Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER ONE


“This is Big Al . . . on behalf of all of us here at WKEY 103.5 FM . . . wishing each and every one of you good luck. God bless you all, and God bless America.”

From: Collected Radio Transmissions of the Fall,

University of the South Press, 2053



Six months later . . . 


The shambler was slowly picking its way through the woods, stopping every so often to lift its head and sniff the air like an animal. I doubted it knew I was there. Safely off the ground in one of the many tree blinds scattered around the mountain, the odds were slim to none of me being spotted. I stayed quiet anyway. Zombies tended to focus on sudden movements, loud noises, and bright lights. It was of the first lessons we learned when the aftermath of the H7D3 virus arrived on campus.

Taking slow, controlled breaths, I continued to watch as it shuffled around. My rifle did not have a scope. At such a short range, though, it was unnecessary. The green dot sight was more than enough for this sort of work. However, I hesitated with the shot. There was no reason to risk anything just yet, especially since I didn’t know if there were any other zombies nearby.

The zombie was naked, as they all were, nothing more than skin and bones. It was not as well-fed as the ones I’d killed during the early days of the Fall. Still, watching what had once been a regular man walk around naked in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains was disturbing as hell. If I had dreams, this view would have haunted them regularly.

Tracking this zombie had been a chore. It’d first been spotted by one of the lookouts a few days ago down by Dunlap Creek, which ran around the base of the mountain we were holed up on. It was almost wide and deep enough to be a river, but for some reason the locals had declared it to be a creek. The girls who’d spotted the zombie had managed to give me a rough heading and location without alerting it, which was fairly impressive, considering. The zombies tended to follow sound and light, and those two girls weren’t known for being quiet. Since my job was site security—a big job for anyone, trust me on this—it was left to me to deal with it. However, this zombie seemed more elusive than most and I’d had a heck of a time tracking it down. Eventually I just decided to park my butt in a tree stand and wait by the creek. All zombies needed water, and the creek is the easiest and safest source of water around.

It’d been a few months since the lights went out. Lots of people called it “the Fall.” It was difficult to remember those dark, early days. Cities burning, chaos, zombies running everywhere. The survival rate if you were in a city was almost zero. For those in the mountains or countryside, it was slightly higher. Not by much. Maybe five percent, tops. All the smart people went out to sea—and even then, odds weren’t great. With the weather service out of commission, nobody knew when storms were going to hit.

For those of us on the mountain, we’d had to deal with zombies running amok, over eighty percent of my schoolmates dying, and a rapidly dwindling food supply issue. We held on, but just barely. Most of the credit for our continued survival went to Sister Ann, the last surviving nun at St. Dominic’s Preparatory School for Girls here in Alleghany County. She’d been a marine during the Global War on Terror before finding her calling as a nun and ended up at St. Dom’s. Since then, she’d been the glue that held us together.

We were lucky to have her. Nothing against any of the other sisters who’d taught at St. Dominic’s before the plague had ended the world, but I don’t think we’d have done half as well if any of them had survived and been in charge. They say God works in mysterious ways. Putting a retired marine who became a nun in charge of a girls’ school in the mountains of western Virginia right before the zombie apocalypse occurs?

There’s a reason why I don’t really believe in coincidences anymore.

A sharp crack of a branch breaking drew my focus back down. The zombie had stopped and was staring off to the west. It was growling, which wasn’t too surprising. Everything we’d seen up to now suggested they didn’t talk or communicate—at least not in any language I understood. They were more like aggressive dogs, ready to attack at a moment’s notice. Most of them, at least. Once in a while you got a quiet, meek zombie who’d only attack when cornered. No idea what was up with those but since they tended to not come up to the school and try to eat the younger kids, I didn’t usually waste a round on them.

Okay, so I know they’re not zombies exactly. Listening in on the clearance operations of the so-called Wolf Squadron on the shortwave helped straighten things out there. Everyone else called them all sorts of names—including zombies—but since Sister Ann said that was incorrect, we’d taken to calling them shamblers. Not because of the way they walk or anything, but because nothing else we thought of really fit.

The forest around me had grown eerily silent. This was normal whenever a shambler appeared. The birds always went quiet whenever one showed up. They were a handy alarm system to have. Not always reliable—they stopped chirping whenever I walked by as well—but better than nothing. Even the squirrels, always numerous, were up in their trees and motionless. It was if they recognized the danger, too.

