Tales of the Decay Read online

  Special Thanks to:

  Todd Webster – Picked first for a zombie survival team.

  My Dad - Who always pushed me to keep my characters real.

  Cover Art by:

  Dao Neyung

  All characters are fictional. All similarities to real people are purely coincidental. All things referenced are to be taken as a work of fiction and in no way depicts businesses, people, or places in real life.

  Copyright © James Barton,

  Forward

  by Zoe Zombie

  Although I can’t speak for all zombies around the world, I know that many of them would be so happy with this body of work. Finally! Someone who understands us at levels far deeper than the average writer.

  In this second book of a promising series, James Barton has captured the spirit of our existence in ways rarely seen in modern times. When we say that his storytelling is rotten, we mean it in a GOOD way. There is nothing like the putrid stench of decaying flesh to start your morning, especially when it is your own! Hollywood used to get pretty close to the truth, until it became so commercialized and politicized that any self-respecting zombie would stagger to its pus-ridden feet and shamble off in despair, ever in search of some well-deserved respect. Just because a few of us have been lured into crappy movies and a few goofy television commercials, too many people these days think we are cute, and want to have a zombie of their own. Trust me, you really don’t.

  Life as a zombie – and many of its horrible derivatives – is tough. If you don’t believe it, you should try it some time. Do you think it’s easy to catch a good meal when most of your body parts are decaying right under you? Haven’t you noticed how it affects our driving, causing us to drive really slow in the fast lane? You can usually spot us slouched down below the wheel, peeking over the dashboard with our mouths hanging open. Dealing with regular human drivers is terrifying! And, as for that eating brains thing … seriously, are you kidding? These days, we’d starve to death. I really hate to complain, but just try to get any job other than fast food cooking and serving, college degree or not!

  James clearly has close friends or family members who have come over to the gruesome side – there’s no other way he could tell our stories so accurately and clearly. It probably explains why he doesn’t get out much, but there’s always a price to pay for truth, beauty, and art. You’ll find it very difficult to find another writer who knows us so well, without being one of us himself … in fact, if I didn’t know better myself, I would smell a rat. Mmmm, smell a rat.

  Oh, sorry, where was I? So, close the curtains, turn up the lights and settle down in your favorite reading chair for this series of stories that will answer some of your questions from his first book, Decaying Humanity. If you find yourself pausing from time to time to look over your shoulder toward that strange shuffling sound by the window, don’t be afraid.

  I was … and look how well it turned out for me!

  Zoe Zombie

  And Friendz

  Contents

  The Last Vacation

  Do No Harm

  Patient Zero

  Alone in the Crowd

  The Broken Blockade

  Stay at Home Mother

  Prepared

  Nautical Nightmares

  Anyone Can Be a Hero

  Employee of the Month

  How the Cornbread Crumbles

  The Price of Order

  The Last Vacation

  Adam Hollings was an adventurer of sorts. He was a car salesman and father of two for most of his life, but once a month he was an excitement-starved explorer. He and his friend Joe were spelunkers; they would repel down into cave systems to put their skills and strengths to the test. Last month they had even flown all the way from Ashbury, England, to a small town in the states that had an amazing cave system. It was a trip that his last few hybrid car sales had paid for. He loved his wife and kids very much and was always deeply involved with their lives. These adventures weren’t because he needed to get away from them, but everyone needed to do their own thing once in a while.

  Adam stood outside of his small country home a few miles from the town and stared at his phone. His bag of gear was slung across his shoulder and the dew from the early morning dotted his maroon-colored electric car. The light from his phone bled out into the thick lingering fog. He had been dreaming about this trip for a long time, he just never knew when it would finally happen. Yet, despite his excitement, the text message on the screen taunted him, ‘been sick all night mate, let’s reschedule for next weekend’. Adam had already kissed his wife goodbye for the day and placed the little brown bag of snacks into the car’s center console. Next week was his son’s camping trip and the week after that was a ballet recital for his daughter. If he rescheduled, it would be too long of a wait. He knew that if he didn’t go today, he could miss his chance entirely.

  Adam leaned up against the car and looked in the direction of his possible adventure. It wasn’t often that there were any local systems he hadn’t already crawled through twenty times over. Last week there had been an earthquake, a minor rumbling really. Only a few days after that, he was talking with a potential customer and their conversation shifted to hobbies. As Adam gushed about his love of caving, he was told about something that had just surfaced. On the old farmer’s land, a small hole or chasm had appeared. The customer swore it was new and looked “real deep.” It was highly possible that it was just a twenty-foot-deep hole covered in shadows, but there was also a chance that it unearthed an undiscovered subterranean system. If he was the first to explore it, he could have his name on a map, or in a history book. Not only could he name the cave system, but he could possibly make an amazing discovery of fossils, artifacts, or maybe even a never-before discovered metal. His mind went off on flights of fantasy, but regardless, if he didn’t move quickly someone else would take it from him. He had offered the old farmer a better car deal if he could explore the spot and they had confirmed it with a firm handshake.

