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

by Wilsey, Martin (Editor)

  Taking down the flimsy rod of a cleaning skimmer from hooks on the fence, he hefted it as if judging a blacksmith’s blade. Gilbert whittled the plastic end into an elongated point. It made an excellent spear point. With a thrust, Gilbert speared Mr. Danson in the his shoulder. Mr. Danson didn’t seem to care. After taking another thrust into his chest, Mr. Danson ignored the fact that he should be bleeding to death. Instead of slowing from terminal blood loss, the arms thrashed with the enthusiasm of a cheerleading squad on homecoming night.

  “That should have cut through the heart,” Gilbert said, confused and frustrated, and also soul-wretched that he felt compelled to kill the man who had helped him clean up his little yard when the last windstorm had swept through the neighborhood. He punched the long pole downward, puncturing somewhere between an eye and the nose cavity. The stick came to rest within the eye socket, stuck fast and refusing to pull free. Mr. Danson had finally found the slumber which his new state had refused. Thus Gilbert realized that the brain was the critical organ to destroy.

  Grabbing an extension cord, he tied the doorknob off onto a spigot, sealing the office from the pool area. Moving along the fence, he then ensured a second time that the gate was locked. With little else he could see to do that would further barricade the pre-fab dwelling, he took a seat at an umbrella-topped table and just breathed. The shotgun lay across his lap, pointed towards the door, finger flickering atop the trigger guard like a nervous cat’s tail.

  Most people at this point would have passed out from sleep deprivation, physical exhaustion, and multiple chemical dumps that delivered the highs and lows, but Gilbert lived and worked at night. So when the soft moans grew behind the corner of the wooden fence, he was not only awake, he was primed. This travelling mob reinforced his belief in the drug and alcohol basis for this abysmal early morning. After Mr. Danson, Gilbert was done giving normal excuses to anything that happened.

  Survival had always been something he was fortunate with, or rather he was good at getting by. Despite the muddied illusions of fate and luck, Gilbert had every intention of being prepared to make it out of this thing alive. Once again, he sized up the situation. Multitudes of people were out to get him. Luckily, very stupid people. He did not have the mental energy to question this new situation that had become his world. It just was.

  “Ok, remember the basics,” he said to himself. “Water, food, security.” With each of these he flipped out a finger to count them off. Patting himself down, he mentally made a list of anything that would fit into the three categories. First, gather anything useful out here. Then he would start checking the room inside.

  Peering into the trash can, he saw that Mr. Danson had actually done his job. It was empty except for a single plastic bottle. Good enough to hold a bit of water, though. He lifted it out and a sloshing gave him hope. Germs be damned if there were a few ounces of some sugary drink. But his hopes were dashed as he lifted it to the light. It contained not a few swigs of soda, but the thick juice of tobacco spit that clung to the sides like motor oil. Mr. Danson was no junkie but he did have his habits. No thanks.

  Last summer there had been a vending machine; now nothing remained but a rusted, rectangular line where it had left its residue from years in the weather. Probably sold and the money spent that same day. A few cleaning supplies, an abandoned towel with one mouse-shredded end, and a stack of ash trays. He took a bottle from among the cleaning supplies, a near-empty bleach container. This could be used to purify water, though the bulky bottle was a hindrance.

  He peeked through the rear window into the office, as the pool area was now empty. The door, though slightly warped, had held from the fast-burning chemical fire. He entered, noticing the quiet after the recent terrible rhythm on the door. The search began. Behind the desk, covered by trash boxes and a cheap printer, was a mini-fridge. It delivered half a sandwich in a brown bag, four packages of cheese and crackers that could outlast the average human in shelf life, and a half-consumed off-brand sports drink. Checking his pockets, he counted eleven shells.

  “Dismal,” he said, shaking his head. “Sure could use that footlocker. Sure could use a beer.”

  As his head moved back and forth to spot anything else of importance, his eyes landed on another set of keys on a peg further down from the grill lighter’s now-vacant spot. Hidden beneath a fly swatter were the keys to the maintenance truck. It was a junker, but it had to run better than his car. He tore them down while taking a bite of cold sandwich.

