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

by Wilsey, Martin (Editor)

  ***

  I had to pee bad when I woke up. I hesitated for a time, watching the mist flow across the forest’s floor. I felt scared to climb down, and considered just peeing out the door. However, if we all did that, we would soon have a terrible mess. I glanced around for my rifle, but Clarence had it in bed with him.

  I climbed down, and moved off a few yards. After doing my business, I noticed a piece of clothing on the ground. It was a rain-soaked, tie-dyed T-shirt with a rip down the front. I took it up the tree.

  “This wasn’t here yesterday.”

  “Maybe it blew here on the wind?”

  “There’s someone out there,” said Gordon. “A girl.”

  “This doesn’t feel right,” said Clarence. “If there’s a girl around, why doesn’t she just show herself?”

  Gordon looked at me. “Maybe she’s afraid she’ll get shot.”

  “It can’t be a ghoul,” I said. “A ghoul would be waiting under the tree.”

  We all were excited by the prospect of a female survivor, and searched the area. We dared not call out, lest we attract ghouls.

  The girl, if she existed, did not approach us.

  ***

  Late the next night, I awoke in fear. I heard a stealthy rustle in the undergrowth below. I rose silently, found the flashlight, and shined its beam out the doorway.

  “What?” Art whispered.

  Seeing nothing, I turned to the window.

  “What?”

  Still nothing. I turned the flashlight off.

  “I’m just hearing things.”

  ***

  In the morning, I found a pair of cut-off jeans. Our mood became electric.

  “Is she running around naked?” Lester asked.

  “No,” said Art. “She’s still got her underwear.”

  We passed the shorts around. It was like touching a girl second-hand.

  “Have any of you kids ever done it?” Clarence asked, then looked at his brother. “I know you haven’t.”

  Lester blushed.

  I exchanged a glance with Art. I was a virgin, and I was pretty sure that he was, as well.

  Clarence said, “Be honest. You don’t have to worry about peer pressure anymore.”

  I said, “No.”

  Art said, “I’ve kissed a girl.”

  Clarence blew a raspberry. “You can kiss your mother.”

  Art blushed.

  Gordon blushed before Clarence addressed him.

  Clarence said, “I know you’ve done it, here in this treehouse, and it wasn’t with a girl.”

  After a pregnant silence, we got it. I looked from Gordon to Clarence, incredulous and horrified.

  “You promised you’d never tell,” said Gordon, his voice quaking.

  “Things have changed,” said Clarence. “Each other is all we have now.”

  “There’s a girl in the woods!” Gordon turned his back.

  None of us had much to say, anyhow.

  ***

  A stick cracked in the night.

  We all came wide awake. Gordon grabbed the flashlight. Nothing stood below the treehouse, but a scarlet triangle lay on the ground a few yards off.

  “It’s her panties,” Gordon said, with a croak.

  He turned to jump down.

  Clarence grabbed him. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going to find her!”

  Gordon tried to fight him off, but Clarence was tenacious. For a moment, they teetered in the doorway. Clarence pulled Gordon back from the edge.

  “Don’t you see how weird this is?” Clarence hissed. “There’s no girl out there, it’s something else!”

  “You’re just jealous!”

  “Look how dark it is. Anything could be waiting for you.”

  “Then, give me the gun!”

  “No!”

  Gordon punched him in the gut. Clarence gasped helplessly and dropped my rifle as he fell. Gordon caught the weapon, and turned to me.

  “Give me a bullet.”

  I hesitated.

  “I’m going out, either way.”

  I obliged. Gordon loaded, slung the rifle, and jumped down. He paused to scan the light, then stepped away from the tree, and retrieved the panties.

  “Come out,” Gordon cried to the night. “We won’t hurt you!”

  Another stick cracked. Gordon aimed the light. At the beam’s limit stood a naked girl. The sight of her thrilled my body. Gordon ran forward. She lifted her arms, and hurried to meet him. Something glinted between her breasts.

  Clarence shouted, “Run!”

