Dying Days: Origins Read online

  "I can just as easily shoot you."

  Randy sighed. He could die of frostbite, although, he knew it unlikely. It wasn't that cold. As soon as he pulled his shirt over his head, he felt differently, though. He handed his shirt over his shoulder and she snatched it from him.

  "The jeans," she said.

  Randy was going to be abandoned in a strange town, naked, in the middle of winter. Or the end of winter. Regardless, it wasn't sunny and eighty degrees out. "Do we really have to do this? Can't you just take the car and be done with it?"

  "I can be done with you."

  Randy decided he'd had enough. He put his hands back on his head. "I'm not giving you my pants. If you feel the need to shoot me in the head, then just do it already. But I'd rather die with my boots on than die from hypothermia or the flu."

  "I'm going to give you one more chance to give me your jeans."

  "Nope." Randy decided to tempt fate and slowly turned, expecting to hear the gun fire before his head exploded.

  "Turn back around," she said. She was holding a shotgun. She was beautiful.

  Flowing red hair, pulled back with a white bandanna, was the first thing he noticed. She might have been in her late twenties and she didn't look like a killer. She looked like a hot stripper wearing tight jeans, boots and a skin-tight concert t-shirt.

  "I'm Randy Jackson."

  "I'm not Paula Abdul."

  He smiled but kept his hands on his head. "Ever hear of the band Zebra?"

  "Tell me what you want," she said.

  "I just want you to relax…"

  She snorted. "The song, dumb-ass. The Zebra tune. You were named after the lead singer of some band. So what?"

  "What's your name?"

  "It doesn't matter." She waved the shotgun. "I have the power right now, so I ask the questions. This is how it works." She tapped on the shotgun. "Woman with gun gets to talk. Those are the rules."

  Randy needed to think fast, but charging her would just get a punch in the torso from a shotgun blast. "I get it. Your gun and your rules. But I don't want to lose my pants or shoes. Sorry. If you're going to kill me, just get it over with."

  She lifted the shotgun and aimed at his head. "Suit yourself, Randy Jackson."

  He stood his ground, even though his knees felt like they'd buckle at any second. "Do what you need to do. I can't stop you. But can I ask a question of my executioner?"

  She frowned but didn't waver with the shotgun.

  "What?"

  "Where am I?"

  "Harrisburg, Pennsylvania." She smiled. "Or what's left of it, anyway. I've picked everything clean in a ten block radius. The zombies roam in huge packs for whatever reason. I haven't seen another living soul in weeks."

  "What's your name?"

  She shook her head. "You asked your one question. Get on your knees and turn around."

  "Shoot me in the face if you have to. I want to stare at you, coward with no name." Randy wanted to piss his pants right now.

  "What if I shot you in the balls then?" She aimed at his crotch.

  "I wouldn't like it," he said truthfully.

  "Turn around. I won't ask again."

  Randy gave up. At least I haven't been bitten by a zombie or raped by a horde of them. I'll go out, on my knees, in some shitty town in Pennsylvania. Killed by a hot redhead with a shotgun. Always my luck. "Fine."

  He turned and dropped to his knees, fingers locked tightly behind his neck. Randy closed his eyes and tried to think of something poignant or a kaleidoscope of images about his life, but his mind was blank. He thought, in the end, he'd dwell on Becca and how she was probably still out there. All he could think about was the coldness of the pavement creeping up his knees. Even in the end, it can't be easy, he thought.

  "My name is Tosha Shorb. I'm going to let you live today, and you can keep your shirt, but you can't keep the car. It's too nice and I need to get out of Pennsylvania. I hope you'll understand," she said from right behind him.

  His shirt sailed over his head and he instinctively reached up to grab it at the same time he felt the jarring impact of the shotgun as Tosha smashed him in the back of the head.

  Dying Days: Eric White

  Lisa McKinney

  Eric White crouched under a table, watching the bloody chaos unfold before him. He had never seen anything like this and, while his mind completely and totally tried to reject what he saw, the very core of his being somehow accepted it as reality.

