Zombie Apocalypse Serial #1 Read online

  After the world ends, I’m going to have a harem, my own cult of beautiful women, who are going to live onsite with me and be outrageously devoted to my presence.

  They are going to worship me like a god, and take care of me for the rest of my life. They will do the gardening. They will do the laundry. They will do the cooking. One of them will fix things around the house when they’re broken. Another will tend to the orchards.

  And they will wait with baited breath for the opportunity to have sex with me. Every night when they go to bed, their greatest wish will be that I come to their room that night, that I grace their pussy with the holy presence of my wanker.

  That is the vision. Here is the plan that will bring that vision to life:

  1. Make a strain of Peebees that endows the host with perfect health and vitality.

  2. Make those Peebees only transmittable through sexual body fluids.

  3. Make my compound a safe haven for hot female survivors of the apocalypse. Watch as they go apeshit over my super semen, which not only makes them feel more alive every time I give them a dose, but also makes them immune to all disease, including zombie bites.

  The super health and vitality Peebees are already done. Ask the governor of Oregon.

  Making those Peebees transmittable only through sex has been trickier than expected, but I’ve got it figured out. Peebees are either contagious or they aren’t. Programming them to move only through sexual contact took some doing. Oddly enough, it was Bart’s marijuana garden where I found my answer. When Bart wasn’t paying attention, I infused his plants with nanobots, and worked to make them transmittable only through the reproductive process. Getting the Peebees to latch onto the pollen, and only the pollen, of the males in Bart’s garden was a two-year process of trial and error. Along the way, I filled Bart with more than ten generations of nanobots, one doobie at a time.

  The compound safe haven idea will come together as part of the larger plan. I’ve prepared a stack of invites. I’ve singled out fifty women, some that I know, some that I don’t, and in a few days I will be sending them packages in the mail, packages that will help me find them and guide them to my compound after the apocalypse.

  If this all sounds crazy to you, let me tell you something about Erica. That woman is so nuts for my…nuts…hell, she would do anything for me. Since we started fucking, I’ve instructed her to learn all about vegetable gardens and get one started, to teach herself how to do maintenance and repair on my solar array and my windmills, to teach herself how to shoot, how to clean a gun, and how to make her own ammo, and keep all of this a secret from her son.

  She’s been more than happy to do all of these things, and it’s because of my super spunk. Even now, as we speak, she’s out in the garden tending to the zucchini.

  That woman can’t get enough of me. When the world goes up in flames, she’ll be worshipping the ground I walk on.

  She and a dozen other beautiful ladies.

  Erica Corning

  There’s a lot you can do with a fresh zucchini. It’s such a versatile vegetable.

  Bart

  I slept all the way to Cruces. When I woke up, Cornbread was gone, and he took all my shit with him.

  Man, I must have been out cold. I didn’t notice a thing, but that kid took my wallet right out of my pants. He took the bag from under my feet. He even took the emergency baggie of weed that was in my socks.

  I have no pot left. I’m gonna be on a bus for two days and I’ve got no pot.

  This is not good.

  Timothy

  Ladies and gentlemen, the apocalypse is about to begin.

  The package I’ve sent Bart to get in locker 51 contains nothing but an empty canister. At one time, that canister was full of raw material for the latest batch of Peebees, but now it’s nothing. I left it in that locker so Bart would have something to do while he unknowingly brought about the end of the world.

  The final batch of Peebees, the one that’s ready for prime time, is divided into two teams, good guys and bad guys if you will. The bad guys are Team George, named lovingly after Mr. Romero, who not only brought us Night of the Living Dead and all its sequels, but also some outstanding zombie work in Creepshow, and an early Armageddon-by-virus movie called The Crazies.

