Zombie Apocalypse Serial #1

by Ivana E. Tyorbrains

  Here’s how you do it. Go to any city in America, drive to a busy intersection, and find the beggar holding the Work For Food sign. Give that dude a cup of coffee (if it’s cold outside) or a bottle of water (if it’s hot) and be on your way.

  A batch of Peebees is easily dissolved into any beverage. They’ll make a bottle of water taste a little grainy, but on a hot afternoon, beggar dude isn’t going to care. He’ll drink them up and get a couple million of them in his gut. Once the Peebees are inside, their programming kicks in. Using the minerals and organic matter in the host’s blood as raw material, the Peebees begin to replicate and attach themselves to the white blood cells. Within six hours, every white blood cell in the body has a Peebee attached to it. Within twelve hours, the Peebees have made their way into the bone marrow, and new white blood cells come out with a Peebee automatically attached.

  At this point, the host feels nothing, other than general malaise due to a mild anemia, the Peebees having taken some iron out of the bloodstream. My bots are just making themselves at home in their new body in this first stage. This is all they will do for the next three days. When the shit starts going down, homeless beggar dude won’t think to blame the beverage I gave him 72 hours before symptoms showed up. Who remembers what happened three days ago?

  Allow me a quick diversion to explain for you the three reasons why the biotech companies haven’t been able to make the Peebees accomplish anything at all despite ten years of effort on their parts.

  1. The FDA confines the biotech companies to animal testing, which is a mostly worthless exercise. Ask Gene Hackman. If you want results, you’ve got to have a human subject.

  2. I’ve designed the Peebees to sabotage any initiative that might lead to real results. The first thing the biotech companies tried was to have the Peebees deliver targeted proteins to their host cells, thereby strengthening the immune system. It was a fine idea that should have worked, but my secret programming kicked in, and the Peebees modified the proteins just enough that the white blood cells rejected them and the experiment failed, as have all similar experiments since.

  3. In their hearts, the execs at the biotech companies don’t really want the Peebees to work. They just want enough progress to keep the government research money rolling in forever and ever. You’d think they’d get frustrated that, after ten years, the Peebees have done nothing for them, but they’re actually happy about it. If I allowed my technology to do what it’s capable of doing, there would be no more sickness of any kind, and the entire health industrial complex would be out of business.

  Anyway, I digress. Back to the beggar dude, who has Gen 2 Peebees in his system, with none of the same restrictions I’ve put on the ones the biotech companies play with. Inside this dude, if I wanted to, I could push a button on my computer and cure him of cancer. Or I could push another button and he’d drop dead right away.

  Over the years, I’ve done both of these things with my test subjects, and more. Using standard WiFi, I communicate from home with nanobots spread all around the world. Here are some of the things I’ve done with a single click.

  1. Cured a junkie’s HIV infection (he didn’t even know he had it).

  2. Made a homeless lady in New Orleans into a contagious spreader of airborne nanobots.

  3. Made said airborne nanobots noncontagious after the woman had infected four people, and they in turn had infected thirty-eight more, all in and around New Orleans.

  4. Gave all of those infected people explosive diarrhea during the Saints’ Super Bowl win. The minute the game was over, I allowed them to get better.

  5. Gave one homeless guy a golden ticket, curing him of all diseases, heightening his energy level, sharpening his senses—even fixing the blemishes on his skin. That dude isn’t homeless anymore; he’s the governor of Oregon.

  Do you remember that hubbub last year about the dead coming to life at a funeral in rural Pennsylvania? You know, there were twenty people who all went on record saying Grandpa Joe sat up in his casket and looked at them, only to fall back down again. The media decided it wasn’t actually the dead coming to life, but rather a combination of rigamortis and the wind. We all had a good laugh about it. You remember, don’t you?

  I’m here to tell you that Grandpa Joe did in fact rise up like Lazarus, for just a few seconds. I was sitting in my car outside the cemetery gates, and used my iPhone to make it happen.

