Year of the Zombie [Anthology]

by David Moody

  Where before the interior of the stockade had been a confusing beehive of men and women scurrying about on various tasks, now it was a single-minded rush to get up the ladders. Stace didn’t have to think about it. She jumped in line with the rest of them and clambered up to the wall-walk.

  A militiawoman with sergeant stripes stood at the top of the ladder Stace was on, directing troops to fill gaps on the wall as the signal whistles continued to blow. She paused when she saw Stace, but after a quick appraisal, jerked her head to the right and said, ‘There’, then went back to yelling at people actually under her command.

  Stace spotted a gap and hurried to it. The thick logs that made up the wall were cut to points, making the top jagged. She pulled her bow and found that the gaps between the peaks were just low enough to let her shoot normally. The militiaman to her left struggled to get his bow unlimbered, bumping into her twice in the process. Then the boy tipped his quiver over and the arrows spilled out. Stace bent to help him pick them up. He looked up to say thanks and froze.

  ‘Stace?’ he said, his mouth falling open and eyes wide as saucers.

  Jeffery Tanner was her age and they had been in school together for years. After graduation, she knew he had joined the militia full-time, bragging about all the ‘Rauders he was going to kill. He was big for sixteen and a bit of a bully with it under normal social circumstances. Now, he looked terrified.

  ‘Here,’ she said, scooping up half a dozen arrows in one motion and handing them to him. She turned back to look out over the top of the wall, realizing that she only heard one whistle still going.

  Three militiamen were sprinting toward them, one with a whistle in his mouth, blowing it with every breath. Stace tracked back where they were coming from and stared at the mass of ferals running after them. There had to be hundreds.

  ‘Oh shit,’ muttered Jeffery. ‘Ohshitohshitohshit—’

  Orders echoed up and down the wall, to hold steady, to get their bows ready. Someone stepped into the space on Stace’s right. She turned to find her father nocking an arrow to Flatliner. He gave her quick nod and stared forward at the oncoming pack. Stace estimated that the things were just out of bowshot, but wouldn’t in a few seconds. At the speed they were moving, the archers on the wall might get nine or ten shots. She wasn’t sure if it would be enough.

  So many, she thought, a chill passing through her.

  ‘Screw this,’ the boy next to her said and took a step back.

  All of the anger that Stace had been holding back since the attack on the road surged up, looking for an outlet. The rage found a target and its name was Jeffery Tanner. She grabbed his arm, spun him toward her, and squeezed.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, Jeffery Tanner,’ she said, leaning in to put her face close to his. ‘You volunteered. This is the job. This is what we do.’

  The boy shot her a look somewhere between fear and shame. She squeezed his arm again, as hard as she could, baring her teeth with the effort. Not taking his eyes off her, he stepped back to the wall and brought up his bow. He only looked away after she let go.

  Stace looked forward again just before the militiamen reached the wall and screamed up to be rescued. Ropes went over the side and the three were hauled up.

  ‘Fire at will!’ came the command and bowstrings sang all along the wall. The first volley arced out more or less as one, dropping on the ferals in a thick cloud. Stace didn’t look to see if she had hit. She had already yanked out another arrow, pulled it to her cheek, and fired. It sounded like her father was shooting twice for each one of hers.

  The ferals had reached the stream and thundered through it, arrows falling in a constant shower now. Every creature still running at them had two or more shafts sticking out of their bodies and still they came. Leaving a trail of bodies, they came.

  ‘That’s it!’ her father yelled. ‘Pour it on!’

  Hundreds of arrows flew into the oncoming pack, more and more successful head shots hitting home the closer the cruddy things got to the wall. In the end, only a couple dozen made it close enough to touch the logs, far below the number needed to “ramp up”, as Stace’s father had once described it, and get over the top of the parapets. Spears and a couple of shots from the scorpion finished the last of them off.

