INFECTED (Click Your Poison)

by James Schannep

  “Let’s go,” you say. “Something like this will surely draw them in.”

  “Sorry, kids, naptime is cancelled!” Hefty shouts with a wry smile.

  • Continue your exhausted march through the city.

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  If You Say So

  “Your choice,” he shrugs. He aims down and blows off your kneecap. You fall to the floor with excruciating pain. “Scream a little louder, will you? I want them all on top of you.

  “I guess it’s only fair if I tell you the truth—I might as well confess to somebody, you know? I’m no cop. I killed one of those pendejo guards and took his uniform when we broke out. These gang-bangers walking around in here? They’re mi hermanos. Later, homie!”

  He turns, leaving you for dead. You watch as the traitor runs across the warehouse, a box of chips under one arm, toward the front entrance. But his gunshot attracted the ghouls that were congregating by the front and now his brothers are here to turn on him as well.

  The fake cop shoots these attackers, but there’re more of them than he has bullets. The commotion brings other zombies from the warehouse behind the man who shot you, surrounding and taking him down. Don’t worry; the crowd from the break room didn’t forget about you, either.

  You hear him scream out from the pain of being eaten just before your own screams drown him out.

  THE END

  Into the Hornet’s Nest

  With enough firepower to conquer most drug cartels, you ride toward civilization. There’s constant rubble and roadblocks, and the trip takes several hours. Daylight is waning, but it would be dark inside the station even at high noon. Lucas flips on the jeep’s headlights. You stare out at the sunset, the wind whipping through the open-topped vehicle, tousling your hair and causing you to squint as grit pelts against your skin.

  One of Salvation’s engineers rides with you, a bespectacled man who informs the group he works in Salvation’s power room. Small and wormy enough to satisfy any cliché, he’s balding in the friar’s pattern. As equipped as you are for wholesale slaughter, the real mission is to keep this guy alive and escort him through the radio station, to where he can activate the relay. Oh, and don’t blow up the tower. That would be bad.

  “So, what’s the plan?” you ask.

  The engineer studies a manual on commercial radio stations; there’s a prison library sticker on the spine, but it looks like it wasn’t checked out much over the years. He lowers the book and pushes his glasses up his nose in the prototypical move of a scientist.

  “The plan is three-tiered,” he begins. “First, is to get the power on. There’s no standard blueprint, so we’ll have to follow the power lines to determine where this room lies.”

  “Like in Jurassic Park!” Rosie exclaims.

  The engineer nods, then continues, “Next is the control room, where I’ll have to attach a receiver for our broadcast. There should be some kind of digital-analog converter that drops our signal onto the carrier wave.”

  He catches himself going too deep into technical specs, smiles, then finishes explaining the plan: “Finally, we’ll go back out to the tower itself, to power up the whole array and activate the relay.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Lucas Tesshu adds, optimistically.

  The engineer scoffs. “That’s because I failed to mention the two most important details. When we start up the diesel generator, it’ll make enough noise to bring in the zombs from miles away. And when we activate the antenna tower, it’ll produce a shock with thousands of amps of current—great enough to kill anyone touching it.”

  “That sounds lovely,” you say.

  “But if we succeed—we’ll be able to communicate with any survivors left in the whole city. We go from being just a pocket of resistance to the region’s central hub in the war for continued existence.”

  Well, he sure makes it sound grandiose. And yet you briefly wish you were sitting in your prison bed with a mug of warm soup and a good book. You shake that thought and breathe in the cool night air, inspecting your weapon once more.

  “If you can, resist the urge to go in guns blazing,” the engineer says to you. “The less attention we have at the start, the better.”

  You arrive at the radio station. It’s high up on a ridge, so hopefully that’ll buy you some time once the shit goes down. The building itself is larger than you expected, and the tower sticks up from the rear—right along the ridgeline.

  Lucas parks the jeep out front and, true to form, the undead already start to trickle out of the surrounding woodline. Tenacious bastards. Lucas unsheathes his sword, but doesn’t stray from a direct path to the station. Rosie pops off a few shots from her rifle, which most certainly calls in a few more, but the weapon is no louder than the jeep engine, so it’s a wash.

  The front door is locked, but that doesn’t matter. Lucas Tesshu smashes the door’s glass face in with the pommel of his sword, then reaches inside to unlock it. The engineer powers up a massive flashlight and stays only a step behind Lucas. The inside of the building is pitch black, but the flashlight washes the halls in light. There’s a main hall straight ahead and turns to both left and right.

  The engineer looks to the ceiling and finds several thick black cables running to the left. Just like in Jurassic Park! “This way,” he says.

  The four of you move down the corridor, scanning for undead. You keep looking over your shoulder, but the ghouls haven’t followed you in… yet. The door at the end of the hall, clearly marked as the power room, is locked with multiple bolts. Lucas delivers a powerful kick—but the door holds firm. “Barricaded on the other side,” he announces.

  “Allow me,” you say, leveling your AA-12 to waist-level. The three others back away and you hesitate only a moment to prepare for the next four seconds. With a deep breath, you depress the trigger, holding it down, and spray the door with metal—unloading the twenty shells of buckshot across the porthole with explosive fury. There’s surprisingly little recoil, and you easily paint the door with empty space.

