Dead Pulse Rising: A Zombie Novel Read online

  Dead Pulse Rising

  The Kyle Walker Chronicles Volume 1

  K. Michael Gibson

  Copyright 2014 by K. Michael Gibson

  Prologue

  Russia

  “Бутырской тюрьмы 1980” (Butyrka Prison 1980)

  Snow pelted the ashen gray grounds of Butyrka prison as Doctor Ivan Morozov ran, at sixty-three years old, he ran for his life. He couldn’t believe what he had done, couldn’t believe he had actually gone through with it. He had let one of them free, one of those vile perversions of nature, one of those things that he had created. He tightly clutched the suitcase containing all of his notes in one leather gloved hand. His hands shook so badly with adrenaline and fear that he nearly lost his grip. All he had to do was make it beyond the gate; get to the car the Americans had waiting for him. He was so naive to think that what he was doing was for the benefit of his people, now he knew better and he would not, could not, allow what he had created to be unleashed on any population. The gate came into view, and he slowed his pace knowing the guards would find it suspicious if he were running. It was bad enough that he was soaked in snow and sweat. A guard held out a gloved hand as he approached.

  “Good evening sir, ID?” one of the sentries asked. Even though Ivan had worked at this facility for nearly twenty years, the guards still asked.

  Doctor Morozov fumbled around his pocket and produced a plastic ID card with his credentials.

  “Leaving kind of early today aren’t you doc,” one of the guards asked. Ivan ran a hand along his sweat covered forehead.

  “Yes, well I’ve seemed to have come down with something, Mr. Vinokurov,” Ivan responded sheepishly while reading the guards nametag.

  The guard nodded and handed Doctor Morozov back his ID.

  “Well, feel better sir,” the guard said and began to raise the barrier that blocked Ivan’s escape.

  At that moment, the sirens went off. Ivan glanced nervously over at the guard, who instantly narrowed his eyes and began to raise the AK-47 that was slung across his back. A shot rang out from somewhere in the distance. Vinokurov fell to the side, half of his skull having disintegrated. Another shot rang out as a second guard emerged from the shack.

  Ivan stared in shock as a hole erupted in the second man’s chest, and he fell dead to the snow covered streets. Headlights appeared in the distance as Ivan heard screams behind him. Ivan turned to face the prison knowing that his creation had found someone.

  A voice with an American accent shouted from behind the Doctor. “Doctor Morozov I presume, this way sir.”

  Ivan turned to face his savior. Relief flooded Ivan’s body as the American ran over and grabbed him by the sleeve of his coat and led him toward his new life.

  Chapter 1

  Where to begin I don’t even know. It seems so long ago since anything was even remotely normal. I suppose, for record purposes, I should start at the beginning.

  It was Monday morning, and my alarm came to life and scared the shit out of me at this early hour. I shot up to smack the long silver button to shut off the noise that I dreaded every waking day and damn near killed myself by tripping over one of my combat boots on the floor. My arm shot out, and I grabbed the closest sturdy object I could find. In this case, it was a large mahogany dresser that set next to the wall. The dresser’s sharp corner dug into the palm of my hand. I winced involuntarily and shook the pain out.

  “Shit,” I whispered to myself in the darkness. My alarm clock set atop a monstrous-sized dresser surrounded by ceramic knickknacks and jewelry boxes. I had a thing about actual furniture, wooden furniture, not that prefab pressboard crap that breaks within a year after you snap it together. I was thankful for this fact, because if it had not been for the real wood, it more than likely would have come crashing to the floor with the impact of my 210 pound buck-naked frame. I had to concentrate this early in the morning to navigate around the items on the dresser and not send half of them crashing to the floor. I stared bleary eyed at the black-and-silver contraption, my eyes blurring in and out of focus on the blindingly red illuminated numbers. My fingers hovered over the alarm clock button for a moment as I listened to a gravelly voiced female. I had come to hate that voice. The voice of Amelia on the early morning talk show that was supposed to be comical annoyed me to every fiber of my being, probably due in no small fact that every time I heard her, well, that meant it was time to get up and go to work.

