Centralia. National Guard. Devil’s Wake. Safe.
By the time exhaustion claimed Kendrick, rain clouds had darkened the sky, and he was so tired he had lost any certainty of placing his feet without disaster. The trees, once an explosion of green, had been bleached gray and black. They were a place of trackless, unknowable danger. Every sound and shadow seemed to call to him.
Trembling so badly he could hardly move, Kendrick crawled past a wall of ferns into a culvert, clutching the little Remington to his chest.
Once he sat, his sadness felt worse, like a blanket over him. He sobbed so hard he could no longer sit up straight, curling himself in a ball on the soft soil. Small leaves and debris pasted themselves to the tears and mucous that covered his face. One sob sounded more like a wail, so loud it startled him.
Grandpa Joe had lied. Mom had been dead all along. He’d shot her in the head. He’d said it like it hardly mattered to him.
Kendrick heard snapping twigs, and the back of his neck turned ice-cold.
Footsteps. Running fast.
Kendrick’s sobs vanished, as if they’d never been. He sat straight up, propping his shotgun across his bent knee, aiming, finger ready on the trigger. He saw a small black spider crawling on his trigger wrist—one with a bloated egg sack, about to give birth to a hundred babies like in Charlotte’s Web—but he made no move to bat the spider away. Kendrick sat primed, trying to silence his clotted nose by breathing through his mouth. Waiting.
Maybe it was that hitchhiker with the sign, he thought.
But it didn’t matter who it was. Hide. That was what Grandpa Joe said.
The footsteps slowed, although they were so close that Kendrick guessed the intruder couldn’t be more than a few feet away. He was no longer running, as if he knew where Kendrick was. As if he’d been close behind him all along, and now that he’d found him, he wasn’t in a hurry anymore.
“I have a gun! I’ll shoot!” Kendrick called out, and this voice was very different from the one he’d used to ask Grandpa Joe for a Coke. Not a little girl’s voice this time, or even a boy’s. It was a voice that meant what it said.
Silence. The movement had stopped.
That was when Grandpa Joe said the danger word.
Kendrick’s finger loosened against the trigger. His limbs gave way, and his body began to shake. The woods melted away, and he remembered wearing this same jacket in the safe room, waiting. Waiting for Grandpa Joe.
There had never been a gunshot from Grandpa Joe’s truck. Kendrick had expected to hear the gunshot as soon as he ran off, dreading it. Grandpa Joe always did what needed to be done. Kendrick should have heard a gunshot.
“Go back!” Kendrick said. Although his voice was not so sure this time, he cocked the Remington’s hammer, just as he’d been taught.
Kendrick waited. He tried not to hope—and then hoped fervently—that his scare had worked. The instant Kendrick’s hope reached its peak, a shadow moved against the ferns above him, closer.
“Breakfast,” Grandpa Joe’s watery voice said again.
Zombieville
By Paula R. Stiles
Paula R. Stiles is the author of more than two dozen stories. Her work has appeared in Nature, Albedo One, the zombie anthology History Is Dead, Shine, Writers of the Future XXIV, Jim Baen’s Universe, Space and Time, and in many other venues, such as the South African magazine Something Wicked, where this story first appeared. She is also the editor of Innsmouth Free Press. From 1991 to 1994, Stiles served as an Aquaculture Extension Agent with the Peace Corps in Cameroon, West Africa.
Resident Evil, a 1996 video game set in a haunted mansion, combined polygonal characters with pre-rendered backgrounds, and was one of the first games in the “survival horror” genre, following the model of Alone in the Dark. The game has spun off numerous sequels, as well as three feature films starring Milla Jovovich and written by Paul W. S. Anderson, most recently the Mad Max-inspired Resident Evil: Extinction. The most recent video game in the franchise, Resident Evil 5, is set in Africa, which has provoked some criticism of the game’s handling of racial imagery.
The author of our next tale says, “I kept hearing they wanted to do a Resident Evil movie set in Africa, and I groaned a little, thinking about how many boring clichés they’d come up with for that. Then I thought, ‘Well, self, why not do your own take on an African Zombocalypse?’”