Resurrection: A Zombie Novel by - (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📕

And that button-up flannel shirt Kyle wore. Good grief. The grunge look went out of style long ago, even in Seattle. Kyle needed practical clothes like what Parker was wearing: water-resistant cargo pants, a black fleece sweatshirt that kept him warm even when wet, and his favorite olive drab army jacket.

And the dumb kid shaved every day, a spectacular waste of effort and time. Kyle kept his face baby’s-ass smooth as if he might get a date. A date with who? Carol?

Worst of all, though, Kyle was a goddamn lunatic for thinking they ought to leave their food and fortifications behind for some mythical island where unicorns romped in the fields and fairies lived in the trees.

An island would be nice, sure, if they could beam there like in Star Trek, but their grocery store was a castle. They had food, water, bathrooms, basic medicine, clothes, blankets, and a whole row of gas cans by the back door.

Every single window was boarded up with plywood except for slits at the top to let in some light. Two-by-fours braced the front and the back doors. No one, and no thing, could force its way in unless it was driving a truck or wielding an ax.

Hughes and Frank had hauled the lumber, nails, and hammers in the Chevy from a hardware store down the street. They did it at night. The darkness at night now that the power was out gave him the creeps. Billions of new stars seemed to leap toward the planet from the farthest reaches of space, but Parker couldn’t see a damn thing if the moon wasn’t up.

Only once since he was seven and afraid of his closet did he feel real fear of the dark. He’d gone on a camping trip with a buddy who marched him and his sorry ass seven miles up a trail in the Olympic mountains. That was maybe ten years ago. The scenery was spectacular. Parker had never seen anything like it because there is nothing else like it. The Olympic Peninsula produced the only true temperate rain forest on earth. Not even the other lush forests of Washington and Oregon are like the forests in the Olympics. Everything’s wet all the time. Baby trees grow from the sides of fallen dead trees, sucking nutrients from their predecessors like cannibals. Curtains of moss the size of houses hang from the canopy.

Unlike in the volcanic Cascades, where they’re few and far between, black bears are thick on the ground in the Olympics.

And that was the problem.

Sometime after midnight he crawled out of his tent to urinate and a near paralyzing fear of the darkness struck him at once. He couldn’t see shit, not even stars. There was no ambient artificial light from a city in any direction. The nearest house was more than fifty miles away, and he was pretty sure the nearest town was in Canada. He turned on his flashlight, but it only cast a dirty yellow splotch on the underbrush. The rest of the world remained shrouded in pitch.

He might have felt okay had the forest been silent. At least he’d know a bear wasn’t stomping around somewhere nearby. But the forest was not silent. Water dripped from the trees in every direction. His ears seemed to work overtime since he couldn’t see. The part of his brainpower that normally processed sight was freed up to listen for sound. The dripping water sounded like an afternoon rainstorm. If a hungry 350-pound omnivore stepped on a branch somewhere nearby, maybe he’d hear it. But if a 350-pound omnivore sat on the path right in front him just waiting for Parker to get a little bit closer, he’d be torn to pieces by claws and by teeth the instant he bumbled into it.

He hurriedly pissed in the bushes and scrambled back to his tent.

The dark of the Olympic National Forest put a fright into him that was primal in its intensity. He didn’t think it was possible to be any more afraid of the dark than he was on that night in the forest, but he was wrong. He was so very wrong.

How many bears live in that forest? A couple of hundred at most? In the now-darkened cities of the Pacific Northwest, thousands of those things were loose on the streets.

Possibly hundreds of thousands.

And the nearest artificial light was on the international space station.

Parker was not going to leave the confines of his fortress unless he fucking well had to.

Hughes had figured out how to board it up without generating as much noise as a construction site. He blew up the used-car lot down the street. Hughes and Frank first doused the building with gasoline, but they dumped the lion’s share on the hoods of all the vehicles lined up out front. And they dropped a match.

The noise was unfuckingbelievable once the cars started exploding. It attracted hundreds of those things. They threw themselves into the flames like moths into a campfire. Most burned to death. Others were blown to pieces when the gas tanks ignited. None heard or otherwise noticed Parker and Kyle as they drove sixpenny nails into plywood and transformed their grocery store into a castle.

