Z-Burbia Box Set | Books 1-3 [The Asheville Trilogy]

by Bible, Jake

  Notice a theme? Yeah, my ass needs saving. A lot.

  Elsbeth sorta got adopted by us Stanfords, and we took her in and have spent a long time curbing her more wild ways. Not that we work too hard at that since Elsbeth has a certain skill set with the killing that keeps us all alive.

  Which brings up Dr. Kramer. But I really don’t want to talk about that crazy fucking asshole. I could go the rest of my life without even hearing that cocksucker’s name again.

  With that said, I think that brings us up to speed on the cast of characters in my life. Unfortunately, the only ones with me are my immediate family. The rest are offstage dealing with whatever they-.

  “JACE!” Stella yells. “Watch it!”

  I swerve around a pile of furniture that has been set in the middle of the road. Why is it in the road? No clue. A couch, two chairs, a coffee table- all just stacked up for no reason. Weird.

  “Sorry!” I shout back at Stella.

  “Now is not the time to space off!” she shouts back. “Pay attention!”

  She’s right, now is not the time to space off. Thoughts come and go and most of the time I can ignore them. The problem is that sometimes I just can’t control it. There was this one time where...

  “DAD!” Greta and Charlie yell at me.

  “Sorry!” I yell back. “Downshift!”

  I whip the wheel to the left again and try to coordinate the clutch with Charlie’s shifting, but we grind the fuck out of the gears before we get it figured out and lose some precious distance between us and the cannies. Their shouts and calls are even louder now and I risk a glance in the rearview mirror.

  They’re laughing at us.

  The pickup trucks are a hodgepodge of parts and colors. They’ve scavenged bits and pieces from all kinds of makes and models and just slapped them all together to make some ugly ass vehicles. I have to give the cannies credit- they sure know how to keep up with the whole post-apocalyptic aesthetic.

  I mean, look at how they are dressed. It’s early fall and the air has started to turn, yet the fuckers are going around in ripped jeans, cargo pants, overalls without any shirts on. All the scars and tattoos must be what keep them all warm as we race through the night air. Of course, it could be the cozy embrace of their insanity that’s keeping them all toasty. I’m not up on my cannibal thermodynamics and shit.

  The one good thing I can say about these particular cannibals is they don’t have firearms. Apparently they done runned out of bullets, y’all. Which is strange since this is rural Tennessee. You’d think they would have found several dozen stockpiles in these tract houses we are zooming past. Either they didn’t look or they went through their bullets fast. Doesn’t matter to me, really. I prefer them to be waving spiked baseball bats and axes rather than shooting AR-15s and shit.

  “Open stretch!” I call out as we come around a corner and I see a straightaway that lasts a few blocks. No cars, no weird piles of furniture, nothing to get in our way. All I see is open road and I floor it. “Gimme third, Charlie!”

  We shift into third gear, then into fourth as I press the accelerator down as far as it will go. The engine coughs a little, probably due to whatever fuel they have in this thing, but we quickly increase our speed until the speedometer says we are going sixty.

  I can feel Stella’s eyes on the gas gauge. I try not to look down at it, but I am painfully aware of how little time we have until the chase is done. Some opportunity better present itself soon or we’ll just end up coasting to a stop on this road, which has suddenly stopped being residential and is now an open rural highway, and I don’t think any of us have the energy to try to outrun our pursuers.

  “Quarry!” Greta yells as she points towards a sign on our right. “Maybe we can lose them there!”

  “Worth a shot!” I yell. “Downshift!”

  More grinding of gears, and I almost lose control with my one arm, but we take the turn and find ourselves on an old gravel road that splits through a small pine forest. I don’t think anyone had maintained the road even before Z-Day. There are more ruts and potholes than actual road and I seriously have to wonder if even the Bronco can make it. We are jarred and jostled to the point that I’m staying in my seat only because I’m gripping the steering wheel.

  Did I mention that the cannies yanked the seat belts out of all their vehicles? I’m guessing they live by a libertarian ethos more than a safety first lifestyle. Ain’t nobody gonna tell them to wear their seat belts in the apocalypse! No, sir!

