Daddy Issues
A Father and Son Zombie Story
By Keith Carpenter
Day ONE… His body lurched forward into a sitting potion in one single jerk, like those people who suffer from sleep apnea do when their body decides to start breathing again, but he didn’t seem to have the luxury of breath.
He sat there a moment; something was wrong. Every inch of his body hurt and the pain was like nothing he could remember having felt before.
He began to rise from the wet damp ground where he had been lying in a pool of his own blood. His arms and legs were limp as if they had all gone to sleep but there were no pins and needles, just dead weight trying to prop itself up, trying to make itself walk again. He had no memory of who he was, where he was or how he had gotten there, but he was there and everything around him was a haze; a blur of an unfocused reality that he didn’t seem to be a part of any longer.
As he began to move, he realized something was plastered to his chest just under the gaping open wound in his neck. It was stuck there by the blood that had dried and it was attached to a chain that was around his neck. He tugged at it and noticed it was some sort of necklace. Probably something someone meaningful had given to him but he could not remember where it came from. It was a tooth of some kind. A large sharp tooth with something etched into the enamel. It was covered with blood and hard for his dried up eyes to make out but it must have been important to him so he left it alone and his attention went back to that terrible urge he was having, the distinctive hunger that he still could not identify.
He tried to call out to anyone who might hear him, but nothing came out. Nothing audible at least, it was just a moan of agony and pain as one foot shuffled in front of the other allowing him to slowly move. He could feel air escaping from his throat, escaping from his neck, through that open gaping wound; gurgling blood as the last air escaped his lungs… he was hurt. How badly he didn’t know.
Something was calling him, drawing him away, something that he had once had but now seemed to have lost. There was an overwhelming desire in him to find it but he wasn’t sure what exactly IT was. The thing that drew him was overpowering, he had to have it. Nothing else mattered anymore. The desire was like a flame in his inner most being, a hunger for something that would sustain him and keep him going. He wanted it, he needed it but he didn’t even know where to get it.
Day SIX… His muscles ached and were so stiff he could barely move. He had wandered around for days trying to figure out what drew him and compelled him onward. People all around him screaming and running and being knocked down by others just like him. Those other people smelled different. It was a smell that penetrated his putrefying nostrils from a hundred yards. It was a wonderful smell.
Maybe that’s why the creepers like himself were devouring them like rabid animals, eating their flesh… FLESH… that was it. He finally realized what was drawing him onward… what he smelled… What it was that he needed. He wanted to join them and tear into the flesh of the other people who ran scared and hid in the shadows of the buildings and garbage bins that lined the alleys between them. He began to realize he was dead. He had awakened from death into a world where he was drawn by the desire to consume that which he didn’t have, warm bloody flesh.
He went into the street and saw a faceless man slumped over a wrecked car attacking a woman who was helpless; screaming for help that would never come. There were hundreds of creepers just like him and they all desired the same thing. They all wanted nothing more than to peel the flesh from the bone and devour it like ambrosia from the Gods.
It had been days since he awakened and he had yet to satisfy this hunger inside of himself. Now that he realized what it was he was eager to eat. Eager to devour the very flesh that he knew would sustain him. Then he heard a cry. It came from inside the car where the faceless man was eating the woman. He slowly crept into the car and saw there in the back seat … a baby buckled safely into its car seat. His cloudy eyes could make out its small squirming figure. He reached out his hand and touched it. It was warm and soft….. and… and… delicious.
Day FIFTY… His craving was relentless and never satisfied. It had been many weeks since his awakening. His skin now drawn over the bone like layers of decaying leather, made every movement harder to achieve than the next. The baking sun was agonizing as it only made the process of decay seem to speed up and cause him to feel like he was literally falling apart, which he was. Hoards of other creepers just like him pushing and shoving in every direction, only seeking out the living to only eventually turn them into what they were, the walking dead.