  Scouting the window, he downed the last of the neon-green drink. The people outside had abandoned the door, except for the few charred bodies that slumped like fallen trees, and the burnt exiles were chasing a screaming lady into the darkness that led away to the back of the park. One stood beneath the light outside, swiping at a fat moth that seemed to perpetually elude capture.

  It was dark and quiet enough outside but for the swatting of one and far-off cries that settled themselves into the night. Closing his eyes, he relied on his hearing, which told him the group around the side of the pool fence were on the move. Another idea came to mind as his hand rested on a long stretch of wall switches. He glanced outside through a near window. Slumped bodies leaned against the door: the reason the fire had not burned through was that it had been smothered by bodies. Two of the burned husks pawed with malformed hands. Legs churned, their motion burned to little paddling gestures. One burned finger snapped off on the door like cracked clay. On the far end of the building was the old truck, but who knew what hid in the darkness beyond.

  His free hand counted shells once more and made sure the shotgun was full. The cheese crackers went into his other pockets as he swallowed the last bite of sandwich. Tapping his belt, he reassured himself that the .38 was still stowed. The near empty bleach jug was held alongside the truck keys in his left and the shotgun suspended steady over his shoulder.

  With the lid of the jug, he began flicking switches by the door. Lights flared all along the edge of the building. At the opposite end, overlooking the road, a floodlight shed its unnatural light on a crowd bent over in the street. Sounds began to match the scene: tearing and ripping of cloth, the shredding sound of something being rended apart. The thought streamed through his head as to what it could be: that bath salt guy in Florida, who he had seen on the news.

  “Murderers! Cannibals?” His mind was unable to process the scene. It reverted back to self-preservation.

  Quiet and careful, he sneaked out the door to the pool. With a final glance towards Mr. Danson, his body floating in the flotsam, he went through the back gate. Rounding the corner, he had to duck beneath a row of untrimmed bushes along the fence and building towards the truck. Something gave him pause.

  “Mrs. Norris,” he whispered to himself, as he hit the corner nearest the truck.

  There she stood. No walker, no cane, standing straight and strong as never before.

  “Mrs. Norris,” he whispered again. “Get in the truck, we’re getting out of here.” As he said this, she turned into the spectral light at her back. The side of her jaw was not only broken, but hung open, slack in perpetual awe. Through all the confusion of the night, the memory returned to him. “You were hit by that car.” That was his last thought before she lunged with the speed of one of her cats.

  With the shotgun shouldered and the pistol behind his back, he had a split second to react. He smacked her with the bleach jug, but it did little to divert her charge. As they toppled, he threw out his hands and the jug nestled beneath her chin, allowing her only to bite at the air above his chest. The fall knocked him on his back, the shotgun digging into his spine. With a howl of pain fueled by fear, he rolled to his left, then reached back and pulled the pistol while with his other hand he pressed the jug below the vicious gnashing of teeth. The jug slipped from beneath her chin like an oily piglet.

  Just as the teeth were coming down, the plastic grip crashed into the side of her head. It did not knock her out, or even hinder her attack, but it did
smash her head enough to the side that she bit uselessly into his sleeve and the air beneath his armpit. Without even thinking, he wrapped his arm around her neck and beneath her chin, closed off the airway and compressed the carotid to cut off blood to the brain. Little did he know, she needed neither to live. Still, the headlock was well suited to keep her teeth at bay.

  Gilbert rose to one knee and wrenched the hold as tight as he could, so tight that her writhing strength toppled him backwards yet again. Falling to his back, he kept his arms in place. His one thought was the wish for her to pass out soon. Yet when they fell, he hit his back again and she crashed hard, forehead first, with a crunch of bone. On impact, she stopped moving.

