Johnny was the one who told me that she was still alive. “But don’t go over there.” He cautioned, turning his back on me as he walked across the room. When he got to the window he told me that he thought they had all the women they needed. He had even seen two teenage girls walking down the street unhindered. (more…)

Morris blinked, looked down at his coffee on the table, then back at the restrooms where he’d been. Something had happened. Something big. The whole coffee shop was empty, only wisps of ash floating in the air. The peppy morning music still poured out of the CD player on the shelf above the milk machine.

There were no sirens, no honks from the street, though it appeared there’d been a massive accident, and several cars were pushed out of line. An SUV was actively burning, but no one was doing anything about it. Morris swallowed, took a big sip of his coffee, and put it down. He had to see this. (more…)

“Mr. Hawking,” his physics teacher used to say on an almost daily basis, “yet again, your namesake would be ashamed of your performance in this class.”

Classmates would snicker. Steve would blush and scan the quiz paper for the humiliating red letter scratched across the top.

“Why are you so dumb, Hawking? Hey Hawking, you’re no Einstein!” echoed the schoolyards and yellow buses. (more…)

With so few humans left, wondered Skiff, why hadn’t the zombies simply starved to death? He poured the last of the kerosene on to the floor of the barn and dropped the empty can onto the hay.

Of course he knew the answer; they didn’t need to eat to survive, they ate to feed the ceaseless hunger for human flesh. Their own flesh was no longer human, it couldn’t be. When one considered the way the sickly gobs of the stuff fell from their bodies at the slightest provocation, it was obviously something dead and rotting. (more…)

1.

Once I had the dough kneaded out into a circle, Isaac strolled over and draped a cheese stick onto the bottom half. This created a mouth for our head. There I promptly applied two pepperonis for the eyes and even gave it some brows by carefully placing two banana peppers over those slices. We looked at our Frankenstein and then at each other before bursting out laughing. Big Barry came back from the register. For the last several minutes he’d been kissing the ass of some old woman who had complained about something alien to fine food being embedded in her ham and cheese. He had had to cough up a refund and, if this didn’t put him in a sour enough mood as it were, now he heard us snickering. (more…)

1. The Protector

As far as General Jamieson was concerned, 2012 represented the lowest point in the history of the once great United States of America. Things happened that year that he wouldn’t have believed possible.

Where the fuck could you even start? (more…)

     In all the years of management experience I’ve had, locking seven others and myself into the back warehouse of my furniture store was probably the hardest decision I ever had to make. I had fired drivers for damaging loads during delivery, I let my office manager go after 8 years of dedicated service when she came back from her lunch break smelling like gin one too many times. Those were easy decisions. Nobody’s life depended on it. This one was rough. I slammed the gate down and secured the huge Master padlock, and waited for a minute before turning around. I didn’t want to see the faces. (more…)

Since working out exactly how to close the metal security gates at the entrance of the Triggs hypermarket, our group of seven had been huddled in the men’s clothing section, toward the back of the store. We each stared off in our own thoughts for a time. The only sounds came from the mall area. Out there, the children shimmied up and down the front gates, hacking and whooping with those croup-like coughs. (more…)