The arm of a man he had devoured that morning at sunrise was dangling from his left hand. He had it in a death-grip, holding onto it thoughtlessly as he made his way toward that every present destination, where or what it was he didn’t know but his rotting decaying brain was leading him somewhere… nowhere… like a living dead mannequin pressing onward toward hell. The city never seemed to end. One trashed street after another, one avenue of smashed burned out cars after another and only once in a great while did he get a whiff of that delicious aroma. The smell of ambrosia mixed with the recognizable aroma of sweat and body odor. People… living breathing people… but where were they? A tendon snapped in his neck as he quickly craned it to the left. He saw something move in the distance.
Suddenly there was a feeling of pressure in the side of his head. Something had hit him. He looked and saw in an alleyway between two tall buildings a teenage boy hiding behind a smashed car. He jumped out from behind the car and began to yell at him and he threw something at him. It hit him again just like before. It was the same feeling of pressure smacking into his flesh but there was no pain. It only made him angry. He began to shamble toward the ballsy teen, arms outspread and fingers clawing like eagle talons. He wanted the boy… he wanted his flesh… he needed his brains.
Day FIFTY ONE… He had been eating all night and now it was dawn. Looking down on him, gnawing on his intestines, he would guess he was about sixteen years old. The boy had turned to throw a third chunk of brick at him and probably would have hit him in the head again if he hadn’t tripped on a car tire and fallen down. He hadn’t thought about it or remembered it until that moment, looking at the boys flesh but he too was a teenager when he died… He was a week short of his 20th birthday.
Something in him regretted having to kill to survive, but the feeling of sheer bliss that the flesh of the living gave him when he consumed it, was well worth it all. Plus he didn’t ask for this, to be killed and brought back as a hunk of walking death. In some ways he was doing this kid a favor by speeding up the inevitable cause he would eventually have become one of them…. sooner if not later. And he would come back… for sure. They always do when the brain is left intact. And as hungry as he was he could not be bothered to crack open the boys skull and eat the brains. The work involved is almost like the difference in tucking into a nice juicy meat pie and trying to crack open a coconut.
Day SEVENTY NINE… The buildings around him were mostly vandalized and trashed. The creepers kept growing in numbers and the living were getting scarcer. It was becoming harder and harder to find sustenance and he could feel his body tightening and slowing and falling apart as he lumbered along.
He realized that he kept seeing things that brought back flashes of memory to him. Things that had been part of his previous life, like music and pictures and people. Sometimes he would even see another creeper that looked familiar to him, but what could he do. It’s not like they could introduce themselves and shoot the bull about days gone by. His decaying brain just didn’t work that way anymore.
The flashes were few and far between and his consciousness was negligible at best. Mostly it was just a driving force to find bloody flesh. Suddenly a shot rang out and his left arm wrenched back with a force that ripped open the rotting flesh. He looked up and saw faces looking at him from the broken windows of a decapitated apartment complex. They really should have left well enough alone if they had been smart. He didn’t know they were there until they ripped open his arm with their gunshot.
He turned and looked at the open stairwell and started towards it with all the speed he could muster. About thirty other creepers heard the shot too and seeing him turn they followed his lead into the building. Suddenly some words entered his rotting brain. Words of wisdom his father had said to him before…. “You should never kick a sleeping dog.”
Day EIGHTY SIX… He had been wandering around in the apartment building for a week at least, but time is nothing to you, when you are a walking corpse. He and the other creepers sniffed out at least ten of the survivors that had held up in the apartment building and they had spent the better part of the week ravaging their flesh and eating their brains but there were a few left, still hiding, just waiting to be found by them. The one with the gun had taken another shot at him and missed and that was his big mistake.
He didn’t really feel emotions per say but he did take out some sort of revenge on him when he smashed his skull against the stair banister and feasted on his warm chewy brains. Somehow it felt really good and he was driven to find the rest of the survivors. He and a group of about twelve of the ugliest creepers you could imagine finally made it to the roof of the building.
