The Zombie Letters Read online

  Once-upon-a-time internet billionaire Alvin French set the Cessna’s autopilot to somewhere . . . anywhere . . . other than over this once beautiful city. Turning to the airport, he needed to see if anyone was still in the radar towers. Those people could tell him if there were any other birds in the area. The city was now reduced to a burning nothing. Her streets were now littered with blood and glass. Her buildings were burning and spreading like a wildfire because there was no one around to put them out. Alvin picked up the headset radio installed on the dash and put the cans over his ears. “Mayday . . . mayday, this is Alvin French. Does anyone hear me out there? Alvin French, number 66553 009, I am the Cessna flying over LAX right now. Does anyone on the ground hear me? Come on LA, answer me down there, over. If there are any other birds out there, acknowledge this transmission.” Nothing came through, as expected. Shattered windows, looted shops and destroyed vehicles littered the entire grounds of the Los Angeles Airport. There were four fires on the runway terminals and a 747 lay on its side. One of the wings was torn off. A small crowd of walkers congregated around the plane, looking up into the sky as Alvin passed.

  He could see them down there . . . rotted and falling apart, sun-bleached, peeling, leathery, sallow faces that appeared human. They weren’t, though. Their skin looked like peaches rotting in the sun, but refusing to die. Up here, it didn’t seem real. Their empty eyes expelled everything that used to resemble human. On their torn, bloody and half-eaten faces were the looks of the truly dead . . . no readable light of the souls that once inhabited those bodies.

  French first encountered them at a subway station in downtown LA. He decided to take a sub to the office as he did on occasion; not that the BMW or Bentley didn’t do a fine job of transportation. Alvin grew up poor. Raised by the state and never adopted. He liked to be around normal people, having never had any real friends. The ones he knew now only befriended him for his money and the other people in his class of society that were available only cared about money. Frenchie, as he called himself, tinkered with computers since he was a little boy. That’s all he cared to do during those endless hours in that fucking orphanage. The computers were his friends . . . and the only ones that helped him build a life for himself. Money never meant shit to Fenchie. If he had it his way, he would take every cent he ever made and toss it out of the window of the plane. Money was pretty useless now, anyway. Moreso than it was before. It won’t keep you warm anymore. It won’t protect you. Money will never in a million years buy your way out of this situation, either. All the money in the world will still get your ass killed in this world . . . this new world.

  The day he took the subway, he rode it until he was only a couple blocks from his headquarters downtown. People were always dumbfounded at how the CEO of the fastest-rising mobile software company never parked his car in his own spot. It always stayed vacant . . . the paint that designated it as fresh as the day it was done. He got off the sub and saw a mass of people at the underground stop. They were everywhere. Wall to wall. Place usually isn’t this busy. Even for a weekday, he thought as he exited the bus. For a moment, he thought a riot was happening and the sound of the fleeing bus was just the sinking feeling in his stomach. The people were running over each other. They were climbing on top of one another to get to the stairs. Another group of ragged-looking people were weaving their way into and on top of the crowd . . . injecting themselves into it. Alvin didn’t get a good look at anybody. Everything was a blur. Alvin stood on top of a newspaper dispenser and squashed his thin frame into a space between the terminal wall and back wall of the stairway that lead up to the street. He always saw himself as pretty puny, and it was still a tight enough squeeze for him to fear he would get stuck. The stairs were a pain in the ass to navigate, but he got there eventually.

  Outside was hell.

  Immediately after he exited the stairway, a car with the two rear tires on fire nearly ran him over. In an attempt to look around, he tripped over something. A man in a mud-caked pair of slacks and a backwards tux jacket was bent over a young woman. Her eyes were frozen in a state of shock. Alvin could not see what the man was doing . . . he had his back facing Alvin. All he could see was the woman’s eyes lock onto his. She extended a hand to him and uttered a weak sob. “Help me, please . . .”

