Killing Country Music (Cities of the Dead) Page 3

moving this way.”

  The raids and zombie killing became the measure of the days for Chase, pieced together in his mind’s eye as clearly as he saw the notes on the fret board of a guitar. It made sense, somehow, though he could not quite explain how he had managed to figure out which undead were runners, which were walkers. He just knew when he saw them, knew in the same way he knew how to make any of the chords on his guitar without looking at his fingers or the strings. Indeed, it was something he could tell more readily than which people on the car lot were sellable and which were not.

  Life had become something unintelligibly different in the months since the zombie plague had wiped out most of the human population, but it had not made it less worth living. At least, not to Chase, who had never really hated his job as an automobile salesman, but had always known it wasn’t his destiny, even though he had long ago come to the conclusion that it would be his unintended, but lucrative, career path through life. Anyway, he saw more of his wife and daughters in this new life, and that made him happier on a deeper, more elemental level. That every time he saw them might be his last now occurred to him, which made it all that more meaningful to him: dying in a car crash on his commute was something that he never really factored into his life, although it was, statistically, the biggest risk he had taken with his life each day.

  He poured himself three fingers of Elijah Craig bourbon and sat down on a stool in his garage. He wondered for a moment about Tim McGraw and the life that man had lived, reaching the epitome of success and fame, having it all in a world in which anything could be had, where there were no boundaries, no limits on what you could have. McGraw and Treat Hemingway could do whatever they wanted, could have anything they desired in the world in which Chase had wanted to live, but they had become just ordinary zombies in the world in which Chase now lived.

  The old world was over, and nothing in it counted any longer. Chase sipped deeply on the bourbon and let the sweetness linger on his tongue before swallowing. For the first time in his life, he was finally gaining a reputation for something he was good at: killing country music.

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  About the Author

  William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.