The Undead: Zombie Anthology

by David Wellington

  “Getthafuckdown!” Kane said. “Everybody, getthafuckdown!” Less than an hour ago, he was addressing a group of people, and his mind had yet to fully acclimate to the drastic reduction.

  Doug blacked out when his head hit the floor, bounced, and smacked again under Kane’s weight. He opened his eyes and almost lost it at the sight of Kane’s face, larger than life, and so close to his; then the extra pressure on his lungs and stomach indicated that someone was on top of him. A man. He could smell old coffee on his breath, and feel stubble when their faces touched. Oh God, what had they talked him into? He must not have locked the door to his dorm. But wait, he didn’t remember drinking last night. . . .

  “Snap out of it, kid!” Doug heard the man say, as if he knew him.

  Did he know him?

  Doug remembered seeing Kane’s thick arm coming at him, and the feeling of hurried descent, but not the actual impact.

  Had he been shot?

  His body seized. He reached up and felt the back of his head. Nothing.

  Smack!—Kane’s hand lagged in the baby-fat when it struck Doug’s cheek, turning his head to the side and finally knocking some sense back into him. He looked into Kane’s eyes. “Please don’t kill me!”

  “Just stay down and don’t move!” Kane yelled over the din that had eluded Doug’s ears thus far. Kane squeezed his eyes shut and pressed himself into Doug.

  As he listened, Doug broke the noise down: open hands slapping raw meat (that’s what it sounded like anyway), bone cracking and splintering into calcium-flecks, electric pops and buzzes, and that familiar moan, its continuity robbed by repeated impact and challenged by the overbearing roar of a large-caliber machine gun perpetually spitting.

  He felt the tap-tapping of fragmented “things” hitting his arms and legs, and something damp that was seeping through his clothes and bespeckling his forearm.

  Kane glared down at Doug, squinting at the debris. “You still with me, kid?”

  Doug shook his head. To his left and right, everything under the sun bounced to the floor and rolled close enough to him to cause his eyes to flutter. Feet, both naked and clothed, followed haphazard patterns; knees buckled and gave out or exploded into pieces.

  Kane was mumbling something about Jason, or to Jason, something along the lines of “That’s right. . . . Make those fuckers pay.” His head was positioned in a way that finally allowed Doug a good look at what was going on above them.

  It reminded him of a nightclub; lights flashing, bodies intoxicated by music (in this case it was something slow and throbbing) and trying their best to translate their own personal sonic euphoria into movement, but instead looking like a roomful of sardonic comedians going for the easy laugh by pulling out their best rhythmless white-guy impressions and literally coming apart at the seams. All around them sparks flew, and glass and paper and plastic fell to the ground. The air was littered with a glowing crisscross of heat like scratches on film that marked the paths of too many bullets to count, ripping in and out of zombified trunks and sending appendages sailing, many of them cut down to mere fibers before they hit the ground, as were the bodies from which they escaped. Without raising his head, Doug traced the glowing bullet-wash that chirped by. Eventually, they led him to Jason, who stood at the top of the steps, stuck in organic turret mode. Ok, first Jesus . . . then Jesus, then the rain, the zombies and now this? Doug wondered what else such a short life thus far could possibly have in store for him.

  * * *

  The atmosphere inside the S11 Police Bulldog (a van-sized quadruped with a short, bulky reinforced shell and loaded with state of the art weaponry) was somber, yet the commentary always seemed to turn to playful insults. Triumphant gestures accompanied by calls of “Yee-Ha!” and derogatory phrases leveled at the zombies (one joked that they had become the new niggers) laced the distinctly masculine conversations. With no source of ventilation, their voices had nowhere to go, ram-rodding into Kane’s quiet dementia like radio-friendly hip-hop bogarting quaint suburban ecosystems from pimped-out lemons, bass threatening to shake them to pieces.

  Bandaged up and reclined on the built-in gurney in the back, Kane felt like a zombie himself, nullified from feeling both emotional and physical by what had happened tonight inside the Megamart. Though he sat back away from the small reinforced window in the back door of the vehicle, Kane could still see the Megamart shrinking in the distance.

  Was it over? Had he finally put a stop to Boring? His gut told him no. However, hope was the only method of satiating the ugly images that were already haunting him: blood everywhere, trumped only by barely recognizable remnants of former people; Jason, on his knees, completely spent from maintaining the bullet-swarm for so long; the way he looked up at Kane, his eyes filled with remorse and fear and semi-satisfaction before Kane blew his head apart; the guilt he felt for not feeling guilty enough anymore; the immediate anxiety that chewed him up and spit him out when he realized that, to be sure Boring hadn’t jumped again, he’d have to kill Doug too, probably even himself.

  At least Doug had gone out on a high note. He had been in the middle of celebrating his survival. Kane waited until he turned his back. Out of bullets, he was forced to do it the old-fashioned way: with an aluminum tee-ball bat. Strange that it felt good almost to kill at this point. The survivors he happened upon in the storage room as he walked out . . . now that was a different story. He had to chase them down, three in all.

  “Hey,” DeWitt, the big black one, said as he peered out the back window, “I know that chick. Fat bitch used to live in my old neighborhood. Always braggin’ about her designer bullshit and lettin’ her stank-ass kids run around all hours of the night.”

  It was Darius’ mother. Apparently, she had gotten away before the zombies finished her off, and now she was one of them.

  Kane could see her just outside the window, shambling away from the Megamart. Her stomach was torn open, and inside, an upside-down fetus curled into classic position, except for an arm that protruded and dangled from the open wound.

