A Serialized Novel by Michael Henderson | Entry 1

WARNING: violence and gore

This is a draft and is subject to change.

SPOILERS

A note:

I’m in the process of writing a Novel. This is the Prologue you’re reading now. I’m serializing it and posting chapters here on my blog under "Stories,” “Lucas.”

The setting is a worldwide “zombie” apocalypse, seen through the eyes of a “zombie” as well as others. It is not for kids, or those who prefer clean, idealized fiction. It’s very dirty.

I actually got the idea to write this after reading or watching other zombie stories and finding that many missed what I loved most about the genre, or were unrealistic or unconvincing. I actually think the zombies in my book are a scientific and biological possibility. I want to explore that. I’m trying to pack everything I love about zombies into this one.

Here I am trying to tell you about my story without spoiling it. I’m writing this note because I’m an unknown author and I have to advocate for my stories. Just “Lucas, prologue” will not catch many eyes in the sea of information. I’m a slave to SEO and engagement tactics, so I’m trying to spark your curiosity without blatantly spelling out my idea.

I don’t at all want to tell you how to feel about my story or what it means. It will mean something different to everyone who reads it, and only you can find what it means for yourself. I’d love to hear what people who hate it think, as well. Please do leave a comment.

I regret to influence your experience and will stop here. Good luck on the journey. Even I don’t know what will happen for the most part. I will find out as write it, and then you will find out too shortly after.

Thank you for reading, it’s a privelage to write for you.

The sun was setting. Its light glazed the palm trees like wild fire. It would be dark soon on the streets, then dark on the mountain top.

It wasn’t the kind of dark that cities are used to, where an array of neon advertisements, headlights and streetlights fight back the night. It would be truly dark but for the stars, those distant sparks untouched by the black and the rot. The smell would never reach them. They would never know that their radiance had lit the stage of the apocalypse.

The city, with its squat buildings and crowded greenery, was quiet. A great fear had gripped the landscape, the living things, the buildings, and the earth itself. The air was still, the constant tropical wind over the island had temporarily abated. It was the peak of summer, and unusual for the warm winds to hold their breath.

Were it not for the ocean, the great Pacific reaching out and tasting the sand, there would have been no sound at all.

Time might have stopped here, and if the sun hadn’t continued to fall there would have been no way of knowing for sure.

It was the calendars and clocks that were most confusing. The many calendars had many Xs over many days, but the Xs never stopped on the same one, and the many clocks had their hands frozen on different minutes and seconds. When it had come down to it, the batteries in the clocks had been worth more than the information the clocks provided. The sun had never yet failed to complete its journey across the sky, but for those that remained on the island, living to the break of day was no longer a certainty.

The silhouette of a creature emerged from the lobby of the nearby hotel. It was the tallest building around, though it had only a few floors. It was a place with many rooms, meant for many different people, and so it was strange to see it empty. The place had all the characteristics of abandonment, standing in ugly accordance with the rest of the city’s structures. Were it not for the growth, the crawling vines and bursting bushes reaching higher and higher, the hotel would have looked truly dead. Many of its windows had shattered. A hundred mounds of debris had collected at its doors and on its balconies. It was of the same spirit as the clocks and calendars. It was in limbo, stasis, a grey purgatory challenged only in the light of day.

The creature walked out and away from the hotel and the beach, stopping as he reached the mostly empty parking lot. He had awoken only five minutes previously, but he wasn’t drowsy. He wasn’t tired. He was hungry. With one mechanical motion he wiped his face, smearing his long black hair out of the way of his nose. He had been crying in his sleep, as was so often the case. He never knew why he cried, upon waking. He didn’t know what one’s tears were even for. They had appeared occasionally on the others’ faces, distinct from the blood, but he’d never known tears to mean anything, or be anything really. The creature didn’t lend them (or the dreams that brought them) much thought. He never lent anything much thought, and everything was irrelevant that had nothing to do with his hunger.

He was a creature, but he was often mistaken for a man. Or maybe it was the other way around. He was somehow always two things at once, or one at a time, or not.

