Flowers Vs. Zombies: The Complete Series

by Perrin Briar

  The foliage behind Bill exploded, and the first undead fell upon Bill. His reactions were quick—they had to be in this world—and he brought the knife around, jamming it into the Lurcher’s temple. Another undead appeared, but he was farther off. Bill took the time to spin back to the overlord, to end him before he could get away.

  But he was already too late.

  The overlord was floating down the river, the current taking him out to sea at a terrific rate, all that was visible was his black clothing. Now they’ll serve as his funeral burial clothes, Bill thought.

  Bill spun round and sliced the second undead’s throat open, spilling his thick blood over the ground, to slop and congeal.

  The foliage crashed again. Bill tensed. Fritz and Jack looked at Bill, and then lowered their eyes to the two undead on the jungle floor. Bill relaxed his stance.

  “Where is he?” Jack said.

  Bill cleaned his knife on the torn vest of the first undead. Fritz could read his father’s expression easier than a book.

  “He got away?” Fritz said. “We have to get after him!”

  “He has more holes in him that a block of Swiss cheese,” Bill said. “He was bleeding profusely, and there’s no medicine around here for a thousand miles. There’s no doctor either, save me, and for once, I might ignore my Hippocratic oath and leave him to his fate. Believe me, his fate will be a suitably grisly one.”

  Bill was suddenly exhausted. His knife felt like it weighed as much as a car. It was over. This whole nightmare. Finally, it was over.

  “Let’s get back to your mother and get home,” Bill said. “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  FALCON’S NEST was all but destroyed. The majority of the farm animals had been released and now ran through the wilderness with a newfound sense of forgotten freedom. It was going to take weeks to fix what had been destroyed.

  “We can start cleaning up tomorrow,” Liz said, stifling a yawn with her hand.

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “Robin’s Nest will have to be our home for the time being.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to stay and help rebuild Falcon’s Nest,” Fritz said.

  “Of course it’s all right,” Liz said. “It’s a silly question.”

  “After that, we can help prepare you for your trip if you like,” Bill said.

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that,” Fritz said.

  Bill and Liz waited with bated breath.

  “I don’t think I’ll go,” Fritz said.

  “Why the change of heart?” Bill said.

  “Because it takes a family to survive in this world,” Fritz said. “Not to do it alone. Maybe there are other communities out there, maybe not. But they all need Ernest’s ability to come up with plans, with Jack’s fearlessness, with your bravery, and Ma’s care, and Francis’s innocence. That’s what it takes to survive now. Not just a single person, a wanderer, but every single one of us.”

  Fritz smiled, but it was resigned. It was a limp, sad thing, made all the worse by the fact it wanted to be something else, but never could.

  “I guess I’ll just have to get used to being alone,” Fritz said.

  Jim’s eyes flicked up, managing to focus for the first time since he had awoken.

  “But you aren’t alone,” Ernest said.

  He put his hand on his brother’s broad shoulder. Fritz snorted and shook his head, but he didn’t crack a joke or shrug Ernest’s hand off. He needed the contact.

  This was what the end of the world looked like, Bill thought. This was what it took. A group of people coming together, using all their strengths to overcome their enemies. It bore a striking resemblance to what love looked like, a family. If they worked together there was truly nothing they couldn’t achieve.

  Bill felt sorry for the next enemy they would have to confront, as he was certain they would. Fritz was right. Individually they were just people, with weaknesses that could be easily exploited. Together they were a team, complimenting one another, each other’s strengths overcoming any weaknesses they had individually.

  That was what a family was. What a team was. What survival was.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  THE OVERLORD In Black was in a bad way. He felt no pain, but he didn’t need to feel pain to know when his limbs weren’t working as they should. He pulled himself out of the river and onto the land.

  He couldn’t feel the sharpness of the sand, the smoothness of the rocks, nor the cold of the sea. He could feel only his blood as it drained out of him. He was weakening, fast. He needed blood donors… Lots of them.

  Luckily for him, he had plenty ready and willing to give up every drop of the red gold they possessed. He reached out as far and wide as his meager sphere of influence would allow, and issued an order for all undead in the vicinity to come to him. He just needed to survive long enough for them to get to him.

  He dragged himself along the beach, toward the embracing arms of a large tree. He pulled himself up, back to the tree, into a comfortable position. He reached over with his weak, heavy lead-like arms, for the reeds he found there. He gripped a handful and, with a slow, drawn-out movement, pulled them free. He drove the sharp ends into his veins. He felt nothing.

  He had his slaves lift his body up and lash him to the tree. Then they inserted the opposite end of the reeds into their own veins. Their blood, dark and congealed and disgusting as it was, was all he had available to him. It would have to do. He felt their blood enter his body, meeting his organs. He would live.

  The Overlord In Black blinked with new life. He saw something out at sea, coming up fast, drawing toward the island like it was on a rope pulley system. It was a ship. A big, powerful ship. Called The Red Flag.

