Cattle: Chapters 1 - 5

It is ten years after the global apocalypse. The Phage, the zombie virus that brought the world to its knees, has mutated, restoring the minds of its undead victims: their personalities, their memories and even their dreams. The hungry dead are no longer the mindless monsters that drove mankind to the brink of extinction. They possess once again the human cunning that once made man the masters of the world.But they still have their relentless hunger for human flesh...


1. Illinois

“Try to keep up, Harold!” Brent Scarborough gasped, racing through the forest as fast as he could go. His lungs were burning, his heart thudding in his chest, but he didn’t dare slow his pace, not even for his friend. They’d been running together for two years now. Harold Killian was like a brother to him—closer than a brother, to be honest—but the deadheads were on their tail, and he was determined to get away, to survive, and make it to the fabled Free Zone, where they could live among their own kind and have some kind of normal life again, without worrying about deadheads eating them alive their every waking moment.“Just go!” Harold gasped, limping several yards behind him. “Don’t you wait… on me, Brent Scarborough!”Harold had twisted his ankle pretty badly when they took off through the forest. A meat patrol had come up unexpectedly on them as they were foraging for food in an old service station—caught them dead to rights as they were coming out of the crumbling Pack’N’Tuck—and they had rabbited into the woods. It was autumn. Probably late October or November. The floor of the forest was thickly carpeted with leaves, and Harold had stepped into a chuckhole, nearly breaking his ankle. They would have been fine if their pursuers were dumbheads. They were good at eluding the dumb ones. But it was a meat patrol, and the zombies had squealed to a stop and given chase. It was the reapers’ job to find and catch wild humans. The deadheads were well trained, and they were armed, and they never gave up.Brent could hear the reapers calling out to one another behind them. Their bone chilling grunts and snarls echoed in the distance, but they were closing in, and Brent felt almost faint with terror. Terror for himself. Terror for his friend.This is it, he thought. We’re going to die! And we were so close!The Free Zone was a city populated and controlled by living men and women. Once it had been called Peoria, but it was the Free Zone now. The people of the Free Zone had ensured their survival by rigging their fortress city with nukes. Any aggressive move by the zombie nations and they would blow themselves up, vaporizing every man, woman and child in the city. There were so few living human beings now the deadheads didn’t dare move against them, and sometimes they even protected the living men from herds of mindless dumbheads. In exchange, the people of the Free Zone gave the zombies their dead. The zombies couldn’t starve to death—they were already dead—but they were always hungry. It was a suicide standoff, but it worked, and the zombies were content to pick off any wild runners who tried to make it to the Shangri-La of the Living.A shot rang out, its report rolling through the forest, and Brent cried out. He couldn’t help himself. The yelp had jumped out of his mouth before he could catch it, like a frightened frog. He tried to increase his speed, but his strength was rapidly flagging. He couldn’t run all day without stopping. He was only a man. But his pursuers could.Harold grunted loudly and fell, the dry forest duff crunching under his body as he hit the ground and rolled.For a second, Brent thought his friend had been shot, and he started to turn back to help him, zombies or no zombies.“Go, go!” Harold panted, struggling to get back to his feet. The barrel-chested older man was sweaty and red-faced, his bright orange hair disheveled, a long scratch on his cheek where some broken branch had gouged him. As Brent wavered between obeying and helping his companion, Harold yanked off his backpack and threw it to the younger man. The bag held all his worldly possessions: supplies, a few keepsakes, and the little bit of food they’d found in the abandoned service station: some old canned vegetables, a few packs of Ramen noodles. “Harold, no,” Brent wheezed, looking down at the backpack like it was going to change into a hungry alligator at any second.“If you don’t go, they’re going to catch both of us today,” Harold said. He tested his ankle and groaned at the pain. “Go on. I’ll catch up if I can get away from them. Get to the Free Zone. Don’t throw your life away on me.”Another shot rang out, and Harold Killian’s eyes bulged out. His body stiffened, and then he dropped to his knees.“Harold!” Brent howled.Harold tried to talk, but his last words came out a froth of blood and spit. He toppled forward onto his face and didn’t move. A moist red stain expanded around a tiny hole in the back of his denim jacket.Brent squeezed his hands into fists, screaming through his clenched teeth. He spotted one of the reapers then, trudging up over the rise, a rifle in its decayed hands. He ducked, snatched up his friend’s backpack, and started running.They wouldn’t follow him any further, he knew. They were like sharks. They wouldn’t be able to resist the smell of his friend’s blood. They would tear the dead man apart, eat until their bellies couldn’t hold anymore, then take the rest to the nearest town and put it on the meat market. Harold was a big man. He’d probably fetch a handsome price, even if they ate half of him here in the forest.Brent ran.He ran for his life.



