Sixteen-year-old twins, Tripp and Trina Light, are rare in the zombie apocalypse. Neither the airborne virus Necropoxy nor the bite from one of the dead will turn them.
No wonder crazy scientists, soldiers in helicopters, and scary doctors want to capture them to see what makes them so special.
But are they special anymore? After freeing their parents and others from experimentation, some of their liberated traveling companions are displaying super immunity, as well. Their former captors just don’t know it.
With the key to super immunity in the twin’s hands, they face a difficult choice. Should they keep running or confront their pursuers with the cure and hope for the best?
Either choice could get them killed. One wrong move in a world filled with Necropoxy, and they’ll hit a DEAD END.
Author and playwright Howard Odentz is a lifelong resident of the gray area between Western Massachusetts and North Central Connecticut. His love of the region is evident in his writing as he often incorporates the foothills of the Berkshires and the small towns of the Bay and Nutmeg states into his work. In addition to The Dead (A Lot) Series, he has written the horror/suspense novels
1
NECROPOXY.
Necropoxy. Necropoxy. Necropoxy.
Here I was
huddled in a sleeping bag during the middle of the night in the breakroom of a
Walmart in Apple, Massachusetts, and I was seriously not having fun.
The whole messed
up notion of Necropoxy kept rolling around in my head making it virtually
impossible to sleep.
Necropoxy
creates poxers. Poxers are the living dead.
They bite. They
bite. They bite.
Of course they
bite. Everything bit these days.
In another world
where Necropoxy never happened, I wouldn’t be losing precious teen sleep
worrying about monsters.
I would be
dreaming about happy things, like, I don’t know...
Tacos?
If Necropoxy
never happened, I would be waking up in another few hours and hitting the
snooze button three or four times.
I would be
showering and throwing on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt while my twin sister,
Trina, caked makeup all over her face to make herself pretty for her meathead
of a boyfriend, Chuck Peterson.
After stopping
at her bedroom door to say something snarky like, "Why bother? Chuck’s just
going to lick it all off,” I would be flying down the stairs to grab a glass of
orange juice and maybe a couple slices of toast.
Then, before
heading off to another fun-filled day of eleventh grade, I would be reminding
my parents for the hundredth time that they wouldn’t have to drive us to school
if they would just suck it up and buy the two of us a car.
Sure, we’d
share.
Not.
Necropoxy.
Necropoxy. Necropoxy.
Necropoxy creates
poxers. Poxers are the living dead.
They bite.
They bite. They bite.
Who was I
kidding? This wasn’t another world. We were in this world where Necropoxy didexist.
Chuck Peterson
was dead, so he couldn’t lick Trina’s makeup off, and there was no more orange
juice because all the orange juice makers were gone. The same goes for toast.
There was no more toast because there were no more bakers. Cars, on the other
hand, were a dime a dozen.
Hell, they were
a penny a dozen or even less than that.
I sighed as my
mind drifted to the sporty mid-life-crisis-mobile that Dorcas Duke and I had
left by the covered bridge outside of Guilford. The convertible was a really
sweet ride. Too bad my favorite octogenarian with the perpetual cigarette in
hand was never going to drive something like that again.
Soldiers killed
her back in Hollowton while she was trying to buy time to save the rest of us
by blocking the road with a bus in front of Swifty’s.
She wasn’t the
first we lost.
Uncle Don turned
into a poxer before we got to his farm up in Cummington, and then I had to go
and torch him.
Tattoo Guy got
chomped by a bus driver.
Eddie with the
fake hair was taken out by a Walmart shopper.
I rolled over
and looked at the clock radio we had taken from the electronics aisle. It said
3:15.
Seeing that gave
me a wicked spooky feeling because anyone who watched as many horror films as I
did knew that 3:15 was the exact time when all the bad things liked to come out
to play.
It’s true.
If you ever run
across a bookstore that’s not filled with poxers, go in search of a book about
a place called Amityville. After reading it you’ll get a chill every time you
see your clock radio light up with that time.
Creepy creepy,
right?
I closed my eyes
and tried to go back to sleep, but it didn’t work.
To top it all
off, the skies opened up, and it started to pour. The rain drummed against the
roof of Walmart. I lay quietly in my sleeping bag, totally awake, and thinking
about how my friends, my parents, and the other survivors of Site 37 had inadvertently
stumbled on Diana’s super immunity cure for Necropoxy.
She didn’t even
know we had it or if it worked.
Just for the
record, we did have it and it did work.
That’s why my
friends and I decided we were going to go in search of the old bat and let her
know that she didn’t need to keep coming after us.
We could give
her what she wanted.
Then she could
leave us alone.
Our plan made
sense. Still, something about going on a manhunt for Diana Radcliffe didn’t
seem quite right.
No wonder I was
wide awake.
About ten
minutes later, a figure slipped up to me in the gloom and gently shook my
sleeping bag.
"Tripp?”
whispered Trina. "Are you up?”
"No,” I
grumbled.
"Uh huh,” she
said. "I think we’re ready.”
I begrudgingly
crawled out of my sleeping bag and followed my sister. A short while later, I
was standing with Trina’s new boyfriend, Jimmy
James, and my... um... whatever you want to
call her... um... kissing partner,
Prianka Patel.
Okay, Jimmy
wasn’t standing. He was sitting, because he’s in a wheelchair.
Prianka had just
finished a big poster she was working on. This is what it said:
‘Dear
Everybody. It’s obvious to us that Diana has perfected super immunity to
Necropoxy but is unaware because we stopped her from completing her experiment.
We are leaving to find her and tell her she doesn’t need Tripp and Trina
anymore. Only then will she stop hunting all of us. We WILL be back.’
