First Time Dead 3

By TW Brown

Welcome to the third installment of First Time Dead. Each of these writers has something in common with Robert Kirkman, Max Brooks, and Brian Keene...they are now published writers in the zombie universe. As hard as it may be to believe, even those three previously mentioned authors once lived in obscurity. One day, somebody read their work and believed in them...

Stories by Sybil Wilen, David Antrobus, Jason Bailey, Xavier Axelson, PJ Ruce, Jeffrey McDonald, John Page, Susan Burdorf, Christina Gavi, David Alexander, Joanna Parypinski, Jack Flynn, and Graeme Edwardson. Edited by TW Brown and cover art by Shawn Conn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: May December Publications
• Release date: Apr 30, 2012

Book preview

Introduction

It is with a great deal of pride that I introduce to you First Time Dead Volume 3. Inside this book you will find stories by two types of newbies. One is the true First Timer who has never seen their name on a By line; the other is the writer who never penned a zombie story before, but has secretly wanted to do so. Some may criticize the fact that a few of our stories are by authors with credits to their name, but since I am the editor...I felt that the rule could be bent.

I hope that you will enjoy the stories that are compiled inside this little tome of terror. There are some cringe-worthy moments, and even a few chuckles. The most important thing that each of these stories has going for them is that each one was crafted by a person who decided to write their very first zombie story. Writing zombie fiction is unlike anything else out there in the horror market. It has a built-in, very fanatical base that is passionate about their monster of choice. 

Thank you on behalf of all these fine writers for picking up this anthology. At the end of this anthology, you will find a little bio on each of the writers. If one of them particularly impresses you, then by all means drop them a line and let them know. I can say that, as a fellow writer, there is something wonderful about hearing from a reader who enjoys your work. And for those so inclined to write a review (good or bad because we understand that not EVERYBODY thinks we are all geniuses), we thank you in advance for taking the time to do so.

TW Brown

Editor

Dedication:

To:

Sybil Wilen, David Antrobus, Jason Bailey, Xavier Axelson,

P. J. Ruce, Jeffrey McDonald, John Page, Susan Burdorf,

Christina Gavi, David Alexander, Joanna Parypinski,

Jack Flynn, and Graeme Edwardson

...welcome to the club!

1

Zombie Love

By Sybil Wilen

They’ve been walking for hours; staggering up one street and down another trying to find the group they had started with. The street lamps are all out and not a single neon sign lights their way. The buildings polluting their peripheral vision collapse in on themselves, gutted with remnants of the past leaking from their vital organs. Computers, TVs, futon mattresses, and posh bistro sets litter the sidewalk and road. Slithering sounds emanate from some of the buildings. The department store sways at them with a smashed in glass-toothed smile.

Her breast bumps against his arm, but this does not turn her or him on. In fact, her physical body seems to be losing much of its sensation. This is good, because her head is filled with a tea kettle whistle. Her parched lips stick to her teeth and her tongue is swollen. Fire creeps up her right arm and slides around her neck, licking her collar bone. Despite this, she is constantly trying to form a congruent thought, but each time understanding flows, the sharp sounds riding her brain pick up a notch.

It is difficult to lift her arm at her own command, but one does come up and she reaches for him. What could have been a delicate movement—and something tells her that she was once graceful, a dancer perhaps—ends in a cumbersome slap to his shoulder. This pushes him backward and turns him around. He moans, his eyes shifting from side to side before settling on her.

His head is buzzing, too, and it is his left hip that hurts. For him, the brain drain feels slightly different. He feels unfettered from the bonds that once trapped him in his manhood. No longer does the Jaguar, the bank balance, or the fucking matter. There’s a Zen-filled satisfaction to simply walking with no destination. He senses there is no one overseeing him, laughing at his hits and misses in this game. Right now he is hungry and he believes those they have lost have food. The woman he is with has none. He has none. He can’t think clearly enough to know exactly where he is or whether food is available.

His stomach growls.

She doesn’t say anything, though she keeps trying to work her mouth. She taps her tongue against her teeth and pushes it between her lips. It feels like a dried out slug. She doesn’t remember being this thirsty before. She looks around the street, and feels as though she is missing something.

It’s fleeting. Her mind plays a quick view of the past events that have led her here. She wonders if she knows the man she is with now. She understands that some part of her knows some part of him. She struggles to remember if they were separated, if they were reunited, but the buzzing grows louder and the ache from her arm and neck flare.

