Read War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) for Free Online Page A

said, wishing more than anything that her mommy would open her eyes and say it back. And she wished her mommy could jump out of bed and be happy again and healthy. But mommy couldn’t, not even after three surgeries, not even when the best doctors in the country had been flown in to save her from the cancer.
    There were some things money couldn’t buy.
     
3
John Burke
Izard County, Arkansas
     
    Sitting in his kitchen on one of his mismatched chairs resting on cracked and faded greenish linoleum and sweating like a fuck-all pig, with only a crappy, old ceiling fan ticking overhead, John Burke tried again to add the numbers so that he could get them to come out the same. So far he’d fed the numbers into his ancient sixth-grade Texas Instruments calculator three times and somehow had come up with three different totals.
    He was on the verge of chucking that ole’ Texas piece of shit at the wall, but he held back knowing if he did, he’d be fucked into summing up the math on a piece of paper; something he was none too good at.
    “Lab work: forty-eight hunnert. Let’s see…bi-opsy, shit, seven thousand each, and there was, let’s see, six of those. The first hospital stay…fuck-all, twenty-one thousand…” The figures blurred as the tears started again. He took a swig of his beer, his third of that early morning. What did he care when he started to drink? What did he care if Mrs. Lafayette saw the can when she came to collect Jaimee? He didn’t care one stinking bit.
    After a deep breath he went on, “One copper and teak casket: f-for-forty-one hunnert. Fuckin’ side-by-side plots…”
    Jaimee walked into the room clucking her tongue like a mother hen. “Daidy, you ain’t supposed to be cussing none. Momma said so.” She had assumed all the motherly duties a six-year-old could attend to, which wasn’t much beyond picking up some and making her own cereal. She could also stick bologna and cheese on bread, only her daddy hadn’t gone to the store except to get beer and cough medicine. Sometime he went swig for swig, with a can in one hand and a bottle of nasty red syrup in the other, but still he would hack up strange looking hunks of who knew what.
    John shuddered, wracked by another coughing spell. He was sure he was going to throw-up afterward due to the violence of the act, but he didn’t and when the fit passed he took a drink of beer with a shaking hand. “She ain’t here no more so I guess it don’t matter none.”
    “We promised her,” Jaimee reminded him. “We both made blood oaths to take care of each other.”
    That had been a year and half ago, and Jaimee who was having trouble even recalling what her mother looked like, remembered that oath like it was yesterday. So did John. It was why he was adding those hated numbers despite the cough that had sprung up and wouldn’t leave and the pain in his joints that felt as though his bones were rubbing together. There was something very wrong with him and he was afraid. The one doctor’s visit he'd had only made matters worse. Amy’s old Doc had poked and prodded and listened and whatnot, all with a grim set to his lips. It wasn’t good. No sir.
    Amy Lynn Burke’s cancer had been a doozey, but she had been a fighter. She’d gone toe-to-toe with that fuck-all champ—eight rounds of chemo that left her bald and wasted like one them poor Jews in Germany. Then they took a lobe from her right lung and then a few months later, one from the left. There were also the lymph nodes the doctors popped out of her, like fuck-all grey, lumpy boogers. They tried radioactive pellets and when that failed they resorted to laser beams.
    Amy Lynn was a fighter to the end and she could honestly say she had won a moral victory. Even when they lowered her into the dirt in that goddamned expensive teak casket that would never-ever see the light of day again, people were singing her praises. Look how brave she had fought. Look at the courage she displayed. She was a