Undead Ultra (Short Story): Foot Soldier Page 4
The fingers of the undead grasp at his Hawaiian shirt, attempting to drag him down. Alvarez stabs with his knife, sinking the blade into the thing’s forehead.
He doesn’t have time to jerk it free. Three more undead come right at him.
The ice cream truck is only fifty yards away.
He vaults onto the hood of a Camry. The metal hood folds under his weight, making a soft popping sound. The zombies on his tail let up a chorus of keens and run into the car. Alvarez leaps off the other side and keeps running.
Forty yards.
He swerves around a motorcycle, grinning when several of the undead crash into the bike and go down.
Thirty yards.
A child zombie churns toward him, her neck and torso encrusted with blood. Kid zombies are the worst, he decides. Even worse than finding a dead child like he had in Gris’s house. He slams his hammer into the little girl’s face and drops her.
Twenty yards.
He pours on an extra burst of speed.
Ten yards.
The open doorway of the ice cream truck yawns before him. Strapped into the driver’s seat is a dark-skinned man in a uniform that had once been white. Blood has turned half of it a ruddy brown.
Hearing Alvarez’s approach, the zombie lifts its head and snarls, struggling to escape the confines of the seat belt that holds it down.
Alvarez vaults into the vehicle, turning the hammer spikes outward. He buries the weapon into the creature’s skull, silencing it.
He’s attracted a crowd of several dozen zombies, all of them converging on the ice cream truck. Shit. He doesn’t have much time.
He scrambles over the dead zombie. The keys to the truck are still in the ignition, but that doesn’t matter. All he cares about is the music. The music will play even if the truck is off.
The inside of this truck isn’t so different from the one his mom drove. He spots the switch for the music and flips it up.
A cheery music-box tune bubbles into the air. The zombies outside surge forward, more of them keening.
Shit and double shit. No going out the way he came in. Too many undead in that direction.
The passenger side is out too. More undead in that direction.
He scrambles into the back of the van, eyes skipping over the colorful ice cream stickers on the freezer units. A quick glance out the back windows shows him even more zombies, but a solid twenty feet is between them and the back of the truck.
Throwing open the door, he leaps down onto the asphalt. His sore body screams from the impact, but Alvarez barely registers the pain. All his attention is on the zombies and the narrow strip of road between him and them.
He tears down it, sprinting for his life. Just when he thinks he’s managed to slip past the outer few, one of them swipes outward.
His fanny pack has been jostled sideways, hanging from his left hip. The zombie grabs it, fingers closing like iron around the purple sequins.
Desperate, Alvarez smashes his hammer into the creature’s face. The first blow glances off the side of its head, pissing the thing off. It lunges, teeth snapping. Alvarez brings the hammer around in another desperate swing.
The hammerhead shatters the zombie’s teeth, collapsing the monster’s lower jaw and nose. The impact sends it sprawling backward.
Alvarez doesn’t wait to see it land. Bloody hammer in hand, he keeps running.
Only when there are a solid fifty yards between him and the ice cream truck does he look back.
Nothing follows him. All attention is on the ice cream truck, an undead horde surrounding it. They slam up against the four sides of the truck, keening and growling and scratching at the metal.
Up and down the highway, every zombie he sees shambles toward the truck.
Alvarez forces himself to slow, to get his breathing under control, and to move quietly. After all that work to set up a distraction, he doesn’t want to fuck it all up by making too much noise.
With the music-box tune playing behind him, he makes his way south at a fast walk.
Toward the military blockade.
Toward whatever future is in store for him.
Mile 50.2
HE MADE IT. MILE 50.2. He wishes there was some way to communicate with Kate, to let her know how much she helped him over the last three days. Without her, he wouldn’t have survived. He’d be just another one of the dead or undead.
Just like the soldiers in front of him.
Alvarez leans against the large tire of the semi, resting in the shade as he takes in the shattered remains of the military blockade. The broken wooden barriers. The jeeps dented from the impact of the cars that hit them.
Half the soldiers are dead. It looks like they were run over or hit by cars. The other half are zombies, their attention riveted on the music in the distance. Some wander toward it, bumping along between the wreckage. Others, unable to find their way, growl and walk in restless circles.
The civilian cars in the immediate area are riddled with bullet holes. He sees more than one driver dead at the wheel. There are two dozen cars—both civilian and military—jumbled together in a mass of crumpled metal. The highway is effectively blocked. This isn’t what the government had in mind when they issued the order for the blockade.
