The Z Chronicles Read online

  The Z Chronicles

  WINDRIFT BOOKS

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  THE Z CHRONICLES

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the proper written permission of the appropriate copyright holder listed below, unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal and international copyright law. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners as identified herein.

  The stories in this book are fiction. Any resemblance to any place, apocalyptic event, or person – living, dead or undead – is entirely coincidental.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  The Z Chronicles copyright © 2015 by Samuel Peralta and Windrift Books.

  Foreword copyright © 2015 by Samuel Peralta. Used by permission of the author.

  “Vindica” by Ann Christy, copyright © 2015 by Ann Christy. Used by permission of the author.

  “Six Days” by Theresa Kay, copyright © 2015 by Theresa Kay. Used by permission of the author.

  “Kamika-Z” by Christopher Boore, copyright © 2015 by Christopher Boore. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Fall of the Percedus” by Jennifer Foehner Wells, copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Foehner Wells. Used by permission of the author.

  “Z Ball” by Will Swardstrom, copyright © 2015 by Will Swardstron. Used by permission of the author.

  “Gloria” by Hugh Howey, copyright © 2015 by Hugh Howey. Original version published in 2012 in I, Zombie. Used by permission of the author.

  “Her” by David Adams, copyright © 2015 by David Adams. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Soulless: A History of Zombieism in Chiitai and Mihari Culture” by Lesley Smith, copyright © 2015 by Lesley Smith. Used by permission of the author.

  “Hybrid” by Geoffrey Wakeling, copyright © 2015 by Geoffrey Wakeling. Used by permission of the author.

  “Free Fall” by Peter Cawdron, copyright © 2015 by Peter Cawdron. Used by permission of the author.

  “Girl, Running” by Kris Holt, copyright © 2015 by Kris Holt. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Sin Eater” by Stacy Ericson, copyright © 2015 by Stacy Ericson. Used by permission of the author.

  “The World After” by Angela Cavanaugh, copyright © 2015 by Angela Cavanaugh. Used by permission of the author.

  “Curing Khang Yeo” by Deirdre Gould, copyright © 2015 by Deirdre Gould. Used by permission of the author.

  All other text copyright © 2015 by Samuel Peralta.

  Edited by Ellen Campbell (http://ellencampbell.thirdscribe.com)

  Cover art and design by Faustino Leonidas Gaitan (www.fausga.com)

  Print and ebook formatting by David Adams (www.lacunaverse.com)

  The Z Chronicles is part of The Future Chronicles series produced by Samuel Peralta (www.samuelperalta.com).

  978-0-9939832-2-1

  THE Z CHRONICLES

  STORY SYNOPSES

  Vindica (Ann Christy)

  Vindica is a doomsday shelter built for those who can afford the very best. It represents luxury, as well as safety, for the end of the world. Gordon made it inside when the alarm sounded, with only hours to spare, thinking he would be safe. Outside, the world died, afflicted by its worst nightmares. But inside Vindica's promised paradise, a different sort of nightmare begins.

  Six Days (Theresa Kay)

  The longest anyone has survived a zombie bite before succumbing to the madness is six days. If she’s lucky, Sarah has four more days before she goes full-on flesh eater and she needs every single one of them. The life of her infant son depends on her finding an uninfected person willing to take him before she loses her mind. Her husband is dead, her child depending on her, and the countdown is on.

  Kamika-Z (Christopher Boore)

  Florida summers are hotter than hell. One broken family must face the heat, as sinister objects in the sky begin to fall.

  The Fall of the Percedus (Jennifer Foehner Wells)

  Tarn is a sectilian research and development engineer in the field of robotics, dedicated to the design of machines to work on molecular scales. His life’s work is to combat the Swarm, his race’s implacable enemy. When his sister Pyona comes to him for help he must move from theoretical to practical applications of his work. The outcome may not be the one he expects.

  Z Ball (Will Swardstron)

  The zombie outbreak is in the past. Society is regrouping and getting back to normal, but the sports that once held the public’s consciousness are too tame. Enter Z Ball. Vince Lager, star quarterback, is on his way to the Brain Bowl when the truth of Z Ball threatens everything.

  Gloria (Hugh Howey)

  All those fingernails gouging and scrambling against the bark of the tree. Mother and daughter sat above, quietly crying and whispering false hopes, cornered like cats by a pack of dogs. Gloria jostled with the pack beneath the limb. There was no escape, Gloria saw…Not for any of them.

  Her (David Adams)

  Diane, when she was alive, used to wonder: can a ghost and a zombie come from the same person? A zombie was the reanimation of flesh without a soul in it; a ghost was a soul without flesh. It turns out that zombies are real; but ghosts are not, because when you’re bitten and turn into a zombie, your consciousness is still in there. But what about the person you were?

