F.J.S.A-M.P. - Working Title (Non-related)

[Dawes]

So, this is a random experiment.

I love zombies. Zombies are awesome. Zombies kick the ass of the world. Very few books have done zombies any justice, though, save for maybe shining examples like World War Z (an outstanding, outstanding book) and various other supernatural pulps. I've been struggling with the idea of trying my hand at a completely different kind of novel while editing my other manuscript, so that's where what you're about to read came from. I wanted to write a series of short vignettes that follow several survivors of a zombie plague through the arc of a story. I wanted to write less formally, in a more casual, even stream-of-consciousness tone.

The following are the first two vignettes of what I hope will be a longer work. If you read this and finish up realizing that none of the questions have been answered, it's because this sequence is started in the middle, and as it progresses, you'll find out what led him to the point he's at.

Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. It's filled with a lot of violence, because I'm a huge fan of that. Hope you enjoy!

________________________________________

March 11, 2009.
10:14 A.M.

There's so much that is meant to go so horribly wrong.




Leaders of the future, soaring high!

He did not know why that was stuck in his head, lodged somewhere in the folds of his brain like a splinter thrust too deep beneath the skin of a finger. He saw it when he had entered that morning, strung along a banner above the front doors of the school. He had seen it so many times that it had become a permanent fixture inside of his conscience, like a positive little reminder when everything seemed to go wrong. Everything would be okay, it seemed to say. Nothing bad happens to leaders of the future.

Nothing bad, even when one of them gets left standing in the middle of the school library, staring down the sights of the shaking gun in his hands.

Paul Kraszwyk refused to move. If he moved, he feared that something in the peaceful little bubble around him would shatter, and the world would go all to hell. He seemed satisfied enough to stand there, his jaw shuddering and his mouth pushing out little puffs of breath. He stared straight ahead, through the smoke still rising from the barrel at the glass door that led into the library. Maybe he stared at the wispy trail of smoke; maybe he started at the blood splattered like a film student's bad special effect across the bricks just above the entrance. How did that get there? Could it really fly that far?

He supposed he had been too focused on the killing to take into mind things like velocity and trajectory and the parabolic-whatsits he had leaned about in Physical Science class. Well, now he knew – that stuff could apply to blood, too, even if he had no clue what it was really all about. Was blood a Newtonian liquid, or was it not? So many questions for a leader of the future, but he felt empty, answerless, unable to do anything but admire how comfortable he felt holding his grandfather's Colt. The tip of the gun's front sight wavered, less something to take aim with and something more to focus all of his attention into, like he were staring through a thin spyglass at the rest of the world, forcing all of his concentration on that one spot.

Paul squeezed the trigger once more, but he had not noticed until then that the slide was all the way back, hungry for more ammunition. He had nothing to shoot at anymore, but shooting was all he felt like he knew how to do.

There were tears on his cheeks, and he was brave enough to pull one hand from the gun and wipe them away. His nose was running. He sucked in a deep breath and caught a quick whiff of a familiarly acrid odor. Shit. Somebody had shit themselves right there in the library. Paul wondered what kind of leader of the future shit their pants during study group.

“You okay?” he asked aloud, and he wasn't even sure that it was the question he wanted to ask. There was nobody to ask it to, so he assumed he meant it for himself. Maybe he was asking it to Leslie Farmer, who lay contorted on the floor with one hand over her face, the puddle of blood under her sopping like a black bruise into the musty carpet. Paul thought he remembered shooting her right in the face – his grandfather would have congratulated him on such an outstanding-fucking-shot – but maybe he had shot Leslie in the shoulder, or in the neck, and maybe it was Donald he had shot in the face. Was it Donald? Donald was laying back across one of the library tables, his feet hanging just above the floor, like had he just flopped back to take a quick cat-nap. Paul could have just leaned over to check – check to see if it was Donald's face he had blasted – but for some reason, he didn't feel the need to.

Donald was dead. Leslie was dead. Did it really matter where the bullets went?