  Team George is swimming about inside Bart right now, having been nurtured to their final form in one of his marijuana flowers. Those bots are the culmination of my life’s work, beautiful, carbon-based self-replicating nanobots that are as versatile as they are deadly. At ten o’clock tonight, right at the time Bart’s bus is scheduled to arrive in Houston, Team George will go airborne, floating out of Bart’s mouth and nose with every breath. Team George will remain airborne, off and on, for the next five days. When Bart steps into the bus depot in Houston he’ll begin spreading the plague, and he’ll continue spreading it as he rides back through South Texas.

  I hope you’re seeing the brilliance in this plan, because it truly is a work of art. The infection starts in Houston, a major international hub of global commerce. Team George will get a foothold at the bus depot, find its way into the skyscrapers for the oil and technology giants of the region, who in turn will take it on airplanes across the country and around the world.

  If I wanted to, I could leave Team George airborne for a month, and infect every person on the planet. But I don’t want the whole world to turn into zombies all at once, and that’s precisely what Team George would do if I left it airborne for too long. Not only will I shut down the airborne contagion after five days, but during those five days, Team George will take periodic breaks during which its hosts aren’t contagious at all. This way, when the apocalypse happens, you might find yourself a survivor even if you were exposed to the infected. Neighborhoods may have nine houses go down to the plague, and one of them might be left unscathed. Children might go zombie even though their parents do not (and then, of course, the children will eat their parents in a scene that is required of all good zombie stories).

  My computer models suggest five days, with a few dormant hours each day, as the ideal contamination schedule. On the first day, Bart will infect a hundred and fifty people, who in turn will infect four thousand more. On the second day, two hundred thousand get infected. On the third day, three and a half million. On the fourth, nineteen million more.

  It’s on the fifth day that the power of exponential growth really hits. On the fifth day, we hit two billion. If I left it for a sixth day, we’d get most of the world.

  So we’re stopping on Day 5 and letting the robots change.

  On Day 5, at midnight mountain standard time, Team George stops being airborne, and becomes transmittable only through the saliva of the host. At the same time, it quits being a benign houseguest, and instead becomes a malignant intruder.

  At 12:01, the host begins to feel a mild fever, kicking off twenty-four hours of flu-like symptoms for all the people unlucky enough to be infected. Since they all will be sick at once, the world will take notice. Doctors’ offices will be overwhelmed with patients. The mystery illness will be the top story on the news that night. People will wonder what the hell’s going on, and will probably blame it on Mexico.

  Once twenty-four hours have passed, the host enters a death cycle, with a high fever, vomiting, and eventual organ failure. Old and weak hosts will die a few minutes after this cycle begins. Younger, stronger hosts may last up to twelve hours.

  At the moment of the host’s death, Team George makes a beeline for the brain tissue. Once there, it goes into a self-replicating frenzy, lining the host’s own neural pathways with nanobots. This process takes about forty minutes, and when it is complete, the host wakes up as a zombie.

  A hungry zombie.

  The zombies who are about to overrun the earth will move faster than those in the Night of the Living Dead, but not as fast as those in 28 Days Later. They will be glad to eat your brains, as well as any other part of you. They have a taste for live, human flesh, but will mostly leave each o
ther alone. If allowed, they’ll eat you down to the bone. Of course, most people won’t allow that. Most people will escape their grasp after a single, infectious bite, and will join the horde of marauding zombies a day or two later.

  It is going to be a beautiful, elegant zombie apocalypse, spreading quickly enough that civilization cannot contain it, but not so quickly that there won’t be survivors. I want there to be survivors. I want the earth littered with little primitive enclaves, some of them civilized and pleasant, some of them as barbaric as anything Hollywood’s ever dreamed up.

  Me and my harem, of course, will be quite safe. Team George is just one half of the final generation of Peebees. The other half, Team Bruce, is equally amazing, maybe even more so, and Team Bruce will ensure that no one on the Frye Estate becomes a zombie.

  Named after Bruce Campbell, the actor who so famously became a raging badass when Demon Zombies from Hell came after him in the Evil Dead franchise, Team Bruce is Freddy to Team George’s Jason. It makes me into a veritable Mother Abigail in a world where Randall Flagg has run amuck. While the rest of you fools will be racing to escape the nanotech plague, me and my girls will shrug it off like a summer cold, Team Bruce living in each of us and keeping us alive.