  The Soulless (Lesley Smith)

  Monsters exist in all cultures but the zombie—a Terran designation referring to re-animated corpses popularised in local media towards the end of the pre-Contact period—is a prevalent one. The Union has its monsters and medical science is often to blame, as is the case with the Soulless.

  Hybrid (Geoffrey Wakeling)

  Attempting to cure the diseased is next to impossible, especially when you’re only seventeen. Freya, plunged into a horror-filled world, has the weight of her community’s hopes on her shoulders. Infection is spreading. To survive, she’ll do whatever it takes.

  Free Fall (Peter Cawdron)

  Jackson is an astronaut conducting a test run in deep space. When he returns home, there’s no one to greet him. Earth has fallen silent. Now he must decide—stay in orbit, watching a dead planet roll slowly by beneath his window, or land and fight for life?

  Girl, Running (Kris Holt)

  An athlete and her former lover face a footrace against time as the hordes close in. Can they learn to work together again, or will they perish at the hands of their relentless foes?

  The Sin Eater (Stacy Ericson)

  Continuing an ancient tradition among cottonwoods and picket fences, a young girl consumes sin with cornbread over the flesh of the dead.

  The World After (Angela Cavanaugh)

  Ella and Mark spent their lives working for the Center for Zombie Control. But when Mark is infected, Ella finds that her life hangs in the balance. Now she must escape the CZC and the city, and seek help from an unlikely source. But what she discovers in her search for the cure could change everything.

  Curing Khang Yeo (Deirdre Gould)

  A terrible plague has devastated the human population of the Earth, turning those infected violent and cannibalistic, even toward those they love. At the brink of extinction, a Cure was found. This is one man's story of waking up to realize what he has done.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword (Samuel Peralta)

  Vindica (Ann Christy)

  Six Days (Theresa Kay)

  Kamika-Z (Christopher Boore)

  The Fall of the Percedus (Jennifer Foe
hner Wells)

  Z Ball (Will Swardstron)

  Gloria (Hugh Howey)

  Her (David Adams)

  The Soulless (Lesley Smith)

  Hybrid (Geoffrey Wakeling)

  Free Fall (Peter Cawdron)

  Girl, Running (Kris Holt)

  The Sin Eater (Stacy Ericson)

  The World After (Angela Cavanaugh)

  Curing Khang Yeo (Deirdre Gould)

  A Note to Readers

  Foreword

  by Samuel Peralta

  “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”

  – Stephen King

  My brain. There it was, dissected and laid out in horizontal slices.

  The screen-saver ran on my computer in a macabre slideshow, a periscope into my translucent skull. Starting from the top, and working its way down just before the spine, the images flickered, one fissured layer after another, like an animation rotoscoped from life.

  Weeks before, I’d driven to my appointment with the Magnetic Resonance Imaging unit of a University Avenue hospital. It was early morning, and the multi-level parking lot behind the hospital was empty, quiet – so quiet I could hear my breath. I remember parking the car across from a black Volvo station wagon. As I made my way toward the second-floor exit, the sound of my shoes echoed from the concrete walls.

  Later at the MRI unit, shoes off, I let myself lie back on the narrow, sliding bed of the machine that was about to engulf me in its coiled Helmholtz embrace. I closed my eyes and tried to quell my fear, that fear that had trailed me from my home when I’d left that morning, from my office the day before, from the clinic where my doctor had read through the results of my first tomographic scan.

  “We don’t know,” he’d said. “We have to make sure.”

  Such simple words, so piercing. So there I was – bereft of metal, any armour – under the thin drapery of a hospital gown, wrapped in wool blankets, and injected with a tracer that slowly coursed its way through my blood like an insidious, multi-headed snake. The bed slid forward, and I was in the maw of the beast.

  Fear is the zombie that pursues you, mindless, unrelenting, hungry.

  It waits for you in the shadows of an empty parking lot as you turn the corner of the stair. It appears when a car careens across the intersection, and you jab your foot at the brake pedal, slipping at its edge. It stalks you in the face of crowds after a lost football game. It grips you when you turn around at the supermarket and suddenly realize your little girl isn’t there beside you, and those aisles of canned spaghetti and bathroom tissues and pet food loom like a monstrous labyrinth, where you run and scream her name.

  With every click, click, click, click, whir the machine devoured my brain, spitting it out into electrons – cortex, cerebellum, medulla oblongata. I would bring it home under my arm, a digital copy captured on disc, to play and re-play at home until I knew by heart that blossoming by the intracranial section near the left cochlear nerve, that intimate shadow of something the physicians hesitated to call by name. A tumor.

  And so we invent our monsters – fictions about zombies and the undead, eaters of flesh and soul – in part so we can close the book at night on them, stifle a nervous laugh, and reassure ourselves they are not real. We face our fears by imagining those we can defeat, because in real life we cannot close the book. We cannot defeat all the monsters.

