Zombie Chaos Book 1: Bloodbath in the Big Easy Read online

  Zombie Chaos

  Book 1

  Bloodbath in the Big Easy

  by

  Laura and Daniel Martone

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  For the Survivors

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Survive the Zombie Chaos

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2017

  Laura and Daniel Martone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the authors — except for brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imaginations and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, and individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, visit the authors’ website: themartones.com

  For the Survivors

  Chapter 1

  “Good morning, Mr. Bassett. This is your wake-up call. Please move your ass.”

  – Valentine McKee, Tremors (1990)

  When I opened my eyes, I immediately spotted the axe, still embedded in the creature’s skull. The ornamental stone weapon my wife, Clare, had given me as a Christmas present a few years before had proven to be more than sufficient for hacking into a zombie’s head. I’m sure that was in the sales pitch at whichever French Quarter store she’d purchased it. Probably Marie Laveau’s, our favorite voodoo shop. It’ll split a zombie skull open in one chop!

  Somehow, I knew Clare would’ve hated to see the black obsidian blade inches deep in zombie gore — blood and brain matter splattered along the carved wooden handle as well as the stones, hide, feathers, and fur that decorated it. On the other hand, she’d be grateful it had saved my life.

  The lump on the back of my head throbbed as I stumbled to my feet. A patch of dried blood marked the lowest edge of the concrete steps leading into our rear apartment — likely the result of my noggin colliding with it. In fact, I’d struck it so hard I hadn’t come to until morning.

  Goose bumps dotted my forearms, no doubt thanks to lying outside all night. Rubbing my flesh to warm it up, I peeked around the left corner of the building, down the alley, to the blue, seven-foot-tall wooden gate that opened onto St. Ann Street. The path was clear of any other undead.

  Luckily, I’d managed to close and lock the gate after the first zombie clawed his way into the alley. Though the creature had tripped and tumbled onto the ground, giving me a slight head start, I hadn’t been able to escape him completely.

  Scrambling to his feet, the disgusting thing had chased me toward the courtyard at the rear of the property. Before reaching our door, I’d had — in the dim glow of the patio lights — my first tussle with the undead. It didn’t exactly go as planned, but what ever does?

  In the cold light of day, I realized the creature wore a pirate costume. It would’ve been funny if my head hadn’t still been throbbing.

  Regardless, removing the weapon from his head was almost as tough as sinking it in had been. Every time I pulled on the handle, the entire body would rise, like the axe wasn’t ready to relinquish its first kill. I anchored my foot against the zombie’s face and pulled as hard as I could. The suction sound that resulted as I freed the blade almost made me puke. I didn’t know what the dark putrid liquid oozing from his head was, but it didn’t seem normal.

  Of course, at this point, what the hell is normal?

  Despite the dull ache invading my skull, I couldn’t believe I’d almost been eaten by a zombie. Though not for the reasons you’d think.

  For the previous fifteen days, I’d known the zombie infection would eventually reach New Orleans. If you’d followed my blog — and you were still alive, that is — what you thought were the crazy ramblings of some whack job had now become our shared reality. I didn’t start the blog to boast about my access to inside information; I thought it might actually help some people survive the epidemic. Foolish and naive, maybe, but true.

  In my pre-zombie days, I’d never helped anyone whom I didn’t love or at least like a whole lot. The blog had been my way of atoning for more than four decades of selfishness.

  Naturally, I knew none of that would matter anymore. Soon enough, the blogs wouldn’t exist at all. There would be no Internet, not one website. Hell, it wouldn’t take long for the entire globe — or what remained of it — to lose its precious access to electricity, not just the billions of ridiculous sites that made up the World Wide Web. Civilization would disintegrate, if it hadn’t already, and little would remain except the desire to survive at all costs.

  As for me, I wasn’t some conspiracy theorist with a ton of stolen data — or a government agent at the top of the pay grade. I was just a lowly entrepreneur, trying to avoid working for “the man,” when I stumbled onto the truth.

  My most recent home-grown business had involved creating smartphone apps. OK, I didn’t actually create anything. I merely came up with the ideas and planned out how the apps would work. Then, I had to find someone much brainier than I was to build them for me.

  At first, I’d tried collaborating with a few college kids on the cheap, but that didn’t work out so well. Incompetence was expensive at any price.