  I finished Peebees Version 3 a week before that funeral. Unlike previous generations of the technology, Version 3 didn’t latch onto living blood cells. Version 3 floated about on the skin, jumping virulently from host to host, looking for the ideal place to set up shop.

  For Version 3, that ideal spot was in the brain of a corpse.

  An hour before Grandpa Joe’s funeral at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church, I poured the first batch of Version 3 into the holy water. As everyone came in and crossed themselves, they spread the robots onto their skin. Then, when they kissed Grandpa Joe’s dead body, they spread the infection to him. By the time the funeral processed to the cemetery, Grandpa Joe’s brain was full of nanobots. Just as the ceremony was coming to a close, I woke him up.

  I can’t begin to tell you the ecstasy I felt when Grandpa Joe sat up in his casket. Fortunately for me, the residents of the funeral were screaming like banshees when it happened, and they couldn’t hear my shouts of joy from inside my car.

  “It’s alive!” I shouted. “It’s alive!”

  I allowed myself ten seconds of pure joy, then I pressed the kill switch on my phone and deactivated all of Version 3, allowing Grandpa Joe to fall back in place.

  In Grandpa Joe, I had proof of concept. But I didn’t have what I needed for a proper zombie apocalypse. At least, not yet.

  Grandpa Joe was proof of concept. He showed that I could reanimate the dead.

  But he wasn’t ready to chase after the living. If I went straight to the apocalypse with the Peebees that created Grandpa Joe, I’d create a world where the corpses meander about like senior citizens at the mall.

  To create zombies that would chase the living, I needed more subjects, and I needed them in a controlled, secret environment. This presented a problem. While it was easy to get a homeless man to take a cup of coffee from you, getting him to step into your car, and doing so in a way that you don’t draw any suspicion—that’s harder. People are on the lookout for that sort of shit.

  Hitchhikers, however, are another story. If someone sees you picking up a hitchhiker, they shake their head at your foolishness as they drive past, but otherwise think nothing of it. And once you’ve got a hitchhiker in your car…you’re golden. By definition, the hitchhiker is far from home. Odds are very good that no one will miss them for a long time.

  I bought a big Chevy Suburban and had the windows tinted, then I made a monthly habit of driving up to Albuquerque and taking I-40 West, where I frequently found people to pick up. Sometimes I’d see a hitchhiker before I got out of Albuquerque. Sometimes, I’d get all the way to Flagstaff before I found one. One time I made it all the way to Victorville, California before I saw anyone on the side of the raod, although that trip was worth it because I found a whole pack of them in Victorville--four smelly young men with dreadlocks and hemp hats traveling together to LA who were all too happy to take a ride from a stranger

  Once they were in my car, I gave the hitchhikers a bottle of water and chatted them up about where they were going. The Peebees in the water were programmed to put the travelers to sleep for 24 hours (enough time to get home without any dead bodies in my car), and then kill them. They stayed dead for another hour, and then became undead.

  It was all a very convenient setup. I didn’t even have to move the bodies. I just pulled my SUV into the staging area outside my zombie lab, made sure their seatbelts were unbuckled, and left the car doors open. When the zombies woke up, they got out and meandered into the lab, at which point I used a remote from upstairs to close the door behind them.

  My zombie lab is
a thing of beauty, a true mad scientist’s playground. Built in the basement of guest house number three (a guest house that never has guests), the zombie lab has an obstacle course, a walking track, 100% camera coverage, six grated drains and an automatic floor wash system, and two airlock exits, one opening to a stairwell into the house, the other opening to the garage.

  Seven zombies made up my stable of subjects. At first, I was calling them by their given names, which I always made a point of asking them before they took a drink from their water bottles, but when the four hippies brought my numbers up to seven, I decided to name them after the seven dwarves. Not from the Disney movie, mind you (I didn’t really have anyone who was Sneezy), but from the 1912 Broadway version of Snow White, in which the dwarves were named Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee.

