When the Dead Read online

  When the Dead

  A Zombie Novel by Michelle Kilmer

  Text copyright © 2012 Michelle Kilmer.

  Any similarities to persons living, dead or undead is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to . . .

  the first type of person

  who will do anything to survive,

  my family and friends for the love and support,

  my editors Rachel and Rebecca Hansen and

  Kevin D. Looney for helping the dead walk,

  To my father who, in his time with his children,

  encouraged us to be creative, unique and intrepid,

  And to my wonderful husband

  who doesn’t like zombies at all

  Table of Contents

  The Infection

  Fucked

  Willow Brook Apartments

  The First Day

  S.O.S.-less

  The Second Day

  Tissue Thin

  The Devil’s Work

  A Promise

  Coping Mechanism

  The Plague in Pixels

  Ben on the Third Day

  The Fourth Day

  Behind Closed Doors

  Imagination Infected

  Anna

  Fuck It List

  The Fifth Day

  The Main Office

  Meet the Neighbors

  3rd Floor

  Expectations

  2nd Floor

  (Un)Charismatically Cold Blooded

  1st Floor

  Uncertainty

  Gate to Hell

  Snack Time

  Spooked

  All Kinds

  Suicides

  Last Second Thoughts

  Really Secured-Access

  Front Row Seat

  Unrequited Love

  Numb

  Second Floor Slumber Party

  An Inquiry

  Lullaby

  The Sixth Day

  The First Meeting

  Noise Complaint

  Tom Vaughn’s 1st Assignment

  Run, Fat Girl

  In Good Hands

  Molly Mathay, Caretaker

  Macabre Parade

  Urges

  The Second Meeting

  DIY Birth

  Afterbirth

  The Photograph Isn’t Enough

  Full Access

  One for You and Two for Me

  Litter Bug

  The Third Meeting

  Tom Vaughn’s 2nd Assignment

  A Thieves Market

  Beat to Re-Death

  Pink Horse

  Dead Lawn

  Family Reunion

  Old Habits

  The Boat House

  FedEx

  Gnome City

  No Blood on Our Hands

  Best Before . . .

  Sanitation

  Finders Keepers

  Hayden

  Love in the Dead Air

  Teen Spirit

  Our Own Little World

  According to Plan

  Shelter

  Let it All Out

  Crash Course

  Appearances

  First Impressions

  A Minor Issue

  The Morning After

  Careful Confrontation

  Fresh Air

  Loneliness

  Living On

  Forms of Decay

  Left Out

  The Mall

  Zombified

  You Are Here

  On the Run

  Missing and Missed

  Brace Yourself

  (Below the) Surface Wounds

  Distractions

  Admitting Defeat

  Another Stab in the Heart

  Home School

  Deadbeat Dad

  A Glass of Courage

  Smoke on the Horizon

  Comfort in Chaos

  Reason to Live

  Permission to Leave

  Fresh Fare

  A Gut Feeling

  Speculation

  Sneak Attack

  Role Playing

  Proof of Death

  Curiosity

  Play Time

  Killing as Kindness

  Friendships Forged . . .

  . . . and Lost

  Movers

  Picking up the Pieces

  A Rough Night

  Selfishness

  A Difficult Decision

  Cold Feet

  To The Point

  Promise or Prayer

  The Best Way to Go

  A Rougher Day

  Baby Blues

  A Different Approach

  Death without Dignity

  Honor the Dead

  Evicted

  Alternate Ending

  Versions of the Truth

  Street View

  Careless Confrontation

  Out of the Bag

  Screw This

  Struggle Within

  Molly Mathay, Alone

  Punishment, Banishment, or Death

  Gossip Mill

  Hindsight

  Unlikely Advisor

  Sleep

  Torrential

  The Trial of Jeff Brown

  On the Outside

  A for Effort

  Normalcy

  Tunnel Vision

  Mind Games

  Disorder

  Exit Stage Left

  Molly Fights Back

  Liars Not Welcome

  Botched

  Tom Vaughn’s New Plan

  Armed . . .

  . . . and Dangerous

  Game Changer

  Off

  Unhappy Ending

  Spent

  Bang

  It All Adds Up

  Self Worth

  Separate Ways

  The Good Old Days

  Pages

  Revenge

  Fire and Rescue

  Options

  Molly Mathay, Actress

  Ripple Effect

  Shut In

  Nothing to Do List

  Out for Repairs

  When the Dead . . .

  End

  About the Author

  The Infection

  It starts with a cold sweat then a swift drop in body temperature that makes the teeth chatter. The skin feels itchy and hot but the insides are dying from the cold.

  Then the numbness starts in the extremities. Finger tips, toes, up through the feet and hands into the legs and arms and finally the core. It cannot be rubbed out as the hands do not work anymore.

  It reaches the chest and the ability to control the breathing is lost. Just before the last breath of air escapes the lungs, numbness reaches the head.

  The eyes go crazy, the tongue limp. One cannot call out for help as the head falls on the chest. There is but a single moment for the dying self to think a final thought . . .

