Them Early Days - 2nd Prequel by Keith C. Blackmore

Author:Keith C. Blackmore [Blackmore, Keith C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Dark Fantasy, Apocalyptic, Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Dystopian, Survival, Zombies, Grim, Gritty, Violence, Thriller, Suspense, Action & Adventure, Character-Driven, Fiction
Amazon: B09GKZR7H2
Goodreads: 59071288
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2021-11-29T13:00:00+00:00

23

The ride home was a lonely, wretched one.

After closing and securing the gate, Gus backed the van into the garage, but didn’t have the will to unload the thing. Then he remembered the frozen food he’d taken, and the ice cream and various other treats, and that moved him into action.

Not before taking several swigs off his whiskey, to honor the memory of a pair of decent people trying to get home.

He carried in all the frozen food, barely aware of doing so, and filled his freezers to capacity. Ordinarily that would lift his spirits, but discovering the fate of Rebecca and Walt had hit him hard––much harder than he would have expected.

When he had all the perishables packed away, he went into the kitchen and dealt with the grim discovery the only way possible.

He got drunk.

Really drunk.

So incredibly crossed-eyed stupefied in fact, that at one point during the night, his senses surfaced enough for him to realize he’d opened up a tin of beans in tomato sauce and had eaten half the can’s contents without knowing it. There was plenty of grub in the house, certainly enough choices in the fridge, but for reasons unknown to him, he got the hankering for beans in tomato sauce. No bread (there wasn’t any, anyway) and no crackers. Just the beans.

Then all conscious thought left him a second time, and he knew no more until morning.

That was the beginning of a fog of depression that lasted a week. Rebecca and Walt had been the experts, and of them all, with all their knowledge about the zombie epidemic, they should have escaped everything going down. They didn’t however, their fate sealed by taking one wrong turn, executing one fatal move. And if they couldn’t survive with all their zombie smarts, what hope did he have?

That thought plagued Gus through the week, where he dressed only in underwear, tight t-shirt, and bathrobe, and roamed the house in a daze. He drank heavily, going through half a forty ouncer bottle a day, mixing in cola or ginger ale, and watching movies. Mostly comedies, but failing to laugh at any of them.

One morning he rose, a living corpse himself, and went to the washroom, where he stood before the mirror. His eyes resembled a pair of clenched, crusty bung holes, and when he drew a brush through his hair, a great clump of it came away. Gus studied his substantial hair loss, dropped it into the sink, and immediately raked the brush through his remaining moss.

“Oh fuck.” He pulled away strands and let them drop. “Oh… oh fuck!”

Stress. It had to be stress. Working its unholy magic upon him, drying out follicle after follicle with frightening speed. The departed hair filled up the wash basin and a horrified Gus stared at it. He was losing it, anyway, but the zombie outbreak had accelerated genetics.

That only got him drinking more.

Several mornings he woke in a pool of his own drool, with dreamy recollections of barfing with violence into a receptacle, then not knowing what exactly that receptacle was.

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