RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse

by Kirk Anderson

  The raids were a perfect excuse. The racists had their bullets and their clouded judgment. The war was started without negotiation, without appropriate intelligence in advance of the attacks, and without mercy.

  Jacqueline hadn’t sleep a wink in weeks. She stood on her dirt bike under the darkening sky, staring out at the smoke stacks in the desert through tinted goggles. She felt sick knowing that there were massive patrols of White Fist soldiers hitting Hispanic towns as she waited to go into battle.

  She knew that the former Mexican nationals would hit back hard, but the racists were wicked fighters, and would take no prisoners.

  Jacqueline knew all of today’s bloodshed was, largely, her fault. She and the two dozen others who had conducted the actual raids that sparked this war. Antonio had been the one who had drawn up the plan, but at any time she could have pulled the plug.

  Originally her group had been hiding up in Houston, just surviving, and when they had heard about the new cities to the south they decided to venture out and explore.

  Jacqueline herself had escaped Caucasia, though she’d been originally admitted as “a fine specimen for the continuation of the Aryan race.”

  The way they treated everyone else who weren’t of the same skin color, the same blood… it had made her stomach churn and her vision flash red with rage. On her way out of town in the dead of night, she had stabbed two guards before fleeing across the desert in a stolen jeep. She would have rather faced the zombies in the city then the monsters in this new colony.

  Jacqueline returned to the temporary camp that her party had built in the dessert. The survivors had been hiding out in tents and sleeping bags, waiting for word on these new towns.

  She called them to a meeting and they listened to the vivid accounts of starving men and women stumbling through arid streets, being marched to factories and fed only bread and water, if that. The slaves’ teeth fell out from malnutrition. Their eyes seemed to sink into the back of their heads. The children died quickly. So long as slave numbers were up, White Fist militia officers were allowed to shoot anyone they pleased inside the ghettos, leaving their mothers and husbands to wail over their bodies, leaving them to be cannibalized by the other slaves who were desperate for any kind of food.

  The White Fist used these poor shells of human beings as labor until their bodies gave out.

  Many of the survivors from her group had walked away during these stories, overwhelmed by the disgusting details. Jacqueline had implored action, and Antonio had been quick to support her. None of those who still retained their humanity were strangers to violence. Everyone had done what they needed to survive over the last five years. That had meant re-killing “turned” family members, friends, and whole neighborhoods in some cases. Antonio had barricaded (and kept clean of infected) an entire city block for a week before a significant amount of survivors had come flocking in to help. It was at Antonio’s fortified block where they all first met, and by swaying him, Jacqueline swayed all of the others that something had to be done to get rid of these Neo-Nazi pricks. They couldn’t simply ignore this genocide.

  The small group of bandits decided to call itself the Black Hammer, because black was the opposite of white and a hammer could surely crush a fist. The reality was that they were out-gunned by a hundred-to-one on a good day.

  The dozen or so organized raids that the Black Hammer had conducted, and the resulting movement of the bulk of White Fist’s forces to the south, was Antonio’s plan unfolding perfectly. He’d been a Captain in the United States Marine Corps what seemed like a lifetime prior, and his tactical prowess was sharp and unmatched. Everything was now slipping into place for a final assault. The main event, so to speak.

  It was just after nightfall that they were to launch their attack. The Black Hammer’s small band of fighters was mounted on their off-road bikes that could cover the desert in relative silence and speed, taking full advantage of their electric motors and a lack of headlights. Those bikes would circle around to the north entrance of Caucasia and lie in wait behind the dunes.

  However, the gated entrance to the south is where the party would seem to start. And just as the sun crawled into the mountainous region to the west, there was a resounding and deep boom in the distance. Jacqueline looked towards Caucasia, and sure enough smoke started to furl away in the desert winds on the other side of the city. That would be the truck they’d loaded with ammo and gasoline, and set to function on a remote control. Shortly thereafter, gunfire was heard in the distance, barrage after barrage of ‘pop-pop-pop’ that was indistinguishable from firecrackers. Antonio and three of the others had opened fire from covered positions, and the guards had spotted them.

  Antonio’s plan was to make the guards think it was closer to twenty men attacking. He and the others had positioned automatic rifle after automatic rifle behind the dunes and would dash in between positions firing handguns along the way, lobbing grenades. One man even fired a mortar. The perceived size of the fictional attack caused the guards from the north entrance to run over to help defend the wall.

  “They’re going,” Sara whispered breathlessly. She had stumbled, almost fallen down from a tall sand dune and back to where Jacqueline and the others were congregated. In her excitement she almost fell head over heels down into the sand, her skinny legs flying and her red hair bouncing in spite of it being tied back.

  “They’re gone from the fences and the gate… we have to go. We have to go now!” Her eyes burned with urgency. Jacqueline nodded, resolving in her heart to finish what she had put in motion. It still broke a little bit as Sara dashed away for her ATV, shouldering a scoped rifle. The girl was only fifteen years old and thirsty for battle.

