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Excerpt for The Undead (Zombie Anthology) by D.L. Snell, available in its entirety at Smashwords

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The Undead

Edited by D.L. Snell

Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

www.PermutedPress.com

Cover art by Alejandro Shelley Bergen.

Chuy and the Fish

David Wellington

Rain came down so hard it was tough to tell the difference between the water and the air. It scoured the esplanade, a million soft explosions a second, and it battered the weeds that pushed up through the cracks in the parking lot asphalt. Chuy couldn’t see five feet in front of him. He was on guard against dead people who might crawl up out of the channel and onto Governor’s Island. But hell, man, not even the dead wanted to be out on a night like this. He stayed where it was safe and dry like a smart guy, under the covered doorway of an old officer’s barracks. He wished he had a cigarette. Too bad there weren’t anymore, not since the end of the world and all. His wife—she was gone now, and his little babies, too—she had always wanted him to quit. Hell of a way for her to get her wish, he thought, as the curl of her mouth swam up through his memory, the soft, soft hairs at the edges of her eyebrows—

Sound rolled up over him from the water. Sounds were coming up from the harbor all the time, but this one was different. A noise like something slapping metal. Like something hitting the railing. Chuy stared out into the murk. Nothing.

Chingadre, he thought. He needed to check this out. One time a dead guy had actually come up over the railing. His body was all bloated with gases, and he had floated across from NYC. They had lost three people that night before they even knew what was going on. When they finally shot the dead guy, he had lit up like a gas main going off and had knocked down one of the houses in Nolan Park. It had been bad, real bad, and Marisol, the mayor of Governors Island, didn’t want it happening again. Nothing for it.

Chuy stepped out into the rain and was instantly soaked.

He ran up the road a ways, water pouring down into his eyes so he had to blink it away. He scanned the street that ran around the edge of the island, studying the iron railing that kept foolish people from falling into the water. Nothing—just some garbage that had washed up against the railing. It looked like a white plastic bag, the kind you got at the grocery. Except there weren’t any more groceries.

Not thinking much about it, he stepped closer for a better look. Maybe some garbage that had blown over in the wind from the city. The dead owned NYC now and they didn’t do much cleaning. He squatted down and thought about getting dry again, sitting by a fire and maybe drinking some coffee. He had half a jar of instant hid away; he could afford to brew a cup if he was careful, sure.

It wasn’t a bag. What it was, he didn’t know. “Hey, hey, Harry,” he called out. “Yo, big guy, come over here!”

Harry was patrolling a couple of blocks down. He had been a teacher up at CUNY before and knew a lot of things. Maybe he would recognize this. It looked kind of like a big, fleshy leaf, twice as long as his hand. It was all pulpy and shit, like the inside of a bad melon and it smelled like ass. Like cat piss, kind of, only a whole lot stronger. Dead-fish bad, but not the same, only kind of similar. Harry came splashing through the puddles and Chuy bent closer for a better look. It was attached to something, something long and thin that trailed down into the water.

He took the gun out of his belt—Desert Eagle, boy, all nickel-plated and deadly, nice one—and gently poked the thing with the end of the barrel. He didn’t want to get that stink on his fingers. The flesh yielded okay. Bubbles squelched up when he applied real pressure. He frowned and turned around to look for Harry.

The fleshy thing moved on its rope—he saw it in his peripheral vision. It lifted up and slapped against his thigh. Chuy grunted in disgust, and then in pain. The underside of the thing was covered in tiny hooks that dug deep into him, tearing at him. “Hells no!” he shouted just when the thing yanked at him hard, pulling him by his leg, slamming him up against the railing.

“Harry! Harry!” he screamed. With a strength he couldn’t understand, it tugged at him, trying to drag him down into the water. He wrapped his arms and his free leg around the railing, holding tight against the power that wanted to tear him loose. “Fucking bastard! Harry, get over here!”

Harry Cho slid to a stop a couple feet away and just stood there with his mouth open. His glasses were silvered with rain and his black hair was plastered down across his forehead. He was a short, skinny guy and he wasn’t very strong. Dropping to the asphalt he grabbed Chuy around the waist and tried to pull him off the railing. “I don’t want to tear it loose,” Harry grunted. “It’s stuck in there pretty well.”

“Fuck that!” Chuy screamed. “Shoot this thing!” He could feel his skin peeling away underneath his pants. The ropy thing had twisted around his ankle and the bones there felt like they might pop. “Shoot it in the head!”

Harry unslung his M4 rifle and leaned over the railing. He shook his head, peering down into the choppy water. “I don’t see any . . . I mean there’s no . . .”

A second pulpy white thing, a twin to the first, batted at the railing a couple of times and made it ring. “Is that a tentacle?” Harry asked, but Chuy didn’t care enough to answer. The club-end of the tentacle stroked the asphalt and then coiled around the railing and pulled. The whole island seemed to shudder as the thing on the other end of the tentacles strained and squeezed and dragged itself up out of the channel, great sheets of silver water sloshing off its back.