  So, after much trial and error, I’d finally found the perfect guy for the job. As with so many businesses in the good ol’ U S of A, I’d had to outsource the programming to India. Like most overseas contacts, Samir had begun our professional relationship as just an electronic employee, creating whatever weird apps popped into my head. Luckily (at least for me), he was extremely skilled at actualizing my ideas — and incredibly efficient, too.

  After six months of successful releases, though, we’d gotten to know each other as more than mere colleagues. Initially, our friendship had emerged through emails and online chats, but it hadn’t taken long before we started talking on the phone or via video chats. Even though we lived in two very different countries, with two exceedingly different cultures, we seemed to appreciate a lot of the same books, movies, and hobbies.

  Our wives had similar interests as well — although Dibya, Samir’s wife, had beaten us all when it came to brains and a career. Like Samir, she was a programmer, but while he and I had been developing an app to help people locate their vehicles in a mall parking lot (or something equally trivial), she had been working for the United Nations to establish a network of satellites that would essentially provide free Internet access to the entire planet. Dibya was wicked smart: if not for her, we would never have learned the undead would soon be a real-life dilemma.

  In truth, most people had been r
ather skeptical of the I-World Initiative — the project she’d been a part of. They’d wondered how the U.N. could possibly provide free Internet access without any ground-based towers. Despite such criticism, the U.N. had approved — and fully funded — the program.

  During a five-year period, the U.N. team had launched forty geo-synced satellites — and ultimately run into problem after problem. Satellites had lost power and become space junk. One had plummeted back to Earth, costing a whopping twenty billion dollars to replace.

  By the time the U.N. team had discovered that almost half of the satellites were misaligned — meaning users would have to be in outer space to send and receive email — the public skepticism had turned to anger. People all around the world had labeled the I-World Initiative a complete failure, and the media (including all the late-night talk shows) had spent almost a month bashing it.

  Then, while trying to remotely realign several of the satellites, Dibya had discovered a signal — well, there was no other way to say it — from “somewhere else.” No matter where the mysterious signal originated, it served as a warning to the human race: Earth was about to be invaded by creatures that, for lack of a better term, resembled the living dead. Worse, they’d bring with them a virus that would allow a zombie infection to radiate across the planet.

  Dibya did her best to spread the word — about the signal and its aftermath — but it was an uphill battle. Don’t you remember the day you initially heard the warning? The first time the media released the “Oh, shit, we’re all gonna die!” message on national television?

  That’s right, you don’t remember it — because the media never issued such a warning. Local, regional, and national government fucktards throughout the world never revealed the bad news. Difficult as it was to accept in the digital age, the powers-that-be managed to clamp down and lock up any whispers of Armageddon. Yep, great plan. What a bunch of asshats.

  Once the breach occurred — and the infection, virus, or whatever it was, started to spread — the whole damn mess was covered up. As country after country went dark, those in the know used every excuse they could. First, solar flares were the supposed cause of any lost communication. Then, borders were closed due to an advanced version of the Ebola virus. In fact, thanks to denial or ignorance or just plain selfishness, they did everything possible to prevent the world from finding out… it was all coming to an end.

  Chapter 2

  “Theyʼre coming to get you, Barbara! Thereʼs one of them now!”

  – Johnny, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

  Not long after learning about the undead invasion, Samir and Dibya had virtually vanished off the face of the planet. Yet, the only reason I knew about any of that was thanks to Samir: turned out the last app he’d prepared for me actually wasn’t an app at all.

  One afternoon, a couple weeks earlier, a mysterious overnight package had arrived at the French Quarter Postal Emporium, where Clare and I kept a mailbox for our various business ventures. Labeled “URGENT” and addressed to “Joseph Daniels” (not one of our business names), the package contained a solitary flash drive — in itself an unusual occurrence since Samir normally just uploaded the latest program to our shared cloud server. Once I’d learned the truth, though, the puzzling flash drive made a whole lot of sense.

  Following the breach and the ensuing epidemic, the powers-that-be had likely tracked Samir and Dibya’s outgoing communications. Leaving snail mail as their last resort. And somehow, by the grace of someone, it had reached us. Not snow, not rain, not heat, not even zombie invasions could thwart some couriers.

