Unhappy Endings: Tales from the world of Adrian's Undead Diary, Volume 1
Edited by Chris Philbrook
Copyright © 2015 Christopher Philbrook
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission of the author. Your support of author’s rights is appreciated.
Published in the United States of America
First Publishing Date 2015
All characters in this compilation are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover Illustration by Ian Llanas
Cover design and interior layout by Alan MacRaffen
Also by Chris Philbrook:
Elmoryn - The Kinless Trilogy
Book One: Wrath of the Orphans
Book Two: The Motive for Massacre
Coming Soon:
Book Three: The Echoes of Sin
Reemergence
Tesser: A Dragon Among Us
Coming Soon:
Ambryn: & the Cheaters of Death
Adrian’s Undead Diary
Book One: Dark Recollections
Book Two: Alone No More
Book Three: Midnight
Book Four: The Failed Coward
Book Five: Wrath
Book Six: In the Arms of Family
Book Seven: The Trinity
Book Eight: Cassie
A.U.D. Anthology: Unhappy Endings
Don’t miss Chris Philbrook’s free e-Book:
At Least He’s Not On Fire:
A Tour of the Things That Escape My Head
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword by Chris Philbrook
Fear by Joe Tremblay
In the Arms of the Dead by Christopher MacDonald
Eddie Smith, Part One: The Truck by Chris Philbrook
Uncle Martin by Steve Gonzales
A Girl Alone by Lee Smallwood
Thirty Thousand Feet by Tracy Wilson
Eddie Smith, Part Two: When Work Becomes Life by Chris Philbrook
Amy's Daycare by Sherry Knight
Peace by Shane Hershey
The Only Thing That Matters by Alan MacRaffen
Eddie Smith, Part Three: Chasing Hope by Chris Philbrook
Meanwhile in Utah by Josh Green
And Then There Was This Time by Dennis Pekkala
Women and Children First by A. Ben Carpenter
Eddie Smith, Part Four: The First Virginia Republic by Chris Philbrook
Rose by Wendi Haegle
Storm Crow 602 by Rob Roche
No Fucks on Timmy by J.C. Fiske
I Know. I Counted. By Krista Blasevick Pullin
About the Authors
AUD Merchandise
Free Short Fiction by Chris Philbrook
Foreword:
What a journey.
I've been writing in the world of Adrian Ring since late 2010, and others have been right there alongside me, creating stories set in the world that somehow slipped out of my mind, and onto the website so long ago.
It all started with the AUD forums and a contest for folks to write some fan-fiction to win a shirt or something. Just as with the success of Adrian's Undead Diary, I had no frigging idea how big the concept of AUD fan-fiction would get. The first contest got dozens of entries, and each contest I ran got bigger and bigger. Now, as I write this, there are over a hundred fan-fiction stories still on the site.
Some are… clearly written by people who wanted to share a story but didn't know how to, and some are written by people who didn't know they knew how to tell a story. I'm thankful for everyone's visions of my world, and I love reading the stories.
I wanted to share the best of these with the larger audience that has come into the world of Adrian Ring, as well as bridge the gap between the events of AUD book eight: Cassie, and the new trilogy I'm working on.
Unhappy Endings serves as a way for me to achieve both.
There are fifteen stories in Unhappy Endings that fans and friends wrote for the site, or for the anthology directly, and I love them all for various reasons. The people, as well as the stories they wrote. From me to them; thank you very much. You’re good people. I don't care what your parents say about you.
Officially, I grace their words in this tome as AUD official. What they've written here, has happened. It is no longer fan fiction, it is AUD canon. Stick that in your pipes and smoke it.
Mixed into their stories like ice with whisky are a series of side fictions that I've written. Most notably are the two original Eddie Smith stories that are/were premium on the site, as well as two more, never-seen Eddie Smith stories. Eddie and his group of survivors from Longview Texas play a major role in the new AUD trilogy I'm working on, and the stories in Unhappy Endings bring them into the fold further. If this is your first visit to the world of Adrian Ring, I highly suggest you run back out and pick up Dark Recollections, and start at the beginning. You can read this first, but some of the stories could spoil some details for you, and as we know, the Devil's in the details.
If you enjoy Unhappy Endings, please, please leave it a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads so I know you liked it. I'd like to do more in the series, but I need to know you enjoyed it before I do this again. Turns out publishing an anthology is a lot of work, and kind of expensive. Please let me know your honest thoughts.
So yeah. What a journey. Thank you, readers, for all the time you've spent gallivanting around inside my imagination, and with Adrian, and now, please enjoy a little time inside the imagination of some great people who shared their thoughts with me, and now you.
