Zombie Attack! Box Set (Books 1-3)

by Devan Sagliani

  He kept talking in a soothing voice that lured me deeper into a state of total relaxation, but I stopped focusing on the meaning of what he was saying. A calm rose in me, overriding the pain that was consuming my entire body. I surrendered to it completely and let it take me where it wanted me to go. I felt my spirit mix with the blue of my mind, like water poured into water as everything I knew faded away into emptiness.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  For a while I wandered, dead and disembodied, through a collage of memories from my childhood. I saw Mrs. Sanders, my kind third grade teacher, watering flowers in her garden. She stopped to wave as I went by. She looked the same as she did when I was a kid. The fact that she had been dead over a decade gave me further conviction that I had passed away.

  So this is heaven, I thought. Strange. I expected something else, like clouds or angels playing harps or Morgan Freeman in a white suit telling me he was proud of me. Instead I was drifting past a river of soothing memories filled with people I had once known and loved who had passed before me. More than anything I wanted to stop and talk to them, to find out what they knew, not just about this afterlife but about what had happened in the place that I had come from. What I wanted didn’t really seem to matter.

  The river slowly pulled me onward, past my best childhood friend Doug’s mom Cindy, who had died of leukemia, and Sally, the girl I asked to prom who later died in a car accident while texting, and Jim, my brother’s friend who had been killed in action in Afghanistan. I saw the Parker twins off in the distance, chasing after fallen soldiers I’d known at the base. Joel ignored me but Tom turned from over a hundred feet away and smiled. He waved then darted off.

  What about your mother? I thought to myself. Where is she?

  No sooner did I think it than her smiling face appeared.

  “Oh son,” she said, her voice like ringing crystal wind chimes. “I am so proud of you. I love you so much.”

  “I love you too, Mom,” I managed before she melted away. “I miss you so much.”

  The whole world became a blur of shifting blue shapes: hexagons and trapezoids and rectangles formed and crashed into one another in a dizzying array of fractal patterns, like a kaleidoscope. My mind tried desperately to attach itself to these forms, but it disconnected as the colors came together and crashed apart like waves in a turbulent storm. I could hear voices gathered around me but I couldn’t make out the words they were saying. Every now and then a sentence would get through.

  “You’re going to feel a pinch and then the burning will stop,” someone said as a sharp pain shot through me followed by hard pressure. Almost immediately I felt a soothing sensation like being bathed in cold ice water. I began to shiver all over.

  “Try to relax,” Simon said, his words transforming into a living jelly that wriggled across my skin and made me laugh. Warmth returned to my bodiless form like a ray of sunlight penetrating my heart. I felt like I was falling through a vast and endless blue sky, but I wasn’t afraid. Nothing mattered anymore.

  Then the ground came rushing up toward me and I landed in a soft foam of sand. A ripple ran off from where I touched down, in every direction as far as the eye could see. I was in a desert and my body was normal again.

  “Where am I?” The words came out of my skin like an exhaled breath.

  “Nowhere,” the sky answered back.

  “Everywhere,” the echo replied.

  Round red bubbles began to form at my feet from out of the sand. I leaned over and picked one up. It looked like a shiny red pool table ball. I put it in my mouth and felt its smoothness on my tongue. It tasted like chlorine and bubble gum and Tuesday afternoons. I didn’t know how that was even possible.

  “The world is nothing more than a child’s dream,” a voice said. It seemed to come from all around me at once, from the sky and the cactus and the bubbles popping at my feet.

  “How do I get home?” I asked.

  “Everywhere is possible if you desire it enough,” the voice sang, revealing a shimmering trail in the sand that seemed to lead off to the horizon. I put down the red bubble ball and began to follow the trail, feeling light and calm. “Every when is possible too.”

  I walked for what seemed like days, coming across an old chair at one point, a singing grandfather clock, and a book with no words that spoke in riddles when you cracked it open. Each time I reached the ridge of a sand dune, I was back where I had started.

  Days passed. When I was hungry, delicious food appeared. When I was thirsty, the sky parted and poured sweet juice into my open mouth. I never saw another soul. I just kept walking and talking to myself and the voice in the sky.

  Finally, after what felt like months, the desert began to fade away behind me, sand whooshing past in fluffy white blurs, leaving clean white walls. I sat up and stared at my brother Moto dressed in his military gear. He was as real and solid as anything I had ever seen, smiling down at me with kind brown eyes.

  “Welcome back, solider,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  “This is a dream,” I said. “It has to be. I’m dead.”

  “No,” he said, nodding his head side-to-side but still smiling. “You’re not. Sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you. You’re going to be just fine.”

  “I was bitten by a zombie.” I shook my head in disbelief. “You don’t come back from that. Do you?”

  I reached down and pulled up my shirt, finding I had gauze taped to my ribs. I ripped it back, not expecting to be as painful as it was. It made me wince and close my eyes as I let out a gasp. When the pain subsided, I took a good look at the wound. A crescent shape bite mark the size of a small child’s mouth perforated the flesh of my abdomen just below my rib cage, but it had scabbed all the way over. To the casual observer it might have looked like I got tangled up in something, or was peppered with broken shards of glass in a fight.

