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

by Wilsey, Martin (Editor)

  “Hello?” Stanley said, quietly, gently, not expecting an answer.

  And it reared up on its two arms, a ruin of a face, eyeless sockets and a bloodied mouth, a howl of recognition from its throat. Stanley screamed. The gulls joined in.

  ***

  He heard his father shouting. He did not understand the rush of words; their meaning escaped him. The roar of anger was so alien to the kindly, too-gentle man he knew. A stranger was yelling with his father’s voice.

  Stanley was disappointed to find himself in the small, now familiar, cottage bedroom. He was sure it had all been a nightmare, that he would wake up back at home, safe from the fears left unspoken by his parents—the “bad men” that had forced them to leave everything—safe from the monster on the beach. The memory of the dead man who came crawling for him rushed back. Stanley moaned and outside the room there was a sudden hush. The door opened and his mother appeared.

  Her face, red eyes and pale teary cheeks, hair wild like she had been running her fingers through it and pulling hard, was a picture of complete shock.

  “Mum….?” Stanley whimpered, and no other words came, he felt a pressure on his chest, a sense of rising panic and then tears. She rushed to the side of the bed and cradled him to her as he sobbed.

  “You’re safe, you’re safe, it’s gone now, you’re safe with me,” she said, rocking him, his face pressed up against her jumper, tears soaking the woolen fabric, a mother’s warmth and a boy’s wet cheeks.

  He heard his father enter the room.

  “Charlotte…?”

  “Deal with him!” she said in a hiss.

  Tom left the room, his expression a flux of concern and anger. Stanley let sleep take him, hoping that maybe he would wake up back at home this time. He no longer wanted to take part in any adventures the island had for him. He did not wonder where Mick was.

  ***

  “No, no, no, no!”

  He woke in the middle of the night to the sound of his parents whispering, crying, pleading with one another. Their fright, their sadness, compounded and became magnified within him. He could not tell if it was his mother or his father whose words had woken him. One was begging the other, but he could not understand what they were saying.

  ***

  Mick did not appear for several days after that. Stanley assumed his father visited him, because now in the evenings he would come home with a fish for dinner.

  Without Mick the prospect of meals became more difficult—neither of Stanley’s parents knew how to properly prepare a fish. Back in Dublin fish came battered and wrapped in grease paper, or crumbed and frozen in a cardboard box. Stanley eventually got used to detecting bones with his tongue and leaving them on the plate.

  “Eat up, Stanley,” his mother said each evening. “Eat everything on the plate. You need your strength.”

  She encouraged him to go out and play, but Stanley was still too frightened. He thought of the man, the dead man, on the beach. And he remembered something else. The bite marks on the face, large, not like a fish’s, but still smaller than a shark. He had pored over pictures of these constantly moving predators of the sea in a school textbook, measured the diameter of a shark’s jaw with his ruler during a lunch break spent hidden away in the library.

  After a week, Stanley and his mother left the cottage together. They went for a walk across the island, staying well away from the beach. Instead, they followed a narrow stone path, large enough for a horse and cart. Stanley’s mother held his hands and told him stories about the island she had learned, about how it had been settled by fishermen who sold their wares on the mainland to pay their rent. He imagined growing up here—well he guessed now he was—but back then before the monsters, when there was the option to one day leave. Few had apparently. Life on the island had been a comfortable one for its small population until the Trouble had started. His mother told him about that, too. That the bad men they had run away from were not just bad men, they were dead men who walked and ate the living. To hear her speak it sounded like a bedtime story.

  “Zombie” was a new word for Stanley. Knowing the name of the thing he had met gave him a sense of control. It was just another monster.

  She was still talking when he saw the girl. She appeared just over a rise, dark black hair and a pale face, looking right at him. “Mum,” he said, “Mummy!” tugging on her arm and pointing. His mother followed his outstretched hand—she had to see the girl, had to. There was a sudden rush of movement and the girl was gone.

