Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #1 | August 2015)

by Anthony, Michael

  He laid himself against the roof access shed in the middle of the roof for shelter from the wind and he closed his eyes. Thoughts of Dana made it difficult to fall asleep. He wished he could have shared some of the food and water with her. Even though she was a girlie girl, it seemed after she saved him earlier today that she might have had a shot of making it in this zombie infested miserable world. He remembered the few times he got to see her pretty smile. He thought about the horrible way that she had to die. Being eaten alive and having her skin torn from her body by those infected zombies’ sharp teeth. Could there be a worse way to die? Not likely.

  Knowing that she was probably right underneath him right now hissing and growling with the other zombies tore at his heart. He wiped a tear from his eye as he wished he could have saved her and wondered if he could have done anything differently. Then sleep finally took over and nightmares of the dead climbing from their graves to eat him haunted his rest.

  “A Story of Nothing, Least of All Living”

  Story #2

  By

  Jackson Hewlett

  Part 1: Knowing is Half the Battle

  Standing there beside his daughter's lifeless corpse, Blake pressed the gun to the zombie's head and pulled the trigger. A volley of fluid, skull, and soft brain popped in a froth of ruby red, overlaying the pavement with its color. He pulled the trigger again. This time aiming at the face, the face of eroding skin and flesh, the face of death. A hole opened up in the creature's forehead, and then Blake pulled the trigger again and again and again.

  It wasn't enough to kill the thing. He had to shower it in a hail of high-velocity metal until its head split open and blew apart there on the hot asphalt of the Florida road. So that's exactly what he did. 10 shots in a row, until the face wouldn't even have been recognizable even if it had still been human.

  He dropped to his knees and put his arms around his daughter. She had only been 14 years old, not even old enough to drive yet, but old enough to be killed. Her eye was missing and her throat had been gashed open. Part of her thick jugular vein was hanging free from the meat that had once been her neck. Her arm was broken, and her skull had a crack in it that was oozing forth thick blood.

  What in God's name was happening? It had all started so quickly, yet it all seemed to be running in slow motion. He knew he had made it to the edge of town. He also knew he had packed lightly, but well. His daughter was with him and that was all that had mattered to him really.

  But the advanced warning hadn't been enough. Somehow the general public had caught wind of it all before he could get out of the city, really get out of it. That's when it had hit, almost in a wave of chaotic insanity, the first of the undead overtaking the stupid, motionless people sitting in their cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Could anything have been more stupid? Where did the zombies even come from?

  In a rush of panic, all the people had tried to escape the metro area at the same time it seemed. But none of them could, so they just sat in their cars, burning gas and not even inching forward. Thousands and thousands of people, just sitting ducks. He was glad that he had been smart enough to pack several firearms and enough ammo to take down a whole fleet of whoever wanted a piece of him. Ammo didn't weigh much when it came down to it, but it packed a punch, right through zombie brains.

  But none of that mattered. Here he was, holding his daughter, tears streaming down his face. He couldn't save her, couldn't protect her, not when it had happened that quickly. He kept his eyes clenched shut, hot with the anger that he felt for failing her.

  Then he opened his eyes when she twitched. In only the blink of an eye, she seemed to stir, and he thought that not all was lost. He looked into her eyes with a momentary smile on his face.

  She was okay, he thought. She had just been hurt. It was all going to be okay. Now they could escape together.

  She looked deeply into his eyes and then reached out her arms to grasp at him, maybe to hug him. With a moan that was more scream than anything else, she wrapped her fingers around his throat and yanked his face toward hers, her mouth open, ready to bite.

  He pushed his daughter away quickly, scooting himself back, almost in panic. Without even thinking, he unloaded the rest of the clip into her body. The last few shots penetrated her head, and she dropped to the ground completely lifeless. Only then did he realize that the early warning had done nothing.

  Part 2: Dying Is Another

  He stumbled away, unsure of what was really going on. All of his training seemed to have left him in a moment, even though he had been able to pull the trigger when he needed to.

  But into his daughter? He had blown his daughter's head off. How could he ever forgive himself?

  It hadn't mattered that he had been a government employee, a contractor for the base's medical wing. He and his daughter knew to leave quickly and had been told to do so. But she was dead now.

  He sat down on the side of the road, some 200 yards away from his daughter's body and stared blankly at his hands. They were covered in blood and sweat. He wiped his brow against his shirt and then checked the number of bullets he had left, pulling the clip from the firearm and then re-seating it before racking back on the slide. He would need to get the rest of the ammo from the car.

  When a zombie tore around the corner of one of the un-moving vehicles, a rotting corpse of a body that had once been a young woman, Blake hardly looked up before squeezing his gun's trigger twice. Both blasts hit her in the face, and the stopping power of each threw her head backward as she tumbled backward and fell. A thin pool of blood began to form, but it looked black instead of red.