The shambler was clearly hungry. It was locked onto a target somewhere in the tree line. I carefully aimed and almost took the shot right then and there. However, past lessons told me that if there was one near campus, there could be others. They might come running at the sound of the gunshot. I had two spare magazines, but after the horde that had come down from Warm Springs the month before, I wasn’t willing to risk it.

Instead, I tracked the direction the shambler was looking. After a moment I spotted what had drawn its ire. A good-sized black bear—a chunk, truth be told—had wandered out of the forest and into the glade. This late in the season it had to be looking for food, with winter just around the corner and all. Bears have become a more common sight around campus since the Fall. They hadn’t gotten into the garden yet but since they could climb, it was only a matter of time. I wasn’t sure if this one had been a regular at the trash bin, or a newcomer.

Either way, the shambler was clearly not happy with the bear’s sudden arrival. It howled a challenge and charged it in a blind rage.

For a moment I could almost see the thought process of the bear as it looked up and spotted the shambler running toward it. Pink man-thing charging? Retreat. RUN. Wait, I’m a big boy. They call me Chonk. I don’t run from pink man-thing. I fight. WIN.

The bear made a strange grunting noise and backed away a few steps, swinging its head back and forth. The poor thing didn’t know what to make of this strange naked human, howling like a banshee. It had to have seen humans before, but never one that actively tried to attack it like this. Hopefully. It reached the bear and tried to claw at it. The bear reared up on its hind legs and roared a challenge, or a protest. I’m not really sure. Bear-ese is not my forte. I took Latin (required by the nuns) and German (the foreign language I chose, because it was required by the state to graduate . . . the jerkfaces). The shambler replied with a howl and tried to bite it.

Standing up, the bear was slightly taller than the shambler, though it was a close thing. The former man had been a bit on the short side to begin with. The black bear was definitely heavier, though, and used its weight to throw off the annoying shambler. The infected stumbled to the ground and tried to get back up to continue its attack, but the bear wasn’t having any of it. With terrifying speed it swiped the shambler across the head with a meaty paw two, three, four times.

The shambler fell, growling and mewling, keening an unearthly sound that set my teeth on edge. However, its legs clearly weren’t working. The chonky boi must have had some power behind those swipes and done some damage to the emaciated thing that had once been human. It tried to grab the bear but Chonk clearly wasn’t having it. Opening its mouth wide, the bear bit down hard on the back of the shambler’s neck and began shaking it like a rag doll. The shambler howled piteously one final time before sound was cut off abruptly.

I had a horrifying thought as I watched the end of the battle: Could a bear turn into a weird hybrid zombie thing, like the shambler?

The shambler was definitely dead now, courtesy of Chonk. The bear took a second, tentative bite of the dead shambler’s head before dropping it. I shivered. The idea of a zombie bear was terrifying, but the sight of the bear trying to eat a shambler was not something I needed in my head. Not now. Not ever. I couldn’t leave just yet, though. If the bear saw me, it might decide I would be fun to chase. Or not. Hard to tell. Again, caution is sometimes better than guns a-blazing. The bear’s full attention was on the dead shambler lying there. It swiped the head again before rising up and bringing its full weight down on the shambler’s back. I could hear the sickening crack of the zombie’s spine from up here. The urge to vomit was there but I managed to chew it back. I could heave my guts out later.

The possibility of bagging the bear entered my mind but I dismissed it almost as quickly as it came. The 5.56mm round from “Baby” (the custom-built AR-15 I’d “acquired” in the first days after the Fall) would probably just piss the bear off more than it already was. Even a shot to the head might not kill it immediately. Besides, I figured I owed Sir Chonk one. It’d bagged a shambler and saved me some ammo.

Eventually the bear grew bored of mud-stomping the shambler into pieces and wandered away in search of more actual food in preparation for the winter. I stayed up in the blind for another hour before deciding it was safe to come down. The zombie hadn’t moved during the entire time. There wasn’t much to see but from what I could, the bear had done a number on it. This was something I would bring up to Sister Ann during the student council meeting that night. Bears were a nuisance and could even be dangerous, but they also apparently hated shamblers about as much as I did.

Good to know.

Like Sister Margaret had always said, nature always finds a way to win in the end.

The forest came back to life, slowly but surely. The birds sang and the squirrels bounced around on the forest floor looking for their meal. A slight breeze blew across my face and for a moment I was able to forget what I’d just witnessed. Instead, I let nature sink in and bring a calm to my soul that growing up in Southern California had never managed. The smell of the mountain air was different, sweeter. Definitely no pollution up here. I didn’t miss the smog alerts we’d dealt with back in Orange County.