  She spouted off something going on in downtown Baltimore. Apparently, there was a shooting in front of a Starbucks on Eutaw Street. Amelia and her partner tried to put a comic spin on the serious situation.

  “Maybe he was pissed that he couldn’t get that half-caf skinny latte,” I heard her partner Mickey say as they erupted in laughter. I often wondered what she and her partner looked like. I always assumed that to be on the radio basically meant that you weren’t good enough to make it in television, perhaps, because you looked like a troll. I was never obsessed enough to research it, and what do I know anyway? They may just be the epitome of style and beauty. I dismissed my abstract thoughts, pushed the snooze button, and stumbled back into bed. I sat down and rubbed my tired face, feeling the gritty stubble that had seemed to sprout up overnight.

  “Great, I’ll have to take care of that, I guess.” I turned over to my wife and kissed her gently on the forehead. She stirred for the slightest of moments and settled back into a deep slumber, snoring lightly. Her nostrils flared and mouth hung open as if to catch flies with each breath. I smiled at the thought of her by my side, snoring and all. She was beautiful, and if she ever read this, she would more than likely kick my ass for that description.

  No matter, it took fifteen years, and a lot of hardship to finally make that happen. We had dated on and off, mostly on throughout high school, and a small stint in college. We ended up married to the wrong people. Neither one of us planned for things to end up in divorce; however, that’s just the way things go sometimes. We each had children with said people who were, for all intents and purposes, my only reason for being for several years of my life. After a period of loneliness, we miraculously found each other anew, and with a much deeper sense of appreciation for each other. I don’t know if I believe in fate or God or any of that other mumbo jumbo, but He, She, or It was there and on our side. I stared at her for a long moment, smiling as I watched her sleepy facial expressions form dimples in her slender cheeks. Her long brown hair nestled against her pale skin and fell into her creamy bosom. I gave her a slight squeeze and stood.

  I walked over to the bathroom door, taking care not to have a repeat performance of earlier by kicking my boots out of the way, sending them clomping across the hardwood floor. I grabbed my uniform off a hook attached to the door and sniffed it. Two days worn, it seemed fresh enough, I thought as I slid the black polyester wool blend shirt on.

  I worked on an armored car. The shirt’s fabric was designed to wick away moisture in the summer and keep you warm in the winter. It sucked at both functions. Personally, I mused that it could have been made out of burlap; fact of the matter was that the contract for the garment went out to the lowest bidder. I slid into my pants and reached for my gun belt and ballistic vest. The vest was the kind that went over the shirt and was designed to blend in with the uniform. It was nice and supposedly worked, although thankfully, I had never put it to the test. I strapped the Velcro fastenings into place and secured my gun belt.

  I strolled out of the bedroom, headed for the kitchen, and stepped on a Lego. Now, if you have children, then you’ve probably had this experience at least once in your lifetime; but if you do not, stepping on a Lego in bare feet is akin to having a railroad spike
shoved into the tender under flesh of your foot. I hopped for several seconds on one foot, cursing the powers that be, and braced myself against the couch in the living room. I positioned my foot over my knee and plucked out the offending object that was embedded in my heel. I rubbed the now-sore appendage and shook my head. I scanned the floor, taking into account any danger areas of the Lego minefield, and then made my way into the kitchen. I paused in front of the refrigerator, reached up top, and grabbed my cooler.

  The large red Coleman cooler was still full of melt water from the day before. I slid it off the top of the refrigerator and managed to brush up against a set of papers that were adhered to the front of it, sending them fluttering to the linoleum floor along with a barrage of magnets that clattered and skittered across its smooth surface.