It didn’t matter to the man, the creature, that it was becoming dark. He was used to that; he had actually grown to prefer it. He could smell his way through the streets easily enough, the cloud of death hanging over the city was diminishing every day. He began to walk down, away from the hotel, away from the salt, and towards the decay, but he stopped when the dying light groped at his face.

He was short, shorter than an average man, and rugged in every way. His clothes hung on him like some assortment of items draped thoughtlessly over a coat hanger. He wore no shoes. Beneath the clothes his body rippled with muscles, fibrous cables and ropey sinew in desperate tension between limbs, but all in perfect coordination and stillness, hiding an explosive power terrible to behold.

Everything about him was contradictory. He had a handsome face, but it was scarred and uncanny. He looked as though he hadn’t bathed once in his life, but strangely, he was perfectly clean shaven (beneath the grime that clung to his face). Beardlessness was just one element of his strange nature, a nature altogether alien to the world up until recently.

In the moment it would have been easy to mistake this creature for an ordinary man. Only he appeared a man down on his luck, much further down than anyone had been down before. At a glance he could have been objects, he could have been a pile of garbage. He was indistinct from the mess around him, except that he stood still and straight, like a mannequin left too long in the weather. But he  wasn’t still for long.

First, he began to taste the air. In deep gulps he took it in. The smell of the day’s events told him many stories. He smelled a fight, smoke from a distant fire, the rain to come in the morning, and lastly, he smelled several warm bodies and the anguish of one injured. It was the scent of another’s pain that had caused him first to stop and feel the smell. There was freshly spilled blood. If they hadn’t already been so black, his eyes might have grown blacker.

A heat began to fill his chest. The hunt possessed him, and with every passing second he became less man and more creature. Yes, undoubtedly a creature, nightmarish and malformed, the full concert of his being gradually overwhelmed by clashes and clangs from strange and violent instruments.

He smelled them around every corner. He heard the sounds of their retreating steps. They had been unusually close to his home, the hotel. They didn’t want anything to do with him; they never had. He was different than they were. He was stronger, fiercer, and smarter, he was darker, in look and feel. He was far more terrible than the rest.

They knew he liked to kill them. They smelled the violence on him just like he smelled the fear on them. The others rarely chose to fight him unless cornered. He wouldn’t hesitate to turn them to pieces and piles. They feared him because he was one of the few creatures on the island that seemed to enjoy killing.

Well informed by his taste of the air, he looked toward the road. His eyes stood out most, black, fathomless and empty. His mouth hung slightly agape; his teeth were chipped and pointed like a shark’s. With the nature of the creature fully incarnate, he had taken on the face of death itself. He stretched out his hands and his knuckles cracked. On his left thumb a sharp hook protruded, like a cat’s claw, but the thumb on his right was a normal thumb, a strange asymmetry in his features--the hook had appeared when the bone had grown and broken through the skin under where his nail had been.

The night fell. He began to run. He’d smelled it close by. It was weakened, it was easy prey. He ran sometimes on two limbs and sometimes four. He was almost invisible, jumping between shadows, and his bare feet made little sound. He would find it, the source of the smell. It was very close by.

He turned into a familiar alley and followed the scent through the backdoor of an old shop. One of the others was hiding here. It must have smelled him too; it knew the end was near. It’s terror filled his every sense.

He hugged the ground and crawled between the empty isles,  completely silent but for the sound of his hooked thumb-tip clicking across the floor. A year’s worth of accumulated dust rose up in a great sigh behind him.

He heard its frantic breaths and wildly beating heart, and then they were face to face. It was one of the others, it was the one injured in the fight he had smelled earlier. It, like the rest of the others, was inferior to him. It did not have his black eyes. It had normal eyes for the most part, and normal fingertips. Its teeth were chipped but not pointed like his. There would be no fight here.

But, for the first time in memory, he hesitated. Only for a second, he paused.