Most of the creepers he was with had been dead longer than he had and they were in really bad shape. He had a gash in his neck and a torn up arm but some of them had their guts hanging out or their faces half eaten off it was quite gruesome but hey he was one of them so he was used to it. Norman the creeper who was leading the rest of them to the roof got his fingers cut off by the metal door at the top of the staircase. It seems the survivors were trying to push against him to close it and he got his fingers caught in the slamming door, only to have them severed clean off.
The three remaining survivors, an old man, a woman and a teenage girl, finally relented and ran for the roof’s edge with nowhere to go by the time we got out onto the gravel and tar. “Treat others like you want to be treated” this rang out in his memory for some reason. He was having a random memory all of the sudden. He remembered that he was very young, about four to be exact, when his father had to leave him for medical reasons. But his mother used to always remind him of his little sayings. Sayings like “kicking the sleeping dog” and “treating others like you wanted to be treated” things that meant nothing to him now, but in his life he had held them near and dear to his heart. He was still pretty satisfied with Mr. “Smith and Wesson’s” brains that he had gorged on only an hour or so before, so his zeal for the kill was not as strong. He actually thought for a minute that he might just bite the girl in the throat and let her turn so he could have someone to hang out with for a while, someone his own age so to speak.
Day NINTY FIVE… He had fallen out of a window of the apartment complex and landed three stories below. It was a fall that would have killed him if I were alive. In the process his messed up arm was ripped off and left dangling from the window frame, so he had been wandering around minus an arm for almost a week now. The girl he had bitten did turn but like most girls through his life she never gave him the time of day, so he moved on not knowing where the hell he was going, but going none the less.
He had wondered around Central Park with a group of creepers in hopes of finding more food but things had gotten really bad. Survivors were so scarce now that all of them were slowing down and mostly meandering in circles going nowhere. He had tried gnawing on the odd piece of corpse he would find lying around now and then but it just wasn’t the same. It didn’t taste right. All cold and dead like himself. It wasn’t a substitute for warm bloody flesh, flesh which was now so hard to find.
He was dragging himself down a side street, literally. At this point one of his legs had gotten ripped up when he stepped in a broken sewer grate and mangled the tendons, so his foot was just dragging along. But it was while dragging himself along that he saw something moving inside of a convenience store. It was a young boy a couple years younger than him and he was rummaging around in the store for supplies. He was being quiet, making his way closer so the boy didn’t hear him, but he was almost as interested to see where the boy had come from as he was to eat his brains.
The boy grabbed some supplies and scurried down to the end of the street that came to a junction. It was there at that junction that he noticed the building he had been drawn to. It was the place his father had taken him so many years before. He couldn’t remember the name and his brain was in no shape to read the sign but he recognized its beauty. It was one of the nicest hotels in the City. The words ‘Rita Car’ kept flashing in his rotten brain. He couldn’t make out the name but he knew it was the place. He suddenly noticed that there was group of other creepers that had also seen the boy. They began to ramble faster toward the boy, when he noticed they were there. The boy dropped the bags with the supplies he had collected and began to run toward the hotel. He had to follow him. He felt like it was somehow his destiny.
Day ONE HUNDRED AND ONE… He was by nature a quiet corpse. He couldn’t moan and He didn’t know how other creepers did it. He was dead and he didn’t breathe but he guessed some of the others had a way of inflating and deflating their dead dried up lungs, but for him it was a plus. He had followed the boy until he escaped into the hotel with the help of another man and a boy.
The other creepers seemed to be very stupid compared to him, or maybe somehow his brain wasn’t quite as decayed as theirs. The creepers spent all night pushing up against the glass window of the hotel’s front façade pressing and smearing their bloody hands and bodily fluid all over the glass, but he was the one that had the brain power to pick up a large rock and smash the front window so they could all get inside.
The man and the boy were on the balcony above them and none of the other creepers could figure out how to get to them. He saw the man disappear with another young boy and a dog, into the stairwell. For some reason He had the feeling they would go down into the parking lot instead of up into the hotel, so that’s where he went, and all the other creepers followed him down there. By this time he was tired of chasing the boy, but he was determined to catch him and eat his warm bloody brains.
