Do or Die

Book : Zombicide

by Josh Reynolds

Genres: Media Tie-In; Horror; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

Zombies, cannibalistic swamp-dwellers, and undead alligators munch on anything that moves in this action-soaked gorefest from the popular Zombicide boardgame



Being undead isn't anything new for Westlake—former thief and deteriorating Zombivor— until he realizes there's not enough formaldehyde in the world to keep him together. He decides to embark on one last mission into the zombie apocalypse to find a long-lost drug cartel cache which will set his friends up for life. The hitch? It's in Florida. By the time they land in the Everglades, not only is the wildlife a lot wilder and more murderous than usual, but a hurricane looms on the horizon, ready to wipe them from the face of the earth. For Westlake, there is no other choice but to DO OR DIE.

Release date: December 5, 2023

Publisher: Aconyte

Print pages: 352

Sample

ZOMBICIDE

DO OR DIE

Westlake was dead.

He knew it. Felt it. But sometimes he couldn’t quite believe it. Sometimes, death was like a bad dream, one he might wake up from at any moment. In those moments, the world went cattywampus and it was easy to forget, well, everything.

Everything except the hunger. The hunger never went away, even when he forgot everything else. It was always with him. The itch at the base of his brain, the churning in his guts.

Hungry.

He stumbled, his head full of red hornets. He slumped against a display window and dug the palms of his hands into his eye sockets. He was coming unraveled, stitch by stitch, tendon by tendon. Rotting on the vine. Meat sliding off the bone.

Meat. Hungry. Eat.

“Stop,” he croaked. His voice was raw and ragged. Not his anymore. “Stop it.”

 

CHAPTER ONE

Kahwihta

Kahwihta Trapper paused, head cocked, ears open. Listening to the soft shuffle of rotting ceiling tiles, the rustle of wallpaper peeling away from cracked plaster as mold grew beneath it, the hum of flies. The ambient noise of the apocalypse. But beneath that was the other; the crash of something ungainly staggering into a display window, the scruff of feet on dusty tile, the querulous groan of a hungry corpse.

She didn’t hear any of that at the moment, thankfully. Just the sounds of the slow collapse of the shopping center. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Sound did strange things in places like this. It was a liminal space, halfway between life and death. She glanced down at her companion. “Anything?” she murmured.

Attila whuffed gently. The dog kept pace with her, rather than bounding ahead or wandering off. He knew better than that, or at least she liked to think so. Attila was a lean black and brown mongrel of indeterminate parentage but substantial size. Big enough to knock down most zombies and fast enough to get away when he couldn’t, he could smell them coming a mile away. He was as much an early warning system as a friend.

Kahwihta took his grumbling for a reply in the negative. “Good enough,” she said, giving him an affectionate thump between the ears. The dog’s tail wagged gently.

She started forward again, keeping her head on a swivel as Ramirez called it. Not that it made much sense; continually swiveling one’s head seemed to confer little benefit when it came to spotting zombies. Maybe it was an FBI thing. Or maybe it was just a Ramirez thing. The older woman had a lot of sayings like that.

The shopping center was empty of human life. Plenty of birds and small animals, however. There were sparrows nesting in the air vents. Their song rose and fell like a more pleasant version of the tinned music that had once kept shoppers company.

At her feet, moss crept across the tiles like a spill of emerald oil. The roof had caved in in places, creating impromptu waterfalls that carried life into the enclosed environment. Flowers and ferns had crept free from their stands and the ornamental trees had become home to squirrels and birds. Here and there the moss shrouded bones – whether human or animal, she couldn’t tell.

Zombies went after animals when humans were in short supply. Animals returned the favor when they could, which brought its own set of problems. That there were so many animals here was a sure sign that there weren’t many walking corpses in the area.

Attila paused, growling softly. Kahwihta stopped. The birds had fallen silent. She reached down and unclipped the industrial cattle prod from her belt. Zombies didn’t like electricity much. Their muscle tissue was still susceptible to sudden contractions, even if they didn’t really feel it. Just one of the useful things she’d learned over the past year and change since the apocalypse had rolled over the world.

