chain link that keeps the zombies outside, and us inside. When I’m not out with my team scouring the countryside for lighters, nylons, and birth control pills, I’m usually here on the fence, pulling a six-hour shift with my C7A1 close at hand, and a Browning 9mm automatic pistol on my hip. I keep them both completely clean. I’m obsessive about it. They have both saved my life more times than I can count, and I treat them with respect.

  My wife Jessica is a sharpshooter. In the New Year she got shot in the hand by some asshole raider, and we thought she’d be unable to shoot as well once she healed up, but she proved us all wrong. She’s still the deadliest shot I know, and these days there are a few good shots around most of the time. I met her in a small town in BC, where she and her young son Michael were holed up in a house, the last two living humans in an area teeming with the walking dead. The group of us made our way from there to here over a longer period of time than I care to think about, all the while dodging zombies and, well, more zombies.

  And where is “here”? Here is Cold Lake, in northern Alberta. It’s a tragic little town filled with survivors, refugees, and the remnants of the Canadian Armed Forces. Our population is about twelve thousand, though that might be a high guess. We lost some people over the winter.

  This fine afternoon, middle of August, cloudy and cold, I was sitting in the tower talking to a former long-haul truck driver named Rick T. Schwartz. He had never told me or anyone else what the middle ‘T’ stood for, but he always used it when introducing himself. Weird guy. We were discussing theories about the why and how of the undead, and Rick had one I had heard before a few times, and seems to be getting more popular.

  “God’s pissed at us,” Rick declared, “and Hell is all full up.”

  I had stopped believing in God a while back, right about when I saw a guy we rescued from a radio station get torn apart by a pack of rotted corpses. I couldn’t believe there was an all powerful deity out there that supposedly loved us all, and would let this happen.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, gazing out towards the distant fields. He was going to tell me anyways, I was just doing my part of the conversation.

  “Well,” Rick said, warming up to his theory, and settling in for a nice long ramble, “I figures, if God wasn’t pissed, none of this would have happened, right? World is full of sinners, right? You got your rapists and murderers, child molesters, adulterers, and all them crazy terrorists who wanted to blow us all up for some shit reason, and not to mention people always gambling and taking the Lord’s name in vain, right?”

  “Huh,” I replied.

  “And Hell, now,” Rick said, hardly noticing that I wasn’t paying attention. Something outside had caught my eye. There was a robin in the tree next to the tower.

  “Hell is full, I figures. See, we got to have had something like seventy or eighty billion people alive since the first days, right? Almost all of ‘em were sinners, so almost all of ‘em were going to Hell, right?”

  I could see Rick was the ‘we put the fun back in fundamentalism’ kind of crazy. I wondered if he was a Baptist. There seemed to be a lot of them around since this shit all started.

  “So if Hell is full, the souls of dead sinners got to go someplace, right? I figure since Satan run out of room, he’s sendin’ them up here. They get into the dead, and that’s why they stand up.”

  “What about the whole eating us thing?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, and clapped his hands together. He had a theory for that one too, I guessed.

  Rick was thankfully interrupted by the sound of gunfire from the next tower. We both stood up and grabbed binoculars to see what was going on.

  The next tower was a wood and steel box set atop a group of posts driven hurriedly into the ground about two hundred meters away. It stood fifteen feet above the ground, and had a retractable ladder leading to a single heavy door, and was identical to the tower I was in. The windows on all four sides slid open to allow fresh air in, and gun barrels out. Currently both guards in that tower were shooting at a large group of the dead, about fifteen of them, who were walking in a silent herd towards the fence. As I watched one was struck in the brain by a high velocity bullet, and dropped to the ground.

  Rick grabbed his rifle and slid open the window, but didn’t yet take aim. First we had some things to do. I called in the event on my radio while Rick checked all four sides of our tower for more of the undead. After that, we made sure our ladder was rolled up, door locked, and we had our 200 rounds of ammunition handy and ready to go. We had checked all this when we came on duty four-and-a-half hours ago, but it was procedure when the undead attacked, and just a damned good idea, so we did it. The shooting outside continued while we did this. When I looked up again, there were only ten walking corpses still approaching. Four more had joined the first one, brains destroyed by rapidly moving small bits of metal. The remaining ten were getting closer to the fence every second, and three of them were wandering in the direction of our tower.