  Bump, bam, whack and many other none too pleasing sounds come from under the Bronco. Some of those sounds are very similar to metal grinding on metal. And I’m not talking about the grinding from the transmission as Charlie and I tag team the fuck out of the gearshift. The Bronco is not sounding good as we continue the pattern of slamming into the road and then catching air as we bounce our way down the gravel road more than actually drive down it.

  At this rate, I distinctly believe that I’m going to snap an axle before we run out of fuel.

  “Oh, shit!” Stella yells as the Bronco sputters and dies. “We’re empty!”

  So much for my prediction.

  I yank the wheel to the side so that the Bronco blocks the “road.” We all scramble out and start running as fast as our weakened bodies can. The cannies haven’t exactly kept us in an environment conducive to our health and well being. And before that, we were fighting for our lives so much that rest and proper nourishment weren’t exactly falling from the sky. No timeouts in the apocalypse!

  “This way,” I huff and puff as I see a trail off to our left. “We can try to lose them in the woods.”

  It isn’t so much a trail as it is a wider space between the pines than the other spaces around us. We have to zig and zag a lot, but eventually, we get deep enough into the woods that the canny shouts become more echoes than threatening calls immediately behind us. I almost wonder if they missed seeing which way we went and are hopefully heading in the other direction. But I know exactly how hopes turn out post-Z.

  “I think I see a clearing,” Greta whispers as we slow to a pitiful pace of stumbling and tripping. “Over there.”

  We all see the break in the trees and head for it in the hopes (there’s that word again) it will lead us to the quarry. Not sure why I think a quarry is a good place to go, but it at least gives us a destination. Maybe we can find someplace in it to hide. Or maybe there’s machinery or supplies around it that we can use as weapons. I don’t fucking know. My mind is a hazy mess of pain and hunger.

  But I can’t let on to my family that I’m not thinking straight. I’m supposed to be the big brain that is always figuring ways out of shitty situations. That’s what I’ve been known for since Z-Day hit. I was the guy in Whispering Pines that could strategize and engineer the solutions we needed to stay alive. I was the generalist that may not have had all the answers, but I at least had some of the answers.

  The only generalist I am now is generally fucked, which doesn’t make a lick of sense. See?

  We break from the trees into an open meadow. The meadow is ringed by pine trees except for the far side which just disappears. I’m guessing that’s the edge of the quarry.

  I glance over my shoulder, but it’s too dark to really see anything in the woods. The fucking cannies don’t even use torches or anything so we can see them coming after us. They’re all night stealth and shit. Fuck, as far as I know, they’re standing at the edge of the trees flipping me off.

  Oh, wait, never mind, here they come!

  “Go! Go!” I shout at my family as we all stumble towards the edge of the meadow. “Just run!”

  “Where, Jace?” Stella shouts. “What are we going to do? Jump in?”

  “If we have to!” I reply, my one arm at the small of her back, urging her to go faster.

  “Wait...what?” Charlie yells. “We’re jumping? Fuck that shit, Dad!”

  “It’ll be like Butch and Sundance!” I yell at him. “Bad guys on our asses and we have to
jump into the raging waters!”

  “I hated that movie!” Greta shouts. “It was boring!”

  I don’t respond because no self-respecting person would give a statement like that the time of day. Butch and Sundance a boring movie? That’s crazy talk! It has all the elements of great cinema! Charisma, humor, adventure, drama, romance...

  “Jace! Keep up!” Stella shouts.

  Dammit, I was spacing again. Can’t blame me, though. I love Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Just a fucking great movie. I am totally psyched to jump off the edge of a quarry cliff into the water below. That will be some seriously cool, post-apocalyptic hero shit!

  “Well...that solves that,” Charlie says as we skid to a halt at the edge of the meadow, which is at the top of the quarry, and look down into an empty pit of dirt and rock.

  No water. Nothing.

  “I thought quarries had standing water in them,” I say to no one in particular. “Holes in the ground fill up with water. Rain comes from sky, water fills quarry. It’s an unspoken law of the industrialized world we live in. I mean what is the fucking point of digging a fucking hole if it isn’t going to fill up with water and become an unsanitary and unsafe place for local rednecks to hang out in? What has this world come to?”

