Deadlocked: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  DEADLOCKED

  A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse.

  By James Robert Smith

  This one is for John Russo and George Romero--two who created a new genre.

  DEADLOCKED

  By James Robert Smith,

  Author of THE FLOCK.

  A previous, shorter version of this novel appeared from a different publisher as THE LIVING END. This is the author’s preferred text.

  Published by Last Hemlock Press.

  Copyright 2019. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced in any format in part or in whole without the written permission of the author.

  Prologue: Tipping Point

  It might have been sometime during the days when the Marines were moving weapons systems to secure sites. Or it could have happened in the weeks when the Army and Civil Defense were scattering far and wide to shut down and lock nuclear power plants. Perhaps the day fell when local police forces were disbanding and running. And maybe it was some hour when the general population was in total panic, concerned only with self-preservation, as society fell completely to bits and people were racing about committing acts of theft and violence and generally killing one another at will. But at some point the government dissolved into that same panic, and cholera and dysentery were raging through the population, knocking people down like dominoes…

  A tipping point was reached.

  It was in those mad days that the zombies began to outnumber the living. It was during those holocaust hours that all was lost.

  People trying to flee to cities found the streets lined with the undead. Anyone who attempted to seek refuge in buildings or houses generally realized that those places were packed with the monsters, or that they had simply found places to be trapped. Families who took to the main roads discovered a very nasty fact:

  The highways and expressways were, quite literally, crawling with the reanimated corpses of the recently deceased. Walking flesh flowed down those asphalt and concrete corridors like water flowing from a high point to a low one. The air was filled with the stench of these things—with the defecations of their dying throes; with the ammonia reek of relaxed bladders; with the rot of tens of millions of death rattles polluting the air.

  In those desperate days, when the tide of battle had turned inexorably away from the living and in favor of the undead, the only salvation to be found lay in constant movement. There was no safe house. Security became an illusion. The future was something to be feared as all those who yet drew breath lived in the here and the now. If people thought at all, it was as if they were rabbits on the run, deer at the wrong end of the chase, cows to the slaughter. People did what they figured they had to do, and in the doing many more of them perished and were devoured, or were delivered as new killers among the raving hordes of zombies.

  The landscape became something truly from a nightmare. In some places the ground was covered as far as the eye could follow with a writhing mass of things that resembled human beings but which, alas, no longer were. The forests moved with the constant press of them. Towns and cities and villages and outposts became host to a seemingly unending flood of the shambles. Their moans echoed over the hills and down the valleys and through the canyons of cities that had become slaughterhouses with streets and walls that were covered red and black with the gore of their victims. When they moved, as a single mass, there was no other sound but the tramp and drag of their slow and implacable tread.

  They stared and raged and were hungry. The things that had once been us never found satisfaction. There was no satiation for their constant and hideous craving for living flesh. Before them, everyone who still lived ran like the harried creatures they resembled. In the wake of this poisonous flood the wily among the living hunkered down and watched. Behind that flood, in the ravaged and ruined land to the rear of the rotting march, people began to gather, to assemble, to wait and watch and exist.

  The ones who yet lived were searching for one thing and one thing only:

  Sanctuary.

  Shortly after the end:

  They were leaving him!

  He could scarcely believe what they’d done. The worst of it was that they had discussed it right in front of him. He’d listened to every word of it. The entire time he’d felt a hideous emptiness in the pit of his stomach while Rick and Tilly had talked about what they were going to do.

  “We can’t take him with us,” Rick had said, in a flat, matter of fact way. In such a tone that BC recognized—one that meant

  Rick would tolerate no discussion on the matter. Tilly knew it well, and knew enough to keep her mouth shut when her husband spoke with that voice.

  “We’ll leave him food,” she said, merely suggesting it, knowing that to argue it would be to risk a verbal lashing, if not an outright beating. “And water. He’ll need water. For a few days, at least.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Rick told her. “But first we need to finish packing the car. I haven’t heard any cars on the street for two days. I think we can make a break for it, now.”

  Indeed, the neighborhood had grown very quiet. Over the previous weeks the country had grown increasingly unstable. Even the normally unemotional talking heads on the news shows had become increasingly strident, saying and doing things on the air that were quite strange, displaying emotions that verged on hysteria and madness. Late in the game, the TV stations had all been militarized and men in fatigues, with shaved heads and hollow cheeks and burning eyes, had taken over the job of doling out information. The last real news either of them had seen was a series of short pieces about the crews of civilian technicians and soldiers who’d been sent out to shut down the nation’s nuclear plants. So that there would be no runaway nuclear reactions if they were suddenly left unattended, the hot fuel packed into stainless steel coffins and left entombed in vast concrete graves.