  “Hey! What the fuck you doin’ to her, man?” Alvin screamed, grabbing her attacker by the shoulder. He turned, showing Alvin his face. A blue, horribly swollen face glared back at him. The man had torn a jagged cavity into the girl’s midsection and had removed her intestines. They were lying discarded on the street beside her. The toothless cavern of a mouth opened wide and the bruised, swollen and bloated man hissed . . . a long and fibrous piece of tissue hanging from his lower lip. The attacker was holding something in his hand. Some of it was in his mouth, too. The girl’s stomach. The guy was eating it. Bloated-man appeared to have been dead for quite some time. Alvin saw a video once of what drowning victims look like. They expand like balloons. The eyes bulge and occasionally pop out. The skin turns a blackish-purple. His fingers were all broken with the white bone protruding from the second set of his knuckle joints; like fingerless gloves. The skinned fingers flopped against his palms where he had forced them to move independent away from the effects of Rigor Mortis. One milkfish grape of an eye pierced his. The dead man reached for him.

  Alvin French backed off and ran. He tore away as fast as he could, past the large groups of terrified people running. Some were lying in the street, missing arms, laying down and holding their guts together. Some had been mugged and tied to poles . . . left defenseless to the chaos. Within the scattered swarms of people were those things. They dragged people from alleyways and into the darkness. People fell from rooftops . . . breaking limbs and popping their heads on the pavement like melons. All of them lay there for a moment, bleeding and twitching. They all got back up and started walking around like the others, dragging broken legs behind them. Cries of pain and terror, the sickly groans of the dead were everywhere. Alvin could hear the SMACK sounds of people falling from high-rise windows. One woman . . . an elderly one at that, fell from what looked like the IXOR Center Tower. Eight hundred and fifty-eight feet straight down. Both of her legs came clean off on impact and her face caved in when she slammed to the ground. Her skull had to have shattered. Her head and face sagged. Her head looked like someone had filled it with broken stones. She used her arms to crawl to the end of the block, where she grabbed a man by the ankle and twisted the foot right off of his leg. He spilled into an alley. The light was still obscured by the waning sunlight. Frenchie threw up, hearing the terrible screams when about twenty of those monsters ran into the alley after him. The sounds of bones snapping and the man’s shoes slapping the pavement could be heard across the street.

  Alvin ran into what looked like a coffee shop. His body was covered in a cold sweat and he was shaking all over. Among the mutilated pile of people covering every inch of the floor were two children . . . no more than five or six years old. They were fighting over someone’s face. It had been torn off and was now just a fleshy mask. When Alvin saw the strange red-eyed children try to pull it away from one another. He could see the holes where the eyes used to be, the strands of hair still attached to the scalp, the mouth-hole stretching so wide that the lips tore open. That sent him over the edge. He turned and hopped into an old Chevy utility van. It was parked and still running. The windshield had been knocked out. Bloody streaks ran in two lines up the dashboard and down the hood. From out of the hole in the vehicle, the sounds of the outside were like the sounds of hell. The screams were coming from everywhere. It was deafening. Like war must sound like. A tuft of hair hung from the beaded glass on the windshield and a human eye . . . the nerve still attached, was impaled on one of the broken wiper blades. Someone had smashed the windshield and must have dragged the driver out. All around him there was death. Chaos and atrocities everywhere made him feel sick to his stomach. Putting the van into drive, Alvin winced as a h
and grabbed the back of his head by his hair. It was pulling so hard that his neck snapped back. He thought he was going to die until he noticed the handgun in the middle console. It had blood all over it, but he picked it up and sent an elbow behind him at his attacker as hard as he could. It felt like hitting a brick. The unknown attacker in the van stumbled back and thumped against the rear doors of the van.

  Another child . . . no more than ten.

  Her bottom jaw had been ripped away from her head, leaving the tongue hanging down like a slug. Her ripped flesh hung like silk where her upper lip had been torn past her gums and exposing the sinus cavities. “Please be loaded,” he said, raising the gun to the little girl’s head. She fell backwards, stumbling into the street when the doors gave way. They must have not been all the way shut. She was still moving when a police officer brought a large machete down onto her neck, severing her head. The body stopped the second the head rolled toward the officer’s feet. The cop extended a hand to Alvin. “Hey, let me in, pal! Start the truck . . . let’s get outta here!” The head at the officer’s feet sank its teeth into the heel of his left foot. He howled and kicked it away, where it rolled down the stairs of the subway terminal. “I know what . . . ha . . . happens now . . .” the officer said. He was slurring his words and looking pale. “Go . . . get out. Out of. Out of here.” Just before Frenchie shut the doors to the back of the van, he caught a glimpse of the policeman holding the machete to his own throat.