  Gordon skidded to a halt, and fumbled the rifle from his shoulder. He fired without aiming. The bullet punched into her gut, and didn’t slow her down. Gordon dropped the rifle, and clubbed at the lunging girl with the flashlight. Its beam lit her face.

  She was Doris.

  She embraced Gordon violently, dragging him to the ground. She wrapped her legs around him, ignoring his repeated blows, and clawed at his hair, trying to expose his neck to her bite. He dropped the flashlight, and caught her face with his hands, pushing her away. Doris sucked his finger into her mouth. Gordon’s bone crunched between her teeth. He screamed.

  Doris’s sisters emerged from the woods, and took Gordon by the legs. Doris rose, and helped them to drag him away. Gordon clawed at the earth. His fingers caught the strap of my rifle, dragging it with him into the dark woods.

  His screams slowly faded.

  “Do something,” Art cried. “Help him!”

  None of us dared to pursue. Clarence collapsed in tears.

  ***

  Later, Clarence said, “They didn’t act normal, I mean, not like normal ghouls. They acted smart.”

  “It was Doris,” I said. “She never was right.”

  “Yeah. I heard that she killed a boy once, but nobody could prove it.”

  “I heard she did it with a switchblade,” said Art.

  Lester exclaimed, “I saw that knife! It’s in her chest now.”

  A silence followed.

  Clarence asked, “Do you know how that knife got in her, Stan?”

  After another silence, I said, “No.”

  ***

  The next morning, we found the Delta Sisters besieging the treehouse.

  “We should leave,” I said. “Before any more come.”

  “Okay,” said Clarence. “Lead them off, then we’ll jump down.”

  I crossed to the window. Doris came around the tree to wait for me, while her sisters waited under the door. Doris looked up, and waggled her tits. I got a boner, and turned away in horrified shame.

  “I can’t do it.”

  “That’s all right,” Clarence said with shaky confidence. “We have enough food to last until they rot.”

  “We haven’t got much water,” I said.

  Clarence did not answer.

  Lester pointed outside. “What’s that?”

  Gordon’s corpse crawled toward the tree, dragging its legs. The Sisters had gnawed his meat off from the hips down. They attacked him now, and drove him back. Gordon circled the tree at a distance.

  Art broke down in wailing grief. Clarence drew Art into his arms. Lester joined their embrace. Then, Clarence looked at me.

  A part of me wanted to share the human contact, but a greater part felt repugnance, because of Clarence’s homosexual confession. I retreated to the window, and climbed out onto the roof.

  The Delta Sisters gathered below me.

  I regarded the ghoul girls. As far as I knew then, there were no girls left alive. As far as I knew then, the other three boys were my future. I felt cheated, and hopeless.

  Doris played with her breasts. She still looked good. I could not look away. No other woman had ever stood naked before me, and I believed that no more ever would.

  Imagining that she was alive, I opened my fly, and touched myself.

  Doris grabbed my emission from the air, and stuffed her fingers down her throat.

 
Revulsion turned my stomach. I dropped to my knees, and vomited off the roof. I loathed myself. The Sisters fought over the steaming puddle.

  Thunder roared. I thought that it was the voice of God condemning me for my sin. Then, the rain poured down.

  “Stan,” Clarence called from inside. “Rip up the roof!”

  He clambered out the window. I hastily closed my zipper. Clarence joined me on the roof. My cheeks felt scarlet.

  Clarence began loosening the tarpaulin. “We’ll make a rain catchment out of this,” he said. “Then we’ll have enough water to last until they rot.”

  Instead of cursing me, God had sent us a gift. I screamed down at the Sisters,

  “You’re going to rot!”

  As we worked, Clarence gave me a look.

  He asked, “Why did you climb up here?”

  My blush deepened.

  “Hey, did you think I was doing things down there, with my brother?”

  “No,” I stammered. “I just, I just couldn’t . . .”

  Clarence looked into my eyes. “We’re all brothers, now.”

  ***

  Another ghoul arrived that afternoon, shirtless, and with a weight lifter’s physique. Tooth marks covered his dense musculature. A length of corrugated esophagus flopped out of his torn throat. His face had been chewed to the bone, turning him into a walking skull with long, blond hair, and madly staring eyes.

