RIZEN
Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse
by Kirk Anderson
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for purchasing Rizen, a collection of four short stories that take place in the same universe, where a plague has caused the dead to rise and stalk the living. The stories are intentionally presented in reverse chronological order, of course you may feel free to read them in whatever order pleases you the most. Each work is a stand-alone story.
The Chosen
Ten years after the zombie apocalypse, Dan and his family try to stake out a new life for themselves in rural Wyoming. When he encounters a mysterious group of survivors who call themselves The Chosen, he is unsure whether he can trust them.
The White Fist
Five years after the first of the infected reach Texas, pockets of survivors are reminded that the living can be far more dangerous than the dead.
Road Trip at the End of the World
A middle aged couple, cut off from civilization for months, decides to strike out into the ruined world and make for the West Coast to see if they can reconnect with their past.
Flight 124
Air Thailand Flight 124 threatens to bring a gruesome and unwelcome passenger to Los Angeles International Airport.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Chosen
The White Fist
Road Trip at the End of the World
Flight 124
The Chosen
There were those that now lived life a lot like the old days. They’d managed to reclaim a few cities, and over the years, they had clawed back a few choice vices. In one city, I’ve heard stories of movie theaters, and even radio and television broadcasts resuming. Last I made contact with other survivors, I heard of a place where the landline telephones were working again. Imagine that!
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still have a spot in my heart for a few of those long lost amenities, but to be completely honest, I’d be lying if I said I wanted any of them back.
My name is Dan. I’m a survivor of a global epidemic that saw to the destruction of 19 out of every 20 people. Things got bad, quick. Within a week of the first news reports of what they called Super Rabies, the entire communications grid was crippled. No one really understood where it came from or how it spread so fast, but in the end, those things didn’t really matter.
What DID matter was being able to run faster than the infected.
I was lucky enough to live in a suburb well outside the city. After the phones and TV went down, I remained hidden in my basement, listening to the radio for updates. I heard reports of the infected being cut in half, and yet still pulling themselves forward with their arms, trying to attack people.
During one evening, a doctor was being interviewed that claimed to have one of the infected strapped to gurney, and that when they injected enough anesthetic into it to kill a dozen African elephants, the infected person still showed no signs of even slightest slowing.
Another doctor was interviewed on a different station and he called the previous doctor a quack for even suggesting that these infected people could be dead and yet up and moving around. There never was a straight answer given as to what these things were on any of the public broadcasts I saw, but it didn’t matter, for soon enough, even the radio went dead. It only took a few more days of staring at my dwindling food supply for me to realize that I could no longer afford to wait for the cavalry.
I hit the road, and right off the bat, I did things that I never in a million years would have thought I was even capable of doing. I killed a lot of infected. That’s a given. I also had to kill a few men.
Dickens said, “No man knows till the time comes, what depths are within him.”
I discovered those depths first hand. The first man I killed went by the name, The J-Man. He rode a Harley, and with him, a young woman with long blonde hair, and a very haunted look in her tearful eyes. I waved them down, trying to trade some batteries for food, but soon, The J-Man had pulled a knife on me.
The woman took off into a field, and the man then spun around, hopped on his bike, and rode after her screaming violent threats and vicious obscenities at her.
I now knew why her eyes had looked so lost and terrified, and in that moment, something in me snapped. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was in my truck, plowing through the same field at incredible speeds.
I saw the man glance over his shoulder, just as my truck plowed into the back of his motorcycle, sending him tumbling through the air.
I slammed to a stop, jumped from my truck, and found the biker crawling through the dirt, coughing up copious amounts of blood. I was still afraid for my life, and wondering how I would defend myself when he got back up, but he never did. He just sort of curled up and died like an old dog.
I asked the woman her name. She said it was Laura. Though she still seemed terrified, I finally convinced her that I wasn’t a threat. I offered to give her a ride. Told her I was trying to find a military protection zone, and that she could come with if she wanted. She did.
Didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just saved the life of the woman I would spend the next 10 years of my life with. She became not only my wife, but also the mother to our three young children, an 8 year old named Sam, a 4 year old named Brice, and my little 6 month old baby girl Jessica.
For the first year, we would spend most of the time on the road, but after Laura became pregnant, we decided to stop seeking rescue, and instead find protected shelter where we could grow our own food, be safe from the infected, and most importantly, to find our happiness and our purpose in life again.
We eventually found our haven in Wyoming.
It was a small ranch out in the middle of nowhere.
Even back then, there were only a few infected that seemed to wander onto the property, as the old wood beam fencing kept most out. I eventually went out and reinforced the fence so that the walkers couldn’t even see us, let alone climb the fence.
