The following is the first 14 chapters from my book of 96 Chapters,
All Together Now: A Zombie Story. You can
get the whole thing here.
WARNING
This YOUNG ADULT novel is mean and
nasty and intended for a mature audience. It is absolutely not appropriate for
younger readers.
In no way is this warning an
apology. I believe a horror story should aim to shock and disturb. But since
much of my writing is targeted at younger readers and I run the blog Middle Grade Ninja, I feel it's
only fair to warn parents and sensitive readers up front:
In
the pages that follow is a gruesome, repugnant tale featuring horrific acts of
violence sure to warp young minds.
Esteemed Reader, if that sounds like
as much fun to you as it does to me, we'll get along fine.
1
I'M NOT A BAD
WRITER, but I'm amazing with a baseball bat, which is why I'm still alive to
write this.
I get mostly A's in English, or at
least I did before the school burned down. Two summers ago my short story
"Raccoon Avenger" was published in the Harrington Herald.
I just wanted you to know this
story isn't going to suck.
It might suck.
I'm not exactly writing it under
ideal circumstances. We don't dare turn on a flashlight. I'm writing this by
moonlight on the floor so they won't see me through the windows.
This story will be filled with a
lot of terrible things. That's not my fault. A lot of terrible things happened.
I'm just going to write what I
know. After all, someone should be writing this down, and for all I know the
world's great writers are all dead, or worse. So you're stuck with me.
At least this will be a short book.
There are only 300 pages in this journal and there's a good chance I won't live
long enough to fill them all. So if this story should just stop somewhere in
the middle, you'll know I didn't make it.
Or maybe I lost this journal. Let's
hope it's that.
I can hear them as I write this,
shuffling around outside, moaning in that low way they all do. I only really
pay attention when the moans get close.
When they get close, their moan
becomes a growling snarl that's one of the last sounds you'll ever hear.
They look harmless, confused. They
stumble and stagger like drunks. They're so slow, you might think you could
walk by them, but that'd be a mistake.
Get too close, they'll rip your
chest open, and you'll die hearing their snarling and your own screaming and
the splash of your insides against the tops of your shoes.
Hopefully, you don't know what I'm
talking about.
Hopefully, as you're reading this,
it's all over and the world is a nice place again with baseball and picnics and
apple pie.
Hopefully, you've only read about
zombies in books, and much better books than this one.
But probably not. Probably there is
no you.
Or maybe you're a different species
that evolved after human beings finally got wiped out and you're curious to see
what we were like.
Or maybe you're an alien, moving in
now that the world is vacant—I mean, even the dead can't live forever, can
they?
If you are an alien or a new
species, you don't even know what baseball or apple pie are and you should read
about them instead of zombies.
I don't even know if that's the
right word for them. Zombies is what they were calling them on the news back
when the power was on and the broadcasts were still running.
Zombie is as good a name as any and
it's what Michelle, Levi, Chuck, and I call them.
Before the news crapped out, they
said there were zombies in Europe and China and even Japan.
If the human race is extinct, who's
going to read this journal?
This is stupid. I'm not writing
this.
2
I CHANGED MY MIND.
I wasn't going to write this, but there's nothing else to do except hide. I
can't sleep or go outside.
Levi's stopped talking to himself,
which is good. He was freaking Michelle and me out.
Now he sits quietly in the corner
of the store, his arms wrapped around his legs, knees curled to his chest.
Sometimes he rocks, but mostly he just stares straight ahead like he's seeing
something Michelle and I can't.
Michelle's not sleeping, either.
She hasn't moved for a while, but I crawled by her and saw her eyes were open.
That's easy to spot on a black girl. The whites of her eyes stand out perfectly
against the darkness of the room and her skin.
Levi's white, by the way, and so am
I, and so is my little brother Chuck. Just in case you were wondering.
This story is kind of going to be
about me—I mean I can only really tell you the stuff I saw, right? So I guess I
should tell you about myself.
My name is Richard Allen Genero.
I'm 15 years old. Michelle Elizabeth Kirkman is also 15, Charles Walter Genero
(technically deceased) is 6, and Levi Davis (I don't know Levi's middle name)
is 17.
Chuck and I have lived all our
lives in Harrington, Indiana, which is a little town 37 miles north of
Indianapolis, not too far from Brownsborough. I was born here and if the things
groaning outside have their way, I'll die here.
If you know anything about what
happened, you know about Harrington. After all, Harrington's the birthplace of
Kirkman Soda, which is where we're going.
That's where the cure is.
That's where Chuck needs us to go.
I don't go by Richard, by the way.
I can't stand that name and I don't want you to think you're reading a book by
some jerk named Richard, or worse, Dick.
I go by Ricky.
The girl I'm traveling with,
Michelle Kirkman, is the daughter of Gerald Kirkman, who
3
I DIDN'T DIE. JUST
IN case you were concerned because I stopped writing so suddenly.
Dead fingers tapped the window
beside the double doors, one finger striking the glass at a time like an
impatient person waiting.
It broke my concentration.
