District: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  District:

  Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

  By

  Shawn Chesser

  KINDLE EDITION

  ***

  District:

  Surviving the Zombie

  Apocalypse

  Copyright 2016

  Shawn Chesser

  Kindle Edition

  Kindle Edition, License

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go and buy your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

  Shawn Chesser Facebook Author Page

  Shawn Chesser on Twitter

  ShawnChesser.Com

  ***

  Acknowledgements

  For Maureen, Raven, and Caden ... I couldn’t have done this without your support. Thanks to all of our military, LE and first responders for your service. To the people in the U.K. and elsewhere around the world who have been in touch, thanks for reading! Lieutenant Colonel Michael Offe, thanks for your service as well as your friendship. Shannon Walters, my top Eagle Eye, thank you! Larry Eckels, thank you for helping me with some of the military technical stuff. Any missing facts or errors are solely my fault. Beta readers, you rock, and you know who you are. Thanks George Romero for introducing me to zombies. Steve H., thanks for listening. All of my friends and fellows at S@N and Monday Steps On Steele, thanks as well. Lastly, thanks to Bill W. and Dr. Bob … you helped make this possible. I am going to sign up for another 24.

  Special thanks to John O’Brien, Mark Tufo, Joe McKinney, Craig DiLouie, Armand Rosamilia, Heath Stallcup, James Cook, Saul Tanpepper, Eric A. Shelman, and David P. Forsyth. I truly appreciate your continued friendship and always invaluable advice. Thanks to Jason Swarr and Straight 8 Custom Photography for the awesome cover. Once again, extra special thanks to Monique Happy for her work editing “District.” Mo, as always, you rose to the occasion! Working with you has been a dream come true and nothing but a pleasure. If I have accidentally left anyone out ... I am truly sorry.

  ***

  Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  www.moniquehappy.com

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Three things worked against Sid and Nancy as they traversed the open range fronting the tree- and scrub-covered foothills to their immediate left. First was the temperature, which had buoyed from well below freezing to the mid-fifties in the span of just a couple of hours. Snow-covered and firm underfoot when they’d taken flight from their captors in the dark early morning hours, the grassy expanse stretching out before them, a never-ending canvas of green and brown dotted with stubborn patches of snow, was now sucking mercilessly at their oversized boots and stealing what precious little energy they had built up overnight.

  Then there was the problem of the clothing they’d taken from their high-centered Volvo wagon and layered on after they had distanced themselves from the string of headlights approaching from far off north on the nearby state route. Amounting to virtually every stitch of cold weather gear crowding their closets before the outbreak, the once thin and pliable high-dollar items—all either touted as GORE-TEX® Treated, Thermal Insulated, or purported to possess Wind Stopping Technology—were now heavy with sweat that had them bunching and pinching at the elbows and knees.

  Lastly was the throng of dead angling in on them from the direction of the road and, in the process, blocking the way to Nancy’s sole objective: Securing anything tangible from the hulk of metal on the road that might help her to remember her dead little boy.

  * * *

  Hours earlier, after having abandoned their overloaded car on the state route, Sid and Nancy had hopped the barbed wire fence and fled across a sparkling carpet of white toward the night-enshrouded tree line.

  However, once they reached the perceived sanctuary the darkened copse of firs and alders promised, Sid looked back and gasped audibly upon seeing the laser-straight trail of shadowed footprints leading right to their position. Thankfully, Nancy had anticipated the effect the diffuse moonlight would have on the six-inch holes they’d stomped into the recent accumulation and was already, literally and figuratively, one step ahead of her husband. Without uttering a word, her breath coming out in great white plumes, she mouthed: “Follow me,” and, grasping his elbow in a firm grip, led him to their left, away from the damning footprints.

  After a minute or two spent ducking low branches and fighting through tangles of ankle-grabbing underbrush, the soft yellow glow of approaching headlights crested a hill ahead and began to slow on the stretch of two-lane to their left.

  Suddenly, and inexplicably, catching Sid by surprise, Nancy went to ground, dragging him down with her. They lay there for a moment listening to the sounds of engines laboring in four-wheel drive and breathing hard from the exertion of breaking brush along the north/south-running tree line. Then, after the trio of vehicles had passed from right to left on the state route and were drawing near to their inert Volvo, she rose and helped Sid to stand. They gawked for a minute, then, with the vehicles gearing down and their brake lights painting the white stripe of road blood red, Nancy nodded for Sid to follow and started off at low-sprint, leaving cover behind.

