Ultimate Undead Collection: The Zombie Apocalypse Best Sellers Boxed Set (10 Books)

by Joe McKinney

  Michael got out of the car, waking Emma in the process, and marched towards the corpse. His sudden surge of determination waned just as quickly as it had begun. He slowed, then stopped and stood his ground. The body continued its desperately slow approach. It’s just you and me, he thought, looking deep into the foul aberration’s distorted face and doing all he could to ignore the bilious feeling at the back of his throat. It suddenly felt as if everything boiled down to what happened next; that these few minutes would somehow shape every single day he and Emma still had left. So was it sink or swim? Fight or flight? Win or lose?

  The corpse took another lurching step forward, and Michael flinched.

  ‘Get back in the Land Rover,’ Emma said from somewhere behind him. ‘Quick!’

  He looked at the dead body as it reacted to her voice. Then he turned to Emma and said: ‘No.’

  Before she could stop him, Michael lunged forward and grabbed the corpse. The smell up close was foul, and the soggy noises the pitiful cadaver made as it squirmed in his grip made him want to vomit. Its flesh was cold and pliable under his fingers. It tried to push his arms away but its comparative lack of strength meant it didn’t stand a chance. Michael straightened his arms and surprised himself by lifting the creature’s entire soggy body several inches off the ground. It continued to try and fight, but it was miserably weak. He lifted the corpse higher before running to the edge of the rooftop and hurling it over. He watched as it tumbled down like a shop window dummy, stiff arms and legs sprawling, then crashed into the crowd below, hitting the deck with a sickening crunch which Michael could clearly hear over the silence of everything else. Down at ground level, the dead immediately surged again, tripping and sliding inquisitively over what was left of their fallen brethren.

  Breathless and feeling strangely exhilarated, Michael returned to the Land Rover.

  ‘We’re going,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t care.’ He wiped his hands clean on a towel then threw it out of the window. ‘Anywhere but here. I’m not going to be a prisoner.’

  He started the engine, and another corpse dragged itself up onto the rooftop, seemingly in response to the noise.

  ‘Are you sure about this? You were the one who—’

  ‘I know what I said,’ he interrupted, ‘and I was wrong. And no, I’m not sure about this, but if we do something and fuck it up, at least we’ll have tried. You were right, we can’t just sit up here and either starve to death or wait for them to get us. I’m taking back control, Em.’

  She was about to speak again, but it was too late. Michael put his foot down and the Land Rover juddered across the wet asphalt. He swerved around a tight corner, smacking into the lone approaching body and sending it flying, then ploughed down the steep, stomach-churning incline into the darkness. Emma held on to her seat, her safety belt, the door… anything she could grab hold of as the Land Rover hurtled further and further down. With each level they descended, the amount of dead flesh around them increased, but it was never enough to stop them. On one floor Michael clipped the wing of another car, and his response was simply to accelerate harder and get out of this gloomy, germ-filled concrete maze as fast as he could. Eventually he smashed through another barrier alongside the one they’d broken through when they’d first arrived here, then raced out onto the street. He gripped the steering wheel tight and thundered through the mass of rotting flesh, no longer bothering to try and avoid hitting them, just doing whatever he had to do to get away.

  #

  They stopped at a cut-price supermarket on the way back out of town. Emma had spotted it in a side road: ignored and overlooked by the bulk of the dead. Michael slammed on the brakes and reversed up to the doors. They’d done this before.

  ‘We should fill the car up,’ Emma said as she climbed out and ran into the store, ‘then just get away again.’

  Michael didn’t answer. He was already inside, dragging a pile of plastic shopping baskets over towards the nearest aisle. He looked around anxiously and began to fill them. Fortunately there were no corpses inside that he could see, but a handful had already appeared at the floor-to-ceiling windows which ran the length of the shop floor. They slammed their hands and slid their decaying faces against the glass, moving from side to side, slowly matching the movements of the two looters inside.

  By the time the first four baskets had been filled at speed and carried back over to the Land Rover, there were eight corpses at the windows. By the time they’d filled ten baskets, there were twenty of them. By the time they’d collected enough, it had become impossible to gauge how many of the damn things there were. The full expanse of glass had become a solid mass of greasy grey flesh, and a crowd had formed around the front of the Land Rover too. Neither Michael nor Emma said anything until they were loaded up and ready to leave. They stood a short distance back and surveyed the chaos outside together.

  ‘Are we in trouble now?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Only if we wait around here much longer. We need to move.’

  ‘Just drive through them?’

  ‘Exactly. Before they reach critical mass.’

  ‘Critical mass? What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Critical mass, breaking point… it’s all the same thing. We’re safe until we let them get to a certain level. When there’s too many of them, the balance of power shifts and we’re screwed. Until then, we just about stay in control. We just have to keep moving.’

  ‘Breaking point… is that what happened to you on the car park roof?’

  ‘Something like that, I guess. You ready?’

  Emma nodded, and the two of them ran for the back of the Land Rover and scrambled over the supplies they’d collected. Michael dropped into the driver’s seat, started the engine, put his foot down, and careened away. Emma held on tight behind him.

