Authors note: It's been a while, but it's here. I had this chapter finished before christmas but the USB disc I had written it on went psycho and formated itself. I've been busy celebrating certain holidays and so on so there hasn't been much writing, untill yesterday. Anyone who can guess where the names on three of the new characters are from gets a lollypop.
Chapter three: Bummer
The two boys ran as fast as they could for as long as they could. But none of them were in good shape and they stopped after a mile when their lungs felt like if they were going to explode. There they decided to stop and wait to see if the zombies had followed them or not. They hid and waited. They waited in an hour before they realized that the zombies probably weren't coming after them at all. But in the almost total darkness of the night every little sound and every shape might have been a zombie. Both Mark and Alec were scared shitless. They sat there, thirty feet away from the road and leaned against each others backs. Mark had the shotgun and Alec with the two glocks. Before everyone died Jimmy had showed them the basics of using the guns. Both of them felt a lot more confident with the guns now when they knew if the safety was on or off.
"Do you think we should keep moving or stay here?" Mark asked his friend.
"Don't know, don't care. We're as good as dead anyway." Alec answered in a very, very depressed tone.
"No we're not. At least I'm not going to get eaten by some dead fuck. Do you?" Mark snapped back.
"Do you really think you're going to survive one more day in this mess?" Alec asked and almost started to laugh, he didn't think so. "Everyone else is dead, so what does it matter if we die."
"I don't know if I'm going to die tomorrow or the day after that, but at least I'm going to try to survive for as long as possible. If you don't think so I don't really get the way you're thinking. Why don't you just lie down and die?" Mark said. "Let's get some sleep and then we keep on moving tomorrow. I'll take first shift."
"Ok, I would fall asleep if I took the first shift anyway." Alec answered and put the two glocks in the bag with all the other weapons. Even if the ground was hard and that every sound might have been an assulting zombie he fell asleep fast.
Mark never needed much sleep at all. He could sleep nine hours and stay up for forty eight, if he wanted to. But if he felt for sleeping he could sleep really long too. As he sat in the night and scanned for any kind of enemy he started to think about how crazy this day had been. First he'd seen the end of the world as we know it, then the robbers, the zombies and driving through the dying Rockport, then they had been safe for a while before Jenny and Morgan had died and returned. He had actually seen two of his best friends get killed. That hurt a little. Knowing that he would never see any of them again. At least he was alive, that was what mattered. Then he thought about what might have happened to his family. He knew that they probably were dead, and that was really bad too. Then he changed the subject into thinking of how all those people he had known and really didn't like were dead. That made him smile for himself in the darkness.
After imagining how Mr. Harrison, his math teacher, probably got eaten he swore an oath to himself. I will do anything to survive for as long as possible. I am not going to end up as one of those soulless fucks, he thought over and over in his head. He sat all night and thought while nothing threatening happened around him. But when the sun rose over the horizon it was as if Marks biological clock told him that he had been awake for to long, which he actually had. In a few minutes he turned from awake and alert to exausted and almost asleep. He only closed his eyes to rest a little. And fell asleep.
The next thing he knew was that Alec was tapping him on his shoulder. He reacted without thinking and grabbed the shotgun and almost slammed its barrel into Alecs torso before he realized who the figure in front of him was.
"Fuck man! You scared the crap out of me. I thought I was going to die." He almost screamed.
"We would have if one of the zombies found us. You didn't wake me up. You should have." Alec said.
Mark grunted something and realized how hungry he was. None of the boys had eaten anything classified as real food since their breakfast yesterday. The sun was up now, the clock was at least past eight. Mark got up on his feet and slung the shotgun over his shoulder. Alec got up after him and reached down into the duffel bag and retrived one of the glocks which he put in his pants, what he later on learnt was called a mexican. Then he slung the bag over his shoulder.
"What do we do know?" Alec asked.
"I dunno. I thought about going back to the roadstop resturant and get the car. What do you think about that?" Mark said.
"Isn't that a little dangerous?" Alec asked. "It's at least four zombies in there."
"But we need the car and the food. And it would be nice knowing that Stan and Kyle are dead and not up and moving around. And we're packing some really mean heat in that bag too." Mark said. He would see it as a favor if he turned into one of the undead.
"It's your choice. You're right when you're saying that we need that stuff, but we might get killed trying to get it." Alec said.
"But walking around here without any food is kinda dangerous too. Without a car they zombies would run us down and kill us easily." Mark told Alec.
"Let's do it then." Alec decided and the two friends were of to another adventure.