Something happened to him. A voice, in an unknown language, screamed inside him. The primal score of  clashes and clangs ceased, as everything around him lost its focus, except for the face of the thing before him, a face with a brown eye and a green eye, a thing with long red hair, a face perhaps known in a life before this one. But all only for a second.

In a blink he was upon it, an organic ensemble of parts and pulleys, triggers and struts. He quickly finished what an other had started. Waves of red and brown gathered up into pools, there was a popping sound and then it was over, and so he began to eat, and everything was once again normal to the creature, the ugly thing.

This night was a typical night, the creature would wake only when hungry, would find food, then after his meal return home and sleep. It had been this way for many days. No, perhaps months, perhaps even years. He couldn’t quite remember when it first began. It didn’t matter. It had been this way forever, for all he knew. And it would be forever, as well. Only, forever isn’t as long as he would have thought.

Hastily finishing his meal, he left the small shop to find the river. His food had left him thirsty.

He heard the others piling into the store behind him, hoping he had left something like he usually did. They weren’t quiet, they never clicked along a floor, they were different. They weren’t like him--didn’t have to be like him. They knew they were safe in numbers, and knew they were most dangerous in numbers too. They did not seem to fear their end or plan the way he planned (if it could be called planning). He heard them snarling and barking, fighting over what remained of the fallen thing with red hair and mismatched eyes.

He sped through the shadows, over asphalt and mud. He glided around bushes, trees, and sand traps, away from the small shop and further away from his hotel.

He hurried to reach the bridge over the river and crawled beneath it. The creature may have been a monster, but monsters and men both get thirsty. With agility he slipped down the river’s banks, hopping over fallen trees and the broken barriers blasted from the road, following the path until he reached the water’s edge. The water was unclear, and strange things floated in it, he didn’t care.

The night was mostly over for him, the burning in his chest had ceased. It had been a short hunt, but he was half satisfied. He was drowsy, but not too drowsy. If he let himself get carried away the others might attack him, to finally be rid of his tyranny. It was for this reason that his ritual had to be repeated so often, he could never tolerate vulnerability that follows a true feast, he could never enjoy the week’s sleep that followed it. Feasting was a luxury afforded only to the others, who moved in packs and would watch over each other when night fell and no thing was safe. It was only when food became scarce that the others had resorted to treachery.

He returned to the street and just as soon reached his hotel. Only the creatures who had learned to be silent in the night had survived on the island, any noise within a mile, the creature would hear it.

His footprints marked his return home, a mix of blood and mud, lit by starlight but cast in black. There were dozens of such footprints leading into the building, and all were his. The trails comprised a record of his many returns on the nights preceding this one, gory and bleak in their similarity.

It was only that single moment that had been new, a fraction of a fraction of time, when the creature looked down upon the eyes of another. The creature did not know it, did not remember it, but this moment would be the first of many moments when that unknown voice climbed higher behind his eyes, pleading for the ear of some god or other.

The footprints bloomed out from the lobby’s front doors, a horrible bouquet on display and in full sight of the buildings around, marking his doorstep. Tonight, he left a new flower for it. He passed through the lobby gauntlet, a narrow passage walled by concrete bags that men had skewered with rebar. It was a passage left by those who had lived in the hotel before him. Reaching the stairwell, he had to crawl again over the piles of others’ corpses. He could eat them if so inclined. He could eat almost anything, at any stage of decay, dead or living. His digestion stretched to accept anything, a bottomless pit that burned like a furnace.

But he wouldn’t eat this pile. He’d left their bodies to be smelled by others. Even in their mindlessness they could not confuse what it meant, and they always heeded it.

This was his hotel and his home. It had been a long time since any of the others had dared to enter it. In his memory, it had always been like this and always would be. But his memory was short, and the sun would rise in the morning. His black eyes closed, and as he slept, a woman with red hair and mismatched eyes ran laughing through his dreams.

Stay tuned for Chapter 1 and let me know if you liked the prologue. It’s hard to be motivated to write things when you’re not sure if anyone will read them, and a Novel is the hardest. But I’m up to writing the rest if you’re up to reading it.

Thank you

Michael