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

by Joe McKinney

  The corpse is getting closer. He tries to visualise what he knows he has to do. These things still have some degree of control, and the only place that control can emanate from is the brain. So it’s the old horror movie cliché, isn’t it? He’s going to have to aim for the head. He visualises again, tries to prepare himself for the crunch of breaking bone, the blood splattering, the softness of decayed brain… If he gets this right, one strike should do it. Get the angle right, get the amount of force right, and he’ll be okay. He knows he can do this…

  Another deep breath. Pulse racing.

  Crowbar held high, he walks closer to the creature. It’s directly ahead of him, and it has locked onto him with clouded, unfocused eyes.

  And now Maxwell can’t move.

  She’s a little shorter than he is. In the half-light she still looks quite pretty, a little like Kathryn, in fact, though he knows that’s just his mind playing tricks. Her hair is white-blonde. Her body, though distended by decay, is still clearly feminine. Her blouse is tight across her chest. She’s wearing glasses. That takes him by surprise… after all she’s been through, he thinks, how can she still be wearing glasses? The dark, narrow frames suited her face, he can tell. What would she have been like before she’d died? Would she have liked him? Would she have wanted to talk to him? Listened to him? He’s transfixed both by what she is now and the thought of what she used to be.

  And Maxwell can’t do it.

  It’s not like the movies. This is real. So far he’s done whatever he’s needed to do to survive, but this feels like a step too far. What has she done to him? What’s she done to deserve this or, in fact, to deserve any of what’s happened to her since the world ended? It’s not fair. It’s not right.

  And she moves ever closer. Does she want him to help her?

  He lowers the crowbar.

  ‘Please…’ he says, not sure what he’s trying to say or why he’s even bothering. ‘Just go. Leave me alone. I don’t want to hurt you…’

  But she won’t listen. She keeps walking towards him. Unsteady. One leg weaker than the other, almost a cripple’s gait. One shoe on and one shoe off. She’s too close now and he reaches out to stop her. Holds her. Looks into her face. The touch of a woman. It’s been a long time. Three years since that night with Kathryn. He pushes her away and, as his grip tightens, he feels her decaying flesh give way under the pressure of his fingers. It’s sobering. Like wet putty. Reminds him what he’s dealing with. He pushes her back and she comes at him again. And again. And again. And she won’t stop and all he wants is for her to go and for him to be out of here and he wishes he’d never left the house because this is harder than he imagined and he curses himself for leaving that stuff out in the yard at home and… and another corpse is close now, also blocking his way out. This one is much larger, wearing gore-streaked overalls. It lumbers awkwardly into an overloaded shelf, sending supplies scattering in all directions and filling this cavernous room with noise. And when the noise of the crashing supplies fades to nothing, Maxwell realises he can hear other sounds now too. More of the dead. Awakened. Closing in on him.

  The dead woman lunges again. Maxwell shoves her back and looks into her face. He wants to see an enemy, something he can hate, but all he sees is her.

  More bodies visible through the racking, heading for this aisle.

  It felt like a game before. He never thought it would be like this. All that Prepper training… that was all about practicalities, not realities, and definitely not emotions.

  It all boils down to this moment, he realises. I have to do it.

  She comes at him once more, dead arms flailing.

  Fight or flight.

  Maxwell raises the crowbar, screws his eyes shut, and does it.

  The first cut’s the deepest.

  Once she’s down, he does what he has to do to get rid of the others. There are five in total. It gets easier with each one he cuts down, but it’s not as painless as it looked in the movies.

  #

  Maxwell’s made it home. All supplies replaced. Everything as it should be.

  Things feel different tonight. Tonight he’s not feeling so self-assured. His confidence has taken a knock. Things have changed. He realises now there’s more to survival than bottles of water and ration-packs. He realises tonight that there’s stuff you need to know to survive that you can’t read in books or pick up online.

  And when Maxwell lies in bed and tries to sleep tonight, it’s a different girl’s face he can’t get out of his head.

  THE HUMAN CONDITION

  Part ii – GOING DOWN

  John Proctor slumped against the wall, his head in his hands, and watched the others through the gaps between his fingers. Christ, how he’d grown to despise these people over the last week and a half. Ten days, he thought. Ten fucking days. That’s how long we’ve been here now. That’s how long we’ve been sitting here doing nothing but shout, argue and fight with each other. This can’t go on much longer.

  In every aspect of his life before this disaster, John had been taught (and had taught others) to always look for the good in people. But trapped up here on the top floor of this hotel, waiting to either starve to death or be flushed out by an army of dead bodies, he couldn’t help but concentrate on the irritating personality traits which made the five other survivors trapped here with him the worst cell-mates imaginable.