  “He looks strong,” said Clarence in a worried tone. “He might be able to haul himself up here.”

  The Sisters attacked the new ghoul, trying to drive him off their territory. He knocked the two mutilated girls down easily, but Doris circled, and jumped onto his back. She wrapped herself around him, and bit the back of his neck. The Skull staggered. Then, he reached back, caught her head with both hands, and pulled. Her neck crackled and stretched, and her limbs released in spasms. He flung her over his shoulder. For a moment, she lay still on the ground, and I thought that he had really killed her, but then her neck contracted. She quivered, stood up, and spat out a mouthful of the Skull’s dead skin.

  The girl ghouls retreated from the tree. Doris led her sisters in an attack on Gordon, driving him out to a wider circle.

  The Skull approached the tree. He reached up, and his fingers nearly snagged on the treehouse’s doorway. We recoiled. The Skull clambered at the tree’s trunk, but he did not find the holds to climb.

  Suddenly, Lester cried, “Look!”

  A crowd of at least twenty ghouls approached through the woods, and more came behind them.

  Art chortled sickly. “They must be out of eats in town!”

  “It’s my fault,” said Clarence. “I made us hide out here.”

  “We’d have had to face them wherever we’d hid,” I offered him in consolation.

  “We’ll wait them out,” said Art. “Like we planned. We have plenty of water, and even if we run out of food, we’ll live for weeks.”

  “We won’t,” said Clarence, his voice a mixture of fascination and horror. “They’ll pile on top of each other, like army ants, and reach the treehouse. They’ll get us.”

  Lester curled into a ball, and wept.

  Art asked, “Isn’t there some way we can use the bullets?”

  My eyes fell on the camp stove, and an idea struck me.

  “We can make a bomb!”

  I grabbed the extra propane bottles, and the duct tape. I scatter-taped the .22 shells around the bottles, then taped the bottles to the burners of the stove.

  Art’s eyes bugged. “Are you nuts? You’ll kill us!”

  “It would be a better death than that,” Clarence said, tipping his head toward the swarming ghouls. “If we survive the explosion, head for the river, we’ll swim across.”

  My heart went cold. They had forgotten that I could not swim. I held my tongue, for our situation was desperate, and I owed it to them to try.

  With my heart pounding, I ignited the camp stove’s burners. Blue flames embraced the propane bottles. I tossed the bomb into the crowd of ghouls, and we cowered into the treehouse’s far corner, with our hands over our ears.

  I waited, and nothing happened. Just as I feared that the bomb had failed, it exploded. The world toppled in the shock. Small, bright holes opened in the planks all around us, as the bullets exploded. At the same instant, a column of tree litter and dead body parts blasted in through the doorway. In another instant, all was still. I found myself lying in a heap with my friends. My ears rang deafeningly. Clarence sat up, and shouted at me, but I could not hear him. I felt intact, so I gave him a thumbs-up. I climbed to my feet, teetered, and fell again. Clarence stood up at an odd angle, and helped me to rise.

  My head began to clear, and I realized that the floor now tilted. The explosion had uprooted the tree, and pushed it over on two of its major branches. We climbed shakily to earth. Ghoul fragments lay all around us, mixed with a ring of blasted forest debris. Some of the fragments still moved.

  Leaves rustled behind us. Doris emerged from the crown of our fallen tree. The trunk had shielded her from the explosion. She hissed like an angry reptile and ran toward us.

  We fled, kicking our way through the mounds of debris. We did not see Gordon lying in our path. The ghoul’s low profile had saved him from the blast. Clarence tripped over him, and fell prone. Gordon crawled up Clarence’s struggling torso, his jutting elbows lending him a semblance of a two-legged spider, and nuzzled under Clarence’s chin. Clarence screamed, but the cry drowned in a fountain of blood.

  I found a rock, and crushed Gordon’s skull, then I crushed Clarence’s.

  “Why did you do that to him?” Lester asked.

  “So he won’t have to come back.”

