The Undead: Zombie Anthology

by David Wellington

  Hank was the weapons expert. The way he stared at me, as well as his tremendous size, told me that he wasn’t a man I should fuck with. The last man in the group was Doug, chief mechanic and driver, whose job it was to see that the rest of the rescue crew arrived at the scene in one piece.

  Finally, Joe introduced me to Michelle, a sexy little thing with dazzling red hair. Her job is at the same time simple and arduous. Five guys alone can get pretty irritable cooped up by themselves. Michelle is a great stress reliever. There had been times that I thanked God for Michelle, like when I pulled the late shift, manning the phones. She would slink under my desk and gently tug down on my zipper, then coax out my member before slipping it between her slender lips.

  Michelle’s also one hell of a cook.

  As he had done countless times in the past, Joe picked up the red phone receiver and listened intently for several seconds before placing it back on its cradle.

  “Still working?” I asked, already half-knowing the answer.

  He nodded, then said, “For now.”

  Soon after the cataclysm, the government set up an emergency phone system in fear that one day the local phone companies would fail. Marty had been able to hack into that system and provide us with unlimited phone service.

  We hoped.

  Suddenly, as if thinking about it made it real, the phone rang. The phone was actually ringing! Joe grabbed the receiver and began to speak.

  “You’ve reached the Zombie Hotline. Please state your name, address, and the nature of your emergency.” After two weeks without a call, he still remembered the spiel.

  I picked up my phone, carefully muffling the mouthpiece with my free hand.

  “My name is Dana Anderson at 1753 Johnsonville Lane. One of those goddamn zombies is trying to break into our house.” She sounded hysterical.

  “Calm down, madam. A team is being dispatched immediately. Please stay on the line until they arrive.” With his left hand, Joe pecked the information into the database. In minutes, tires squealed and sirens wailed as our teammates headed to intercept the undead bastards.

  In the phone, I heard whimpering. Joe must have heard it too.

  “Is someone with you?” he asked.

  “Just my daughter, Erin.”

  “How old is Erin?”

  “She’s fourteen.” Dana began to sob. “Why did this have to happen? It’s not fair. She shouldn’t have to grow up in this world.”

  “Well, you just tell Erin that everything will be okay. Everything will be over soon.”

  “Thank you so much. With my husband gone, it keeps getting harder to survive.”

  As she spoke to Joe, I thought about what a lovely voice Dana had. It reminded me of Karen’s voice. I still missed my wife and regretted having to put that slug through her brainpan. But she had turned into a zombie.

  My arm still hurts from where she tasted me.

  Gunshots exploded from the phone’s receiver, then silence.

  “It sounds like my boys have arrived. Why don’t you let them in?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  I heard a clatter as Dana laid the phone down, and several seconds later, the creaking of the hinges as Dana opened the door.

  She shrieked. “Dear God, no. Run, Erin!” Her cries were drowned out by the grunts, followed by the familiar sounds of teeth tearing flesh. Dana tried to scream, but the warm blood flooding into her throat garbled it.

  Joe and I hung up our phones.

  Soon, the retrieval team would return with the day’s catch.

  “Hello, sweethearts,” Michelle said as she wheeled out her clinking, stainless-steel cart, the half dozen chef knives gleaming under the florescent lights. She rolled up the Oriental rug that lay between my desk and Joe’s, uncovering a paint spill of dried, rust-colored blood.

  The tray is the closest thing we have to a kitchen table.

  There are two breeds of zombies in the world. You have the bestial zombies, like my dear departed Karen, which use brute force to get their food. Then you have the more cerebral zombies, the zombies that were able to quickly evolve into thinking creatures, the zombies that retain their human thought processes. Zombies such as Joe and the rest of the team.

  And myself.

  The undead outnumber the living now, and the food supply grows short. It takes brains to eat nowadays.

  Joe leaned out of the shadows, exposing more of his ghoulish, rotting head. “How long must we live this way?”

  Home

  David Moody

  I’ve been here hundreds of times before but it’s never looked like this. Georgie and I used to drive up here on weekends to walk the dog over these hills. We’d let him off the lead and then walk and talk and watch him play for hours. That was long before the events that have since kept us apart. It all feels like a lifetime ago. Today, the green rolling landscape I remember is washed out and grey; everything is cold, lifeless and dead. I am alone, and the world is decaying around me. It’s early in the morning, perhaps an hour before sunrise, and a layer of light mist clings to the ground. I can see figures moving all around me. They’re everywhere. Shuffling. Staggering. Hundreds of the fucking things.

  Just two hours now. One last push and I’ll be home. I haven’t been this close since it happened. Twenty-eight days ago—four weeks to the day—millions died and the world fell apart around me.

  I’m beginning to feel scared. For days, I’ve struggled to get back here, but, now that I’m this close, I don’t know if I can go through with it. Seeing what’s left of Georgie and our home will hurt. It’s been so long, and so much has happened since we were together. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to walk through the front door. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand the pain of remembering everything that’s gone and all that I’ve lost.

