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

by Joe McKinney

  Flood, fire, earthquake, flu epidemic, alien invasion, terrorism, war… he’d got all bases covered. When you take things down to base level, the requirements for survival are largely the same whatever the shade of shit being hurled at the fan. Food, water, medicinal supplies… all generic entries on any self-respecting Prepper’s standard tick-list.

  People who didn’t know Maxwell called him a loner. Some avoided him, thought he was a bit strange. Very few understood him. She did. They hadn’t been together for long, but she’d seemed to instinctively understand what he was doing and where he was at. Sometimes, when he’s lying in bed at night, listening to the silence, he can still hear her voice and feel her lips on his. Kathryn was special. Everything his first time should have been and so much more besides. He can’t get her face out of his head.

  Who’s laughing now? When he thinks about all his detractors, he can’t help but feel a little smug. There’s a part of him wishes they could see him. Maybe they can? Maybe some of the corpses outside remember more than he’s given them credit for? Maybe they’re looking at him, thinking we’re sorry, Max, you were right… we shouldn’t have taken the piss…

  He knows that none of this matters now, because he’s won. If this was a film and he was the star, they’d call it King of the Dead.

  Externally, Maxwell’s modest house is indistinguishable from pretty much every other house on the street. It’s all part of the plan. A small, run-of-the-mill terraced house with a door at the front, one at the back, and a side-passage giving access to a small, walled backyard. A small backyard that’s full of equipment and supplies. He had most of it already, but in the two day’s grace between the fall and the resurrection of the rest of the population, he went into town and scavenged everything he was missing and more besides. Maxwell has so much stuff in his home now that he’s struggling for living space. He could have set-up somewhere else, but the familiarity was important. Loading up and clearing out would have taken too much effort and risk. He knows there’ll be plenty of time for all that. When this is over, he tells himself regularly, he’ll get out of town and find himself somewhere perfect. It’ll be like all the best post-apocalyptic dreams he ever had. Bloody hell, he hadn’t realised how much he’d been looking forward to these days. The only downside is the loneliness, but he’ll cope. The freedom is more than enough of a trade-off. The dead world is his oyster…

  But he really does miss her.

  #

  Maxwell spends his days checking and rechecking his provisions, then checking them again. The undeniable buzz of all this preparation is still enough of a distraction from the monotony of keeping his head down and staying quiet. He knows that’s what it’s going to take to stay alive.

  He’s a smart kid. He watched from the window and worked out the rules of the dead quickly enough, figured out how they were becoming increasingly self-aware and, therefore, increasingly dangerous. He also knows that the danger will continue to increase for as long as the dead remain mobile. Their decaying bodies will inevitably fail them in time. It’ll be another six months, he reckons, something like that. He knows he can hold out that long.

  Maxwell has always felt different to everyone else, but now that difference is stark. When he’s watching the dead, he can’t make up his mind whether they’ve undergone a radical transformation or if they’ve barely changed at all? They look completely different, of course, but they still hang around in packs and follow the herd, fitting in and trying not to be noticed, just like they used to.

  Maxwell never tried to fit in, never subscribed to the same bland shite as everyone else. The mainstream was too mediocre for his liking, constantly exploiting the mundane for profit and gain. Shit, it had come to something when even geeks and nerds had become cool. Didn’t anyone understand how wrong that was? When a minority is accepted and swallowed up by the mainstream, he’d told Kathryn that night, it gets diluted and sanitized until it eventually becomes the majority. When they saw some of the clothes he wore and learnt about the things he enjoyed, people thought he was being ironic. But he wasn’t. He was just being Maxwell.

  He’s distracted watching a pack of them now. They’re regressing, he thinks, becoming more animal-like. Their humanity is being stripped away in layers, and now what he’s seeing is base-level instinct. Guttural. Clumsy. Unrefined. Brutal. He studies them with a confident superiority, predicting their movements. One of them – a man in his early fifties when he died, perhaps, judging from his clothing and shabby appearance – has lost his balance. He trips down the kerb and clatters into the side of a parked car. The dead man is an awkward mass of barely-controlled flesh now, struggling with his own substantial weight. The impact with the car is enough to set off the vehicle’s alarm, and the sudden noise and flashing headlights disturb the eerie stillness of everything else. The sound is ugly. It makes Maxwell feel nervous and he wants it to stop. These days, silence is his friend.

  Maxwell predicts the alarm will draw hundreds of those things closer from miles around. He makes a mental note to remember how effective it is, because it might be useful. Already there are more than twenty corpses lumbering towards the car. He covers his mouth with his hand when he laughs involuntarily. They’re so bloody dumb and predictable. As soon as the noise stops, they start moving away, spreading out like ink across blotting paper. But the alarm’s not finished yet. It’s silent for about thirty seconds, then it goes off again, and every last one of the dead bodies which has started moving away immediately swivels around and pointlessly trudges back again.

  And it goes on and on and on.

  For hours.

  Stupid fucking creatures.

  #

  Shit. Maxwell has a problem.

