Zombie Attack! Rise of the Horde
Read Zombie Attack! Rise of the Horde Online
Authors: Devan Sagliani
Zombie Attack!
Book One: Rise of the Horde
by
Devan Sagliani
Copyright 2012 by Devan Sagliani
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Cover art by Rob Sacchetto
http://www.zombieportraits.com
If I can survive this day, just this
one day . . .
my crazy thoughts raced as the monstrous hordes closed in on
me . . .
then I can survive anything this world throws at me.
Where did
it all begin? How did I even get to this place in my life?
The last words my brother said to me were, “Don't leave this
place, no matter what happens.” But there was no way he could have known when
he said it that one day zombies would form into wild hordes large enough to
take out a military stronghold—especially one as large as Vandenberg Air
Force Base. We were a small band of survivors, in the end mostly made up of
military families, staying together in a big huddle at the back of the barracks
where we watched as one by one the monsters picked off the soldiers protecting
us. We'd made a break-out toward an abandoned elementary school at the edge of
the base and taken refuge there.
For a while we were all safe. No one said much. We'd piled
up all the furniture against the windows to make sure the ravenous creatures
wouldn't just break the glass and flood in. It's not like the living dead feel
pain. They never get tired either. Once they got the urge to kill and eat you
that was pretty much it. They just kept coming until one of you was dead. You
couldn't plead with them; they had no feelings. Crying wouldn't do a thing. The
creepiest thing I've ever seen in my whole life was one of those monsters that
used to be a man, all tangled up in barbed wire and broken glass, frantically
chewing its own arm off to get loose and join the feed.
We were herded together with no will of our own, desperately
trying to survive this madness all around us.
This isn't going to work,
I thought.
We're going
to need a better plan, fast.
Mostly we just listened to the fighting outside—the
gun fire and the yelling and that terrible low moaning that sucks the very life
out of you when you hear it. We learned it was smart to stay away from the windows.
Eventually there were less and less of the piercing popping noises and
terrified cries. One final living soldier let out a gut wrenching shriek as he
ran out of ammunition and they tore him apart, advancing on him from all sides.
A cold streak ran down my spine leaving me shivering in mindless fear as his
sobs faded off into echoes of wet, slurping sounds. Then there was nothing but
the infinite chorus of low moans and the lifeless shuffling of feet outside.
Their massive meal kept them satisfied for about an hour—probably the
longest hour of my life. But then their heads came up one by one as they
started smelling the air, recognizing that we were there, packed like trapped
rats quivering in our own stinky fear.
Time's up
, I thought.
No one made a sound that hour. Honestly, there wasn't
anything to say. I'd guess we were each just praying in our heart of hearts
that they might lose interest and leave, but knowing beyond all hope that it
wasn't going to happen—that eventually they'd be coming for us again.
I'd made friends at the base with this younger kid named
Benji Jones. He was twelve years old, quiet, choosing not to talk with others
and keeping mostly to himself. We all developed ways to block out what was
happening, trying to keep our sanity intact in what had become an impossibly
insane world.
For me, that meant an endless series of martial arts
practice and training sessions. I'd go over the top five my brother had taught
me in succession, like a loop, often warming up with Tai Chi and ending with
high kicks. I used the common grounds area between the buildings and spent
hours each day going over the different karate forms until I was literally
exhausted. It had become the only way I could sleep at night. When my body was
tired, my mind would keep going—but eventually the darkness would pull me
under.
There wasn't a whole lot to do at the base most of the time.
They'd assigned jobs to the adults, but for the rest of us, the kids, the days
were long and boring. Outside of the base the world as we knew it was burning
away and we were sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone else
to handle the problem for us. It didn't make any sense at all.
A couple of times, other kids around my age would come up
and watch respectfully from a distance. Once a red headed kid asked if he could
train with me but he quit after a day and went back to hanging at the perimeter
of the base with the tough looking kids—smoking cigarettes they'd
pilfered from their parents and trying to act cool. I hate to say this but he
was one of the first I saw go down when they overran us. One minute he was
behind us as we fled for our lives and the next I saw him buried alive under a
mass of dead, squirming, biting corpses.
Poor bastard,
I thought.
He didn't deserve that.
None of us deserves this.
For Benji, it meant losing himself in comic books. He'd
brought a sizable stash with him from his house in Santa Cruz.