Chris Philbrook, May 2015
Fear
Joe Tremblay
I'm Michael Turner, I'm a cubicle zombie at the local phone company. I sell shit for a living and just recently started reading 'The Secret.' I am on a quest to lead a more positive life now. This morning I was thinking to myself, today is going to be a really great day! Wednesdays are usually very shitty days for me, but I figured what the hell, give positive thinking a shot. So it's Wednesday, June 23rd and I walk out of my apartment building in San Diego for my morning cup of coffee at the Starbucks across the street. The first positive sign I get for my hopefully awesome day is that the place is empty! Weird, but hey, no line! Positive thinking is working already!
Hippy-kid Jerry, as I like to refer to him on account of his ratty hairstyle and tie-dye shirt, is at the register barely even aware that I am standing there waiting to place my order. Instead, his eyes are glued to his cell phone watching some video.
"Everything alright?" I ask. He looks through me as if I'm not actually standing there.
"Naaah maaan... It's like Dawn of the Dead out there, you been watching the news?"
He holds up his phone to show me what looks like an amateur video of two disgusting looking people ripping some older man open with their teeth. The video was raw and made me instantly sick to my stomach. The same kind of feeling I used to get when I watched Faces of Death videos when I was a kid.
"That's fucking sick man," was all I could think to say. Although at this point, I'm just thinking it's some kind of prank and how nice it would be to get my fucking coffee.
Right about then, two cars crash head-on into each other just outside the shop and I realized that if I listened closely, I could hear police and
fire sirens and... were those gunshots? I knew instantly that panicking would lead to my untimely demise so I ushered Jerry to fetch my coffee, which he did with an "are you fucking serious?" attitude. Yeah I was fucking serious. This might be the last Grande Mocha with whip cream I ever get to drink. He got it to me and told me don’t worry about the money. He grabbed a bunch of pastries and bottled juices and took off and told me to be careful to not get eaten by one of the “dawn of the deads.”
I then decided to call people and pulled out my new awesome flip phone. I hit all the speed dials on my phone one after the other and got nothing but busy circuits dial after dial. I left the store thinking that maybe I was just dreaming. As I hit the sidewalk and looked around, I noticed how surreal it all was. People were everywhere suddenly. Like some kind of impromptu city block party. People ran, walked and screamed maniacally from every alley, corner and storefront. I swigged some mocha and pinched my cheek just to be sure this wasn't all some fucked up nightmare.
Out of nowhere a black haired Korean woman carrying a kid appears in front of me and I see the kid is bleeding badly from his neck. She grabs my arm with an impossibly strong vice like grip.
"PLEASE help my Billy!!!" Damn woman almost made me spill my coffee.
"What the hell happened to him?" I say as I wrestle my own throbbing arm away from her. I look at Billy and Billy looks like shit. His neck has an oozing tear in it and his clothes are drenched in blood. I gently place my coffee to my side, grab the kid and toss him on the ground to look at the wound, he was bleeding badly and man do I hate blood. I kept staring at the blood oozing out of his neck and I felt an awful sensation of terror march up my spine.
"He got bitten by a very sick man!" she whines frantically.
“Bitten” There’s the word. I don't like this, matter of fact, positive thinking is completely worthless if this is what happens. I should have probably woke up thinking only the worst can happen and then maybe I'd have won the lottery or something.
I’m looking at the kid, but all I feel is the sun hitting me hard and I hear screaming from distant areas of the city and the clatter of chaos everywhere. The kid was bad. I was bad. I hate blood and gore. It makes me sick to the point that my body goes into shock and I knew that I couldn't help him; it was too much for me. I started to get the nausea and gut wrench feeling which told me that if I stuck around this dying kid and crazy woman any longer, I was dead. I don't want to be dead.
I look the lady straight in the face and say, "I can't help you and if you stick around your dying son, he's going to turn into a zombie and kill you.” I then grab my coffee and I run from her as fast as my shaky legs would let me. I could hear her screaming at me as I fled and I tried very willingly to get a grip on the new reality being force-fed into my scrambled mind.
I come around the corner on G-street and Kettner Boulevard where I experience my first ever, heart stopping shock in life; a horde of zombies. Freshly minted dead people, able to get up and kill. Fucking zombies... I was terrified. I can’t explain it, but you ever see a kitten get circled by a bunch of hungry stray dogs? I’m feeling like I am that kitten at the moment.
Hilariously enough, I was one of those people who would often say, “Yeah baby, bring on that zombie apocalypse! No more laws, bills or taxes! Just kill or be killed and take whatever the fuck you want!” What's not to love about that?
Well, being about fifty feet from 20 or 30 undead changes the way you think about things dramatically. The first hard lesson is that I’m alone and that my family and most of my friends are probably going to die and become one of these things. Second hard lesson is that for as cool as I thought I was going to be if I ever was going to deal with a zombie apocalypse, I was wrong. I was stuck in the middle of San Diego with no gun, no water, no vehicle, backpack or even a fucking Swiss Army knife. I had a cup of coffee and my phone and the stupid fucking phone wasn't ever going to work again. Did I mention that zombies were just a stone's throw away from my still living body?