2. Night

There was one thing more frightening than death, more horrible than the zombies who had inherited the earth, and that was being alone.Brent was 23 years old when the zombie apocalypse went down, a junior studying at Western Tennessee University, still living at home with his parents to save money on tuition, and engaged to a bright, funny, sexy little bookworm named Naomi Richardson. Naomi was a sardonic feminist, wore crazy hornrim glasses to damper her rather stunning beauty, and only read novels written by dead authors. Her only nod to conventionality was dating him, and a longtime addiction toThe Days of Our Lives, of which she was both proud and embarrassed. The soap because it was so ordinary, and him because there was really nothing special about him apart from his looks. Your typical college jock, that was Brent Scarborough, studying business and partying on a football scholarship. His mother loved Naomi and couldn’t wait for them to marry and start having beautiful babies for her to spoil. His dad thought Naomi was strange, and that Brent should sew his wild oats before settling down, though he would never say something like that in front of his wife or future daughter-in-law. He only said it to Brent after he’d had a few too many drinks.But that was before the Phage. That was before people started getting sick and eating each other. That was before his mother and father and fiancé died, and he was cast adrift on the churning whitecaps of a global catastrophe.He had survived because he was strong and fast and lucky. He might not have been the sharpest utensil in the silverware drawer, but he quickly found that he possessed a keen instinct for self-preservation. It had kept him alive when so many others were dying, kept him going when other smarter people gave up.He wanted to live, and that survival instinct drove him on when any other rational being would curl up into a fetal position and surrender.But he hated being alone.He was crouched in the corner of some sort of derelict pumping station now, a squat little shed with a tin roof and cinderblock walls. In the center of the bare concrete floor was an abstract sculpture of pipes and gauges. He hadn’t the faintest idea what the station was for, but he was glad that he had stumbled across it. He had almost wept with joy when the door gave way under his first few kicks. It was safer, and a whole lot warmer, sheltering inside the shed than it would have been sleeping out in the open.“What do you say, Harold old buddy old pal?” Brent murmured, huddled under his jacket and threadbare blanket. “It’s a lot better than sleeping outside,” Ghost-Harold replied.Teeth chattering, Brent nodded. “Yes, indeed!”He knew there weren’t any ghosts in the shed with him. He wasn’t that crazy, but he was still too juiced up on adrenaline to sleep, and it was a way to keep his brain occupied until exhaustion finally claimed his weary soul. It was that or replay the day’s events in his mind, and he certainly didn’t want to do that.“Remember how we met, Harold?” Brent said, grinning a little in the dark.“Oh, yeah,” Ghost-Harold said with a chuckle. “Sorry about that.”“It was about two years ago,” Brent said. “I was on my own at the time. The girl I was traveling with just before you, girl named Angie Wright, had just died. She scratched her hand trying to climb over a barbed wire fence and got some kind of infection. It was pretty bad.”“You guys fuck?” Ghost-Harold said.“I told you already,” Brent said. “No. She was a lesbian.”“Oh, yeah, right. I forget.”“Anyway, I was on my own. It was a hot summer afternoon, and I decided to cool off in a creek. I was splashing around buck naked when you came out of the woods with your rifle. ‘Put your hands where I can ‘em!’ you yelled. Oh, man, I about messed myself. And then you told me to turn around, and I thought for sure you were going to shoot me in the back. That, or cornhole me. Or both!”“Naw, man, I don’t swing that way!” Ghost-Harold guffawed. “I just wanted to rob ya!”“You did, too. Took everything I had. Even my clothes.”“Yeah, but you followed me. You followed me for the rest of the day, naked as a baby, until I felt sorry for you and gave you your stuff back.”“Yeah,” Brent said, smiling at the reminiscence. The smile faded and he sniffed. “We got off to a rough start, but we ended up making a pretty good team.”“We sure did, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said.“Always stayed two steps ahead of the meat patrols. Always… Ah, hell, man, why’d you have to go and die today? I hate being by myself!”“Sorry, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said. “I couldn’t help it.”“I know.”“You just keep running, kid. You’ll make it to the Free Zone, and then you can find you a nice live girl and get married and have a whole passel of fat little live babies.”Brent snorted. “Is that all you think about?”“What? Making babies?”“Yeah.”“What else is there to do? We gotta repopulate the world, kiddo.”Brent sighed. “I think our time has came and went.”“You and me?”“No… humanity.”“Oh… That’s fucking grim, kid. Why you gotta say stuff like that? It’s depressing.”Brent laughed. He pulled his backpack around and laid his head down on it. He wished he had some light to see by. He hated being in the dark almost as much as he hated being alone. But he couldn’t make a fire, and it was too cold out to leave the door of the pumping station open, even just a crack.“I don’t think I’ll ever have kids,” Brent said. “I used to want kids, when Naomi and I were engaged, but not now. Not anymore.”He imagined he heard a scraping sound as Ghost-Harold lay down on the other side of the pumping station.“They’ll just get eaten,” Brent said.Ghost-Harold didn’t speak, but only because he wasn’t really there, and Brent was finally falling asleep.



