“I can’t!” he said. Clarence, the tallest and the buffest of them all, pushed Roy and made him topple over on the hard ground. He hit his head and the pain made his eyes swim with tears. Manly tears of pain of course. Boys did not cry. His mother had told him.
“Your Mormon parents aren’t here to stop you, you freak!” Clarence stooped over and began prodding at Roy’s chest with his chubby fingers.
Poke. Poke. Poke.
The poking became visceral, it became lucid to the point that it was hurting him even though this was a dream. A perfect re-enactment of an actual event that he had long since forgotten.
Roy screamed as Clarence poured beer over his face, waterboarding him with cool, malty Budweiser, a taste that he would in later years come to acquire and get accustomed to. And every time he’d drink it, he’d get uncomfortable because it’d somewhat remind him of this event.
Poke. Poke. Poke.
*
Roy screamed and woke up on the floor. There was a crow sitting on his chest, poking at his shirt with his beak.
“Shoo, motherfucker!” he screamed at the bird. It flew away stubbornly. Roy saw flecks of flesh on his shirt: projectile from the man he had killed. He wanted to throw up again but there was nothing left in his body to puke out.
He got up and assessed the situation. The unconsciousness had done him good. His head was not throbbing anymore. His hangover was gone, and he was feeling fresh.
The dead man was still there.
“Oh God!” he cried and skittered away from the headless corpse. I have done that. I have killed him. He’s headless, thanks to me! He thought. His train of thought was hurriedly broken off when he heard loud noises in the distance. He squinted and saw a horde of people approaching. Their behaviour resembled that of the man he had just killed. They looked like barbaric brutes on the march. They looked like a group of stampeding cattle on a rampage to tear down everything in their path. Roy knew he had no time to waste. Whatever time he had laid to waste in his brief span of being knocked out, he had to make up for it. Otherwise the horde approaching him would make sure he paid for the killing of one of their own.
He turned towards the Stonehenge-like rocks and uncovered a trapdoor underneath them. It was made of heavy duty steel. Roy turned the wheel and unbolted it and then pulled it with all his might. It was as heavy as a blue-whale. But love for his dear life granted him strength that allowed him to jerk the trapdoor open. It opened to reveal stairs, more like iron rungs embedded in the rocky wall, leading downwards in to utter darkness. He grasped the rungs and began to descend. Now came the tough part. He had to pull the door shut.
The approaching horde grew louder, drew closer and growled louder. With both his hands grasping the iron lever on the inside of the door, he pulled. The door crashed downwards and hit him on the head. It was not too painful, but now he had a new source of head-throbbing. It always poured, never rained. Nevertheless, he screwed the wheel counter clockwise and jammed it shut. Then he proceeded to lock the wheel in place using a lock that was dangling in the topmost rung. He was not kidding when he had prepared this bunker. He had taken tedious measures, and those measures included trivialities such as placing a lock to bolt the door from the inside in case the need arose.
As he descended the rungs in the pitch black of his bunker, he heard the scampering of the wild men on his iron door. They were clawing at the door, by the sounds of it. Then they began trampling all over it and kicking it. Whatever they were, they were not intelligent, that was for certain. They were screaming angrily, using incoherent sounds far removed from civilised words. They were snarls, angry grunts and loud screeches.
Roy had descended twenty feet underground when his feet felt the floor. The horde, by the sounds of it, seemed to have amassed outside his trapdoor. Who were these people?
He swept his hand warily along the wall, looking for the light-switches. And voila! They were there, sure as sunlight. He hit the button and at once, the whole place lit up like the fourth of July. The fluorescent bulbs shone on his face from above. The light showed up another door that led to his main bunker. He squinted his eyes and made for that door. He went through it, revelling in self-awe at the spectacle that he had created. His screens lit up, and his computer started making those beep bop boop sounds and began flashing neon lights as if acknowledging Roy’s presence. He waved at it dismissively and went deeper into the bunker. It looked like a submarine without windows. The whole room was actually quite large and spacious.
Roy, automatically and instinctively headed for the corner containing the booze and removed one beer can from the hundreds. He opened it and began chugging it down with the desperate thirst of a desert-abused man, and sat down on the chair in front of his computer station. The screens all came to life. There were four screens that showed the CCTV footages outside and all of them showed it in brilliant High Definition. Roy had been thorough to the extent of securing the most expensive cameras available at that time, so that he’d be able to clearly view the happenings outside his bunker.
The camera that faced his bunker showed two dozen people standing outside his door. It was apparent that all of them were too dumb to figure out how to open the door. They were bent over the iron trapdoor, and stupidly and repeatedly clawing at it, as if that would miraculously open the door. Roy chuckled mirthlessly and watched them take turns to try and break in that impenetrable door. He was in Fort Knox and, at the very best, they were petty thieves with lock picks when they should have had sledgehammer and rocket launchers.
