Mark Clodi (38 page)

Author's Note –

As a first book this one has taken me a couple years to finish, the writing was done in about seven months, but the editing, ugh! Don't get me started about the editing. I am a firm believer in good editing...now. Unfortunately I have the editing skills of a slow zombie; this is the second edition of the book, and by 'second' I mean 'tenth'. I've read through Outbreak many times and in each instance I am 'sure' I caught all the errors and each time I am wrong. Hopefully the story overcame the many misspelled words, poor sentence structure and grammatical errors that I have missed. I never set out to write an American Classic and have always felt that a decent book should be read easily and make me look back on it with fond memories as an escape from the minor problems life was throwing at me at the time. If I have done this for a few people then I have done my job.

Thanks to the following people for their editing help and general advice: Mike Keleman, Jesse Masoner, Anne Clodi and Mike Picco. Also thanks to the people who left reviews of my work online, sometimes it is painful for me to read, but it made the work better in the end: C. Brunner, J. Coffey, Jessica Manning, Jessica Hannigan, W. Temple, Ian Bottomley and Jeffrey Johansen.

I am writing the second book in this trilogy right now and taking care to get the story right. I have also written a few other novels set in the 'Zombie Chronicles' universe, most of which are not connected directly with this book, however I do have this strange desire to connect all the works in some way, you can find the links if you hunt for them hard enough. The next book in this series will start with "The Zombie Chronicles II:" right now the working title is "The Zombie Chronicles II: Discovery", but I might change it before all the body parts are eaten, I mean words are written. Any affiliated novels will have a title like "Undead Advantage: A Zombie Chronicles Novel", just to keep things easy. The story of Max will be a trilogy, no more, no less. I like the character, but I have no plans to use him beyond three books, he'll need a rest by the time I am finished anyway.

You can keep up with my progress at my website: www.ctales.com, where you will find no advertising, no log ins and plenty of lightly edited things to read, including numerous short stories of those who didn't make it through World War Z and a few non-zombie related pieces of fiction as well.

Thanks for reading!

Mark Clodi

February 20th, 2010

Mark Clodi (born March 30th, 1969) is the author of many zombie and science fiction novels and short stories. At an early age Mark was hooked on fantasy and the pulp fiction of the 'Golden Age of Science Fiction'. While moving around the mid-west with his parents he continued to feed his frenzied reading by buying fiction at yard sales and utilizing the local libraries. The thought of actually becoming a writer struck him at an early age, but he never followed through on his dream until he was much older and 'settled in' to a career as a computer programmer. His writing started one day while trading emails back and forth with Mike Keleman, the co-author of his first book. They started assigning chapter numbers to the emails and the rest, as they say, is history.

He lives in a small town in Iowa in the United States with his wife, two daughters, two dogs, two cats and two hermit crabs. On any given Saturday night no matter what the temperature, so long as it is not raining or snowing, you can find him on the rough 'man-deck' behind his house grilling ribs, reading and listening to the radio by the light of a kerosene.

Mark's latest and greatest works are always available at no charge on his website located at http://www.ctales.com/

An excerpt from The Zombie Chronicles II (coming in 2010):

Chapter 1

The police cruiser slewed sideways on the highway, not an unexpected event. Max had noted a debris field indicating they were coming up to yet another accident in the road. What was unexpected was the sudden lurch to the right that the cruiser made as two of its tires blew out. The driver of the car, Jane Stewart, brought it to a controlled stop along the shoulder, near the crest of a small hill. Max groaned out loud, “Not again!” Then he slammed on the brakes of the mini van he was driving, the brakes were of the anti-lock variety and he slowed to a stop while keeping control easily. He hoped he had stopped before hitting whatever the cruiser had hit.

Beside Max, his son Nick sat staring intently out the window.

“I don't see what they hit. I can't see anything.” Max had been relying on his son to help him avoid any debris on the highway, in fact whomever sat in the shotgun seat had to keep an eye on the road. Even going twenty to thirty miles an hour they still ran over some things. There were times the entire highway was closed off from wrecks and as they traveled along interstate seventy six they had also come across one bridge that looked liked it had been blown up on purpose. That was an ominous sign that Max took to mean they were behind enemy lines. Skirting the blown bridge had caused them to detour about thirty miles out of their way, but they had lucked out and found another wrecked state trooper vehicle, from which they had taken three good tires.

Stopping well shy of the cruiser. Max directed the occupants of his car to get the brooms out and start sweeping the glass out of the way, while he went forward to check on Stewart and Tom, who were in the other car. Max had to pick his way carefully through a ton of broken glass. He couldn't tell what it has come from, but the shards were pretty bad. The scrub brush on the side of the road did not offer any concealment to anything in the land around the highway. This was good, some of the zombies seemed to be smarter than others and it could have been an ambush. Oh yes the zombies had grown clever, they were hard to kill, requiring massive damage to their brain to send into the afterlife, again, and they had an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Max had even reasoned with some of the smarter ones, who seemed to remember their past. Thinking, fast moving and nearly indestructible zombies made for pretty fierce opponents and Max was not sure how humanity was going to survive the war they were now engaged in.