  After the deafening barrage, the weapon whirs its finish and you release the trigger. The door is now little more than a few splinters, and what’s left falls off the hinges in a delayed reaction. The barricade collapses as well. Your hands are shaking, and there’s a dull throb in your loins.

  You slide a shoulder strap off your ammo backpack and replace the first spent drum while your team enters the room. Your shots have pockmarked the far wall, but the room itself cascades out to the left side, and luckily you’ve done no damage to the generator.

  Still, there’s a gruesome sight within. A man is mangled and dead on the floor, his innards missing, and the area around him is covered with evidence of a struggle. A circuit box in the back is all smashed in. The engineer inspects it and glumly announces, “This might take a while.”

  The dead man was planning on sticking it out in the power room for the long haul. A dozen office-cooler-style water jugs and boxes of foodstuffs are piled at the ready. Evidently, he didn’t get the chance to make use of them.

  Rosie reloads her rifle, then slings it, opting instead for the pistol in such close quarters. Then a look of concern washes over her face. “Wait a sec. This guy’s torn apart, right? But there was a barricade up… so how did Zulu get in?”

  Right on cue, a zombie emerges from behind the furnace unit, snarling and rushing in for you. With lightning reflexes, Rosie sends a .22 bullet straight into his forehead and Lucas imbeds a shuriken only a millimeter to the side at the same instant. “Whoa,” you utter, still holding your shotgun loosely at the waist.

  “Remind me to thank Eastwood for this,” Rosie says, holding up the pistol.

  The generator growls to life, clanking and rumbling as it spins up to full operation. The sound is so loud, you’re forced to yell above the noise. There are plenty of safety warnings on the walls about proper ear protection, but without any equipment, you can only cup your hands over your ears.

  “Are we
good?” Lucas yells.

  “No, goddammit! I still need to isolate the damage!” The engineer works in overdrive, knowing as well as you that every wasted moment will be filled with the arrival of more undead. That realization is made certain by a low moan, accompanied by scuffling feet on broken glass. They’ve most certainly breached the front door now.

  “I’ll hold the hall,” you announce. Two undead file down the corridor toward you, and the glow from the flashlight is just enough to catch their eyes. You fill the hall with daylight, using a well-aimed blast of your shotgun. The spray is enough to put lead into both brains, and they fall to the ground.

  But those two were only the beginning. Moaning permeates the building, deep and fearsome, and soon they arrive in droves. “Scoot over!” Rosie shouts, and you gladly share the burden of slaying the oncoming crowd. You blast away, counting down from twenty to keep track of your ammunition.

  “Stand aside!” Lucas announces, holding high one of the MK3 grenades. You do exactly that. He pulls the ring atop the canister and throws it down the hall, intentionally rebounding the weapon off the far wall and sending it around the corner.

  “Hit the deck!” Rosie yells. You tumble into the corner off to the side of the door, close your eyes, grit your teeth, and press your forefingers against the tragus of your ears to block out the oncoming concussion.

  The whole building vibrates from the blast; dust cascades from the ceiling as part of the structure’s resettling. Despite being two corners away from the explosion, you’re struck with an instant headache. You can’t hear your team’s screams over your own, and the resonant damage is a feeling of dull pressure and a slight ringing in your ears.

  The engineer rises from the floor, and you can barely make out his shouts—don’t do that again. You’re able to push through the pain and rise to a defensive position. Through the hallway dust cloud, figures are already emerging. These ghouls have blood leaking from their ears and noses, their eyes crimson from burst blood vessels. The concussion blast must have artificially pumped their hearts and gotten the fluid moving again. What would have incapacitated a man only adds a devilish appearance to the undead.

  You crack off shotgun blast after shotgun blast in a calm nirvana of killing. Only a hand on your shoulder takes you out of the moment. You turn around, ready to kill again, but stop short when you recognize Lucas Tesshu. We are good—time to go, he mouths to you. You look to the engineer, who gives you the thumbs-up. Rosie points for you to proceed down the hall.

  Leaving the generator room, you’re forced to step over the corpses of the zombies you took down, which is unnerving, to say the least. Every time you see a still body, you expect it to rise again, despite the fact that these bodies no longer have heads.

  Around the corner, past the dismembered soup of body parts at the grenade blast site, you make it back to the entrance. As your hearing returns, you pick up on a blasting from the parking lot. When you look out, you see that the CROWS system is operational and the remote turret is firing away at the oncoming crowd of undead.

  What was next again? The control room, right? To your left is a long hall, while straight ahead is a hall leading to a clearly marked bathroom.

  • “Left!”

  • “I have to go to the bathroom…”

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  Into the Light

  No more shadows playing tricks at the entrance, no more dank dripping driving you insane, no more cave spiders trying to infiltrate your sleeping bag; but no more protection from the living dead, either.

  You move out into the blinding sun, all your belongings packed and strapped to your back—except your trusty hammer and knife. As your eyes adjust to the light, you move further away from the protective mouth of your cave home.