There were other bodies strewn around the library, all somehow angled in their death towards where Paul stood with the pistol pointed in front of him. Beyond Leslie and Donald were Nathan Spencer and Natalie Hopkins and Melinda .... what was her name? Started with a “P,” maybe a “T.” Either way, none of them moved, and two more students whose names he had never known lay face-down dead on another wooden library table. They had been corpses before their heads had smacked down.

Paul's eyes flicked right. There was that kid who always dressed in goth clothes lounging against the card catalog, the metal beads of his broken necklace scattered like marbles across the floor. His neck had been torn open. It looked like a moist prime-rib, and one hand was still clenched against his chest, as if he had tried to reach up and push everything back inside of his throat before it was too late.

At first, Paul did not register any of the violence – in games, in movies, in graphic novels, it was always so much more stylized, so much cooler, and not nearly so fragrant. But now, he knew what blood smelled like, and it was musty and rancid and rotten, and the library smelled more like a toilet – like feces, like piss, and like the warm, heavy air of the Morgan Street Butcher Shop. Instead of freaking out, giving into tears, and shitting his own pants, he remembered the task at hand and tried to jump-start the gears inside of his head, focusing on the gun's shaking sight. He envisioned the banner coming into the school, and he remembered that somewhere along the line, before he had graduated twelfth grade, he would somehow have been trained with Math and English to be a leader of the future.

Leaders of the future, soaring high!

His thumb flicked up at a lever on the side of the gun's handgrip, and the empty magazine slid out, landing down between his feet. Almost without looking – just like he had practiced a hundred times before – he stuffed his free hand into his pocket and pulled out a filled magazine and fumbled it as quickly as he could into the pistol's handle. He released the slide and the gun jerked mechanically in his grip, pulling him out of his daze and back into the blood-stained library fallen silent around him.

Why had nobody come running? The doors to the library – the construction-paper tree on them had been splattered with blood – were still closed. There were no fire-alarms sounding the need to flee. There were no people rushing through the halls, slamming into each other, crawling over one another to get out the exits because there was some no-named kid who didn't play football waving a gun around and tossing bullets. The din of chaos that Paul Kraszwyk had expected was a lot quieter than he first intended – in fact, it was non-existent, and everything had gone so smoothly. There had been a few seconds of action, and then – bam – he was left alone standing in a bloody library surrounded by corpses of his fellow classmates, a hoodie heavy with three more clips of ammunition sagging down from his stomach.

Everybody was dead, including the English teacher, including the librarian with her stained neckscarf and her smoker's teeth. Everybody except for Paul, until–

“Paul...”

Paul's breathing changed, shifting from short little spurts into long, drawn-out swaths. He locked his elbows and squinted over the sight, but did not search for the voice.

“Holy .... holy shit,” it said, and then it swept up into a high-pitched moan. “Fuck, oh fuck...”

Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw movement, and with his limbs locked as firmly as a statue's, he turned, letting the pistol guide his eyes. He saw someone hunkered down beneath one of the library tables, perched between the knees of two dead students. Red sneaker-laces caught Paul's blurry eyes. He swung the gun in the kid's direction.

A live kid.

“No ... no fuckin' shit,” the kid said, repeating it over and over, his eyes snapping towards the dead goth boy. “No fuckin' shit. No fucking way.”

Paul should have seen it coming. No sooner were the words out of the kid's mouth before he puked all over his arms as they were wrapped over his knees. It splattered onto the library carpet, and he looked up at Paul Kraszwyk like a dog who had soiled his master's favorite rug. Only then did he see the gun in Paul's hands, pointing right down at him, but he seemed to look at the person beyond the Colt, as if Paul were his only promise of help.

Don't you get why I have a fucking gun, Paul wanted to scream at him, but his jaw felt like it was going to burst, clenched tighter than a vicegrip. Don't you get why–

“You saw it too, didn't you.”

