A Good Distance From Dying (Book 2): Samantha's Song Read online

  A Good

  Distance

  from Dying

  Book Two

  Samantha’s Song

  By David Carroll

  A Good Distance From Dying, Book Two : Samantha’s Song

  Copyright © 2018 by David M Carroll

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United State of America

  First Printing, 2018

  ISBN 1-7170991-4-9

  www.david-m-carroll.net

  NOW

  DAY 123 OF THE INFECTION

  ONE

  If you were to see me, laying here in my tent, you would think I was asleep. I show all the traditional signs. My eyes are closed. My breathing is even. No part of me is moving or twitching. However, if you could see under my closed eyes, you would find that I am very much awake.

  Just like every other night.

  It’s been four months since we arrived in Johnson City. Four months since we built the first few tents of Jack’s castle in the sky. Four months of lying awake listening to Veronica breathing, babbling, and sometimes snoring. If I’m lucky I’ll get between two to three hours of sleep before morning, before Amanda will demand my attention, before Veronica will give me those looks of distrust. If I’m lucky enough to fall asleep, it will only be for a short time before I’m awake again, and again, and again. When I sleep, I dream. When I dream, I see Jim. It’s like a horror movie version of a children’s nursery rhyme.

  See Jim.

  See Jim run.

  See Jim fall.

  See Jim bleed.

  See Jim die.

  Die Jim, die.

  It happens in slow motion. I see his eyes go wide as panic bites him. His eyes dart left and then right as he scouts for an escape route. Then, I watch Jim make the worse decision of his soon to be finished life. He turns right and begins to run.

  I want to stop him. I want to yell for him to wait. I tell myself I can’t let it happen. But, I can’t move. I can’t speak. All I can do is watch as he trips and falls. It takes him forever to find his way to the shattered bus window waiting below. When he does reach the window, his throat explodes as blood spews from him like lava from a volcano. In real life the glass broke after a few seconds and he fell from sight. That never happens in the dream. He hangs there. His body rocks back and forth and the blood never stops flowing.

  Like I said, I don’t sleep much.

  On that first night, our city was only six tents. Now, four months after the dead started snapping into some Slim Jims, our city has grown from six people to over fifty. We are running out of space and rationing has been going full force for over three months now. Even so, it seems like the supplies down in the store are dwindling much too quickly for any of us to be comfortable.

  I’m the leader because out of everyone here, on that first night, I had read and watched more zombie books and movies than all the others combined. This, at least to the rest of the group, meant that I was the best person to keep everyone alive. Sounds like loco logic, yes? Yeah, I thought so too. I have done my best to hold up my end of the bargain but much too often it seems that somebody else could be doing a better job.

  I have my reasons for saying this. The first reason is that this world is turning out to be nothing like any zombie movie or book I have ever experienced. The movies always seem to start with a frenzy of gore that accompanies the invasion of the hungry dead. Those who make it through this orgy of blood find themselves cut off from the rest of the world. The dead surround their Fortress of Solitude and begin to lay a slow, patient, siege. This will last until the people finally decide, in a moment of high drama, to make a run for it or to kill all those “zombie bastards” and cleanse the world of this moaning blight forever.

  It’s all very entertaining and exciting to watch. It’s in your face with action and the pace of the drama never seems to slow down. Having lived through a zombie invasion myself, I find that I am in the position to set the record straight. No book or movie has ever shown the audience the one basic truth of surviving the true day of the dead.

  The truth is, once you find yourself that safe place and barricade yourself inside, things change. They don’t play out like they do in the movies. In short, once you’re safe, life can be summed up with one word. You would expect that word to be danger or terror, but you would be wrong. The truth of living in the world of the dead is that it is so…SO…boring.

  Zombies are more like dogs with a bad case of ADD than anything you’ve ever seen in a movie. However, Hollywood did get a few things right. One of these is that the dead will stand at the walls and try to beat their way inside until their arms fall off. But, what they fail to tell you is they will only do that until something loud or shiny wanders close enough to get their attention. It isn’t easy, but it can happen. These are creatures bent on living for the moment. Once their attention is snagged and they start chasing the new shiny object, they won’t come back. You will be forgotten.

  This means if you get cornered, just be patient, hopefully something, or someone, will blunder by and take half, if not all, of the zombies away from you. Lie still and be as quiet as you can. Try to lie in such a way that they can’t see you. No visuals and no noise will make them more than ready to jump ship for the next unluckiest guy in the world who happens to come down your street. It sounds mean, and I guess it is, but, it’s a dog eat dog world out there. You just need to make sure you’re the one still hunting Milk Bones at the end of the day.

  Taking this bit of knowledge into account, you most likely have realized that after the fall of man, the zombies will be gathered wherever they were when all the hub bub calmed down and there ceased to be any new shiny things for them to chase. I’m not sure how this would play out in a big city, but for us, it meant that instead of the five hundred to a couple thousand zombies that Hollywood would have you expect to see surrounding our building, In reality, there were no more than forty.

