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  NECRO

  NECRO is copyright © 2017 Dell Sweet. All rights foreign and domestic reserved in their entirety.

  Cover Art © Copyright 2017 Wendell Sweet

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your bookseller and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  LEGAL

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places or incidents depicted are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual living person’s places, situations or events is purely coincidental.

  This novel is Copyright © 2016 Wendell Sweet and his assignees. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic, print, scanner or any other means and, or distributed without the author's permission. Permission is granted to use short sections of text in reviews or critiques in standard or electronic print.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  New York

  John: October 29th

  I am here in this farm house at Green Valley Farm. Kate and I found this place a few weeks back. I'm by myself now, Kate is gone. I sat down here to write this story out before I am gone too. Maybe that sounds melodramatic, but it isn't. I know exactly what my situation is. It's all gone, destroyed, there's nothing left. Time to hold on to what is left for you. I had Kate... That was my something that was still left to me, but she's gone now...

  Kate... I knew they'd find out, hell, they probably knew immediately in that slow purposeful way that things come to them. I can hear them out there ripping and tearing... They know. Yeah, they know, I know it as well as I know my name, John Mother used to say I... I get so goddamned distracted.... It's working at me...

  Bastards! If only I could have... But it's no good crying about it or wishing I had done this thing or that thing. I didn't. I didn't and I can't go back and undo any of this, let alone the parts I did.

  In August when the sun was so hot and the birds suddenly disappeared, and Kate came around for what was nearly the last time I hadn't known a thing about this. Nothing. It's late fall now and I know too much. Enough to wish it were August once again and I was living in ignorant bliss once more.

  Kate: I didn't want to do it. I told myself I would not do it and then I did it. Not bury her that had to be done; I mean kill her. I told myself I wouldn't kill her, and that's a joke really. Really it is, because how do you kill something that is already dead? No, I told myself that I wouldn't cut her head off, put her in the ground upside down, and drive a stake through her dead heart. Those are the things I told myself I wouldn't do, couldn't do, but I did them as best I could. I pushed the other things I thought; felt compelled to do, aside and did what I could for her.

  The trouble is, did I do it right? It's not like I have a goddamn manual to tell me how to do it. Does anybody? I doubt it, but I would say that it's a safe bet that there are dozens of people in the world right now, people who have managed to stay alive, that could write that manual. I just don't know them... I wish I did. And it won't matter to me anyway. It's a little too late, but I'll write this anyway and maybe it can be a manual for someone else... You...

  So the books say take their heads off. The books also say, for Vampires, put a stake in their heart, and older legends say turn them around, upside down in the grave. Isn't a vampire a kind of Zombie? Isn't it? Probably not exactly, precisely, but could it hurt to have done the stake thing just in case? To be sure? To put her at rest? I don't think so.

  They can come out during the daylight, you know. I thought they wouldn't be able to. Every goddamn movie I ever saw, starting with the Night of the Living Dead said they couldn't. You could get some relief. You could get some shit done. And you could if it was true, but it's not. They rarely come out in the daylight, that's the truth. It's hard for them, tough somehow for some of them, but they can. It won't kill them. They aren't weaker than they are at night. They just don't like the daylight. They don't like it. And don't you think writing that made me a little paranoid? Thinking it over once more? It did. I got up and checked the windows. Nothing I can see, but they're out there. They're right out there in the barn. Sleeping in the sweet hay up in the haymow. I know it, so it doesn't matter whether I can see them. I can hear them and I know where the rest of them are. And I know they know what I did and they'll come tonight. They'll come tonight because I'm afraid of the night. Not them, me. And they goddamn well know it! They know it! They think. They see. Did you think they were stupid? Blind? Running on empty? Well you're the fool then. Listen to me, they're not. They're not and thinking they are will get you dead quick. And what about me? How will I feel tonight? What will I think about it then?

  Zombies: I thought Haiti, horror flicks...? What else is there? Dead people come back to life, or are raised from the dead to be made into slaves. Those are the two things I knew and nothing else. Well, it's wrong, completely wrong. No, I can't tell you how they come to be zombies initially, but I can tell you that the bite of a zombie will make you a zombie. The movies got that much right.

  I can't tell you why they haunt the fields across from this house. Why they have taken up residence in the old barn, but I can tell you that it might be you they come for next and if they do you goddamn well better realize that everything you thought you knew is bullshit. See, Kate didn't believe it and look what happened to her! Kate... Kate: I know I know I didn't tell you about her, but I will. That's the whole point of writing this down before they get me too.

  See, in a little while I'm thinking I might just walk out the kitchen door and right out to the barn. I'll leave this here on the kitchen table. For you, whoever you are, who happened along into this kitchen.

  Goddamn zombies, ever lovin’ dead bastards! …

  I am losing control; I know I am, but...

  Anyway, it was August. Hot. Hotter they said than it had been in recorded time. I was not here in this kitchen in rural New York I was in my own home in the city on Linden Street, a little place of my own. There was no wind. No rain. Seemed like no air to breath. Global Warming they said. Maybe... Changes coming, they said. Oh yeah, changes were coming. Changes right there on that wind, probably...

