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theoccultarchives · 6 years

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Zombie Novel in the Works

Working on something a little different as of late. Just a little snippet of this upcoming story...

You could call us a few things: Revenant, Ghoul, Undead, Lych…Zombie. Pick your poison, but they were all the same on some level. Soulless, mindless, stark-raving mad, flesh hungry creatures with not a drop of supposed morality or self-control and only one uncontrollable urge—to consume. Whether it be brains, or blood, or fleshy muscle and sinew, we had the need to consume everything in our paths. We were cannibals, only wanting to taste the sweet, succulent flavor of human tissue as we gnashed and sucked meat from bone and brain from skull. We were pariahs, devils, evils from the darkest corners of human thought, but we were human too…or we were at some point. Everyone acted like it was our fault that we wanted to hunt them down, rip limb from body, and feast upon the meat that coated their bones, but that wasn’t a fair assumption. We never asked to be this way. We never asked to lose our humanity and be forced to only eat that which was once ourselves. But we had no choice. Something made us this way and we had no ability to control it. I didn’t know how it worked. I didn’t know what it was that had infected us and dumbed us down to the point that the only thought in what was left of our minds was to eat—and to eat our own kind. I used to love meat as much as the next zombie—er, person, but that was when I craved a nice rare hamburger or a piece of fried chicken…not my next door neighbors brain meat. When it first happened, when the virus or whatever it was hit me, I didn’t understand. I wasn’t attacked and bitten to be turned like some of the others, I was unfortunately chosen by the virus and most likely one of the first ones to turn. I was minding my own business, waiting for the bus so I could hopefully get to work on time when the lady sitting next to me puked on my shoes. I thought it was just my luck that this would happen on a Monday after I had already lost my keys, discovered I had a flat tire, ended up with gum in my hair thanks to my shitty roommate and her habit of falling asleep drunkenly on the couch while she chawed away on Juicy Fruit. I spilled coffee on my laptop as I woke up late, frantically trying to finish my presentation before I had to go and stand up in front of my colleagues to pitch my latest idea for the magazine. It wasn’t an ideal job, I wanted to be a writer, but not a columnist for a fashion magazine. It just wasn’t my thing, but it was money, and in that world, you needed money to survive, to eat. I didn’t need that now. Everything that walked on two legs was food. I wasn’t proud of what I had become, but like I said—I didn’t have a damn choice. But I digress. Back to the woman that retched all over my new boots… “Hey!” I jumped up off the bench as putrid chunks of that morning’s breakfast hit my shoes. “I’m—I’m so sorry.” The middle-aged woman apologized, rifling around in her purse for a handkerchief. “It’s ok.” I softened, trying to shake the vomit from my boots. “I haven’t been feeling well. I should’ve stayed at home, but you know how it is.” She tried to mop the slop from my feet. “Yeah, Mondays.” I shrugged, helping her clean up my feet with a napkin I found inside my own bag. “I hope your day goes better than I assume mine will.” The woman cast me a half-smile that I returned as the bus pulled up and we both climbed on board. The ride to work was uneventful, even quiet, as everyone sat silently in their seats reading books or listening to music with their headphones on. I spent my time looking out the window at the buildings and city trees that passed by me in a blur. This isn’t what I wanted for my life, this isn’t what I had planned that I would be doing by now, but it was all I had and something was better than nothing. The bus made its stop a few blocks from my job and I hopped off and power-walked it down the sidewalk before jaywalking over to my office building and rudely shoved past someone who was more focused on their phone than they were on actually getting to their destination. I scrambled into the elevator and made it up to the thirteenth floor before bolting to my cubicle to prepare my presentation which was in less than fifteen minutes at that point. “You’re late.” Mariah hovered over me as I tried to get my laptop to boot up and do what it was supposed to do. “Yeah, I know. It’s been a bitch of a morning,” I replied as I mashed buttons angrily, trying to get the computer to fucking work. “Mr. Markle was asking