Zombie Short Stories

[pYromania]

So far all you zombie fans out there, let's share some short stories! I've recently been reading this series by Z.A. Recht and I nabbed a couple short stories from his website (the first was written by him, the rest were written by members):

"The Last Hurrah"
Z.A. Recht

I took a long drag on my cigarette, leaning out over the tarred roof
of the old hospital. I blew out the smoke slowly, felt it curl around my
face and waft away in the crisp evening air. I surveyed the scene
around me. Stuck, smack dab in the middle of the city, low on
ammunition, low on supplies, and completely surrounded. I was also
safe from harm, however, having barricaded the stairwell that led me
to the roof. For now, I was locked in a stalemate, but I had one major
disadvantage--in a couple of days, I'd die of dehydration.

This was it, I thought. Finally fucked. After all the planning, the
patience, the (at times) raw willpower, all of it was going to go to
waste because of one stupid mistake.

I never should have come back to this town. I wouldn't have, if I had
a choice. But I needed supplies. What else could I do? I went in.

I spent the last few years avoiding this town completely. It held too
many weird memories for me. I preferred the countryside. The softly
rolling Appalachian hills, the mountain streams, the cowfields and
corn rows, all of that was what I considered to truly be home.
Besides all the quasi-romantic bullshit, it was much safer in the
country than in the city since the plague.

I don't know what they're calling the plague officially. Hell, I don't
even know if anyone else is left out there to call it anything officially.
All I know is it's a virus. One hell of a virus. You'd catch it, see, and it
drove you mad. You got a real high fever, you stopped being
yourself and you go rabid. I watched people who I would trust with
my life run at me and try to take a chunk out of my arm--I'm talking
real aggressive qualities, here. Predatory. And I haven't even gotten
to the good part, yet. The part that makes me wonder if the victims
are the sane ones and I'm the one who's lost it. Thusly: should you,
by some means, manage to bring down a carrier of the virus, be it
with a gun, a blunt instrument, electrocution, whatever--within a few
minutes that dead body gets back up and comes at you again,
though much more slowly. I figure, hey, if the laws of science have
gone haywire, at least the bastards are less dextrous after you've
offed them once.

And I figured this out, too. Shoot them in the head, and they go
down. Permanently. It's become a kind of official policy with me:
head shots or no shots. Ammo's precious.

That thought served to remind me of my current, untenable situation.

No food or water. Trapped on a roof. And I only had four bullets left.

I took a final pull on the cigarette between my fingers, then flicked it
out over the edge of the roof. I watched as it spiraled, end-over-end,
before finally landing in a shower of sparks on the flagstones of the
courtyard below.

It drew attention. Dozens of sets of eyes turned skyward, picking me
out against the backdrop of the evening sky. Voices drifted to my
ears, but they were no longer human. Feral growls and piteous
moans rose all around me, and rotting hands reached skyward. I
leaned down closer. They were three stories down. I was safe from
them. For now.

I had counted nearly fifty of the zombies in the courtyard, and I was
certain more were inside. I felt confident calling these things
zombies. They were dead, they were moving, they were zombies.
Their living brethren, on the other hand...

...they could prove a bigger problem.

Living carriers of the disease aren't hampered by such post-mortem
concerns as decay and rigor mortis. They're as fast as I am, and just
as strong. And I knew for a fact there were at least two of them
inside the old hospital beneath my feet. I was confident I could get
past the zombies in the courtyard, even on foot. A decent jog is
twice as fast as any of those rotting freaks could go. But I'd have to
deal with the living carriers first. They'd run me down faster than a
pack of dogs on a three-legged cat. Not that it mattered.

With the zombies as support, the carriers downstairs had an almost
certain chance of killing me before I got out the main door. I felt a
frown cross my face. Since when was I so fatalistic? Or, maybe, I was
merely being realistic.

I spun on my heels and walked briskly away from the edge of the
hospital's roof. I'd had to leave my rucksack and half my gear
downstairs near the access door I'd taken to get up here, but I still
had my weapon. I picked up the rifle, a nice lever-action Winchester
30-30, and racked a round into the chamber. Action was better than
inaction. I'd be damned if I was going to sit up here and slowly die of
dehydration. I'd be damned if I let them win that easily.

"You're going to have to work for it," I breathed, shouldering my
rucksack and cradling the rifle in my arms.

The sun was sinking lower behind the green hills to the west. It was
going to be dark inside the building. I had an old, chipped,
Army-issue crookneck flashlight clipped to the epaulette on my shirt,
and I flicked it on. It cast a swaying, dancing beam of light in front of
me. It would have to do. I had nothing else.

I pulled the rusty metal door that led to the hospital's stairwell open
slowly. The hinges cried out with a raspy, grating sound that
weighed heavily on my ears. Noise was what had gotten me into this
mess in the first place. I left the door standing open. Twilight cast a
bit of illumination into the dark stairwell, and I was thankful for that
much.

I let my eyes sweep the roof. In all likelihood, this would be the last
time I would be outdoors. At least, alive. I inhaled deeply, breathing
in the scent of autumn in Appalachia. It seemed a shame. Autumn
was always my favorite time of year.

Hallowe'en would be soon. The thought made my eyes narrow. This
year, the monsters were real.

With one last, longing look around, I turned and stepped into the
stairwell. My boots rang out on the hollow metal of the stairs as I
began my descent, rifle held out in front of me. They could be
anywhere inside the sprawling three-story structure. I had to be on
guard.

The hollow ringing of my steps ended abruptly as I arrived on the
third-floor landing, and stepped onto its concrete base. Here, I
halted.

There would be a throng of them waiting for me at the door on the
ground level. I would only hasten my inevitable death going that way.
I wracked my brain for an alternate route.

Elevators.

The hospital was undergoing renovations. During my harried ascent,
I had noticed two of the three elevator shafts were hanging open.
Apparently they were undergoing some maintenance just before the
plague hit. There might be a way to climb down that way. It would put
me across the building from the greatest concentration of the
zombie below, at the very least.

I turned my back on the stairs, reaching out a hand to the third
floor's doorknob and turning. It was unlocked. Now came a moment
of indecision--anything could be waiting on the other side. I took a
quick breath, primed myself, and swung it open, snapping my rifle
up. My flashlight's beam sliced through the darkness, illuminating
the empty, sterile corridor beyond.

I lowered the barrel of the Winchester, but kept it at the ready. I
stepped forward onto the cold white tiles of the ward, eyes roving
back and forth as I advanced. There were signs of violence here. An
empty wheelchair lay at my feet, tipped up on its side. A bloody
smear led away from it. I played my light over it, and saw it tapered
off to nothingness a few feet away. It might mean nothing. Or it might
mean I had company on this level.

I shoved the chair out of the way with my boot, sliding it across the
floor slowly so as to make as little noise as possible, and moved on.
Every open door I came to was inspected, flashlight dancing through
empty patients' rooms where disheveled beds and get-well cards
sat, here and there a lonely, forgotten rose in a vase, long since
dead, dried petals dotting the tiles below.

I reached the nurse's station near the center of the level, resting the
rifle on my shoulder and reaching up with my free hand to grasp the
dangling flashlight. I panned the beam across the walls, lighting up
the signs hung there.

And the mural painted on the wall behind them. It was a happy
scene drawn in bright pastels of a park in the sunlight, people
having a picnic, a boy throwing a frisbee to a badly-drawn dog.
Beneath it, in shaky black paint, was written:
"Painted by our favorite little patients, 2003!"

Jesus. I was in a children's ward. It was obvious the plague had been
through here, as everywhere else. I shuddered at the thought,
shoving the mental picture I had of carriers ripping into the sick
children out of my mind. Whatever had happened here, I had missed
it by weeks.

The signs on the wall said the elevators were further down the
corridor. I was heading in the right direction. Unfortunately, the
corridor ahead of me was blocked by an impressive attempt to seal it
off from the rest of the hospital. Beds, mattresses, crutches, gurneys
and I.V. trolleys were all thrust together in a heap. The last stand of
the third floor, I surmised. There was a gap torn through the middle
of the blockade. It wasn't much, but I knew it was enough for a living
carrier. They would pull themselves through the gap, one after
another, like sand through an hourglass. Whoever had been hiding
behind that barricade would not have survived.

Taking great care to keep my ambient noise down, I padded silently
up to the obstacle, sliding my eyes over it. I could climb through with
little trouble. I slung my rifle over my shoulder and propped my foot
up on a bedframe, reaching out my arms to pull myself up. For the
barest moment, my flashlight's beam flitted across the gap in the
obstacle.

It took less than a second for the carriers beyond, shrouded in the
darkness of the hallway, to react to the stimuli.

A hissing face with bloodshot eyes flew into the gap, bared,
glistening teeth shaped into a feral growl.

I yelled despite myself, and fell off the side of the barricade, landing
with a grunt on my back. The rifle slung on my back had dug
painfully into my shoulderblade. I rolled onto my side and drew
myself to my feet, unslinging the rifle and spinning to face the
barricade.

It was another carrier, a living host of the virus. She was maybe ten
years old, spasming frantically as she tried to pull herself through
the gap. Her arm was tangled in the debris, and she had lacerations
up and down her face. I knew those marks--they were caused by
human fingernails rending flesh. She had been infected by a living
carrier. And now she, in turn, would try to infect me.

I backed away slowly, rifle trained on her little form. I was breathing
heavily, adrenaline coursing through my system. My vision swam
and my trigger finger itched, but I reminded myself of the ammunition
situation, and slowly realized she wasn't going anywhere. She had
mired herself in the obstacle.

The girl growled and gibbered, foaming a little at the mouth as she
tried to get at me, throwing herself forward again and again, rattling
and shaking the entire barricade, but her arm held her back. The
pure, unsullied hatred in her eyes drove like a stake through my
heart. She was corrupted, body and soul. She was the Enemy.

"Bastards," I whispered. "You bastards."

I stepped towards her, raising the rifle above my head slowly. In the
last moment before I brought it down, I thought I saw comprehension
in the little girl's eyes. Perhaps, I thought, even a hint of humanity.

Then the rifle butt smashed into her forehead, snapping her head
back. She squawked once, a pitiful sound, and then fell limp and
silent. The light went out of her eyes. As I watched, rivulets of blood
ran down her now-peaceful face, dripping almost inaudibly onto the
tiles of the floor, a soft tip-tip-tip.

I took a long, shuddering breath, and wiped the rifle butt clean of
blood on one of the mattresses in the barricade. I turned to go, felt
my knees go weak, and I kneeled quickly, reaching out a hand to the
floor to steady myself.

Why was this happening to me? To the world, even?

What point was there in going on?

I let myself slump into a seated position, back against the barricade,
and leaned my head back. My eyes drifted to the right, where the
limp arm of the infected girl hung. I watched her blood pooling on the
floor. Soon, I thought, I would be like her. At peace. Or, perhaps, in
Hell.

Maybe, I thought, I should save one of my bullets for myself.

I furrowed by brow, glancing around the dim corridor from my spot
on the floor. What was I thinking? When the world is dead and
society is stripped away, all you have left are your principles.
Despair was not one of my defining principles, I reminded myself. I
needed those bullets for a more constructive use than suicide.

Rage, however, was always one of my vices. And even vices had
their uses. I pulled myself to my feet, dusting off my pants as I stood,
turning to face the body of the infected girl with the now-peaceful,
innocent face.

