Zombie Apocalypse Serial #1 Read online

  But then the next night the same thing happened again.

  “Alarm clock headaches.” That’s one of their nicknames. “Suicide headaches” is another. They are an unexplained medical phenomenon that afflicts less than 1% of the population, mostly men over the age of twenty.

  Cluster headaches is their most common name, and fuck you if you think you’ve got them. You don’t. Unless you’ve seriously thought about sticking a gun in your mouth to end your headache pain, unless you definitely would have killed yourself to end a headache but couldn’t bring yourself off the floor for long enough to do it, unless your life has been completely trashed by your headaches, you don’t have them. You might suffer from migraines, or maybe from tension headaches, or maybe you ate too much sugar, I don’t know. If you’re living a normal life, don’t talk to me about your fucking head.

  Not that I ever had a normal life, but I sure as hell wasn’t the same person before the headaches as I am now. Before the headaches, me and my buddies had a good thing going. I stole cars from movie theaters and hospital parking lots, my friend Johnny drove them to a guy on the south end of town, he gave us money, and we had a good time. I was saving up to go to college. After I got my Associate’s Degree at the community college, I was gonna go to the Police Academy. From there I was going to become a detective, and maybe work my way up to the FBI or CIA or something. I would have been good at that shit because I know how a criminal thinks. I was going somewhere and everybody knew it.

  Now I have to smoke. Every morning when I wake up, then before every meal. It’s the only thing I’ve found that deadens the pain in my head. Note that I said deadens. Not kills. When I’m in the middle of a cluster (a cluster is a timespan in which you can count on your head hurting every day at about the same time on the clock), the pot can’t eliminate the pain, but it can keep me from screaming. When I’m out of a cluster, the pot makes me forget that the pain is coming back some day, waiting on the horizon to ruin my life some more.

  And the pot is good. I’m thirty-five now. Been growing my own for more than a decade. I’ve become damned skilled at it if I do say so myself.

  I grow the pot from seed. Got my early batches of seed from Amsterdam (doesn’t everyone?) but now even my seeds are home grown. This requires me to keep a couple unsmokable males around in the garden (Phillip and Charles), but it’s worth it. No one makes better pot than me. No one. That’s my security blanket. Some day, when my benefactor's well runs dry, I’ll need to find another source of income. When that day arrives, the world will come to know my pot, and I’ll get rich selling it.

  But until then, it’s all for me. Timothy demands that it be that way. I can grow it. I can smoke it. I can name it and nurture it and love it into the most beautiful weed on the planet. But I can’t sell it. If I ever try, my mother and I are back on the streets.

  Have I told you that I work for Timothy Frye and live on his property? Sometimes I forget to mention that. It’s a really weird arrangement we have, kind of unique in the history of the world, I’d guess. My mother and I are permanent residents in a three-bedroom guest house on the Frye estate. Timothy took us in when we were homeless transients living in downtown Albuquerque. He’s let us stay ever since.

  It’s a pretty good deal, actually. Timothy leaves us alone, he doesn’t charge us any rent, he’s helped us get clean (and yes, I’m clean; pot doesn’t count). Timothy even lends us a car when we want to go somewhere. In exchange, we have to abide by three rules, and three rules only.

  1. Timothy gets to use my identity for all the really weird shit he buys from shady characters all over the world, and, if necessary, I go and meet with his oddball business partners for drop-offs and pickups.

  2. Under no circumstances may we ever share or sell the pot we grow here.

  3. We address him as Timothy at all times, never shortening his name to Tim, and never, ever resurrecting the nickname we all called him in grade school: Tiny Tim.

  To earn my keep, I spend about thirty minutes a month being Timothy’s alter-ego. He brings me papers and I sign them. Sometimes he sends me to government offices and I have to get my photo taken. Every once in a while, I have to go meet somebody and drive away with a metal suitcase or a leather bag or some other weirdness.