  Rick had explained that one to Tilly and the children, Little Rick and Maya. Both of the kids were far too young to comprehend what Rick was telling them, but he was of the impression that if you spoke plainly to kids, that they would eventually understand what you were saying, no matter how abstract the idea. “The fuel rods have to be separated and removed,” he told them all. “That way, if the pools of coolant were to somehow empty, the heat of the nuclear reaction won’t run wild and start a meltdown, resulting in the release into radioactivity into the atmosphere and into the groundwater.” Tilly had nodded and the kids, eight-year-old Maya and four-year-old Little Rick had stared at their father, thinking of toys or lunch, knowing that not to feign undivided attention was to risk one of his long monologues, or perhaps a whipping.

  “Did you get the water bottles packed?” he asked his wife.

  “Yes,” she told him. “Six gallons on the floorboard and four more in the trunk. I couldn’t fit any more of them in the trunk.” She’d made several trips into the back yard to quickly provision the auto. In a strange bit of fortune, their decrepit hatchback had looked far too listless to steal in the final days when all Hell had broken loose. One of their neighbors, a college professor who lived one street over, had termed those last rabid hours “Payback Time”. For three days it seemed the nation, from end to end and coast-to-coast, had raged red. Not only had they to contend with the roving groups of undead who plodded about, killing and consuming all they found, but their fellow citizens, too, had degenerated into mad, frightened, murderers.

  “It’s Payback Time,” Ned Waters, their friend and sometime visitor had told them. Ned was a college English teacher and shade tree phi
losopher. “The Black Nationalists are killing anything Caucasian that they can find. White Supremacists are slaughtering everything darker than Jessica Alba. Baptists are killing Jews and Catholics. God save the Yankees who moved down here for the climate.” Indeed, the city was a symphony of racial and religious and regional hatred that succeeded in tearing apart what was left of law and order.

  “Even my next-door neighbor is acting creepy. When he comes out at all, it’s generally to say something nasty to me. You know…he thinks I’m gay!”

  Tilly allowed herself to laugh too quickly at that, but even Rick joined in, seemingly without suspicion at her sudden and uncharacteristic outburst. Generally, she didn’t laugh without his permission.

  The last time they’d seen Ned, he had come over with three magnums of wine (his last) and they’d all sat in front of the little battery-powered television watching the sixth in a series about the brave men who had shut down the last of the active nuclear power plants. The three adults cheered the heroic workers who danced across the tiny black and white screen. They drank a toast and a toast and a toast and a toast and on to these larger-than-life fellows until the three adults were puking drunk.

  And while Rick slept it off, the teacher and Tilly had found a quiet place in the pantry where they screwed like cats for two hours, Ned leaving months of pent up emotion and semen deposited in his host’s shapely Eurasian wife. Before Rick woke up, the teacher was gone, leaving behind half a bottle of Merlot, a satiated woman, and the terminology “Payback Time” for Rick to repeat endlessly. Rick liked the term for these strange end days and kept repeating it until it sounded right.

  But in the half a week since they’d last seen their friend, the neighborhood and the city had grown very quiet. Their windows had been barricaded since the outbreak of the plague that had brought the dead to life. Their doors were securely locked and reinforced. Their pantry was growing empty, though, and they knew that they’d have to make a break for it very soon. There was room for them all, but they’d decided to leave BC to fend for himself.

  “Stop looking at him like that,” Rick commanded Tilly. “We don’t have room for him. He’ll be more trouble than he’s worth.”

  BC ducked his head at that one. That one hurt.

  “And don’t tell the kids that we’re leaving him. We’ll get loaded up in about an hour. Make sure the coast is clear. And then we’ll be out of here.” Rick took that instant to lower a slat of hardwood nailed across the living room window to peer out into the yard. It was still early in the afternoon and the sky was clear. It wasn’t particularly warm, yet, but he knew the nice weather would break soon and that the house would become a hotbox that would be intolerable now that there was no electrical power. They still hadn’t been able to figure out why the water was still working.

  Outside, the neighborhood looked a mess. It was surprising how fast the vegetation had grown up and things fell apart. Yards were choked with knee-high grass and weeds. Limbs and garbage all but filled the sidewalks and streets. A windstorm from a week previous had blown all manner of things to the earth. One never appreciated the mechanics of a society until it was all but gone. Down the avenue, he saw a movement and he froze. Tilly noticed—Rick had all but stopped breathing.

  “What do you see?” She asked.

  “Zombie,” he whispered. “About half a block down.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  Rick looked through his makeshift peephole, his green eyes glaring out. “It’s looking around,” he said. “I think it’s trying to figure out where to go.”

  “Is it alone? Do you see any others?” She buttoned her blouse up to her neck and knew that she’d throw on her black coat before they left. She’d seen those things bite through fabric so easily. Her rule when venturing out was two layers, sometimes three.

  “No. Just the one. But it’s moving this way. It’s looking this way. It…” Rick was silent.

  “What is it, Rick? What’s it doing now? Are there more of them?” She didn’t want to think of the possibility that they’d be found out by a group of them this late in the game, when they were almost ready to leave for good. It wouldn’t be fair!

  BC was alert, now, his attention on every word that was being said. He wanted to peer out of the peephole, too, but knew that Rick would never allow that.

