by Bryan Smith
Sybil’s smile broadened as she watched one of her minions take a big bite out of a living thing’s forearm. The high spurt of blood was a beautiful thing to behold. She longed to fill her mouth with it. The urge was so powerful she even took a tentative step toward the staircase. But a scream from the second floor hallway shifted her attention. She turned and glimpsed the first girl she’d transformed—the one who’d tried to smother her—and smiled again. The girl had extracted another of the living things from its room and had pinned it to the floor. The living girl screamed and thrashed against her zombie assailant, but failed to dislodge her. The girl pinned to the floor was particularly nubile, with lush curves and big breasts that strained against a tangled pajama top, and she had a mass of blonde hair as radiant as the sun’s rays.
Sybil lurched through the door and staggered down the hallway, dropping to her knees beside the struggling girls. The living girl’s eyes locked on her for a moment, her breath catching in her throat as recognition dawned. Then she realized the SIMRC’s headmistress was also a zombie and loosed a shrill scream. Sybil tried to scream back at her, but all that emerged from her throat was a dry exhalation of rancid breath. The girl screamed again as the zombie girl atop her bit off her thumb. A high spray of dark blood arced out of the mangled stump. Some of it splashed Sybil’s face, entering her open, leering mouth, the taste of it exquisite on her tongue.
She ripped at the living girl’s pajama top. Fabric tore and plastic buttons popped into the air. And now the girl’s large, jiggling breasts were on display. The sight of them inflamed Sybil. She shoved the zombie girl away and fell atop the nubile blonde. The girl tried to get up, but Sybil was able to keep her pinned to the floor. She bared her teeth at the girl and hissed like a snake. The girl screamed again, but this time the sound trailed away to a mewling blubber.
Sybil latched onto one of the exposed breasts, drawing the large nipple deep into her mouth. She lapped at the nipple with her rough tongue, eliciting more squeals of pain. But soon the flesh-eating imperative inherent in her new nature overrode the echo of carnal lust and she bit into the breast, felt blood fill her mouth for a moment. Then she wrenched her head as hard as she could and tore loose a hunk of flesh. It felt so good sliding down her gullet that she immediately took another bite.
Then another.
The girl’s struggles weakened, then finally she surrendered to the inevitable. In mere moments she was one of them, a new soldier in the war against living things.
Sybil rose and licked delicious blood from her lips.
Then she found the passkey again and lurched toward the nearest closed door.
18: CRASH COURSE IN BRAIN SURGERY
Steve leaped through the open door an instant before Wayne, slamming into Melissa and the zombie at knee-level, a devastating tackle that would have been the envy of any NFL cornerback. The three crashed into a mop cart. The cart spun toward Wayne as they fell in a heap to the floor. Wayne kicked the cart away and was moving to assist Steve and Melissa when he saw the other zombies descending the staircase. They were teenagers, likely no older than he was. But their hungry, vacant expressions provided sufficient evidence of zombie transformation.
Watching the carnage from the second floor landing was another zombie. This one was older. Someone formerly in a position of authority at the SIMRC, he guessed. Her clothes were in tatters and covered in blood. Her face was flecked with blood. None of this bothered him half as much as the strange smile pulling at the edges of her mouth.
A smiling zombie?
Something about it just seemed…wrong.
A high-pitched scream from the floor jolted him. He tore his gaze from the strange zombie and saw something that nearly made his heart seize. The zombie janitor had gotten his mouth on one of Steve’s arms. The slavering creature growled and bit off a chunk of flesh. Wayne kicked the zombie under the chin with all the force he could muster and it went sailing backward. Melissa scrambled to her feet and moved away as Wayne stepped up to the zombie and pointed his gun at its forehead. He squeezed the trigger. A hole appeared in the zombie’s forehead and blood splashed the wall behind it.
Wayne stood there shaking for a moment, struggling to maintain control as he watched the dead thing hit the wall and slide slowly to its knees.
Melissa let out a shriek. “Wayne!”