After a few moments, the zombie
moved on, but I'd totally forgotten what I was going to write.
So let's start over:
Michelle, Levi, Chuck, and I got
back to Harrington this afternoon. It took us four hours to get here from
Brownsborough—a trip that used to take 25 minutes by car.
We walked in the fields that run
parallel to I-65. We only saw three zombies during the whole walk, aside from
Chuck, of course.
The first two weren't a problem.
In our first hour of walking, we came
across a green truck lying on its roof, its wheels in the air like the stiff
limbs of a carcass.
It was in the center of a field,
but we could tell from the thick tracks leading up to the wreckage that the
truck had come from the highway.
A side mirror lay in the grass
several feet away and I had an idea the truck had flipped over at least twice,
breaking off its mirror before rolling to a stop on its back.
Levi wanted to walk around the wreck
and I thought that was smart, but Michelle marched straight to it. "They
could've packed food or weapons," she called over her shoulder.
That was a fair point.
I hurried to catch up, but I
stopped when Michelle brought our only gun out of her jeans and pointed it
through the truck's windshield.
She knew not to fire it. A gun's
good for getting out of a tight spot, but the shot will draw the attention of
every zombie in hearing distance.
I had my bat up, ready to swing before
I knew what the danger was.
Then I heard the muffled thumping.
There were two corpses pounding on the windshield from inside the truck.
"They're out of food,"
Levi said.
When I looked where he was pointing
I felt faint and my vision clouded with black spots. If this had happened a
week ago, I would've thrown up. But I've seen a lot since then.
At first I could see only the
zombies lying on the roof of the truck's cab, Mommy and Daddy. Both of them had
the dark-rimmed, all-white eyes of the dead, sunken because the pale grey skin
surrounding them had gone lax and hung off their skulls like dough.
Mommy was wearing a blue summer
dress, stained maroon all down the front. Daddy had broken his neck and his
head lolled on his shoulder. An unnatural bulge protruded beneath his jaw and
stretched the skin there to near bursting.
Then I saw what Levi meant by
"food."
Hanging upside down behind Mommy
and Daddy was a car seat. It was still strapped in, despite the seat belt
straps on either side having been gnawed through.
The soft grey lining of the car
seat was stained red and black and covered in flecks of skin and hair.
"They're trapped in
there," Levi said.
"How can you tell?"
Michelle asked.
Levi shrugged. "If they
could've got out, they would've. Let 'em starve."
He kept walking. Michelle followed.
I stood a while staring at the car
seat, but when I heard a faint crack in the windshield the zombies were
pounding on, I got moving.
The third zombie wasn't trapped. He
came right at us.
4
WE DIDN'T KNOW HE
WAS a zombie at first. He staggered as he crossed the field. From a distance,
he could've just been injured.
He was about a football field from
us when Michelle said, "That man's headed for the highway. We should
warn—"
The thing growled, the sound a
combination of hoarse moan and sharp snarl, screamed from stiffened vocal
cords.
Michelle had the gun up and aimed
before the zombie could turn toward us.
His right arm was missing from the
bicep down. His mouth stretched too wide. As he got closer I saw his jaw was
broken and hanging permanently open, held in place by strips of rotting flesh.
None of them run, really. Most of
the time they shamble slow, but they move a little faster when motivated.
If we'd been running, the zombie
never would've caught up to us. If he hadn't been in our path, we would've let
him be.
Some people enjoy killing them,
like maybe they're making the world safer one zombie at a time. But when the
whole world is filled with those things and more people turning every day, I
doubt one more or less zombie makes much difference.
I don't like killing them.
'Killing' isn't really the right
word. How do you kill something that's already dead?
It isn't easy, but they can at
least be put down and afterward they don't bother anyone anymore. Whether
they're dead then or were before, I don't know. I'll leave it to the
philosophers to decide.
Killing zombies isn't hard. They're
slow and dumb and have no weapons, aside from their teeth and fingernails. But
you have to be very careful and know what you're doing.
I've seen people fire round after
round into their chests and the zombies keep coming. You have to kill the
brain. Otherwise they don't die, or stop being undead, or whatever.
I've seen them walk around on fire
and it doesn't bother them. Hack off their legs, and they'll crawl after you
without stopping to notice they can't walk.
They feel no pain.
So far as I can tell, they feel
nothing except hunger. They don't think, they don't sleep, and I've never seen
one go to the bathroom.
They kill and roam in search of
more things to kill, and that's all they do.
Michelle had the zombie locked in
her gun sight, but only as a precaution.
Levi and I flanked him.
I had my lucky baseball bat, but
Levi carried an axe, so I let him take the first swing, and the second, both
aimed at the thing's legs. The blows were intended to disarm (disleg?) rather
than kill.
The zombie crumpled to his knees,
his white eyes never leaving my face, his craven moan never changing pitch, his
one remaining arm stretched toward me.
Levi hacked at that arm and I swung
my metal bat straight into the zombie's forehead, like hitting a baseball off a
batting tee.
Though the bottom half of his one
arm now hung by the thin membrane of skin Levi hadn't severed, the zombie still had both biceps raised toward me.
