Pale Rider: Zombies versus Dinosaurs

~~~

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2015 James Livingood

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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 your favorite ebook retailer and
purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.

For more like this, check out
Paperbackward.com
.

Prologue

Chapter One: A Bargain

Chapter Two: Too Easy

Chapter Three: Hunger

Epilogue

Meet the Author

An article from the New Eye City Government

Titled “Janus”

Published on the network

Date unknown, Author unknown

Blue brains, blues, or zombies as they are
commonly referred, did not happen overnight. Like most medical
issues, the problem started with a child. Janus Sands, a young
toddler from a rural farm community, had trouble walking. Janus’s
parents took the child to their pediatrician who then referred a
developmental specialist. After extensive and expensive probing,
the prognosis was “Metachromatic Leukodystrophy”. A genetic
disorder and the second biggest misdiagnosis in history. Faced with
mounting medical bills, Janus’s parents chose to wait and try home
remedies.

While Janus gained some semblance of
mobility, he often shook like a Parkinson's patient. Janus’s
parents filled the home with walking bars and canes to help ease
the child’s progress. Perhaps surprisingly, speech is thought to
have occurred during these formative years. Most agree that
mumbling did take place, but the idea of Janus creating fully
formed sentences is unknown.

The first real clue came from a cat scan near
Janus’s 7th birthday. The scan was repeated several times to verify
the accuracy. Janus’s grey brain matter was increasing while his
white brain matter did not increase. Unfortunately for humanity,
this was the largest misdiagnosis in history. If they had been able
to open Janus’s skull, they would have seen blue brain matter, not
grey. No one knows if a parent was a carrier, or if both parents
were carriers. What is known is that Janus’s myelin, the “white
matter” had mutated. Fearing an auto-immune disease, Janus’s
doctors began a regimen of drug sampling. Some focused on the
symptoms while others were wild guesses at the illness.

When Janus was reaching near 12, his parents
tried a bone marrow transplant. After a year of looking for
compatible donors, they found a match. History is no longer sure if
something went wrong in transplant, or if puberty was a factor.
What is known is that shortly after that procedure, the first blue
entered the world.

Janus began to crave flesh and started
hunting small animals. As his little victims increased, his
humanity shrunk back. Nearing 16 Janus attacked and killed his
parents. After eating them for a week solid, he disappeared into
the woods.

Mislabeled a psychopath, the hunt began for
Janus. During the days that followed, it is well documented from
the police report that:

“
I shot him in the mid-section, beneath
the navel. Instead of slumping over he kept coming at me. The wound
appeared to stop bleeding nearly instantly. He bit me, but I was
able to push him off. It took almost the entire squad firing
several dozen shots to finally kill him. The brain was
blue.”

As others turned, it was thought that Janus
was the start of a rare virus. A virus that allowed a near instant
coagulation of blood from wounds and increased rage. We now know,
after extensive DNA mapping, that Janus’s kiss is both a DNA defect
and a spreadable virus. Furthermore, while rare, there is film of
blues mating. Blues often form in small packs of 4-5.

Blues are easy to mistake for human. While
human in appearance and movement, they rarely use tools and hunt
like wolves. Young blues do not take part but are often spectators.
Those exposed to the virus through blood or saliva lose their
humanity. We refer to this event as “the clearing” and the process
can take 3-4 days. Symptoms often involve shaking and short term
memory loss within a few hours. As the days progress, long-term
memories are wiped out. The victim becomes more aggressive and
agitated. Speech moves from short sentences, to grunts, to nothing
at all. By the end of the process, feeding and mating appear to be
the primary motivations.

We do not understand the virus or genetic
mutation Janus encountered, but we do know that blues appear to
focus on eating humans. Blues have been seen feasting on small
prey, but only when human hosts are not available. It is not known
why “Janus’s Kiss” does not spread to other animals. Testing with
chimps would be helpful, but there are none in this part of the
world. Several enterprising young minds have tried rats, but they
are not changed by the saliva or blood from a blue.

If you encounter a blue, follow this
advice:

Don’t Run, Stun!

Blues often hunt for weaker and sick humans.
Standing your ground and appearing strong will scare off blues. In
the beginning, we had become so used to being the top of the food
chain, that the thought of being hunted was frightening. Most of
the population ran, and that led to massive feasts. Furthermore,
our distaste for mandatory physicals meant pockets of blues formed.
Gun owners and others brazen enough to stand their ground often
kept their ground. Yet, as humans became replaced, the blue’s
tactics became more complex. Soon, only standing your ground with a
gun was not enough. The practice still works in isolated regions,
but the best escape from a blue is to retreat to a safe city.

