Zombies and Shit Read online

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  “Braaaaaaaiinss ...and shit.”

  Every zombie fan has a plan for what they would do in order to survive the zombie apocalypse...you know, if it were to actually happen someday. My plan is to put my brain into a robot body. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, as long as it has tank treads for legs, laser cannons for arms, and can fly. Then I would be like a robotic superhero of the zombie apocalypse. I would carry around a battle axe and wear an american flag cape, fighting zombie hordes and rescuing survivors from malls and farm houses. It would be awesome. But I guess it would also be kind of lonely, because I’d be the only robot in the wasteland and who wants to be friends with a robot? Still, it’s kind of a cool idea...

  I’ve been obsessed with zombie movies my entire life and I believe I might have one of the largest zombie movie collections in the world, it includes some movies that are so rare that the only other people who own copies of the movies are the people who made them.

  My collection started back when I used to bootleg zombie movies for a living. When I was 21 and trying to make it as a writer, I was able to write full-time because I bootlegged zombie movies on the side. Then I started a company called Crappy Homemade Zombie movies, where I sold unreleased backyard zombie movies through bootleg distribution channels. It was a fun way to make a living. Most writers are happy to quit their day jobs once their writing careers take off, but once mine took off I was actually kind of sad to quit.

  “Zombies and Shit” is my thank you letter to the zombie genre. If it weren’t for those zombie movies I probably wouldn’t have a writing career today. However, I have been hesitating to write a zombie book for quite a long time. So many zombie movies and zombie books come out these days that it seems unnecessary to unleash yet another zombie novel onto the reading public. But I wrote one anyway, for the fun of it.

  However, I decided not to go with the Romero style of zombies. Instead, I did the Return of the Living Dead style of zombies. Nobody does the sludgy brain-eating indestructible Return of the Living Dead zombies in literature. I don’t know why. They should. Return of the Living Dead is fucking awesome. And it’s punk as hell. And it was also the first zombie movie I saw as a kid.

  It is pretty obvious that this book was inspired by the Return of the Living Dead movies (well, at least 1 and 3). It was also inspired (in small ways) by zombie video games like Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead, as well as zombie books by Brian Keene. But probably the biggest influence for this book is the book/movie/manga Battle Royale. I have always loved the “elimination match” plot line. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.

  “20 people go in, only one comes out...”

  This book is an elimination match story set in the zombie apocalypse, which is something I’ve always wanted to read. They say you should write what you want to read, so that’s what I’ve done. It was the most fun I’ve had writing a book in a long time. I hope you enjoy it.

  - Carlton Mellick III 10/10/10 4:08pm

  As far as trends go, I think most of us can agree that zombies should pretty much be done. They’ve had their fifteen minutes in the pop-culture spotlight, and now the marketplace is saturated. The time has come for the dead to die off again, and come shambling back a decade from now, with new life and purpose, to eat the hell out of a new generation.

  Except this isn’t happening.

  And it used to be my fault.

  But now the blame falls squarely on Carlton Mellick.

  Let me explain. In case you’ve been living under a rock or in a coma for the last decade, most critics and media-watchers agree that the current uber-zombie craze in pop culture (books, movies, comic books, television, video games, board games, card games, role-playing games, trading cards, toys, clothing, food, tattoos, philosophy, music, college courses, etc.) is at least partially my fault.

  A decade ago, the publication of my first novel, The Rising, coincided with the release of a movie called 28 Days Later. Both The Rising and 28 Days Later featured different kinds of zombies, which was okay with most people, since nobody else had done much with zombies for the decade leading up to the book and movie’s releases. Both were big hits. City of the Dead, my sequel to The Rising, followed soon after, and so did a lot of other books and movies and comics. And they haven’t gone away. Indeed, there seem to be more of them than ever. There are now publishing companies that publish nothing but zombie literature and authors who write about nothing but the living dead.

  I had a chance to do the same. In truth, I could have probably made a very good living (i.e. a lot more money than what I make now) doing for zombies what Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton did for vampires, and just written zombie novels, but doing so didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to be typecast. I didn’t want to become ‘The Zombie Guy’. Occasionally, I would write about zombies. I tried my hand at the traditional “Romero-style” undead (with Dead Sea) and returned to the world of The Rising with a collection of thirty-two original short stories that all took place in that world, called The Rising: Selected Scenes From the End of the World. After that, I decided I was really burned out on them. Upon reflection, though, I wasn’t so much burned out as I was written-out. I didn’t want to just repeat the same story over and over again (which is the risk any author or filmmaker runs when dealing with zombies—or any other genre trope). There are only so many things you can do with the dead, and I felt I’d done them all. Much of what I read and saw from my peers seemed to be treading the same old ground. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There were some good stories. Some great stories, in fact. But they weren’t anything new. We’d seen it all before.

  Recently, after several years of refusing to write anything about zombies, I returned to sub-genre for three projects: a novella (The Rising: Deliverance), a novel (Entombed), and an ongoing comic book series (The Last Zombie). The only reason I agreed to do them was because I felt they were something different than what we’d all done before. The Rising: Deliverance is a prequel that focuses heavily on characters and not on zombies. In Entombed, the zombies appear only briefly (a handful of pages) before the story focuses on a group of survivors who are safe from the zombies but not each other.

