Zombie Attack! Rise of the Horde

by Devan Sagliani

  “Come on!” I screamed. “Is that all you've got?” Adrenaline pumped through me as I stood back up. I was ready to die fighting but I was going to take down every last one of these creatures before I did.

  “Xander look,” Felicity said as she pointed to the middle of the horde.

  A flash of light drew my vision off to the right and I turned to see the strangest thing I'd ever witnessed in my whole life. The zombies turned back on a man who was walking among them calmly swinging two objects in a blur around his body that seemed to be made entirely out of reflected light. The horde seemed so captivated by him, they had forgotten all about us.

  His face was painted like an Indian warrior and he had several crows feathers tucked into his hair. His face was a mask of calm resolve. He wore a thin layer of chainmail over his upper torso and head and protective metal armor from the waist down to his metallic boots. Light reflected off his mirror polished armor as well as whatever he was using for weapons, giving him the impression that he was glowing almost from head to toe.

  I thought of the pictures Moto had once shown me of Shaolin warrior monks.

  How is he doing that? I wondered to myself. It's like he's somehow able to communicate with them.

  The zombies would turn to attack him, then stumble back looking confused and disoriented. Whoever he was, he calmly moved through them like he was taking a stroll through the park on a lazy Sunday afternoon. He might as well have been walking on water as far as I was concerned. He was headed right for us but I didn't feel any fear. Instead, an indescribable calm began to settle over me at the sight of him, like for the first time in forever everything was going to be all right.

  “On your right,” Benji called out. I turned to look at him, confused by everything that was happening as I felt a sharp pain shoot through my right side. Something cold clamped down onto my skin. Glancing down I saw that a small zombie boy in a blue and yellow striped shirt was latched onto my stomach by his dirty mouth. With a sharp strike from my elbow I dislodged him, then swung around and took his head clean off. I watched the expression go blank on his kid zombie face as his lifeless head rolled to a stop at the curb and his small corpse fell over flat.

  My hand shook as I touched the wound and saw bright red blood forming. I'd been bitten! I heard Felicity yelling something at me but I couldn't make out what it was. There was a loud ringing in my ears and I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest. I started to feel woozy. My legs wobbled beneath me as they gave way. The last thing I remembered was the ground rushing up to meet me and then seeing a big burst of light.

  ***

  When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on my back looking up at the inside of a canvass tent with a hole that went straight up into the sky. The brown skinned man with the bird feathers in his hair and black paint on his face worked over a fire nearby, boiling water. Rolling my head to the side I could see my sword lying next to his two huge shiny knives. My reflection was clearly visible in them. I could tell I was in deep trouble with a single glance. My skin was already turning a yellowish green to match the feeling of bile rising up from my stomach, and my forehead was beaded with feverish sweat as my body tried to fight off the killer infection. I touched my side where I had been bitten and winced with pain.

  “Awake to the dream of reality,” the man said with a smile.

  “Who are you?”

  “I'm called many things by many different people,” he said. “It all depends on how they see me or what they need from me.”

  “I don't need anything from you,” I said trying to sit up and falling back over in agony.

  “We all need something from each other,” he said pleasantly. “Life is by its very nature interdependent. You can call me Simon if you like. You've more than earned the right.

  “Where am I?”

  “Paradise City,” he said.

  “I thought we were in Oxnard,” I argued.

  “That's what it used to be called,” he explained. “Before things fell apart. There isn't much that remains as it once used to be.” He had a cryptic way of talking, as if everything he said was a riddle or Zen koan waiting to be unraveled. My head throbbed and I tried not to think about it.

  “Who were those people hunting us?” I was already starting to feel feverish.

  “Cannibals,” he replied. “They would have eaten you all if they could have caught you. Turned your organs into soup and your flesh into strips of jerky.”

  “Just like zombies,” I said, attempting an ironic smile.

  “Worse,” he offered. “Zombies don't have free will while the cannibals know exactly what they are doing and just don't care. There aren't many people left out here. Almost everybody is a zombie. Cannibals track passing traffic on the freeway to trap fresh victims. I saw your car hit that pole in the parking lot from my little hill up here and knew you were in big trouble so I headed down. I figured if you had any sense at all you'd cut through the mall and head west.”

  Despite my state I took his words as the compliment they were intended to be. It felt good to know I'd been right, even if it had cost me my life. None of that mattered as long as the others were safe. Panic shot through me as I realized I didn't know what had become of them. What if the zombies had eaten them? I couldn't go to my grave without knowing and judging from the way I felt I knew I didn't have long until I changed.

  “Where are my friends?” I asked, confused. I tried to sit up but didn't have the strength. It felt like a boulder had been dropped on my chest.

  “They are outside, waiting,” he said. “You were very brave. You saved their lives.”

  “I was very stupid,” I said. “I'm paying the price for it now.” The realization that I was going to become one of those flesh eating monsters wasn't fully kicking in. It was just more than I could handle at the moment.

  “I don't think so,” he countered. “You're brother will be very proud of you.”

  “How do you know my brother?” I lifted my head, straining to look at him.