  It was on a Tuesday and I had just got back from my first real vacation in ten years earlier that morning. I had been tempted not to come back at all. I went to get the mail and there were six or seven dead crows by the box. I thought those goddamn Clark boys have been shooting their B.B guns again! So I resolved to call old man Clark and give him a piece of my mind, except I forgot. That happens to all of us: It's not unusual. I work… Worked late shifts. Tired most of the time… I remembered about four o’clock the next morning when I got up. Well, I told myself, Mail comes at ten, I'll get that, and then I'll call up and have that talk.

  I make deals like that with myself all the time. Sometimes it works out fine sometimes it doesn't. It didn't.

  Ten came and I forgot to get the mail. I remembered at eleven thirty, cursed myself and went for my walk to the box.

  I live alone. I have since Jane died. That was another hot summer when she went. I… Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

  I walked to the mail box cursing myself as I went. When I got there I realized the Clark boys had either turned to eating crows or they had nothing to do with the dead crows in the first place. There were dozens of dead crows, barn swallows, gulls. The sidewalk leading up to my place was scattered with dead birds, dark sand where the blood had seeped in. Feathers everywhere, caught in the trees, bushes and the rain gutters at the side of the road. There were three fat, black crows sticking out of my mailbox: Feet first; half ate.

  Some noise had made me turn, but I didn't turn fast enough. Whatever had made the noise was gone once I got turned in that direction, but there were bloody footprints on the sidewalk next to the box. They were not clear, but draggy as though the person had, had a bad leg. He had of course, but I had yet to meet the owner.

  Hold on...

  The day's getting away from me. My ears are playing tricks on me too. I thought I heard something upstairs, but there's nothing. I have the bottom floor boarded up. Those zombies may be far from stupid, but it's goddamn hard to get dead limbs to help you climb up the side of a house and we took everything down that they could hold onto...

  Where was I? … The mailbox. The mail never came that day. In fact the mail never came again. Already Emma Watson, our local mail carrier, was a zombie. I just didn't know it.

  I tried Clark, but I got no answer. Kate came later, upset; her boyfriend had run off somewhere she thought. It'll be okay I told her. She did the cleaning, ran some groceries from downtown and left. She seemed in better spirits to me.

  I had seen him almost a week later.

  Kate usually came at the end of the week to help me with shopping, bills, she's a... She was a good girl. A good one. A good zombie fearing girl. She was... She hadn't come as July had turned to August and I was sitting by the stove on night just home from the mill and heard a scrape on the porch.

  His leg was bad. Somebody had shot him, but her fella had worse things going on t
han that. He was dead. What was a bum leg when you were dead? Small problem, but it made him drag that leg. I'm getting ahead of myself again though.

  I picked up my old shot gun where it sat next to the door, eased the door open and flicked on the porch light. He jumped back into the shadows.

  “Step out into the light,” I tried not to sound as afraid as I was.

  “No,” he rasped

  “Step out here or I'll shoot,” I tried again.

  “Kate,” he whispered. His voice was gravelly.

  That stopped me cold. I squinted, but it was too dark to make out much: Still I had the idea it might be her boyfriend. Maybe he'd got himself into something bad. I couldn't get the name to come to me. “You Kate's boyfriend that went missing...?”

  Nothing but silence, and in that silence I got a bad feeling. Something was wrong. It came to me about the same time that he stepped into the light. There was no sound of breathing. It was dead quiet, that was what my panicked mind was trying to tell me. My own panicked breathing was the only sound until he stepped into the light dragging his leg.

  My heart staggered and nearly stopped.

  “Kate,” he rasped once more. He cocked his head sideways, the way a dog will when it's not sure of something. One eye was bright, but milky white, the other was a gooey mess hanging from the socket on the left side of his face.

  I found my old shot gun rising in my hands. I saw the alarm jump into his eyes and he was gone just that fast.

  I stood blinking, convinced that I had somehow dreamed the whole encounter, but I knew I hadn't. The smell of rotting flesh still hung heavy in the air. In the distance I heard the rustle of bushes and then silence. Zombies are not stupid, and they are not slow.

  The next day it seemed ridiculous. What an old fool, I thought. What had I imagined? But the next few days told me a different story.

  I drove into downtown around the middle of the week. I passed maybe two cars on the way, but neither driver would meet my eyes. That was wrong. Trash blew through the streets as I drove. The traffic lights were out on the four corners and no one was on the streets. I didn't see a city police car.

  The Shop Mart strip mall where Kate worked was closed. The road into it barricaded. I found a little Mom-and-Pop place open on the way back, but there was next to nothing on the shelves. I got a jar of peanut butter that I didn't want a package of crackers, there was no bread, and I paid with the last of my cash.

  The store owner wore deep socketed eyes in a lined face. His attitude said; I will not speak to you and he would not: After a brief attempt I gave up and went home. I never went back. By that next morning I knew what the deal was when Kate showed up.

