Delusions of the Dead

By T.C. Armstrong

First came segregation. Then separation. Then extermination . . . The taut, terrifying followup to Notes from a Necrophobe.

Swarm intelligence, observed in ant colonies and beehives, was found in its most dangerous form at the microbial level–and it was this collective intelligence that brought on the apocalypse.

Only ten people made it out of the Mclean High School Refugee Center alive. They enjoy their celebrity status–until they discover they’ve been infected with the same parasites that reanimate the dead. Soon they find themselves on the run, hunted by the very institution that saved them from the apocalypse. Now, as they continue to fight external forces, they’re struggling against the commands from the parasites in their brains: Scratch. Bite. Kill. Repeat . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618685506

Book preview

I look down at a sea of dead faces, each one of them pointing up at us, all of them sharing the same thought. It’s an idea that reverberates around my head until it focuses into the two words they want me to hear:

"Join us."

The part of me left that is human is fighting with the part overtaken by the same Parasites that control the mob of corpses below. It’s the struggle for my life, so there’s no time for reminiscing. And yet I cannot help but look back on the last few months and wonder:

How did we get here?

First came segregation, then separation, then extermination.

JENNY

I don’t know why I bit Jimmie. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. Anyway, it was his fault because he took my Dora doll away from me. It’s the most special thing I have now ‘cause I got it for my fifth birthday and that means it was the last present I ever got from Mama before she went away on the Lost Day. But that don’t matter to Jimmie ‘cause Jimmie’s a jerk—he don’t care about other people’s things. He’s rich and got a ton of his own stuff-why did he want my doll too? Mama once said that Jimmy was growing up in material wealth but emotional poverty. I don’t know what that means. I think she was trying to get me to feel sorry for him. But I don’t feel sorry for him, he’s just too rude. Rude and mean.

He made me so mad when he grabbed Dora and started pulling her arms out. I was mad at him even before that, and not just ‘cause he’s got more stuff than me. I was mad ‘cause he got both his mommy and daddy. He keeps letting everyone know about that, like he’s won some big prize at the school fair or something. He’s a brat. He keeps smooshing my face in everything and making me cry because he makes me remember my mama’s not here. I miss her so much. All I’ve got left from her is Dora.

I guess I shouldn’t have bitten him though. I should have been like He’s just a stupid boy and I’m better than him, but then my brain started to itch and twitch and suddenly the thing that made the most sense in the whole world was to bite him. So I did.

You would have thought I had bitten into a beehive the way my teacher reacted. If I had overreacted like she did my mama would have said, Don’t be a drama queen. Teacher was making screamy noises, which was weird, ‘cause it wasn’t like Jimmie was cryin’ about it. He didn’t even seem to care that I bit him. He just went all quiet and stared at me like I suddenly got really boring. My teacher should have been grateful he was silent for once. I’m like the first person who shut him up and now we can all take a break from Jimmie’s big mouth. But oooooh no, instead of saying, Thank You, Jenny! Teacher was like "Jenny! No! What did you do? What did you do?! She started grabbing my classmates and shoving them out the door. They started crying ‘cause she was so rough with them, but she didn’t say sorry to them, or anything. She just kept yellin’ Run! RUN!" And all this time Jimmy just stared like he was sleepin’ with his eyes open. My teacher snatched me last.

It really pinched when she pulled at me and I was like Hey! but she just kept draggin’ me out the classroom. Jimmy was still not talking, but he did get up and follow us. Teacher turned real quick and slammed the door in Jimmie’s face so that there was only Jimmie left in the classroom. It all happened so fast, but I did get a good look at him while we was scooting out the door. Jimmie was looking right at me, right into my eyes like he was trying to say something to my brain instead of to my ears.

I don’t know what he was trying to say. But he did look grateful.

JANE

We’re not alone.

What are you talking about? Of course we’re alone! That’s why we came to your brother’s place. And we were careful. We made sure we weren’t followed…

I know, I know, said my husband in frustration. But there’s someone out there. Have a look.

