Hell Hath No Fury

by TW Brown

  He drew the gun from his belt, only to have it knocked away by the bokor swinging the bar. He yelled in frustration and hurried for the gun, the bokor also making to grab for it.

  ***

  Sam screamed when she and Atkins were pulled apart from each other. A zombie had its arms around her waist and was dragging her backwards across the carpark. Atkins was in a similar situation with two of the undead pulling him with them.

  Sam yelled and thrashed and fought. Something sharp bit into her ankle, and when she looked down, she saw a zombie sinking its teeth into her leg. She kicked out and screamed louder.

  A screech of car tyres on tarmac caught her attention and she saw her father drive into the carpark, narrowly avoiding one zombie and catching another, knocking it under the wheels and running it over.

  Atkins was screaming hysterically, and Sam just caught a glimpse of him on the ground, a zombie tearing his arm from his body, when the car pulled up and obscured her view.

  She kicked at the zombie near her feet again and caught it in the face. It let her go and she spun around, stabbing the knife into the neck of the zombie still holding her. Her father leaned across the car and opened the passenger door; she ran and dived inside.

  “Atkins,” she managed to gasp, pulling the door shut as her father drove on.

  “He’s dead,” her dad replied. “They’ve...”

  Sam swallowed. They were moving slowly, pushing through the throng of zombies who were banging on the car as they passed. “Frank’s on the roof,” she said.

  “What’s he doing on the roof?”

  Sam looked out of the windscreen towards the supermarket; she could see the cop swinging his fist at the robed man. “Fighting,” she said. “See that guy up there? He’s controlling the zombies, we need to kill him.”

  “How the he—”

  A gunshot rang out, echoing across the carpark. Sam looked to the rooftop, but she couldn’t see Frank.

  ***

  Frank lay on his back, his heart racing. He still held the gun in front of him. The bokor, lying opposite, groaned.

  “You’re not dead, you bastard?” Frank growled. He got to his feet and gave the man a kick, prompting another groan. He grabbed the bokor’s robe and gave him a shake. “Send them back to Snowcombe.”

  The bokor laughed, blood bubbled on his lips. “No,” he said. His voice was heavily accented.

  Frank pushed his gun under the man’s chin. “I’ll blow your head off,” he warned.

  “Do it. You have no more ammunition.”

  Frank held the gun a moment longer before thrusting it back into its holster. “You’ll bleed to death if you don’t get medical attention soon. Send them back or I’ll leave you to die.”

  Again, the bokor laughed. “You’re a cop,” he said. “You won’t let me die.”

  Frank didn’t know how true that was. He opened his mouth to reply when Sam and her father climbed onto the roof.

  “We’ve lost the scientist,” Sam said. Then she dropped to her knees by Frank’s side and peered at the bokor. “He’s still alive!”

  “I know,” Frank said.

  “Well, kill him!”

  “This is a police matter,” he replied. “I’m hand-ling it.” He looked at the bokor, willing the other man to just die. Nothing happened.

  “I don’t mean to alarm anyone,” Sam’s father said, “but a zombie is on his way up here.”

  “If I kill him, will you arrest me?” Sam asked, showing Frank her knife.

  “Samantha! You’re not killing anybody,” her father said.

  Frank was glad he’d didn’t have to reply. He turned back to the bokor. “We’ll get him in the car and drive him up to Snowcombe. Hopefully, they’ll follow.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  Frank looked at Sam and then over at her father who was peering over the edge of the roof. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Help me with him.”

  He took one of the bokor’s arms and hooked it around his neck, Sam did the same and they lifted the man awkwardly, half dragging him to the edge of the roof.

  “I don’t think we can go down the same way!” Sam’s father cried.

  “There must be a store entrance,” Frank said. “There must—”

  “Wait, something’s happening,” Sam’s dad said. He beckoned them over.

  Frank kept hold of the bokor as Sam left him and went to the edge of the roof. The bokor felt limp and heavy. A dead weight. Frank looked at him. Blood was dripping from the bottom of the brown robes to pool at his feet.