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you and the zits on your fat-fucking-nose, you–

“Oh my God, Paul, you saw it. You had to have seen it.“

–wussy piece-of-shit, you sniveling little turd, you–

“What's ... what's that fucking smell, Paul? Is that shit? Did sum'mony crap in their pants? What the fuck even happened? Paul? Come on, man, we've got to ... we've got to go.”

I saw it. I saw what happened. You were hiding, hiding like a scared little bitch...

“How did you get the gun, Paul? You...” said the boy, but his voice lost its strength and trailed off, as if he had finally figured out that the puzzle he was putting together was missing a few pieces. “You didn't know this shit was going to happen, did you, Paul? Oh, fuck! The cops are coming, ain't they? You call the cops or something, Paul? They've got to know that we're still alive, right? How did we fucking survive, man? Never in my life, man. Holy shit, we've got to call the–“

Just as the kid starting scrabbling to his feet, seemingly ignoring the slumped bodies sitting at the table around him, Paul saw something just on the underside of the kid's wrist. Blood lapped out from a gaping wound in the kid's forearm, and the fingers were mangled, useless, as if the tendons had been wrenched out and tossed aside.

“Oh, shit. I ... I gotta get to the hospital, or ... or something. Paul, look at my fucking arm, man,” he whimpered, and with a calm that must have rivaled anything that Paul had ever seen in war-movies, the boy reached up a free hand and plucked something out of a wrinkle of flesh just beneath his palm.

He pulled a bloody tooth out of his wrist and tossed it on the floor. Paul listened to the kid choke back a scream before he began to sob like an infant. As the boy crawled out of his safe-haven, Paul lowered the barrel of the pistol. He stared at the tooth.

A broken tooth.

Maybe it's just like it is in the movies. That means that maybe they got you.

That was when Paul Kraszwyk raised the pistol that once belonged to his grandfather, aimed it right at the fat kid crawling up from under the table, and with his eyes shut tighter than the stitches of a healing wound, he squeezed the trigger. Even beneath his eyelids, he could see the bright muzzle-flash cutting through the darkness. It flashed once, twice, three times, and then again and again, until the weapon was empty, and Paul was crying, and the fat kid with the red sneaker-laces that Paul had no reason to hate was just another carcass. When Paul looked again, the kid had folded back to the floor. His glassy eyes stared at the water-stained drop-ceiling. Paul thought he suddenly remembered the boy's name. Brendan, he thought. Brendan Miller.

“You okay?” Paul asked, not of the kid's dead body, but of himself, as if he were asking how cool he was with everything that had been going on.

Brendan Miller was, after all, the first living person Paul Kraszwyk had ever shot in his entire life.

Leaders of the future, soaring high!

[Dawes]

March 11, 2009.
10:16 A.M.

Tragedies aren't predicted; they simply happen, and that's what this did – it happened.




“He's dead,” Paul whispered to himself when the silence assured him that it was alright to breathe again. Everything that had happened was still a senseless ball of sound and noise and emotion in his head, waiting to get peeled apart later like an orange. Later, when he was ready for it. Later, when he could cry and rock back and forth and wonder what the fuck happened and why he had kept his eyes open the whole time. “He's dead, right? Right, but that's ... that's a mercy, yeah? Would've been bad,” Paul promised himself, biting his bottom lip and turning away from Brendan Miller's body. “Great job.”

He still had a few rounds left in the pistol, and had he still had the guts to have a real rebellious streak in him, maybe he would have found a copy of The Catcher In The Rye so he could put it in his pocket and say it inspired him. How many rounds left? Not sure, not sure – Brendan had eaten a few, but Paul couldn't remember how many. Three? Four? Enough. One was enough, but the others...

The others had just been security.