  Timothy sold his company a long time ago for a gazillion dollars. Then he ducked out of the public eye and built this compound in the middle of the forest. I have no doubt that he is up to some crazy, illegal shit and that’s what he needs me for. Sometimes I look inside the suitcases people give me. It’s always the same stuff. Metal canisters protected in layers of foam—no clue what those canisters contain. I think Timothy has gone off the deep end and is up to no good, but I don’t care, so long as I’ve got my pot. I was worse than dead before Timothy took me in. Whatever he’s doing is his own business if you ask me.

  I guess in that way, I feel a loyalty to the guy. It’s funny how it ended up like this. I’ve known Timothy since elementary school, but it wasn’t like I was his friend, or even like I was nice to him. To be honest, I was pretty darn awful to the guy. I remember this game we used to play at recess where me and Johnny would take turns punching him until he puked. We thought it was so damned funny. We probably could have killed the poor kid.

  And then there was that time that Johnny dropped the sickest looking turd in the toilet before gym class and I used it to give Timothy the world’s nastiest chocolate swirly.

  My mom says Timothy has forgiven me, and I should learn a lesson from it.

  “He’s a good man, Bart,” she says. “A really special human being.”

  I don’t have the heart to tell her that he’s still the nerd and I’m still the bully. In high school Tiny Tim used to give me cash in the morning. No questions asked, he’d just hand me his wallet and I’d take what was inside. We had an understanding that this was his payment to me for his safety. I was like one of those boss men in the mob movies, always wetting my beak.

  It’s no different now. What’s that shit that happens to hostages? Stockholm Syndrome. That’s what’s up with Timothy. He got so used to being my bitch that he doesn’t know how to live any other way. I think when he found me living on the streets, he was glad for the chance to renew our relationship, just in a more grown-up fashion. He knows I’m not gonna beat him up now. Even if I tried, I don’t know if I could. The pot’s made me fat and slow.

  But he’s still the kid giving me his money every morning. Even as he pretends to be in charge, he’s still the nerd who knows his place in life is to take it up the ass.

  Timothy

  The top 5 zombie movies of all time:

  5. Night of the Living Dead – The classic. It wasn’t the first time zombies appeared in the movies, but it was the first time a gang of them came after the living with unrelenting desire to drag them to the world of the dead. Sure, it isn’t as terrifying now as it must have been when it came out, but it’s so damned important to the genre it has to be on the list.

  4. 28 Days Later – If the second half of the movie were as good as the first half, this might be at the top of the list, because, damn…the first half of this film is just killer. Starts with an homage to The Walking Dead graphic novels, with a guy waking from a coma to find the world overrun with zombies, then the movie just kicks ass for forty minutes of solid horror. The second half of the movie sucks, though. When they arrive at the military base, you can turn it off.

  3. Dawn of the Dead – The original from George Romero is what I’m putting here, though the 2004 remake was pretty cool too. This one was nice because it took Romero’s original zombie concept and put it on a larger scale, introducing the world to the notion of a zombie apocalypse.

  2. Braindead (aka Dead Alive) – Absurd, ridiculous amounts of gore from a dude who knows how to make a scary movie. I turn this movie on at least once a year just to enjoy the visions of a thoroughly fucked up mind.

  1. Evil Dead – Isn’t it interesting that the top two movies on my list wer
e the low budget beginnings of directors who went on to make some of the biggest hits in Hollywood? Evil Dead tops my list because the zombies are just so damned scary. More than simple corpses who want to eat your brains, these zombies are possessed by angry demons with a killer sense of humor. Two great sequels too.

  Don't go emailing me that 28 Days Later and Evil Dead don't count because the zombies aren't the traditional reanimated corpses. I don't have time for such silliness. In the modern era, a zombie is any member of a marauding army of formerly human cannibalistic monsters. Rage-infected humans in 28 Days Later, "Phoners" in Stephen King's Cell, pseudo-vampires in The Passage by Justin Cronin, and traditional up-from-the-ground zombies ala George Romero—all of these take us to the same place. All of these count.