3. Morning

It was the dim gleam of sunshine around the edges of the door that woke him. That, and a throbbing bladder.Brent swam up from terrible dreams, dreams of blood and wormy monsters, and sat up. He looked around the dingy interior of the pump station, disoriented and a little bit afraid, before remembering where he was, how he had gotten there, and that his best friend Harold was dead. Harold was probably just bones by now, he thought. Broken bones with the marrow sucked out.“Stop it,” he said very firmly to himself, and he struggled up to his feet. His body was stiff and achy from sleeping on a cold concrete floor all night, but it was better than being dead.Maybe.He put his jacket on, rolled up his blanket and stuffed it into his backpack, then shuffled to the door.He put his ear to the crack, feeling the cold autumn wind snuffling through the narrow gap, lapping at his ear like a dog. After a moment or two of listening, he opened the door a crack and peeked out with one eye. It was still early, the sun barely clear of the horizon. The area immediately visible to him was free of any deadheads, dumb or otherwise. It was just him, a field of waist high wildgrass gone to seed and the gently stirring forest on the far side of it. Birds were twittering, the sky was deep and blue, and he had to piss like a ruptured racehorse.His grandfather used to say that.Gramps Scarborough had died the year before the zombie apocalypse. He had lived a long full life, loved many women, had a passel of young’uns, and passed in his sleep of a coronary thrombosis at the hoary old age of 82. He didn’t have to see his family and friends get sick, turn into monsters, and start killing and eating everyone in sight. He never sat in front of the TV and watch in stunned disbelief as the pope got dragged from his popemobile and torn apart by a mob of mindless cannibals. He would never have to stab his own parents in the brains with an icepick to make sure their dead bodies didn’t reanimate, or sit with a comatose fiancé after her insulin ran out and her non-functioning pancreas slowly poisoned her with her own blood sugar.Lucky guy, Gramps Scarborough.Gritting his teeth at the cold, Brent unzipped, opened the door just a little wider, and eased his shrunken pecker through the gap. Little puffs of steam curled up from the arc of piss that pattered on the frosty ground outside. Brent emptied his bladder, then tucked El Toro away and retreated into the pump station.“We’ll never make it to the Free Zone before the weather turns,” Brent said, as he returned to the far corner of the shed. “We need to find some place to hole up for the winter. Someplace warm and safe, with plenty of fresh water and food.”“While you’re at it, why don’tcha wish for a tropical island with lots of nubile young native girls, too?” Harold said. “We can lay on the beach all day and drink from coconut shells while they fan us with great big palm leaves.”Brent laughed. “I wouldn’t turn my nose up at that!”“I imagine not!”He eased down and pulled Harold’s backpack to him. There was just enough light coming through the seams of the door to see by. He unzipped the backpack, fingers clumsy with the cold, and started dragging out Harold’s things. The food he set carefully to one side. Lighters, eating utensils, can opener, bowie knife—he put those aside, too. He would keep Harold’s pistol, even though bullets were as rare as four leaf clovers now. He pulled out a ragged issue of Hustler and set it aside. It was bloated with moisture and some of the pages were stuck together, but the paper could be used to start fires, or for toilet paper. There was a yellowed copy of Fifty Shades of Gray and another book called The Road. He kept those for the same reason he kept the Hustler. He had never been much of a reader.He put on an old sweater that was in the backpack, but tossed aside a pair of spare blue jeans. They were too big for him. He threw away a pair of holy underwear (pinching it between his forefinger and thumb). Kept the extra socks. Tossed the flashlight. Good batteries were as rare as bullets now. Aspirin: keep. Nail clippers: keep. Half-full bottle of Jack Daniels: keep!He turned the backpack upside down and shook it.“Now, you’ll wanna keep those,” Ghost-Harold said in a low voice.A plastic freezer bag full of photographs had fallen out. Brent unsealed the bag and took the pictures out. He had to hold them close to his face to see them in the low light. Here was a picture of Harold looking young and trim and happy, leaning against the grill of a nice sports car with a young woman on his arm. She was wearing a t-shirt and shorts and had nice long tan legs and curly brown hair.“Your wife?” Brent said.“My first wife,” he murmured.“She was pretty.”“Yeah.”Brent flipped through the rest: Harold with a blonde, Harold with a redhead, Harold with a couple kids who looked like miniature versions of their father. Here was another ginger kid. And another one.“How many kids did you have?” Brent asked.“Didn’t I ever tell you?”“No.”Ghost-Harold didn’t answer.Brent put the photos in the bag and resealed it.“I can’t take them with me,” he said, and he tossed the bag over by the too-big pants and dirty underwear. “It would be stupid. I don’t have enough room in my backpack as it is. Besides, they’re not my pictures. They’re yours, and you’re dead.” Then he got up and retrieved one of the photos from the bag. The one of Harold leaning against his car with his first wife. He folded the picture and put it in the interior pocket of his jacket.