  The overlord threw back his head and barked a laugh. Just what he wanted, and just what the Flowers deserved. He just had to work on making sure he was still alive when it happened. It wasn’t the ending he depicted of the Flowers, but it would suffice.

  FLOWERS VS. ZOMBIES

  Book Five -- Native

  Prologue

  SARAWAT sat in the stern of the rowboat as it glided across the perfectly calm water. The men were silent, disturbed by what they had seen on the Sacred Island. As well they were. No white man had ever set foot on the island before, and now there was a tribe of them. They had prevented them from making their sacrifice, and the gods had still yet been appeased.

  The Khmu had been bested by the white men, and were now on their way back to their own home island. There, they would seek advice from the elders as to the best course of action. They were meant to bring peace to the world, to bring it back to its natural order.

  They called them demons. They stole over the tribespeople, taking possession of them, turning them into fearless monstrous warriors, with no need of weapons, relying only on their own hands and teeth to inflict harm.

  The Khmu tribe believed they were magical creatures, trapped souls reborn. Others believed they were shamed warriors sent to the underworld, but had escaped and took on these forms to exact revenge upon those who had cast them down.

  There were only two ways to destroy these demons: smash their skulls or remove their heads. Anything else was a minor inconvenience. They were considered strong and powerful, something to be embraced, not feared.

  Tribal Leader Vam advocated the drinking of the creatures’ blood, to absorb their strengths as well as become immune to their powers. It was only thanks to Chief Warrior Sarawat that they did not. He argued that anything so inhuman and profane as the demon could only proliferate darkness wherever it went, but that if Vam wished to experiment, he was prepared to watch over him while he drank, and take action if necessary. Vam did not drink the demon’s blood, but he had a look in his eye that suggested he would much prefer Sarawat drink it.

  The Khmu tribe were infected with these demons, and it was growing in power, spreading from one man to the next, and there appeared to be no way to
stop it. They needed to find the cause of this darkness. But they were coming up short. Until one day they were visited by a trio of white men.

  Their hope had been to exorcise the darkness from their tribe by sacrificing the white men.

  The Khmu tribe had had an uneasy relationship with the white man in the past. Whenever they gave something with one hand, they took away more with the other. Then the three white men were delivered to them. In their tall forms they found the sacrifice they needed, to appease their god for whatever ill they had done Him.

  One of their tribal number, a young apprentice fletcher called Ice, took it upon himself to argue in the white men’s favor, to say it could not have been the white men who brought this darkness down upon them. How could it be when the white men had visited them for far longer than the darkness had been upon them? But the tribespeople needed to be appeased, and they imprisoned Ice alongside the white men.

  Ice had been allowed to be sacrificed. If he had been right, their god would not have allowed him to be so easily killed in his honor. This only made Sarawat’s conviction that they were doing the right thing even more certain.

  But they had not been allowed to sacrifice the white men. They had been rescued by a tribe of yet more white men. Where they had come from, Sarawat did not know. To live on the Sacred Island was itself heresy.

  Sarawat had deliberated between dealing with these people and heading home, but eventually he decided the only course of action was to return for reinforcements. Armed with their smoking sticks that fired metal into their bodies, there was no way to defeat them without superior numbers.

  But they were to be forestalled once again.

  The first sign of trouble came with the finger of grey smoke that issued just off the coast. Each of the men recognized it for what it was. There was no question as to its original starting place. They all knew where it was coming from.

  They moved through the jungle in crouched, shuffling positions. Their hunting skills never left them, imbued every action they took. Hunting was a part of their culture. They ran through the jungle like they were a part of it.

  There was a time when Sarawat had been consumed with the desire to go see the rest of the world, to explore what their brothers and sisters in other parts of the world had done. By all rights, they had spread their wings and achieved incredible things. He dreamed about his place in such a world. But what would the skills of a man from a small tribe mean to them? Nothing. Less than nothing. It would be a hindrance.

  He would not have known where to go nor what he had to do in such a place, isolated from all his friends and family. But here, in this tribe, he knew who he was, what he could do, and how the world worked. It made sense. As time went by, that desire poisoned his mind, and he turned against the world upon which he had once laid his dreams.

  The warriors crept between two twisted Jambu trees and came to their village. Or rather, what had once been their village. Now it was nothing but smoldering remains, cracked and crushed underfoot. Everything they had once used to thrive on the island, gone.

  Sarawat crouched down and put his fingers to the parched earth. He knew with just a glance what had taken place. He might have watched it in real time, the tracks were so clear.

  He didn’t need to look far to see the cause of this destruction. Cups festooned the area like fallen stars. Red spilled from skull cups, forming small puddles. Blood of the darkness.

  The hobbled footsteps of the Wise Woman showed signs of a struggle. She’d pulled at Tribal Leader Vam’s arm, to convince him not to drink the concoction, but he was too strong, and shrugged her off. This was a question of honor.

  He’d picked the skull up and drank the blood from it, letting the blood spill down his muscular torso, his legs, to the ground, forming wet circles about the balls of his feet.

