Zombies?! Zombies!!: An Anthology

CONTENTS

Paynetown

Lowell R Torres

Hokahey

Christopher Eger

Caesar’s First Zombie War

PJ Oubre

Grave Robber

Erika Gimbel

Ham On The Bone

Michael Griffiths

Her Birthday Dress

John Greer

Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse: In Heels

Bryanna Wynn

Monday Night In Kerryfield

John Greer

My Undead Friend

Lester A. Wiltfong

Nathan Becomes A Zombie

Shawn Rohrbach

Zombie Wieners

Mathias Jansson

Zombie Fever

Mathias Jansson

The Grave

Mathias Jansson

The 20Th Round

Christopher Eger

Trapped

Aaron J. Perez

In The Sunset

Luis Salguero

Zombies

Ayumi Conmy

The Revivers

Adam Dennis

Brain Flavored Kisses

Brittany Hartloff

When Death Came To Flannan Isle

Colin M. Drysdale

Twintuition

Nadia Burrell

Fright Club

E. Mitchell

For Gabriel, Nyxie and Jane

PAYNETOWN

Lowell R Torres

We still don’t know what caused it.

It’s not some type of virus or bacteria or pathogen or alien, or any combination of those. A few weeks into the epidemic the Swiss invited the greatest minds in the world—doctors, scientists, mathematicians and even a couple politicians. All the smartest people in the world, and some politicians, and they discovered nothing. The Swiss Conference eventually broke up and governments throughout the world, scientists on their own, and private corporations all spent countless amounts of time and money trying to figure it out. If any of them have answers they aren’t sharing them with us.

They didn’t know then and they don’t know now exactly what the hell it was that caused the dead to rise. The religious nuts claim it was the Rapture, even if it makes no sense. No one ascended to Heaven. There was no mass exodus of the good and pure. No traffic jams or planes falling out of the sky because people just up and disappeared. No antichrist.

People who died came back to life, is all. And they came back as bloodthirsty monsters capable of inhuman feats of speed, strength, agility, and stamina. So to be technical I should instead say that people who died came back to life as insane undead cannibals who would destroy their body to get to yours. Is all.

They just don’t know what caused it. They don’t know why the dead are so aggressive or why they will attack anything they see moving and attempt to eat it if they catch it, be it a person, animal, car, leaf; it doesn’t matter. They don’t know why zombies ignore all else around them while feeding and why you can walk right by them and they treat you like you don’t exist… until they finish, at which point the chase is back on. They don’t know why they cluster together or why they will travel and hunt and peacefully share their meals with up to a dozen others.

And of course the key, which everyone knows: a zombie’s lifecycle is only about five days, give or take. Five days until rigor mortis has set in so severely that exterminating a deadhead is as simple as walking up to its prone and frozen corpse to stab something pointy into its skull. With this knowledge every household in the United States was and is equipped with a standard one hundred twenty hour survival kit. There was a big fight about that in the government; even the so-called End of the Days couldn’t prevent congress from their business as usual childish squabbling. There was less of a fight over the special squads stationed in every hospital and attached to every police force. Z Squads are the official name. Not very original I know but the name doesn’t matter. What matters is that Z Squads are very effective at their job. These squads have the sole mission of being there when someone dies so that they can kill them again.

What we do know is that those attributes combined make it very easy to contain and eliminate any zombie outbreaks. The great epidemic really was quite harmless in the West and other developed countries, and still is. They might not have figured out what made the zombies but the more important question of how to deal with them was fairly easy to solve since it pretty much solves itself.

And it wasn’t anything like the movies or books. I’d just like to state for the record. Getting bitten or scratched by one of the dead wasn’t a death sentence. That belief caused many of the original hysterias, thanks in part to lazy national news organizations citing the pop culture experts because they had directed or starred in a movie or wrote some books. You wouldn’t know how complicit the media was in so many deaths according to the recent histories. I’m sure I’ll even get a note on this manuscript from my agent, telling me not to bite the hand that wants to feed me. After all, those same news organizations are still up and running and pumping misinformation about the latest tragedy or fad. And one subsidiary of a branch of a division of one of those organizations has paid me a fat advance to write this story, my agent will remind me.