  “I don’t have time for this crap,” I said to myself and scowled at the mess. I emptied the Coleman cooler into the sink; the scent of the day was old tuna sandwiches. The odor wafted up and assaulted my nasal passages, threatening to overwhelm my olfactory senses. It smelled much better the day before, I thought as I tried not to gag (unsuccessfully, I might add). I opened the fridge, squinting at the light as it pierced the darkness. Sandwiches again, I thought as I grabbed for the salami and mustard on wheat and shoved it into my cooler. I liked good crusty French or Italian bread, but my wife insisted that whole wheat bread was better for me. A commercial for Fiber One Cereal shot through my head: A man standing with a shit-eating grin eyeing another man eating a bowl of cereal, with his wife standing over top of him, pouring a glass of juice. “She gave you fiber,” he said, implying that she must love the shit out of him for caring about his bowel habits, and the man with the cereal chewed as contently as a cow with his cud. Stupid, I know, but that’s what went through my head. Dumbass commercials make me lose brain cells every time I see one.

  The stereo suddenly came to life again, the alarm only set into sleep mode. I heard Amelia say something about a disturbance at the train station as I rushed as quietly as possible into the bedroom, even though the point of that was lost at the fact the alarm was screaming like a banshee. I cursed quietly as I jammed my pinky toe on the bed frame; a shock of pain from the blow traveled all the way up to my knee.

  “What in the hell does the universe have against my feet this morning?” I said in an irritated whisper. I smacked the alarm, and then smacked it again for good measure just to be sure it was indeed off.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, cracked my toes, and rubbed away the pain, deciding that it would be a good time to pull my boots on. However, in order to do that, I needed that precious commodity of socks. In a house full of children, trying to find a matching pair of socks was like trying to actually locate your soul mate on eHarmony. They might be out there, but good luck finding them. Just for giggles, I stood facing my dresser and opened my sock drawer. Surprise etched across my face when there was actually a pristine pair of socks staring back at me. I grabbed the soft items and hastily slid them over my feet, fearing they may be some sort of a sleep-deprived mirage. The softness of the socks felt good against my battered feet. I slipped on my black Bates tactical combat boots and zipped them up the side.

  I checked the clock, and it was 6:27, only a few minutes left before I had to be on the road. I stood, made my way into the bathroom, and stepped into our walk-in closet. I reached up onto the top shelf and withdrew a small locked case from behind a stack of old file boxes. I swiftly unlocked it with a code, grabbed my weapon from the gun safe, and slid a speed loader full of FTX rounds into the cylinder and twisted the knob. The bullets slid home and, in one swift motion, snapped the cylinder shut and holstered the weapon. Yeah, make fun of me if you want; the police I work with often do. They would always poke fun at the fact I still carried an old-fashioned revolver, a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum, model 10 to be exact. My employer preferred to issue .38 caliber slugs, mainly because the less robust rounds were cheaper. I personally liked the stopping power of a .357 FTX round, unlike the slug, the FTX was a hollow point filled with an expanding polymer which allowed the bullet to flange out to its full potential effectively giving the target a really bad freaking day. The police I worked with would always praise the higher capacity semi-automatic Glock’s they carried. I would in turn give them a joyful ribbing that it was easy to hit a target when you could empty a magazine in around 2.5 seconds. I was a firm believer in one-shot-one-kill shooting, whereas our standard training dealt more with instinct shooting. This is what you would do at high noon on the dusty streets of the old West. My skills were a little more honed by my previous years spent working for Air Force intelligence.

  Acquire sight picture, breathe, squeeze the trigger were my instincts. In fact, it took quite a lot of practice to get used to drawing from the hip, whereas I was acclimated to a tactical leg holster. This was a little known fact for most, being I had to sign a nondisclosure form the size of a phonebook when I retired from active duty; my friends, my current job, and even my wife had no idea of the things that I had done in the past or that I had even been an enlisted man. I was recruited young due to strong test scores on a not-so-standardized test. I had recruiters calling me at the tender age of twelve. When I graduated high school, I enlisted and was supposedly rejected. In actuality, I spent a year at a facility in Nitro, West Virginia, training.

  To the rest of the world, I was simply there living with my cousin, which I was; however, when he and our other roommates were out working at taco-hell, I was training on how to create improvised plastic explosives by scraping the sulfur off match heads. Needless to say, it took a lot of scraping. After my training was complete, I was reintegrated back home, and sent on business trips, and none were the wiser.