He moved automatically, his brain still someplace else, someplace where the gravity and the reality of things like you-just-shot-a-fucking-kid and everybody's-dead-but-you,-Bucko were safely stored behind a mental wall. Empty brass cartridges rattled against one another as he took a few steps through them, and headed towards the library's glass doors. He thought that he would wait for the cops to arrive before he blew his own brains out. Then he thought that he'd just point the gun at them through the glass so they could do the job for him. Then, they could parade his dead body out and cover up the fucked-up reality of everything that had happened in the Brasswick High Media Center, and things could appear to have gone as he originally planned them: dead kids, check; dead teachers, check; one dead kid sporting Pap's old G.I. firearm, fueled by a bunch of suicidal thoughts, violent music, and violent videogames, check.

But that wasn't what happened. Not exactly like that, anyway.

His head throbbed with the pace of his pounding heart, too heavy to sit upright on his shoulders. As he came to the glass door of the library, he reached out his hand and felt the cool glass. It felt amazing. He pressed his cheek against it and closed one of his eyes, and then raised the hand with the gun in it and put it on the glass too, as if he were trying to pull himself into the refreshing sensation and forget the mangled dead kids behind him.

A soda would be awesome right now, he thought. A soda, or a fucking Hawaiian Blast.

He did not know how long he sat there, leaning his face against the glass, waiting for the police to arrive and bust him full of holes. It could have been ten minutes, or twenty, listening to the tip-tap of the large-faced clock hanging just above the door and the hum of the ancient air-conditioner. They accompanied one another with a rhythm that, while it was off-time, complemented the morning's spontaneity perfectly. Yet, Paul Kraszwyk could not just sit there in the school's library forever. He curled his free hand into a fist and punched the glass, rattling the old pane and relieving some of the tension in his bones.

“Come on already,” he moaned. “Where the fuck are you?”

Just want the cops, his brain added. Just want to get out of here, but I'm too much of a pussy to open the door. Can't break the seal, yanno? Things wouldn't feel safe anymore. He would be beyond the realm where a pistol and some good luck meant he was in control.

One of the bodies refused to give him the satisfaction of his silence, though, for as Paul Krazswyk leaned there against the glass door, he heard a squeal from behind him. He nearly squeezed his trigger-finger before he had pulled his head off the gun to look, and just as he did, he snapped his glare towards the source of the noise, which crescendoed into something more obnoxious. Even though Leslie Farmer was dead, Paul pointed the gun at her anyway, because there should have been absolutely no reason why someone who had been such a pretty girl before being dead should have had any excuse to make a sound like that. Even though she was dead, the mousy little squeal became a single uproarious fart, as if everything inside of her was just trying to nudge its way out while it had the chance.

The fact that her body continued to empty itself despite her lack of life seemed enough of an excuse for Paul to break away from the library. He'd read about that kind of shit before, about how the body continues to work despite its death – about how nails and hair still grow, about how other stuff keeps happening. It had probably been in one of those 1,001 Facts You Didn't Care To Know About books that he'd thumbed through in his grandfather's bookshelf or something.

Either way, the fact that a dead body could fart better than most live people he'd known was enough reason for Paul to stuff the Colt into his hoodie pocket, grab the handle of the glass door, and wrench it open. He left the massacre in the library behind and broke into a swift jog down the single hallway. Green lockers swept past him as he ran, occasionally broken in their pattern by wooden doors that led into individual classrooms.

All of them looked empty, Paul realized – the lights were still on, but as he darted past them, he did not see groups of teenaged heads tilted towards the front of the rooms. Instead, the desks were empty, reflecting the March morning sun off of their pencil-tattooed surfaces. They must have evacuated the minute they heard the gunshots, he thought. I run down here and turn the corner, and the blockades are going to be ready, and there are going to be badges pointing guns, telling me to get the fuck down and kiss the floor. The silence is part of the ruse. It's how they draw nutcases out of their hidey-holes, I bet – they tease them with the potential freedom, and then you turn the corner, and you're staring down guns. Yeah, that's what they do.

By the time Paul reached the end of the hall, his heart was sending left hooks into his ribcage and filling his lungs with lava. Once he turned down this hall, he'd see the front doors of the school lobby, and the floor tiles would turn from smooth white into hexagon-shaped bricks. Then, when he saw the lobby, he'd see the police, and he would be lucky not to catch a bullet in his jaw.