Eight thicker arms reared up to grab at the railing. The iron bent and squealed as the main body heaved upwards and into view. Chuy saw diaphanous fins, tattered with rot. He saw its long red and white body thick and heavy with muscles. He saw its beak, like a parrot’s, only about ten times bigger. He saw an eye, the size of a manhole cover maybe, clouded with decay, and the eye saw him.

“Orale, tu pinche pendejo! Enough fucking playing!” Chuy screamed and he brought the Desert Eagle up to point right at that motherfucking yellow eye. He was no cholo gangsta (not good old funny guy Chuy; no, he had been a doorman in NYC), but at this range he thought he could score. He hit the safety with his thumb and then he blasted the dripping asshole, absolutely blasted it with three tight shots right in the pupil. The eye exploded, spraying him with a mess of jelly and stinking water. He spluttered—some of that shit went right in his mouth.

“An undead squid! Architeuthis?” Harry asked. He looked dazed. “Or is it—it couldn’t be a Colossal. . . .” The ex-teacher brought his rifle around and fired a quick burst into its main body. Bullet holes appeared in a line down its back, big fist-sized holes that didn’t bother the fucker at all. You could shoot a dead thing all day and it didn’t feel it, not unless you got the head. Harry fired another burst at its head where all the tentacles attached: same result.

Rings of fire bit into Chuy’s calf muscle, little round buzzsaws of pain. He bit the inside of his cheek as a wave of nausea and agony jittered through him. His hand twitched, but he couldn’t let go of his pistol. No, that would be suicide. “Harry—Christ! Get some fucking backup!”

Harry nodded and let his rifle fall back on its strap. He twisted open a flare and tossed it high up into the air. Chuy looked up over at the towers on the ferry dock and saw the lights there flicker in acknowledgement. If he could just hold on—if he could just stay cool—help was on the way.

The railing groaned and the bolts that held it to the esplanade began to squeal.

“Where’s its fucking brain?” Marisol demanded. “It’s undead, right? You shoot it in the fucking brain and it fucking dies. Where’s its brain?” She had a shotgun against her shoulder as she bent to stroke Chuy’s hair. He was in a bad way. He’d lost a lot of blood and he could barely hold onto the railing. It had been maybe twenty-five minutes since the squid got hold of him. Gathered around him, the crowd had put dozens of rounds of ammunition into the asshole thing, but it only fought harder. It hadn’t come up any farther onto land—it lacked the energy, looked like, to come crawling up any more—but it wouldn’t let go, either. Its tentacle—one of the two big feeding tentacles, Harry called them—had wrapped around his leg so many times Chuy couldn’t see his foot or his shin.

“That’s what I’m telling you! It doesn’t have one! It has long axons but they’re spread out through the body. There’s no central nervous system at all. Nothing to target.” Harry looked away. “It has three hearts, if you care.”

“I don’t.” Marisol knelt down next to Chuy. “We’ll cut you loose, I promise.”

Chuy nodded. They’d already tried that, with fire axes. The tentacle was so rubbery that the axes just bounced off. Marisol had sent somebody to look for a hacksaw.

The squid snapped its beak at Chuy’s foot. It couldn’t quite reach. It pulled again and he felt his skin coming loose. The pain was bright and hot and white, and it seared him. He screamed and Marisol clutched his head. Somebody came forward and tied a rope around him, anchoring him to the railing.

Nobody talked about chopping off his leg to get him free. There weren’t any surgical tools on the island. Worse, there was no penicillin. People didn’t survive that kind of injury any more. The tentacle had to go, or Chuy would.

He turned his face up to the sky and let rain collect in his mouth.

Someone set off a white flare and held it over his head. The sputtering light woke Chuy with a start, and his body shivered. He looked down and saw the fucking fish all lit up. It was as big as a school bus and it looked like chopped meat: they had done so much damage to it with their guns, but it wouldn’t just die. “How long,” he said, his throat dry and cracking.

Down on the rocks, Harry stepped close to the thing, keeping his head down, his hands out for balance. He had a hacksaw in one hand. He moved so slow, so quiet. He was coming up on the squid’s blind side, on the side where Chuy had popped its eye. Maybe he thought the fish wouldn’t notice when he started sawing through its arm.

“How long was I out?” Chuy croaked.

Somebody behind him—he couldn’t see who—answered, “About an hour. Sleep if you can, guy. Ain’t nothing for you to do right now.”

“No jodas.” Chuy tried to clear his throat but the phlegm wouldn’t come. Down on the rocks, Harry stepped a little closer. He touched the hacksaw blade to the tentacle as if he was trying to brush off a speck of lint.

The squid’s enormous body convulsed and the air filled with the stink of ammonia and dead flesh. Foul black fluid spurted from the holes in its back. Gallons more of it slapped Harry across the face, choking him, sending him flying on his back into the water. Ink—the fucker was squirting ink, Chuy realized. Harry thrashed in the water, the rain washing his glasses clean, but he couldn’t seem to get his mouth clear. His arms windmilled and his legs kicked, but he couldn’t get back to the rocks. Marisol leaned over the railing and threw him a bright orange life preserver. He grasped it in one hand and slowly got control of himself.

