Zombie Attack!
Book One: Rise of the Horde
by
Devan Sagliani
Copyright 2012 by Devan Sagliani
http://devansagliani.com
License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover art by Rob Sacchetto
http://www.zombieportraits.com
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
If I can survive this day, just this one day . . . my crazy thoughts raced as the monstrous hordes closed in on me . . . then I can survive anything this world throws at me. Where did it all begin? How did I even get to this place in my life?
The last words my brother said to me were, “Don't leave this place, no matter what happens.” But there was no way he could have known when he said it that one day zombies would form into wild hordes large enough to take out a military stronghold—especially one as large as Vandenberg Air Force Base. We were a small band of survivors, in the end mostly made up of military families, staying together in a big huddle at the back of the barracks where we watched as one by one the monsters picked off the soldiers protecting us. We'd made a break-out toward an abandoned elementary school at the edge of the base and taken refuge there.
For a while we were all safe. No one said much. We'd piled up all the furniture against the windows to make sure the ravenous creatures wouldn't just break the glass and flood in. It's not like the living dead feel pain. They never get tired either. Once they got the urge to kill and eat you that was pretty much it. They just kept coming until one of you was dead. You couldn't plead with them; they had no feelings. Crying wouldn't do a thing. The creepiest thing I've ever seen in my whole life was one of those monsters that used to be a man, all tangled up in barbed wire and broken glass, frantically chewing its own arm off to get loose and join the feed.
We were herded together with no will of our own, desperately trying to survive this madness all around us.
This isn't going to work, I thought. We're going to need a better plan, fast.
Mostly we just listened to the fighting outside—the gun fire and the yelling and that terrible low moaning that sucks the very life out of you when you hear it. We learned it was smart to stay away from the windows. Eventually there were less and less of the piercing popping noises and terrified cries. One final living soldier let out a gut wrenching shriek as he ran out of ammunition and they tore him apart, advancing on him from all sides. A cold streak ran down my spine leaving me shivering in mindless fear as his sobs faded off into echoes of wet, slurping sounds. Then there was nothing but the infinite chorus of low moans and the lifeless shuffling of feet outside. Their massive meal kept them satisfied for about an hour—probably the longest hour of my life. But then their heads came up one by one as they started smelling the air, recognizing that we were there, packed like trapped rats quivering in our own stinky fear.
Time's up, I thought.
No one made a sound that hour. Honestly, there wasn't anything to say. I'd guess we were each just praying in our heart of hearts that they might lose interest and leave, but knowing beyond all hope that it wasn't going to happen—that eventually they'd be coming for us again.
I'd made friends at the base with this younger kid named Benji Jones. He was twelve years old, quiet, choosing not to talk with others and keeping mostly to himself. We all developed ways to block out what was happening, trying to keep our sanity intact in what had become an impossibly insane world.
For me, that meant an endless series of martial arts practice and training sessions. I'd go over the top five my brother had taught me in succession, like a loop, often warming up with Tai Chi and ending with high kicks. I used the common grounds area between the buildings and spent hours each day going over the different karate forms until I was literally exhausted. It had become the only way I could sleep at night. When my body was tired, my mind would keep going—but eventually the darkness would pull me under.
There wasn't a whole lot to do at the base most of the time. They'd assigned jobs to the adults, but for the rest of us, the kids, the days were long and boring. Outside of the base the world as we knew it was burning away and we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone else to handle the problem for us. It didn't make any sense at all.
A couple of times, other kids around my age would come up and watch respectfully from a distance. Once a red headed kid asked if he could train with me but he quit after a day and went back to hanging at the perimeter of the base with the tough looking kids—smoking cigarettes they'd pilfered from their parents and trying to act cool. I hate to say this but he was one of the first I saw go down when they overran us. One minute he was behind us as we fled for our lives and the next I saw him buried alive under a mass of dead, squirming, biting corpses.
Poor bastard, I thought. He didn't deserve that. None of us deserves this.
For Benji, it meant losing himself in comic books. He'd brought a sizable stash with him from his house in Santa Cruz. Captain America. X-Men. Fantastic Four. Justice League. Avengers. Witchblade. A whole bunch of Spiderman. He even had a couple of Walking Dead comics, ironically enough. After a few weeks he got to swapping them with other kids for other comics. People got to know him as the Comic Kid. They'd see him coming and hide, knowing if they started talking with him, they'd never get him to shut up. What they didn't know was that Benji didn't have anyone else in his life—that he looked forward to having someone to chat up, that the stories he kept rambling on about were the only things keeping him from sinking into a deep, dark depression. He'd lost both of his parents on Z-Day—right before his eyes.