  I incorporated Project Blue in 1998, when Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was like a Candarian Demon feasting on the soul of American business. Everyone wanted to be proactive about beginning with the end in mind so they could properly do their quadrant 2 activities and hopefully find some synergy. When I approached the investment bankers about getting some serious cash, you know what they cared about the most? It wasn’t my technology. It wasn’t my patents. It wasn’t my business plan. No, what they wanted was a mission statement. Seriously. I had developed technology more revolutionary than the light bulb and they wanted a sentence describing how I felt about my customers.

  Here’s what we came up with: Project Blue serves the biotech industry with new technologies delivered with top notch customer service.

  Jesus Christ.

  Here’s the mission statement I wrote for myself after I sold the company for a billion dollars so I could pursue my own interests: Timothy Frye creates biotech solutions that will bring about a zombie apocalypse that leaves civilization in ruins and makes him the most sexually attractive man on earth.

  Not bad, huh?

  The idea of bringing about the apocalypse had been with me since that first reading of The Stand in seventh grade. Zombies got added to the mix later. Nanotech was the last piece of the plan to fall into place when I came to learn how thoroughly unpredictable an organic virus can be. I can program a tiny robot to do exactly what I want it to do. A virus, not so much. Even a virus created in the lab will get out in the world and mutate, and by the fourth or fifth host, you may or may not know what you’re dealing with anymore.

  Nanotech is different. One tiny self-replicating robot; one immutable non-evolving program. With nanotech, I can create something that behaves like a virus as far as the human body is concerned, but has none of the nasty organic side effects. My little Peebees can enter the body through saliva, or blood, or semen, or even the respiratory system, and then start replicating inside. They can attach to blood cells, to muscles, to bones…even to the brain.

  They can make the host strong, healthy, and smart, or they can enslave it and force it to act against its will.

  Whether the host is alive or dead doesn’t really matter.

  When I was in college, Star Trek made a series of dumb choices, especially on Voyager, that ruined everything that was cool about the Borg. The writers on Voyager took formerly indestructible alien nano-zombies and morphed them into just another bad guy in the extended ST universe. The Klingons, the Romulans, the Humans, the Borg, yada yada yada…

  Too bad, because in its original incarnation, the Borg was as terrifying as any creation of Sam Raimi or Stephen King. A race of creatures hellbent on assimilation of everyone and everything around them, enslaved by their own technology, thinking they are “perfect” and bringing you into the Collective for your own good. Good God that’s a wonderfully frightening vision. It’s one that kept me going all these years. Whenever the task before me seemed too daunting, when the personal mission statement seemed unachievable, I just thought about how wicked cool the original vision of the Borg was, and then I pushed ahead.

  I’m almost there. The mission is almost complete.

  In the first year after I sold Project Blue, I did three things:

  1. Bought a huge chunk of land in Southwest New Mexico. I waved my money in front of the local landowners and quickly rounded up two farms, a ranch, and everything in between, giving me an uninterrupted 14-mile plot surrounded on three sides by National Forest.

  2. Built a state of the art nanotech research lab on my land. “The Lab in the Middle of Nowhere” is what Harpers called it in an article that argued for the government to monitor what I was up to. The author of that article was convinced I had built this property to do “highly illegal and dangerous experiments far from the watchful eye of government or anyone else.” Funny how spot-on that guy was.

  3. Built the ultimate zombie apocalypse survival space on the rest of my property. I started with a tall iron gate running the entire length of the perimeter. Inside the gate I have my own twelve-bedroom mansion, three guest houses, an orchard, a lake that I’ve stocked with trout, bass, and catfish, four one-acre gardens, a fully stocked armory, three freshwater windmills, and the second largest solar array in New Mexico.

  Not bad for a first year on the job.

