Shamblers: the zombie apocalypse Read online

  Shamblers

  the zombie apocalypse

  Copyright © 2014 Andrew Cormier

  Cover Design by Andrew Cormier

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the express, written consent of the publisher. Exceptions to this are brief quotations for a book review and as permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email: [email protected] with the subject line: PERMISSION REQUEST

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, businesses, events, and references, are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is pure coincidence.

  ISBN-13: 9781310183294

  Dedication

  Shamblers is dedicated to everyone who has struggled while trying to pursue their dreams. I know how you feel.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Final Chapter

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank fellow author and zombie apocalypse enthusiast Joseph M. Chiron for encouraging me in the early phases of this novel.

  Part One: Nick Steiner

  Chapter One

  “What do you mean we’re out of bullets? Fuck!”

  The only thing worse than pulling the trigger of your .40 cal and hearing a hollow click as you realize your magazine is empty is being told the reserve ammo has just been used up as well.

  “Are you sure there’s no more?” I asked with hopeful expectation.

  “I’m not a fucking retard, Nick,” my companion by the name of Marcus Gray replied. Marcus was a pretty good fellow…well, according to recent definitions since the world fucking ended. I mean, I knew he’d probably shoot me and take the last of my food if it came down to it; I figured he’d at least shoot me in the front. He wasn’t the kind of guy to shoot a person in the back. Well, unless he didn’t like them to begin with. Then all bets were off. As far as I could tell, Marcus and I shared a mutual respect.

  I looked at him and nodded as we both crouched behind some fifty-five gallon metal drums. The nod was our kind of improvised signal that basically said ‘fuck this is gonna suck, and I’m probably gonna die, but here goes.’

  Marcus nodded back, which indicated that he felt the same. The look on his face was one of grim determination.

  I dropped my pistol to the warehouse floor. It clanked off the cold cement and echoed throughout the warehouse amidst the snarls of the undead nearby. They’d discovered us earlier in the afternoon, having most likely followed one of our runners back from his patrol to scavenge for food and supplies.

  We had lucked out this time: it was a small group of the fuckers. Well, kind of small. If you’d say around twenty zombies was a small number than you’d agree that this was a small group. I thought so, but I’d had to flee Bakersfield, CA at the start of the outbreak, and the population there had been well over 325,000.

  Our group had just finished taking out most of these zombies with the last of our ammo. It was now time to go in and play clean-up. It was always a nasty business, and usually someone died in the process. I hoped it wouldn’t be me this time.

  As my pistol bounced off the floor, I pulled out my machete. It was old, dull, chipped, rusted, and the handle was cracked. So basically it was a useless piece of shit. I hoped to replace it before it snapped off in my hand, but machetes were kind of in high demand, for understandable reasons. I still figured a piece of shit machete was better than none at all.

  Marcus holstered his pistol and picked up his bat. It was a regular bat. He had gotten pretty proficient with it during the time I’d known him. We’d been killing zombies together for two and a half months. That may not sound like very long but believe me when I say that life expectancy has been way down lately. Like, we’re talking Verdun levels in World War I. We’re talking three to seven days average for most folk I met. Not that I counted, but I’d seen more people come and go than I cared to think about.

  The fact that Marcus and I had survived together for this long wasn’t a coincidence. We both knew our shit. Well, we had other talented associates in our little group, and we were really starting to work well as a unit, but I’ll get to them in a while. We’re still talking Marcus, and that’s how it’ll stay for now.

  So Marcus grabs his blood-stained bat in both his enormous hands, and I’m standing there with my machete behind some old drums full of who-know-what-crap. We both take off from behind the barrels at nearly the same time. The undead come staggering toward us, ever so slowly. They are no more than twenty paces away. By now, there are four zombies left of the original twenty. The rest of them had followed our decoy as he ran out of the warehouse. For the moment, Marcus and I could only assume that the rest of the members of our group were dealing with the bulk of those zombies. We’d be sure to double check after we took care of our own problem.

  Zombies nowadays are much like you’d imagine them to be: they’re slow, they don’t think, sleep, dream, feel pain, play soccer, go grocery shopping, get pissed when their favorite football team loses the fucking Super Bowl, watch porn, or do any of the other stuff that people used to do prior to the world ending. Zombies only know one thing: eat people that aren’t zombies. They have a really good grasp on that concept, and I will say they have nailed it down. Oh yeah, and I should mention the headshot thing: aim for the head, smash the brain, cut the head off, or something like that – only way to stop ‘em.

  Also, I should mention that most people have taken to calling them shamblers now, because of how the zombies move. I guess some radio announcer came up with the term right after the outbreak. It sounded trendy and it stuck. I never liked conformity, though, so I still call them zombies. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Either way, I’m banking on the assumption that the announcer who invented that moniker was now long dead, so fuck trends.

