Zompoc Survivor: Exodus (21 page)
Read Zompoc Survivor: Exodus Online
Authors: Ben S Reeder
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Aside from the military hardware he picks up along the way, everything Dave uses in the story is available to buy or make. I’ve listed some of the places Dave would have bought his gear from below.
These are the real life folks who made Dave’s knives and sword. Great bunch of guys with a down to earth attitude. I’d trust my own life to their weapons any day.
http://www.darkangelmedical.com/
The folks over at Dark Angel Medical, who inspired Dave’s kit in his cache tube and bug out bag. For a no-nonsense response kit, the folks at Dark Angel have you covered.
Down To Earth Foods is the kind of place where Dave and Maya bought their bulk foods and staples, as well as their food storage containers.
http://beprepared.com/#default
Emergency Essentials, where Dave would also have bought freeze dried foods and other essentials. Though he would have created his own bug out bags, these folks have some decent 72 hour kits of their own.
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds would have been Dave’s choice for his seeds for the homestead. He would have gone with heirloom seeds for practical reasons, one being that they aren’t dependent on any outside provider for replanting (no contracts saying you can’t replant part of what you harvest, so no requirements that you buy seed from the company every year) and no dependency on certain pesticides or fertilizers for “best results.”
http://www.ruger.com/products/1022/
The Ruger 10/22 is Dave’s choice of utility weapon. Light, rugged and reliable, the 10/22 is one of the most popular rifles ever made for a reason. And in spite of some of the myths out there, the .22 caliber round is perfectly capable of dropping a zombie with a head shot within 100 yards.
An excerpt from Zompoc Survivor: Inferno
Chapter 1: At Hell’s Gate
I came to with the sound of gunshots and screaming in my ears. The world was a blur when I opened my eyes, but my hearing was still sharp enough to hear the tell-tale moans of infected and the sound of crazed laughter. Something moved to my right, and I swung at it. The back of my fist connected with whatever it was, and I tried to reach for it with my left hand. A band of fabric across my shoulder stopped me from moving more than a few inches, and I remembered I was strapped into a seat on a helicopter. I looked around, but my vision was still blurry. No movement on my left. Sound of something to my right. Without a thought, I reached out and grabbed at whatever was on my right. My hand fell on brittle, coarse hair; my fingers closed around it and I twisted. Something flopped on the Blackhawk’s rear deck, and chilled hands grasped at my forearms. My fuzzy vision showed me a straight line, dark on one side, light on the other. My arm straightened and I tried to line up whatever was in my hand with the border of light and shadow. The shock of impact against the door frame felt good, and the dull thud of the blow was almost musical. But it was missing something, something that my brain told me I just needed to hit a little harder to hear. So I did. The second hit didn’t get the job done, so I pulled my arm back a little further and slammed the thing’s skull forward again. The crack of bone brought a smile to my face, and I let go of the thing in my hand. There were other things I needed to break and kill.
The pop of gunfire behind me brought my thoughts into focus, and other sounds started to make it through the haze in my head. Gunfire, voices, the groan of metal, and a moan that wasn’t a zombie, all of them came clear at once. Across from me, I could see one of the Marines seated against the back of the compartment; she was turned in the seat, right hand on a bloody wound in the right leg of the Marine beside her, her left arm hanging bloody and limp at her side. On my left, Amy was slumped in her seat, and my heart froze in fear. The surviving pilot’s voice, the gunfire, the other Marine’s pleas to her squad mate, none of them mattered. I freed myself from the harness and dropped to one knee in front of Amy. Gently, I put my fingers under her nose and felt the slight flutter of air as she exhaled. Still breathing then. My vision seemed to be clearing slowly as I put my hand to her wrist and checked her pulse just to make sure. If she was still breathing, it made sense her heart was still beating, but I still had to check.
With Amy’s safety seen to, my brain shifted gears. She was okay for the moment, but I had to make sure she stayed that way. I looked out the right side of the Blackhawk’s door and saw a couple of the infected shambling across the gray surface we’d landed on. My brain replayed the last thing I remembered, the chopper not quite falling, not quite gliding toward the ground. Smoke all around us, parting at the last second to reveal a building beneath us. Then the chopper had tilted back for a moment before slamming forward hard. We were on top of a building, and there were infected on the roof. While one corner of my brain wondered why there were infected all the way up on the roof, the majority of my attention was on finding a weapon among the bodies on the blood slicked floor. I grabbed an M16 and hit the mag release. The black magazine dropped into my hand to reveal what looked like a full load. It certainly felt heavy enough. I popped it back in the well, pulled the charging handle and set the selector to single fire. I was ready to rock and roll.
“Armstrong, help me with Kale!” the wounded Marine called out as I brought the rifle up and took stock of the situation. Silence answered her. “Come on, Private! On your goddamn feet!”
