I Die Before I Wake Chapter 8
Chapter word count: 2,191
Total word count: 16,808
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Chicago, IL. Superstore Warehouse
“Kristopher!” I called, weaving through the maze of abandoned cars, the pistol I had grown so comfortable with was warm in my hand as the summer sun shone into my eyes, temporarily blinding me, but never making me deaf like it wanted to. Never completely incapacitated me as much as it surely wanted to. As much as those I was tracking surely wanted it to. My boots crushed broken glass into the cracked pavement beneath me as I searched the streets. I knew he was here… I knew he and his buddies populated the area and this was their territory. I knew this because he had told me. Because Kris knew this and despite his conscious efforts to recruit me into the same ‘family’ he had found, my older brother had only proved to show me what streets I needed to avoid on the way home from school so I wouldn’t have to deal with his friends that also wanted me to be a part of their ‘family’. The same family that forced you to kill an innocent human being in order to gain a branch on their family tree.
Fuck that.
But it seemed that my teenage years weren’t going to be the last time I was going to have to deal with my brother and his cronie drug ridden friends as I ducked through a shaded alleyway, my eyes focusing and attempting to adjust to the light difference. I wasn’t a trained cop and if I had gone down that road instead of the one I had chosen, I probably wouldn’t have been able to live to see a day like the one I seemed to be living now. But despite not being trained in the weapon I was holding, I had been taught enough by my brother, who was a self-proclaimed drive by artist.
Fucking tool.
“C’mon, Kris! Let’s go!” I cried out to him, taunting him and his buddies out to play as my heart thudded in my thin chest. I had always been the weaker one. Always the one that wanted to tag along and play with the big kids. At least until I realized how much Kris’s games had torn our mother and father apart and eventually killed the both of them. How much his stupid power struggles with other high school drop outs had destroyed our family and Kristopher himself. I would never do that to our family and had decided to go down a different path filled with theories and books written about the life my brother had chosen.
The streets were unusually empty, quiet except for the mewling of a hungry cat or the soft whine of a lonely dog as they only found food and solstice in the dirty alleyways, like the one that I was traveling down. This one led straight into the heart of their territory and I knew eventually I was going to find the self proclaimed Zombie hunters. A group of vigilantes who didn’t believe in cops or anyone else and didn’t think authorities were going to protect the kids they threw in jail every goddamn day. So they took it all into their own hands.
Too bad this wasn’t some kind of stupid turf war, a battle over some stupid punkass kid wandering into the wrong store or onto the wrong block after school. This was something way above that and it seemed they hadn’t realized that.
Sweat loosened the grip on my gun and I had to readjust as I slowly went down the dirty alleyway, my eyes now fully adjusted to the oncoming darkness and whatever shadows had already claimed this alleyway as their own, silently defeating the gang and stealing their territory. A low snarl filled the space, bouncing off of spilling garbage cans and scaring a cat enough to influence its flight into the open street behind me. The safety flicked off of my gun as a shuffling and very familiar form came towards me, bile and blood pouring from its mouth as it cocked its head like a curious puppy. But this asshole wasn’t nearly as cute and I remembered him as my brother’s best friend, one of the same kids who I had looked up to for all those years before realizing the mistakes he and my brother had made. The body gave another gruff bark, stumbling towards me, barely supported on a broken knee and one rotting ‘good’ leg. And when I looked at it completely and fully? I stopped for a moment, my brain registering this THING as my brother’s best friend, but just for a moment. And it only took a moment for the rotting corpse to get closer than I wanted it to. The stink of rotting flesh and rising gases hit my face like a brick and immediately I pulled off a few shots, the echoes racing one another up and out of the alleyway as the body hit the ground with a splatter of old blood and vomit.
And for good measure, I put another bullet in its head. Rule number two when fighting these mother fuckers. Double tap. Always make sure they’re down because they’re already fucking dead and the only way to finish them off was to put a bullet through the only organ that was still somewhat working, even if it was working on the most basic of instincts and needs. Animalistic bullshit and everything like that. The body gave a twitch and then fell still and I continued on, knowing that I should have brought more bullets incase my dumbass brother had more cronies to do his bidding.
But as I turned a corner, my mouth hanging open slightly to accommodate for the nasty stench that filled my nose and allowing me to breathe, an even more familiar shape turned, spit and bubbling vomit dripping off of his fucking chin and onto his tattered zip up sweatshirt. He rose from the slumped and dead form of some poor soul that had gotten stuck in this dead end. Entrails, surely the poor soul’s, were clutched in my brother’s dark and broken fingers and I could spot the open cavity that he had carved with his teeth and those fingertips of his. A darker growl bubbled up and out with the other bodily fluids as the viciously familiar body of my brother turned on his heel and began the ragged sprint towards me. Flashes of childhood memories went through my brain as his snarling got louder and the stench got worse. He was gaining distance and getting closer and I prayed that the Kristopher I knew inside of that monster would suddenly wake up and he would become the older brother that I knew. The one that would joke around and beat me up but still take me to get a well deserved ice cream at the end of the day.