She pointed to something beyond him. He turned and saw that the zombie kids had reached the bottom of the staircase. He gave himself the mental equivalent of a slap—get your shit together!—and moved to place himself between his friends and the approaching threat. He raised his gun, trained the sight on the forehead of the nearest one, and paused for a moment as his gaze flicked upward. The strange lady zombie was gone. He had a feeling he’d have to deal with her soon. And though he couldn’t have said why, the prospect of a confrontation with her unsettled him more than any of the many other horrific things that had happened thus far.
He shook his head, again forced himself to focus.
The lead zombie, a boy of about sixteen with a mop of curly brown hair, was within six feet of him. Wayne perfected his aim and squeezed the trigger. The bullet hit the boy in the cheek and sent him stumbling backward. The zombie bounced off one of its comrades and staggered forward again, arms reaching for Wayne.
Wayne cursed.
The brain, dumbass.
You have to blow its fucking brains out.
Wayne aimed again, squeezed the trigger again, and this time the bullet penetrated forehead and voided brainpan as it exited the back of the dead boy’s head. Wayne put down the remaining two zombies more efficiently—one bullet each to the head. He looked at the sprawled bodies on the floor and felt a great sadness. They had all been young, of course, but they looked even younger in death. Then anger replaced sadness as an impression of innocence betrayed resonated. Anger not just at whatever force had created this zombie nightmare, but at the shortsighted stupidity and ignorance of the parents who had sent their children to this wretched place.
Wayne turned to look at his friends. “I’m gonna finish this. You guys stay here.”
Steve’s features were taut with pain. He leaned against Melissa for support, standing bare-chested, his wiry torso gleaming with sweat and blood. His denim jacket was on the floor, his Motorhead t-shirt wrapped tight around the wound on his arm. His eyes radiated defiance. “No way, bro. I’m in this with you to the end.” He managed a strained smile. “Besides, I’m gonna need you around to finish me off once I start to turn.”
Something fluttered inside Wayne. His brow creased in a deep frown. “What do you mean?”
Steve’s laugh was a weak thing, the kind of sound a dying animal might make. “Fuck, you know. I’ve been bitten. I’m gonna turn into one of those fucking things.”
“Bullshit.”
“Serious, bro.” He disengaged himself from Melissa and took a staggering step toward Wayne. “So far everything’s been just like in the movies. I’ve got the zombie virus or whatever in me. It’s gonna spread and I’m gonna turn. I know it and you know it, so do me a favor and stop acting like it ain’t gonna happen.”
Tears welled in Wayne’s eyes. The prospect of losing the best friend he’d ever had made him feel empty. Hopeless. Then he looked into Steve’s eyes and accepted that there was only one honorable way to go here.
He nodded. “All right. When it happens…I’ll do what I have to do.”
Steve clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Cool. Now let’s kick some zombie ass.”
The three of them stepped around the pile of bodies and headed up the staircase.
19: STONE DEAD FOREVER
The second floor hallway was awash in blood. Pools of it on the slick floor tiles. Big splashes of grue on the walls. A number of doors stood open. Kids in their sleeping clothes—pajamas, boxers and t-shirts, or sweats and tees—battled creatures intent on devouring them. Creatures that looked like them. Young and pajama-clad. Former friends and fellow sufferers, transformed into mo
nsters driven only by simple, deadly instinct.
But maybe not so simple. One among them, at least, retained some level of human-like intellect, enough to know how to get the rooms open in order to extract fresh meat. He glimpsed the older female emerging from one of the doors with a young girl in tow. Of course. The smiling zombie. She dragged the girl by her long auburn hair. The girl screamed and flailed to no effect. The zombie held her at arm’s length, watching the girl struggle with a strange leer suggesting a level of perverse enjoyment not evinced by the other zombies. The auburn-haired girl’s roommate followed them out of the room. She loosed a war cry of sorts and took a swing at the female zombie’s head with a thick black book. A bible, maybe. The book bounced off the zombie’s head. The zombie’s free hand shot out, the heel of its palm connecting with the forehead of its assailant. The girl staggered backward and fell hard to the floor, the back of her head bouncing off the tiles. She didn’t get back up and her roommate was left to fend for herself.