  “They’re leaving!” Sam said, turning to give Frank a wide grin.

  He smiled back. “We should follow in the car,” he said. “Or I should. I need to check they return to Snowcombe.”

  “Is he...?”

  Frank lowered the bokor to the ground. “Dead? Yep. Let’s hope he doesn’t come back as one of them.”

  ***

  Sam and her father thanked Frank as he dropped them off at home. The town was once again empty of zombies, although there were bodies everywhere. Sam couldn’t find her cat and she worried, though she knew he’d be okay.

  She sat with her dad in the kitchen, her hands around a mug of tea. She felt exhausted and sick and knew she’d have to go to the hospital to get the bite on her ankle looked at.

  She gave her dad a smile and sipped her tea.

  Jordan Deen lives near the mountains in Southern California, under expansive crystal blue skies. A die-hard multi-tasker, Jordan can be found most nights curled up with a book, her laptop, multiple novels in progress swimming in her head, and her two sons (one human and one of the canine variety) competing for her attention. Jordan has won multiple awards for her debut novel, ‘The Crescent’. Her sequel, ‘Half Moon’ released January 2011. For more information, please visit www.JordanDeen.com.

  "Everything comes down to family. Who we are, what we value, our particular combination of crazy…all of it the inexplicable dance of blended DNA and various childhood traumas. And despite decades of social and scholastic engineering, we still have that impulse for home and hearth and the people there to whom we gave, or from whom received, noogies. So the urge to protect, even nurture, those people who simply by happenstance of birth became your parents and sisters and brothers or whatever, remains inviolate. No matter what your family did to bring about the worldwide apocalypse, or what you have to do to keep them alive…we’re there for ya, bro."

  The Candidates

  By Jordan Deen

  So, you think your life sucks? Let me take a few minutes to prove you wrong. My name is Kirsten Lewis, and five years ago my father, Doctor Charles Lewis—world-renowned geneticist—unwittingly unleashed The Sickness on the world. Yeah, cliché, I know. Trust me. My best friend Kyle and I used to spend our summers laughing about how stupid zombie movies are and how they always begin with a mad scientist trying to save the world. We’d even joke about how corny it was that zombies moved slow and how stupid they were. But that was long ago, and this story is different. This is nothing to laugh at.

  Zombies aren’t like they are in the movies. It’s true, they are slow, they do eat flesh and they do make that horrid gurgling sound that makes your skin crawl—what’s different is they don’t lose their personalities and they definitely aren’t dumb. They remain the people you once loved, and it’s easy to say that you’d kill your mom or dad if they were attacking you—but could you really? They are still your parents after all, just, they look at you differently…they look at you like you’re the buffet and they’ve paid for the breakfast, lunch, and dinner specials.

  “Are you ready for this?” Kyle asks climbing into the used mini-van my mom insisted she had to have when my brother, Aiden, made the soccer team. Her Proud Parent of a Highland Hills Eagle bumper sticker still attached to the bumper reminds me of happier times, even though it is lame to the tenth power.

  “Yeah, we have to do it now,” I say, slinging our bag of supplies behind the seat. Today has
to go according to plan. We’ve been careless with our activities lately and the last thing we need is to draw attention to ourselves.

  “Do you have a plan?” he says as we pull onto Sixth Avenue heading towards the elementary school and the park. Soccer balls roll back and forth in the back of the van like the thoughts in my head—carelessly bouncing off of one another until they are squishy and deflated.

  “I figured we’d just run it like last time.”

  “We had a dog last time.” Jasper was our Golden Retriever we got shortly after we relocated. But he is gone now, devoured by a filthy little impatient leech.

  “I know,” I reply half-heartedly. “We’ll get another…eventually.”

  “Yeah, fat chance.” Kyle pulls sunblock out of the bag and starts rubbing it feverishly onto his pale, freckled skin. “Want to try ice cream?”