  “Yeah, we’ve lost Dad,” Greta says. “Anyone else have any ideas?”

  “Can we climb down?” Charlie asks.

  “I can’t see three feet in front of me, Charlie,” Stella replies. “There’s no way we can see to climb down into there.”

  “And it’s like two hundred feet down, dumbass,” Greta adds.

  “Be nice,” Stella snaps.

  “Well, he’s the one with the stupid idea, not me,” Greta snaps back.

  “You asked for other ideas!” Charlie shouts. “I gave one! What’s your bright idea then, genius?”

  “We run that way until we find a trail down or someplace to hide,” Greta snarls.

  “Oh, wow!” Charlie laughs. “That’s the best idea anyone has ever had! Find someplace to hide! No one in the history of ever has anyone thought about finding someplace to hide when being chased by fucking cannibals!”

  “Better than climbing down a fucking cliff in the dark!”

  “Kids! STOP!” Stella roars. “Jace? What do we do? How do we get out of this?”

  “We go that way,” I say and point to where the woods meet the edge of the meadow and the edge of the quarry. “We dive back into the woods and hope we can get back out.”

  “That doesn’t reassure me,” Stella says.

  “That makes two of us,” I reply as I grab her arm and start pulling her to our left. Or right. It depends on where you are standing. “Come on, kids! Move ass!”

  They both groan and I wonder at the capacity teenagers have to complain about anything in any situation. It’s like they are hard-wired to just be pains in the asses.

  “Is running from the cannies too much work?” I snap.

  “Jace, not now,” Stella hisses.

  “Sorry,” I reply as we skirt the edge of the quarry, which isn’t exactly a straight line. We are only one wrong step from plummeting to our deaths.

  Which is probably where we are headed anyway since several shapes come out of the woods in front of us and step into the meadow. Looks like the cannies know how to flank their prey.

  What am I saying? Of course they do. They are pack hunters that chase down humans so they can slaughter them and eat them in a fucking stew. They know how to flank, press, surround, and trap and all the good huntery stuffs that huntery types do.

  Fucking huntery types...

  “Now what?” Stella asks.

  I would like to stop right now and declare that the words “now what” make up my least favorite sentence ever. I have come to detest those words.

  But I would never say that to Stella.

  “Back the other way,” I say and spin about to see that the kids have already had that idea and are sprinting in the opposite direction, leaving us behind. Fucking kids...

  But they only get back to where we first stopped at the edge of the quarry before another set of shapes step from the woods on the other side of the meadow.

  See? Cannies know their business. Unfortunately, business seems to be good.

  “Where ya goin’, Long Pork bro?” a voice cries out from the main group that slows to a casual walk as they come at us through the meadow. “Why ya runnin’? Ya could have had it good, bro! Ya could have fixed the power and the plumbin’ and been able to live your life with us! But you had to go and fuck it up, bro! Not cool, bro!”

  Ugh. I know that voice.

  Barfly.

  Leader of the Crossville Cookers.

  Yeah, I said “Crossville Cookers.” Mother fucking cannies have gang names and shit.

  Been like that since we got past Knoxville. Only a few miles after the connection to what was once I-75, we started seeing cannibal gang names spray-painted on billboards. Names like Tennessee Hunger Brigade, Kingston Queens, The Droolers , and my favorite, The Thigh Boners.

  I laughed for a good while after seeing that, until we started coming to the human hides with the name branded into them. The crazy fucks skinned people, tanned their skins, and stretched the hides out along the road with their gang name and other messages for those unlucky enough to happen by.

  What messages?

  “Dark meat is the best!”, “Eat more Pete!”, “Ain’t no thing but a human wing!”, and last but not least, “We make our own sauce!”

  All of those messages led up to such a fun time in such a fun place- Cannibal Road.

  “Hey, Barfly,” I sigh as he pushes through the cannies and walks up to me. Oh, and look, they’ve lit some torches. I guess it’s a real party now. “What’s up?”

  “Long Pork! Bro!” Barfly smiles as he shakes his head. “What were ya thinkin’, bro?”