“Maybe just one,” he muttered.He took stock of his keep pile and tried to stuff as much of it into his own backpack as he could fit. It was so tightly packed when he was done he could barely run the zipper. That finished, he opened the canned food and sniffed the contents suspiciously. The green beans and mixed vegetables smelled fine, but the creamed corn had gone sour, and he put it aside with a grimace. He drank the water out of the green beans can, then took up his fork and began to eat.He ate until his stomach throbbed, putting as much of the canned vegetables inside of him as he could fit, then he rose and prepared for another day of walking. He and Harold had crossed two states on foot, trying to get to the Free Zone. They had been travelling steadily north since the night, over a year ago, they found a working radio and heard the broadcasts coming from the city of living people. They had listened to those broadcasts whenever they could pick up the signal—usually on overcast days—until their batteries had run dry. The signal was always weak and crackly, but it had become a beacon to them, a bright ray of hope. The first time they heard the radio station, they had both wept. It was a Barry Manilow song, “Looks Like We Made It”, faint and distorted. When Brent first heard the music issuing from the radio’s speakers, his breath had caught in his throat and the blood rushed to his head, and he thought he was going to pass out.After the music played, a man and woman began to speak. They called themselves the Last Living Deejays. It was a husband and wife duo named Rick and Ronni Parker, and they were transmitting from Peoria, Illinois, a city they called the Free Zone, where the survivors of the zombie apocalypse still lived something like a normal life.“If you are out there listening to this broadcast right now, know that you are not alone. And know that you have a home here with us, a place where you can live in peace and security, among your fellow living men and women,” Ronnie had said. She had a purring, angelic voice. “Come, if you can. There is a place waiting here for you. There are fifty thousand living men and women here. There are children, and there are dogs. You can have a life again. You can be free.”They gave reports on the activities of nearby meat patrols, warned of herd movements, reported the local news, the births, deaths, and engagements of the citizens of their Free Zone, and commented on the politics of their burgeoning civilization. The Free Zone was a democratic parliament, much like England’s government before the Phage, though they called their legislature the Board of Trustees and “mayor” was the title of their head of state, rather than “president” or “prime minister”. The day they restored electricity to the entire city they held a wild celebration, and played rock and roll music all day long. They observed all the old holidays, like Easter and Christmas. They reported on their dealings with the nearby zombie nations, and put on old-fashioned radio dramas. They had fortifications, highly trained military defenses, and nukes.It was an education for Brent and Harold, who had done little besides run, hide and scrounge for food for the past eight years. It gave their lives purpose again, gave them something to live for, something to hope for.And something, ultimately, to die for.But that was better than the life they had been leading.Stomach sloshing with all the vegetables he had eaten, Brent shouldered his backpack and went to the door. He listened again, then peeked carefully outside. In the field beyond the chain-link fence that encircled the pumping station, a small herd of deer were grazing silently. The sight of the animals brought a smile to his lips, and he stood there for several minutes just watching the majestic creatures. Finally, he eased the door open wider and stepped outside. The sun had risen further, dispelling some of the night’s chill. He felt its light on his cheeks like a benediction. The deer continued to graze for a moment, flicking their tails, then a buck with a large set of antlers noticed him, and they all bolted away toward the forest, some of them scrambling in fear, other leaping above the grass. He watched them vanish into the wilderness, then stood there for a moment, listening to them crunch and crash through the woods until the sounds had faded.“You don’t see many deer anymore,” Brent said to Ghost-Harold.“Naw. The deadheads eat ‘em when they can’t get any human meat.”There were not many dogs, cats or cows anymore either. Dogs were vulnerable to the Phage and had gone all but extinct shortly after the pandemic swept across the globe. The cats and cows had been caught and eaten by the eternally hungry zombies. Birds and fish had thrived, but not any of the larger or more friendly mammals. Zombies would eat anything warm-blooded they could get their claws on.Brent crossed the small yard and stepped carefully across a section of the fence that had fallen over. He eyed the waist high wildgrass, looking for any suspicious movement. One of his old companions had been bitten by a legless zombie in high grass. They hadn’t seen it until it was too late. Usually they moaned or snarled, but sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they couldn’t. The one that had gotten his old companion had had its throat ripped out, but it was still bitey.