  Why me?

  But then . . . you aren’t you anymore.

  Fucked

  “I can’t understand what they’re saying,” Edward said as he slammed a fist down on the radio.

  “You could try another station. That sounds like French they’re speaking,” his wife Moira suggested. She had wanted a television for a long time but Edward preferred the way the voices came floating from the speakers into the apartment. This meant that in the current situation though, they had to rely on the radio show hosts graphic descriptions to give them any idea of what was going on in cities across the globe.

  “The other stations keep replaying the same stuff. It’s not getting any better; only worse,” Edward grumbled.

  “Then there’s nothing we can do but make some tea and wait to see what happens next.”

  “It’s happening everywhere,” Isobel said to her mo
ther over the phone. She had spent the morning reading news articles online. She had watched a clip of someone succumb to the infection on a CDC table, surrounded by plastic and strapped down like a criminal or lunatic.

  “Things will be ok, Isobel! They have a carrier. It really is only a matter of time. If they can study it, they can find a cure or at least a vaccine. Try to keep this thing from spreading any further.”

  “It’s too big already. The world is fucked. I’ve got to go.” She hung up the phone not knowing it would be the last time she’d speak to her mother.

  “On and on for three days, man; can’t they talk about something else?” Vaughn turned off his television angrily. “Could have been aliens, maybe the government, maybe bio-terrorists? Shut up.” He chucked a drained beer can at the black screen. “Just fix it and forget it!”

  Vaughn was alone, as he often was, unless he paid for company. He was talking to himself. He probably couldn’t even pay someone to listen to him. Especially when he was drunk and that was most of the time.

  “Couldn’t be bio-terrorists, they’d a laid claim to it. Been proud of the trouble they were causing. Pretty fancy stuff making dead people come back to life. It has to be the government; only group with enough funding and closed doors to pull this shit off.”

  The infection was quickly spreading. It had reached terrorist groups and government groups alike. It lay in thousands of sickbeds, it rode the bus, and it lived next door to many already. No one was immune from this unstoppable plague.

  The number one cause for the spread of the disease was denial. It made no sense to anyone. News media could be blamed for the lies with headlines like It’s impossible!, Death is death, the final breath, and People don’t come back. They stay wherever it is that they went.

  Willow Brook Apartments

  Willow Brook is a three-story building, four if you count the basement. Each floor has six two-bedroom apartments with identical floor plans.

  The kitchen is to the left of the entry. It has an island that looks out on the dining room and living room. The first room on the right down the hallway is a second bedroom. Next is the laundry closet with a stacking washer/dryer unit. The last room on the right is the bathroom. At the end of the hall is a closet and the master bedroom is on the left.

  All of the apartments look more or less like this save for differences in décor and varying levels of tidiness. The Willow Brook building is controlled access, meaning that if you don’t have a key, someone has to buzz you in, or not.

  The First Day

  On the morning of the first day, the day that things would start to change for the residents of Willow Brook Apartments, things looked normal. When Isobel Shiffman looked outside it was almost too normal, right down to the happy thieving squirrel in the tree nearest her living room window.

  Northgate is at the northern edge of Seattle and the nearest reports of the disease were further north in Everett and south in Tacoma, still far enough away for Isobel to brave the outdoors. Her mother had told her to stock up on food just in case things didn’t clear up as quickly as she hoped. Isobel had gone shopping on Sunday and it was only Tuesday but her mother insisted.

  Like Isobel, the rest of the city driven by nagging mothers, packed into the grocery stores and left them in such a state of disarray that it was hard for her to navigate. The cart, even without the help of the wobbly right front wheel, kept running into things: cans of food, a bag of chips, some nylons, and other items strewn about. All of which were displaced far from their original aisle and shelf. She struggled with it until she found the secret to making the cart move was to put pressure on the left side of it with her foot. She went for some of the fresh food that everyone else was ignoring, figuring it could be eaten first and when it ran out or started to rot, whichever happened first, she’d break into the non-perishables (of which she had a lot).

  She made it up to the only open checkout lane.

  “How long did you buy for?” the nervous cashier asked.

  “Um . . . I don’t know. A week?” Isobel wasn’t good at estimation or small talk. Her cart was full with what she knew was affordable for her budget and, more importantly, what she could carry up to her second floor apartment on her own. She hadn’t been thinking about timelines.

  “That won’t be enough. The world is coming to an end.”

  “Ok. Well how long do you buy for when the world is coming to an end?” Isobel snapped at the cashier.

  “Don’t know,” the cashier shrugged. “Do you want your receipt?”

  “Sure.”

  On the way back home, the radio still reporting news from all over, documented the plague’s movement. It crept slowly closer. Isobel turned the radio up and listened.