  “Was that a zombie, mummy?” Stanley said.

  “I didn’t see anything, dear,” she said.

  “Mum! She was there, a girl.” His mother shook her head and Stanley impatiently let go of her hand and ran across the field, up towards the small rise. He was almost there when he heard the roar of the ocean. He stopped, and that now-familiar tightness in his chest seized him. Stanley turned around and walked back to his mother.

  “It was probably a bird, Stanley,” she said. “The dead can’t come here. We’re safe, remember?”

  ***

  Stanley went out for walks more often, but now finally alone. His mother didn’t seem to mind. He saw Mick, too, briefly. Stanley noticed the faint traces of a fading black eye. The adults were not talking to one another anymore. Whatever had happened, his parents and Mick kept it from him and did not even pretend at civility. But one thing Stanley was sure of was that it had been Mick who saved him from the zombie at the rock pool.

  Mick was strong. He had lived here all his life, survived even after the start of the Trouble, and still he was not afraid. Stanley was certain Mick had rescued him and was the real reason they were safe on the island. Maybe Tom and Charlotte would leave the island, once the dead had rotted away entirely, of course, and Mick could be his father.

  He did not see the girl during his walks, but he looked for her. Perhaps there was another family somewhere, hidden away.

  One afternoon the sky became overcast and just as suddenly rain began pouring down. Stanley ran, half-blind, across a muddy field. The winds that swept down across the low island buffeted him, soaking him in sheets of rain. He made it back to the cottages and saw Mick, standing alone and unbent in the wild weather, shielding his eyes to look out at the bridge to the mainland. Stanley turned to try and make out what the man was looking at. Through the rising mist and the wet he saw them. There was a mass of bodies, slowly making their way across the steel bridge. Zombies.

  “Go inside to your parents, boy,” said Mick. “Go inside and get yourself out of those wet clothes. I’ll take care of it.”

  “We should hide—maybe down in the caves!”

  “No! You stay away from the water, Stanley. You don’t go down there. Be a good lad, help your family, they’ll need you now. They’ll make the right choice for you—they’re good people, your parents. Not like the people who lived here.”

  Mick spoke firmly, but without anger or sadness. Stanley did not know what the man could do, why he was so sure of himself. He did not know what Mick meant about the people who used to live on the island. Of course his parents were good. They were his parents. It was Tom and Charlotte’s job to be kind to him. He heard Mick whisper “This is impossible,” and then—

  “Go inside now!”

  With that, Mick set off, down the path towards the bridge.

  Stanley turned and ran in to the cottage. “They’re coming,” he yelped, and his parents hugged him, brought him through to their bedroom and asked what he had seen.

  Charlotte fetched a towel to dry him while Tom paced the room nervously. The storm broke across the island in earnest, but over the crashing of the sea and the howling of the wind Stanley could hear the creatures moaning in the distance, getting ever closer.

  “Did he say anything to you, Stanley?” Tom asked. He looked up at him, this man who was looking at him in an odd, almost nervous way, as if he could barely bring himself to meet his own child’s gaze. “Did Mick tell you what to do?”


  “No, Dad…he just said to help you.” And Tom let out a sob and ran his fingers through his son’s hair.

  A loud, crashing roar shook the cottage. Mother, father and child screamed. It felt as if the island was about to be swept away by the storm. A shriek of metal cut through the bellowing confusion—and something else, a high-pitched wail that chilled Stanley to hear.

  Hours later the storm and its unnatural violence passed, the winds died, and calm descended.

  Charlotte left the bedroom. Stanley heard the sound of the front door creaking, his mother’s boots scuffing the stony path outside and then the strangest sound—her throaty laughter, the sound of birthdays and Christmas. Stanley and Tom emerged out to a changed world. The sun was shining, the waters around the island were calm and blue—and where the bridge once stood was a wreck of torn steel.

