Zombie Jesus Read online

  Zombie Jesus

  By Edward Teach

  And he said,

  "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death nor be of the walking dead."

  THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA

  These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded, and then Cisco received and re-recorded.

  Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. And after they have reigned they will rest, and not rise again to consume the flesh of the living."

  Zombie Jesus had first risen in the nation of Israel, spreading a plague of the cannibal undead as he rampaged through the city streets, seemingly unstoppable, then as inexorably as he’d appeared he vanished. He reappeared in every country on the planet, spreading the zombie plague as he went, finally appearing in the United States of America and within several days of his appearance cannibalistic reanimated corpses rampaged across the nation. No country on the planet was immune, as the plague of undead risings had swept across the world. The age-old saying seemed to be true. When there is no more room in Hell, the dead shall walk the earth.

  As the world was torn apart by a zombie outbreak, some of the survivors began to suffer a sort of divine madness. No other explanation could be found. Vast portions of the survivor population began to display extreme psychopathtic behaviors. They displayed homicidal urges, the desire to have outlandish appearance, and developed an overwhelming pack mentality, so banded together into roving hordes of marauding madmen. The most bizarre, and ultimately deadly, side effect of their madness was that the cannibal corpses that roamed the land did not seem to notice or care. These psychopaths had free reign, and did not have to hide from or battle with the teeming zombie masses.

  The survivors, as they came to call themselves, were locked in a mortal struggle with the zombies and the psychopaths. All the while Zombie Jesus walked the earth, his appearance both a mystery and a warning, for in this time he performed no miracles and spoke no gospels, and craved only the flesh of the living. Survivors who had once believed in the promise of salvation were outraged, and soon churches were burned and crosses torn down as people lost their faith the world over.

  Within a few months the entire world had been engulfed in what everyone had accepted was the End of Days. Even non-Christians could not deny the truth that Zombie Jesus had risen, and with him the plague of cannibal corpses and the madness of the psychopaths.

  Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, the Father's kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the grave, then the walking dead will precede you. Rather, the Father's kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

  When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are living children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the flesh that shall be eaten."

  Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live, for they shall see that it is to be cherished.

  For many of the first will be last, and they shall ceaselessly walk the earth in hunger and in rage, and will become a single body that seeks to devour yours."

  From this maelstrom emerged two men, named Romeo and Cisco. Whatever their names had been as babes at birth, these were their chosen names as they walked the world as men. Romeo and Cisco were members of a motorcycle club based out of San Antonio called ‘The Calaveras’. They were a large club, with just over forty members, not including pledges, wives, and girlfriends. The club had chosen the flowered muertos skull of the Day of the Dead celebration as their symbol, and their jacket patch reflected this. They would also paint their faces in the sugar skull muertos make up and ride as a club during several of the Day of the Dead parades and festivals in the community.

  Like many motorcycle clubs with sufficient size and resources, the Calaveras were involved in a variety of business enterprises, some legal and some illegal. The club had neglected to get into the drug trade, though did a fair amount of gun smuggling for the Mexican drug cartels. They also had a club compound that doubled as a body shop and wrecking service. As such they were uniquely and unwittingly prepared for the catastrophic events preceded by the appearance of Zombie Jesus.

  The group had listened to their radios and were glued to their computers and televisions as the apocalypse unfolded around them. Zombie Jesus walked the earth, and they could barely believe it. The savior of mankind roamed as a cannibal corpse, feeding on the living, spreading the plague as he went. Within the first three months the sightings of Zombie Jesus, as the media had named him, had dwindled as living news crews quickly gave up reporting and turned towards survival.

  The emergency broadcast system went down, and the governments of the world collapsed. Perhaps if there were only the walking dead to contend with police and military forces could have contained the threat before it became too widespread, though with the additional challenge of the rampaging psychopaths it proved too much. Now the world had become a vastly different place. Survivors huddled together in fortified compounds like that of the Calaveras, or hid in their homes while hoping to avoid discovery, while many had taken to ships and tried their luck at sea. Most survivors had no communication with each other, so for all who yet survived life had become bleak and isolated.

  Cisco was in his mid-thirties and had been a member of the Calaveras for nearly ten years, while Romeo was in his early twenties had only been a full member for roughly one year. Cisco had a wife and daughter, and lived in his own house near downtown, while Romeo still crashed in one of the several apartments the club maintained in the compound. The rampaging corpses had torn Cisco’s family from his grasp, and he had reluctantly sought shelter in the compound along with many of the other club members and their companions.

