Alpha Zombie: Zombie Botnet, #3

By Al K. Line

The group take to the road in an effort to stay safe, and decide there is one thing missing - guns.

 

So the mission is planned, the sandwiches are made, the new transport revved up.

 

Only problem is the infected are getting smart, the world continues to degenerate, and they hadn't counted on the beginnings of the hivemind.

 

Something new was awakening: Alpha Zombie

• Language: English
• Publisher: Al K. Line
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781498952347

Al K. Line

Al K. Line is a British author who lives in rural England with his wife, son and dogs. When asked to describe himself for this bio all we got was the following: "Who am I? Degrees, jobs, living in other countries, fighting squirrels, cuddling monkeys, amused by penguins, all the usual stuff." Best newsletter in digital make-believe land: http://www.alkline.co.uk (discounts and cool stuff) Facebook thing: https://www.facebook.com/authoralkline

Book preview

Neuropeptide Y in Overdrive

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) coursed through Michelle's once beautiful body at a rate unheard of in the living. She was something different now.

Infected.

She had lived. She had died. Now resurrected as something pure.

Primal.

Her heart beat. Her blood pumped — fast and furiously. That's where the similarities ended between what she had become and what she had been. In a split second her previous life was no longer even a wisp of a memory. Exposed directly to the zombie botnet she had become something unique, a new species born of man's madness. Her previous grace and beauty dead and buried forever.

Michelle's body no longer functioned like before; it was re-designed with one goal in mind — to devour human flesh. Definite focus on brains.

Less than a second after her initial infection, unleashed while she viewed a clip of a squirrel being tickled on YouTube, a devastating epileptic seizure took hold. Next came anaphylaxis. Airways contracting, the body starved of oxygen. The brain, able to continue its existence for minutes after death, re-configured rapidly, signaling for huge pulses of chemical mixtures to be released throughout her body. A unique cocktail never before experienced by the living.

Neuropeptide Y was no longer regulated by the hypothalamus, the hunger trigger unable to shut down effectively. Henceforth there was no room for anything but a base drive to find and consume more flesh. The lack of effective digestion meant it was nigh on impossible to satiate the desire for more food. But abate the hunger and serotonin was released in vast pulsing waves. With an amalgam of myriad hormones the result was a high better than anything that had come before. Better than anything anyone had ever experienced.

The body delivered on its promises when, and only when, sufficient intake of food was reached, leading Michelle to experience a high a heroin addict only wished they could experience.

A price was paid. Currency? The life and flesh of the living.

Her hyper-coagulated blood meant nutrients were hard to extract. Thrombin would work to stop blood loss if wounds were inflicted, all to aid in the pursuit of survival to consume. Pain receptors were blunted, nociceptors no longer needed. Why feel pain when it just hindered the final goal?

Autonomic and motor nerves ran better than ever, giving Michelle the ability to move fast, to react fast. To be better in many ways than when she was human. Tactile sensory nerves were a thing of the past, extraneous to her needs.

The frontal lobe had shrunk, neural pathways burned. However, as she had slowly starved, unable to find fresh victims, they fired up via newly created routes, configuring to better aid with the pursuit of food. Problem solving had been non-existent, but now it was back, and with a vengeance. The frontal lobes were there to find solutions to problems, and Michelle only had one — not enough food. So dopamine sensitive neurons gradually re-configured, doing so with only one motive.

Michelle's once idolized body was a parody of itself. Her clothes were in tatters. Once golden hair plastered to her skull, clumps pulled out to reveal a red raw scalp. Mixed in with caked blood and gobbets of flesh and brain from her latest victim. The long limp strands of hair, now dark with blood and bile, stuck to the two lumps that were her pride and joy once upon a time — silicon breasts. Still standing proud and stark against the ripped flesh of her abused body, sticking out like those of a Barbie doll dipped in blood.

Her taut waist, at one time the envy of her friends, was now pinched. The ribs protruded leaving deep shadows across her abdomen. The belly button still sporting a single stud she had thought was cool. Once skin-tight denim jeans were saggy at the bottom. Weeks worth of feces and urine straining to escape, stiffening in the warm days, turning liquid after a heavy downpour — running down her legs to pool in her trainers and weep out where it could. Gaping holes at the knees were evidence of past falls, not that there were nociceptors enough for the deep gouges to even register.