The sun was behind the two boys and when they walked they saw their shadows. Alecs shadow was taller than Marks and thinner. He looked like a scarecrow. Mark wasn't fat but he was bigger than Alec, broad shouldered and tall, just not as tall as Alec. If he had spent all those hours working out instead of lying on the sofa watching TV he probably would have looked like a doped up ox or something. After a while they saw the roadstop cafe and the humve. The zombies were nowhere to be seen, probably still inside. When the two boys got there they put the bag down and armed themselves. Mark took the shotgun and the .38 in his pocket while Alec grabbed the two glocks. They shared an unceartain look and went in.
The first thing that hit the two boys when they entered was the hideous coppery smell of blood. And Jenny's corpse, it was eaten upon. They didn't see any of their lost comrades at first, but then they saw that the kitchen door was open. And that was the gates of hell. And from it the Jimmy zombie came charging. Mark reacted first and fired of a load of buckshot at the enemy. It hit the totally shredded the zombies shoulder and threw it backwards. But as soon as it landed it tried to get up again. But then Alec stepped in, holding one of the glocks with both hands. He fired two shots into the ghouls face and Jimmys head was destroyed like a melon hitting the ground from the third floor. Almost at the same time the Stan zombie and the Kyle zombie stormed out. Mark pumped the shotgun and started to pace backwards aiming at the zombies. He fired another load at the two walking dead but missed. Alec on the other hand started to fire and emptied the clip at the two corpses. At least some of the bullets hit, but only one did real damage. Stan took one in the head and the wall behind him was painted red and pink.
Mark pumped the shotgun again and fired a third shot at his former friend. This time he hit Kyle (since he was much closer now) in the head, perfect shot. Kyles head exploded and both Alec's and Mark's clothes were splattered with brain and blood and bone. And last of the undead Morgan's corpse came stumbling. The zombie took one step, fell and tried to get up to take one more step and fall again. Mark pumped the shotgun and ended his misery with another almost point blanc shot. Again he was splattered with brains and blood and bone. The building went silent and both boys threw up. When they had been fighting they didn't really care about all the horrors they saw, but later, when the adrenaline didn't last anymore, the things they'd seen reached them.
When the whole vomiting part was over they searched for the gun Jimmy had used last night to take car of Jenny. After a few minutes of searching they found it and put it back in the weapon bag. Then they ate, a lot. Candybars, coca cola and chips, everything went down to still their hunger. But they ate outside since the scene inside wasn't to appealing.
"Do you think we should bury them?" Mark asked, unceartan of what to do with the truly dead inside.
"Yeah right, since we don't have a shovel and we both are to damn tired to really do anything." Alec said with a hint of sarcasm.
"Should we burn them?" Mark asked a minute later.
"You mean like burn the whole house?" Alec asked.
"I don't want to fucking move them and letting them lay inside there and rot is a bit... unceremonial." Mark said.
"Then we should grab everything usefull inside before we torch the place." Said Alec.
"OK. But let's do it quick. I don't want to be there a minute more than necessary." Mark said and the two friends went inside to pack some food.
The smell inside was worse, more smell of blood and the new vomit smell made it a torture to stay there. When they had packed as much food as they could carry they searched for something to start the fire with. They found some bottle used for removing paint with, but before they sprayed as much as they could over the floor in the shop and lit a match Mark did something. He walked over to the corpses of Stan and Kyle, the so called South Park brothers. He ripped a piece of cloth from their T-shirts and tied it around his own arm.
"Why did you do that?" Alec asked as he watched Mark finish.
"Since we're not going to get any ashes or anything to remember them with we might aswell do it like this." He told Alec.
"That's a little sick, I'm not going to do it." Alec anwered. Actually he could understand what Mark meant, but he wasn't going to do anything like that.
Then the two boys emptied the bottles over the floor and lit a match and threw it. And ran away from the inferno as the blazing fire spread throughout the whole building. They ran a good twenty meters away from the place and then stood and watched as the flames tore through the roof. As they stood there and sweated from the imense heat Mark realized something.
"The keys! The fucking keys!" He shouted and Alec realized that they forgot the keys inside. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!" Both he and Alec shouted.
In front of them thick black smoke rose as the flames devoured everything inside. They got tired of using every single curse after a while and simply sat down to watch as the house fell apart. Mark had never ever in his whole life felt so fucking stupid as he did now. For all he knew he might have killed both him and Alec. But at least they had food. But that was about it. The whole scene was almost funny.
"What the fuck are we going to do now?" Alec asked.
"We walk." Mark answered.
"Okay. Beats sitting here and sweating our asses off." Alec answered and grabbed his bags.
"What do we really know about the 'zombies?'" Alec asked Mark as they walked away from the burning house and their charred friends.
"They're dead, they're fast and you've got to shot them in the head to kill them." Mark answered. They didn't really know much about the enemy, but at least they knew how to kill them.
"And that they infect through bites." Alec added. That was everything.