  Jacqueline circled one finger in the air high above her head. A little over twenty separate electric motors started up, humming and whining. Jacqueline wondered how old the youngest of the barbarians who had burned Rome to the ground had been. How old the youngest French Resistance fighter in 1942 had been. She wondered if the entire world didn’t have bloodlust in their hearts at birth. She pulled her bandana up around her mouth, and jerked her arm forward to make what was essentially a spearhead.

  She took off, her small army of fighters behind her.

  They rounded the main mound of sand they’d covered behind, and spread out, doing their best to keep enough spacing so that they could aid each other, but far enough away so that they wouldn’t blast sand in their friends’ faces. Either that, or become easy targets for explosives.

  Those who had scoped rifles, like Sara, stopped in front of the gates about ten yards back. The rest of the group dismounted closer.

  Jacqueline rushed forward towards the great patchwork metal gate. Four went west along the fencing and four went east. Once they had spaced out far enough apart they would go to work with the wire cutters. She fumbled with the satchel at her waist, digging furiously at the sand below the gate. She put the plastic explosives right where the two halves of the gate met and then rushed over to the fencing with the rest of her assault squad.

  She thought about how it would have been preferable to place the brick of explosives at one of the supports for the gate, but the thing was a flimsy patchwork of scrap metal. What had kept people at bay and inside were mostly the White Fist militia and their guns. Peeking through the fence at the brickwork guard station and homes, she could see no soldiers at all. The place looked like a ghost town section of nineteenth century living picked up and dropped into the desert two hundred years later. Retreating back to cover she fished out the radio from her bag, nodded at the raider now standing closest to the gate, and clicked the knob on top.

  The gate blew in with a boom that shook Jacqueline’s vision. Just as the smoke began to clear, shots flew in from the sharpshooters outside. There were screams. There was sporadic gunfire close by, and then the action was all distant again, save for shouting. The men and women who’d cut the fence were already in with compact weapons and sidearms, moving quickly and hitting with
keen accuracy.

  The sharpshooters had isolated themselves after the zombie plague hit. They had kept themselves alive with calm accuracy and distant marksmanship. They’d had to be dragged from their nests to join the rest in many cases. In a way, it probably made the violence less real for some of them. Look through the scope, point, aim, pull the trigger. It was like a video game, though not that many of those were played anymore.

  The ones striking through the fence, cutting throats, shooting up close with homemade silencers on their weapons, they had been the ones who ran when the dead first rose up. They seemed to never stop running, never resting in one place. They moved and they stayed ahead of the undead and the bandits and the consequences of what they’d done. They were the ones with baseball bats, fire axes and crowbars strapped to their backs no matter what. These were the ones who struck like lightning.

  Then there were the soldiers. The ones who had played conventional survivor. They made shelters and fortified daily. They made raids for sake of supplies and ammunition. They sought out the last dregs of humanity and did their best to help each other. They killed just to get along. They were not the kind who usually went after the bad guys where they lived. Jacqueline was one of these, and as she shouldered her shotgun and turned through the smoldering wreckage of the gate, she did her best to silence the part of her brain that screamed “Murderer!” and tried to amplify the part that was roaring “Soldier!”

  The poorly paved streets were dusty, the air thick with grime and gun smoke. A man with a shaved head cradling a rifle rounded the corner of the factory ahead, and she caught him with a shotgun blast to the chest. He hit the ground hard, his weapon tumbling free. Jacqueline pumped another round into the chamber and kept moving. She leaned up against a concealed corner in a protected position, listening to gunshots left, right and center.

  The city was just as she remembered it. Large hotel-like structures and factories surrounded each other in a circle. In the center was the pit, the size of at least three football fields: guarded by the electrical fence that separated the blacks, Hispanics and other undesirables. It was the center of commerce, the pool of slave labor. From five towers guards had shot for kicks, killed people for entertainment based on the color of their skin.

  Jacqueline’s blood boiled as she recalled why she had started all the violence, the battle and the war in the first place. And she no longer regretted any of it.

  Confused by the swift assault’s breaching of the gates, many of the militia defending the city assumed that they were now under attack from hundreds of raiders, not dozens. A well placed mortar shell landed just inside the city, igniting a fire near the fuel depot. It was the second and final mortar shell that Antonio’s man had, but the noise and fire created the perfect atmosphere. The city, it seemed, was being bombarded from all sides.

  The White Fist militia was an undisciplined and cowardly bunch, not used to fighting on the defensive.

  Jacqueline led several of her raiders on a strike through the factory on the left, while the other group handled a factory to the right. They shot surprised foremen and slave drivers where they found them, taking no prisoners. The raiders let those who had been enslaved take up their guards’ weapons when they could. Most were too emaciated to do anything but collapse in pure exhaustion and gratitude. Some did possess strength enough to take up arms, helping to secure hallways and workshops. Once the two factories were clear on either side of the gate, Jacqueline gave the order for her sharpshooters to move up and take positions in the windows.

  Less than a half-hour had passed since the “assault” had begun and she was shocked to still be alive. Only a few of her fighters had been wounded and only one, that she was aware of, had been killed.