***
Mac was trying to coax the girl out of the box when he suddenly heard a very familiar and unwelcomed moaning sound. It was faint but it was thick with the voices of more than one stencher. He knew he had been discovered. Mac reached into the far corner of the shadowy box and grabbed the crying girl and ran for his life, retracing the direction he had come in. The mob of stenchers had just rounded the corner and they seemed to be led by a one armed male zombie just a bit older than Mac and in some strange way the look on his face made Mac feel like he was coming specifically after him.
***
At this point Bill was very worried. Mac had been gone almost 45 minutes and in zombie apocalypse, terms that was an eternity. He was literally sitting in the car waiting with Taylor in the back seat, ready to start up the car the moment he arrived. He had actually given himself about 15 more minutes to wait before he gave Mac up for dead and got the hell out of there.
I know it sounds pretty harsh, but he just couldn’t wait any longer than that. Suddenly he heard Rufio’s distinct bark and saw Mac come running out of the alley with a small girl in his arms. Behind him, about twenty yards, was a hoard of living dead that were moving unusually fast and at the front was another boy about Mac’s age. He looked so familiar to Bill at first and then he realized something horrible. His heart sank and he suddenly felt like he was going to throw up.
The young one-armed zombie leading the group was his son Brandon. He had been about 4 or 5 when he had been forced to leave them and when he and his wife divorced she moved to New York with him and he never saw him again. Through the decaying flesh and dried up features he could barely make out the boy he once knew that had grown into a man, but the one thing that convinced him that it was his boy, was the shark tooth necklace that was a souvenir he had obtained on one of the many salt water fishing trips he had taken in his early years of marriage.
He had given it to the boy when he was five so he would always feel that he was close to him even after the divorce. The shark tooth had the initial ‘B’ carved into the enamel and even though all the dried blood, he was sure it was the same one.
Mac was running for his life and Brandon and his hoard of living dead were not far behind. Bill wanted to call out to Brandon to make him stop, but he knew that it would be futile. Brandon was one of them and there was nothing Bill could do about it. What a hell of a way to be reunited with someone you love from your past. He was a zombie…. one of the worst kinds. He was a zombie that Bill loved and knew he was going to have to destroy.
Mac made it to the car and put the small girl in the back seat. She was about the same age Brandon had been the last time Bill had seen him. Bill took his shotgun and began to dispatch every zombie he could, without shooting Brandon. He took out an old woman to his right, whose scalp had been peeled back from her skull and then he blew the head off a young housewife to his left who was definitely a fresh kill and looked almost normal except for the gaping hole in her chest where her lungs had been torn out. He shot zombie after zombie as the group got closer, but he left Brandon intact, still leading the charge.
Mac opened the driver’s door, grabbed the shotgun from Bill and pushed him into the car.
“Get the hell out of here, I’ll hold them off.”
He said in some stupid effort to be brave. But at this point the zombies were on top of them. They had reached the car and were already grabbing at them. Brandon jumped on Mac’s back, throwing his one arm around Mac’s neck and spun him around pulling him into the crowd of living dead. Mac began to shoot into the crowd, dispatching zombies’ right and left but Brandon was on him and there was no getting him off.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
Mac yelled as Brandon took a huge bite out of his shoulder. The car was already idling so Bill shoved it into gear and sped off, only to slam on the breaks about 15 feet away from the hoard. He grabbed the pistol from the front seat and with a not in his stomach and a shaky hand, he aimed it right at Brandon’s head and pulled the trigger. Brandon’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brain matter and he collapsed to the ground taking Mac with him.
The other zombies piled up on Mac like an overzealous high school football tackle. Bill sped away leaving the gore behind him as his eyes welled up with tears. He had just killed his son and he had watched a kid he barely knew give his life to save Taylor, himself, his dog and some little girl none of them even knew, but that’s what separates the heroes from the losers in this world.
