Ultimate Undead Collection: The Zombie Apocalypse Best Sellers Boxed Set (10 Books)

by Joe McKinney

  The bodies began to get annoying. The damn things just wouldn’t leave him alone. He convinced himself he was the focus of some bizarre kind of hero-worship from the dead, but he knew that wasn’t really the case. The merest sight of him would cause a herd of the bloody things to come after him incessantly. And he noticed they’d started to become more violent too, scrapping with each other as they jostled for position. He guessed it wouldn’t take much for them to start on him if he gave them half a chance. Skin made a conscious decision to keep out of sight and lie low for a while but, before disappearing from view, he went out looting again. He rode into town on his bike, following the bus route he remembered, heading for one particular shop. He and his friends had spent hours looking in the window on wasted Saturday afternoons, but they’d never made it inside. The shop sold hunting and fishing equipment. He didn’t know what he wanted or what he needed, but he took as much from the shelves as he could carry: knives, pistols, rifles and anything else which looked vaguely useful and suitably dangerous. He packed it all onto the bike and rode back to school.

  Skin was in charge now. He was unstoppable. He made the decisions and he made the rules, and after a while he decided that hiding away didn’t suit a man in his position. He began to move through the bodies with contempt, only running when he absolutely had to. Already knowing he was vastly superior to the decomposing morons all around him, his guns and knives made him feel all-conquering. He carried weapons all the time. He hadn’t had to use them yet, but he was ready.

  Food became a problem. He’d had some supplies but they’d dwindled down to nothing. With a rucksack slung over his shoulders and a rifle in hand, he walked to the local shopping precinct, half a mile from school. He’d spent many afternoons hanging out there with friends when he should have been in lessons. Missing school hadn’t done him any harm, had it?

  He crept through the supermarket, collecting whatever food he could find that was still edible. Most stuff had gone off, and the place stank so bad that he almost threw up. He needed to rest and catch his breath before he made the trip back to school and he walked further into the building, eventually emerging from a back entrance. A metal staircase led up to a boarded-up, graffiti-covered flat above the shop. Skin climbed the stairs and forced his way inside. He rested for a while in a damp living room with a mouldy carpet and peeling wallpaper, passing the time with cigarettes and alcohol he’d taken from the store below.

  A narrow veranda ran across the front of the flat. Skin stepped outside and looked out over the whole of the dead precinct below him. A large, roughly elliptical collection of run-down shops centred around an oval-shaped patch of muddy grass, it didn’t look very different now to how it always had done. There were a few bodies still lying on the ground, but other than that the place looked as grey, lifeless and terminally dull as it always had. Even those bodies which continued to incessantly drag themselves around looked strangely familiar: as slow, vacant and pointless as they’d been before they died. Skin baulked at the idea of ever allowing himself to become like that.

  Standing up there, in full view yet untouchable, he felt like some kind of ancient tribal chief looking down on his rotting subjects. Maybe this was his opportunity to show them just how powerful he was? He grabbed his rifle and rummaged around in his rucksack for ammunition. He loaded and took aim.

  Can I do this? Of course you can.

  Should I do it? Why not, who’s going to stop you? You’re Skin: no one tells you what to do anymore.

  Does it matter? Don’t be fucking stupid. Of course it doesn’t matter. Damn things are dead already.

  Skin lined up a single, bedraggled figure in his sights. He squeezed the trigger slightly and took up the slack. Then he cleared his throat and held his breath as he readied himself to fire. The end of the rifle seemed to be waving about uncontrollably. He wedged the butt deeper into his shoulder, shuffled his feet and re-balanced himself, then located the figure in his sights again. Then he pulled the trigger and fired. The gunshot cracked in his ear, rendering him temporarily deaf on one side, and the force of the shot almost threw him over. He dropped the rifle and rubbed the sore patch on his shoulder where the recoil had dug in. He shook his head clear, then looked out over the precinct. There wasn’t much to see at first, primarily because the noise had caused all of the bodies to stagger towards the supermarket, but after a few seconds he managed to locate the one he’d been aiming at. He’d hit it. Christ, what a shot! Half the damn thing’s head had been blown away. More importantly, the fucking thing had finally stopped moving.

  Skin stood on the veranda and fired another thirty-two times, managing to down another nineteen bodies. He became more used to the noise and recoil of the rifle with each shot, learning how to ride the kick. He learnt how to load and reload fast. Most importantly, he learnt how to get rid of those fucking things below him.

  #

  Unchecked and unrestricted, Skin’s confidence soared. No one was laughing at him now or trying to tell him what to do, were they? No one was on his back to do this or do that or be home by a certain time or not to wear certain clothes or not to speak in a certain way or not to drink or smoke… Christ, he felt like he could do anything.

  He began by getting himself more comfortable. The school had two gymnasiums, housed in a single two-storey building. He moved from his previous classroom hideout and made his home in Gym B on the first floor. Using an old, battery-powered machine, he filled the vast room with music from when he first woke to when he finally fell asleep at night. Fully aware of the effect the noise had on the dead population outside but arrogantly indifferent, he drank and smoked his way through each day. His height above the crowds seemed somehow to camouflage the direction and source of the sound. Although it continued to attract many more bodies to the school, they wandered aimlessly around the campus rather than gravitating around his building.

