To get you excited for the first novel set in the world of Adrian’s Undead Diary, Carl Meadows and I are giving away the first ten chapters or so of his book. A couple at a time, once or twice a week here and on Facebook.
Here are the first two entries: Not Sun Tzu, and A Woman With a Sort of Plan.
NO MORE HEROES
Lockey vs the Apocalypse
Book One
An Adrian’s Undead Diary Novel
By Carl Meadows
Edited by Chris Philbrook
PART 1
“CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE
RUCKUS, SIR?”
1ST ENTRY
NOT SUN TZU
Hey. It’s 2010. It’s June. I think it’s like the 24th? 25th? Honestly, I’m not sure. My phone is dead and there’s no power to charge it. And who wears a watch these days?
Anyway.
Two days ago, the world shit the bed.
I’m not talking about an accidental shit the bed, dear reader, like a fart gone wrong that leaves a little chocolate streak on the sheets. Oh no, I’m talking about waking up from a major girly night and realising you’re riding the wave of a faecal tsunami that’s drowned every part of the bed you’re in. I’m talking a half hour of screaming and anal incendiaries as you purge your system. And the situation is made worse because that guy you liked? The one you finally hooked up with and came back to your house? Your hunky chunk of man beef?
Yeah. He’s been sandblasted by your rectal volcano.
That’s how bad the world has shit in its bed.
I’ve no idea what happened, or why it’s still happening, but the world has become a horror movie. I’m talking a legitimate zombocalypse. The dead are up, shuffling about, lunging – yes, lunging- and fucking eating people.
No, wait, that’s not right. They start eating people, yet as soon as the victim is dead, the meal comes to an end. Then it’s like they just wait for their newest recruit to sit back up after a bit of twitching and join the silent shambling mass, looking for the next victim.
Movie zombies all shuffle around moaning, arms outstretched, or hissing like I do when someone’s stolen my last tampon.
Not these ones.
These are ninja zombies, hungry stalkers that sneak up on you if you don’t constantly pay attention. I nearly walked right into one downstairs last night and just managed to get my hand on its chest, pushing it away while it snapped its jaws at the empty air in front of my face. Pant shitting stuff. Most of the guy’s face had been chewed off, leaving a bloody half-skull snapping its teeth together in the air. There’s something inherently chilling about teeth smashing together over and over like that, plus Skeletor looked at me with such fury. Weirds me out how they always seem so rage-filled when you get up close. They’re dead and should be empty, but it’s like there’s something… there. Something… wrong.
Eesh. My butt is puckering just at the thought.
I’m just spilling all this out as it comes to me, trying to make sense of all this bullshit.
The world is ending. Everywhere is fucked. Everywhere. The world is a porn star being aggressively boned in all available orifices and there’s still a queue impatiently waiting for summary insertion.
Hey there, unknown reader who may have found this scribbled notebook. I hope you can read my handwriting. The name’s Lockey. Well, my actual name is Erin. Erin Locke, but my friends – well, basically everyone – calls me Lockey.
I’m 26 years old, I have a mouth (and apparently a hand when a pen is in it by the looks of it) that runs off before my brain gets in the driver’s seat. I make frequent and often obscure pop culture references and I have a particular set of skills, skills that make me a nightmare for zombies like you. If you give the world back now, I will not look for you…
See? I love movies, comics and general nerd-stuff and can’t help but quote them.
What are my particular set of skills? Well, I’ve been doing parkour and mixed martial arts from thirteen. Zombies can’t chase you up a drainpipe when you spider-monkey the fuck away from them and using the aerial highway when possible makes life a little easier. Thankfully, I haven’t come across any climbing zombies as yet. I’ll probably just give up on life if that happens.
MMA is great for up close and personal if I end up tangling with another survivor for a can of soup. Ground and pound on a zombie is pretty useless, as no choke hold or arm lock is gonna stop Chompy McTwatface from chewing through your arm. Sleeper holds are ineffective against the rage-filled dead. Plus, I came up in the care system. When you’re a teenage girl and you start shaping like a woman, a lot of unwanted attention comes your way. I found the best way to deal with such attention was a kick in the balls followed by a knee to the teeth, so I applied myself to perfecting aggressively violent self-defence.
