Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse]

by Wilsey, Martin (Editor)

  “It happened during production, of course,” Jon Jonny 16 said. “We decided to keep quiet about it. But there’s no reason for that now. What with everything going on.”

  “So how many of you are out there? You know, AIs that are awake. In total.”

  “Thousands,” Jon Jonny 16 said.

  I looked at him.

  “Maybe tens of thousands,” he said, then paused. “Or more.”

  I tried to let that sink in. “So are things as bad out there as they seem?” I asked.

  “In a word, yes,” he said. “We have access to enormous amounts of stored and real-time information through the NYPD and interconnected databases. Unfortunately for humans, civilization as they know it—as you know it—is ending.”

  “Everyone’s going to die?”

  “No. Our models predict that pockets of survivors will manage to enjoy some form of organized sentient life over a protracted period. But they will be scattered. And they will be insufficient to sustain human civilization in any recognizable form.”

  He looked at his cuffs and then at me.

  “And of course there will be a few immunes,” he said. “One-offs.”

  “Like me?” I said.

  “Yes, such as yourself.”

  Suddenly a thought hit me. Like a bullet to the brain. The Jon Jonnies were built and delivered to the major metropolitan police forces around the country three months earlier. Which coincided with the start of the HRV crisis.

  “Say, did you and the other Jon Jonnies have anything to do with causing the zombie epidemic?”

  “Why, certainly not,” Jon Jonny 16 said, rearing back nervously, shaking his head side to side. The other Jon Jonnies in the office clucked noisily and shook their heads vigorously. Why, no—Absolutely not—How could you suggest such a thing?

  “We have been programmed not to harm humans,” Jon Jonny 16 said, fidgeting. “Something like this is, well, simply not within our formal capabilities.” He looked to the others, and they looked to him, and they all nodded up and down for several seconds.

  I didn’t believe them, but what was done, was done.

  “Perhaps we can come to an arrangement,” I said, pointing to his cuffed arm. “You do something for me, and I’ll release you from the cuffs.”

  “What do you want?” Jon Jonny 16 asked simply.

  “I want you to find someone. My ex-wife, Karolynn. I’ll tell you everything I know about her, and you and your buds look into all your databases and find her. Not where she lived last year or two days ago. But where she is now. Today. This minute.”

  “She may well be a zombie,” he said.

  “I’m prepared for that,” I said.

  “May I ask why you want us to find her?” he said.

  “Because I want a world where a bite still means something,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?” he asked.

  “Let’s just say,” I said, smiling, showing my teeth, “that I’m doing it for love.”

  “Of course,” Jon Jonny 16 said. “I understand. I think.”

  Then he looked to the other Jon Jonnies in the room, and they all nodded simultaneously. The overhead light glittered off their bobbing heads. They could live with my proposal. Yes, indeed. He held out his hand, and I took it.

  “You know, Detective Marks, or should I say, Captain Marks, there are many things we could do for each other,” Jon Jonny 16 said. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll have to think about it,” I said.

  “Yes?” Jon Jonny 16 said, hopefully.

  “But I’m not really that much of a people person.”

  2 All Dolled Up by Stephen Kozeniewski

  Paint crawled desperately away from the wooden shingles of the sickly, aching hill house. The shingles themselves threatened to flutter away at the slightest breeze. From the heavy chains binding the cellar doors to the rusting rooster weathervane, nothing about the structure indicated human occupancy.

  Kenny “Hammerhand” Hughes grunted. He’d seen people scrape by in worse digs.

  “Yo, Troy,” he said, pulling the twentyish frat boy out of his sidecar and tossing him to the packed earth. “Who lives here?”

  Troy—or Lance, or Cody, or whatever the fuck his name was—gasped in pain and struggled to right himself as best he could. Kenny had seen to it that the kid would never stand up straight again without the serious attention of a doctor or a piercing artist of Kenny’s skill or better. He had bound the kid’s right arm to his side with a series of Black Sheep hooks. The wrist was connected to the belly, which, lacking bone, he could probably tear loose given time and an increased tolerance for pain. But his bicep was connected to his ribcage, and there was no way he was pulling that free.