  Zombies. That simply wasn’t a plausible explanation (hell, it was downright crazy) for what he was watching. But that is most certainly what appeared to being happening. For all practical purposes, it looked like zombies, the monsters of television dramas, horror movies and nightmares, were shuffling through the enormous building that Des Moines residents referred to as “The Arena”, attacking anything that moved. Usually the arena was filled with thousands of screaming concert goers or sports fans. Now, screams of a different sort echoed under the high roof. Blood splattered through the air and body parts littered the floor.

  He continued to watch the bloodbath unfold, considering his options, as he saw person after person being eaten alive. Or raped. What the fuck? Eric didn’t believe what he was seeing. The zombies in movies didn’t rape people, for the love of God. However, the evidence was right there in front of him. People were being violated in unthinkable ways that were literally ripping them apart. The zombies helped themselves to chunks of flesh from their victims as they sexually assaulted them, making the horror even more terrible. As if that was even possible.

  Eric was by no means a coward, but he wasn’t a stupid man either. When the shit hit the proverbial fan minutes ago, he quickly took cover under a folding table with a table cloth that reached to the ground so he could observe the action before deciding on his own plan of action. After all, you can’t fight an enemy you don’t know and Eric was gathering as much intel on them as he could right now.

  Zombies poured into the arena where an antique sales event had been underway only minutes before. Eric had been searching for his next trash to treasure makeover for his television show Everything Old is New Again, hoping to find a Hoosier cabinet that had recently been made popular thanks to the internet pinboard craze. He briefly considered the possibility that this was all a horrible dream, and that he was, in fact, really asleep several blocks away in his upscale, downtown hotel. As a severed arm, bloody and studded with teeth marks, slid under the table and up against his knee, Eric decided that was wishful thinking.

  Trying to make as little noise as he could, he carefully lifted the tablecloth to check the status of the fight. The place was still a madhouse as people tried to avoid the stumbling undead and get to the exits. The living were going down by the dozens, but some were fighting back with makeshift weapons they had scavenged from the antique-laden tables that filled the arena. It appeared that the best way to dispatch the dead ones was a hard blow or stab to the head. So, the first order of business was finding a suitable weapon, and that meant leaving the relative safety, for now anyway, of the table he was hidden under.

  * * * * *

  Eric White hadn’t always been the host of a television show that specialized in tutorials for do-it-yourself refurbishing projects. After a four year stint in the Marines, he spent years in the construction business, learning from the ground up, and he still possessed hard, capable muscles and calloused hands from the years of physical labor. At only five feet ten inches, he wasn’t tall enough to be considered tall, nor was he short enough to be considered short, either. His height was strictly average. But his strong jaw and striking blue eyes, along with his more than adequate physique, made him handsome enough to be successful in his small niche of the television market. His hair was what people referred to as “salt and pepper”: black with silver strands scattered throughout, especially around his temples. He preferred to keep it longer and pulled it back into a ponytail most of the time, thinking that it enhanced the ruggedness of his face and lent cre
dibility to his television persona of an earth-friendly, Mr. Fix It, who recycled junk into beautiful creations.

  Exactly how he had gotten from the construction yard to the television studio remained as much a mystery to Eric as anybody else. It seemed as if one day he was building houses and moonlighting by refurbishing old dressers and such for a shabby chic clientele he had developed on the side, and the next he was offered a job doing it in front of the cameras. It was a dream come true, as cliché as that sounded, and it came with more money than he had ever made in his life.

  And that is how Eric White found himself smack dab in the middle of the zombie apocalypse at an antique show. Who would’ve ever thought it would all come down to this?