  Barry Bushell. Now there was an interesting character. John still wasn’t sure what the dress-wearing man was about. Barry had been understandably annoyed when the other survivors had arrived and compromised the safety of his precious hotel hideout. Even now he continued to maintain a distance from the others, spending much of his time alone in the master bedroom. John had initially admired his confidence in wearing women’s clothing in public, but he still couldn’t understand why he did it. There must have been some underlying sexual confusion, he thought. Whatever the reason, he’d been equally surprised when, a couple of days ago, Barry had reverted to wearing ‘normal’ clothes. He’d asked him why he’d made the change, and Barry had explained it was just to shut the others up. He’d said he’d had enough of the constant jibes from Nick and Elizabeth, and the endless pointless questions and sideways glances from that bloody woman Doreen. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone, he’d asked? What difference did it make to any of them what he was wearing? That said, John found it far easier to relate to Barry when he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt rather than full drag. It really shouldn’t have made any difference, but it did. Barry now sat on his own in the doorway of his bedroom, quietly reading a book he’d already finished once this week.

  Elizabeth and Nick had a strange relationship. One minute they were fighting, the next laughing. They were of a similar age and background, and maybe that was the connection? John sensed that the decision to fight or laugh was usually down to Elizabeth. She used her femininity to twist Nick around her little finger, dangling him on a string. Then again, maybe he was doing her a disservice? Perhaps he was jealous?

  Now Doreen Phillips he couldn’t stand. There were no ifs, buts or maybes when it came to Doreen, he simply couldn’t abide the woman. He hated her grating voice and her witch’s cackle of a laugh. He hated her smell and the cloud of cigarette smoke which followed her around the room. He hated her wizened, wrinkled skin and her yellow teeth. Most of all he hated the fact she moaned constantly about everything to anyone who’d listen. She had more aches, pains and problems each day than the rest of them combined. No matter how low or desperate you might be feeling, Doreen always had it worse. John tried to avoid all contact with her, which wasn’t easy being trapped together in such a confined space.

  It was interesting how little everyone seemed to have to do with Paul Jones. Nick in particular hardly spoke to him. Perhaps there was an element of competition, both of them considering themselves the all important alpha male? Whatever the reason they kept their distance from each other, although Paul tended to keep his distance from everyone. He bot
h infuriated and fascinated John. Such an isolated and solitary person and yet, when he could be persuaded, he brought so much to the group. He was obviously intelligent, but his distance from the rest of them came across as an unpleasant arrogance. Maybe he just wasn’t very good at relating to other people? Or did he think he was better than the rest of them?

  Funny, John thought, that we should easily overlook the good and find so many faults with each other. There they were, all living through the same nightmare, and yet they couldn’t put aside their differences and work together for love nor money. They focused on trivialities rather than trying to work together for the common good. It spoke volumes about the human condition.

  Doreen and Nick were at the dining table playing cards, their poker faces emotionless. Close by, Elizabeth dozed on a couch. Like Barry, Paul also had also marked out a small area as his own: sitting on a chair, looking out of the wide floor-to-ceiling windows at the front of the hotel. From there he could see the rear-end of the bus sticking out of the gaping hole where the main entrance to the building had been. Ten days on and the dead were still fighting through the rubble to get inside.

  Boredom and curiosity caused John to get up and wander over to Paul. Paul didn’t react, hoping he’d go away again. He didn’t.

  ‘Any change?’

  ‘Yeah, they’ve all gone. What do you think?’

  ‘Still more of them coming?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘You’d think they’d have given up by now, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Fuck all else left to distract them, isn’t there? Just the noise up here.’

  John knew he was annoying Paul, but he couldn’t help incessantly asking questions. It was a coping mechanism, he’d long-since decided. ‘You think they’ll ever stop?’

  ‘What, stop moving or stop trying to get in here?’

  ‘Both. Either.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes they’ll eventually stop moving and yes, they’ll eventually stop trying to get in here.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Quarter past six tomorrow night. Christ, how the hell should I know?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘They’ll stop moving when they’ve rotted so much they just can’t do it anymore, and they’ll stop trying to get in here when there’s so many of them crammed into this fucking building that there’s no more room. And please don’t ask me which is going to happen first because I don’t have a fucking clue.’

  John took that as his cue to go. A sudden tirade like that from Paul usually meant you should go before he told you to. Dejected, he ambled slowly back into the middle of the huge penthouse apartment. It had been an impressive sight when they’d first arrived there, palatial and immense. Now the Presidential Suite looked as dilapidated and rundown as the rest of the world; a millionaire’s home taken over by squatters.

  John wandered into the kitchen area to look for scraps of food he knew he wouldn’t find. They were rapidly running out of everything, but he kept looking regardless. Maybe he’d find something in the rubbish that one of the others had missed…

  As he waded through the discarded boxes, bags, wrappers and other litter that covered the floor, he thought about what Paul had just said. He was absolutely right, the bodies would keep trying to force their way into the building until there was no more room. That was a terrifying prospect which had generated a lot of very animated discussion but little action over the last ten days. If things kept progressing as they had (and there was no reason to suggest they wouldn’t) then a time would inevitably come when the building in which they were sheltering would be filled to capacity with dead flesh, leaving them stranded and starving. But what could they do? They’d talked and talked about it without reaching any conclusions or workable solutions. There had always been enough food in the kitchen and enough space between them and the dead to enable them to put off making difficult decisions until tomorrow, and then the day after that, and the day after that. John sensed that very soon, one way or another, they’d have no choice but to act.