  I’m as nervous and scared now as I was when this nightmare began. I remember it as if it was only hours ago, not weeks. I was in a breakfast meeting with my lawyer and one of his staff members when it started. Jackson, the solicitor, was explaining some legal jargon to me when he stopped speaking mid-sentence. He suddenly screwed up his face with pain. I asked him what was wrong, but he couldn’t answer. His breathing became shallow and short, and he started to rasp and cough and splutter. He was choking, but I couldn’t see why, and I was concentrating so hard on what was happening to him that I didn’t notice the other man was choking too.

  As Jackson’s face paled and he began to scratch and claw at his throat, his colleague lurched forward and tried to grab me. Eyes bulging, he retched and showered me with blood and spittle. I recoiled, pushing my chair away from the table. Too scared to move, I stood with my back pressed against the wall and watched the two men as they choked to death. The room was silent in less than three minutes.

  When I eventually plucked up the courage to get out and get help, I found the receptionist, who had greeted me less than an hour earlier, face down on her desk in a pool of sticky red-brown blood. The security guard at the door was dead too, as was everyone else I could see. It was the same when I finally dared to step out into the open—an endless layer of twisted human remains covered the ground in every direction. What had happened was inexplicable, its scale incomprehensible. In the space of just a few minutes, something—a germ, virus, or biological attack perhaps—had destroyed my world. Nothing moved. The silence was deafening.

  My first instinct had been to stay where I was, to keep my head down and wait for something—anything—to happen. I slowly picked my way through the carpet of bodies back to the hotel. Each face was frozen in an expression of sudden, searing agony and gut-wrenching fear.

  When I got back, the hotel was as silent and cold as everywhere else. I locked myself in my room and waited for hours until the solitude and claustrophobic fear finally became too much to stand. I needed explanations, but there was no one else left alive to ask for help. The television was dead, as was the radio and the telephone. Within hours, the power had died too. Desperate and terrified
, I packed my few belongings, took a car from the parking garage and made a break for home. But I soon found that the hushed roads were impassable, blocked by the twisted and tangled wreckage of incalculable numbers of crashed vehicles and the mangled, bloody remains of their dead drivers and passengers. With my wife and my home still more than eighty miles away, I stopped the car and gave up.

  It was early on the first Thursday, the third day, when the situation deteriorated again to the point where I questioned my sanity. I had been resting in the front bedroom of an empty terraced house when I looked out the window and saw the first of them staggering down the road. All the fear and nervousness I had previously felt instantly disappeared. At last, someone who might be able to tell me what had happened and who could answer some of the thousands of impossible questions I desperately needed to ask. I called out and banged on the window, but the person didn’t respond. I sprinted out of the house and ran down the road after him. I grabbed hold of his arm and turned him to face me. As unbelievable as it seemed, I knew instantly that the thing in front of me was dead. Its eyes were clouded with a milky-white film, and its skin was pockmarked and bloodied. And it was cold to the touch. Leathery. Clammy. I let it go in disgust. The moment I released my grip, the damn thing shuffled away, this time moving back in the direction from which it had come. It couldn’t see me. It didn’t even seem to know I was there.

  More bodies began to rise. Many were already staggering around on clumsy, unsteady feet whilst still more were slowly dragging themselves up from where they’d fallen days earlier.

  A frantic search for food and water and safe shelter led me deeper into town. Avoiding the clumsy, mannequin-like bodies which roamed the streets, I barricaded myself in a large pub on the corner of two once busy roads. I removed eight corpses from the building (I herded them into the bar before forcing them out the front door), and I locked myself in an upstairs function room where I started to drink. Although it didn’t make me drunk like it used to, the alcohol made me feel warm and took the very slightest edge off my fear.

  I thought constantly about Georgie, about home, but I was too afraid to move. I knew that I should try to get to her, but for days I just sat there and waited like a chicken-shit. Every morning, I tried to force myself to move, but the thought of going back outside was unbearable. I didn’t know what I’d find out there. Instead, I sat in isolation and watched the world decay.

  As the days passed, the bodies themselves changed. Initially stiff, awkward and staccato, their movements slowly became more definite, purposeful and controlled. After four days, their senses began to return. They were starting to respond to what was happening around them. Late one afternoon, in a fit of frightened frustration, I hurled an empty beer bottle across the room. I missed the wall and smashed a window. Out of curiosity, I looked down into the street and saw that a large number of the corpses had turned toward the sudden noise and were beginning to walk towards the pub. During the hours which followed, I tried to keep quiet and out of sight, but my every movement seemed to make more of them aware of my presence. From every direction they came, and all that I could do was watch as a crowd of hundreds upon hundreds of the fucking things surrounded me. They followed each other like animals and soon their lumbering, decomposing shapes filled the streets as far as I could see.

