Apocalypse Rebirth: Surviving Zombies in Extreme Mode

Three days into being chased around the neighborhood by familiar faces, I had stopped thinking of them as people I knew. Officer Bryant almost caught Tomi when he lunged at him from between two buildings, and I swung the metal bat in my hands hard enough to knock what remained of the officer sideways. By the first day of the apocalypse, we had figured out that the dead stopped getting back up once you damaged their heads enough, so I hit him again. Blackish-red fluid oozed from the split in his balding scalp as I pulled the bat free and looked toward the fence ahead of us, where Chloe was already trying to climb over. Her pregnancy made every attempt slower, and she kept slipping back down before she could get enough leverage. “Patty!” she shouted. “Keep your voice down,” I hissed as I looked behind us, but several infected at the end of the street had already turned in our direction. Four or five of them started moving toward us while another stumbled out from between two parked

Warm sunlight hit my face and woke me up. I opened my eyes fully convinced I would find myself gagged and bound somewhere, with Art still trying to keep me from turning. Instead, I was staring at the ceiling of my apartment on 59th Street.My hand immediately went to my right shoulder, where an ugly, deep bite should have been proof that the infected teenage girl had gotten me. There was nothing there. No wound, no blood, not even the burning pain that had been spreading through my body before I lost consciousness.For a few seconds, I thought Art had somehow succeeded. Maybe he had actually found what he said John was working on to stop the complete downfall of civilization. But the longer I looked around my apartment, the less that explanation made sense. This place shouldn’t have looked untouched.The same day Art found me bitten in that alley, raiders had broken into this building while we were still using my apartment as shelter. We heard them coming up the stairs, and my neighbo

I tackled John while screaming like a banshee before he could open the car door all the way, and the two of us went crashing onto the concrete. Something struck my right shoulder as we rolled, sharp enough to make me cry out, and within seconds I could feel blood soaking through my oversized white shirt. John’s hand closed around my head almost immediately, but I barely registered it over the ringing in my ears.“Fuck,” I heard Art curse somewhere above us. By the time I managed to lift my head, he was already kneeling beside us.John was staring past me with a stunned expression, so I followed his gaze and found his car engulfed in flames only a few feet away.“It waited until you opened the door,” Art said, his expression hardening as he studied the wreckage. “Someone wanted to make damn sure you were standing beside it when it went off.”Art helped me stand up, was that also in your dream? he asked.“No,” was the only thing I managed to say. I was still too stunned by the sight of

You’d think that because I knew exactly when the apocalypse was coming, we would already be out gathering supplies. Instead, John insisted it would be safer if we stayed inside until dark, when there would be less chance of someone recognizing him. Art agreed with him, which meant I was outnumbered.They were probably right, but that didn’t stop me from feeling increasingly anxious every minute we sat around doing nothing. In my first life, we had survived mostly on the questionable amount of canned sardines and Spam I kept in my apartment, and even that hadn’t lasted long. Chloe had been pregnant and eating more than usual, while Tomi ate like the world wasn’t ending whether we were surrounded by undead cannibals or not.So while we waited, John had taken over Art’s laptop. Hopefully with a VPN running so nobody could easily trace what he was doing, because judging by how seriously he was staring at the screen, he was probably trying to reconstruct his un-zombification serum in case