  Attempting to conceal the evidence of
their passage, Nancy stepped only in the shadow of a raised feeder road and led them straight to the hard-to-miss dark oval mouth of a galvanized culvert buried sidelong beneath it.

  As the growl of engines softened to an easy idle, Nancy again fell to her hands and knees, taking Sid along for the ride. Together, panting and grunting, the two backed themselves into the drainage pipe and lay there as the thunk of doors opening and closing and low murmur of hushed voices carried back to them.

  “Thank God they ate the dog,” Sid whispered to Nancy as the backlit silhouettes conferred on the shoulder beside the high-clearance vehicles.

  “What makes you so sure that was all they ate?” she whispered as the dark forms crouched down and trained rifle muzzles on the Volvo.

  Sid stared at her stump, but made no reply. Expecting the imminent braying of hounds finding their trail to shatter the night air, he buried his face in Nancy’s parka-clad shoulder and began to weep.

  Nancy shushed Sid and then directed him to look to the road where a flashlight beam lanced out to illuminate the burgundy-red Volvo. “It’s empty,” a voice called out. Then there was cussing. Next, accusations were thrown back and forth for a minute or two. Finally, the voices died to nothing and a half-dozen new beams of blue light painted the field a couple of hundred yards south of their hiding place.

  There was a shout, the words garbled, and then a disembodied voice said, “Wait a second. I’ll get the cutters and snip the wire.”

  And someone among the group did just that.

  The voices rose in volume and pitch as the group poured through the newly created opening. Nancy clutched Sid’s hand as their pursuers fanned out and started heckling and calling them by name. The insults and threats of violence continued as the five women and one man walked the length of the fresh tracks and probed the tree line with their flashlight beams.

  Soon the cussing was back as the posse fought the same undergrowth Sid and Nancy had. The futile search lasted an hour and ended in more arguing. Within ten minutes of the searchers giving up on searching the tree line and crunching back through the snow towards their awaiting vehicles, doors were thunking closed and motors were turning over.

  After letting the rigs warm up for a spell, the two SUVs pulled slowly around the lone 4x4 pickup and stopped single file in front of the Volvo.

  Teeth beginning to chatter, Sid said, “You fooled them.”

  “No … we fooled them,” Nancy replied, absentmindedly rubbing her bandaged stump.

  As the first tendrils of dawn turned the sky to the west from deep black to a harsh shade of purple, the last vehicle in the small convoy, a squared-off black pickup truck, stopped alongside the Volvo. Without warning a lick of red flame lit up the retreating night and a thunderous report crashed across the countryside.

  “There goes the window,” Sid exclaimed.

  “We’ll get another car,” Nancy said consolingly.

  Sid sighed. “What’s she doing?” he asked.

  As if answering the question, where there had been darkness between the vehicles, a bright red point of light spewing smoke and spark suddenly appeared, illuminating the Swedish wagon in a lava-like red-orange glow.

  “A flare,” Sid whispered, his already damaged night vision etched further with red tracers as the truck driver swung the sputtering and spitting item lazily back and forth a couple of times before tossing it through the Volvo’s newly shot-out driver’s side window.

  For a long while they remained silent and watched their car burn, their meager belongings—mostly boxes full of memories: curling pictures of their tow-headed boy, the certificate of live birth with his tiny footprints stamped in blue ink, and moldy toddler’s clothes Nancy hadn’t been able to part with after his death at the hands of the rotting dead—going up with it.

  Nancy stared stone-faced. She was cried out. Had been for a long while. Sid, on the other hand, was not. He cried for a long while as tendrils of smoke curled from the smoldering Volvo. And while he did, a driving sleet started up and the snow began to melt.

  Thankfully, their combined body heat was trapped in the culvert with them and Sid finally cried himself to sleep.

  Nancy spent the next three hours staring at the bloody stump where her dominant hand used to be. The makeshift dressing was holding, but the cauterized wound had begun to seep again, the new yellow and red splotches mingling with the ground-in grass and mud.

  After the first hour the sleet turned to a cold, hard driving rain—the water streaming in the culvert making things even more miserable.

  Hour two saw the rain slow and the pewter clouds cruise off to the southeast.

  By the third hour Nancy still had not heard so much as a single exhaust note from the direction of the state route—south or north. The temperature was also rising quickly, and as a result trees to the left were shedding snow at a quick pace—the thumps startling at first, then welcome as their true source became known. At the end of the three hours, as if a switch had been flicked, the storm had been usurped and to the west was brilliant blue sky as far as the eye could see.

