First 4 Chapters of "Zombies of the Red Descent"

Zombies of the Red Descent
by Jason Earls, author of Cocoon of Terror & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711


Chapter 1: Eight Kills Today

The zombie charged Alex, squealing and running at full speed, its diseased eyes narrowed, its thin arms outstretched with long fingers twitching from the deadly poisons boiling inside it. The zombie tried to yell something and red chemicals sprayed from its rotted decaying mouth as Alex casually propped up his boot on the bumper of a ‘76 El Camino and put a round from his .38 in the center of the zombie’s forehead. The top half of its skull shattered as the rest fell backward, yet its body continued to run. It must have travelled about fifteen more feet before veering off and slamming into an old Chrysler. The undead thing lay there on its back, twitching and spasming in the dust, as Alex watched more chemicals and blood pour from its neck – the “life” inside it gradually dissipating out on the ground.
“Hell of a lot of toxin in that one,” Alex said.
He heard another zombie squeal behind him, but he had plenty of time to spin around. He tucked the .38 in his pants and pulled a double-barreled shotgun from a holster on his back. Luckily, this one was a slow-mover. It squealed again, but Alex didn’t see how the sounds were even possible. Half its face was gone, including its bottom jaw. He looked down at its mid-section to see only a huge gaping hole – the meat from the top of its left hipbone, all the way to the bottom of its ribcage and over to its spine, was completely gone. Its vertebrae glowed white and its body was leaning toward the injured side as it charged him.
“I’d be slow too if I had 20 pounds of organs missing,” Alex said, taking his time to aim.
He allowed the zombie to creep within four feet of him, then put the shotgun barrel to the bridge of the thing’s nose and slowly pulled the trigger.
Kablam. The head vanished. The shattered bone and brains spattered over several cars in the salvage yard, the skull fragments echoing off and sounding like BBs plinking tin cans. The zombie toppled onto a pile of hubcaps and pipes and a brass rod leaning against a pickup penetrated its rotting chest tissue, stopping it from hitting the ground. The zombie hung there, propped up like a menacing scarecrow of mutilated flesh and chemical waste.
Alex turned around and shadowed his eyes with his forearm.
He saw no movement now among the wreckage.
Only a spot of fire burning off in the distance.
“Eight kills today,” he said. “Not too bad.”
He kicked an air filter out of his way, moving down the narrow path, adjusting his guns as he carried them back to his small hovel hidden among the cars and piled up wreckage.