  Blick, my first hitchhiker, was a raggedy old alcoholic I had picked up on Coors Boulevard in Albuquerque. It was with Blick that I mastered the perfect rate of decay, striking a balance between the rotting appearance required of any zombie with my own desire to have these guys roam the earth for a few years at least.

  Zombie pop culture typically underestimates how quickly the human body will decay upon death. The walking dead that we see in a run of the mill zombie movie look like a body somewhere between weeks two and four of decay. A zombie apocalypse that goes on for longer than a month would be a mess of blackened, rotting flesh barely clinging onto bone, with vultures and ravens all over every walker, and maggots devouring the zombies as they moved.

  I want survivors of the apocalypse to be stuck in a more traditional zombie setting than this, with the classic zombie hordes roaming the earth for a good ten years. I want my zombies to decay quickly in the first week and then settle into a more permanent state of rotten flesh for years to come.

  With Blick, my Peebees let things go bad in the corpse for a week, then they became rabid defenders of their home. All that science had dreamed about my nanobots—that one day they would create an immune system that could fight off any intruder—it all came true with Blick after the first week was done. A half-rotten dead man with sagging, decayed flesh who would stay that way indefinitely…Blick was an extra good-looking zombie because he was so damned ugly even when he was alive. I totally did that guy a favor making him into a corpse, and so long as the Peebees stay active inside him, Blick will walk the earth forever more.

  Of course, I tweaked the program with each subsequent test subject. I don’t want the zombies of the apocalypse to last forever like Blick. As it stands now, the zombies of my apocalypse will die and rot quickly for a few days, then rot very slowly for a few months, then settle into a stasis of sorts for seven to eight years, then begin rotting slowly again until they drop to the ground as nothing more than skeletal remains.

  My second subject was Flick, a young man with a guitar on his back who I picked up at the Arizona border. Flick was my first zombie who was hungry for human flesh.

  You see, there’s a problem with the whole notion of cannibalistic zombies that Hollywood never deals with. What happens to the food they eat? Do their digestive systems still work? Do zombies have to take a shit?

  I taught the Peebees in Flick to occupy his digestive track, starting with the esophagus and going all the way through the colon, and to use the food he consumed as raw material for more Peebees. Whatever waste the Peebees left behind in this process got mulched all the way down to liquid, which Flick leeched out as sweat.

  What’s really cool about this process is not only its elegance—the zombie really is hungry because his body is making use of the food—but its outcome. Having waste leech out onto the skin gave Flick a really rank odor, and turned his skin into a sickly shade of green. During that first week of decay, all that waste on Flick’s skin heightened the process. During those subsequent weeks of stasis, that skin piss, if you will, makes sure the zombie stinks to high heaven even though decay has slowed.

  Glick, my third zombie, was the first female of the bunch. She was a meth addict who was looking for a ride on Central and I-25 in Albuquerque. The Peebees in Glick learned to go into system-wide shutdown if the brain was destroyed, making her the first zombie you can take out with a bullet to the brain. Most survivors of the apocalypse will have some inkling of what to do…from video games to the Romero movies to The Walking Dead, everyone knows that the way to kill a zombie is to take out its head. My zombies will be no different. Shoot them in the heart or the spine or the stomach or wherever, and they’ll barely notice. Shoot them in the brain and they fall dead for good.

  It’s only fair.

  Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee were the last ones to arrive. These were the four California hippies. By the time they came along, I had the basic formula figured out, but my zombies weren’t very scary. To alleviate this, I gave the California 4 a batch of Peebees with very flexible algorithms that were capable of learning basic commands. I taught them three guiding principles:

  1) While you enjoy all meat, fresh human flesh tastes best of all. Teaching this command required me to pick up more hitchhikers to use as food so my zombies could have tasty treats they learned to love.

  2) The tastiest part of any human is the brain. The idea of brain-eating undead isn’t universal in zombie lore, but it’s special to me because it originated in Return of the Living Dead, a movie I snuck out of bed to watch on late night cable when I was ten. Your favorite zombies might not like brains, but mine do.