  “Nah,” I say, pulling into the parking lot behind the playground. Dozens of unassuming kindergarteners and elementary kids run near the fence line while others sway on the swings and go down the slides. All of them are completely unaware of the real nightmare that happened in the quiet town of Upland, California. The actions of one man brought a community to its knees and resulted in a fifteen foot electrified fence being erected from the Pacific Coast to the boarder of Nevada—completely cutting off Southern California from the rest of the United States and Mexico.

  “Then how are we doing it? I highly doubt one of these kids is going to play soccer with us. Besides, we need a chunkier kid this time.”

  “What?” I ask, turning to look into his steely blue eyes.

  “Yeah, a bigger kid will last longer.”

  “Ewww…” I say and toss the soccer ball to him as I reach for the bag. Ropes, duct tape, and a blanket are overkill for this setting, but I refuse to be unprepared if something goes wrong.

  “I’m just saying.” He gives me a wide smile, tosses the ball onto the ground and takes off towards the park, volleying the ball back and forth between his feet. It doesn’t take long for more than a half-dozen kids to surround him to watch his fancy footwork. He has always been better at drawing the kids in; I really don’t know what I’d do without him.

  When Aiden came down with leukemia, my family fell apart and Kyle was the only friend that stood by me while my dad spent hours at his lab trying to splice the right combination of medicines and genes to cure my brother. Unfortunately, the company he worked for, Linux Genetics, did not see eye-to-eye with my dad in his methods for testing the new serums and terminated him. That’s when the garage became the lab and Aiden became Dad’s personal lab rat. Dad knew Aiden didn’t have the years needed to perfect a cure. Even at six years old, Aiden knew what was happening to him. He endured shot after shot and serum after serum, hoping Dad would fix him and stop the cancer from spreading throughout his body. But, no matter what Dad did, nothing worked—leading to more frustration and aggravation for all of us. My baby sister and I had to watch helplessly as our brother withered away to nothing.

  “No fair, you cheated!” a small boy, no older than Aiden, yells at Kyle for kicking the ball past him in between two trees.

  “No, I didn’t!” Kyle yells back, in a very immature way—instantly creating a bond between him and the boy. Candidate A we will call him. It’s easier not to refer to them by names or look at their faces too closely. It personalizes them, and we can’t get attached.

  Candidate A backs up far and kicks the ball as hard as he can. Kyle fakes like he is trying to stop the ball but lets it zoom past him through the makeshift tree-goal that he is guarding.

  “I won! I won!” Candidate A squeals and high-fives all the other Candidates on the grassy field. Again, all completely oblivious to the world outside and the dangers they could have faced—had it not been for that giant wall, the National Guard, the Marines, and half the world sending in Special Forces teams to systematically destroy every one of the infected. Including most of the senior class from my high school, all of Aiden’s elementary school classmates and all of our rela-tives. In fact, once word got out that Dad was the reason the infection spread, a mob of people tore him from our house and offered him to the sickened as a snack. Penance for him trying to play God according to the local news media that tried to justify the angry crowd’s actions. There is no justification for what they did. He was trying to find a cure for the sickness and the blood thirst that the infected had—they just didn’t give him enough time to perfect it.

  “Anyone want a snack?” I call out to the kids hovering around Kyle like he is the next David Beckham. I shake the bag of two-dollar, stale cookies like they are actually homemade and wait for the cattle to come running to the trough. Sometimes, they make it too easy. Other times, it’s hard.

  “Can I have two?” Candidate A asks followed by Candidates B, C, and D.

  “Of course.” I smile at them while trying not to make eye contact with their hopeful, innocent little faces.

  Aiden was once like these kids; Brianne, my kid sister, was like them, too—until I woke up to my brother gnawing on her leg. That’s when the sickness began, when his hunger became so great and his ribs and stomach collapsed onto themselves until he looked like a walking bag of bones. All we knew was he didn’t want to eat anymore, we just didn’t realize we were feeding him the wrong stuff.

  At first, vegetables would make him violently ill, and he said meat smelled funny to him. By the time he killed my little sister, he was too far gone. Red, demonic rubies replaced his once blue eyes, and his mind was rotted with the insanity that comes from eating one of your own.