  “It’s Ned,” Rick said. “It’s Ned and he’s going to come here. You know how they are. They come back to what’s familiar, if they can.”

  Tilly’s hand went to her mouth. She was thinking of her liaisons with the college professor, so different from her coupling with her husband. Her girlfriends—before Rick had run them all off—had asked her how she tolerated Rick. Not just his attitude, one of them had said, but his breath! His breath is horrid! He was arguing with me and breathed on me! I thought I was going to vomit!

  Although she didn’t like to admit it, she’d married Rick Nuttman because she’d been so desperate. She’d never had a problem attracting men—she was very well built and her half-Asian/Caucasian features were pleasing to most. But no one wanted to make a long-term commitment. Until Rick had come along. Before she could talk herself out of marrying him, she’d gotten pregnant with the first, with Maya. She wasn’t even sure their daughter was Rick’s. She looked even more Asian than Tilly did, and she suspected the girl belonged, genetically speaking, to her second cousin—a young man named Tran whom she’d seduced not long after she’d met Rick.

  And so she’d accepted Rick Nuttman’s proposal. And a few years later Little Rick had come along. By then, Rick had chased off all of her friends and most of her family. By then, she was too well cowed to leave him, despite the fact that most of the time she was the primary breadwinner. Rick was too busy pursuing a career as a musician or an artist to bother with working a full-time job. And he refused to take work as a laborer, assuring his wife that soon, very soon, he’d land work as an illustrator, as a painter, as a musician. They continued to be very poor. Such had been life when the dead had begun to rise.

  Rick continued to peer through the opened slat in the window. “He’s definitely coming this way. He’s wearing the same yellow shirt he was wearing when he was last here,” he said, whispering, as if his now-dead friend might hear. “Someone shot him,” he added.

  “His neighbor,” Tilly said. “Ned kept saying that his neighbor was taunting him because he thought Ned was gay.”

  “Shit,” Rick whispered again. “Shot him in the back. I think the bullet exited his chest. Lots of blood on the front of his shirt.”

  “Oh. Poor Ned.” Tilly began weeping. “We…we’d better get out of here. Let’s get out of here before he gets to the door. You know how it goes. He’ll start hammering on the door or the side of the house and pretty soon the whole place will be filled with them. That’s how it happens! We’ve seen it happen like that!” She was losing her cool. Behind her, Maya was beginning to whimper.

  “He remembers. It’s like they said. They remember shit from when they were alive. He’s coming back here because he enjoyed talking to me,” Rick insisted.

  At that, Tilly began laughing, and it was all she could do to contain it.

  “Get hold of yourself, Tilly. He’s only about one hundred yards away. Past Mr. Magruder’s place. Even shuffling like he’s doing, he’ll be here in a few minutes. We can’t chance him bringing others with the racket you know he’ll make. I don’t know if we can hold out that long. Especially if the weather turns hot again.”

  “Let me get the kids bundled up. We’ve got time for that. The car’s loaded. All we have to do is get in it and run.” Her attention was then immediately on her kids. “Help me get another shirt and pants on them. Find Little Rick’s gloves,” she reminded her husband.

  “I think you’re overdoing it on the clothes thing. I’m not going to cover myself like that. Slows you down. Gets you too hot.” But he had Little Rick in his lap, helping him put on an extra shirt and putting on another pair of baggy pants over the sweats
his little boy was wearing. Rick preferred his son—the boy was blonde and had only a hint of his quarter Vietnamese blood; the kid might almost pass for white, truth be told. Not like his sister, at all. Only Maya’s intelligence made Rick know that the girl was his kid, despite her features. She just physically took more after her mom, he figured, knowing nothing about Cousin Tran.

  Tilly had mentioned the layering to her husband before, without arguing with him. That was how she had learned to treat the man. Suggestions were sometimes effective, but arguing only brought on his anger and caused him to exhibit his vindictive nature. He had a talent for cruelty, she’d found. She’d suggested that an extra layer of clothing would protect them from being bitten if they were to come into contact with one of the undead. After a while, he’d agreed that this might be the case, but that he wasn’t going to do it for his own reasons. At least he wasn’t forbidding either the children or Tilly to layer. She knew that if she’d treated it as a confrontation that is precisely what he’d have done.

  “Hurry,” she said to the children, holding their hands as she went to the back door in the kitchen. “Everything’s in the car, except for us. All we have to do is open the door and make a run for it.”

  Rick was beside her, then, holding an art portfolio in his left hand. She looked down at it. “What’s that? Why are you bringing that?”

  “I can’t leave all of my illustrations,” he told her. “They might have some value for us. We might be able to trade them. Or barter them.”

  Tilly bit her tongue. There was really no room for that thing in the car. Not when he wasn’t going to take BC with them! She said nothing.

  “Mom? Isn’t BC coming with us?”

  Still in the den, BC sat and looked at them, his eyes pleading, but no other sound or movement. He’d already heard and understood what was going to happen. He would stay. They would go.