It was hard to remember what it had been like before. Intellectually, the memories were still there, but emotionally, she might as well have been reading a history book. She’d been in college when the curtain fell. She’d been up in the Adirondacks, studying the biodiversity of the Saranac Lake area when it had all ended. She figured that was why she’d survived the initial outbreak. She hadn’t even realized that the world had ended until she’d hiked down to town and nearly gotten eaten by the locals.

She was still a student, but her focus had shifted somewhat these days. Zombies were the hot new environmental catastrophe, worse than global warming and carbon emissions. She’d taken her share of hungry corpses apart in the months since it had all gone wrong – dissecting them down to the marrow to try to get a handle on what had happened. She had no answers, unfortunately. Just a lot of questions.

Not that it mattered really. Who was there to tell, after all?

Attila gave a sharp bark. Kahwihta followed his gaze and saw a section of moss a few feet away suddenly quiver and bulge. She took a step back and activated the cattle prod. It

snapped to life with a crackle of ozone. The moss ripped like carpet as something that was more bone and topsoil than meat hauled itself into view.

Zombies were remarkably durable. They could endure conditions that would cripple a living human with little degradation of their physical abilities. Shoot them, stab them, set them on fire, run them over, they’d just keep going unless you removed the brain or severed the spine. If there was no prey to hunt, they just… stopped. Went into hibernation where they were and waited for someone to wake them up. Of course sometimes they rotted away to nothing while they waited, but that took a lot longer than most people thought.

This one was well on its way over the river, as her grandmother might have said. But that didn’t make it any less dangerous. It had enough muscle memory left to get to its feet and move in her direction. Dirt slid from its wasted form as it took a staggering lurch toward her. Attila barked again and sidled away from her, drawing the dead thing’s attention. It didn’t have eyes anymore, or a nose. It was acting on sound alone. Maybe vibrations – had it felt her approach somehow?

She watched it move, noting the jerkiness, the lack of plasticity. A broken thing. It swayed in Attila’s direction, jaws falling open in a hiss. The dog backed away, still barking. The zombie took a step forward in pursuit.

Kahwihta lunged. The cattle prod stabbed into the zombie’s exposed ribcage and a fat spark danced in the air. The zombie twitched, champing its jaws mindlessly. She yanked the cattle prod out and jabbed the dead thing again. It was more resistant than she’d anticipated; maybe it didn’t have enough tissue left to contract.

Attila darted forward and clamped down on a wobbling leg. Swiftly, the dog yanked the zombie off its feet and retreated, dragging it away from her. Kahwihta followed, reaching into her satchel for her hammer. It was just a standard ball peen hammer with a rounded head, but it did the job well enough.

Attila let go as she approached. The zombie made to push itself to its feet, but too late. She caught it in the center of the head with her first swing. It went down like a sack of potatoes. She hit it again, just to be certain. When it didn’t move, she jabbed at it with the cattle prod, inspecting the remains.

The radio clipped to her belt crackled to life. “Kahwihta?” a woman’s voice asked. Ramirez. She had the sort of voice that Kahwihta associated with people in charge – direct and authoritative.

Kahwihta thrust her hammer back into her satchel and unhooked the radio. “Here.”

“We heard barking. Everything OK?”

“Just a zombie. Well past its expiration date. What about you?”

“Nothing. Found him yet?”

“No. But I think we’re close. How’s Terry?”

“Shaken up, but in one piece.”

“Thanks to Westlake,” Kahwihta said.

Ramirez was quiet for a

moment. Kahwihta could almost see her face. Finally, she said, “Are you sure?”

“Which one of us is the expert?” Kahwihta asked with more confidence than she felt. “He hasn’t gone feral, boss. Trust me.”

“I do. And don’t call me boss.”