  A cry of celebration spread along the top of the wall. One of the loudest voices belonged to Jeffery, fist pumping up and down. She didn’t have the energy or the desire to join in. Instead she stared down into the mass of bodies at the base of the wall, wondering how many more of the things could be out there. A hand came down lightly on her shoulder and she turned to see her father smiling at her. Her eyes went wide as he pulled her close, his long arms wrapping around. She squinted, failing to hold back her tears and not really caring that she couldn’t. She hugged him back hard.

  ‘I saw how you handled that boy,’ he said. ‘I saw everything you did today. I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier. It wasn’t you I was mad at.’

  ‘I know, Daddy,’ she said, sniffling. Her tears mingled with a nose suddenly gone runny.

  ‘I’m very, very proud of you, babygirl.’

  He hadn’t called her that in years. Her eyes burned and more tears flowed.

  ‘And I’ll make you a deal with you,’ he said, just loud enough for her to hear over the jubilant militia, still yelling and jumping up and down all around them.

  ‘What’s that?’ she said into his shoulder.

  ‘You don’t tell anyone that I let a feral knock me down,’ he said, ‘and I won’t tell anyone that you got snot on my best coat.’

  She laughed and squeezed him tight, letting all the tension of the day flow with the tears. She had no idea how long they stood like that, the militia cheering around them, when she heard someone down below calling her father’s name. The two of them turned to see Commandant Edwards looking up with them.

  He did not look pleased.

  ◆◆◆

  Stace stood with her father, the commandant, and a handful of militia officers in the little log cabin that Wall-Captain Davis used for an office. They crowded around a rough wooden table, looking down at a map of the Shawnee Lodge area. A single lantern hung from the ceiling provided the only light.

  ‘Outriders, Rob?’ the Commandant asked.

  Jacob Edwards was not a big man. In fact he was a full head shorter than her father, but that didn’t seem to diminish his authority one bit. There was an intensity about him that filled every open space wherever he went.

  ‘I believe so, sir,’ her father said. ‘Ran into ten of them, all less than a month since turning, I’d say. Fast and mean. They killed one of Brad Hosberg’s runners.’ He pulled out the bag of feral ears and emptied it on the table. Wall-Captain Davis grimaced, but said nothing.

  ‘Definitely fresh,’ the Commandant said, raising an eyebrow. He pawed through the grisly collection. ‘Outriders mean the full swarm can’t be that far behind. You say you got hit by ten and then there were, how many here, Captain?’

  ‘Just short of three hundred, sir,’ Davis said.

  ‘Cedric Anderson’s command up on the south wall got hit by a group about the same size. That’s why we sent up the green flare. The swarm has to be on this side of the Ohio River by now,’ the commandant said.

  ‘The outrider groups get bigger the closer to the main body,’ Davis said. ‘The only variable is how many smaller swarms they’ve pulled in and that depends on far they’ve travelled since they started moving north.’

  ‘This might give us a good idea,’ her father said. He reached into a pouch and pulled out the wallet.

  The Commandant took the little square of leather and did the same thing her father had done when he found it: opened it and tried to pull out some of the little things inside that were pasted together by weather and time.

  ‘Look,’ her father said. He pulled out a little rectangle of white plastic and held close to the lantern. Stace moved so she could see what they were looking at without getting in their
way. She saw a picture of a young man’s face, shaggy hair and a patchy beard, probably about twenty or so. The letters and numbers next to the picture were too straight, too perfect for even the most careful handwriting. That meant a machine, probably ‘lectric and definitely from Before. Stace’s head swam as she tried to imagine using a rare thing like a ‘lectric machine for simple writing.

  The Commandant squinted at it. ‘An ID card?’

  ‘That’s what it looks like. And look at the code,’ her father said, pointing at the largest lettering.

  TFZ106651

  ‘If those numbers are assigned to ID holders sequentially,’ the Commandant said, ‘that would make it the biggest enclave we’ve ever heard of. If someplace that big were anywhere within a month’s wagon-ride of here, we’d know about it.’

  ‘Right,’ her father said, ‘it would mean a city with over a hundred thousand people, but look at the back. Here,’ he said, pointing at the clear plastic edge. There was tiny writing there that followed the perimeter of the card. The Commandant pulled a pair of glasses out of his pants pocket and opened them with a practiced flip of his wrist.