where you were. They changed the meeting to 8:30.” Mariah looked over my shoulder as my computer crashed and I tried not to scream. “But it’s—” I checked my watch, “Fuck! Almost nine!” I slammed my laptop shit, working or not, and hoofed it to the conference room where Mr. Markle and the rest of the advertising and writing team was waiting for me. “Miss North. You’re late.” Mr. Markle spoke flatly as I took my seat and attempted to get my computer to boot up again. “I’m so sorry; I didn’t know that the meeting time had been changed.” I apologized, repeatedly punching keys on my keyboard. “Maybe if you checked your e-mails like you’re supposed to.” He scolded me and I cringed. “I’m so sorry.” I apologized again. “Is your presentation ready? You’re up first.” He pointed at me. “Um, it was—is. I’m just having some technical difficulties.” I continued to try and get the laptop working and I could feel myself sweating as I panicked. “Any day now, Miss North.” Mr. Markle stood at the head of the table as all eyes fell on me. “Ok. I may just have to start without my Powerpoint. My computer seems to be having issues.” I could see where the sugar from my coffee had crystalized in my keys. I got up from the chair and rounded the table to where Mr. Markle was standing as he took his seat to my right and I pulled a rolling white board from the corner to start sketching out my ideas. “So, I was thinking that with this new issue and Fashion Week coming up, maybe we could focus on some local designers and artists and maybe do a section where we can interview them on their inspiration and their process, maybe showcase a few of their favorites pieces and—” “Mm, I don’t think so. No one is interested in local designers. They want to know what is going on in the world of High Fashion, not what Sally Dress-Maker is doing in the Bronx.” Mr. Markle shook his head. “Uh, well…maybe if we talked to them about what High Fashion designers influenced their work—” I started down a different track, while still keeping my idea alive. “Nope. No. You don’t have anything else, do you?” Mr. Markle had his pen to his mouth as I stood in front of him and a room of at least twenty of my colleagues with a dry erase marker in my hand. I wasn’t a person who cried at the drop of a hat, but with the stress that the morning had put me under, I was swallowing hard so as not to blubber in front of everyone. I opened my mouth and closed it a few times like a fish out of water looking for a response, but something outside the office saved me. “What’s that sound?” My colleague Brenda stood up from her seat and craned her neck to see past Mr. Markle and out through the window that faced the street. He turned and glanced behind him, did a double take, and got up from his chair. “Jesus Christ. Someone call 911.” He waved his hand behind him as he stood plastered to the window. Everyone got up from their expensive ergonomic chairs to see what he was looking at, myself included. There had been a car wreck—no, a pile-up, right outside the office. There was a mangled bike and a cluster of people on the sidewalk screaming. I thought that maybe someone had gotten struck at the crosswalk and others swooped in to help, but that wasn’t the case. The man in the bike helmet had a woman pinned on the ground and was howling as he swiped at other people who tried to pry him away. One man finally did and I could see that the woman had her throat torn out, her eyes wide and glassy as she stared up at the blue sky. “The police are on their way.” Mr. Markle’s assistant came to inform him as the deranged cyclist leapt on another man and began tearing into the meat of his face. Everyone in the room gasped and Brenda screamed as I took a step back from the window. What the hell was this guy on? Steroids? A new performance enhancing drug? High on a new blend of kale and wheatgrass juice? Then the most impossible thing happened… The woman who had previously had her throat torn out and was very clearly deceased, began to pull herself up from the sidewalk and surprised another bystander with an ungodly strong bear hug. “Holy—did anyone else see that?” Brian, my cubicle mate, asked. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from what was happening. “Call down to security and have them lock the building down. