by Mary Martel
Zombie Queen
Copyright © Mary Martel & Brandy Slaven 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Mary Martel or Brandy Slaven, except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.
1st Edition Published: May 2020
Edited By: Michelle Ann at Inked Imagination
All Rights Reserved: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction in whole or in part, without express written permission by Mary Martel or Brandy Slaven.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Other Books by the Authors
About the Authors
Emerald
A whimper escapes me as I press my back up against the wall so hard I can practically feel the bruises that will show up later on my body forming.
I cover my mouth with one hand, and I slap the other one on top of it for good measure. My lips will be bruised as well now.
“Mmmffggrr…”
Wetness hit the tops of my hands like rain falling from the sky as I hear the sound of skin being ripped open wide. A sound I have never heard before, but I know what it is.
“Mmmggrr…”
My body shakes so hard I feared it might rattle apart.
“Emm-” a female shrieks.
Her voice cuts off with a wet gurgle.
My sister. The voice of my beautiful, sweet sister.
A loud crash comes from above my head as I hear another female scream. This one loud and shrill, also the voice of my mother.
“Emerald! Amy!” My mother shrieks our names in a high-pitched voice I’ve never had the misfortune to hear her use before. “Run. Get out of the house. Find a s-”
Her voice was cut off mid-sentence as a heavy thump lands above my head. I flinch, jerking back and the back of my head connects with the wall. If it hurts, the pain doesn’t register.
Run, she’d said. That means leaving her behind.
Moans come from the other room and I know that they aren't coming from Amy. They sound happy, pleased with themselves.
It is coming from those things.
My stomach churns and the urge to vomit is strong. Bile crawls up my throat and I gag.
Unable to hold it in any longer, I bend forward at the waist and throw up all over my pristine white sneakers. When I am done, they are only white in the places the vomit didn’t hit. Instead, they are splattered in a grotesque brown, remnants of the stew I’d had for lunch earlier in the day visible in the wet mess at my feet.
For some reason the changing color of my shoes is important to me. It feels like an omen, and a bad one at that. All that white, pure in its color, gone in a heartbeat. What remains now a hot, smelly mess.
I cough and wipe the back of my hand across my mouth.
I straighten my body and slump back against the wall. My throat stings, and I desperately wish for a bottle of water to rinse the bitter taste out of my mouth. I place the palm of my hand over my stomach that feels justifiably hollow, seeing as its contents are now splattered across my shoes and the tan-carpet covered floor.
I hate throwing up.
My stomach always cramps up afterwards, and I want to lay down on a cool surface (which is usually the bathroom floor because that’s where I’m generally at when I’m vomiting) until my body settles down and feels like my normal, everyday body again.
The sudden silence in the house steals my breath from me, robbing me of oxygen. I wheeze, struggling to draw in air, and the sound that comes out of my throat terrifies me. Not the noise I had made but the fact that I can hear it at all, and it is the only sound to be heard. That’s what terrifies me.
The sounds of my mother’s screams and Amy’s whimpers have died away, telling me they are likely dead. If my mother was alive and was still able to draw breath into her body, she’d be screaming for my sister and I to run for safety. There was nothing in this world that my mother loved more than the two of us. If she were alive, she’d be screaming for her babies to get to safety, and she’d fight to the death to make it happen.
My stomach clenches for an entirely different reason than having just vomited, and my throat closes up for the same reason.
But the silence of the house, the lack of noise coming from those things makes it the wrong time to think about the loss of my loved ones and what that will mean for them considering the fact that those things wear the faces and body suits of human beings. Some of them are even people I know, one of them a neighbor.
Mr. Thompson, the old man from across the street had been the one who’d barreled through the big picture window in the living room with an unholy roar, the one who chased my mother up the stairs with an animalistic snarl on his face. All my life he’d been the shy, quiet old man who lived across the street from my parents’ house. Before tonight, I had never so much as heard him raise his voice, and, at his age, I hadn’t thought it physically possible for him to jump through our living room window.
The lights were on, but Mr. Thompson was clearly no longer home.
I assume he is still upstairs, unless he’s chosen to jump through another window. Which I would have heard.
So why the sudden silence, I wonder.
“Ggrrfff…” an unintelligible voice gurgles into the silence, and my heart skips a beat because the sound is a whole lot closer than before. Too close. Where the sudden silence had freaked me out, the reappearance of sound, any sound, freaks me out more. Especially because it is so close to me.
Scooting with my back along the wall, in the opposite direction of the gurgles. They’d come from behind me. Going forward means moving in the direction of Amy, and I don’t want to see my sister, but it can't be helped. Not unless I want to come face to face with the gurgling thing behind me.
I slide along the wall quickly until the hallway ends and opens up into the living room.