Brent put the rising sun to his right and headed north.


4. Road

He pushed through the waist high wildgrass until he came to a road, if that’s what you wanted to call it. It was really just two gravelly ruts zigzagging through the high grass and brush. It would not be safer following the tracks, but he would make better time, and expend less energy, if he followed it.“Just have to keep my eyes and ears open,” he said.“Yep,” Harold said behind him. “We don’t want to get caught with our pants down again. Not like yesterday.”They had been so excited to find some canned food and ramen noodles at the Pack ‘N’ Tuck yesterday that they hadn’t heard the approaching drone of the meat wagon until it was too late. The last thing they’d eaten was a possum they’d found dead on the forest floor two days before. It had looked fresh dead, not too bloated or maggoty, so they’d made a fire and cooked it. Possum flesh was disgustingly greasy and gamey, but they’d tucked into it like a couple of zombies that hadn’t had brains in a month. Compared to possum, canned vegetables and ramen noodles would make for a gourmet banquet. When they finally noticed the rumbling of the truck engine, they had hurried outside, intending to retreat into the forest, thinking they’d have time to duck out of sight before whoever was coming ever saw them, but they were just a minute too late. They had stumbled out of the collapsed service station just in time to see a vehicle come zooming around the bend in the road. It was a huge red Ford with a barbed wire cage in the bed, a cage meant to hold wild runners. It shot past them so fast the wind blew their bangs back. For a moment, Brent hoped they would just keep on going, that they were too distracted, or too slow in the head, to take note of the two live men standing like dummies on the side of the road. But the deadheads had seen them as the big red Ford whooshed by, and the truck had screeched to a halt, smoke curling up from the wildly sliding tires.“We should have just ducked down inside the store,” Brent said. “Waited for the vehicle to pass.”“True,” Harold said. “Well, the truck startled us. We weren’t expecting it. We hadn’t seen a meat patrol for weeks. It was just instinct to run.”“And look what it got you.”“Ah, don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault, kiddo.”Brent walked most of the morning, stopping to rest only once. The gravel ruts he was following wound back and forth and up and down through the wooded countryside. Sometimes the forest closed in and formed an arching green roof over the road, like the ceiling of a church, and sometimes it fell back to prairie grass and brambles. He heard no sounds but the sounds of the forest.You had to be careful following roads nowadays. The zombies had begun driving again shortly after their awakening, which was what Brent had dubbed the reemergence of their consciousness. They didn’t drive very well, for intelligence did not counteract the damage that had been wrought to their bodies while they were mindless, but they drove really fast, and they weren’t afraid to chase you over rough terrain if they saw you. They were, after all, already dead. What was left to be afraid of?Thankfully, there were not many running vehicles, not after a decade of disuse, and he supposed they had to ration their gasoline, too. Deadheads didn’t have the numbers, or the mental capacity, to take up the industries they had manned when they were alive. They might be smart, but he had seen very few of them actually working. They didn’t clear or repair the roads. They didn’t restore their houses. They didn’t even mow their lawns. They just ate. Ate and fought and hunted the living. Mankind had been replaced by the most debased, cruel and voracious version of itself imaginable. It had been consumed by its own evil twin.At noon his stomach started gurgling queasily and he walked out into the grass to void his bowels. He dropped his pants and held onto the trunk of a small tree so he could squat and relieve himself. He kept a wary eye on his surroundings as he took care of his business, then wiped himself on a page torn out of Fifty Shades of Gray. He pulled up his pants, slung his backpack back over his shoulders and continued on.The gravel road finally came to an end. Brent leaned out, like a safari guide peering from elephant grass, and scanned the paved blacktop the gravel road abutted. Time and the elements had shattered the once smooth surface of the road into a jigsaw puzzle made of concrete. Grass and saplings had sprouted from the cracks, but it was still navigable, and frighteningly open to the environs. He looked up and down the long stretch of highway, listening for car engines, or the telltale moans of the forgetful dead. The smart zombies had taken to killing and eating the ones who’d never recovered their minds—less competition for resources, he supposed—but there were still plenty of them shambling around in the wilds. Sometimes whole herds of them.On a distant hill was a derelict farmhouse, its roof partially caved in from past snows. It was a big house, two stories with a porch and gables facing the road and the back yard. The house was barely visible amid the grass and trees that had quickly reclaimed the world once man quit chopping it all down regularly. There was a collapsed barn behind it, and what looked to be an old farm truck rusting slowly in the front. There didn’t appear to be any signs of occupancy, but you never knew. Nevertheless, it was in the direction he was headed, and it would be dark in another three hours or so, so he decided to make it his next goal. There might be food inside, supplies he could use. Maybe even a bed he could sleep in for the night.Nerves taut, he eased his left foot out onto the highway. He took a calming breath, then shifted his entire body out. Clear of the concealing grass, he felt terribly exposed and vulnerable.