The Undead Age Origin Stories Read online

  The stench of rotting meat hit him like a punch to the face. Connor twisted his head to the side, constrained by the blanket covering them both, the snap of teeth beside his ear impossibly loud. He pushed against the old nun and rolled, the blanket flapping around them, and a sudden memory of playing Blob with his cousins surfaced. The game consisted of sitting along the inside edge of a blanket on the floor, holding onto it with one hand. At the count of three they all yelled “Blob!” and rolled into the center, wrapping the blanket around themselves as they bumped into one another, laughing and giggling. Then they had smoothed out the blanket to do it again.

  Connor flailed against the blanket, the strings of the blinds, the old nun, the darkness enveloping him in this deadly version of Blob, even as the childish laughter of his cousins echoed in his head. His hand slipped beyond the blanket’s edge. He clutched it and freed his head, then pulled the blanket over Sor Juana’s face. Her snapping teeth scraped against his cheek, but the blanket blunted their deadly purpose.

  Weak moonlight shone through the window, throwing the room into the sharp relief of gray and black. Connor tightened the blanket around Sor Juana’s neck. He searched the room. The end of the rasp handle poked into the moonlight from a shadow a few feet away. He slid over on his ass, dragging the thrashing woman with him. He picked up the rasp, then felt the front of her face through the blanket to locate her eyes.

  “God bless you, Sister,” he whispered.

  Connor jammed the rasp into her eye through the blanket. The textured metal rod punctured the eye socket and slid into her brain. Sor Juana slumped, her body dead weight against him. He pushed her away and sat for a moment, catching his breath.

  Outside, the moans of the creatures in the street grew louder. Staying on his knees, he peeked over the window sill. The commotion had attracted their attention. Forty or so stood below the window, moaning. More were coming down the street and from nearby alleys, stumbling like drunkards in the moonlight.

  Connor climbed to his feet and found his pack. He checked the contents one last time; water, some food, leather gloves, an extra flannel shirt, three pairs of socks, the CD he had found, and the tool set. The pistol given to Brother Tomas by a man with unsavory connections, who was rumored to be a sicario, was there, too. He wrapped the CD in the extra shirt. God only knew when he could listen to it, but if he ever did, he wanted Miranda to be with him.

  I just want the chance to tell her that I know I fucked up.

  He pushed the mistakes he’d made with Miranda aside. He couldn’t do anything about it now. He had to stay alive if he ever wanted to make things right, so he had to focus on the here and now. He re-fastened the Rolex watch that the reporter from home had traded for his car. It had come loose in scuffle with Sor Juana. Connor would have given the reporter the car. He knew where he could get a motorcycle, and he wanted something that he knew how to fix, since he had no idea how far he needed to travel to reach safety. But he’d accepted the trade when the reporter offered. He might be able to trade such an expensive watch for something he needed later on.

  It wasn’t as bad in the States yet, the reporter had told him. Connor clung to the hope that the reporter had been—was still—right.

  He tucked the rasp and the gun in the waistband of his jeans, then glanced out the window. The number of creatures in the street had tripled. He would exit at the other end of the building, on the far end of the block, where he hoped less of them congregated.

  Connor shrugged into his jacket, then the backpack. He stepped into the hallway, resisting the urge to look back at poor Sor Juana, and fled, like all the others.

  Emily McGuire

  Wednesday, September 16, 2026 — Los Altos, California

  * * *

  Emily pushed the sleek glass door open, squinting as the bright afternoon sun assaulted her eyes. Super-heated air, dry and hot, radiated up from the black concrete sidewalk. She dug in the debris field that doubled as her purse as she stalked across the parking lot of Sonalto’s cookie cutter, tech company campus. Her platform sandals clicked against the pavement.

  What a bunch of pretentious assholes, she thought. She yanked her keys free of a tangled charging cord and jammed her sunglasses over her nose.

  “Where did I park?”

