Die Trying: A Zombie Apocalypse

by Ryan, Nicholas

  There was a narrow belt of long grass stretched out before me, then an equally narrow area with more low shrubs and bark chips. Then, down a narrow walkway, there was the front porch of the house. I went left instead. A driveway wound down the side of the home and wrapped behind the back of the building. At the end of the drive was a two-car garage. The roller doors were down. I didn’t try to lift either of them. There was a small window cut into the side wall of the garage. I pressed my nose against the glass and cupped my hands close around my face. There was a hulking dark shadow inside the structure.

  I turned away and studied the back of the house. The moon hung over the distant treetops, casting everything in a ghostly grey glow. It was enough for me to make out the shape of a long porch and a wide set of three steps leading up to the back door.

  I went to the steps. They were a basic wooden assembly. I went up one step at a time, treading carefully, keeping my weight on the edges of each board where they had been nailed to the side rail to minimize the risk of them creaking.

  The porch was wide and littered with worn sofa chairs, wooden crates and old bicycle parts. The back door had a weary old screen door fixed in front of it with tears in the sagging gauze. A rusted spring mechanism held the door closed. I pulled it back slowly, expecting the worst, but the spring had lost all its tension. It gave way without a sound and I pulled the screen door all the way open.

  I pressed my ear against the back door and listened. It was just a plain hollow slab with a rectangle of painted beading. The paint was peeling. I stood silently for a few seconds but heard nothing.

  My instincts told me to wait. I remembered something about caution being the better part of valor, but the fact was that I expected the entire street to be over-run with convulsing undead at any moment.

  I couldn’t wait.

  It was do or die….

  I held the Glock ready, then took two steps back and launched my foot at the door in a side kick that had all my strength behind it. The door blew inwards and the noise was like a sudden loud explosion.

  I went through the opening without hesitating.

  And tripped over a dead body.

  Even in the darkness I knew it was a body, and I knew it was dead. My foot socked into it and I fell face-first on top of cold stinking flesh. The gun flew from my hand. I heard it skitter away across the floor.

  The body must have been stretched out on its back. My fingers dug into rubbery resistance, and then my hand groped over facial features and long greasy hair. I felt a sudden surge of nausea rise up into the back of my throat. My fingers came away covered in oozing slime and I felt my skin crawl. I scrambled away from the corpse and then went stone cold when I felt the barrel of a gun suddenly thrust hard down against the top of my head.

  “Stay on your knees,” a man’s voice said tensely from out of the darkness. I froze. I heard heavy rasping breathing, and then the voice ghosted out of the night again, this time dripping with undisguised relish. “You’re fucked.”

  I turned my head a little and caught the shape of the man in the corner of my eye. He was holding a flashlight, the glow from the bulb muted by wads of tissue paper so that the light it gave off was like a child’s bedroom nightlight. I couldn’t see him clearly until he stepped past me and pushed the back door closed. I heard the scrape of an iron bar, and then the sound of it being set between steel brackets. The man turned quickly back to face me and suddenly I could see past the glow of the flashlight.

  He was ghastly.

  He was a small, wiry man, maybe seventy – maybe even older. He was shirtless, and the skin of his chest was wrinkled and sagging, the flesh on his arms hung in loose folds. The man’s face was drawn, the skin pallid. He leered at me and I realized he had no teeth. There was spittle dribbling down his chin.

  He was wearing the decapitated head of a dead man, tied by rope and knotted under his chin. The dead man’s head had long wiry black hair, the eye sockets empty, the mouth open and its purple swollen tongue protruding obscenely.

  The gunman was wearing the dead man’s head like some kind of grotesque Easter bonnet.

  “Get up,” the old man said. He was wheezing – the sound of his breath being choked by bad lungs. I got to my feet.

  “Start walkin’,” the old man said. He jabbed the barrel of the gun between my shoulder blades. “There’s a candle in the living room. Walk towards the light… and do it slow like.”