The sad remains of Michelle's once carefully applied make-up made the twenty two year old look more nightmarish than merely allowing for the infection. Heavy dark mascara had run and gradually worn away, leaving behind trace enough to accent the sunken sockets her hunger exacerbated. A testament to the money and research that went into something as simple as keeping the young woman made-up for as long as possible with minimal re-application. A fake tan on her face looked sickly comical now that her upper torso was bare. Rivulets revealing the pale skin beneath.

Bangles still adorned her arms, as did the watch from her boyfriend. Him being the first meal when she awoke to her new existence, many weeks past.

As she began to starve her body went through yet more changes — switching from running at a high temperature, heart beating at triple time, to a controlled beat that would allow continued survival for weeks or months with minimal food. Unfortunately the cravings never abated, they just fueled the changes that would drive her body onward in the never ending search for the zombie high. The serotonin cocktail still the driving force that kept the body fighting on for flesh of the human kind.

The NPY levels not only halted the epilepsy, blunted pain and prevented the ability to feel satiated, it also had one other main function: when the body began to get too lean it would begin to turn food consumed into fat stores, to help the body continue to function. Combined with a potent mix of other amino acids it stopped the body from getting too weak and gaunt and would continue to stunt the sense of touch. When needed it began to flip the body from an emaciated state into one where the body began to primarily lay down fat for hibernation if truly needed.

So Michelle was gaunt, past slim and beautiful by a large margin, but not yet skeletal. With scraps of human flesh she devoured that could only be classed as well past their sell-by-date, and absolutely not what was the primary craving her body needed, she had begun to conserve her meager meals so she could continue her grisly quest.

Finally, she had scored. Big time.

She had fed and fed. Her belly so large there was a real risk the skin would split and her partially digested meal would spill out into the road. The button on her jeans had popped, the zipper breaking; not built to withstand such pressure from the female form.

What was unfortunate for the creature once named Michelle was that all these bodily changes had resulted in her lying comatose in the road after feeding on her older sister. Her belly obscenely bloated, a sick and twisted smile of blissful satiety on her ravaged face.

Michelle had lived with her family in a small village her whole short life — and she hated it. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no interesting people to meet. When the zombie botnet was unleashed she had been in the small village pub's beer garden, sipping on a vodka Red Bull, chatting away to her new boyfriend and her sister. Between stunted conversation they were all checking their smart phones, social manners now allowed for fragmented conversations interrupted by exclamations about what so and so said about so and so on Facebook.

Up popped a two second picture of someone's very hairy private parts that a disgruntled ex had posted repeatedly on Snapchat, setting the Snaps to only a few seconds but not realizing that there was a hack everyone knew about so the pictures could be stored indefinitely. So what if Snapchat deleted them from their servers if such apps could be manipulated by anyone old enough to own an iPhone? One minute Michelle was giggling away to her sister about the size of Robert the ex's man bits, the next the zombie botnet had infiltrated the Snapchat servers and sent a viral subliminal packet to 80% of users, most of whom clicked on it and were infected.

Her boyfriend was dead five seconds later.

The sister, sporty and in her final year of teacher training, had the foresight to run like hell and hole up in the pub along with a few regulars. The old geezers didn't have a single phone between them — money was better spent on beer than accessing Facebook when they were half pissed.

For sixteen days they held out and survived. Whilst Michelle and other infected tried in vain to get at the soft and delicious brains behind the heavy pub doors. Even if the older ones were half pickled with whiskey and vodka.

Rape, of the attempted and very inebriated kind, by three men with nothing left to lose was what finally gave Michelle her dinner. Her sister smacked one of the old cronies over the head with a third full bottle of good whiskey and unbolted the doors. She made it as far as the grassy area to the front of the pub, that had a few swings and slides for the kids, before Michelle caught up with her. The struggle didn't last long, the older sibling went down under a mania that animated Michelle with an inhuman ferocity. She was ripped to shreds in seconds, watching in abject horror as her innards became kissed by the sunshine for the first time. Then she thankfully died. Michelle dashed her head against the concrete base of a swing set, spilling the brains, greedily scooping them up in her cupped hands.