  ‘“Tallahassee Free Zone”. Tallahassee, Florida? That’s got to be five hundred miles from here.’

  ‘Closer to six, sir,’ her father said. ‘But that’s not the worst part.’ He turned to one of his lieutenants and asked her for a map of the eastern United States. The woman fished through a satchel of rolled up maps, pulled one out, and spread it out over the table, using rounded creek stones to weigh down the corners, careful not to get any gore from the feral ears on it. Stace recognized the name Florida from school and knew it was somewhere far to the south. She blinked and understood where her father was going.

  ‘Look where Tallahassee is,’ he said.

  The Commandant bent over the map and held a hand out. The lieutenant slapped a long, plastic ruler into it and he laid it down on the map of the US.

  ‘If this “TFZ” was overrun,’ her father said, ‘and there was enough of them to start moving north like the damned things do—’

  ‘They would have gone right through Atlanta and Knoxville,’ said the Commandant, ‘pulling every pack of ferals with them along the way.’

  ‘That was my thought when I first saw it.’

  ‘Well then, we’re going to need our best archers up on the wall when they get here,’ the Commandant said. ‘Young lady, from what your father tells me, that includes you.’

  She looked at her father, beaming. He grinned back and took her hand, squeezing.

  ‘And after we deal with this... problem,’ the Commandant continued, ‘we will need the very best Rangers keeping these hills safe. I would be proud to sponsor you, Stace Tomlinson, for Selection.’

  ONE OF THEM

  Matt Shaw

  IMPATIENT

  Please wake up. I’m not sure how much time we have and there’s so much to discuss. Please wake up, my darling. And dinner’s getting cold.

  But she didn’t wake up. The unplanned sleep he had put her in was deep and talking into her ear, even nudging her, failed to wake her from the slumber. Her hands were upturned on the table with bindings round the wrists, the other end of the binding tied to the chair she was sitting on. Her fingers were twitching as though squeezing off rounds of a fully loaded gun. Her face - still pretty - also twitching. Dreaming.

  What are you dreaming of, my darling?

  She was dreaming of better times. She was dreaming of when things had been normal. She was dreaming of when she’d had her little family. Given the state of the world today, all the rot and decay out there festering, and especially given her present situation, they should have been good dreams. But they weren’t. Happy dreams that couldn’t possibly have a happy ending given the fact that, as soon as her eyes opened, the reality of the situation was forced upon her once again. And then, once again, she had to say goodbye to them.

  Her family.

  Gone.

  Not coming back.

  And now this.

  Him.

  The man sitting opposite her. Staring at her intently, desperate for her to open her eyes so that he could show her the world he had created for her. Her? No. Show her the world he had created for them. So long as she wanted it.

  You will want it, won’t you? It might not be perfect but it’s better than what’s waiting for us out there. The man sighed, growing ever more impatient at her refusal to wake, not that she had much control over whether she opened her eyes or not. Hurry up and finish the dream, my darling. I’m waiting for you. Dinner is waiting.

  A WORLD LOST

  Andria knew it was a dream. Sitting on the grass outside her caravan-home watching the three kids playing happily together. The children were all of a similar age in the dream yet, in the real world, only Jack and Becky were close. Becky was twenty-three and Jack was twenty-one. Here though, in this blissful setting, they couldn’t have been any older than ten. Becky wasn’t living with her boyfriend in Amblecote. She wasn’t working with people with challenging behaviour and learning difficulties. She hadn’t yet decided to be a vegetarian. She hadn’t chosen her two cats and she hadn’t started playing her favourite games, Pokémon and The Sims. Also here, in this world, she was smiling as if she didn’t have a care. Her laughter carried across the field to where Andria was sitting. Not a worry in the world.

