Jake's story, ch 6

He had watched people turn into zombies before, so Jake immediately knew what was happening to him a few minutes later.  His fingers hurt.  He felt hot, feverish, and wanted to lie down.  With a heavy heart, he ignored all the screams of frightened people around him, pausing only as he passed a construction worksite to grab a pipe and brain a new, weak zombie as it attacked a middle aged woman.

This sucks, he thought.

As he walked down the street, barely noticing people turning into monsters, or the hungry dead rising, he wondered what the most responsible thing to do would be.  At least I still have my soul, he thought.

Out loud he quoted the book of James in the Bible.  “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”  Then he chuckled.  “Yeah, that didn’t happen, did it?”

At least he wasn’t getting burned by quoting scripture now.  Of course this likely couldn’t last long since he was not a cultivator anymore.  He wasn’t an anything.  In this moment, he was a regular man in jeans and a hoodie, about to become a zombie.  As a zombie, it was not like he’d have the ability to speak at all, but if he could, he had a suspicion that quoting holy texts would probably destroy him.  A single tear leaked down Jake’s cheek, but he didn’t have any real regrets, just frustration at the injustice of the universe.

After he’d brained the newly risen  zombie, all the surviving construction workers had run away.  Had the rain stopped?  It seemed it had.  Maybe some of them would survive.  Jake made his way into the construction site, most of which was unfinished with exposed rebar jutting from cured concrete.  At least it had a roof.

Jake found a length of chain and a padlock.  He wrapped the chain tightly around his waist, then some concrete and rebar before closing the lock and dropping the key that he’d found inside it.  His skin was burning up now, and the fever was even making his eyes hot.

This really sucks, he thought.

Out loud he talked to himself.  “Maybe I should try praying.  Couldn’t hurt, right?”  He’d considered himself a knowledgeable man before, but meeting Ahriman had really expanded his horizons.  Now he was willing to try things he might have written off before as foolish.

He cleared his throat and said, “Any gods out there that might be listening, my soul will never be part of any bargain, but I’m apparently an enemy of Ahriman now.  If you have an axe to grind with him, maybe I can do you a favor.  My offer is simple: Give me help, perhaps advice, and if I think it’s a reasonable exchange, I will owe you a favor.”

Jake laughed after that.  He really doubted anything would come of his little half-assed prayer, but putting it together had been better than just waiting to die.  Then he began to choke on his own tongue and pant as the fever got worse.  It grew harder to breathe.

Not long after that, he puked, mostly just frothy white stuff and died for the second time, chained to a concrete pillar.

***

Jake woke up feeling strange.  His vision was terrible and his thoughts were slow, like he was trying to think through jelly.  “What the fuck is going on?” he tried to say, but all that came out was, “Ahhhh.”

After experimentally moving his mouth a few times and waving a hand in front of his face, Jake accepted his reality.  He truly had turned into a zombie, but he was still himself, like he knew who he was, and had not lost his will.  Now he understood what Ahriman had meant about punishment.

“Why the fuck does this shit keep happening to me?” he tried to say.  Instead he just managed to moan.  His motions were jerky, and just getting worse the longer he was dead.  Fine motor controls would soon be a thing of the past, but he barely managed to bend over far enough to pick up the key to the padlock and unlock himself. 

He managed to walk forward, and keeping his balance was difficult.  No wonder so many zombies crawl or stumble around and sometimes hold walls, he thought.  Despair was growing, but he was trying to ignore it.

As he walked through the construction site as a newly undead, he passed the zombie he’d killed earlier and tried to shake his head.  As he was now, he doubted he could even kill another zombie.  What could he do, chew on one’s arm?  It wasn’t like they were alive, so even if he bit an enemy zombie’s neck it wouldn’t feel a thing.  As a zombie he was strong, but couldn’t move fast, and in ten more minutes, he likely wouldn’t be coordinated enough to hit the broad side of the barn with a machine gun if he could even keep it pointed in the right direction.

Suddenly, a black cat on top of a fence caught his attention. He turned and stared as the cat stared right back.  “It’s about time you noticed me,” it said.

Jake was far less surprised than he probably should have been.  He tried to say, “Not my fault, my eyes suck now.”  Instead, he just gurgled.

He couldn’t tell if the cat understood.  It said, “Your prayer has been  heard, but limited assistance can be given.  Think about Ahriman’s domain, and ask yourself how many magic stones you saw during your time there.”

Zombie-jake watched the cat scamper off as best he could and thought, Well, I guess I got help, but it was kind of useless too.

This sucks.