Nukes seemed to be on the table. Max had been in Arvada, a suburb city of Denver, two days ago when the government had dropped a nuclear bomb close to the Denver International Airport on top of a radio station. The dj, Blake 'the snake', had kept broadcasting in the week since the zombie infestation had started, living off of bottled water and the station's vending machines. His co workers had deserted him one by one until he was left alone. Blake barricaded the doors to his building and to the floor of his building too and kept the whole place running on generators. Unfortunately some of the more intelligent zombies heard his broadcast too and they had surrounded the place. For some reason the smarter zombies seemed to attract the less intelligent ones around them in droves and the constant efforts by outsiders to rescue the dj had not been able to get through the surrounding undead. The last effort, by the Colorado National Guard, had involved a whole convoy of troops, they had humvees, tanks and even a helicopter. The zombies numbered in the tens of thousands, the convoy troops numbered in the hundreds. Blake had given a play by play of the fighting, including accounts of the smart zombies using rifles of the fallen guardsmen. The convoy was bogged down, then surrounded then almost completely wiped out. A single column of troops got away, although Blake reported that individual soldiers may have escaped too, because his view was limited. The zombies relished their victory and the station was mobbed by ever more of the things. Finally, when they realized that no one else was coming to save Blake, they broke into the building and the radio audience listened as Blake gave his last performance. It ended in a few chaotic word that didn't make any sense and a white flash of superheated light, the federal government had set off a nuclear bomb with the station at ground zero.

The morning the bomb fell Max had watched his wife turn into a zombie, she had been bitten and died within twenty four hours of being infected.Through a series of mishaps he ended up leaving her in the attic where she died, Max had been lucky not to break his neck when he fell out of the attic access while getting away from her. Together with his companions they had fled Denver, passing not too far from ground zero themselves. His traveling companions were Jane Stewart, a former police officer, Tom Eby a computer administrator for MAC Co. where Max had worked before the current crises and Amelia Bryon, also from Mac Co. That rounded out the adults, who were all wounded and tired, but so far, 'bite' free. They had also picked up Max's kids, Nick who was ten and Jessica who was seven. Amelia had brought along a boy she had found who was also ten, his name was Cory. The last child they found in the police cruiser that Stewart, Max and Tom had driven to Arvada. The girl had a bandaged wrist and appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old. So far she had not been too talkative, but Amelia had coaxed her name out of her – Erin.

The drive from Denver had been extremely stressful on all of them, one moment they were driving at a walking pace through smoky burning suburbia with no one in sight, the next they were hitting the gas and driving far too fast for conditions trying to get away from zombie mobs that seemingly sprang up from the very ground. Every place they stopped was empty and quiet, like an old western movie just before the big gunfight. It didn't help matters that Max thought there would be gun fire at the end of every one of those silent scenes. The zombies seemed to be attracted to the living in the usual ways people were attracted to each other; noise and sight, a light in the darkness was a very bad thing now. In addition they seemed to smell their prey and it was almost as if they could somehow sense them through walls too, nowhere seemed particularly safe.

Stewart and Tom drove the point car, Stewart's police cruiser about two hundred yards ahead of Max in the mini van, which had Amelia and the kids in it. Amelia switched off with Nick from time to time and kept all the kids in line. All of the group had seen enough horrors over the last two days of travel to remove any doubt that this was a full blown catastrophe. They were tentatively traveling to North Platte, where Tom's parents lived on a ranch out about a few miles from town. After that Max wanted to move on to Iowa, where he had a friend with a large house and some land. They had not received any news from anyone so far. Their cell phones had stopped working two days ago, and they could get nothing but static on any televisions they tried or on the car radios.

Tom was proving to be a handy resource in an odd variety of ways. He had come up with a pump and hose that operated off of the electric power of the vehicles, more and more often the electricity was completely out wherever they stopped for the night. No electricity meant, no way to pump fuel. An hour of poking through the zombie infested remains of a small prairie town brought Tom out with the electric pump. Tom said he learned all about such things on the farm growing up and was now very glad he has some practical knowledge that could help them out. They could keep the cars fueled, so long as they could find a gas station and get the storage tanks opened. They also grabbed a dozen two gallon fuel cans from a big box store and had them filled up and strapped on top of the van, with two more in the cruiser. They had a tarp strapped over the ones in the roof rack, but Max was still nervous about driving around with all that fuel over his head.

After North Platte, where Tom planned on staying, Max planned to continue traveling with anyone who wanted to go with him and his kids to his friend Bill's house. Bill went way back with Max, they grew up on the same street when they were kids and attended the same schools, albeit Max was four years younger and had not ever gone to the same school with Bill at the same time. As the the only two boys on a street full of girls the two were bound to become friends, despite the age difference. The friendship born in primary school continued through high school and even prospered into college and beyond. After college Bill had moved around a lot, only returning to Denver to find and marry his wife. Still he visited Max once every year and the women they had married got along well too, which made things easier as everyone looked forward to the annual visits in the fall.

Unlike Max, Bill had started his family early, barely out of college and he had five children now, the oldest was seventeen and they alternated in gender down from there every two years. Max had kidded Bill that he and his wife were like machines, you could set a clock by the birthing of their children. Bill worked in technology as a computer programmer, but he was always spouting off about Armageddon and being prepared for whatever life threw at you. He was heavy into Boy Scouts of America as well, his oldest son had made Eagle Scout a year early and his other boys were involved in camping, hunting and fishing all year round. The only complaint Sarah, Max's wife, had about Bill was that he seemed way more focused on the boys of the family than the girls. On more than one occasion she had heard Bill say he took care of the boys and his wife, Trisha, took care of the girls.

Max knew Bill would be ready for the storm of zombies. He knew with the financial markets fluctuating so badly over the past few years that Bill had been planting large gardens on his land, learning how to preserve meat by drying it out and teaching the boys to hunt and fish as more than a hobby. Max was hoping his perception was not off, that his friend would be the rock in the storm that he needed him to be right now. Somewhere in the back of Max's mind there was a little nagging thought that things might not go as planned, Bill could get fickle when his families welfare was on the line, would he treat Max as family or as a drain on the family resources? It was a small disturbing thought and Max resolved to show up to Bill's house with as many resources as he could cram into the van, if that meant driving seven hundred miles with gas cans on the top of the car, then that was what he would do.