The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 1): Wicked Dead Read online

  Table of Contents

  Wicked Dead

  Wicked Dead

  Book Two of the Dead (A Lot) Trilogy

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  39

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  Please visit these websites for more information about Howard Odentz

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Wicked Dead

  LIFE IS MADE up of an infinite amount of stupid mistakes. This was just another mistake to stack on top of the rest. The word ‘poxer’ is what my friends and I called the infected ones. I think everyone else had decided that ‘zombie’ was the word de jour, so Aunt Ella and Tattoo Guy didn’t know what I was saying when I yelled out ‘poxer’ to them.

  “Box her?” said Tattoo Guy. “With what? I don’t got no gloves.”

  “No,” I screamed. “Zombie! Zombie!”

  “Zombie,” squawked Andrew, but it was too late.

  Tattoo Guy didn’t deserve Necropoxy.

  He was still staring at me with this stupid, confused look on his face when some decrepit, old poxer who probably drove the bus for booze money bit him.

  Wicked Dead

  Book Two of the Dead (A Lot) Trilogy

  by

  Howard Odentz

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-733-5

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-712-0

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2016 by Howard Odentz

  Published in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Art (manipulated) © Grandfailure | Dreamstime.com

  :Mdwa:01:

  Dedication

  I would like to dedicate this book to everyone out there, young or old, big or small, black, white, and all colors in between. Whether you are gay, straight, bi, trans, heavy, slight, dark-haired, fair-skinned, deaf, blind, differently-abled, or any other category that I’ve missed, please remember this:

  Never think because you are not the norm you are somehow less. You are far more than you could ever imagine.

  Poopy Puppy says so.

  Prologue

  I NEVER THOUGHT about evil before. Evil was an abstract concept like what bad guys do in movies or in countries far, far away. A week ago, the whole idea of real evil never even entered my mind.

  Then again, a lot changed since last week.

  Someone, somewhere, with serious butter fingers, dropped a test tube filled with genuine man-made evil. Exactly sixteen hours and thirty-seven minutes later, the entire world was infected with a nifty little disease called Necropoxy.

  Necropoxy, as it turns out, is a fancy word for ‘surprise, you’re now a zombie’.

  A lot of people died since then. Some I knew—well, almost everyone I knew. Then there were the immune ones like me and my family. We didn’t die. We just got left behind to pick up the pieces and put them back together. Just like when all the king’s horses and all the king’s men tried to fix Humpty Dumpty, but couldn’t.

  The pieces of our world will never fit perfectly together again. Whatever picture they’ll make will be all Salvador Dalí at best—a weird, drippy, nonsensical version of what life used to be like.

  That’s evil for you. It sends everything to hell in a handbasket.

  Frankly, I think we did go to hell and this is what hell looks like: a world filled with poxers—the ones infected with Necropoxy. They aren’t true zombies like in the movies. From what we know, once the Necropoxy parasite finds a human host, it goes right to the brain then rapidly multiplies. Within a very short amount of time, the host body fills up with the little buggers. What’s worse, the poxers don’t even have the decency to decompose and fall apart like normal zombies. They’re actually human bags filled with living organisms. They don’t rot away as long as the host bodies keep feeding the parasites what they want.

  Meat.

  Guess who’s no longer at the top of the food chain?

  To make matters worse, the mad scientists who thought up Necropoxy to begin with had a contingency plan if they were stupid enough to ever let the virus get out.

  Oops!

  So now there are sites all over the country, maybe all over the world, manned by specially chosen immune people who are charged with getting the disease under control. And—just so we’re clear—by ‘specially chosen’, I mean nut-house crazy. We don’t know where these sites are, or how many, or when we might step right in the middle of one. All we know is that the people running these sites are gathering survivors and experimenting on them to find a cure.

  I’m positive the government is somehow involved, unless it’s just a big, fat coincidence that we ran into Army soldiers a couple days ago. Cal and Luke weren’t the brightest bulbs on the porch. That’s why we had an easy time finding out from them that my parents were being held captive at one of these places called Site 37. My friends and I, along with a last minute rescue by my twin sister Trina and my Aunt Ella, saved Mom and Dad from the eggheads there, especially a wrinkled old raisin of a woman named Diana Radcliffe and her greasy sidekick, Dr. Marks.

  Unfortunately, rescuing my parents came with a price. Diana had assumed that Trina and I hadn’t survived the poxer hordes after everyone turned, but she was wrong and we did, so now she wants us real bad.

  You see, we’re the children of two immune individuals, which i
s something like a one in a bazillion chance. We’re both super immune—neither the airborne version of Necropoxy nor a bite from a poxer will do anything to us.

