Aftershock Zombie Series (Book 2): Breakdown (A Collection of Survivors Tales)

by Lioudis, Kristopher

  As the thing was pulling itself closer, we could hear what almost sounded like someone slurping noodles with each pull. I started to dry heave. Thank god for small miracles, like not having eaten dinner yet. Max was next to me cackling. If the dog had followed suit, I may have lost it.

  “Shut the door!” I yelled between heaves.

  “Oh, for god’s sake.” He rolled his eyes as he moved in and planted the hatchet in the zombie’s skull. “All better. We all clear now, boy?”

  Rocky barked twice.

  “Rocky says it is all clear. I’ll go check, just in case. The smell might be messing with his nose. I think he would hear them if there were more, though.” His voice trailed off as he used his foot for leverage against the dead man’s head to pull the hatchet back out, then headed into the house. Rocky leaped in front of him. They were one hell of a team.

  “It’s all good in here. Kind of a mess, though. Give me a few minutes. I’ll check if there’s a mop. You should probably stay out on the porch until I get it aired out a bit.”

  It took a good fifteen minutes before my head stopped spinning. The kid had managed to clean up enough of the mess to call the place home for one night. He had already set up the small camp stove that we had and was cooking a can of beans and pulled pork in a pot he found in the house. You would think, after losing my nonexistent lunch, that my stomach would be in no condition to handle beans and meat. If you thought that, you would be wrong.

  Max kept giggling throughout our meal, and continued pretty much until we went to lay down in the locked-up house. “Thanks for that,” he said.

  “For what? You did all the work.”

  “For making me laugh. I don’t think I have laughed that hard since I saw my first zombie. Feels like years ago.”

  “I know how you feel, kid. Glad I could be of service.” I yawned and rolled over on the couch so I was facing the wall.

  Rocky jumped up on the loveseat with Max. We all went to sleep around the same time, no one staying up to keep watch. A good laugh, a ridiculous scenario, and a long day had bonded us in a way that was unexplainable by words. We were a unit, or family, even if it was just for a while. We were finally comfortable enough with each other to let our guard down. Before I could think too hard about how content I felt, I fell fast asleep.

  21

  Ranger

  It’s cool that everybody calls me Ranger. My friends used to call me that. It’s also cool that everybody thinks I’m a badass. My friends used to think I was a badass too. We used to hang out in Jimmy’s mom’s basement. Jimmy called it his apartment, but come on, if your mom is only as far away as a basement door, you live with your parents. So anyway, we used to hang out down there all the time because Jimmy had a sweet movie collection. He pirated everything off the internet. Jimmy called himself a hacker, but seriously, anybody can use BitTorrent. So we would watch movies and smoke pot and talk about what would happen if there was a zombie apocalypse. I said I would get two big .44 magnum revolvers on hip holsters and blast my way through crowds of zombies. Mitch said he would get a crossbow, just like that guy from the TV show. Jimmy would show off this samurai sword he got at the mall and say that was all he would need. We thought we were so badass.

  When everything started to go to shit, back even before the news ever got around to reporting what was going on, Mitch called it. He was always on news aggregator sites and he said what was coming. We got all our gear together in Jimmy’s mom’s basement. I didn’t have any guns or anything and Mitch never got around to getting a crossbow, but we had a ton of knives and swords. We thought we were ready. We thought the three of us were gonna save the world. We watched news reports and followed Twitter feeds and talked about what was coming and how much ass we were gonna kick.

  The night it started for me, Jimmy’s mom came home from work, she worked at the grocery store, and says that there was all kinds of “commotion” downtown that afternoon. That’s the word she used, “commotion”. What she meant was that some dude got off the crosstown bus, threw up blood all over the street, then died right there in front of the Pack ‘n Save. She saw the whole thing from her register. She says that even through the crowd of people she can see the guy on the ground and another guy on top of him trying to do CPR. Only by the time the cops get there, the guy isn’t on the ground anymore. He’s on his feet attacking anybody stupid enough to get within arm’s reach. The cop that gets out of the squad car yells for the guy to get on the ground and put his hands behind his back, you know, like how they do with everybody, only the guy doesn’t listen. He goes straight for the cop. The cop backs up a couple steps and pulls out his gun, all the time yelling for the guy to get on the ground.