“Just stay alert and you’ll be fine,” Ghost-Harold said reassuringly.“Easy for you to say. You’re dead.”He walked down the center of the highway, for it was safer to stay in the middle where nothing could snatch at him from the grass. He was about halfway to the farmhouse before he began to relax a little, though he did not dare drop his guard completely. He pulled his jacket together in the front, shivering. The sky overhead had grown more and more overcast as the day wore on, and the blustering autumn wind was getting a bit moist, almost nippy. He had begun to suspect that there was some bad weather on the way. The clouds in the west were gray and pendulous.“Might be some snow coming,” he said.“I think you might be right,” Ghost-Harold said. “First snow of the season.”“I hate snow.”“I no longer have an opinion.”Brent laughed softly. Even dead, Harold was a cut up.He heard a guttural moan then and bit the chuckle off. He jerked his bowie knife from the side pocket of his backpack, reaching up and behind him with practiced speed. Body tense, he turned in a circle, trying to locate the source of the moaning. Already his adrenaline had kicked in, and his heart was rattling in his chest. A greasy film of sweat oozed from his pores. His skin felt prickly, like someone was poking him with hot needles.“Careful, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold murmured.He heard another low moan, and realized it was coming from the yard of the farmhouse. He started forward, staying low. It sounded like there was just one, but sometimes they didn’t groan. He peered up as he came around the bend, scanning the property. Near his left elbow was a mailbox, nearly cocooned in ivy. The mailbox said The Johnsonson the side in fancy cursive script. The paint had all but worn away over the years, but it was still legible. In the center of the yard was a tall, broad-shouldered deadhead.Judging by the way it was moaning softly, just swaying back and forth like a hypnotized cobra, it was still brain dead, one of the living dead that hadn’t regained its senses. It was dressed in bluish gray rags that might once have been bib overalls. It’s visible flesh looked like beef jerky stretched over bone, and in some places the bone shone through where animals, or some other zombie, had gnawed on it a little. It was too old and withered to be wormy. Probably couldn’t move much further than it was already moving. When they didn’t get enough fresh flesh to eat, the Phage sucked them dry from the inside out. They sort of locked up, like a rusty old hinge in need of oil.Brent tiptoed forward, keeping the truck between them. He crouched behind the vehicle, breathing through his mouth, trying to make as little noise as possible. He was planning to rush up behind the creature and stab it in the base of the skull, but before he made his move, he spied a rusty shovel laying in the bed of the truck amid years worth of fallen leaves and windblown debris. He put away his knife and gently lifted out the shovel. He hefted it in his hands. Better. If he used the shovel, he wouldn’t have to get so close.The zombie seemed to notice his furtive movements. It let out an inquisitive gurgle and tried to turn its head. The desiccated flesh of its neck crackled and split open as its head twisted around.Brent trotted forward and swung the shovel at its head with all his strength. He did it silently, moving as quickly as he could. The shovel connected with the zombie’s head with an almost comical clunking sound, and the withered creature’s head went flying across the yard. He had knocked it clear off the deadhead’s shoulders!The head hit the ground and went rolling through the grass. The zombie’s body swayed from the blow, then just stood there. It was too dry and stiff to fall.Lips curled back from his teeth, Brent used the shovel and pushed the dead thing forward.It toppled over with a thump.He waited, listening intently. If there were any other deadheads in the vicinity, they would be roused by the clonk of the shovel. He jumped a little when a bird came fluttering from beneath the roof of the farmhouse’s porch, squawking irately, but that was the only sound he heard besides the hoot of the wind in the eaves and the susurration of the shifting grass.The front door of the farmhouse stood open. The doorway was a dark maw through which he could see little of the house’s interior. A framed picture on the wall. What looked like the arm of a sofa. There could be anything in there. Zombies. Wild animals. Food. Weapons.“If you’re lucky, there’ll be a hot nymphomaniac hiding out in there,” Ghost-Harold said. “And she hasn’t seen a live man in ten years.”“Somehow I doubt it,” Brent whispered.