  Something’s got into the back yard overnight. A fox or a starving dog must have got over the wall somehow. Thankfully almost all of the perishable stuff is in the house, but the damn vermin has had a go at some of the medical supplies Max left off the ground on a pallet outside because he didn’t have room indoors. He doesn’t think too much damage has been done, but this stuff will need replacing. He can’t afford to take risks and leave himself open to infection. Christ alone knows the air’s going to be full of all kinds of germs from here on in. What’s happened this morning isn’t the end of the world (he smiles to himself when he thinks that – that’s been and gone already) but he does need to do something about it. He’ll probably be okay, but probably isn’t good enough anymore. And the thing is, from what he’s seen, he’s sure that in the short to mid-term, things are going to get far worse out there before they get any better. He needs to sort this out fast. The sooner he gets it done, the less risky it should be.

  Maxwell spends the rest of the day reorganising his stuff and bringing everything inside but he knows there’s no escaping the fact he’s going to have to go out in the morning.

  #

  Maxwell gets up early, just before first light. He knows the dead have no concept of night and day – he’s seen them milling about at all hours – so going out at this time is purely for his benefit. The shadows will help. It’s light enough so that he can see what he’s doing, but still dark enough to remain hidden. On a less practical level, he knows it’s better to get this done now than to spend the whole day thinking too hard about leaving the house and getting worked up unnecessarily.

  He has a specific set of clothing he’s prepared for occasions such as this. He wears a wetsuit as a base-layer. He doesn’t think the dead things outside bite like they did in the movies, but he’s not taking any chances. He reminds himself that this time last month he didn’t think the dead could walk, either. The wetsuit provides protection, yet it enables him to remain mobile too. Over it he wears several warm, loose-fitting layers. He also wears a utility belt – more DIY-expert than Batman-like in its design, but it does the same job. From it he hangs his tools: screwdrivers, pliers, a hammer, a crowbar… they can all double-up as weapons if push comes to shove.

  He moves quietly through the shado
ws, passing so close to some of the corpses that he can hardly believe they don’t notice him. Their senses have clearly been severely dulled by what happened, and that’s no surprise. The surprise is that they’re still managing to function at all.

  For the first ten minutes, Maxwell intentionally walks in the wrong direction. When he’s a safe distance from his home, well away from his intended destination, he uses the trick he picked up earlier this week and smashes a car window to set off the alarm. He waits out of sight until the noise has done its work and all the dead nearby have been drawn out of hiding.

  This morning, Maxwell is going to the hospital. Although he might be able to get what he needs from a supermarket (and there are several of those between the hospital and home), he’s steering clear of such public places. Let’s face it, if anyone else has survived, that’s where they’ll be heading. Maxwell’s not interested in any other survivors (except one). Other people will present more problems than solutions. It’s a pretty safe bet they’ll be nowhere near as prepared or as able as he is. The last thing he needs – the last thing he wants – in these circumstances is to saddle himself with freeloaders. His provisions have been sourced on the basis of catering for one, and his home/hideout has just enough space for him alone to live comfortably. Harsh as it sounds, anyone else who’s made it this far can go to hell. And anyway, if they’ve lasted ’til today, they obviously don’t need him.

  He waits in the open garage of another house and daydreams, wishing Kathryn could see him now. Imagine if she’d survived, that it was just the two of them… She thought some of the things he did were strange, but he knew all along he was right. The apocalypse has justified his odd behaviours.

  #

  It doesn’t take long to get to the hospital. Obviously the wards and other public spaces are no-go areas full of corpses, but he’d never planned on going there anyway. There are kitchens and supply areas where he can get everything he needs, both today and in the future. He knows his way around the hospital campus. He’s never been here as anything other than a visitor and an A&E patient on a couple of occasions, but he’s spent long enough poring over the plans and Google Earth to know where he’s going.

  Avoid main entrances and obvious doors. Find other ways to get where you need to go. Think about what other survivors would do – less prepared survivors – and do the opposite.

  He talks to himself constantly, reassures himself he’s doing the right thing, focuses on getting the job done and getting back home. This isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Being away from the house has added an additional layer of realism to the situation he wasn’t expecting. He wasn’t prepared for the unending scale of the devastation this morning, nor how everything has deteriorated in the two weeks or so since he last ventured out. How things feel, how things smell… Everywhere he looks he sees something worse than before. The corpse of a child in the backseat of a car, pawing the glass constantly with tiny, brittle fingers; imprisoned bodies prowling the rooms of their mausoleum homes, unable to escape; half a woman dragging herself along the middle of the road, tattered stumps where her feet used to be…

  Maxwell stops and presses himself flat against a wall when a cadaver approaches. He stands completely still and studies its decay as it moves past him, oblivious. It has sustained appalling injuries, as if its unprotected face has been smashed into something at force. Its bottom lip is split down to the chin, and there are yellowed teeth protruding from its broken jaw at unnatural angles. Its swollen brown tongue moves constantly around the inside of its mouth. No spit. Too dry to lick. Maxwell stays exactly where he is for a moment longer, feeling faint. It’ll pass, he knows it will. It’s just shock.