  “I was thinking that I’d get my family out of here so you wouldn’t kill them and skin me like you said you would,” I reply honestly as I step forward, putting myself between the cannies and my family.

  You don’t lie or bullshit Barfly. The guy is creepy perceptive when it comes to deception. I have no idea who or what he was pre-Z, but I’m guessing his talents were wasted. It’s why I hate the guy so much. I’m all about bullshit and sarcasm, it’s how I roll. Took me a few smacks to the head with a steel rod before I figured out that my brand of humor was not Barfly’s brand of humor.

  It’s that steel rod in Barfly’s right hand that I focus on as I shrug.

  “You said you were done with me and were going to skin me alive, Barfly,” I say. “Sorry, man, no disrespect meant. I just had to look out for me and my own, ya know?”

  “I dig that, I dig that, bro,” Barfly nods. “I see yer point, but it ain’t my point, so I don’t care, bro.”

  Like all cannies, Barfly is scrawny, but scrappy. He’s lean and mean with wiry muscles and a gaunt look that sharpens his features while sending his eyes back into his skull in two pools of shadow. Almost six feet, but not quite, he stands before me wearing only a pair of cutoffs (front pockets hanging out, I shit you not) and wearing Hello Kitty flip-flops on his feet. Where he found Hello Kitty flip-flops that fit his size eleven feet, I have no idea.

  The steel rod hits my left thigh before I even know it and I cry out in pain. Stella moves towards me, but I wave her off. The hit wasn’t hard enough to take me down, but I know the next one will be. I have the bruises all over my thighs to prove it.

  “Bro, stop,” I hiss as I rub my leg. “Just protecting what’s mine, you know? You respect that, right? Always worth a try.”

  “I get ya, I get ya,” Barfly nods. His head is shaved (of course) and he has various tattoos of badly drawn cartoon characters all across his scalp. It’s too dark to really see, but I think Tweety Bird winks at me each time Barfly bobs his head.

  “Sooo...we good?” I ask, thinking the direct question might take him off guard. I’m an optimist that way.

&nbs
p; “No, bro, we ain’t good!” Barfly says. “You tried to play me, Long Pork bro! Then you killed six of my peeps before you stole my Bronco, bro. Why you have to go and do that?”

  I watch him for a second, thinking maybe my exceptional skills as a sarcastic bastard have rubbed off on him, but he’s dead serious.

  “Six? What the hell are you talking about, bro?” I ask. “We didn’t kill anyone. You got to believe me, Barfly. We jacked the Bronco without seeing a single soul until we crashed the gate, man. Last we saw of your peeps was them running around to put out all those fires.”

  “You fucking, bro?” he asks as he cocks his head like a beagle. “Six bros dead.”

  “Two girls!” someone shouts from the cannie crowd.

  “Yeah, yeah, Spitty is right,” Barfly nods. “Two them bodies was lady bro bodies. You killed two lady bros, bro.”

  “I’m telling you I didn’t kill a single bro, lady bro or man bro, Barfly,” I insist.

  The hit to my right thigh makes me totter, but I hold myself up and stay on my feet.

  “Dead bodies don’t lie, bro,” Barfly says. “Unless you be tellin’ me that crazy chick bro did them in. One crazy chick bro killin’ six of my bros? My bros got skills, Long Pork bro. Don’t think crazy chick bro got that good of skills.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask. “She is a crazy chick, you know.”

  Barfly grins and wags his steel rod in front of my face.

  “Oh, Long Pork,” he replies. “Bro, bro, bro.”

  The rod nails me a little higher and I clutch my right hipbone as excruciating pain radiates through my skeleton, but I don’t fall down. I do that and it’s all over. I’ve been falling down too much lately; time to stay standing like a man.

  “I’m gettin’ tired of your shit, Long Pork,” Barfly says. “You keep layin’ on the bullshit and I’ll have to do somethin’ about it.”

  He looks past me and zeroes in on Stella and the kids.

  “Maybe have us an impromptu cookout, bro,” he laughs. “Dig us a pit, get us a fire goin’, and then dump your pretty pretties in there so they roast up all nice. I’ll make you and your boy do the diggin’,”