  We hope that every time we will come out, whistling, from that parking lot. We hope the brakes slow down the car in time; that the boisterous crowds go home; that our little girl comes running from the other aisle and wraps her arms around us, crying, never again to stray. And we hope we will be set down by the doctor, and that he will nod, point to the shadow on the screen, and say, “Don’t worry, we’ll beat this.”

  But fear is the monster, hungry, relentless. And no, we cannot defeat them all.

  __________

  Samuel Peralta is a physicist and storyteller. As well as his own work, he is the creator and driving force behind the Chronicles short story anthologies, including the speculative fiction series The Future Chronicles.

  www.amazon.com/author/samuelperalta

  Vindica

  by Ann Christy

  CHAPTER ONE

  GORDON PUSHED THE BROOM down the hallway, the debris from last night’s party wedging itself into the growing pile in front of him. Another survival party, this one celebrating sixty days since the doors to the shelter closed. Another party he wasn’t invited to or allowed to show up at. Another party he was expected to clean up after while the others slept through their fuzzy-headed dreams.

  A sequin from someone’s dress clung stubbornly to the floor tiles, resisting the angry pushes of his broom. He bent and scraped it up with a fingernail, flicking the silvery disk into the pile of who-knows-what he’d already swept. Given that the shelter was a sealed environment, it was a mystery as to where all this debris came from. However it got here, it collected with alarming rapidity along the corridor edges and it was his job to sweep it each morning.

  The hallway was dim and quiet, the lights at half-brightness because of the extra energy used the night before during the festivities. The only ones not sleeping were those who had no right to complain of the poor lighting that made work more difficult than it had to be. People like Gordon.

  All because of twenty thousand bucks. Out of two hundred thousand.

  “Frigging ten percent short,” he complained to no one, his voice gruff and sounding louder than it should in the quiet hallway.

  Nothing save the strange breathing sounds of the ventilation responded to his words, not that he expected an answer. He was alone in this passageway. The other “Shorties”—the pejorative given to those like him who had come up short on the price by the time the shelter was needed—were all at work in other parts of the facility. Ramon was probably in the kitchens. Larry and Lewis were trying to do maintenance on the off-cycle air filtration system. And Violet, that bull of a woman, was probably preparing for her run outside the facility to check the solar panels and wind systems.

  The other one hundred and twenty-two residents were probably still in their beds or lounging the morning away. Not that morning really mattered anymore except in what choices they were able to order from on the menu of freeze-dried foods.

  “Gordon, do you read me?” a scratchy voice asked from the general vicinity of his waist.

  He unclipped the radio from his belt and sighed, swallowing down the sudden flood of bitterness that washed up from his stomach and twisted his mouth. “Gordon here.”

  “Need a clean-up in the Gathering Hall restroom. The ladies,” the voice said.

  Again Gordon swallowed, this time holding back the angry retort trying to make its way up and out of his mouth. Instead of telling the voice—one that belonged to Paul Crabtree, the organizer of this whole shebang—to stuff it up his ass or clean it himself, he said, “Roger. I’ll be done in the Gold passageway in about fifteen minutes.”

  “No good. I want this cleaned up before anyone gets up. Somebody threw up everywhere,” Paul said.

  Gordon gripped the radio so tightly that his knuckles went white against the plastic, contrasting sharply with his otherwise work-reddened hands. There was so much information conveyed through that simple answer. It said that Gordon’s schedule didn’t matter, that his work day would never end, so Paul didn’t need to consider it. It said volumes about who mattered and who didn’t. And Shorties didn’t matter when compared to the puking needs of those that had finished paying off their berth inside Vindica.

  “Roger,” Gordon said, his voice betraying no hint of the fury and frustration inside.

  Slipping the radio back into the clip, Gordon eyed the pile of dirt on the floor in front of him, then looked down the hallway at the dust bunnies drifting along the edges of the corridor as the ventilation kicked on again. He scooped up what he could into the dustpan, knowing that anyone who happened to walk down this passage wouldn’t think twice about scattering it ag
ain with their careless tread.

  A low laugh—the kind a woman makes when a man surprises her in just the right way as she wakes—bled through one of the Gold Pod doors near the spot where Gordon crouched. He winced at the sound. His girlfriend, a more patient soul than he had ever deserved, wasn’t here with him. That sleep-deepened laugh reminded him of hers.

  He’d never even considered buying a slot for her. He regretted it now, his lack of caring and foresight. If he hadn’t finished paying off his slot, he certainly wouldn’t have finished paying for two of them, but at least he wouldn’t be alone right now. Even working eighteen hours a day left six hours for him to sleep next to her, dreaming of a day when all of this would be over and they could go into the sunshine above once more.

  He missed her warmth, the way she was like a furnace when she slept, making him sweat and kick off the covers even in the depths of winter. He missed her crazy smiles and that scar on her lip from some childhood accident he could never remember the details of. He missed the bright white line of it as her lips stretched wide in a grin. He missed the way she smoothed back his hair while they watched TV at night and that she never teased him when he cried during a movie.