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is too close for comfort.” Mr. Markle stepped away from the window and instructed whoever was listening to make a call. Everyone was talking all at once, mumbling to one another about what was going on and my first thought was to run…so I did. I left the conference room amidst the hub-bub and went back to my cubicle, packed my laptop, and made my way to the emergency exit just as I could hear the sirens of an ambulance and police vehicles pulling up out front. I came out through the side entrance that was usually used for emergencies only to see the rotating blue and red lights as I turned the corner of the building. “Hands up where I can see them! Get on the ground! Get on the motherfucking ground!” An officer yelled as I peered out into the street. He was yelling at the throatless woman, but was paying no attention to the cyclist, the soccer mom with her coifed pixie, and the sign guy that usually stood on the corner doing tricks with his advertisements for the Deli around the corner. All of them were behaving in the same manner and began to charge towards the officers, grunting and spitting as they tackled one after the other and took them down to the pavement screaming. What the fuck was happening? I could feel myself begin to sweat and I assumed it had something to do with the panic that was bubbling inside me as I witnessed what was going down. “Keep it together, Calli.” I whispered to myself as I pulled my bag in close and booked it in the opposite direction. I was probably going to be fired, or at the very least penalized for leaving work without telling anyone, but I had this sense of urgency; something was telling me to get away from everybody…and fast. I made it to the closest bus stop and waited impatiently with shaking knees for the first bus to pull up and take me home. But the bus didn’t come. There was supposed to be a ten AM bus, but there wasn’t one. I was now hearing multiple wails from ambulances, fire trucks, and cop cars, but no sound of the diesel that usually accompanied the bus. “Fuck.” I cursed, picking my feet up to keep moving down the street. I was at least twelve blocks away from my apartment, but I had this need to get home and to get home now. I wasn’t feeling so well as I hobbled down the sidewalk clutching my messenger bag. I was sweating more now, almost drenched from head to toe even though it wasn’t more than sixty degrees out and I felt my head pounding as I began to cough like I had smoked two packs a day for my whole life. My gut was churning, my knees were weak, and my throat was raw as I came to a crosswalk and just missed getting hit by a damn bus as it ran the red light and crashed into two taxis and an SUV. I jumped back on the sidewalk and lost my balance as I landed hard on the pavement, my laptop crunching beneath me as I fell. I felt sick, like I had the flu, but worse… My hand flew to my face as I tried to pick myself up and wipe the sweat from my cheeks…but it wasn’t sweat. There was blood covering my hand and I began to panic as people got out of their cars to check on the victims of the wreck and I pulled my compact from my purse. I almost screamed as I saw my own reflection. My eyes were bloodshot, but somehow jaundiced at the same time and the irises were dark like they had been injected with black ink. Blood was running from the corners and dripping down my face like tears as I began to cough violently, more blood staining my other hand as I covered my mouth. “Ma’am, have you been hurt?” There was a man standing next to me on the corner who had obviously seen the bad wreck. “No, I’m—ugh uuuuuck—I’m fine.” I coughed and wheezed, holding my stomach as I felt it churn like it did that one time I had eaten bad shrimp. “You don’t look fine.” He replied, laying his hand on my shoulder. I could smell him, and despite the fact that I was feeling sick to my stomach…he smelled like a wonderful, delectable meal. “No, I’m ok.” I jerked myself away from him and ran in the opposite direction, away from my apartment and the people gathering on the streets. I could now hear helicopters overhead as I jogged down the street, leaving my busted laptop behind. I passed people running in a completely different direction as they screamed, crazed individuals hobbling closely behind them with constricted limbs and gnashing mouths. I wanted to stop, but I was too scared to help as I sprinted across the street and holed myself up in an alley. “What the hell is happening?” I fumbled for my phone in my bag as I attempted to find a livestream for the city that would give me some sort of information. “Bedlam has broken out in New York City as citizens are being violently attacked by crazed individuals that are assumed to be under the influence of some sort of super street drug. Multiple deaths have been reported totaling close to the hundreds as police respond to the scenes. Many officers have either been killed or injured and aren’t sure the exact cause of the violence.” I watched as the news anchor debriefed the populace, “In other