His beer tasted wheat-ish. He drank it slowly, letting the coldness of it seep into him, lulling him into a sense of safety and comfort. He sighed with relief and then closed his eyes. He began thinking about his bunker. The walls had a depth of five bricks, all paved with cement. There was not a chance in the world that anyone would be able to break it. It was twenty feet below the ground, much deeper than any grave. It was a funny story of how he began building this place. He did it all by himself with nothing but a shovel and a forged contract saying that he owned a thousand bricks at the Mason Kiln a few miles out of town. They seemed to buy it, and the kiln owners gave him the bricks. He had a rented pickup back in those days. It took him four days to transport the bricks from the kiln to his home. The transport offered by the kiln was too expensive, besides which he did not want them to know the location of his secret bunker building site. The keyword here was secret.
Some contractor he is, coming in here for four days on the trot with nothing but that rickety pickup of his, he had overheard one of the kiln workers say. But by then he had already transported all the bricks. The vehicle’s tires had given out, and it was in no shape to be returned, but he went with the most fake apologetic look he could muster and returned it to the owner with a hundred-dollar tip. The owner did not seem to give a shit. But Roy lied to him nonetheless about having completed a trip across the country, hence the state of the truck.
Yeah, how was it? The contractor had asked lazily while drinking his coffee.
The real hard work began after all that. He had to dig a huge hole in the ground close to the lake, and close to his shack, and build a bunker without even the slightest concept of architecture or civil engineering. But you know what they say about will and ways; after two whole months of construction during which he suffered many bruises that earned him questioning looks at his workplace (he’d joked to one of his co-workers, “the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. Oops!”) he had finally built the basic structure of the bunker. He spent the next week covering the entire underground building with dirt, hiding it completely. And for five years he devoted himself to making it liveable by stocking food, drinks and every conceivable survival requirement in there. He even had Playboy magazines and condoms stuffed away in there. Just in case. You can’t be too careful. He doubted that getting lucky with a lady in that bunker would ever happen. It’s not like there was a neon sign flashing outside the door saying �
��single lonesome guy living underground. Come down here for a good time.”
Roy laughed at this thought and opened his eyes to observe the wild men at his door. They were still there, but their numbers had thinned, with maybe only half a dozen of them remaining. Roy zoomed the video and looked at them in detail, to figure out what was wrong with them. They were people alright. They were all wearing normal clothes, normal shoes and had perfectly fine outward appearances, except for the fact that their eyes were glowing, their skin was a deadly texture and their mouths were curved in sinister grimaces. Their hands were clawed and they were all either hunched or in a pouncing-stance. The ones who were moving about were doing so extremely fast.
Zombies?
Frenzies?
Roy dismissed both of those thoughts with a flick. They couldn’t be. Those things were strictly fictional material upon which many writers had made their living, and many film directors had directed B-grade cheap movies in hopes of making the ‘next big horror film.’ None of them succeeded.
Roy saw from the corner of his eye, away from the keyboard and mouse, a remote lying forlorn in the corner of the table. T
“Jesus!” he exclaimed upon realizing that there was a television amidst one of those screens on the wall. He had totally overlooked that fact. He hurriedly turned it on and used the remote he had found lying in the corner of the table to switch over to the news channel. Cable was still up and running. That was a good sign. It meant that the world had not totally gone to shit. Perhaps whatever was happening was happening in Boston only. Perhaps it was a Harvard group experiment gone wrong or something like that.
But the television told a different tale.
As Roy watched the news on the channel, his eyes widened in horror as the facts unfolded to reveal that it was in fact the very same, overly cheesy, clichéd plot those B-grade movie directors used that had come to life.
The newscaster was huffing out sentences incoherently and showing camera footage of people displaying behaviour exactly like that of the men outside Roy’s door.
“This is a national emergency. We repeat, this is a national emergency. The epidemic, as the reports are confirming, has spread all over the United States of America. The United Nations and NATO are holding emergency meetings right now about alleviating the situation. If you are watching this broadcast, please be advised, stay indoors and do not venture out. Lock your doors, bolt your windows and stay away from those infected. The zombies are lethal and the condition is contagious. If you come in contact or are infected…” the news-reporter suddenly stopped in midsentence, as if not knowing what to say. What recommendations are feasible should you become infected by a zombie?
Zombie Outbreak
Also Available Now:
A Town Called Desperation
Liam Otterman, a lone survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, makes his way from California to Arizona, across cityscapes and deserts riddled with the undead. Humankind is back on the food chain and is on the brink of extinction. Hunted by zombies, killing each other over scarce resources or simply succumbing to the harsh, unforgiving climate that’s taken hold of the world in the wake of this crisis.
With a pickup truck stacked with weapons and his trusty mongrel, Lady, Liam travels from town to town, looking for survivors, hoping to redeem himself. A violent past haunts him. A recent encounter with the zombies that left a young kid-the only human he had seen in the last six months-brutally mangled at their hands plagues him. He seeks redemption.
On his way to the southern tip of Arizona, where he guesses there are humans still left, he comes across a façade of a town called Desperation, and at the epicentre of it, there’s a church. There he meets a woman of magnificent beauty and a sought-after brain. She’s Dr Victoria Truelove, a microbiologist who has been researching for a cure to this epidemic.