  Jack was different here too. His voice as he shouted to his sister wasn’t as deep as it was now and his face was so young, missing the beard Andria had grown accustomed to seeing. His dark hair was still mid-length though. Still messy too. It was nice to see him here, in this dream, without his headphones on and a laptop resting on his lap. No games playing up on the screen. No coding for the games of his own he was designing. In the dream there was an innocence to their playing, one which seemed to have gotten lost over the years, lost as the children became exposed to more and more of the world’s cruelness and horrid secrets.

  Please wake up, my darling.

  Andria ignored the voice in the back of her head. She didn’t want to hear it. More to the point, she didn’t want to wake up. She wanted to live in this moment. It was nicer than the real world. More peaceful. More serene.

  ‘Nice to see them getting on.’ Rob’s voice came from behind Andria, making her jump. He appeared at her side and sat next to her on the lush green grass, then set his glass of wine down and lit up a cigarette. She smiled at him lovingly. The kids were younger in the dream but he seemed to be his actual age. Forty-five years old. At this point, they would have been together for ten years or so. People often wondered what Andria saw in Rob: bald-headed and heavily tattooed, he looked pretty tough. She knew the truth though. She knew he was soft as shit. At least he was towards the people he loved. ‘Where’s Oli?’ he asked.

  Without a word, Andria pointed towards the trees to the left of where the others were playing. Oli came crashing out into the open with all three dogs chasing. Oli was younger too, the same as the others but, like Rob, the dogs appeared to be their correct age. Rob laughed as Oli tripped to the ground only to be jumped upon by the dogs. Pippin - a West Highland white terrier, Minnie - a Yorkshire terrier and Douglas, a black Scottie and Yorkie mix.

  ‘They’re crazy,’ Rob said, unable to tear his eyes away from the playful dogs.

  Andria looked at him and wondered whether he knew this was a dream too or whether she was the only one. Surely he must have known something was amiss, given how Minnie was happily playing with the other dogs (and Oli). In the real world she’d been ripping stuffed animals apart. She never played properly like a normal dog. Even ignoring the dogs, Rob hadn’t seemed to notice the fact that Oli had dark hair where, in reality, his head was shaved. He hadn’t commented that he was fully grown rather than the young child they were watching play. Just as Rob hadn’t mentioned their ages or their looks, neither had he picked up on the strangeness of seeing Oli spending time with anyone else. A lad of thirty-one, he much preferred his own company - taking care of
his fitness, playing video games, drawing… anything really that didn’t involve other people.

  Rob couldn’t know it was a dream. It was Andria’s secret.

  ‘How long before the peace is ruined?’ Rob asked.

  Please wake up now, my darling. You’ve been asleep for long enough. It’s time to get up. Dinner is getting cold. Come on. Open up those pretty blue eyes.

  Andria tried not to show her disappointment as she realised it probably wouldn’t be very long before she woke. The realisation killed the peaceful dream, threatening to bring an end to its disjointed-but-satisfying playback.

  ‘Shh... Don’t jinx it,’ she said as she cuddled into Rob. If she really was about to wake up, she wanted to make the most of this moment. More so as she realised, given the way dreams worked, she probably wouldn’t be able to recall any of this. But then, maybe, that might be a good thing? Maybe remembering this dream, these brief happy moments, would make the reality of her situation that bit even more unbearable. Tease her with the world she had once lived in, before throwing her back into the harsh reality of knowing that they - her family - were all dead now. Only she had survived. She and...

  WAKE THE FUCK UP.

  ...Him.

  AWAKE

  Andria slowly opened her eyes and let them focus on her lap. She lifted her head up. Groggy. Dizzy. Headache. Tired. Restrained.

  ‘Where am I?’ The words slurred as she spoke, making it sound as though she’d drunk a bottle of wine by herself. It wasn’t drink that had made this happen though. It was what he had used to knock her out in the first place.

  ‘It’s okay. We’re quite safe here.’

  She looked up and saw that he was sitting opposite her. An obese man with a missing front tooth. Ugly inside and out. His hair was growing in greasy tufts here and there but he was mostly bald. Even the whites of his eyes weren’t right with a tinge of jaundiced yellow to them. His skin, almost as greasy as his hair, was blotchy around his cheeks.