War of the Undead Day 5 Read online

  The Apocalypse Crusade 5

  War of the Undead Day 5

  A Zombie Tale by Peter Meredith

  Copyright 2019

  Peter Meredith

  Blah, blah, blah, lawyer speak, lawyer speak, blah blah, blah.

  Do we really need to go into this? Here’s the deal. Looky-no touchy.

  It’s as simple as that.

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect America

  Infinite Reality: Daggerland Online Novel 1

  Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2

  Generation Z

  Generation Z: The Queen of the Dead

  Generation Z: The Queen of War

  Generation Z: The Queen Unthroned

  Generation Z: The Queen Enslaved

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day One

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead: Day Two

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Three

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Four

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day Five

  The Horror of the Shade: Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell: Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade: Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Blood Lure The Hidden Land Novel 1

  The King’s Trap The Hidden Land Novel 2

  To Ensnare a Queen The Hidden Land Novel 3

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  The Apocalypse Exile: The Undead World Novel 6

  The Apocalypse War: The Undead World Novel 7

  The Apocalypse Executioner: The Undead World Novel 8

  The Apocalypse Revenge: The Undead World Novel 9

  The Apocalypse Sacrifice: The Undead World 10

  The Edge of Hell: Gods of the Undead Book One

  The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead Book Two

  The Witch: Jillybean in the Undead World

  Jillybean’s First Adventure: An Undead World Expansion

  Tales from the Butcher’s Block

  Prologue

  Day 5

  Oneonta, New York

  Fear was the one true constant. It was all-powerful. It permeated everything. The stench of it hung in the air with a sour smell. It rose up out of the dark earth like cold tendrils and ran like an electric current down the chains that strung one man to the next.

  The men, thousands and thousands of them in long lines, shivered from the fear and the chill, making their chains clink, clink, clink. On and on, maddeningly. They had the fear of trapped animals, and more than one had torn flesh from their ankles trying to escape their shackles. To make everything worse, the fields were shrouded in a chilling night fog that hid the dead.

  As the men waited on the onslaught, most of them prayed to a God they had actively despised throughout their brutal lives. Watching murderers get on their knees to beg and plead and make promises they had no intention of ever keeping was both laughable and annoying to Juan “Cobre” Santiago. He was a man with few morals, and yet he despised hypocrisy.

  Even if he had been a hypocrite, he knew better than to waste his breath. What god would ever want him? He was a demon, worse than anything he was about to face. The truth: he was cold-hearted, evil through and through, and ugly inside and out. His face ran with tattoos and scars, as did his gleaming bald head, his muscular torso and his long arms.

  Besides, he didn’t think he had enough time left to ask forgiveness for all of his crimes. He had killed a lot of people in his time with the Los Zetas cartel, and he had killed them in an astonishing number of ways. It was a thing he prided himself on. He had beaten seven men to death using only his fists. He had stabbed fifteen others—on some occasions, he had pounded the knife home, breaking bones in the process, and on others, he had given his enemies just a little poke in the liver, so he could watch them die slowly. He had used hammers and saws, a homemade guillotine, rope, chains, and gardening implements, including a trowel. Once he had tried to kill a prostitute with a sink disposal, although that had not worked nearly as well as he had hoped, and in order to silence her caterwauling, he had thrown her down and dropped a refrigerator on her head.

  Cobre was a horror of a human being, but interestingly enough, no one thought he was insane. He certainly didn’t think he was insane. Being part of a Mexican cartel meant that killing people with revolting barbaric cruelty was sometimes just a way of life.

  The only reason he was even thinking about his mental state was because he found himself chained within in a few feet of David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer. Berkowitz was famous, although for the life of him Cobre couldn’t understand why. All through the long march, Cobre had stared at him trying to puzzle it out.

  “Shiiit, he look like a retired janitor,” Cobre muttered to himself in heavily accented English. And he did, too. His heyday as a killer was long in the past. Berkowitz was now in his late sixties, and was portly and bald save for a half-ring of greasy hair that ran from one ear around to the other. His janitorial appearance was cemented by the grey little fag mustache that for some reason made Cobre want to punch him.

  Supposedly Berkowitz was a psycho, and everyone looked at him with side eyes. Cobre, who had known his share of crazed, twitchy mother-fuckers didn’t see it.

  “How many people you kill?” Cobre demanded.

  “Six,” Berkowitz replied in a soft voice, looking down over his round belly at his feet. “And this is my punishment…my final contrition. I am born again. God loves me, and this will set me free.”

  Cobre snorted, shaking his head. “You kilt six people and you think God loves you? Shiiit, God must really love me. I kilt a whole mess of people. More’n I can count. What about you, yo?”

  There was only one man between them: a short, squat, bulked-up negro who had been busted with thirty pounds of weed in the backseat of his car and a dismembered corpse in the trunk. His birth name was Jamal. “None,” Jamal whispered, sticking to his lie right to the end. His lawyer, who had managed to plea bargain the murder charge down to a possession with intent to distribute, had drilled it into his head never to admit anything to anyone.