  “You see?” Moto pointed to the wound. “It’s almost healed already.”

  Despite my mind arguing that it wasn’t possible, the evidence showed he was right. The injury was now nothing more than a tiny island chain of hardened blood ringed by puffy, pink flesh. It appeared to be no more life threatening than a cat scratch.

  “In no time at all you’ll be as good as new,” Moto assured me. “Which is first-rate! I’ve got a lot to tell you. Gotta get you caught up to speed.”

  “How is this possible?” I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I wasn’t one of the living dead.

  “Apache radioed to us,” my brother told me. “We got there as fast as we could.”

  “He said you’d been looking for me?”

  “I sent choppers up to Vandenberg after I found out. There were no survivors. None of the deceased matched your description. I knew you’d make it out. I believed it in the pit of my stomach. It’s been all that’s kept me going since. The thought of seeing you again. You have no idea how happy I was to hear from Apache.”

  I thought about the black helicopters that passed over us when we were on the road to New Lompoc. How different would things have been if Benji and I had stayed near the base?

  “He told me that you had been asleep for about five minutes,” Moto continued. “We administered the antidote before moving you so we wouldn’t lose any time.”

  “Did you just say antidote?” My head was spinning. “Does that mean that the outbreak was caused by a virus?”

  “Yes. We know that now for sure. We even know who created it. It was one of our guys, not some terrorist attack like we originally suspected. What we don’t know is how it got out. We are still working on that.”

  So much for Felicity’s fast food theory, I thought. Not that I would be having Arby’s any time in the near future, the way things were going.

  “So there is a cure for it?”

  “Yes and no,” he said, looking around the room nervously. He glanced up and over my head, holding his gaze on something for several seconds before returning them to me
. “It’s complicated.”

  I turned and saw he was looking at a camera with a red flashing light on top. I had been so out of it, I hadn’t seen that there were several cameras recording our conversation.

  “If there is a cure then why are there still zombies?” I wasn’t trying to be difficult or ungrateful. I really wanted to understand. “Why can’t we just give a dose to everyone that’s been infected and end this whole nightmare?”

  Moto sighed and rubbed his temples. “First of all, there wouldn’t be enough of the antidote to save everyone. It’s not easy to make. Many of the ingredients were hard to come by before Z-Day. Now they are virtually impossible to get.”

  “Like what?”

  “Spider venom for one,” Moto said. “One of the side effects of a bite from a brown recluse is that the tissue around the wound dies. Doctors have to cut the dead skin and tissue away from the wound, and a lot of times people end up needing plastic surgery to cover the nasty looking scar. The way in which the healthy cells go necrotic is similar to the way the zombie virus functions, in part. There are a lot of parallels. So we figured out how to isolate the chemical that does that and reverse engineer it as part of the antidote. The problem is that it requires plenty of actual spider venom—or an equally rare synthetic compound that takes weeks to yield small batches of under absolutely perfect lab conditions.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, “you’re saying that I’m gonna be like Spiderman now?”

  Benji is going to be so jealous, I thought.

  “Will I have super human strength and be able to swing through the air and shoot webs to slow bad guys down?”

  “Not that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “But you’ve always had a supernatural ability to annoy people. Looks like you’ve retained it. That should come in handy around the base. Really help you win new friends over.”

  Moto grinned from ear to ear as he teased me. Things were getting back to normal in some small way. It felt good to have my brother back, even if he was reminding me of what a bossy know-it-all he usually was.

  “And you’ve kept your killer sense of humor,” I fired back.

  “That’s just one part of the recipe,” Moto finished his explanation. “There are a ton of very complicated steps that go into creating the cocktail. The vast majority of the ingredients are as dangerous to use as they are to locate or whip up.”

  “I lost all track of time and space,” I said. “It’s weird, because I am sitting here talking to you but I don’t even feel like the same person that I was before. The truth is that if the walls melted right now and you sprouted butterfly wings and began singing opera, I wouldn’t be all that surprised.”

  I half expected him to argue that I had been through a traumatic experience, but instead the smile slid off his face and his demeanor grew darkly serious.

  “One of the other ingredients is Ibogaine,” he said. “It’s a powerful natural hallucinogenic derived from a root. It’s banned in the United States, or it used to be, but you can easily get it in Mexico, if you don’t get butchered by surviving cartel members or devoured by hordes of zombies with over a million corpses in them.”

  “So it makes you trip out?” That would account for the wild visions and out of body experiences I had undergone.

  “Shamans used to take it,” Moto said. “It’s about a hundred times more powerful than LSD or mushrooms. They were giving it to junkies the last I heard because the trip was so heavy it scared them off ever using drugs again, that’s if they lived through it. The dose you received was cleaner and more balanced than just eating the plant version, but it was also much stronger.”

  “How long does it last?”

  “Usually not more than a couple of days. We were starting to get worried about you.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Seven days.”