The squid rolled over, yanking Chuy savagely against the bars of the railing. He screeched like a dog, like one of those little dogs the white women used to carry in their purses in NYC.

Down in the water, Harry slid up onto a rock covered in green hairy seaweed. He couldn’t quite get a grip. He was still trying when the squid’s beak cut right into his ribcage. Harry didn’t scream at all. He didn’t have time.

Nobody spoke but they all looked, the way New Yorkers used to slow down on the highways to look at accidents. They couldn’t turn away as the squid cut Harry into tiny pieces and swallowed them one by one, its whole mantle contracting as it sucked down the bloody chunks of meat.

In his dream, he was with his Isabel again, and she was laid out on the bed, smiling up at him. She was wearing a kind of nightie, only like one you get from Victoria’s Secret. Her hair was pulled back in one big ponytail and was spread out across the pillows in ten thick tendrils. Those lips, man, they were like sugar. He jumped on top of her, felt her bones against his, and they smiled together. His gold cross pendant touched the skin above her breasts. It was so sweet, man, only why did she smell so bad? She smelled like something dead. He brought his mouth down and kissed her bony lips hard, so hard he could make her be alive again, like Sleeping Beauty.

His shivering had turned into real convulsions by the time the sky turned blue, the funny blue it gets right before dawn. The sea was a uniform and dull gray. The rain had stopped hours earlier, while he was unconscious.

“He’s not tracking,” somebody said.

He saw Marisol’s face swimming before him. “It’s shock, probably. Jesus. I’ve never seen anybody so pale. Do we just put him out of his misery?”

“Don’t even say that. There’s got to be a way to get him loose.”

Marisol was used to making hard decisions. That was why they made her mayor. Chuy was pretty sure she would figure out what to do.

He saw pink clouds over Manhattan—so beautiful, buzzing with beauty—before he slipped away again.

Hot pain in his leg brought him up. The suckers on the feeding tentacles were rimmed with tiny hooks that tore the long muscles in his thigh. It had more of him than before. It was trying to bring him closer, to its beak. It must have gotten hungry again.

Chuy gritted his teeth. He felt foul—slimy with old sweat.

Something was happening.

He struggled to focus, to look around. He saw people running, some towards him, some away. He felt his leg being straightened, felt his foot being torn loose from his ankle and the pain was enormous, it was real big, but it wasn’t like he’d felt before. Maybe he was getting used to it. He lifted his head, looked down at the squid.

It was rising up. Pulling itself up with its eight thick arms. He saw the dripping ugly wound where its eye had been, and he thought, You serote, I did that.

It was coming for him. The railing sighed and shook and then started to give way.

“Everybody get back!” Marisol shrieked. A bolt let go with an explosive noise, and a section of railing lifted up in the air, twisted. The squid dragged itself an inch closer. Chuy could see the beak, huge, hard, sharp—he looked over his shoulder and saw people edging away from him. So this was it, huh?

More bolts popped loose. Dust and rain shot out each time. The railing crimped back on itself. Chuy reached down and felt the knot of the rope holding him to the railing. Rain and seawater had soaked through it, made it as hard as a rock. He pushed his thumb into it, tried to wiggle it around.

The free feeding tentacle draped around Chuy’s neck and arm. He tried to shrug it off, but it was too strong. Razor-sharp suckers sank into his back and he grimaced. He didn’t feel the pain so much, but it made his body stop, just squeal to a stop like a taxi with bad brakes. When that passed, he tried to move his thumb again.

The knot started to come loose. “Somebody get me a grenade!” he shouted.

He’d had time to think about this. About how they were going to remember him. He kept working at the knot.

The squid heaved its body up onto the railing, its great big meaty mass. The iron cried out in distress. Tons it must weigh, the fucker. Whole tons. The railing broke under that weight and the squid started to slide, but it held on to his leg and his back. Its beak wallowed closer to him.

“A grenade!” he shouted again, and instantly it was there, hard and fist-sized and round. Somebody shoved it into his free hand and somebody else—they must have seen what he was doing—reached down and cut the rope with a combat knife. The only thing holding him to the railing then was his arm.

The squid rippled toward him. He could see its good eye now, yellow and black. Glassy. He saw the beak moving silently.

He let go of the railing. The squid pulled him hard and he went right through as it yanked him toward its beak. In the process, it shifted its center of gravity backward, toward the water.

It hit the foam with a splash that rushed across Chuy’s chest and face, pummeling him. It was all he could do to keep a hold of his grenade. He fought—fought hard to retain consciousness.

“Good luck, ese!” he heard Marisol shout. Marisol was fine, he thought. It was good to have a fine woman cheering you on when you gave your all. Saltwater filled his nose and his eyes and made him choke, and then there was no more sound.

The squid took him down, fast. He felt pressure building up in his ears until they popped so hard blood spurted out of his head. He saw the light fading, the last rays of it reaching down from above but not quite reaching. He saw the seaweed on the rocks give way to gray algae, colorless algae, and then he saw the bottom and the dead men looking up at him.

They were little more than skeletons. Dead people who fell in the harbor and couldn’t get out again. Exposed bone turned to rock, water-logged flesh turned white and fishy, their hands all missing knuckles and fingers, their feet rooted to the bottom muck. Their eyes were still human. He could see human desires and needs in those eyes. They were hungry. So hungry.

