I Zombie I has been officially released! You can purchase the book (for the incredibly low price of just $0.99 cents) from the links in the right navigation of this sight (or by clicking one of the following: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.) But for those that like to get a free snippet of what you’re getting your mind, heart, and soul into…here’s a sample.
I was trapped in a small room, Spartan in decoration and utilitarian in nature. The only items of note in the room were my notebook and digital recorder. My head was pounding, and my mouth felt like I’d been sucking on cotton rags. I had no memory of what had brought me to this room. No matter how much I strained, I couldn’t recall anything after reaching for Susan in the hallway.
I had the recorder, but I was afraid to listen. I didn’t want to know what had happened, what would have caused me to actually lose fragments of my memory. The fear of drawing ever-closer to full-on zombie was overwhelming.
Fuck.
Right now was one of those moments when I fully understood why desperate people deep-throated shotguns to splatter-paint their living room walls with their gray matter. If I had a gun at this moment, I thought I could pull the trigger. The idea of ending my life to avoid what I thought was imminent sounded perfectly logical.
Seriously, given the choice of dying with some dignity or trundling around like an extra in “Dawn of the Dead,” I knew exactly the choice I would make. I hadn’t seen even the slightest joy in the eyes of the moaners. I’d seen their suffering face to face. I smelled the rot in their breath, heard the constant death-rattle seeping out between their lips. It was horror. Grand Guignol in the flesh, and I wanted no part of it.
It seemed, however, that I had no choice. Dr. Godwin posed the same questions I had been asking myself: ‘What were we to do, should I turn into one of the undead? Was it worth risking the lives of the others? But why this? Why did I agree to this insane experiment? The greater good? I wanted so badly to shout to the rafters, ”Fuck the greater good! I’m out!” I knew I couldn’t really do that. But I could at least get some answers.
“Hey! I want to talk!” Pounding on the door with all the might I could muster in my dying limbs rattled my bones more than it made any real noise. “Doctor Godwin? Susan? Bethany?” My shoulder slamming against the door did about as much good as my slamming fists. I kicked the door. I smashed a chair against it, which did nothing more than bend a leg of the chair and send shockwaves up my arms.
So, it boiled down to this: I was being held captive against my will as I spiraled downward into the black abyss of moaner-hood. It was really dawning on me how fucked the situation was. As if it weren’t bad enough, now I was trapped in a cell with little more than a government-issue, prison-like bed, prevented from doing anything about my situation by a simple door, a door I couldn’t possibly open. I always liked to think that when one door closed, another opened. But right now, I saw only one damn door. Fuck me.
“Jacob?” The voice was obviously the doctor’s, and it wasn’t coming from the other side of the door. It was electronic, disconnected.
“Hello?” I called out.
“I hear you, Jacob.”
“What’s going on, Godwin? Why am I locked in this room?” I tried to ignore the fact that I most likely knew why I was incarcerated. I was hoping a little feigned innocence would win me some sympathy.
“I think you know why you are in your current situation.” The doctor’s voice had an undertone of anger.
I had to continue the lie. Maybe there was a chance the father had no idea his little daughter was infected. That was, of course, if she even was. I had no way of knowing for sure if I had bitten her when I attacked her in the hall.
“Jacob, I believe your condition has progressed more rapidly than expected. Because of this, I had to lock you in that room. This way I can observe you more carefully.”
No matter how right the man was, I wanted to kill him at the moment.
“Jacob, I am going to have to rely on you for blood samples. I can’t risk infection at this stage.” The voice broke my daydream of crushing Godwin’s skull and sifting through his oversized brain-pan. Instead, I listened. I was instructed to take a syringe full of blood every hour and place it in the small sliding hatch-box attached to the door. After I did this, the doctor would safely snatch his sample from the box on the other side of the wall.
The problem with this plan was that I had never drained blood. My own, or anyone else’s. I had never stuck a needle in a vein. To me, the act had always seemed like a sort of morbid masturbation.
I really had no choice but to comply. Maybe I would get an early parole for good behavior if I just learned how to draw my own damn blood. It was starting to really hit me that the only way I was getting out of this nightmare was if either a cure was found, or I died. I hadn’t lost my mind yet, but the writing on the wall was crystal clear. Even a zombie-in-training could read it.
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