  Jamal licked his full lips with a pale tongue. He had never been so unhappy in his life. “I’m only inside cuz the white man is…” A sudden high scream split the dark and Jamal took a step back, only to be brought up short by the chain around his ankle. The scream had been inhuman. No person could ever have let out such a hideous shriek. It went on and on, and now the moans were growing louder in response. Jamal was on the verge of pissing himself.

  The lip licking started going nonstop, his eyes huge and round. “The, the, the white man did this. He did all of it. He messed this world up. It was a paradise and he messed it up.”

  Once more Cobre snorted. Jamal turned on him, glad for any excuse not to have to think about the fact that he was chained in a long line with hundreds of psycho killers all passively waiting to be eaten alive. It was crazy. It was all crazy, and the need to piss was so great that he fumbled out his cock and let out a gushing stream as he snarled up at Cobre. “Snort all you want, spic. The white man is holding you down, just like he’s holding the black man down.”

  “Which white men?” Cobre asked. “Is that one holding you down?” He pointed at Berkowitz, who was praying again, his thick, pale lips moving quickly. Cobre laughed easily. “No mot
her-fuckin’ white man ever held me down. Shiiit, don’t you know that even saying that gives them power they don’t fuckin’ deserve? You know who you sound like? Mi padre. He was poor as shit, just like his father. And you know who made him poor? Other fuckin’ Mexicans. All they ever did was bitch, just like you. That’s all they ever did. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Wah, wah, wah. But that wasn’t me. I did something. I made myself fuckin’ rich. I came here and lived the American dream!”

  Jamal began to splutter, half in hysterical laughter, half in hysterical fear. “What? You’re in prison, you fucking freak. They got you in chains! They got you just like they got the slaves. Don’t you see that? The white…” Just then they caught the squeak of overloaded wheels and the scrape of metal. A cart was being pushed down the line. Quieter now, Jamal hissed, “You know what you are? You’re brainwashed.”

  “Shiiit, I ain’t here because of no white man. I’m here cuz I kilt people. I kilt a lot of fuckin’ people. The problem was doing the work myself. That was a mistake. I’d still be chillin’ in Florida if I done some of that delegating.” The cart came even with them. It was stacked high with all sorts of tools and strange weapons. A long-handled shovel was held out to Cobre. “Naw, man. Gimme the pick-axe. A shovel won’t do shit.” The shovel was tossed at his feet. Jamal got the pick-axe, which he gripped with both hands and hugged to his chest as if Cobre was going to take it from him.

  Cobre thought about it, then realized that Jamal with a pick-axe was a better sidekick than Jamal cringing behind a shovel. Besides, he had killed men with a shovel before.

  He fingered the metal edge and, like everyone else, glanced down at his shackles. Despite the fact they had been warned, in the very clearest of terms, not to try to escape, thirty-eight men had been shot to death during the endless marches of the last three days. The guards weren’t playing games. One of the would-be escapees had been shot in the leg and instead of giving him a bandage and a second chance, a guard had walked up and capped him at point blank range, then just left him there. Another man had sat down and refused to get up; he had been executed on the spot. There had been no questions, no repercussions, and certainly no admonishments.

  Even with this ingrained in everyone’s memories, somewhere down the line there was a hard CLINK! as some fool gave his chains a whack with a metal tool. A few guards surged forward with guns leveled. Fingers were pointed and the offender had his sledge hammer pulled from his hands. He was left without a weapon of any sort, and he mewled petulantly.

  His cries meant nothing to the guards.

  The world, as far as the prisoners knew it, had been turned on its head. No one cared about them; not even a little. From the worst offender, a title Cobre relished since it had once given him cache, to the man serving two years for tax fraud committed by his now ex-wife, their lives were now utterly forfeit.

  Three days earlier, the governor had given the order to “rescue” them from the New York State prison system. That same governor was currently under arrest for a vague federal crime that would find justification just as soon as the President got around with charging him with something. In the meantime, a general was running things in New York and when it got back to him that there were thousands of prisoners sitting around doing nothing but eating, he had set them marching to the very edge of the front lines north of Oneonta where there were just a smattering of farmers and reservists holding down an area a hundred miles long.

  The army of prisoners was 51,000 strong, and heralded from forty-three different correctional facilities, including Shawangunk, Sing Sing, Attica, “The Hill” at Elmira, and the infamous S-Block Special Housing Unit from the Fishkill Correctional Facility.

  The men from these maximum-security prisons were some of the most hardened, toughest criminals in the world. Now they were little more than cannon fodder.

  “Stand and fight,” a man in dark body armor said, walking down the line handing out little blue surgical masks. It was hard to tell if he was a guard or a soldier; they were mixed together now. “Anyone who tries to run will be shot down.” It was as simple as that.

  “What if we win?” Jamal asked.

  The man laughed, “Then you get to fight again tomorrow, the same as the rest of us.”

  Jamal muttered something that sounded like, “Stupid mother-cracker-fucking shit-headed, honky, mother-fucker.” It all sort of ran together and was muffled by the surgical mask. Someone hissed him into silence. The shadows not far in front of them were moving. The moans were now louder and closer. And the smell…the smell of the dead was revolting, and more than one man began retching.

