THE
ZOMBIE
BOOK
Zombie Book One
By Diana Graves
Copyright © 2017 Diana Graves
All rights reserved.
Kindle Edition
♦
License Statement
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Disclaimer
This book is a work of pure fiction. Characters, places and incidents are creations of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to people, living or dead, businesses, events or places is purely coincidental.
Acknowledges
To Erin, my best friend.
Chapter Three:
“ARE you excited to see our base?” asked Derek.
I smiled. “Not particularly. I’ve seen a lot of forts and bases; walled off city blocks, boarded up buildings, large boats all strung up together like a floating town on a lake and houses out in the safer countryside. They all had one thing in common...they were not sustainable.”
Food ran out, clean water ran out, good people were the first to die and in the end, all that was left was cannibalism and disease. Christopher and I had just escaped from such a place; a boarded-up church far out in the country with a walled-in courtyard.
“We’re fully sustainable,” Derek smiled with big white teeth. His smile was almost contagious, but it wasn’t hard to fight it. I was fairly certain I would never enjoy a genuine smile ever again.
“They all claim to be.”
“Who’s ‘they all’?” Derek asked.
“A lot of people…”
Derek stopped walking only for a moment before doing a little happy jog to catch up.
“That was a thousand yard stare if I ever saw one. What’s your story? Why were you out on that road tonight?”
I didn’t want to talk about it, but Pane and Derek were looking at me expectantly and I had to admit that a part of me wanted to confide in them. Maybe it was Derek’s smile or Pane’s gentle way, or maybe I just needed to hear myself say it out loud. Either way, I started talking.
“Chris and I had made a home out of an old trailer we found on the side of the road. Weeks ago we were on a supply run and we ran into a preacher named Finn. Though, in hindsight, he may not have been a real pastor. But at first he was a sweet older man but that act didn’t last long at all. He talked well. He convinced us to come back to his church. He said there were hundreds of survivors thriving inside the high walls. I remember feeling so excited. I felt like I’d finally found a place to feel safe, a place to raise my son. But, once the doors were locked with us on the inside he changed drastically.”
“How?” asked Derek in a small breathy voice that told me he had some feeling as to how it changed. Badly.
“Finn was a violent sexual sadist. He preached for hours and used food as a tool to keep us in line. If we didn’t please him, we starved and our kids starved. The families that stay there are loyal to him to the point of mental illness.”
“Sounds like a cult,” Pane said.
“Yeah, like a cult. They held public executions once every couple of days for entertainment. Anyone who disagreed with Finn or tried to leave were hung from the gallows in the garden until dead, and then we would have a great big feast.”
“Sick.”
They had no idea. The executioner was the preacher’s son, Jensen, and he loved his job far too much. He relished in his power; fucking and killing whoever he liked or didn’t like.
“But you escaped. How?” asked Derek.
It took me a couple weeks to plan our escape from the church. The walls were guarded too well and all the windows were boarded up. There was no way off the property, no conventional way at least.
“At night I chipped away at the wood floor under the mattress that Christopher and I shared, with a knife from the kitchen.”
“Like in the movie Shawshank Redemption,” Pane commented.
I felt the thought of a smile enter my mind because I loved that movie, but the smile never made it to my lips.
“Pretty much. I scattered the wood chips outside while I tended to the plants. Jokes on them, I’m a crappy gardener. Once the hole was big enough for me to fit through, I dug my way through to the crawlspace under the church. Over the course of a week I stole whatever weapons and supplies I could find and hid them in the hole under the mattress.”
“Did you leave them with anything? You were fucking loaded,” Pane said.
“They’re fucking loaded. They never noticed a thing I took was missing, or maybe someone did...Earlier tonight we waited for the dead of night to make our escape. While most everyone was sleeping or otherwise occupied, Christopher and I crawled through the underbelly of the building, located the crawlspace access door on the side of the church, then I picked the lock on the gate and we made a run for it. But, I didn’t expect someone to be sitting outside the gates with a shotgun as if he knew we’d be there. Finn’s son, Jensen.”
Jensen aimed for us and I heard the roar of his shotgun, but he missed us. Even so, Chris stopped running. He was frozen in fear. Jensen ran after us so I swung Christopher onto my back and ran through a field of tall grass to lose him in the woods, but I didn’t lose him.
Jensen caught up with us and tackled me to the ground.
“You’re going to hang tonight, bitch! But before you do, you’re going to beg me to end you!” he screamed in my face.
He ripped Chris away from me and kicked me in the stomach repeatedly. At first all I could hear was Jensen grunting with every forceful kick and Chris crying for me, but then I heard THEM. The zombies came through the trees. They must have followed the sound of our fighting, those who still had ears at least. They attacked Jensen first since he was the obvious target. Big, easier to see through milky dead eyes...
I didn’t realize I’d fallen silent until Derek asked, “So someone was waiting for you? What did you do?”
“I-we fought and the zombies must have heard it because they came running at us. For the first time ever I was actually a teensy bit happy to see them, and used them as a diversion to escape.”
I’d scrambled to my feet and grabbed up Chris, kicking in the head of a zombie in my way.
“The last time I saw Jensen, he had a pack of the dead besting him in the worst sort of way.” It seemed his fate was sealed, and it was fitting. “Unfortunately we didn’t escape unnoticed and ended up running with a horde of undead at our backs, and you know the rest.”
“Damn, now I get why you acted like you did. Fuck,” said Derek.
Pane stopped walking and I looked up at him. “We’re here,” he said as he calmly rocked Christopher in his arms.
I looked out at the night, nervously massaging my sore hands. I couldn’t help but fear that I was walking into another nightmare situation. These men seemed like harmless enough geeks, but Finn seemed like a sweet old man at first too. My fear peaked when I realized there were no structures among the trees. Had they just taken us deeper into the forest to do what they wanted with us.
“Where’s your base?” I asked, trying hard to keep the fear out of my voice.
“We live underground,” said Derek as he bent down and began fiddling around in the dirt. I bent down next to him and saw that he was actually trying to lift a round metal door half hidden by leaves and dirt.
“What’s wrong?” asked Pane.
“She must have locked it from the inside,” said Derek. He pulled a walky-talky off of his belt, pressed a button and spoke into it. “It's okay, Karen. She’s just a lady and a kid. Neither of them have been infected.” He let go of the button and turned to me and asked quietly, “You haven’t been, have you?”
“No.”
“Come on,” Derek said. He turned to Pane. “Turn to the camera and show her the baby.”
Pane turned around and looked up and there was a short buzzing sound, as though we were being let into an apartment building in the city, but the metal hatch swung open on its own accord. I looked down into it to find a short metal staircase and soft white lighting.
“Thanks,” Derek said into the walky-talky before he put it back on his belt and climbed into the whole. “Come on Erin,” he said.
I took a deep breath and spared a lingering look back at Chris. I looked up at the man holding him and I gave him serious eye contact through his long black hair. “Pane, don’t hurt us, okay,” I said. The look in his dark eyes was part shock, part pity, but he gave me a shallow nod of his head and I followed Derek underground.
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