"I don't know who you were before all this," I said quietly, "but one of
those things turned you. You didn't deserve to die like this. No one
who's died like this deserved to. Today I'm going to do you a favor.
I'm going to go downstairs, now. And I'm going to kill as many of
them as I can before they get me. Today, you have your revenge.
And so do I."

Fuck the elevators, I thought. I want them to know I'm coming, now.

I strode forcefully back through the ward, rearing back and kicking
the fallen wheelchair I had passed on the way in. It clattered into the
stairwell and crashed down half a flight, smashing into pieces. I was
right behind it, slamming my booted feet on the metal stairs and
dragging my rifle barrel along the railing, making each step an
exercise in piercing noise. Even though they were two floors below
me through concrete walls, I could hear the bassic growling of the
carriers, and the dull thuds as they began to throw themselves
against the door to the stairwell. I had had the foresight to break the
knob off with my rifle butt on the way up. They couldn't get in. But
they knew I was on my way.

It would have been nice if I had more bullets. I laughed grimly. Now
that I was resigned to death, the prospect wasn't nearly as terrifying
as I thought it would be. Like Doc Holliday, I had nothing to lose. I
realized I felt good, heading for that confrontation. Better than I had
felt in a long time.

My 'tiny fucking mistake,' the error that had doomed me, began
instead to feel like the blessing that had released me.

Today was an exercise in irony, I thought as I reached the first
landing.

I had come here in hopes of securing gear to help ensure my
survival. I had brought with me, originally, a radio, in hopes of
contacting someone--also to help ensure my own survival. That my
choice of location and choice of equipment were both meant to help
me live, and that both ended up contributing to my death, was the
very definition of the old phrase, "an ironic turn of events."

You see, apparently someone with the feds decided it would be a
good idea to record a message telling civilians to remain in their
homes and seal the entrances. I guess it started getting played near
the beginning of the plague, when there were actually still people
alive to listen. Wherever it was broadcasting from obviously still had
power. I hadn't counted on either. And, naturally, Murphy's Law
ensured that I had forgotten to turn the volume on the radio down
before I went into town.

As I had entered the hospital, the message went back out across the
airwaves, was translated to sound through my radio, and came
blasting out of the speaker in a garble of static and frantic voices. I'd
ripped it off my belt and smashed it against the floor in my hurry to
silence it, but the damage was done. They were on me in moments,
running in from the grounds outside, or shambling slowly out of dark
patients' rooms and nurses' stations. I tried to run outside, but one
of them actually managed to grab me from behind, and I'd had to
slip out of the straps of my rucksack to escape it. The thing was
down there, somewhere, wandering around with my ammo and food.
I decided on the fly that if I saw him, I'd gun for him. I wanted my
rucksack back on general principles, now. I had finally managed to
run back into the hospital, barricade the stairwell, and go up and out
onto the roof to mull over what had happened.

I rounded the landing of the second floor, gritting my teeth. I'd been
hiding from these things so long, I looked forward to the showdown. I
could hear them more clearly as I got closer, pounding on the door
in an erratic pattern, distant moans and growls providing an eerie
backdrop to my descent.

How long could I push on before I was brought down, I wondered?
How many would I take with me? Five? Ten? Twenty?

I rounded the final flight and stopped. I was facing the door to the
lobby, highlighted in the dark stairwell by my flashlight's beam. It
quivered as the infected pounded on it from outside. I could see a
bit of light outside the door, dim and blue, the final effort of twilight
before true night. That was fortunate. The light would help me kill
them better. I guessed there were six or seven out there. Six or
seven. Four bullets. Then what? I'd have an unwieldy club. It would
have to do.

I lifted my foot outwards to head down the final few stairs, but I
stopped it in midair. My eyes glinted. I remembered my flashlight
catching a glimpse of red paint and glass as I had rounded the
corner. I slowly reached up a hand, grasped the light, and panned it
left. It came to a rest on a metal box bolted to the wall. I smiled. Not a
grim smile, but a genuine one.

It had to be a gift from a generous god, I guessed. The fire axe that
was illuminated in the case would make a much more suitable
replacement for my unwieldy club. I strode over to the case, sparing
a glance at the door that separated me from my enemies. They
continued to pound away.

"Emergency use only," I read out loud. "To be used only in event of
fire."

I reached into my pocket, pulling out my crumpled pack of cigarettes,
and opened the top. One left. I stuck it between my lips and lit it,
watching the reflection of the burning coal as it glowed brightly in the
glass.

Then I smashed through it with the butt of my rifle, sending glass
shards crashing to the ground. I swept the rim of the case with the
rifle butt, clearing away the shards still hanging there, and driving
the zombies on the other side of the door into a near-frenzy. Their
pounding increased. I reached into the case and pulled the heavy
axe out reverently, cradling it in my hands.

"Alright," I said, walking back over in front of the door. I leaned the
axe against the wall by my feet, and hefted the rifle. "It's time."

I took a drag on the cigarette between my lips, blowing out the
smoke in a quick sigh, ashes swirling in the air in front of me. Then,
before I had time to dwell on it, I reached out a hand, turned the
knob, and kicked the door with as much strength as I could muster. It
flew open, crashing into the besieging force and sending half
sprawling to the floor.

I leveled the rifle and narrowed my eyes. One of them had been
missed in the door's swing. It was an infected, a living carrier, a man
not much older than I. He glanced back at the fallen zombies, and
whirled on me, hissing inhumanly and baring his teeth. I barely
flinched as I pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening in the
enclosed space.

He seemed to fall back in slow motion, blood trailing from the hole
where his eye had been moments before. He hit the floor, a fevered
look of surprise notched on his frozen features. I worked the rifle's
lever, a quick clack-clack, and the empty brass flipped to the floor,
tinkling as it rolled against my foot and stopped. A wisp of smoke
blew away from the barrel, and I spat my cigarette out.

"Come on, you bastards," I said.

And come, they did. The second living carrier I knew to be in the
building had been among those knocked to the floor in my first
assault. She rolled quickly to her feet, launching herself through the
doorway at me, snarling. I fired a second time as she came at me,
and she jerked to a halt, falling first to her knees, then on her face in
front of me. I chambered my third round.

The undead compatiots of the carriers were on their feet now. I
raised the rifle to my shoulders, taking a careful moment to aim, and
fired, the round penetrating the temple of one of the undead,
spraying brain matter and shards of skull across the corridor. It fell.
Before it even finished twitching, I had sight-acquired and fired on
the fourth of them. It slammed into the far wall, sliding to the floor
slowly, leaving a dark red blood trail behind it on the white paint of
the wall.

I dropped the rifle to the ground, and retrieved the fire axe. Thus far,
I hadn't moved from my original position, but now I strode forward,
pushing the door all the way open and moving out into the hallway.
There was one more undead at my feet. It hadn't been able to pull
itself to its feet after the door had knocked it down. I felt my face
contort in rage as I slammed the axe bit through its skull. I put my
foot on the re-killed head and levered the axe out of it. It came free
with a sickening noise, and I spun around, facing the hall that led to
the main lobby, axe in my hands. I could hear them. More were
coming this way.

The first one rounded the corner a moment later. She might have
been attractive in life. Now, half her lower jaw was missing, and her
tongue hang out the side of her face, twitching as she moaned,
reaching an arm out towards me as she stumbled along. Behind her,
more appeared, of every race and age, with varying wounds and
post-mortem scratches and bruises. I stayed put, watching them
filter into the hall, lip curling in disgust.

A vision of the little girl upstairs flashed in front of my eyes as I
watched them, followed quickly by a vision of myself among their
ranks. I lowered my head, hands gripping the axe so tightly my
knuckles were white. When the first of them had crossed half the
distance to me, I charged.

I locked eyes with the female zombie as I ran at her. If zombie could
have expressions, I imagine she was elated for a moment. Her prey
was actually coming to her, instead of the other way around. Then I
decapitated her with a wild swing of the axe, and she was elated no
more. The axe embedded in the plaster of the wall, but I yanked it
out in a spray of dust and wound it up over my head, bringing it
down into the shoulder of the next zombie in line. It managed an
annoyed sound, and was brought to the ground by the force of the
blow. The next zombie took the axe bit in the face, the stroke
carrying through into the chest of a fourth. I yanked my weapon free
of the gory mess and plunged forward. Hack, slash, kick, shove,
slice--I rained death on all sides as I advanced.

I felt the anger and indignation in me begin to fade as fatigue set in.
I pried the axe from the neck of a foe and kicked the corpse back,
hunching over slightly as I panted for breath.

There were plenty more enemies in front of me. I took the moment to
glance around, and felt my heart sink. I had fought my way into the
lobby, and in the wider space the zombie had circled around me as I
had advanced.

I was surrounded. Behind the throng of zombies in front of me, I
could see the swaying trees outside on the grounds through the
building's wide windows. The front doors were no more than a dozen
feet away.

But I wouldn't be going outside. The circle closed in as vapid, empty
faces moaned, and cold hands reached out towards me. I drew in a
deep, shuddering breath, raising the axe in my hands and pulling
myself to my full height.

This was it, I thought.

I felt fingers grasping at my shoulders from behind.

The last stand.

I swung the heavy fireaxe, felt it bite into the crowd. I would go down
fighting, just as I wanted.

In the end, I reasoned as I felt the axe being torn from my grip and
the teeth sinking into my body, it's not such a bad way to die. To go
down swinging, with honor.

A woman couldn't ask for more.

"To Whom It May Concern"
SICBELLY13, a.k.a. Sean Parker
This is my story. Well, the important parts, anyway. I'm writing this
down in the hopes that I can look back on it someday, and laugh at
myself for being a hung-over idiot.

Today started like any other. Well, not quite. I woke from my drunken
slumber at about half-past eight, took a piss, staggered into the
kitchen for some day-old coffee, and sat down in front of the TV for my
morning fix of local news. I lit a cigarette (the first one of the day is
always the best), and started flipping through the channels. Thay
were all the same (they always are), but in a different way this time.

I tried channel 2. What the fuck? Where I should be seeing the
ever-so-perky visage of my favorite local "away girl", there was nothing
but a black and gray EBS logo. I then tried channel 13. Same shit!
Channel 4? Cannel 5? I'm sure you can see the pattern developing
here, can't you? Along the very bottom of the screen rolled a
constantly looping list of places to avoid. Some were schools: others
were office buildings and such. And what the fuck is with the sirens?

I vaguely recalled hearing something on the news last night. I seem to
remember the anchorman with the bad rug saying some shit about a
new virus or flu or something. So what? Some people call in sick and
it makes the fucking news? I knew Utah was a boring place, but come
on. I turned the TV off and went for the radio. Shit, Dissapointed
again! Figures.

At first, all I got was that "emergency" squeal. I turned the dial until I
finally heard a voice. It was the local shock-jock "Slick Bill". He didn't
sound like he was having nearly as much fun as usual, so I listened
closer. He was going on and on about some shit. I could barely
understand him. I was, however, able to decipher a couple of
unsettling phrases. Ones like "Keep all doors locked", and " Under NO
circumstances should you attempt to make contact".

Jesus, I thought. What is this dude so fucking wound up for? This
has got to be some kind of sick-ass joke!

My curiosity piqued when he began to scream. Not fake screaming,
either. None of that "Hollywood" shit here. This was real. Too real.
He sounded like he was being ripped apart, or something. When the
screaming ended I could hear growling noises in the background.
Then the signal cut off. I think that did more for my state of awareness
than any amount of cold coffee could.