I
grimaced.
I knew leaving
the rest behind—my parents and my aunt, Trudy Aiken, Nedra Stein, Felice
‘Freaky Big Bird’ LeFleur, Randy Stephens and four-year-old Krystal—was the
right thing to do. They had been through enough.
Still, it felt
wrong.
"They’ll be
safe, right?” I said to nobody in particular.
"Yes,” nodded Trina,
even though she probably didn’t know if she was telling the truth or not.
"What about the
front doors?” I asked.
Jimmy raised a
finger. "They’ll be locked down tight with bike chains.” Then he held up a
piece of paper. "I have the combinations to the locks right here,” he said.
"We’ll leave them with the poster.”
I
didn’t want to burst his bubble by telling him that any soldier with a bolt
cutter could get through bike chains in no time. The simple truth was there was
nothing we could use to barricade the door from people.
At
least the adults would be safe from poxers. The last I checked the dead didn’t
know how to use a combination lock.
I
shook my head a little. Yup, we were really going to do this. After everything
we had been through, we were really going to leave everyone chained inside a
Walmart and go in search of the very monster we’d been running from.
I
didn’t know if we were making the right chess move or not. After all, Diana was
the poxer queen. We were only pawns. I hope we weren’t playing the wrong game.
After
a moment I slowly turned and mumbled something about grabbing a Ring Ding. A
minute later I was in the front of the store, staring through the huge
plate-glass windows at the blackness outside.
The
rain came down in sheets.
God,
I missed Littleham High School. Life there was easy. Adults told us what to do,
what to think, what to learn, and we just did it.
Then
we got to go home and eat junk food and play video games.
How
did my life devolve into this? In what universe were my friends and I even
equipped to make the big decisions?
Trina
came up behind me. "Hey,” she said. "Are you okay?
I
took a deep breath. "I’m fine.” I really wasn’t, but I didn’t want to revisit
whatever scary choices we were about to make.
She
shrugged then made a beeline for one of the candy racks in front of the
registers. She reached down, grabbed a candy bar and peeled it open. I tried
not to make a big show of noticing her stuffing chocolate in her mouth, but
then again, what else are brothers for?
"You
think Jimmy’s going to be into you when you weigh six hundred pounds?”
Trina
finished chewing, swallowed, and ran her hand across her mouth. "You think
Prianka’s going to be into you after I break your face?”
"Oh,
that’s mature.”
"Were
you looking for mature?” she said as she shoved more chocolate into her mouth.
"I can do mature. Do you want me to be mature?”
"Trina...”
I began.
"What?”
"Do
you think we’re doing the right thing? I mean trying to find Diana?”
"If that’s what
it takes for her to stop coming after us,” she said. "Do you have a better
idea?”
"Hiding. We
could keep hiding.”
"Hiding won’t
work,” she said. "It’s only been like a couple of days, and her soldier boys
already found us at Swifty’s. One wrong move and they’ll find us again.”
I knew she was
right, but seeking out Diana seemed, I don’t know, like going after the big
boss in a video game when you’ve only just passed level one.
"I suppose,” I
murmured. I’m not so sure I was all that convincing.
After a moment,
Trina stopped eating and stared at the portion of the candy bar that was left
in her hand. "I shouldn’t be eating this,” she said. "I just keep thinking that
if I don’t eat all the candy bars now, they’ll go bad.”
I chuckled a
little. "That’s the crappiest excuse for stress eating that I’ve ever heard.”
She looked right
at me as a little burp crept out of her insides and punctuated the air.
"Sorry,” she said.
"Don’t apologize
to me. I’ve heard worse noises come out of your body.”
I looked out of
the windows again. Every once in a while lightning flashed followed by the
rumbling of thunder.
The storm didn’t
look like it was going to let up any time soon.
Trina came and
stood beside me. She stared out into the darkness, too. Then she rubbed her
bandaged hands. She almost burned them off in yesterday’s forest fire near
Black Point Fort in front of the Quabbin Reservoir. Thankfully, the skin just
turned red. Being handless in the zombie apocalypse would be a bad, bad thing.
"Do you think the rain will put the fire out?” she asked.
"Maybe.”
Trina didn’t say
anything else. We both stood quietly watching water spill out of the sky, lost
in our thoughts. Trina was probably thinking about Jimmy and what kind of house
they were going to live in when this whole poxer-disaster was finally over. I’m
assuming it would be one that was accessible for Jimmy’s chair, not that he
needed it. He was a beast on wheels. I didn’t think there was anything that
could slow him down. As for me, I was thinking that I was missing something
crucial.
Suddenly we
heard sneakers slapping against the floor. We both turned around to see Ryan
‘Bullseye’ McCormick streak out of the gloom.
"Jeez,” I said.
"Doesn’t anybody sleep around here?”
Tears streamed
down his face.
"Bullseye?”
whispered Trina. "Are you okay?”
Bullseye ran
right up to us. He was punching himself in the side of the head. "I’m so
stupid,” he cried. "Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”
"Hey,” I said
and grabbed him by the shoulder.
"I’m so stupid,”
he wailed again. "I can’t believe it.”
"What is it,
Bullseye?”
His eyes were
puffy. "All the guns that we took from those soldier dudes, Luke and Cal, back
in Purgatory Chasm.”
"What about
them?” Trina asked with a shrug. Taking all of the soldiers’ bounty and leaving
them stranded at Aunt Ella’s llama farm seemed like decades ago.
"Don’t you get
it?” Bullseye cried. "We left the guns in the bus back at Swifty’s. We left
them with... with dead Dorcas.”