  My alarm started screaming again, telling me that I still hadn’t figured out which of the damn buttons shut it off for good. It told me I had but five minutes to get my ass out of the house. Quickly, I finished putting on my gear, grabbed my cooler and backpack, and headed for the door.

  I opened the door and stepped out into the hazy summer gloom of an August morning. Sweat instantly began to bead on my forehead. I turned back toward the door, staring longingly into its air-conditioned interior, wishing I could just go curl back up next to my wife’s soft form, but money had to be made, bills paid, and bread bought. I sighed and closed the door, having to slam it hard for the lock to catch, the humidity swelling the wood of the door frame. The whole frame of my manufactured home shook with the impact. I cringed, hoping against hope I hadn’t awakened my wife. Not that it mattered much; she would be up soon welcoming her children that she cared for every day.

  For the better part of ten years, my wife had taken care of the neighborhood children; and after a while, she decided to turn it into a business. She catered mostly to the low-income families in the area, which in this economy were plentiful; and since we lived close to a military base, the enlisted men and women transferring to Aberdeen proving-grounds were steady clients as well. In this day and age of conflict and war, business boomed.

  I walked through the dew-covered grass, its wetness coating the black leather of my Bates tactical boots, and stepped onto the street to my car. I fumbled with my keys for a moment. I blindly located my ignition key and opened the door to my little white four-banger of a car. I drove a Hyundai Accent, not the most fashionable car on the planet; but hey, I got what I could afford, well, just barely, anyway. I opened the door, sat down, and plopped my cooler on top of about four weeks’ worth of empty drink bottles that crunched with the added weight; several cans spilled off the seat and fell to the floor. The scene reminded me of a Simpsons’ episode where Homer had been pulled over by the police, drunk as a skunk. When the cop asked him if he had been drinking, he said, No. When he shifted in the car, the tinny sound of cans rattled from the cartoon car’s interior. I sighed and started the engine. “I really need to clean out this damn thing,” I said to the air. The engine purred to life—oh, who am I kidding?—it more or less coughed, then spit,
and then sputtered to life. I backed out of my driveway, taking great care to not hit the dumbass’s car that was parked directly behind me on the opposite side of the street. For some reason, my neighbor, Ned, who I believe was an ex-Marine with severe—and I mean severe—PTSD, could not seem to bring himself to park his ugly ass red El Camino in his driveway. Several times I had actually kissed the piece of shit with my rear bumper. The first time it had happened, I was half asleep and rushing to get to work, and wham-o, I backed right into it. I pulled my car over to the side of the street, stepped out, and went up to his house and rang the doorbell. Now keep in mind it was like six thirty in the morning. He opened the curtain and peeked out at me. I waved at him, seeing that he was staring at me through what I thought were curtains. As I peered closer at the windows, I discovered the curtains were actually camouflage netting hung over the windows.

  I smirked when he came to the door, fully decked out in camouflage BDUs. I grinned ear to ear at the sight and had to stifle a chuckle that would have totally screwed up any kind of apology I had in mind for my transgression. I started to explain what had happened.

  The older man didn’t seem interested in hearing a damn word I said. His eyes darted around from place to place as if he were looking for the ever-present man to pop out and read his mind, or perhaps abduct him, and whisk him away to some super-secret lab to perform highly classified LSD experiments on him. I was surprised as hell that he wasn’t wearing a tin foil hat. After a moment, he looked at me and nodded as if just noticing my presence, and simply shut the door in my face.

  I stared at the door for a terse moment, wondering what the hell had just happened. So ever since that little experience, so long as I didn’t do any damage to GI Psycho’s car, truck, or whatever the hell it was supposed to be, I didn’t bother taking the time to inform him of my blunder. Besides, if he even gave a shit, he could always park in his empty driveway. Ceasing my reverie, I backed out, narrowly missing Ned’s truck, and I started on the long trek to base.