  In terms of danger this was nothing. This was like opening your Christmas present and finding Miss America butt naked holding a pizza and winking at you. Or to put it in the terms of Shawn, “It kicked total ass.”

  Of course, that declaration was made before the field trip that Shawn, Jane and I took. It was before Shawn would no longer set foot on the ground. And it was definitely before we realized zombies were the least of our worries in this brave new world.

  TWO

  The second example of how reality doesn’t match up with Hollywood is simple. It may be hard to believe, but trust me on this, not every moment of every day involves a life or death struggle against the dead.

  In the last four months we have played every board game and every card game that we could find inside Wal-Mart. We brought all the Hot Wheels tracks up to the roof and built this ungodly jump track and had a competition to see who could fling their car the furthest out into the parking lot. We have hit baseballs in attempts to land one on the interstate. We have taken darts and had competitions to see who could stick the most in a zombie’s head from the roof line (which is much harder than you would think). We even spent an entire afternoon digging through the old stock pile of merchandise that Wal-Mart has stored in the back looking for an honest to god real version of lawn darts only to come up empty. I think you’re getting the picture. In the last four months we have run out of options for entertaining ourselves. And life has become a long drive into boredom.


  I guess I am painting you the wrong picture here. Stuff has happened. Little dramas surface every day. There have been events such as the rescue of the Norths, the Biker invasion, Jericho’s arrival, and Veronica’s daily blow ups just to name a few. But I guess I see those moments as something like fireworks. Brief explosive moments of action that make you go “Oooohhhhh”, then it's back to business as usual.

  The fact that our roof top population has grown so quickly over the course of the last four months wouldn’t be such a source of tension if it wasn’t for a man named Jericho who some believe is borderline insane. I believe that he is nothing short of a con man who has found a weapon he thinks will get him everything he wants. Jericho’s con is that he believes God has commanded him to take leadership of this group and lead the righteous into the promised land. We’re supposed to ignore the fact that when we rescued him and what remained of his flock; they were busy becoming breakfast burritos for the Johnson City Zombie Society.

  So far, I have denied his repeated requests to take the mantle of leadership. While I believe there are others who could do a better job than me, he is not even close to making that list. As long as I am able to, I will continue to stand in his way. This has led to a very unhappy Jericho. And apparently an unhappy Jericho means that you are going to have somebody in your group who is going to stir up dissent at every possible opportunity.

  Having a group this size also means that I, as leader, have had to spend a good bit of time in meetings with the rest of the council. Coming up with rules which will hopefully keep our people from killing themselves, as well as the rest of us. Sass and I insisted that the rules be kept to the bare minimum. This came to be the focus of days of arguments, because Jack, Jane, and Amanda believed that we should draw up a document as long as Santa Clause’s naughty and nice list.

  When it all boiled over and we could finally read the tea leaves, we had set five rules down in stone. Almost all the rules seem to enforce the same point, which is, don’t leave the roof.

  When we almost lost a group of six people because they decided to go down to the parking lot and have a picnic, we made rule one, which states; “No person can leave the rooftop without the approval of the council and a plan of action must be set in place and approved by the scout leadership.”

  The scouts are a group of individuals that are being trained by Amanda, Jack and Jane to handle hand to hand combat with the dead. The trainees were originally just Sass and I with a few others joining as they became members of the community. Alongside protecting the city, our job is to shore up defenses when needed and to scout the surrounding areas for survivors or supplies. Every time a person stepped off the roof it had to be planned and approved by Jane, Jack and Amanda.

  Then there’s rule number two. You know, I really thought certain things would be common sense, but you’d be surprised. It’s alarming how people behave when confronted with a group of hungry dead tourists hell-bent on some hot wings. My experience tells me that people will scatter and run. This doesn’t help their chances of survival at all. The best chance that a group has to survive a skirmish with the dead is to stay together and not let themselves be surrounded. Strike and fall back, strike and fall back. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until all the zombies are dealt with. In order to help our citizens help themselves, a basic combat skills course was created by Amanda and rule number two was voted in by the council. Rule number two states; “Never leave your group when on the ground. Stay close at all times.”

  That rule and Amanda’s class, which became mandatory for all citizens, did more good than anything else we ever voted into existence in my humble opinion.

  Rule number three seems to repeat the same thing that rule number one had set in stone, but trust me, once you have fifty people living in a space as confined as the top of a Wal-Mart Super Center, you start to have all manner of “geniuses” deciding what their particular clique should do. While I will be the first to admit that sometimes these ideas are worth pursuing, I am also ready to acknowledge that most of the time all they are going to do is make another clique mad or maybe hurt somebody. In extreme instances these ideas could even get somebody killed. These random ideas of mass destruction had to be run through a filter for everyone’s protection. To this end, rule number three appeared. Rule number three states; “All major decisions must be approved by a majority vote of the council for the action to take place.” And as an amendment to the rule we also added that all council members had to be present at the time of the vote and all had to vote yes or no. As well, a copy of all votes had to be kept as public record. We also allowed that if the council members wished to note the reason why they voted yes or no then that could also be attached to the public record. These were added because there were some people in our little city who were scared that three council members could sneak away together and railroad anything through or deny anything based on dislike of the presenter of the idea. Yes, our society was slowly devolving into something resembling high school. And if I am being honest, in most of the interactions concerning Jericho, I really wasn’t helping matters.

