The Fucking Zombie Apocalypse Read online

  The Fucking Zombie Apocalypse © 2020 by Bryan Smith. All rights reserved.

  Grindhouse Press

  PO BOX 521

  Dayton, Ohio 45401

  Grindhouse Press logo and all related artwork copyright © 2020 by Brandon Duncan. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Matthew Revert © 2020. All rights reserved.

  Grindhouse Press #059

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941918-62-3

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

  To Carrie Nicely and Andersen Prunty,

  for bringing this one back from the dead.

  Other titles by Bryan Smith

  House of Blood

  Rock and Roll Reform School Zombies

  Darkened

  Highways to Hell

  The Dark Ones

  Some Crazy Fucking Shit That Happened One Day

  The Freakshow

  Soultaker

  Queen of Blood

  Grimm Awakening

  Blood and Whiskey

  The Halloween Bride

  The Diabolical Conspiracy

  Deathbringer

  Strange Ways

  Slowly We Rot

  Surrounded By Bastards

  The Reborn

  Bloodrush

  All Hallow’s Dead

  Christmas Eve on Haunted Hill

  Seven Deadly Tales of Terror

  The Late Night Horror Show

  Go Kill Crazy!

  Wicked Kayla

  Murder Squad

  Last Day

  Depraved

  Depraved 2

  Depraved 3

  68 Kill

  68 Kill Part 2

  Kayla and The Devil (Kayla Monroe: Haunted World Book 1)

  Kayla Undead (Kayla Monroe: Haunted World Book 2)

  The Killing Kind

  The Killing Kind 2

  Dead Stripper Storage

  Kill for Satan!

  Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories

  House of Blood

  Merciless

  PART I

  THE FUCKING LOWDOWN

  I WAKE UP THAT MORNING and the fucking zombie apocalypse has started. That’s not to say I know it’s happening right away. I don’t, on account of having gotten righteously smashed the night before after breaking up with Crazy Sue.

  I know what you’re thinking: “Gosh, Phil, Crazy Sue sure is an interesting nickname to give your girlfriend, but surely, it’s merely a quirky term of endearment rather than an accurate description of the young lady’s personality, because otherwise why would you date a crazy woman for three fucking years?”

  Here’s the deal on that situation: I didn’t give her that name. It was bestowed upon her years ahead of my involvement with her. And, yes, I was aware of it from early on in our relationship. And, listen, I dated her for some pretty simple reasons. She’s one of those girls who’s so goddamn sexy it almost makes your eyes hurt to look at her too long. She’s got a tight little shapely body and the ability to make you weak in the knees with just a glance from those sultry eyes.

  Also, she fucks like a demon from hell.

  So, there’s that.

  Sue’s given name is Susan Leigh Jones. The reason everyone calls her Crazy Sue is pretty straightforward, really, and it’s basically because she’s totally fucking crazy. I’m talking a stark raving loon, a chick who should be permanently locked up in a padded cell somewhere and doped to the fucking gills on Thorazine or whatever the fuck it is the head doctors feed the space cases to keep them from going off on kill-crazy crime sprees.

  Somehow, though, Crazy Sue had never gone off on a kill-crazy spree and thus was out there walking free amongst an unsuspecting populace. So, you know, maybe you’re thinking I’m exaggerating Crazy Sue’s craziness. Surely someone so unhinged couldn’t have made it to the ripe old age of twenty-two without having violated at least a few of the major statutes in the criminal codebook. Maybe I’m just being a typical misogynistic piece of shit, right? The kind of fucking wanker always going on about his “psycho” ex-girlfriend. Sure, you know the type. And you likely know damn well at least half the fucking time the real problem was the guy in the equation. Guys are assholes. Take it from me. I’m a guy. I fucking know. But, and I swear this on the hallowed grave of my beloved childhood pooch, Dog Juan DeBarko (or DJ for short), Crazy Sue is the genuine article when it comes to brain-scrambled pure-ass-psycho weirdness.

