Zed's World (Book 1): The Gathering Horde

by Rich Baker

  Toni gives him the finger and asks where Danielle is. Keith makes a sour face. They all know Danielle is graduating tomorrow, and Ben and Toni know she’s planning to break up with Keith.

  “She’s out back with Andy and Natalie. No doubt boring them to death with all her plans for life after college.” There’s more than a hint of resentment in Keith’s voice.

  Ben raises his eyebrows a little as if to say “aaaawkward…” Toni returns the gesture and says to Ben, “I’m going to find them. You boys have fun. Come find me in a bit.” Ben watches her rear end as she sashays out of the kitchen toward the back door.

  “So I guess you never had that talk with Danielle?” Ben asks.

  “Fuck that, man,” Keith says. “She’s leaving anyway. It’ll resolve itself. I don’t want to start a fight right before graduation and miss out on graduation sex, farewell sex, and so on. Maybe we can do it in Moby before the ceremony!” Keith coughs, spitting beer, and hands the tap to the next guy in line. “Dude,” he says, “speaking of Moby, did you see Watts’s live stream?”

  Ben replies with no, but even if he said yes, Keith is already thrusting his phone at him with the video player buffering. On screen, their friend Tim Watts appears. Tim is an audiovisual technology major, and he does a lot of work at Moby Gym. Tonight he’s running the show for the early graduation ceremony. The audio quality of the video is, ironically given his major, pretty terrible. He starts shouting at the camera on his phone.

  “I don’t know what started it, but the crowd here at early graduation is in full riot mode. I’m recording on the big cams here in the control booth, but we’re not broadcasting tonight and I don't have access to activate the feeds, so this will have to do for now.”

  He holds the iPhone up and pans the crowd with it. From his vantage point in the control booth, you can see just about everywhere in the arena except immediately below the booth itself. The image shows hundreds of people fighting, screaming, and running. People can be seen trampling one another. Some people are covered in blood—and there’s a LOT of blood—and the noise from the arena is oppressive. The camera returns to Tim.

  “You can see it’s total chaos out there. I just got off the phone with 911. The operator told me they have ‘a lot of things’ going on right now and that they’ll get someone out as soon as possible. I can hear fights in the hallway outside the booth, and people aren’t even supposed to be up here. I’ve locked the door, and I’m turning out the lights, so I don’t draw attention to myself.”

  There’s a loud pounding in the background much closer than the noise coming from the arena.

  “Fuck! Someone’s trying to get in. I’m cutting this off. If you’re watching this, please see if you can get help. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  The video ends and Keith returns his phone to his pocket. “Isn’t that fucked up? I wonder how he got that many people, let alone the school, to go along with that. I’ve tried texting him a ton but no answer. You know this is going to be like his calling card to Hollywood. Like a War of the Worlds kind of thing. Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Ben can feel the color leaving his face. “Keith, we ran into a cop in, like, full riot gear on the way here. He said there’d been ‘an incident’ at Moby.”

  Keith is quiet for a half second before saying, “You almost had me. Tim clued you in on this, didn’t he? You’re such a douche!” He laughs as he grabs the tap back and fills his cup from the keg.

  “Keith, it’s no joke. They closed Laurel Street. He had a machine gun, and there was another cop there too, also in full gear.” Ben is replaying Watts’ video.

  Keith gives Ben a hard stare and says, “And there was a man on a horse, and a man on fire, and Brick killed a guy with a trident! That escalated quickly!” He starts laughing at his Ron Burgundy reference.

  “Dude, I’m completely serious. I think something really bad is going on.” He holds the phone out with the image paused on the crowd in the arena.

  “You better not be fucking with me. If you get me believing you, and it’s all a joke, I’m kicking your ass!” Keith says.

  “No joke, man. I swear.”

  They’re interrupted by a commotion from the front room. The music has suddenly stopped and it sounds like everyone in the front room of the house is running for the door. They can hear angry yelling, but it’s too jumbled to make out what is being said. Keith hands the tap back to the next person in line and sets his beer down on the counter. He gives Ben a backhanded tap to the chest.

