Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse (Issue #1 | August 2015)

by Anthony, Michael

  Charlotte pushed him away. She was saying something, but Ethan couldn't understand it. When he looked into her eyes, he saw a mix of expressions in her face. At once, she was pleading with him to leave her. She was clutching her bloody ankle, jagged and inflamed with pain already, and it was clear, she would be unable to follow. At the same time, her face was full of terror, fear of the unknown and a place between being captured and being dead. She pointed down the hall as tears streamed down her face: the dark figure was closing in at a fast walk.

  "I'm not giving you up," he mouthed the words to her. "I'll get guns. I'll come back for you."

  He kissed her once, her lips were cold but her breath was hot and labored. He would return no matter what; he would come back for her. As he ran, he didn't look back to see her there, captured.

  Part 2: Measuring Up to a New Day

  When he broke out into the hot night air outside, he gasped and panted, falling to his knees momentarily. But Ethan knew that he couldn't stop, not if he was going to get away and come back for his wife. He had to push on and get to his house, so he could get his guns.

  "Why?" he cried out. "Why is this happening? Why couldn't we have been anywhere else?"

  He rose to his feet and continued running, out the gates of the warehouse and down a steep hill. In his rage and fear, he ran right into one of the creatures, crashing into it at full speed. The zombie wasted no time lunging at him, grabbing him by the hair and rushing in to consume him. In a second, it was inches from his face, and he could smell the rancid decay emanating from its mouth. What had once been a man had been reduced to little more than a body covered in lesions, a face literally rotting off. Ethan thrust his weight forward and threw the zombie off him with everything he had.

  "What are you?" Ethan screamed as it charged him again. With one hard swing, he caught it across the head with the tire iron he still held in his hands. The undead creature flipped once and landed on its back, but Ethan wasted no time. With both hands clutched around the bar, he slammed the iron into the zombie's face. Once, twice, three times. Swinging it high above his head, he continued to hammer away at the head. With every stroke, bits of scalp and hair flew into the air, chunks of soft brain splattering across the grass. Blood was oozing everywhere, and with each strike, a splash of it rose up into the air like the splash from a muddy puddle on a rainy day.

  By the time he stopped, Ethan was covered in blood. He realized he had been screaming at the top of his lungs the entire time and that he could hear himself finally. The creature no longer had a head, but merely the stump of a neck with a mat of bloody broth beneath it. The tire iron was caked with flesh and skull, and he looked at it for a moment in disbelief.

  This was the brutality of a new world, where death was indistinguishable from life. This world was what was demanded of him now. This was the reality that stared back at him, gory, twisted, and broken. He dropped the bar to the ground.

  "Where the Hell am I?" he yelled. In less than a day, his town had become merciless, savage, and full of disease. It was impossible to even determine the death toll.

  As he crossed town, one overriding thought echoed through his mind: Get all the firepower he had and return to enact his revenge. He didn't care who they were or what they had wanted. He had one singular purpose, one path his life was now on. He would save his wife and meet this new brutal world with the level of bloodthirsty ruthlessness it deserved.

  Part 3: Judgement Behind Enemy Lines

  Ethan awoke. He had been tied down to a wooden chair, and he tasted blood. Groggily, he looked around him as the room came into focus.

  Beside him, his wife was crying, tied up as well. There were also at least five other people with them that had been caught. Several men in military fatigues stood around them with machine guns. They were all in some large room of the warehouse, an industrial looking place with white walls and bright florescent lights above them

  "What the Hell?" he thought to himself.

  In one corner, a zombie was strung up from its feet and appeared to have been completely flayed. It was a gruesome carcass that moaned and occasionally reached out in an effort to grab whomever it could. Further on, was a drop into some sort of manufacturing area, and Ethan could hear the terrifying sound of zombies, waiting to destroy the living. There were several more creatures chained to a wall on the other side of the room.

  "Where--" he started to say, but was interrupted by a stout punch to his jaw.

  "You're going to keep your mouth shut, pretty boy," one of the men said, a short, mean looking bastard with a mustache and black hair. He was thick and muscular, and instead of a machine gun, he had a Glock in one hand, Ethan's Glock. "Did you imagine you'd just roll up in here and save the day, pretty boy?"

  The other men laughed. Now Ethan remembered: he had loaded up and come back to find the dark figure. He had been caught and beaten.

  "What do you want from us?" Charlotte cried out.

  "Want?" the stout man, clearly the leader of the group, asked with mock confusion. It was his turn to laugh. "We don't want anything. We have exactly what we want already... You."

  The other men laughed again.

  "What is this?" Ethan asked, gruffly.

  "This?" the leader asked, again in mock tone.

  The stout figure stepped forward and took out a combat knife.

  "Leave him alone," Charlotte begged.

  "Relax, honey," one of the other military men said.

  The leader took the knife and made a small, superficial cut across Ethan's forearm.

  Ethan winced, but otherwise tried not to show any emotion.