  Just because she hadn’t killed a bunch of motherfuckers yet didn’t mean she didn’t want to do just that. She did. I know this because she talked about it all the time. And I do mean all the time. We’d be in bed getting it on, I mean really getting into it, when she’d start telling me about her murder fantasies. And I’d be like, “Yeah, baby, that’s real interesting how you want to cut some dude’s wiener off, fry it up in a pan, and feed it to him with some pickles and horseradish, but bring me them titties.”

  That worked most of the time. Well, pretty much all the time. It’s not like there were occasional exceptions where I’d give in and say, “Okay, let’s do this shit and get it over with” just to shut her up. No, I’d distract her some way or other, either by maybe going down on her for an extended period or initiating a discussion about her other favorite pastime, her massive collection of Precious Moments figurines. Seriously, the girl is cuckoo for those fucking figurines. Don’t ask me why. She spends an ungodly amount of fucking money on the motherfucking things, buying shit-tons of them off goddamn eBay.

  Or, you know, she did until the rise of the zombies.

  And until . . . well, that’ll have to wait a bit.

  Yeah, you’ll want to hear all about that. And about the zombies. I get it. Really. Everyone who wasn’t caught in the exclusion zones during the outbreak always wants to hear all about the fucking zombies. And of course, you’re mainly interested in the other thing.

  I’ll get to all that. But I need to start with what happened to me at the beginning of that descent into bloody fucking hell. Crazy fucking Sue. Jesus. She’s the number one reason I almost didn’t make it through outbreak day alive. I mean, yeah, I nearly got devoured by countless flesh-eating ghouls a bunch of times, but that was a direct result of what Crazy Sue set in motion that morning.

  Here, I’ll share a little anecdote that should illustrate pretty fucking clearly the depths of her insanity. This was about three months before the outbreak. I’m lying awake in bed at Sue’s place. My phone starts ringing. I haven’t been up long and I’m still kind of groggy. Before I reach for my phone, I pry my crusty eyes open and take a look around. I’m alone in the bed. No sign of Sue. This doesn’t surprise me as she’s often up and about before I am. The phone stops ringing and my eyes start to flutter shut again.

  But the phone immediately starts ringing again.

  “Fuck,” I say, annoyed by the obnoxious persistence of whoever this pushy motherfucker is. “Can’t I get some goddamn sleep, you fucking cocksucker!?”

  As I say this, I hope it’s not my sweet old grandmother calling because that would make me feel bad and I’m not a bad guy. Not really. Not most of the time. Right now, I’m just cranky because I’d rather get some more shuteye than interact with some idiotic representative of the outside world, even if it’s only by phone. Finally, giving up, I reach for the hateful device and grab it off the nightstand. I look at the screen and scowl,
seeing who it is.

  I hit the accept call button and put the phone to my ear. “The fuck you want, asshole?”

  “You should step outside a minute, dude.”

  It’s “Mad” Mark Montgomery, my best friend in the world since middle school. “Why in fuck should I do that, you fucking cocksucker?”

  Mark chuckles. “Because Sue is up on the roof.”

  This makes my eyes open wider. Suddenly I’m more awake. I sit up and start scanning the floor for my clothes. “Are you shitting me?”

  Another chuckle. “No, man. The bitch is perched up there like a fucking woodpecker or some shit. It’s creepy. I was driving by on my way to work and saw her up there. I thought to myself, ‘Hey, man, this seems like something Phil should know about.’ So, I called you.”

  I’m scanning the floor. I don’t see my fucking pants. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and start feeling under the edge of the bedframe with my toe. “Are you drunk? Is this some kind of fucking joke?”

  “Not a joke. And I’m not drunk. You know I don’t start drinking until after I get to work. Anyway, you should definitely go check that shit out. I gotta go. By the way, I fucked your mother last night. She wasn’t very good. Called your name out while I was putting it to her. Creepy, huh?”

  He cackles.

