Kill-basa: New Flavors in Zombie Horror

By Sean E. Graham

A collection of classic zombie horror ground up and stuffed into this tight intestinal sleeve that any undead fan will love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean E. Graham
• Release date: Nov 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465926494

Sean E. Graham

Sean lives in central Oklahoma with his beautiful wife Tammy. They share their home with a couple of short haired felines and a pair of three legged dogs. His short fiction can be found in various anthologies, e-zines and periodicals.

Book preview

Kill-basa:

New Flavors in Zombie Fiction

By Sean E. Graham

Smashwords Edition

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PUBLISHED BY:

Sean E. Graham on Smashwords

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Kill-basa: New Flavors in Zombie Fiction

Copyright © 2011 by Sean E. Graham

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for

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Cover image found on Flickr and attributed to We Love the Dark.

Complete cover created by Donna Casey.

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Table of Contents

They Rode Personal Transportation Vehicles

Lee’s Decision

Ten Count

The Crick

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They Rode Personal Transportation Vehicles

Texas, 2018

A dog howled in the distance. Maybe it was a wolf.

Sam's stomach growled. He told himself it was a wolf.

He wanted it to be a wolf or a coyote or any damn thing that was not a dog because eating dogs was just wrong. Not wrong on any ethical or moral level, it was the apocalypse after all and he had given and received much worse. No, it was wrong the way a warm public toilet seat was wrong. It just wasn’t cool. A good ole American boy who played baseball as a kid and won stuffed things at the county fair for his girlfriends wasn’t supposed to eat dogs and public toilet seats weren't supposed to be warm. You wanted your dogs playing catch and your toilet seats nice and cold because you just didn’t know whose strange, bare ass might have been on it only moments earlier, their shed pubics hiding just out of sight, yet no doubt touching you somewhere. But food was food and the whole world was a public toilet now and his stomach growled as the canine howled.

Sam stifled the pangs; food would have to wait. There were more pressing survival requirements at hand. He watched the walking dead guy in a suit work the door handle of a burnt-out hatchback twenty yards away that had been driven into the glass front of a mega-mall. The rusted door creaked on its hinges and the living corpse slid behind the wheel. He wasn’t totally surprised by this and called it regurgitated memory—he’d seen it before. The brainless sack of meat would spend the next month trying to start the thing, turning an invisible key over and over, some distant part of his mind still clinging to the old life, the life before this one, before his first death. Sam once walked in on two undead dry humping in a supermarket, in the cereal aisle no less. He stood over them for a few seconds watching. They never noticed him. The woman moaned without emotion and clawed at the man’s back tearing deep grooves in the man’s rotting tissue. One shot from behind took them both in the head.

Sam watched. The undead guy did not try to start the car.

He reclined the seat, leaned back and closed his eyes. Brain hunting was hard work, no doubt, but a napping zombie? Sam crept around the other flash-fried vehicles, his bare feet screaming against the broken glass and blast-wrenched metal; the entire parking lot looked like a napalm testing ground. He stopped cold. The zombie’s eyelid wiggled slightly, a jaundice yellow eye peered out, a crescent moon against the black decay of its flesh, and then it shut again. Disturbing.

It was playing dead.

Sam rushed the economy car, his naked manhood swaying with the effort. The most beautiful sound in the world echoed across the lot as he chambered a round in the Mossberg riot gun and leveled it as the dead suit, hearing Sam, spun on his hip and lunged from the car. The gun went off. The dead man died. His rotting Swiss cheese brains sprayed through the broken glass, across the tarmac and pale marble floors of the shopping mecca.

Normally he avoided places with mass appeal like this mall and stadiums and certainly hospitals, because they usually contained mass zombies, but daddy needed a new pair of shoes and a fresh banana hammock. Once on television he had seen that the Celtic barbarians fought in the nude to intimidate their foe. Glancing down, conscious of his vulnerability and the heavy presence of adrenaline in his system, he did not feel very intimidating and certainly didn’t look it. He eyed the dead man’s rags. Tempting, but he would rather be naked than undress this poor bastard. All it took was a single drop of infected blood or saliva in your system and you were a brainless moaner humping in a supermarket. Nakedness, although not his ideal state of being, was not deadly.

Staring at the dead thing before him Sam’s shackles rose slightly as if a chill had blown through him; he had just witnessed cognizant, rational thought from the walking dead—not cool. It made eating Rover feel like you were wearing Robert Plant’s shoes playing a gig at the Garden- only the coolest thing on earth. But insects, with their tiny minds, could manage predatory thought couldn’t they? It didn’t take much under the hood to manage that when you got right down to it. What he had seen wasn’t much more than basic survival instinct; but, he argued with himself, on the zombie scale of intellect playing dead was far beyond instinct, it was rocket science. Unnerving indeed, but not worth much more thought. In the immortal words of his dead-twice dad, It is what it is, and a twelve-gauge shell still put the smartest undead on their backs. When that stopped working, then he would worry.

He walked into the mall. His footfalls echoed throughout the cavernous structure. Two department stores and a specialty athletic shop later, he was still shoeless and dangling, with only his Army rucksack on his back, not surprisingly the place had been picked over thoroughly. Sam swallowed his pride and entered one of the trendier stores—the kind that sold fifty-dollar t-shirts and reeked