  That makes us freaks—really, really lucky freaks, and special enough to be wanted by Diana or any other psycho scientist who comes along. We’re prime targets to be hunted down, strapped to a lab table, and cut up into teeny tiny pieces to see what makes us tick.

  Good times, huh?

  So now we’re on the run, from zombies, mad scientists, and who knows what else is out there.

  As for me, this is so not how I expected to spend the first month of my junior year in high school.

  Not one bit.

  On a positive note, it seems I’m now on the baseball diamond with my high school nemesis, Prianka Patel, which would never, ever, ever have happened in a world that wasn’t filled with zombies, unless I’m totally clueless.

  The thing is, I could be clueless, but I think I’m learning.

  1

  “HEY, TRIPP. WHY are they slowing down?” asked Trina. She was sitting in the back seat of the minivan along with her current boyfriend, Jimmy James. Chuck Peterson, her prior offense, turned into a poxer the first night everything happened. He actually tried to eat me, but Chuck was way too slow and stupid to get the job done.

  We saved Jimmy James the second day of the poxer infestation. He was a junior DJ for the local university radio station. He kept broadcasting as long as he could, but was pretty sure he wasn’t going to survive because he was stuck in the sound booth and the sound booth was surrounded by poxers.

  I managed to get Jimmy out of the sound booth and safely away from his poxer fans. At first I wasn’t sure how smart it was to save a dude in a wheelchair during an apocalypse, but Trina didn’t seem to mind the wheels. She thought he was a red-headed hunka hunka burning love.

  They’ve been hot and heavy ever since.

  To be honest, sometimes I can be a major tool. Just to set the record straight, Jimmy James is better on wheels than any of us are on two legs. I took a bit to warm up to him, but now we’re tight.

  “I don’t know why,” I said. “Poxers?”

  Prianka sat next to me in the front seat while we followed the school bus that carried my parents, Aunt Ella, and the rest of the people we rescued from Site 37. She opened her window and leaned her head out.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s nothing around but trees.”

  If you were to tell me a week ago that I would be playing tongue tango with Prianka Patel, I would have probably dry heaved. Don’t get me wrong, Prianka’s a bonafide hottie with light brown skin and silky black hair. I’ve known her since kindergarten. It’s just that she’s always been so freaking perfect, or at least more perfect than me, which is kind of hard to do.

  Still, she survived, and I survived, and somehow we hooked up before we even knew what we were doing. It’s funny how things work out like that.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ryan “Bullseye” McCormick, a sixth grader with a wicked knack for firearms. He sat next to the window behind Prianka, clutching a handgun he had lifted from a sporting goods store the day after Necropoxy hit.

  Bullseye watched his whole family turn into poxers and kill each other. It was only by sheer luck that he found the rest of us. I think we freaked him out at first, but it only took a day or so for us to adopt him as our little brother.

  He’s pretty cool for a sixth grader. If it weren’t for him, none of us would know how to shoot a gun—a definite necessity these days.

  “Maybe someone needs to take a pee break,” I said.

  “Pee break,” echoed Sanjay Patel from the seat in the way back. “Poopy Puppy, Andrew, and Newfie all agree.”

  Sanjay is Prianka’s ten-year-old autistic brother. Poopy Puppy is his stuffed dog. Newfie’s my Aunt Ella’s giant Newfoundland, and Andrew—well, Andrew is Jimmy’s pet crow.

  Keeping up?

  I peered into the rearview mirror. Sanjay looked like he had been holding his pee for quite a while. He clutched Poopy Puppy tightly against his chest. The toy had been torn to shreds during a narrow escape from a group of poxers back in Greenfield. Stella Rathbone, the famous author of Urban Green—yeah, I never heard of it either—had sewn him back together as best she could, and returned him to Sanjay when we stopped to say goodbye to her.

  Now, Poopy Puppy looked a little like a science project.

  The bus slowed to a crawl and then stopped in front of us. I pulled the minivan close and dropped into park.

  “Be right back,” I said, and got out. As I walked along the side of the bus, all these semi-strange faces stared back at me with weary eyes. Dorcas Duke, the old lady that my Aunt Ella had found in her own search for survivors, watched me warily with her bloodshot peepers. She had cracked a window and was puffing deeply on a cigarette.

  Yo, lady. Those things will kill you. I guess she didn’t care.

  Some of the others I really didn’t get a chance to meet long enough for them to make an impression. Getting out of Site 37 had been absolutely nuts. Making nicey-nice wasn’t on the top of anyone’s priority list.