  And The Last Zombie takes place after the zombie apocalypse is over, and focuses on humanity’s efforts to rebuild.

  Still, the majority of what is still being published is material that just re-treads and recycles the same old plotlines. And as a result, I predicted readers would soon grow bored, and then zombies would go away for a while until somebody younger and smarter came along and figured out a way to revitalize them. I figured this would take about ten years.

  I was wrong.

  Fucking Carlton did it in the here and now.

  It would be easy to dismiss Zombies and Shit as nothing more than a fun, entertaining, literary distraction. And if you want to look at it as just that and nothing more, there’s no harm in doing so, because the book is fun and it is entertaining. Hell, it’s fucking exhilarating—a tight, breakneck narrative and lots of awesome ultra-violence and quirky, distinct characters.

  But it is the setting that really sets this book apart, and thus, not only elevates it above any other zombie novel currently on the market (including my own), but also instills that new blood and new idea I was talking about before. And the bitch is, the whole thing is so deceptively simple. Carlton simply changed the location. Gone is the familiar shopping mall or island or skyscraper or any of the other genre tropes. Instead, we have a dark, dystopic, post-apocalyptic future. Think Mad Max or Battle Royale… with zombies.

  How fucking genius is that?

  Throw in some wild futuristic technology, a bit of Carlton’s trademark social commentary (this time focusing on our soc
iety’s reality television addiction and Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame), and a plot that literally leaves you guessing until the end, and you’ve got a hit. You’ve got a classic. You’ve got an addition to the zombie canon that, twenty years from now, will be just as influential on the next generation as Romero’s original trilogy and Skipp & Spector’s Book of the Dead anthologies were on our generation.

  If you love zombies, you’ll love this book. But more importantly, if you’re sick of zombies—if you want them to go the fuck away now—then you will love this book. Why? Because it will remind you of what you loved about them in the first place, before they became overdone clichés that saturated the marketplace.

  And in either case, you can blame Carlton Mellick.

  Empathize

  Brian Keene

  Somewhere in rural Pennsylvania

  June 2011

  Charlie rolls over in his sleep and spoons his wife lying next to him. He burrows his face into the back of her neck and inhales the scent of cinnamon and motorcycle grease. His eyes still closed, he takes a deeper smell of her hair and recognizes the odor of cloves mixed with river clay. Her hair is soft against his nose. He wonders why she has such soft hair. Rainbow Cat, his wife, normally has very crusty dreadlocks that are itchy against his nose. With his lips pressed against her bare neck, it feels as if she doesn’t have dreadlocks at all. It feels more like she has a short pixie haircut.

  As he rubs his arm against the front of her body, he wonders if this is actually his wife at all. His hand is cupped around a large plump breast, yet his wife is nearly flat-chested. Her waist and hips are soft and curvy, yet his wife’s body is knotty with muscle from working in the fields. When the woman moans, it is deep and smooth, not high and coarse. This is definitely not his wife.

  Charlie opens his eyes. He feels groggy, drugged. His muscles are so relaxed that he only just realizes that he’s been fully clothed this whole time, lying on a hard concrete floor. He pushes himself up and looks at the woman next to him. She’s an Asian woman with short dyed-blonde hair, someone he’s never seen before in his life. She’s wearing jeans and a white tank top. Her mouth is open against the pavement, a puddle of drool below the corner of her lip. In her

  sleep, she grabs his arm and pulls it back against her chest, hugging it like a teddy bear.

  Leaning awkwardly against the sleeping woman with his arm in her grasp, he takes a look around the dimly lit room. It seems to be the lobby of an old abandoned hotel or office building. Dust-coated couches and chairs can be seen through the stripes of light coming from the boarded up windows. Debris from the partially-collapsed ceiling litters the reception area.

  There are other people sleeping on the floor all around him, almost two dozen of them. Most of them look to be real scumbags: vagrants, gutter punks, junkies, whores. Charlie wonders how the hell he got there. The last thing he remembers is having drinks with his wife. It was their five year anniversary, the first day in months they were able to afford to go for a night on the town. He remembers having some drinks and then waiting to be served. He remembers the owner of the establishment giving them each a couple of free drinks.

  The only thing that makes sense to him would be if he’d gotten too drunk to walk home and passed out in a nearby abandoned building. It isn’t rare for abandoned buildings to be filled with lowlifes these days. It also isn’t uncommon for him to pass out in public places after a night of heavy drinking. But what is strange is the drugged feeling in his brain, his numb mouth and tongue. If he did some kind of drug while he was drunk, Rainbow is probably pissed off at him right now. He promised her he would never do any kind of drug ever again. She might have even kicked him out of their apartment. Perhaps that’s why he’s sleeping in a place like this.

  He looks down at the Asian woman snuggling his arm. She’s probably a prostitute. Charlie might have even slept with her last night for all he knows. Rainbow isn’t with him, thankfully. He hopes she arrived safely to their apartment last night and has no recollection of what happened to them the night before. Otherwise, he might have just fucked up their marriage for good.