“You got it, boss.” Kahwihta broke the connection before Ramirez could reply. Long conversations could be dangerous outside of a designated safe zone. Not that they’d seen many zombies since they’d arrived at the airfield. A few here and there, but no big groups.

···

Given the condition of the place, no one had expected any walkers to still be around. Zombies would travel hundreds of miles to stand on the wrong side of a chain-link fence, so long as there were human beings in sight. But take humans out of the equation, and zombies wandered off. It was something Kahwihta was still trying to puzzle out. How did they know when there were no more people in an area? The answer might well hold the key to building a true zombie-free zone. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a biological reason for it. At least none that she could determine.

The walker that had attacked Terry had been the first they’d seen in the mall. It had been waiting in one of the stores. Lurking in the employee washroom. Maybe it had been there since the beginning of the end. Locked in by someone and left as a nasty surprise for the next person to come along. In this case, that had been Terry.

He was a new face; one of the Atlantic City crew. A scrawny kid, a few years her junior. He’d probably still been in high school when the world had ended. He didn’t talk much. None of the folks from Atlantic City talked much. Kahwihta didn’t blame them. What was there to talk about? Few people liked to swap survivor stories; most just wanted to keep their heads down and make it to the next day.

Another member of their group, Ptolemy, talked about it a lot. He called it generational trauma. Like the sort that affected the survivors of wars. People could only take so much before they withdrew into themselves. Even the most boisterous or outgoing person could only keep it up for so long under these conditions. Eventually, everything became muted – gray all day, every day.

Kahwihta felt like that sometimes, though she tried her best to keep her mind occupied. Animals had it easier. Every day was new, and exciting. Not enjoyable, perhaps, but exciting. She glanced down at Attila and smiled. He scratched himself, ignoring her. “Good dog,” she said, still thinking about Terry and the toilet-walker.

It had nearly taken the kid out and had banged him up pretty bad. Most walkers weren’t very strong, but some could throw hands with the best of them. This one had tackled Terry to the ground while he scavenged toilet roll, and nearly had him until

Westlake had intervened.

Things had become confusing pretty quickly after that. Everyone had been surprised, even Attila. Kahwihta wondered about that, too. Maybe something in the bathroom had masked the smell, or maybe he just hadn’t been paying attention. Dogs could be as unobservant as people.

Terry had gone down, the walker on top of him. No one had reacted in time, except Westlake. He’d swooped down on them and wrenched the zombie back, away from Terry and… and then what had happened, had happened.

“Damn it, Westlake,” Kahwihta said. He’d been doing so well, at least until they’d reached South Carolina. It had been weeks without an incident, without so much as a flicker of uncertainty. And now it was all over.

He’d ripped the walker’s throat out with his teeth. Just like an animal.

Just like a zombie.

Ramirez had almost put a bullet in him then and there. But Westlake was quicker, thankfully. He’d scrambled away, vanishing into the labyrinth of the mall. Kahwihta had gone after him without waiting for the others. To their credit, they hadn’t tried to stop her. They knew as well as she did that they needed him in one piece, preferably with a working brain.

Westlake had been turned months ago. They’d thought he was dead, but he’d somehow wound up in Atlantic City, trapped in a makeshift arena fighting an oversized zombie wrestler, and hadn’t that been a surprise? Kahwihta still wasn’t sure just what kind of zombie Westlake was, and she’d seen a lot of them. She’d never known of one that retained its sentience after turning.

The problem was, it didn’t seem to be a permanent state of affairs. Westlake was still a corpse, albeit a talkative one. Like any corpse, like the zombies themselves, he was decaying. And his mind was getting worse. Soon, he might not be Westlake anymore. Maybe today was the day. But she hoped not. She liked him. Had liked him, since their first meeting in the Adirondacks.

She stooped and held a scrap of cloth, torn from Westlake’s shirt during his struggle with the walker, to Attila’s nose. “Find him, boy. Before he gets himself into any more trouble.”