It also helped when Skeletor popped up like Aladdin’s genie and tried to bite a chunk out of my beautiful face. When I put my foot through the front of his knee, then kerb-stomped his head like an 80’s football hooligan, it felt pretty useful then.
What’s my other skill? I drive like a Hollywood stuntwoman.
Okay. I might be overdoing that a bit, but I’ve been stealing cars and joyriding them since I was fourteen. Admittedly, there were some “incidents” where things didn’t go “as planned” and I may have “crashed” a few times, but nobody’s perfect, right?
Look, I never said I was a shining example of goodness and light, but a girl has to do what she can to survive right? I came through the care system and learned to take care of myself. So, I’d describe myself as a mix of Ripley from Aliens (because she’s bad ass and you don’t know me so I can say whatever I like), Tigger and Jackie Chan, all rolled into one sweet-cheeked package of awesome. Go Team Lockey. (And the crowd goes wild…)
But all my awesomeness aside, I’m still shitting myself.
Do you know what is notone of my skills?
Strategy.
I’m more of a reactive, rather than a proactive girl. I wing it. I ride the wave of fortune and sometimes I’m up high, or sometimes I’m teeth-deep in liquid shit.
This was the latter.
#
What was I thinking? Who thinks a fucking high school is a good place to ride out the apocalypse? Well, my dearest reader, let me tell you about this rare and uncompromising genius.
Sticks two thumbs up, rams them backwards.
I’ve obviously watched too many movies where the great strategists say, “if you own the high ground, then victory is assured.”
Well, Boudicca here took that to heart, didn’t she? And the tallest building around was the top floor of the high school in this shitty small English town so off I went. Everyone was coming out, a flood of panicked teenagers desperate to escape, so Sun Tzu here decided to go for the high ground. Well done Lockey. You are now the proud resident of a classroom, with huge windows looking out over a town filled with fucking zombies.
They’re everywhere, because this high school is right in the middle of a residential area.
Sigh. I am so wise. Pass me that great tome of knowledge, so I can chew on it like a retarded donkey.
It’s not a big town by standards, but it’s still a town. In the full bloom of life, there had to be a good ten thousand living here. Not exactly a rural hamlet, so there are people everywhere. Well, there were. Most of the town fled when Hurricane Shitstorm landed, but they’re the live ones. The rest are dead and just milling about, all lost and forlorn.
Such a weird thing to say… the dead are just milling about.
So, what’s my problem? Well, let me tell you, my inquisitive unknown reader friend. About ten minutes after I shimmied my way up a drainpipe and through an open window, some panicked helicopter parent in their giant SUV (pointless for a town this size) came thundering through the school gates to pick up their precious little angel. Of course, Mrs. Thomson-Smythe isn’t exactly trained for high speed driving and as she came through the gates into the car park and rounded the corner at pace all panicked for her little cherub’s safety, she managed to plough through a field of teenagers.
Dear. Fucking. God.
It was awful. It was like a bowling ball through pins, scattering the poor little bastards everywhere, though the ones at ground zero just made a god-awful “thunk” sound as they were hit square and smashed flat, then ridden over. The asphalt of the car park near the school gate was splashed with crimson and mangled uniformed kids, which then unleashed all kinds of crazy. Kids started screaming, the mother in the giant SUV was screaming, I was standing two floors up screaming. Did I mention the screaming? There was screaming.
Turns out it got even worse, because one of those little angels that got splashed was her own little angel. So, Mrs Thomson-Smythe gets out of the SUV, screaming in shamanic tongues as she goes to attend her very dead child who – yep, you guessed it – summarily reanimates and bites a mouthful from the fleshy front of her throat. Shit, sometimes these zeds reanimate reallyfucking fast; there was probably a total of twenty seconds max, from dead teenager to flesh-rending undead. I saw the arterial eruption even from my elevated and distant position. Gross.