  Adam took a deep breath and fished his keys out of his pocket. A band of blue cloth dangled from the keyring, gently swaying in the cool breeze. On it were the sloppily written words “I luv u dad” in permanent ink. It had been a project his son did in school for Father’s Day a few years back. Adam stared at the keychain and got into the car. He turned the key and programmed his GPS. Travel one mile and then make a left turn, it blared in a mechanical voice. He took his phone out and responded to Joe’s message with, “Sure buddy, get some rest.” He slid his phone into the bag and put his car in drive. Adam wanted to be remembered for something, he wanted to leave his mark on the world, even if it was just something small. If only he had known then what kind of impact he was about to make on the world … he would have never left the driveway.

  The car bounced lazily on the dirt road as Adam made his way to the site. He was driving much slower than he generally would. Without Joe in the car making jokes and talking about his wife’s mood swings, Adam felt alone. He had never tackled a caving trip alone and while he never actually received any real training, he figured it might be a standard rule. If it wasn’t a rule, it had been one they had unofficially followed since the day they bought some cheap flashlights and a coil of rope. They had been excited to find a vein of quartz in one of the more touristy caves. Ever since that day, the two of them had been like junkies, looking for more and more challenging caves. Going in not only scared him, but made him feel guilty. “Turn right, then travel point three miles, your destination will be on the right,” the GPS cut through the silence and startled Adam.

  His headlights cut through the eerie fog like he was on the set of a B-rated horror movie. He looked at the side of the forested road, almost waiting for something wi
th glowing eyes to jump out at him. In the passenger seat, in a crumpled heap, was his bag of gear, the yellow emergency beacon jutting out of one of the pockets. His wife had gotten worried on one of their trips and bought it for him. It was the most expensive one she could find, and he had only barely read the instructions. He had seen her calibrating it and setting it up as she searched for the right steps online. Adam always wondered how far down he could be and still have the signal reach anyone. He shook his head and thought that as deep as they had gone on the last trip, that thing was just dead weight. He kept it in the bag though; he had promised his wife he would. The promise of a car salesman … it was almost ironic.

  “You have arrived at your destination, on the left.” Adam pulled the car to a stop and looked out his window. There was a small cattle fence with a sign warning of electric shock. Next to the sign was a small dirt road. If the man’s directions were right, twenty yards into the woods from his old tractor and it would be there. He was told that he could come in by foot, and not to worry about the fence, he never actually turned on the electricity to it. “Adam,” he said aloud to himself, “it’s probably just a shallow hole. I’ll look at it, laugh, and be home for morning tea before the kids are up.”

  Adam stepped out of the car and slung his bag over his shoulder. He walked up to the rusty gate and threw the latch. As it opened, it let loose a metallic wail. He was trying to be quiet, but was failing terribly. As he walked along the wooded truck path, he looked up at the sky. The sun was trying to beam through the haze and soon the weather would clear up and it would be a beautiful day. Until that happened, this whole road seemed a bit dreary. Adam pulled out his cellphone to make sure he hadn’t missed any messages and saw that he only had one bar of signal strength. Up in the distance he could see the rusty tractor.

  Adam stood at the dying green tractor; it was a fossil compared to the new one Mr. Hanson used. He told Adam earlier that he planned to fix it up, but that would likely never happen. He began to wade through the brush in the direction he was told. He wondered how Mr. Hanson even found this thing, what was he really doing, deep in the woods like this? After a short while he could see a break in the trees and there was something up ahead.

  As he broke through the tree line there were fallen trees spiraled out from a gaping hole. A couple of the small trees had fallen into the gap and it was, at least from his vantage point, a possibility of something interesting. As Adam stepped closer, he could see the nearly thirty-foot-wide hole was empty. Something must have shaken the rocks loose and maybe fallen into a deeper chamber. That could mean there was a lot down there to explore, or whatever was of interest is now full of dirt and fallen rocks.

  Adam knelt before getting to the edge and fished out a plastic yellow torch and flicked it on. He stepped over to the edge, making sure to watch his footing and peered down. The light’s beam faded into the darkness as it stretched deep into the earth. Despite his internal arguments, it was obvious to him now that this wasn’t a waste of time. With that realization, he thought it would put his nerves to rest, but it seemed to only make them worse. He took one big deliberate breath before grabbing the 80-meter rope from his bag, long enough to tackle an unknown challenge like this one … or to get him into deep trouble, he thought with a nervous grin. He scanned the area for a place to anchor it. A couple of trees were gnarled together away from the chasm. Adam ran a few good loops through the closely packed trees and tied it off with a standard bowline. He clapped the dirt from his hands and ran the rope to the edge of the grassy cliff. He put on his helmet, flicked the headlamp on, and tightened the straps on his bag. He stood looking over the edge thinking to himself how cool it would be to have an Adam Hollings cave system on the map.