  The second year was even better. The second year was when I found my old schoolmate, Bart.

  Bart

  So I’m guessing you think I’m a no-good lazy-ass pothead who is perfectly content to use his medical condition as an excuse to let his life slip away. Do you? Before you answer, here’s something you might wanna know.

  My mom was fifteen years old when she had me.

  How you like that, asshole? Fifteen!

  My grandpa let me and my mom stay with him until I was three. I don’t remember anything from that time, but after my grandpa died, my mom sat me down and told me all I needed to know.

  “He was a horrible man, Bart,” she said. “He beat me like a dog. He beat you too sometimes. Don’t ever be sad that you didn’t know him. He was a piece of shit.”

  So there you have it. Still wanna judge me? Do you think you could have done any better? Teen mom, abusive grandpa, cluster headaches, and here I am, living the good life thanks to a connection I made as a kid. I think I did alright. Hell, my mom is doing great too and it’s thanks to me!

  I look out for my mom. She might not have been much, but she did her best with what she had, and I’m not a judgmental bastard like you.

  When I was twelve, my mom started dating this guy named Rex. I knew he was bad news right away (who the fuck names their kid Rex?) but my mom couldn’t shake him. She was so desperate for a man’s attention that she was willing to fuck a prick named Rex, and she thought she was happy about it. How do I know she felt happy? She would whistle. Like some god-damned idiot, she would walk around our apartment and whistle off-key versions of whatever shit was on the soft rock station. Imagine that, a grown woman prancing about whistling Oh Sherry or Never Gonna Give You Up. It was just embarrassing.

  And completely unlike her. In all my years of life until then, I had never once known my mother to whistle. When I confronted her about it, she acted like she had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Was I whistling?” she said. “Oh, I guess I was. If it’s bothering you, I’ll stop.”

  “It’s bothering me,” I said.

  “I won’t do it anymore. Sorry Bart.”

  The next day she was whistling again.

  That weekend Rex came over with a bucket of KFC and a six pack of beer. I greeted him at the front door with a punch to the gut. Totally caught him off guard, and when he was crouched over in pain, I grabbed one of the beers he’d dropped on the floor and poured it on his head. To get away from the beer, Rex jumped back and hit his head on the wall. Then I stomped his foot.

  Then Rex called me a little shit and punched me in the face.

  We never saw him again.

  My mom didn’t try to date anyone else until after I graduated high school and moved out, and then, when she did, the bloke she found was a meth head who got her addicted and blew up her whole life. I should have been th
ere to protect her, but this was around the same time that my headaches started. Independent of one another, my mother and I both ended up homeless. I found her in a crackhouse downtown, tight-skinned and pale, like some motherfucking zombie.

  How’s that judging thing going for you now, assturd? Yes, I may not be living a normal life, but at least I’m happy. My mom is too. She got all cleaned up after we moved to Timothy’s place. She doesn’t even smoke pot with me, at least not firsthand. She spends her days gardening and taking care of things around the property. And she even goes out at night, driving the car into Magdalena or Socorro or someplace.

  The other day I heard her outside whistling. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that sound.

  Don’t worry. Whatever bloke my mom has found, this time I’m not going to mess it up like I did with Rex. I’m a grown man now. I know it’s none of my business who my mother is seeing. I trust her. And I’m not seeing any signs that she’s back on smack.

  She hasn’t told me anything, of course. Why would she? The last time she tried to share her man with me I ruined everything.

  I just hope that whoever it is deserves a sweet woman like her, because if anyone ever hurts my mother again, I’ll rip his nuts off.

  Timothy

  I started using homeless junkies for my tests because I always liked that movie with Gene Hackman and Hugh Grant—you know, the one where you’re supposed to be horrified that they’re killing homeless people in the name of progress. To me, this is a no brainer. Stupid people are expendable, and smart people should be allowed to experiment on them, preferably before they reproduce.