  Smiling broadly, Nancy shook Sid, urging him to wake up. Her simple moment of joy was quickly shattered when she looked down and realized that the red slush his hand had been resting in was melted fully, which meant the dead would be thawing out, too—a death warrant for sure, if they didn’t find shelter soon.

  Feeling the sun warming her face, Nancy told Sid to stay put. After shimmying from the culvert, she commando-crawled a few feet down the ditch in the direction of the road and lay still in the shallow water pooled there. After listening hard for a moment and hearing only a steady dripping and occasional whoosh-bang of more snow calving off the tall trees behind her, she rose up slowly, her head barely breaking cover of the ditch, and regarded the dense forest that had saved their lives. It was much closer than she remembered. In the dark the sprint from the forest’s edge to the drainage pipe had seemed like a forty-yard dash with lions snapping at their heels. In reality, the lush green wall behind her was less than thirty feet away.

  Dead ahead, Nancy’s vantage was mostly blocked by long tufts of grass slowly springing back after being knuckled under the snow for a day and a half.

  “I’m going to take a better look,” she whispered over her shoulder to Sid. He muttered something a little louder than she would’ve liked, and she winced. Then, rearing up off the ground in a pose never attempted outside of a yoga studio, she got an unobstructed look at the burned-out windowless shell that had been their Volvo. Craning left, then right, she saw only a steaming ribbon of road spooling away from the charred hulk in both directions.

  “Clear,” she called over her shoulder. Which was a little white lie, because though their pursuers were nowhere to be seen, a small group of undead had keyed in on Sid’s plaintive voice and were ambling onto the pasture through the breach in the barbed wire fence. The lie had been enough to get Sid moving and out of the pipe.

  In the light of day, Nancy saw that Sid’s clothing, like hers, was drenched and sluicing water as he stood. So much for manufacturer’s promises, she mused, grabbing hold of her man and pulling him stammering and flailing in the general direction of the slow-moving zombies.

  “Hell are we going that way for?” he asked, his voice gone hoarse.

  “Because everything we had was in that car. Everything.”

  And by “everything” she meant all of her dead son’s belongings, some of which she hoped had survived the fire. His favorite spoon, hopefully. Perhaps some of his Hot Wheel cars … at least the metal bodies. Anything tangible to have and to hold would be better than the memories that seemed to get fuzzier around the edges the farther she got from that horrific day in late July when she had lost him.

  Chapter 1

  Now, slowed by the unlikely combination of mud sucking at their oversized boots and waterlogged fleece and nylon weighing them down like suits of armor, the young couple were no faster than their new pursuers—nearly a dozen moaning and hi
ssing dead things all in various stages of decay and undress.

  Nancy and Sid trudged a rough semi-circle around the things to get to their car. Once there, they found only ashes and charred skeletal seat frames inside the metal shell that had once contained all of the memories of their past lives.

  “Let’s go, Nance,” Sid urged.

  Shaking her head, Nancy pounded on the car’s flat roof with her good hand, sending blackened, scaling paint flying in every direction.

  “We’ll make new memories,” Sid called, as he led the slow procession of dead things around the front of the Volvo and away from Nancy.

  “Fuck memories,” Nancy hissed, as Sid returned, grabbed her elbow, and lead her toward the fence.

  “We can’t stay on the road. They’re coming back … sooner or later.”

  The dead were hissing and moaning louder than ever as Sid dragged Nancy away from the now low-to-the-ground car.

  Sid reached the snipped wire fence and ushered Nancy through. He burned the ten-second lead over the zombies by working feverishly to wind the longest of the rusty strands around a post as a makeshift barrier.

  Falling short by less than an inch, Sid gave up and reentered the pasture through the breach and began shedding his leaden layers of clothing the same way he had donned them: on the run.

  “Fucking Pineapple Express,” he shouted, tugging at a sleeve to extricate his arm. “Thought these kinds of wild weather swings only happened near the ocean.”

  “Help,” Nancy called out, one arm bent at an awkward angle and stuck fast in the sleeve of her goose-down parka.

  Sid stopped in his tracks and, as he turned at the waist to regard Nancy, there came a string of hollow popping sounds. In the split second between realizing what the noises were and opening his mouth to tell Nancy to duck, his side vision registered two slender women rising up from the roadside a hundred feet south. In the next beat he was delivering the warning and staring directly at winking muzzles as the two shooters advanced along the state route toward them.