Race the Dead (Book 1): The Last Flag Read online

  The Last Flag

  by

  Wren Cavanagh

  Illustrations

  by

  agileart

  Notch’s Publishing House

  © 2016, Wren Cavanagh, Daniela Morescalchi, AgileArt, Notch’s Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the writer.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Dedication

  To all the loved ones. What, where would I be without you?

  Prelude: Like any predator, go for the young. Or the weak.

  hu•man be•ing

  noun

  1. a man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance.

  2. Decent, kind, a person with empathy and strength. Not an asshole.

  The heater in the car was on high, as it fought off the early morning chill and the driver checked her appearance in the rear view mirror. She wiped the corner of her lips for an imagined lipstick smear, patted down the curves of her hair and ran her fingers across some unruly strands. She examined her eyes intently for almost a minute, then decided it would be okay.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she smiled tightly to herself, and stepped out of her black BMW.

  She walked past the iron gates and took a clean new cement path that cut through a carefully landscaped lawn to the entrance of the private school.

  She had been here before (Invited to an obligatory school recital, obligatory in so much as the invitation had come from the boy’s father, who was up on company ladder than herself, but she was sure the boy wouldn’t remember her), so finding her way around wasn’t a problem and she knew just where to look. The woman walked deeper into the maze of school corridors, past halls and walls adorned with drawings, posters and notices, past arrays of lockers and classes.

  There. There was the boy.

  A small, shy child, who according to the father: was an intelligent little bookworm, sensitive, and artistic. The man could drone on about it. The father loved the boy very much, which surprised everybody, as the boy was not even his real son.

  As she walked up to him he turned toward her. The clicking of her high heels on the tiled floors had announced her arrival.

  “Nate, hi.” She leaned toward him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Your mom is waiting for you in the office. Come with me.”

  “She just dropped me off,” the puzzled boy mumbled.

  “She said she forgot to give you something. I forget what.” She smiled at him “Must be a cool surprise! C’mon.”

  She walked down the hall, the high heels beat an unpleasant rhythm that echoed in the hallway, the small boy quickened his pace to keep up. As she went she tested and inspected the doors along the way until she opened a door to an empty stockroom.

  “Come here a second. I need to grab some paper” Her words were cold and no longer even held the memory of friendly tone.

  The boy hesitated briefly. Puzzled, uncomfortable but obedient, he followed her inside.

  There she closed the door after him, her smile turned to a grimace, and she fell on the boy. She gripped the child painfully tight and pushed him to the floor, clamped his mouth shut with one hand, while with the other she grabbed one of his thin arms, brought it to her mouth, and bit down hard.

  It’s all about the money.

  “So, about fifty blocks. The town itself is just barely over fifty square miles. Not too big. Not too small.”

  Frank “Fats” Whitford observed as he pointed to the map. “Two days. Any extra is overtime with penalties.”

  The other executives around the table nodded. They were all excited to finally be getting the show on the road. To everyone’s surprise, the undead apocalypse had arrived; it was no longer a fictional cliché, however, it wasn’t quite apocalyptic yet and humans were making do. Because that is what they always do. Humans, like roaches, can survive just about anything. It’s what they do.

  It was now nearly three months since the event finally hit the news. All the news. All the time. Everywhere. For weeks, days, twenty four hours a day, every day. “Turned” fatigue followed. The “returned”. The “turned”. Only the most garish, low class, attention-seeking news services and entertainers called them zombies. Returned or turned seemed to be the term of choice and it also allowed for some wiggle room, as no one really wanted to admit that they were really, no doubts about it, dead.

  With a wink, a nudge, and the encouragement of the government and corporations that wished to prevent massive destabilization, along with the short attention span and news cycle of the modern media, they were surpassed by the traffic news and the event or cute animal of the day, but retained a steady presence nonetheless. That bit of news had become a threatening constant undercurrent that everyone was trying hard to ignore.

  The “Outbreak” was being managed. Now, at least metaphorically, the living ate the dead with as much gusto. To men and women who saw challenges over problems, opportunities instead of issues: the rise of the dead was a glorious. Glorious event, opportunities abounded!

  In their shambling wake the cadavers brought along new businesses and new products, and foremost: the likelihood that immortality was finally at hand. You just had to isolate the factor that kept the shambling horde shambling past their dead due date, and apply it to the living without turning them into mindless, aggressive, cadaverous biters.