  The smells begin to affect him more than the sights. There’s an ever-present fug of death hanging in the air here, a noxious stench which seems to coat everything. He’s wearing a basic facemask as a precaution, but even that’s not enough. Maybe, if the opportunity presents itself, he’ll be able to find something more substantial in the hospital stores for next time. Christ knows he’s probably going to need it. The longer this goes on, the more the bodies will decay. He’s already outnumbered by insects, several million to one. It’s only going to get worse.

  Am I really the only one left alive?

  He wishes Kathryn had given him her address after the party. He could go and check. One way or another, he thinks he’d just prefer to know.

  He’s distracted. He forces himself to find focus. Get a grip. Concentrate.

  Maxwell pushes himself away from the wall and steps on the outstretched hand of a girl who dropped dead and never got up again. The horrible sound of bones breaking under his boot, fingers crunching, threatens to make the nausea return. He takes his time, looks up into the swirling clouds overhead and waits for the sickness to pass. He almost turns and goes back home, but stops himself before his nerves give out. Do this right, he thinks, and I won’t have to leave the house again for a long time. Fuck it up, and I could be back here before the month’s out.

  He imagines her watching him from afar. Waiting for him. He imagines doing this for her.

  Up ahead is the large storage building he’s been aiming for. According to the information he accessed online before the Internet died, this is the largest such facility on the campus. There’s a loading bay around the back, and a smaller entrance on the side which he manages to pry open with his crowbar. One last look around, then he disappears inside.

  The building is surprisingly light. Clear Perspex panels in the roof let in a decent amount of early morning illumination. He stands still, waiting for the sound of his forced entry to fade. And when it does, he becomes aware of more noise coming from deeper inside the vast space. There are several corpses in here, and he has to assume they’re all aware of him now. No matter. He thinks he can work around them. They’re not people anymore, just… things.

  There’s a small office up ahead. He goes inside and shuts the door behind him, grateful of the space. A dead woman is slumped facedown over a desk. She’s holding a mobile phone, which he wrenches from her death-grip. Even after all this time it still has a little battery remaining. He spends a few seconds looking through her digital life and remembering his own. Maybe he should spend this time trying to get online? Should he check the major news sites to see if they’re responding or if they’ve been updated? What’s the point? What does it matter if anyone else is left alive out there? If he discovers the whole of the rest of Europe has survived this, so what? What difference will it make? He is where he is. Strange thing is, he thinks he’d actually be disappointed now if he found there were other people still alive. He couldn’t face having to go back to living in the old world. Not now. Not after the taste of freedom that Armageddon has given him.

  The dead woman’s name is Amelia. She partied hard. He flicks casually through her photograph – most taken in various pubs and bars, others taken at home as she relaxed with her boyfriend and parents. There’s a video of her playing with a dog. He watches it over and over, transfixed by the little black and white dog catching the same thrown ball again and again.

  And then the battery gives up the ghost.

  The screen dims and the pictures disappear and no matter how many times he tries to get the phone to come back to life, it doesn’t. All those images are still trapped in there somewhere, but he has no way of accessing them. Digital Amelia has ceased to exist. All that’s left of her now is this rapidly decaying mass of flesh and bone. He knows Kathryn’s like this somewhere, or worse. But he consoles himself with the fact that he’s still thinking about her, and surely that’s keeping her alive in some way?

  He looks at Amelia’s body, and remembers his time with Kathryn. He’d liked her a lot, but she’d barely looked at him before the office party. They’d both got drunk and ended up having a quick, fumbled fuck in the toilets. His first time. His only time. He’s daydreaming again now, imagining what life would have been like if she’d survived too. Christ, she’d have been blown awa
y by what he’d achieved… But he has to accept she’s gone. Truth be told, she was gone long before all this madness started. She was gone by the time the hangovers had cleared.

  He struggled with people. Things, Maxwell could always deal with: plans, preparations, contingencies, supplies, whatever it took. It was people he had trouble with. Couldn’t handle their unpredictability. Didn’t like the fact he was never in complete control when other people were involved.

  There’s a noise.

  Something close behind him, just outside the office door.

  Maxwell holds his breath and stands perfectly still, cursing himself for being a dumb fucking idiot and getting distracted. And then he sees it. Another one of them. He knows he needs to get moving, that every second he spends here now is a second too long. He waits until the corpse has gone, then lets himself back out and starts looking for the stuff he needs. He finds it quickly enough – the store is well-organised and labelled – and loads up his rucksack.

  And now one of them has seen him. It’s at the end of this aisle, and there’s no other way out. Shit, he’s cornered. Maxwell’s going to have to get past it to get home.

  He hasn’t had to kill any of them yet, but how difficult can this be, right? He’s seen enough films, read enough books… and it’s not even like this is going to be a fair fight. These creatures are already dead.

  Nervous. Mouth dry.

  He gets his crowbar ready, passes it from hand to hand. It’s his weapon of choice, though he’s not yet had to use it. Quick, quiet and effective.