  “Cops must be here,” he says. “C’mon, let’s check this out.”

  They make their way back out to the now empty front room and see two of the guys who were playing football outside carrying a third guy inside, with one of his arms over each of their shoulders. The kid being carried is bleeding steadily from a wound on his head and on his arm.

  “What the hell happened?” Keith asks.

  The guy closest to them says, “Some assholes in a white van just pulled up, jumped out and started fighting with us. Seriously fucked up, man.”

  The other non-injured kid says, “Yeah, two of them just started in on us for no reason. The van took off, but these two they left behind just went frickin’ crazy. Biting and clawing and shit.”

  Ben has been looking out the front door. There’s a crowd of about thirty people circled around a half dozen or so who are punching, kicking, and wrestling with each other. A bearded kid in a bloody “The Dude Abides” t-shirt runs up the steps and shoves his way past Ben, trailing a string of curse words and disappears into the rear of the house.

  “Keith,” Ben says, “I think we should get Andy and the girls and go.”

  The Dude Abides kid comes storming back from the rear of the house with a baseball bat. “We’ll see how fucking tough they are now,” he says to no one in particular as he rushes past them and out onto the lawn.

  “I think you’re right,” Keith says. They turn and weave their way through the house, finding the back door behind the kitchen. Toni and Danielle are headed toward the door as the guys walk out. Toni speaks up first.

  “What the hell is going on out there?”

  “There’s a fight. Some dickheads in a van rolled up and started shit with the guys out front,” Keith says.

  “And that incident at the gym looks like a riot broke out. Watts posted a video, and it looked bad,” Ben says. The girls immediately reach for their phones, but Ben stops them. “Hey—watch it in the car. I think we should get the hell out of here before the police show up, or one of us gets caught up in that crap out front. Is there a side gate we can use?”

  Keith offers to check for a gate. Danielle goes and gets Andy and Natalie and quickly tells them what’s going on. Off in the distance, they can hear the pop-pop-pop of fireworks going off.

  “Guys, over here!” Keith calls out. He’s holding a gate open, and they all hustle over to him. He and Ben lead the way through the opening. At the corner of the house, they look around at the front yard. Several people are prone on the grass, and the rest of the crowd has pulled back. A couple of people are crying, and others are vomiting. Someone screams, “I can’t get through to 911!!” Another person responds with, “I can’t get a signal at all!” There are people straddling some of those who are prone, accosting them as they lay apparently unconscious. It looks like the some of the people attending the party have started fighting each other, not the late arrivals. The Dude Abides guy runs at one of them and swings his baseball bat, connecting with the assailant’s head. After the blow, the assailant goes stiff and collapses. Two other people grunt angrily—or did they growl?—and tackle Dude Abides. His baseball bat clatters loudly on the sidewalk. In the waning light of the day, there appears to be a lot of blood on most of the people involved in the scrum.

  Keith turns to Ben and says, “We are getting the fuck out of here. Where’s your truck?”

  “This way,” Ben says. “Come on, guys!” And with that, he starts jogging
toward the ancient Toyota. The group follows him. When they get to the old SUV, Keith goes around back and opens the rear door. He helps Danielle get in and turns to Natalie, offering to help her climb in.

  Andy waves him off. “I’m not leaving my car here. We’ll drive separately. C’mon, Nat.” Andy goes to a PT Cruiser across the street, and Natalie follows him.

  Keith gets in the rear of the Land Cruiser and pulls the door shut. Ben starts the engine and begins backing up. In his mirror, he can see Andy back out of his space and point the car south, toward Laurel Street, and toward the gym where there’s apparently a riot in progress. Ben calls out to him.

  “Andy, no, don’t go that way! The cops have Laurel closed!!” he shouts, but it’s too late, the PT Cruiser is speeding off. Ben backs the old SUV the rest of the way out of the parking space and heads after Andy, putting distance between them and the melee in the yard. With the window down, the distant sound of fireworks is more persistent now.