It’s easy to imagine the chaos that must have engulfed the area. There are zombies in many of the cars. They claw and scrape at the glass, agitated by the ice cream truck still playing music up the road.
Alvarez doesn’t care about them. His attention is on five of the undead soldiers. They cluster around a minivan in the middle of the wreckage.
Alvarez watches them. They moan and claw at the minivan, all their attention on the silver vehicle. They don’t mill around in aimless circles like most zombies.
Something has their attention. Something inside the minivan.
God dammit, Alvarez, don’t just stand there for Christ’s sake—do something!
“Yes, sir,” Alvarez murmurs, moving toward the maze of cars.
It’s impossible to move through the pileup. There are too many cars smashed together. Alvarez climbs onto the hood of a blue sedan, not caring that he makes noise.
The undead soldiers turn toward him as the roof indents beneath his weight. Alvarez glimpses the eyes of a living teenage girl inside the minivan. Beside her are the eyes of a living teenage boy.
Survivors. The first he’s encountered in fifty miles.
Get inside, Alvarez. That’s an order!
He jumps from the hood of the sedan into a truck bed. He continues to leapfrog from car to car, making his way to the minivan.
“I’m coming,” his whispers, never taking his eyes from the scared kids.
Another face appears beside the kids. It’s a woman, her eyes wide and scared. A second later, two more faces appear, these of men with thick coatings of stubble on their chins.
They don’t make a sound, but even so, the zombies around the van snarl and moan. Their scratching picks up in intensity, nails grating against paint and glass with a shrill sound that makes Alvarez’s hair stand on end.
A few other zombies shamble toward the wreckage, drawn by the noise Alvarez makes as he clambers from car to car. There’s no way to be silent. The scuff of a shoe against paint, the squelch of his sweaty palms against glass, the complaint of the metal that dents beneath his weight—all of it draws the monsters.
The undead congregate on the edge of the car maze, a dozen strong. They bump up against the cars, scratching at the metal in frustration as they attempt to follow the noise. All are fallen soldiers.
He’ll deal with them later. Right now, he has to get those people out of the van.
It takes another few leaps, but at last he arrives. Crouching atop a Prius, he eyes the undead below him. They’re corralled in a small pen created by the pile of cars. The far side of the minivan is smashed, the doors on that side blocked. There is only one way out for the people inside.
Alvarez crouches atop the Prius, thrumming hi
s fingers on the rooftop. The zombies rotate in his direction. One by one, those sightless white eyes roll toward him. The undead moan, arms outstretched as they fumble their way toward him.
The first one, a middle-aged woman with bad teeth, is the first to reach the Prius. Alvarez brings his hammer down and smashes open her skull. She drops.
Someone inside the minivan screams. Alvarez scowls as the zombies rotate back around, converging on the van in a rush.
Shit.
He raps his knuckles on the car, hoping to draw their attention back to him. Only one of them turns. The rest keep up their frantic assault on the van.
Alvarez knocks harder, glancing over his shoulder at the crowd of zombies that’s grown to more than a dozen. They grow more frantic with each passing second, several of them keening.
Double shit. If he doesn’t dispatch these inner undead soon, the crowd on the edge of the maze is going to go ape shit.
What are you waiting for, Alvarez? Waste those fuckers already!
Alvarez jumps to the ground, hammer swinging. The blunt head catches the nearest zombie in the face, dropping it.
At the sound of his feet hitting the ground, the remaining three turn. Alvarez rushes them like a kamikaze pilot. He swings the hammer again, smashing the face of the foremost. Then he pivots, his hammer spraying droplets of blackish blood under the morning sun. He buries it in the temple of the next zombie.
The last one springs straight at him. Alvarez stumbles, his back smashing up against the Prius. There isn’t enough room to swing his hammer. Instead, he slams it lengthwise against the zombie’s chest, holding it at bay.
The zombie in military fatigues growls at him. The stench of rot and decay rolls off the monster and hits Alvarez full in the face. Alvarez growls back, adrenaline surging through him. No way is this undead fucker getting the better of him. Never again.
He hooks an ankle around the zombie’s leg. They go down in a tangle of limbs.
He’s not going to die today. Not when those people need him.
He releases the hammer and wraps his hands around the neck of the undead. As they hit the ground, Alvarez slams the monster’s head against the concrete. It snarls, teeth snapping. Alvarez slams his head a second time, a third. Blood splatters. He slams the creature’s head a fourth time, at last hearing the crack of its skull. Alvarez slams it back one final time for good measure.