  With his head canted back toward the oncoming horde of undead, the soldier with the masks shoved the box at David Berkowitz. “Take one and pass them on.” He then disappeared, running to the rear. The box made its way down the line in a blur as the first of the undead came close enough to go from shadowy myth to terrifying reality. It walked on stumps, its clothes and flesh hanging like rags. One arm ended not with a hand but with two sharp bones protruding from a mangled wrist. Its face was shredded and looked like it had been dragged behind a car—and somehow it was moving.

  It wasn’t even a big zombie; still, it sent a portion of the line reeling back. A gunshot stopped the movement. One man challenged the creature. He held a post-hole spade up threateningly. The spade had a long narrow metal head, which the man sent right into the thing’s throat, practically decapitating it. The zombie collapsed at the man’s feet.

  A wild ignorant cheer went up by the men chained to the victor. Looking more astonished than anything, he raised his bloody tool and crowed over his victory.

  More zombies stumbled out of the dark, all just as disgusting, though not all so easily destroyed—some were big, strapping humanoids that had to be beaten to the ground by half a dozen men. It was especially frightening when they came in throngs of ten or twelve. The first couple would be killed with a few swings of a mallet or crowbar, but sometimes there would be three or four right there in a man’s face. A concerted effort by all the prisoners nearby would be enough to destroy them, but this didn’t happen as much as it should have.

  The prisoners were selfish and stupid, concerned only with their own survival, and many times wouldn’t attack a zombie, even a few feet away if they didn’t think it was a danger to themselves. Men began to die and gaps appeared in the line. The zombies didn’t pour through these gaps, instead they turned and attacked the men on either side—and the gaps grew.

  Like everyone else, Cobre had been foolishly optimistic when he saw how easily the first zombie had been killed. It didn’t take long before he saw that the only way to hold the line was if someone assumed a strong leadership role. He saw that the twenty-man chain-gangs could be formed into platoons, dead bodies could be removed to give the platoons more mobility, weapons could be reassigned based on need and effectiveness, and a round-robin system could be used to allow platoons to rest or act as reinforcements.

  It was either do that or try to run away. The night was filled with high screams, thousands of moans, angry shouts and gunshots. It was loud enough that no one would hear a single man trying to break his chain.

  “Here’s the plan,” he told Jamal. “I’ll hold them off while you use the axe to free me. Then I’ll free you. We can both escape.”

  Jamal held his pickaxe away from Cobre. “No way. I’ll do me first.”

  “Shiiit, you’ll run,” Cobre answered.

  “You’ll run if I do you!” Jamal shot right back.

  Their argument was going in circles, and all the while more of the dead were coming closer. There were eight lurching, groaning things coming right for them.

  “We’ll do a fuckin’ compromise,” Cobre told Jamal. “Cut yourself free of that Son of Sam mother-fucker and then cut me free of this guy.” He jerked his thumb at a near-toothless, spidery-thin man from Guatemala, who had been in the joint since the early eighties. The Guat seemed lost in the outside world and was spooked as much by the da
rk as he was by the zombies.

  “Once you do that, you cut this chain and…”

  “We’ll both be free,” Jamal finished as he caught on. He immediately started swinging the axe down: CHANG! CHANG! CHANG! There was no disguising the sound and someone behind them took a loose shot at Jamal. The bullet winged off into the dark, and Jamal only paused a second.

  Cobre gave him a shove. “Come on, ese! Takin’ a motherfuckin’ slug is the easy way out, so don’t sweat it.”

  Jamal went back to hacking at the chain and, as he did, Cobre faced the monsters coming at them. With a muttered curse, he hefted the shovel and decided that it wasn’t the worst of weapons. It was long enough for him to heave zombies away, pushing them down the line; and it was rangy enough that he could kill without letting them get too close. Using a winding, over-hand swing, Cobre brought the shovel down on the head of one of the zombies—Thwap! The top of the thing’s head compressed by three inches as black blood squirted from both its ears, and its teeth broke like glass and shot out of its mouth.

  “Nice one, ese,” the little Guat mother-fucker said, grinning and holding what was essentially a long branch like it was a baseball bat. He took a Babe Ruth swat at one of the zombies and broke its jaw, turning it toward Cobre in the process.

  “Stupid Guat mother-fucker,” Cobre said, before jabbing his shovel spear-like at the thing’s throat. It fell and he was just about to bitch at the Guat when Jamal gave a relieved cry; the chain had broken.

  “Look out. Move. Give me some room.” Jamal started hacking at the next section of chain: CHANG! CHANG! CHANG!

  As he did, Cobre was battling five zombies at once. He was strong and fast; they were strong and slow. They were also stupid, attacking with only their teeth. Sure, they tried to grab him with their scraggly claws, but most of their nails were torn down to nothing, and those with nails couldn’t rip their way past his heavy Carhartt coat.

  He slung the first two left and right, letting Berkowitz and the Guat take care of them. The next took the point of the shovel straight through the eyes. It was still alive, but blind and stumbled into the fourth. The two fell, as behind Cobre the sound of Jamal hacking and hacking rang out even louder: CHANG! CHANG! CHANG!