DIANA GRAVES: THE ZOMBIE BOOK 2: CHAPTER ONE

The new chapter 1 of book 2. (a work in progress)

Also I have two working covers...let me know what you think.

THE

ZOMBIE

BOOK

The Zombie Book Series

By Diana Graves

Kindle Edition

♦

1

Red lights strobed, bringing the world into and out of existence to the beat of my heart, crashing around my chest with fear.

“SHE'S BESIDE YOU!” someone shouted at me.

I looked to my right and there she was, a wretched zombie crouching near me. She was bathed in red light but only for an instant. Then darkness again and I shot in her direction but she tackled me down with the unrelenting strength and persistence of the undead. I kept shooting even when I felt her teeth sink into my shoulder. I screamed through it and when the red lights came back on and I saw that I shot her stomach full of led. She was covered in blood. Her mouth was full of my skin and muscle. In close corners, I wedged my gun between us. I shot her point blank in the head.

“DO you need or want anything?” Gerald asked me from behind the glass wall that separated us. I shook my head from the memory of the attack, but I couldn’t meet his eyes because I knew I’d see pity in them and I couldn’t stand to see it. I looked down at my hands instead and thought inward. I’d just been infected with a deadly disease. What was happening to me? I could see every large vein or artery under my skin and as hysterical as I felt, as fast as my mind was racing, my breathing was shallow and my hands were very still. They should have been trembling. Why weren’t they shaking? Shock?

“Just take care of my son,” I said without looking up at the men standing in front of me.

Derek put his hand on the glass. I looked at it and not at his face. “You need time to process what just happened to you. We’ll leave you alone. I’ll unlock the door to this side of the room, so you’ll have access to all of the doctor’s research...if you want it, if you think it will help.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll keep an eye on you on the monitors,” said Gerald.

Pane tucked his long black hair behind his ears. He hadn’t said much since he came in the room but he looked scared and sad...I could only assume he was scared of me and sad for having just lost his friends, William and Karen. I didn’t know Will and Karen, as well as the boys, had. All I knew of them was that Will was a charming man-child and Karen was his grandmother and a scientist who knew the disease was coming long before the rest of the world. She warned everyone she could, but she was labeled a lunatic. The only people who listened to her was her grandson and his friends. Together they built this amazing bunker out in the middle of the Olympic rainforest. It was completely self-sustaining. It was a marvel, really.

The boys left the room without another word spoken. I stayed where I was standing in front of the glass for a moment or two before walking to the metal door that separated the two halves of the room, one a medical examining room and the other a cozy office full of books, lab equipment, and jars housing zombie parts. I looked down at the floor where it happened. The blood was gone now, but just there I was lying in front of the door when Karen infected me with this curse. I couldn’t really be mad at her though. She was a zombie at the time. I crossed my arms and held myself tight. I knew then that the memory of my infection would haunt me forever.

My brows pinched in confusion as I recalled the event again. She was a zombie and now so was I, but we weren’t exactly what you would call the typical undead. Up until her infection, zombies were just mindless rotting biters. As soon as they were infected they began rotting away and turned violent, consumed with blind hunger. Karen wasn’t that. Not entirely. She became infected while studying zombies in her lab. Not the smartest thing she could have done, but she seemed determined to find out what caused the disease to mutate the way it did. It would seem it mutated again. It must have evolved inside her because zombie Karen wasn’t mindless at all. Sure she was a violent hungry rotting bag of bones, but she tricked us! In a show of intelligence never seen before, she waited until I was alone and then attacked me when I couldn’t see her. That took a lot of planning, too much for the dead. And here I was, for the most part still alive. I was changed but to what degree? I didn’t know. Looking at myself in the mirror revealed darkened skin around my eyes, which looked scary, even to me. My skin was damn near translucent and I had this unsettling calm about me, but otherwise, I was still me.