  The line goes dead.

  I stare at the phone. The guy’s probably yanking my chain about the mom thing, but I can’t be totally sure. He might be telling the truth. Hey, I know how fucked up that sounds, but my family is weird and fucked up and my friends are scumbags. Harsh, yeah. But true. Except for my grandmother. She’s sweet as apple pie. I love that old bag. I hope she’ll be all right without me.

  Anyway, I drop the phone on the nightstand and drag my pants out from under the bed. I pull them on and find my Mindless Self Indulgence T-shirt. I put that on, too, put on some shoes, and go the fuck outside.

  Mark wasn’t kidding.

  Crazy Sue is up on the roof. She’s perched up there in a way I can only describe as owl-like, her platinum blonde hair shifting in the breeze. Sue lives in a relatively small apartment complex. It’s not one of those big, sprawling things. But it’s situated at the edge of a hip residential area that bumps right up against a busy commercial district.

  There are a lot of cars going by and in those cars are assloads of nosy motherfuckers. They’re curious about the hot chick perched up on the fucking roof. As I stand there watching her in utter fucking confusion for a few moments, multiple horns are honked. Some dude in an old Camaro leans out his window and shouts something crude.

  I show him an upturned middle finger.

  Then I raise my voice and go, “Hey, Sue. Um . . . whatcha doin’ up there?”

  She doesn’t look at me. Her pretty face is tilted upward. “Watching the skies.”

  I nod, as if this explains everything, which, of course, it fucking does not. But she doesn’t see the nod so I raise my voice again and go, “Watching the skies for what?”

  “Frogs.”

  “Frogs?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You expecting frogs to fall from the sky?”

  She doesn’t reply, just keeps staring skyward.

  A silence stretches out, becomes uncomfortable really fucking fast. More car horns slice through the still morning air like a slasher’s knife ripping open a prostitute’s throat. Or not exactly like that at all. But . . . whatever. Anyway . . .

  I try again. “That seems kind of, I don’t know, fucking biblical. I thought you were an atheist.”

  Still staring upward, Sue shakes her head. “I’m a Satanist.”

  I frown. I’ve been with Sue a while now. For years. At no point have I seen any evidence of devil worship on her part. Given her bloodthirsty interests, you might think otherwise. But, nope, this is news to me. To my knowledge, there have been no midnight goat sacrifices at Sue’s place, but maybe that’s about to change. “Huh. That’s weird. Since when?”

  She glances at me for the first time. She’s wearing dark sunglasses. The breeze blows more wild blonde tresses across her gorgeous fucking face. “Since 7:58 this morning.”

  My frown deepens. “Oh. Um . . .”

  “Don’t even worry about it,” she says, her tone growing stern. “Go back in and make my breakfast.”

  It’s then that I remember the time displayed on my phone’s screen when Mad Mark called. “Baby, I can’t. I have to be at work in, like, twenty fucking minutes.”

  She tilts her face skyward again. “Go make my breakfast, Phil.” There’s a brief pause. “Or else.”

  “Or else?”

  “That’s right. Or else.”

  I scratch my chin and glance off to my left. My shitty old Dodge Neon is parked at the curb. I could get in it and drive away from this insanity once and for all. It’s not the first time I’ve weighed this option. An end to the craziness and a return to relative normality would come as a relief in many ways.

  Then I look at her. I study that body. And I think of things she does to me in bed. And I say, “Or else what?”

  Still not looking at me, she says, “You can either go make my fucking breakfast and never worry your pretty little head about it, or I can explain at length what’s definitely gonna happen to you if you don’t do what I want. Now stop distracting me from my sentinel time.”

  Sentinel time?

  Whatever.

  I sigh.