He wasn’t going to be one of them.

The fish brought around its beak to nip off his foot, and he couldn’t stop it. This was its world, and his lungs were bursting. He pulled the pin on the grenade and offered it up. Here you go, pez pendejo. Eat ’em up real good.

Pale Moonlight

D.L. Snell

Crying, Nathan swung the axe. The beveled steel chopped into the stair. It squeaked against the wood as he wrenched it free and swung again and again and again.

Nathan didn’t know that he was crying, didn’t notice the hot, salty tears trickling through his thick beard. He was deaf to his own mutterings and numb to the snot stinging his left nostril. He was blind to the shaggy brown hair that tickled his dense and wiry eyebrows. He was too busy thinking about his father Jon, about how those . . . those things had slurped the intestines out of Jon’s gut, how, beneath the pale light of a nearly-full moon, Nathan had pressed a gun to his own father’s head, and—

“Arrrghh!”

Swinging with all his might, Nathan buried the axe into the stair. He tried to dislodge it, but it was caught in a stud.

Nathan cursed, spraying spittle and ropes of mucus. He slammed all his weight against the axe handle, pushing, face boiling red and teeth clenched. The axe began to move. Just a little.

He stopped with an exasperated splutter and wiped his sweaty brow on the back of his arm. He had rolled back the sleeves of his flannel shirt, so his arm hair came away from his forehead matted and wet.

Great. Just fucking great. He hadn’t even demolished one step, let alone enough to keep those bastards out of the upper story, and now the goddamn axe was stuck.

Fighting the constipated aggravation that boiled in his chest, Dane slammed his body into the axe handle. The blade budged again. Another inch.

Then, a bad odor died in Nathan’s nose. He stopped pushing against the axe and looked over his shoulder. He sniffed. Even through all the snot, he could smell rotting meat. And now that he was alert, he could hear something dragging across the concrete walkway outside. He could hear sluggish footsteps.

The gun he’d used on his father, a Smith & Wesson .38 special, was tucked in the waistband of his jeans. He tried to pull it out, but the hook-like hammer snagged the inside of his pants.

Nathan flinched as glass shattered in the parlor to his left. A wall blocked the room from view, but he could hear the windowpane shards crunch under a dozen feet. He could hear groans.

Nathan yanked on the gun. Something ripped, and the weapon sprang out. Its chamber echoed with a phantom gunshot, and its steel retained the pallid glow of last night’s moon, the same moon that had formed cataracts on his father’s staring eyes.

Shaking, cringing at the feel of the gun’s oily wooden grip, Nathan leapt down the stairs onto the polished oak floor. The front door was straight ahead, with a patchwork rug at its foot. Nathan bounded toward it, glancing left into the parlor, his arm held out sideways to point the gun through the archway.

A pasty hand, veined with blue, shot out at his throat.

Nathan screamed and fired. The .38 shouted, bucked slightly, and the zombie’s bloodshot eye disappeared. The ghoul stumbled back into the arms of its brethren. The others didn’t try to catch it; they just trampled over its body, their groans muffled by the lingering gunshot.

As he reached for the door, Nathan’s foot slid on the rug. His head hit the floor. It bounced, and a bright explosion blinded him temporarily.

Whimpering, he clambered to his feet and twisted the doorknob. Soon, he would burst out onto the porch, into the light of the newly risen moon, a nearly risen full moon.

Nathan yanked the door open.

Zombies crowded the porch. They groped and lurched forward.

Nathan stumbled back, feet tangling with the rumpled rug. He windmilled his arms to keep balance, but the weight of the gun bowled him over. He stubbed his tailbone on the floor.

The cannibal corpses seized his legs and started to drag him through the door. The intruders from the parlor were closing in, too. And the moon wasn’t out yet.

With two shots, Nathan brained the duo clogging the doorway. He kicked their hands away, feeling fingers break beneath his Timberlands. Rolling into a crouch, he shot a parlor zombie in the collarbone, leaving a smoking hole in the thing’s plaid shirt. The ghoul, beer-bellied and suffering male-pattern baldness, staggered back, but kept coming, pushed forward by the ones behind it.

Using his last bullet to deter the parlor zombies, Nathan strafed toward the kitchen, toward the back door, but corpses were already spilling out of the dining room. They seized the back of his vest and pulled. Nathan fought, knowing that most his extra bullets were in the vest pocket. But the zombies were surrounding him. Some were already snapping teeth at his face, and their breath was fetid because it didn’t come from their lungs; it came from their bloated stomachs and intestines.

Managing to shrug out of the vest, Nathan pushed past a skinny female zombie that had her hair up in a bun. She swiped at him, but he dodged her, pounding up the stairs. Another zombie, this one a gas-pump attendant wearing a STIHL cap, snagged Nathan’s ankle. Nathan fell and hit his head on a stair. He plunged his boot into the gas-pump attendant’s face, breaking the twisted spine of the cadaver’s nose. But the bastard clung, and more zombies were lurching up the staircase.