Chapter 2: Alex O’Haney and the Red Descent

Seven months ago, red dust and large chunks of debris had fallen from the sky. Tons of the stuff. Most of the rocks were the size of softballs, yet they were lightweight with numerous veins running through them. The rocks emitted strong radiation and chemical poisons. Anyone who touched the rocks or came within a few feet of the patches of dust became violently ill. They would soon be vomiting black and red bile and turning into either a “runner” or a “slow-mover,” as Alex called each of them. The Red Descent quickly turned almost everyone on earth into hungry zombies that consumed human flesh.
But some people had a natural immunity to the radiation.
People like Alex O’Haney.
Something inside his body had prevented him from getting sick. And although he noticed he was not the only one with this ability, most of the others were quickly killed off by the runners or the slow-movers.
Two days after the Red Descent came, Alex heard part of a news broadcast about the tragedy. The reporter speculated that an object – possibly a small asteroid – had struck the RS-343 Dome Space Station, and when it had hit the force combined with a multitude of onboard chemicals had created a huge explosion – one of the biggest ever in outer space – and the resulting red moon rocks of radiation fell to the Earth. Even if the reporter’s explanation was not entirely accurate, it was still good enough for Alex O’Haney, since he knew it really didn’t matter at this point.
His apartment was a block away from a small gun shop that his uncle Rex O’Haney owned. Upon witnessing his entire town becoming insane and killing each other from the Red Descent, the gun shop was the first place that Alex ran to.
Out on the street, he saw people he once knew, but now they were vile zombies, eating their fellow humans and fighting everything around them. Alex found his uncle laying part of the way out the door of the gun shop, his whole throat ripped out, and two zombies in a frenzy fighting over his fresh corpse. Alex ran past them, went inside and grabbed a double-barreled shotgun and a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 36 Chiefs Special. Taking as much ammunition as he could carry, he ran out the back door and tried to decide where he should go next.
The salvage yard, he thought. He knew the zombies would have difficulty navigating through the piled-up junk with their off-kilter equilibriums and their minds scarred by chemical radiation.
He arrived at the salvage yard without any major problems, having to shoot only one female zombie along the way. Three bullets in her chest did almost nothing. So he put a round in her left eye and she went down and stayed there.
The first night he slept in a ‘94 Dodge Dynasty. And the following day he worked to build a perfunctory shelter in a vacant space surrounded by several junk cars that were stacked up as a barrier to invading zombies. He used truck doors, windshields, car hoods, trunk lids, and seats from other vehicles to build his shelter. Everyday he worked a little bit more on improving his new home.
Eventually, Alex fell into a set pattern. He would go out around 6 PM for two hours of shooting as many zombies as possible, then he would scavenge through the homes in the area for food, or clothing, ammunition, anything else of value that he might run across. He found that if he didn’t kill as many zombies as he could just before bedtime, he would usually wake up with several of the ghouls beating on the walls of his shelter, their foul fingers sticking through the cracks as they squealed and groaned, releasing harmful chemicals from their diseased mouths and polluting his living quarters.
Finding food was always a problem. But water was not. A working faucet stood near the rear of his salvage yard from a garage that used to stand there, and surprisingly the zombies never came near the source of water. They seemed to have no need for any liquids, other than human blood of course.
Alex’s other main problem was running out of ammunition. It was too dangerous to go back to the gun shop for more bullets. He had already tried that. Now he figured he had enough ammo to last about two more months, if he was supremely conservative (which he always was). After that, he knew he would have to move on.
Some nights, when he didn’t hear a plethora of zombies moaning and fighting off in the distance, or when he didn’t witness too much gore prior to bedtime, he would stare through the cracks of his shelter, up at the moon or the bright stars above.
And at times like those, his life didn’t seem quite so tragic.


Chapter 3: Maxine

Alex picked up the female zombie’s hand. He marveled at the spotted grayish-blue skin and the small red scaly blotches that covered it like a crude pattern from a Persian carpet, then he let the hand drop gently to the car seat.
She was not dead. Only sleeping. He could hear her breathing – heavy with a slight chemical wheeze to her voice. He had never seen one of the infected up close before – a zombie that was still “alive” anyway.
He assumed this was Maxine. She was a highly unusual zombie. One that wasn’t fully infected. For some reason, Maxine still retained some of her previous mental abilities and humanlike qualities. Alex knew this because two days ago, after his evening hunt, he had found a piece of paper sticking out of his shelter door, a note from her that read:

Do not kill me. I will help you fite them. I am not one of them, all the way. I am not completly damuged. Let me help you. I can speek, and do other things to. You must take me to a sceintist. A labrutory. Have them wurk on me. Have them fix and ssave me. Pleese.
- Maxine

Alex’s thumb shook slightly against the piece of paper as he read the note. His mouth fell open. He did not understand how this could happen. Maxine was an example of an evolution in the zombies that he had not expected. He took the note inside his shelter, sat down on his makeshift bed, and read the piece of paper repeatedly, again and again, squeezing his forehead, trying to understand what was happening, trying to decide what he should do.
Now he had found Maxine asleep while scavenging through the junkyard in an area that he did not normally visit. She was lying in an old Chrysler; sound asleep; and he figured it had to be her. He stepped away from the open car window, his foot bumping a hubcap and flinging it into some junk with a loud clang. He jolted and spun around to look at Maxine. But her eyes did not open. He continued staring at her for quite awhile.
How the hell can she survive out here among these things? he thought. She must be a damn good fighter. I remember in the note she said she would help me fight them. Tomorrow maybe I should come back here and try to speak to her. Maybe this is where she stays regularly. But what if it’s all just a trap?
He moved his gaze from her face down to some of the jagged rusty metal jutting out everywhere in the salvage yard. He thought the debris looked like like tiny deformed pyramids setting in the middle of an iron desert. He didn’t see or hear any zombies moving around, even though he knew a few had to be close. He ran his thumb under the rope that he had attached to his shotgun which functioned as a strap. Then he stepped through the junk, trying to be silent as possible.