  Seven days? Is he kidding? How could I be high and locked in a room for a whole week and not know about it?

  “I’d like to argue with you but I kind of lost track of time where I was,” I said. “Am I still on it now?”

  I turned my hand over in front of my face several times and waved it in the air. Moto laughed at me.

  “No,” he said. “You’d know. You were pretty incoherent when you were juiced up.”

  I looked around the room again at all the cameras. They’d been monitoring me like a lab rat. I knew it was a small price to pay for not being a mindless zombie, but it still made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful so I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “Will I feel any side effects?”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “A few people reported feeling mild aftershocks after being given the antidote—like flash backs, but nothing serious. Walls breathing, people melting, losing track of time, that kind of thing.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So nothing too scary like people around me transforming into flesh eating demons that want to kill me . . . or delusions of grandeur.”

  “No more than normal for you,” he said, raising his finger to his temple and making a cuckoo bird gesture. “You’ve always been a little Loony Tunes, if you know what I mean.”

  “How did I get here?” I asked, ignoring his taunt.

  “You were strapped down and transported in an armored Humvee. You were too close to consider air lifting. We only have one chopper and our fuel supplies are limited. Apache caught us up to speed on your condition and your friends filled in the blanks.”

  “Apache?” I shook my head more. “He told his name was Simon.”

  “Really?” Moto couldn’t hide his amusement. “We never could get him to tell us his name. Not even to me in private. We took to calling him The Apache because he lived in a teepee and talked like a crazy Indian. It’s like the guy speaks in riddles or something.”

  I smiled as I remembered thinking the exact same thing. I’d almost forgotten along the way what it was like to have real family that I grew up with. It made the end of the world that much easier, knowing he was with me.

  “It’s amazing what people will open up and tell you when you are about to die,” I said sarcastically.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “Believe it or not I’ve been where you are right now.”

  “What?”

  My mind reeled. My brother had been bitten by a zombie? He’d had to go through all of this alone? It was more than my brain could comprehend.

  “I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said, “or at least as much as I am allowed to tell you. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not alone.”

  “Who is watching us?”

  “I asked the general for permission to debrief you,” he said. “He’s been kind enough to give us some leeway considering the unusual circumstances around your discovery. He said only a Macnamara would try to kill a horde of zombies with a toothpick carnival sword to defend his two pals, more or less. I’m paraphrasing. Basically, I think you impressed him.”

  “So what aren’t you telling me?”

  I knew my brother’s ‘poker tells’ from growing up with him. He was definitely keeping something from me, and it was big.

  “Let’s just start with what I can tell you,” he said. “You are not allowed to tell anyone about being bitten by a zombie or about receiving an antidote. That’s the big one. It’s not as hard as it sounds though. No one in the outside world would believe you and no one here has the clearance to ask about it.”

  “What about the civilians on base?”

  “Good question.” He patted me on the shoulder. “It brings me to my next debriefing point. There are no civilians at Port Hueneme. If civilians were allowed, I would have brought you here from the start. The only non-military personal here are doctors and the wives of enlisted men. This is an advanced military base, the last one on the west coast. If you decide to remain here, you will need to enlist. Otherwise, you will be shipped to a controlled civilian population area, most likely the clean zone out near Las Vegas.”

&
nbsp; “I’m not old enough to enlist. I’m only sixteen.”

  “Age is no longer a consideration for those who wish to serve their country,” he explained, sounding like a recruiting commercial. “America needs all the able-bodied trained soldiers it can get to fight this war.”

  “I don’t want to be separated from you again. Will I get to stay here?”

  “The general has assured me that if you are so inclined, I will be allowed to personally oversee your training. You’re already temporarily assigned to my unit, just in case.”

  “I’m in,” I said without hesitation.

  Moto smiled, but there was sadness in his eyes. “Glad to hear it, soldier. I assured them that you would react this way. It’s gonna make things a whole lot easier for a lot of jumpy people. Now the first thing we got to do is get you changed out of those hospital scrubs and into a proper uniform. After that, we’re gonna shave off those curly locks of yours.” He ran his fingers through my hair and messed it up. “If you need a moment to say goodbye to your Justin Beiber fever hairdo, I’ll understand.”

  “What did you guys do with Benji?”

  “You’ll be happy to know that your little friend gladly enlisted the minute we got him back to camp and gave him a hot meal and a shower. He’s been assigned a non-combat job working in the canteen. He’s eager to see you, so he’ll be glad to know you’re up and moving around.”

  “He was there,” I said. “He saw me get bit. What am I supposed to tell him?”

  “It’s not a problem,” Moto said. “Benji is a soldier now. He’s been debriefed, just like you. If the subject comes up, all you have to say is that the incident is classified and you’re not allowed to talk about it.”

  “Oh,” I said lamely. It was going to take a bit to get used to this new way of life as a soldier.

  “Aren’t you forgetting about somebody?” Moto wore that knowing grin that drove me crazy when we were kids. It was the same look he gave me when Darla, the girl who lived across the way from us back home, brought me a Valentine’s card one year.