  So far, science had no inkling on how to do that, but God knows they were looking. The security and medical sectors were buzzing with activity and new stocks rose and fell. Money rolled in. Rich people got ever so much richer. Poor people mostly got eaten a lot faster.

  Not last or least: the entertainment business embraced the event: Yes. This was the apocalypse they were waiting for.

  Fats and thousands like him that fed products into the media and entertainment funnel thanked God for the turned every day they got out of bed and put their feet on the floor.

  “This town was cleared when?” he asked.

  A blonde, thin L.A.-styled executive answered his question with no hesitation or pause. Fats did not have a reputation for patience. “The town of Prideful was declared clear of healthy, unaffected people yesterday morning; my FEMA contact called me and let me know as soon as he could.”

  A thin, condescending and confident smile creased her lips. “We could have gone in as early as last night. Some of his people earned extra money by dropping off the flags and prizes at indoor locations as early as a week ago. I had the helicopters drop the outdoor flags overnight.”

  “Good, good,” Fats smiled at her and turned to another one of his managers, “Do you have the teams ready?”

  “We’re good to go.”

  “Cheryl, how many of the returned do we have there? The viewers need to see a credible threat to the contestant or they’ll watch something else.”

  Cheryl’s answer was ready. “At least five hundred. We’ll use noise to attract them to the flags. They respond to noise very well.” She lifted an elegantly manicured hand as if announcing an upcoming magic trick and continued. “But my friend sa
id the army and guards used the town as a storage camp for returned from other areas - filled up the town as they evacuated everyone. He's not sure how many they trucked in before they shut the town down and fenced it in. So... Maybe a lot more. We're good to go. I've sent our production team ahead and they're waiting at the entrances. Camera crews, production vans, contestant. Everything is ready.”

  “Great,” Fats nodded “Have our lawyers on standby - first amendment, freedom of the press, speech...Whatever. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Fats looked at the map and aerial footage of the town. He wondered what would happen if it ever got bad enough that they had to contain something the size of Mexico City. He imagined that if it ever got that bad, things were probably past being containable or manageable.

  Prideful, thank God, was containable. It had been a quiet, comfortable town, large, but not too large, quaint, but not too quaint. Set in the Oregon countryside in a beautiful agricultural area, yet conveniently close to larger, more populated and spread-out cities. It had been growing and on the verge of gentrification as larger business and corporations had settled nearby, and their well-paid workers looked for affordable housing in an attractive town with a slower pace of living.

  In early August, the turned openly began to afflict the town: the missing friends, the newly aggressive neighbors could no longer be explained away. Within two months the town had been evacuated and left to the dead. Two rings of reinforced chain link fencing now kept them from the outside world. After its fall, the Army and National Guard had not even left guards outside the town. They fenced Prideful and moved on. They had other fires to put out. The town was up for grabs.

  To capitalize on the hungry dead event, Fats had his production crew assemble four teams as quickly as possible, to enter the town and compete for prizes. The production for The Last Flag was rushed, but they had no time to waste. Cheap blitz marketing followed with Comic con events, Twitter blasts and as small an investment he could put into promoting, so he could capitalize on the returns.

  The show was marketed as a race through a zombie-infested wonderland, a modern haunted town filled with danger, obstacles and mystery. Each team would be dropped into the town at the same time, with two days to collect a minimum of three flags. A member from each team would be allowed a blunt weapon of choice going into the game.

  Each flag was worth five hundred thousand dollars. Backpacks with additional rewards and weapons would accompany the flags. Once you had your three flags, you could call it quit and run for the roof of the tallest building at the center of town and retrieve a last flag for the payout and end the game. Or gather more flags for a bigger payout.

  To make it more devious, whichever team reached the flag and ended the game would also take the money and prizes that had been earned by the other teams and get a ride back out by helicopter. The others would walk back in shame to the original entry points, to be picked up and go home with a consolatory five grand each.

  The fast-tracked production went into full live streaming activity. These were uncertain times and nobody knew for how long the dead would keep walking around. They might drop back to old-fashioned dead again tomorrow, and become relatively useless once more. So those who could, would milk the event for all it could bring in. Also, and not a minor thing: no one knew how long the situation would be manageable or keep attracting the viewer’s interest, after all. One day the viewers might be too busy trying to stay alive to watch a show.