I ran back to my room to get properly dressed. If the shit really is
hitting the fan, I'll be damned if I'm going to die in a pair of
"Spongebob" boxers! Then (as the fog of my hangover started to
clear), I looked out the window.

Chaos. There's no other way to put it. It looked like every single
person in the whole damn city had dropped some bad acid, or
something. People were chasing each other, running each other down
with their cars, and clubbing each other! Not to mention some crazy
asshole out there with a handgun. Talk about fucked up! It was like
some giant game of rugby with no rules, where all the players are
wearing the same fucking shirts! I couldn't tell who was who out there.
God, this is so insane!

And just when I thought I'd seen it all, it got worse. A lot worse. From
where I sat, I watched a little kid remove one of the kidneys from some
teenage slacker-type kid in an "I Love Soccer Moms" T-shirt. The little
bastard wasn't alone, either. While the kid was busy clawing away at
the guy's lower back, an old lady (who should've needed a walker, by
the way), ran out from behind a truck and started chewing on the side
of the guy's head! She fucking ran!! Once the guy was down a whole
shitload of them came out of nowhere to join in. Not even in the
movies have I ever seen anything like this!

I'm sure as hell not going out there! What the fuck is happening
here? Is it everywhere? I wonder if this has anything to do with all the
crazy shit that's goin on in Africa?

I tried to call my parents but nobody answered the phone. God, I
hope they're okay. They're pretty smart, maybe they got the fuck out
of Dodge when it started getting weird. Maybe not. Maybe they're out
there chasing people around, too. Shit! I can't think like that.

I think I'm just going to sit tight. Jesus! I never thought I'd need to
fear a little kid, let alone an elderly woman!

Fuck this! Yup, I'm staying right here. Oh shit, there's someone
knocking. Should I answer it? What if I don't and it's my mom, or
something? What if I do and it's not? I suppose I should at least go
check it out.

Okay, I'm going to look out the peephole. I'll finish this once I know
what's going on.

Whoever it is sure is knocking hard.

Those two are the only ones I've read so far. I'll bump with more as I continue to read them. So WCR, share you zombie stories!

[Michael Myers]

Zombie tales are good, but the first one was pretty retarded man, that ending sucked, in middle of a zombie crisis, who would be so stupid to die thinking about what woman can ask.

[pYromania]

Do you have any you like that you could share?

[Michael Myers]

Originally Posted by pYromania

Do you have any you like that you could share?

Yeah but in spanish.
Was pretty good, exist a site called www.soy leyenda.com or something like that a lot of full zombie histories but spanyard site tt.
u have any with long histories in english?

[rave]

One of the best Zombie short stories IMO. Two others are "Heckel's Tale" by Clive Barker and "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" by Joe Hill. You'll have to buy some books to see those two tho.

Some Zombie Contingency Plans
by Kelly Link

This is a story about being lost in the woods.

This guy Soap is at a party out in the suburbs. The thing you need to know about Soap is that he keeps a small framed oil painting in the trunk of his car. The painting is about the size of a paperback novel. Wherever Soap goes, this oil painting goes with him. But he leaves the painting in the trunk of his car, because you don’t walk around a party carrying a painting. People will think you’re weird.

Soap doesn’t know anyone here. He’s crashed the party, which is what he does now, when he feels lonely. On weekends, he just drives around the suburbs until he finds one of those summer twilight parties that are so big that they spill out onto the yard.

Kids are out on the lawn of a two-story house, lying on the damp grass and drinking beer out of plastic cups. Soap has brought along a six-pack. It’s the least he can do. He walks through the house, past four black guys sitting all over a couch. They’re watching a football game and there’s some music on the stereo. The television is on mute. Over by the TV, a white girl is dancing by herself. When she gets too close to it, the guys on the couch start complaining.

Soap finds the kitchen. There’s one of those big professional ovens and a lot of expensive-looking knives stuck to a magnetic strip on the wall. It’s funny, Soap thinks, how expensive stuff always looks more dangerous, and also safer, both of these things at the same time. He pokes around in the fridge and finds some pre-sliced cheese and English muffins. He grabs three slices of cheese, the muffins, and puts the beer in the fridge. There’s also a couple of steaks, and so he takes one out, heats up the broiler.

A girl wanders into the kitchen. She’s black and her hair goes up and up and on top are these sturdy, springy curls like little waves. Toe to top of her architectural haircut, she’s as tall as Soap. She has eyes the color of iceberg lettuce. There’s a heart-shaped rhinestone under one green eye. The rhinestone winks at Soap like it knows him. She’s gorgeous, but Soap knows better than to fool around with girls who aren’t out of high school yet, maybe. “What are you doing?” she says.

“Cooking a steak,” Soap says. “Want one?”

“No,” she says. “I already ate.”

She sits up on the counter beside the sink and swings her legs. She’s wearing a bikini top, pink shorts, and no shoes. “Who are you?” she says.

“Will,” Soap says, although Will isn’t his name. Soap isn’t his real name, either.

“I’m Carly,” she says. “You want a beer?”

“There’s beer in the fridge,” Will says, and Carly says, “I know there is.”

Will opens and closes drawers and cabinet doors until he’s found a plate, a fork and a knife, and garlic salt. He takes his steak out of the oven.

“You go to State?” Carly says. She pops off the beer top against the lip of the kitchen counter, and Will knows she’s showing off.

“No,” Will says. He sits down at the kitchen table and cuts off a piece of steak. He’s been lonely ever since he and his friend Mike got out of prison and Mike went out to Seattle. It’s nice to sit in a kitchen and talk to a girl.

“So what do you do?” Carly says. She sits down at the table, across from him. She lifts her arms up and stretches until her back cracks. She’s got nice tits.

“Telemarketing,” Will says, and Carly makes a face.

“That sucks,” she says.

“Yeah,” Will says. “No, it isn’t too bad. I like talking to people. I just got out of prison.” He takes another big bite of steak.

“No way,” Carly says. “What did you do?”

Will chews. He swallows. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“Okay,” Carly says.

“Do you like museums?” Will says. She looks like a girl who goes to museums.

Some drunk white kid wanders into the kitchen. He says hey to Will and then he lies down on the floor with his head under Carly’s chair. “Carly, Carly, Carly,” he says. “I am so in love with you right now. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world. And you don’t even know my name. That’s hurtful.”

“Museums are okay,” Carly says. “I like concerts. Jazz. Improvisational comedy. I like stuff that isn’t the same every time you look at it.”

“How about zombies?” Will says. No more steak. He mops up meat juice with one of the muffins. Maybe he could eat another one of those steaks. The kid with his head under Carly’s chair says, “Carly? Carly? Carly? I like it when you sit on my face, Carly.”

“You mean like horror movies?” Carly says.

“The living dead,” says the kid under the chair. “The walking dead. Why do the dead walk everywhere? Why don’t they just catch the bus?”

“You still hungry?” Carly says to Will. “I could make you some cinnamon toast. Or some soup.”

“They could carpool,” the kid under the chair says. “Hey y’all, I don’t know why they call carpools carpools. It’s not like there are cars with swimming pools in them. Because people might drown on their way to school. What a weird word. Carpool. Carpool. Carly’s pool. There are naked people in Carly’s pool, but Carly isn’t naked in Carly’s pool.”

“Is there a phone around here?” Will says. “I was thinking I should call my dad. He’s having open-heart surgery tomorrow.”

It’s not his name, but let’s call him Soap. That’s what they called him in prison, although not for the reasons you’re thinking. When he was a kid, he’d read a book about a boy named Soap. So he didn’t mind the nickname. It was better than Oatmeal, which is what one guy ended up getting called. You don’t want to know why Oatmeal got called Oatmeal. It would put you off oatmeal.

Soap was in prison for six months. In some ways, six months isn’t a long time. You spend longer inside your mother. But six months in prison is enough time to think about things and all around you, everyone else is thinking too. It can make you go crazy, wondering what other people are thinking about. Some guys thought about their families, and other guys thought about revenge, or how they were going to get rich. Some guys took correspondence courses or fell in love because of what one of the volunteer art instructors said about one of their watercolors. Soap didn’t take an art course, but he thought about art. Art was why Soap was in prison. This sounded romantic, but really, it was just stupid.

Even before Soap and his friend Mike went to prison, Soap was sure that he’d had opinions about art, even though he hadn’t known much about art. It was the same with prison. Art and prison were the kind of things that you had opinions about, even if you didn’t know anything about them. Soap still didn’t know much about art. These were some of the things that he had known about art before prison:

He knew what he liked when he saw it. As it had turned out, he knew what he liked, even when he couldn’t see it.

Museums gave him hiccups. He had hiccups a lot of the time while he was in prison too.

These were some of the things Soap figured out about art while he was in prison.

Great art came out of great suffering. Soap had gone through a lot of shit because of art.

There was a difference between art, which you just looked at, and things like soap, which you used. Even if the soap smelled so good that you didn’t want to use it, only smell it. This was why people got so pissed off about art. Because you didn’t eat it, and you didn’t sleep on it, and you couldn’t put it up your nose. A lot of people said things like “That’s not art” when whatever they were talking about could clearly not have been anything else, except art.

When Soap got tired of thinking about art, he thought about zombies. He worked on his zombie contingency plan. Thinking about zombies was less tiring than thinking about art. Here’s what Soap knew about zombies:

Zombies were not about sex.

Zombies were not interested in art.

Zombies weren’t complicated. It wasn’t like werewolves or ghosts or vampires. Vampires, for example, were the middle/upper-middle management of the supernatural world. Some people thought of vampires as rock stars, but really they were more like Martha Stewart. Vampires were prissy. They had to follow rules. They had to look good. Zombies weren’t like that. You couldn’t exorcise zombies. You didn’t need luxury items like silver bullets or crucifixes or holy water. You just shot zombies in the head, or set fire to them, or hit them over the head really hard. There were some guys in the prison who knew about that. There were guys in the prison who knew about anything you might want to know about. There were guys who knew things that you didn’t want to know. It was like a library, except it wasn’t.

Zombies didn’t discriminate. Everyone tasted equally good as far as zombies were concerned. And anyone could be a zombie. You didn’t have to be special, or good at sports, or good-looking. You didn’t have to smell good, or wear the right kind of clothes, or listen to the right kind of music. You just had to be slow.

Soap liked this about zombies.

There is never just one zombie.

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There’s the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little, crammed cars. Zombies weren’t much of anything. They didn’t carry musical instruments and they didn’t care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) Given a choice, Soap would take zombies over clowns any day. There was a white guy in the prison who had been a clown. Nobody was sure why he was in prison.

It turned out that everyone in the prison had a zombie contingency plan, once you asked them, just like everyone in prison had a prison escape plan, only nobody talked about those. Soap tried not to dwell on escape plans, although sometimes he dreamed that he was escaping. Then the zombies would show up. They always showed up in his escape dreams. You could escape prison, but you couldn’t escape zombies. This was true in Soap’s dreams, just the way it was true in the movies. You couldn’t get any more true than that.

According to Soap’s friend Mike, who was also in prison, people worried too much about zombies and not enough about icebergs. Even though icebergs were real. Mike pointed out that icebergs were slow, like zombies. Maybe you could adapt zombie contingency plans to cope with icebergs. Mike asked Soap to start thinking about icebergs. No one else was. Somebody had to plan for icebergs, according to Mike.

Even after Soap got out of prison, when it was much too late, he still dreamed about escaping from prison.