  The guy gets to within about five feet and the cop just unloads on him. Hits him three times in the chest, Jimmy’s mom says. The fourth round goes wild and cracks off the sidewalk almost catching a bystander. This guy just keeps coming, Jimmy’s mom says, and gets his hands around the cop’s throat. She tells us how the guy leans in and bites the cops nose right off his face then rips his throat out right there in the street. By now everybody is losing their shit. Jimmy’s mom says the store manager told everybody to get into the storage room and lock the door, he was gonna call more cops, but Jimmy’s mom took off out the back door instead and hauled ass home. By then we had seen a couple of news reports about crazy people doing the same kind of shit. TV said it was some new drug that people were overdosing on, but we knew better. Fat lot of good it did us… We grabbed our arsenal from Jimmy’s room, jumped in his car, and drove downtown. When we got there it was total chaos. It looked like riot footage only in real life. People were running everywhere, cars were on fire, buildings were on fire. It was crazy. We jumped out of the car looking for some zombies to tangle with. It didn’t take long. A gang of them in police uniforms came out of an alley. We jumped on them. Stupid. Jimmy swings his big old sword and buries it the collar bone of one them then cant get the damn thing out again. He’s jerking the handle trying to get the blade out and the whole thing snaps in half. Mitch starts in with his throwing knives, even manages to land a couple of hits. One of them right into the eye of one of the zombies. Mitch lets out this little victory cheer then turns to me to celebrate his first kill, only the thing doesn’t go down. Mitch looks confused. We hear Jimmy scream and turn around just in time to see him get dragged down under three of them, still trying to get his machete out of the hip holster it was in. Mitch pulls a hatchet out of his belt and buries it in the skull of the one closing in on him. The zombie goes slack and falls to the ground. Mitch puts a boot on the back of its head and levers the blade back out.

  While that was happening, I spotted one of the dead cops’ revolvers laying on the ground. Score! I grabbed it up and came around bringing the gun up in an arc as I spun. Must have looked so badass right then. The only problem is that before that, I had never fired a gun before. I always figured it would be like in the movies and the comic books, you know, just aim and fire. I pulled the trigger six times, even though only the first two tries fired any bullets. Neither of them hit anything near as far as I could tell. I looked around for another gun or some bullets as me and Mitch tried to fall back to the car.

  Mitch actually managed to take down two more zombies, but I could tell his arm was getting tired. The third one he got he had to kind of hack at before he could do enough damage and by then he couldn’t get the blade back out of the thing’s skull. He pulled a buck knife out of his pocket and flipped it open. We kept moving back to the car.

  There were more of them in the street now. Mitch goes to stab one in the temple only I don’t think he stabbed hard enough because the blade just sort of slid along the zombie’s skull and peeled off a slice of its scalp. Mitch tried to stab again only the blade folded closed on his hand, cutting up three of his fingers bad, and he dropped the knife. The last of him I ever saw disappeared under half a dozen zombies as they dragged him to the ground and tore him apart. Actually, the last I saw of
him was a chunk of meat and some intestines twirling through the air.

  I turned and ran. I made it back to the car completely out of breath and not moving much faster than the dead that chased me. I pulled the door shut just as one of them made a grab for my shirt, taking off three of its fingers in the process. They landed in my lap with a little plop-plop-plop sound. That’s when I threw up, the first time anyway.

  I sat there for at least an hour crying, smelling like puke, trying to make sense of what just happened. Zombies surrounded the car. Not many, just a handful of them bumping and thudding on windows. All at once it became real. This wasn’t some stupid video game or a movie I could put on pause so I could go take a leak and not miss the really gory parts. It was all the really gory parts. And I wasn’t the super hero I always thought I was. I had gained all this knowledge over a decade and a half from movies, TV, books, comics… Surprisingly, they weren’t that far off the mark when it came to what the Z-pocalypse would look like, except for that running bullshit. Yet here I was, completely mentally fucked, crying like a baby and uselessly waiting for somebody else to come and save me.

