Love in the Time of Zombies
Read Love in the Time of Zombies Online
Authors: Jill James
(Time of Zombies, Book 1)
Jill James
Visit Jill James at:
Published by Gray Sweater Press
Copyright © January 2015 by Jill James
All poems attributed to Seth Ripley © Jill James
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the author.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author and all incidents are pure invention.
Cover Art designed by Elaina Lee of For The Muse Design
This book is dedicated to Max Brooks and Jonathan Maberry for inspiring me by writing the best zombie books out there. To Carrie Ryan, Dana Fredsti, Mira Grant, and Bonnie Dee for showing me women can write zombies too.
Blurb:
First influenza, then virus Z decimated the population. Now, Emily Gray is just trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. When she meets and falls for Seth Ripley she learns that just surviving isn’t enough if you don’t have someone to share the danger, your life, and your love.
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Dear Reader Letter
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I could start by quoting the old saying about good intentions and the road to hell. But what is done is done and the human race doesn’t get a do-over. We all have to live with the consequences of our actions. Or in this case, live with the actions of our government.
I could start by saying I miss my husband, but that would be as big a lie as the one we were told would save countless millions and instead killed them—sort of. I’m sure the president meant well. I’m sure in his grief over his son’s death by influenza, along with one-hundred million other people in the United States it seemed like a great plan to add a new flu vaccine to our food and water supply to save those of us left. Riots rocked the major cities. The anti-vaccination people tried to take on the government. The government won. What a shock.
It took an executive order, but President Andrew Thomas got his wish. I’m sure a scientist somewhere knew the risks of mutation and didn’t speak up. Or maybe, they didn’t get the chance to say anything. Events unfolded pretty damned quick once the spraying was completed. The infected attacked as soon as they turned and the dead didn’t stay dead.
I could start by saying that life now sucked, but at what time in human history haven’t we thought life sucked and the apocalypse was just around the corner? It’s kind of like paranoid people. Sometimes there
is
someone out to get you. Sometimes the apocalypse really
is
right around the corner.
I could give you the step-by-step events that led to our downfall and the almost extinction of the human race, but it’s been told many times before in books and movies and it pretty much happened just as they said it would.
Or I could tell you my name is Emily Gray and this is the story of my life in the time of zombies.
Guess you never know. Who would have thought something as terrible as the zombie apocalypse would bring me something as wonderful as Seth Ripley?
Of course, the zombies got my mother and my father, and my husband, Carl. Pretty much, they got my whole family. Okay, my husband Carl had been an asshole so he was no great loss. Never could keep it in his pants, if I may be so crude. If he could’ve kept it in his pants, he may have kept that appendage altogether. But, it was the early days of the Z virus mutation and how could he know the hooker he took to the cheap by-the-hour motel had the sickness? I’m sure he didn’t realize anything until the woman chewed it off, to be honestly blunt. He never was a great one for paying attention during sex as it was. Oh, maybe in the early days of our marriage, but he’d changed in the last few years, just before the end of the world.
Five years of him spreading it far and wide to prove his virility and all I was left with was a one-sheet police report and a blurred photo of Carl with one between the opaque, dead eyes. The police had stopped trying to take sickies to the hospital a couple of weeks before. By the time Carl was attacked it was kill ‘em, identify ‘em, and burn ‘em in a pile. KIB was the order of the day. A few weeks after that and they skipped the identify part of the acronym too. A few weeks more and there weren’t enough police or bullets for the killing part either.
Six months had passed and the police were all gone, along with the military. Now it was survival of the fittest. Never in a million years would I have pictured myself—neglected, society trophy-wife, Emily Gray in that category. Guess you never know.
Your day could start so shitty and end so... well, not great, because there weren’t too many great days anymore. The only definition to divide the monotony of the days were get bitten by a zombie day and not get bitten by a zombie day. But that day would turn out better than most. At least it would with a great deal of hindsight and distance from the event. Adding a whole hell of a lot of seeing a silver-lining after the fact helped too.
As with most days, I had zombie patrol for the morning, which was so not my best time of the day. But zombies don’t have an off switch so we had to hunt first thing in the morning to clear the perimeter around the giant mall.
Did you know shopping centers are the best defense against zombies? Me neither, until I got shipped out of what was left of San Francisco to the middle of nowhere—Brentwood. I’d never even heard of the town before I got sent there. Shopping centers are like medieval castles. Brick up the front doors and small back doors and the roof is like the battlements of a castle. Zombies can’t climb. Thank God for any small favor we could get. It’s about the only advantage we have. Because we have to sleep and the zombies don’t.