“So whose house is this, anyway?” Will asks Carly. She’s walking up the stairs in front of him. If he reached out just one hand, he could untie her bikini top. It would just fall off.

“This girl,” Carly says, and proceeds to relate a long, sad story. “A friend of mine. Her parents took her to France for this bicycle tour. They’re into Amway. This trip is some kind of bonus. Like, her father sold a bunch of water filters and so now everyone has to go to France and build their own bicycles. In Marseilles. Isn’t that lame? She can’t even speak French. She’s a Francophilophobe. She’s a klutz. Her parents don’t even like her. If they could have, they would have left her at home. Or maybe they’ll leave her somewhere in France. Shit, would I love to see her try and ride a bike in France. She’ll probably fall right over the Alps. I hate her. We were going to have this party and then she said I should go ahead and have it without her. She’s really pissed off at her parents.”

“Is this a bathroom?” Will says. “Hold on a minute.”

He goes in and takes a piss. He flushes and when he goes to wash his hands, he sees that the people who own this house have put some chunk of fancy soap beside the sink. He sniffs the soap. Then he opens up the door. Carly is standing there talking to some Asian girl wearing a strapless dress with little shiny fake plastic flowers all over it. It’s too big for her in the bust, so she’s holding the front out like she’s waiting for someone to come along and drop a weasel in it. Will wonders who the dress belongs to, and why this girl would want to wear an ugly dress like that, anyway.

He holds out the soap. “Smell this,” he says to Carly and she does. “What does it smell like?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Marmalade?”

“Lemongrass,” Will says. He marches back into the bathroom and opens up the window. There’s a swimming pool down there with people in it. He throws the soap out the window and some guy in the pool yells, “Hey!”

“Why’d he do that?” the girl in the hall says. Carly starts laughing.

Soap’s friend Mike had a girlfriend named Jenny. Jenny never came to see Mike in prison. Soap felt bad about this.

Soap’s dad was living in New Zealand and every once in a while Soap got a postcard.

Soap’s mom, who lived in California out near Manhattan Beach, was too busy and too pissed off with Soap to visit him in prison. Soap’s mom didn’t tolerate stupidity or bad luck.

Soap’s older sister, Becka, was the only family member who ever came to visit him in prison. Becka was an actress-waitress who had once been in a low-budget zombie movie. Soap had watched it once and wasn’t sure which was stranger: seeing your sister naked, or seeing your naked sister get eaten by zombies. Becka was almost good looking enough to be on a reality dating show, but not funny looking or sad enough to be on one of the makeover shows. Becka was always giving notice. So then their mom would buy Becka a round-trip ticket to go visit Soap. Soap figured he was supposed to be an example to Becka: find a good job and keep it, or you’ll end up in prison like your brother.

Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in North Carolina. Guys kept asking Soap when they were going to see his sister on TV.

Soap’s mom owned a boutique right on Manhattan Beach. It was called Float. Becka and Soap called it Wash Your Mouth. The boutique sold soaps and shampoos, nothing else. The soaps and shampoos were supposed to smell like food. What the soaps really smelled like were those candles that were supposed to smell like food, but which smelled instead like those air fresheners which hang from the rearview mirrors in taxis or stolen cars. Like looking behind you smells like strawberries. Like making a clean getaway smells the same as the room freshener Soap and Becka used to spray when they’d been smoking their mother’s pot, before she got home.

Once when they were in high school, Soap and Becka had bought a urinal cake. It smelled like peppermint. They’d taken the urinal cake out of its packaging and put it in a fancy box with some tissue paper and a ribbon. Soap had wrapped it up and given it to their mother for Mother’s Day. Told her it was a pumice soap for exfoliating feet. Soap liked soap that smelled like soap. His mom was always sending care packages of soaps that smelled like olive oil and neroli and peppermint and brown sugar and cucumber and martinis and toasted marshmallow.

You weren’t supposed to have bars of soap in prison. If you put a bar of soap in a sock, you could hit somebody over the head with it. You could clobber somebody. But Becka made an arrangement with the guards in the visiting room, and the guards in the visiting room made an arrangement with the guards in charge of the mailroom. Soap gave out his mother’s soaps to everyone in prison. Whoever wanted them. It turned out everyone wanted soap that smelled like food: social workers and prison guards and drug dealers and murderers and even people who hadn’t been able to afford good lawyers. No wonder his mom’s boutique did so well.

While Soap was in prison, Becka kept Soap’s painting for him. Sometimes he asked and she brought it with her when she came to visit. He made her promise not to give it to their mother, not to pawn it for rent money, to keep it under her bed where it would be safe as long as her roommate’s cat didn’t sneak in. Becka promised that if there were a fire or an earthquake, she’d rescue the painting first. Even before she rescued her roommate or her roommate’s cat.

Carly takes Will into a bedroom. There’s a big painting of a flower garden, and under the painting is a king-sized bed with dresses lying all over it. There are dresses on the floor. “Go ahead and call your dad,” Carly says. “I’ll come back in a while with some more beer. You want another beer?”

“Why not?” Will says. He waits until she leaves the room and then he calls his dad. When his dad picks up the phone, he says, “Hey, Dad, how’s it going?”

“Junior!” his dad says. “How’s it going?”

“Did I wake you up? What time is it there?” Junior says.

“Doesn’t matter,” his dad says. “I was working on a jigsaw puzzle. No picture on the box. I think it’s lemurs. Or maybe binturongs.”

“Not much,” Junior says. “Staying out of trouble.”

“Super,” his dad says. “That’s super.”

“I was thinking about that thing we talked about. About how I could come visit you sometime?” Junior says.

“Sure,” his dad says. His dad is always enthusiastic about Junior’s ideas. “Hey, that would be great. Get out of that fucking country while you still can. Come visit your old dad. We could do father-son stuff. Go bungee jumping.”

The girl in the plastic flower dress marches into the bedroom. She takes the dress off and drops it on the bed. She goes into the closet and comes out again holding a dress made out of black and purple feathers. It looks like something a dancer in Las Vegas might wear when she got off work.

“Some girl just came in and took off all her clothes,” Junior says to his dad.

“Well you give her my best,” his dad says, and hangs up.

“My dad says hello,” Junior says to the naked girl. Then he says, “My dad and I have a question for you. Do you ever worry about zombies? Do you have a zombie contingency plan?”

The girl just smiles like she thinks that’s a good question. She puts the new dress on. She walks out. Will calls his sister, but Becka isn’t answering her cell phone. So Will picks up all the dresses and goes into the closet. He hangs them up. People clean up after themselves. Zombies don’t.

In Will’s opinion, zombies are attracted to suburbs the way that tornadoes are attracted to trailer parks. Maybe it’s all the windows. Maybe houses in suburbs have too many windows and that’s what drives zombies nuts.

If the zombies showed up tonight, Will would barricade the bedroom door with the heavy oak dresser. Will will let the naked girl come in first. Carly too. The three of them will make a rope by tying all those dresses together and escape through the window. Maybe they could make wings out of that feather dress and fly away. Will could be the Bird Man of Suburbitraz.

Will looks under the bed, just to make sure there are no zombies or suitcases or that drunk guy from downstairs under there.

There’s a little black kid in Superman pajamas curled up asleep under the bed.

When Becka was a kid, she kept a suitcase under the bed. The suitcase was full of things that were to be rescued in case of an earthquake or a fire or murderers. The suitcase’s secondary function was using up some of the dangerous, dark space under the bed which might otherwise have been inhabited by monsters or dead people. Here be suitcases. In the suitcase, Becka kept a candle shaped like a dragon, which she’d bought at the mall with some birthday money and then couldn’t bear to use as a candle; a little ceramic dog; some favorite stuffed animals; their mother’s charm bracelet; a photo album; Black Beauty and a whole lot of other horse books. Every once in a while Becka and her little brother would drag the suitcase back out from under the bed and sort through it. Becka would take things out and put other things in. Her little brother always felt happy and safe when he helped Becka do this. When things got bad, you would rescue what you could.

Modern art is a waste of time. When the zombies show up, you can’t worry about art. Art is for people who aren’t worried about zombies. Besides zombies and icebergs, there are other things that Soap has been thinking about. Tsunamis, earthquakes, Nazi dentists, killer bees, army ants, black plague, old people, divorce lawyers, sorority girls, Jimmy Carter, giant squids, rabid foxes, strange dogs, news anchors, child actors, fascists, narcissists, psychologists, ax murderers, unrequited love, footnotes, zeppelins, the Holy Ghost, Catholic priests, John Lennon, chemistry teachers, redheaded men with British accents, librarians, spiders, nature books with photographs of spiders in them, darkness, teachers, swimmming pools, smart girls, pretty girls, rich girls, angry girls, tall girls, nice girls, girls with superpowers, giant lizards, blind dates who turn out to have narcolepsy, angry monkeys, feminine hygiene commercials, sitcoms about aliens, things under the bed, contact lenses, ninjas, performance artists, mummies, spontaneous combustion. Soap has been afraid of all of these things at one time or another. Ever since he went to prison, he’s realized that he doesn’t have to be afraid. All he has to do is come up with a plan. Be prepared. It’s just like the Boy Scouts, except you have to be even more prepared. You have to prepare for everything that the Boy Scouts didn’t prepare you for, which is pretty much everything.

Soap is a waste of time too. What good is soap in a zombie situation? Soap sometimes imagines himself trapped in his mother’s soap boutique. Zombies are coming out of the surf, dripping wet, hellishly hungry, always so fucking slow, shuffling hopelessly up through the sand of Manhattan Beach. Soap has barricaded himself in Float with his mother and some blond Japanese tourists with surfboards. “Do something, sweetheart!” his mother implores. So Sweetheart throws water all over the floor. There’s the surfboards, a baseball bat under the counter, some rolls of quarters, and a swordfish mounted up on the wall, but Sweetheart decides the cash register is best for bashing. He tells the Japanese tourists to get down on their hands and knees and rub soap all over the floor. When the zombies finally find a way into Float, his mother and the tourists can hide behind the counter. The zombies will slip all over the floor and Sweetheart will bash them in the head with the cash register. It will be just like a Busby Berkeley zombie musical.

“What’s going on?” Carly says. “How’s your father doing?”

“He’s fine,” Will says. “Except for the open-heart surgery thing. Except for that, he’s good. I was just looking under the bed. There’s a little kid under there.”

“Oh,” Carly says. “Him. That’s the little brother. Of my friend. Le bro de mon ami. I’m taking care of him. He likes to sleep under the bed.”

“What’s his name?” Will says.

“Leo,” Carly says. She hands Will a beer and sits down on the bed beside him. “So tell me about this prison thing. What did you do? Should I be afraid of you?”

“Probably not,” Will says. “It doesn’t do much good to be afraid of things.”

“So tell me what you did,” Carly says. She burps so loud that Will is amazed that the kid under the bed doesn’t wake up. Leo.

“This is a great party,” Will says. “Thanks for hanging out with me.”

“Somebody just puked out of a window in the living room. Someone else almost threw up in the swimming pool, but I got them out in time. If someone throws up on the piano, I’m in big trouble. You can’t get puke out from between piano keys.”

Will thinks Carly says this like she knows what she’s talking about. There are girls who have had years of piano lessons, and then there are girls who have taken piano lessons who also know how to throw a party and how to clean throw-up out of a piano. There’s something sexy about a girl who knows how to play the piano, and keys that stick for no apparent reason. Will doesn’t have any zombie contingency plans that involve pianos, and it makes him sick. How could he have forgotten pianos?