  She came around noon. I heard the sound of her engine revving long before she came into sight. She took out the mailbox and crashed into the porch and that was that. We were up most of the night talking about how much the world had changed. She knew more than I did. She knew there were no more police. She knew there were roving gangs of zombies on the streets of the city. She had met a man who had come from Manhattan, it was a ruin. And she had spoken to another, this time a young woman from up toward Seattle; the same story there. The zombies, it seemed, owned the world.

  I am getting way ahead of myself… Let me go back to how it started…

  Factory Square: John Morrison

  5:00 PM

  Early summer

  John sat at the bar and watched football on one of the big screen TV's Mort had put in. It was a slow game, he was tired, and his mind kept turning to other things. He couldn't concentrate. Part of the allure of the Rusty Nail was the quiet. After a 12 hour shift at the mill with the constant noise from the huge machinery, the quiet had been nice. But that had all changed once the bar had become popular with the nearby base. He needed to go home. The crowd in the bar was starting to build and the noise was giving him the beginnings of a headache. He caught Mort's eye and went back to his thoughts as he waited.

  The Rusty Nail had always been a locals only bar up until a few years back when the economy had taken a nose dive. The nail was wedged up a side street off Factory square. Not exactly easy to find, and that had hurt business too as the old people left and the new people came in.

  Mort, Mortimer to anybody that felt like being tossed out on their ass, had nearly lost the small bar and the building above it to the bank. The building above it had six small apartments that Mort had purposely left empty when he had bought the building fresh out of the service thirty years back. Who wanted to deal with tenants, he had said then. But times changed, and so he had sold his house, moved himself into one of the apartments, and then sold the bank on remortgaging the whole building as well as renovating the other five apartments. The bank had come up with a loan that took all of that into account and added a second income source from the apartments that could pay the monthly mortgage and put a good chunk of change into his pocket too.

  He had signed on the x, taken their money, renovated the building, moved in the tenants and then taken a hard look at the Rusty Nail. He had decided to completely gut the bar and do it over. He had dumped far too much into the renovations though, including being closed for nearly a full month, and then opened it to find that the economy had taken an even deeper nose dive during those nearly thirty days. The third month into the new mortgage and he had found that he was maybe in a bad spot already.

  John remembered now that he had sat right at the end of the bar when Mort had talked it over with some others, Moon Calloway, Johnny Barnes, Jim Tibbets, John had been welcome to include his two cents which he had declined to do.

  “Well, what you do is put the word out to those cab drivers. Believe me, I've seen it. They will have them soldiers down here in no time, even if you are off the beaten path,” Jim had said. Jim was a school bus driver for the north side district and less than a year away from a fatal car accident on the interstate. Jeff Brown, who had been a local football star, was doing ten years up at Clinton Correctional for hitting Jim's car head on drunk and killing him. But that night Jim had still been alive and had wanted to be a part of the New Rusty Nail that Mort had in mind. Something a little more modern. Modern bought the soldiers, but more importantly it also bought women.

  “I'm not paying a cab driver to bring me G.I.'s,” Mort had said. “And I know your game. You're just hoping to get laid out of it.”

  They had all laughed at that, except Jim who had turned red. But after a few seconds he had laughed too, and the conversation had plodded forward the way bar conversations do.

  “Well, you ain't got to pay them exactly, give them a couple beers,” Moon threw in.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mort exclaimed. “That's why you boys ain't in business. You think the beer is free.”

  “I know it ain't free, Mort,” Jim said. “But it don't cost you that much. You get it wholesale.”

  “Wholesale? I drive right out to that wholesale club and buy it by the case most of the time just like everybody else. Cheaper than them beer guys, except draft, of course. That ain't free. You got to pay the yearly club fee. You got to pay them taxes to the feds. You got a lot you got to pay for. Some fuck crushes your can you're fucked for that nickle. Jesus... wholesale my ass. It ain't no bargain.”

  “Yeah? ... Let's see,” Moon starting writing in the air with his finger. You get it for let's say six bucks a case, I know that cause that's what I pay out there too. So six bucks divided by 24 is,” he drew in the air for a few moments, erased it, and then started over. “How the fuck do you do that, Joey... The six goes into the twenty-four? Or times the twenty-four?” Moon asked.

  “Uh, it's a quarter a can,” I had supplied.

  The argument had raged on from there. Once Moon found out he was paying a buck fifty for a can of beer that only cost a quarter he was pissed off.

  In the end Mort had talked to a couple of cab drivers. Free draft beer one night a week if they bought soldiers by all week long and told as many others as possible about the place. Within two weeks John hadn't recognized the place when he had come by after shift to have a couple of beers. The soldiers drank a lot of beer, the bank mortgage got paid, and life was fine. Except for the fights, John thought, but you can't load young guys up on alcohol and not expect trouble. Especially when those young men were just waiting on the word to go and maybe die in another battle that remained undeclared as a war. High stress levels meant heavy duty unloading. The M.P.'s got to know the place as well as the soldiers did.