The Z Chronicles Read online

  As for Kat, I didn’t even hear his response. I saw her. At least, what used to be her. After the player introductions, the Z combatants were released from their containment area, and Kat was shambling out with the rest of them. I barely noticed the hulking form of Cal behind her. In that moment, I didn’t care about my teammates. I didn’t care about the other half-dozen Z. I didn’t even care about myself.

  The game hadn’t started yet, but I ran towards the horde. For once I figured I would try to be brave. I was going to put whatever was left of Kat and Cal out of their misery. I was going to try to make up in some small way for everything I’d done. I would take care of all of them and spill the league’s secrets after the game. Kat and Cal deserved that much. I reached for the sword latched to the back of my uniform.

  But...my sword wasn’t there. I pawed at my arms and found no knives. I reached for my hip pads, hoping for the back-up pistol I’d always kept there.

  Nothing.

  They’d drugged me and left me with nothing. Parnell’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

  “Thanks for a great career, Vince. You were and will always be one of the greats of Z Ball,” Parnell said.

  The fight wasn’t over. I remembered Jellyroll’s last stand, and fought and clawed my way through the undead. Even without weapons, the uniform protected me for a long time. I grabbed a nearby helmet and used it like a baseball bat against a few of the heads of the Z before me.

  Parnell knew what he’d done. He knew who I was. I was the same, scared man who had gotten into a bar fight and lost a chance to have everything in the NFL. I had a chance to tell the world about the ZFL, and I charged, without thinking, into a full squad of fresh undead players.

  I was a coward and a failure.

  Cal, Kat, and the other Z slammed into me. I had a few more seconds of consciousness, and Parnell confirmed what I already knew.

  “Long live Z Ball,” Parnell seemed to whisper in my ear.

  Within seconds, my own blood clouded my vision. Parnell had won, and I had lost. I knew I had failed for the final time.

  Parnell’s voice echoed in my ears.

  “Long live Z Ball!”

  A Word from Will Swardstrom

  So often with zombies, we think of apocalyptic events and the end of the world. A ragtag group of survivors on the run, living day to day. We think of massive hordes that are too overpowering for the world’s civilizations.

  I’d like to think that even if zombies were to overrun the earth, our trained military forces would eventually gain the upper hand. We’d might even contain the threat. That was part of the idea behind “Z Ball”. What if we not only contained the zombies, but also put them to work for us?

  Back in 2008, the big banks in New York caused a huge financial crisis. Millions of people were affected between losing jobs, pensions, and their homes. Yet, nothing of consequence has happened to the bank executives. In fact, when the banks should have been bankrupted by their unethical practices, the government bailed them out with billions of dollars.

  When a government that refuses to acknowledge when corporate corruption and crime exists, what happens when zombies enter the picture?

  Then, in 2014, when Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was caught on camera knocking out his then-fiancee, the power of the NFL commissioner was on full display. Again, a multi-millionaire CEO essentially was able to do what he wanted without many repercussions.

  In a previous life, I worked as a sports reporter, so the football side of the story came naturally to me. I thought “Z Ball” could be an out-of-the-box take on the zombie genre, and I hope you enjoyed it.

  Huge thanks to my brother Paul Swardstrom, Thomas Robins, Chris Fried, David Walters, Christy Winemiller, and Chris Pourteau for beta reading this story and helping it along. I’d also like to thank Samuel Peralta for his creation of The Future Chronicles and his invitation to be in The Z Chronicles and to Ellen Campbell for her excellent editing.

  I’d love to hear from you, the reader. You can follow my adventures on my blog, or my Amazon page where you can also find all my other books.

  RIP Jellyroll

  Gloria

  by Hugh Howey

  1

  IT SOUNDED LIKE HANDS digging in buckets of popcorn, like Velcro pressed together and ripped back apart, all those fingernails gouging and scrambling against the bark of the tree. Gloria jostled with the pack beneath the limb. Mother and daughter sat above, quietly crying and whispering false hopes, cornered like cats by a pack of dogs.

  There was no escape, Gloria saw. For the past few hours, she had studied the predicament of the two women, and there was no escape. Not for any of them. This was what frightened her the most: the left-behind souls scrambling at the trunk were just as trapped as the starving couple in the tree. And a steady trickle of the blood-crusted meat-eaters were shambling through the woods to cluster beneath that limb. It was like ants spilling down a slippery funnel they couldn’t get back out of. They were all trapped, every one. They would be, until those women on that limb starved to death or lost their balance, until they were either consumed or their meat rotted in death and stopped smelling like sweet succor.

  This was not a problem Gloria had foreseen. The living simply did not do this, they didn’t hover almost within reach, neither running nor dying. They survived or they were consumed. They got away or they passed through the guts of the damned. One side or the other won, never a stalemate.

  Not a stalemate, Gloria thought. Purgatory. Trapped in the in-between. They were a lot like Gloria in that way, and she wondered what they had done to deserve this. Something,obviously. The Lord was just, all sins accounted for. They had all done something to be trapped there.

