Zombie Apocalypse Serial #2

by Ivana E. Tyorbrains

  “See you in hell you old bitch.”

  What happened next was fitting. I pulled the trigger and got an empty click. I hadn’t checked the Glock before I came inside. The last bullet from the current magazine was in the forehead of some zombie in the backyard. And all the ammo was in the car.

  My hands fumbled for the Colt but it was too late. Melba was right on me. I backtracked, but not fast enough to avoid Melba’s spindly, dead hand. She got hold of my shirt. Panicked, I leaned back too hard, and fell over backward. My Colt came loose and tumbled to the side. Melba fell on top of me, and struck like a snake, her jaws clamping down at the base of my neck.

  “Nooo!” I shouted, thinking of Cori, of how I’d failed her. This was it. I was on the floor, with a zombie on top of me, and it was biting into my neck. No matter what now I was dead.

  Maybe if I hurried up I could get back to camp and give them the antibiotics I’ve found, give Cori at least a fighting chance.

  I struggled to get up ony my elbows and managed to get a hand underneath Melba’s chest. As I threw her off me, I heard something clatter to the floor. My eyes followed the sound, and found two sets of teeth dancing along the tile of the catwalk. A top and bottom jaw of pearly whites, bouncing along, until they both fell through the railing and plummeted to the floor underneath.

  I pulled myself up, but I was too slow, and Melba tackled me back to the earth again. This time she bit into my arm.

  Or rather, gummed into it.

  There was no blood. No blood on my arm. No blood on my neck. Melba had bitten into me with the dentures she wore on her death bed and they had tumbled out. She had never broken the skin. Now she was gumming rabidly at my arm, like some toothless turtle.

  “Get off me!” I shrieked, and with arms and legs flailing, I got out from underneath Melba. Now the two of us were pushing backward across the catwalk on elbows and knees, Melba’s gums slapping together, my boots kicking at her face. I got just enough distance between us that I was able to pull my feet underneath me, and, as Melba’s gums slopped against the leg of my jeans, I stood up.

  Two quick kicks and Melba was off me, and as she rolled around on the floor, I dove at the Colt. By the time she was up, I was up too, and I filled the old broad with lead, blasting out her torso with fifty rounds before realizing I needed to raise my aim and take out her head. It took only a few rounds with the Colt to make the old lady’s noggin look like a busted watermelon. Her body fell sideways, and she tipped over the railing, landing watermelon first on the ground below in a splat worthy of Gallagher.

  Melba was toast.

  A minute later, after I’d gotten my bearings, I went to the door at the end of the hall where Melba had been standing when I found her. It was a white door, but was covered in streaks of blood, and long, deep gashes in the wood. Melba had been scratching at it, maybe for a long time.

  I tried the doorknob and found it locked. What was behind this door that Melba wanted to get at so bad?

  I heard movement on the other side, footsteps maybe, and a rustling sound.

  “Hello?” I said. “Is anybody in there?”

  No answer.

  “My name is Caleb Conway. I’m alive. The woman who was out here is gone. I’ve taken care of her. If somebody’s in there, please say something. Maybe I can help you.”

  Nothing.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I muttered, and proceeded to search the rest of the house. It was a big beautiful place. Whoever Melba was, she was living the good life in her retirement. A big, well-kept home built on a river with mountains rising up on two sides…if there weren’t so damned many zombies out there, I might have moved Sabrina and Cori into this home right away.

  “Maybe later,” I whispered, as I went through all the drawers of a vanity in what looked like a guest bedroom.

  Maybe later, when all the zombies had spread out, when people like that crazy fucker at the CVS had all been killed, when nature asserted its authority and the towns became no different than the woods surrounding them…maybe then we’d come back here to Angel Drive and take over Melba Holbrook’s lovely estate, with its access to a river, to a forest, to whatever stores of food and supplies might be left in a little mountain town like this one. Melba’s home had a big fireplace in the front room. I’d seen another in the master bedroom. The beds were still good. The chairs were still good.