news, cases of a highly contagious flu strain are being admitted to Bellevue and Lennox hospitals. Doctors are working around the clock to come up with a working treatment, but so far any sort of solution seems resistant. Individuals with the following symptoms are urged to make a trip to the emergency room as soon as possible: high fever, intense body sweats, nausea and vomiting, uncontrollable coughing, migraines, and bleeding from any orifices. More information to come as it is reported.” I felt my breathing quicken. I was sick. I had almost all of those symptoms. Now was not the time to be making a trip to the ER. Something crazy was going on in the city and I didn’t want to be stuck in the hospital. More screaming was heard outside the alley as I emerged and continued to make my way home. The sound of crashing cars, people shouting, and now gunshots were ringing out around me. My knees were becoming weak as I coughed harder and wiped the blood from my eyes…then the nausea got the better of me. I stopped dead in my tracks on the sidewalk and evacuated everything that was in my stomach and then some. A soupy red mess came pouring from my throat as I purged the contents of my stomach, my hands to my knees as I gasped for air. Everything was happening so quickly. I had felt fine this morning, albeit a bit pissed off, but not ill. Though, here I was, vomiting on the corner of Carmine and Bleecker, drenching the sidewalk in what looked like bloody coffee grounds. My insides felt like they were melting as I tried to move forward, but my stride was slowed as my body weakened and I sucked in air to inflate my lungs that were sore and feeble. Where had I gotten sick? I was usually so good about not getting the crud and it was past flu season… The puking lady at the bus stop. That bitch. I tried to keep going, but my vision was getting blurry and my feet were heavier than normal. Even though my stomach was churning and the bile was sloshing around in it like a tumultuous ocean, I was hungry. And not for bagels or a Reuben sandwich slathered in sauerkraut—I wanted something a little more fresh and enlightened. I hungered for thoughts, urges, dreams, ideas, emotions… I wanted the gray matter. “No.” I shook my head hard and trudged forward down the street like I was walking through a snow storm, but the thought of fresh brain meat, all pink and squiggly with knowledge and ideas made my stomach twitch with hunger pangs. I vomited again, so hard I thought my eyeballs were going to eject from their sockets and roll down the street. Then I felt my body seize, the locking of joints and that rigid sensation your muscles feel when you start to get a charlie horse. I collapsed in the street, slipping off the lip of the sidewalk and right into the gutter as my body locked up. I started to lose consciousness as I began to vomit thick dark blood once again. This wasn’t the flu, it was fucking death and I couldn’t stop it. The last thing I remembered as I flailed on the asphalt was that intense craving for human flesh and sticky sweet brain meat. That was just the beginning of it, though. I’m pretty sure I died, or my body did at the very least, and when I “woke up” I was still lying face first in the gutter with sirens wailing all around me and blood curdling screams of people in the distance. Something was really wrong. My body felt like it was vibrating at such an accelerated level. I couldn’t control my body movements, my arms jerking about at my sides as I tried to use them to push myself up off the asphalt. My knees were shaking and my legs wobbled like a baby calf fresh from its mother. An explosion to my left that would have normally caused me to duck and cover my head, didn’t even make me flinch. The air was hot now. Hot and thick with a scent I had never had the pleasure of inhaling before. It was raw and sweet like burning cloves and scorched cedar. I needed it. Whatever it was, I needed it. No, I wanted to eat it. Like the smell of burgers on the grill or bacon in a skillet permeated my surroundings and I felt myself hobbling towards it at a slow speed. Eventually I became accustomed to the vibrating within me and began to sprint down the vacant street to the nearest intersection where I was sure the smell was coming from. And I was right. That’s where the smell originated from…but it wasn’t coming from a hot dog cart or falafel stand. It was wafting from a group of people who were stuck in a multi-car pileup, panicking as they tried to lock their doors and roll up their windows as other people frantically tried to break into those cars while gnashing their teeth. They looked—weird. Not like uniquely dressed or with rainbow spiked hair…I