  "This is where we learn," the leader said.

  "Learn what?" Ethan asked.

  Taking a white handkerchief from his pocket, he sopped up the pooling blood from Ethan's arm and crossed the room to where the upside-down zombie hung.

  "What it takes to destroy the enemy, what their limitations are," and with that the leader got closer and dropped the blood-stained rag on the floor five feet from the hanging zombie. It was almost as if someone had flipped a switch: instead of occasionally reaching out slowly and with little energy, the undead creature truly came to life. It thrashed and twisted, trying with all its might to get free and have a taste. It thrust at its chains and nearly yanked them off from the ceiling.

  "So you're not going to kill us?" Ethan asked.

  All the captors laughed at the question. When they stopped, several of them still had smirks on their rugged, worn faces. The leader nodded to one of them, a man with a drooping eye and a buzzed haircut. Without hesitating, the man walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a chainsaw.

  "As far as I'm concerned," the leader said, before pointing his gun at the zombie's head. "You're already dead." He pulled the trigger twice, blowing apart the creature's face in a rip of brains. The monster went limp and motionless.

  This time, the size of the room carried the shot on, and Ethan was glad that the ringing didn't start again.

  "You think you can save everyone?" the leader asked, chuckling and turning back to him.

  "You have no idea what I'm capable of," Ethan responded, gritting his teeth.

  "Is that so?" the leader asked, pointing to the chained zombies. "You see that zombie over there, the one furthest to the right, the one without the eyes? I seared them out with a cigarette car lighter. We tied it down, and I pressed the red-hot metal nub into each of its eyes until they were extinguished."

  He laughed.

  "The animal just kept coming. They can smell the living, don't even need to see," one of the other men said.

  "To be one of us, you have to be already dead inside," the leader said.

  "Is he trying to recruit me?" Ethan though, before saying aloud, "I have what it takes."

  The leader just looked at him for a moment.

  "Saw your wife's arm off and throw it to the zombies in the pit just beyond," the leader said in a monotone voice. Ethan was shocked, and it showed on his face. W
as this some sort of joke?

  When he didn't respond, the leader nodded again, and the man with the dropping eye handed him the chainsaw.

  "Death makes you capable of so much," the leader said, chuckling again. He pulled the cord on the saw several times and it roared to life. Ethan's heart starting pounding. When the leader picked up the saw and walked forward, Ethan shouted for him to stop, but instead of approaching Charlotte, the man went up to a boy of perhaps 15 years. Without hesitation, the leader sawed through the boy's bound arm as the young man screamed and struggled. No one could hear the cries over the sound of the blade, and then suddenly, it was done.

  Turning the chainsaw off and putting it down, the leader picked up the arm, as the boy flailed about. The screams came flooding in with the saw now motionless. Charlotte threw up.

  "You're just fodder, and this is my world," the leader said, walking to the drop off and tossing the arm inside. The howling and shrieking from the undead equaled the crying of the boy beside Ethan and Charlotte.

  Part 4: Guessing to the End

  "Go scout and bring me back another crop," the leader told his men. Filing out, they exited the room and were gone.

  There seemed to be no end to the crying, but Ethan wasn't fazed. Sure, he was shell shocked at first, but now he understood: he had to find out if he really had it in him. It wasn't about words or thoughts, but about actually doing what needed to be done.

  Carefully, he removed the tiny hack saw from where he had hidden it behind his belt. Within minutes, he had cut his zip ties without being noticed, and he realized that his plan was working. These men expected stupidity and helplessness. They expected fake bravado that they could match with their "shock and awe." Whether they were really ever military had yet to be seen, but Ethan wasn't going to be asking any more questions.

  In under a second, when the leader turned his back to check a stack of papers, Ethan was up and crossing the room. Now was his one and only opportunity.

  "Guess who's got it in him?" he asked, quickly drawing his Glock from the leader's side and taking it for himself. He aimed the firearm at the back of the leader's skull. "Time to empty your head."

  "Is that a fact?" the leader asked, laughing. Before Ethan could even react, the leader ducked around and turned, elbowing him across the nose. Ethan felt the crunch of his nose breaking and his head ricocheted back. As the gun fell to the floor, the leader reached down to grab it, but Ethan caught himself. In this moment, he could give in, fall down, or he could accept all this pain and death around him. He could do what he came there to do.

  With a swift kick, Ethan hit the leader's head as he bent down to retrieve the gun. That was all it took, and he was surprised Ethan was fighting back, really fighting back. Kicking the gun away, Ethan laughed this time.

  "Looks like we're about to learn something new," he said.

  The leader cracked his knuckles and came at Ethan. At first the two exchanged heavy blows, aiming at eachothers’ heads edging further past Charlotte and the others. Ethan felt fogged, and if the world might slip out from beneath him. But in a moment of clarity, something changed. As the two grappled and boxed, the leader made one fatal error: underestimating his opponent, he dropped his guard to look at where the gun had spun off to. In a moment, Ethan delivered a clean, well-timed shot to the other man's liver.

