The Dead & Dying: A Zombie Novel Read Free Page A

and simple. You listen outside of doors before opening: if you hear moaning in there, then you either leave that sucker closed or bust right on through with all guns blazing.
    Turns out it's not always quite that simple. Sometimes a single bullet to the forehead will drop one of those suckers, but sometimes you hafta pump in a couple more before they finally drop. And they're so damn quiet it doesn't matter how long you listen outside that door. You might hear some scuffling on the other side, but is it really one of them? Or just some schmuck trying to be as quiet as possible because he hears you out there and thinks you might be one of them? You go in like Rambo and there's a good chance you won't accomplish anything other than killing some poor bastard who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    For a while, I traveled with a fellow who went by the name of Doc. Big guy who looked like maybe he played a little football in high school. A lot of people we came across seemed to assume that Doc wasn't too bright right off the bat. Maybe it had something to do with the way his brow and beard made him look a little like the caveman in those insurance commercials. I don't know. But, truth be told, that man had one of the sharpest minds I ever come across.
    The way he saw it, a single shot didn't always work because the bullet would tear through different parts of the brain. He told me about a chicken he'd read about named Miracle Mike: apparently, back in the forties or fifties, some farmer tried to cut off this rooster's head. Only he botched the job a bit. Mike's head came off all right, but there was still some of the brain stem or something like that left over which kept this headless chicken alive for a year or so as he toured across the country in sideshows.
    Doc said he reckoned the zombies are a lot like 'ole Mike: if you don't wipe out the part of the brain that's in control, they'll just keep coming at you until you do.
    He also said it makes sense, when you really think about it, that they don't make much noise. To get sound, you've got to force air over the vocal cords. And these bastards definitely aren't breathing. Oh, you might hear some gas pass out of them every now and then. Sometimes that gas might even bubble up through their windpipes and cause this soft, little wheeze; but they don't moan and groan like I always thought they would. Hell, I've been doing more moaning than they ever dreamed of.
    And you don't need to be bit to become one of them either. Don't get me wrong. Bites like the one I got right here speed up the process, that's for certain. But sooner or later we all die one way or another. And when you do, you're coming back. Plain and simple.
    Pain tends to make the mind wander, doesn’t it? I was originally thinking about how I always thought I was prepared for this. Truth be told, even though that little part of me always half expected this to happen I still didn't recognize it when the news reports started rolling in. In the beginning I thought, like plum near everyone else, that this mystery illness I kept hearing so much about was some sort of terrorist attack. It just seemed to make sense, ya know? People getting sick in New York, DC, Los Angeles: pretty much all the major cities, all at the same time. And then the reports of what they originally thought to be riots and widespread violence. Sounded like some sort of nerve gas or biological agent. Al-Qaeda type shit.
    By the time the infection, or whatever the hell it is, hit Harrisburg there wasn't anything that could really be done. It spread through our town like the clap at a whorehouse, I tell ya. One minute it's just another dead-end hole in the wall and the next all Hell's breaking loose.
     I remember looking back over my shoulder at the Pit Stop, watching the flames licking at the night sky like the tongues of hungry demons, the smell of wood and burning rubber; I watched from a distance as the pumps finally caught