LAST STAND IN A DEAD LAND EXCERPT

by Eric S. Brown

Mark was having a blast. The apocalypse had been the best thing that ever happened to him so far. He was a self-made king in this new world of hungry corpses and anarchy. The morgue’s heavy steel door kept the dead at bay and he had stockpiled the place full of everything he thought he would need, and then some, while everyone else was still refusing to believe the end had come. Heck, the morgue even had its own generator. Used carefully, his supply of gas would last weeks. By then maybe the monsters would have rotted away. Who knew? He plopped the chainsaw onto the autopsy table, filling its tank from a jug of gasoline. A loud thump sounded from inside one of the refrigerated corpse storage units in the wall.

“Shut up!” he shouted. “I’ll deal with you later!”

Mark lifted the chainsaw and marched over to the morgue’s side door. Unlike the main entrance, it was made of wood but it was thick and tough. It led into the chapel area which was the only true insecure part of his domain. He had fortified it as best he could before the dead swarmed the area around the building. Mark carefully cracked the side door, peeping into the chapel. A chorus of moans, snarls, and grunts could be heard from within but he didn’t see any rotters that had made it inside among the pews. Scores upon scores of arms covered in green and gray decaying flesh flailed about through and in between the boards he had nailed in place over the sea of windows. Oh yeah, he thought, it’s fun time. He cranked up the chainsaw and went to work.

Ten minutes later, covered in blood and black pus, he staggered into the morgue proper again. Most of the rotters were missing their arms or, at the very least, their hands from his efforts. It lowered their chances of tearing away the boards and getting inside, or so he told himself. The things were packed so thickly outside that the ones close enough to get their arms in were actually pressed against the walls by the weight of those behind them to where they could barely move. It should be a while until the crowd of them, as brainless as the things were, shifted around enough to be a threat again.

The one thing the morgue lacked was a shower. Mark stripped away his soiled clothing, cleaning himself with pieces of a torn-up lab coat at one of the larger sinks. Then he put his clothes in it to soak for a while before he attempted to wash them. Shrugging on a long lab coat over his otherwise naked body, he grabbed a beer from one of the morgue’s large freezers and sat down at the work desk in the main room. Patting himself on the back for a job well done, he took a sip of the beer and opened the laptop in front of him. When he had moved in, he had wired several security cameras along the edges of the roof so he could keep a better eye on the building’s exterior. He watched hundreds of corpses on a laptop now, wandering about the parking lot and the streets beyond it. The sight of the things reminded him of the ones stored in the morgue when he had first arrived. Dealing with those fraggers hadn’t been fun. Unlike the ones trying to get into the chapel, they had been able to fight him. Only the devil knew how much ammo he’d wasted blowing them into twitching pieces. If he ever had to do all this again, Mark swore he would leave the creatures more intact next time. Cleaning up that mess took forever. A thump sounded from one of the roll out corpse containers in the wall again.

“I told you to shut up!” he raged, walking over to it and pounding his fist loudly on its small, square door. “Can’t a man get a second to kick back with a beer and think?”

The noise stopped. Marked returned to his seat, still grumbling quietly under his breath. “What in the Hades?” he spat out a mouthful of his beer as he watched a black van come tearing into the morgue’s parking lot. Its side door was open and some idiot leaned out from it with the biggest machine gun Mark had ever seen, mowing down the rotters as the van drove around in circles. Mark suddenly felt very cold. For the first time in his three days of paradise, his perfect little home was truly threatened. Whoever those folks in the van were, whether they made it past the rotters or not, he wasn’t about to let them in. He realized what they were doing as he continued to watch them on the laptop’s screen. They weren’t trying to kill all the creatures, merely thin the things’ ranks enough to make for the chapel door, his door. Mark didn’t bother to put on anything else. With his lab coat open and his male parts flopping about freely, he grabbed his closest weapon and got ready to meet them just in case.

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