I draw in a deep, admittedly shaky breath through my nose and choke on another gag. That had been a mistake. The stench of raw meat and something stronger, a lot fouler, hits my nose, and I cover half my face with my trembling hands.
The noise coming from behind me grows louder, closer, more persistent. The gurgles turning to moans, sounding hungry.
I peer around the corner, and a breathless sob escapes me at what lays on the carpet in the center of the room. My eyes widen in disbelief and shock.
Sorrow burns through me like a tidal wave.
Amy lays face up on the floor. Her eyes stare up at the ceiling above her, wide and blank. Dead eyes.
I have never seen a dead body before, but I know that’s what she is. Dead. In life, my sister had been a very passionate person, and it had never f
ailed to show up on her facial expressions. She would have sucked at poker had she ever played. I’m surprised to see that not even death could change that part of her.
Her lips are parted wide as if she’d died screaming, which I know she had. Her eyes are wide, shocked, and probably had been filled with pain and terror before life had bled out of her.
Tears have stopped leaking out of her eyes, but the trail of wetness still remains. It is fresh. Otherwise, her face is unmarked. Her body, however, is not. The plaid, button-up shirt she wore has been ripped open straight up the middle.
I swallow thickly as I force myself to not look away from what I was seeing.
Now I know why it had grown so quiet.
There is a man leaning over my sister’s body with his face buried in her stomach. Her stomach that has been ripped wide open. It looks like someone had sunk their hands inside her soft belly and pulled it apart by force. The man hovering over her literally has his face shoved in her stomach. Her insides had muffled the noise.
I can’t help but wonder if the same gross violation is being done upstairs to my poor mother’s body. I hope not. But I’m not so stupid as to believe it.
Making an involuntary noise in the back of my throat, I take a step back, moving into the hallway.
Another mistake made by me.
At the sound of the noise I’d made in the back of my throat, the man who has his face in Amy’s stomach sits up abruptly, and his head twists around. His movements are jerky and uncoordinated.
His eyes are even deader than Amy’s. The entire bottom half of his mouth is covered in blood, likely my sister’s. His mouth is open in a silent snarl, and his face is slack.
He has a wound on the side of his neck. It looks like a big dog had sunk its teeth in deep and taken a chunk out of his flesh.
Blood drips off of his chin, raining down onto the already-red carpet with a wet plop.
I take another step back as he surges to his feet in one fast, non-human movement. My back meets with something solid and I shriek as I whirl around.
Mr. Thompson stands before me, his lip curled in a snarl, half his face covered in blood and small chunks of something I don’t want to think about. My brain shuts down, and I refuse to consider what is on his face.
His arm is bent at an awkward angle. Two of his fingers look like they’d been gnawed on by an animal of some kind and were chewed down to the bone. Stumps remain, and they look painful. They don’t seem to bother Mr. Thompson one bit because he raises his injured hand, knocking it into the side of my face. The stumps of his left-over fingers scrape against my cheek, and I scramble backwards trying to get away from his touch.
I do not want him touching me with that hand. I trip over something unseen and go down hard, landing on my ass in a heap.
Mr. Thompson snarles angrily at me and throws himself down on top of me with his jaws snapping like a starved dog. Blood and spittle drip down from his face, splattering against my chin.
He snaps his teeth in my face and snarles at me. His movements are uncoordinated and snappy as he grabs at my sides, seeking purchase with his good hand and the bad one.
I shove my arms between us, putting my forearm in his throat to keep his face out of mine, and shove at his thin chest with my other hand.
Inhuman noises came out of his throat as we struggle for dominance. For an old man, he is incredibly strong. I thrash underneath him, kick out with my feet, and try to roll him off of me while shoving up with my hips and trying to dislodge him. From the waist down, he is unmoving, not struggling, but his body feels like dead weight on top of mine. I can’t get out from underneath him no matter how hard I try.
He gives up on grabbing onto my sides. He raises his good hand and, jerkily, brings his fist down on my face. Unable to stop him with my arm in his throat while we struggle, I pause, stunned when his bony fist connects with my cheekbone.
Blinking away the pain, I lower my arm and momentarily stop pushing against his chest. Another mistake, this one almost costing me dearly.
He takes advantage of my lack of movement and shoves his face in mine.
His cool, moist breath blastes over my face, smelling of death and blood. I scream in his face as I thrash beneath him.
I get my leg in between his and am able to put my foot on the floor. I shove my hands at his chest at the same time I plant my foot on the floor and shove with all my might. I roll his body off of mine and scramble backwards. I don't get far because he grabs ahold of my sneaker, and even though it is still wet and covered with vomit, he manages to keep hold of it when I expect his hands to slip right off of it. His hands claw at my shoe as I lift my other foot and kick out. He grunts when my heel connects with his nose, but it doesn't stop him or seem to slow him down in the slightest.