Chapter 4: Maxine the Warrior

Evening hunt... Six zombies surrounding him... Deep groans, high-pitched squeals... Metal clanking and banging... It would soon be dark...
A slow mover stumbled toward Alex in the gloom, its hips bumping against twisted metal. He could see one of its eyes glowing and dangling from the socket by two thin strings of yellow and red membrane. More than half of its face had been melted away. He casually put a bullet into the zombie’s temple and it fell forward slowly, slamming its damaged skull into the hood of a Cadillac. Alex then spun around just in time to see a runner coming for him. He pulled the shotgun from his back, extended it with considerable force to jab both of the barrels into the thing’s cheek, simultaneously pulling the trigger and making its head vanish.
Another zombie grabbed him from behind, tackling him against the side of a pickup. He dropped his shotgun and twisted his body until the zombie was in front of him so that he could keep it from sinking its teeth into his flesh. He stared deep into the zombie’s eyes. Black circles surrounded the whites, with wrinkled gray skin on the outside, making them even darker. Maggots fell from the thing’s matted black hair and it growled and pulled back its lips to display green teeth and red liquid oozing from blackened gums.
The stench was horrific – like chlorine and sulfur mixed with kerosene and death.
Alex strained, trying to push the thing away, keeping it from sinking its lethal teeth into his body. The zombie reached up and gradually worked its hand over Alex’s face, pawing him as its fingernails grazing his cheek. It grabbed his right ear and ripped away a small part of the ear lobe.
A loud scream from behind... The sound of pounding feet...
Alex felt something slam into him and into the zombie as well. Something was attacking the zombie that held him. Whatever or whoever it was, it yelled in an animal-like way and the zombie gradually released its hold on Alex when the bites and tears to its back and neck became too much. The zombie turned around to fight whatever was attacking it and Alex picked up his shotgun and reloaded and put it to the rear of the zombie’s skull. He pulled the trigger and a thick spray of brains and skull fragments flew over the junk and splattered back into his own face, almost covering it with the sickness of the Red Descent. He wiped his eyes and spat over and over again, trying to clear the deadly chemicals from his face.
When he opened his eyes, he saw her standing there panting.
Maxine.
She had saved his life.
She had been the one attacking the zombie.
After he looked at her and their eyes met briefly, she turned and went back into action, attacking two of the others: slow-movers shuffling through the junk. She bit and slashed at them with her long fingernails and screamed loudly, wrestling them to the ground with a demonic fury, slamming their skulls with a rusty railroad spike she found, trying to kill them by destroying their brains.
Alex backed away, eyeballing the salvage yard for more zombies. She’s actually helping me fight them, he thought. She actually saved my fucking life just now.
He reloaded his .38 and ran to where she was still rolling on the ground with two of the infected.
“Maxine! Get out of the way!” he yelled.
She moved off one of them and he efficiently put a bullet in each of the zombie’s foreheads.
She stood up and looked at Alex. He saw her take a step forward, but then confusion registered in her eyes, so she turned and ran away. He called out to her, but she did not stop or come back, and he watched her tangled hair bounce as she dodged numerous vehicles and eventually disappeared among the junk.
Alex slipped the shotgun strap over his shoulder and glanced around for more of the undead. Nothing. He lowered his head and walked toward the few surrounding houses to scavenge for more food (even though he knew it would probably be futile), thinking all the time about Maxine; and how she had just saved his life.


(Read the rest of this novella by clicking the cover of "Zombies of the Red Descent" at the top of this blog. Thanks.)