  Angered by the interview, she’d walked out of the building blindly. She started clicking the unlock button on the car’s ignition dongle, on the same key ring with her house, garage, and bicycle lock keys, heard a bleep, and realized she had passed it. Once inside, she turned on the air conditioning and reached for her phone, then backed out of the parking spot. The handsfree speaker picked up as the line began to ring. Almost immediately, the call went to voicemail.

  “This is Miranda and you almost reached me. Leave me a message and I’ll return your call…maybe.”

  “You were right, Miri,” Emily said. “High tech is a boy’s club and the interview was a total waste of time. The guys interviewing me—all guys—were such dicks. They kept talking about ‘disrupting the market space,’ like they were so clever they could reinvent the wheel or something. At the end they asked me one of those stupid brain teasers questions like people said Google used to do. I was so fed up! I told them it had nothing to do with being a marketing intern and they only asked it to feel superior by making people squirm when they couldn’t figure it out.” She chuffed out a laugh. “You should have seen their faces.”

  Emily pushed harder on the gas pedal. The shiny smoked glass and steel building, the pretentious organic mini-orchard of orange and lemon trees on both sides of the winding main drive of Sonalto’s corporate campus… She couldn’t get away from the place fast enough. Why did I ever think I wanted to work at an agri-tech company anyway, she thought.

  Three short beeps pinged through the car speakers.

  “My phone’s almost dead, Miri. I hope your day’s going better than mine. Talk to you later.”

  Emily pushed the ‘End Call’ button on the steering wheel, then pulled at the charging cord for her phone, glancing away to plug it in. When she looked back up a man staggered from the fruit trees into the path of her car, his hand upraised as if he were hailing a cab. She slammed on the brakes, and saw his eyes go wide as he realized she couldn’t stop in time. The thud as her car and his body collided made her stomach turn somersaults.

  She fumbled with the button on the seat belt. First her hands, then her entire body, started to shake. She scrambled out of the car on unsteady legs.

  “Please don’t be dead. Jesus, please don’t be dead!” she pleaded as she ran to the crumpled figure. The man had landed yards away from where she had struck him. He moaned and stirred as she knelt beside him.

  “Oh, thank God,” Emily said, relieved that he was alive, before taking in his awkward landing and ripped shirt. Blood from a gash on his temple coursed over his face. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  Emily dropped her keys and pulled off her suit jacket, stuffing it under the man’s bloody head. His light brown eyes came into focus. He raised his arm.

  “No, don’t get up,” Emily cried, catching his arm.

  The man pulled free and pointed in the direction he had come from. He whispered something, but she couldn’t hear what he said.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” she said, realizing that her phone was still in the car. “Don’t get up. I’ll be right back.”

  She started to stand but the man grabbed her wrist. The strength of his grip startled her. Then he let go and pointed. His voice was weak but urgent.

  “Run.”

  Confused, Emily followed the line of his pointing arm. There were people walking through the little fruit tree orchard, a lot of them. They stumbled and shuffled, many obviously limped. They bumped into one another without acknowledgement. It was…odd. Why were they walking on a private corporate campus at least a mile from a pedestrian walkway?

  “Help!” Emily shouted as she jumped to her feet, shoving the strangeness of the people aside, because she needed
help.

  A woman walked out from the leafy fruit trees. Her floral print dress was ripped at the shoulder and stained with something dark and brown. She wore one shiny red pump so that the gait of her stride alternated: up down, up down. Her skin looked gray and leathery.

  What the hell, Emily thought, taking a step back.

  Then another person, and another, neared the edge of the orchard. They too were injured and blood-soaked and looked sick. But worst of all was when they started to moan. Emily’s skin began to crawl as the most unnatural sound she had ever heard filled the air. But the moaning wasn’t just in front of her. She turned around to discover more people nearing the tree line on the other side of the drive.

  Fear shot through her body, sudden and electric. Emily looked at the man, desperation filling her chest. He was unconscious, maybe dead, and outweighed her by a hundred pounds, but she couldn’t leave him. She slid her hands under his shoulders, gripped him under his arms, and pulled. He barely budged. She looked back up at the moaning, bloody people beginning to stumble out of the trees. They didn’t seem to move very fast, but were closing the distance.