I haven’t forgotten what the media helped create and a paycheck, healthy as that check may be, will not erase some of those memories. What became a huge panic was caused by the mistaken knowledge people thought they had of the undead, a knowledge that came from fictional sources. Many people bitten in the beginning weren’t even given a chance. They were just straight up lynched and had their skulls crushed in because of the mistaken belief that they’d soon turn into a monster.

Some real, factual cases did help stir that cause. People would hide their bites and refuse to get medical attention until the infection was too far along to treat and like anyone else with a nasty, untreated infection they would become horribly sick and then die. Then they would rise again. And they wouldn’t have died if they’d just gone to the hospital. A human mouth is full of bacteria, enough to cause a regular bite to become infected without treatment. A dead human’s mouth… well you can imagine. Go without treatment just a day too long (which was usually just one single day) and you’re badly infected. Not with some kind of special zombie virus, but with nasty, rotting corpse bacteria. Which, I guess, you could successfully argue is a special zombie virus since corpses as a rule generally didn’t bite before that summer.

No, it wasn’t like the books and movies at all. Besides the occasional unforeseen natural disaster or major accident there are barely any outbreaks these days. The cooperation of the dying has been magnificent for the most part. Beyond anything that could have been hoped for. People don’t want to hide or run away because that hysteria still runs in some parts of the world—so much so that being sick and running or going underground is a crime. Most people decide to go with the Z Squads because being on the run is no good and reanimating in front of friends or family only risks their lives.

That’s another thing the movies and books never touched upon, except a few of the newer zombie flicks and even they didn’t get it quite right. Recently reanimated corpses are always faster and stronger than their previous tenants, because they are no longer limited by what their mind tells them they can’t do. They don’t have to stop to catch their breaths or limp when they pull a muscle. Not in the beginning at least. As the body decomposes, so do the motor skills and strength. You start with the fast and strong uberzombies and eventually you get the slow and clumsy zombies most famous in pop culture, which aren’t very pleasant, but compared to the fresh creeps they’re a blast.

If you’ve ever been face to face with a newly turned zombie you’d be thankful for the Z Squads. It’s very good to know there are at least half a dozen fully armed and armored soldiers trained with the sole mission of killing zombies stationed at every fire and police station in the country.

And the word is that Limbo isn’t so bad. Limbo is the nickname for the camps and centers where you spend your final days or hours as a human. They don’t have official names, as the authorities threw them together as a temporary thing, and Limbo just sort of stuck as a catchall. Helps bring a sort of sense of communion. It’s not like jail but it’s not like being free either and you’re pretty much left alone to do what you will until its time. Then they gas you and toss you straight into the crematorium and to save the cost of burying you for your family they add your ashes to some type of great zombie victim memorial.

At least that’s the propaganda. Who really knows the truth? You may be taken directly from the cushy buses they pick you up in and straight to an incinerator.

Regardless, the system works. It’s been over year and a half since I’ve seen a zombie in person and it was three whole years before that when I’d seen the last. Neither time was I in any physical danger. The cities still have small outbreaks every once in a while and a few ghettos remain in quarantine, but the last time there was a major outbreak that remained uncontained for more than a day was months ago.

Zombies simply are not a problem unless it’s a disaster and dozens or hundreds or even thousands are unleashed at once. I can’t imagine what it must have been like after the floods that killed ten thousand in India or the famine and genocide in the Congo that wiped out six million. And I don’t even want to think about it must be like in the Middle East. They thought they had it bad with suicide bombers before. Now they have suicides of a whole other type and no chance of explosion mishaps. All that’s needed is a brainwashed zealot, a knife to slit a few throats followed by their own and a crowded area. The end result is as gruesome and effective as any small bomb.