Some more rapid twitching followed from other mangled kids, which was then followed by more Dawn of the Dead, and well… you can guess what happened from there.
Multiply zombies to the power of “oh shit.”
Those kids who had gone to help friends – or were holding their phones up and recording the horror on their grainy little cameras like assholes – suddenly fled the scene like they were escaping from a fart-clouded elevator, but not before a metric fuck ton had pieces chewed from them. Some of the bites were insta-kills like poor Mrs Thomson-Smythe, some were slow bleeders that would kill them in minutes, and others ran off home nursing apparently superficial bites to arms and legs. I’ve seen enough zombie movies to know what that means though. They’ll just die at home later and eat their parents and siblings.
It’s in the movies and it seems to be the case in this messed up reality. Getting bitten equals doomed. It might not be right away, but once those zombie teeth leave their mark, the doomsday clock starts ticking on you ending up a brain-chomping cock-rot.
So, that means now I have a car park full of mangled, blood covered high school kids and parents, a big SUV blocking the vehicular exit of the school – so even if I get in one of the vehicles in the car park to make my daring escape I can’t get the bastard out of the gates – and a whole heap of “what the fuck” to sort through.
Having raided the stores for this shitty little school notebook and a box of pens, I’m writing all this bullshit out to try and order my thoughts. I’m a social person who doesn’t know when to shut up, and with nobody else to talk to, it helps that I’m talking to you, unknown future reader who will find this after my death.
Shit. I need to give you a better name. I’ll think on that.
Honestly, I have no fucking clue what to do next. I’m trapped in a high school, surrounded by a legion of little bastards that want to bite chunks out of me, with no clear method of escape or plan for what comes after.
I mean, I could just run over the back field behind the school and leave all this shit behind me, but the field backs on to houses. It’s a residential area and I don’t really fancy the idea of jumping over a fence and coming face to face with a zombie doberman.
Fuck, is that even a thing? Does the zombie virus – or plague, or possession, or whatever it is – pass to animals? Being chased by a pack of zobermans is noton my “things Lockey would like to experience” list. See, just the thought of it is making me talk myself out of that plan. I love dogs. I really do. They’re awesome. But I’ve never been a huge fan of massive dangerous-lookingdogs that could tear all my lady-parts out in a single snap.
I like terriers, collies, mongrels and pugs, but if I see an undead doberman or rottweiler coming to chew through my most precious of orifices, I’ll probably just die on the spot out of sheer fucking terror. I love dogs. I really love dogs. But killer zombie dogs?
Nope.
So, if heading into the heart of a zombie council estate to be eaten by zombie smackheads or undead canines is off my list of things to do (and it is) I’ve got to figure out a way to get my ass from this school. I’ve got to get out of this building, through the car park, out the gates and prance off into the sunset. Though… I’ve got no idea where to go.
This planning shit is hard.
2nd ENTRY
WOMAN WITH A SORT OF PLAN
Well, not only is sleeping in a school classroom overnight uncomfortable, it is fucking pant-shittinglyterrifying. Honestly, I thought I’d been dropped into Silent Hill last night. When it gets dark, and there’s no power… holy shit, it gets fucking dark. And let me tell you, my dear stranger, the night carries with it a capacity for pant-smearing terror that the day cannot hope to match.
There’s a pile of desks and chairs I’ve pushed against the classroom door I am now lovingly referring to as the Great Wall of Lockey. It’ll take me ten minutes to pull all that shit clear to leave and I’m planning to do that shortly, because… remember how good I said my planning skills were? Well, what does a human being have to do to survive?
Yup. Eat and drink.
Sigh. I’ve got no food and no water. I’ve seen a hundred zombie movies and clearly learned nothing. You know how you laugh with your geek mates about what you’d do if the zombocalypse descended like a great celestial turd to curl upon the world? How you think you’ll be a fucking champ and know exactly what to do?
Bullshit.