“I’ll help you clean up,” Will says. “If you want.”

“You don’t have to try so hard, you know,” Carly says. She stares right at him, like there’s a spider on his face or an interesting tattoo, some word spelled upside down in a foreign language that she wants to understand. Will doesn’t have any tattoos. As far as he’s concerned, tattoos are like art, only worse.

Will stares right back. He says, “When I was at this party outside Kansas City, I heard this story about a kid who threw a lot of parties while his parents were on vacation. Right before they got home, he realized how fucked up the house was, and so he burned it down.” This story always makes Will laugh. What a dumb kid.

“You want to help me burn down my friend’s house?” Carly says. She smiles, like, what a good joke. What a nice guy he is. “What time is it? Two? If it’s two in the morning, then you have to tell me why you went to prison. It’s like a rule. We’ve known each other for at least an hour, and it’s late at night and I still don’t know why you were in prison, even though I can tell you want to tell me or otherwise you wouldn’t have told me you were in prison in the first place. Was what you did that bad?”

“No,” Will says. “It was just really stupid.”

“Stupid is good,” Carly says. “Come on. Pretty please.”

She pulls back the cover on the bed and crawls under it, pulls the sheets up to her chin. Good night, Carly. Good night, Carly’s gorgeous tits.

It was so small and it was so far away, even when you looked at it up close. Soap said it was trees. A wood. Mike said it was a painting of an iceberg.

When Soap thinks about the zombies, he thinks about how there’s nowhere you can go that the zombies won’t find you. Even the fairy tales that Becka used to read to him. Ali Baba and the Forty Zombies. Open Zombie. Snow White and the Seven Tiny Zombies.

Any place Will thinks of, the zombies will eventually get there too. He pictures all of these places as paintings in a gallery, because as long as a place is just a painting, it’s a safe place. Landscapes with frames around them, to keep the landscapes from leaking out. To keep the zombies from getting in. A ski resort in summer, all those lonely gondolas. An oil rig on a sea at night. The Museum of Natural History. The Playboy mansion. The Eiffel Tower. The Matterhorn. David Letterman’s house. Buckingham Palace. A bowling alley. A Laundromat. He puts himself in the painting of the flower garden that’s hanging above the bed where he and Carly are sitting, and it’s sunny and warm and safe and beautiful. But once he puts himself into the painting, the zombies show up just like they always do. The space station. New Zealand. He bets his dad thinks he’s safe from zombies in New Zealand, because it’s an island. His dad is an idiot.

People paint trees all the time. All kinds of trees. Art is supposed to be about things like trees. Or icebergs, although there are more paintings of trees than there are paintings of icebergs, so Mike doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“I wasn’t in prison for very long,” Soap says. “What Mike and I did wasn’t really that bad. We didn’t hurt anybody.”

“You don’t look like a bad guy,” Carly says. And when Soap looks at Carly, she looks like a nice kid. A nice girl with nice tits. But Soap knows you can’t tell by looking.

Soap and Mike were going to be rich once they got out of college. The two of them had it all figured out. They were going to have an excellent website, just as soon as they figured out what it was going to be about, and what to call it. While they were in prison, they decided this website would have been about zombies. That would have been fucking awesome.

Hungryzombie.com, lonelyzombie.com, nakedzombie.com, soyoumarriedazombie.com, zombiecontingencyplan.com, dotcomofthewalkingdead.com were just a few of the names they came up with. In Will’s opinion, people will go anywhere if there’s a zombie involved.

Cool people would have gone to the site and hooked up. People would have talked about old horror movies, or about their horrible temp jobs. There would have been comics and concerts. There would have been advertising, sponsors, movie deals. Soap would have been able to afford art. He would have bought Picassos and Vermeers and original comic book art. He would have bought drinks for women. Beautiful, bisexual, bionic women with unpronounceable names and weird habits in bed.

Only by the time Soap and Mike and the rest of their friends got out of school, all of that was already over. Nobody cared if you had a website. Everybody already had websites. No one was going to give you money.

There were lots of guys who knew how to do what Soap and Mike knew how to do. It turned out that Mike’s and Soap’s parents had paid a lot of money for them to learn how to do things that everyone could already do.

Mike had a girlfriend named Jenny. Soap liked Jenny because she teased him, but Jenny really isn’t important to this story. She wasn’t ever going to fall in love with Soap, and Soap knew it. What matters is that Jenny worked in a museum, and so Soap and Mike started going to museum events, because you got Brie on crackers and wine and martinis. Free food. All you had to do was wear a suit and listen to people talk about art and mortgages and their children. There would be a lot of older women who reminded Soap of his mother, and it was clear that Soap reminded these women of their sons. What was never clear was whether these women were flirting with him, or whether they wanted his advice about something that even they couldn’t put their finger on.

One morning, in prison, Soap woke up and realized that the opportunity had been there and he’d never even seen it. He and Mike, they could have started a website for older upper-middle-class women with strong work ethics and confused, resentful grown-up children with bachelor degrees and no jobs. That was better than zombies. They could even have done some good.

“Okay,” Will says. “I’ll tell you why I went to prison. But first you have to tell me what you’d do if zombies showed up at your party. Tonight. I ask everyone this. Everyone has a zombie contingency plan.”

“You mean like with colleges, just in case you don’t get into your first choice?” Carly says. She holds an eyelid open, puts her finger to her eyeball, and pops out a contact lens. She puts it on the table beside the bed. She doesn’t take the other lens out. Maybe that eye isn’t scratchy. “So my eyes aren’t actually green. The breasts are real, by the way. I don’t watch a lot of horror movies. They give me nightmares. Leo likes that stuff.”

Will sits on the other side of the bed and watches her. She’s thinking about it. Maybe she likes how the world looks through one green contact lens. “My parents keep a gun in the fridge. I guess I’d go get it and shoot the zombies? Or maybe I’d hide in my mom’s closet? Behind all her shoes and stuff? I’d cry a lot. I’d scream for help. I’d call the police.”

“Okay,” Will says. “I was just wondering. What about your brother? How would you protect him?”

Carly yawns like she isn’t impressed at all, but Will can see she’s impressed. It’s just that she’s sleepy, too. “Smart Will. You knew this was my house all along. You knew Leo was my brother. Am I such a bad liar?”

“Yeah,” Will says. “There’s a picture of you and Leo over on your parents’ dresser.”

“Okay,” Carly says. “This is my parents’ bedroom. They’re in France building bicycles, and they left me and they left Leo here. So I threw a party. Serves them right if someone burns their house down.”

“I feel like we’ve known each other for a long time,” Will says. “Even though we just met. For example, I knew your eyes weren’t really green.”

“We don’t really know each other very well,” Carly says. But she says it in a friendly way. “I keep trying to get to know you better. I bet you didn’t know that I want to be president someday.”

“I bet you didn’t know that I think about icebergs a lot, although not as much as I think about zombies,” Will says.

“I’d like to go live on an iceberg,” Carly says. “And I’d like to be president too. Maybe I could do both. I could be the first black woman president who lives on an iceberg.”

“I’d vote for you,” Will says.

“Will,” Carly says. “Don’t you want to get under the covers with me? Are you intimidated by the fact that I’m going to be president someday? Are you intimidated by competent, successful women?”

Will says, “Do you want to fool around or do you want me to tell how I ended up in prison? Door A or Door B. I’m a really good kisser, but Leo is asleep under the bed. Your brother.” Jenny and Mike used to go off and kiss in the museum where Jenny worked, but Soap never kissed Jenny. Once, in college, Soap kissed Mike. They were both drunk. Men kissed men in prison. White men made out with black men. Becka used to make out with her boyfriends out on the beach while her brother hid in the dunes and watched. In the zombie movie, a zombie ate Becka’s lips. You don’t ever want to kiss a zombie.

“He’s a heavy sleeper,” Carly says. “Maybe you should just tell me what you did and we can go from there.”

Soap and Mike and a couple of their friends were at one of the parties at the little private museum where Jenny worked. They drank a lot of wine and they didn’t eat much except some olives. Jenny was busy and so Soap and Mike and their friends left the gallery where the wine and cheese were laid out, where the docents and the rich people were getting to know each other, and wandered out into the rest of the museum. They got farther and farther away from Jenny’s event, but nobody told them to come back and nobody showed up and asked them what they were doing. The other galleries were dark and so somebody dared Mike to go in one of them. They wanted to see if an alarm would go off. Mike did and the alarm didn’t.

Next Soap went into the gallery. His name wasn’t Soap then. His name was Arthur, but everybody called him Art. Ha ha. You couldn’t see anything in the gallery. Art felt stupid just standing there, so he put his hands straight out in front of him in the darkness and walked forward until his fingers touched a wall. He kept his fingers on the wall and walked around the room. Every now and then his fingers would touch a frame and he’d move his hand up and down and along the frame to see how big the painting was. He walked all the way around the room until he was at the door again.

Then somebody else went in, it was Markson who went in, and when Markson came out, he was holding a painting in his arms. It was about three feet by three feet. A painting of a ship with a lot of masts and sails. Lots of little dabs of blue. Little people on the deck of the ship, looking busy.

“Holy shit,” Mike said. “Markson, what did you just do?”

You have to understand that Markson was an idiot. Everyone knew that. Right then he was a drunk idiot, but everyone else was drunk too.

“I just wanted to see what it looked like,” Markson said. “I didn’t think it would be so heavy.” He put the painting down against the wall.

No alarms were going off. The gallery on the other side of the hall was dark too. So they made it a game. Everyone went into one of the galleries and walked around and chose a painting. Then you came out again and saw what you had. Someone got a Seurat. Someone had a Mary Cassatt. Someone else had a Winslow Homer. There were a lot of paintings by artists whom none of them knew. So those didn’t count. Art went back into the first gallery. This time he was slow. There were already some gaps on the gallery wall. He put his ear up against some of the paintings. He felt that he was listening for something, only he didn’t know what.

He chose a very small painting. When he got it out into the hall, he saw it was an oil painting. A blobby blue-green mass that might have been water or a person or it might have been trees. Woods from very far away. Something slow and far away. He couldn’t read the artist’s signature.

Mike was in the other gallery. When he came out with a painting, the painting turned out to be a Picasso. Some sad-looking freaky woman and her sad-looking freaky dog. Everyone agreed that Mike had won. Then that idiot Markson said, “I bet you can’t walk out of here with that Picasso.”

Sometimes when he’s in houses that don’t belong to him, Soap feels bad. He shouldn’t be where he is. He doesn’t belong anywhere. Nobody really knows him. If they did, they wouldn’t like him. Everyone always seems happier than Soap, and as if they know something that Soap doesn’t. He tells himself that things will be different when the zombies show up.

“You guys stole a Picasso?” Carly says.

“It was a minor Picasso. Hardly a Picasso at all. We weren’t really stealing it,” Will says. “We just thought it would be funny to smuggle it out of Jenny’s museum and see how far we got with it. We just walked out of the museum and nobody stopped us. We put the Picasso in the car and drove back to our apartment. I took that little painting too, just so the Picasso would have company. And because I wanted to spend some more time looking at it. I put it under my coat, under one arm, while the other guys were helping Mike get past the party without being seen. We hung the Picasso in the living room when we got back and I put the little painting in my bedroom. We were still drunk when the police showed up. Jenny lost her job. We went to prison. Markson and the other guys had to do community service.”