  Cisco had grieved, and spent much of those first few months lost in the depths of sorry and oceans of whiskey. One night, while lost in a stupor, he heard a voice speak to him. He could not tell if it was male or female, nor could he discern where the voice was coming from. He stumbled through the common area and outside into the main courtyard of the compound, and still the voice spoke. It seemed to be at once right in his ear and far outside the safety of the walls. It was a frightening voice, full of power and authority, and yet it was also soothing, like a parent or teacher.

  As he sobered up over the next several days Cisco found that if he calmed himself and relaxed his mind he could actually make out the words being spoken. Within a few days he realized that the voice was insistent, and a pressure in his skull worsened the longer he listened. He felt compelled to write down the words he was hearing, and managed to find a grease-stained but blank mechanic’s logbook in the body shop. As he wrote the words that came Cisco began to realize that he was writing what appeared to be a bible of some kind. He had never been a man of faith, and yet here he was listening to a voice in his head whisper passages into his mind.

  Cisco kept it quiet for several days, scribbling in his logbook when the voice became insistent and the pressure in his head becoming unbearable. It was as if he was giving birth to passage after passage, passing it from the womb of his mind onto the page. He struggled with this, wondering if he were truly being spoken to by divinity, or if he was losing his mind, which would make perfect sense in this world out of order. And yet, while he sat at the bar in the common area, young Romeo approached him with his own story.

  The young man poured himself several stiff drinks to build up his courage, and then
began to speak to Cisco. The older man had been Romeo’s mentor of sorts within the club, and had been his sponsor when Romeo was patched in. Romeo was a good kid, and Cisco wanted to help him out, so listened quietly as the younger man told his tale. Romeo had been, for nearly a week now, having strange and crippling visions of Zombie Jesus. Not nightmares or drug hallucinations, but what he felt were true visions. Romeo said that it was as if he could see through the eyes of Zombie Jesus, watching through the undead messiah’s own eyes as he roamed the landscape.

  Romeo told Cisco of watching Zombie Jesus batter down locked doors and enter the homes of survivors to feed on their flesh. He talked of how enraged the messiah had seemed, and witnessed the ferocity of his attacks. He had also seen the bodies of the slain return to life and walk with Zombie Jesus, joining an ever-increasing horde of walkers that trailed him on some unknown pilgrimage. Romeo spoke of a pressure in his head, an overwhelming urge to leave the compound, and to seek out Zombie Jesus. Whether to join him or slay him the young man did not know.

  Cisco revealed the truth about the voice, and showed Romeo the book that he had been recording. Though neither man had much in the way of faith, both knew that their fates awaited them in the wasteland outside the safety of the fortress walls. They made a pact that night, to help carry one another’s burdens, and to face Zombie Jesus, to whatever end.

  Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. The corpse and the madman are but masks.

  For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. There is nothing buried that will not be raised. And there is nothing subdued that will not be unhinged."

  His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we seek to fight with the marauders? Should we give charity to other survivors? What shall we do?”

  Jesus said, "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, shoot walkers in the head, and don’t pity the raging of the madman, because all things are disclosed before heaven. After all, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed."

  THE FORTRESS

  Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human. Let not the teeth of the dead pierce your skin, for you will become foul like them, and still they shall remain dead."

  And he said, "The survivor is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish, so that the smaller return to the circle of life and yield large fish again."

  Jesus said, "Look, the survivor went out, took a handful of seeds, and scattered them. Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn't take root in the soil and didn't produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop. You are like the seeds, and while one survivor falls on the rock, others may fall on good soil."

  Siege warfare was a grinding thing, filled with equal parts horror and boredom, made all the worse by the constant moaning of the encircling horde. The Calaveras had closed the gates to their compound when the outbreak first began, and had since transformed it into a fortress. The compound was half a city block in size, and surrounded on three and a half sides by reinforced cinder block walls topped with razor wire. The main gate of the compound was comprised of a series of sliding metal panels that slide over one another and locked in place. Once all of the survivors had gathered inside the gate was closed and locked in three places by heavy pad-locks.

  Since the compound was on the edge of town, in an older area of the city well removed from the shopping malls and skyscrapers of progress, the walkers would only attack in small groups. However, as the outbreak reached its full momentum, the compound was soon surrounded by hundreds of the hungry dead. The bikers quickly saw that they needed to wedge spare cinder blocks into the gaps beneath the gate to keep the scrabbling hands of the undead from gaining purchase on the underside of the gate and pulling it loose. Sadly this prevented them from leaving the compound easily, though some measures were in place to allow for single riders to come and go on scavenging runs into the depths of the city.