“Bobcat, Talon three is down,” I heard the pilot calling out from the front. “The bird is grounded, casualties unknown. We’re under attack by infected.” Three pops came from up front. I put my sights on one of the infected and tried to keep the red dot centered in on its face when I pulled the trigger. The gun bucked against my shoulder, but the zombie’s head stayed intact. I fired twice more before I put a round through its left eye. I swung the gun to my right and found the other one. It went down on the second try, and I counted off five rounds. I glanced through the cockpit and saw several more coming toward us.
From the rear compartment I couldn’t get a good shot at them, so I hopped to the ground. The world tilted under my feet and I stumbled a couple of steps before I got my balance back. As close as these four were, it was easier to get a shot at their faces. It only took me ten shots to get four rounds into their skulls. A quick look at the far side of the chopper and to the rear showed me no infected, though the incessant moaning was still reaching my ears. I turned my head to follow the sound and nearly dropped the gun.
The building we’d landed on had another section butted up against it and a structure on the roof. It was hard to tell directions in the heavy smoke over the city, but the chopper’s nose was pointed diagonally across the roof, and the small structure was almost right in front of its nose on the opposite side. The infected I’d just shot had been near it. Off to my right across the roof was an unfinished looking section, and it was absolutely thick with infected, at least fifty if I had to guess. My slowly clearing vision also caught something else: several bodies between the unfinished section and the chopper. People I knew I hadn’t shot. The mysterious dead people could wait, though. I figured they’d stay dead for a little while longer, but unless I did something
fast,
odds were stacking up in favor of me being just as dead for just as long. Short of a bomb, there was no way I was going to kill that many infected with an assault rifle before they got to us. I couldn’t get that many rounds downrange in time.
An inhuman scream cut off my frantic search for options, and I looked back toward the unfinished section. Every one of the dead infected was looking my way now as another one, a ghoul in blue-green scrubs opened her mouth and let out another scream from the edge of the roof. The dead infected behind her started shuffling toward us like they had a purpose the second her voice ripped across my eardrums. The rifle was up to my shoulder before I could even think about it, and I put round after round into her torso. Her body jerked with the impact of each bullet, and I walked my rounds up her body until I was putting shots center mass. Finally, she fell to her knees, and I brought the red sight on her nose.
“Die, motherfucker,” I snarled as I pulled the trigger. The moment her head jerked back, the zombies stopped moving toward us for a moment, and I felt a brief sense of accomplishment. Then their collective gaze zeroed in on the chopper again, and desperation gave birth to a solution. What I needed was a way to put a lot of bullets into a lot of zombies in a very short time, and I had just the gun for that.
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Zompoc Survivor: Inferno
on Amazon.
From The Paean of Sundered Dreams!
At the end of the world, one woman holds the only key to the future, written in madness and blood.
Fifteen years after the events in
Rationality Zero
, Earth falls to an apocalypse that none could have seen. In this whisper of a possible future, the worst nightmare of the Facility comes into being.
But is it true? Or are we simply peering into the mind of a deranged woman, who cannot tell fact from fiction?
In this odd story, which nestles uncomfortably into the timelines of
Rationality Zero
,
The Herald of Autumn
,
Collateral Damage
, and
The Primary Protocol
,
Rational Earth falls to the darkness of the Shroud. Will our world recover from the desolation of darkness and madness that storms at the center of creation? Or, like the world of
Cæstre
, will all that man has wrought be lost?
None can say. Whether terrifying truth or irrational fantasy, one young woman holds the fate of all in her trembling hands.
What are people saying about “The Wormwood Event?”
One of the better short stories I've read in a while. Great flow throughout the story. I will definitely read more of this author.
This is a real chiller-thriller book. While you're trying to contain your shivers, your heart is thumping with the excitement of what’s going to happen next.
This was my first time stepping into a world brought to life by JM Guillen and I am still in awe of his words.
This was my first experience of this author and I highly recommend him based on what I've seen so far.
First in the Paean of Sundered Dreams!
The world is not what it seems.
Michael Bishop has is an Asset of the Facility
—
a job that comes with many strange perks. He is a man who never gets ill, who never pays taxes. He is effortlessly fit, and has a different woman every night of the week.
That is, when he is not on assignment.
When activated, Michael becomes Asset 108, an enhanced human who stands against the strange darkness that lurks at the edge of our world.
Armed with equipment that most would find impossible to comprehend, he is sent on missions both strange and deadly. Each dossier pits him against irrational creatures and beings
—
most with the power to unravel his sanity, or reality itself.
It’s never a simple job.
This one, however, is more complex than most. Mysterious unknown targets are fracturing reality, somewhere in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
The Facility has no other Assets in the area, and their telemetry is spotty at best. Without knowing what to expect, Bishop is activated, assigned to a cadre, and sent to the middle of nowhere.
What he finds there is both the beginning and the end.