  Your car is still parked nearby where you left it, but the windows are busted out—and there’s a large man reaching into the cabin. He hears you approach and turns around: he’s muscle-bound, Hispanic, wears a police uniform, and is covered in tattoos. The short sleeves of the uniform expose myriad ink designs, which escape north from the shirt’s collar as well. Three tear tattoos drip down from under his right eye. His hair is short-cropped; he must have been shaved bald before the world ended.

  “You alive, esse?” he asks. He holds a policeman’s combat shotgun.

  You say that you are, looking at your car.

  “I was trying to umm, commandeer this vehicle, you know?”

  You toss him the keys. He notices your eyes on the blood spatter across his uniform. “I had some trouble with my… prisoner. Listen—you got any food?”

  You shake your head. “I’m out looking too,” you say.

  He rubs the Christian cross tattooed on his chin in contemplation. “Listen… You wanna team up? We can find some food together and watch each other’s back, you know? I gotta take this car either way, but you can come with me.”

  • “I think we’ll have better chances alone. Probably not too much food out there.”

  • “Sure thing, Officer. How many rounds you got? Maybe I can cover you with that pistol?”

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  In Vain

  You wait. Soon, without even realizing it, you no longer know what you’re waiting for. Days go by while you simply stand in the middle of the room. Occasionally, you shuffle around, bumping into the desk and filing cabinet, but still you wait. Why? Whatever reason you’re waiting for fled when your thoughts gave way to instinct. But there’s no cues driving your instinct now. You just wait.

  Weeks pass by. Months. Nothing ever happens. Your door doesn’t rattle or open, and you don’t age or decay. You stay perfectly as you are, standing in the middle of the room, waiting for all time. Until one day, months from now, perhaps even years (you no longer have any sense of time), the building is destroyed… with you in it.

  THE END

  Iron Will

  Starvation is not a painless death. You start to chew on random things for sustenance: shoes, belts, your fingernails—you can’t help it. There is a madness that comes with hunger, and you cry out your last drops of moisture. Well, at least you’ll die on your own terms.

  You didn’t beat the plague, but you didn’t contribute to it, either. There will be no marker for your grave, and none to mourn you. You are a collateral casualty in the war for survival.

  THE END

  It Favors the Bold

  Rosie and Lucas are still looking out over the chasm when you step onto the bridge. It sways like a great serpent across the canyon, causing you to hold the ropes for stability. But you don’t look back—the bridge has obviously worked for others, the ones who built it, so it’ll work for you too. Unless, of course, some of the undead below are those builders.

  The platform lurches again when Rosie steps out behind you. You pause, letting the bridge settle a bit before you take another three-foot lunge. Then one more great sway from Lucas. “Don’t look down!” he says.

  “Gee, thanks,” Rosie replies.

  You want so badly to look down, not consciously, but because he said not to. You grit your teeth, strengthen your grip on the rope, focus on the horizon, and continue crossing. The wind sweeps down the canyon, blowing you slightly and testing your resolve. Moans permeate your senses from the ghouls huddled below.

  Terra firma. Your foot reaches the edge of the concrete and you walk onto the other half of the collapsed road. Before long Rosie and Lucas are with you.

  “I’d rather not go that way again,” Rosie says, shaking off the willies.

  Lucas nods. Without another word, the three of you take off down the road. The concrete becomes packed dirt and dust. Then just as you feel your body sinking back toward calm, adrenaline shoots through you once more. There’s another split, a “T” intersection road sign reading, “STATE REFORMATORY SERVICE ENTRANCE.” You all smile in unison, taking the road toward shelter.

  A couple hundred yards ahead is a crude banner: “Welcome to Salvation.” An arrow points away from th
e road, down a deer path.

  “The survivors wrote that,” you say. “This is it.”

  • Continue to the Prison.

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  It’s Him or You

  Hefty screams his pleas as you wrench your hands out from his grip, his fingernails tearing the skin from your wrists. “Please, don’t leave me! Christ, don’t—”

  Deleon pulls the release. The bramble of heavy furniture collapses from the nets above. The slam upon the landing is so forceful, you don’t even hear the crunch of Hefty and the zombies. At least you’re granted that small mercy.

  The doctor looks at you, betrayal in his eyes, desperate for your understanding. “There’s no way he would’ve made it… right?”

  • “Let’s just go find the others.”

  MAKE YOUR CHOICE

  It’s the End of the World as We Know It

  And you feel fine. You’ve been preparing for this day for years, though for your money you thought it’d be an economic meltdown spurred on by a liberal government and lax immigration laws. But hey, the compound works for zombies too.

  You’re the kind that built a bunker during the cold war. The kind that bought a generator and foodstuffs for Y2K. The kind that has been terrified by the twenty-four-hour news cycle since 9/11, and now all your conspiracy paranoia comes off as brilliant preparation in hindsight. There was a chance you and your constituents were going to be wrong, but as you always said, you weren’t going to be dead wrong.

  There were more than a few times your friends thought you were overreacting when you lambasted the President, and said you knew this country was going down the toilet. Even your family wasn’t always supportive when you spent large chunks of your savings on gas and solar generators, massive seed banks, and of course, firearms.