New Eye City was formed for just that reason.
Survivalists knew how to build flash communities, which would then
focus on walls. As many of you know, gasoline fuel was no longer an
option as the infrastructure collapsed around humanity. Cars,
trucks, and farming equipment gathered rust from disuse. Humanity
needed a new approach to surviving.

An enterprising young man noticed the size of
birds increasing every year. With the idea of combining a carrier
pigeon and package delivery service, he captured several birds. He
manipulated DNA from the birds and added in sequences found in
Janus’s myelin deformity. A multitude of generations of
experimentation later, a series of useful franken-monsters were
created. Because of their small brains and massive sizes, these
beasts make quick work of farming and clearing land. These large
creatures are immune to Janus’s kiss and perform excellently in
loud conditions. They are easy to train. They behave like war
horses, prone to help charge in and defend our livelihood.

In honor of the past, and to help build our
future, we named these creatures dinosaurs.

I am often left to wonder why a zombie,
walking around in the sun, smells better than a pooping dinosaur.
The fecal smell always reminded me of an industrial strength
cleaner mixed with expired milk, then put into a wood chipper.
Perhaps I am a purist, but poop should smell like poop.

Such are my thoughts as I watch the half ton
green stegosaurus pull my steel plow across the meadow while also
using the bathroom. The plow churned up the earth and jumped when
it hit a rock. Even though this was a secure area, I hated the
extra noise when I hit a rock. Additional noise was the most common
way to attract blue brains. This area was farm classified land, and
as such, protected by one of the best containment fences. Still, I
had known many other farmers that died from a blue that had been
hiding. I paid little attention to how thorough of a job I did, as
it made more sense to watch the tree lines.

This crop was simply a test harvest. All the
food I produced would be thrown to the dinosaurs. It was “unfit for
human consumption”. Once the land was reclaimed from those zombie
blues, the soil was considered a bio-hazard for at least a year.
Spilled blood could carry the virus for up to 2-3 weeks. People
were always paranoid that blue brains would start their harvest in
our fields. That is why I took the job, because I didn’t have to do
much but keep watch. I knew that the professional farmers viewed
what I did like their “canary in a coal mine”. If I died, then only
risk hardy fools would work this land. If I survived a season, I
would have a chance at selling this sun filled plot to a
professional farmer. What they grew would be sold for a
premium.

It was a good life, so long as one wasn’t
complacent. Relaxing or taking naps had undone many unprofessional
farmers. Other new farmers didn’t have the stomach to extract any
lingering blues. Sometimes fishing out a rotting blue from a well
or a half collapsed wall was hard work. After the heavy work was
done, followed by the gruesome work of killing, came the tedious
work of purification. Scrubbing blood in a full hazmat suit three
times, followed by spreading dirt and salt over the spot. I am not
sure if the salt had any effect, beyond a psychological one.
Throughout humanity, there was the idea that salt made the perfect
purifier.

I had spent yesterday rationing my salts on a
blue that decided to hide in an outhouse of sorts. It was the last
structure I needed to check, and I had been dreading the task for
weeks. The blue was firmly trapped, but you don’t half complete a
job. After I had scrubbed for several hours, I made sure to add two
coats of dirt and salt, just in case. The next few months would be
smooth sailing on this job. With all the outlining buildings being
cleaned up, the only tasks left to do were to till the land and
keep an eye on the tree-line. The land was nearly finished being
reclaimed. By this time next year, a professional would be pulling
vegetables and fruits from the ground. It was hard work, but it was
almost complete.

As I neared finishing turning up a section of
ground, I heard deep thunder claps that did not originate from the
cloudless sky. The solid rhythm of thuds announced a dino rider.
These guys were worse than the tax collectors, always causing so
much damn noise. It would serve this brash bastard if he were the
first to be eaten on my farm, so long as I wasn’t the second. The
triceratops pulled up a bit away from where I was working, then
halted. This practice was only polite. If those shambling monsters
wanted a day-time snack, they would walk to this man. That might
give me a chance to retreat and live another day. After 20-30
minutes of everyone standing still I made my way over to the
rider.

“What is it?” I hissed at the rider.

The man was dressed in a red pea-coat, minus
the sleeves. The color was a simple statement to those around him.
Blood, the single most lethal thing in this world, was nothing to
him. Death and life were both to be mocked openly. Below his pencil
thin blond mustache, his lips flexed into a practiced smile.

“Are you the farmer of this land?” He swept
his hand across the horizon as if that simple gesture set the land
and containment markers.

“I am” was my quick reply. I don’t waste
precious sound on frivolous people. His red coat seemed a waste,
but the sun glistened on a simple armor underneath. I knew that was
not a fashion statement.