  It would be a hell of a lot more comfortable than our outfitters tent in the forest.

  I got so enamored with the idea that I dragged Melba’s corpse out onto the front porch—I didn’t want it to rot in the living room of my future abode—and I found three zombies coming out of the woods to greet me. My instinct was to reach for the Glock, but I remembered in time that it was empty, so I used the Colt to take them down. I did a quick scan of the surrounding terrain and didn’t see any more of them. But I did see a toolshed off to the west side of the property. One of its wooden doors was cracked open.

  Thinking there might be some real survivalist gems in the tool shed of a rich family like this, I went inside for a look. A single light bulb with a draw string hung from the ceiling. I gave it a yank and was pleased to see the bulb come on. I wondered how much longer we could count on the electrical grid. It was awfully nice to know it was still humming, and, I supposed, if the electricity came from wind or solar, it might keep on running for awhile.

  Now I was dreaming about electric toasters and nighttime lights and all sorts of other modern amenities for my family. I needed to stop. I was getting way off track here. I had come to the shed to look for supplies, and there were plenty. Four fishing poles hung on the walls. Two tackleboxes sat under a shelf, both stuffed with gear. There were nets. There were buckets. There were snares and trip lines—all the stuff I had raced to gather in San Antonio, there was more of it here. I could load it up in the SUV in just a few minutes. Melba’s house would be a productive trip even if….

  No. There was no even if. I came here to find doxycycline, and I wasn’t going to leave without it. Clearly Melba hadn’t taken it anywhere. Somewhere in that house was a bottle of pills that could save Cori’s life, and I had a pretty good idea where it might be. Based on what I had seen (three bathrooms, four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a dining area, a laundry room, a bunch of closets, an office space with a bunch of books on outdoor living), the locked room upstairs was the master bath. It had to be. In a house like this, there had to be a bath near the largest bedroom, and that room was perfectly placed. Melba might not have been able to get through that door, but I could.

  I grabbed a yellow handled screwdriver that lay on top of the workbench and headed back to the house. From the porch, I could see a zombie way out in the distance. I stopped, and for the first time, I used the powerful scope on the Colt to line up a shot before I took it. The crosshairs fell neatly on the zombie’s forehead. Poor little guy. Even from a hundred yards away, he didn’t stand a chance.

  Back upstairs, I used the screwdriver to remove the handle from the locked door. A simple brass mechanism, meant not for security, but for privacy, the handle fell out with ease, and the door swung open.

  The bathroom stunk to high heaven inside. Could it be that Melba was attracted to the stench? Had she left a deposit in the toilet when she was still alive, and then was drawn to the smell in death? Yuck.

  I opened the medicine cabinet and found my prize on the top shelf. Doxycycline from CVS Drug, prescribed to Melba Holbrook. Take 2 times a day for fourteen days. I opened the bottle and counted twelve pills inside.

  “Yes!”

  I put the bottle in my pocket and turned to leave. It was the sight of that door that stopped me. In the light of the bathroom, I had a much better view of what Melba had done to it. The scratches were really deep. She had wanted into this bathroom bad.

  Moving quickly, my reflexes on fire from the day’s zombie battles, I reached across the bathroom and yanked open the shower curtain.

  Two children, a boy and a girl, bo
th of them perfectly alive, stood inside the bathtub.

  Timothy

  I spent a week in Vegas, mostly from my penthouse suite atop The Palazzo. I braved the zombies in the second floor mall (as a nod to their namesake, Team George zombies love shopping malls) and stole a pair of binoculars from the Brookstone so I could see more action on the Strip.

  The survivors all tried to escape during the daylight hours on Tuesday. None of them knew what was coming. It was a delicious, nonstop live-action zombie movie from my balcony.

  My girls were scared to leave the suite, and at first I indulged their fear, going out into the world by myself to collect supplies for us, always coming back safely and allowing them to be amazed at my prowess. It wasn’t until the third day up there that I announced my “theory” that the zombies would leave us alone.