  Emily pulled again, every muscle in her body quivering with effort, but she hadn’t moved him an inch.

  She looked at the man.

  He had told her to run.

  “My phone is in the car. I’ll call the police.”

  She sprinted for her car. Jumped inside, slammed the door shut, and fumbled for her phone, panic making her fingers feel like jelly. One by one, people staggered out from the trees.

  9-1-1 picked up on the first ring. “All circuits are busy. Please try your call again. All circuits—”

  “Fuck!”

  She’d drive back to Sonalto. People were there—normal people—and they could call 9-1-1. They could help her. She jammed in the clutch and stabbed at the start button. Nothing happened. She looked to the center console, but her keys weren’t there. Frantic now, she searched the passenger seat and the floor. She cast a desperate look out the windshield to see how close the people were.

  “Oh my God! NO!”

  They were attacking the man she had hit, snarling and biting, falling on him like wild animals. And then she saw her keys, glittering in the sun while blood pooled around them and the car’s ignition dongle. She had dropped them when she took off her jacket.

  The staggering, moaning, nightmare of people from the trees who had not stopped to attack the man were almost to the car. She started to pull the door shut when a sudden clarity descended on her: if she stayed in the car, she was dead.

  Emily flung the car door wide. A man in a green tee shirt and blue jeans lunged at her. He looked almost normal, except for the twisted, unnatural angle of his neck. She ducked away from him as she pivoted away from the car, away from the man she had hit, away from the murderous mob pursuing her.

  She didn’t slow as she kicked off her platform sandals. Fear propelled her up the long drive, toward the building she had only minutes before never wanted to set eyes on again, as if the Devil Himself snatched at her heels.

  Mario Santorello

  Wednesday, September 16, 2026 - Mountain View, California

  * * *

  Mario wrenched the steering wheel of his Audi sports coupe right, steeling himself against the dull thud of the woman who had darted into the street in front of him. She twirled, thumping against the length of the car, but didn’t fall down. In the rearview mirror he saw her pick up the handgun she had dropped, then continue running down the street.

  Thank God she hadn’t tried to flag him down. He couldn’t stop.

  He downshifted, taking the corner too fast, tires squealing. His brother’s house was halfway down the block of picturesque Craftsman bungalows. The street was anything but picturesque now. A house in flames belched black smoke skyward, bodies littered the street, the sidewalks, the lawns. Some of them stirred or sat up. Others dragged themselves along the ground, or shuffled slowly. And then there were the fat ones—the fast ones.

  None of it made sense.

  Dominic had not been at the door the last three times he’d driven past. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could circle the block before they were completely cut off from the freeway. This morning a friend called him from Los Angeles on a SAT phone. She’d told him the National Guard had closed all the freeways. He’d found it hard to believe at first—something like that would be on the news, and people live streamed everything nowadays—until she said cell phone and internet service had been down since yesterday morning. That was when he realized this thing was a lot worse than the authorities were letting on.

  A middle-aged man sprinted across the street, pursued by an obese woman at a speed that should have been impossible for someone so large. Spidery black veins, as if she had blood poisoning, stood in stark relief against the pale flesh of her jiggling arms and dimpled knees. The front of her white nightgown was a blood-soaked red-brown. Smears of blood covered her face, hands, and arms, even her bare feet.

  The man tripped, sprawling on the sidewalk. He shrieked like an animal in a trap—an animal that knows it’s going to die. The woman closed the distance. The man stumbled to his feet, even though he had to be thinking he would never make it.

  Mario jammed on the brakes, then opened the window. He aimed the Sig Sauer his neighbor had given him at the woman’s head as she pounced, praying as he squeezed the trigger. Headshots on moving targets were difficult, especially for a novice with firearms such as he.