  I rushed the first zombie. I heard Marcus shout as he swung his bat at another. My heart was racing. My zombie was missing an eye. Most of the flesh appeared torn from the top of its skull, which was visible and white. The zombie looked as if it was wearing a janitor outfit with a whole mess of blood that formed a V-shaped stain down the front.

  Janitor-zombie snarled at me and gnashed its teeth. I swung my crap-machete horizontally as hard as I could. With a pretty gross sounding plop, my crap-machete cleaved into the janitor-zombie’s head. I nearly split that fucker’s head in two. The second zombie was already coming at me. It was just feet away. I could practically feel its wretched breath on my face. I needed to react quickly.

  As I jerked my machete free, I went to impale zombie #2 through the bottom of its jaw. And, of course, this is when I noticed that my crap-machete had fucking snapped off in the janitor-zombie’s head. I was left holding a wooden handle.

  “Ah fuck, God damnit!” I yelled in despair. It was too late to change plans now. The zombie was upon me. Its yellowed teeth were cracked and broken. It lurched at me and snapped its teeth. It
was begging for a taste. As it pushed against me, it tried to force me to the ground. I held it at bay with my left hand. It strained against me with unnatural force. I had all I could do to keep those fucking teeth from sinking into my flesh; one bite and it would be “bye-bye Nick.”

  Raising my right hand, I jammed the handle that once had a machete attached to it into the zombie’s pure-white, dead eye.

  The zombie growled and snapped at me as I heard the handle thunk into its face. The machete handle was now jutting out from the janitor-zombie’s eye socket. The zombie groaned. Flakes of spit flew into my face. As I continued to hold it at bay with my left hand grasped around its neck, I pounded on the end of the machete handle and drove it further into the zombie’s face. One….two….three whacks…the zombie suddenly collapsed. I had pierced its brain.

  “Holy shit!” I exclaimed as I stepped backward and allowed the zombie to smack off the cement. I caught my breath as I looked over at Marcus. He simply grinned as he stood nearby. One hand was on his hip. He leaned on his bat like a cane with the other. Both of his zombies were already smashed open. I watched as their brains oozed out all around them and blood trickled to a low-dip in the warehouse floor to form a small pool.

  “You dick, you could’ve helped me out,” I shouted in annoyance in-between labored breaths.

  “Yeah, I thought about it,” Marcus replied. He then turned around and started to wipe the gore from his bat. Marcus wasn’t much for words.

  “Well,” I added as I retrieved my .40 cal from where I had dropped it, “why didn’t you?”

  Marcus looked up from wiping off his bat and shrugged as he replied, “you looked like you were doing alright.”

  “Damn man, next time feel free to interject. That one got pretty damn close.” I sighed with annoyance and started to walk toward the warehouse exit. I figured I’d check up on the zombies outside and see if the rest of our group had taken care of them. Marcus just laughed and called me a pussy.

  Chapter Two

  I exited the warehouse. The scene that greeted me was the usual slaughter. I say it that way because you could hardly go anywhere anymore where there weren’t bodies or parts of bodies lying around. So the slaughter here was nothing extravagant or worse than what I was accustomed to.

  This time, luck was on the side of my group. The bodies were mostly that of the zombies we had just encountered, and I didn’t notice or hear any zombies in the immediate area. I immediately saw that one new guy had been killed. He looked like he’d been a computer programmer prior to the apocalypse: thin, tall, glasses, crew-cut. Maybe he’d been an accountant. I couldn’t recall his name.

  He was now sprawled out in the dirt. His guts were all torn out and strewn around him. Someone had bashed his head in, perhaps to put him out of his misery, but more likely to keep him from coming back as a zombie. The creature that had likely killed him was heaped right next to him. It was a woman-zombie. She’d been a redhead, and had recently turned. Her flesh hadn’t yet rotted away. Except for the dead eyes, she actually looked very pretty in her black and white dress. The bottom half was white, the top was black. Her breasts now hung out of the top, which had slid down nearly to her belly-button. Once upon a time, I was willing to bet she’d been a knockout.

  Were it not the zombie apocalypse, had I stumbled upon this programmer and this redhead laying side by side like this (though presumably clothed and covered up decently) I could have easily seen them as a loving couple, maybe spread out on a beach blanket together. Yet, it was the zombie apocalypse. So now they were both just fucking dead, one the victim of the other, and the scene was grotesque.

  “Wow, look at the tits on that fucking whore!” Marcus exclaimed as he spotted the dead duo. “Fuck! Why do the hot chicks have to turn into shamblers? It’s fucking bullshit!” he cursed with genuine anger and slammed his bat into the knee of the woman-zombie. He nearly split her leg in half.

  “You have a better chance getting a crack at undead pussy than the real, live thing,” a woman’s voice piped up from nearby. A round of hearty laughter from our surviving companions followed the joke.