By the time the government started acknowledging that there was a real problem, it was already too late to save the civilian population at large. My guess was that they had been trying to contain whatever caused the outbreak of people going nuts and eating each other in the streets, and they had badly failed. That's when they officially declared Zombie Day, or Z-Day for short. Talking heads in newsrooms interrupted every channel to tell people that they needed to evacuate their homes and drive to a safe zone, generally a military base or installation. There they would be quarantined, then set up in internment camps to wait out the worst of it. Sadly at that point, there weren't a whole lot of people who didn't already know how screwed they were. Most of the major American cities were already crawling with the hungry dead. It wasn't safe to stick your head outside your house much less drive around like a big, fat target. Let's just say a lot
of good folks didn't make it.
Benji's parents told him to wait in the car while they grabbed the last of their valuables before heading to the base. The street had been swarming with zoms by that point. Benji locked the doors and hunkered down. Horrified, from the backseat of his parents’ minivan, he'd seen them devour his family on the front lawn—mom, dad, and little sister. Benji hadn't been able to make a move to save them. He must have gone into a state of total shock. He said it was like watching a really scary horror movie on pay-per-view. He hadn't even thought about what he was doing as he climbed into the front seat and started the van with the keys they'd left in the ignition. Before he knew it, he was calmly driving over bodies in the street—some were alive and fighting to survive, but most were the living dead. He said he turned on the Frank Sinatra CD his parents had in the van and cranked the volume. The last thing he saw was one of his neighbor’s houses going up in a fireball while Ol’ Blue Eyes crooned “I did it my way . . .”
When he got to the base they took the minivan and all his possessions except the comic books, and sent him into quarantine. The military needed all the supplies they could get to help take care of all the civilians they'd taken in. Originally they were only supposed to be able to care for about two thousand but within days of the outbreak the base had about ten thousand people—all hungry, all scared, all pushed to the edge of their sanity by what they had seen and done to get there. A lot of amazing stories will probably never get told. Some of those people wandered off on their own after a month or so had passed. They were willing to take their chances outside rather than stay on the base and starve while being told what to do all the time. Some wandered out of the safe zone and got picked off by stray zombies. Some volunteered to risk being moved to another safe zone. Some enlisted. By the end of two months we were down to a thousand or less survivors and things were much more manageable—until the horde came, that is.
I met Benji one day when I was heading back after a practice of taking out multiple attackers with my beloved katana. It was a gift from my big brother and had turned out to be the most important thing I owned. When the outbreak first started, I didn't bother to take anything with me other than my sword.
“It's better than a gun,” my brother had said. “It's quiet so it doesn't draw a lot of attention. And you never have to reload it. All you have to do is keep it clean.” As usual he was dead right.
I turned a corner and found several older boys, eighteen or nineteen years old at least, shoving Benji around between them. His right eye was already swollen up and bruised, no doubt from one of their balled up fists.
“It's no use fighting us, Benji,” said the biggest of the gang—a greasy haired bully they called Weasel. “We're going to get them and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You might as well just give up and put this behind you. Get in line like the others. What's the point in getting roughed up when you can't win?”
Just what the world needs, I thought. A philosophy-spouting hooligan. My fingers twitched slightly with anticipation as I began to remove the blade from its casing. To my surprise, Benji managed to wriggle loose from his captors hold. He dropped to the ground, red faced from being choked, and thrust his fist straight out with all the might he could muster, connecting hard with Weasel's groin. Weasel screamed, letting out a high pitched squeal like a girl, and fell over frantically clutching himself. The others looked on in shock. Benji used the distraction to grab up his comics and dash toward me. As fast as he was, it still wasn't fast enough. Another one of the boys stuck out his leg and tripped him. Benji went down face first, his arms letting go of the comics and thrusting out in front of him to break his fall. A blur of paper showered over me for a minute as comic books rained down and landed at my feet. It was the first that they'd noticed me, but right away I could see from the looks in their eyes that they knew the balance of power had just dramatically shifted.
“What's going on, Weasel?” I asked.
“This doesn't concern you, Xander,” he huffed, still winded from getting his family jewels rocked. “Just walk away.”
Despite being only sixteen I usually got a lot of respect because I knew how to handle myself and I never backed down from a fight. People knew that I was a Macnamara, the equivalent of military royalty because of my brother. Breaking a grown man's arm who'd tried to steal my samurai sword the first week we were here hadn't been so bad for my reputation either. Word got around fast after that not to cross me. Since then I'd kept to myself and usually the only time anyone saw me outside was when I was training. To be honest, I was surprised Weasel had challenged me in the first place. As far as I can figure, he must not have wanted to lose face in front of his pathetic gang of long haired thugs.
“That's not gonna happen,” I said. I thought I heard Weasel let out a small groan as he righted himself back to full standing position. He still looked a little green from the punch to his privates. “In fact, I think you owe young Benji here an apology.”