Nathan kicked again, shattering the attendant’s nicotine-stained teeth. Then he smashed the ghoul’s fingers between his boots. The attendant released him, and the other dead bodies reached forward. Nathan escaped their flailing hands and scrambled up the staircase. The zombies swatted at his heels.

At the top of the staircase there was a hallway, the oak floor carpeted with a strip of royal blue. The left wall was lined with dormer windows that overlooked the dark front yard. The right wall was lined with doorways.

Kicking open the second door, Nathan ducked into the darkness. An arm darted through the doorway and grazed his shirt collar. He slammed the door and the limb snapped, withdrew. Nathan shut the door and turned the lock with shaky hands. He flicked on the light switch, but the bulb popped and the light didn’t come on.

Out in the hallway, zombies began to beat against the door. Their shadows moved in the light that leaked through the seams.

Eyes adjusting to the dark, Nathan moved to the nightstands beside the bed. A candle and matches stood on the nightstand’s tabletop. Trying to light the wick, Nathan wasted three matches. When he got it right, candlelight flickered across the glass in a picture frame, illuminating the photograph within: though he was smiling and draping an arm around Nathan’s mother, Jon’s eyes were grave moons.

Nathan looked away, shuddering.

A zombie hit the door and its attack sounded like a distant gunshot.

Nathan dug into the pockets of his jeans. One pocket contained lint. The other held a single bullet.

Trying more than once to fling open the chamber, Nathan steadied his hand enough to slide the bullet into the .38. With the gun loaded, he tucked it in his waistband so he didn’t have to touch it and remember his father—so he didn’t have to remember the pale moonlight. He hunkered down behind the bed and tried to push it, but his face just flushed. He had forgotten that Jon had bolted all the heavy furniture to the floor. The dresser—which contained all Jon’s socks, underwear, and t-shirts—was also secured.

Moaning, groaning, the zombies continued to pound on the door.

Nathan went to the only window and threw open the gossamer curtains. The candle made enough light that the glass reflected the bedroom. It also reflected Nathan’s face, but he ignored his own sunken eyes; they were too much like his father’s.

With a grunt, Nathan slid the window open.

In the yard below, zombies stopped crunching over mats of dead oak leaves and looked up. They moaned louder, gurgling, their useless lungs flatulating. Some were partially eaten, arms gnawed down to the bone and clothes blotted with russet blood. Others looked normal except for sallow skin, bruised purple in spots, except for torn shirts and missing shoes. But they all had one thing in common: they were all headed toward the house, toward Nathan.

Nathan ignored them and looked straight down, scanning the face of the house. The white siding, though overlapped, provided no handholds, no way to climb down, and the drop was nearly fifteen feet onto a brick patio; the overhang of the roof was too high up to reach, and the neighboring window, also too far away, led into a sardine can of the undead.

Nathan pulled his head back through the window and glanced over his shoulder toward the bedroom door. Something black jumped out at him. It was just the dresser’s shadow, stretched into a tilting, two-dimensional skyscraper; the shadow recoiled only to leap again.

It sounded like the zombies were kicking the door now, slamming into it with all their weight. The door was shuddering. The doorjamb was splintering. And the stink! Flesh liquefying into seaweed-green rot. Bloated bodies belching green gasses.

Nathan only had one hope left.

He looked over the skeletal branches of the Oregon white oaks, and he searched the gangrene-soaked clouds for something that glowed like an incandescent bone. The moon had been nearly full last night when Nathan shot his father. Tonight, it would be completely full, and the shortage of bullets would no longer matter.

Behind him, the door bucked; it shifted back and forth. Nathan glanced back, then fixated on the sky again. And just as the clouds drifted past, Nathan saw it: the lunar skull, ghostly and round as a coin. It had just risen past the distant mountains.

At the mere sight, Nathan’s hackles constricted and stood on end. His heart began to gallop, and his pupils dilated to the size of dimes. He felt his bones become restless beneath knotting muscles, and his beard began to itch.

The door lurched forward as zombies hammered it. There was one more crack, and the jamb gave way. The ghouls stumbled into the room.

Nathan’s skeleton twisted, reconstructed. He screamed as his fingers went momentarily arthritic. He dropped the gun, and his fingernails protracted into claws. His pants, shirt, and shoes stretched against his bulging muscles, then ripped. His jaws and nose began to elongate into a snout, shoving knives of pain through his sinuses. His teeth grew into sharp canines. His eyes went black.

Unafraid, the zombies came forward and tore at his already ripped clothes. They dragged him down, and Nathan screamed, not from fear but from the pain of shifting bones. The cannibals sunk teeth into Nathan’s rippling muscles, which were sprouting wiry, black hair. They piled over him, moaning and gnashing flesh.

Nathan’s screams curdled, gurgled, and ceased altogether. The only sounds were hungry slurping and munching.

Then, a low growl. And a snarl.

Suddenly Nathan sprang up. He was a canine, covered with black hair. Zombies hit the wall, the bed, the closet door. One crashed into the window, shattering glass, and another bounced off the edge of the dresser.