I joined him at the window, concerned he might be losing his mind. I was relieved to see he wasn’t; there was someone out there. It was just one person, a man, and he was standing in the middle of the meadow, halfway between the woods and my brother-in-law’s cabin. My worries started tumbling out of my mouth one after the other. What does he want? How on earth did he find this place? It’s impossible for anyone outside of the Dowling family to find it. You can’t even see it from the air, it has a living roof that makes it look like it’s part of the meadow. Does he want shelter? Does he have a family waiting for him in the trees? Or does he just want to come in?

My husband picked his bird watching binoculars up from the windowsill and handed them to me. Look closer at him.

I did, and I wished I hadn’t. The man was dead. Or more accurately, he was one of the Infected dead. I needed to get used to the fact that these weren’t zombies; they were super-bugs who used the deceased as a puppet.

I don’t think he wants to come in, my husband said solemnly. I think he wants us to come out.

Well that’s not going to happen, I said with finality.

We did our best to ignore him. We made a nice dinner from what we could find in the basement larder. We found a card game called Blink in my nephew’s bedroom, and we played game after game of it. We boiled enough water to take a nice long bath. We built up a cozy fire in the fireplace, wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags next to it, and read ourselves to sleep. But no matter how many distractions we busied ourselves with, we couldn’t get the deceased sentry out of our thoughts. We kept stealing glances out the window and even when we couldn’t see him, we could sense him. He was the last thing on our mind when we went to sleep at night and the first thing in our thoughts in the morning. And the more we tried to ignore him, the more we were aware of him.

We had enough of this by the fifth day. We were careful with our ammo because we wanted to have it on hand in case the food ran out and we needed to start hunting. We also weren’t sure if others would stumble across this place and try to take over our new home. We talked about it over breakfast and decided he was worth the bullet.

My husband and I had been hunting all of our lives, but for some reason we found it difficult to shoot the man. We kept telling ourselves it was not a person; it was a vessel being controlled by Parasites so they didn’t have to wait to evolve into a higher life form. We reminded ourselves that these were the very Parasites that had wiped out over half the population, maybe even the family who owned this cabin. In the end it was my husband who had to make the head shot.

The guy didn’t do anything. He didn’t run when my husband raised the gun. He didn’t put his arms in front of his face. He stood there like a sitting duck and obediently fell when my husband’s bullet found his brain. And the instant he died—again—our minds were set free. It made me feel foolish for waiting as long as we did to take him out. We had almost forgotten him by dinner.

But there was a replacement by the next morning. We knew it before we even opened our eyes because we could feel someone out there, waiting. This time it was a woman. The only thing a glance out the window told me was that someone or something had removed the first sentry’s remains.

The replacement was more gruesome than the first. This woman was badly decomposed and twisted, like she had fallen down a ravine and crawled back up after she died. Her skin had turned black from the dead blood beneath. Her eyes were gone. Worse yet, our minds were under her spell, just like it had been under the man’s watch.

It wasn’t as hard to shoot her, but it didn’t matter. Her body was gone by the next morning and replaced by another of their kind. This became a pattern, our new normal. It seemed foolish to waste our bullets on something that couldn’t get in, but it was worth the mental break we got once they were taken out. Sometimes I wondered if this was their plan, to make us use up all of our ammunition.

I wish we didn’t get vaccinated, my husband said after he shot what looked like a kindly farmer.

Sweetheart, that injection enables us to drink the water around us. Remember what it was like before? We had to depend on a shrinking supply of water bottles. That shot allows us to be out in the rain without getting infected. It’s the one thing that keeps us from turning into one of those things outside.

I wondered where the steady supply of corpses was coming from. I hoped the woods would run out of Infected dead before we ran out of ammo. Surely there couldn’t be an endless supply of corpses in this neck of the woods. We weren’t near a big city with a large undead population. We were at one of the most remote spots in America. That’s why my brother-in-law built his safe house here, to stay away from the threat of civilization. How many more of them could there be if they only replaced the shooting victim with one instead of a Hydra-like seven? I don’t know how long I stood there at the window contemplating the steady supply of sentries, but my husband’s trancelike voice brought me back to the present.