  A week went by, and the ferocity of the creatures outside increased. They began to fight with each other. They clawed and banged at the doors, but didn’t yet have the strength to get inside. My options were hopelessly limited, but I knew that I had to do something. I could stay and hope that I could drink enough so that I didn’t care when the bodies eventually broke through, or I could make a break for freedom and take my chances outside. I had nothing to lose. I thought about home and I thought about Georgie and I knew that I had to try to get back to her.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all that I had. I packed all my meager supplies and provisions into a rucksack. I made crates of crude bombs from liquor bottles. As the light began to fade at the end of the tenth day, I leaned out of the broken window at the front of the building, lit the booze-soaked rags which I had stuffed down the necks of the bottles, and then began to hurl them down into the rotting crowd. In minutes, I’d created more devastation and confusion than I ever would have imagined possible. There had been little rain for days. Tinder dry and packed tightly together, the repugnant bodies sparked almost instantly. Ignorant to the flames which quickly consumed them, the damn things continued to move about for as long as they were physically able, their every staggering step spreading the fire and destroying more of them. And the dancing orange light of the sudden inferno, the crackling and popping of flesh drew even more of the desperate cadavers to the scene.

  I crept downstairs and waited by the back door. The building itself was soon alight. Doubled-up with hunger pangs (the world outside had suddenly become filled with the smell of roasted meat), I crouched down in the darkness and waited until the temperature in the building became too much to stand. When the flames began to lick at the door separating me from the rest of the pub, I pushed my way into the night and ran through the bodies. Their reactions were dull and slow, and my speed, strength, and the surprise of my sudden appearance meant that they offered virtually no resistance. In the silent, monochrome world, the confusion that I’d left behind offered enough of a distraction to camouflage my movements and render me temporarily invisible.

  * * *

  Since I’ve been on the move, I’ve learned to live like a shadow. My difficult journey home has been painfully long and slow. I move only at night under cover of darkness. If the bodies see or hear me they will come for me, and, as I’ve found to my cost on more than one occasion, once one of them has my scent countless others soon follow. I have avoided them as much as possible, but their numbers are vast and some contact has been inevitable. I’m getting better at dealing with them. The initial disgust and trepidation has now given way to hate and anger. Through necessity, I have become a cold and effective killer, although I’m not sure whether that’s an accurate description of my newfound skill. I have to keep reminding myself that these bloody things are already dead.

  Apart from the mass of bodies I managed to obliterate during my escape from the pub, the first corpse I intentionally disposed of had once been a priest. I came across the rancid, emaciated creature when I took shelter at dawn in a small village church. The building had appeared empty at first until I pushed my way into a narrow, shadowy storeroom at the far end of the grey-stone building. A rack of mops, brushes and brooms, which had fallen across the doorway, had blocked the only way in or out of the room. I forced my way inside and was immediately aware of shuffling movement ahead of me. A small window high on the wall to my left let a limited amount of light spill into the storeroom, allowing me to see the outline of the priest’s body as it lunged and tripped towards me. The cadaver was weak and uncoordinated, and I instinctively threw it back across the room. It smashed into a shelf piled high with prayer and hymn books and then crumbled to the ground, the books crashing down atop it. I stared into its vacant, hollowed face as it dragged itself into the light again. The first body I had seen up close for several days, it was a fucking mess. Just a shadow of the man it had once been, the creature’s skin appeared taut and translucent and it had an unnatural green-grey hue. Its cheeks and eye sockets were dark and sunken, and its mouth and chin were speckled with dribbles of dried blood. Its dog collar hung loose around its scrawny neck.

  When the body charged at me again, I was knocked off-balance, but I managed to grab hold of its throat and keep it at a safe distance. Its limbs flailed around me as I looked deep into its cloudy, emotionless eyes. I used my free hand to feel around for a weapon. My outstretched fingers wrapped around a heavy and ornate candleholder. I gripped it tightly and, using the base, I bashed the priest’s exposed skull. Stunned but undeterred, the body tripped and stumbled back before coming for me again. I hit it again and again until there was little le
ft of the head other than a dark mass of blood, brain and shattered bone. I stood over the twitching remains of the cleric until it finally lay still.

  I hid in the bell tower of the church and waited for the night to come.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long to work out the rules.

  Although they have become increasingly violent, these creatures are simple and predictable. I think that they are driven purely by instinct. Each one is little more than a fading memory of what it used to be. I quickly learnt that this reality is nothing like the trash horror movies I used to watch or the books I used to read. These things don’t want to kill me so that they can feast on my flesh. In fact, I don’t actually think they have any physical needs or desires—they don’t eat, drink, sleep or even breathe as far as I can see. So why do they attack me, and why do I have to creep through the shadows in fear of them? It’s a paradox, but the longer I think about it, the more convinced I am that they attack me out of fear. I think they try to attack me before I have the chance to destroy them.

  Over the last few days and weeks, I have watched them steadily disintegrate and decay. Another bizarre irony—as their bodies have continued to weaken and become more fragile, their mental control seems to have returned. They respond violently to any perceived threat, as if they want to exist at all costs. Sometimes they fight between themselves, and I have hidden in the darkness and watched them tear at each other until almost all their rotten flesh has been stripped from their bones.

  I know beyond doubt now that the brain remains the center of control. My second, third and fourth kills confirmed that. I had broken into an isolated house in search of food and fresh clothes and found myself face to face with what appeared to be the rotting remains of a typical family. I quickly disposed of the father with a short wooden fence post that I had been carrying as a makeshift weapon. I smacked the repulsive creature around the side of the head nearly to the point of decapitation.