  The Last Flag would be televised live by the camera men and woman embedded into the teams, camera-equipped drones, and helicopters equipped with gyro-stabilized cineflex and wescam camera systems that would follow the contestants in the sky. The helicopters alone would run around five grands a day. At least the drones were cheaper.

  Everyone in the room was excited: money was about to be made.

  “Alana, put on the live feed,” Fats ordered, addressing the pilot that had joined them remotely and was on the speaker phone. “Ellis, give me a quick tour, from the center of town outward. Let’s see some dead people.”

  “Sure thing, Fats.”

  1089 miles away from the L.A. meeting, in the low-lit, comfortable trailer parked outside the fenced-in town, and reserved for the drone pilots, Alana Croy guided her high-tech toy into the town.

  Once over the fence it flew over abandoned homes, the once pristine yards now unkempt and covered by autumn’s fallen leaves, the wind’s broken branches, and large toadstools. Past churches, schools, and small local mom-and-pop stores that people in larger towns no longer saw much of now days, all now abandoned.

  Every so often, a lonely figure would be found walking about, and as they closed into the center of town the figures multiplied. They milled in the streets, the new inhabitants of Prideful were aimless and homeless until they rotted on their feet, however long it may take. Toward the center of town a large crowd of the dead milled. They shuffled as a group but went nowhere.

  “Okay, that's a good turnout,” Fats muttered, then something anomalous showed up on screen. “What is that? Hey fly back - go back.” The pilot back tracked the drone. “I thought I saw a woman looking directly at us. She didn’t look like the others.”

  Alana lowered the drone closer to the crowd. “You see her?”

  Everyone was watching now. Looking at the screens for Fats’ mystery woman, who ‘Didn't look like the others’. Minutes passed. “Okay. Maybe I imagined her. Don’t see her now. Go ahead, move on.”

  Far below and far away, she saw it leave. When it turned back she had wanted to shout with joy, scream with relief. But her scintilla of hope burned out in seconds. Too slow and too silent, she had not been able to get its attention and too quickly it flew on, uninterested. It left her behind. With a silent wail, she covered her face with her hands and fell to her knees.

  prideful

  Let the sexiest man alive start you off

  a•live

  līv/Submit

  adjective

  1. (of a person, animal, or plant) living, not dead

  2. (of a person or animal) alert and active; animated.

  dead

  adjective ded

  1. no longer alive or living : no longer having life

  2. not able to feel

  3. not able to move

  4. very tired

  5. not what it used to be

  Away from the Los Angeles heat, outside Prideful chain link fences in the cooling November air, Tom Cotton stared at the abandoned ghost town. He saw no shambling dead. He saw nothing alive, nothing dead. Not a dog, not a cat, not a bird. Prideful looked deserted and dead unto itself.

  Just like my career. How the greats have fallen, he mocked himself. Two years ago, he was a hot commodity, sexiest man alive, thank you very much People’s magazine, and now this, a shill for a reality show. He followed that thought with another pull from his silver flask then took surreptitious guilty look over his shoulder to see if anyone had noticed the early drinking. Nope, he was in the clear. The monogrammed flask went quickly back in his jacket’s inside pocket. What the hell, he thought. It’s gotta be past ten o’clock somewhere: A pathetic rationalization that he had been using far too often lately.

  Tom zipped up his coat and was glad to have it as he walked back to the production staging area. The Oregon Indian summer had lasted well into the last days of October, but was now finally giving way. He had hoped for the contestants that the comfortable weather would last a few more days, but it was looking chilly. And the forecast was getting twitchy. Oregon weather was not without surprises.

  In the space of a few days it had become a miniature town set up not even half a block away from the fence: vans, trailers, gear, a large enclosed cafeteria tent where the crew members lined up for breakfast, lunch and dinner if they didn’t feel like taking the long drive to a real
town. Quality food carts, tents and toilets, and with the exception of the bustling production people, nothing moved under the gray overcast sky. Everyone was ready to go.

  The introductions of the four competing teams had been filmed weeks prior and were now getting edited judiciously into the live feed. Carefully cut, the scenes would go from the live action and back to make up for the slow moments. Anything dull would be supplanted by brief bios, team training videos and of course, commercials. Lots of commercials.