  I don’t remember how long I sat there with my eyes closed and blubbering. By the time I looked up there was only one zombie left. The others had either gone off after easier prey or had just gotten bored and wandered off. I started the car and tried to think of where the hell I could go. Back home? No way. I couldn’t think about answering all my mom’s questions and nagging and shit. I knew enough to stay away from the obvious places, Army base outside town, police station, hospital, church. These were always the first places people went when the shit hit the fan, and large groups of people were bad news in this scenario. I didn’t have a bugout location. I never thought I would actually need one. Like I said, Mitch and Jimmy and I always figured we would save the day.

  “Fuck it,” I said to the walking corpse smashing its head into the windshield. I put the car in Drive and headed south. I figured I would pick up the interstate and head east to the coast. Then I would steal a boat, a big one, and head out into the ocean. I figured it was as good a plan as any at that moment. The longer I drove, the worse the roads got. After three hours, and maybe 10 miles on the highway, I got off and stuck to back roads. The going wasn’t much quicker, but at least I wasn’t going to get stuck in some giant clusterfuck traffic jam.

  It took a few days, okay more like a week, to get to the East Coast. I remember being amazed at how quick everything went to shit. I guess people were too busy dealing with zombies to worry about some dude driving a piece of shit Corolla, so nobody messed with me. I saw some big groups of dead but I always managed to make my way around them. One time, I had to go through them. That was scary as shit and I almost got bogged down. I guess I would have been fucked, but I got away.

  I was somewhere in South Carolina, damned if I knew where, when I saw the Atlantic. I started north figuring it would only be a matter of time before I found a boat. Truth be told, it didn’t take long to find a marina full of big assed yachts. A lot of the spots were empty, like other people had already had my idea and had taken off. I got out of the car and headed toward the lines of boats slowly bobbing in the water. I hadn’t bothered to try and find a weapon or anything. I moved down the first row and onto the closest yacht. Looking back, I have no idea what I was thinking. I had never even been to the beach, let alone on a boat, let alone driven one. Do you drive a boat? That doesn’t sound right to me for some reason… Anyway, I found the steering wheel and realized you needed a key to start one of these things. I rooted around the little room trying to find keys, but no dice. A little voice in my head, the same one that used to tell me how bad ass I would be in a zombie attack, told me to try hotwiring the damn thing. Like that was an option. I climbed back outside and jumped down to the dock. I climbed into the next boat and immediately heard moaning coming from below the deck. I turned around and jumped off almost breaking an ankle in the process. I climbed into the third boat and as my head cleared the rail, I heard a shotgun rack. I froze.

  “Ge’ thFUCK off m’ boat!” came a very drunk, but still authoritative voice.

  “Please! Don’t shoot!” I cried. “I’m just trying to… Trying to…” Trying to what, exactly? Steal a boat so I can run away from the undead? That sounded pretty stupid in my head. Besides, this guy had to know what was going on. “I just need someplace safe.” Did I just say that? Jeez.

  “Z’not safe here,“ the voice waivered, “S’prolly not safe anywhere.” Then a laugh that was almost soaked in gin. “M’wifes downstairs. She’s dead. But then again, she aint!” Again, the laugh.

  I started to climb back down slowly not wanting to hear, or smell, this guy anymore. I wandered to another boat, but I heard moaning inside as soon as I put my foot on the deck, so that one was out. The next boat I tried was clear, but the cabin door was locked. I tried kicking the door in, a trick I had always thought would work just like TV. It didn’t. I thought I was going to break my damn foot and the door barely budged. I tried another and another and another boat. Finally, I found one with the door unlocked. I climbed into the driver’s seat or captain’s chair or whatever you call it and I realized, I had no fucking clue how to drive a boat. There wasn’t a gas pedal. No brake pedal either. There was a wheel at least, and after a minute or two I figured out the throttle. I pushed the big, red starter button and heard the engine chug to life somewhere under and behind me. I pulled back on the throttle and the engine roared a little louder. The boat started to slide backward and I relaxed a little. Then, it started to strain. I heard creaking wood as I pulled back more on the throttle. The engine whined higher and then I heard a snap and the crack of boards. I hadn’t untied the big ropes from the dock. A big metal thing the rope was tied to, I think it’s called a cleat, torn off the side of the boat, leaving a gaping hole in the side. I knew enough to know you don’t take a boat out into deep water with a big, fucking hole in it.