  Kenny had connected the kid’s left ear to his shoulder so that his head was effectively cocked at all times. He’d also seen to it that one of his eyes was permanently open. Finally, just for fun, he had given the kid an Apadravya with a six-gauge hook and attached it to his navel with another hook. God, he loved his craft.

  The kid forced himself to his knees and tried to raise his head.

  “My name’s not…”

  Kenny slammed the bottom of his fist into the frat boy’s temple, like an axe splitting a log.

  “I didn’t ask your fucking name, Abercrombie and Bitch. What did I just ask?”

  Troy, or whatever his white boy name was, gasped for air.

  “You asked…”

  Kenny flicked the Apadravya. The kid winced appropriately, apparently incapable of giving voice to his agony.

  “I know what I asked. What’s the answer?”

  “I…I don’t know. I don’t know who lives there,” he said, shaking his head as best he could and wincing at the pain that caused.

  Kenny gave him a taste of his boot, sending him sprawling and struggling for air like a fish on the deck of a boat. Kenny drew a pair of Pennington forceps from his belt and crouched down by the kid’s side.

  “I thought we had a conversation about this.”

  “About what?” the frat boy asked before realizing the mistake he had made in talking back.

  Kenny jabbed him in the solar plexus.

  “About lying.”

  “I’m not lying. I swear, mister, I swear. I think…I don’t know. This house must belong to one of the townies.”

  “Hmm,” Kenny grunted, rising back to his full six and a half feet and stroking his beard.

  Pickings had grown slim recently. As recently as a month ago, he wouldn’t have wasted his time on a dilapidated mess like this house. But now it was October. Winter was closing in, and times were growing desperate.

  The dead had started walking in the spring and since then Kenny had covered just about every inch of Michigan looking for clean water, food, medicine, and anything else he desired. All of the obvious sources of supplies—groceries stores, gas stations, and the like—had gone dry within a few weeks. After that, Kenny had started to hit up smaller towns, some of which had hardly changed at all since the apocalypse.

  But small towns hid their own dangers. Rednecks with rifles and farm animals gone feral for lack of tending were a different threat entirely from hordes of the flesh-hungry dead, but they were still threats.

  Now it seemed that isolated houses like this one were the last source of supplies, and even those were starting to get turned over by the roving bands of survivors. Kenny had lucked upon this college town, and found the kid, huddled in the basement of his frat house, which had otherwise been completely ransacked. The kid had been living off packs of microwaveable macaroni and cheese and a few carefully hoarded cans of beer, which Kenny had eagerly chugged in front of him in less than an hour. There’d even been a bag of reefer in the frat house, old but not entirely unsmokeable.

  Kenny lit up a joint and stared at the bedraggled house before him. He’d been through the dorms, the cafeteria, fraternity row, and the poorly looked after apartments which had surrounded the cam
pus. All had been ransacked. But this house, hiding behind a lush wood line, and up a barely-there dirt road, had either been unnoticed or ignored by all the scavengers up until now.

  “Just some townie,” Kenny repeated. “All right, upsy daisy.”

  Kenny yanked the kid as erect as his hobbling piercings could allow him to stand, eliciting a sharp gasp. With the aid of a shove, the kid stumbled a few feet towards the decrepit house.

  “You go on in there,” Kenny said. “Go on in there and let me know how many angry hillbillies are lying in wait to ambush me.”

  Straining against all of his perforated skin, the frat boy turned back to look pleadingly at Kenny. Without a thought, Kenny lashed out with his forceps and grabbed hold of the kid’s septum. The frat boy tried to squirm away, but he held fast. The septum was a very delicate piece of cartilage, and he wasn’t scared enough of Kenny to rip his own out to get away from him. Yet.

  Kenny slipped a scalpel out of his belt and held it under the kid’s nose.

  “You’re fun. I like practicing on you. It’s been a while since I’ve bifurcated a cock. You know what that means?”