Mr. Thompson snarls and pulls harder on my foot. I slide across the carpet on my ass, moving closer to him. All the way, I keep kicking out at him with my foot, making contact with his head every time.
My back is now exposed to the living room where Amy’s body lays dead, and I have to take my eyes off of Mr. Thompson in order to look over my shoulder when I hear scuffling noises coming from behind me.
My eyes widen in fear as the man whose face had been buried in Amy’s stomach is now crawling across the floor on his hands and knees towards me. From the tips of his fingers up to his elbows are covered in blood and something brown that resembles dirt. He has gaping wounds on his forearms, chunks missing out of them that look like someone had bitten him and taken his flesh with them. The size of the bite marks is small, and I know that if he’d been bitten by a human mouth, it had been that of a child.
I shiver at that thought as Mr. Thompson gives a triumphant howl and viciously yanks back on my foot.
I stop paying attention to the man coming at me from behind and let my focus return to the bigger threat in the room, or, at least, the more immediate of the two.
Mr. Thompson’s face is leaning over my ankle, his eyes riveted on the skin on my leg that has been exposed as my jeans ride up my leg during my mad scramble to escape out from underneath him.
I draw my free foot back at the knee and kick him in the face again, this time putting all the force I have in me behind it. I get him in the eye.
He howls as his head jerks back and he immediately lets go of my foot.
I kick him in the face one more time. I have enough presence of mind left to feel bad about kicking a shy, sweet old man whom I’d grown up around in the face, a man who never in his right mind would have ever dreamed of harming a soul, before climbing to my feet.
I bolt through the living room, not daring to look at Amy’s body as I go. I know that no matter how badly the need to escape my family home and the things that have overrun it is, one look at my sister would have me changing direction. Instead of fleeing for my life, I would be running over to her body. That was what stopped me from looking and from going over to her. The thought of it not being her lying over there on the floor, but instead thinking of it as simply being her body lying over there. Though her body remains, my sister is entirely gone. I’d seen it in her eyes.
Still, it kills something inside of me to run away from her body. It also kills something inside of me to be running in the opposite direction of the stairs that lead up to the second floor where my mother is.
I think of her screaming for us to run, to get out of the house, and the fact that her screams have long since died away. I know in my heart if she were somehow still alive, she would never forgive me for turning back around and going to check on her. I also know that if she were dead, as I know her to be in my heart, it wouldn’t matter and the only thing I would succeed in doing is likely finding my own death.
So, I run.
I don’t make it out of the living room before something slams into my side, and I am tackled. My breath leaves me in a rush as a hard body drops down on top of mine. My back meets with one of the antique tables my mother had loved so much because they had been lovi
ngly passed down through her family for several generations and are worth a small fortune. There are several throughout the house, and they are always something my mother had taken pride in bragging about every time someone new visited the house for the first time.
The table rocks back into the wall with a slam. Things clatter around on top as a Tiffany lamp tips forward and makes a slow descent towards the carpet, narrowly missing my head on its trip down. Glass shatters as it hit the floor and shards fly at my unprotected face.
I feel something unmistakably wet and cool leaking from the body straddling mine, landing on my jean-covered thighs, and I shudder at the thought of what it might be.
The body above me lets out a hiss. Frantically, I swipe the hair out of my face with shaking hands that no longer wants to function correctly. I have to struggle to get them to work at all.
Shock, I think. I am going into shock; the night’s events have taken their toll on not only my poor brain but my now battered body.
My face stings with cuts from the glass of the broken lamp shade, and blackness is slowly creeping in at the edges of my vision. I blink, trying to keep the blackness at bay.
I shake my fuzzy head as I try to focus on my attacker who now looms over me.
Cold, rancid breath hits me in the face before Amy’s murderer tries to shove his face into my neck. I scream as I shove at the side of his head, dislodging his body from its place atop of mine.
His body lists to the side, and he face plants into the front of the table.
I reach out to the side, my hands searching for something to use as a weapon to defend myself with. My numb hand hits the heavy base of the lamp, and I wrapped my fingers around it.
The man sits up with an enraged snarl on his face as I lift the lamp high above my head. My numb arm shakes under its weight as I swing the lamp down in an arc. I hit my attacker in the side of the head, opening up a small gash.
It doesn’t faze him.
He growls low and deep in the back of his throat as he carelessly swats at my hand.
I hit him in the head again with the lamp. A jagged piece of glass sticks out of the shade stuck in his eye. It doesn’t come out when I pull the lamp back but instead breaks off and sticks in his eyeball. I gag and hit him in the head again.