  Hours went by, thinking such circular thoughts. Gloria circled that tree, which she thought was an oak. She bumped into the others and took her turn scratching the rough bark. She clawed at the air and groaned at the nothing, secretly privy to the voiced fears and panicked whispers that drifted down from above.

  And Gloria prayed for deliverance. She thought of that shoreline she had walked down hours before and wondered if turning toward the water, toward the thing she feared in that moment, may not have been the better choice. Wasn’t this her lot? Her life? Was this the lesson God was attempting to hammer home?

  Gloria kicked through the dry leaves and mulled over the times she’d felt both trapped and safe. Trapped in marriage, even after the baby was taken from her, even after her husband was locked away. The sin of divorce was that frigid lake, and so she circled Carl for years and years, pawing at the empty space around her.

  A job she hated, turning over rooms, making bed after bed, picking up scattered towels and restocking stolen toiletries. Every day, tiptoeing through wrecks that looked more like robberies than a night’s stay, dealing with creepy men who put signs out for service, but were still in there, sometimes a towel around their waists, pretending to be startled, sometimes wearing nothing at all. Men sent by the devil to harass her, to tell her she was pretty when she knew better, offer her money for unspeakable things.

  A job she hated, but change was the other way. Applications and learning something new were the icy deep.

  The city was a funnel. Gloria looked around her, something she secretly did on the subway. All different colors, different backgrounds, all the accents. Ants drawn to honey, but they can’t get away from the city. They land with their parents or bring their own children, get that first job, learn to drive a cab or flip a room, and never leave.

  This was her sin, Gloria thought. God had given her command of her feet and had set her on the shore of life, and she had chosen to live the least. She had always chosen to avoid her fears, had shrunk from the daunting and the risky. And what had her Savior done? Had he walked away from the challenge, or had he strolled across the water knowing he would not sink?

  Gloria let out a frustrated gurgle, a prayer to Saint Anthony, the liberator of prisoners:

  Tear down my prison wa
lls. Break the chains that hold me captive. Make me free with the freedom Christ has won for me. Amen.

  She prayed to Saint Leonard, the patron Saint of captives, slaves, and all those held against their will:

  Pray for those like me in prison, Saint Leonard. For those forgotten in prison, pray for them. Amen.

  Gloria prayed for herself, for her own plights. She prayed for someone to grant her the courage. She prayed for deliverance, for rescue, for something to break her free of the cycle in which she’d long been trapped. She prayed that she could do it all over again, that she might head west and live in a small town, find a different job, a good man, try once more to start a family, to have a child or two or four. She prayed and prayed the same prayers, her words running out, forming small loops, memorized verse, begging and begging for release as she circled that tree, bumping into so many others, but giving little thought to them at all.

  2

  Morning came, and birdsong filled the air around all the trees but one. Unlike the squirrels, which would burrow through the leaves by undead feet, the birds chirped warily and from a distance. When they did swoop in, it was only briefly to pick maggots from a cheek or eye socket. They would perch on a shoulder and pluck a morsel or scrap of rotten flesh, maybe a torn bit of fabric for their nest, and then flap away to a far branch. While they preened and ate and squawked at the world, another leaf would lose its precarious grip and drift down around Gloria and the others.

  It had been an especially cold night for all of them. Frost lay in patches, the browning leaves looking as if dusted in sugar, the uncut grass and tall weeds adorned with frozen crystals. Gloria wasn’t sure how the mother and child in the tree had survived the bitter cold, but they were already moving about on the broad limb. The mom directed her child into a patch of sunlight that managed to lance through the distant buildings and silent trees to warm a spot of air. Their whispers leaked through chattering teeth.

  Gloria had spent much of the night drifting in and out. She remembered coming to and hearing the sobs, which she assumed at first to be from the child, but it was the mother crying. She also saw the pack had grown in number. The tree was one of those crab pots the poor animals could crawl into but never get out of. Gloria and the rest would be there until the couple starved and rotted, until the appetite was gone, the scent dissipating.

  It was bitingly cold, and the evidence formed in puffs of false breath, the undead groaning in hungry frustration, the woman and young girl above adding their own shivering clouds to the air.

  Gloria circled beneath them. She watched as the mother seemed to succumb to the stress and cold, as she lost her mind. It took a moment to realize what she was doing, that she was stripping herself bare in the morning chill. With her chin lifted toward the promise of a meal, Gloria followed, curious and confused, as the woman tore her thin shirt into strips and began twisting them together. She was talking to her daughter as she worked, explaining something, some kind of plan.

  Whispers of a plan made Gloria feel torn. There was the thrill of maybe witnessing an escape, perhaps a dash down the creaking and frost-slick limbs, a daring swing or jump to a neighboring tree. Some plan that relied on racing naked ahead of the stumbling pack, running through the woods still dappled in darkness, hoping to avoid the promise of a roaming bite.

  Gloria felt the allure of such daring and guile. She also dreaded the loss of a meal, no end to her infernal hunger, and all those days wasted following their scents.