The fear of defeat did not stop him, though. His feet wanted to put distance between him and the inexplicable massacre, between Brendan Miller and Leslie Farmer's ultra-talented corpse. Anywhere, he realized, would be better than being in Brasswick High anymore, the place he had planned to gun down that morning with his grandfather's service-issue pistol, not for any real reason other than to try to fix all the fucked up things swimming around inside of his skull.

Just as he rounded the corner, however, Paul Kraszwyk's right foot abruptly stopped, and while he kept moving, it refused to. His sneaker squealed against the floor. The sudden change in momentum launched the Colt out of his hoodie pocket and sent it sliding across the floor while he – without any time to react – smashed down to the floor on his hands and knees.

“Motherfucker,” Paul hissed. He tried to tug on his foot, but it was caught on something. Paul jerked again, and then twisted at the hip to look behind him.

A hand squeezed like a clamp around his ankle, having caught him mid-stride, and the fingers refused to let him go. The hand belonged to an arm thrust out from one of the class-rooms. Instinctively, Paul gasped and tried to break his foot free, meanwhile reaching back to slap for the pistol. His fingertips brushed the handle and drug it a little closer to him.

Four little lines of blood were stretched across the floor, and Paul saw that his sock was red too. The hand was bloody, quivering, and desperate. “Get the fuck off,” Paul whimpered, and he used his other shoe to kick the wrist and break himself free. No sooner had he done so than he dived for the pistol and the opposite wall, trying to get away from the hand and the voice that rattled from behind the door.

“Police,” Paul heard the person say, as he flattened himself as hard as he could against the lockers and tried to slide to an angle where he could see into the classroom. He felt his way along the row of lockers by the handles, the Colt rattling loosely in his hands. What's seriously going on around here? What the--

“Please,” spat the figure, who begged Paul from the doorway of the classroom like a street-urchin begging for food. It – for he could not tell by voice or by body if they were male or female – seemed afraid. “Don't ... l-... leave me,” it said.

“What's going on?” Paul demanded. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Please don't leave me,” it repeated, voice grinding like a wet garbage disposal. The bloody hand reached out for Paul, digits shaking like little worms. “It's ... it's freezing in here, and I'm ... I'm not so fast.”

Paul remembered that somewhere before he had planned to gun down a few classmates, he had a conscience that belied his favorite heavy-metal shirts. He reached out to cup his hand in it's hand – in her hand, because he saw a hint of blue nail-polish beneath the blood – and heaved, trying to drag her out of the room and into the hall. Inside, Paul's mind was screaming at him to get away, an instinct that knew damned well better than to show a good heart. Had the same thing that had happened in the library – the same thing – happened out here? Frightfully, Paul gave the woman – a teacher he never had, he presumed – a heavy tug, compensating for the weight of pulling a whole body out across the floor. He dug his heels against the tile and bent his knees, heaving her out.

She was a lot lighter than he first expected, though, and he staggered backwards once he released her hands, having exerted much more strength than he actually needed. She screamed in agony, and her shoulder-blades buffeted against the floor.

“I-... I'm sorry,” Paul apologized, at first thinking that he had pulled her wrong, had hurt her more. “I'm sorry about...”

But then he realized two things: he realized, very suddenly, why she was screaming, and he also realized why it had been so ridiculously easy for a dweeb like him to pull an adult across the floor like that. At least there was sudden relief in knowing that he hadn't hurt her ... much.

After all, how much more pain could he have put her in when her suit-skirt was nothing more than a sopping, tattered mess tangled around two very blunt stubs where legs had once been?

“Holy fuck,” wheezed Paul, putting the back of his hand over his mouth. He bit down on his knuckles to keep from screaming. It felt like his eyes were going to blow themselves out of their sockets as he stared sobbing at the mealy stubs kicking and flailing as if they thought they still had knees and feet. “Oh God, Oh--”

Last night's beef stew tasted like shit the second time around, and looked even worse.