Captain
America. X-Men. Fantastic Four. Justice League. Avengers. Witchblade
. A
whole bunch of
Spiderman
. He even had a couple of
Walking Dead
comics, ironically enough. After a few weeks he got to swapping them with other
kids for other comics. People got to know him as the Comic Kid. They'd see him
coming and hide, knowing if they started talking with him, they'd never get him
to shut up. What they didn't know was that Benji didn't have anyone else in his
life—that he looked forward to having someone to chat up, that the
stories he kept rambling on about were the only things keeping him from sinking
into a deep, dark depression. He'd lost both of his parents on Z-Day—right
before his eyes.
By the time the government started acknowledging that there
was a real problem, it was already too late to save the civilian population at
large. My guess was that they had been trying to contain whatever caused the
outbreak of people going nuts and eating each other in the streets, and they
had badly failed. That's when they officially declared Zombie Day, or Z-Day for
short. Talking heads in newsrooms interrupted every channel to tell people that
they needed to evacuate their homes and drive to a safe zone, generally a
military base or installation. There they would be quarantined, then set up in
internment camps to wait out the worst of it. Sadly at that point, there
weren't a whole lot of people who didn't already know how screwed they were.
Most of the major American cities were already crawling with the hungry dead.
It wasn't safe to stick your head outside your house much less drive around
like a big, fat target. Let's just say a lot of good folks didn't make it.
Benji's parents told him to wait in the car while they
grabbed the last of their valuables before heading to the base. The street had
been swarming with zoms by that point. Benji locked the doors and hunkered
down. Horrified, from the backseat of his parents’ minivan, he'd seen them
devour his family on the front lawn—mom, dad, and little sister. Benji
hadn't been able to make a move to save them. He must have gone into a state of
total shock. He said it was like watching a really scary horror movie on
pay-per-view. He hadn't even thought about what he was doing as he climbed into
the front seat and started the van with the keys they'd left in the ignition.
Before he knew it, he was calmly driving over bodies in the street—some
were alive and fighting to survive, but most were the living dead. He said he
turned on the Frank Sinatra CD his parents had in the van and cranked the
volume. The last thing he saw was one of his neighbor’s houses going up in a
fireball while Ol’ Blue Eyes crooned “I did it my way . . .”
When he got to the base they took the minivan and all his
possessions except the comic books, and sent him into quarantine. The military
needed all the supplies they could get to help take care of all the civilians they'd
taken in. Originally they were only supposed to be able to care for about two
thousand but within days of the outbreak the base had about ten thousand people—all
hungry, all scared, all pushed to the edge of their sanity by what they had
seen and done to get there. A lot of amazing stories will probably never get
told. Some of those people wandered off on their own after a month or so had
passed. They were willing to take their chances outside rather than stay on the
base and starve while being told what to do all the time. Some wandered out of
the safe zone and got picked off by stray zombies. Some volunteered to risk
being moved to another safe zone. Some enlisted. By the end of two months we
were down to a thousand or less survivors and things were much more manageable—until
the horde came, that is.
I met Benji one day when I was heading back after a practice
of taking out multiple attackers with my beloved katana. It was a gift from my
big brother and had turned out to be the most important thing I owned. When the
outbreak first started, I didn't bother to take anything with me other than my
sword.
“It's better than a gun,” my brother had said. “It's quiet
so it doesn't draw a lot of attention. And you never have to reload it. All you
have to do is keep it clean.” As usual he was dead right.
I turned a corner and found several older boys, eighteen or
nineteen years old at least, shoving Benji around between them. His right eye
was already swollen up and bruised, no doubt from one of their balled up fists.
“It's no use fighting us, Benji,” said the biggest of the
gang—a greasy haired bully they called Weasel. “We're going to get them
and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You might as well just give up and
put this behind you. Get in line like the others. What's the point in getting
roughed up when you can't win?”
Just what the world needs
, I thought.
A
philosophy-spouting hooligan
. My fingers twitched slightly with
anticipation as I began to remove the blade from its casing. To my surprise,
Benji managed to wriggle loose from his captors hold. He dropped to the ground,
red faced from being choked, and thrust his fist straight out with all the
might he could muster, connecting hard with Weasel's groin. Weasel screamed,
letting out a high pitched squeal like a girl, and fell over frantically
clutching himself. The others looked on in shock. Benji used the distraction to
grab up his comics and dash toward me. As fast as he was, it still wasn't fast
enough. Another one of the boys stuck out his leg and tripped him. Benji went
down face first, his arms letting go of the comics and thrusting out in front
of him to break his fall. A blur of paper showered over me for a minute as
comic books rained down and landed at my feet. It was the first that they'd noticed
me, but right away I could see from the looks in their eyes that they knew the
balance of power had just dramatically shifted.