  * * * * *

  A weapon and an exit strategy, Eric thought. That’s what he needed to get out of here alive. He slipped out the back side of the folding table where he would still be hidden from those things and crawled along the vendor side of the corridor that had been set up with curtains. At each table, he stopped only long enough to glance at the wares for sale to determine if any of them would make a suitable weapon. The first table offered a large variety of milk and carnival glass, most of which had been shattered in the slaughter. Moving on, Eric began to feel dismay as table after table turned out to hold only useless shit, until, finally, at the ninth table, he found a display of old, wooden baseball bats.

  Eric picked up the largest one he could find and rose from his position behind the table. Immediately, a woman, soaked with blood and missing a sizable portion of her neck, reached for him with ruined hands, teeth gnashing in anticipation. Here goes nothing, he thought as he reared back with the bat and swung it at her head with all the strength he could muster. It met with a satisfying “thunk,” which nauseatingly reminded Eric of smashing watermelons with his brother during summers as a boy, and the woman went down in a motionless heap.

  Oh, hell yeah! For the first time, Eric felt a glimmer of hope that he may just make it out alive. He lowered himself behind the table again, this time to plan his escape route. In the short amount of time it had taken him to find the bat and take down the female zombie, the arena had cleared out more than he had thought possible. As the living poured out the exits, the dead (or would it be undead?) streamed after them, leaving only a few dozen stragglers. Most of them were locked in battle with people that had managed to find weapons of their own and stand their ground, letting the panicked masses lead the majority of the zombies away like greyhounds chasing a rabbit. Eric stood up and joined the battle to retake the arena.

  * * * * *

  One hour and forty-two minutes later, every remaining zombie had been killed and removed from the main floor. The survivors had sealed off the arena with the large, metal roll down doors at each entrance. At the moment, they were hurriedly dismantling all the displays and throwing whatever they could lift, including the zombie remains, up into the seating area, in an attempt to clear the floor so they could maintain an unobstructed view of the surrounding, gore spattered area. Just in case they had missed one or two. The last thing they needed was a straggler popping out from behind one of the curtains that separated the large area into rows and taking them by surprise.

  The stuff they couldn’t toss, the men were pushing in front of the smaller doors to fortify them. This, clearing the area and beefing up the security of the doors, had been the idea of Paul Rais, retired full bird Colonel of the US Army, and Eric thought, one smart son of a bitch. He commanded respect and obedience, all while maintaining an air of calm certainty that soothed the survivors of the initial attack. Not that there were too many of them. Eric had counted thirteen all together, including two children. That meant they had eleven fighters, though the fourteen year old boy, Mason, looked like he could be a scraper, if you asked Eric.

  After clearing the area, the remaining people gathered in the middle of the arena floor unsure how to proceed. They found themselves simply staring at each other, sizing up their fellow survivors. Were they companions or competition for survival and any supplies they might be able to scavenge? Eric could see these thoughts flitting over the other’s faces as they sat in a circle, heads craning back and forth, so they could observe any potential danger that might present itself, various odd weapons held tightly in their hands.

  Eric started to speak and found his voice scratchy and almost nonexistent because he hadn’t used it since the attack began, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “Has anybody heard anything from the outside? A phone call or a news update on your smart phone?” Eric lost his own phone somewhere during his mad scramble behind the vendor tables.

  A twenty-something redhead, sitting two people down from him answered, “This thing might as well be a door stop” she said, holding her phone up. She was attractive in a girl next door kind of way. Not chubby, but not rail thin, with full lips and striking, green eyes. Eric thought she was just right, though maybe a bit too young for him. She seemed about half his age. “I can’t get a signal at all and, on second thought, it’s too light to hold open a door.” She threw the phone across the room in exasperation. “Anybody else having better luck with their phone,” she questioned the group.

  Everybody checked their phones, but all experienced similar results. Nobody was able to obtain service. Modern technology appeared to be useless in helping them determine what the hell was happening in the outside world.

