The Zombie Chronicles - Book 3 - Deadly City (Apocalypse Infection Unleashed Series) (10 page)

“
I have no idea what these freaks are up to.”

“
You people are sick!” Lucas shouted, as if it would help.

An intercom crackled to life and echoed over the field. I covered my ears to muffle the sound, until it was replaced with a loud voice. “Welcome, my people! I hope you’re all ready for a show. Today, these three degenerates will pay the ultimate price for the heartless butchering of our beloved hero, our Jason, defender of our great new civilization.”

The crowd cheered in some sections and continued their bloodthirsty cries in others.

I just stood my ground on shaky legs and swallowed back the rising bile.

Lucas threw me a worried glance. “Crap!” he muttered.

I gazed down at my shaking legs and noticed that the turf below me was covered in dried blood. My heart lurched. We weren’t going to be the first, and I was sure we wouldn’t be the last to face a horrible fate.

“
By the authority vested in me as the mayor of this great new city, let the execution begin!” the voice howled over the loudspeaker.

Those words made me shudder all over. We’d definitely been taken there to die, and I hurriedly, instinctively scanned my surroundings, desperately looking for a way to escape. We could have made a run for it and tried to hop the towering fence covered with spiked barbs, if it weren’t for the guards standing there with their big guns locked, loaded, and at the ready. I had no doubt they’d shoot us before we’d ever get the chance to jump over. Running back the way we came was also not an option; the bullets would outrun us, whichever direction we tried to retreat.

Suddenly, a familiar stench wafted into the air, immediately followed by loud, angry grunts coming from behind us. Operating on instinct, I grabbed Nick’s arm and spun around to find three figures stumbling toward us. They were distastefully familiar in the way that we’d all come to know and fear. The living dead were coming for us, three against three, one on one!

Chapter 11

“
Nick!” I uttered in amazement. “They’re not gonna shoot us. This is some kind of zombie fight club.”

“
Now we know why they’ve been bringing zombies into the city,” Nick said sullenly. “They’re gladiators!”

“
Yeah, your theory on experimental testing of strangers was way off,” Lucas said.

Nick nodded. “They aren’t trying to save the human race. This is just the next evolution of the Coliseum!”

“
And the missing people…” Lucas muttered in shock. “The outsiders… They must’ve been…”

“
Yeah,” Nick said through gritted teeth. “They were just the nightly entertainment.”

“
No!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “You can’t do this! This is so…inhumane! You’re all being affected by the contaminated drinking water! Don’t you see? Please don’t do this!”

“
What kind of sick game is this?” Lucas muttered. His hands clenched to fists as he yelled up, “We have no weapons! We don’t have a fighting chance against you or those things! Let us go!”

“
It’s not a game,” Nick spoke softly. “There will be no winner—only losers. We’re here for some sick, twisted fantasy execution, like the Christians being fed to the lions back in ancient Greece.”

Lucas made a fist, as if mentally preparing himself for battle. “This is what happens when humans lose sight of their humanity. We need weapons!”

“
You really think they’re gonna hand us a chainsaw?” I asked.

“
No, but we need to find something…and quick.”

“
Like what, Lucas?” I asked sarcastically.

“
Anything that will pierce, hack, cut, or explode will do nicely,” Lucas said, ignoring my cynicism. His eyes remained glued on the zombies moving ever closer, ready to close in on us at any second.

“
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s nothing around,” Nick said, “and I doubt they’re gonna give us an arsenal to work with. That would only destroy their fun.”

“
The zombies don’t have brains,” I said. “Luckily, we do. We just have to outthink them.”
Three zombies? That’s manageable. Yeah, we can handle that. We’ve fought off far more,
I reasoned suddenly feeling naïvely hopeful. “I’ll take the hag in the green dress.”

“
I call dibs on Officer Deadhead,” Nick said, noticing the tattered uniform of the middle zombie. “Lucas, can you manage the chick in the purple?”

“
Love me a chick in a form-fitting jumpsuit,” Lucas said.

I tuned out to focus on my target. The rotting lady in the green halter dress sneered and growled as she moved toward me. The left side of her face, from cheek to throat, had been ripped away. I had nothing for a weapon but my wits—that and a wicked roundhouse kick. The decomposing woman half-staggered toward me. She seemed to be limping worse than the others, and I soon saw why: She was still wearing one high heel. The other shoe dragged along the ground behind her, still looped around her ankle. I wanted to get my hands on those stilettos, not because they matched my outfit, but because they’d make for a spiky weapon, in lieu of anything else. As she came closer, I took a running leap and dropkicked her in the center of her chest, sending her somersaulting backward, into the grass, with a stupefied look on what was left of her hideous face. I ripped the high heels from her ankles and proceeded to pound one right through her eye, and she stopped moving.
“Lucas!” I said, throwing him the other heel. “Here!”

He used the fashionable footwear to take down the lady in the purple jumpsuit in one quick blow. “Shoes are a girl’s best friend, ya know!” he yelled as she tumbled to the ground in a stinking, lifeless heap.

Now came the part I hated. If I wanted to use the heel again, I knew I’d have to pull it out of the lady’s decaying face.

I heard Nick cheer from behind me, “The police dude still has his revolver. The idiots didn’t disarm him!”

I turned to see the policeman writhing on the ground, grasping his mutilated hands at Nick’s legs. Nick put both hands around the revolver, centered his aim, and squeezed off his shot. The policeman’s brains seemed to explode from the back of his head, painting the field in a fresh coat of gore. Nick spun around, keeping the gun at head level.

