Never Enough Tomorrows: A Zombie Apocalypse Novel By Christopher Hugh Mills.

Roland

Roland Kincade stood in the doorway of his cell watching other cons going about their business. He was a very big man with long black hair and grey eyes that were seemingly always full of mirth, whether he was eating lunch or committing a violent act.

He was pulling a twenty-five to life sentence for armed robbery and then putting his partner in a coma after his partner crashed the getaway car. It had taken five officers to subdue him, none of whom walked away unscathed.

He was doing his stretch in the Hunt, a Texas Correctional facility 160 miles southeast of Dallas and 70 miles North of Houston.

Behind him inside the cell his cell mate was whimpering softly. He was an eighteen year old kid who had been accused of raping two underage girls. Roland had broken him in on his first night.

Everyone was probably talking about what happened to old man Hall the day before. The tough old bastard had just dropped dead in the yard. Possibly a coronary, but no one got a chance to see. When the guards ran to him, the dude just sat up and started snapping at them.

Unluckily, in Roland's opinion, he missed all three guards. They got him under control and took him to the infirmary. Roland hadn't been close, so he had missed the show.

Those that had seen said it was the damnedest thing, the old man's eyes had gone all milky, and he was like a feral animal, gnashing his teeth and making some kind of god awful growling or groaning noise.

Roland figured it was all bullshit. The old man fell down, the guards roughed him up and old man Hall fought back. He was, or had been anyway, a lifer. Doing time for murdering his old lady and her lover...with a pick axe.

Creepy Garner ambled over and squatted next to Roland. Nobody called him Creepy to his face. He was probably the ugliest guy in the whole prison, if not on the planet. He had one blue eye and a soupy green eye that was lazy. The blue eye was lively, intelligent. The soupy one stared off into space. He walked around the prison with a humped back.

"Death is coming inside these walls." Garner said in that raspy voice of his.

Roland wasn't afraid of anyone on the planet. But, Creepy Garner gave him the shivers whenever he was near. "What the hell are you talking about now?"

"Old man Hall was just the beginning," Garner rasped and chuckled, "soon these walls and floors will be running red with blood."

Garner played himself off as a kind of...soothsayer or something. Claimed he could see certain futures with his crazy eye, although Roland was quite sure he was blind in that eye. Creepy was a car thief and house burglar and good at neither one of them. He couldn't be very good at soothsaying either, since he got caught all the time.

"Take your crazy talk else where," Roland said softly, "I ain't buying your shit, today."

Garner wheezed laughter and Roland's skin crawled. "You wait and see my friend, pretty soon the howls of the dead will echo off these walls."

Roland chuckled dangerously, "You don't get away from me...Creepy...your howls will be echoin'."

That wheezy laugh again. For some reason Creepy Garner had latched on to Roland and his merry little prison band. Nobody liked him, but nobody really had the guts to make him stay away either.

"Last night," Creepy went on, "some gov'ment boys swooped in...collected the old man and spirited him right out of here."

Roland was sure Creepy had seen something, he was the night janitor and didn't seem to sleep...at all. Roland didn't know how he felt about the creepy bastard moving around in the dark while he slept.