  Strips of clothing were tied together. A belt. Torn and threadbare jeans, much too large. The mother worked in her underwear fifteen feet above Gloria’s head. It was the daughter’s turn to cry. While she sobbed, her mother looped the knotted fabric around the limb on which they crouched. They were both sobbing. The mother stroked the girl’s hair, caressed her cheek. Gloria could see them shivering. Maybe she imagined the blue cast to the woman’s naked skin. Perhaps it was real. How they survived the night, she couldn’t understand. With her clothes off, Gloria felt she could see every bone in her emaciated body.

  “Shhh,” she said, consoling her child. “It’s okay.”

  She arranged the improvised rope around her daughter’s neck, adjusting it as if getting her ready for school. The girl’s thin arms held her mother’s wrists. Bits of bark rained down from their movement on the limb.

  “I love you,” the mother said. The words were interspersed with sobs.

  And before Gloria could process what was happening, before she could fully wake, there was a final kiss on the forehead, a scrambling of thin arms as the child realized what plans her mother had for their escape, and then a painful shove out into the open air, the crunch of rope on bark, the yank and pop of a young neck, and then bare feet swinging in the frosty air, the last of the leaves from that great bough leaping to their deaths, shaken off by this disturbance in the tree.

  Gloria circled beneath the girl, horrified. A police officer waved at the air, the flesh hanging just out of reach, the child slowly spinning as the twisted rope settled.

  There were curses above, the mad screech of a woman at the end of a more figurative rope, the yell of anger at the world that Gloria secretly longed to erupt with, that sort of anger with a silent, invisible, and cruel God that bubbles up with every injustice, every heartbreaking loss, every turn of bad luck. Screams instead of whispered prayer. A woman’s throat working and yelling all that needed saying.

  Gloria’s gaze was lifted to the heavens, to this brave mother, and she saw that the curses and screeches were not directed at any God, but rather at the demons below, the hellspawn she had joined.

  More leaves fluttered from their weakening stems as the mother pushed off. And with a great leap, she threw herself out of her misery, not enough rope for the both of them, and Gloria, unable to resist, horrified, dove in with the others and claimed her share. And as she fell on the brave soul, something snapped. Some sinew or thread in her brain, whatever it was that anchored her to sanity, she felt it snap and knew, with righteous surety, that God made no mistakes. He had left her there for her sins, for not being perfect enough. This was her damnation, her eternal reward.

  She fought her way through the feeding pack and lowered her face toward the mother’s screams. Her first bite was of gaunt and trembling cheek, flesh tearing away. She chewed the mouth of this fallen woman, the rubbery lips, hungry for the mind inside. Hungry for it, even as she lost her own. Even though she was, as ever, unaware that anyone resided there. Unaware that anyone other than her suffered at all.

  A Word from Hugh Howey

  Being a zombie is not at all what we’ve thought all these long years. It turns out that zombies know exactly what they are doing, they just can’t stop themselves. Not only is this just as sound scientifically (there are disorders where motor control is subverted or lost while mental faculties remain intact), it’s also much, much more interesting. This is the premise behind “Gloria”, one of the souls from I, Zombie.

  Hugh Howey is the author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling WOOL series. The WOOL OMNIBUS won Kindle Book Review's 2012 Indie Book of the Year Award -- it has been as high as #1 in the Kindle store -- and 17 countries have picked up the work for translation. WOOL is in hardback from Random House UK and keep your fingers crossed that Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian will do something exciting with the film rights!

  Hugh lives in Jupiter, FL with his wife Amber and their dog Bella. When he isn't writing, he's reading or taking a photograph.

  www.hughhowey.com

  Her

  by David Adams

  You know, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender – people are people.

  - Judith Light

  DIANE

  WHEN I WAS ALIVE, I used to wonder: can a ghost and a zombie come from the same person?

  The question made sense, I suppose, based on what I knew at the time. 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.

  I don’t think ghosts are real. I think this because, when you’re bitten by a zombie, and turn into a zombie, your consciousness is still in there. Trapped inside. A spectator to your own life, watching every horrible thing that you do to those you love.

  Canada’s gone now. And I don’t mean gone as in a giant smoking crater—that would be a welcome development at this point. I mean it’s mostly overrun with the living dead. The undead. The walking dead. Whatever we are; shambling corpses staggering around, running, biting, chewing.

  The physics of it defy me. My limbs have severed tendons yet still manage to move. My muscles have mostly rotten away but I’m stronger than ever. I eat, even though the meat falls out the empty side of my jaw, and yet I don’t die.

  When you’re a corpse you have a lot of time to think. Almost all of my day is spent wandering the frozen streets of Vancouver, trying to find the living. There aren’t many of them left these days. Sometimes we find them.

  They don’t last long.

  My wanderings took me all over town. Into people’s houses. Climbing up disused stairs, past debris and ruin and rubble. The city was rotting just like its inhabitants were; falling apart. One day I wandered past a train station. I don’t know why my body went that way; when I was alive I rarely took the train. I had my own car. Not a nice car, but it beat riding the train.

  Trains were dangerous for girls like me. Yet, in my undeath, I was drawn to the tracks. Further evidence of the gulf between my living and dead self.