  ‘So what’s the plan now?’ she shouted over the noise of the engine and the relentless thump of the stream of unsteady bodies they ploughed into and through. At first Michael didn’t answer, concentrating instead on mounting the pavement to weave around the back of a truck, then avoiding another clutch of corpses to get back onto the road.

  ‘No plan,’ he told her.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Plenty of food, though.’

  She couldn’t really argue, but she did. ‘We need to be better organised that this, Mike. We can’t just keep stopping and starting.’

  ‘Why not? I’m beginning to think that’s exactly how we need to be. The same thing’s going to happen wherever we go, isn’t it? Wherever we are, whatever we do, we’re going to have about ten minutes grace before we’re surrounded. Fact is, we’re massively outnumbered, Em. We just have to deal with it.’

  ‘So is this it then? Just drive, loot, drive, sleep, drive, fight…? We’re going to end up spending the rest of our lives stuck in this bloody car.’

  ‘If you can think of a better solution, I’m all ears.’ He gripped the wheel and swerved to avoid a child’s corpse which walked down the white line towards them, arms outstretched in a classic ghoul-like pose. ‘We need to drive out into the middle of nowhere, find somewhere practically inaccessible, then hope there’s a building or something we can use nearby.’

  ‘There’s a café on the top of Snowdon,’ Emma offered.

  ‘That’s not as dumb as it sounds.’

  ‘It wasn’t dumb at all,’ she said, offended. ‘I was being serious.’

  ‘But it’s impractical. Too extreme. There are probably loads of places like that, but less remote. It’s just a question of finding them.’

  ‘Let’s stop and get a map or something. Plan things properly instead of just lurching from crisis to crisis.’

  ‘We’re not lurching from crisis to crisis. It’s all the same bloody crisis, in case you hadn’t noticed. We just need to find somewhere as isolated as the top of Snowdon, then only a handful of them will ever be able to reach us. Christ, it’ll be hard enough for us to get there.’


  ‘Déjà vu. Haven’t we been down this road before? Wasn’t that the big selling point of the farmhouse? Look where that got us.’

  ‘It almost worked,’ he replied, wincing as the Land Rover powered into another corpse.

  ‘Yes, but almost is the same as didn’t. It’s not that simple. There are too many of them.’

  Michael braked as he reached a cross-roads. The Land Rover skidded to an abrupt halt. The dead poured towards them from every conceivable direction.

  ‘This is bloody crazy,’ Emma said under her breath. She ducked instinctively as another corpse lunged for the Land Rover. It tripped in the road and fell forward, its skull cracking against her window with a sickening thump.

  Michael struggled to keep control of both the Land Rover and his temper. ‘I’ll keep driving until we find a bloody light house or something like that, shall I?’

  Emma didn’t bite. She gripped the sides of her seat as he accelerated again. And then she saw it.

  ‘Stop!’

  Michael instinctively reacted, bringing the Land Rover to another juddering stop and wiping out four more straggling cadavers in the process. ‘What?’

  ‘Over there,’ she said, pointing ahead and way over to their left. ‘Look!’

  Michael saw it immediately and sped up again. ‘You’re a bloody genius,’ he told her as he steered them towards an industrial estate. Through the chain-link fence he could see a vast expanse of tarmac covered with caravans and motorhomes of varying shapes and sizes. She’d found a temporary solution to their problems: a way of getting as far as they could from the towns and the cities and the dead without having to resort to living out of the back of this bloody Land Rover any longer.

  ‘That one,’ Emma said as they approached, pointing out the largest, most luxurious, and strongest-looking motorhome she could see.

  DAY SEVENTEEN

  AMY STEADMAN

  Part v

  Amy Steadman’s remarkable physical transformation has continued unabated. It is now more than two weeks since her death. As her body has festered, however, the low level of muted brain activity has continued to increase. Defying all previous understanding of the changes undergone within the human body after death, as Amy’s flesh and bone has deteriorated she has, paradoxically, regained a remarkable degree of self-awareness. The increasing physical limitations of her decomposing body result in much of this mental improvement remaining undetectable.

  Time has taken its toll on the millions of cadavers now walking the streets. They are steadily disintegrating; countless internal and external chemical reactions affecting the composition and strength of their flesh. Amy’s corpse is no different. Her skin has darkened and dried out in places as fluids have drained away. Her body has become a breeding ground for huge numbers of insects. Amy’s corpse is infested. She is riddled with maggots.

  Operating on a basic level, the bodies are driven by an instinctive desire to continue to exist. Self-preservation is each corpse’s only concern. Because of their worsening physical state, however, their ability to defend and protect themselves is severely limited. As a result their reactions now appear clumsy and overly aggressive. The bodies will fight to protect themselves at all costs even if, perversely, this results in them sustaining physical damage. It’s not uncommon to see a body attack another corpse in self-defence, and sustain substantial damage in the process. This is the norm with those bodies that are particularly badly decayed. Where the process has been slowed – as with Amy Steadman who died indoors, shielded from the elements for several days – the actions of the dead are slightly more reserved and controlled.