  In the tradition of repeating ourselves, we voted in rule number four which states the same thing that rules number one and three set in stone, but it was something that I felt had to be set off on its own because people were starting to sneak off at night and look for things to loot in the surrounding homes and businesses. This led to three deaths and one infected person actually sneaking back onto the roof and turning while in his tent. Thank god he lived alone and Amanda was on guard duty that night. He didn’t make it two feet from his tent before she blew the top his head off. We had to stop this, so rule number four arrived which stated; “Nobody leaves the roof at night for any reason.” It is a simple and straight forward rule and it stopped the insanity of the night sneakers from putting us all at risk.

  Around month number three, a movement for us to start hitting the local hospitals for supplies sprung up. They wanted us to go to the hospitals and loot the pharmacies. I explained to the front runners of this movement that we didn’t even have a doctor, a dentist, or even a veterinarian. Nobody on the roof would even know what those drugs were for or how much to give somebody. I contended that hitting drug stores like Walgreens would provide us with everything we would need. It led to a full-on council vote, and in the end, the council sided with me. Rule number five was voted into existence which states, “Nobody is to ever, for any reason, go into a hospital.”

  When rule number five was voted in, the resentment I could see in our “friends” eyes told me how successful Jericho has been in his mission to convince everyone of how unfair the council is, and how we are lording over them with our power. I couldn’t prove the movement that led to rule five was led by Jericho, but it felt like him, at least to me.

  Setting those five rules into place really helped to calm things down and make it much easier to sleep at night, well, for the others to sleep at night. Like I said, I don’t sleep. It may sound like a lie, but I had grown used to the night life I had earned for myself. I had started longing for those hours of dark and quiet. I wouldn’t sleep but the quiet was meditative, especially with all of the noise I had to listen to during any given day.

  Having grown used to the solemn quiet that embraces our new world at night, you can imagine the panic that would grip you upon hearing one lone voice screaming into the dark.

  “Samantha!”

  The word boomed out of the darkness and I looked across the tent to Big Lou who raised his head and then looked at me before rolling his eyes as if to say, “I thought we were beyond this kind of thing.” I knew I shouldn’t smile, but I did.

  “Samantha?!”

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was just after three in the morning. The world surrounding my tent was pitch black and I found myself wondering what on earth could be going on at this hour. As I got out of my sleeping bag, I heard Veronica stir awake.

  “What’s going on?” She asked in her drowsy
tone.

  “Nothing, go back to sleep. I’ll be right back.” I said as I smacked my leg for Lou to come with me, which he did with reservations. As I was stepping out into the dark world of screaming men I could hear a more awake Veronica say in her I’m fed up with this voice, “No, you won’t.”

  “SAMANTHA!”

  I was amazed at how much louder the voice was out in the open. I walked towards the front of the roof where I could see Jane and Amanda already at work, their sniper rifles searching the parking lot for a target. Jack and Sass were making their way towards our snipers, both were looking sleepy and confused.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Jack.

  “Not a clue me compadre. Heard a yell so I came running.”

  “I see them.” Amanda said softly.

  “Yup, I’m there with ya. Distance?” Jane asked.

  “Hundred and fifteen yards and opening fast.”

  Jane reached up and made an adjustment to his gun. Without another word the rifle exploded and the bullet that had been chomping at the bit to reach out and touch someone finally got its wish.

  “Hit.” Amanda said.

  “Did you kill him?” Sass asked.

  “Who the hell is the him we’re talking about?” I asked.

  Amanda sat her gun down and looked back to where I stood. “Samantha Baker has been kidnapped by a group of six men, by my count. Jane wounded one in the leg. We should get down there as quickly as we can to interrogate him before the dead begin to feed on his body.”

  “You’re serious?” Sass asked.

  “How did a group of six people get up here? We completely lock the top down at night since the whole night sneaker incident.” I added.

  “God knows that I never tire of either of your constant questions, however, I feel that I must remind you, we need to gear up and get to that man before he is no longer able to answer the truly important questions of the night.” Amanda turned from us and walked over to her tent to get her gear. Sass looked at me and shrugged before leaving to get his gear. I turned and looked at my tent. I had to go back in there and get my stuff. Veronica was in there. I knew that she would be awake now and waiting on me to come back. I knew the moment I grabbed my bag and began to get dressed a fight would start. I was so tired of fighting with her. Looking to Big Lou I said, “Go fetch me my gear Louie.”