Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #2 | September 2015) (4 page)

“Zombie Relations”

Story #4

By

Sakura Skye

Jenna flicked an eyeball off of her vest and readjusted her grip on the axe. It wasn’t her weapon of choice, but a girl had to be flexible during times like this.

“Keep moving,” screamed the voice in her head.

She wasn’t sure if it was a full on hallucination or her psyche’s way of keeping her motivated. As if a school bus full of monsters that used to be teenagers wasn’t motivation enough.

Jenna willed her legs to keep moving forward despite the fear that blanketed her. She kept her head on the swivel as she jogged across the campus green. Most of the time these things were loud, slow and clumsy. But occasionally you ran across a fresh one, somebody recently infected. They were fast and relentless. Those were the ones you had to worry about.

“We found survivors barricaded here at the West Halls Dining. Troy and Sam are going to load them up, Nikko, Rich and I are moving on,” came Tasha’s voice over the walkie talkie.

“Copy that, I will meet you guys by the South Halls Commons,” Jenna replied.

“Behind you,” whispered the voice in her head.

Jenna turned around just in time to catch a freshie racing up behind her. She brought the axe around like a baseball bat, swinging upward with all of her might. For a moment, she felt the blade stick in the skull but momentum carried it through, and the head of what used to be a young man split open. Jenna wound up for another swing as the body crumpled on the ground. She flinched when it spurted blood for a short moment. Jenna didn’t allow herself to linger. She had to keep moving. Aisha was somewhere inside this building. She had to find her before those things got to her. She had to save her baby girl.

“The war doesn’t care about your relations,” the voice screamed.

“As long as I know which voices are inside my head, I am not crazy,” Jenna whispered. She laughed to herself. It was a mirthless laugh. Her father, a Vietnam Vet, used to say the same thing all the time. At the time she thought he was in denial about his mental illness. Now, she wasn’t so sure he was as crazy as everyone thought he was.

Despite seeing it with her own eyes, she still couldn’t bring herself to name the monster she was facing. Zombies? Just saying it out loud sounded ridiculous. She was a rational and pragmatic woman, not a crackpot conspiracy theorist. And yet, here she was, checking her hair for brain matter as she tried to rescue her daughter from becoming one of the evil undead. That was the problem with the truth; sometimes it was so crazy you couldn’t face it without losing your mind.

Jenna made it into the building and decided against the stairwell. Being trapped in a concrete tube with unknown numbers of hostiles waiting on every landing didn’t seem like a good idea. She hit the call button and breathed a sigh of relief when the elevator doors opened, and nothing jumped out at her. She waited until the doors closed behind her before she checked her weapon. She had a full clip and one in the chamber, she was ready to rock and roll.

It was her father who had insisted that she learn to use a firearm. Back then it had been part of his Black Panther Party, conspiracy theorist mentality. He believed that it had been the government who broke up the Party, flooded the streets with narcotics and was running experiments for biological warfare on unsuspecting citizens. Turns out he was right about everything. He just didn’t live long enough to be vindicated.

The last time Jenna spoke to her daughter she had moved to the roof with some friends. They could still get a cell signal from there, and they might have a chance of being noticed by a search and rescue team from up there. Jenna told her to sit tight and stay there no matter what. That had been two days ago. She hadn’t been able to get in touch with her since.

When the elevator door opened, Jenna had her axe at the ready. She braced for impact, hoping that what she found would be hungry, dirty teens. Instead, she was greeted by silence. The knot in her stomach tightened as she stepped onto the roof and let the doors close behind her.

“Movement is life,” barked the voice in her head. The trouble was, she didn’t see any movement. No bird in the sky, no teens, no infected. There was the smell of coffee in the air. Jenna walked over to where somebody had rigged up a make, shift kitchen, complete with a toaster oven and a hot plate. The coffee was still warm, so she knew they had been here recently. Without any way to get in touch with Aisha, Jenna would have to wait for them to return.