Nathan shook off the clinging flesh-eaters and his skin mended over his wounds. Still, the creatures ambled forward, moaning. Nathan lashed out, severing arms, slashing faces. Entrails, runny from putrefaction, piled at his feet. A severed head bounced off the mattress and rolled, thumping into a corner. A bloated carcass toppled with half its skull clawed away. A dead woman fell with her face chewed off.

Nathan ravaged his way out of the house while zombies clung to him and bit away chunks of hairy flesh; their virus withered in Nathan’s blood.

Outside, Nathan shook off the pests and stomped their heads to smithereens.

He looked up and he saw his father.

Jon was pale and bloated. The belly of his flannel shirt was ripped open to reveal the cave of his disemboweled gut, and a bullet hole blemished his forehead: Nathan’s shot must’ve missed Jon’s brain; then, after a pre-undead coma, Jon must’ve woke in his grave and clawed his way out.

With dirt still packed beneath his jagged fingernails, with dirt still caked to his shirt, Jon stretched out his arms and tottered forward. His moan was more of a chortle.

Snarling, Nathan slashed his claw through the air. But inches from Jon’s sagging cheek, he stopped himself. He took a few steps back.

His father groaned, and the moon reflected in his dead eyes.

Feeling the burn of a single tear, Nathan shrugged away from newcomer zombies and loped across the yard. He howled as he crashed into the withering stalks of corn, and the moon watched over him; it was milky and pale, just like his father’s dead and staring eye.

Hotline

Russell A. Calhoun

“How long have we been here?”

I looked up from my computer and stared across the office. Though his workstation was partially hidden in the shadows, I could still make out the scowl on Joe’s face.

I was taken aback slightly, as Joe had not been a man of many words. In fact, in the past week, I remembered him saying barely more than a handful of sentences.

“How long have we been here?” he repeated, more to himself this time. A hint of exhaustion had crept into his voice.

I stared at the computer monitor, gathering my thoughts. Within the line of text, I caught a glimpse of my reflection, blurred and distorted on the phosphorous screen.

Christ! It seemed like an eternity since the first reports of zombiefied corpses started showing up on the evening news. But I knew it hadn’t been that long. I tapped my stiff fingers against the desktop as I wandered through the maze of memories.

“About six months, I guess,” I finally answered.

“Damn waste of a life if you ask me. How much longer must we exist this way? Tired, afraid . . . hungry.”

I wished I had an answer for him. But I didn’t, not a good one anyway. Not one he wanted to hear. I knew deep down in my gut that we were going to be here a long time.

The long fluorescent tube suspended above my desk flickered and buzzed like a wasp trapped inside a glass jar. The wastebasket next to my left leg emitted a sound of muffled scratching. I peered over its rubber lip. Between its blue walls laid our pet, Wormie, bits of yellowed newspaper clinging to his leathery gray flesh. His black, stumpy teeth tore into the rotting remains of the rat I had caught yesterday; scraps of rat flesh clung to the corners of his black lips.

Joe and Wormie had come into my life on the same rainy night. I had been ambling along the dark, glassy-wet streets on my nightly ritual to fill my ravenous stomach, which had been growing increasingly more difficult.

Above, the sky rumbled as if it, too, were hungry, hungry enough to swallow the earth. But I continued to walk. I rather like walking after a strong downpour, the way the air smells pure and the way it feels cool against my skin.

And how the streets are cleansed of the blood and gore. At least temporarily.

I ran into only five zombies that night, out like me, looking for food. They lumbered down the street, uncaring of the puddles of rainwater under their skeletal feet.

They didn’t see me, but to be on the safe side I slipped into a darkened alleyway nestled between Harry’s Hardware and a boarded-up antique shop.

I soon found that I wasn’t alone.

In the alley, three teens were playing with a baby, little Wormie. At first, I just watched, hidden safely by the night’s shadows. Wormie’s left arm had already been crudely hacked from his body. It lay next to the squirming baby, rancid blood oozing from its jagged stump. One of the boys took his greasy knife and began to carve the flesh of the right arm. The other boys hooted and hollered.

Wormie snarled and tried to bite any body part that drifted too close to his clicking nubs.

Farther towards the back of the alley, the punks’ rottweiler had its blood-soaked muzzle buried deep in the dead mother’s vacated womb.

I had seen enough.

I retrieved the snub-nosed .22 from my leather jacket and squeezed the trigger. I always had lousy aim. The bullet whizzed past the nearest teen, missing his ear by a mere inch. It compacted on the hard asphalt.

The punk marched towards me, slashing his knife back and forth.

Swoosh. . .swoosh. . .SWOOSH!

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black shadow. A gunshot shattered the night’s silence. Joe’s bullet made contact, defacing the brick wall with brains and bone.

Two more squeezes of Joe’s trigger finished the teens’ night of games.

Two of the zombies I had seen earlier must have heard the commotion and had hobbled into the alley to investigate.

“Come with me,” Joe said, tugging on my jacket sleeve.

I bent down to scoop up the baby.

“No. Leave it here.”

I said nothing, but instead picked up the squirming bundle, careful to avoid its gnashing teeth.