  3) You have no interest in eating other zombies.

  The Peebees in the California 4 were my true masterwork, adapting just enough to give my zombies basic life skills. Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee started out as completely helpless automatons, and slowly, over the course of several weeks, learned how to climb up stairs, how to push open doors, and how to find food. They know how to tell the difference between a tumbleweed blowing in the wind and a dog running down the road. They know that the dog is something they want to eat and the tumbleweed is not.

  Four smelly hippies spreading a message of peace and love along the California Highway. It was in the bodies of four smelly hippies that the zombies who would end the world were born.

  Just thinking of what they’ve accomplished brings a tear to this daddy’s eye. I’m so proud of them.

  Bart

  I’m riding a bus to El Paso. I’ve got the window seat. There’s a brown skinned teenager seated next to me, probably a god-damned illegal. He smells like cornbread.

  What a strange way to spend an afternoon.

  Timothy doesn’t trust me to drive myself to the pickup sites anymore. I don’t blame him. Isabel is making some really potent buds these days and I’m not good for much of anything after I smoke them. I should pull her from the garden before whatever’s up with her spreads to all the plants and I’ve got no choice but to be stoned out of my mind.

  Or maybe I shouldn’t. This is such a deep, sweet high, I’d like nothing more than to sit inside of it every moment for the rest of my days. Even Cornbread Head seated here next to me can’t make me sad when I’m this high. I’m just gonna coast all the way to El Paso on a cotton candy cloud.

  “Ride to El Paso and get off at the depot. Take the package from locker 51. Get on the next bus to Houston. When you get there, take the package to locker 51 at the depot in Houston. Leave it there. Get on the next bus to Albuquerque. When you get to Socorro, I’ll pick you up.”

  Those were my instructions from Timothy.

  “Like Enterprise,” I said back to him.

  “What’s that? The Enterprise?”

  “No, man. Not THE Enterprise. Just…Enterprise. They pick you up.”

  Timothy didn’t get it.

  “Repeat back the instructions to me,” he said.

  “El Paso. Locker 51. Package. Bring it to Houston,” I said. “I got it.”

  Yeah I do. I got it good. Thanks to Timothy, and thanks to Isabel, I got it real good.

  Timothy

  I’m fucking Bart’s mother. How sweet
is that? Dude bullies and abuses me into abject misery, and now I’m fucking his mother. And she’s crazy about me.

  I always had a thing for Bart’s mother. Erica Ruth Corning is her name. I was in seventh grade the first time I met her. Some state inspector was at our school that day so the teachers had to pretend they cared when Bart beat me up at recess. They broke up the fight and took us to the principal, who called my mother and Bart’s to come in for a meeting.

  She wasn’t even thirty. She looked more like a hot older sister than somebody’s mother. That night, she was the star of my bedtime fantasy, which became a recurring role for her ever since. Hell, even when I was at grad school, and hadn’t seen her for years, I still liked to imagine her naked body on top of mine, her legs wrapped around my hips, her gorgeous, pouty eyes full of lust for me as I filled her with my sweet, sweet love.

  You can imagine my elation when I went looking for a new homeless test subject on the streets of downtown Albuquerque and found Erica Corning.

  I found Bart too. They were both squatting in the same crack house. I knew right away that I had to use them both in my research, not as anonymous hosts that I tracked remotely, but as permanent guests on my compound in the middle of nowhere.

  The whole plan came to me in a matter of seconds. That’s how my genius works. I noodle about a problem for weeks, sometimes years, and then one new piece of information makes itself known and the solution explodes from my brain.

  When I found Erica, my brain was at work figuring out what I would do with myself when the zombie apocalypse happened. I was about to end the world, but what would I do next? How would I amuse myself after it all went down? Who was going to live in the compound with me, and what were we going to do? How was I going to make it all worthwhile? What could I do to make sure that, once I flipped the switch and ended the world, I had no regrets?

  These questions had vexed me for years. When I saw Erica Corning, the answer came to me like a divine revelation.