  Of Mick and the zombies there was no sign.

  ***

  Tom let his hand rest on her stomach, felt the kick. He smiled down at Charlotte and they laughed together, that old familiar sound they used to share as one. “We have to do it,” she said. And he knew she was right. He hated that she was right. Mick had saved them all once again, using the darkest rite in the island’s Commonplace book. Now the only living souls left on the island were Charlotte and himself, their unborn child—and Stanley.

  ***

  As his mother’s belly swelled, Stanley tried to do what Mick asked of him. He scavenged for supplies from the neighboring houses, helped around the house, made his mother hot water boiled over the fire in an ancient black pot, and went out with his father to cut turf. He stayed away from the sea. But even though he tried to be helpful, nothing he could do seemed to make them happy. His mother was given to short blasts of anger that Stanley could never predict. His father’s moods were dark, constant, and the air seemed to hum with resentment whenever he was nearby. Stanley learned to stay outdoors most of the day.

  Having to please his parents was a new and unusual activity for the boy—not as much fun as the games he had begun to enjoy before the storm tore down the bridge, running and hiding and teasing the adults to distraction. He was trying to be a “good boy”—and he was not very good at it.

  The balmy weather and calm seas that had followed the strange night when Mick had vanished held for weeks. In the distance Stanley would see the occasional zombie wandering across the mainland peninsula. They would appear lost, sad even, aimlessly shuffling through the wilderness—hunters without a home to return to, a family to feed, or a fire to sleep beside.

  Mick never returned. And Stanley’s parents did not go out to look for him. They pretended otherwise, but Stanley was certain Tom and Charlotte knew exactly what had happened to the kindly man who had welcomed them to the island. Their hostility towards him made Stanley feel truly alone for the first time and he had begun to consider his situation here on the island a little more carefully. Mick was dead, Stanley was sure of it.

  Tom brought the fish for dinner. He had no rod. Stanley did not ask about it, but not because he had not noticed. Now he knew not to speak if he could help it. Questions just made his father angry. On the days when he walked across the island by himself, the air growing colder with each day, Stanley could feel he was being watched. He knew it was her, the strange girl with the pale skin and dark hair. And in the distance he would hear the sea pounding on the rocks and taste salt on the air, like a promise made that was still to be kept.

  ***

  In the end it was Tom who did the deed and performed the sacrifice. The cold night air announced the approach of a bitter winter. The time was set. Mick had prepared Charlotte and him for what had to be done on this evening, explained each step of the ritual. He went to collect the rope from Mick’s house, the home of the island protector where it had rested for generations. He woke his son after midnight and made him get dressed. Then he led Stanley out into the night. The boy was unusually quiet. He did not ask where they were going. Instead he seemed to be listening. When they found the coastal path Stanley began to tug on Tom’s sleeve, urging him to go back the way they came.

  He picked his son up, held him over his shoulder and kept walking. He ignored Stanley’s shouts and only grunted once when a flailing foot connecting with his chest. Tom remembered the morning Mick came back carrying Stanley and shouting about the pact with the people below the waves. He remembered the sick realization of where he had brought his family, and how the man he thought was their friend offered no resistance as Tom beat him. How many generations before Tom’s family had tried to fight against the island before realizing there was no fighting the doom of that place? The island was safe. It always had been a refuge for those with nowhere else to run to in the wider world. People found their way there. More would come, perhaps with a boat. It had happened before, during times of war, occupation and famine. Zombies were simply the latest suffering to strike Ireland. Ochón agus ochón ó and all that.

  Tom had agreed to the sequence—Stanley, himself and his wife—a deadly and torturous arithmetic demanded by the Commonplace book. And then, if there was no one left living on the mainland to be drawn here, the people below the waves would come for the child three winters hence.

  Mick had done right by them. He had kept the pact and eliminated the threat from the mainland into the bargain by offering himself up as sacrifice. The allotted season had rolled around again too soon. The price would be paid twice this year.