  Thinking she had finally succumbed to lack of oxygen or blood, he slipped from beneath her clawing hold. Her body did not slide off as it should; rather, her head stuck fast to the edge of the concrete. Leaning low, he saw the truth of it. She hadn’t passed out at all. She had landed on a protruding piece of rebar that stuck out of the ground. What once held a parking block in place now held Mrs. Norris to the crumbling edge of the concrete. Revulsion skewed his face, but the sound of more people moving and groaning in his direction sent him back into survival mode.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Norris,” he said, but still scuttled to his feet and ran towards the truck without looking back.

  None were near enough to intercept him, and he got to the driver’s door an instant before any others. The key fit, but first he pressed on the clutch so it slid backwards. Chuga, chuga, chuga, vroom, it started with some reluctance and he churned broken asphalt all the way to the wreck of his car. There was just enough time to grab the footlocker from the back seat and throw it in the back before the pack of bipedal wolves got too close for comfort. More gravel flew and the road became nothing but a blur that evolved into a breath of light at the eastern edges some distance down the road.

  14 Crave New World by Adrian Ludens

  Her customers craved a fix and Mara did her best to make sure her supply kept pace with the growing demand. It was nerve-racking, demanding, and deadly work but she was driven and determined to survive.

  Mara crouched, concealed and waiting, with her finger on the trigger. A trickle of perspiration began a maddening insect-like crawl down her neck. She ignored the urge to move and waited for her target to step close enough for a sure shot. The zombie lurched past her as the bait squealed and strained at its bonds. She had been three years into her neurosurgical residency when the zombie outbreak had altered the world. In moments like these, her experience steadied her hands. At the last possible moment, she squeezed her rifle’s trigger. She saw a blossom of something that resembled raspberry jam seeping down the back of her prey’s neck. It was, by some quirk of fate, near the same spot that sweat still tickled Mara’s neck.

  The zombie collapsed. Mara scrambled to the fallen zombie, focused on getting it off the street and into the safety of her workshop before she encountered anyone. She crouched beside the zombie. The bullet slug had shattered two neck vertebrae and severed the spinal cord. It gazed up, paralyzed. A few inches higher and she would have wasted a bullet.

  Someone groaned. It was not the zombie.

  “Shit.” Mara looked up at the bait. The man she had gagged and trussed to the splintered wooden light pole jerked his body within the confines of the ropes. He had been one of those irritating bleeding hearts who insisted that zombies deserved limited rights as citizens, and be confined to secured areas, but under no circumstances should they be killed. She endeavored to see things from this point of view but could not. Not that she had tried too hard; zombies had killed her husband and daughter.

  The bait’s bulging eyes seemed even less human than the zombie’s as he fought to break free. Mara mentally chastised herself for botching the job. Hunted relentlessly by armed bands of survivors, zombie numbers had dwindled as a result. The hunters did not realize the zombies’ secret potential. As far as Mara knew, she was the only person to have discovered the value in harvesting from incapacitated zombies. She made her living off the recently resurrected. Thanks to their contributions, she could almost say she thrived.

  But now she had a loose end. Mara usually waited, letting the zombie bite and infect the blood of the bait first. Then she made the paralyzing neck shot, dragged her prey to safety, and returned to free the newly turned. Kill a zombie; create a zombie—that was her motto in what she had dubbed this Crave New World.

  Today she had let herself get careless. She had screwed up. Royally. She sighed, knowing she couldn’t let him go.

  The bait met her gaze, accusation in his eyes. He tried again to cry for help but the gag she’d stuffed in his mouth rendered his words inaudible. Mara chambered another round and shouldered her rifle.

  This time the slug tore straight through the brain, leaving behind it a path of irreparable destruction. Like the zombie outbreak itself, she realized.

  The report from the shot echoed once and faded. The tang of gunpowder lingered much longer.

  ***

  “Mommy, can I have another popsicle?”

  Mara frowned. She twisted in her lawn chair and regarded her daughter. “Skylar, you already ate a popsicle. One’s enough.”

  Skylar’s shoulders sagged but her voice rose. “But, Mommy, why can’t I have another one?”