  “Moto is a friend,” he said. “That's more than I can say for the rest of his tribe. He will be pleased to learn his little brother has become a fierce warrior. He's been looking for you since news reached him about Vandenberg. He left me a walkie to contact him if you came this way. He said you would make it, that you were strong and would find your way to the base. Turns out he was right.”

  “It's too late,” I said. “I've been bitten.”

  “Don't worry,” Simon said. “He will be here soon. He was very excited to hear you were still alive.”

  “I'm dying,” I said, fighting to stay awake. “By the time he gets here more than likely he'll have to chop off my head.”

  “I wouldn't be so sure,” Simon said. “Things are not always as they appear in this world. Nor are they otherwise.”

  “I saw you,” I said, ignoring his brain twister. “You were walking right through a crowd of zombies but they moved out of your way. It was a miracle, like parting water with your bare hands. How did you do that?”

  “It's a long story,” he said with a pleasant smile that made me feel calm and at ease. “The short answer is by controlling my breathing. I've spent years learning how to lower my heart rate through meditation. It helps me to move calmly among them without drawing attention to myself. Usually I don't have to raise my weapons at all. Today required I move with greater speed than normal, hence the light display. Forgive me if it seemed vain. It was not without purpose, I assure you.”

  “I thought zombies were attracted to movement,” I said.

  “If that is true, then why don't they attack each other?”

  “I don't know,” I said. “I always assumed they came after us because we smelled alive, like food.”

  “They are driven by hunger,” he answered. “Like all predators, they use their senses to search out victims. Most people panic when they see them, causing their heart rates to skyrocket and their skin to sweat. Just like a dog can smell fear, so too can the
undead sense our repulsion of them. Add to that the fact that most people scream or wave their arms and run around like chickens with their heads cut off and it's no wonder they zero in on us as if they had heat seeking technology.”

  “So you're saying if I stood perfectly still in the middle of a zombie horde I wouldn't have been bitten?”

  I thought about Joel and Tom's story of hiding under the dead soldiers as the zombies passed by them.

  “I can't say that for sure,” he admitted. “What I can tell you is that I have been walking with them in a trance-like state on many occasions and have not been attacked.”

  “How do you remain calm when you know they can turn on you at any moment and rip you to shreds? How is that possible?”

  “You have to learn to change the way you see the world,” he said with a kind smile. “When you view them with compassion, your fear is transformed into sympathy. These were people once, just like you and me. They had hopes and dreams, families, loved ones. Just like you and me they wanted more happiness and less suffering in their lives. They had plans for the future. Now they are eternally damned to wander the earth with a terrible hunger that cannot be fulfilled, reviled as monsters. It's heartbreaking in every way imaginable.”

  “I'm glad you are so sympathetic,” I said. “Considering I will shortly be one of them. But I still think you should cut my head off the minute I change. I don't want to be responsible for killing anyone.”

  “You're going to be just fine,” he said opening his hand and revealing two blue pills. “Your friend Felicity told me to give you these. She said she took them from your pocket in Ojai. She told me to tell you not to be mad at her.”

  So she stole the pills back from me! I wasn't mad at her. A pang of sadness shot through me knowing that I would never get to kiss her again, that the moment we shared up on the hill was the best we would ever have together.

  I raised my head and he placed them in my mouth. He took a bottle of water from the ground and placed it to my lips. It felt cool and refreshing. I gulped down as much as I could.

  “How is she?” I asked. “How is her arm?”

  “I managed to take the arrow out and clean the wound,” he told me. “She's going to be just fine. The shaft went almost clean through. She is very lucky it only hit her arm.”

  The pain in my body was growing. It spread across my entire chest, radiating out from the wound in my side and even ran down my legs. I panted steadily to relieve some of the pain, trying to breathe it away.

  “I'm going to need you to listen to me,” Simon said. “An antidote is on its way, but for now we're going to want to slow down the spread of the virus. The pills will help calm you but I want you to work on your breathing with me. Got it?”

  “Yes,” I managed. The pain was growing exponentially now. I could feel it in my toes and finger tips.

  “Remember what I told you about controlling my heart rate with meditation?”

  I nodded in reply, too sick to answer. My throat felt dry like hot sand at the beach.

  “We're going to slow yours down now too,” he said. “I want you to close your eyes but concentrate on the sound of my voice.”

  I closed my eyes without argument.

  “That's good,” he said. “Now I want you to focus on your breath as it moves in and out of your body. Don't try to control it. Just become aware of it. When thoughts arise, resist the temptation to follow them. Instead, gently push them aside and return your concentration to the breath.”

  I did as he said and immediately began to relax. The pain was still there but I wasn't fighting against it now so its effect on me didn't seem as overwhelming.

  “Think of your mind as a vast blue sky without end and your thoughts like white, fluffy clouds. They don't come from anywhere and they don't go anywhere. When the causes and conditions are right, clouds appear. Don't follow the clouds but return to the calm, peaceful blue of your mind.”

  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 shapes, like a kaleidoscope. My mind tried desperately to attach itself to these forms but 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 t
he 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.”