It’s time.

What?

It’s time, he repeated.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Time for what? I asked.

I don’t know. It’s just something that popped into my head he replied. I’m probably tired. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Come on, let’s go to bed early tonight.

That night there was one more replacement.

I woke with a start because it was cold. It was cold because my husband was not there by my side to keep me warm. My husband was not by my side to keep me warm because he was outside. And my husband would never be warm again because he was dead. He was watching the house. He would always be watching the house because I could never shoot him.

I didn’t know what to do. I read. I cooked. I obsessively cleaned. And I neurotically gazed out the window at the man I loved, trying to figure out how he died. I don’t think it was a heart attack; he was only fifty-four, he was healthy and fit, and there was no history of heart disease in his family. He had no visible injuries. He had no reason to be dead.

After a while time got a little fuzzy. I couldn’t remember if I had eaten until my stomach cramped from deprivation. I would forget to stoke the fire until the cold seeped into my bones and woke me out of my brain fog. Is this how mourning works? I wondered. I can’t do anything anymore. Is this what they mean when someone says they’ve been paralyzed with grief?

I would stare out the front window until the hunger and cold pulled me back to the present. And then there was a subtle change. I thought it was a trick of the light at first, and then I wondered if it was a sign that I was finally loosing it. Even though I didn’t see him do it, I could swear my husband had taken a step closer to the house. The next day I knew I wasn’t crazy, he was definitely closer. He never moved while I watched—only when I dozed off or looked the other way.

I couldn’t tell if it had taken hours or if my mind was so far gone that it had taken days, but the gap between my husband and the house was slowly closing. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when he reached the front door.

But he didn’t come to the front door, he came to the window. I felt half-dead with cold, so I built up a fire in the fireplace. When I came back he was there, right in front of the window I had been looking out of just minutes earlier.

I should have been scared out of my mind, but I wasn’t. For the first time I knew what I was supposed to do. The grief left me and was replaced with a sense of purpose. I had been given direction. It was time.

I went to the kitchen and pulled a large butcher knife from the drawer. I considered my drawn face in its reflection before I drew it across my neck.

It was my turn to guard the house.

KC

It started with that girl Jenny. She was in kindergarten or preschool or, I don’t know, one of those holding pens for little kids. She was inoculated with the rabies vaccine just like we were. We thought it was a cure against the Parasites that turned us into the undead. Unfortunately we soon discovered that the rabies vaccine didn’t kill the invading organisms; it just kept them from killing us. We were so smug thinking a shot would protect us. We were wrong. The microbes remained in our system, whispering inappropriate things to our brains.

Little Jenny lost her temper and bit some munchkin who wasn’t inoculated.

She infected him with the Parasites she was carrying, killing him off immediately and turning him into the walking dead. Or in his case, the toddling dead. Anyway, it was this incident and many others that made the government believe that it was no longer safe to have the inoculated and noninoculated living together.

It blew my mind at the time, but there were a lot of people that didn’t want the vaccine. Some of them felt they didn’t need it now that the last of the dead were either smoked by the soldiers or moldering on the ground. Some of them felt it was pointless now that we lived under glass domes. Some of them simply couldn’t afford it. The rabies vaccine was stupid expensive before the invasion and it was incredibly expensive still. People’s earning power went down when they could no longer go out and work, which meant that most of the population was practically a ward of the State. My family and friends could afford to get the jabs because we were celebrities. We were the ones who survived the Undead Siege of the Mclean High School Refugee Center. And Ghost and I were richer still after we finished and sold our survival guide Notes From A Necrophobe.

So there were those who couldn’t afford the rabies vaccine and many more who couldn’t afford to live in our glass-covered town of New Arlington. This left survivors peppered here and there throughout the country, holding out in their strongholds—be it an office, a prison, a warehouse, or a fortress of a home. This was okay because the Scientists-We-Don’t-Question discovered that the amount of Parasites in the rain was decreasing and they believed all precipitation would be Parasite-free by the end of the year. This discovery made people want to wait things out instead of investing in a series of painful shots.