***

The first thing Jake did was get the hell out of the town he’d been in.  Right after Purple Rain in his first life, it’d taken people a while to figure out what was going on, but getting brained by some kid with a hockey stick who was quick on the uptake might still be a possibility.  Luckily, he was on a hill in town and could see around the area pretty well, but his sight was fading as fast as his motor skills.

Since zombies don’t need to breathe, Jake moved directly for a lake.  He crossed a forest, then a quiet road and mentally cursed when a fence stopped him in his tracks.  He couldn’t climb a fence as a zombie.  Moving his body felt like driving an unfamiliar car with two flats, a broken transmission, and an overweight trailer.

Finally, he found a gate through the fence to a park beyond that butted up to the lake.  Then he wasted no time, wading in as fast as his dead legs would carry him.  He began to relax after he was under the surface, and moved slowly, but safely to the other side where he thought he’d seen mostly trees with a handful of scattered buildings.  

Walking underwater was slow and difficult, but as a zombie, he had no air in his lungs, and he’d actually gotten heavier after his transformation.  He’d lose weight as he rotted more, but for right now he could barely stay on the bottom of the lake.

Plodding through the darkness gave him some time to think, which he needed since his mind was working so slowly.  He used a trick he’d learned before Purple Rain and made a mental to-do list.

His first priority was to figure out where he was.  Next he had to find a way to let people know he wasn’t a monster.  He also needed to puzzle through what the cat had told him, and what or who the cat was.  Lastly, but probably most important, he needed to figure out a way to save his family.  Everything else he planned to do was a means to that end.

When he finally emerged from the lake on the other shore, he was shocked to realize that half a day had passed.  Now it was night, close to the next morning, which meant that lots and lots of people had died by now.  Despair welled up again, but he beat it down.  If living in hell wasn’t going to break him, this wouldn’t either.  Ahriman could eat a dick.

There was a building nearby--maybe a bait shack.  The bait shack turned out to be gas station that also sold fishing gear, and when Jake saw the door was open, he already knew what he’d likely find.  Inside, an old man was dead on the floor,  being gnawed on by two zombies that were covered in blood.  They looked up with blank expressions but bent back to the grisly meal after only a slight hesitation.

The sight of the corpse stirred something in Jake, something he refused to acknowledge.  There were some lines he refused to cross.  Luckily, he spotted a cell phone on the counter by the register and avoided the body.  The landline was useless--he couldn’t talk.

Jake picked up the phone and tried to swipe it awake, but nothing was working.  His mind worked really slowly, so he stared at the nonfunctioning tech for a while before he realized the obvious reason he couldn’t use it: he was dead.  Dead fingers couldn’t use phones, at least he decided this was likely the case. .

Well, shit, he thought.  He glanced around the half-assed convenience store, now a mess from either the zombies or the soon-to-be zombie crashing around earlier.  Jake looked around behind the counter but couldn’t find anything useful.  A locked door likely led to the manager’s office, but he had no way to open it.  As he briefly looked for a key, the sloppy eating sounds of the other zombies were annoying him, so he decided to do something about it.

After moving back outside, he glanced around to make sure nobody else was nearby.  The old stubbornness he’d perfected in hell had come back, and he refused to give in, even if he was already technically dead.

The area he was in was actually fairly empty of people.  It seemed the lake had been large, and it looked like most civilization was on the other side.  The zombies inside the gas station had likely been turned right after Purple Rain, killed the gas station worker, and nobody had come here since then, which was not hard to believe.  Jake remembered most survivors hiding at home for a few days after his first Purple Rain.

He found a car with a door open in the parking lot.  He decided it must have been how the two feasting zombies had gotten here when they’d still been alive.  Keys were still in the ignition.  Jake tried to smile, but when his face just kind of twitched in random directions, he gave up.

His control of his limbs and fingers was awful, but luckily, the car was already more or less where he needed it to be.  After starting the engine, he backed up as carefully as he could, and still almost managed to ram into a pump.  Going forward was going to be a lot easier, though.  He couldn’t really feel much through his limbs anymore, so he carefully watched to make sure his foot was in the right place before he gave the car all the gas he could and drove it into the front of the gas station at full speed.

The glass store front exploded.  Bags of chips and packs of crackers flew everywhere.  The car surged up one when it went over the curb, and again after going through the store before slamming into the rear wall of the gas station.  Jake was already dead, but moaned in frustration when he noticed a big shard of glass sticking out of his arm.  He was already taking damage!

Jake slowly, deliberately got out of the car and made the closest thing to a grin he could when he realized that he’d actually killed one of the zombies.  The other one was pinned under one of the car’s tires.  He noticed the remaining zombie had been a young man before turning, probably out joy riding with a friend.

The world was cruel.