  Alvin still had no idea how he made it out of the city in one piece. When he reached the cliffs, there seemed to be no sign of the horrible things that now inhabited the city. None of them chased the van. Perhaps, he assumed, they had some form of intelligence. The food supply was better in the city. Either that or those fucking monsters down there were too hungry to climb the steep cliff to the house. Alvin ditched the van at the bottom of the cliff and climbed a small, twisty path on foot. Now, overlooking the decimated city below his feet, Alvin French’s mind wandered. He let it drift into the sky all around him. There was no destination anymore. No meeting to attend. Nowhere to go. Just look for a place to refuel and sleep. Then . . . back to the sky. If that was going to be his life until either someone saved his beloved city or these dead people starved themselves to death, then so be it.

  Private airports litter the country. Small landing strips and tiny community airports were everywhere. The ones on the edges of towns and ones on National Guard military bases had small restaurants and cafeterias, pilot bars and vending machines that had actual food in them. The ones in the Midwest were walled-off with ten-foot high concrete walls. National Guard ones were ideal. They had some pretty amazing security gates. Small airports are natural fortresses. Nothing is getting in. For the zombies or whatever the hell they were, airports were not good food-sources. Even to the living. They wouldn’t waste their time there unless someone went full retard and wanted to make a hell of a lot of noise. There are a lot of farmer’s fields in Midwestern states and at night, hungry pilots and lot lizards would go out to the fields and steal the crops. Happened all the time; all the way up into the latter nineties when small and private airports finally got some goddamn funding from Uncle Sam. Frenchie was too young to remember this, but his father talked about it from time to time. He said that back then, in the space of one season, an acre of fucking corn would be cleared. The only way in and out of the airports was with a bag or shirt-full of corn, soybeans or tobacco. That doesn’t happen anymore, even though the airports are still in the middle of nowhere. Alvin could find them all blindfolded. The best part about them? Alvin could detonate a mile-wide perimeter of Claymores and the zeds near the city wouldn’t hear a thing. He knew better to stay more than a day in one, though. No more than two at the max. Staying in one place with the way things were now was just begging to make yourself dead.

  The only safe place now is the sky.

  PART III

  THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY

  CHAPTER 8

  I

  He always travelled by bike. That was the way to do it for sure. Bicycles are silent and able to effectively outrun a person if shit goes to shit. It was always best to travel during the day. There was a common misconception that being out and about at night was the best way. At night, all you get is obscured vision, confused senses and disorientation no matter how good you know your surroundings. Power grids . . . whole plants . . . didn’t work anymore. There was no one around to operate them. Forget generators. They make too much noise. Dennis Jackson had one of those silent outdoor ones installed a long time ago, but even though his home was nearly impassable by foot, stragglers made their way in from time to time. One or two of those things . . . maybe even ten were no problem to dispatch. A whole group of them could navigate his secluded home in Kentucky’s Barlow Bottoms with relative ease. Dennis was always a survivalist. Expensive hobby . . . but then again, he had electricity. The electricity was only used on bright days, however. The generator had a bit of a hum to it.

  Today was one of the now frequent trips to town. Dennis hated going out even when he had to, but the family needed a few things. A few days ago, the married man of two broke the head off of his axe while chopping wood for the evening fire. That axe came in handy. It came in too handy for a trip into town to wait. It had been ten months since the invasion started. Dennis looked down at his watch. JUN 13 2016. Man . . . even ten months ago seemed like a lifetime away now. The past hadn’t slipped into history. It was executed. Mayfield, Kentucky was a wasteland now. Every day, more and more of those monsters he didn’t recognize were wandering the streets. They were ravenous, half-starved and deadly. They had laid claim to the earth while mankind was careless. Someone had to have been careless. Somehow, in some place, a test tube was dropped or a diseased animal bit someone. Whatever it was, it was man who turned his back. Seizing the moment, these things crept out of fate’s back door.