  Stanley was screaming again, but in a panic now, as the sound of the ocean came ever closer.

  Tom made fast work of it. He had hammered in the stake the week before, to let the island’s masters know what he was planning. He threw the body of his still-screaming son to the wet ground, stunning the child, and then tied him securely to the stake. Trussed up like a deer after the hunt. Another year of food. Another year of safety. He had bought his family time.

  Tom walked away from the boy’s cries and followed the path back up to the cottage where he would spend the rest of his life. He got undressed in the dark and slipped into bed beside his wife.

  “It’s done,” he said, and kissed her shoulder. Charlotte took his hand and pressed it to her belly.

  ***

  They came for Stanley before dawn. Dark hair, deep eyes and pale skin. He saw the girl. She smiled at him with her sharp teeth.

  16 The Bridge by Martin Wilsey

  “I don’t know, Ray,” Allie said, as she lowered her binoculars. “It pretty looks quiet to me. There are two or three shambling around the mouth of the railroad tunnel.”

  “Two or three we can handle,” Ray whispered, out of habit, as he fingered the handle of his katana. “But do you remember that tunnel in Westport?”

  “How could I forget that shit storm? I miss those mountain bikes. They could haul ass,” she said, as she slowly slid back down the embankment on her belly. She quietly drew her own katana as she got to her feet.

  “There is a bike shop just on the other side of the train trestle in Harpers Ferry. If we’re lucky, it won’t be empty,” Ray said, as he started to quietly move. “We’ll follow the C&O towpath along the Potomac here and bypass that tunnel. It will loop around to the bridge.”

  The two moved along in the silence of experience. All their gear was stowed and padded for stealth. When they rounded the bend and saw two of the undead on the towpath ahead they didn’t miss a beat. Without even breaking pace they decapitated them both.

  One was a woman in a filthy yellow sun dress that was incongruous in the cool autumn air of late October. The other was a man in a state of long decay and desiccation.

  As always, Allie quickly and efficiently searched the bodies as Ray watched for threats. The woman had a purse still hanging across her shoulder diagonally. Allie dumped it out and discarded everything except a full tube of Chapstick and a quality fingernail clipper.

  The man’s pockets were empty but he was wearing a policemen’s gun belt. The holster was empty, but the belt had a single .357 magnum round still
secured in it.

  Allie drew it out like it was made of glass or gold and held it up to the light to examine it. When her eyes shifted to Ray, his smile was wide.

  “Three,” was all he said as she stood and drew her stainless steel Ruger SP101 from its holster and expertly opened the drum. It contained two rounds. This addition made three.

  Allie reholstered as they began to move.

  “Don’t say it,” she whispered.

  “Say what?”

  “You always say it. ‘Save the last two for us’.”

  “I don’t always say it.”

  “When it comes to my .357 you do.” Allie shook her head. “We each have 12 rounds in our ARs and you still have like fifty rounds of 9mm for your Glock.”

  “I don’t always say it.”

  Allie fell silent then because the train trestle bridge came into view. “Ray, look.”

  In the center of the bridge were four train cars about three hundred feet from each end of the bridge. Allie looked through her binoculars. There were two tankers of some kind, a passenger car, and a freight car.

  “Looks like we can get across. We should get moving. We need to find a place to bed down before dark,” she said, and Ray nodded.

  ***

  “Dammit,” Ray cursed quietly. “There used to be stairs that went up to the trestle here for the Appalachian Trail crossing.” They looked up farther. “We’ll go to the tracks up by this end of the tunnel and double back.”

  Ray led the way and as they moved the wind picked up. Autumn leaves were filling the air as the breeze turned into a constant wind.

  They emerged onto the tracks before they realized that not all the sound was from the rustling leaves. They were only a dozen yards from the gaping maw of the tunnel when they began to emerge. First a few, then a dozen, and suddenly hundreds.