Michelle Birbeck, $0.99
Horror, 2015
Zombie Lottery is set in a time when the zombie apocalypse… well, maybe apocalypse isn’t the right description, as for now, the zombies are somewhat contained in their cemeteries. Once a year, when the sun sets, they will rise to feed. Instead of letting them roam free to eat everyone and everything, the government has a zombie lottery system in place. Folks over the age of eighteen would be picked at random and herded into the cemeteries of their neighborhood for a battle royale-style bum rush; if they live by morning, great, they can go home and pray they won’t get picked again the following year. Repeat picks are becoming more likely as the living increasingly dwindle in numbers even as the dead grow more numerous.
Our story sees several characters over the course of one night. Charlie and Sandra are two of the lucky people picked to enter the zombie royale. Jack heads the supervision crew that oversee the whole thing and make sure that no one, living or dead, gets out of the cemetery so long as the sun isn’t up yet and the dead haven’t returned to their graves. Some scientists, in the meantime, continue to labor in hope that they can finally discover a vaccine that year that can end the zombie plague once and for all.
This one is a short but very satisfying story, well, at least for perhaps the first two-third of it. The set up is suspenseful, the buildup as Charlie and Sandra make their way to what seem like a painful, certain death is full of nail-biting tension, and then when the gore starts I’m all hallelujah, give me some munchies, baby. I have to hand it to the author: while being every economical when it comes to words, the author still manages to make Sandra and Charlie feel like real people that I can root for.
The payoff can be disappointing, though, because it relies on what I call convenient “Gotcha!” science to bring an unrealistic finality to the whole zombie situation. What, the author doesn’t want to leave the door open for sequels? Even then, this finality is a little too hard for me to believe—the whole thing feels too simplistic and neat, and in the process, it works against the terrifying set-up and chilling momentum that had been building up to that point. At that point, everything just deflates like a pin being used on a balloon, and I can’t help feeling cheated as a result.
Still, it’s almost there as a very appropriate short Halloween-season read, and hence, here are three oogies from me. Just imagine them to be shaped like Jack-o-lanterns, and we’re on our way to have a good, spooky time this month, COVID-19 be damned.