“You need six eyes. Charlie doesn't play by any rules,” whispered the voice. The hairs on the back of Jenna’s neck stood on end as she crouched down by the coffee pot.

“Goddam monster,” she grunted as she swung her axe. She caught the zombie clean in the rib cage but the head of her axe lodged in its sternum. Blood poured out of the cavity in its chest. Jenna took a look at the monster before placing her boot on its chest and yanking her axe out. He hadn’t lost color yet. By the amount of blood, he was leaking and the lack of aggression in his face she knew he had only turned in the last hour or two.

Panic gripped Jenna. Her daughter had been here. If an infected person found their way to the roof, where would Aisha run to? There wasn’t anywhere to hide up here. Jenna scanned the rooftop. How the hell had the infected managed to make it up here? After about a day they all lost the ability to operate simple machines, like door knobs and buttons.

A moment later she got her answer. The stair access door swung open, and two freshies stumbled out. The first one rushed Jenna; she caught it on the side of the head with the flat of her axe. The second followed close behind, taking advantage of her momentary loss of balance. Jenna hit the ground with a thud. The only thing between her and the monster trying to infect her was the body of her most recent kill. The infected teen snapped and snarled at Jenna, just inches from her face.

“Kylie?”

The freshie paused momentarily, and Jenna knew it was her. She had met the girl last month when she came to visit Aisha.

“Don’t you hesitate, because Charlie won’t,” bellowed the voice in her head. It was right. Jenna pulled her Glock from her holster and turned her head away from the snarling girl. The bang of the shot would surely attract more of the infected. Jenna had to get off of the roof before they overran her.

She kicked furiously at the two bodies, wiping Kylie’s blood off of her face before making a dash for the door to the access stairs. The steel bar that had been used to keep it closed wasn’t damaged. Somebody had intentionally opened that door. Jenna replaced it and grabbed a few packs of instant noodles from the pile of food on the floor. It was time to get the hell out of there.

There are moments in life that you never forget. They never fade or lose their ability to bring tears to your eyes. Most of the time, when you are having one, you are unaware of how deeply that moment will affect you. But sometimes, on very rare occasions, you know that you will never be the same again. When Jenna saw the stunted shuffle of the girl, she knew it was one of those moments.

The wind caught her hair and made it dance for just a moment. How many hours had she spent trying to get that girl's hair to lay down? Jenna didn’t move. She needed to go, but she couldn’t look away.

“Aisha,” she whispered. The girl shuffled towards Jenna, silent and disoriented. Her soft brown eyes were still open, but the light in them had gone out. All that was left was the husk of the happy freshman she had been. Her skin and hair were all intact; she wasn't raging yet. Inside, some part of her was still fighting to hold on to who she was. Some small piece was still waiting for her mother to come and rescue her.

Jenna dropped the axe and walked over to the infected girl.

“Aisha, it’s mommy. I came sweety,” she announced to the girl she knew couldn’t answer her anymore. Tears rolled unbidden down her face.

Hours.

She had only been infected a few hours. Jenna began to think of all the things they did that morning that delayed their arrival. How many of those tasks could be put off for another day? Now her only child was among the infected, and there was nothing she could do to save her anymore. Something fragile broke inside Jenna, and she was quite sure she would never be able to mend it.

“Jenna, we are about ready to go. I see some movement in your direction. You need to get out of there now,” came Troy’s voice over the radio. The sound agitated Aisha. She flinched and grunted as if fighting an unseen enemy.

“The war doesn’t care about your relations,” screamed the voice in her head. Only this time she knew whose voice it was.

“You’re right, it doesn’t,” Jenna agreed as she lifted her gun and fired a single shot. The bullet passed straight through the girl’s head, leaving splatter everywhere, red and thick. Jenna walked over to the body and fired once more for good measure.

“Zombie,” said Jenna. She had named it. The thing she had killed was not her daughter; it was the thing that killed her daughter and took up residence in her skin.

“Keep moving! Movement is life,” instructed the voice.

