That Zombie Novel

It happened, no one really knew how, or why, no one knew what had caused it, but people started getting sick, and I mean really sick. It wasn’t something like the flu, or some twenty-four-hour bug, it was more like a mix of different diseases. The infection, if that’s the right word for it, started in Liverpool and made its way North, it spread quickly like wild fire, it started with the recently deceased, people who’d just died or were dying, in hospitals, homes, morgues were most susceptible to the infection, somehow, they became reanimated, and started walking again.

->There is a myth that long after someone is dead, their hair and nails still grow and that part of their brain is still alive. If we brought the deceased back, they would have to work on their basic needs, any living thing’s basic needs are, food, water, sleep. However, The Infected deceased’s mind; decayed and gone due to oxygen deprivation and decomposition, only had one function in their brain that remained the same, the need to feed. Just like any epidemic, it evolved, rather speedily at that, it advanced into a stronger form and was passed on through bodily fluid, which meant if you were bitten, scratched or exposed to any bodily fluid from one of The Infected, you would soon become Infected, a mindless, feeding machine. How fast the infection would take you depended on your height, weight and a number of other factors, there were no known cures but there were a handful of survivors who had been bitten but only if they’d had the infected limb removed quickly enough, you only had a small window of time in which to amputate but if you removed all of the infection you could survive. No one knew the cause of the illness or the cure. Soon enough the whole of England and then some of Europe had been swept by the infection, it was slowly spreading across the world.

I sat back in my seat and watched as the world I knew collapsed in on itself, electricity was becoming harder to generate and food had started to be rationed again until the governments began to collapse and people had to scavenge for food, riots and mobs plagued the streets, people were picked off by The Infected and then it went quiet, people made groups of only a handful of trusted people and the only people who walked the streets openly were the infected, if you could call them people at all. People had become so accustomed to technology that many people who weren’t able to adapt to having no electricity, hot water or any other home comforts they were used to and became depressed, so suicide rates went through the roof.

The town in which my friends and I lived in hadn’t been touched yet but I had begun to prepare, preparing for what was inevitable, I knew I’d be one of the first to go but I had to at least try to survive, a few friends and I had made something of an alliance, sort of an army. We'd all lost our families and friends to the effects of the infection, so we had to survive, for them at least.

Alex; a seventeen-year-old, short, 5ft something, ginger curly haired girl, she always wore her hair in a bun, she had a few freckles scattered across her podgy little face; she was a real tom boy when it came to anything, she wasn’t squeamish, she pulled her weight, got her hands dirty, she just did what she had to do, she was a pretty good little fighter too. She never wore make up or tried to dress to impress, she wore combats and a t-shirt, she wore steel toe capped boots and sports bras, and that made her look more like a boy than most boys I’d come across. We’d never seen her wear heels or a dress. Alex was very serious and didn’t take shit from anyone, she was stubborn, a real soldier type, took orders and got her missions over with.

Tom; a twenty-two-year-old, the taller end of five foot, long dark haired man usually wearing it tied back, he was smart and came up with good strategies, Danny and he usually worked as a team creating plans of action and reading maps, he was also quite handy with weapons, but he liked to drink… a lot, so sometimes that got in the way of fighting.

Danny; a thirty something, 6ft 2, skinny, black haired man, he wore his hair in a mullet, usually tied back. He was a bit of a fidget and was very pale; and wore glasses, before the infection broke out, all he did was sit at home playing video games, watched movies, read and listen to music, he didn’t really go out, but when he did it was usually to Tally’s, but we hadn’t heard from her since just after the infection began. It was a miracle that any of us actually knew him after a while. He always chose a button up shirt, jeans and boots, he also loved his leather jacket or trench coat. Danny was a quiet man and spoke very little, but when he did speak he made completely out of this world crazy but all round excellent plans.

Molly; a twenty-year-old, tall and slender, she wore her perfectly straight dark brown hair down more often than not, she was very girly, always wearing make up, always dressed to impress; even if it was just a casual shindig. She was usually the victim of my practical jokes, she was caring and was a real softy, she’d panic at the slightest shuffle or groan. She was also a real flirt but the boys and I would have none of it, we wanted one thing and one thing only, to focus on our mission of finding somewhere safe.

Finally there was James; in his late twenties was built like an athlete, short light brown hair and a keen eye for shooting type twos in the head just before they jumped on him to devour his flesh. He was a real adrenaline junky when we were out and about, he loved a rush so much he’d wonder away from the group get into a sticky situation where he was surrounded by the fuckers and he’d have to get himself out of that situation… it wasn’t always as fun for us because we’d be looking for him for hours and a few hours later we’d find him in a pile of rotting corpses looking for a trophy to attach to his belt.

We'd been doing our research, watching films, playing video games, reading comics, books, surfing the net, what we had thought it sounded like was a Zombie Apocalypse or something very bloody similar, we knew exactly what to do if this were a video game, and in itself this was a game. A game of survival. We needed weapons and ammo, knives, pipes, bats, guitars, anything we could decapitate The Infected with.

James the dirty joker he is tauntingly brought a vibrator, the girls weren't impressed, especially Alex, she thought joking around was wasting time, she had punched James in the arm and told him to quit joking around, but we all knew that’d never happen.

Molly had found something truly amazing in her garage, a chainsaw, filled with fuel, never used before. She swore she was keeping it, even though she didn’t know how to start it, let alone the strength to use it.

We had two main priorities we drew up in our plan of action; stay alive being the first, and find survivors being the second. A third mostly vital priority was to scavenge and find supplies, but that was part of the surviving. The camps and quarantine bases that the government had set up were complete bullshit. They didn't do anything apart from get overwhelmed and overrun by The Infected, they were trying to keep too many people in one place at one time and that would get very tempting to the flesh hungry, blood thirsty infected beings; and that would lead to abandonment or mass genocide of living breathing uninfected humans. The good thing about the camps and the quarantine bases was that they were filled with food rations, guns, water, more ammo and medication. We made it our goal to find out where the quarantine bases and camps were and once we had we marked them on the map for future reference. The list went on to side missions we'd set as jokes, like killing people we didn't like, stealing the crown jewels, stealing cars and joy riding, setting fires, stealing cash from banks. And the last resort… re-populating the earth, some of us seemed a little too eager for the last one.