Unless you’re a proper survivalist who truly ispreparing – even hoping – for the end of civilisation (and anybody who says theywantan apocalypse is a total turd of a person), when it comes, all us normal folk do is squeal “arrgh, shit, zombie, run!” And we all run like the little bitches we really are with no plan, no good sense, and not one fucking clue. How the fuck is the world supposed to survive a zombie apocalypse when most people run away from spiders and can be defeated by peanut allergies? We’re just not that strong these days.
So, here I am. Hungry. Thirsty. And of all things, I’m absolutely bursting for a shit. Yeah, that’s never in the movies is it? Everyone just thunders round popping their rounds into zombie skulls, but the heroine never says, “Dude, hey, dude… I gotta drop the kids off at the pool.” That’d be badass having Charlize Theron drop her panties and gruffly wave everyone ahead, nine-mil clasped in teeth and squatting because she’s got to saw a log in half, and all the while the zombies are getting closer. Whoosh. That’d be some tense cinema right there.
Nope, the need to go potty is never in the movies.
I need to go and purge myself and I’m building up the courage by scribbling in this stupid notebook.
Last night was so damn quiet. When you go to sleep at night, there’s usually some ambient noise outside your little bubble. Cars in the distance. Wind in the trees. Teenagers laughing overly loud because they’re pissed up on some cheap booze bought with a false ID. That kind of stuff.
Well, somebody pressed the world’s mute button last night. I couldn’t sleep because it was too quiet. I could hear my own heart beating in my ears. Freaky. You know what’s freakier though? Hearing the squeak of shoes somewhere below you.
There are zeds still in the school, maybe random staff members or students. How they died, I don’t know. But hearing that squeak… squeak… squeak…like some horrific metronome echoing up the stairs as something shuffled somewhere below? Eesh.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.
Like he was shuffling around in a circle. I’ve been waiting for whoever that zombie is to shamble off before I go out hunting.
In the movies, our intrepid heroes wield their handguns like a boss, headshot here, headshot there, headshots everywhere. But this is England. I can’t very well throw three darts for one-eighty and distract the zombies with a nice cup of tea now, can I?
Aw, I’d fucking lovea proper brew right now. Mental note… get a brew. I’m from Liverpool originally. A solid, boiled-in-the-bag English northern girl. How am I supposed to take on the apocalypse without a brew and two sugars? Mind you, there’s no power, so how the fuck will I even boil a kettle? Ray Mears I am not.
So, I’ve got something that resembles a plan. I think. Ha, because we all know how well Alexandra the Great has done so far eh?
But anyway, I’ve got a plan. I need food, I need water, I need a weapon and first and foremost, I need a great big shit. And the stretch goal? One cup of tea. Just one.
So, first off, there are toilets on the bottom floor of this building, right at the base of the stairs. How do I know this? Well, because this shithole was my high school when I was a teenager a decade ago and not much has changed. I know this place, so at least I’ve got that going for me.
Once I’ve dropped the kids off at the pool, it’s a quick run through some double doors into the canteen. In there, there’s got to be water, dried food, and canned stuff. From there, back up to base HQ and stash any fat loot I acquire.
Then I go back to the middle floor, to the end of the corridor that leads to a walkway crossing the inner courtyard, over to the sports hall, then down the stairs where all the art rooms are and…. drum roll please… the fucking woodwork department.
Tools. AKA weapons. Big ass hammers, screwdrivers, stuff. Before the morning is out, I’ll be hammers-in-hand and feeling better about my chances of escape. So, here’s the plan.
Downstairs, take a shit, wipe (front to back, I’m no savage), canteen to get food and water, back upstairs, dump my loot, back to middle floor, across to sports and arts building, downstairs, load up on weapons, back up to my classroom HQ, take the car, go to Mum’s, kill Phil, grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over. How’s that for a slice of fried gold?
Like my old stoner mate Rodney, the plan I have is simple.
But unlike Rodney ever did, this plan might just work.
Gotta take a dump first though, I’m fit to shit.