  “Juice?” I ask Candidate B as I pull out enough Capri Suns to quench the thirst of a dozen baseball players. If satisfying all kids was this easy. “More cookies?” I hold out the bag of cookies to a red-headed, pig-tailed girl with bright green eyes.

  “Not her,” Kyle says leaning into my shoulder. “She reminds me of Katie.” Kyle’s only sister, Aiden’s first crush…and second victim.

  I nod in agreement to Kyle because I know it’s off limits to question. “Why don’t you go find your Mommy?” I say and usher her, with cookie and juice in hand, towards the playground. It’s better to have her completely gone from the area before Aiden starts sec-ond-guessing our mission.

  “I think he’s it,” Kyle says, and points back to Candidate A. “Think he’s a screamer, or do you think he’ll go quietly?”

  We both assess Candidate A playing with another boy that looks similar to him. I seriously hope this other boy, Candidate E, isn’t here with Candidate A. It’s been a long time since we’ve tried to take two at once, and years of practice has demonstrated it’s easier to focus our energy on one, not two. Patience is a virtue, and taking too many at once not only raises suspicion, but makes things difficult when we get them home. One screaming kid is easier to deal with than two.

  “I have a gag and a blanket in the bag if he doesn’t,” I say, and sit cross-legged on the ground while Kyle goes back to distracting our prey with cookies, juice, and the soccer ball.

  After an hour, the other kids have started to disburse, like they always do when Kyle singles out one kid to give attention to. I’m not sure how he does it, how he separates these “fun” times with them, to the ultimate goal. But I’m thankful that he does. If he wasn’t here to help me, I’d never be able to fulfill the promise I made to my mother.

  “Ready to sit for a little while?” Kyle asks Candidate A when he comes over to get more juice.

  “Yeah, I’m so tired.” Candidate A yawns, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen all day. It’s almost time to go. He’s worn down. We are by ourselves with very few parents and kids still running around. Most are at tables, enjoying their lunches, completely unaware of what is about to happen.

  “Here,” I say, handing him the thermos with an extra special mixture of Kool-Aid and a concoction that Dad specially formulized for just this purpose. “This is something special my dad used to make me. It gives you strength.”

  “Reeeal
ly?” Candidate A says with wide eyes and wraps his tiny hands around the plastic thermos to take a large drink. Just a little more, and he’ll be putty in our hands.

  Three more gulps and A’s eyes are drooping. One more, and his head is nodding. Another half sip, and he’s completely slumped over onto Kyle’s shoulder. We sit another few minutes to make sure he is really out.

  “Okay, he’s in,” Kyle says after he’s buckled A into the benchseat of the mini-van. It seems almost counter-productive considering what his purpose is.

  We drive in silence, like we always do, all the way back through the seemingly unassuming streets of suburbia. We’ve moved six times in the past year, and after this kidnapping, we will have to move again. After the first few times, we learned not to stay in one area more than three kids. People start to look at us funny when we are new in town and don’t go to work or school …especially when news reports start popping up of missing children in the neighborhood.

  “Got the blanket?” Kyle asks, and starts pushing A down on the seat so we can cover him and slip unnoticed into the house. I pull the heavy gray blanket from the bag, and he wraps up our new houseguest like a tasty burrito.

  This time has gone well, too well, and my nervousness is starting to show with tremors vibrating my hands as I unlock the front door. The shanty of a house we are staying in has no furniture and won’t have any either. We’ve given up on ever having anything of value after the first few times we had to flee.

  Kyle goes to the small fridge and pulls out one of the remaining vials of antidote. After our next move, I will start collecting the supplies to make a new batch based on Dad’s formula. Unfortunately, it’s not potent enough to completely undo the sickness, but, it is enough to keep Kyle and me from becoming victims.

  “Sorry,” Kyle says as he withdraws the needle from my leg. The whole time I was growing up, I was deathly afraid of needles…now, I welcome them. They are saving my life and making this existence possible; even though it’s a crappy existence, I’m still alive, and we were able to escape the genocide of Southern California. I’ll take a needle poke over death, any day.