  He had, for his part, tried to do something constructive. Granted it wasn’t much, but (as he frequently reminded them), it was more than anyone else had done. A keen photographer, five days ago he’d found a camera and batteries lying around the suite which Barry had brought back with him from an early trip into town. In a moment of inspiration, he’d crept out onto the landing, attached the camera to the end of a fire-hose, and lowered it down the middle of the staircase. Through trial and error he’d managed to work out what length of hose was necessary to lower the camera between floors and, at the same time, he set the timer to take a single picture once the required level had been reached. With a surprising degree of accuracy he had soon developed a means of taking photographs of each level down as far as the hose would reach. He had, therefore, found a way of measuring the progress of the dead when they finally appeared. Their incalculably vast numbers meant that those bodies at the front of the crowd were continually being pushed forwards, inevitably beginning to climb the stairs. With corpses continuing to pour through the bus-shaped hole in the hotel’s outside wall, once the ground floor reception had been completely filled there was nowhere else for them to go but up. Moving almost as one huge dripping mass, the enormous crowd was slowly being funnelled deeper and deeper into the building, climbing higher and higher.

  Each time John hauled the camera back up to the top floor, the group crowded around to check the progress of the slowly advancing cadavers. There had been no sign of them initially, but John continued to take his photographs every morning regardless. And then, yesterday, the dead had been photographed on the twenty-second floor. It was a simple enough calculation to make – they’d covered twenty-two floors in about nine days, so they were climbing at the rate of just over two floors a day. The second simple calculation made was altogether more disturbing. It was Thursday today. If their rate of climb continued at the same speed (and there seemed no immediate reason why it shouldn’t) then the bodies would reach the twenty-eighth floor sometime on Saturday, Sunday morning at the very latest.

  Bizarrely, John enjoyed his role of chief cameraman and body-watcher. It gave him a purpose. Perhaps even more importantly, it became something he could hide behind and use as an excuse for not doing anything else.

  #

  Three forty-five. The afternoon sun was dropping down towards the horizon, filling the Presidential Suite with orange light and long, dragging shadows. Rather than spreading themselves around the edges of the apartment, on this rare occasion the six survivors sat together around the dining table. They needed to talk. No food, very little time.

  ‘So exactly how much stuff have we got left?’ Doreen asked.

  ‘Enough for a day,’ Barry replied, ‘maybe two at the very most. After that there’s nothing.’

  ‘We must have something?’

  ‘No,’ he said again, shaking his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It can’t have all gone, can it?’

  Nick had reached breaking point. How were they supposed to get through to this bloody woman? ‘Listen, Doreen, the cupboards are empty. We’re down to our last crumbs. There isn’t an extra little stash of food tucked away for emergencies. After this we’ll have absolutely nothing. Zip. Fuck all.’

  Doreen slumped back in her chair. ‘So what are we going to do?’ More sighs came from around the table.

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to work out, you stupid cow,’ Nick said, sitting on his hands so he didn’t throttle her. ‘Bloody hell, are you on the same planet as the rest of us?’

  ‘Wish I wasn’t.’

  ‘So we’ve got two problems,’ John summarised, trying his best to control the conversation. ‘We need to try and get out and get supplies but—’

  ‘—but this building is full of bodies,’ said Barry, before adding, ‘thanks to the hole you lot made in the front door.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Doreen asked again.

&
nbsp; ‘Is there any way of getting out of here and back up again?’ Elizabeth wondered.

  ‘Don’t think so,’ Barry answered quickly. ‘Getting down’s no problem, we can use the fire escape.’ He nodded over at an inconspicuous looking door in the far corner of the room. ‘The problem is what to do once you’re down there. Open the fire escape door on the ground floor, and you’ll find yourself right in the middle of a few thousand bodies. And if you manage to get outside, you’re not going to get back in again afterwards. It’d be impossible empty-handed, no chance if you’re carrying supplies.’

  ‘But there must be a way?’

  ‘Get a sheet, hold it like a parachute, climb up to the roof and jump off,’ Nick suggested.

  ‘You think that’ll work?’ Doreen said, her bewilderingly stupid response meeting with groans of disbelief.

  ‘Try it and let us know, Doreen,’ he said.

  ‘But how would I get back up again?’

  ‘Flap your arms,’ Nick said. ‘You know what I think? I think we should just get out of here. This place is fucked. We should go downstairs and torch the place on our way out. Set light to the building and watch the whole fucking place go up in flames.’

  ‘What good’s that going to do?’ Barry said.

  ‘Well it would distract them for a start. Christ, the heat and light this place burning would generate would be more than enough of a distraction to let us get away. They’re not going to be interested in a handful of people sneaking out the back door with all that going on, are they?’

  Nick’s suggestion was met with an awkward, muted silence. They each thought long and hard about it, but none of them were sure. It wasn’t the wanton destruction that put them off, rather it was the thought of being out on the run again, searching for places to hide…

  ‘What about the cradle?’ John said. ‘We’ve talked about it before, haven’t we? Barry said there’s a window-cleaner’s cradle half way up the side of the building. We could use that to get us down, couldn’t we? We might even be able to use it to get back up as well…’