Weasel smiled at the suggestion, flashing a crooked row of yellow teeth the color of melted butter.
“Is that a fact?” Weasel scoffed.
“For the last two weeks I've watched your little gang prey on the younger kids on the base,” I said. “I've heard stories about you stealing everything from food to family heirlooms. I'd be only too happy to teach you some manners.”
“You got proof to back up those accusations?” Weasel challenged me. His boys began to fan out in an attempt to circle us. I helped Benji up, pushing him behind me while never taking my eyes off Weasel. A fight was definitely going to happen now. There was no doubt about that. All the talking was just to distract me while he gathered up his courage. I smiled at the thought of having a chance to practice my skills on real life volunteers. I began regulating my breathing, slow and steady.
“I don't care who your brother is,” Weasel said, spitting on the ground and wiping his mouth with the back of his dirty hand. “I'm not afraid of you, Xander.”
“Well, you should be,” I said in a low voice, more of a promise than a threat.
“No one is going to save you,” Weasel taunted. “Out here it's just you and us.”
“If you're not afraid of me why don't you take me on yourself?” I asked as the first of his guys slipped past my peripheral vision.
Weasel smiled wide, looking just like a jack-o’-lantern.
“You must think I'm stupid,” he said.
“Oh, I do,” I assured him.
“Look out!”
I felt the first blow coming toward the back of my head even before Benji cried out. By the time his warning reached me I'd already ducked under a wide right hook, setting down my sword and reaching up to trap his arm. I grabbed onto it with both hands as I lifted up and jammed my shoulder into his armpit, immobilizing him. With the slightest amount of downward pressure I could easily have shattered his arm in several places, but I knew I'd catch a lot of heat if I did. Being trained to fight came with certain responsibilities, including knowing when to show some restraint. As good as it would feel to teach this coward a lesson he wouldn't forget for trying to sucker punch me in the back of the head, I'd be tying up some limited hospital resources in the process. I'd gotten away with it once before but the circumstances were radically different. Doing it twice in a row would raise a lot of red flags and bring heat down on me and my brother as well. I couldn't let him down like that. I locked eyes with Weasel and smiled as I held his minion in place while he hopelessly squirmed to get free. All the color drained from his face.
“Let him go,” Weasel demanded. I saw the third guy puff his chest up, gathering all his courage to do something foolish, and then lunge toward me. With barely a pivot I turned and threw his buddy at him head first, causing his outstretched fist to collide dead on with his pal’s unsuspecting face, knocking him out cold. The weight of his unconscious body knocked the assailant to the ground and pinned him there, helpless.
“Okay then,” I said calmly. “What now?”
“This isn't over,” Weasel warned me in a low growl. “One of these nights when your guard is down, I'm gonna pay you back for this.”
I glared at him, all traces of my smile vanishing at the sound of his words.
“Did you just threaten me?” I knelt down and swooped up my sword, unsheathing the blade and letting the sunlight dance across it. Weasel turned in his crud-covered Converse high tops and ran away as fast as his feet would carry him. I never had a problem with him again. If he had been planning some kind of surprise attack on me it might have been foiled by the massing zombie horde, but I doubt it.
I helped Benji gather up his comics and cautiously walked back to the barracks, avoiding making eye contact with soldiers along the way. Military royalty or not, I could be in as much trouble as Weasel if word got out I was fighting civilian kids on the base. I didn't feel like having to explain myself so I shushed Benji until we were back in his room. After that, there was no keeping him quiet—and he’s been with me ever since, like my shadow.
Suddenly, a loud, inhuman grunt coming from outside the barracks tore through the silence and shook me out of my little trip down memory lane. It was a cold-blooded sound and caused one of the smaller kids to wet himself in fear. The smell of his urine, salty and metallic, harshly permeated the tiny room. No one said a word. I know we were all thinking the same thing—if we just hold our breath long enough the zombie horde will move on and we'll be left alive. No such luck. The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me it wasn't going to end well for most of us in that room.
Sure enough, within less than five minutes the zombies had sniffed us out. For dead things who can't feel pain or show emotion they sure have a fantastic sense of smell, I thought. Soon they were beating their dead fists on the doors and windows. The sound of the hammering echoed down the empty hallways of the elementary school, ringing off locked windows and unoccupied metal lockers. A couple of the adults got up and blindly bolted out the back door, no doubt thinking they could escape down that long hallway. I knew better than to even try. The way the school was laid out meant that they were heading into a dead end with a high block wall down at the perimeter—originally intended to keep predators out and kids protected from wandering off into traffic unsupervised. Once the zombies got inside, those adults would be trapped like rats in a sinking ship with only one way out—through a maze of undead former human beings, all trying to eat them alive.
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