  I went in a careful shuffle. The house was dark, but I could see the faintest glow bouncing off internal walls. We went through a dilapidated kitchen with carefully packed cardboard boxes lined up along the worn linoleum floor. The house stank of decay and urine. I reached a doorway and turned left then right until I stepped into a large room with timber floorboards. The room was completely empty. No furniture, no paintings or photos on the wall.

  No windows.

  The candle was set on a three-foot high steel stand in the middle of the floor. I went towards it and when I was standing beside the flickering glow, the man called from somewhere behind me.

  “Stop right there. Turn around.”

  I turned.

  He was hovering in the shadows on the edge of the room, his shape blurred by the darkness. He switched the flashlight off and there was a long silence.

  “Take off the jacket, and the t-shirt,” the old man’s words ghosted out of the gloom. I hesitated, and he barked the order again, his voice snapping.

  I peeled off the leather jacket and let it fall to the floor. Then I pulled off the t-shirt and tossed it aside. I stood there, bare-chested, and he stepped out from the darkness towards me, with the gun in his hand pointed between my eyes.

  He was a skeletal figure, his face lined and deeply creased like old wood. The hair of his beard had fallen out in tufts leaving clods of white strands that were stained dirty brown around the corners of his mouth and down his chin. He looked me up and down carefully, and the decapitated head, strapped to his chin like a hideous helmet, bobbed and swayed precariously.

  The man was wearing nothing but a pair of dirty underpants. He had scrawny white hairless legs, and a bizarre mat of grey hair that trailed down the hollow curve of his chest to the base of his stomach.

  “Who are you?” he pointed a finger at me.

  “I’m one of the people you shot at on the road outside,” I said.

  He looked suddenly astonished. His eyes widened.

  “You murdered my friend,” I said.

  The old man’s head nodded like it was being jerked at the end of a puppeteer’s string – as if he was recalling a fond memory. “The fat one.”

  “His name was Clinton. Clinton Harrigan.” I had to grit my teeth and fight back the impulse to charge across the space that separated us. “He was a good man. A kind man – and you shot him dead.”

  The old man’s eyes rolled from side to side, and he cackled with delight so that I could see the broken rotting black stumps of his teeth. He danced away from me in some kind of mad jig, then spun back and thrust one of his hands down inside the sagging elastic band of his underpants. His eyes went wide and rolled up into the top of his skull.

  He was insane.

  The old man sighed, and then licked his lips. “How much do you weigh?” he asked, and his voice was breathless and slurred. “One eighty? One ninety?”

  I said nothing, but I felt a sudden cold chill of impending doom. The man waved the gun in my face and then the madness in his eyes seemed to recede. They turned hard as stone. He glowered at me.

  “Pick up the candle,” he snapped. “Go down the hall. At the end, turn left.”

  I took the candle off its stand and for the flash of a split-second I considered turning on the old man and smashing my fist in his face. But he was insane – not stupid. He kept himself out of reach, and I knew I wouldn’t be fast enough to whirl round on him before he could kill me.

  I went down the hall. The candle flame flickered and huge distorted shadows played and leaped across the
dark walls. At the end of the hall was another passageway. I turned left, and the floor beneath my feet felt suddenly sticky.

  The crazy old man jabbed me in the back with the gun. “At the end of the hall is a door. Open it and go down the stairs.”

  The door was like something from a medieval dungeon. It was made of solid timber with huge iron-strap hinges. There was a heavy black metal ring for a handle. I pulled the door open and a nauseous brew of ripe rotting smells washed over me from a basement.

  A descending set of stone stairs stretched out before me. They were well lit with candle light. The steps were rough stone, like they had been fashioned without care, hewn from solid rock.

  “Move,” the old man hissed.

  I went down the steps slowly, my fear rising as I descended. I heard the old man pull the door firmly shut behind us.

  It was an underground cavern, torn from the rock beneath the house. The walls were ragged, the floor covered in hard crusted dirt. The whole area was lit up by hundreds of candles, like a macabre altar. The flickering light leaped up the walls and cast everything in it with a golden glow and deep menacing shadows.