  “That sounds like …” Ben says, trailing off.

  “Gunfire,” Keith finishes the thought.

  They round the corner onto Laurel Street and can see the flashing lights from police cars at the far end of the street—about six blocks ahead—where it intersects with Shields Street. Four blocks beyond that is their apartment complex.

  The noise they hear is now unmistakably that of gunfire. He presses harder on the gas so he can catch up with Andy. They pass a row of four-story dormitories before getting to “The Towers,” which are twin twelve-story dorms. Durward and Westfall Halls are the tallest buildings on campus and overlook Moby Arena. There are dozens of people wandering between the buildings, and several in the street as well. They see a cop running from a crowd of about twenty people. He turns, raises a rifle, and fires a volley of shots.

  A couple of the people fall and don’t get back up. Others go down, but get up and immediately rejoin the pursuit, some of them injured and moving much slower than the others. The main group is still gaining on the cop, who fires a few more shots, dropping a couple more people, and then swaps magazines on the run.

  Andy stops his PT Cruiser in the street and Ben rolls up behind him. No one in the car talks for a second.

  “That did NOT just happen. Please tell me that didn’t just happen,” Danielle says.

  Keith has his phone out and is filming the chase. The cop has made it across the street and turns again, firing his gun into the crowd until the magazine is empty. There are only about four people left in the main group, but they are enough to overpower him. They tackle the officer and begin beating and tearing at him, the assault bathed in the light of a street lamp. Andy, in the PT Cruiser ahead, has rolled down his window and is shouting at someone.

  “What is he doing?” Toni asks.

  Ben sticks his head out of the window and listens for a second. As the cop’s screams die down, Andy can be heard more clearly.

  “It sounds like he’s yelling ‘Watts,’” he says.

  One of the people who was pursuing the cop, but much slower than the rest, turns toward Andy. It’s Tim Watts, their friend who posted the video from inside the arena earlier. Visible in the cars’ headlights, Tim is still carrying his cell phone in his right hand. As he turns toward them, they can see that his left arm hangs limp at his side. His shirt is ripped, and the muscle and skin from the upper arm are gone, leaving the bone exposed from just below the shoulder to just above the elbow. Most of his left hand is missing, and he has multiple gunshot wounds to his torso and left leg, which lags behind the right as he limps along; it seems barely able to support his weight. His abnormally pale skin is spider webbed with black veins. His pupils are blown, and his black eyes lock in on Andy. He opens his bloody mouth and screams in an eerie, disembodied fashion. It reminds Ben of Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  “What. The fuck. Is going on?” Danielle asks.

  “Dudes, those people are eating that cop,” Keith says, still filming the assault on the officer with his phone. They all look over and can see the people pulling at arms and legs, sinking their teeth in and pulling away, long strings of gore stretching from the body to their mouths.

  “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON??!!” Danielle is getting hysterical, so Keith stops filming and pulls her close to him. She buries her face in his shoulder and starts sobbing.

  Up ahead, Watts, or rather the ragged body that used to be Watts, is shambling closer to Andy’s car. Ben honks his horn and screams out the window, “Andy, GO! Let’s get out of here!”

  The four people who were ripping the cop apart have stopped their attack, turning their attention to Ben’s horn and the people inside the vehicle. They scream in that same weird way as Watts did, and they all stand up almost in unison. Andy starts to pull forward as the gruesome foursome begin running at their vehicles, two of them drawn by the moving PT Cruiser and the other two focused on the Toyota. Ben puts the car in gear and gives it gas, pulling away, but not before the fastest of the creatures slams into the front fender. Ben keeps the gas pressed down, and the SUV lurches as the unfortunate ghoul falls under the rear wheel and gets run over.

  “Fuck!” Ben shouts and slows down, instinctually worried about hitting a pedestrian.

  “Ben, don’t stop!” Toni yells. “Get us out of here!”

  Ben presses the gas pedal again, pulling away from the bloody scene. Andy is roaring off in the PT Cruiser, dodging around the police cruiser at the intersection. In his rearview mirror, Ben can see three of the people chasing them, but dropping back quickly. The fourth one, which he ran over, is trying unsuccessfully to stand up on broken legs.

