Haven From Hell: Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse

by Won, Mark

  The assistants wheeled in two food service trays with a cloche atop each. The good doctor reached out and removed the cover to reveal, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, another severed head. It looked to have had its upper skull cut through and removed, leaving the brain intact. As I watched the doctor took up a scalpel.

  “Please pay close attention to the areas I’m about to do injury to. I hope you’ll find this as interesting as I do. Observe as I carefully slice away layer after layer of the cortex. Sensory, movement, anterior cingulate. Now let me start on the frontal lobe. The dorsolateral prefrontal, lateral orbitofrontal. This next part is a bit tricky. Let’s see, there it is. The amygdala. There. Done. The hard part is to avoid any collateral damage. That’s essential. The least concomitant injury to the brain at this point would ruin the entire experiment. Now let’s see the subject.”

  Dr. Shelly put a glove on his left hand and placed it into the subjects mouth. The horror bit down hard. I was beginning to get worried that Dr. Shelly would need another trip to quarantine, when he deftly slipped the blade that he’d been holding in his other hand into the back of the zombies brain, the occipital lobe. Suddenly the zombie stopped.

  As the doctor pulled his hand from the zombie’s mouth I asked, “What’s it mean, Doctor?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said. Then he lifter the other cover, revealing another mindlessly gnashing head. That one was fully intact.

  “Observe.” Then Dr. Shelly slashed the left eve of the zombie, cutting deeply into its tissue. Instantly, it stopped moving. The doctor took off his glove and stuck his hand directly into its mouth. No response.

  “What the hell, Doctor?” That had me very curious.

  Dr. Shelly seemed quite pleased with himself. “It’s all about the eyes, or the visual center of the brain. I’m not entirely sure. Anyhow, you can take back a new method of extermination to the militia. I can’t say how useful it will be but, you have to admit, it is interesting!”

  “That’s...impressive, Doctor. Does it matter which eye gets cut open?”

  “No, no it doesn’t! Massive trauma of any sort to either eye results in instant termination. Isn’t it wonderful?! I had often wondered why we never found a blind zombie!”

  “Really, Doctor? I’d never even considered it.” I mean, seriously, who thinks of something like that?

  “I know what you’re wondering, Mark.” The doctor had become so transported by his discoveries that he forgot to use my title. I thought that whatever he was thinking that I was thinking must have been pretty interesting, at least to him.

  “Tell me Doctor. Read my mind.” That’s an old trick. Whatever he came up with I’d claim to have been wondering about. That’s the kind of thing that gets the old simpatico juices flowing.

  He replied, “You’re undoubtedly wondering if the zombie’s apparent vulnerability to fire is merely the result of the optical organ being burned.” He was preening in joy. That man surly loved his work.

  “Wow,” I said, “you see right through me. So, is it?”

  “No, no it most certainly is not! That is a misconception based on the vulnerability of the eye itself! A fire which would merely blind a human will ‘kill’ a zombie. Zombie eyes are equally vulnerable to fire and heat as the human eye, with fatal results. But that’s not the interesting part!

  “Fire actually does burn ‘living’ zombie tissue faster than human tissue! They are slightly combustible, if you can believe it, at least until fully terminated. A marvelous discovery! And there’s more!” He allowed a pregnant pause to add emphasis, “They fear it!”

  Well, well. That did change the whole survival dynamic a bit. I had heard rumors of such a thing but it seemed almost too good to be true.

  “Doctor, I’m going to need a demonstration of that if you can manage it.”

  The good doctor was all to happy to comply. He told me it would only take a minute to set up a ‘live’ test. Meanwhile, he pulled out his tablet and showed me recorded images of zombies held in restraints flinching at the proximity of open flame. Altogether, he must have had over a half hour recorded. Naturally, he eventually got around to lighting the restrained zombies on fire, so I got to see how zombie flesh would sustain a flame, albeit weakly.

  I had to ask, “Doctor Shelly, why does the zombie tissue burn better than human tissue?”