  The man startled at the sharp report of the gun but did not stop. The woman’s head snapped to the side. A shower of black goop exploded from the far side of her head. She dropped to the pavement with a muffled whump. The man had already disappeared.

  Mario shoved the clutch into first and hit the gas. He saw a twitch of the blinds in the front window of Dominic’s house.

  Thank God.

  The front door flew open. His younger brother raced to the curb. He clutched a bloody golf club in his hands, and a backpack dangled from his shoulder. He yanked the passenger door open before the car stopped and dove inside.

  “I started to think you weren’t coming back,” Dominic said over the roar of the Audi’s engine.

  “Where the hell were you?” Mario said, swerving to avoid running over a body. A staccato burst of gunfire sounded behind them. “This is the fourth time I’ve been around the block.”

  “I couldn’t—they were outside. I saw you go by but I couldn’t come—”

  Mario glimpsed a blur of motion at the edge of his peripheral vision as they turned the corner, then the world jarred and jolted, accompanied by a grinding crunch of metal. The car was shoved sideways, hopping the curb onto the sidewalk and smashing into cafe tables and chairs. They came to rest against the front of an upscale restaurant. Its plate-glass window shattered with a gunshot loud crack. A bright, yellow table umbrella toppled onto the hood of the car. A blue pick-up truck, the blur that Mario had seen, took off.

  Dominic slammed his hand on the dash. “He didn’t even stop!”

  Mario concentrated on getting back onto the road without snagging the car on one of the metal chairs. When they thumped back over the curb, he floored it.

  All around them, the stretch of El Camino that ran through Mountain View looked like a war zone. The wail of sirens grew louder by the moment. A pair of burning cars, now permanently entangled, filled the air with choking smoke. Dominic flinched at every burst of gunfire. Fat but lightning fast whatever-the-hell-they-were charged up and down and across the streets, intent on catching and eating their neighbors. Others limped along, much slower than the others, but just as dogged in their pursuit. Mario wrenched the Audi’s steering wheel back and forth, downshifting and upshifting constantly, to get past cars with doors left wide open.

  “Jim’s still at work?” Mario asked, stealing a glance at his younger brother. Dominic’s face was pale and drawn, his eyes wide. He looked as shell-shocked as Mario felt.

  “I called him a
n hour ago. He said everything at Sonalto’s campus was fine. He didn’t even know what I was talking about.”

  That guy wouldn’t notice if water was wet, Mario thought, but fleetingly—he had to keep his attention on the road in front of him. He blew through intersections, heedless of traffic lights. They needed to get off El Camino but there were only a few major arteries that would get them to I-280. He was afraid to try the side streets after what he had seen while circling Dominic’s block.

  Traffic clogged the road as they neared the turn onto El Monte, which led to the freeway. The frustrated bark and hoot of horns filtered through their closed windows.

  “Those things are already here! We can’t stop,” Dominic cried, panicked, when the Audi slowed.

  “Shut up, Dom,” Mario snapped, trying to think.

  They would never get through the intersection. Traffic had stopped. People were abandoning their vehicles to flee the hulking figures flitting between them. They only needed to get another thousand feet to turn onto El Monte. They could take it all the way to Foothill Expressway, if it wasn’t too jammed. They should be taking it all the way to 280, but first they had to go to Sonalto to pick up Jim.

  Mario was so frustrated and scared that he wanted to scream. The last thing they should do was fetch Dominic’s boyfriend. He treated Dominic like shit, but that wasn’t why Mario didn’t want to do it. Something niggled at him, just out of reach, insisting that going to Sonalto was a bad idea. Mario wanted to go straight to GeneSys and lock himself and Dominic inside the main lab building until everything was under control again. But Dominic thought he was in love with the guy. If Mario refused, he was afraid that Dominic would go on his own and wind up dead, or worse.

  He searched frantically for an escape route. They were on the wrong side of the road to cut through the corner shopping center on his left, and had passed the entrance besides. Then he realized the corner around it was landscaped. A car could fit through and get around the clogged intersection.