  Skin kicked a football around the gym. He threw empty beer bottles out of the window and watched them hit the bodies below. He spray-painted the bland grey-brick walls. Now and then he took pot-shots into the festering crowd with one of the guns. He slept, he ate, he got bored. The novelty of his situation began to wear dangerously thin. A person of sound mind and average intelligence might well have been able to rise above the boredom, or put up with it in view of the potential danger outside. Skin, however, although not stupid, was driven by a hormone, alcohol and drug-induced anger. The power he had now was incredible, and yet he wanted more. In spite of all this freedom, he still felt incomplete.

  It was late one night when the way forward became clear. Revenge. That was what was missing. It was the ultimate expression of his superiority, wasn’t it? Hell, why hadn’t he thought of it before? Here he was in this incredible position of power, and he hadn’t once used it properly. Sure, he’d fired a few shots and got rid of a pile of bodies, but he’d not yet taken out his anger on the people who deserved it most, had he? Christ, he had a string of people he needed to get even with. His parents topped the list, then his ex-girlfriend, then the so-called friends she’d slept with after she’d dumped him, then his teachers… Fucking hell, he thought, what a fucking idiot. All that time he’d been stuck here in the gym, and those fuckers had been wandering about free.

  This was his time. He was in control. Time for retribution.

  There would be little satisfaction in just finding these people and destroying what was left of them, he decided next morning as he walked back towards his parents’ house through the dawn shadows. What I need to do is make them suffer. I have to make things as unpleasant for them as they did for me. I have to hurt them.

  His mother and father were still in the kitchen of the house where he’d left them on the first morning. His mother still lay on the ground where she’d fallen, slumped between the now defrosted fridge-freezer and the dishwasher. Her soggy body stank. She was going nowhere, but a whack to the back of her head with a rolling pin removed any uncertainty. Skin’s dead father, though, followed hi
m around the kitchen, occasionally lashing out at him with sharp, twisted hands. Skin brushed aside his pathetic attacks and slipped a dog collar and lead from the dead family pet around his neck. He tied his father’s hands together with washing line and half-led, half-dragged him the quarter-mile or so back to school. He threw the body into the empty ground floor gym below his den, and watched what was left of Dad scramble around aimlessly for a while. He spat and threw stones at it, then lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the damn thing’s face before stubbing it out on its forehead. ‘Bet you wish you hadn’t been such an uptight fucker now, eh Dad?’ he shouted as the corpse came at him again. ‘Who’s laughing now?’

  Skin found Dawn in her bedroom at her mother’s house. He slipped the lead around her neck, then tied her to the bed. Before leaving he spent some time going through her belongings. He wasn’t sure whether that made him feel better or worse. In her underwear drawer he found the kind of things he’d hoped she’d wear for him, but which she’d obviously saved for his friends. To humiliate the dead bitch he stripped her bare before dragging her back through the streets and dumping her in the gym too.

  He’d had a feeling that he’d already seen the bodies of Mr McKenzie, Mr Miller and Miss Charles wandering around the school, though it was getting harder to distinguish between individual corpses. It was while he was searching for them that he came across what was left of an ex-friend (and one of Dawn’s recent conquests) Glenn Tranter. Tranter’s face was pretty badly eaten away, but he knew it was him. Although his skin was a blotchy blue-grey, he could still see the tip of a tattoo Glenn had recently had done on his neck, just below the loose collar of his blood-stained school shirt. Another one for the gym.

  There was no sign of Mr Miller. Damn, if there was one fucker who deserved a little dismemberment and torture, it was him. It was of some consolation when he found what remained of Mr McKenzie, his dictatorial modern languages teacher, crawling along the corridor outside the main assembly hall. Stupid fucking thing was still wearing the same damn tweed jacket it had worn to school every bloody day for as long as he could remember. He took great pleasure in wrapping the dog collar around the dead teacher’s neck and dragging the body twice round the school before throwing it into the gym.

  Miss Charles, his twisted, sadistic, sour-faced ex-head of year, had been trapped in the stock cupboard next to her office when she’d died. Skin found her still crashing around the room, half-buried beneath text books and papers. He’d hated this bitch, and she’d hated him too. He tried to drag her to the gym by her long grey hair, but it wasn’t strong enough. It kept coming away from her scalp in sickly clumps. Skin resorted to the dog lead again.

  Over the course of the next day and a half he gathered together another fifteen bodies. Some of the rapidly putrefying corpses had been people who had wronged him in one way or another. Others were just poor unfortunates who just happened to have been in the wrong place at the right time, plucked from the obscurity of the faceless masses and flung into the gym.

  So what do I do with them now?

  He pondered the question as he lay on his makeshift bed at the far end of Gym B. Music blared out of the player which he’d now hung from a basketball hoop with skipping ropes. He thought it sounded better like that, although the volume was so loud that getting the right acoustic settings didn’t really matter anymore. The room was filled with a haze of smoke. It helped disguise the increasingly noxious stench of death which filled his world.