  “It’s amazing, really,” the doctor replied. “Did you notice how as soon as the zombie became inanimate the fire went out? Almost as if, once the zombie was reduced to an ordinary corpse, the flesh lost its uncanny flammable quality.”

  “I caught that, Doctor, but why?”

  Doctor Shelly waved his hands excitedly, “I have no idea! Isn’t it overwhelming?!”

  I couldn’t compliment him enough. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I might not have believed it. This commitment of resources to research was yielding better results than I’d hoped for, and it would only increase my standing with the councils.

  Thank God for the Scientific Method.

  Chapter 5: Running, An Intriguing Conversation, and Not Skating on Thin Ice

  Suddenly, a scream sounded from the front of the house, from the so called ‘Receiving Department’. Said department was responsible for cropping the zombies of whatever arms, legs, hands, or feet were deemed necessary in order to render the subjects safe for further handling. In my, admittedly limited, experience screams were never good.

  “Well, you’ve got your hands full here Dr., I’ll just see myself out.” That just sort of slipped out.

  Meanwhile, the doctor and his two assistants were looking wildly about, casting fearful glances at one another. Each drew his personal sidearm and took up defensive positions around the door that led into Receiving. I knew that would never do. It sounded like somebody was getting murdered in there.

  I drew my own pistol and charged. Who knew? I might not have been too late.

  But I was.

  I had just about reached the door when it came flying off its hinges and slammed me aside. My handgun went flying. As I fell I noticed a pair of zombies shambling through the open doorway. No, not two, just one, but unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It was a patchwork of various parts all sewn together in an attempt to form one whole creature. It was a frankenzombie. After all the effort that went into setting that place up those lunatics had crafted a frankenzombie. I was so pissed.

  Just beyond the opening I saw a couple of wrenched and broken lab technicians. As I watched, one of them got up. So now we really did have two zombies to deal with. Super, what else could possibly go wrong?

  The frankenzombie had two heads, six arms and four legs. I thought it must have had an extra pelvis and a bunch more ribs in there somewhere, too. What a mess. The thing had to be nine feet tall. I intended to have someone shot over that, you’d damn well better believe. If the doctor wanted a live specimen to work with I’d gladly give him himself.

  The monster’s right head looked like some white man in his fifties. The left head reminded me of an old biddy that used to come around the store, a real hag. Under different circumstances I might have wished it was her. The torso was that of a tall bodybuilder and the arms and legs, who could tell? It was poly-ethnic, I could see that much.

  Joe, Burt and Dr. Shelly all opened fire on it as soon as it crossed the threshold, but none of them could hit the broad side of an Ethics in Science textbook. Morons.

  If it had noticed me laying there on the floor, under the door, I thought I would have been a goner. As it was, the unholy amalgamation stepped over me and jumped at Dr. Shelly. That sucker could really move! If the doctor hadn’t been so quick to duck under an experimentation table that would have been it for him. Burt wasn’t so lucky. The frankenzombie managed to snag him with a couple of spare hands on the way by and, snap, that was the end of Burt. He had his head twisted around like an owl’s.

  The former lab tech turned zombie had finally managed to make it to the doorway. It glanced down and stretched a hand t
oward me. I was pretty sure he wasn’t trying to help me up so I grabbed ahold of the door laying across me and tried to use it as a shield. The zombie smoothly reached down, grabbed the door, and flung it aside like some kind of oversized rectangular Frisbee. So, not a zombie after all. An ogre. What were the odds?

  Feeling motivated, I drew my backup gun out of my jacket pocket. A little bitty two shot derringer. Its hands reached down, my shooting iron went up and fired. A small hole appeared between the horror’s milky grey eyes, and the back of its head exploded outward, magnificently. I’d had no idea such a little firearm could be so devastating. Then the ogre fell on me. That lab tech had not been a small man. Regarding its strength as an ogre, it didn’t seem to matter, but as dead weight on top of me it was extremely inconveniencing.