  When Blake looked over to where his car was, he noted that the windows were smashed out and that nearby, another car was on fire. Several bodies lay in the street. But before he could even stand up and take further survey of his surroundings or even collect himself more, a man appeared at the far end of his vision, a man running down the open shoulder of the highway.

  "Help, Oh my God, help me," the man screamed, running straight for Blake with a crazed look in his eye. He was alive, very alive, but in a complete panic. There was blood running down his left temple.

  "Please, can anyone help me to …"

  His soliloquy was cut short by a single sound: Blake had put a bullet hole right in between his eyes.

  "There's your help," Blake said in a monotone voice. His hand was shaking, but not from killing the man. He wiped the tears from his eyes.

  Part 3: The Grave is the Final Moment

  Blake whipped around the Jeep Wrangler he had hot-wired to the shoulder and pressed his foot all the way to the floor, riding on the wrong side's shoulder all the way back to town. He looked beside him at the cache of weapons and ammo he had been smart enough to bring. They would only serve one purpose now.

  When he entered the city again, it was a gory scene of blood and terror. A woman in a yellow dress ran across his vehicle's path at the first street, two zombies in hot pursuit. The woman had thick blood running down her shoulder and her hair was matted with sweat. She was screaming loudly, and then she stumbled.

  Blake jammed on the brakes, jumped out, and dispatched the first zombie with a clean shot to the side of its head. The second one proved to be more difficult as he corrected course right toward Blake. Blake's first shot hit the shoulder, but did not slow the undead thing down. The top half of its scalp and skull were gone, but from what he had no idea. It had its stomach slashed wide open, disgustingly wide with a bulbous sack of entrails hanging by a thread. But Blake didn't flinch, pocketing his pistol instead and un-shouldering his shotgun. One single blast bit through the entire neck, shoulders, and head of the zombie, a beautiful blast of meat and bone sent into orbit.

  What was left of the creature blew backward to the ground, and the woman started crying as she came toward Blake for protection.

  "Thank you. God, thank you. We have to…" she said, but she was cut short when Blake un-pocketed his pistol again and shot her in the head. He tho
ught he saw the spray of brains exit the back of her head as she fell, blood oozing down her forehead, down her neck, and onto her yellow dress.

  Blake got back in the Jeep and drove on. At the next intersection the scene was almost the same, except times 100. An entire mob of the undead could be seen from a distance running in his direction, chasing perhaps 10, maybe 12 survivors who had some distance on them. The faces of both the undead and the still living were a mix of wailing mouths that seemed to blend together in one harmonious sound of destruction and oblivion. One man tripped and fell before being consumed, literally swallowed up, by the mob of zombies as it overtook him.

  Blake parked the Jeep, removed his assault rifle and fully armed himself before taking a defensive position. When he brought the scope of the rifle to his eyes, the many faces came into sharp focus. It was still difficult to process just what he was seeing: hordes of terror, each with their own expression of death. Faces were peeled back to reveal teeth and black eye sockets. Arms were missing, and entire shoulders might have been blown away, yet these monsters would never stop. They would continue on forever, infecting and destroying, taking all to the grave with them.

  What had happened? He thought again. The government had assured them that this situation would never happen, that it was within their control. They had said that even if it did happen, it would be contained. It would never get so far out of hand. Now an entire city was in flames, and it was clear that the entire world was on the brink of going under. Life as he knew it before was over.

  And there was no stopping this, he thought, before picturing his daughter's lifeless face. Then her undead face flashed before his eyes, and for a second, he nearly started to cry before stopping the tears. She had been so beautiful before. Now she was just a lifeless corpse on some highway, a zombie that had been dealt with.

  Blake aimed the rifle at the man that was at the front of the advancing mob, the still living man with the best lead. He was a big guy, probably played sports, and he was wearing a regular t-shirt and shorts.

  Here was a guy who thought he was a survivor, Blake thought. He pulled the trigger once, the cross-hair right over the man's nose, and the man's head snapped back before he disappeared.

  Blake re-aimed his sights to the person who was now in the front of the group, the one most likely to make it. She was a business woman of some kind, in slacks and a blue blouse.

  "Nice blouse, moron," Blake said aloud and pulled the trigger, having put the cross-hairs right over where her heart would be.

  By then, some of the still living had realized what was going on and were trying to get off the street and into shops. But it was clear that many of the doors had been locked at some point.

  "Alright, let's hit zombies," Blake said, and standing up, he brought the assault rifle down and rapidly sprayed bullets into the oncoming wave of decay. None of them fell however, though blood sprayed from chests and stomachs.

  "Dammit," Blake said aloud and brought the gun back to his eye. Aiming at one large creature, he squeezed the trigger and shot it right in one of its eyes. The bullet tore through the socket and blew apart the back of the zombies head. It also fell and was devoured by the mob.