  It is now early on Thursday morning and a light, misty rain has been falling since dawn. Amy’s body is shuffling along the side of a warehoused-sized furniture store. There are a large number of corpses nearby, although the reason for their swollen numbers is not immediately apparent. It may be that there has previously been an incident here which initially attracted their attention, and that this is simply the residue of that crowd gradually disappearing. The fact that many of these bodies seem to be moving in the same overall direction, however, indicates that this could be the beginning of such an incident, not the end.

  Amy’s corpse continues to drag itself around the building and the surrounding streets until a single noise in the near distance attracts its attention. It is the sound of a survivor preparing to leave his shelter to search for essential supplies. Amy, along with all the other corpses in the immediate vicinity, immediately begins to gravitate towards the source of the sound.

  The young male survivor is based in an office building in the centre of a sprawling car lot. Over the last few days he has attempted to fortify and strengthen his hideout with limited success, but as the behaviour of the bodies has changed, so he has been forced to change his priorities. Failing dismally to prepare for the potential long-term problems caused by the infection, he is struggling to stay sane and stay alive. The survivor failed to anticipate the herding behaviour of the dead, nor did he consider the potential duration of his incarceration. Initially naïvely believing that he could continue to enjoy something resembling a pre-infection standard of living, he is now dangerously ill-equipped, having focused his early efforts on comfort rather than practical necessities.

  His health is deteriorating. As a result both of the increased number of bodies in the locality and the fortifications he made to his shelter, he is unable to easily venture out for supplies. He has been trapped for days without access to clean water, sanitation, medicine, and food of any real nutritional value. He is dehydrated and malnourished. After an aborted attempt to fetch supplies three days ago, his mental state has also deteriorated. At this point in time the differences between this survivor and the corpses which surround him are remarkably slim. Because of their vast numbers and their emotionless state, the bodies now have a clear advantage.

  The survivor has emerged from the office building in the middle of the car lot where he has hidden for the last two weeks. He moves slowly in a futile attempt to avoid detection. Because of his poor physical condition, his movements are uncharacteristically clumsy. He plans to take a car and drive to a supermarket and he is confident that once he is in the car he will be relatively safe. His activity, however, has not gone unnoticed. His pained, awkward movements and rasping breathing have already attracted the attention of several of the nearest cadavers. An inevitable chain reaction is spreading throughout the crowd as more bodies gravitate towards him.

  Amy Steadman’s body is close. She has crossed the main road between the furniture store and the car lot and is heading towards the office building, focussing on the increased levels of movement all around it. The dead are closing in from every direction.

  Some of the bodies are distracted by the movement of other corpses around them. Amy, however, is able to differentiate between the dead and other distractions. She will not hesitate to attack anything that threatens her, but she no longer wantonly attacks other bodies. She concentrates on moving towards the source of the disruption, although she does not fully understand why. She likely assumes it represents a threat.

  The lone survivor is weak and, after a long period of frightened inactivity, he finds the sudden effort of moving at speed unexpectedly difficult. Just leaving the building has left him breathless and light-headed. Overcome with nerves, he has stopped in the shadows at the side of the building and is trying to summon up the strength to make a run for the car he previously left ready for an occasion such as this.

  Amy’s corpse – along with more than fifty others – is less than ten metres away from the front of the office building. The survivor is now aware of the sudden movement all around him, but he is being dangerously indecisive. He knows he can either retreat (as he did a week ago) or continue with this attempt to fetch supplies. He knows that either option is equally dangerous: if he turns back he will starve and his sickness will worsen, yet if he leaves he risks attack from the advancing hordes. He also knows that he
will have to leave eventually and that going back inside will only delay the inevitable. He decides to run for the car.

  Indecision has ultimately proved to be this survivor’s undoing. The brief but unnecessary delay has given sufficient numbers of bodies enough time to drag themselves into the narrow space between him and the car. He attempts to run towards the vehicle, managing to avoid the first few corpses which attack. Within another few metres, however, there are too many of them. He tries to double-back, but once the first of the dead has caught hold of him he is trapped. He easily releases the first corpse’s grip, but wastes precious seconds fighting it. By the time he’s free and the first body is down, another eight are on him.

  Amy Steadman’s corpse is at the front of the crowd which swallows up and kills this survivor.

  #

  Half an hour later and the scene has changed again. With the survivor now dead and the area silent, the bulk of the crowd of bodies has begun drifting away. Amy Steadman’s body limps alone through the early mist along a wide road strewn with death.

  DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME?

  In the seventeen days since it happened, Maxwell has rarely needed to leave his home. In the last fourteen days, in fact, he hasn’t had to go outside at all. He’s what people used to call a ‘Prepper’: someone who planned for the worst, because they knew it was going to happen someday. And Maxwell was right. All the effort he put into stockpiling and planning his survival before the event has definitely paid off now. The fact he’s alive was all down to chance at the end of the day, though he doesn’t know that. Or if he does, he doesn’t care. Maxwell is convinced the reason he’s still here after millions of others were wiped out is because he knows what he’s doing. In a world where all reason appears to have gone out of the window, it’s hard to argue with his logic.