I brought the bat down again. When
I raised it, it was covered in the same blackish red that sprayed from his head
in a fine mist.
The zombie convulsed.
I swung the bat one last time and
when it connected, the thing's skull made a loud cracking sound like an ice-weighted
branch snapping. The impact traveled up the bat and stung my hands.
The zombie went limp and silent.
Levi wiped his axe on his purple
"New Life Christian Church" T-shirt, then dropped it to his side and
kept walking.
I should've kept walking, but I
didn't.
Maybe it was the clothes the zombie
was wearing: brown slacks, a blue and black striped polo shirt, and black dress
shoes, as though he'd been at a church supper. Maybe it was the wedding band on
his left hand.
I knelt beside the corpse and rooted
in his pocket until I found his wallet.
According to his license, this man
had been Gary Boyer. He had four credit cards, a gym membership, and a photo
from his human days. He was standing with a woman, two small children, and
Donald Duck in front of that giant golf ball in Epcot.
"Are you coming?"
Michelle asked as she passed.
I couldn't speak just then, so I
dropped the wallet and got to my feet.
From a distance behind us came the
quiet moans of Chuck, ever following.
5
THE KIRKMAN SODA
BOTTLING PLANT was the third Harrington exit off I-65, but off the first was
Ernie's filling station.
For the record, I didn't want to
go. I was just as hungry as Michelle and Levi, but we'd been avoiding buildings
the whole walk for a reason.
A zombie alone in a field is one
thing, easy to spot and relatively easy to put down. But the only way to truly
know how many zombies are in a building is to go inside.
The other problem is the people who
are still living, crouched in whatever shelter they can find, terrified, maybe
insane—the last week has had that effect on people—and armed.
If they see something come into
their shelter walking on two legs, they might shoot first and check to see if
it was a zombie after.
Ernie's has a glass front, so we
could see most everything from outside. But we couldn't see what might be
hiding between the aisles of motor oil and candy and travel goods, or in the
bathrooms, or in Ernie's office.
It was Michelle who made me see the
logic in it—but don't put this on her. In the end, it was my stomach that did
the convincing.
"Daddy's plant is five or six
miles from Ernie's," Michelle said. "But it will take us longer to
get there."
"Why?"
"Because of Bridgeport
Heights, Autumn Creek, and Tree Side Point."
"What?"
Michelle stared at me, waiting for
me to catch on. When she saw I wasn't going to, she rolled her eyes and said,
"The subdivisions Daddy owns off the next exit. Plus there are two other
subdivisions and an apartment complex. We'll have to go around them."
She was right, of course, and I
felt stupid for not thinking of it.
It's nothing but fields and farms
from Brownsborough to Ernie's, but the second Harrington exit leads to
neighborhoods that stretch out on either side. Here I was protesting going into
one building and trying instead to march us into an army of rotting
suburbanites.
"It's already late afternoon
and the sun will be down before we can get to Daddy." Michelle put her
hands on her hips and sighed. "We may need to find someplace to stay
tonight. But first we need food, and Ernie's is our best bet. It's the only
thing off this exit."
"There's the Harrington
Inn," Levi said, shifting a gnawed toothpick from one side of his mouth to
the other.
"That's on the opposite side
of the overpass," Michelle said. "And the next building on the same
side as Ernie's is the jail, and that's at least two blocks away."
"Sounds safe," I said,
throwing my hands up. "While we're at it, why don't we swing by the Java
Jive. I could use a latte, maybe a muffin. If we hurry, we can still catch the
7 o'clock movie. I want to see the new James
Bond, but only if you guys want to. We can see something else."
"Funny," Levi said, not
laughing or even smiling.
"I'm hungry," Michelle
said through gritted teeth, her eyes locked on mine. "Tonight, I'll be
even hungrier. Tomorrow morning I'll be weak and we have a lot of walking still
to do. We'll go slow and be safe. If the place is crawling, we'll backtrack and
go around."
Every so often, it surprises me
this is the same Michelle Kirkman I grew up hating almost as much as I hate her
father. She's been a rich brat as long as I've known her, but now that money
doesn't mean anything, she's different.
My dad used to say you know you're
hungry when gas station food sounds good. There was more to our argument, but I
don't remember the rest and in the end Michelle's plan made sense.
It was after six when we got to
Ernie's.
We could see it from the last few
fields before Harrington proper starts. It was a small building with an awning
stretched out over six pumps, and neither humans nor zombies milled around
outside.
Atop the awning were bold red letters
spelling out "ERNIE'S." The sign was neon, but Harrington hadn't had
power for days and the red letters were as dull and dark and lifeless as the
rest of the world.
In a backyard three houses down
from the jail, two adult figures stood beside a swing set. They weren't moving
or talking, just standing and staring in that mindless way of the dead.
They were far enough away from
Ernie's not to be a concern.
Michelle had her gun out and Levi
and I had our axe and bat at the ready, but it was unnecessary.
We were able to
creep right up to Ernie's and around to the front without being seen.
Or so we thought.
