RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse
Read RIZEN: Tales of the Zombie Apocalypse Online
Authors: Kirk Anderson
RIZEN
Tales of the
Zombie Apocalypse
by Kirk Anderson
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for purchasing
Rizen
, a collection
of four short stories that take place in the same universe, where a plague has
caused the dead to rise and stalk the living. The stories are intentionally
presented in reverse chronological order, of course you may feel free to read
them in whatever order pleases you the most. Each work is a stand-alone story.
The Chosen
Ten years after the zombie apocalypse, Dan and his family try to stake out a
new life for themselves in rural Wyoming. When he encounters a mysterious
group of survivors who call themselves The Chosen, he is unsure whether he can
trust them.
The White Fist
Five
years after the first of the infected reach Texas, pockets of survivors are
reminded that the living can be far more dangerous than the dead.
Road Trip at the End of the World
A
middle aged couple, cut off from civilization for months, decides to strike out
into the ruined world and make for the West Coast to see if they can reconnect
with their past.
Flight 124
Air
Thailand Flight 124 threatens to bring a gruesome and unwelcome passenger to
Los Angeles International Airport.
There were those that now lived life a lot like the old days. They’d managed
to reclaim a few cities, and over the years, they had clawed back a few choice
vices. In one city, I’ve heard stories of movie theaters, and even radio and
television broadcasts resuming. Last I made contact with other survivors, I
heard of a place where the landline telephones were working again. Imagine
that!
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still have a spot in
my heart for a few of those long lost amenities, but to be completely honest,
I’d be lying if I said I wanted any of them back.
My name is Dan. I’m a survivor of a global epidemic
that saw to the destruction of 19 out of every 20 people. Things got bad,
quick. Within a week of the first news reports of what they called Super
Rabies, the entire communications grid was crippled. No one really understood
where it came from or how it spread so fast, but in the end, those things
didn’t really matter.
What DID matter was being able to run faster than
the infected.
I was lucky enough to live in a suburb well outside
the city. After the phones and TV went down, I remained hidden in my basement,
listening to the radio for updates. I heard reports of the infected being cut
in half, and yet still pulling themselves forward with their arms, trying to
attack people.
During one evening, a doctor was being interviewed
that claimed to have one of the infected strapped to gurney, and that when they
injected enough anesthetic into it to kill a dozen African elephants, the
infected person still showed no signs of even slightest slowing.
Another doctor was interviewed on a different
station and he called the previous doctor a quack for even suggesting that
these infected people could be dead and yet up and moving around. There never
was a straight answer given as to what these things were on any of the public broadcasts
I saw, but it didn’t matter, for soon enough, even the radio went dead. It
only took a few more days of staring at my dwindling food supply for me to
realize that I could no longer afford to wait for the cavalry.
I hit the road, and right off the bat, I did things
that I never in a million years would have thought I was even capable of
doing. I killed a lot of infected. That’s a given. I also had to kill a few men.
Dickens said, “No man knows till the time comes,
what depths are within him.”
I discovered those depths first hand. The first man
I killed went by the name, The J-Man. He rode a Harley, and with him, a young
woman with long blonde hair, and a very haunted look in her tearful eyes. I
waved them down, trying to trade some batteries for food, but soon, The J-Man
had pulled a knife on me.
The woman took off into a field, and the man then
spun around, hopped on his bike, and rode after her screaming violent threats
and vicious obscenities at her.
I now knew why her eyes had looked so lost and
terrified, and in that moment, something in me snapped. Before I even knew
what I was doing, I was in my truck, plowing through the same field at
incredible speeds.
I saw the man glance over his shoulder, just as my
truck plowed into the back of his motorcycle, sending him tumbling through the
air.
I slammed to a stop, jumped from my truck, and found
the biker crawling through the dirt, coughing up copious amounts of blood. I
was still afraid for my life, and wondering how I would defend myself when he
got back up, but he never did. He just sort of curled up and died like an old
dog.
I asked the woman her name. She said it was Laura.