“Never know ‘til you look,” Harold replied, and Brent nodded and eased toward the door.

5. House

One of the most vital skills to possess during a zombie apocalypse was a very basic thing: knowing when to move fast, and knowing when to take it slow. When a zombie was after you, you ran. You ran as fast as you could. Didn’t matter if it was a slow, stiff, dumb one, you hauled ass. You hauled ass because even the slow ones were dangerous if there were enough of them, and they tended to travel in herds. Even if they seemed to be alone, you either killed them or ran, because they were attracted to noises, and even the solitary ones grouped up with terrible alacrity, and you let just one of them lay their cold, lifeless hands on you and nine times out of ten you were dead. But when entering a house, or any other kind of artificial construction, you took it slow. Especially if the building was closed up. Dumbheads didn’t remember how to use doorknobs, so if some poor sucker changed into a zombie inside of a house or shed or some kind of public building, they just wandered around inside, shuffling ceaselessly from corner to corner until someone blundered in on them. But even when the doors were open, you had to watch your step, because even the dumb ones tended to congregate around objects and places that had been familiar to them in life. That’s why towns were so dangerous, and forget trying to forage for supplies at supermarkets or malls. The parking lots of the big chain stores were like watering holes at the height of the dry season in the Serengeti. Wal-Mart was the worst. Wal-Mart parking lots looked like a free U2 concert in Central Park. It was safer out in the country, away from the cities, away from any human things that might be attractive to the wandering dead, but even out in the country you had to be very careful when entering houses. Out in the countryside, houses were often the only artificial constructions visible for miles and miles, and they tended to attract the dead like a beacon on a rocky promontory.Take this one for instance. The door was wide open, the windows busted, but there was no telling what horrors might be wandering around its cold and silent halls, ready to jump out and sink its teeth in him the instant he stepped inside. There might be a dozen of them in there, just shuffling around like contestants in some nightmarish cakewalk, their minds as still as mausoleums until some sound, some glint of movement, roused them to their hunger.Brent eased up the front steps, holding the shovel in front of him, and started across the porch to the doorway, waiting for some chomper to spring out at him like a jack-in-the-box from hell.The floorboards of the porch were warped and creaky. They gave under his weight with spongy elasticity. He reached out with the spade of the shovel and tapped it against the doorframe a couple times, then waited to see if anything came stumbling out of the darkness.“Give it another whack,” Harold said behind him. “Sometimes they don’t hear so good.”Brent almost shushed him before he remembered that his travelling companion was dead. Harold’s voice wouldn’t alert any nearby deadheads because he wasn’t really there. He was just a figment of Brent’s imagination.Nevertheless, Brent nodded. He clanked the doorframe again and listened.Nothing.He licked his lips and stepped forward. His left foot crossed the threshold……and an all-but-mummified deadhead whose body was missing from the ribs down latched onto his boot with a bony claw. He cried out as the withered creature jerked his ankle to its mouth and started gnawing on the leather. It was female, naked, its hair as fine as spider silk, but it was surprisingly strong. It almost pulled him off of his feet.The deadhead snapped and chomped at his boot, its movements frantic and crablike in its hunger. Thank God he was wearing boots! If he had been wearing tennis shoes, it might have been able to bite through to the skin.Stumbling around in its grasp, Brent put the spade of the shovel to the back of its neck and pressed down. He put his weight upon it and the sharp edge of the shovel sliced through. With a crunching sound, the zombie’s head came free and rolled over on its cheek. He twisted his ankle free of the deadhead’s jittering fingers and stumbled back. The zombie’s jaws continued to gnash together, its one visible eye rolling in its socket.“Jesus Christ,” he whispered shakily. He shook off his surprise and brought the shovel back up, ready to do battle with the next mindless chomper.He surveyed the room he was standing in. It was a small livingroom with country-style furniture, a flat screen TV sitting atop an old-fashioned console TV, and several bookshelves lined with paperback romances. The matted carpet was covered in several season’s worth of blown leaves, and the wallpaper was peeling from the water-stained gypsum. Some of it had unfurled all the way down to the wainscoting. Ivy had infiltrated the house through the broken windows and green runners of vegetation wavered up the walls and across the ceiling like thick green veins. Beside one of the recliners was a wooden basket with skeins of yarn still in it. On the wall above the couch was a large framed reproduction of “The Last