  Rick took aim now at the closest one to the fence. He licked his lips, and lined up the shot. I watched through the binoculars as the zombie, a former fast food chef by the look of the uniform bits and rags it still wore, lurched towards the fence. It had only one arm, the left. The right was a stump that ended above the elbow in shredded flesh and splintered bone. Half of the zombi
e’s face was a mess of burns and abrasions, like he’d been dragged under a car across a gravel road. As I watched, Rick fired, and the other half of the face became a ruined mess of bloated rotten meat. It was a good shot, but it missed the brain, taking out the sinuses and spraying black fluids in a wide swath. The zombie fell, but started to get up again. I heard Rick swear. He aimed again, and just as the thing got to its feet he fired once more. This shot was true. I saw the entry point just above the ear, and the violent spray out the other side.

  Ten minutes later all fifteen of the dead that had approached were lying in bloody heaps, and cleanup crews were dragging the bodies to a pit for cremation. Rick had shot two of the three that came close to our tower, and I had taken the last one down. This is how it was for us, day after day.

  * * *

  As I said, we still don’t know for certain what it is that made the dead rise up and walk again. It started last year in May, and the Centers for Disease Control at first thought it was a virus. When I made it to Cold Lake in the fall with Jess and Darren and a few others, there was a story going around that the virus theory was all wrong. I haven’t seen proof, but when I asked Major Couper about it a few months ago he just shrugged and said, “What does it matter what caused it, Brian?”

  He had a point. The cause of this hell doesn’t matter anymore. We have to live and deal with the results. For over a year now we’ve been surviving and fighting and struggling to continue.

  It was late August now, the 24th I believe. My team was preparing to go out on a salvage run, and we were packing supplies into our vehicles—two Ford Explorers, one red, the other green. We’d nicknamed them ‘Stop’ and ‘Go’ in a fit of whimsy. My team consisted of myself, my wife Jessica, and four others. Team members have come and gone over the last few months, but our core group is intact. Still with me is Eric Craig, our contact with the military, now a Captain and a damned good man to have with us, and Darren Patterson, the kid we met in the mountains, who has just turned seventeen and is engaged to Mandy. Kim Dresson had gone out with us several times before meeting a man here and getting married last month, and she was working with the agricultural teams now. We’d replaced her with Sanji Singh, a former Vancouver police officer and fire fighter, and a good friend of ours since we had rescued him, his brother Jay, and a bunch of others from a store in Prince George where they had been holed up and surrounded by over two thousand undead. Sanji had just come out of a stint with the military, and was joining us as a full time member of Salvage Team 107. His brother Jay is a dentist, very much in demand, who works here in Cold Lake.

  The final team member, six being the suggested minimum number we should take out on a trip, was a former college student a few years older than Darren, named Chris Nakao. His father was Japanese, his mother Scottish. We’d met him three months ago when his entire family, including two younger sisters and an uncle, were brought in by a rescue squad. They’d been living in the outskirts of Edmonton for almost a year, and finally hit the road when they ran out of supplies. They had met up with the rescue squad near Westlock, and were escorted to Cold Lake. Chris set out to make a living and help support his family, and ended up joining our team. He’d been out with us once so far, and proved his worth quite satisfactorily.

  We loaded the trucks up with food, water, and clothes. Each of us had a C7A1 or a shotgun as a primary weapon, and a Browning 9mm sidearm, and we each carried 100 rounds for the Brownings, and another 100 rounds for the C7’s. In the vehicles we stowed extra ammo and clips, gun cleaning kits, and an assortment of melee weaponry for the ‘up close and personal’ contacts that could happen so easily. We carried maps, radios, and spare parts for the vehicles. We had a few extra car batteries, and cans of gasoline strapped to the outside of the Explorers. We had siphons and all of us were trained in hotwiring methods. Water purification tablets, sun block, raingear, and emergency first aid kits. All of this we managed to cram into a pair of Explorers, one towing a trailer small enough not to be too much of a gas waster.

  Our plan for this trip was to head west towards Slave Lake, a town on the eastern coast of the Lesser Slave Lake, a 100 km long body of water in the north of Alberta. If we were lucky, we might find unlooted stores, tanker trucks filled with gasoline, and living survivors. Time would tell. A military expedition out there in the middle of winter hadn’t found much, but they had been primarily concerned with survivors, not locating supplies. Our priorities were a little different.

  In the morning we would be ready to go. Hundreds of kilometres of travel, scrounging what fuel we could, what food we could, in lands inhabited by the ravenous walking dead, all intent on devouring our flesh to satisfy a need they could not explain, while they slowly decayed, withered, rotted. We must be crazy.