He stops talking. Carly takes his hand. She squeezes it. She says, “That’s the weirdest story I’ve ever heard. Why is it that everything is so much sadder and funnier and so much more true when you’re drunk?”

“I haven’t told you the weird part yet,” Will says. He can’t tell her the weirdest part of the story, although maybe he can try to show her.

“Did I tell you that I used to be on my school’s debate team?” Carly says. “That’s the weirdest thing about me. I like getting in arguments. The boy with his head under my chair, I kicked his ass in a debate about marijuana. I humiliated him all over the map.”

Will doesn’t use drugs anymore. It’s too much like being in a museum. It makes everything look like art, and makes everything feel like just before the zombies show up. He says, “The museum said that I hadn’t stolen the little painting from them. They said it wasn’t theirs, even when I explained the whole thing. I told the truth and everyone thought I was lying. The police asked around, just in case Mike and I had done the same thing somewhere else, at some other museum, and nobody came forward. Nobody knew the artist’s name. So finally they just gave the painting back to me. They thought I was trying to pull some scam.”

“So what happened to it?” Carly says.

“I’ve still got it. My sister kept it for me while I was in prison,” Will says. “For two years. Since I got out, I’ve been trying to find a place to ditch it. I’ve left it a couple of places, but then it turns out that I haven’t. I can’t leave it behind. No matter how hard I try. It doesn’t belong to me, but I can’t get rid of it.”

“My friend Jessica does this thing she calls shopleaving,” Carly says. “When someone gives her a hideous shirt for her birthday or if she buys a book and it’s not any good, she goes into a store and leaves the shirt on a hanger. She leaves the book on the shelf. Once she took this crazy, mean parakeet to a shoe store and put him in a shoebox. What happened to your friend? Mike?”

“He went to Seattle. He started up a website for ex-cons. He got a lot of funding. There are a lot of people out there who have been in prison. They need websites.”

“That’s nice,” Carly says. “That’s like a happy ending.”

“I’ve got the painting in the car,” Will says. “Do you want it?”

“I like Van Gogh,” Carly says. “And Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Let me go get it,” Will says. He goes downstairs before she can stop him. The guys on the couch are watching somebody’s wedding video now. He wonders what they would think if they knew Carly was upstairs in bed, waiting for him. The dancing girl is in the kitchen with the boy under the table. The girl in the dress is out on the lawn. She isn’t doing anything except maybe looking at stars. She watches Will go to his car, open the trunk, and take out the little painting. Out behind the house, Will can hear people in the pool. Will hasn’t felt this peaceful in a long time. It’s like that first slow part in a horror movie, before the bad thing happens. Will knows that sometimes you shouldn’t try to anticipate the bad thing. Sometimes you are supposed to just listen to swimmers fooling around in a pool. People you can’t see. The night and the moon and the girl in the dress. Will stands on the lawn for a while, holding the painting, wishing that Becka was here with him. Or Mike.

Will takes the painting back upstairs and into the master bedroom. He turns the lights off and wakes Carly up. She’s been crying in her sleep. “Here it is,” he says.

“Will?” Carly says. “You turned off the light. Is it the ocean? It looks like the ocean. I can’t really see anything.”

“Sure you can,” Will says. “There’s moonlight.”

“I only have one contact lens in,” Carly says.

Will stands on the bed and lifts the painting of the garden off its picture hook. How can a painting of some flowers be so heavy? He leans it against the bed and hangs up the painting from the car. Iceberg, zombie, a bunch of trees. Some obscured and unknowable thing. How are you supposed to tell what it is? It makes him want to die, sometimes. “There you go,” he says. “It’s yours.”

“It’s beautiful,” Carly says. Will thinks maybe she’s crying again. She says, “Will? Will you just lie down with me? For a little while?”

Sometimes Soap has this dream. He isn’t sure whether it’s a prison dream or a dream about art or a dream about zombies. Maybe it isn’t about any of those things. He dreams that he’s in a dark room. Sometimes it’s an enormous room, very long and narrow. Sometimes there are people in it, leaning silently up against the walls. He can only figure out if there are people or how big the room is when he stretches out his arms and walks forward. He has no idea what they’re doing in the room with him. He has no idea what he’s supposed to do, either. Sometimes it’s a very small room. It’s dark. It’s dark.

“Hey, kid. Hey, Leo. Wake up, Leo. We gotta go.” Soap is lying on the floor beside the bed, holding up the dust ruffle. He has to whisper. Carly is asleep on the too-big bed, under the covers.

Leo uncurls. He wriggles forward, towards Will. Then he wiggles back again, away from Will. He’s maybe six or seven years old. “Who are you?” Leo says. “Where’s Carly?”

“Carly sent me to get you, Leo,” Soap says. “You have to be very, very quiet and do exactly what I say. There are zombies in the house. There are brain-eating zombies in the house. We have to get to a safe place. We have to go get Carly. She needs us.” Leo stretches out his hand. Soap takes it and pulls him out from under the bed. He picks Leo up. Leo holds on to Will tightly. He doesn’t weigh a lot, but he’s so warm. Little kids have fast metabolisms.

“The zombies are chasing Carly?” Leo says.

“That’s right,” Soap says. “We have to go save her.”

“Can I bring my robot?” Leo says.

“I’ve already put your robot in the car,” Will says. “And your dinosaur T-shirt and your basketball.”

“Are you Wolverine?” Leo says.

“That’s right,” Wolverine says. “I’m Wolverine. Let’s get out of here.”

Leo says, “Can I see your claws?”

“Not now,” Wolverine says.

“I have to go to the bathroom before we go,” Leo says.

“Okay,” Wolverine says. “That’s a great idea. I’m proud of you for telling me that.”

Some things that you could try with zombies, but which won’t work:

Panic.

Don’t panic. Remain calm.

Call the police.

Take them out to dinner. Get them drunk.

Ask them to come back later.

Ignore them.

Take them home.

Tell them jokes. Play board games with them.

Tell them you love them.

Rescue them.

Wolverine and Leo have a backpack. They put a box of Cheerios and some bananas and Leo and Carly’s parents’ gun and a Game Boy and some batteries and a Ziploc bag full of twenty-dollar bills from the closet in the master bedroom in the backpack. There’s a late-night horror movie on TV, but no one is there to watch it. The girl in the dress on the lawn is gone. If there’s someone in the pool, they’re keeping quiet.

Wolverine and Leo get in Wolverine’s car and drive away.

Carly is dreaming that she’s the President of the United States of America. She’s living in the White House—it turns out that the White House is built out of ice. It’s more like the Whitish Greenish Bluish House. Everybody wears big fur coats and when President Carly gives presidential addresses, she can see her breath. All her words hanging there. She’s hanging out with rock stars and Nobel Prize winners. It’s a wonderful dream. Carly’s going to save the world. Everyone loves her, even her parents. Her parents are so proud of her. When she wakes up, the first thing she sees—before she sees all the other things that are missing besides the oil painting of the woods that nobody lives in, nobody painted, and nobody stole—is the empty space on the wall in the bedroom above her parents’ bed.

[rave]

oh here i found an excerpt of Joe Hill's story

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead
by Joe Hill

Bobby didn’t know her at first. She was wounded, like him. The first thirty to arrive all got wounds. Tom Savini put them on himself.

Her face was a silvery blue, her eyes sunken into darkened hollows, and where her right ear had been was a ragged-edged hole, a gaping place that revealed a lump of wet red bone. They sat a yard apart on the stone wall around the fountain, which was switched off. She had her pages balanced on one knee—three pages in all, stapled together—and was looking them over, frowning with concentration. Bobby had read his while he was waiting in line to go into makeup.

Her jeans reminded him of Harriet Rutherford. There were patches all over them, patches that looked as if they had been made out of kerchiefs; squares of red and dark blue, with paisley patterns printed on them. Harriet was always wearing jeans like that. Patches sewn into the butt of a girl’s Levi’s still turned Bobby on.

His gaze followed the bend of her legs down to where her blue jeans flared at the ankle, then on to her bare feet. She had kicked her sandals off, and was twisting the toes of one foot into the toes of the other. When he saw this he felt his heart lunge with a kind of painful-sweet shock.

“Harriet?” he said. “Is that little Harriet Rutherford who I used to write love poems to?”

She peered at him sideways, over her shoulder. She didn’t need to answer, he knew it was her. She stared for a long, measuring time, and then her eyes opened a little wider. They were a vivid, very undead green, and for an instant he saw them brighten with recognition and unmistakable excitement. But she turned her head away, went back to perusing her pages.

“No one ever wrote me love poems in high school,” she said. “I’d remember. I would’ve died of happiness.”

“In detention. Remember we got two weeks after the cooking show skit? You had a cucumber carved like a dick. You said it needed to stew for an hour and stuck it in your pants. It was the finest moment in the history of the Die Laughing Comedy Collective.”

“No. I have a good memory and I don’t recall this comedy troupe.” She looked back down at the pages balanced on her knee. “Do you remember any details about these supposed poems?”

“How do you mean?”

“A line. Maybe if you could remember something about one of these poems—one line of heart-rending verse—it would all come flooding back to me.”

He didn’t know if he could at first; stared at her blankly, his tongue pressed to his lower lip, trying to call something back and his mind stubbornly blank.

Then he opened his mouth and began to speak, remembering as he went along: “I love to watch you in the shower, I hope that’s not obscene.”

“But when I see you soap your boobs, I get sticky in my jeans!” Harriet cried, turning her body towards him. “Bobby Conroy, goddamn, come here and hug me without screwing up my makeup.”

He leaned into her and put his arms around her narrow back. He shut his eyes and squeezed, feeling absurdly happy, maybe the happiest he had felt since moving back in with his parents. He had not spent a day in Monroeville when he didn’t think about seeing her. He was depressed, he daydreamed about her, stories that began with exactly this moment—or not exactly this moment, he had not imagined them both made-up like partially decomposed corpses, but close enough.

When he woke every morning, in his bedroom over his parents’ garage, he felt flat and listless. He’d lie on his lumpy mattress and stare at the skylights overhead. The skylights were milky with dust, and through them every sky appeared the same, a bland, formless white. Nothing in him wanted to get up. What made it worse was he still remembered what it felt like to wake in that same bed with a teenager’s sense of his own limitless possibilities, to wake charged with enthusiasm for the day. If he daydreamed about meeting Harriet again, and falling into their old friendship—and if these early morning daydreams sometimes turned explicitly sexual, if he remembered being with her in her father’s shed, her back on the stained cement, her too-skinny legs pulled open, her socks still on—then at least it was something to stir his blood a little, get him going. All his other daydreams had thorns on them. Handling them always threatened a sudden sharp prick of pain.

They were still holding each other when a boy spoke, close by. “Mom, who are you hugging?”

Bobby Conroy opened his eyes, shifted his gaze to the right. A little blue-faced dead boy with limp black hair was staring at them. He wore a hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up.

Harriet’s grip on Bobby relaxed. Then, slowly, her arms slid away. Bobby regarded the boy for an instant longer—the kid was no older than six—and then dropped to Harriet’s hand, the wedding band on her ring finger.

Bobby looked back at the kid, forced a smile. Bobby had been to more than seven hundred auditions during his years in New York City, and he had a whole catalog of phony smiles.

“Hey chumley,” Bobby said. “I’m Bobby Conroy. Your mom and me are old buddies from way back when Mastodons walked the earth.”

“Bobby is my name too,” the boy said. “Do you know a lot about dinosaurs? I’m a big dinosaur guy myself.”