  They’re going more than sixty miles per hour by the time they reach the Village Apartments. Their building is adjacent to the pool in Village West, farthest from the campus, so they pass the first two parking lots and pull into the third one. Ben drives up on the sidewalk and stops at the base of the staircase that leads to their apartment. He jumps out and takes the stairs two at a time, unlocking the door and getting it open as Toni catches up, followed by Danielle and Keith, with Andy and Natalie bringing the rear after sprinting from the parking lot.

  Ben follows them in, turns, shuts the door, and locks it. He turns around and can see by everyone’s face that they feel like he does. They’ve just escaped from a nightmare, and they don’t know how to process what they’ve just witnessed. They also don’t know that there’s no escaping this nightmare and that it’s only just begun. The age of man is ending; it’s Zed’s World now.

  About The Author

  Rich Baker traces his love of zombies back to the Dan O’Bannon movie Return of the Living Dead, which was his first introduction to the genre. He was hooked, devouring any movies or books he could get his hands on. Reality and a well-paying day job kept his passion for writing at bay until he met and spoke with a few writers who were writing apocalyptic zombie fiction, and he put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were).

  Rich would like to thank SP Durnin for showing that an ordinary guy can write an extraordinary tale, WJ Lundy for showing faith in Zed’s World and bringing Rich to the rest of the crew at Phalanx, and Brian Parker for demonstrating that writing and an all-consuming job and family life can mutually exist. The examples provided by these fine gentlemen (term used loosely) has been inspirational.

  Zed’s World will return soon with another installment, due out in early 2016.

  SIXTH CYCLE

  Nuclear war has destroyed human civilization.

  Captain Jake Phillips wakes into a dangerous new world, where he finds the remaining fragments of the population living in a series of strongholds, connected across the country. Uneasy alliances have maintained their safety, but things are about to change. — Discovery leads to danger. — Skye Reed, a tracker from the Omega stronghold, uncovers a threat that could spell the end for their fragile society. With friends and enemies revealing truths about the past, she will need to decide who to trust. — Sixth Cycle is a gritty post-a
pocalyptic story of survival and adventure.

  Darren Wearmouth ~ Carl Sinclair

  DEAD ISLAND: Operation Zulu

  Ten years after the world was nearly brought to its knees by a zombie Armageddon, there is a race for the antidote! On a remote Caribbean island, surrounded by a horde of hungry living dead, a team of American and Australian commandos must rescue the Antidotes' scientist. Filled with zombies, guns, Russian bad guys, shady government types, serial killers and elevator muzak. Dead Island is an action packed blood soaked horror adventure.

  Allen Gamboa

  INVASION OF THE DEAD SERIES

  This is the first book in a series of nine, about an ordinary bunch of friends, and their plight to survive an apocalypse in Australia. — Deep beneath defense headquarters in the Australian Capital Territory, the last ranking Army chief and a brilliant scientist struggle with answers to the collapse of the world, and the aftermath of an unprecedented virus. Is it a natural mutation, or does the infection contain — more sinister roots? — One hundred and fifty miles away, five friends returning from a month-long camping trip slowly discover that death has swept through the country. What greets them in a gradual revelation is an enemy beyond compare. — Armed with dwindling ammunition, the friends must overcome their disagreements, utilize their individual skills, and face unimaginable horrors as they battle to reach their hometown…

  Owen Ballie

  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

  Alone in a foreign land. The radio goes quiet while on convoy in Afghanistan, a lost patrol alone in the desert. With his unit and his home base destroyed, Staff Sergeant Brad Thompson suddenly finds himself isolated and in command of a small group of men trying to survive in the Afghan wasteland. Every turn leads to danger.

  The local population has been afflicted with an illness that turns them into rabid animals. They pursue him and his men at every corner and stop. Struggling to hold his team together and unite survivors, he must fight and evade his way to safety. A fast paced zombie war story like no other.