Paul spit out puke and slammed back against the lockers, his gaze rolling towards the ceiling, his hands steepled around his nose and mouth. The teacher was mewling and moaning, reaching out for him, but all he could think about were her legs – her fucking stumps – kicking like animatronic nubs, beating a wet cadence on the floor. The image kept replaying in his eyes, more gruesome and more violent each time.

“Don't go,” she said.

“Oh God. Screw this,” he said, tapping the Colt's slide against his temple. “Screw this place.”

“Don't leave me.”

“What the fuck is going on in this place?”

“It's so cold...”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Don't go,” she said again.

Wet stumps flopping on the floor like dead fish, splashing in blood. Little twists of stocking-strings swimming in lumpy ichor. Ripples with each beat...

Paul grabbed the sides of his head and bounced it hard against the lockers. “Shut up “

“You can't leave me.”

“Why the fuck not?” he begged to know, as if she was in any state to give him moral support. He was crying. “All I want to do is go back home and get the fuck out of here, alright? I have to call someone,” he reasoned. “Gotta call my Grandpa, alright? Tell him what's going on, and–“

Her voice flattened out. “Just don't leave me. Please don't.”

“Why not?”

The fading woman's lips twisted into a thoughtful line before, with almost tactile disappointment, she said, “Because I don't want to die alone. Because if you leave me alone, it's going to eat me. It's going to eat me, because it's still hungry.” She raised a blue-edged finger and shook it at the empty classroom from which Paul Kraszwyk had dragged her.

She whispered, “It's still in there, and I don't want to die alone.”

[Fire2box]

Is there a reason you ripped the title off of a campaign from Left 4 Dead?


Anyways if you want the story to be better make the zombies... zombie nazi's.

[Dawes]

Well, that needs to be fixed, then! Again, it was just a working title -- something to call it other than Cheeseburgers and Tits or Fat John's Swizzling Anti-Matter Penis until the time came to give it an actual title. I think it's pretty impossible to name a story or anything of that sort until you actually have a near-whole product in your hands, so I just toss some generalized moniker on it until it's done.

I haven't played Left 4 Dead yet, though, as I'm waiting on Christmas for that. Does the Dead Air campaign involve something with a radio station? If so, I'd better get real creative beyond the usual conventions of zombie bullshit, and fast!

Thanks for pointing that out, Box! I guess I need to think a little more outside of the box -- I couldn't think of any other cheesy-ass titles that involve the idea of dead-something and radio broadcasts other than Dead Air -- if I don't want to look like a plagiarising cocksucker!

Nazi Zombies are pretty sweet, but Treyarch's done it! I can't ever hope to claim that kind of awesomeness.

[Chillhouse]

Rance,

You have a style of writing unlike anything I've seen before. It's very original, and you really are on par with professional big-league writers you find on the New York Times lists. The story flows better than anything I've read in quite a while, and the pacing in excellent. I especialy like the way you describe the situation; it brings about very detailed imagery in the reader's mind, making it a very believable and enjoyable story. There was one part in particular that I especially liked because of the image it brought to mind. Gory, bloody, violent, and excellent. You've got it all down pat.
I look forward to reading more from you.

[blarg]

rance i will read your story when i can! Which will probably be tomorrow or monday but i'm looking forward to it, you are by far my favorite writer on this site.
(P.S. If i have time on the day i read it i will disect (Critique) this for you )
~blarg

[Boogeyman]

Fuck yes. I have nothing else to say about this kick-assery.

[Dawes]

Thank you very much for the pleasant reception and encouragement, guys! I'll be adding the next installment either late, late tonight or tomorrow during the day.

Glad somebody likes it!

[Boogeyman]

I did not read it yet...I don't really like zombies, are they funny? Because I can deal with funny zombies. Never was really into sci-fi books or writing.

-The Sun-

Zombies... walking, more-than-likely disfigured, rotting, flesh eating, nearly immortal corpses... Tis not funny at all, good sir...



Was being sarcastic...