I try not to think about stuff like that but I want you to understand. This generation now, they experience zombies online and on television or at the freaking zoo. Most preteens have gone their whole lives without seeing one, it’s so contained. Most preteens in the West, that is. Some third world countries are still quite a mess; there are chunks of China, Russia and India that are like scenes straight out of hell and a lot of Africa is just wrecked. The world isn’t all peachy, like you’re told to believe. There is madness, so much madness that it’s hard not to give in to it if you think about it too long.

But most of you know all this. I’m just giving a retread. Anyone with a Net implant has knowledge and more of what I’ve said but most haven’t experienced what I’ve experienced, and that’s why I’m writing this. They don’t know what the true horror of an outbreak is like. I do know. I was part of the first major outbreak.

I was in Bloomington on May 18, 2007. I was part of America’s Zombie Wake-Up Call, as the media dubbed it, when a category F-4 tornado bounced through the city, leaving a bobbing path of destruction and killing twelve hundred people as they slept. About eight hundred of those would rise up as murderous, rampaging zombies. Over fifteen thousand was the final death toll. Nearly a fifth of the population of a small city wiped out in a nine hour span.

I was there through most of it and here’s the big reveal: my part in the heroics of that day was limited. Practically nonexistent is the truth of the matter but the media and government needed a hero to throw at the public. And, well, I’m just good looking enough, smart enough, and with a clean enough record to qualify for the part and I came with a readymade pedigree pronouncing me Hero with a capital H. But I’ll get to that.

First came the storm.

* * *

First came the storm and I slept through it. I’d been suffering from a severe case of not-giving-a-shit-itis and was in the process of drinking myself into a stupor. Then, in the midst of said stupor, I shot up a load of heroin big enough to kill a donkey. I can look back now and see that the goal of this was to kill myself. I’d had just about enough of my pointless, going-nowhere life. I had nothing worth living for or so I believed at the time. I know better now but then I was a miserable shit.

It may come as a surprise to you, learning that the Hero of Paynetown was a suicidal junkie before zombies changed the world but it’s true. I’m sure my agent isn’t going to like my revealing this fact either and the publisher may very well have their editor omit this part. It takes away from my credibility, from my status symbol as clean cut American hero. But I was told to write about what happened that night and what happened that night is I took a ride on the China White Express. I’m not going to stray away from the truth even if it means I don’t get invited back on Ellen.

I’d been a smackhead since my tour of duty in the Middle East was cut short by a roadside bomb that killed three of my squad members but only tore off a large chunk of my ass. All things considered, the Hero of Paynetown sounds a lot better than the Man with No Ass.

In the hospital I was introduced to morphine. And I liked. I liked it a lot. We became fast friends, morphine and I, and the VA Hospital did a horrible job of making sure I was off the stuff before sending me home with my Honorable Discharge and hemorrhoid pillow.

It took less than a day, only hours really, after running out of my prescription for the withdrawal to hit me hard and it only took several hours of sitting through that withdrawal—almost as painful as the injury that caused me to be on the stuff in the first place—to make me go seek out a few acquaintances who could introduce me to morphine’s cousin, Sweet Lady H. The Lady and I became lovers for the next six years. Six long years of a drug-induced haze. I remember bits and pieces of that time but I couldn’t give you a direct timeline of those years for the life of me.

My last shot of heroin was that night when I should have overdosed and died. The pictures and videos of me being rescued and looking like the survivor of a concentration camp make a little more sense now, don’t they? It was because I was a survivor of a concentration camp, in a way. Mine was run by addiction but it was just as deadly. I weighed a little over one hundred pounds after being rescued, a full eighty pounds lighter than what I’d weighed after basic training.

My liver and kidneys are so damaged doctors say it’s likely I’ll die before I hit fifty. I’m willing