Bobby felt a sick pang that seemed to go right through the middle of him. He glanced at her face—didn’t want to, couldn’t help himself—and found Harriet watching him. Her smile was anxious and compressed.

“My husband picked it,” she said. She was, for some reason, patting his leg. “After a Yankee. He’s from Albany originally.”

“I know about Mastodons,” Bobby said to the boy, surprised to find his voice sounded just the same as it ever did. “Big hairy elephants the size of school buses. They once roamed the entire Pennsylvanian plateau, and left mountainous Mastodon poops everywhere, one of which later became Pittsburgh.”

The kid grinned, and threw a quick glance at his mother, perhaps to appraise what she made of this off-hand reference to poop. She smiled indulgently.

Bobby saw the kid’s hand and recoiled. “Ugh! Wow, that’s the best wound I’ve seen all day. What is that, a fake hand?”

Three fingers were missing from the boy’s left hand. Bobby grabbed it and yanked on it, expecting it to come off. But it was warm and fleshy under the blue makeup, and the kid pulled it out of Bobby’s grip.

“No,” he said. “It’s just my hand. That’s the way it is.”

Bobby blushed so intensely his ears stung, and was grateful for his makeup. Harriet touched Bobby’s wrist.

“He really doesn’t have those fingers,” she said.

Bobby looked at her, struggling to frame an apology. Her smile was a little fretful now, but she wasn’t visibly angry with him, and the hand on his arm was a good sign.

“I stuck them into the table-saw but I don’t remember because I was so little,” the boy explained.

“Dean is in lumber,” Harriet said.

“Is Dean staggering around here somewhere?” Bobby asked, craning his head and making a show of looking around, although of course he had no idea what Harriet’s Dean might look like. Both floors of the atrium at the center of the mall were crowded with other people like them, made-up to look like the recent dead. They sat together on benches, or stood together in groups, chatting, laughing at each other’s wounds, or looking over the mimeographed pages they had been given of the screenplay. The mall was closed—steel gates pulled down in front of the entrances to the stores—no one in the place but the film crew and the undead.

“No, he dropped us off and went in to work.”

“On a Sunday?”

“He owns his own yard.”

It was as good a set-up for a punch line as he had ever heard, and he paused, searching for just the right one… and then it came to him that making wisecracks about Dean’s choice of work to Dean’s wife in front of Dean’s five-year-old might be ill-advised, and never mind that he and Harriet had once been best friends and the royal couple of the Die Laughing Comedy Collective their senior year in high school. Bobby said, “He does? Good for him.”

“I like the big gross tear in your face,” the little kid said, pointing at Bobby’s brow. Bobby had a nasty scalp wound, the skin laid open to the lumpy bone. “Didn’t you think the guy who made us into dead people was cool?”

Bobby had actually been a little creeped out by Tom Savini, who kept referring to an open book of autopsy photographs while applying Bobby’s makeup. The people in those pictures, with their maimed flesh and slack unhappy faces, were really dead, not getting up later to have a cup of coffee at the craft services table. Savini studied their wounds with a quiet appreciation, the same as any painter surveying the subject of his art.

But Bobby could see what the kid meant about how he was cool. With his black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, black beard, and memorable eyebrows—thick black eyebrows that arched sharply upward, like Dr. Spock or Bela Lugosi—he looked like a death metal rock god.

Someone was clapping their hands. Bobby glanced around. The director, George Romero, stood close to the bottom of the escalators, a bearish man well over six feet tall, with a thick brown beard. Bobby had noticed that many of the men working on the crew had beards. A lot of them had shoulder length hair too, and wore army-navy castoffs and motorcycle boots like Savini, so that they resembled a band of counterculture revolutionaries.

[Michael Myers]

^So he was an actor of George Romero movie?? good history but i dont understand the ending plz explain

[InfC.AnatoLiy]

That first one was really good. Very descriptive all through out and the ending totally warped my imagination as through out the whole story I was picturing a man grinding for survival, not a woman. Great read, will read rave's later for sure.

edit: btw, if you read the first story with Requiem for a Dream playing in the background it's EPIC!

[pYromania]

Thanks for giving me something to do rave. Summer can be so boring! I'll check these out when I wake up tomorrow and hopefully I can also update with some more.

@Anatoliy: I'm glad you liked it. After all, that's what this thread is about.

[pYromania]

Here's another decent one.

"Private Arlen"
Raccoon City Survivor

Many of the men had fought, and died. But some remained, some still
willing to fight. The world was all but lost for now; it wasn't totally taken by
this new plague that had swept across this nation with a hammering blow.
The plague that had been little more than a new sickness. But it was
certain even now, as Private Jon Arlen ran across Highway 127 at the
Highway 40 junction, that the world had shit the bed.

Of course it was only his observation, there were other men in his
platoon that thought otherwise. The maniacal rank of this army now was
to its full extent. And if it could get any worse, then he was certain he'd
die.

He glanced up from his feet and saw salvation, in the form of a brigade of
heavily armed men walking towards him with quickened pace. They stood
in front of a La Quinta Inn, the area that the National Guard had taken
refuge. It was only a temporary base for this garrison.

But how long was temporary to the eyes of the United States National
Guard? They'd been here for two weeks, and he hadn't seen any sign of
anyone coming to rescue.

More than half of his platoons were dead; the cause of looters and
likewise factions that now roamed Crossville, Tennessee. Molotov's and
hand-made dynamite sticks were no match for anything his platoon had
in possession. Except for the fifty-caliber he'd manned, he wished the fifty
had had more ammunition than it had. He took out possibly ten of them
before the fifty went quite.

He wasn't a coward; just unfortunate.

Looters weren't the only things he had to worry about. There were
other...things...abroad. Things that should not be. And they were fast as
fuck.

Carriers, that's what some of his buddies called them. But he called them
just plain zombies; he'd seen them in horror movies, including one that
had come out in the past year. Those were as fast as these, but that
didn't mean they weren't something to fear. They were fear, busting down
your door and breaking in your windows. Fear was running through your
streets and biting your neighbor, then it went on to find more of your
neighbors, and finally fear would find you.

He looked over his right shoulder and saw them swarming through the
convoy he'd left two hundred yards behind him. Many of the score
started a mad run for him, the survivors of his platoon.

The men in front of the hotel opened fire, rendering the carriers
defenseless in the flat lawn with the grass. That green grass soon turned
crimson as the bodies were obliterated by the mix of 7.62 and 5.56
rounds filtering through the barrels of United States steel.

Jon almost fell at the horrifying sound of large caliber rounds whizzing
past him, but remained on his feet. He glanced down at his mud-covered
M-9 pistol. He had no idea how many rounds were left, but he knew it
wasn't empty. Many a foe on his trip had thought themselves worthy to
stare down his barrel. He had stupidly left his M-16 in the Humvee with
the fifty-caliber mount.

So far he was grateful for having a gun at all.

The shots in front of him had died down considerably, but many were still
firing. He walked up to a Captain, who was eyeing him intently. Captain
Donald Matheson was a fit fellow, weighing in at an easy two hundred
pounds with the biceps to show. He fiddled with his trigger safety any time
he was nervous.

"Report, Private!" he barked, revealing teeth that had seen better days.

Jon snapped off a quick salute. "Sir, ten were lost to roaming gangs in
downtown Crossville. We no longer control downtown. Sir!" Jon barked
back, Downtown Crossville was being used as a safe zone as well as a
supply dump. He thought back to the slaughter, and mentally shuddered.

"Fuck!" Captain Matheson screamed, letting go a puff of smoke as he lit
his cigarette. He fiddled with his trigger safety.

"Grenade!" someone to the far right bellowed, it was followed by a sharp
explosion and dirt showering the men.

"Listen up, pansies," the captain bellowed. "We've got a job to do, and
that's to clear out this sector. I'll be damned if we aren't gonna fucking
complete our mission! Hooah!"

"Hooah!" came the response, thick with readiness.

Jon's response lacked a lot; he didn't think the world would sort this kind
of shit out. And he was sure that he wasn't crazy. Yet.

Jon walked to the entrance of the hotel, walking up to an area full of
downed men, he stopped in front of the area. Some were bitten and had
worsened in health over the few days they had been there. He didn't
exactly like that; he'd seen zombie movies and hoped that this wasn't the
case.

One started moving erratically, belying his weakened state unable to lift a
finger. Jon took a step back. It stopped, dead. He watched the last breath
exit the lungs of the sergeant.

"Fuck." He gasped, gripping the M-9 with white knuckles. Any minute he
would get up, any fucking minute that sergeant would be biting others.
But he was going to stop that, here and now.

But just as he vowed to end it were it started, ten more stopped breathing.

Jon glanced to the right, and then to the left. Insuring no one was
watching. This was the moment of courage--his moment of courage. And
he ran.

He pushed through to the left, running further into the bowels of the
hotel. Bounding past men and women that had no idea what was
happening. He got to the elevators and pushed the glowing button as the
screams first started. The screams were relentless, ongoing until the
person died. He dropped his pistol involuntarily and started running to
the emergency stairs.

More screams were thrown into the chaos, as well as a volley of
gunshots. But all faded as he leaped and bounded up the stairs taking
three at a time.

Soon level two came into view. He glanced down, looking if anyone had
followed him.

The door on the lowest floor was thrown open. And to his ears came the
sound of boots pounding against the concrete steps.

"I saw that fucker run!" screamed a familiar voice, and that familiar voice
had a name; Corporal Brad Jenkins. A man that had despised Jon since
the day they'd met in boot camp.

He glanced at his empty left hand. No pistol. No life. He continued up the
stairs, but with a quieter pace. Why the hell had he dropped his gun? He
stood no chance up against Brad and Josh. PFC. Joshua Lynwood was a
fighter by heart, the only problem in his case, though, was that he was a
fighter that didn't need a brain. He let his fists do the thinking.

"I'm gonna cut that dipshit's prick off." Brad vowed.

"Yeah!" Josh chimed in.

Jon crested the third level and shot into a room. His breathing was the
only thing that kept him sane--the only thing that separated himself from
the fucks running around outside. He cocked his head and walked to the
window, it was a full view of the outside.

Many of his platoon were caught in between two waves of carriers, one
coming from the town, and another coming from the lobby of the hotel.

He heard their pounding footsteps seconds before they actually stalked
past the door.

"End of the line, dipshit!" Brad bellowed, making sure the whole level
could hear him. "Search the rooms." He ordered.

Ray heard the footsteps of Brad and heard him attempt to open his door.
After what seemed like hours but was only five seconds elapsed, he went
to the next room. Private Arlen let loose a breath long forgotten in his
lungs, and silently took in deep breathes.

He heard more attempts down the corridor, followed by cursing. Jon
elected to make his move; he stealthily walked to the door. The sounds
of gunfire still rang outside. He grasped his hand around the knob and
twisted the silent ball slowly, he was awarded with a clicking sound as the
lock disengaged. And with a flash of energy and swift arms that belied his
strength the door was open.

"Shoot the mother!" Josh screamed, catching first glimpse of the private.

Jon ran towards the stairs, bracing for an inevitable volley of 5.56 rounds
in the back. And then that would be the end of Private Jon A. Arlen.
Bound by bound, leap by leap, he came closer and closer to achieving
his goal. And then Josh opened up.