He looks at her tattered dress and bare legs and feet. He can’t say if her hair is red or blond. It is probably light. It almost glows in the dark. His feet hurt.

This bothers him enough to cause him to look down and notice that the toes of his shoes both point the same way. He can’t remember putting them on. In fact, he can’t remember getting dressed at all. He thinks of his body and almost has a good image of the last time he felt healthy. He faintly sees this woman cleaned up and weaving through a crowd in a fitted black dress with something glowing in her ears and at that soft spot between her collar bones. A gemstone! Something blue. That’s it, there is something about her neck tearing away that grips him and then the buzzing begins again.

Her dress wasn’t black. It was blue. Or maybe purple? Bruised skin slips through his mind and that seems the color, plum? Perhaps puce. There is a color. Or at least a word he remembers being impressed with. At some earlier stage of his growth he had wanted everything to be painted puce; not black like Mick Jagger crooned, but puce because the word felt like a wound when it rolled around his mouth. Puce sounds like what it is. He is almost certain he had commented on this fact when the woman arrived in the purplish-brown dress with a scarf around her neck and gemstones at her throat and in her ears.

He is a neck guy. Nothing entices him like rubbing his fingers into the delicate skin below a woman’s earlobes. He is also a biter and he remembers running his teeth across her flesh and pushing into her. But this isn’t arousing him like reliving sex used to do. There is something about her neck that bothers him; something about tendons tearing and then the buzzing is back. He grunts.

Cars in various stages of disintegration pack the streets. Doors litter the pavement, and belongings spill from trunks and seats. No one dares loot here. His head aches but he tries to think his way through the haze. After a few minutes of chasing the current events and history of his lifetime, he gives in to the burning that flares behind his left ear and eye. Swinging back around to his partner, he studies her. Although he can’t remember her name or where they met or why they are walking down this street together, his headache dissipates while he watches her. He wants to help her. Or he had wanted to help her, but he thinks he hurt her. He starts moving in the direction they had been headed.

There is going to be trouble getting through the stalled cars. He knows it but doesn’t stop moving. He pushes his way through, tripping and falling more than once. It is difficult to regain his feet each time he falls. He begins to wonder if he has the flu that is going around. The one that kills people swiftly and indefinitely. The fourth time he falls, he stays down, thinks of sleeping where he is amidst toys, luggage, and magazines that have fallen from the decaying Fords, Toyotas, and Kias.

He stays down wedged between two open car doors. A Raggedy Ann doll sprawls indecently on the ground before him, her legs up and skirts covering most of her face except for one eye that is outlined with black ink. The word Sharpie forms in his mind and the idea that this word has something to do with the doll’s eye tickles his brain. Another part thinks there is something dangerous about this doll. He stares at this child’s abandoned plaything trying to beat back the buzzing that rams against his forehead.

There is a damp breeze moving through the street picking up the stench of decay and rotting flesh, then washing him with it and finally forcing its way up his nostrils, pushing past his lips and ramming itself down his throat. Raggedy Ann winks at him from behind her upturned skirts, her red hair brazen against the shadowed pavement.

He sits for hours looking about him, hungry, hurting, tired, but unable to sleep. It is the exhaustion of a new parent that bears down on him. The sleep deprivation of a medical student drives into him. An army cadet’s suffering shoots through him. He vaguely grasps he is thinking in clichés, but he has no humor. It has been washed out of him, much like the ability to shut his eyes or stand up for that matter.

There is not much to see from where he sits. The street stretches in front of him full of obstacles and this tires him. The cars are an assortment of sizes and colors, but everything seems dark and dreary. It is like those dreams one has where they cannot quite remember who they are and everything is in shades of gray—soot—black smoke. His hand is outstretched in front of him, but he doesn’t recognize it. The skin is jaundiced, bloated, peeling back from the ragged fingernails. He stares through his fingers, splaying them in a Vulcan greeting.

This way the cars are obscured and the street looks like a journey to be had. If only he can figure this out. The buzzing in his ears is loud and it makes him angry. His leg is injured, he knows that, and for one coherent moment, he understands that a large chunk of it is missing. He has been bit! The thought comes so suddenly and purely, that for a moment, his senses are dulled and the pain flashing through his body is gone. That’s it! A large animal has taken a chunk out of his thigh. A dog! An image of brown shaggy hair and snarling infiltrates him. Yes, that is it, he was attacked! He needs medicine because he is poisoned. There is a way out.