  Team Bruce trumps Team George in the body. This I know because Erica and I have been exposed to both, and tests prove that only Bruce remains inside us. Once, in a nearly monumental accident, I ended up in the garage of my casita with the airlock to the zombie playground open. The seven dwarves should have run over and devoured me then and there.

  They didn’t. They looked my way with curiosity, not moving a muscle, giving me plenty of time to key in the code and close the door.

  Team Bruce repelled them. In a world overrun by the living dead, I will walk freely among them, a veritable Zombie Whisperer in a world gone mad.

  Team Bruce also gives me great energy, vitality, and health. Those of us who will live on my compound will have plenty of strength to till the garden and hunt the forest. We won’t have to worry about stocking antibiotics or any other medications: Bruce takes care of any bodily invader that gets out of hand, from bacteria to viruses to nanotech to cancer.

  Put simply, Team Bruce is the greatest invention in the history of the world, a medical miracle that could have ended all human sickness had I chosen to share it.

  But I didn’t. The only way you can get Bruce is by coming into my bed and making sweet love to me.

  Speaking of that, something unexpected and awesome happened in the development of Team Bruce. Somewhere, along the way, as the nanotech was growing and evolving in Bart’s marijuana garden, Team Bruce gave itself a brilliant evolutionary advantage. Because it can only spread to girls who want my body, Bruce has made my body into something the girls want.

  I noticed it on my first trip into town after infecting myself. Girls were smiling at me when I passed them in the streets. I had a waitress at my favorite Chinese restaurant sit down at my table and ask me what a cute guy like me was doing out alone on a Friday. It seemed that all the ladies wanted to say hi, to strike up a conversation, to share a friendly smile…

  On the surface, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Sure, my skin is better now, Team Bruce cleared up the acne and grease. My eyes are a nicer shade of white. My formerly balding head is fully grown again. I move about with a youthful energy, and project the confidence of a high school stud.

  But all of these shouldn’t be enough. I still inhabit the body of a puny nerd. I’m still a thirty-six-year-old recluse and oddball who isn’t that far removed from his days as Tiny Tim, the kid who got his ass kicked every day on the playground.

  Could it be pheromones of some kind? Is Team Bruce making me smell like a delicious sex machine?

  I asked Erica about it once and she said she didn’t know why she loved me so much. “I just do,” she said. “What girl wouldn’t want to be with a guy like you?”

  Indeed my sweet Erica. Indeed.

  I can’t wait for the apocalypse.

  Bart

  “How’s it going?” Timothy asked.

  “I’m at the depot now,” I said. “Just got the package from locker 51. The next bus to Houston leaves in two hours.”

  “Very good,” said Timothy. “So everything’s going okay, then.”

  “Yeah…umm….well…”

  “Well what, Bart? This is without question the most important assignment I’ve ever given you. If anything’s less than perfect, please let me know.”

  “It’s nothing that affects the job. Just some kid ripped me off on the bus. Picked my pocket while I was sleeping.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. So he took your wallet?”

  “And my duffle bag. Guess I’ll be wearing these same clothes the whole time. You’ll have to excuse me if I stink a bit when I get back.”

  Timothy laughed. “You are perfectly welcome to stink. Tell you what. When you get back, you and I can go up to Albuquerque and go clothes shopping. Sky’s the limit. I’ll buy you whatever you need. That’s how grateful I’ll be when you finish this assignment. I’m just glad you still have your phone and the keys to the lockers. Those are all you really need.”

  “Yep. Still got all that.”

  Still got all the pieces I need to do your dirty work. Just missing my pot.

  “Let me know if you have any trouble,” said Timothy. “Otherwise, hang in there. When this job is done, I don’t foresee you having to do anything for me for a long, long time.”

  “Sure thing, Boss,” I said. Calling him Boss was something I did to humor him, as if he was really in charge.

