Chapter One

A typical zombie story is pretty predictable. An average Joe or Jane is mucking around on a normal day and zombies come out of nowhere to turn the world to shit. They fight to survive, try to save friends or family members, and seek out a method of long-term survival while they wait for the walking dead to desiccate. Sometimes they figure out a cure. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they end up fighting not only zombies, but each other. It's a crapshoot.

My story is a little different. Oh, sure, it started the same way. November 3rd, 2038. It was a hot winter like most in the past decade. I was an eighteen-year-old high school student with a chip on my shoulder, attending military school because I was a little shit who didn't respect my parents. To be fair, they didn't respect me, either. My dad didn't understand why I couldn't love the woman he abruptly brought into our lives and she convinced him to get rid of me for my own good. It's cliché when I look back on it—one of those scenarios I didn't think could happen outside of a family film until it actually happened.

At first, people thought the zombie virus was a hoax, maybe leftover Halloween shenanigans. Fake news for the win. But the virus spread fast and unedited video footage spread even faster. By the time the first of the dead reached the wilderness boot camp where I was living, every student had been deputized, organized, and armed under the command of the ex-military staff. We held our own for a while and the fences held long enough for us to think we might actually pull off the whole business of surviving. Of course, our chances severely diminished the minute some bureaucratic idiot decided our camp would make a perfect location for funneling survivors.

We lasted four days after the initial group arrived, making it a total of nine days since the first netcaster used the word 'zombie' on-air without repercussion. That's where things went off-script for me because I didn't survive. Like everyone else, I was eventually tagged by a biter and infected. I'd seen plenty of netcasts by then. I knew it took less than an hour for the infected to die and rise again. I'll admit I was very tempted to end it all before I could become another shuffling threat to the people around me. Too bad for them, I never really liked giving up without a fight or, at the very least, getting in a sucker punch or two.

Here's where I get into the science portion of the story. Every zombie tale has one, usually as a way to say, "These zombies are unique!" They rarely are. It's either a mutant variation of the latest hot-button illness, a vampire fantasy masquerading as zombies, or a heaven-and-hell drama with either Lucifer, aliens, or the government posing as the big bad behind it all. It's all very predictable when it comes to zombies in pulp fiction.

I got the illness version, which I'm certain is the only reason I'm still around to tell the tale. Like with any virus, there are three ways to survive. One: you avoid contracting it. I was fucked the moment one of them took a chunk out of my ear—yes, my ear. I'm lucky it didn't get ripped off completely in the attack.

The second way to survive is to be one of the lucky bastards who were naturally immune. When those guys were bitten or scratched or traded DNA with a zombie, nothing happened. Of course, they were still dead as anyone else if they were wounded too badly or they picked up a nasty—albeit relatively normal—infection, but they didn't have to worry about turning into an undead.

I wasn't that lucky.

I survived via the third method—natural selection. It's like a lottery where gamblers can rig the odds if they use the right medicine. It takes a combination of the virus mutating from repeated transmission over a short period of time and having an immune system capable of adapting to the version one receives. I'm guessing the guy who bit off the tip of my ear was the umpteenth person down the line to transmit the plague. By then, it'd mutated enough to not kill its host, allowing it and me to survive.

Surviving through natural selection changes a person. If I fought off something like the flu, the change would have been unnoticeable. My immune system would have simply grown a little smarter. No big deal. Right? This was the zombie apocalypse. It was a big deal, which made the changes big, too.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So there I was in the middle of a paramilitary boot camp for unruly boys—sorry, military school. Boot camps meant for shock therapy had been made illegal long ago. I'd been bitten, but I managed to get away from my attacker without being its full course meal. Guys I'd known for most of a year were getting chomped on left and right and I'm fucking pissed because I already knew I was a dead man walking (no pun intended).

