Shamblers: the zombie apocalypse Read Free

with you buddy, with the exception of Martin being an ass-wipe. I don’t know him well enough to make that judgment call, and I don’t think you do either.” Martin smiled sheepishly. His cheeks were bright red. Marcus twirled his bat around in one hand and looked at me with annoyance. He hated being corrected. I continued anyway, “our scavenger: that thin guy with the cauliflower ear, whatever his name is, broke a cardinal rule.”
    “Never lead shamblers to the camp,” Martin recited.
    I nodded, “c orrect. We made our rules to keep ourselves safe. That guy endangered us all.”
    “So let’s hold a consensus,” Becky chimed in, “I say we vote to kick him. If it passes, he’s out.”
    Marcus spat on the ground. He nearly hit one of Becky’s dirty, white tennis-shoes. “Why do we have to fucking vote on every God damned thing?” he complained. “Why can’t we just beat the piss out of the fucker and send him on his way? It’d be one less mouth to feed.”
    Becky scowled at him. “We’re trying to rebuild society, not plunge it back into chaos,” she lectured .
    Marcus opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off, “Olivia…errrr… .Becky is right,” I told him, “we can’t act like animals. We’ve lived in hell for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be normal. It’s important that we at least try to do things civilized.”
    Marcus paused for a moment, stared up at the sky, and sighed as he responded, “I hate when you guys all gang up on me like this.” Looking at me, he added, “Nick, buddy, I thought you would’ve had my back. Remember when we used to just hand out beatings to people who fucked up?” he slammed his fist into his open palm to illustrate someone getting smashed, “and that’s if they were lucky. Don’t pretend like you’re some saint Lucyfus all of a sudden.”
    I was pretty sure that Marcus had just invented a saint, but I couldn’t deny that he had me pegged: we had survived for so long because we had done some terrible things. There was no doubt in my mind that everyone I was now acquainted with had committed vile atrocities. Well, except for perhaps Martin: I suspected he was still a virgin, and had survived by clinging to people who could protect him.
    Marcus and I had been associated longer than anyone else we knew. We had done things to survive that I hadn’t thought I’d been capable of. The way I had met Marcus was an interesting story all by itself:
    I was separated from my family at the onset of the infection. I haven’t seen them since. After I narrowly escaped the city, I was forced into a quarantine zone by the military. Everyone I’d met there had also perished when the area, designated Zone #24B, was overrun.
    The military had come up with a “brilliant” idea to stop the epidemic early on: they gathered everyone who wasn’t infected into camps and surrounded us with a series of large, electrified fences and guard towers. These multi-acre concentration camps were erected outside every city in the US.
    The general population was content to move into these camps at first, because they had actually worked (for a few weeks). At that time, outside the camps, there was nothing but death and mayhem. I, myself, had felt safe contained within the militarized zone when I first arrived. Until that point, nothing had even slowed the growing tide of zombies: the government had knocked out bridges, fire-bombed cities, dug trenches, and sent soldiers into urban areas with the latest gear and equipment.
    By the time the quarantine camps went up, everyone had seen a lifetime of madness packed into a few weeks; most of us were just happy to be alive and remotely safe.
    This was, of course, until a few really large and inevitable problems sprung up. The biggest was the rationing of food and water, which quickly turned into a lack of both. I later learned that many quarantine camps had rioted. The solders who manned them either left their posts or