  The leader stumbled backward and clutched his side, trying to recover. Ethan didn't wait, jumping forward and landing a kick right across the man's chest. That was all it took. Having slowly edged toward the pit, the military man had been so concerned with outmatching Ethan by getting the gun that he didn't realize until it was too late. He toppled backward, losing his balance and falling off the edge.

  It was all over in the blink of an eye. The leader screamed, a blood-curdling scream, as the first set of undead hands caught him. The monsters let him fall to the floor, and in their mania for death, tore him limb from limb. Ethan watched as flesh was torn in clump after clump from the headless torso, until even that was gone. He could hear the sound of bones crunching and then it was all gone. He stepped back when the zombies reached up to him, ready to add him to the dying if he were careless enough.

  "Let's go," he said, releasing Charlotte and the others, tending to their wounds. "We have to get out before the others return."

  Once they were just beyond the warehouse, he had the others hid in the brush.

  "Where are you going, Ethan?" Charlotte asked, almost begging him to stay now that he had rescued her from death.

  "To put whatever that was to an end," he said.

  Once he crossed back to the warehouse, he emptied the contents of several gasoline canisters stored there and moved a few more into position.

  "None of these monsters are going to live while I'm around, zombie or otherwise," Ethan said, lighting a single match and setting the entire structure aflame. He quickly hid to the side of the property to wait for the other men to return, the blaze shining in the first light of the next day.

  The first day of the zombie apocalypse was over, but his mission had just begun.

  “Last Chance”

  Story #10

  By

  Brendan Cole

  Kyle awoke in a cold sweat, heart pounding. The dreams were starting again; dreams filled with those agonized screams. They were getting more intense, this time it had woken him from a sound sleep.

  The sound of muffled speech from downstairs brought Kyle fully out of his dream state. He realized that guilt and terror had not woken him…someone was in the house. He reached into the bedside table to retrieve his revolver and instead found a book. It was that useless book the therapist had given him after telling him he had to lock up the guns.

  Training took over and Kyle quickstepped to the top of the stairway to listen. He heard someone talking, but it was nothing that he could understand. As his eyes adjusted he saw that there was a figure hunched over amid broken glass from his window.

  “Whoever you are, get the hell out of my house.” yelled Kyle.

  The figure looked up slowly and said “Man, you’ve got to help me. We have to get out of here…NOW!”

  “Derek…” Kyle murmured. “Jesus Christ man, are you using again? I told you that you aren’t welcome here anymore.”

  As Kyle approached his brother, he noticed the wild look in his eyes. He was panting as if he had run all the way from the city and his right arm was covered in blood.

  Derek spoke in fits and starts, “It’s not like that man…I just need to, I mean. They’re killing each other…he bit me, he bit my goddamn arm…”

  “Shut up for a minute,” Kyle interrupted. “Just breathe for a minute and then tell me why I should listen to a piece of trash junkie.”

  Derek took a deep breath and seemed to compose himself a bit. “I…”, he was interrupted as his body was wracked by a violent spasm. He flopped onto his back into the broken glass and went rigid, then contorted weirdly as though he were trying to touch his head to the soles of his feet. Then everything went still except for a thin, reedy whistle. It was Derek’s last breath slowly escaping his lips.

  Trying to keep it together, Kyle reached for the phone and dialed 911. It didn’t dial, only silence greeted his panicked hyperventilation. He did not know what was happening, but it sounded like somebody had been after Derek and they could be on their way to his house. He needed to arm himself and he needed to do it now. He had lost the custody battle anyway, what the hell did it matter if he got caught carrying again.

  Rushing to the basement, Kyle headed straight for the gun safe. He punched in the code and opened the door to reveal an arsenal of weaponry. He had kept them because they were like family to him, the only family that he had left. He chuckled in spite of the situation; there was only a half full box of 9mm rounds for his Beretta M9. All of this firepower and he was left with a pistol that he could reload one time.

  He grabbed the pistol, loaded an extra clip and strapped on his Kevlar vest. Another check
of the phone, the line was still dead. There was a slam from upstairs; it must be the pricks that attacked Derek. Moving like a ghost, Kyle glided up the stairs gun at the ready. When he reached the top, he saw that the body was gone. It sounded like the noise had come from the kitchen and Kyle inched toward the door slowly before kicking it open. Standing with his back turned was Derek, it was impossible.

  Derek spun around and the horrible truth washed over Kyle in a soul crushing moment that was instantly burned into his consciousness. Cold, dead eyes stared back out of a hollow visage ripped from the depths of hell. Arms raised slowly, greedily as his mouth opened in a horrid caricature of a grin. The thing that had been Derek surged forward with a ghastly shriek and instinct took over for Kyle. He fired three shots: chest, chest, and head. The third shot dropped the creature to the ground, completely still.