  We fled.

  Doris screamed, a chalk-board sound that raised my hair.

  We outraced her. The river gleamed through the trees ahead, and we had nearly reached it, when we heard a susurrus. From the direction of Oswego, hundreds of ghouls shuffled toward the tree.

  “Be quiet,” I warned. “They haven’t seen us; the explosion must have attracted them.”

  Doris came into view, between us and the crowd. She pointed toward us, and screamed. The crowd paused. She screamed again, and they turned to follow her.

  I said, “Shit!”

  We ran.

  At the river’s edge, Art and Lester slid down the muddy bank, and into the swirling water. I hesitated.

  “Come on, Stan!”

  I stepped off the edge, turning to claw at the mud as I fell. The river took me up to the waist. The bottom sloped to infinite depths. I froze, clinging to the bank, while Art and Lester waded to deeper water.

  “Come on!”

  “I can’t!”

  “Jesus, he can’t swim!”

  They splashed back to me.

  “Hang on to us, we’ll keep you afloat.”

  “I can’t, I’ll drown! You guys take off.”

  “We won’t leave you.”

  They remained at my side, my last brothers, as Doris appeared on the bank above us. She hesitated there.

  Suddenly, a female voice echoed from downriver.

  “We’re coming!”

  Two girls in an aluminum canoe paddled furiously toward us.

  Doris screamed at the girls, then jumped off the bank at me, her fingers clawing and her mouth open. I thrust out my left hand, and caught her under the chin. She pawed at my face, but I had the reach on her. Then Doris grabbed my arm, trying to force it down. I was stronger, but I could not release her. We stood locked in the final step of a death-dance, on the slippery edge of the river’s abyss. I realized with horror that my only chance was to hurl both of us into the current.

  Then sunlight glinted from the switchblade knife in her chest. I yanked the knife out, and drove it through her eye, into her brain. She collapsed.

  The girls beached the canoe beside us. We climbed in, and they paddled away just as the crowd of ghouls arrived.

  “We heard your bomb from our school,” said
the girl in the stern. “We thought no one else had survived!”

  “We’ve been hiding in the woods,” I said. “Are you from Dyke Island . . . I mean, Esmeralda Smith?”

  She giggled. “Yeah, we’re from Dyke Island.”

  ***

  Well, Son, that’s how it happened, all that I know of it, at least. I see your tears, but I’m an old man, and I’ve lived a good life. The time has come for you to do your duty, so I don’t have to come back.

  I love you, too.

  7 A Slow Leak by Cameron Smith

  The ocean beat the shore in rhythmic waves as the nineteen-year-old boy trekked through the cool sands beneath a hazy gray sky. He was dressed in a filthy t-shirt and black jacket, cargo pants and combat boots, and a beaten, blood-stained aluminum baseball bat dangled at his side like a samurai sword from a loop of cord strapped to his belt. A large Ka-Bar was sheathed against the opposite thigh. Otherwise, he was weaponless, and had run out of food days ago, water last night.

  Far off down the coastline a figure strolled his way. It neither ran nor lumbered, but walked in the manner of the living. The figure grew and the boy said to no one, “It’s not an Eater, man. You can always tell the difference, Billy.”

  Before long he could make out the figure: older, late thirties maybe, with long, straggly black and silver-streaked hair, full beard. Drawing nearer, he saw weapons—a machete, a few knives, a pistol—along with canteens and a camper’s backpack strapped to the man’s frame. The economy of his stock and armory betrayed a man accustomed to the new era of survival.

  The boy grew nervous but was too curious to turn tail. “I don’t know, Billy, what do you think?” he asked aloud, then said nothing more. Both men stopped with twenty feet between them.

  “I didn’t think you were one, not the way you moved,” said the man in a gravelly monotone. “You bit?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Well there ain’t no of fuckin’ course about it. What’re you doin’ out here?”

  “Came up from Sac. This town over here has a lot of ’em roamin’ around, mostly older ones, not really a threat, you know, but they’ll getcha, too. They don’t come around the beach much. I think they don’t like the water or…”