  Marcus turned to face the woman who’d made the joke at his expense. “Don’t get jealous, baby,” he said. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”

  The woman snorted as she brushed her dark hair away from her face. If I remembered right, her name was Olivia, though I had only met her a few days ago. “Too bad I’m celibate,” she told him plainly. She clearly had zero interest in Marcus, though for the life of me I couldn’t see why she wasn’t turned on by his rude, callous, dick-headed, arrogant, and priggish manners. Oh, and his violent and sometimes unpredictable temper. He had all of the qualities a beautiful young woman could want in a mate. I should point out my tendency towards sarcasm now in case that slipped by.

  “All nine inches of me are here if you change your mind,” Marcus shrugged and pointed to his junk.

  “More like your inch and a half,” the brunette quipped.

  “So what’s the damage?” I broke up the back-and-forth chatter between them as I surveyed the area. I didn’t feel like hearing about Marcus’ junk and I genuinely wanted to know where we stood.

  “Well, we’re critically low on ammo, I can tell you that much. We also need to repair the perimeter fence,” the woman whose name I thought was Olivia stated, “I heard that the shamblers broke through on the Southwest side.”

  “Is anyone working on that?” I asked with urgency.

  “Yes, but it’s going to take time.”

  “How long?”

  She tapped her fingers to her pouty, red lips and answered, “maybe a few hours.”

  Fuck. That was bad news. It would be dark in a few hours. The zombies always got more active at night. For whatever reason, they developed a more incessant hankering for flesh around sunset. I likened it to myself having a snack before bedtime. We had to get that fence repaired or it would be a major problem.

  “We have enough wire and materials to reinforce it, though,” the Olivia woman continued, “and everyone who’s able to work is now helping with it. The only shamblers we’ve seen, other than that group that surprised us, are stragglers. The guards shouldn’t have any trouble keeping the area secure for now.”

  “That’s encouraging,” I replied, “and what of our recent scavenging raid?”

  Olivia turned and looked over her right shoulder. “HEY MARTIN!” She shouted. “GET OVER HERE!” With a wave of her hand, she summoned to a plump, middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt and khakis. He held a clipboard and pen and was presently taking some notes, presumably regarding who had died.

  Martin looked up from his clipboard upon hearing his name. He pushed his square-rimmed glasses further up his nose then started to walk over to us.

  “Martin has been responsible for jotting down the tally of goods,” Olivia turned and informed me, “at least for today, until we had this little mishap.”

  I nodded: every morning we rotated camp duties to a different individual. We did that based on a group consensus. It ensured that no one person could act like a dictator. It also helped us to develop a variety of skills that we knew we’d need for our survival and for rebuilding the community going forward. The only drawback to our system was that it sometimes became confusing to figure out who was in charge of what: especially when people frequently died.

  Martin sheepishly strolled over to us. He cleared his throat then politely nodded to me and Olivia in turn. He then nervously stuttered, “hi there, Becky, what is it you…ahem…you need?”

  Okay, so maybe Olivia’s name was Becky. Whatever. I didn’t put much stake in learning the names of people who I thought would be dead by the end of the week.

  “We’re wondering if you have the count of the goods that were scavenged before this attack,” Becky asked bluntly.

  “Ahem….” Martin cleared his throat and fumbled with his clipboard, “I uhh, I uhhh…..let me see,” he answered. After flipping a page, he made some more f
ucked-up Martin noises then recited his figures, “today’s hunt has yielded, ahem, two cans of albacore, solid-white tuna, a yellow potato, a box of angel-hair pasta, and…ahem…a four ounce jar of mango-pineapple jam.”

  “What the fuck!” Marcus grunted. He almost caused Martin to faint. “That’s all we got from today? That little fucker we sent out had better not be holding out on us!”

  “Easy there buddy,” I said as I patted Marcus on the shoulder, “you’re gonna cause Martin to have a fucking stroke.”

  Martin nodded agreement. He looked ready to piss himself. I figured that he already had, though I could see no evidence of it.

  “Sorry man,” Marcus apologized to me (though he really should have apologized to Martin, but it was rare for him to ever admit wrong-doing, so I was happy that he made the effort), “but I’m standing here listening to this ass-wipe and what I’m hearing is this,” he held up three fingers, “three of our people died for a jar of fucking mango-banana-whatever-shit. That doesn’t sit well with me. The fucktard that we sent out to raid supplies led all those fuckers,” Marcus pointed to the dead zombies, “back here. Three people are dead because of him. We need to teach him a lesson.”

  I couldn’t argue with Marcus’ logic there, though I did stand up for poor Martin, “I totally agree with you buddy, with the exception of Martin being an ass-wipe. I don’t know him well enough to make that judgment call, and I don’t think you do either.” Martin smiled sheepishly. His cheeks were bright red. Marcus twirled his bat around in one hand and looked at me with annoyance. He hated being corrected. I continued anyway, “our scavenger: that thin guy with the cauliflower ear, whatever his name is, broke a cardinal rule.”

  “Never lead shamblers to the camp,” Martin recited.

  I nodded, “correct. We made our rules to keep ourselves safe. That guy endangered us all.”