  “Man, that’s just sick,” commented another man who hurried over to get a look.

  “I say good riddance, man,” DeWitt groaned. “We’ve got enough ig’nant-ass-mutherfuckas like her spoiling shit for everybody else. It’s people like her who make us look bad in the eyes of people like you, Keith.”

  “Fuck off,” Keith replied. He was still feeling salty from the verbal beat-down he took from DeWitt in response to using the “N” word a few moments ago. If DeWitt wasn’t so fucking big, Keith would’ve slugged him when he had walked up face to face and had stared him down.

  Kane wanted to tell him that he agreed completely, but experience taught him that guys like DeWitt often jumped sensitive when someone from outside their race pointed out a flaw.

  “Y’ever wonder how we must taste to them,” a voice from up front interjected, “I mean just fer curiosity’s sake?”

  Kane grimaced. “Probably like chicken to those deadfucks.”

  Afterword

  Brian Keene

  Zombies. You know you love them. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have bought this book. You would have purchased one of those horrible Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and then I would have had to hunt you down and slap you.

  Wonder if they’ve made a Chicken Soup for the Undead Soul book yet? Maybe I should write it.

  See, I’m lucky enough to make a living writing horror novels. It’s a good gig. I have no complaints. The pay is decent. The commute is unbeatable. And I get to be my own boss. My first two novels, The Rising and City of the Dead, were zombie novels. I tried to reinvent the mythos. Tried to do something different and fresh. Hopefully, I succeeded. I think I did. Readers loved them. So did most of the critics. And so did Hollywood, because the film rights were snatched up quicker than a fast zombie in 28 Days Later.

  Since then, I’ve written a number of horror novels; giant, carnivorous earthworms; horny, murderous Satyrs; demon possessed bank robbers; serial kille
rs with homicidal pet tapeworms; ghouls and ghosts; etc. etc. et-fucking-cetera.

  And after all of those books, you know what my readers keep asking me? Not, “Will you write another ghost novel?” or “Will there be a sequel to Terminal?” Huh-uh. They say, “That was cool, but when are you going to do another zombie novel?”

  And I’m okay with that, because I love zombies, too. It was the original Dawn of the Dead that screwed me up for life and put me on the path to doing what I now do for a living. (To be fair, it was also Phantasm and Jaws, but they weren’t zombie movies and this isn’t an anthology of stories about devilish funeral home directors or rampaging Great White sharks.)

  It’s very clear that the authors who contributed to this anthology also love zombies, and it did my heart good to read these stories—kudos to all involved for a job well done. There are some valuable new entries into the undead mythos between these pages. They aren’t the first, and won’t be the last. Zombies are hot again, and it seems like everybody wants to take a stab at them lately.

  That’s a good thing.

  Zombies are the new vampires. Remember, just a few short years ago, when, if you stood in the horror section of your favorite bookstore and closed your eyes, your

  finger landed on a vampire novel? I do. It sucked. You couldn’t find a fucking zombie novel to save your life, but there were twenty million new vampire books every month. Vampires suck. They used to be cool, but now, vampires are no longer mean and nasty. These days, they are nymphomaniac detectives or morose creatures in desperate need of a suntan, dressed in black that smoke clove cigarettes and listen to too much Bauhaus.

  Not exactly scary, are they?

  But zombies—oh man, even after all this time, zombies can still scare the shit out of you. Maybe it’s because they speak to our deepest shared anxiety—what happens after we die. We don’t know. And that rocks us at our spiritual core—that maybe there’s nothing after death, nothing except getting back up and munching on the living. Or maybe it’s just because they’re like undead Energizer bunnies—they keep coming and coming and coming.

  Now there’s resurging zombie popularity. Zombies are cool again. It started with 28 Days Later and my own novel, The Rising. It continued in both film (Shaun of the Dead, Resident Evil 2, Return of the Living Dead 4, the Dawn of the Dead remake, and Land of the Dead, just to name a few) and in literature (with over a dozen new zombie books published in the last year, including Xombies, The Zombie Survival Guide, Risen, We Now Pause For Station Identification, Zombie Love, The Walking Dead, Cold Flesh, Stephen King’s upcoming Cell, and this book that you hold in your hands, among others). And there are more zombie films and books on the way, along with a slew of new video games. Zombies have invaded pop-culture; everywhere from episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force to clothing lines at Hot Topic and role-playing games like All Flesh Must Be Eaten. As I write this, I’ve just come from a children’s movie—Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. The corpse in question is a zombie.

  But even as these reliable old corpses shamble towards their place in the spotlight again, something becomes apparent; these aren’t your father’s zombies. These fuckers don’t lurch around. They run. And forget about just humanity being affected. We’ve reached the point where we’ve got zombie squids (as in this anthology’s wonderful opening story.)

  What comes next? Well, like everything else in the genre, these things are cyclical. This new zombie craze will continue for a little while longer. Then, the market will get flooded with too much of a good thing, and people will move on to other monsters. Werewolves or ghosts or even vampires again (shudders at the thought.) But that doesn’t mean that the zombie sub-genre will die. Nope. You can shoot it in the head, but I guarantee you it will come back again. It always does. Sooner or later, the undead rise once more from the grave.

  And take a bite out of you, like chicken for dead fucks (if I can toss a subtle nod to this book’s closing story.)

  Zombies are undead. Un-dead, meaning, they can’t die.

  And let’s all be thankful for that…

  Brian Keene

  Journey’s End, Pennsylvania

  September, 2005