Bad Bitch

Chapter 1

It's high July of 2026, and my friend Tamsyn and I are US Army soldiers at a top-secret bioengineering unit in Santa Juanita, Texas. We work in the administration wing of R&D, facilitating military science projects for the mega geeks. When they come up with something really crazy, they get us to write the proposal and go after approval for expenditures and experimental trials.

Tamsyn has always been the "fit" chick in our platoon. She leads free yoga classes in her off time, because soldiering isn't enough of a workout, I guess. I'm the platoon foodie. I can sniff out the best restaurants within two hours of landing an overseas assignment, and always stash a generous supply of snacks in my cargo pockets.

On the day our story began, we were running like hell away from a super troop of zombies with a major hard-on for soldiers.

The "geniuses" in our research lab created a viral form of a fast acting genetic mutation, to be used to "weaponize" volunteers for brutal suicide missions in combat theaters. We were standing in opposition to just about everybody at the time, and our national leaders were pushing us to come up with something creative that would re-establish Global superiority. This viral mutation effectively transforms its subjects into lethal, brain-dead zombies.

They retain advanced motor skills and have increased strength, and are power pumped with adrenaline. The personality, or 'id' is completely lost. They lose the ability to communicate except on a primal level, and exist only to satisfy blood lust until their physical limitations are finally exceeded. In trials, this usually happened within three to five days. Their lack of pain receptors make them killing machines, able to take a licking and keep on ticking, and ticking, and ticking... With that much added stress and incidental blood loss from the inevitable abrasions, contusions, lacerations, and internal injury, the heart eventually just... beats to death. In the meantime, the creatures go on an adrenaline-fueled killing spree.

Our zombies are death row volunteers. Injected with the retro-fitted viral mutation by the military lab geeks, the volunteers were given a lavish farewell party in exchange for their contractual "post-life service obligation."

When the virus kicked in, they lost consciousness, were crated for their "incubation period" and warehoused; to be activated on demand and deployed as a new kind of weapon. Two days into the incubation period, and five days ahead of schedule, they escaped storage and took off in hot pursuit of anyone unlucky enough to be wearing a uniform. Which means pretty much everyone, where we worked.

The problem with this cluster-fuck scenario is obvious in retrospect. Zombies don't take orders, and they wake up hangry. I don't know whose brilliant idea it was to secure them with zip ties in cardboard storage "caskets", but predictably, they broke free. Suddenly the entire base was swarming with (nearly) indestructible, freakishly strong, and unfortunately, experienced homicidal monsters.

These zombies were less gray and waxy than your standard 8mm monster, and more raw and shredded looking. Like victims of some out of control steroid experiment. They were slightly more intelligent than the movie zombies, too. They seemed to have some sort of hive mentality and from what we observed while hightailing it out of there, were focused on soldiers as a group.

So there we were, just walking home from the chow hall after a filling yet completely unpalatable meal of hockey puck steak and instant potatoes. From out of nowhere, fucking zombies were jumping out of doorways screaming "Soldier!" over and over in these horrible death metal voices. Those voices, like the screams of demons with brimstone tonsils and acid tongues, the screams alone were enough to convince us to hit the ground running.

And run we did. We were running through hell with demons on our heels. I hate running. As fate would have it, getting caught outside with Tamsyn, seconds ahead of a murderous zombie horde, was probably my only chance of staying alive.