mean, weird. Like, oddly similar to the way I looked before I face-planted in the gutter. And then it hit me. I was hungry and the woman in the soccer mom van was frantically trying to get her car started despite the fact that the front end was smashed all to hell, smelled like fresh steak. Then, there I went. Rushing forward as I slammed my full body up against the driver's side door, banging my fists into the window as I let out incoherent groans, clicking my teeth furiously. I was starving and she looked like a fucking snack. None of the other weirdos were paying her attention so I didn’t have to fight for my food as I finally cracked the window and punched my fist through the glass. The woman was screeching, clawing at me with her perfectly manicured nails as I yanked her through the busted glass, the sharp edges tearing at the flesh on her face and arms. The smell of the blood was just an appetizer to the meal that I was about to enjoy. She was screaming bloody murder as I finally pulled her portly body completely from the vehicle and cracked her head against the door a few good times so she would stop with the goddamn screaming. Whimpers and feeble protests still came from her as I opened my mouth as wide as it would go and bit down on the side of her face. Who knew that my teeth were strong enough to tear right through the top of her cheekbone? I felt the eye socket crumble, ejecting the eyeball from her skull as she began to scream again. Oh my God, if she wasn’t the most scrumptious thing I had ever tasted! I slurped her optical nerve into my mouth like a piece of spaghetti before crunching down on the eyeball itself, the insides squishing between my teeth. But that wasn’t enough, that was just a hor d'oeuvre compared to the meal I was about to have. I gripped the wound I had just created in her face with both hands and yanked, cleaving her skull in two like you would tear a tail from a lobster. Theeere was that smell that had beckoned to me from down the street. Her brain was still pulsating in her skull as the blood continued to course through her body and I began to feast on the grey matter. It tasted like chocolate cake, rare steak, fried potatoes—a slimy pink, cranial Everlasting Gobbstopper. She finally stopped making noise at this point and I ate my fill before tossing her body into the side of her vehicle and wandering off to find the next meal because… I was still hungry. No—I was starving, and I needed to fill the void in the pit of my stomach lest it drove me insane. But nothing would stop that hunger, that blood lust, that need for food that would satiate nothing. I was a monster, but at that moment nothing mattered more than finding the next brain that I would devour. And that leads us to now, or sort of to now. I wasn’t sentient enough at the time to get the full effect of what happened, but apparently it was straight out of a Romero film. People who were infected ate people who weren’t and if they survived then they became infected too and the cycle perpetuated on down the line till there weren’t many people left that weren’t infected. And when I say many, it seemed that over 85% of the population in any given place had become either infected or dead, leaving the living a minority in a quickly crumbling world. Those left alive fought for their lives at first and then eventually fought each other to preserve their lives, or so they said, and everything went to shit. I survived all of this. I mean, I survived not getting a bullet to the brain or a knife through the skull, but I would hardly call what I did for the last nine years living. I mean, I’m a zombie for Christ’s sake. I’m no one’s favorite person and generally considered to be a threat or, at this point, a social pariah. And yes, I know that sounds ridiculous to call myself a social pariah because zombies don’t exactly have social structures or even people skills for that matter, but I was different. There was no one like me that I knew of. I was the only one. The only zombie in existence who evolved from a devolved life form that had one been the highest evolved being on the food chain. Sound confusing? Yeah, I’m still confused about it. Why was I still infected, still craving brains, still clearly dead-ish—but I was walking, talking, and thinking like a normal human being? Where had things changed? From terrifying brain eating monster to somewhat normal human-like monster with the mental faculties and cognitive functions like the regular humans. I didn’t know where things went wrong…or went right. But life goes on.

#fiction #zombie #sci-fi #author #writer #indie author #horror #gore #novel

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