We planted our first crops, and before the harvest, Laura gave birth to our first son, Sam. I was pretty terrified at the thought of delivering a child, as I had no previous medical training, but after making a trip to the library in the next town over, I found plenty of books on the subject, and plenty of others as well on a whole score of topics, from first-aid, to weatherproofing, to water conservation, and even some classic novels by Dickens, Hemmingway, and Tolstoy that I snuck back to the ranch for my private time.
In what felt like no time at all, we had our second son, Brice, and just months after that, Laura was giving birth to our little baby girl, Jessica. SHE was the reason I began to seek civilization again. I knew that one day these kids would grow up, and they couldn’t just live out their lives on this ranch. They would need to find others, have houses of their own, and one day, kids of their own as well.
I began to make week-long outings, scouting around the area and all major cities within a 300 mile radius. After only one month, I found a massive group of scavengers moving through an old abandoned neighborhood. They all seemed as normal and friendly as you could want, so I finally introduced myself to them.
They came from an honest to God city. It was a smaller, walled off section of Evanston, Wyoming. They named it New Evanston. They all wore black arm bands with a white hand painted on them. This represented the hand of God, they said, which they all believed was the reason they had been spared and their new city spared the wrath of the plague. They referred to themselves as The Chosen, short for the chosen few, although over the last decade their numbers had soared into the thousands.
Though they could not find another significant city in the surrounding area, they ha
d located other small towns and communities where hearty bands had gathered together and managed to survive against the odds. The Chosen even told me about how they had encountered a group of ex-military that had secured a Navy base on the West Coast, and how they were supposedly sending out helicopter search parties that were trying to locate any remaining military units across the country. They talked about wild stories of a new Democratic Republic that had risen from the ashes in the desert a thousand miles to the south of us and HAM radio broadcasts from all over the globe. The plague had been completely swept from the island of Hawaii, they said.
My new friends tried to convince me to bring the family along and to join them in New Evanston, and I said I would consider it, but something still felt a bit off about giving up this new life of self-sufficiency. It was impossible to imagine a return to a world of electricity, televisions, cd players, and all of the other things that we’d not only come to terms with giving up, but after being so far removed from our daily lives, seemed more of a distraction from our family interactions than a convenience.
They gave me a map with all the roads they had cleared for others to reach the city, and we parted ways.
When I arrived back home to my family, they were amazed at the news. Now we knew that civilization not only survived, but there were THOUSANDS of people out there, working, building, and creating the world of tomorrow. It really changed our entire outlook on the future.
A few months had passed, and one day while checking the fences, I found an infected female clawing at the boards. This was nothing new, as they still showed up on our land on occasion, though over the last year, we’d seen less than a dozen. What made THIS infected different than the others, was the rate of decay. At this point, what few infected we found were practically mummified, or so deteriorated that they could barely walk, or sometimes even crawl. This female, however, had died very recently. I noticed that she wore one of the armbands of The Chosen. I figured that she must have gotten bitten on one of New Evanston’s scavenging missions. It was unfortunate, but even after most of the dead had crumbled apart, the infection still lingered out there, and had to be watched for at all times.
I put her down, and this time, instead of just burning her as I’d done to hundreds of the things over the years, I decided to bury her. She was from a different generation, and to have survived as long as she had, I felt she deserved better than the fire.
A few more weeks went by, and I found another of The Chosen, this man torn to shreds, but rotting flesh, not just tanned hide on animated bones like the rest. I buried him next to the woman. We assumed he must have been from the same scavenging party. Perhaps they’d gotten swarmed. Even in this day and age when most of the infected are barely able to walk, there are still those that can move enough, that in a group, they could pose a serious threat.
I awoke one morning to a beautiful sunrise gleaming through the windows. I stepped out onto the porch and inhaled deeply, hoping to get a whiff of that sweet morning dew on all of those yellow and purple wildflowers that seemed to have taken back the earth. I immediately threw my hand over my nose and coughed and sputtered. The air was rancid. The smell was so familiar, yet certainly no longer possible. It smelled of death en masse.
I ran barefoot to the fence, and before I even got to it, I saw the boards of the fence rattling in their frame. I began to step back, when one of the sections suddenly splintered apart, and dozens of rotting corpses came rushing in.
I sprinted for the house, and as I came careening through the door, I screamed to my family to grab the guns. They were all rushing to the door, and when Laura saw what was coming through the window, she began to scream.
There had to be 40 or 50 of the things, half running, half stumbling towards the house, and there were dozens more still working their way through the break in the fence. I slammed the door shut, and moved the family to the back door.
We rushed out into the foul air. Little Brice and Jessica were in Laura’s arms, screaming, as they both sensed our terror. Sam was trailing quickly right behind her. I had a pistol in each hand, and a rifle slung over my shoulder, and kept up the rear, guns blazing, as we ran like mad. We headed for the south part of the fence, but just as we got there, the fence began to buckle forward, and planks began to splinter apart.