"Wanna know something funny?" Mark asked Alec.
"What?" Alec answered.
"They say that if one skips school as much as we did one would end up unemployed and without education, but we skipped school and are alive. Kind of ironic isn't i?" Mark said.
"When you say it like that." Alec said and laughed a little.
They walked a while without saying anything until Alec broke the silence.
"What do you think happened to our family?" He asked.
"I don't really want to know. But I guess that they're as dead as everyone else." Mark answered.
"You're probably right, but I hope they went down fighting." Alec said.
"Picture yourself my mom go down fighting against one of those creatures." Mark said and both boys thought of Marks behemothic mother doing anything.
"I can picture myself that. Like the cavetroll in Lord of the Rings. Breaking necks and smashing skulls." He said and both boys laughed for at leat two minutes. Then they kept walking.
They walked for hours without stopping. Nothing happened at all. They didn't see any kind of life anywhere, no zombies, no animals and no survivors. After a while both of the boys got a severe headache, the result of only eating sugar and caffeine. Mark regretted that he didn't search for any aspirin or something before they torched the place. But then their luck turned. From far away they heard the unmisstakeable sound of an engine. A car engine. Mark almost felt for doing a little dance as he saw the two cars come down the road against them. The first car stopped ten meters in front of the two boys who stood in the middle of the road, clutching their guns and hoping that this weren't the wrong kind of people. Then the second car stopped a meter or so behind the first one. Two people emerged from the first car. The one sitting in the drivers seat was a middle aged man with white streaks in his brown hair, he had a double barreled shotgun and looked like if he was some kind of hillbilly or something in the flanell shirt and bleached jeans. The one riding shotgun didn't really have a shotgun, he had a revolver and looked like a younger edition of the driver. From the second car three people got out. The first was a black man in his early thirties looking as if was straight out of the ghetto holding an automatic pistol in his right hand. The second was a twenty something guy with sunglasses and typical skater clothes. He didn't have a gun, he simply held a fireaxe. The third man was in the same age as the one with the fire axe and had a blonde beard and hair and didn't really have a weapon. These people didn't look like the wrong kind of people. A ragtag group of survivors in a world were everything was turned upside down maybe, but not the wrong kind of people. For several moments the two groups stood and watched each other. No one wanted to make the first move, so they just stood there for a while. But then the first car's driver made the first move.
"You fellas want a ride?" He asked like he was driving past the two of them a normal day.
"Sure." Mark said and started to walk to the cars.
"Not so fast, drop them guns!" The younger redneck shouted and raised his enourmous revolver. Both Mark and Alec stopped instantly as they realized that someone pointed a gun at them. Maybe this was the wrong kind of people after all Mark thought.
"Stop that Carl!" The older redneck said like he was telling someone to be a little more polite. "Don't you see that these two are 'live and kicking. And two kids, they don't want to harm us at all." He said. Now he spoke in a calming tone, reassuring Carl Jonas that Mark and Alec didn't want to harm them. It seemed to work as the man lowered the revolver. "Sorry 'bout that, he's a little jumpy and all after everything that has happened. Where are you from anyways?" The driver continued.
The three men in the second car had reached the first one now.
"We're from Rockport down south. Is it as bad up north as it is there?" Alec asked.
"It sure as hell is bad up there. Are you saying that it isn't any better here?" The driver asked.
"I don't think so. You hope you're not having any bitten people with you." Mark said.
"No, why would that be bad?"
"Because the viruse or whatever it is seems to transmit through bites." Mark said.
"That's good to know, how do you know that?" The fire axe man asked.
"We saw it happen. There were seven of us back then. And as you see we're only two." Alec said.
"To bad. Where do you think we should go then?" The old redneck said.
"Anywhere. Last thing we saw on TV was that this shit was everywhere." Mark said.
"That's bad. I'm Steve and the youngster over there is my nefue Carl." He said and pointed at the younger hillbilly. "In the car over there is my daughter Jessica." Both boys looked at the car and got a glance of a beautiful face belonging to a girl in their own age. "As we drove south we hooked up with these three young men who can introduce themselves."
"I'm Brandon." The fire axe guy said.
"I'm Terry." The black man said.
"Ryan." The third one grunted.
"I'm Mark and this is Alec." Mark introduced them.
"We'll get to know each other during the ride. I don't have any room in my car so you two car ride with Brandon and the others." Steve said and returned to the car.
The two boys got inside the car with the others and they were off. Terry simply followed Steve down the road to wherever he was heading. No one seemed to know anything the two boys didn't know and it was good to be in the company of some other people. Everything felt safe. But Mark kept on guard. He promised himself to always be on his guard nowdays. Nowhere was completley safe, only safer. This was safer than trudging down the road.