Those were her last words.
I let out a primal scream as her eyes closed. Quickly setting the child in one of the seats, I wrapped my arms around her body, yelling, “Don’t leave us. Don’t leave me.”
Glancing out the helicopter window, the medics were just yards away from reaching us.
“You need to wake up! You need to come back to me!” I screamed as I reached down to kiss my lifeless wife on the forehead. Clutching her in my arms, shaking her back and forth as tears poured down my face, I felt a small movement from one of her legs. Lifting my lips, I looked down to see her eyelids move.
Her red eyes opened.
Bonus Content:
To read a letter from Tyler, John’s son, visit this page: www.zombiebook.net/tylersnote
Acknowledgments:
Many of my best friends and family members were subjected to the early drafts of 900 Miles. Whether they read it, commented on it, or were simply a sounding board for me during its creation, I want each of them to know that I really appreciate every second that they spent with me on this journey to publish.
Specifically, I’d like to thank:
Debbie Davis
Phil Davis
Jamie Crosby
Ryan Dunn
Jenaya Cones
Stefanie Oberhansley
Chad Davis
Tim Davis
Sarah Davis
David Michaud
And of course, Gary at Severed Press for taking a chance on me as an emerging author.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Laurie Davis. Without her encouragement and support, I would never have sat down to type the first word.
This book would not have come to life without all of you!
THANK YOU!
About the Author
S. Johnathan Davis lives in Atlanta, GA with his wife and two children.
For more information, please visit www.sjohnathandavis.com
Read on for a free sample of The Road To Hell Is Paved With Zombies
Chapter 1:
Zombies Need No Introductions.
Jango peeked out the door of his room at the Prescott Sierra Inn in Prescott, Arizona, and then quickly closed it again. “Those sure look like zombies,” he mumbled to himself, as he lifted a corner of the curtain to look out the window. “But then again,” he thought, “this IS Prescott. It could just be a bunch of Liberal Arts students dicking around and doing some kind of fucked up performance art.” Jango coughed into the crook of his arm, and hoped he wasn’t coming down sick with the flu or something.
He continued watching through the window as what appeared to be three blood-covered people, two men and a woman, played tug-of-war with a dead looking fourth person. There was something wrong with the way the three people moved; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Their limbs moved with a stiff, marionette-like quality that he found funny, creepy and off-putting all at the same time.
Jango hadn’t left the hotel room in several days, and since there was no television in the ratty little room, he had no idea that a real Zombie Apocalypse had started two days before.
Everything he knew about zombies came from movies and books, so the information he had on hand was Hollywood sketchy, “But damn,” he thought, “They sure look like zombies to me!” Their hair looked matted with clotted blood, twigs, and dirt. Their clothing had probably been expensive at one time, but was now torn to shreds. One male, he noticed, seemed to be missing his right cheek and ear, and the other male seemed to be chewing on the un-moving person. The female was gripping one of the maybe-dead-body’s arms in her teeth and hands, while savagely jerking her head side to side, like a wolf does when it wants a piece of meat to go. “Probably definitely zombies,” he thought to himself with the kind of simple acceptance usually only found in children and the seriously mentally ill.
Jango noticed movement from the direction of the hotel office. The foul-mouthed older lady who worked at the front desk had run out of the office in a pink bathrobe and pink, fluffy slippers. She waved an aluminum baseball bat above her head and shouted, “You get away from my guest, you nasty hippy assholes!” She ran toward the three zombie/liberal arts students with the wobbly, hunch-backed, shuffling gait so common with older people.
The zombies heard her shout, noticed her slow-motion advance, and raised their heads. They sniffed at the air, and then rose like marionettes being pulled up by invisible strings. The creatures started hissing and moaning. Saliva ran from their slack lips as they all began making a high-pitched keening sound, “Rhheeeeeeeeee-EEeeeeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee.” Then, in a blur of motion, the zombies charged at the old lady.
The zombies’ upper bodies didn’t coordinate well with the speed of their churning legs, so the high speed movement was almost comical as their torsos swayed around atop their legs, and their arms trailed behind them like the tassels on a kid’s bicycle handle-bars.
The old woman suddenly seemed to realize that the creatures were not a bunch of hippies. She dropped the baseball bat, screamed in terror, and turned to run back inside. The zombies, though, were less than fifty feet away from her, and it was obvious that they would catch her before she could shuffle halfway to the office door.
Jango, who was a compulsive supporter of the underdog, would not stand by and watch a little old lady get eaten by zombies. Without thinking, he tore open the door to his room and shouted at the zombies, “Hey, you, over here!” The zombies all looked his way at once, and then, as one, they veered toward him like a group of top-heavy ostriches, and their keening wail became louder as they rushed toward him.
Suddenly, he realized that he didn’t really have a plan for dealing with the un-dead, so, in a panic, he started running toward his car. His panic ended up saving his life.
As a resident of Arizona, a modern version of the Wild West, Jango owned a gun. This being Arizona, he was not going to leave his gun in his hotel room for the maid to steal, so he had stashed his 9mm pistol in the welded lockbox under the driver’s seat of his 1990 Geo Metro hatchback.
He reached his car well ahead of the zombies, got the keys out of his pocket, and opened the car door. He climbed in quickly, slammed the door shut, and locked it. By that time, the old lady had made it back to the hotel office and slammed the door shut behind her.
Jango reached between his feet for his gun box, just as one of the zombies smashed into the side of his Metro. The small car lurched and rocked as the zombie tried to get to him. He fumbled his key into the key hole on the box, twisted the key, and the box popped open. Inside were a Ruger KP 89 pistol, four fully loaded fifteen-round magazines, and four spare fifty-round boxes of ammunition. Swiftly and smoothly, he fitted a magazine into the grip of his pistol, seated it, and worked the slide to chamber a round. He stuck the three remaining mags into his front pockets, and steadied himself.
All three zombies were mindlessly bashing against his little car, arms swinging wildly, flailing with such force that the car’s frame was bending. The doors were buckling in, and the side windows were spider webbed with cracks. Even though it seemed they could not think clearly enough to just break a window and haul him out through the hole, it wouldn’t be long before they opened the tiny automobile like a piñata full of Jango treats.
Jango began breathing faster, hyper-oxygenating his blood as he put his hand on the door handle, and then with a violent surge, he slammed the driver’s side door open and into one of the male zombies. The door rebounded, and closed behind him as he jumped out of the car. The zombie tumbled backward in a disjointed pile, but immediately got back up. He noticed the guy wearing a pinkie ring on his right hand. “Guys shouldn’t wear pinkie rings,” he quipped, half to himself, as he shot the zombie in its head.