The fire stirred up in each one of us comes screaming out in huge angry strides.  The seam of the undead stretches out in front of us, and a sight that usually spells death and retreat seems like a smiling challenge begging for our boot heels.  I clutch my crowbar tightly, each end sharpened and scarred, a part of me since the sun went down and never came back up.  In front of me, white headstones spread out in rows, identical in shape but not in content.  Thousands, all the way to a horizon flecked with the hulls of planes, great crushed airliners that failed to save us from the realization that each destination was more tainted than the last.  A jeep carrying The General screams past, guns blazing precious high caliber promises.  His megaphone screams, “THIS LIFE!  A FUCKING CAKEWALK.  MAKE THEM PAY!” (more…)

Sequel to UNTITLED PART 4

I liked the neighborhood because you could hear crickets.  Some people, it bugs them, but I liked following their rhythms.  When they came out it was time to go quiet, to calm down and let them do the talking.

The lamp stayed pretty close to me when I read.  I liked the heat from the bulb.  Me smirking with the thought of being part moth, her weight resting silently on my lap.  She looked up.  “Hey why don’t I feed her and put her down, you can keep reading,” she said, lamp glow reflecting from her eyes. (more…)

There is a point on the horizon.  Take that point and split it in two.  Split it again, and again, and again until you reach a space, one that cannot be split.  Within that space you’ll find the most immense horror you can imagine.  Oceans of pain, not just the type of pain that your flesh so poorly translates, but the actual essence of it.

A thing. (more…)

Sequel to SALVATION

Jeff Robinson sat in the chair and waited for his inevitable death. In fact he wasn’t as much sat in the chair, as strapped in. Think leather fastenings were secured tightly round his ankles, thighs, wrists, arms and waist. He looked around the empty room, moving only his eyes as his head was held firmly in place by the metal cap tightly fixed to it. It reminded him of a room where prisoners on TV shows were taken just before receiving several thousand volts in the electric chair. The irony wasn’t lost on him. (more…)

Sequel to DEADLY COMMUTE

Daniel lay dead to the world. It felt like the best rest he had had in ages as he slowly opened his eyes and thought it about time he rose. The fact that his head was lying on a tiled surface did not alert him, nor what seemed like the distant screams of people locked in hand to hand fighting, it was the sight of a middle aged business woman, on her knees, trying to pull the heels from her stilettos out of some huge guys ears as he lay on the ground. At this he awoke with a jump and everything came flooding back to him; the fighting outside the train, the driver getting bit and then her head being cut off as she tried to attack them and then him leading a group of commuters against a bunch of zombies so they could escape the platform. (more…)

Even using heavy equipment, explosives, and fire, it had taken the whole winter to set up the race course.  Every time the weather warmed up above freezing, we had to stop and retreat to our holes.  Fortunately, this was one of the coldest winters in thirty years, which gave us almost 100 days to work from dawn to dusk, from mid-November to the last cold days of March.  Deepening or digging the pits was the hardest, most grueling work of all although getting the track walls high enough was a close second.  However, we expected it was all going to be worth it when the flag came down, the engines revved up, and our fans literally clawed their way onto the course.  Doing this kind of construction and prep work close to a major city these days seemed to just be asking for trouble but the Chief was adamant.  He told us again and again that putting the course out in the boondocks wouldn’t give us the huge crowds that would make this event profitable enough to justify our efforts. (more…)

“The bearer of evil tidings,

When he was halfway there,

Remembered that evil tidings

Were a dangerous thing to bear.”

Robert Frost

Derelix  Jersey

“Shoot them in the temple. Aim for the temple and they will go down.” This is what the radio said, some time ago, and all the other rubbish that spills from those speakers is worthless. Maintain faith, faith in one’s self, but this is difficult to do. (more…)

Hello?…is this thing on?….OK…. well I guess you want to know what I did in the war? They told me you was recording stuff about the war and wanted to know what I did. You ain’t gonna get a story about the shooters from me…I wasn’t one of those fancy-assed trigger pullers… I did my time in G,R&D. Graves, Registration, and Disposal. (more…)

This is the second story of a series that began with 1ST OHIO VOLUNTEERS.

1.

Moonrise.

The darkened, almost pitch black landscape below began to shift into faint shadow as a nearly full moon climbed above the eastern horizon. The cold, white lunar light gave the entire forest surrounding the tiny compound of the 1st Ohio Volunteer Regiment an eerie, almost enchanted quality. The chorus of crickets was almost deafening in the cool night air, broken only by the occasional hoot of a solitary owl. (more…)

Mark gripped the gun in his hand and aimed dead center at the zombie’s head, when he pulled the trigger bits of brain and skull sprayed everywhere. “Just admit that you were wrong.” He demanded and aimed for another. He was only around thirty, but could have been mistaken for fifty.

“I’m not the one to blame here.” His wife, Kathryn, said and shot two rounds out the window. She too looked old for her age, something that came with the situation they were in, but she had grown into it. The pair was stuck in their old kitchen, with its blood-splattered, now-useless conveniences in it, with hundreds of walking corpses wandering towards them outside. “Besides, I’m not the one who decided for us to stay put instead of moving north where these things can’t get us.” (more…)

200 Miles and Miranda Penton couldn’t bring herself to look back at what she left. A little over a year ago she had the perfect husband and a baby on the way. She’d given up on being a soldier for the “quiet life” and in exchange, ended up with a stillbirth and a divorce so fresh the ink was still wet. The doctor said it wasn’t her fault. “Nothing you could have done,” he said. But no matter how she tried to convince herself, she couldn’t believe it. Something was wrong with her. Something killed their baby and their marriage just after that. The call from Entity 6, a biomedical research compound in upstate New York, gave her a place and a reason to run. It gave her an $80,000 a year paycheck and an escape from the suburban housewife persona she never wanted in the first place. No one would feel sorry for her where she was going and there was no reason for any of them to know. She was tired of pity. (more…)