With clarity on his side, he put his hands down on the ground and tries to push to his legs and stand. He doesn’t budge. Flexing his muscles, he balls his hands and tries again, nothing. Again, nothing. Okay, this time. Nothing.

She sees the top of his head, but can’t remember that they have been together or have ever even known each other. She is slowly making her way down the street because she constantly bumps into things and this turns her around. Occasionally she realizes that she is going back the way she had come, but over all she moves like a ping pong ball.

Her neck is starting to flare, causing her head to bob to the side. Her hand drifts to the spot over and over again, her fingers rolling loose flesh.

She is drawn to him in an unclear way. This forces her to again and again turn around in an attempt to get herself going in the right direction. Desire etches out in the back of her head like memories trying to bring someone back to a place they moved away from. Memory is an elusive snake that coils around us at the most inopportune moments, flexing its muscles in a tender embrace that is meant to stroke our heart’s desire. But that monster is coy as most of these memories are incomplete, embellished, or not ours at all. She is moving rather gracelessly back and forth, weaving almost a tapestry with mistakes and slip knots that glow gray and stretch out in tendrils of urban decay.

Whenever she looks at the smashed up buildings, rusted cars, and crumbling tarmac, her mind finds peace and her body reacts by moving listlessly in any direction. But, whenever the top of his head sweeps into her view, something clicks in her, a memory switch snaps on and the serpent uncoils, flexes, and sinks its fangs dripping with venom into her pituitary gland. Images fill up the space behind her eyelids, grotesquely parading a happiness. A collection of dates, laughter, glasses of wine and conversation, tongues touching, are all she sees.

That’s how memory betrays us! She doesn’t remember the infidelity, the resulting coming clean and fighting. She can’t recall other men who crept into her life, much less the one she married. Her infatuation lasted for three years before she finally realized the flirting and innuendos were not fulfilling. There is something about his mouth that clings to her memory like damp cotton on flushed skin. But she no longer knows if these memories belong to the man wedged between the cars. Memory is dank and dark dragging us down to gray tinged bedrooms dusty with lost wants and desires. Memories are smoke stained glass revealing a desolate alley of wet overturned trash cans and elaborate smells. Memory lies.

So she doesn’t really know whether she loves the man stuck now. She only knows that he harbors a place within her from before the fire ripped her flesh and left her wondering why she has not died yet.

This concept propels her forward and straightens her walking arc. If she can get to him, lay hands on him, then clarity will come. He is surely trying to stand, his head angling awkwardly as he tries to turn to her. Or so it seems. She feels he is trying to face her and that is enough to lunge her forward. Her feet heave as she stumbles. Isn’t walking like riding a bike, does one ever forget how?

Her body no longer responds as it once did. Her torso had been lithe, her arms and legs are long and snakelike. She could pivot, walk, run, and swivel her hips with angular motions and undulate her chest like a mermaid. Now she can barely get her feet to move one after another. As soon as left goes forward, right wanders off to the side like a lazy eye.

But she is determined, and so she plows through the car doors and litter. A few times she comes close to falling, but her speed moves her onward. His scent drifts to her, a mix of cologne, pheromones, and decay. Glass cuts into her bare feet as she begins running and more than once her knees snag on rusty metal. She pushes forward and as he grows closer, his smell becomes intoxicating, awakening carnal desires.

He remembers now, he had bit her on the neck as that was his fetish. They were in the park. They had discussed the fact that being alone was not recommended anymore, but decided to sneak off on the others for a stolen moment. He had checked the spot earlier in the day and again before leading her to a densely wooded patch. Trees bent and embraced one another making it difficult for anyone to pass through. They figured that would keep them safe. Besides, they promised each other they would be quick and return after a short fondle and lingering pressing of the lips.

But once he kissed her, she had pushed back, her tongue tapping against his teeth and searching his mouth. Before long they were nearly undressed and he was pressing her into the leaves, pine needles, sticks, and dirt. Her back was arched and his hand was in her. His tongue found her neck and he was golden. He knew it from the small sounds that ushered from her throat.

He bit her and watched her smile and moan and then her eyes grew large and something was pushing them closer together. Hands groped their exposed flesh and a sweet pungent smell enveloped them. The weight lifted from his back and a head lurched between them. At the same exquisite moment he felt his flesh rip, he witnessed lips breaking apart to expose jagged teeth and a rotting tongue that bore down on her throat. He pushed to his feet, grabbed pants and the shoes nearest him and chose that moment to run.