  * * *

  We hit the road early on the 26th of August, just as the weather was starting to look like summer again. It had been crappy for so long that we had gotten used to rain, cloud cover that looked like a sheet of lead, and seeing our breath in the air in the mornings. When the sun came out it was a pleasant change.

  Jess and I sat next to each other in the lead vehicle, ‘Stop’, and Sanji was in the back seat. Jess drove, to keep her mind off Michael, her son. He was being left behind with my sister Sarah and some others. There was no way we would take Michael out with us deliberately, though we had managed to keep him alive between the times we met and when we got to Cold Lake. He was five now, and understood that we had to go out for supplies. Jess didn’t like leaving him, but he had classes and we had a job. I didn’t like leaving him either. He’s a great kid and I love him like he was my own, but we need to do this so we can have food and drink for the thousands of survivors we have crammed into the town.

  So Jess drove. It helped her. In the meantime, Sanji and I struck up a conversation, and only when we reached the first checkpoint outside the town fence did we stop reminiscing. Within three kilometres of the fence everything is usually pretty empty of undead. They get inside the perimeter, and we deal with them at the fence, just like we did a few days ago. But once outside the first checkpoint things can get hairy. With the roving patrols to keep numbers down we usually do okay, but it pays never to be too sure of yourself. After all, one bite is all it takes.

  I remember one time, I was trapped in a school by a horde of the damned things, and a zombie bit me on the arm. The only reason I am not dead and walking right this moment is that I had broken my wrist earlier, and had a cast on. It was enough to stop the bite from penetrating to flesh. I had to pick teeth out of the cast later on, but I survived.

  I looked back at the other Explorer, ‘Go’, and could make out Eric’s blonde hair in the drivers seat. He, Chris, and Darren were all riding together. I could see the military camouflage clothing they wore through the windscreen. Actually, our gear was a mix of military and civilian clothing and equipment. I myself favoured a pair of sturdy jeans, military boots, and a black t-shirt, over which I would usually wear a vest or jacket the armed forces had supplied us with. Jess liked the camouflage pants, but usually wore a tank top. Eric was the only one of us who wore strictly military gear.

  Our destination that day was the town of Athabasca, and from there we would start west until we found a clear path north towards Slave Lake. If time permitted, we would head farther west from there, along towards Peace River, since none of those communities had been contacted since this began, over a year ago. If there were any survivors in that area we should try to contact them and tell them about Cold Lake. If we found only the dead we would mark the area on the maps and move on.

  We drove for most of the morning on roads thankfully clear of debris, car wrecks, and walking corpses. Like I said, we patrol this area often, and any zombie encountered is destroyed as soon as possible. Likewise, the roads have been cleared of cars and trucks, many salvaged, and many others abandoned in the ditches. We saw a total of three undead that morning, and all were off the roads, in fields or up on hills. We called them in, and left th
em to others to deal with.

  We arrived at Athabasca shortly before lunch time, and stopped at the gates where we were met by armed sentries. We showed our passes and drove through to the inspection area, where we got out and submitted to a medical examination to prove that we had not been bitten. We all did this every time we went inside a surviving community, and we did that so often that we didn’t even think it unusual. We had seen people come in who were bitten before. Usually they didn’t try to hide it, just showed the medics and looked depressed. They were offered choices, usually between a bullet and a pill. Most took the pill. The bullet followed after the heart had stopped.

  On the other hand were those who tried to hide the bites. They just got a bullet. It was quick and painless, and got the point across to others. The point being, if you come into a community with a bite, you risk the lives of everyone there. Since the bites are always fatal, and always result in the victim rising, there is no choice but death. Better the pill, and a quiet, peaceful death, than a bullet to the brain while soldiers pin you to the ground.

  * * *

  Broken glass splintered and cracked beneath my feet as I stepped through the window frame of the gas station. Damp leaves and old newspapers mildewed in the corner, and something small and furry scuttled away through the door into the garage. There was a smell of stale piss, and I wanted to gag. To my left, Sanji stepped over the window frame, Browning 9mm at the ready. We were doing a check on a gas station we had stopped at on the road between Athabasca and Slave Lake. Our maps said it had been checked before, a few months ago, but we needed a rest stop, and this was a convenient place. Sanji and I went to check the interior of the station while the others checked outside and guarded the vehicles.