When the wooden walls came smashing down, one knocked my wife to the ground, and Brice and Jessica tumbled screaming from her arms into the dirt. I dropped my guns to the ground, and scooped the kids into my arms, as I turned I saw the things clawing their way across the downed fence towards Laura who was half trapped under their crushing weight.
I began to run towards her, but she screamed for me to save the kids. My eyes were blurring with tears as I turned and began to run, yelling for Sam to follow. I heard Laura shout how much she loved us, and as I made it a few dozen feet towards the western wall, I heard Laura scream Sam’s name. I turned just as I heard the gunfire. Sam was rushing towards his mother, blasting the things that were attacking and biting his mother. My stomach lurched and my feet began to tangle as my brain couldn’t decide which way to run.
I was about to take off for my boy, when the initial horde who’d broken through the east wall cut me off from him. I turned back towards the west wall, and ran like mad, listening to the gunshots ringing through the air again and again.
When the gunshots stopped, and all I could hear were the screams of Laura and my son, I began to scream even louder, just trying to drown it all out.
I reached the fence and could see it was clear on the other side. With Brice sobbing and clinging tightly around my neck, and Jessica wailing in my right arm, I grabbed the top of the fence, and pulled myself over just as the clammy and cold hands of the dead were reaching for my legs.
We thumped hard to the ground on the other side, and once I could get my feet back under me, I was pumping my legs harder than I’d ever known in my entire life. I ran like that for what seemed like an eternity. My calves and thighs were burning white hot, but still I ran until the sun began to set in the west.
I eventually found an abandoned car on the side of some forgotten State Road. My arms ached from carrying the little ones such a distance, but I still clutched them close to me, and kissed their crying and tired faces. We climbed inside, closed the door, and huddled together, our cries mingling into the cold and dark night.
The next morning we were woken at dawn by the chopping sounds of helicopter blades, far in the distance. This was a sound that my children’s ears had never heard before.
The White Fist
It’s easy enough to blend in with the undead. If only a few more people had learned that five years ago, when the dead first began to walk the earth, then maybe ninety-five percent of the globe’s human population wouldn’t have been wiped out. Maybe if everyone hadn’t gone out with shotguns and baseball bats like they were in the middle of an action movie, there would still be a few more able-bodied fighters available. Maybe if the military hadn’t been overwhelmed from within and splintered to pieces by the reanimation plague, maybe cities would not have fallen like dominos. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken the world so long to even begin thinking about rebuilding.
Five years after the outbreak and, despite the fact that many of the infected are now gone, the world is no safer place. With the absence of a central government, the people are free to do as they please in the rural areas, but they must still remain alert. Attack, from the living and the dead, is a constant possibility.
Those who would rather have not repeated the mistakes of their forefathers were forced to band together, first by forming roaming caravans. They searched and searched for survivors and a home relatively safe from the infected. These groups became settlements, colonies, towns, and even reclaimed some parts of the shanty ghosts of the major cities. Many settlers chose to build their encampments in the desert, far enough out where they could see any infected coming from miles away, but close enough to the remnants of civilization so that they cou
ld raid the bones of long dead cities and towns for food, tools, medicine and supplies.
Given the nature of human beings, it was only a matter of time before the new city-states began making war on each other for their different ideologies or over resource disputes. There was no shortage of men willing to fight, especially since contact with the undead was becoming more and more limited. Naturally, different cities with similar ideologies began to spring up within close proximity. Sad little empires.
Down in the south of Texas, north of the predominantly Spanish-speaking colonies and just below the isolationist pods of the survivalists, was the White Fist -- a group of white supremacists who intended to eliminate the non-white, non-Christian portion of the remnants of humanity in their small corner of the world. And they did a very close job of it. The Hispanic populations to the south stood clear. The isolationists, to the north, of course kept to themselves. And the White Fist grew.
The Hispanics and blacks and Jews they did not kill, they enslaved in the slums of their cities, erecting forges and processing plants to aid in manufacturing weapons of new and simplistic design. They made bullets that fit the old weapons as well as the new ones, and ammunition had become their currency of choice. Those who would not barter with it could certainly be shot down with it. The White Fist was not discriminating in how they used their bullets, at least. Those who refused to work were shot, those who fought back were shot, and those who they bartered with were forced to adhere to the White Fist code.
In the summer of the fifth year after the world moved on, when White Fist caravans started being picked off by raiders, the response was swift and brutal.
Traveling in between the towns of Arya, Paradise Sun and Caucasia, the caravans were going missing with increasing frequency. Search parties would be sent out and the reports that came back were of vicious ambushes. Ten armed guards, one heavy machine gun in the bed of a truck, all taken out. The men had been beheaded. The vehicles had been blown up, leaving dark clouds flying in the desert sky. Their ammunition had gone missing. Over a dozen patrols went down like this, sparking a campaign of retribution by the White Fist against the Hispanics to the south.
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