  Dennis was in town the previous weekend, poking through a now-deserted sporting goods store for a new machete and face-mask. The outbreak happened so quickly in Kentucky that most of the stores hadn’t even been looted, which made everything so much more accessible. Dennis knew there were survivors in Mayfield unseen and unheard. There were still evidences of them everywhere. A window was broken where one was intact just a couple days before. A coffee machine that he had planned to take back home was yanked from the shelf at Walgreens; along with hand towels and toothbrushes. A lot of the winter jackets and shoes had been hoarded by someone at the larger clothing stores in the area. That was understandable, though. While hunting for the machete that day, Dennis walked outside to sharpen it. They were always so dull when they came out of the store. There is only one way to sharpen a knife. Use a car window. The outside edge of a car window is actually an abrasive . . . far more effective than any whetstone. It didn’t take as long to bring a razor edge to a blade, either. Twenty strokes and the machete went from butter-knife to Ginsu. He’d been working on the machete slowly and always with the mask on. Military-issued gas mask. He’d seen too many people try to take down one of those terrible monsters, only to get blood all over their faces. Bad news after that. So . . . the stuffy gas mask was a necessary evil. The thing was one uncomfortable pain in the ass, but it kept him living.

  Today was a quick trip. In and out. There was a National Guard base that had been used as a makeshift FEMA shelter right after the invasion broke out. It wasn’t a shelter anymore. Dennis had cruised by there recently and had to return to get a few more MRE’s and a new axe. MRE’s . . . the Army’s yardstick of civilization. The acronym stands for Meals Ready to Eat. Dennis didn’t need them for the food, though. MRE’s have little pouches of the main meal, a packet of peanut butter, crackers, pepper, chewing gum, towelettes and a single-use wad of toilet paper. There was an appetizer in there too . . . usually beans or rice. The food was typical of sustenance packed astronaut-style. It kept a good soldier alive and that was it. No one considers an MRE fine cuisine by any stretch of even the wildest ima
gination. As an avid survivalist, Dennis didn’t use them for the food at all. Inside the MRE pack is a flameless heater . . . a little pouch that chemically heats the food inside. No soldier deserves a cold meal. The idea behind chemical flameless heaters is the oxidation of metal to generate heat. Magnesium dust is mixed with salt and a little iron dust and spread on a thin, flexible pad about the size of a playing card. To activate the heater, the good soldier just adds a little water. The metal quickly oxidizes and brings the water to a boil; expelling massive amounts of steam in the process.

  Back in the Gulf War, American soldiers found a remarkable use for the flameless food heaters when they were in a pinch. A POW invented it. What he discovered was that a soldier could take a canteen – a very thick plastic bottle with an airtight lid and fill the canteen three-quarters full with water. Good soldier could then place an MRE heating pad in the canteen, along with bits of metal, bolts, rocks and pieces of shrapnel lying around. If the airtight lid was screwed on tight enough, the gasses of the chemical heater would expand the canteen and inflate it like a balloon . . . effectively making a pretty powerful shrapnel grenade. The canteens would be under so much pressure that the thick plastic bottle would explode, killing every single thing unlucky enough to be within eyeshot of it. Dennis knew great tricks like that. Loading a Ricky-Bomb, as the Gulf War vets called it, with Tabasco sauce along with the water was effective as well. Zombies couldn’t be killed by anything other than incineration or decapitation, but Ricky-Bombs were powerful enough to blow arms and legs off. The Tabasco ones did that and added the bonus of blinding anything with eyes exposed to the blast. The little heater pad, having nowhere to go, dissolves and releases the metal shavings into the sauce. Although temporary, it was a great way to make a good and effective field explosive. They were a last-resort thing and never to be used in town. At home, it was fine. One Ricky-Bomb could cake a handful of zeds. Three could take out a tree stump. Five would capsize a two-story house.