 

CHAPTER TWO

Westlake

Westlake was dead.

He knew it. Felt it. But sometimes he couldn’t quite believe it. Sometimes, death was like a bad dream, one he might wake up from at any moment. In those moments, the world went cattywampus and it was easy to forget, well, everything.

Everything except the hunger. The hunger never went away, even when he forgot everything else. It was always with him. A fellow traveler. The monkey on his back. The itch at the base of his brain, the churning in his guts.

Hungry.

He’d known junkies who described their addiction as a voice, echoing up from the base of their skull. This was the same. He was hearing it, but it wasn’t there. Not really. Just an impulse that his dying mind was trying to communicate in a way that he could process.

Did the others hear it that way? Were they like dogs responding to their master’s voice? Or was it so much a part of them that they didn’t even perceive it? Did it just go quiet one day and they never noticed?

Westlake thought about neurons popping like overheated bulbs and city blocks going dark in a blackout. He was hard-pressed to say which was worse… the voice, or the silence that must inevitably follow.

He stumbled, his head full of red hornets. He slumped against a display window offering holiday deals and dug the palms of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to press the hunger back into its box. It was getting harder by the day.

Speaking of which, what day is it?

The thought, so sudden and out of place, stung him. His hands fell away, and he found himself looking at his reflection in the cracked glass. There was enough left of his face for it to be recognizably his, but probably not for much longer. The thought didn’t bother him as much as it once had. It hadn’t been a very pretty face to begin with. Fit for mugshots, not television. He noticed, almost absently, that his mouth was stained with something dark.

Westlake touched his face in ugly wonder, and his fingers came away wet. Blood. Was it blood? He closed his eyes, trying to force a replay of the last ten minutes, the last hour. There was a cigarette burn on the film reel of his mind.

He knew he was in a shopping center – a mall by any other name. One of the hundreds of retail outlets that occupied this part of America.

What part is that?

Westlake didn’t know. He had known, he was sure. But the memory wouldn’t come now. One mall looked like any other. All corporate brands and chain eateries. Why was he here? Who had he come with?

What day is it?

The thought again. Persistent. Like the hum in his ears, or the feel of his ligaments loosening. He was coming unraveled, stitch by stitch, tendon by tendon. Rotting on the vine. Meat sliding off the bone.

Meat. Hungry.

He cracked the glass with his fists. Inconsequential thoughts slipped and slid through the runnels of his brain.

Who has an Arbor Day sale?

He stumbled back, glass in his hands, his reflection fractured and elongated. There was no pain, except for the hunger. It thrashed within him like a wild thing, and he ground his lacerated hands into his face, trying to wrestle it into submission before it overwhelmed him.

Hungry. Eat.

“Stop,” he croaked. His voice was raw and ragged. Not his anymore. “Stop it.”

“Westlake?”

His lips split as he bared his teeth and spun, eyes fixed on the speaker. A young First Nations woman, dressed in clothes that had seen better days. For a moment, he didn’t recognize her. Names, places, dates… they all slipped through

his fingers like sand these days. Then, iron bars of self-control slammed down like it was lights out at Joliet Correctional Center, and he straightened. “Is he alive?”

Kahwihta nodded. “You didn’t touch him. The only one you took a bite out of was the walker.” She paused. “You damn near tore its head off, by the way. Whatever else, your jaw muscles are still intact.”

“Wonderful,” Westlake muttered. It was coming back to him in bits and pieces. They were in South Carolina. Some shitbox retail site on the coast, near Charleston International Airport. A day’s drive from a private airfield chopped out of the salt marshes; an airfield known only to a precious few – fewer now. “Did we – did you find it?”

Kahwihta shook her head. “Not yet.”

Suddenly out of strength, Westlake sagged back against another display window, and sank down until he was seated on the floor. He looked at his hands and then, with a sigh, began to pull out the pieces of glass still embedded in them. Kahwihta crouched beside him – but not too close, he noticed. He wanted to smile but couldn’t quite make it work.