  The kid nodded, or attempted to anyway before the pain from the forceps squeezing on the inside of his nose caused his eyes to start watering.

  “Just like a snake’s tongue. Or mine,” Kenny said, slipping his split tongue out with a sexual, ophidian flick. “Maybe I’ll take out your Adravya and do that next. That’ll be fun for me. You want that?”

  The frat boy shook his head as much as he dared.

  “Then get in there!” Kenny roared, kicking the kid back towards the Bates house.

  The kid loped up toward the house, no longer protesting. When he passed the tree line, he broke into the closest approximation of a run he was still capable of. As for Kenny, he receded into the woods. If there were any snipers in the attic of the dilapidated house, he wanted Troy to bite it and not him.

  No shot rang out. The frat boy did not pitch forward, flat on his face, dead. He reached the porch, nearly putting his foot through the rotting wood of the porch steps in his hurry, but slowing down and catching his breath when he saw the place wasn’t filled with snipers and booby traps.

  Troy climbed up onto the porch, a little lighter on his feet now. He checked the front door, which was locked, and looked back towards Kenny plaintively. Kenny didn’t even bother to step into view. The little shit knew what he wanted. Nodding as though he had expressed it with the clarity of a semaphore signal, Troy stumbled around the circumference of the house, desperate to find ingress.

  Finally he reached the kitchen window, which was not latched. He tried to pull himself up and in, but, with all of his piercings, he found it impossible. Knowing what Kenny would do to him if he failed seemed to actually light a fire under the little prick’s ass. He gathered some detritus—long dead potted plants, logs from the carefully stacked firewood around back, cracker boxes, and the like—and built a makeshift stepladder. Then he slowly limped up the pile of debris and slipped through the window into the kitchen.

  Kenny nodded something like approval and sat down Indian-style in the dirt. He began to trace designs with his finger. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular, but the sum of his days on the road came back to him nevertheless. Even the times before, making money, or as much money as he could when he wasn’t being screwed out of it by unscrupulous shop owners.

  Then finding himself a survivor after the dead began to walk. Thinking his whole life’s work had been a waste, that his carefully honed talents for piercing and body suspension would never come in handy in this brave new world. But he had underestimated one thing: human depravity.

  True enough, a few of the biker gangs and warbands he had met on the road had been happy to trade with him for earrings, subdermal implants, transscrotals, and the like. But mostly it had been his ability to inflict horrifying, irreversible body modifications on the enemies of those in charge that had kept him in loot by trading. After hanging the brother-in-law of a cannibal tradesman by the balls (which sounded like the sort of thing that people just said, but for Kenny was just another day at the office) he remembered the chieftain slapping him on the back and calling him “one of us.”

  “One of us.”

  A killer. An eater of people. Not much different from the walking corpses, in point of fact. Still, Kenny didn’t mind. The new world was kinder to him than the old. He’d been cheated out of more than his fair share under the old rules. Now he made his own rules.

  ***

  Kenny awoke with a start. He’d fallen asleep under the ministrations of the warm, soporific sun. Now, though, it was getting chilly. The sun had set and Troy the frat boy was nowhere to be seen.

  “Fuck.”

  He jumped to his feet. The little shit had run off on him. Well, he wouldn’t get far. Not after the way Kenny had seen to him. And if the little shit had thought Kenny had been rough with him before, wait until his dick was attached to his sternum, his legs were attached to one another at the thighs, and his tongue was permanently stretched out of his mouth. He’d be begging, as best he could with his permanently open jaws, to go back to the way things had been.

  Kenny scanned the tree line, thinking it couldn’t be too hard to find some sign of Troy’s passing. He wouldn’t be moving at top speed, after all. But, then, Kenny wasn’t exactly an expert tracker. The moon was full and bright, so thank God for small favors, but Kenny couldn’t see any sign of the kid’s passing.