The one thing the opt-outs had in common was their mistrust of the inoculated. They weren’t sure what effect the vaccine was having on our system. They worried that once we were immunized and allowed ourselves to drink the water or dance in the rain, terrible things would happen.

They were right.

HOUSTON

Things weren’t half bad after we were rescued. We lived off our celebrity status. I didn’t feel guilty about that because we basically won the most extreme version of Survivor. Except in this case there wasn’t just one winner, there were ten: Mr. Cromwell, Sarah, Nemesis, Doom, Mouse, Ghost, Mom, my sisters KC and Jesse, and of course, me. There were a lot of losers too, but I did my best to suppress those memories so I could enjoy the moment.

We did lots of tiresome interviews for YouTube and TV. KC and Ghost sold their Notes From A Necrophobe book about how to survive the zombie apocalypse and my mom sold her book about what happened at the Mclean High School Refugee Center. Dad kept making money doing what he did best, setting up apocalypse-friendly businesses and creating a new society under glass.

That’s right, we lived under glass. Our little band of survivors was inoculated with the rabies vaccine as soon as we arrived here, so we no longer feared the Infected or the rain that spread the Parasites. Unfortunately there were many who did not have protection. The rabies vaccine is expensive and difficult to mass manufacture. There was nothing fair about it—its price limited it to the wealthy. There was also a large subset that feared the shot and its side effects so they refused it no matter how much money they had. And why would they have to worry? They only had to keep dry and drink purified water to stay safe. Our new town balanced a glass dome on top of its tall towers so people could cross between work and school and home and cars without fear of rain. And by cars I mean golf carts, because our town was not big enough to need cars. No one wanted exhaust pollution sticking to the ceiling—the dome was difficult to clean as it was.

Instead of homes we had apartment complexes because that was the only way they could fit a lot of people under one dome. There were a few folks loaded enough to have their own place, but their homes were tiny and their gardens even tinier. Ghost was the only person I knew who invested in one. Most of us wanted to be in apartments anyway. There were so few people alive after last year’s parasitic invasion, most survivors found comfort in huddling up with others so they could work on getting back to normal lives.

We did a good job of it too. Power stations, Cellphone Towers, and Internet servers were the most protected areas in America. We could still text, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and Tweet, and we were still burdened with junk on TV. We were slow to develop new versions of social media because we were more focused on survival. But still, fashion was back in fashion and the ladies were back to out-dressing each other. People spent more time at the gym, partially out of boredom, and partially as a reaction to living in a fishbowl and being on display all the time. You wouldn’t do well if you tried to hide from society; the natives got scared you’d been infected somehow and would be breaking down your door to make sure you hadn’t joined the living dead.

We were back at work, we were back at school, we were back at all those little mundane activities that make up a life, and we were all living under the microscope of small town living. It made me long for the days when it was just my family living under the roof of our old Colonial house. The parasitic-controlled corpses burned it and the rest of our neighborhood down, so there’s no going back now.

The thing that allowed us to get close to a state of normal was nature’s removal of what used to be our biggest threat: the Infected dead. Their bodies started to fall apart in the spring, and summer heat just made them rot faster. It was like KC and Ghost’s book said it would be; as soon as the temperature went above fifty Fahrenheit, the blowflies would go to work liquefying bodies from the inside out. It was something I chose not to watch; I’d seen enough of the dead at and around the Mclean High School Refugee Center. What I learned came mostly through the morbidly curious on Facebook (I skipped the photos posted of the evidence) or the more gossipy marines that were stationed around the perimeter of our newly manufactured town.

I heard tales of bloated corpses exploding with one step, spewing their putrefied contents far and wide. I heard of skin falling off the decomposing dead in sheets. I heard tales of bones collapsing within their skin because the rotting tendons could no longer hold them together.

I could hide from those sights, but I couldn’t hide away from the smell. First came the stench of decaying flesh, then the stink of burning flesh as the soldiers blow-torched any corpse they could find. Most were in a state too far gone to pick up, so when they’d find a body, they’d blast it with a flamethrower and then put it out with an extinguisher before it could set anything else on fire. During the first few weeks of spring, I could see plumes of smoke here, there, and everywhere. In my mind, I imagined the earth pockmarked with charred holes where bodies once lay.