The only reason I survived the initial attack was that the zombie turned on the other guy in my foxhole and had him for brunch instead of me. That was something most zombie movies got wrong. Zombies were ravenous, but they weren't wasteful. They wouldn't stop eating and attack if they noticed another person while they were in the middle of chomping down. That would be like asking a coyote to ignore a freshly hunted buck in favor of chasing down the others that got away. They also wouldn't chomp down on someone who fought back when there was easier prey in reach.

When the zombie appeared, my foxhole buddy had become a frozen rabbit compared to me. His loss became my gain, freeing me to scramble further away from the foxhole and pick up the first weapon I saw. I'd learned fast our rifles made shitty clubs once we ran out of bullets—too much plastic. They were cheap crap meant to be used for target practice, not real combat. Mine had broken into pieces against the skull of the zombie who attacked me and the metal bent out of shape without killing it.

What I did find was a flagstone from the stupid-ass retaining wall we'd been building as one of our instructor's sadistic methods of 'building character' prior to the outbreak. I suppose it's a good thing none of us had known what we'd been doing when mixing the mortar because it popped off without a problem and suddenly I had a weapon.

It was a very good weapon. I held it like an open book and brought it down on the zombie's head. Its skull cracked. The stone didn't. Unfortunately, it was already too late for my foxhole buddy. His neck was gone along with half his face. His open eyes—I'll never forget that blank stare.

Knowing I was going to die just like him sapped every trace of fear from my body. And once the fear was gone, I realized how foolish I'd been to panic. Zombies were like rabid animals. Some were fast and capable of running, but they had no focus. They attacked blindly, charging toward prey with single-minded determination. Others were shufflers too weak to run and more than happy to pick up the scraps the front-runners left behind. The rest of the zombies were the troublesome ones—the apes.

When a shuffler hit an obstacle, they'd bounce off like an automated vacuum cleaner and change direction. Runners kept going, attempting to claw through obstacles prey put in their paths. Apes were different. They could jump, climb, and seek alternate routes. Make no mistake, they were still rabid feeders searching for fresh prey, but they retained just enough brainpower to put them in the same league as the apes we'd evolved from. One of the instructors had theorized the difference between them could be related to their sight—shufflers were blind, runners could see shadows, and apes could differentiate shapes. No one had found a reason to contradict him. Of course, we weren't planning our tactics around his theory, either.

I didn't see any apes in the current patch of the undead. The zombies in front of me were mostly shufflers with just enough runners to make the horde dangerous. Once the runners were taken out of the equation, a small group with weapons could pick off the rest.

So that's what I did. I strolled toward the main grounds, bashing in the heads of any shufflers in my path, and aimed for the distant screams of living humans. I found a group of four runners beating at the doors of the main office. The building stood on a raised foundation, putting the windows too high off the ground for the undead to reach. From the shouting I heard within, I assumed the people inside were bracing the door against the pummeling.

To be clear, I wasn't intending to save anyone when I bashed my rock against the first zombie runner's head. My thoughts were too mixed up for anything resembling self-sacrifice or martyrdom. I just wanted to kill some of the fuckers who'd killed me.

The first runner dropped and the other three turned toward me. I should have been lunch at that point, but one of the zombies tripped on the stairs and knocked down the other two. I took advantage of the moment, smashing the skull of the topmost zombie in the zombie pile. The two zombies trapped below the dispatched undead grabbed at my ankles and tried to pull themselves free, but my impression of a Neanderthal was perfect. Two more quick hits and they stopped moving.

I went back and hit them all again to make sure they weren't merely stunned, then I straightened up and glanced toward the building's closest window. Two familiar faces peered back—Sergeant Jacobs, one of the lesser asshole instructors, and Private Coombs, my platoon's kiss-ass.

I used my sleeve to wipe the blood spray from my face, then I flipped my middle finger at them. Don't ask me why. Maybe, somewhere in the back of my muddled thoughts, I wanted to call them out for running and hiding instead of fighting. Or maybe it was because they were literally looking down on me thanks to the window's height off the ground. I didn't know. I didn't really care.

Ten minutes had already passed since I'd been bitten. I had fifty more I could still use.