All of this was occurring beyond the larger struggle in the middle of the hallway. Again Wayne was certain this was evidence of cunning on the part of the older zombie. She was erecting a barrier between herself and the only remaining human threat. Wayne counted five other zombies and an equal number of kids struggling against them. A sudden high spurt of arterial blood signaled an abrupt tipping of the scales in favor of the zombies. Another kid dropped to the floor under the weight of two zombies.
Wayne drew a bead on the back of the nearest zombie’s head. He squeezed the trigger and the high caliber bullet penetrated the crown of the boy’s skull. Blood leaped from a massive forehead exit wound. Another zombie, drawn by the scent of fresh meat and the gun’s report, released a girl in sweats and a SIMRC t-shirt and staggered in their direction. The girl scuttled across blood-slick tiles and disappeared through one of the open doors, kicking it shut behind her. Steve moved into position next to Wayne and fired a bullet into the approaching zombie’s forehead. The zombie staggered backward, stumbling into two zombies hunched over a fallen boy on the floor. It toppled onto the back of one of the feasting zombies, which reared up, propelling the zombie carcass back toward Wayne and Steve.
Steve had time to say, “Jesus fuck.”
The dead zombie plowed into him and drove him to the floor, eliciting a shriek from Melissa who knelt to drag the dead thing off of him. Another zombie lurched toward Wayne, swiping at the side of his face with an outstretched hand. One jagged fingernail etched a shallow groove in his cheek before he could shove the thing away. When it tried to rise again, he stepped on its chest and slammed it back to the floor. He pointed the gun at its face and pulled the trigger. The creature’s grasping, reaching arms flopped down. Wayne stared at the thing’s mangled ruin of a face. Looking at it made him think of the Billy Idol song “Eyes Without A Face.” There was a better song by the same name by a punk band called The Flesheaters. He knew it from the Return of the Living Dead soundtrack.
“Damn.” Still staring at the unmoving zombie, addressing no one but himself. “Eyes without a fuckin’ face. This is so fucked up.”
“What’re you babbling about, bro?”
Steve was back on his feet, leaning on Melissa for support again. This time he appeared to need the assistance more. He looked pale and his face glimmered with sweat. The shirt wrapped around his wounded forearm was soggy with blood. Wayne thought back to what Steve had said about infection. About how anyone bitten by a zombie was doomed. But was that really true? There was no way to really know, at least not until they actually saw it happen. If there was even the merest ghost of a chance of Steve surviving this, shouldn’t their focus be on getting him to a hospital?
Before he could think about it any further, the zombies on the floor began to stand up. The girl they had been eating began to rise too, half-devoured organs and bits of intestine spilling out of her open stomach cavity as she got to her knees.
Great, Wayne thought. Another fucking zombie. If we don’t nip this living dead bullshit in the bud now, we’ll ALL be fucking zombies.
He shot the nearest zombie in the forehead and it dropped at once, a puppet with its strings cut. He turned and shot another zombie in the face. He heard the report of another gun next to him and saw yet another zombie fall. Steve was standing next to him, good arm extended to aim his gun. He was operating under his own power now, having rallied yet again, but Wayne had to wonder how much fight his friend had left in him.
Steve swayed on his feet.
Not much. Fuck.
The disemboweled zombie girl crawled toward them on her hands and knees, cute little pixie face lifted toward them. She had fair hair and freckles. Couldn’t have been any more than sixteen. The kind of girl Wayne might have had a crush on before meeting Melissa. But there was an obscene hunger in her eyes, something utterly unrelated to whatever this girl had been prior to her death. Wayne winced as a bullet from Steve’s gun blew her head apart.
Steve grimaced. “It’s like we’re at a zombie shooting range.”
“Or a booth at a carnival,” Melissa said, stepping between them. “Shoot all the zombies and win a big cuddly bear for your best girl.”
Wayne nodded. “Big bucket of brains and blood, in this case.”