  I punched the steering wheel in frustration. This as supposed to be easier than this. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did. I jumped from the boat to the dock as it drifted further away. I landed on the ankle I hurt trying to kick the other door in and a bolt of pain shot up my leg. I hobbled back to my car, now almost out of gas, climbed behind the wheel, and started to cry. I cried like a little bitch. And for a long time, too. This was bullshit! I had seen all the movies, read all the comics. My friends and I used to talk about how cool a zombie apocalypse would be. How we would ride around on motorcycles, fighting zombies and other assorted bad guys, maybe find some babes who would be so grateful for us saving them that they would be as sexually explorative as all the women on the internet. And yet here I was, stuck in a car, crying like a girl.

  After that it gets kind of blurry. I know I drove north, otherwise I never would have found the flyer. I don’t remember ever stopping for gas or to sleep, or if I ran into anybody, undead or otherwise. I remember crossing into New Jersey though. I drove over some big assed bridge that was almost completely clogged with cars. Halfway across, I had to abandon my car. As I moved on foot, zombies threw themselves at the, thankfully, closed windows of a lot of the cars. When I made it to the other side I found another car. Not right away, I had to walk a long time to find one that wasn’t blocked in. That was some scary shit, too. You can outrun a zombie pretty easy, but if there is a group of them it’s pretty unnerving.

  I found a pretty sweet Camaro, but it was a stick shift. I finally landed a beat-to-shit, old pick-up truck.

  The driver was half in, half out of the cab. I snuck up slowly just in case he wasn’t, you know, all the way dead. I threw a rock at his head and when he didn’t move, I figured I was in the clear. He had a piece of paper in his hand with a map on it. I figured maybe he was a Prepper and this was his stash. Why not? That kind of shit happened all the time in movies. What I saw instead was some outfit claiming to be a safe haven. Sure, my ass, I thought. They were either already dead, or they were luring people into so
me kind of cannibal trap. Damn thing looked like it was drawn by a four-year-old with some stubby crayons. The map wouldn’t do any good anyway, I had no idea where I was. I crumbled it into a ball and threw it on the floor of the truck.

  I climbed behind the wheel, turned the key still in the ignition and just started driving in the direction the truck was already pointed. Turns out, that was the first really smart thing I had done since this all started.

  22

  Ian

  I walked in on Ken as he was firing up another computer. The look of frustration and dejection on his face damn near broke my heart. We knew when we headed out how big of a long shot this was, but now that it was right in my face, I couldn’t help but think about the risks we took and the men we lost, all apparently for nothing.

  “This is bullshit,” Ken exclaimed as he caught my eye, “Everything is password protected. So far, I’ve been able to get into a couple HR files, but that’s about it.”

  I tried to be consoling, “Maybe we can start with the paper files? Might be something in there…”

  “Whatever. It’s better than staring at a Windows login screen wondering why the fuck I thought this would ever work.”

  He moved to the carts stacked high with patient charts, picked the first one up and began to flip through it. “Vital signs, med lists, physical exam note, no labs results, no progress notes… Wait,” his face contorted in concentration, “This is interesting. I think they were intentionally infecting some of these people.”

  “What?!” I exclaimed. “What the fuck do you mean, they were infecting people?! Like there weren’t enough people getting infected the old-fashioned way!”

  Ken raised a hand to calm me down, or just to get me to shut up so he could concentrate. He picked up another chart, flipped through it until he found what he was looking for, then another and another. After a while, he had a pile of them spread out in front of him all turned to some graph that made no sense to me, but seemed to interest the hell out of him. “Without any real context, this doesn’t get me anywhere, but at least it’s a start. First, they had no idea what the hell caused all this. It wasn’t a virus or a bacteria or even a parasite, at least any that we knew about. Second, yes, they were exposing uninfected people to the pathogen in order to determine the vector, how the disease was transferred. Third, this had been going for at least a year. See this chart here, it’s at least 18 months old”