“Go on, Nash, get it over with.”  Ramon gestured toward the stream of cars rushing by in the California twilight.

The younger zombie stared at the careening traffic.  “They’re moving awfully fast.”

“Yes, and that’s good.  They won’t be able to avoid you.” (more…)

Dan was awake; he couldn’t sleep anymore, not since he was bitten anyway. He had known it was bad as soon as it had happened; late in the zombie heyday, just before the living had mobilised. Dan had slowly turned into what the news reports had warned him of. Just that one bite. Dan had prided himself on his fitness, and when one staggering corpse had come upon him, he had hit him with all his strength. That had been enough to send the rotting man down, but not sufficient to make the undead unconscious and as he passed the victim of whatever mutation or virus that had caused all this plague, the victim had bit him on the ankle. (more…)

Darin leaned back and his chair creaked as he looked out from behind the wall of his cubicle.  He felt like the last person at the lab on campus, but he knew that wasn’t possible.  Hell, it was only ten o’clock.  Felt like midnight.

Sidewalks were empty, fluorescent lights hummed in the hallway, but they were too dim to see very far.  He’d been pulling late nights running some biochemistry tests on a sample the biology students picked up at the lake.  Some kind of organism that was unlike the other forms of algae they’d found.  It was resistant to most of the standard analysis at the lab, too.  It behaved like a parasite, in a way, consuming the algae and changing its form.  It multiplied by an insane rate once it achieved a foothold. At least that’s what the centrifugation process suggested. (more…)

SEQUEL TO IRONY

Brian Gren was a simple man with simple tastes. He liked his coffee in the morning, scotch at night and a full rest in between. He always had it too. Running the hardware store in town kept his needs meant and living above it made his life almost too easy. Well, that life was soon tested when the Darkness came around. Just waking up from a long night with his loveliest bottle of cheap scotch, Brian found that he may not have another night like that in quite awhile. The Darkness he heard people call it, assumingly because it had come on at night, Brian wasn’t too sure. Not many living people roam around outside anymore to talk to.

(more…)

“Gotta stop the bleeding” I tell myself. “Gotta stop it or they’ll find me.” They can smell it. They can taste it in the air. “Gotta stop the bleeding.” I say again in a nervous whisper. It’s been two months, three days and “Shit, it’s almost evening already.” I say, looking at my watch thinking of how long it’s been. No one saw this coming and I definitely wasn’t an exception. (more…)

Odan stood motionless in the heat as a gentle dust cloud whisked around him. The sun glared from a sky that was, as always, cloudless, but never empty. He studied the large black ships hovering in the air, sanctuaries for the privileged. Everyone else remained down on Earth, trapped in a nightmare as unrelenting as the sun.

His wife, Jesmin, crouched on the concrete yard, gnawing a synthetic chew bone. Saliva glistened off the toy which squeaked each time she bit into the plastic. Her fingers tore at the plaything, and when that didn’t work she clutched it between her teeth and swiped her head from side to side. (more…)

Gunner and I ran like hell through the dark streets. We could still hear the screams. Air tore in and out of my stubborn lungs, but not fast enough to keep my sides from throbbing. That didn’t stop me. We ran until the road forked, then slowed to a walk. Gunner—at least that’s how he introduced himself, after I bought him a beer—thumbed toward a branch of the fork. I assumed his house was that way. He didn’t speak—too busy sucking down air, chest heaving. When he leaned back, I saw that blood had speckled one half of his body, from his face down to his waist. Screams came sporadically, now. One final one, cut off abruptly. Then silence. “Holy shit,” Gunner said, the blood on his face looking like chicken pox. “Holy fucking shit.” (more…)

The flowers looked hungry.  The blossoms turned their stem-necks towards the family as they walked by.  Filaments rippled and gnashed together like teeth as ovules vibrated with pangs of starvation.

A red grevillea reached toward Brie.  Straining at its roots, tiny red petals, barbed at the end, reached out for flesh.  Grandma brought down her machete chopping the head off the flower.  It fell to the ground with a tiny squeal and rolled down an embankment into a swarming mass of tangled weeds. (more…)

Brian was aware that the brain he was dissecting was donated by a man who had suffered from an exotic necrotizing virus. That was nothing new. After all, nearly every brain he dissected came from somebody who had died of something.

He laughed at that thought. It was a running joke around the lab. It had started when a rookie assistant in the University Pathology Laboratory had absent-mindedly wondered where they got all of the dead brains that they studied. (more…)

Johnny was the one who told me that she was still alive. “But don’t go over there.” He cautioned, turning his back on me as he walked across the room. When he got to the window he told me that he thought they had all the women they needed. He had even seen two teenage girls walking down the street unhindered. (more…)

The first indication Gil Pevney had that anything was wrong was when the power blipped, just past 3:30 am. He was sitting in the station’s small common room with his feet up on a table eating his lunch: a sardine sandwich. It was a little silly to call a meal eaten at that hour “lunch,” but as it was the second meal of his day, “lunch” would have to suffice.

“Aw, shoot,” he said as darkness enveloped him. He waited expectantly for the backup generator to come online, and relaxed when he heard it powering up, exactly as it was supposed to do. The generator at the transmitter shack a mile or so away would be doing the same, he knew. Sure enough, within 15 seconds of the outage, the lights came back on. The security lights outside in the parking lot stayed dark, but this was no surprise. They were off the main circuit and wouldn’t come back until full power returned. Gil glanced around while the fluorescents flickered back into life, waiting for further problems, but nothing else happened. It was unlikely that any listener would notice the brief signal drop-out. (more…)