The crudely taken shot hit him high on the right shoulder, flinging him
over the banister and sending him falling to the stairs that awaited his
arrival. He landed mid-way on the flight of stairs. His air had escaped
from his lungs and rendered him unable to accurately breathe. But that
soon recovered.

"Don't shoot him, you dumbfuck." Brad said.

Jon rose to his knees and felt the back of his head. There was a large
lump, but no bleeding. He stood erect and scanned the area; he saw
nothing but heard Brad and Josh above. This caused an all-out run down
the stairs.

"Come back here, dipshit!" Brad pursued him.

Jon giving up was unlikely. He would rather betray himself to Captain
Matheson and get shot, than let his pursuers lay one finger on him.

"You can't run forever!" Josh said.

Jon kept at the mad run even with his bruised head and blurred vision.
He came abreast of the emergency door and pushed it opened. After
hearing the metallic clang of the door closing, his eyes scoured the
ground in search for something to reinforce the door with. Nothing was
forthcoming.

He walked towards the lobby, his foot kicking a metallic object. His pistol.
He picked it up and checked the magazine; half full. He smiled and
started into the lobby.

He had no fear now. There wasn't an ounce of fear behind his thick
military issue glasses. He stalked into the lobby and caught a carrier
feasting upon a soldier. He shot them both in rapid secession.

A carrier outside came to investigate the loud noises; he was shot.
Another shot, and then another. And his magazine went empty. No
matter, he dropped it and grasped the cold grips of an M-16 A2 and
opened up, felling four more swiftly.

He turned around and gave the two men in pursuit of him what they
deserved. He turned and ran out the front door, he inhaled a deep
breath of air and realized this was a new start for him.

He started for the Humvee which he had manned the fifty. During his run
he checked the clip for his rifle. Empty. He dropped it and ran faster for
his abandoned rifle in the Humvee.

Two soldier carriers came running after him from the left.

He ran faster, his lungs balls of fire. Being awake for long periods of time
and sleeping so little was wearing him down. He yawned, despite the
adrenaline rushing through him. He glanced down at a body that littered
the lawn; it was Captain Matheson. Minus a neck.

Two hundred feet to the Humvee, and his weapon.

He could make it, just a few hundred feet. He took bounds and leaps,
running the same speed as the carriers behind him. His heart pumping
his lifeblood through vessels.

One hundred feet now separated himself from the rifle.

His speed was decreasing and he knew it. His legs ached from exertion
since the rise of the first carrier. He, along with his platoon, had been
sent to this town to patrol and protect it.

What a bang-up job they'd done.

He came to within twenty-feet and glanced back. The carriers were still
gaining speed, but not as rapidly as he'd thought. The private came
abreast of the Humvee and tried the doors, locked.

"Fuck!" he screamed. How the hell had the occupants gotten the time to
lock it up? He swung around to the opposite side and tried the front
passenger door. To his surprise it swung open. He grabbed a pistol that
lie forgotten in the seat and put three rounds into the first carrier, then
readjusted his aim and felled the other with one shot.

After checking his immediate vicinity, he clambered into the driver's seat
of the Humvee and twisted the key. It roared to life and he put it into the
appropriate gear and gunned it. He turned left and began down Highway
40.

It was until he was forty miles away from Crossville when his white
knuckles abated and he realized he had a new life ahead of him.

A life he wouldn't fuck up.

[Michael Myers]

Wow amazing relate, nice ending at least hes the only survivor from all those relates, terrible massacre at Racoon City.

[pYromania]

I love the ending of this one.

"Mr. $1,500 AR"
Stizzorm

Mr. $1,500 AR had been eyeing us for a while. At first, it's okay, because
everyone gives every other survivor a careful once-over for signs of
infection. This was different.

"What are you cuties doing in such inhospitable environs?" He asked with
all the tact of a sleazy used car dealer.

"Medicine for our friend," I said, "The herbs aren't keeping the infection
down."

"What's wrong with your friend? If he's been bitten, you know what you're
going to have to do, don't you?" He pointed his index finger and pulled
his thumb back like a pistol's hammer, and made the unmistakable
gesture of blowing his brains out, complete with what sounded like a
duckfart. He looked back at us, and cocked his head, "And what's with all
the commie guns? Couldn't you afford the good stuff?"

Crystal was seething. We'd seen this kind of macho commando asshole
before. Our patience with this type had worn threadbare. She scowled at
him, waiting for any excuse.

He fondled the AR. I have to admit, it was a sweet rifle.

"We need drugs," Anita stated flatly, "antibiotics. Our friend wasn't bitten,
he was scouting and was almost killed by one of your traps."

A self-righteous grin spread across his face, "yes, ma'am, we do make
great traps. It's too bad your friend didn't see. I think we can help you
lovely ladies."

Crystal was nauseous with frustration and helplessness. She shrunk
back to the door. One of these post apocalyptic fratboys started to get
up close to her. There was a call over the jerk's walkie-talkie and he
looked out into the parking lot and then ran up the steps. Something was
going on.

"Marcus, can we help these ladies get medicine for their clumsy friend?"
He was all of a sudden all business, so maybe we would be able to finally
get somewhere. The guy behind the desk disappeared. It occured to me
that the desk was out of place.

"You ladies don't need to be so on edge, here. I mean, you know the
business we're in. We're skilled professionals, and you don't need to be
afraid. I don't keep this baby to impress people," he smiled in what must
have been an attempt at tenderness, unslung the rifle, and started
talking about everything from the telescoping stock to the birdcage
muzzle break.

Marcus appeared uncannily with a charitable smile on his face, "I'll help
you. After all, it's not every day we get cuties dropping in to visit!"

I thought I was going to puke. All we were trying to do was buy antibiotics
off this handful of smug assholes and all they can do is hit on us. Fucking
retards! The world as we knew it is gone and they still can't avoid thinking
with the little head. I'd rather deal with the fucking carriers, at least they
don't try to get uncomfortably friendly with you. Yeah, I'd take the threat
of mortal harm over these shitbags. How the hell did they survive with this
fratboy mentality, anyway?

Mr. $1,500 AR put his arm around me. I sidled away, and he didn't get
the hint. By the time Marcus came back with the drugs, I had almost
decided to scrap this whole plan. Besides, it seemed pretty clear that
they were going to follow us as soon as we left. Oh well, measures could
be taken. We bartered for some food, some fuel, and a few boxes of 5.56
NATO we pulled off a dropped LD. Anita came back from gazing into the
parking lot and verified the drugs in the bottle were right. The creeps
tried to follow us, but luckily a handful of LD's and three carriers had
appeared around the old hotel.

"You girls aren't going out with those monsters out there, are you?"
Marcus was visibly shaking, but Mr. $1,500 AR (plus $1,000 in
accessories) made a ridiculous face like a bulldog taking a dump and
readied his rifle.

I just smiled the way you do when you have to, extended the bayonet on
my SKS, and flipped the safety off. There was enough gas to get back,
the question was getting to the car. Crystal tapped the safety of her
Remington 870, and Anita made sure her Russian M44 was set to go. Mr.
$1500 AR scoffed at our guns.

"Totally inadequate!" He called out. "Don't worry girls," he said in what
seemed to be an attempt at an earnest tone, "the guys and I will cover
you. If you need anything, you know to come to us, and we can always
figure out a way that you can get what you need."

I looked at Crystal, but she was surprisingly calm. Out of all of us, she
smiled widest and sweetest as we left.

A carrier in a tattered business suit bounded across the parking lot, and
Anita brought up her M44 and fired. We're never ready for that
shockwave. The bullet had pierced the carrier's chest and sprayed red
paste into the air behind it. We had seen the mess those soft points
make. I knew why Anita hadn't shot it in the head. It would eventually
come to and give those commando assholes at least some trouble. A pair
of LD's appeared from around the corner. One was that hideous,
sagging gray, and the other was relatively fresh with an arrow sticking out
of its chest. I lined up the gray one in my sights and squeezed the trigger.
Big chunks of skull and brain sprayed from its head. Crystal launched a
load of 12-gauge 00 buckshot into a carrier in full sprint. Before Anita
could deafen us with the M44 again, I blasted the fresher LD right at
nose level. Mr. $1,500 AR just stood and watched inside the door,
playing with his right ear. A carrier got between the car door and me, and
I actually think it was caught off guard when I charged it and drove the
bayonet into its chest. I had learned to sidestep the sprinters if it came to
bayonet work. Just a sidestep, pivot, and you never even lose your
balance. It fell to the ground, sliding off the blade and leaving it smeared
red.

I started the car, and watched in the rearview mirror as the door came off
in Mr. $1500 AR's hands and clattered down the steps. I glanced at
Crystal.

"Hey, fuck him," Crystal said, "he was an asshole and a fucking scumbag
and he fucking deserves having those doors detached from the hunges."

"Well," I smiled, "now I almost feel bad for stuffing gum in the action on
his AR...Almost." I thought back to how when he squeezed up to me, I
stealthily squeezed gum into the action of his rifle.

All the commotion of the steel door going down the concrete steps had
drawn more attention than the car. We could see more carriers and living
dead cresting the hill. Mr. $1,500 AR was screaming at his post
apocalyptic frat brothers and pointing at the unhinged door as he faded
out of sight.

"Well then I guess those cocksuckers are going to have an interesting
time for the rest of their lives," Anita smiled.

"What's that gonna be, five minutes?" Crystal smirked.

"Aw, give 'em some credit, I was thinking fifteen," I said with uncertainty.

It had become a much harsher world, and it was hard enough to survive
with people we knew and trusted. We could not have let those guys find
the house. If they hadn't hidden their traps, this whole fucking mess
would have never happened.

[0meg4]

wall texts crit's me like a BM.

[pYromania]

They're short stories. I'm not sure what you were expecting.

[0meg4]

Nah, no offense, it's just that i read the topic name " SHORT stories " and i thought they were really short like 8-10 max lines, then i look at all theses lines i felt like when i lose my hero to imba bm.

[pYromania]

Well, they're great time wasters if you have nothing to do (summer...).

[rave]

short stories are typically 4,000 to 7,000 words. just sayin.

[fridginators]

I don't really get that surreal one about Soap - I assume it's essentially that he's partially insane and that he kidnaps that kid at the party? I just don't get why zombies had any relevance. Like obviously a construct of his mind, but they could have been anything really.

Edit: I didn't actually like the ending or really the general story of the last one Pyro. And the one before that was a bit too rushed imo - Sorta doesn't make sense why the commandos would chase Jon instead of killing the zombies.

To be fair, most of these stories are probably just fan-fiction stuff, not serious writing, so fair enough, doesn't have to be amazing.

Also, most of these stories tend to combine both the Undead as well as the Infected - which is a bit bullshit imo, it's one or the other. You have humans that are infected, or something reanimates the dead.

[Aydin]

Originally Posted by rave

short stories are typically 4,000 to 7,000 words. just sayin.

And in all fairness, this is really talking about non professional or student work. Good short story writers can easily excel both above and below those numbers.

[pYromania]

Originally Posted by fridginators

Also, most of these stories tend to combine both the Undead as well as the Infected - which is a bit bullshit imo, it's one or the other. You have humans that are infected, or something reanimates the dead.

The fantasy world I took these stories from work like this:

Human gets infected --> virus takes over his/her body, he/she is still alive but can infect others, feral in behavior (like 28 days later) --> eventually dies because of virus or because he/she is killed by another human but the brain isn't damaged --> a little while after they are reanimated and slow (like resident evil or dawn of the dead).

So yeah they combined it. I can understand if you don't like it.