The feast continued, until a fight broke out with another infected, who happened to be the pub landlord. He'd been outside taking a smoke when a sneaky look at a porno gave him the video experience of his soon to be over life. They fought each other for the remaining best bits, Michelle finally dragging the body to the curbside, claimed it as hers and hers alone. The vanquished beer-bellied landlord turned to the doors of his pub as he heard the screams of old men being devoured in the gloomy interior.

Michelle sat in the road, the broken head of her sister cradled in her lap, slowly pulling out the eyes from the remains of her ruined face, the rest of her victim's body lying broken and purged in the trash laden gutter. Michelle feasted on the best bits then moved onto choice selections of upper intestine, esophagus, breast, lungs, liver and kidneys. As she ate, partially digested meat was forced from her anus, some spewed back up, mixed with foul smelling bile as it was evacuated. But she was happy, insanely happy, as serotonin gave its reward in ways that scientists had been trying and failing to master for decades.

The bliss was short lived however. A single-decker red and cream bus driven by Kyle slowly bounced over her head and body, a loud 'pop' echoing up through the old wooden floor of the bus as her head was flattened to a gory smear on the tarmac beneath her. The destruction of the rest of her body was next. There were no giant spurts of blood, just a thick puddle of mangled flesh. Thrombin, produced initially by the liver, further enhanced by the high levels of calcium consumed from human bone matter, meant that the thing that was Michelle's blood was thick and hyper-coagulated, more of a tar than a free-flowing red liquid.

When her distended stomach was hit the contents were pushed out through her bowels, large squirts of digested and un-digested human flesh squirting out of her backside and staining the tarmac deep burnt cinnamon — malodorous fumes permeated the floor of the bus for a second as it trundled past.

As Michelle was unceremoniously ground to a pulp the serotonin coursing through her brain meant that her last worldly experience was beatific and glorious. She died on a high even those combining LSD and MDMA could only dream of.

###

Bump, bump, bump. The bus bounced slightly then was past.

Poo-ey, said Al, holding his nose as the foul vapors of the undead seeped up through the floor for a split second. There is something stinking worse than Bos Bos.

What was that? shouted Ven from the rear of the bus. She was playing cards with Al and was becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that the bugger kept beating her. She made sure to keep her eyes on her cards, Al must be cheating somehow.

Well, shouted Kyle, turning his head to look back at his two compadres. It was bumpy, squishy, gooey, brain-eaty, skinny, very fast, and now altogether flat. What do you think it bloody was?

Ten pence Kyle, said Al, swear box rules still firmly in place. The battered tin, full of paper IOUs, on the table in front of him. But I am knowing what it was that you are being describing, and I am liking this new game very much.

It wasn't a game — Kyle was just answering a question. But hey, go with what you've got was Kyle's motto.

Ven just rolled her eyes.

Sometimes these two were like little bloody kids.

It was a squished zombie! shouted out Al proudly. Startling Bos Bos who was asleep under the table. Even baby Tomas gave a loud moan in his sleep, luckily not regaining consciousness. I am being right, yes?

Gold star to Al, shouted Kyle, grinning proudly at the big guy. Nothing for Ven.

Ven stuck out her tongue.

Stupid bloody game anyway.

The horrors had not gone away, they had gotten a lot worse, and although not merely an everyday inconvenience some of the absolute dread had receded, at least in the waking hours. Driving slowly over an actual person, feeling them get crushed and mangled underneath 14 tonnes of red and cream bus would have crippled Kyle with sickness scant weeks ago, and many a therapy session would have been the result. Now here they all were, making light of what was an horrific act. One that should never be taken lightly.

It was a coping mechanism.

When your world has burned, and all that is left is a dysfunctional family, then you have to find a way to deal with the horrors. If a rather gruesome form of I Spy is the way you make it through the day then so be it.

While Ven was looking at Kyle, Al surreptitiously took a peek at the deck of cards, replaced the ones he didn't