She watched him for a moment, before asking, “Do you feel it?”

He didn’t look at her. “The glass? No.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He paused. Then went back to cleaning his hands. “I know what you meant. Yes. I feel it. I always feel it.”

“Even when you – when you’re fed?” she asked, stumbling slightly over the phrasing.

Westlake glanced at her. “Yeah. Even then.”

“Is it stronger then, or weaker?”

Westlake didn’t reply. He knew what she was asking about. The hunger was a constant source of worry for all of them, not just him. Indeed, it was a greater worry for Kahwihta and the others. If he turned feral, they’d be the ones on the receiving end.

The lights in the shopping center hadn’t been on in months, but there were plenty of windows on this side of the building. Lots of muddy gray light filtering in through smeared glass. Enough to see the extent of things. Water damage, scorch marks from an electrical fire… bullet holes. Always bullet holes these days. A ubiquitous sign that a place had already been cleaned out and picked over. But hope sprang eternal. Looters missed things, or were eaten before they could pilfer much.

Though this place had been largely deserted even before the apocalypse. Just a few stores left open to keep up appearances. It was – had been – a way station for Narcos and other sorts of traffickers coming north on the I-77 corridor. Like a bed and breakfast for assholes. There was food, water, ammunition, medicine… whatever might be needed, all socked away in a set of offices at the back of one of the stores. Only he couldn’t remember which one. He looked across the hall at the cracked display window. “Arbor Day,” he murmured. Kahwihta said nothing.

“Arbor Day,” he said, more firmly this time.

“Weird holiday. What about it?” Kahwihta asked.

“Did the apocalypse happen on Arbor Day?” 

Kahwihta paused. “No, I think I might have remembered that. Why?”

“No one has an Arbor Day sale.” Westlake pushed himself to his feet and went to the display window. “This is it.”

Kahwihta’s eyes widened. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Positive. It’s in there.”

Kahwihta looked at the security shutters over the doors. They’d been padlocked shut. “Right, so, is there a code to unlock the shutters, or…?”

Westlake smashed his fist through the cracked glass. No alarms went off. No power and the backup generators had long since been drained. He kicked out the rest of the glass and climbed into the window. Kahwihta followed him. “If there’s anyone – anything – in here, it knows we’re coming.”

“That’s what the mutt’s for,” Westlake said, as he plucked glass from his arm.

“Admit it, you just didn’t remember the code to unlock the shutters,” Kahwihta said teasingly. Westlake grunted.

“We’re in, that’s all that matters.” She was right, but he didn’t want to admit it. The truth was his old life was just ashes in his head. He could sift through them and find answers, but it was getting harder by the day. Soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of the old him. He’d be a shadow of himself and nothing more. Or worse than a shadow.

One more job. Maybe two, at most. That was all he was good for.

It would have to be enough.

He led Kahwihta through the empty store, toward the back. According to rumor, the store had once sold men’s clothes. But there was nothing on the shelves now except dust and cobwebs. It had been that way for years. The stockroom was the only part that had seen any activity in that time. That was where the real business went on.

The stockroom was locked, of course. Another padlock. But that was easily solved. One good thing about being dead, he’d become a lot stronger. He twisted the padlock off, warping the door in the process. He tossed the broken padlock aside and noticed Kahwihta staring at him. “What?”

“Most zombies can’t do that.”

“Hey, you said it yourself… I’m special.” He kicked the door open and went in. It was as he remembered. At least he thought it was. It looked like a stockroom, but for a survivalist’s bunker. Tins of food, bags of dried pasta and rice, crates of bottled water. First aid kits, too, and some general antibiotics. He judged there was two or three weeks’ worth of food, if properly rationed. The medicine was more important, but there wasn’t much of it. He sighed. “Less than I thought.”

“I thought you said there was ammunition?”

“There was, last time I was here.” He paused. “Wait.” A dim memory flickered and he looked down the floor. ...