We seemed to have nothing left to fear from the dead. The fires that were once so frequent died down by late summer. We read stories on the web about the Infected going underground, hiding in caves, or heading north for colder climes in a desperate bid to preserve themselves. Trigger-happy hillbillies and government forces picked off most of them. I don’t care what happened or what the government had to do to them to wipe them out. I just want to live my life without ever seeing a zombie again.

KC

The Dumb Luck Club will come to order, led by me, Nemesis, on account of the fact that I pushed our previous president off the roof.

Whoa, Nemesis, that’s cold. Even for you, I said. But secretly I wished I could do what she did and just say whatever was on my mind. And it was good to see her, even if it was on a screen instead of in person. I would have liked to have seen all the original survivors from the Mclean High School Refugee Center. We weren’t going to include my little sister Jesse and her friend Sarah, or my mother or Mr. Cromwell because we didn’t want to self-censor our conversation. But it still felt weird to meet as a club without Kaboom or Linus….or Ghost. The thought of Ghost hurt my gut, so I quickly brushed the past aside and set my mind on the present.

I could see that Nemesis was her usual stylish self. She didn’t look like an eighteen year old in her sharp grey suit and contrasting lacy black camisole; she looked like she was on her way to a corporate takeover of Victoria Secret. I squinted at my screen to see if everyone else looked the same. I know I had changed, so I wanted to see if anyone else had. A quick look told me no.

There was Doom in the top left box, looking disheveled and small in a sweater two sizes too big for his ninety-eight-pound frame. His shiny black emo-hair was swept over his left eye like a pirate patch. He looked like he was going to start shaking at any moment like one of those accessory dogs with un-spellable names.

Mouse was right next to him. She and Doom had been adopted by a nice couple after they were rescued. Mouse was wearing an unremarkable don’t-look-at-me t-shirt and jeans combo. Her height and hair color matched Doom’s, but her classic Snow-White good looks prevented her from looking like his sister. She had the same haunted stare she developed in the refugee center, something that most survivors wore in those days. Grief had turned into a spectator sport after The Lost Day, like some sick I-suffer-more-than-you competition, but the kind that Mouse bore was the real thing.

I glanced over at my brother and thought that he hadn’t changed much either. Then I noticed that, apart from his ironic Mclean High School hoodie and strategically torn jeans, Houston had bulked up. Since when did my brother start lifting weights? Then I followed the line of his sight to Nemesis, and I could see the incentive to his new bodybuilding hobby.

I looked at my own faint reflection in the screen and wondered if they would notice how different I appeared. Gone were the yoga pants and shapeless T-shirts. Gone were the unisex sneakers. I had turned stylish and steampunk. I didn’t need to dig too deep for my change, I had spent a lot of time in front of a camera promoting Notes From A Necrophobe, and I wanted to look good. It’s not like my reclusive coauthor was going to do it. At first I wore what I was told to by the agents. They surveyed our readers and asked them what they thought I looked like, and their crowdsourcing came back with a Goth version of Indiana Jones. I thought I would hate giving up comfort for fashion, but I liked how the outfits made me feel. Those knee-high leather boots made me powerful instead of helpless and hopeless. My fitted waistcoats made me stand out from the others, like I was someone in charge. And that’s how people looked at me, like I was in control. And why not? I had lived through the unlivable; I looked like a female action hero, and I liked it.

I didn’t have to wonder for long if anyone had noticed, because Nemesis asked, Where on earth did you get your outfit? Was there an End of Season Sale at the Marvel Comics store?

No, I replied with a smirk. I got it from the End of the World sale at the Chuck Norris Brass Knuckle Boutique. And I had to kill two salespeople just to get to it.

And you call me cold, she said with a touch of admiration. "Besides, I saw you wear that same outfit on your

Reviews for Delusions of the Dead

[Allison Kollmar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Funny, cute characters. I love a good zombie book and it's nice to see original take.