  Dr. Shelly and Joe had caught a break when the ogre had thrown that door. It had smacked right into the back of the frankenzombie just as it was about to rend the good doctor limb from limb. The blow had managed to knock it to all of its knees, as well as break a bunch of bones (not that I’ve ever met a zombie that cared about that). Moreover, Dr. Shelly and Joe were given the time they needed to run through the door leading outside. The frankenzombie was quick to regain its feet, but by the time it did I was the only one left in the room to interest it.

  The hulking horror still ‘alive’ turned toward me, and all I could wonder was what classification it should fall under. It had four legs, so that made it a quadruped, right? But it also had ten limbs, overall. So did that make it a decapod? One other thought did creep in: I only had one bullet left and that damn literal monster had two heads! Wait! Didn’t trolls sometimes have two heads? Or was that giants? The blow from the door being smashed into me was clearly affecting my thinking.

  As the frankenzombie drew close, I tried burrowing deeper beneath the corpse of the lab tech. When the brute tried lifting the body off me I clung to the dead man’s belt, forcing it to lift us both. The frankenzombie tossed aside the corpse and I lost my grip. Its evil hag head leered at me (I assured myself that it was nothing personal, since the Changed have no intellect) and then both mouths laughed. How unfortunate.

  A woozy confusion overcame me and my mind began to ramble: Zombies, ghouls and ogres all had one thing in common (besides all the other things): all of them were to stupid to tell a joke. I had always thought that was the most important weakness of the Changed that we living beings could exploit. Not the joke part, the being stupid part. Those damn ‘scientists’ had built a zombie with a brain. I mean, of course they all had brains. Just not the kind of brain that did any thinking. Strictly the kind of brain that could get shot or stabbed or exploded or chopped with an axe, rendering the offensive things dead. Not that I was any too sure they were alive in the first place, in the strictest sense. I meant the just laying there, decomposing kind of dead. Not the walking around trying to kill people kind of dead. And when I indicate ‘decomposing’ I mean the kind that results in eventual total decay and skelitalification and not the unfair kind of decomposing that never seems to get anywhere.

  My wooziness continued and I noticed a steady flow of blood coming from the side of my head. The injury which I had incurred when the door struck me was worse than I had thought. The wound suddenly become painful and my hand automatically went to it. My vision grew bleary. I tried to aim with one hand, only to find the gun missing.

  The pounding in my head grew worse. The head wound would explain things, actually. I was just hallucinating the zombie laughter. My mind was in a confused and altered state of diminished capacity. That realization came as a great comfort to me. At least until the heads spoke.

  “Dooontt sheeot yersssellf”

  “Are you two screw heads trying to say something?” It wasn’t lost on me that I was still alive. There I was, on my back, wounded, helpless before a giant frankenzombie, with only one bullet left in a gun I’d lost. If striking up a conversation with a probable hallucination seemed a bit desperate, that’s because I was, well, desperate.

  “Doont sheot yeorself”

  “You don’t want me to shit myself? Why would I do that?” Was this some sort of Frankenzombie mockery?

  I decided to try again, “Hey, I only speak English. Do either of your brains know that language?”

  “Don’t shoot yourself. We want you whole.” It came out as a hellish rasp. Like something dragged out of a Lovecraftian nightmare by way of the Crypt Keeper on LSD.

  That’s when I noticed that I had my hands mixed up. The reason I had thought that I lost my derringer was because the gun was in my other hand. The hand holding my head wound. That made much more sense. This monstrous horror was concerned for my health. It didn’t want me to commit suicide. Great, now I had leverage.

  “Why don’t you want me to kill myself? I want to kill you.” Something weird was happening to my thinking. For some reason I’d begun telling the truth.

  “You will be our greatest. When you die you will rule all. A mind to think.” Still that spooky double voiced echo going on. It was like listening to a tabernacle choir spawned in the Abyss.

  “So let me get this straight. When I die I get to rule all you zombies. Cool. What do you guys want me to rule you for?” I just dropped in that ‘cool’ part to throw it off guard. My power to lie was returning slowly. Good. If that conversation was real, I’d need all the lies I could tell.