  There was an old table set in one corner, and on it I saw some kind of a jacket. There were sewing needles and reels of cotton. There were plastic buckets under the table.

  Beside the table was a long cement trough, streaked and stained with blood, and above it – suspended from their ankles on huge iron hooks – hung three dead bodies.

  “What the fuck…?” I gasped. The words were wrenched impulsively, and were numbed with my incredulous horror. I felt my eyes widen with shock.

  There were two women’s bodies, and between them hung the corpse of a man. Each body had its wrists slashed. The women had their throats cut. The man’s head had been hacked from its neck.

  They were all naked, dripping the last drops of their blood into the trough. The corpses had been cut behind the Achilles tendon, and meat hooks buried into each ankle to take the weight. Their legs were spread apart, with their feet wider apart than their shoulders. The women’s throats had been cut from ear to ear, slicing through the neck and larynx, and severing the internal and external carotid arteries that carried blood from the heart to the head and brain.

  One of the women had been skinned. Her stomach was deeply gouged where a knife had been inserted above the breast bone and then sliced down through the connecting tissue and muscle to peel long ragged flaps of flesh away from the corpse.

  On a blood-stained bench beside the hanging bodies were several knives and a canvas sheet where the flesh had been stretched out and laid flat.

  “Meet the family,” the old man said. He nudged the closest corpse and it swayed like a slaughter yard carcass. “This is Ellie, my daughter, and at the other end, that’s my wife, Marjory.” He waved the gun around airily like a baton. “And that no-account son-bitch in the middle, that’s Jethro, the daughter’s boyfriend.”

  I backed away, stumbled in shock and disbelief. I felt the gorge of nausea rising in the back of my throat, scalding like acid. I clutched at the sewing bench and bent at the waist, heaving and retching painfully over my shoes and the dirt floor.

  The old man sniggered.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stared numbly. My eyes were swimming and unfocussed. I shook my head to clear my senses and then realized the jacket on the bench was made of cured human flesh. The front and back of the hideous garment had been completed, and one sleeve attached with crude ragged stitches.

  “They’re your family?”

  The old man shrugged.

  I felt another dizzying bout of nausea rise up into my throat but I jammed down on the reflex and took short quick breaths, my mouth wide open, like a man who had run a marathon.

  “You’re insane,” I choked, turning in outrage. “You’re completely fucking insane!”

  The old man turned his head quizzically and then frowned, almost like he didn’t understand. The dead man’s head he was wearing slipped down over his forehead and he pushed it back up with the tip of a gnarled, stained finger.

  “I’m not insane,” he said, offended. “I’m crazy. Crazy like a fox.”

  The gun in his hand became steady. He kept it pointed in the center of my chest. “The undead won’t be able to sense me,” he said softly. “Not if I’m wearing dead flesh. Once the clothes are complete, I’ll be able to walk amongst them without being seen.” He tapped his nose as if he were sharing some secret with me.

  “You’re mad...” I said again, this time more surely but he seemed not to notice. There was an evangelical blaze in his eyes like he was possessed.

  “I wanted the fat one,” the old man looked suddenly pained with disappointment. “He would have been enough to make the pants with flesh left over,” he said, lamenting the fact that he had murdered Clinton Harrigan but not been able to retrieve the body. “That was a waste – like the other one in the back room who tried to break in last week. Had to shoot him of course, but I couldn’t get the body down here. He was too heavy.”

  I leaned against the sewing bench. My head was spinning in a whirlpool of disbelief and horror.

  “The man you murdered was my friend,” I said.

  The old man shrugged. “I needed the skin,” he countered, and his tone was cold with the reasoning of insanity.

  Slowly I felt the horror gradually uncoiling in my gut, becoming something darker. It rose, gathering size and strength and taking form until I could feel myself shaking with murderous rage. I felt my hands bunch into fists and a red mist of fury seemed to glaze over my eyes.

  The old man was ten feet away. He was standing near the hanging corpse of one of the women. He crouched down to his haunches and dipped his hand into the blood-filled trough.