  Tomorrow I’ll make those fuckers suffer, Skin decided as he drifted into a nauseous, drink-fuelled sleep. One by one I’ll take each of them apart.

  #

  He didn’t move until early afternoon. He woke with a hangover of epic proportions which, he decided, could only be eased by drinking more alcohol. Damn, he was getting low on booze. He’d need to go out and get more soon, but not today. He had more important things to do today.

  After he’d taken a piss out of a first floor window onto the heads of the crowd below (and thrown up too – he was feeling particularly bad today) he ambled down to the ground floor gym and opened the door. The twenty bodies he’d shut in there immediately began to move towards him. He pushed his way through them with contempt, shoving them away whenever they came at him. Keen to spend a reasonable amount of time with each body and not be rushed, he built a corral in one corner of the gym with benches and various other pieces of apparatus. The bodies, although still very animated, were also clumsy and their coordination was desperately poor. It didn’t take very much to keep them restrained behind vaulting horses, trampolines, crash mats, weight training equipment and anything else he could lay his hands on.

  Who first?

  He’d had a late start, and getting the gym ready had taken longer than expected. The sun was already beginning to set as he looked across the room at his motley collection of corpses. Which one of these fuckers has caused me most pain? Which one hurt me most? Which one showed the most complete disregard for me and for everything I ever stood for or believed in or wanted? It was a close call between two of them. It was either Dad or Dawn. Just because he preferred the idea of messing with Dawn’s body (it made him feel slightly excited in an uneasy, perverted kind of way) he chose her. He grabbed hold of his ex-girlfriend’s corpse and hauled it over the barrier.

  ‘Okay, Dawn?’ he asked, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice. Dawn’s dead body lumbered towards him, twisted arms outstretched. For a moment he almost lost his nerve. What was he actually going to do? He hadn’t thought this through. He squinted as she came at him, remembering her as she used to be. More specifically, he remembered what it was she’d done to him. Even more specifically, he remembered what it was she hadn’t let him do to her. Bitch.

  Christ, just look at the state of her, he thought as his dead ex-girlfriend slipped in a puddle of blood or vomit or something equally unpleasant. Over the course of the last twenty-four hours the floor of the gym had become covered with various noxious spillages, both from the corpses and from Skin himself. The corpse dropped to its knees in front of him and then managed to pick itself up again, clumsy feet skidding like a new-born animal. Dawn was an appalling sight but, knowing her strange tastes, he thought she might have approved of the look. Her eyes were hollow and sunken, her skin green-hued and ruptured in places. She had a deep cut on her right shoulder and, in the low light, Skin was sure he could see squirming movement in and around the wound. Was it just blood or decay glistening, or was it something more foul? Maggots, flies or larvae feeding off her dead flesh? Whatever it was, the thought of it was disgusting, too much even for the twisted mind of Skin to handle. The sight of her standing there, naked and practically falling to pieces as he watched her, was too intense. He pushed her back over the barrier and grabbed another body from the other side of the divide. Change of tactics. He’d have to build himself up to his headline acts.

  Mr Read! Bloody hell, it was Mr Read, the head of music at the school. He’d almost forgotten that he’d found Read’s body. He hadn’t set out to get this particular teacher, but he was glad he had him. Now this bastard really deserved to suffer. He was the one who made kids sing on their own in front of the class and play endless bloody glockenspiel solos in his lessons.

  Skin hadn’t got on with Read, but he had no specific issues with him either, just a generic dislike. He felt sure he could deal with his body without giving it a moment’s thought. Maybe the strength of his hate for Dawn, his dad and certain other ex-teachers made it harder for him to do their corpses justice? He just needed practice, that was all. Mr Read’s body was the ideal candidate.

  What could he do to him? He glanced around the gloomy gym and his eyes settled on a pile of weight-training equipment in the corner. As the body dragged itself after him, moving pathetically slowly, he took a short bar (the kind he’d seen used for single arm exercises) and stripped the weights off it. He was left with a bloody heavy, fourteen inch, chrome plated metal rod. He turned back around to face the
body of the dead teacher and swung the bar at its head. He’d expected to feel the impact but he hardly felt anything. It seemed to cut through the flesh like a hot knife through butter, such was the level of the creature’s decay. And Christ, look what he’d done! The damn thing’s jaw had been ripped right off its bloody face!

  Now feeling more confident and in control again, Skin circled the helpless corpse. He was moving at several times its miserable speed, and it had no idea where he was. It staggered around, desperately trying to find him, spinning circles, and he hacked at its legs. He hit the right knee cap, shattering it, and the body crumbled to the ground. This was too bloody easy! He smashed the bar down again, this time coming down hard on its pelvis, feeling bone splinter under the force of the metal.

  Whatever tensions, frustrations and fears had been building up inside Skin were released by the therapeutic destruction of the school teacher’s body. By the time he’d finished with Mr Read he had all but disappeared, spread around virtually the entire gym. This was really firing him up. It felt good, and he wanted more.