THE END
A Father and Son Zombie Story
By Keith Carpenter
Day ONE… His body lurched forward into a sitting potion in one single jerk, like those people who suffer from sleep apnea do when their body decides to start breathing again, but he didn’t seem to have the luxury of breath.
He sat there a moment; something was wrong. Every inch of his body hurt and the pain was like nothing he could remember having felt before.
He began to rise from the wet damp ground where he had been lying in a pool of his own blood. His arms and legs were limp as if they had all gone to sleep but there were no pins and needles, just dead weight trying to prop itself up, trying to make itself walk again. He had no memory of who he was, where he was or how he had gotten there, but he was there and everything around him was a haze; a blur of an unfocused reality that he didn’t seem to be a part of any longer.
As he began to move, he realized something was plastered to his chest just under the gaping open wound in his neck. It was stuck there by the blood that had dried and it was attached to a chain that was around his neck. He tugged at it and noticed it was some sort of necklace. Probably something someone meaningful had given to him but he could not remember where it came from. It was a tooth of some kind. A large sharp tooth with something etched into the enamel. It was covered with blood and hard for his dried up eyes to make out but it must have been important to him so he left it alone and his attention went back to that terrible urge he was having, the distinctive hunger that he still could not identify.
He tried to call out to anyone who might hear him, but nothing came out. Nothing audible at least, it was just a moan of agony and pain as one foot shuffled in front of the other allowing him to slowly move. He could feel air escaping from his throat, escaping from his neck, through that open gaping wound; gurgling blood as the last air escaped his lungs… he was hurt. How badly he didn’t know.
Something was calling him, drawing him away, something that he had once had but now seemed to have lost. There was an overwhelming desire in him to find it but he wasn’t sure what exactly IT was. The thing that drew him was overpowering, he had to have it. Nothing else mattered anymore. The desire was like a flame in his inner most being, a hunger for something that would sustain him and keep him going. He wanted it, he needed it but he didn’t even know where to get it.
Day SIX… His muscles ached and were so stiff he could barely move. He had wandered around for days trying to figure out what drew him and compelled him onward. People all around him screaming and running and being knocked down by others just like him. Those other people smelled different. It was a smell that penetrated his putrefying nostrils from a hundred yards. It was a wonderful smell.
Maybe that’s why the creepers like himself were devouring them like rabid animals, eating their flesh… FLESH… that was it. He finally realized what was drawing him onward… what he smelled… What it was that he needed. He wanted to join them and tear into the flesh of the other people who ran scared and hid in the shadows of the buildings and garbage bins that lined the alleys between them. He began to realize he was dead. He had awakened from death into a world where he was drawn by the desire to consume that which he didn’t have, warm bloody flesh.
He went into the street and saw a faceless man slumped over a wrecked car attacking a woman who was helpless; screaming for help that would never come. There were hundreds of creepers just like him and they all desired the same thing. They all wanted nothing more than to peel the flesh from the bone and devour it like ambrosia from the Gods.
It had been days since he awakened and he had yet to satisfy this hunger inside of himself. Now that he realized what it was he was eager to eat. Eager to devour the very flesh that he knew would sustain him. Then he heard a cry. It came from inside the car where the faceless man was eating the woman. He slowly crept into the car and saw there in the back seat … a baby buckled safely into its car seat. His cloudy eyes could make out its small squirming figure. He reached out his hand and touched it. It was warm and soft….. and… and… delicious.
Day FIFTY… His craving was relentless and never satisfied. It had been many weeks since his awakening. His skin now drawn over the bone like layers of decaying leather, made every movement harder to achieve than the next. The baking sun was agonizing as it only made the process of decay seem to speed up and cause him to feel like he was literally falling apart, which he was. Hoards of other creepers just like him pushing and shoving in every direction, only seeking out the living to only eventually turn them into what they were, the walking dead.