  “So, exactly how long should we just wait here? I’ve got a family out there. I need to get home and check on them. Make sure they’re okay. I can’t just sit here,” said a young man with dirty blond hair. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Nobody is opening those doors,” Rais, the Colonel, said authoritatively. “Not until we can scout the area and determine what’s out there.”

  “But what about food?” asked a middle aged woman, clutching an old, weathered garden hoe, its rusty blade covered with blood and something that could be brains. “All the food, the concession stands, the vending machines....they are all on the other side of those doors.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. If you had paid attention, you would’ve seen the doors under the stadium seating. Those doors go somewhere. Could be janitorial closets, employee bathrooms, or they could be break rooms.” Rais explained. “We need to split up and explore whatever is behind those doors. Let’s not panic until we know exactly what we are dealing with here. Now, we don’t know for sure that none of those things got into those rooms, so I’m recommending we use the buddy system. Get a partner and make sure that both of you are armed. Report back here in half an hour. That should be plenty of time. Make a list of everything you find that you think might be even remotely useful: food, water, flashlights, batteries, fire accelerants, anything at all. Let’s go. Find your partners and, above all, be safe.”

  People started milling around and Eric found himself standing next the attractive redhead.

  “Hey, Red! Wanna partner up?” he asked.

  “The name is Jessa. Don’t call me Jessica, Jess or Jessie. Ever,” she replied tersely.

  “Ooookay. Man, you are really touchy about your name.” Eric teased.

  “You would be surprised how often people get it wrong. What the hell am I talking about? We just killed zombies. Fucking real live zombies! Or is it real, dead zombies? Undead? We watched people die, and I’m worrying about you getting my name right. I think I might be going into shock, actually. I don’t feel so well.”

  “Oh, shit!” Eric exclaimed he as noticed the color draining from her face. She swayed before him, obviously dizzy. “Um, sorry. Sit down and put your head between your knees.” He led her to the front row of seats and sat her down in one that wasn’t cluttered with stuff from the earlier purge.

  Jessa put her head down and took deep, controlled breaths. While she concentrated on not passing out, Eric rummaged through some of the junk they had tossed up into the seats. A few minutes later, Jessa was sitting upright and some of the color had returned to her face.

 
“Holy shit!” Eric whispered loud enough for her to hear.

  “You really like that word, don’t you?” she inquired, rubbing her forehead.

  “Well, in all fairness, you did say “fuck” earlier. And it’s a good word. Useful in all sorts of situations.” Eric responded.

  “Like, say, a zombie apocalypse?”

  “Absolutely,” he answered with a lopsided grin.

  “But, in all fairness, I said ‘“fucking”, not “fuck”. And I think fuck is way more appropriate in all situations than shit. Tom-a-to, tom-ah-to. To each is own. Anyway, I never got to finish my introduction and this is important, or it used to be before the fucking zombies, so pay attention. My full name is Jessa James and if you laugh, or even think about making a Jessie James joke, I will clothesline you so hard you won’t eat for a month. My parents were obviously on crack. Now that that is out of the way, what’s your name? I like your ponytail, by the way,” Jessa finished and smiled brightly.

  Eric raised his hand to his short ponytail. He forgot he had pulled it back into a rubber band earlier in the day, while he was inspecting an old butter churn. “Eric White. Pleased to meet you, Jess. Um, under the totally fucked up circumstances and all.” He was messing with something he held in his hands.

  “I said it’s Jessa,” she said between clenched teeth. “Not Jess. Whatcha got there? It looks like a cross between a toy gun and a bow.”

  “You’re not too far off. It’s a hand crossbow. This one is old and it really needs some working over before it will ever be functional, but I think I might be able to fix it. I wonder if there are any bolts for it around here, too.” Eric started groping through more junk.

  “Later, Eric. Let’s get started on what we are supposed to be doing. Food? Water? Weapons? Any of this sound familiar,” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Eric replied absently. “I tend to get sidetracked sometimes. Sorry. But, technically, this is a weapon. Or it could be if I could find some damned bolts for it.”