“Alexander!” It snarled, at least it seemed to be that single world and that was what my brain registered. My name. The one word his broken jaw could even form around and the gun in my hand shook violently as I attempted to focus on his forehead. A shot to the chest would just slow him the fuck down and I couldn’t do that. It was like putting down the family dog.
Had to do it quick. Painless. In the head and let it all be over from there. A bullet to the fucking brain would put him out for good.
The shot rang out, but grazed the side of his head, dragging bits of flesh and blood away from the skull and making him spin in his jog, but barely slowing him as he stumbled, found his footing and continued down the small bit of alley I had cornered him in. Another shot made the ricochet tremble up my arm and into my chest, but it caught Kris in the throat, dropping him as it severed something well enough that only his fingers and arms could twitch. But even then, he began to crawl towards me on his stomach, dull eyes flashing in the dying sunlight as if he knew that if he just kept coming, eventually he would get me. Or he would distract me enough that one of his gang banger buddies would kill me.
“Alexander!” The thing that resembled my brother gurgled, head still cocked to the side as if something had attempted to break his neck, his fingers clawing across the broken pavement towards my booted feet. And when he reached the soles of my shoes and his fingers, rotting straight to the bone, reached up to grab my leg and tear it off, I put another bullet through his eye, sending rotting blood spraying across my clothes and the pavement around us. The body went limp and the arm fell to the ground along with the rest of his body… but as I stared and shook and nearly sobbed at the sight of my older brother, the one that was supposed to be protecting ME and teaching ME how to shoot these mother fuckers, the broken jaw wobbled open and uttered…
“Alexander!”
The new and suddenly clear voice made my eyes snap open and forced me to shoot up in the makeshift bed I had concocted only hours before. My heart raced in my throat and I could feel the sweat cooling on my dark skin, soaking both the loose t-shirt I was wearing and probably the pillow I had been sleeping on.
There was no alleyway. There was no gun in my hand. And I had already shot the face off of my brother and his best friend three days ago. So who the fuck was… ah. A scared as hell looking Seth stared at me with those bigass eyes, his hands wringing one another as he knelt on the ground next to me. Miles was still snoring a few feet away and Giselle was gently turning over on her own inflatable mattress. We had managed to find a box of them and blew them all up for one another. It had been the most comfortable thing I had slept on all week and it hadn’t taken long for me to pass out.
Guess my subconscious got the best of me.
A soft groan slipped through dry lips as I wiped my hand over my sweaty face, peering over my fingers at Seth, who still seemed scared to even be next to me. “What’s wrong? You hear zombies?” I questioned, eyes instantly going to the doors that were still barricaded. No sound of clumsy fingers attempting to claw their way through, although I could see the beginning of a sunrise attempting to peer through whatever cracks it could. A quick glance away from Seth showed the time on the clock I had set up for us so that none of us would sleep through the day.
No matter how much I’m sure all of us wanted to.
Seth shook his head, gaining my attention once more. “No… You were practically screaming.” He replied, which made my heart stop in my chest. That dream… that memory was so real to me, so real I could nearly smell the death that had clouded my mind and nearly feel the warm steel of the gun in my hand. “Were you having a nightmare?” He questioned innocently, as if he were five instead of eighteen or nearly nineteen. He was barely younger than me and yet I felt…
Shit I felt like a big fucking brother. That’s what I fucking felt like at that moment.
A small, ironic chuckle escaped my throat, something I couldn’t help. Nightmare. My whole life was a fucking nightmare at that point and I merely nodded. “Yeah… Fucking zombies.” I replied, shaking it off as I glanced back at the clock, hoping for a few more hours of quiet moments. But the red numbers showed a time that was so close to the numbers of the alarm I had set that it seemed pointless to shoo him back to bed and attempt to get a few more moments of sleep. Because I knew that the nightmare would return, just as it had every night since that moment in the alley.
“C’mon… I want to finish packing.” Because he seemed oblivious to the time or the yearning to go back to bed, at least that was my assumption as he rose to his feet as I did the same, slipping on jeans over the boxers I had worn to bed. We had packed nearly all of our supplies after dinner. Cans of food, GPS if we could get it to work and needed it, a surprising amount of ammunition and guns that would have taken ages to get a hold of in the real world, they all filled our backpacks, but I knew that there was some things we needed to finish collecting. Seth gave a nod and went to get his backpack before heading with me into the depths of the warehouse to go for a bit more shopping.