Still gripping the pistol, Joe escorted me to an old abandoned warehouse near the east edge of the town, where he introduced me to the ragtag team he had assembled. There was Marty, a squat, scruffy man, his black hair always a tasseled mess. Marty was the communications and computer specialist.

Hank was the weapons expert. The way he stared at me, as well as his tremendous size, told me that he wasn’t a man I should fuck with. The last man in the group was Doug, chief mechanic and driver, whose job it was to see that the rest of the rescue crew arrived at the scene in one piece.

Finally, Joe introduced me to Michelle, a sexy little thing with dazzling red hair. Her job is at the same time simple and arduous. Five guys alone can get pretty irritable cooped up by themselves. Michelle is a great stress reliever. There had been times that I thanked God for Michelle, like when I pulled the late shift, manning the phones. She would slink under my desk and gently tug down on my zipper, then coax out my member before slipping it between her slender lips.

Michelle’s also one hell of a cook.

As he had done countless times in the past, Joe picked up the red phone receiver and listened intently for several seconds before placing it back on its cradle.

“Still working?” I asked, already half-knowing the answer.

He nodded, then said, “For now.”

Soon after the cataclysm, the government set up an emergency phone system in fear that one day the local phone companies would fail. Marty had been able to hack into that system and provide us with unlimited phone service.

We hoped.

Suddenly, as if thinking about it made it real, the phone rang. The phone was actually ringing! Joe grabbed the receiver and began to speak.

“You’ve reached the Zombie Hotline. Please state your name, address, and the nature of your emergency.” After two weeks without a call, he still remembered the spiel.

I picked up my phone, carefully muffling the mouthpiece with my free hand.

“My name is Dana Anderson at 1753 Johnsonville Lane. One of those goddamn zombies is trying to break into our house.” She sounded hysterical.

“Calm down, madam. A team is being dispatched immediately. Please stay on the line until they arrive.” With his left hand, Joe pecked the information into the database. In minutes, tires squealed and sirens wailed as our teammates headed to intercept the undead bastards.

In the phone, I heard whimpering. Joe must have heard it too.

“Is someone with you?” he asked.

“Just my daughter, Erin.”

“How old is Erin?”

“She’s fourteen.” Dana began to sob. “Why did this have to happen? It’s not fair. She shouldn’t have to grow up in this world.”

“Well, you just tell Erin that everything will be okay. Everything will be over soon.”

“Thank you so much. With my husband gone, it keeps getting harder to survive.”

As she spoke to Joe, I thought about what a lovely voice Dana had. It reminded me of Karen’s voice. I still missed my wife and regretted having to put that slug through her brainpan. But she had turned into a zombie.

My arm still hurts from where she tasted me.

Gunshots exploded from the phone’s receiver, then silence.

“It sounds like my boys have arrived. Why don’t you let them in?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

I heard a clatter as Dana laid the phone down, and several seconds later, the creaking of the hinges as Dana opened the door.

She shrieked. “Dear God, no. Run, Erin!” Her cries were drowned out by the grunts, followed by the familiar sounds of teeth tearing flesh. Dana tried to scream, but the warm blood flooding into her throat garbled it.

Joe and I hung up our phones.

Soon, the retrieval team would return with the day’s catch.

“Hello, sweethearts,” Michelle said as she wheeled out her clinking, stainless-steel cart, the half dozen chef knives gleaming under the florescent lights. She rolled up the Oriental rug that lay between my desk and Joe’s, uncovering a paint spill of dried, rust-colored blood.

The tray is the closest thing we have to a kitchen table.

There are two breeds of zombies in the world. You have the bestial zombies, like my dear departed Karen, which use brute force to get their food. Then you have the more cerebral zombies, the zombies that were able to quickly evolve into thinking creatures, the zombies that retain their human thought processes. Zombies such as Joe and the rest of the team.

And myself.

The undead outnumber the living now, and the food supply grows short. It takes brains to eat nowadays.

Joe leaned out of the shadows, exposing more of his ghoulish, rotting head. “How long must we live this way?”

Home

David Moody

I’ve been here hundreds of times before but it’s never looked like this. Georgie and I used to drive up here on weekends to walk the dog over these hills. We’d let him off the lead and then walk and talk and watch him play for hours. That was long before the events that have since kept us apart. It all feels like a lifetime ago. Today, the green rolling landscape I remember is washed out and grey; everything is cold, lifeless and dead. I am alone, and the world is decaying around me. It’s early in the morning, perhaps an hour before sunrise, and a layer of light mist clings to the ground. I can see figures moving all around me. They’re everywhere. Shuffling. Staggering. Hundreds of the fucking things.

Just two hours now. One last push and I’ll be home. I haven’t been this close since it happened. Twenty-eight days ago—four weeks to the day—millions died and the world fell apart around me.

I’m beginning to feel scared. For days, I’ve struggled to get back here, but, now that I’m this close, I don’t know if I can go through with it. Seeing what’s left of Georgie and our home will hurt. It’s been so long, and so much has happened since we were together. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to walk through the front door. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stand the pain of remembering everything that’s gone and all that I’ve lost.