The moment of calm passed. I needed to get back to campus. Sister Ann would want a detailed account of what happened here. Plus, with the amount of zombies—yeah, sorry, shamblers—we saw dropping every week, we needed to start preparing for whatever crisis would hit us next. And there would be one. Things were running too smoothly.

I let out a soft sigh and kicked the rope ladder down. It unfurled in a hurry and stopped two feet off the ground. Once Baby was secure, I carefully climbed around the safety rail of the blind. Using the trunk of the tree as support, I made my way down the ladder. Safely down, I scanned my surroundings. Still no sign of any other shamblers. I started back up the mountain to campus, staying aware for any signs of danger. A girl’s job is never done.

My name is Madison Coryell. Everyone I care about calls me Maddie, but this isn’t my story.

It’s our story. Humanity’s.

For better or worse.


Long before I removed her head with a twelve-gauge, Sister Margaret had given me solid advice: Try your best and rise above the rest. I’d always taken it to mean that she wanted me to rise above everyone else, to be better than them. It wasn’t until the middle of the zombie apocalypse that I began to wonder if there was a deeper meaning to her words.

The long hike back up the mountain gave me plenty of time to think about her words. Not for the first time did I search for some kind of hidden meaning in them. But lately I’d been wondering about her words, mostly because they didn’t really fit with what was going on before the Fall had occurred. Had she somehow known what was coming? I mean, everyone had been tracking the Pacific Flu when it first showed up, but what had Sister Margaret anticipated?

One of the benefits of the school was that St. Dominic’s was perfectly situated to survive a zombie apocalypse. Or any sort of apocalypse, for that matter. Originally built way back before the Great Depression to provide a home for orphaned girls, St. Dominic’s had morphed throughout the years to become a reform school of sorts for at-risk girls. All of us were somewhere between eight and eighteen—except for my classmate Lucia, who’d turned nineteen right after the news of the Pacific Flu broke.

The campus was situated high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, not too far from the West Virginia border. Alleghany County was big, but not really populated. Ten thousand people, maybe twelve, tops. The nearest major city was probably Roanoke, which was over an hour away to the south. Covington was a few miles away but since it had less than five thousand people before the Fall, I guess it’s not a city. Or is. Was? Eh, whatever. This entire area was weird before the Fall hit.

Secluded and isolated was what the orphanage’s founders wanted. I don’t know why. Most Catholic orphanages that I’ve read about in books were situated in big cities like Boston or Los Angeles. The founders of St. Dominic’s, however, wanted seclusion and privacy. The original farm was supposed to be self-sustaining, complete with dairy cows, pigs, and chickens. Of course, as more time passed and technology progressed, the cows and pigs went away. The chickens remained—until the Fall, at least. None of them had survived the shamblers.

That’d been one nasty incident.

Thanks to this isolation, though, St. Dominic’s had weathered the early days of the Fall better than most. Although we’d lost over ninety percent of the students and staff to the plague, we had natural borders, fresh water, well water, and some solar panels to help keep the mechanical well running.

Which made it the perfect location for a small group like ours to survive just about anything.

During the height of the Cold War, some school director had decided that being so close to the Greenbrier Resort was a BAD IDEA. The Greenbrier was where members of Congress would go in case of a nuclear attack. If missiles started flying, then it was supposed to be a place politicians could hole up and wait it out. Since the Soviets probably knew this as well, the old school director had figured it had some nukes aimed there. You know, to be thorough.

So how does one protect a school from nuclear fallout? By sinking two years’ worth of the budget into building an elaborate underground bunker system across campus, and a separate one beneath the cafeteria, complete with air filtration system. This second one was what all of us girls called home now, since it was still too dangerous and nasty to clear out the dorm cottages around campus. Eventually we’d get there. Especially if Sister Ann decided we would open up the school for refugees . . . if any found their way to us, I mean.

Like a phoenix from the ashes, St. Dominic’s was rising once more. Fueled by the iron will of a nun, some teenage spite, and lots of ammunition, maybe, yeah, we could rebuild. It was better than simply lying down and letting death come for you. At least, that was what I thought. Fortunately, Sister Ann shared my opinion.

Somewhere in the distance, another shambler gave out a keening howl. It was unsettling but didn’t sound very close. I stopped and listened for a reply. None came. Just to be sure, I unslung Baby and waited. A few more minutes passed and still nothing. The shambler must have been a loner, not part of the more dangerous hunter packs that seemed to roam randomly throughout the Alleghany Highlands.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t going to hang around and find out if I was wrong. We didn’t survive this long by being stupid when it came to dealing with shamblers. I picked up the pace and fifteen minutes later was on the bridge that led up to the school.