All in all, people say they can’t wait for this shit and then when the shit does actually happen they shit themselves. There is nothing cool about blood, guts, ripped skin and death being around every corner unless it's on the flat screen being run off a PlayStation. There’s nothing cool about it when it's real because it's the most disgusting feeling ever. Just remember what it was like to lose someone close to you and how much it hurt that you'd never see them again and then imagine losing EVERYONE. It's gut-wrenching misery. There’s also nothing cool about the fact that I’ll probably never get to have Starbucks Mocha again. That really sucks.
Okay back to the problem at hand, the undead don't see me because they are currently occupied with chewing the skin off some obese guy's hairy back and legs. I'm reminded of this nature series on the discovery channel featuring those mangy, starving wolves in the winter feasting on the one skinny deer whose blood is all over the pure white snow. I got sick and threw up the little bit of coffee I'd drank. This sucks, is the only thing going through my head. That and What the FUCK am I going to do?
Where do I go, should I get a fucking boat? Nah, fuck boats.
Should I find a Wal-Mart? That’s probably not a good idea. I imagine there are a thousand other people who think that’s going to be a great place to have to their own, killing any other survivor who tries to get in. Greedy materialistic bastards. Jesus I had to do something before I was surrounded with nowhere to run.
Just then, a man appears behind me screaming, "RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!" I turn and he's being chased by another mob of undead. As I'm turning to confront him, he pivots left and runs right where I just came from and where there is the bigger group of dead people. I try to scream to him not to go that way, it's worse. He can't hear me, his mind is gone and into the hungry wolves he goes. Christ, nothing is going well. I decide to down my coffee and really get my head in the game. Positive thoughts, Michael, positive thoughts.
First fucking problem, how do I get out of the city? Scratch that, how the fuck do I get away from the zombies this old man brought in my direction? Those ugly, shambling, bastards all had that glazed look in their eyes. They were horrid to watch with their bloodied faces and necks. I felt like they exuded this kind of aura that made me think and move much slower than usual. The curse of terror I suppose and it actually made me realize why in every horror movie, the girl trips. It's legit now those movies make great fucking sense!
First rule is cardio. Thank you Zombieland! I was dressed in my New Balance shoes and khaki cargo pants, so running would be easy. Although it was hot as balls outside today, so obviously water was going to be a priority if I was going to be doing a lot of running. And so I ran, as fast as I could. Lucky for me the dead people were kind of slow, but the problem is they were just about everywhere I was heading. I remember running and hearing screams from all over. There were nonstop sounds of vehicles crashing, horns honking, sirens blaring and the trolley train. The damn train was filled with people, but it would just move five or so feet, stop, move five more feet, stop… Imagine being on that train with the urgency that I feel. Maddening. Didn’t seem like a good method of transportation. At random I'd see two or three zombies eating some poor fuck or some woman or God forbid, a kid. It was all so sickening to the stomach that it took all I had not to just flop on the ground and give up completely. I'm so glad my adrenaline was on, or else I'd have done just that.
My first inclination was to get out of the City by darting through it on foot, but then I thought, why go empty handed and on foot? Being that I live in the city, I didn’t own a car, so I needed to find one. Then I could simply drive it back to my apartment and get some spare shit. So fuck it, let's get a car I thought or at least a cab. There are usually taxi cabs by the Hyatt Hotel only a block away. The Hyatt is right next to the Convention Center where they have the ComiCon every year and it's usually bustling with activity. I just knew there was going to be zombies, but I had to take the risk. Getting a vehicle to ride my ass out of town
was my only shot to retaining some of my sanity. Not to mention, I was in a major city and based off the illogical actions of our government's history with bombs it wasn't farfetched to think that they would be dealing with this major disaster with a nuclear BANG! I mean was San Diego the only place this was happening? Or was this worldwide?
Within minutes I am right near the Hyatt, the tallest building in the city. As usual there are scores of white and yellow cabs situated just outside of the main entrance. I can see that there are actual living people scrambling about attempting to get the fuck out of Dodge. This is a good thing; it meant I still had time. I run up to the long series of cabs and all the cab drivers are screaming and shouting at each other. I think they were quickly realizing that competing for fares was utterly useless. Zombies have a funny way of making money obsolete. One by one as I got near, the cabs started taking off in a hurry with no passengers. Shit. I approached a driver and told him to let me in the cab. He looked at me, spit on ground in front of me and sped off. I watched him speed down the road to the first light, which was red, run it and get T-boned by an SUV which is a scene straight out of the new Dawn of the Dead remake. I almost laughed until I understood that this time it wasn’t a movie. Man shit was bad, but oh well that guy was a douche.
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