  “Your mind to direct. We will eat the world. All will be us.” I couldn’t be certain, but the man head’s voice seemed to be getting kind of throaty. Like he was having trouble with his vocal cords or something.

  “The whole world? Will all the animals turn into zombies, too? How about the plants? Wait! What makes you so sure that I’ll turn into one of you evil, rotting, repugnant terrors?” That last part was on purpose. That way when I ‘caved in’ later it wouldn’t seem like it had been too easy. When lying for you’re life it pays to think ahead.

  “We want people. All the people. Souls for us. Food. We see you. You will bring much food. Feast with us. Turn away from the Lie, and we will let you live out your days. Then join us and feast.” Now the hag head had taken on that throaty way of speaking. It was starting to sound a little like a crowd whispering in a graveyard on Halloween night during a giant blood moon, maybe with wolves howling in the distance. Weird. Especially that wolf part.

  “I hate lies! What lie do you want me to ‘turn away from’?” I could hardy wait for the answer. Meanwhile, I was regaining my equilibrium. The fuzziness had left my vision and I could feel my strength returning.

  “We cannot speak of it. It is forbidden. Turn from Hope and embrace the Truth. To be, one must consume. For you to gain, others must suffer loss.” By then both heads were in full chorus mode and losing that whispering quality. Things were getting loud.

  “Hope’s a joke. Who needs it? Can I go now?” I was imagining how quickly I could get Floyd and a bunch of his best men, come back here, and burn this whole island down to the bedrock. I absolutely could not afford to let this horror get off the island. Not even into the water, if I could help it. Even if it was stupid enough to believe me it was way too smart to let wander around.

  “You LIE! You cannot lie to us. We made the lie. Recant and we will let you live, we will let you leave. We will help you all your days. We will make you strong. We will make you rich. We will help you to be God among men.” As sales pitches go that one left a lot to be desired. About all it had going for it was volume. A real hard seller, those two heads were, but a quick tip: if you’re trying to sell something, don’t preface it by declaring yourself to be the guy who invented lies.

  “So, Two-Face, what’s your name, anyhow?” I got my derringer ready. There was no way I was going to let that monster have its way. The question was intended as a distraction.

  “We are...” I brought the derringer around and shot it in the hag head before it could finish. That shook it up some. The hag head hung limp while the other head took on a furious cast to its features. I�
�d made it mad. Good. That’s when I moved.

  Never having taken a break dancing class in my life, my desperation was such that I managed a passable floating gremlin maneuver getting to my feet. Good thing too. Two-Faces two front feet had landed right where my head used to be. Then it fell to its knees, obviously messed up. It seemed to be having trouble regaining its coordination.

  It wasn’t done talking though, “Die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die” I could hear all the other zombies, throughout the complex, screaming the same thing. That’s when I noticed that Burt had gotten up at some point and was making his own move for me, eyes blazing hate. I could see its eyes only because its back was turned to me. That got a crazy little chuckle out of me, watching it flail about, helplessly.

  I still was trapped between the two of them. Burt zombie seemed impotent but I didn’t want to risk getting to close, since it was directly in front of the door leading outside. The frankenzombie was having its own issues but still blocked the only other exit to the room. With so few options available to me I opted to see what a taunt might offer.

  “Hey, Two-Face, do you still not want me to shit myself?”

  Things did seem to be headed in that general direction when the Burt zombie brought its hands up and twisted its head back around. I’d never seen a zombie do that before. While it was doing that, Two-Face was shaking off some of its weakness and was getting its own act together.

  I had the frankenzombie behind me and the Burt zombie ahead of me. I was lucky in that the experimentation table was between Burt zombie and me. The former Burt reached out a hand and flipped the table end over end, right at me. I ducked amid a shower of bone saws and scalpels, the table missed me and slammed into the frankenzombie, knocking it back a pace. It was good to see that these new horrors still had very little tactical sense or concern over friendly fire.