  “Early this morning, a ferry full of people trying to get home to their families left Whidbey Island alive and well and arrived at the Edmonds ferry dock infected with the mysterious disease we’ve been seeing. They had somehow contracted the disease on the passage over the Puget Sound. Ferry officials at the Edmonds Pier heard no reports from the captain of the vessel that anything was wrong on the boat. The captain routinely steered the ship into port and the infected disembarked and started attacking people in the parking lot. It is suspected that at least twenty of the infected passengers made it out of the ferry terminal and into downtown Edmonds. Efforts to locate and apprehend them in order to contain the spread of the infection have been unsuccessful. Several injured passengers made it safely onto lifeboats before the ferry made it ashore, but they did not survive their wounds. The captain of the vessel has been detained for questioning at this time.”

  The program switched to weather and Isobel changed the station, desperate to find out just how close it had become.

  “- determined that the perpetrator of a street fight in downtown Seattle, described by witnesses as a “drunken transient”, was actually a person suffering from the infection. Police shot the man after he attempted to attack them. It is unknown how he came into contact with the disease. Attempts to identify the individual are ongoing, as his body appeared to be in a state of decomposition. The flesh of his fingertips was gone, rendering fingerprinting useless. Investigators are working with dental records -”

  Isobel changed it again, looking for another news story and its location.

  “A group of students started a riot on University Avenue in the U-District just after eleven a.m. Over fifty college students were injured in the event, four fatally. The group seemed to have no agenda and was only intent on causing destruction and harm to individuals. Sources at the scene noted that the group was not involved in looting or property damage. Most of the students fled the scene before they could be arrested and interrogated. Campus police had great difficulty dealing with the problem and are not commenting at this time. It is still unknown whether the perpetrators were rioting in response to the disease, or as a result of being infected with it.”

  Isobel’s heart beat faster.

  “A bloody scene at the Helene Madison Pool greeted Shoreline Police investigators midday today. A lifeguard interviewed said that a man had emerged from the men’s locker room at the start of Public Swim and started attacking children in the shallow end of the pool. It took two lifeguards on staff to remove the man from the water and hold him while a third employee called the police. All of the children involved suffered only minor injuries. The pool has been shut down for investigation and sanitation reasons and will remain closed until further notice.”

  “That’s just up the road,” she said to herself.

  Initial reports thought the disease spread and made people psychotic and violent; that the infected were living people with altered minds and an inability to differentiate right from wrong. Whatever the process, it only took one infected person to ruin everybody’s day.

  Approaching from all directions, the disease was soon upon Isobel’s neighborhood and suddenly it was right in front of her in the form of a traffic accident. Someone had destroyed a bicyclist with
an SUV. A deep cut in his abdomen sat open, displaying his intestines. One of his legs had been almost completely severed near the hip joint. He had not survived his injuries. The driver of the vehicle, a pale young woman in hysterics and leggings, was leaning over the dead man when he sat back up, guts spilling from his body, and bit her face, taking a chunk out of her cheek as she screamed for help. Isobel wasn’t the only driver that swerved around the mess. She could still hear the woman’s yelling as she sped the last three blocks home. There was nothing I could do to help the man or the woman, she thought over and over again, trying to calm her nerves and her conscience. The world was feeling much smaller to her; the troubles of it more her own now.

  She pulled her car into the parking lot of Willow Brook and quickly lugged her two bags of groceries from the lot to the front door.

  “Whroah roah wroooah! Roah!” A giant black poodle jumped into her making her scream and drop her food.

  “Kiki, no! Get down! Bad dog, BAD DOG!” Sheila Brown from apartment 201 yelled, tugging roughly on her dog’s leash and dragging it up the stairs.

  “Oh, it’s ok. I can pick it all up myself. Really, don’t worry about it!” Isobel said to Sheila who was already out of earshot. “Thanks for the apology too, bitch.”

  Upstairs she put the groceries away with what was already in the cupboards. Her food situation looked much better to her now so for the rest of the first day she sat alone in the living room in front of the television, eyes glued to news report after bloody news report; ears listening intently to the speculation. Several times she hopped up to check that the door was locked. She was still having trouble mentally digesting what she’d seen on the road earlier. Maybe the bicyclist wasn’t dead? Perhaps he was just knocked unconscious and when he came to, in all his pain and bewilderment, he lashed out? No story she made up explained how the man could be alive after suffering wounds so horrific, nor why he would want to bite the driver who shattered and shredded his body.

  His guts were on the road, she kept coming back to this single sight, this undeniable fact. No one sits up with his guts on the road.

  S.O.S.-less

  Many people still had a very strong sense that things would be ok because they had no contact with the disease yet. They were viewing the plague on televisions and computer screens, not in person. Their faith in the police force, that the uniformed men and women in affected areas could get things under control, was strong. Stronger still was the idea that all of the world’s best scientists would be gathering in a sterile room at an undisclosed location, working day and night until they found the cause and then the cure. Hollywood had showed the citizens this response so this is what they demanded; what their minds had decided would happen - was happening. The population waited for quarantines and white-suited specialists with giant mobile labs but they didn’t come. Many CDC labs had already been overrun with the dead.