“Jenna picked up her axe and holstered her gun. She stepped onto the elevator and prepared to fight her way back to her team. She reminded herself that they had managed to save a few, so it wasn’t a complete bust. It wasn’t exactly a victory either. Jenna pulled her goggles and face mask on and prepared to even the score a little.

When the elevator doors opened, Jenna greeted two zombies with her axe. She wielded it like a propeller, swinging left and right in a wide arch. Bodies dropped and stayed down, leaving a slurry of congealed blood and soft tissue in her wake. By the time she made it out to the green, she was covered in blood. Jenna crossed the grass at a dead run, without looking back. She could hear the growing crowd of the undead giving chase.

“They will take everything from you if you let them. Even your life. The only way to keep living is to be prepared to die and take them with you. They love life, so we have to love death,” the voice instructed.

“I hear you, Daddy,” Jenna huffed.

Jenna dropped the axe and pushed herself to run faster. She only had one chance at this. Jenna turned down an alley between two lecture halls. The zombies followed. She could see her team on the other side.

“Start them up! I am coming in hot!” Jenna screamed as the zombies began to bottleneck.

Clearing the alley, Jenna pulled two grenades from her vest and tossed them over her shoulder. The boom was deafening, and the force of the blast knocked her off her feet.

“GET UP,” demanded her father.

Jenna obeyed, stripping off as much of her blood-soaked clothing as she could while running for the departing vehicles. The dust and the ringing in her ears left her unfocused, but she kept running. A hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her inside the Hummer as the team sped off.

“Are you okay?” Troy’s concerned face came into focus.

Jenna accepted a bottle of water from him and nodded.

“Did you find who you were looking for?”

“No, she wasn’t there.”

“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically.

“Don’t be. This is war, and the war doesn’t care about your relations.”

“The Stranger”

Story #5

By

Samantha Hames

She was quick. She knew it, felt it in her bones. After a life spent feeling inferior - the runt of the litter - she was finally showing the world what she could do. If only the smug, self-satisfied girls in the office could see her now. If only her parents could see her, or that teacher from high school who told her she didn’t have the right look to make it in life.

Hell, I’ll even take her, she thought glumly, whilst picking through a box of bloated Twinkies.

The woman, attracted by the harsh crackle of plastic, suddenly stopped her mournful lowing and started to make her way across the room. It had been a month, maybe even two, since patient zero had smashed his way out of that quarantine room in Toronto, and Kate had all but lost the instinct to flee. The way the world was now, well, it was hard to see the point of running away from one rotting stinker only to dive straight into the arms of another.

She stood motionless, aware that the woman couldn’t see her, but would find her anyway – even this slight sound had set the poor beast off on a slow and shambling road to mindless destruction. She also knew that if she took a step to the side, the dead woman would probably just keep clawing at the wall behind her until those mottle green legs rotted to dust.

They weren’t frightening these things. They were just plain sad.

Kate picked up her machete as easy if it were a butter knife and sunk it straight into the woman’s skull. She dropped to the floor with barely a sound, just a quiet splash as her body hit the waterlogged floor. It was time to leave. There was nothing left to loot, if looting is what you’d still call it - just like the five other stores in the neighborhood she’d searched this week.

She dropped to the ground to pick up her machete. There was a pool of greenish brownish water covering the floor of the place and she retched as the motion of her searching hands threw up a smell which reminded her of the rotting deer her father had found in the woods when she was seven. It was murky enough to render her hands near enough invisible.

Then, suddenly, she was dragged into the murk and stink. A cold dead hand closed tight around her ankle and, for a moment, she was too surprised to react. The taste of the water filled her mouth and she thought of her mother, sitting in that chair with a bubbling cavern of blood and flesh where her skull used to be.

It was the sound of colliding teeth which brought her back. It must have been delicate as a whisper among the frantic splashing and panting, but to her, it sounded like bones crunching. The woman, machete still embedded in her skull, was crawling up Kate’s leg now, convinced that she had her prey. Kate kicked wildly with the other, using her heavy combat boots to land a harsh blow to the woman’s face.