  “The undead are driven to frenzy by the scent of blood,” he said to me. He sucked the blood from one of his fingers and savored the taste like it was a rare delicacy. “It drives them mad. Did you know that?” Without waiting for an answer, he got back to his feet and gently fondled the breast of the dead woman. The corpse swayed gently, and the heavy hooks in her ankles groaned from their support beam in a low mournful creak. The man’s breath hitched in his throat and his eyes rolled white into the back of his head. Without waiting for me to answer, he went on, his voice suddenly ragged with bizarre arousal. “That’s why I use the basement,” he said. “The walls are solid stone. They can’t smell the blood down here.”

  He thrust his hand down inside his underpants and they fell down around his ankles while I stared in revulsion and disbelief. His brow furrowed in concentration and he blinked sweat from his eyes. He stared through me with a glazed wonder, his mouth open and dribbling, seeing something else entirely.

  He groaned aloud. His dried out wrinkled body undulated lewdly, and he ran his hand through the coarse grey pelt of hair down to his sunken stomach in a grisly caress. He wrapped his fingers around the stub of his dangling penis and stroked himself. His skinny frame began to tremble uncontrollably and the shriveled pale flesh of him went hard within the dense unruly nest of pubic hair.

  He groaned again, and a strangled sigh of ecstasy gurgled in his throat. Then he was gasping for breath, his chest heaving as he sagged on trembling legs.

  I lunged for him.

  I threw myself across the room, and there was a vicious, murderous roar in my ears – a sound I didn’t recognize – a sound I didn’t know I was capable of. I was shaking with rage, snarling like a wild animal, and my hands clawed around his skinny neck and buried viciously into the withered flesh of his throat.

  The old man went backwards, crashing to the hard ground with my weight on top of him, driving the wind from his lungs. The gun fell from his hands and he kicked and thrashed in sudden fear and desperation. I drove my knee into his guts and hunched over him, feeling the tips of my fingers and my thumbs moving closer and closer together around his throat until they were almost touching – until the life would be choked out of him.


  The old man’s eyes were wide and wild. He made a sharp hissing sound. Spittle bubbled from his mouth and his eyes began to cloud over. I lifted his head and then smashed it back down into the ground. The decapitated head he was wearing fell off and rolled away, and I saw that the old man’s thinning grey hair was matted stiff with dry blood.

  He clawed at my hands and punched at my shoulder. He raked his nails down my forearm and scratched at my chest. I snarled at him – wild beyond reason – and beyond the reach of compassion or remorse. I shrugged his hands away and tightened my strangling grip around his throat.

  I pounded the back of his skull hard down onto the ground again and he suddenly went slack. The breath escaped from him in a long weary wheeze, and his eyes seemed to bulge then glaze with mist. I opened my hands and drew away from him, shaking and gasping. The old man’s gun was lying near the trough of blood. I scrambled for it on my hands and knees and snatched it up. I got to my feet and backed away, putting space between us. My hands were trembling, my body pumped full of adrenalin – but the brutal need for retribution still pounded like a relentless drumbeat in my head that I could not ignore.

  I had never known an emotion so powerful as the need for revenge that gripped me.

  “Get up,” I said to the man.

  He didn’t move. He lay, limp and lifeless – but he was still breathing. I saw the gentle rise and fall of his chest.

  “Get up,” I repeated. “Get on your knees. Right now.” I kicked out at him with my boot, and caught him high up on the thigh. His body flinched, and then he made a gargled choking sound in the back of his throat as though his lungs had suddenly started pumping again.

  The old man groaned and reached for his throat. His breathing was harsh and asthmatic. He rolled his head and his eyes opened reluctantly. He saw me and there was a dark shadow of alarm in his gaze. He sat upright and then spasmed into a fit of coughing.

  I held the gun on him and it was level and steady in my hand, as though carved from stone.

  “I thought the zombie apocalypse was the horror to beat all horrors,” I said conversationally, my voice flat and devoid of all emotion. “I thought nothing could be more terrifying than the undead rising to kill without remorse or reason. But I was wrong.”