The arm of a man he had devoured that morning at sunrise was dangling from his left hand. He had it in a death-grip, holding onto it thoughtlessly as he made his way toward that every present destination, where or what it was he didn’t know but his rotting decaying brain was leading him somewhere… nowhere… like a living dead mannequin pressing onward toward hell. The city never seemed to end. One trashed street after another, one avenue of smashed burned out cars after another and only once in a great while did he get a whiff of that delicious aroma. The smell of ambrosia mixed with the recognizable aroma of sweat and body odor. People… living breathing people… but where were they? A tendon snapped in his neck as he quickly craned it to the left. He saw something move in the distance.
Suddenly there was a feeling of pressure in the side of his head. Something had hit him. He looked and saw in an alleyway between two tall buildings a teenage boy hiding behind a smashed car. He jumped out from behind the car and began to yell at him and he threw something at him. It hit him again just like before. It was the same feeling of pressure smacking into his flesh but there was no pain. It only made him angry. He began to shamble toward the ballsy teen, arms outspread and fingers clawing like eagle talons. He wanted the boy… he wanted his flesh… he needed his brains.
Day FIFTY ONE… He had been eating all night and now it was dawn. Looking down on him, gnawing on his intestines, he would guess he was about sixteen years old. The boy had turned to throw a third chunk of brick at him and probably would have hit him in the head again if he hadn’t tripped on a car tire and fallen down. He hadn’t thought about it or remembered it until that moment, looking at the boys flesh but he too was a teenager when he died… He was a week short of his 20th birthday.
Something in him regretted having to kill to survive, but the feeling of sheer bliss that the flesh of the living gave him when he consumed it, was well worth it all. Plus he didn’t ask for this, to be killed and brought back as a hunk of walking death. In some ways he was doing this kid a favor by speeding up the inevitable cause he would eventually have become one of them…. sooner if not later. And he would come back… for sure. They always do when the brain is left intact. And as hungry as he was he could not be bothered to crack open the boys skull and eat the brains. The work involved is almost like the difference in tucking into a nice juicy meat pie and trying to crack open a coconut.
Day SEVENTY NINE… The buildings around him were mostly vandalized and trashed. The creepers kept growing in numbers and the living were getting scarcer. It was becoming harder and harder to find sustenance and he could feel his body tightening and slowing and falling apart as he lumbered along.
He realized that he kept seeing things that brought back flashes of memory to him. Things that had been part of his previous life, like music and pictures and people. Sometimes he would even see another creeper that looked familiar to him, but what could he do. It’s not like they could introduce themselves and shoot the bull about days gone by. His decaying brain just didn’t work that way anymore.
The flashes were few and far between and his consciousness was negligible at best. Mostly it was just a driving force to find bloody flesh. Suddenly a shot rang out and his left arm wrenched back with a force that ripped open the rotting flesh. He looked up and saw faces looking at him from the broken windows of a decapitated apartment complex. They really should have left well enough alone if they had been smart. He didn’t know they were there until they ripped open his arm with their gunshot.
He turned and looked at the open stairwell and started towards it with all the speed he could muster. About thirty other creepers heard the shot too and seeing him turn they followed his lead into the building. Suddenly some words entered his rotting brain. Words of wisdom his father had said to him before…. “You should never kick a sleeping dog.”
Day EIGHTY SIX… He had been wandering around in the apartment building for a week at least, but time is nothing to you, when you are a walking corpse. He and the other creepers sniffed out at least ten of the survivors that had held up in the apartment building and they had spent the better part of the week ravaging their flesh and eating their brains but there were a few left, still hiding, just waiting to be found by them. The one with the gun had taken another shot at him and missed and that was his big mistake.
He didn’t really feel emotions per say but he did take out some sort of revenge on him when he smashed his skull against the stair banister and feasted on his warm chewy brains. Somehow it felt really good and he was driven to find the rest of the survivors. He and a group of about twelve of the ugliest creepers you could imagine finally made it to the roof of the building.