  “I don’t know why…it’s just something about us,” I told them. “Some magic we unearthed during the party. We are too alive to become the living dead. I tell you, I go out there and they leave me be, and I think they would do the same to you.”

  When they didn’t believe me, I proved it to them, opening the door to the hallway and letting a few zombies inside. The zombies stared blankly at the collection of faces, then turned to leave.

  I led my harem to the valet station in the parking garage, where we selected the cars we would use to caravan back to New Mexico. A Lamborghini, a Ferrari, two BMW’s, and an Audi. I also insisted that we keep Lola’s Prius. The Italian sportscars were absurd choices that ran out of gas before we even reached Flagstaff, at which point we went three to a car. The German cars would be fun to have around, but the Prius was the only truly useful vehicle of the lot. With my solar farm, electrical energy was plentiful. Gasoline was not.

  We found the compound overrun with zombies in police uniforms and FBI jackets. They must have decided to sleep off their illness in my home. Serves them right. Damned assholes were sleeping in my bed!

  I decided to use these uninvited guests as props in my first lesson for the girls. I decided to have a “teachable moment” if you will. After pulling in through the gate and getting settled, I gave a gun to each of my harem and told them to have at it, with the caveat that zombies who were not wearing FBI or police garb were off limits. When they were done, the only zombies left standing were my original seven (all except Whick, who had already been sacrificed for the cause).

  I had my girls line up on either side of me, and together we swept the compound, gathering up Flick and Glick and Blick and Plick and Quee as we went. The zombies were scared of us, and moved like cattle in a roundup. We made it to the gate with everyone and pushed out the original zombies.

  “Thank you my friends for all you’ve done,” I said. “Your job here is finished. Go be among your own kind. Good luck you all.”

  I closed the gate behind them. Then, with six girls on my left arm and six girls on my right, I went into my mansion to begin my new life.

  Bonus Content – Excerpt from The Homecoming Masquerade by Spencer Baum

  1

  Homecoming at Thorndike Academy was different than at other high schools. There were no pep rallies. There was no football game either, as Thorndike’s brief experiment with a school football team ended in 1952.

  There was no rival school brought in for a competitive celebration. After all, who could rival Thorndike? Located in Potomac, Maryland, Thorndike Academy was the wealthiest high school in the nation by far. Children of congressmen, senators, judges, lobbyists, and corporate bigwigs made up the student body. Annual tuition was well in excess of six figures, and the endowment was larger than the Gross National Product of many countries.

  There was a Homecoming dance at Thorndike, but it wasn’t in a gym. The Homecoming dance was held in the mansion belonging to Renata Sullivan, chair of the school’s Board of Regents. Renata’s mansion, located on a fifty-acre plot west of town, housed a ballroom suitable for an affair as prestigious and important as Homecoming.

  Like other Homecoming dances, the event at Thorndike was a formal affair, with the guys in tuxes and the girls in gowns. But there was no DJ. Renata wouldn’t dream of allowing bumping and grinding to teenage jungle beats or other such nonsense inside her mansion. In Renata’s mansion, the dancing was just as formal as the attire, having been codified over the years into rules and routines all students were expected to know. Minuets, waltzes, cotillions – all the great formal dances of the Victorian Age, all of them set to live music, with a small chamber orchestra on the stage playing the tunes – these were the dances Renata liked to have played in her mansion. And the students didn’t dare show up to Homecoming without learning all the dances first. Stepping onto the floor for a minuet and not knowing how to do it was a terrible insult to the school, the students, and the hostess, and the last thing anyone wanted to do was insult Renata Sullivan.

  Renata Sullivan, who had helped create and maintain the traditions that now governed Homecoming, was a proud graduate of Thorndike Academy. After her own graduation, Renata moved straight into administration at the school, and had overseen the Homecoming event for nearly seventy years.