  I go back inside and prepare a big breakfast for Crazy Sue. I’m almost a half fucking hour late for work by then. Later that day I get shit-canned from that job. No big fucking deal. I hated that job. I’m kind of not the most diligent employee ever, okay? This was at a comics shop. I know fuck-all about comics and superheroes and motherfuckers in fucking spandex, but for some reason they hired me anyway. Probably because I’m such a cool cat and look like a young Brad Pitt at the end of a three-week meth bender if you squint really hard. I kind of made the place seem less like a haven for fucking losers, but even losers can get tired of a cool cat’s crusty old slacker shit eventually.

  Or so I have been told.

  But, I digress.

  Anyway, I go back outside to get in my car and drive off to that ill-fated fucking work day and guess what? There are dead motherfucking frogs all over the place. Not huge piles of them, just dozens scattered everywhere. I have to pluck a few from my windshield wipers, which I then turn on to clear away the smears of blood and frog guts.

  Weird shit.

  So maybe Crazy Sue is a little psychic in addition to psycho.

  Anyway, back to where we started.

  I broke up with Crazy Sue. Finally. It took months of working up my nerve and consulting with friends. Every last one of those fucking motherfuckers told me in the most emphatic terms that breaking up with her was the smartest fucking thing I could ever possibly do.

  Kind of hard to go against prevailing opinion that strong, you know?

  Still, none of those bastards had ever gotten their brains fucked out by Crazy Sue. I’m just saying . . . some of them might have had a slightly different perspective on things if they’d ever been dragged into bed by the wildest she-demon fuck machine on the planet.

  I had to get drunk to do it. There was no other way. Never mind that I get drunk to do most things. That’s a habit. It’s my life. But this time it was absolutely fucking required.

  After it was over—and after I somehow escaped her place with a still-beating heart—I met up with Mad Mark and the usual crew at the Dirty Halo Saloon. In the interest of consoling me in the wake of such a traumatic and momentous turning point in my life, those motherfuckers proceeded to buy me drinks all night long and got me so fucked up I’m pretty sure I eventually became untethered from my body and went floating about the cosmos for a while.

  And I don’t return to my fleshy shell until the moment my mom bangs on my door the next morning and wakes my still half-drunk ass the fuck up.

  I pry my eyes open and yell, “Wha
t is it, you fucking whore!?”

  Mom yells back: “Eat a cock, Phil. That crazy girlfriend of yours just called me and said you better call her back. Or else.”

  I frown. “Or else?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Mom snorts. A gurgling sound comes from the other side of the closed door. She’s probably swigging from a bottle of Popov vodka. It’s her favorite morning libation. The fucking cunt. “How the hell should I know?”

  “But I just broke up with her. I don’t want to call her.”

  Another gurgle from the other side of the door. Then a cackle. “You broke up with Crazy Sue?”

  My mouth feels really fucking dry. I need to drink about a gallon of fucking water. Also, my bladder is ready to explode. And my head is throbbing. It’s one of my worst hangovers in ages, at least since last month.

  But in that moment, all I can think is, Or else?

  I shiver helplessly and a few dribbles of diarrhea leak out of my asshole. I force some saliva into my mouth and sit up with a groan. I cradle my head in my shaky fucking hands. More diarrhea dribbles out of my butthole. Fucking gross. I’m never drinking again, I think. Or, immediately revising that bullshit notion for a more realistic scenario: Not until tomorrow. Maybe. At the very least, I’m sure I can hold out for a few hours.

  Probably.

  “Yes,” I say, half-moaning. “I broke up with Crazy Sue. Everybody said I was doing the right thing.”

  Mom cackles again. “That’s because they’re not the ones with their asses on the line. My advice? Call the bitch now. Oh, and if you go out today, watch out for the zombies.”

  Before I can say anything to that, the fucking hag goes away, her heavy footsteps clomping down the hallway. I reflect on what she’s just told me and almost get misty-eyed for a moment. For a second there, it sounded sort of like she kind of cared a little. Maybe.

  Then I thought, Zombies?

  But I push the thought out of my head. Obviously, Mom’s a little more crocked than usual this morning. Such a thing boggles the fucking brain, but how else to explain the z-word nonsense?