Though she still seemed terrified, I finally convinced her that I wasn’t a
threat. I offered to give her a ride. Told her I was trying to find a military
protection zone, and that she could come with if she wanted. She did.
Didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just saved the
life of the woman I would spend the next 10 years of my life with. She became
not only my wife, but also the mother to our three young children, an 8 year
old named Sam, a 4 year old named Brice, and my little 6 month old baby girl
Jessica.
For the first year, we would spend most of the time
on the road, but after Laura became pregnant, we decided to stop seeking
rescue, and instead find protected shelter where we could grow our own food, be
safe from the infected, and most importantly, to find our happiness and our
purpose in life again.
We eventually found our haven in Wyoming.
It was a small ranch out in the middle of nowhere.
Even back then, there were only a few infected that
seemed to wander onto the property, as the old wood beam fencing kept most out.
I eventually went out and reinforced the fence so that the walkers couldn’t
even see us, let alone climb the fence.
We planted our first crops, and before the harvest,
Laura gave birth to our first son, Sam. I was pretty terrified at the thought
of delivering a child, as I had no previous medical training, but after making
a trip to the library in the next town over, I found plenty of books on the
subject, and plenty of others as well on a whole score of topics, from
first-aid, to weatherproofing, to water conservation, and even some classic
novels by Dickens, Hemmingway, and Tolstoy that I snuck back to the ranch for
my private time.
In what felt like no time at all, we had our second
son, Brice, and just months after that, Laura was giving birth to our little
baby girl, Jessica. SHE was the reason I began to seek civilization again. I
knew that one day these kids would grow up, and they couldn’t just live out
their lives on this ranch. They would need to find others, have houses of
their own, and one day, kids of their own as well.
I began to make week-long outings, scouting around
the area and all major cities within a 300 mile radius. After only one month,
I found a massive group of scavengers moving through an old abandoned
neighborhood. They all seemed as normal and friendly as you could want, so I
finally introduced myself to them.
They came from an honest to God city. It was a
smaller, walled off section of Evanston, Wyoming. They named it New Evanston.
They all wore black arm bands with a white hand painted on them. This
represented the hand of God, they said, which they all believed was the reason
they had been spared and their new city spared the wrath of the plague. They
referred to themselves as The Chosen, short for the chosen few, although over
the last decade their numbers had soared into the thousands.
Though they could not find another significant city
in the surrounding area, they had located other small towns and communities where
hearty bands had gathered together and managed to survive against the odds.
The Chosen even told me about how they had encountered a group of ex-military
that had secured a Navy base on the West Coast, and how they were supposedly
sending out helicopter search parties that were trying to locate any remaining
military units across the country. They talked about wild stories of a new
Democratic Republic that had risen from the ashes in the desert a thousand
miles to the south of us and HAM radio broadcasts from all over the globe. The
plague had been completely swept from the island of Hawaii, they said.
My new friends tried to convince me to bring the
family along and to join them in New Evanston, and I said I would consider it,
but something still felt a bit off about giving up this new life of
self-sufficiency. It was impossible to imagine a return to a world of
electricity, televisions, cd players, and all of the other things that we’d not
only come to terms with giving up, but after being so far removed from our
daily lives, seemed more of a distraction from our family interactions than a
convenience.
They gave me a map with all the roads they had
cleared for others to reach the city, and we parted ways.
When I arrived back home to my family, they were
amazed at the news. Now we knew that civilization not only survived, but there
were THOUSANDS of people out there, working, building, and creating the world
of tomorrow. It really changed our entire outlook on the future.
A few months had passed, and one day while checking
the fences, I found an infected female clawing at the boards. This was nothing
new, as they still showed up on our land on occasion, though over the last
year, we’d seen less than a dozen. What made THIS infected different than the
others, was the rate of decay. At this point, what few infected we found were
practically mummified, or so deteriorated that they could barely walk, or
sometimes even crawl. This female, however, had died very recently. I noticed
that she wore one of the armbands of The Chosen. I figured that she must have
gotten bitten on one of New Evanston’s scavenging missions. It was
unfortunate, but even after most of the dead had crumbled apart, the infection
still lingered out there, and had to be watched for at all times.