I’m as nervous and scared now as I was when this nightmare began. I remember it as if it was only hours ago, not weeks. I was in a breakfast meeting with my lawyer and one of his staff members when it started. Jackson, the solicitor, was explaining some legal jargon to me when he stopped speaking mid-sentence. He suddenly screwed up his face with pain. I asked him what was wrong, but he couldn’t answer. His breathing became shallow and short, and he started to rasp and cough and splutter. He was choking, but I couldn’t see why, and I was concentrating so hard on what was happening to him that I didn’t notice the other man was choking too.

As Jackson’s face paled and he began to scratch and claw at his throat, his colleague lurched forward and tried to grab me. Eyes bulging, he retched and showered me with blood and spittle. I recoiled, pushing my chair away from the table. Too scared to move, I stood with my back pressed against the wall and watched the two men as they choked to death. The room was silent in less than three minutes.

When I eventually plucked up the courage to get out and get help, I found the receptionist, who had greeted me less than an hour earlier, face down on her desk in a pool of sticky red-brown blood. The security guard at the door was dead too, as was everyone else I could see. It was the same when I finally dared to step out into the open—an endless layer of twisted human remains covered the ground in every direction. What had happened was inexplicable, its scale incomprehensible. In the space of just a few minutes, something—a germ, virus, or biological attack perhaps—had destroyed my world. Nothing moved. The silence was deafening.

My first instinct had been to stay where I was, to keep my head down and wait for something—anything—to happen. I slowly picked my way through the carpet of bodies back to the hotel. Each face was frozen in an expression of sudden, searing agony and gut-wrenching fear.

When I got back, the hotel was as silent and cold as everywhere else. I locked myself in my room and waited for hours until the solitude and claustrophobic fear finally became too much to stand. I needed explanations, but there was no one else left alive to ask for help. The television was dead, as was the radio and the telephone. Within hours, the power had died too. Desperate and terrified, I packed my few belongings, took a car from the parking garage and made a break for home. But I soon found that the hushed roads were impassable, blocked by the twisted and tangled wreckage of incalculable numbers of crashed vehicles and the mangled, bloody remains of their dead drivers and passengers. With my wife and my home still more than eighty miles away, I stopped the car and gave up.

It was early on the first Thursday, the third day, when the situation deteriorated again to the point where I questioned my sanity. I had been resting in the front bedroom of an empty terraced house when I looked out the window and saw the first of them staggering down the road. All the fear and nervousness I had previously felt instantly disappeared. At last, someone who might be able to tell me what had happened and who could answer some of the thousands of impossible questions I desperately needed to ask. I called out and banged on the window, but the person didn’t respond. I sprinted out of the house and ran down the road after him. I grabbed hold of his arm and turned him to face me. As unbelievable as it seemed, I knew instantly that the thing in front of me was dead. Its eyes were clouded with a milky-white film, and its skin was pockmarked and bloodied. And it was cold to the touch. Leathery. Clammy. I let it go in disgust. The moment I released my grip, the damn thing shuffled away, this time moving back in the direction from which it had come. It couldn’t see me. It didn’t even seem to know I was there.

More bodies began to rise. Many were already staggering around on clumsy, unsteady feet whilst still more were slowly dragging themselves up from where they’d fallen days earlier.

A frantic search for food and water and safe shelter led me deeper into town. Avoiding the clumsy, mannequin-like bodies which roamed the streets, I barricaded myself in a large pub on the corner of two once busy roads. I removed eight corpses from the building (I herded them into the bar before forcing them out the front door), and I locked myself in an upstairs function room where I started to drink. Although it didn’t make me drunk like it used to, the alcohol made me feel warm and took the very slightest edge off my fear.

I thought constantly about Georgie, about home, but I was too afraid to move. I knew that I should try to get to her, but for days I just sat there and waited like a chicken-shit. Every morning, I tried to force myself to move, but the thought of going back outside was unbearable. I didn’t know what I’d find out there. Instead, I sat in isolation and watched the world decay.

As the days passed, the bodies themselves changed. Initially stiff, awkward and staccato, their movements slowly became more definite, purposeful and controlled. After four days, their senses began to return. They were starting to respond to what was happening around them. Late one afternoon, in a fit of frightened frustration, I hurled an empty beer bottle across the room. I missed the wall and smashed a window. Out of curiosity, I looked down into the street and saw that a large number of the corpses had turned toward the sudden noise and were beginning to walk towards the pub. During the hours which followed, I tried to keep quiet and out of sight, but my every movement seemed to make more of them aware of my presence. From every direction they came, and all that I could do was watch as a crowd of hundreds upon hundreds of the fucking things surrounded me. They followed each other like animals and soon their lumbering, decomposing shapes filled the streets as far as I could see.

A week went by, and the ferocity of the creatures outside increased. They began to fight with each other. They clawed and banged at the doors, but didn’t yet have the strength to get inside. My options were hopelessly limited, but I knew that I had to do something. I could stay and hope that I could drink enough so that I didn’t care when the bodies eventually broke through, or I could make a break for freedom and take my chances outside. I had nothing to lose. I thought about home and I thought about Georgie and I knew that I had to try to get back to her.

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