There was no time for celebration, however, as another squad of undead goons had been released and were heading our way.

“
Guys!” Lucas shouted. “I don’t think they’re gonna stop sending these things until we’re dead.”

“
Well, they best not hold their breath,” Lucas shouted with a laugh as he took aim at the coming horde.

Three more surrounded me, and I knew then that it wasn’t going to end. They were going to keep sending zombies out until we were dead, just like Lucas said, the sick freaks. They shouted and cheered the zombies on, and I couldn’t believe it.
What happened to the America I believed in? The one my brother and Lucas fought for?

I assumed a combat fighting stance and immediately went for the closest zombie. He had scraggly red hair and was missing his right arm. He was also shirtless and flat-out nasty. I wanted to gag at the missing chunks of skin that had left a hole in his bulbous stomach. Ropes of intestines dangled and dragged behind him with every lumbering step. With my left hand open and palm out, I struck him hard in the nose, sending the shattered bone up into the thing’s brain. The creature slumped to the ground, releasing a sickening, unforgettable gurgle from his throat.

Spinning around as fast as I could, I delivered a vicious sidekick to the head of some tattooed skinhead who had a gaping hole where his nose used to be, sending him reeling into the grass. I then rushed the third zombie, a naked, elderly woman who was missing so much flesh from her physique that it was difficult to tell she once was female.

I hit her with another palm strike directly to the face, but that only knocked her down on her back. I brought my foot down hard on the back of her skull and felt it give way as the heel of my boot sank into the slippery goo of her brain matter. I then turned back to the skinhead, who was still rolling around on the grass like a turtle caught on his back. With a
crunch
, I sank the high heel deep into its skull, but the heel snapped off the shoe from the blow, which wasn’t good at all since it was my only weapon.

Another member of the rotted masses caught me by surprise and managed to grab a fistful of my hair. I quickly reached up behind me, clasped the thing’s wrist, and ducked backward while twisting the man’s arm up behind him. I released his twisted arm just long enough to grab the top of his head with one hand and then his jaw with the other, then immediately wrenched his neck hard to the right, causing the thing to collapse to the blood-soaked turf. I didn’t like hand-to-hand combat because there was always the risk of infection, but I was fresh out of options.

Shots echoed around us, and I turned just in time to see Nick kill a number of zombies, one by one. The bad thing was, his ammo wasn’t going to last, and we had no real weapons. A horrible thought came into my head as I stared at one of the zombie’s decomposing legs. Sometimes you have to be creative and use whatever tricks you’ve got up your sleeves to tip the scales in your favor. The leg was pretty much rotted to the point of falling off the unmoving ghoul. His entire femur was exposed, gleaming white in the morning sun.

I gazed around, only now noticing that all three zombies had been maintenance workers. I ran over to one of them and retrieved a pair of thick leather gloves from his pocket. The other two had the same gloves, so I assumed they must’ve been on a job when things turned ugly; they were certainly the most decomposed of the dead I’d seen. I slipped on the gloves and prepared to perform one of the most repulsive acts of my life, out of absolute necessity, of course.

Sucking in a deep breath, I reached for my gleaming white prize and easily wrenched the loose bone out. I nearly vomited, but it didn’t matter. Now I had a real weapon.
I choked up on the femur like it was a Louisville Slugger and proceeded to raise it high and point it to the crowd of stunned and confused townspeople, like I was Babe Ruth, about to send one more over the fence.

“
Nick, Lucas! We can use the bones,” I said.

Nick glanced over. “Dude, that’s just…sick!”

“
I don’t care! We either fight or crawl into a fetal position and hope they mistake us for a football.”

“
You didn’t let me finish,” my brother said. “It’s sick, gross,
and
insane, but it’s brilliant. Stephen King himself couldn’t have come up with something that twisted.”

“
I ain’t puttin’ my hands inside one of those things!” Lucas barked. “I don’t wanna risk contamination.”

I pointed down to the gloves on another worker. “It’s do-or-die time, Lucas! Glove up and start swingin’, man!”

Lucas smiled and rushed over. “Swing, batter-batter!” he shouted, pumping me up as I stared straight ahead into the zombie-infested battlefield. “Hold up! I’ve got an idea,” he shouted.

“
Lay it on us,” Nick yelled back.

“
Remember that firefight in Fallujah?” Lucas asked. “We were pinned down behind those dead insurgents, and I started stacking the bodies on top of one another to create a bunker so we could return fire?”

“
Speaking of sick and twisted,” Nick said through a smirk.

“
We keep knocking them out and create a wall, of sorts—layers and layers of dead zombies. They’ll try to climb over it and just fall flat on their faces. That’s when we bash their brains in.”

“
I love it!” I shouted. “They’re definitely too stupid to walk around, and we know they can’t climb.”

Nick clapped Lucas on the shoulder. “I like it!”

We stood side by side as the next wave of undead came streaming across the field.

A rotted skater boy wearing kneepads, elbow pads, and a red helmet limped toward me, and I swung the femur with the speed of a lightweight bat. The sound seemed to reverberate throughout the field. I watched him tumble forward, then tore off his helmet and brought my boot heel down hard on his head. I had never even killed a fly before this zombie thing had ever happened, and there I was going all gladiator as I bashed in the skulls of one zombie after another. An ocean of emotions flooded through me. I was proud that I was fighting back, yet angry that I was forced to kill people whom I was sure I could eventually save. The booing crowd fueled my rage even more. It was kill or be killed, and I didn’t plan to die anytime soon.