  “Because I said so,” Mara said. As an afterthought, she added, “And because I don’t want you to get cavities in your pretty teeth.”

  Keith returned from the grill and sat down across from Mara. “Come on, hon. It’s summer. What better time to—”

  “Keith, please. I’m being a good parent here, okay? I need you to back me up, not run me over.”

  Her husband’s mouth drew into a straight line. “No more popsicles, Sky.” He leaned back and stretched out his legs. “How about you pick me a bouquet of dandelions instead?”

  The girl beamed up at her father. “Okay, Daddy. I’m gonna pick you some daddy-lions.”

  “We can’t spoil her,” Mara said after their daughter was out of earshot. She felt defensive, and the summer heat had her on edge.

  “One popsicle isn’t going to spoil her,” Keith replied.

  “She needs to learn that if I tell her ‘no’ she can’t go running to you in hopes of getting a different answer.”

  Keith gave her a measuring look. “But what if I don’t always agree with you?”

  Mara felt her cheeks flush. “Are you trying to pick a fight now?”

  Her husband rose, and for a terrible moment, Mara expected him to strike her. But Keith, unlike her father, did not express anger with his hands. Instead, he knelt at her feet and took her hands in his.

  “Mara, listen. You’re being too hard on her. She’ll be grown up and moved away before we know it. You’ll think back and wonder where all the time went. You are a driven, determined, and intelligent woman, and I love that about you. But learn to relax and enjoy time spent with Sky, okay? Every memory, every giggle fit, every scraped knee, every birthday party, every Christmas morning... those are memories you’ll treasure. When she grows up and moves away, and it’s just you and me and the newspaper, you’ll wish you’d given her more popsicles, believe me.”

  Mara sighed. He was right—up to a point. “Fine. But when she starts to run wild, you can’t always be Good Cop to my Bad Cop. I need you one my side.”

  “We’ll present a united front,” he said, nodding. Keith’s cell phone rang. Mara knew from the ring tone that his work was calling. Keith was as a camera operator for one of the three local TV news teams. Some breaking news story needed his attention.

  “Fire? Car crash?” Mara asked after he ended the call. She had already resigned herself to losing him for the rest of the afternoon.

  “No.” Keith shook his head, frowning. “It’s an angry mob, down by the shipyards.” He stood. “They disembarked from a freighter that just docked. Then they just started attacking people.”

  ***

  Mara loaded the incapac
itated zombie into her battered but functional wheelbarrow and steered down an alley toward her current safe haven.

  She had selected a location close to the home she had fled and not yet revisited. She wasn’t sure she could face the memories head-on and had forfeited all her earthly possessions as a result. Instead, she had set up her base of operations in a ground-level apartment adjacent to downtown.

  She encountered no one on the return expedition, and for this, she felt thankful. Had she run into one of the gun nuts, she would likely have gotten nothing more than a high five for eliminating another zombie, but in their enthusiasm, they often asked too many prying questions. A zombie rights activist, on the other hand, might accost her—not physically but with words. They often gathered to chant and carry signs with slogans like “Zombie Lives Matter,” “Shame on Zombie Killers,” and her personal favorite, “Jesus: the Original Zombie.”

  The zombie’s eyes rolled in their sockets as she wheeled him into her workshop area. Whether he felt angry, afraid, or simply craved sustenance, Mara could not say. She paused to lock and bar the door. Then she dumped the zombie onto a rocker recliner and eased the blood-drenched back of the chair to a 45-degree angle. She fired up a generator she had salvaged from an abandoned auto body shop and dragged a wooden straight-backed chair behind the recliner.

  Mara plugged her most cherished possession into the generator. She had stolen a cranial bone saw from a mortuary. Like the auto body shop, the abandoned mortuary had not been entirely empty. Though any cadavers lying on the prep room’s embalming table when they reanimated were long gone, she heard several zombies still locked inside the coolers pounding on their trays. She’d listened to the sounds as she’d gathered all the tools she thought necessary for her survival, then fled the building, heart pounding.