  He would have cheered, making a great show of it, and Sarawat could make out his strutting posture in the dirt. The others would have seen this, how he seemed to grow in strength, and they had followed suit, drinking from their own skull cups.

  And then Tribal Leader Vam had stumbled, his footsteps uncertain. He collapsed on the ground. His body shook and froth erupted from his mouth, nose and ears. The others would have screamed, turning to run, as if they could outrun their own mistake, and they collapsed too.

  But not all of the tribe had drunk the blood of darkness. Those who had not stood watching from the sidelines. And then, panic. As the fallen former friends and allies got to their feet and approached the unaffected tribespeople, their movements slow and dragging, like they had suffered a great injury.

  Some of the tribespeople were struck immediately, knocked to the ground, while the vast majority turned and stole into the jungle, a mother grabbing her child and carrying him. It would be the safest place they could escape to, perhaps their only chance of escape. And the darkness, those infected with it, had given chase.

  The tribespeople had run, tripping and falling over themselves in their frantic attempt to escape. They got to the lake that ran against sheer rock cliffs, and disappeared into its cool embrace. The darkness did not enter that body of water, and congregated on the edges, the fringes, spreading out until they covered the entire arc on the water’s edge. There were no more tracks from the unaffected. They went into the water, but they never came out…

  Bodies dotted the water’s edge, and when Sarawat cast his eyes over the moonlit lake, he made out the unmistakable human-shaped lumps floating there too, face down. More than one warrior ran into the water to retrieve the bodies, turning them over to identify friends, family. Wails cried into the night, strong men who had never uttered a cry in their lives before, now wept like babies.

  Tribal Leader Vam was a fool. And the tribe, they had all been fools for following him. In their desperation they had listened to their leader’s crazy theories, and committed mass suicide, drinking the blood of the darkness. In so doing, they had condemned themselves to their god’s warm embrace. Friends, family, everyone. They were all gone.

  Sarawat turned to head back to their canoes. There was nothing they could do here now. There was nothing left for them.

  The Sacred Island had been defiled by the white man. Their god was displeased and had cursed the whole tribe. They needed to scrub the Sacred Island clean of all who resided upon it. The white man had stepped where he should not. The tribe would wipe them from the face of the island, from the Earth.

  Their time was at an end.

  Chapter One

  POP POP POP. Pop pop pop pop pop. Pop pop pop.

  Captain Ching Shih had heard the sound of gunfire often enough to recognize it for what it was. Semi-automatic, retaliating gunfire, unless she had missed her guess.

  And she never missed her guess.

  She would have made a brief note on her map as to the location of the gunfire, to return another day, except this might have been just what she had been waiting for. And if so, there was no time to lose. Something interesting was happening on this island, and the captain wasn’t about to pass it up, especially when it was so close to where they had lost the boy.

  Captain Shih pushed the door open to her cabin and arched her neck to peer up at the rigging. She had three figures installed there. They always groaned when they heard interesting noises. This in itself was of no interest to the captain—she already knew something was happening on the island.

  What was interesting was the long drawn-out Uhhhhhhh noise they made whenever they sensed what was referred to as an ‘overlord’ in their close proximity. They spoke a rudimentary language, and it took a while to acclimatize one’s ear to its subtle undertones.

  Captain Shih watched as the figures began to shift side to side, swinging from the ropes around their necks. There was one of the abominations, one of these ‘overlords’ on the island. And gunfire. Yes, something truly interesting was taking place on the little island.

  The boy would be there, Shih knew. The boy would be there and, finally, they could get on with
their task of locking down the region. Shih had made a terrible mistake in entrusting something so important to a single member of her crew. It would be rectified the moment they retrieved the boy.

  “Set a course for the island,” Captain Shih said to her first mate. “We may have found him.”

  In truth, there was no ‘may’ about it. He was there. Captain Shih was certain of that. And when Captain Shih was certain of something, there was no derailing her.

  Chapter Two

  RUPERT gasped for oxygen. He had hidden behind a bush, taking a break. He’d been running through the jungle ever since the freak—he had no other term for a talking undead—had turned the tables and set Manuel on him. For hours. Days?

  He had been moving, nonstop, exhausted beyond all measure, unable to take a break even for a moment, knowing full well the fate that awaited him should he take just a moment’s respite.

  Rupert knew there was no chance Manuel would stop. There was nothing that could change his mind, because his was a mind that could not change, as inflexible as the most brittle shafts of steel, unflinching, unyielding.

  Rupert was going to need to destroy him, or evacuate this island altogether. In previous attempts it had taken several strong members of the pirate crew, the second time, an entire family. But how was he to do that by himself? If he failed to shut Manuel down, he would undoubtedly carry out the task set before him. Rupert should know. He had set the very same beast upon many other victims in the past.

  Rupert had run himself ragged to lever some distance from Manuel, using all his strength and ability, and even more than he thought he had. He got a slight lead and used it to hide behind this bush.

  Then he heard the unmistakable heavy footsteps of Manuel as he stumbled through the undergrowth. He was not a tracker nor a hunter, and would have only gotten this far by following the sounds Rupert had made.