  I knew Tattoo Guy. He punched out Dr. Marks when we were still at The McDuffy Estate where Site 37 was housed. It was a huge mansion hidden down a dirt road, deep in the woods off the Mohawk Trail. The place was seriously creepy—the perfect location for a group of eggheads to conduct freaky experiments on zombies.

  I ALSO KNEW THE kid, Krystal No-Name, who was only four years old. Aunt Ella found her, too.

  The others, six in all, were just adults, and adults all looked the same to me.

  Aunt Ella folded open the school bus door. “We need gas,” she said.

  “Eat beans.”

  “Great. Now we need a food break, too.”

  I smiled. “Just keeping it real,” I told her. Still, I couldn’t deny that my stomach was rumbling a little. We had a big breakfast, but we skipped lunch. Teenagers eat a lot. It’s a scientific fact. “So where are we going to get gas for this monster?”

  “There,” she said, and pointed. Another bus had driven off the road, down the embankment, and crashed into the trees. There were maroon stripes painted on its side, and darkened windows. Maybe it was a tour bus, or one of those private coaches that carry famous bands from concert to concert.

  Aunt Ella turned off the bus and got out of her seat.

  “Break time,” she yelled to everyone before hopping down three steps to the gravel on the side of the road. She rolled her eyes at me.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to kill that guy with those tattoos if he doesn’t shut up soon.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “He’s got enough hot air in him to fly us to the moon.”

  “Hey, at least he’s breathing.”

  “For now,” she said. “Let’s take a look at that bus.”

  I turned around and waved my hand for everyone to get out of the minivan. Newfie squatted as soon as his paws hit the ground. Sanjay looked like his eyes were filled with lemonade, so Prianka led him behind the back bumper. Bullseye joined them. Andrew stretched his wings and flew up into a large fir tree on the side of the road. Jimmy and Trina didn’t get out of the minivan at all.

  Get a room—please.

  My dad and mom got out of the bus, followed by a few others. My mom was holding four-year-old Krystal’s hand while Krystal sucked on two fingers like they were the best tasting lollypop she ever had.

  “New little sister?” I asked. “Aren’t you two a little old for that kind of stuff?”

  “Never,” Dad said, and gave my mom a big wet one.

  “Hey, stop with the PDA, grandpa. You’ll scar me for life.”

  “Then I’ll know we’ve done our job right,” he said, and smiled.

&nb
sp; My parents are really cool. Dad’s a doctor and pretty buff. He sort of makes me look like a toothpick with a head. Mom was a realtor until last week’s poxer crash destroyed the housing market. No matter what, I was happy to be with them. For a while, Trina and I thought we were never going to see our parents again. When we finally found them, that old bag, Diana, almost shot them both right in front of me. In fact, she did graze my dad with a bullet.

  The bus in the woods lay about twenty feet off the road. Aunt Ella skirted down the embankment, followed by Tattoo Guy. Way up in the fir tree, Andrew cackled and said something, but I was so used to the talking buzzard I didn’t really pay attention.

  Sanjay’s high-pitched scream was what really made everyone take notice.

  “Dead man walking,” cackled Andrew again. This time I heard every word.

  There was a poxer next to the bus in the woods.

  “Poxer,” I yelped, but no one did anything. By the time I realized what I had done wrong, it was too late.

  2

  LIFE IS MADE UP of an infinite amount of stupid mistakes. This was just another mistake to stack on top of the rest. The word ‘poxer’ is what my friends and I called the infected ones. I think everyone else had decided that ‘zombie’ was the word de jour, so Aunt Ella and Tattoo Guy didn’t know what I was saying when I yelled out ‘poxer’ to them.

  “Box her?” said Tattoo Guy. “With what? I don’t got no gloves.”

  “No,” I screamed. “Zombie! Zombie!”

  “Zombie,” squawked Andrew, but it was too late.

  Aunt Ella saw the walking dead at the last second and dove into the brush to the right of the bus. Tattoo Guy wasn’t as lucky. I never did catch his name, but he did a fair amount of damage to Dr. Marks while we were still at Site 37. He was also the one who told everyone to shut up and let me and Trina decide what to do with Diana and her greasy sidekick when we decided to leave them behind.

  Tattoo Guy didn’t deserve Necropoxy.

  He was still staring at me with this stupid, confused look on his face when some decrepit, old poxer who probably drove the bus for booze money bit him. It was like everything was moving in slow motion. My fashion-challenged aunt in her purple shirt and green pants found safety in the mass of dying foliage while the poxer took a meaty chunk out of Tattoo Guy’s shoulder.