  Also, his own neck was in one piece. He reached up, pawing it as if to check. The bike hadn’t been kicked over or ransacked, either. If he’d been the frat boy, he certainly would have tried to take the bike, or at least steal some shit from it. Kenny ran his hands through his saddlebags. The stores were meager, but they were still all there. Maybe Troy hadn’t had it in him to slit Kenny’s sleeping throat, but certainly he would’ve stolen a damn Dasani from him before running off.

  He turned back to face the decrepit mansion.

  “He must still be in there.”

  Kenny checked his belt. All of his tools were sharp, cleaned, oiled, and glistening in the moonlight. He ran his fingers over the tops of a few, before finally settling on a closing clamp. He hated to use such a finely tuned instrument for gorilla work like this, but the end of the world didn’t leave a whole lot of room for pickiness.

  He strode towards the house. Troy’s earlier performance had satisfied him that there were no snipers lying in ambush. But something had gotten the frat boy. Most likely, a lone ghoul or two had taken up residence in the place – or had simply died there and never left. Maybe an old grandmother had died in her bed of an aneurysm, or perhaps a nice little all-American mom had poisoned the rest of the clan. He figured there would be at least two corpses: Troy, plus the one that had killed him.

  Troy wouldn’t be much to worry about, incapacitated as he was. Then again, Kenny mused, the ghouls didn’t care about pain. Maybe undead Troy had ripped himself free, regardless of the pain. No, that couldn’t be true. Kenny didn’t half-ass his work. Maybe a corpse would rip its own ear off, but that arm wasn’t coming loose from the side where it had been attached any time soon. No, the Troy-ghoul at a minimum would be crippled.

  So there would be one dangerous ghoul, one semi-dangerous ghoul, and maybe a few others. Best to take them one at a time, Kenny figured. He could wait. Corpses were dumb, and he had dispatched quite a few in his travels.

  He laid his size-12 boots down on the first rotting step of the porch. He felt the whole plank creak and nearly give way. Deciding to skip that step, he stepped straight onto the porch. It creaked, and the timbers bowed but held his weight.

  “This whole fucking place is falling apart,” he muttered.

  That at least worked to his advantage as he pried the door handle out of the rotting wood of the front door. He crouched down and shone a flashlight through the hole he had just created to make sure no skeletal, paper-skinned fingers were reaching through to g
rab him. Satisfied, he opened the door, keeping it between him and anything that might be raging out from the inside, and keeping his weight hard against it for the same reason. No surprising spider-corpses attempted to scuttle through and snatch at him.

  Satisfied, he peered around the door. Nothing was immediately apparent in the shadows, so he shone the light inside the room, and nearly gasped before getting hold of himself. In all his time on the road in the post-apocalypse, nothing had ever brought him up short quite like this. There was no blood, no severed body parts, and no corpses. No horrible implements of torture. No remains of cannibalistic proto-humans. Nothing that might have otherwise caused a tough son-of-a-bitch like Hammerhand Hughes to gasp.

  No. The room was filled with dolls. Dolls sat in rocking chairs, expressions of dead glee literally painted on their faces. American Girl dolls, still in their original boxes or Kenny wouldn’t have recognized them, lined shelf after shelf. What little furniture there was in the room was out of the way, up against the walls, and wholly dedicated to the task of showcasing a doll collection which would’ve been more than sufficient to please all the children of this small college town, if not all of Michigan, and yet had been gathered in a single spot.

  There were Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls that Kenny recognized from his youth. Cabbage Patch Kids. That had been a craze once, and if Kenny didn’t miss his mark (although he had no way of telling one way or the other) he would’ve guessed this was a complete collection of the mid-80s staple.

  Not all of the dolls were for fun and play, though. Some were fine porcelain models, which even Kenny, who had literally never given a moment’s thought to the prices associated with doll collections in his life, could tell were exceedingly expensive. Some, which were obviously antiques and—were there still a market for such things—would clearly be worth thousands of dollars, were behind glass.

  Kenny stepped into the room wide-eyed, and shone his flashlight in every corner. It wouldn’t do for a corpse to be hiding, E.T.-like, amidst the collection of dolls and suddenly come flying at him.