She really did hear bones crunch now. The woman’s rotting nose finally lost its moorings and hung impotently from a single scrap of blue grey skin. The exposed flesh behind it did not bleed – just hung there like gone off turkey strips. She kicked again, wrenched her other leg free and launched herself at the zombie. She took her hands, these powerful hands, and plunged her fingers straight into the eyes of the thing, without fear or caution.

This time the blood swelled over her hands, but the decaying tissue yielded without resistance. The woman was flailing now, gnashing her teeth still, and making a sound like a dog growling. She soon stopped though, when Kate felt the scratching splinter of bones and sockets give way to a spongey mass which slid over her fingertips.

‘That was reckless,’ a voice barked from the darkness, ‘you could have been bitten.’

Kate felt the fear rise in her throat. She might not be scared of these guys, but she’d seen plenty on her travels to know that a stranger did not equal a friend. She did the only thing she could do and raised her hands, palm outwards, as a clear gesture of surrender. She sat, still astride the woman who had so nearly been her end, and wondered how this chump has managed to get the jump on her.

She was facing away from him, so she could not see if he had a weapon, but she knew the chance of an unarmed man in these parts was about as likely as her mother and sister walking through the door.

‘Thanks for your concern,’ she answered, ‘How long have you been watching me?’

‘Not long,’ the man said, ‘but long enough to wonder how you’re still alive. Were you bitten?’

‘No. I was careful. I’m always careful.’

‘Then turn around – slowly.’

Kate heard the unmistakable whisper of a rifle butt moving through the heavy air, so she kept her movements measured, as she rose to her feet and turned to face the stranger. He was tall, dressed in faded hunting fatigues, and sported a pallid face covered with patches of graying stubble. He didn’t look particularly healthy, but he didn’t look starved either. He stared at her, both with his own dark eyes and with the barrel of a Ruger .22 rifle.

‘Do you live around here?’ she asked gently.

The succession of empty grocery stores was starting to make sense.

‘You’re the reason there’s nothing left, right? This is your spot.’

She thought she saw him lower the gun, just a little.

‘I picked this spot clean weeks ago,’ he murmured. ‘There’s nothing much left round here.’

Then, he reached into the pocket of his bottle green jacket and pulled out a cereal bar. He thrust it in her direction, broaching the space between them like it was quicksand.

‘You look hungry. Go on, take it, I’ve got plenty.’

Kate hesitated and a million thoughts passed through her mind. The last time that she had taken food from a stranger, he had decided that he was entitled to take whatever he wanted from her in return. It had not gone well for him. But she hadn’t eaten in two days and the gaudy yellow packaging called to her. It was probably stale, but her mouth still watered. She reached out and gingerly took the snack. She pocketed it for later – eating it now would only make her look weak.

The man lowered the gun and took a step forward. Kate immediately took one in the opposite direction and there they stood for a few moments, drinking in the sight of each other.

‘My name is Sam,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I startled you. I heard a noise and I haven’t seen anybody else for weeks, so I just assumed it was one of those guys.’

He gestured at the body of the woman with the butt of his gun.

‘I’m not out to hurt anybody – truth be told it’s nice to see another…to see…somebody else who made it. What’s your name?’

The silence hung in the empty space between them. He may have lowered the gun, but she still felt vulnerable without her weapon. She liked his face. He had sad eyes, but a person needs sad eyes, she thought, how can a person not have sad eyes in a world like this? She also knew the danger of sentimentality, which was why she had given it up a long time ago.

‘That’s okay,’ the man said, ‘that’s okay.’

He looked like he was wrestling with his thoughts for a moment – he half turned as if to leave but then thought better of it – flipped the safety catch on the gun and let it fall from his hands to hang loose from his shoulder.

‘I live in a house at the end of the block – about fifteen minutes away. I can’t invite you to stay, because my wife and kids are back there and I need to keep them safe, you understand? But if you come back me, I’ll give you some food and some water. I have a map of the state too, if you want.’