Looking around Karen’s office, the first place my mind went was to her personal notes on the disease. It was on the shelf, a thick black notebook she titled The Zombie Book in bold black marker on white tape. I opened it to the first page. In the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen she wrote, Center for Disease Control Global Health Department at the top of the page.

Doctor Karen Duskin, bioengineer with the CDC tasked with understanding and curing the curious matter of Naz-Konrta, a Russian drug turned virus.

Below that statement was a hand-drawn diagram of the Naz drug’s molecular structure...I wasn’t a scientist so they were just a bunch of connecting hexagons and pentagons as far as I could tell. After looking at a few pages of shapes and letters in what looked like a completely alien language, I flipped forward to the middle of the book. The pages were blank? I moved back a few pages until I saw writing again. Her last entry into her zombie book.

Doctor Duskin, entry 55. Day 779 since U.W. incident.

I’ve injected Naz into five men in less than twenty-four hours. Every infection followed the same pattern. Seconds after the injection they began to rot and behaving aggressively. I have one more man to experiment on. Instead of using disease samples gathered from the local population, I’ve decided to use the last of my samples from the University. Perhaps an earlier strand of the disease will yield different results.

That was her last entry? The man she was about to inject was an evil son of a bitch who deserved it, but when she injected him with the sample from the University she was hoping something different would happen and something different did happen. U.W. The University of Washington was in Seattle. Naz came from Russia, but its entry into the U.S. was through Seattle. Could there be other’s who didn’t completely turn, like me? Or could my blood be the key to a cure or vaccine? Where there still scientists in Seattle, more members of Karen’s team?

“Erin,” spoke Derek’s voice of the office intercom. “Please move back behind the glass.”

I looked back up at the camera they were monitoring me through and I didn’t want to do as he said. I gave them a mean scowl but I moved slowly back through the metal door and closed it behind me. Only after the door was secure did Derek come into Karen’s lab and Gerald at his side.

“I know, I get it, I do! But please don’t treat me like I’m a fuc-,” I had to stop myself because my little boy, Christopher came in sheepishly behind them. He was three-years-old with soft mousy brown curls and bright blue eyes that melted my heart. “Chris, honey.”

“He wanted to see that you’re okay,” said Gerald.

“I-I am, honey. I’m fine, I’m just a little sick. That’s why I have to stay behind glass for now. I don’t want to get anyone else sick.”

Chris eyes filled with tears. “No, Mamma, no, no, no,” he said.

Chris didn’t know how to talk well. He didn’t know a lot of words...He knew: no, yes, Mamma and zombie. That was my fault. I spent so much time teaching him how to be quiet, and close to no time teaching him anything else.

My hands clutched my stomach because I desperately wanted to hold my baby. He was the only thing that kept me going the past three years since the outbreak. I’d been beaten, stabbed and raped more times than I care to recall, all for him. I would have put a gun to my head a long time ago, but I didn’t because of him. I needed to protect him. He needed me...I needed him.

I bit my lip to stop myself from crying. It took much to force myself to smile, but I managed it.

“I’m going to be just fine as soon as I can be.”

“No Mamma,” Chris said and he hid himself from me behind Derek. He wasn’t scared for me. He was scared of me. “No Mamma!” Chris cried out.

I turned my back on them. I’d forgotten that I didn’t look like myself anymore. Veiny skin and sunken eyes, I looked dead without the rot! No wonder he was scared. My poor baby.”

“Please take him out of here!” I yelled. “I love you. Mommy loves you. I’ll be better.” Lies! I closed my eyes tight and let a few tears fall.

“He’s gone,” I heard Derek say. I turned around slowly to find Derek alone in the room. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think that was a good idea. I was against letting Christopher in, but Gerald insisted. Idiot.”

I knew my eyes were positively drowning in tears, so I kept them downcast as I spoke. “Can you leave me alone for a couple days? I need to be alone. I can’t stand being stuck behind this glass.”

“Sure thing. Can I bring you anything, food, and water?”

“Yes, please, thank you.” My words were shallow defeated things.

((end of chapter 1))

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