Will the uncanny duo overcome their differences and aid each other? Will mankind be salvaged from this mess or left for dead? Read and discover this epic tale of self-discovery, remorse and horror.
Here is a Taster:
There’s something you should know about the zombie apocalypse that plagued the world at the end of the second decade of the twenty first century: It was not due to some toxic nuclear waste by some Big Pharma company. It wasn’t due to the mad cow disease, it sure as hell wasn’t due to some radioactive waves emitted by some ancient cult to thin the population of the earth and it sure as shit was not due to some viral infection. Here’s something you should know about the zombie apocalypse that plagued the world in March of 2020: It came like the flood from the Old Testament stories and engulfed the world whole in one tsunami of an outbreak. The internet that everyone crutched on, it was the first thing to go. After a month the electricity went out. I do not know about the rest of the world, but there weren’t any backup reserves of electricity from the thousands of power sources which had been constructed with taxpayer money. Food was next. You should have seen the supermarkets; oh, how they had been ransacked. Funny thing. No one went for the crops or the warehouses storing wheat, flour or rice. In that time of organic crises (how else would you classify a zombie apocalypse?) people relied on only the utterly inorganic for salvation. And it didn’t. Those who had prepared for such crises their entire lives, known in normal times as preppers - crazy people predicting the end of the world by one means or another, were the first to die. Regular people running for their lives, regular people who had made fun of the preppers for being out of their minds, murdered them for their weapons, their food and their underground bunkers. In the time when humanity was supposed to come together to avert this crisis, they did the opposite. Man was killing man more so than any zombie. Governments all over the world had fallen. It was a throne-less anarchy out there. Factions of people, more fanatical than religious fundamentalist groups - in fact, those factions were the new fundamentalist groups - popped up all over the country. And we’ve all heard that kindergarten story where the lion separates the three oxen and takes them down one by one. That’s what happened. Had we all stayed together, the zombies would not have dealt the damage they did.
There was no cure known to man for this disease. Was it a disease of the mind or of the body? Or both? The doctors were clueless. Researchers gathered from around the United States and started working on solutions. But nothing. How do you solve a situation you don’t even know the source of? The religious zealots were calling it the end of times, the conspiracy theorists dubbed it the Mayan end of the world, albeit eight years too late, and the scientists… for once the scientists did not have an answer.
After the initial wave of terror was over, things began to settle. A new world order was formed, but not the one you’re thinking. For once in two centuries, pollution actually diminished; the climate began to normalize. If there was someone in the polar areas, he’d tell you that the ice caps were doing A- okay now. After a thorough purge of Earth’s human population, there was a greater impact, a healthier impact, on the planet. The lucky few who were alive experienced fresher air, the once desolate urban cityscapes were redecorated by mother nature, who was only too glad to be given back the reigns; Trees jutted out of potholes, grass and flowers peeked from beneath the cracks in the roads, beautiful brambles and vines covered the sky-scrapers from head to toe in a majestic display of serenity. No human could have decorated their version of earth this pristinely. Wildlife started coming out. You could see deer, squirrels and jungle-cats roaming in what used to be Central Park in New York. You could even see tigers and lions in Time Square, hunting around for gazelles and cattle. Nighttime was the time for wolves, owls and hyenas.
Of course, there were zombies too. There were zombies by the thousands. And they weren’t like the ones you saw on The Walking Dead or read about in a Stephen King novel. These were close-to reality zombies. They looked like humans, walked like humans, they were dressed in the clothes they wore when last they dressed as humans. Their eyes contained blankness and their mouths uttered no words, only a few g
runts and growls, and ghastly howls whenever they’d sight a prey. Their skins did not decay and give way to red flesh underneath, as most zombie movies would have you believe; instead, they looked paler and thinner, like anorexics. While zombie-ism took their consciousness and their sense of being human from them, it did grant the zombies a heightened sense of smell, sight and hearing. Hell, if they sighted a prey (God have mercy on that poor soul who would be food in a few minutes) they mustered up strength and agility the likes of which you’d only seen before in the Olympics. That was the scariest part about them. And the other scary thing was what they did to you next. If you were a human being all alone in the wilderness, then so help you God, because the zombies made it their business, their only business, to catch you, eat you and leave nothing for the crows. They hate everything: your meat, your organs and chewed on your bones like vile Orcs. The theory that they’re only hungry for brains. Yeah, that’s a myth. They eat everything. And when humans are not plentiful, they turn to animals. And when animals are not around, they eat one another, but that’s very rare.
In the midst of this apocalypse, were people who made it their foremost aspiration to survive. They formed colonies in far off places where the undead dared not wander. Islands, mountains, villages far away from towns and cities, treehouses in forests and on water in ships, yachts and, for the lucky few, submarines that still functioned.
The Golden Horde and the Zombies (Zombie Conflict Series Book 1) Page 8