The body below him shudders and goes still. The back half of its head is pulverized mush.
Breathing hard, Alvarez gets to his feet. Blood is spattered across his spandex and Hawaiian shirt. Luckily, it blends into the dark colors. He won’t look too gory for the family.
The door to the van clicks and slides open. The mingled stink of feces, urine, and unwashed bodies rolls out. Alvarez takes a step back, making a concerted effort not to gag. How long had they been stuck in that van?
The two men step out, eyes wary. It takes Alvarez a moment to register the fact that they’re identical twins. The haircuts are different, and one of them wears glasses, but the facial features are otherwise identical.
The two teenagers and the woman huddle together in the van, peering out with a mixture of curiosity and fear.
“Are you guys okay?” he asks.
The men look at each other, then back at him.
“We’re alive,” says the man with bushier hair. “Thanks to you.”
Alvarez feels something stir in his chest. It might be pride.
“Glad to help,” he says and means every word.
“I’m Ragan,” says the shaggy-haired twin. “This is my brother, Steve.”
“Nice to meet you both.” Alvarez wipes off a few stray droplets of blood on his spandex before shaking their hands. “I’m . . .” He pauses, realizing he doesn’t feel like his old self anymore.
He’s not Jorge Alvarez, the man who let fear get the better of him. He isn’t the man who ran away and let his friends die. He’s a new person now.
“I’m Foot Soldier,” he tells the men.
“Foot Soldier?” Steve, the more clean-cut of the two, frowns at him.
Alvarez shrugs. “I was in the army.”
They look him up and down, dubious, taking in his Hawaiian shirt, black spandex biker pants, and purple-sequined fanny pack.
“Long story,” Alvarez says. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
“On the way where?” the woman in the van asks.
Alvarez shrugs. “Away from here. Somewhere safe.”
“We were thinking of going to Fort Ross,” Ragan ventures.
“Fort Ross?” Alvarez asks. “Where’s that?”
“It’s on the coast,” Ragan says. “It’s a Russian fort built in the early eighteen hundreds. The place has walls a foot thick. No way the—the things can get us in there.”
Fort Ross. Alvarez shrugs. Sounds as good a place as any. “Let’s go,” he says.
Five pairs of eyes stare at him.
“Dude, we need a car,” the teenage boy says.
“No.” Alvarez shakes his head. “Cars are death traps. Zombies can hear them from miles away. Cars get mobbed.”
“Then how are we supposed to get there?” the girl asks.
“On foot.”
“On foot?” Steve gapes at him. “It’s almost a hundred miles from here.”
“I just traveled fifty miles in a little over two days,” Alvarez tells them. He thinks of Kate. “I met a woman and her friend a ways north of here. They’d traveled one hundred and twenty miles on foot. Feet are the safest form of travel.”
Now they’re all gaping at him.
“We break it down,” he tells them. “Walk fifteen to twenty miles a day. We’ll get to Fort Ross in a week or so.”
“You’re crazy.” The woman emerges from the van.
Alvarez shrugs. “Crazy is the only way to stay alive.”
The three adults exchange looks.
“I vote for following the zombie killer,” the boy says.
“I don’t care how we do it,” the woman says with a shrug. “I just want to get to someplace safe.” She glances briefly over her shoulder at the teenagers.
“You heard the woman,” Steve says. “Let’s do this, Foot Soldier.”
“This is crazy.” The girl emerges from the van, eyes flicking between the dead zombies and Alvarez.
“Didn’t you hear the man?” The teenage boy climbs out after her. “Crazy is the only way to stay alive.”
The family of five stands in a semicircle, all eyes on him.
When they look at him, Alvarez realizes with shock that they’re expecting him to lead. They expect him to know what the fuck he’s doing. They expect him to keep them safe and alive.
And that’s just what he’s going to do.
Free Gift
Subscribe to Camille Picott’s newsletter and receive a complimentary
End of the World Book Bundle!
The bundle includes Hacker, a YA dystopian adventure, and Dawn Patrol, a zombie apocalypse.
Ebook and audiobook formats available.
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my team who helped whip this story into shape!
Chrissy Wolfe @ EFC Services, LLC
Chris Picott
Picott, Camille, Undead Ultra (Short Story): Foot Soldier
Thank you for reading books on Archive.BookFrom.Net
Share this book with friends