We were the last escapees of the city by the bay. Pre-Z the city had a population of more than 850, 000. In the end, San Francisco had 5,000 living beings to round up and ship to other communities to the east. The lieutenant governor (the governor had turned on live television and been put down) declared San Francisco the land of the undead, and blew up the bridges connecting it to the rest of the state and collapsed the Caldecott Tunnel for good measure. A bunch of massive explosions of entire city blocks to the south and San Francisco was pretty much an island of zombies.
My skin had burned lobster-red my first week of roof living here. San Francisco is more known for fog and chilly days than for getting a suntan. Once I tanned, it was the burnished copper of my ancestors—Native Americans of some unknown tribe, according to my mother. Way back in our ancestry, she had always been sure to add. The long hair my husband had insisted on was gone—happily. Long hair and zombies did not mix. My first day there I’d seen a young, blonde girl pulled back by her long braid and devoured in a dirt field. Long hair gone. Also happily gone, the extra thirty pounds I had carried through my unhappy marriage years. Running from zombies was the best aerobic exercise around. The penalty for missing a day of exercise was death—or nondeath in our case.
No one knew for sure back then if the animals were susceptible to the mutation, and what eating them would do to us, so breakfast was lots of fruits, vegetables, and soy patties. After six months of eating the food and drinking the water, either we were going to turn undead or not as far as I was concerned. I looked at it like this, if we were going to turn, we would have already done so. Scientific types were still testing cows and pigs to see if they just had the flu vaccine in them or if it would mutate in them too. Hadn’t seen any pigs or cows running amok yet.
Fruits, veggies, and soy weren’t too bad, considering in my last days in the city some of the inhabitants had been considering eating the grass in their yards. Cats and dogs had been missing from the streets and the rat population had been way down.
Brentwood, and the surrounding small towns, was a farmer’s market dream. Orchards for miles around and farms galore. With the population down to one or two thousand, there was plenty for everyone.
Food wasn’t a problem. Harvesting and transporting it was. It’s hard to pick a row of corn if you’re afraid the man-eating undead are in the next row over. I’d never been the growing type. If it needed care and tending, I would probably kill it. Fortunately, I was an excellent shooter. Who knew? I’d never shot a gun in my life before. Why would I? San Francisco was the land of anti-gun belief. Maybe if we’d had more gun-toting citizens we might have held the city.
When we got there, they’d put us through a bunch of tests: agility, strength, skills, and shooting. I’d scored a hundred at all distances. No picking apples for this girl, I was a member of the undead hunting patrol.
Breakfast out of the way, I cleaned up my section of the roof. Gathering up my dirty clothes, and believe me, you haven’t seen dirty until you try to get zombie guts out of your shirt, I took them to my friend, Michelle, who had laundry duty this month. Michelle Greggs had been on the wild ride with me out of San Francisco. We’d clung to each other all night as the horde of undead tried to get to the fresh meat inside the fortified school bus. Rotted fingers poked between the welded metal sheets and their moans stayed with us long after the trip was over. We’d been friends ever since. Shit like that is a real bonding moment.
She stopped me with an upraised hand, and then grabbed a pair of surgical gloves before taking my clothes. We’d all told her countless times that she couldn’t get the mutated virus from simple contact; because we pretty much all had the virus, but she continued to use the gloves. We all have our idiosyncrasies since this all started and we’d let her have hers.
She dropped into a curtsy. “And would madam like these pressed and folded as well?”
I played along. “Yes and any spots left will come out of your pay.” I put up my chin and looked down my nose at her. I could have done a dowager countess proud.
Michelle laughed. I would play any silly game to get that light, airy sound from her, even if it were a mockery of my pre-Z life. Or maybe, my pre-Z life had been a mockery of reality all along.
Unlike me, my friend had loved her husband with all her heart and had to kill him when he’d turned. She’d told me the sad story on the bus with the caveat that she would never mention it again.
“Now, go kill those skinbags,” she ordered.
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied, giving her a snappy salute. We all had our names for the zombies we had to kill. Some used other names to make it easier. Parents in our group used funny names to make it less scary for the children. Way back when, before my time, there had been a late-night local show, Creature Features, and the parents had taken to calling the zombies Black Lagooners. But for the life of me, I couldn’t see how anything made what we were going through less scary. Maybe kids had a defense mechanism I was missing. I was scared shitless most days.