  Very quickly the skills and equipment possessed by the club became the daily needs of survival. At least once every few days the zombies that ceaselessly battered their hands and bodies against the metal gate would successfully cause fractures in the welded joints and supports of the gate. These had to be replaced by welding scrap metal and rebar to the gate, and within a month the main gate had become a collage of makeshift spikes and sheet metal. The small crane that was used to lift junk cars into the crusher was the primary way in which cars and bikes were lifted out over the wall and set on the road, though this was indeed a dangerous task.

  Drivers, mechanics, welders, and handy men were all present within the ranks of the Calaveras, and for this everyone in the club was grateful. The wives and girlfriends kept the men in high spirits as best they could, and the few children who had been brought to the compound seemed to thrive in an environment where they had several mothers and fathers. Yet all were worn down, and quickly, by the unrelenting assault of the horde. Quickly it was realized that for every walker gunned down several more would take its place, being drawn in by the gunfire and clamoring voices of those already hammering on the walls. Their ferocity never waned, and day after day the gate reverberated with the pounding of hands on metal.

  So it was that Romeo walked his patrol on the roof of the main common building, his sunglasses glinting in the midday sun as he scanned the area. He had tried counting the number of zombies that surrounded the compound, and had given up at five hundred and sixty-seven. Most of them were massing on the main gate, pushing and shoving each other in an attempt to move ever forward. The rest were choking the alleys and side street, all shuffling in the press of bodies that moved towards the main gate. It reminded him of youtube videos he had seen of Muslim pilgrims surrounding the sacred stone in Mecca.

  The welders were busy repairing a fresh fracture in the gate, and the women and children were sorting through a truck-bed loaded with canned food. Harrison and Turk had made a run into town to get supplies, and had only returned about twenty minutes ago. They had outfitted one of the trucks with metal grating around all of the windows to prevent walkers from getting their hands on the drivers, and had added a wicked metal grille to the front of the vehicle. The standard procedure that had been developed over the last few months was that the truck would honk its horn and approach at top speed, using the grille to smash through the horde. The grille was shaped like a plow, its point pushing through the crowd and its curved prow lifting bodies out and away from the tires.

  The bikers had spray painted a giant orange X in the road next to the street side of the building that was guarded by a cinder block wall, and that was where the giant magnet on the end of the crane would drop. The incoming vehicle would screech to a halt on top of the X and the crane would lift them up and drop the truck safely inside the compound. This tactic had served the Calaveras well, and had only failed once. This was before the metal grating had been installed, and the riders were mauled through the broken windows. The truck had been recovered with the crane, and the two bikers inside who had been killed by walkers were decapitated so that they would not rise again like so many others.

  This time it looked like Harrison and Turk, who had made several runs this month already, had found the mother-load. There had to be enough canned goods in the haul to feed the club for several weeks. He was brought out of his reverie by the sound of another car revving its engines. He turned and looked out across the low buildings, his eyes scanning the area for the source of the engine noise. Then he saw them; fou
r wickedly armored and garishly painted SUVs, each one bristling with spikes and blades. Psychopaths.

  Jesus said, "I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I'm guarding it until it blazes, for I too am of the walking dead."

  Jesus said, "This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away, and this world shall belong to the dead man and the mad man.

  The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive. When there is no room left in Hell, the dead will walk the earth. When you are in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do? You paint your face in many colors and you clothe yourself in strange garb, you thirst for mayhem, and you speak in tongues only the mad comprehend."

  Romeo lifted his field glasses to his eyes, and looked more closely at the vehicles. Each one had armor plating crudely lashed to the frame, and were bedecked in a variety of spikes and blades. Several men stood outside of the vehicles, one of them looking back at him with his own pair of field glasses. They had to be psychopaths, as the handful of zombies nearby simply ignored the men and kept shuffling towards the compound. No two men were dressed the same, as each of them wore a bizarre array of mismatched clothing and armor. One wore football pads festooned with severed fingers and carried a pump-action shotgun, while another carried a large revolver and wore only combat boots, swimming trunks, and a gas mask. The leader, Romeo assumed, was a man with a large burn scar on his face and a dyed green mohawk who leaned out of the foremost car and gave a hand signal. The others leapt into their vehicles as the four SUVs began to roll forward.