The only zombie still mobile in the hallway was the older female. It was still toying with the auburn-haired girl Wayne had seen it drag from a room moments ago. The girl was flat on her stomach, the zombie writhing atop her, its hands clutching at her in a clearly sexual way.
Wayne’s scowled. “That freaky-ass zombie bitch is pissing me off.”
He began to move toward her, taking care to avoid bodies and slippery pools of blood. Steve and Melissa followed him. The zombie was too absorbed in the subjugation of its latest victim to sense their approach. It slurped at the girl’s slender neck without puncturing flesh with its teeth. It slid a hand under the girl’s belly, angled downward and reached for her pussy. The girl whimpered and tried to roll the zombie off her, but the creature was too strong. It slammed her back to the floor and made a sound somewhere between a dry cough and a laugh. Then it tore open the girl’s flimsy top and nipped at a narrow shoulder.
Wayne shook his head. “A lesbian zombie. Okay. None of this is real. Right? I’m on some bad acid and I think I’m really in some trashy video I rented.”
Steve smirked. “You don’t do acid, bro. That’s my thing. You never want any.”
“Oh. Right. Well…”
Melissa sighed. “We’ve got to get the bitch off her.”
She pushed past them and knelt over the zombie. She grabbed a fistful of the thing’s blonde hair and yanked up. The creature swiped a hand at Melissa. Melissa dodged blood-caked fingernails and surged to a standing position, dragging the suddenly thrashing zombie away from the girl, who immediately scrambled out of the way.
The zombie shifted its attention fully to Melissa, delivering an open-handed blow that landed with a solid thud at such close range, its knuckles crashing into her cheek. Melissa surrendered her grip on the thing’s hair and staggered back against the wall. The zombie snarled and lurched after her. Melissa raised her own gun and pulled the trigger. But she was dazed and her aim was off. The bullet hit the concrete wall and Wayne flinched away from the ricochet. Melissa immediately fired again and the next bullet shattered one of the creature’s kneecaps, sending it in an awkward heap to the floor.
The girl Melissa had rescued yelped and scooted backward. “Shoot it again!” she screamed at them. “Oh, Jesus, it’s still alive! Please kill it!”
One of the zombie’s hands reached toward the sound of her voice.
Wayne kicked the zombie and it flopped onto its back. He pinned it to the floor by stepping on its chest. It bared its teeth and hissed at him. A shudder rippled through him as he stared into its gleaming eyes. The glassy dullness typical of the other zombies was missing. There was more to this creature than a simple need to devour flesh. Something more than primitive lust. He was sure it wa
s consciously thinking about its situation, searching for a way to continue its struggle.
A way to escape.
A strong hand gripped his ankle.
Wayne aimed his gun at the zombie’s face.
Melissa and Steve moved into position on either side of him, each also aiming their guns at the creature’s leering, blood-soaked visage.
Melissa said, “This is Sybil Huffington. She runs this place. And she’s an evil bitch.”
Steve said, “So let’s send her to hell.”
Wayne’s answer to this was a squeeze of his trigger.
And then another squeeze.
The other guns erupted.
The roar of gunfire filled the hallway as the three of them emptied their weapons into Sybil’s head. There was precious little of it left by the time Melissa’s gun clicked empty. They stood there for several long, stunned moments, the echo of the gunfire reverberating in their ears.
Then Steve’s gun slipped from his fingers and landed with a clatter on the floor.
A moment later, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and he swooned.
Wayne caught the unconscious boy in his arms.
20: BURN THE FLAMES
They were back in Wayne’s Jeep Cherokee now, parked across the street from the main SIMRC building. Wayne watched the orange glow visible through many of the building’s windows. Somewhere shy of a hundred kids milled about on the front lawn, watching the hated building go up in flames. Some of them were dancing in the rain, which had begun to pick up a little. A celebration of sorts. To Wayne the celebrants looked vaguely like participants in some pagan ritual. Which seemed fitting, given the fundamentalist, pagan-hating principles upon which the center had been founded.