  Adam clipped onto the rope and began to descend slowly into the crater. As his view sank below the grass, he made one last squint up at the sky, it seemed the fog had lifted, and the sun was finally peeking through the clouds. It was comforting to know that when he was done with all this, he could kick the ball around with his kids. As he descended roughly five meters into the cave, he brushed at the wall. It was coated in moist soil, but underneath was a dark colored stone. Adam continued the descent. He had been in a lot of caves, some were mostly horizontal, and some had started off like this, straight down. The ones that just went down always made him nervous. For a 36-year-old man, he still found himself afraid of the things he couldn’t see. If he let his mind get away from him, he would imagine terrible things at the bottom of his climb. Sometimes he pictured pale cave humanoid cannibals, like in a movie he had seen a few years back; other times he imagined a giant antlion waiting to swallow him whole.

  His rope gave a strange jerk and he placed his hand on the wall. Nothing felt out of the ordinary and as quickly as the feeling had come, it was gone. But then, a small dirt clod with tufts of grass clinging to it whizzed by him. Adam thought that the rope had probably just dug into some wet grass on the surface. It may have been more ignorance than courage, but Adam continued to descend without losing much time.

  The angle of the sun had originally given him a little bit of light, but now, roughly twenty meters down, there was nothing but the faint, unnatural white glow projected from his helmet lamp. Adam locked his descender on the rope, stopping his descent for the moment. He reached up and turned off his helmet lamp, a habit he had developed some years ago, just to get a brief feel of the real darkness that lives in deep underground places. The blackness that enveloped him felt tangible, almost like a weight pressing down on him. He unclasped the canteen from his belt and raised it to his lips, letting the cool water rinse his drying throat and wash away some of the fear that seemed to be growing in there. After a few swallows, he held the canteen out in front of him, continuing the old ritual. His kids always delighted in his claims of bringing some of the cave’s darkness home in his canteen while they tried to figure out how to see it before it escaped into the light when the cap was removed. Adam’s quiet break was interrupted by a sudden, harsh jolt in the wall that sent a clear shock through the soles of his boots that traveled past locked knees and his tight seat-harness to his brain, before the first shower of dirt and pebbles rained onto his helmet. It ended with a heart-freezing jerk when the rope went slack enough to drop him a couple of inches further into the darkness … inches that felt like a mile to his terrified brain. He panicked and grabbed the rope with both hands; sending his forgotten canteen spiraling into the abyss. A couple of seconds later he heard the hard thunk of it hitting whatever was below. The tremor had only lasted a few brief seconds, but he found himself shaking with tattered nerves for a minute afterward.

  Was this going to pass or was the Earth warning him that there are some secrets that should never be found? But it sounded so close, not much further to the bottom. Adam reassured himself, “It’s just a hole, I can touch the bottom and be back before lunch.”

  The rumblings still worried him, but he batted it away. He drowned his fears and practical concerns with forced confidence. Just finish this and then go home. He looked up at the small, moon-like opening so far above him, reached up and turned his headlamp back on, then forced himself to look down toward the bottom as the light from his headlamp struggled to pierce the darkness. It barely reached five meters before fading into nothingness.

  Without allowing himself to look upward again, he began to descend further into the darkness. After a short time, he saw the bottom, a torn, cracked mess of rocks and loose debris. Among the rocks were tufts of grass still connected to small dirt clods. He eagerly finished his descent and put his feet on the rocky floor. His nerves began to ease up as his feet met with solid ground. Humans were always doing things they were never designed to do, scuba diving, flying, and probably spelunking, but as he put his feet down, everything just started to feel right again. As he slowly scanned the small circular area, he wondered if this was it. Nothing seemed noteworthy, as his weak light danced across the rocky ground. It appeared to just be a deep pocket that th
e earthquake had revealed. Rocks had fallen to this point and well, that was pretty much it. Adam wasn’t sure if he was relieved or upset.

  Adam unhooked himself from the rope and found a spot to sit down and catch his breath. Soon he would have to make his climb to the surface, but for just a moment, he wanted to enjoy it. It was moments like this, wrapped in darkness and surrounded by silence that he truly felt at peace. This was his meditation, of sorts. He sat there for a while, just relaxing before he found himself thirsty, which refreshed his memory on the missing canteen. It shouldn’t be hard; this chasm was rather small after all. He stood up with a grunt, a reminder that he was getting older, and began to scan the floor. Against the opposite wall he spotted the canteen, practically upside down of course. He made his way over to it and bent over to pick it up. When he did his light disappeared for a second. Upon further investigation, there was a small gap in the bottom of the wall.

  Adam got on his stomach and tried to peer through the hole. Through the gap and down a few more feet was an entirely new chamber. Its placement couldn’t have come from the earthquake. Could there actually be something important down here, he wondered. He wriggled around and arched his back to try and see anything through the slat in the wall. The slat was just big enough that if he left his gear, he might have a chance of fitting through it. He stuck his head in the entrance of the small tunnel and something caught his eye.

  “Ho-lee-shit!” Adam cried out, sounding an echo that promised more open space than could meet his eyes. There on the wall in the chamber was something that looked like cave drawings. They were faint and barely caught the light, but they weren’t anything from nature. Someone, from who knows how many years ago, had painted on the wall in there. Adam’s mind began to race at the possibilities. Could it have been cavemen, or maybe a civilization that lived underground during the cold winters? He really couldn’t even begin to imagine what they meant, but he knew he was going in there to officially discover them.