  “Call me when you’re in Houston and the package is in place,” Timothy said. “I can’t wait to hear that the job is done.”

  “All right. See you around.”

  “Goodbye, Bart.”

  Timothy hung up. I did not. I just sat there in the grody plastic chair at the Greyhound Station in El Paso, the phone plastered to my ear, the truth of things coming over me like that time I thought I’d found Jesus.

  Timothy was sleeping with my mother.

  Right before he’d said goodbye, I heard her in the background. It was in the second of silence between when I said “See you around” and he said “goodbye.”

  It was the sound of my mother whistling.

  God, I’ve been so stoned out of my brain I didn’t even notice, and it should have been so obvious. Mom wants me to talk nice about Timothy when he’s not there. She spends all day making little vegetable gardens in his yard. She carries bushels of squash and peppers and zucchini into his house, and when she comes out, she’s whistling.

  Fucking Tiny Tim. Feeding me pot that is so crazy good I don’t even notice that he’s fucking my own mother!

  I didn’t get on the bus to Houston. Instead, I walked outside and chose a car. It had been a long time since I’d done a hotwire, but I could still do it. Hell, this was the first time in years that I wasn’t high—my mind was sharp as a nail. I picked a Camry whose driver had left the doors unlocked. Found a Swiss Army Knife in the glove box and got to work on the steering column.

  A few minutes later, I was on the highway, headed back to the Frye Estate.

  Timothy

  Erica and I have done everything imaginable and then some. We’ve done it in the bed in at least twenty different positions. We’ve done it in the shower, on the kitchen counter, in the garden, in the woods, in the car, in the lake...

  I built a sex room in the east wing of the mansion, and we’ve spent a lot of time in there. There’s a swing, a water bed, a hot tub, a torture rack, and a closet full of toys, and we’ve done it all. Last month I rented the apartment where she and Bart lived when I was in middle school, and we went into Bart’s old bedroom and did it in there.

  That was especially awesome.

  On this afternoon, as I returned from my beer run, I was looking forward to a playful day in the woods. Erica and I would take our clothes off and go for a little nature walk, our bodies
as natural as the woods all around. When the moment struck, we’d lie down on the forest floor and fuck. Then we’d get up and walk some more.

  Just thinking about it put a smile on my face and a lump in my pants. So you can imagine how pissed I was to come home and see a black armored truck parked outside my front gate. The truck, a beast of a machine that probably was fully bulletproof, was unmarked, at least on the portion I could see. It was parked lengthwise across the whole of my front gate. As I approached, two middle aged men in black suits stepped out of the car.

  “What the fuck is this?” I said.

  But I knew full well what the fuck it was. This was a bust. Somewhere along the line, maybe in my sourcing of nanotubes, or my use of a European arms dealer to get some of my more exotic equipment, I hadn’t properly covered my tracks, and now the feds were here to see me.

  I pulled my car to a stop a few feet from theirs and rolled down my window.

  “Can I help you gentlemen?” I said.

  “Timothy Frye?” asked one of them. He was a tall, slim man, with white hair that was combed forward on his head in a balding man’s version of a faux hawk.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  He flipped open a billfold to show me his badge.

  It wasn’t FBI, or CIA, or even ATF.

  “We’re from the IRS, Dr. Frye. I’m Agent Stamps. This is Agent Martin. We’d like to ask you a few questions. May we come inside?”

  I suppressed a giggle. The IRS? Of all the cockamamie things that could happen in an evening…I mean, on this compound I had a stockpile of illegal weapons. I had research equipment that UN Biological Weapons Inspectors were trained to seek out and destroy. I had motherfucking zombies, for Christ’s sake! And the government sent two agents from the IRS?

  How wonderfully, outrageously absurd this moment was. All this time I had been worried about the military, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security—you know, the big boys. I had prepped myself and my compound for visits from armed SWAT teams who knew full well that the fate of the entire world was at stake.