I left my friend with a smile on her face, so that took some of the crappiness out of the day. Grabbing my canteen, I headed to the weapons cache to get mine. Standing by the pile was my partner for the day, Nick Cruz. He was only sixteen, but his kill rank was two times mine and it showed in his eyes. They didn’t belong on a kid. He was built like a linebacker, which he’d been before the feces hit the proverbial fan. I liked the days I was teamed up with Nick, which was most days. We worked well together. He was a local and he’d tell me stories of Brentwood in its finer days.
I greeted him and we bumped fists. He handed me my crossbow and a rifle. I slung the crossbow on my back and grabbed a holder for the bolts. The rifle had a solid weight in my hands. I never knew what kind I’d get each day, not that it mattered because I can’t tell the difference anyway. After six months, you’d think I would know all about weapons, but the letters and numbers of the gun model just flew right out of my brain. Hand me a gun, hand me the bullets, I’m good to go. I could field-strip and clean them with my eyes shut, so I guess that’s something more useful than being able to plan a cotillion for five hundred; a seating chart and all.
We went out in a group of eight. A team of two people went each direction on the map. North, South, East, and West. Nick and I got south for the day. It’s my favorite. We could walk straight down the old bypass with Mount Diablo on our right. The view is breathtaking. For the first few miles, the cars have been cleared and you could see for a good distance. Last week, a fire whipped through the hills around us, so the stubble is short, burned, with nowhere to hide. This is a good thing, although the burning smell and drifting smoke lasted for a while.
The pop of gunfire started as the spotters on the corners took out the undead outside the perimeter of the mall. Nick and I checked out the area when the popping stopped. Spotting no one, dead or alive, we shimmied down the rope ladder that would be pulled up as soon as we were clear. I’d been doing this for months now and my heart still stopped beating when we jumped down and the ladder was pulled up. An even scarier moment for me than meeting the Queen of England, and trying to remember not to touch her, unless she touched you first. Believe you me that had been scary.
I stood by the cargo containers stacked to make temporary walls on what was the road into the interior of the shopping center. Putting the binoculars up to my eyes, I turned in a semicircle to scope out the area. The teams from the shopping center across the road were starting their morning too. The faint pop-pop-pop of rifles carried across the empty space.
Once Nick was down, I tried to look elsewhere as the ladder was pulled up. I closed my eyes and clutched my lucky necklace in my fist. The metal edge bit into my palm and reassured me by its very existence. The necklace was a thirteenth birthday present from my parents. The center was a fifty-cent piece minted in my birth year, inserted into a fancy, silver filigree setting. It never came off my body. I slept and showered with it.
We trekked across a field to the broken asphalt of the Highway 4 Bypass. The first time we’d gone this way, Nick had told me of the grand plans and tax dollars used for a new road, but the economy not only didn’t bounce back from the recession, it sunk into an abyss that made the former Great Depression look like a temporary dip in the Dow Jones Index. I’d been oblivious in San Francisco. Carl came from money and I guess the city was better off to start with than the outlying East Bay. The zombie apocalypse was a great equalizer. It did what Occupy Wall Street couldn’t. Money was worthless and your skills put food on the table, clothes on your back, and a canvas roof, at least, over your head. Or not, if your skills sucked or were no longer useful. Not much call these days for bankers and lawyers, maybe there never would be again.
At the Bypass, we headed south and another team headed north toward the next town over— Antioch. I waved at Robert Jones and Joseph Jones, the other team heading that way. Bob and Joe were partners in every way. I couldn’t imagine seeing one without the other. Another way the virus equalized our world. Bob and Joe were married the first chance they got. With everything going on and same-sex marriage on-again and off-again, they hadn’t found the time. When the dead could walk, most of your stupid beliefs went right out the window. We had several gay/lesbian couples, even some threesomes, and foursomes. Whatever worked to make a family unit with adults and the numerous orphans left from the virus. Whatever! I’m staying happily single. After Carl, I’m in no freaking hurry to be hitched to another person anytime soon. If ever. Thanks to my skills, for the first time in my life, I could take care of myself. I would never rely on a man again.
Nick’s whisper brought me out of my thoughts as our boots plodded on the road, the echoes bouncing back in the silence, “Joe and Bob saw some undead this way yesterday, so be on the lookout.”
I gasped. “There haven’t been any for a week. Not since the fire burned out. Where do you think they came from?”
“There’re a couple of schools down Balfour. Joe said some of them appeared to be kids. I hate undead kids. Last time we ran across some, I had to take out ones I used to know.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go the other way. We can hit that little shopping center with the Safeway. I heard they are growing tomatoes.”
“I could die for a tomato,” I joked.
“But you would come back and I’d have to shoot you in the head,” he replied.
I groaned at the latest, sick, zombie humor going around, but Nick smiled.