  By this time, the throng of death was not more than 50 yards ahead of Blake. Then 30. Then 15.

  This was it. The face of Blake's daughter flashed before his eyes again. They had been so close and yet so far away. Now they would always be in the same place.

  As the first reached him, one of the still living men, a working class man in jeans, came running at full speed toward Blake.

  "Hi," Blake shouted out, and pulling out his pistol, unloaded 3 shots right into the man's chest. There was no hesitation, no thinking. Blake shot three zombies next, one-by-one as they overtook another one of the still living. The woman, she had probably been a nurse actually and was still wearing her scrubs, looked up from where she had started to fall and caught Blake's stare, eye-to-eye.

  One shot to the forehead, that's all it took, and she was on the ground with the rest of them. There was no difference between the once dead and the once living. They would all be dead right here, today.

  No less than 10 zombies attacked Blake at the same time, a band of disease and destruction. He kept pulling the trigger and pulling the trigger. He kept shooting even as they were tearing off his legs, even after they had pulled out his eyes. Even though it meant nothing and didn't even matter anymore, he screamed and kept pulling the trigger.

  “Family Dinner”

  Story #3

  By

  Christina Estrada

  My mother's ruby frown was pressed together tightly, her kohl-lined eyes avoiding mine as she wrung together hands that bore an overabundance of jewel-encrusted rings. She looked to my father with wide-eyes and nodded ever-so-slightly in my direction, pleading with him to be the one to break the tension in the room. Father puffed up his chest, adjusted the lapels of his pin-striped suit, and shut his eyes as his nostrils flared and a grunt erupted from his throat.

  “Otto,” he began, jerking his head in my direction, “where is your eye-patch? You know how uncomfortable it makes your mother when you don't wear it.”

  My mother gasped, tugged on the pin-striped pant leg next to her, and looked away from the table. I glared straight at her and blinked only my top eye several times in a row, knowing she was watching me peripherally. Although she still pretended not to see the anomaly that was her son, her cheeks betrayed her as they swiftly turned splotchy and crimson. My sister Lucy gently touched my shoulder.

  She gulped down the large bite of linguine she'd just taken and said, “Why should he need to wear his patch? You'd think after nineteen years you'd be used to it by now! Plus, it's not his fault he's got three eyes, he didn't choose it, did he?”

  I sighed and slouched in my chair, letting the shagginess of my hair cover the third eye that sat in the middle of my forehead. Lucy, my best and only true friend, was trying to defend me and possibly make me feel better about my deformity, but her words still stung. Lucy's comment was meant more to jab at my mother's never-ending guilt that began at my birth, when I was discovered to have the defect. The doctors explained it as the only remnant from a twin that almost formed in the same womb. I guess that's the kind of thing that can happen when you mix fertility drugs with Valium-Vicodin cocktail.

  “OTTO, eat your dinner! Luzelle, don't speak to your mother that way,” my father barked in attempt to change the subject.

  “I can't eat this. The texture makes me nauseous,” I muttered, still slouching and crossing my arms over my chest.

  “You say that about everything I cook. Maybe instead of spending all of your time on video games and screwing around with knives you should learn to cook for your damn self,” my mother snapped.

  “You won't be so hostile toward my hobbies when the zombie apocalypse is upon us, Mother. And you know I can't eat pasta, yet you cook it every time Geoffrey has the night off. I never eat it, yet you continue to make it and insist I come to dinner. I would rather not eat than eat something that feels like worms.”

  My father slammed his fists on the table and growled, “Don't be difficult, dammit! EAT your FOOD. Stop all this zombie nonsense, too. Instead of preparing for some bullshit apocalypse, you need to prepare for your future. Your mother and I are leaving tomorrow morning for Athens. We will be gone for two weeks, and when we get back I want all of your zombie crap out of this house: no more swords, movies, books, or video games. Get rid of all that crap and I'll consider continuing to pay for your education.”

  I rolled my eyes and pushed away from the table. As I started toward my room, my father yelled, “I AM SERIOUS YOUNG MAN! You need to change that attitude or I'll kick your ass to the streets!”

  “Uh-huh, well, you'll be sorry when the zombies come,” I called back as I descended the stairs to my basement bedroom.

  A while later, as I was sharpening my favorite machete, there was a light tap on my bedroom door. Lucy slowly ope
ned the door and peeked inside with one eye. I waved my hand to say “come in” and she slipped inside and gently shut the door behind her.

  Picking a couple throwing knives off one of the shelves which displayed my collection of weaponry, she sat next to me on my bed and started doing some sharpening also. Although complete opposites from an outside perspective, Lucy and I had been the best of friends since she could walk. She'd always followed me around when we were kids, and although she grew up to be popular in school, she'd never turned her back on me. Lucy had always stood up for me when the other kids in our neighborhood poked insults at my abnormality. She was the most important person in my life, and the only one I had any form of real affection for.