Most of the creepers he was with had been dead longer than he had and they were in really bad shape. He had a gash in his neck and a torn up arm but some of them had their guts hanging out or their faces half eaten off it was quite gruesome but hey he was one of them so he was used to it. Norman the creeper who was leading the rest of them to the roof got his fingers cut off by the metal door at the top of the staircase. It seems the survivors were trying to push against him to close it and he got his fingers caught in the slamming door, only to have them severed clean off.
The three remaining survivors, an old man, a woman and a teenage girl, finally relented and ran for the roof’s edge with nowhere to go by the time we got out onto the gravel and tar. “Treat others like you want to be treated” this rang out in his memory for some reason. He was having a random memory all of the sudden. He remembered that he was very young, about four to be exact, when his father had to leave him for medical reasons. But his mother used to always remind him of his little sayings. Sayings like “kicking the sleeping dog” and “treating others like you wanted to be treated” things that meant nothing to him now, but in his life he had held them near and dear to his heart. He was still pretty satisfied with Mr. “Smith and Wesson’s” brains that he had gorged on only an hour or so before, so his zeal for the kill was not as strong. He actually thought for a minute that he might just bite the girl in the throat and let her turn so he could have someone to hang out with for a while, someone his own age so to speak.
Day NINTY FIVE… He had fallen out of a window of the apartment complex and landed three stories below. It was a fall that would have killed him if I were alive. In the process his messed up arm was ripped off and left dangling from the window frame, so he had been wandering around minus an arm for almost a week now. The girl he had bitten did turn but like most girls through his life she never gave him the time of day, so he moved on not knowing where the hell he was going, but going none the less.
He had wondered around Central Park with a group of creepers in hopes of finding more food but things had gotten really bad. Survivors were so scarce now that all of them were slowing down and mostly meandering in circles going nowhere. He had tried gnawing on the odd piece of corpse he would find lying around now and then but it just wasn’t the same. It didn’t taste right. All cold and dead like himself. It wasn’t a substitute for warm bloody flesh, flesh which was now so hard to find.
He was dragging himself down a side street, literally. At this point one of his legs had gotten ripped up when he stepped in a broken sewer grate and mangled the tendons, so his foot was just dragging along. But it was while dragging himself along that he saw something moving inside of a convenience store. It was a young boy a couple years younger than him and he was rummaging around in the store for supplies. He was being quiet, making his way closer so the boy didn’t hear him, but he was almost as interested to see where the boy had come from as he was to eat his brains.
The boy grabbed some supplies and scurried down to the end of the street that came to a junction. It was there at that junction that he noticed the building he had been drawn to. It was the place his father had taken him so many years before. He couldn’t remember the name and his brain was in no shape to read the sign but he recognized its beauty. It was one of the nicest hotels in the City. The words ‘Rita Car’ kept flashing in his rotten brain. He couldn’t make out the name but he knew it was the place. He suddenly noticed that there was group of other creepers that had also seen the boy. They began to ramble faster toward the boy, when he noticed they were there. The boy dropped the bags with the supplies he had collected and began to run toward the hotel. He had to follow him. He felt like it was somehow his destiny.
Day ONE HUNDRED AND ONE… He was by nature a quiet corpse. He couldn’t moan and He didn’t know how other creepers did it. He was dead and he didn’t breathe but he guessed some of the others had a way of inflating and deflating their dead dried up lungs, but for him it was a plus. He had followed the boy until he escaped into the hotel with the help of another man and a boy.
The other creepers seemed to be very stupid compared to him, or maybe somehow his brain wasn’t quite as decayed as theirs. The creepers spent all night pushing up against the glass window of the hotel’s front façade pressing and smearing their bloody hands and bodily fluid all over the glass, but he was the one that had the brain power to pick up a large rock and smash the front window so they could all get inside.
The man and the boy were on the balcony above them and none of the other creepers could figure out how to get to them. He saw the man disappear with another young boy and a dog, into the stairwell. For some reason He had the feeling they would go down into the parking lot instead of up into the hotel, so that’s where he went, and all the other creepers followed him down there. By this time he was tired of chasing the boy, but he was determined to catch him and eat his warm bloody brains.