Parker was impressed with Hughes for coming up with that plan. It was a good idea, a big idea, and if Carol hadn’t been so freaked out by the explosions, it would have been fun.

He heard something outside, tiny and faint through the boarded-up windows, most likely Hughes’ truck. All sounds were magnified now. The silence of the earth itself seemed to make noise. Parker thought the “sound” of silence might be the onset of tinnitus in his ears, an incessant ringing that he never noticed before beneath the hum of civilization.

Or maybe what sounded like faint tinnitus was really just the sound of the earth, of insects crawling on pavement and grass, of drifting and subducting tectonic plates, of oozing magma miles below, and the hum of the planet’s magnetic field. Maybe he was just imagining things. Maybe silence itself had a sound that he never noticed before because silence had never existed.

Even the quietest night in his Seattle neighborhood had plenty of sounds: cars on the interstate, even though it was miles away; planes coming into the Sea-Tac airport from the East Coast and from Asia; trains on their way up to Vancouver in Canada; ships coming into Puget Sound from the ocean. All those things made noise. Even the wires in his house buzzed with electricity. Now there was nothing.

It was worse at night when absolute silence met absolute darkness in a world full of absolute danger. Those things were somewhere out in that void. Hundreds of thousands of them just waiting for stimulus.

But now he thought he heard Hughes’ truck somewhere in the distance.

“Is that them?” Carol said.

“Don’t know,” Parker said.

“It has to be them,” Kyle said. “They’re actually a little bit late, and we haven’t seen another person in days.”

Parker stood. Maybe that was Hughes and Frank’s truck and maybe it wasn’t. He picked up his freshly oiled Beretta M9.

Kyle picked up a hammer.

The vehicle pulled into the lot and stopped. Parker couldn’t see through the door since it was boarded up like the windows. He’d cut a tiny piece out of the plywood so he could reach the door’s locking mechanism, but that missing piece was only the size of the lock. He stood by the door and waited until he was sure it was Hughes and Frank outside before unlocking it.

Parker heard Hughes’ voice. “We need to get inside. Those things are attracted to noise. We got lucky before.”

Then he heard a woman’s voice. Who was that? He couldn’t quite make out what she said, but that definitely wasn’t Frank he was hearing.

Parker opened the door.

“Hey,” Hughes said.

“Parker,” Frank said and nodded.

Parker squinted at the light and saw the woman. She was covered head to toe in blood and matted gore. “Jesus Christ. What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “My name’s Annie.” She wiped her hands on her pants. They came off no cleaner than before. He could tell she was thinking of shaking his hand, but she saw the look of disgust on his face and put her gross hands in her pockets instead.

“Just get inside,” Parker said as he scanned the parking lot and the street outside. “And don’t touch anything until you get cleaned up and changed.”

“We got some good stuff,” Frank said as he stepped through the door.

“Shh!” Parker said. “Just get inside in case anything followed you.”

That should be the last supply run for a while, Parker thought. If they kept going out there in the truck, eventually they’d bring dozens if not hundreds of those things back to the store on their tail.

Hughes gestured for the woman named Annie to walk ahead of him. Parker stepped out of her way and locked the door behind Hughes. The amount of light in the store fell by half when he shut the door.

“I’m Annie,” the woman said to Kyle and Carol.

“Whoa,” Kyle said when he got a good look at her.

“Oh, honey,” Carol said.

“Sorry,” Kyle said. “I’m Kyle.” He tentatively reached out his hand and shook hers. “This is Parker and Carol. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up. There’s a sink in the back that still works.”

This Annie person was a biohazard on legs.

“She clean?” Parker said to Hughes.

“I think so,” Hughes said.

“You think so? Annie, your clothes will need to be burned.”

“Oh,” she said. “My clean clothes are still in the truck.”

“Just wait,” he whispered, annoyed. “We can unload the truck later. Right now we need to be quiet in case those things heard you pull in here.”