He reached back into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a dog-eared wallet. After fumbling with the catch for a second, he took out a tattered photograph, all torn and frayed at the edges. In the same way that he’d offered the cereal bar, he now offered the picture – across a space which felt like a vast ocean even though it was only a meter or so.

Kate plucked the photo from the air and knew that the man was not lying. The two blonde haired girls in the picture stared out from the frame with his eyes and his nose. The woman who sat next to them was smiling broadly – she looked like she smelled of cupcakes and expensive perfume. The hunger deep within her bowels was now an ache across her body.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘If it takes any longer, or you try anything weird, I’ll show you why I don’t need to carry a gun.’

She reached down with one arm and dragged the machete free of the corpse at her feet. This could be the biggest mistake of her life, but she’d be dead in two days anyway if she didn’t find more water.

I like his eyes, she thought again. He has such sad eyes.

They would have been an absurd sight, the two of them, in better days. She in a massively oversized sweater that she’d found in an abandoned house and him in those torn fatigues, looking like Rambo in retirement. Together, they walked, taking care not to stand too close or too far apart. The street was quiet – they had that on their side at least – and Kate forced herself to look at every mutilated corpse as they passed.

She saw the body of a man with a hole where his face used to be. He was dressed in a suit and a shotgun lay at his side. This last act of defiance had spared him some pain, but it had not stopped the undead hordes. They had torn his stomach open and strewn the intestines about the garden like scarlet streamers at a birthday party.

As they walked, Sam talked softly about his wife and children, who he had briefly left to go out on a run for supplies.

‘The girls, they hate it when I leave,’ he chattered. ‘They don’t understand. This morning, I had to distract them with some crayons I found in a pharmacy last week just so they’d let me out the door.’

Kate allowed herself the ghost of a smile. There weren’t many children left these days and just hearing about kids doing – well, kid stuff – made her feel warm inside.

‘How old are they?’ she asked.

‘Oh, Stacey is five and Megan is seven – big girls now, getting to be real big girls.’

As they made their way across what would have been a very nice and very normal middle class neighborhood, if it weren’t for the scattered and moldering bodies dotted about the place, Kate pointed to a man who was missing his legs. His torso ended abruptly, cutting off at a jagged red arrangement of meat and bone.

‘Did you know any of these people?’

‘Some’ Sam answered quietly, without lifting his head to look. ‘I try not to think about it. I just thank God I’ve still got my girls and keep going.’

They moved in silence for a while, until Sam stopped suddenly in front of a big grey two story house.

‘Home sweet home,’ he said gently, flashing Kate a smile.

She instantly put her guard up. Her bones told her that this was for real, but she could not take the risk of an ambush. Sure, he had a family photo in his wallet. Sure, he had kind eyes. They were the type of things that could get a girl killed. She stayed behind Sam, kept her machete close to her chest, and followed him into the house.

They entered a kitchen, clean and white and so wonderfully normal that she felt tears bite at her eyes. She had seen dozens of kitchens in the last month, all fetid and stinking, all covered in dust and dirt and decay. This was different – somebody had kept this space human, somebody alive and ready to believe that it might be needed again someday, for cupcakes and pies and pecan tarts.

‘Come on, come meet my girls,’ Sam said, as he strode down a hallway towards a pristine white door.

Kate followed him without hesitation and stood blinking in a darkened room. She had expected big windows, lace curtains, and light, lots of natural light, so the gloom took her by surprise at first. She felt Sam move past her and into the space.

‘I have to keep it dark in here. They get a little overexcited otherwise. I think they must have been sleeping – let me wake them up.’

She now saw that he held a torch in his hand, one of those chunky ones that her dad used to get out every time the fuse box shorted. There was something wrong. This wasn’t right. The room was too dark. The air was too heavy. And the smell, the smell was all wrong. She gripped her machete and kept one eye on the door.