***
Mac was trying to coax the girl out of the box when he suddenly heard a very familiar and unwelcomed moaning sound. It was faint but it was thick with the voices of more than one stencher. He knew he had been discovered. Mac reached into the far corner of the shadowy box and grabbed the crying girl and ran for his life, retracing the direction he had come in. The mob of stenchers had just rounded the corner and they seemed to be led by a one armed male zombie just a bit older than Mac and in some strange way the look on his face made Mac feel like he was coming specifically after him.
***
At this point Bill was very worried. Mac had been gone almost 45 minutes and in zombie apocalypse, terms that was an eternity. He was literally sitting in the car waiting with Taylor in the back seat, ready to start up the car the moment he arrived. He had actually given himself about 15 more minutes to wait before he gave Mac up for dead and got the hell out of there.
I know it sounds pretty harsh, but he just couldn’t wait any longer than that. Suddenly he heard Rufio’s distinct bark and saw Mac come running out of the alley with a small girl in his arms. Behind him, about twenty yards, was a hoard of living dead that were moving unusually fast and at the front was another boy about Mac’s age. He looked so familiar to Bill at first and then he realized something horrible. His heart sank and he suddenly felt like he was going to throw up.
The young one-armed zombie leading the group was his son Brandon. He had been about 4 or 5 when he had been forced to leave them and when he and his wife divorced she moved to New York with him and he never saw him again. Through the decaying flesh and dried up features he could barely make out the boy he once knew that had grown into a man, but the one thing that convinced him that it was his boy, was the shark tooth necklace that was a souvenir he had obtained on one of the many salt water fishing trips he had taken in his early years of marriage.
He had given it to the boy when he was five so he would always feel that he was close to him even after the divorce. The shark tooth had the initial ‘B’ carved into the enamel and even though all the dried blood, he was sure it was the same one.
Mac was running for his life and Brandon and his hoard of living dead were not far behind. Bill wanted to call out to Brandon to make him stop, but he knew that it would be futile. Brandon was one of them and there was nothing Bill could do about it. What a hell of a way to be reunited with someone you love from your past. He was a zombie…. one of the worst kinds. He was a zombie that Bill loved and knew he was going to have to destroy.
Mac made it to the car and put the small girl in the back seat. She was about the same age Brandon had been the last time Bill had seen him. Bill took his shotgun and began to dispatch every zombie he could, without shooting Brandon. He took out an old woman to his right, whose scalp had been peeled back from her skull and then he blew the head off a young housewife to his left who was definitely a fresh kill and looked almost normal except for the gaping hole in her chest where her lungs had been torn out. He shot zombie after zombie as the group got closer, but he left Brandon intact, still leading the charge.
Mac opened the driver’s door, grabbed the shotgun from Bill and pushed him into the car.
“Get the hell out of here, I’ll hold them off.”
He said in some stupid effort to be brave. But at this point the zombies were on top of them. They had reached the car and were already grabbing at them. Brandon jumped on Mac’s back, throwing his one arm around Mac’s neck and spun him around pulling him into the crowd of living dead. Mac began to shoot into the crowd, dispatching zombies’ right and left but Brandon was on him and there was no getting him off.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”
Mac yelled as Brandon took a huge bite out of his shoulder. The car was already idling so Bill shoved it into gear and sped off, only to slam on the breaks about 15 feet away from the hoard. He grabbed the pistol from the front seat and with a not in his stomach and a shaky hand, he aimed it right at Brandon’s head and pulled the trigger. Brandon’s head exploded in a spray of blood and brain matter and he collapsed to the ground taking Mac with him.
The other zombies piled up on Mac like an overzealous high school football tackle. Bill sped away leaving the gore behind him as his eyes welled up with tears. He had just killed his son and he had watched a kid he barely knew give his life to save Taylor, himself, his dog and some little girl none of them even knew, but that’s what separates the heroes from the losers in this world.
THE END