  For a hippy, Rainbow Cat is a very angry and unforgiving human being. She’s also materialistic, snobbish, and high maintenance. He told her he was done with pills and hookers. If this is what happened that would be the end of it. She wouldn’t take him back this time.

  Charlie tries to slip his arm away from the sleeping woman, but she only hugs it tighter. He tries to rip it away and she digs her fingernails into his arm. When the fingernails draw blood, he cries out, waking her. Her black eyes pop open and point up at him. As he hovers a foot above her, he sees the shocked look on her face. She is just as surprised and confused to be there as he is. He can tell that she too has no idea where she is or why she is there.

  Still holding his arm, she glares at Charlie. Then she grinds her teeth and digs her nails deeper into his arm, as if she thinks he is the person responsible for bringing her there.

  The woman is about to go for his eyes when they hear somebody yell, “What the fuck!”

  They turn their heads to see a young punk with a tall yellow mohawk standing on the other side of the room.

  “Where the hell are we?” he says. “What the fuck is going on and shit?”

  A punk girl, one with pink spiky hair, gasps and looks around frantically. More people begin to wake up, all of them just as surprised to be there as Charlie.

  “Why am I on the floor?” cries a shivering prostitute, no older than sixteen.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” says a large black homeless man with a beard and mud-coated hoody.

  Charlie looks down at the Asian woman and their eyes meet. The white tank top she’s wearing is moist with sweat. Because she’s not wearing a bra, Charlie can clearly see her dark nipples

  “Get the fuck off me,” she yells, then kicks him to the floor.

  When Charlie gets up, he watches the angry woman storm away from him, covering her breasts with folded arms. She pushes through the shoulder of a muscle-bound punk with a white flat top and a hot pink half-shirt.

  “I’ve been drugged,” says a voluptuous punk girl with green hair. “I can taste it.”

  “Yeah, me too, and shit,” says the yellow mohawk punk. “What the fuck!” He kicks a piece of rubble across the concrete floor.

  Everyone in the room has now woken, pulling themselves slowly to their feet, rubbing their groggy eyes. All of them except for one: a girl in the corner. A tall, bony girl with blonde dreadlocks.

  “Rainbow?” Charlie says.

  He goes to her and turns her over. It is his wife. She rubs her eyes open and smiles at Charlie.

  “There you are,” she says, touching her index finger sloppily to his lower lip.

  The Asian woman looks over at Charlie with a sneer, feeling dirty for snuggling with a married man while his wife was in the same room, even if it was an accident. She shakes her head and stares out of a crack in the boarded up window.

  When Rainbow Cat looks around and notices the unfamiliar surroundings, she leaps to her feet, and yells, “Oh god.”

  The hippy girl looks around the room in a panic. When Charlie tries to hug her to him, she pushes him away.

  “This has got to be some kind of mistake,” she says. “This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”

  The Asian girl looks over at Charlie and says in a calm, serious tone, “You better shut her mouth right now.”

  “I can’t be here,” Rainbow cries. “I can’t be here!”

  “Shut her up or I’ll snap her neck,” says the Asian woman, without raising her voice.

  Charlie can tell by the look in her eyes that she’s serious, so he calms down his wife. The Asian woman’s eyes return to the window, peering at something in the distance.

  “Where the fuck are we and shit?” says the yellow mohawk punk, as Charlie passes him to go to the window. The punk follows him.

  Standing over the Asian woman’s sho
ulder, Charlie peers out of the window. Outside is a vast city of collapsing vine-ridden skyscrapers and rubble. A wasteland. The building they are in is an old hotel, with a security wall around the perimeter.

  The punk’s jaw drops when he sees the city. It is one of the ancient ones, the kind of city that they have only seen in old pictures and books.

  “We’re on the mainland,” says the punk, “in the middle of the damned Red Zone!”

  “Impossible,” Charlie says. “How did we get all the way out here?”

  The punk’s mohawk quivers. “Look around and shit! We’re not on the island anymore. It’s obviously the damned Red Zone!”

  The Asian woman glares up at the punk. The look in her cold dark eyes is enough to shut him up. She peers at Charlie and puts her long black-painted fingernail to her lips, then points to a figure on the other side of the yard.

  When Charlie looks, he sees a naked man staggering through the weed-coated parking lot. His skin has melted off of his body, his face nothing but a skull buried in fluffy pink meat, his intestines wrapped around his neck like a scarf. He’s a walking corpse, moaning with every step he takes.

  “We are in the Red Zone, aren’t we?” Charlie asks.

  The Asian woman nods. “Right in the middle.”

  “How is that even possible?” Charlie asks. “That’s hundreds of miles away from the island. How could we have possibly gotten here?”

  “We were put here,” she says.

  “For what reason?” he asks. “To play some kind of joke on us?”

  “Something like that,” she says.

  When the young prostitute with the dark red hair looks out of the window and sees the zombie, she screams.

  “What the fuck is that!” she cries. “What is it doing here!”

  The zombie hears the prostitute and looks over at her. Sunflowers are growing out of its hollow skull like weeds. A tongue coils out of its black teeth.