  Not that Renata was elderly. Despite walking the earth for the better part of a century, Renata looked exactly the same as the day she graduated. Renata, like all the true power players in Washington, was immortal, having earned the honor to live inside her eighteen-year-old body for as long as she could keep it. She didn’t age, she didn’t get sick, and she wouldn’t die until someone managed to kill her.

  One of the first traditions Renata instituted at Homecoming was the masks. Starting three years after Renata’s own graduation, and continuing ever since, Homecoming at Thorndike was a masquerade ball. The immortals liked it that way. Not only did the masks help Renata and the other immortals blend in when they stepped onto the floor, but masks also made the party into a kind of game, and immortals loved games. They got bored, living so long. They saw normal humans as their playthings. They invited all the high school seniors to one of their mansions and had them learn formal ballroom dances and drink wine and dress up in masks because it all was just so amusing.

  And the masks…the masks had become a tradition unto themselves.

  For the guys, the masks were simple and plain. Understated pieces of black fabric to match their traditional tuxedos.

  For the girls, sky’s the limit. Glittered, bejeweled, artistically rendered to match their outfits, some barely covering their eyes, some stretching over their foreheads and into their hairdos. The masks would become treasured heirlooms, reminders for each girl of the night she claimed her birthright and entered adulthood as a member of the power elite. The girls at this ball had been dreaming about their masks since childhood, sketching them on the pages of their math notebooks, talking about them the way some people might talk about their children. When a Thorndike girl first entered high school, her parents began interviewing designers who might bring the dream of a perfect mask to life. By the start of junior year, every girl in school had a portfolio of potential mask designs collected from different artists. Mothers, grandmothers, fashion designers, and respected plutocrats in DC went through these portfolios and selected one design, then the family hired the hottest, trendiest artist they could afford to bring that design to life. The morning after the ball, the masks were put in glass cases protected by magnetic locks and laser alarm systems, and for the rest of their lives, the girls would look at their masks, displayed as the most prominent, significant works of art in their homes, and remember. Their self-worth would be defined by how good they thought they looked at Homecoming.

  A girl’s choice of dress was very important as well. Red, blue, gold, green, silver, white (well, nobody wore white) – these were all acceptable colors around which a girl might arrange her outfit. A red dress might go well with a gold mask. A blue dress might do well with silver. Girls in green dresses might highlight their masks with emeralds; girls in red with rubies.

  And girls wearing black dresses wou
ld cover their masks in diamonds, for a black dress signified something entirely different than the other colors, something special. A black dress at Homecoming was a special privilege, a form of self-selection reserved for the boldest, most daring girls at school. Those girls who wore black dresses entered themselves in Thorndike’s prestigious, demanding, and high stakes Annual Fundraising Tournament, commonly known as “Coronation.”

  In Coronation, the girls wearing black went on to compete in a year-long fundraising contest. They raised money in a series of parties, games, and events. All money raised was collected into a trust, or, in DC parlance, “the pot.” Every donation that went into the pot was on behalf of one of the girls wearing black. At the end of the year, whichever girl had the most money donated in her name was crowned Queen at the Senior Prom.

  And made into an immortal.

  Vampires. That’s what Jill Wentworth called them, but only behind closed doors. Vampire was their old name, the one that had identified them for centuries as bloodsucking creatures of the night. Now that they had come out of hiding and taken over Washington, they wished to be known as “immortals.” Immortal sounded better. It didn’t have that connotation of evil, of Counts from Eastern Europe wearing long cloaks and turning into bats. Vampire was a name for a monster to be hunted down and killed, but immortal was a title one could aspire to. Immortal had better spin to it, and spin was everything in Washington.

  Jill didn’t care. To her they would always be vampires. Vampires like Renata could join polite society, infiltrate Capitol Hill, point the Washington gravy train their way, and name themselves the new lords and masters of it all, but they were still filthy bloodsuckers. They were still manipulative, greedy parasites whose eternal life was one side of a coin on whose opposite face was a collage of victims, of innocent people that were now gone because the vampires didn’t see them as humans, but as food.