Dunlap Creek was running high, though not quite enough to flood out the lower fields. The bridge sat high above the creek and was narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other on. And I mean really small cars. Looking at the concrete bridge, I wondered if there would be a time when we needed to block access. Or perhaps make it so narrow the only passage would be to walk through it. There were some cars up on the mountain that could work . . . 

I shook my head. Figuring out Sister Margaret’s advice would have to wait. I had a report to give.

I slung my rifle back over my left shoulder and walked on the right-hand side of the road. It might seem odd to note this, but it was the sign that I was returning alone and safe. If someone was forcing me to come up to the school or something, I’d walk on the left and have the rifle over my right shoulder. Simple, but effective. I just had to make very certain I remembered if I ever was coming up the main road—which I didn’t do too often. This, along with the fact that it was actually quicker, was why I preferred the path by the railroad tracks on the north side of the school.

I could see one of the other girls watching me from the rooftop of the cafeteria. I rounded the main road past the ruined admin building, making sure to stay clear of the wrecked building just in case. We hadn’t seen a shambler spend the night down there in months but once was enough. Not being careful back in August had cost us Tammy.

The spotter on the roof had a rifle but there was no way she would fire, even if I’d come up the road being chased by a horde of shamblers. None of the girls were willing to kill a shambler, which pissed me off to no end. However, she could give the alarm. This meant that while I would be screwed, the other girls could make it back into the safety of the bunker. I’d accepted this risk since I first volunteered to start scouting around campus, but it still sucked.

I really needed to find someone to back me up. Soon.

Sighing, I waved the all clear. There were days when it sank in just how alone I was up here. Today was one of those. Yeah, the girls lived in the bunker with me, but with the exception of the student council, nobody really wanted to deal with me. The nagging suspicion that even the others on the council detested me lingered constantly in the back of my mind.

For a moment I just . . . paused.

The quad was quiet and still. The athletic field, where we played soccer and field hockey before the Fall, was overgrown and filled with weeds. It was still green, though it’d started to turn a little brown as autumn really started sinking its teeth into the Blue Ridge Mountains. The abandoned cottage dorms of the elementary and junior high schoolers were to my left, and in rather rough shape. When the Fall had begun, many of the first-floor windows had been smashed by shamblers trying to get out or chase down anybody trapped inside. Since we weren’t in a hurry to sleep anywhere but in the bunker, there wasn’t a need to clear them yet. We hadn’t seen a shambler anywhere near them in four weeks.

My eyes followed the curving pavement path beyond to the high school cottages. Both Groller Cottage—my former residence—and Bolgeo Cottage were in better shape than the younger girls’ cottages. They were also newer, which might have had something to do with it. Or not. Still, we’d cleared them to make sure shamblers weren’t lurking in there and locked them up. Sister Ann told me we might have use for them later. I didn’t know what for, but I’d learned to completely trust her judgment over the past six months.

The paved path actually made a full loop around the field. On the opposite side of the field was the gym. We’d only gone in there a few times, grabbing items off a list Sister Ann had given. We’d seen shamblers around it in the early days, but nothing recent. Still, caution was something Sister Ann preached on almost as much as the Bible. Anytime any of us went near it we were careful—especially since the hidden back trail came up behind it.

A cry overhead drew my gaze upward. There were a few ravens flying above, their wings catching thermals as they rode higher into the late afternoon sky. They were a pretty common sight and one of the other natural alarms we had for the school. Typically, if the ravens weren’t flying above then there was a shambler somewhere close. They soared higher and higher, dipping and weaving as they jockeyed for position on the thermals. For a moment, I wanted nothing more than that sort of freedom. To just lift off and fly away at a moment’s notice was . . . enticing.

Growing up used to be my life’s ambition. To be an adult and not have to deal with people telling me what to do anymore was probably the biggest reason I started acting out in junior high school. My parents tried to tell me to slow down on a daily basis. But I knew best, of course. It was my life and I would live it how I wanted.

God, I want to go back in time and smack the hell out of fourteen-year-old me. That little girl had been one ignorant bitch.

The heavy door to the cafeteria squeaked open. Sister Ann’s voice cut into my reverie. “Maddie? It’s getting dark. Is everything okay?”

My moment of peace was over. It was time to get back to work.

“Coming, ma’am.”


Back | Next
Framed