Supper”. On the wall above the TV was a framed print of praying hands. It seemed the Johnsons were a god-fearing couple. Didn’t keep Mr. Johnson from eating his wife from the waist down, though. That’s what he assumed had happened-- her pelvis and leg bones were scattered about the living room, looking somewhat gnawed upon.The female zombie had lain there beside the doorway for so long her body had kind of fused to the floor. The arms of the creature had stopped moving, but the head was still animated, its teeth snapping like a metronome, the milky gray eyes rolling to follow him as he crept toward the kitchen doorway.The kitchen was even more dimly lit, the windows coated with dust so that only a weak yellow light shone through. The room was like a sepia-toned photograph brought to life, everything stark and colorless. The dingy yellow wallpaper bore an apple motif. The kitchen table was made of a heavy, dark wood, and set with chunks of plaster that had rotted and fallen from the ceiling. There were, however, no zombies, but before he ransacked the cabinets for food, he needed to case the entire house, make sure there were no more surprises lying in wait for him.He crossed the kitchen and checked out the rest of the first floor. Past the kitchen was a short hallway that connected to four other rooms as it circled back around to the livingroom. Two of them were bedrooms, and the third looked like it had once served as Mr. Johnson’s office. It was wood paneled and masculine, with a large boxy desk, several filing cabinets and a wide-mouthed bass mounted on the wall. There was a calendar with a photo of a pretty blond bent over a tractor engine. She was grinning, her daisy dukes riding so high the globes of her butt were visible. She was wearing a flannel shirt tied around the waist so that her midriff was bared, and there was a little smear of grease on her cheek. There was also a gun cabinet standing beside the filing cabinets, but the front glass was shattered. Whatever firearms it had once held had long ago been pilfered.“Ammunition too, I bet,” Brent muttered.The final downstairs room was a bathroom. It was small, very blue, and featured an old-fashioned clawfoot tub. Beside the bathroom door was a narrow staircase.He crept up the creaking steps. The second floor was partially obstructed by the collapsed roof, an impenetrable jumble of drywall and wooden beams and mounds of yellow insulation. The two rooms he could get into were empty but for some boxes and plastic storage bins and some physical fitness equipment.“You should work out up here,” Ghost-Harold said. “Try to get buff for the ladies.”Brent chuckled. “You’re the one that needs to work out. I don’t know how anyone could stay fat after the Phage, no food to eat, always running from deadheads.”“This ain’t fat, kid. This is muscle.”“I’ve seen you without a shirt,” Brent said. “That isn’t muscle.”“When you get my age, it’s not so easy to stay trim. You can starve and workout every day, don’t make any difference. It’s just middle age, my boy. One of these days you’ll get fat, too.”“I’ll get eaten before that ever happens,” Brent said, going back down the stairs.Before he settled in, he stepped out the back door and scanned the rear lawn, making sure there were no other deadheads nearby. The wind was blowing even stronger now, whipping the trees and grass back and forth almost violently as it whooshed across the yard. A section of the collapsed barn’s tin roofing wagged up and down like a giant rusty tongue, creaking and booming. The gusting winds had driven the lumpy, steel-colored clouds completely across the sky, and with the overcast an early twilight. The temperature had plummeted while he was exploring the old farmhouse. In the west, the sun was just a dim, glowing patch pasted above the horizon.“Snow for sure tonight,” Brent whispered. “Or a… what did they use to call it?”“A wintry mix?” Ghost-Harold suggested.“Yeah, a wintry mix.”Shivering, Brent retreated inside. He pushed the heavy kitchen table against the door, then walked quickly into the livingroom and used the shovel to scrape Mrs. Johnson off the floor. The two zombies might not be the original Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, but that was what he’d dubbed them.He scooped her head up first, wrinkling his nose at the sight of her snapping jaws and roving eyes. He stepped out onto the porch and gave her head the old heave ho, tossing it in the direction her husband’s noggin had rolled, then he returned inside and did his best to pry her body off the carpet. He got a good portion of it up, wincing at the fibrous tearing sound her flesh made as it pulled loose of the carpeting. One of her arms tore off at the shoulder with a dry crunching sound as he lifted her up so he had to make an extra trip outside, but he got most of her out. He even scooped up her scattered and gnawed on bones, so old now they were gray and striated.He blocked the front door with the sofa, pushed the bookshelves in front of the broken windows, and then he sat and rested for several minutes. He was sweaty and out of breath, and utterly exhausted, but he would rest easier tonight knowing he had made his hideout as secure as possible.
 They caught him two days later.