I put her down, and this time, instead of just
burning her as I’d done to hundreds of the things over the years, I decided to
bury her. She was from a different generation, and to have survived as long as
she had, I felt she deserved better than the fire.
A few more weeks went by, and I found another of The
Chosen, this man torn to shreds, but rotting flesh, not just tanned hide on
animated bones like the rest. I buried him next to the woman. We assumed he
must have been from the same scavenging party. Perhaps they’d gotten swarmed.
Even in this day and age when most of the infected are barely able to walk,
there are still those that can move enough, that in a group, they could pose a
serious threat.
I awoke one morning to a beautiful sunrise gleaming
through the windows. I stepped out onto the porch and inhaled deeply, hoping
to get a whiff of that sweet morning dew on all of those yellow and purple
wildflowers that seemed to have taken back the earth. I immediately threw my
hand over my nose and coughed and sputtered. The air was rancid. The smell
was so familiar, yet certainly no longer possible. It smelled of death en
masse.
I ran barefoot to the fence, and before I even got
to it, I saw the boards of the fence rattling in their frame. I began to step back,
when one of the sections suddenly splintered apart, and dozens of rotting
corpses came rushing in.
I sprinted for the house, and as I came careening
through the door, I screamed to my family to grab the guns. They were all
rushing to the door, and when Laura saw what was coming through the window, she
began to scream.
There had to be 40 or 50 of the things, half
running, half stumbling towards the house, and there were dozens more still
working their way through the break in the fence. I slammed the door shut, and
moved the family to the back door.
We rushed out into the foul air. Little Brice and
Jessica were in Laura’s arms, screaming, as they both sensed our terror. Sam
was trailing quickly right behind her. I had a pistol in each hand, and a
rifle slung over my shoulder, and kept up the rear, guns blazing, as we ran
like mad. We headed for the south part of the fence, but just as we got there,
the fence began to buckle forward, and planks began to splinter apart.
When the wooden walls came smashing down, one
knocked my wife to the ground, and Brice and Jessica tumbled screaming from her
arms into the dirt. I dropped my guns to the ground, and scooped the kids into
my arms, as I turned I saw the things clawing their way across the downed fence
towards Laura who was half trapped under their crushing weight.
I began to run towards her, but she screamed for me
to save the kids. My eyes were blurring with tears as I turned and began to
run, yelling for Sam to follow. I heard Laura shout how much she loved us, and
as I made it a few dozen feet towards the western wall, I heard Laura scream
Sam’s name. I turned just as I heard the gunfire. Sam was rushing towards his
mother, blasting the things that were attacking and biting his mother. My
stomach lurched and my feet began to tangle as my brain couldn’t decide which
way to run.
I was about to take off for my boy, when the initial
horde who’d broken through the east wall cut me off from him. I turned back
towards the west wall, and ran like mad, listening to the gunshots ringing
through the air again and again.
When the gunshots stopped, and all I could hear were
the screams of Laura and my son, I began to scream even louder, just trying to
drown it all out.
I reached the fence and could see it was clear on
the other side. With Brice sobbing and clinging tightly around my neck, and
Jessica wailing in my right arm, I grabbed the top of the fence, and pulled
myself over just as the clammy and cold hands of the dead were reaching for my
legs.
We thumped hard to the ground on the other side, and
once I could get my feet back under me, I was pumping my legs harder than I’d
ever known in my entire life. I ran like that for what seemed like an
eternity. My calves and thighs were burning white hot, but still I ran until
the sun began to set in the west.
I eventually found an abandoned car on the side of
some forgotten State Road. My arms ached from carrying the little ones such a
distance, but I still clutched them close to me, and kissed their crying and tired
faces. We climbed inside, closed the door, and huddled together, our cries
mingling into the cold and dark night.