She falls just as she catches up with him, slamming into his back. He turns one more time to see her, this time truly knowing who she is and desire fills him as she bears down on him. Her teeth rip through his hair and she relieves him of one ear and then the other before going for his collarbone. He closes his eyes and screams. She scrambles over his head and settles in his lap. She pauses long enough to run hands over his mouth and nose, and rears her head back. She shakes out her hair, then snaps forward and begins working on his face.

2

Unquiet Slumbers

By David Antrobus

The first snow of the year was always a singularly beautiful moment for me. For us. I would take whatever leftover cheap red wine we had laying around, add spices and lemon and heat it for Jon and I. Mulled wine steaming, we’d venture onto the covered deck and listen to the near-silence, the tiniest whisper of flakes on conifers, and more recently, Lynette—raucous, wide-eyed—would burst from the house and break the spell in the forgivable way only your own small children can.

This year, for the Donya family, not so much.

The flakes float greyer than flawed memories, and I sit awkwardly against a Dumpster watching them land in the filthy alley and liquefy like tiny sugar-spun doilies, turning slush-brown. No quiet lawn and hushed cedar backdrop for this sad mama.

When the infection came almost a year ago now, in early January, we were still off school for the holidays; Lynette in the second grade, myself in my fourth year teaching high school English to largely unruly, occasionally surprising teenagers. What we took to be another scare—SARS, bird flu, swine flu—escalated suddenly and frighteningly. Whatever this was, it was different; a pandemic without parallel. The end of the winter festivities coincided horribly with the first outbreak, and within a few days, it was clear that those infected would not be showing up for work.

Not then; maybe not ever.

The numbers were so staggering that the city never even got up to speed after New Year’s. No transit staff, no office workers, no construction workers, no store owners, no educators, no shrinks, no NHL players, no cab drivers, no firefighters, no entertainers. Foolishly, before my mind had accepted the extent of this catastrophe, I once drove as far as I could into the downtown core, around an assault course of abandoned vehicles, and saw a man with a hardhat sitting in a lot on a freshly-cleared, poured concrete foundation. A red crane still festooned in Christmas lights loomed above him, a blasted tree choked by vines. The man was crying.

I approached him and asked him if I could help in any way and he said, No, no one, nothing can help this. To which I had no reply, so I went home.

There were sounds in our quiet neighbourhood, back then, that you would not want your seven-year-old to hear. Occasionally, the hopelessly sick would lurch past, moaning, usually alone, sometimes in disorderly clusters. Suddenly, there were no reporters, no TV talking heads, no newspapers, a vestige of the internet; and when the power quit, we knew it would be a long time before we sat down to watch Glee together (singing and dancing will never go over the heads of children). Four layers of clothing and our Champion Gas Generator from Canadian Tire would have to suffice for the basics.

That winter, the muffled noises behind suburban doors grew steadily more disquieting until, one day in early spring, Jon and I—foolishly, it turned out—decided to do something about them. Heaven help me, but I’m not the type of woman to let my husband play the lone hero role; I insisted on accompanying him on this ill-conceived mission, he armed with a hammer, me a tire iron. Not exactly armed for bear. What can I say? We’re Canadian. We approached the house across the street where our middle-aged neighbours, Don and Shelley-Ann Winkler lived… had lived. Now, feral sounds of snarling and gurgling emanated from behind their front door.

What happened happened fast.

After we knocked and yelled their names, the sounds abated. We knocked again. Called out. Jon gave me a look, and I shrugged: what else can we do?

To hell with it, he said, grabbed the handle and opened the door.

They had been fighting, that much was clear. No, that’s an understatement. By all appearances, trapped suddenly behind a front door too complex to open, they had been methodically tearing body parts from each other, their pallid, near-naked bodies a landscape of leaking welts and deep, troubling wounds. Shelley-Ann was missing her left cheek; her chattering teeth were framed by the ragged, bloody hole of what remained. Don appeared to be chewing on the missing part. Likewise, his right eye socket was dripping and haunted by the absence of an eyeball, and for a second, I thought I saw something white and finely capillaried in the hole in Shelley’s face…but all this was happening too fast for anything beyond an initial horrified split-second…because the two