Chapter 1

“Alright, team. Listen up! Bring it in! Bring it in, gather round!”

Coach Williamson crossed his muscular arms. His steely blue eyes looked around the locker room at his college football team in the blue and green jerseys of Heartland A&M. The tension was palpable. He could see how his players kept sneaking glances out the locker room door at the tunnel leading out to the field. He needed to get them fired up and focused.

“Shut that door, Henderson. I want every pair of eyes on me right now.”

Josh Henderson, his best defensive player, stood up and closed the door. Even at 250 pounds of mostly muscle, he moved smoothly and effortlessly. Williamson had high hopes for him tonight.

“Look at the guy standing to your left. Look at the guy standing to your right. You’ve been bleeding together, sweating together, running 110-degree gassers in August together since day one of practice. And for what? For tonight.”

“This is going to be unlike any other game we trained for. They’re waiting for us on the field and they are out for blood. They don’t just want to beat us, they want to dominate us completely. You all know the game plan and that plan will bring us the victory that is rightfully ours.”

“This game won’t be won out there under the bright lights. It’s won right here, in your chest. When your lungs are burning, your muscles are screaming, you’ve gotta dig down deep and ask yourself this: how bad do you want it?”

“When you strap on that helmet and walk through that tunnel, you aren’t just fighting for yourselves. You’re fighting for this town, for your families at home, and for the brothers standing next to you.”

“Defense! I want relentless, violent blocks! I want eleven hungry dogs on them constantly! Make them regret ever coming here!”

“Offense! You set the tone! You hit ’em hard, you execute, and you drive it down their throats until they lay down and quit!”

“We all give 110% tonight. Leave everything – and I mean everything – on that grass. No regrets. No excuses. You hear me?”

A deafening roar went up from the players and Williamson nodded approvingly. The nerves had been replaced by determination.

“Hands in.” 

The players came to their feet and each put in a hand for the familiar ritual. Williamson looked around and saw that the apprehension and nerves had been replaced by steely looks and determination. They were going to win this thing. He just knew it.

“Heartland On three! 1… 2… 3… HEARTLAND! Now GET OUT THERE AND TAKE IT!

Henderson opened the locker room door and led the team at a run down the tunnel to the closed door at the end through which lay the field.

Williamson waited a moment, then jogged to the end of the hallway where his team waited. The bright stadium lights shone in through small windows in the closed double door, and he could hear the roar of the crowd outside.

“Alright, team. Beyond those doors lies the fight of our lives and beyond that fight lies glory. Make it count.”

On each side of the door was a big bucket of assorted sports equipment. Baseball bats. Lacrosse sticks. Javelins. No one quite knew how, but a single cricket bat had made its way to this town in flyover America.

Coach Williamson looked on approvingly as each of his players grabbed a weapon, testing out the weight and getting a feel for the swing.

He looked at the last few remaining items in the buckets. Cricket bat it was! He picked it up and swung it around experimentally. Nice. He could put a lot of weight behind each hit with this thing.

He nodded. Two of his players lined up, palms flat against a door each, getting ready to push them open.

This was it. He was not scared. Ma Williamson did not raise any wimps. He had complete confidence in his plan and in his team.

“GAME TIME!” he shouted. The doors opened.

Chapter 2

The team ran out onto the field, shouting at the top of their lungs, keeping exactly the tight formation Williamson had demanded, each player in close proximity to the man next to him, no gaps.

They stopped in the middle of the center line in a tight circle, every man facing out, weapons ready. The roar from the crowd became even louder. Williamson looked into the stands and not a single person was sitting down.

The stadium lights showed everything in stark detail, including the opposing team, their archrivals from Saint Mark’s College on their half of the field in their red and white uniforms.

As if at some unheard signal, every figure on the field – some twenty of them in all – turned towards his team as one and started moving in their direction. Not with the athletic power of football players but with the slow, erratic shamble of… Williamson refused to even think the Z-word.

The outbreak had come to the college just an hour ago. He and the team had already been in the locker room preparing for the big game when the news reached them on their phones and it became apparent that many people in the stadium and probably the whole town had been turned into… Damn it, he didn’t care what they were, he just knew he wanted to beat them. As they lumbered closer, he started to see discolored bruised-looking skin with strange white veins, bloodshot eyes, bite wounds on every part of their bodies not covered by a helmet or shoulder pads.

“Here we go. There aren’t that many of them. We can take them.”

The first few figures reached his team and his team was ready. Powerful swings of baseball bats or lacrosse sticks knocked them right down. He saw Fletcher stick a javelin all the way through a red-and-white clad torso.

One of the St. Mark’s coaches approached Williamson. Williamson recognized him – he’d hated that sanctimonious jerk ever since he’d dared ask if maybe Williamson was a little too hard on his players. He wound up with the cricket bat and swung it at its head as hard as he could. It connected with a satisfying crack and the coach went down in a heap. Oh yeah, THAT’S how it’s done.

And then the crumpled figure started to get right back up. The left half of its face was caved in but that did not seem to affect it at all. As it got to its knees, Williamson unleashed another mighty swing, this one overhead, coming down hard on its skull. It went down again… and started to get right back up again.

Williamson could see the same thing happening all around his team. Not only that, but since many of the opposing team were wearing helmets, hitting them did almost nothing, except stagger them for a moment.

He heard a scream to his right. One of the St. Mark’s players that had been knocked over in the first wave had grabbed onto Henderson’s right leg and was biting chunks out of his calf. Williamson recognized the St. Mark’s punter. He was shorter and skinnier than nearly any player on the field but his grip seemed unbreakable.

 “Get it off me, get it off me, get it off me,” Henderson screamed as he kept raining down panicked blows with his Louisville Slugger. Some of the hits connected but none of them made any difference. After biting most of the meat off Henderson’s calf, the punter pulled himself further up the leg and started biting down on the inside of his meaty thigh. Henderson fell over on his back, still screaming but now without any words.

Williamson looked up at the empty stands behind him. Wait… empty stands. Hadn’t they just been filled with spectators? He looked out at the field and his heart sank. The crowd was coming towards the middle of the field in one slow-moving wall.

Williamson turned back towards the St. Mark’s coach he had been bashing, just in time to see him get fully back on his feet, the left side of his face and the top of his skull a bloody pulpy mess. He brought the cricket bat up and back for another swing, but before he could, its hands locked around his throat. It opened its mouth wide and he saw something white and stringy moving.

The… thing came in for its first bite and the force of it knocked him over on his back. He felt teeth starting to gnaw at his chest.

Williamson looked up at the sky. A blinking light attracted his attention. A drone – what the hell? Now that he could see it, Williamson could make out the high-pitched whine of its propellers. His view of the drone was blocked by Henderson’s familiar face looking down at him.

“Thank God, Henderson,” he said. “Help me. Get this thing off…”

Williamson choked on his next words when Henderson opened his jaws wider than any human should be able to. Williamson again saw white thready-looking things thrashing. The nightmare mouth descending towards his face was the last thing he saw.

The drone looked down at the field as the crowd of spectators washed over the struggling football team on the center line. In seconds, none of the team were even visible any more, all that could be seen below was a writhing mass of zombies.

The drone took off towards the roof of a building on the nearby campus. Three college students stood on the roof looking at a laptop that showed what the drone saw. A fourth, wearing goggles, brought the drone in for a landing using her controller.

She pulled the goggles off, making her shoulder-length black hair with its one neon pink streak even messier and exhaled loudly. She shared a long look with the other three.

“Well, fuck me if that was not the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever fucking seen.”