  It wasn’t until the snipers were in place that the White Fist soldiers understood what was happening. If they wore the polished black boots and the shaved head of soldiers, they were gunned down, whether they had surrendered or not. The rest of the raiders were getting their first look at the pit which smelled like shit and held hut after ramshackle hut of starving and half-naked slaves. The raiders’ stomachs churned, and their blood boiled, as they continued to kill guards and militia in a hopeless attempt to wash away what they had seen with more blood. This was a modern day concentration camp they were liberating.

  Today was not a day for mercy.

  Over the next hour, the gunfire became less and less.

  That night the electric fence was disabled and cut down, and people were carried out of the slums.

  The raiders’ numbers had been reduced as drastically as Antonio anticipated. They had lost seven of twenty-five total fighters. The White Fist had lost more than sixty, but there was room for triple that number in the ground level barrack buildings. Many of the militia members and civilians had decided to flee in the chaos, retreating through the desert night to other White Fist towns and outposts.

  Antonio ordered for food, clothing and weapons to be cataloged and he was shocked to learn how much the hapless White Fist had left behind. He was also shocked to discover a cage of more than a dozen poor beasts gnawing and moaning. It appeared that the Fist had collected a few of the infected they encountered, perhaps planning to use them as weapons in the future. Antonio put these monsters out of their misery in short order.

  All together, the liberated slaves numbered two hundred and eleven people living piled on top of each other like rats in a tight cage. The survivors, slaves and wide-eyed civilians both, were given the choice to join the fight against the White Fist and their particular brand of brutality. The alternative for former slaves was that they go free. The alternative for White Fist civilians was trial and possible execution.

  The raiders spent the day outfitting and feeding the people with what they had on hand, mindful that a counter-attack could be coming at any moment. The second night was long and uneasy, but eventually the sun rose again on the ashes of what had once been Caucasia.

  The raiders adopted a new name for their captured outpost, Fort Burnet, after the David G. Burnet who had served as the very first President of the independent Republic of Texas in 1836.

  Planning to return to Fort Burnet in a few days, Jacqueline and several others set off in a small convoy for Houston, planning to recover personal possessions and additional supplies from their old home.

  Jacqueline, more relaxed than she had been in months, rode with her legs dangling out of the back of the pick-up truck that Antonio drove. He had taken care of the ill and the damned alike. She had acted only as executioner.

  It felt as if, for the first time since this entire nightmare began, the survivors had a real purpose for living and knew exactly where they were going and the fight that would lie ahead.

  Beside Jacqueline, Sara sat staring into the distance. It hadn’t been the violence that had unhinged her, but the sight of those destroyed holocaustic remnants of the enslaved.

  Jacqueline and Sara placed their arms around each other, mother and daughter, Angel of Death and Angel of Innocence Fallen.

  Road Trip at the End of the World

  Andrea sighed as she cranked the handle on the can opener. She and her husband had been living on nothing but tuna, green beans, and fruit cocktail for the last few weeks. She figured that the moment they were rescued, she’d never eat another bite of tuna for as long as she lived.

  She reached into the cupboard to get a plate when the high piercing note of a muted trumpet startled her, causing her to lose grip of the plate, which went careening off the edge of the countertop and exploded into dozens of shards on the linoleum floor.

  “Jesus, Richard,” she mumbled to herself in a whisper, as she leapt over the pieces of broken glass and went hurdling up the stairs.

  Suddenly the muted trumpet began blasting a familiar tune, When the Saints Go Marching In. Andrea sprinted down the hall, punched open the door to Richard’s study, and immediately snatched the gleaming instrument right out of his hands.

  “For Pete’s sake, Ri
chard,” she chastised him. “Are you crazy? You KNOW you can’t make any noise like that.”

  Richard rubbed his fingers over the dark bags under his eyes and then replied, “I’m sorry. I put the mute in. I thought that it…”

  He exhaled heavily. “I wasn’t thinking. I just missed it all. The class, the students, the music. I just… Jesus, Andrea. It’s been almost 3 months. What’s the point of being alive if you can’t LIVE?”

  Richard then shuffled over to his recliner, slumped down into the seat, and laid his arm across his eyes. He looked pale and listless. Andrea knew he hadn’t been sleeping. She could barely remember the last time she woke up in bed to find him next to her. He was always down in the basement, working on his HAM radio, trying to get a signal from other survivors. There were quite a few at the start of this mess, but with each passing day, there was less and less traffic going over the airwaves.

  He’d been in contact with a gentleman from Norway for the first few months of the disaster, but about 3 weeks ago, he too went silent. Some of the people he encountered were broadcasting extreme religious messages, and he’d even encountered some racially-themed broadcasts that had scared the daylights out of him.

  “I don’t want to run into these people,” he would remark to himself upon discovering almost every new active channel. The craziest elements of society seemed to be taking over.

  “Honey,” Andrea said with a soft smile, slipping her arm around his shoulders as she sat on the arm of his chair. “I know things seem bad, but rescue IS coming. They found a cure. Remember? They said so on CNN.”