Curious, Jake got closer to the other zombie, right out of reach.  When he was just about to enter the range of the pinned monster’s arms, it seemed to finally become interested in him and lunged, grabbing at the air.

Much like during his conversation with Ahriman, Jake was gathering information to understand his situation better.  He likely still had a human soul since he had refused to give it away, and he could think somewhat clearly.  At least something about him was still human enough that the zombie had tried to attack him when he’d gotten close enough.  Good to know.

The corpse of the gas station manager was under the car, so Jake was spared seeing it again. Instead, he headed to the wall the car had hit, and moaned in appreciation to see it’d knocked a hole leading into the manager’s office.  He could barely climb through, and began to poke around.  

In the bottom drawer of the manager’s desk he hit pay dirt.  A subcompact .40 S&W Springfield would not be his first choice of pistol, but it was better than nothing.  It took him a few tries, but he managed to drop the magazine and make sure the gun was clear before holding it up.

Wow, he thought.  This is even worse than I imagined.  There was no way he was going to hit anything with the pistol, especially like he could before becoming a zombie.  Fine motor skills and staying steady were just not what zombies were known for, and Jake was no exception.

He moaned thoughtfully, loaded the gun, and tried to load a round.  When it proved too difficult for his fumbling, dead hands, he pushed the front of the pistol against the desk, using his weight to push the slide back, then released it.

That done, he pocketed the second loaded magazine he’d found and wandered back out to the car.  The vehicle was smoking now, and obviously wouldn’t work.  Jake stayed far enough away for the zombie under the wheel to mostly ignore him as it futilely scrabbled at the ground.

Jake got a sudden flash of inspiration that moved slowly through his dead brain, and decided to act on it.  He moved to the other side of the car, then climbed on the hood.  Jake shimmied over until he could hang his head off.  

This close, the natural zombie began freaking out, moaning and trying to turn around.  Jake slowly, calmly lowered his acquired pistol, putting the muzzle close to the back of the zombie’s head, and pulled the trigger.  With his weapon that close, missing had been very unlikely.

The shot struck home more or less where he’d intended it to, killing the pinned zombie.

Jake moved back until he was off the car and walked back over to the other side to inspect his handiwork.  To his surprise, as he got close, a light flashed and a magic stone was pushed out of the zombie’s body.  The stone, called a “core” by some adventurers in the future, fell to the ground.

If he were an adventurer, this would have been a very lucky find.  Magic stones could power magic tech or help sorcerers and other mystic practitioners.  Jake was a monster now, though.  Monsters didn’t bargain.  If monsters found magic stones, they usually ate them.

Jake picked up the magic stone and remembered what the cat had told him.  Why had the zombie dropped a magic stone, but even after he killed hundreds of demons in Ahriman’s world, he’d never seen a single one?

The mystery intrigued Jake’s mage-trained mind, but it took him a while to even think through walking anymore, much less magical mysteries.  Whoever had sent the cat, it wouldn’t have mentioned magic stones if they weren’t important.  Maybe he could figure it out.

In the meantime, he needed to find a way to use his acquired phone to figure out where he was, and find some more magic stones.  Monsters could transform, and eating magic stones had something to do with that, right?  Turning into anything else had to be better than a zombie.

When Jake tripped over a curb and fell, breaking his dead nose, it seemed proof the universe had a really fucked up sense of humor.  He got up and dusted himself off as best he could, then tucked his new pistol into the top of his jeans and covered it with his shirt.  Nobody would expect a zombie to be carrying a pistol. 

His luck was really terrible.  Why did Purple Rain have to happen during one of the tiny handful of times a year that Jake hadn’t had his own phone with him?  He’d just been running an errand that day, going to get something to eat.

Even if he found a way to use the stranger’s phone he’d found, he wasn’t sure if it was password protected, or locked some other way.  Well, if it is, I’ll find another phone, he thought.

That made sense, so he agreed with himself.

Fifteen minutes later, when he was too far to turn back and return, he realized all the other ways he might have been able to discover his location while he’d still been in the gas station.

He definitely needed to find more magic stones.  There was no way he was going to ever save his family if he stayed a zombie.

___________________________________

Okay!  That's the last chapter I have to post right now.  I'm going to be busy for the next day or two and I won't be able to write.

So in the comments below or in PMs, please tell me what you thought of these first 6 chapters.  Is this something I should continue writing in my spare time?  Keep in mind that I started this story (mainly writing at night before falling asleep) when I was about halfway done editing First Song 2, so it took me some time to get this far.

Since this is a new narrative style for me, and a completely unique sort of story, I'm actually intensely curious about all of you will say.

I look forward to hearing your opinions!

-BC