  More than a little curious, I’d loaded the app onto my phone and entered the password Samir and I typically used for all of our unreleased programs. But what was supposed to be our version of a white noise generator — to help people sleep or meditate or just calm the fuck down — had actually contained an audio message explaining everything that would happen.

  As an unwelcome bonus, Samir and his wife were apparently in extreme danger and, consequently, wouldn’t be able to contact me anymore. It saddened me to think I’d never talk to him again, but I also felt grateful he’d thought of me in his darkest days and managed to send me anything at all — much less classified information that probably had gotten him and Dibya killed.

  Then, at the end of his message, came the kicker: I had only three weeks to get ready for the end.

  However the epidemic had started, it had spread alarmingly fast — via direct bites or any other zombie fluids people managed to get into their systems. At first, the disease simply killed its hapless victims. Then, it animated the dead cells in any infected human bodies (with their brains still intact), effectively bringing recent corpses back to life as flesh-seeking monsters. Just like any good zombie flick, except without the benefit of make-believe.

  All of those “chemical spills” that killed thousands across India had simply been the first dead zones. Incidents that, in the beginning, had been covered up by local and regional governments. When those entities could no longer handle the crisis, the task had moved to India’s national administration. Every time the truth leaked out, the next level of fucking bureaucracy had done its best to put a lid on it.

  In the end, I had far less than three weeks to prepare for the impending doom. Dibya’s calculations on the probable distribution of the infection had missed the mark on that score, but sadly, the actual timing was the only thing Samir and his wife had gotten wrong.

  So, I thought I had another six days to get out of Dodge. Well, the zombie gore on the pavement told me otherwise.

  No doubt most people would’ve considered the whole mess one giant prank. I probably would have, too, but something about Samir’s tone had made me a believer, even more so when I’d tried to contact him. As he’d predicted, that proved to be impossible. By the time I’d heard his message, he and Dibya had disappeared.

  Clare and I had always been horror fans, particularly of zombie flicks and TV shows, so to her credit, my wife had believed me when I’d told her about Samir’s message. OK, well, that wasn’t exactly true. It was one thing to have a fondness for tall zombie tales; it was another thing entirely to trust such post-apocalyptic scenarios could really happen.

  In all fairness, I’d had to play Samir’s actual audio recording for her — a few times, in fact — before she’d accepted the new normal. Granted, Clare hadn’t wanted to believe our friend’s heartfelt warning, but she’d ultimately agreed to vacate our life in New Orleans before the three-week deadline.

  Still, Clare would’ve hated seeing the courtyard like that. Blood splatter covered the front of our grill. Our patio chairs lay in disarray, and whatever goo had oozed out of the zombie’s head also dripped from the legs of the plastic folding table that held our ultra-inexpensive washer and dryer.

  With my head throbbing and my stomach grumbling for sustenance, I righted the chairs and rolled the undead pirate closer to the grill, away from the rear steps. Big mistake. The foul-smelling goop slowly spilling out of his head splashed all over the pavement.

  It didn’t really matter, of course. I never expected to return to the apartment once we were safely somewhere else. Clare would never see the courtyard in such a state. In fact, she would never again see any of what had become, over the past four years of living there, our pride and joy.

  Nabbing the apartment had marked the first time we’d ever had a private courtyard — quite a coup for renters in the French Quarter. Most courtyards in New Orleans, especially those in the city’s oldest neighborhood, were either enjoyed by a single homeowner or, in the case of buildings turned into apartment complexes, shared by all the current tenants.

  Our building, however, only housed three apartments: two in the front, along St. Ann Street, and ours in the rear, accessible via a gated side alley. Since we (and the landlord, if she were still alive) had the only keys to the gate, Clare and I had the courtyard all to ourselves. Not the roomiest space, but we’d still managed to transform it,
within our small budget, into a cozy retreat, a place to grill and relax, a sanctuary from the craziness of the Quarter.

  Sadly, though, not one item from the courtyard had been part of my prep work for the oncoming zombie apocalypse, so it would all stay put.

  My gaze shifted to the tiled table beside the grill, a faded red canvas umbrella sheltering it and the four encircling chairs from the sunlight. Clare and I had shared so many romantic meals at that table, so many card games and cocktails with friends. All that was over, though. Most of those friends were surely dead by now — either unwilling to believe Samir’s warning or ill-prepared for the premature zombie onslaught.

  To be honest, though, I’d never really liked most of them all that much. Besides, I had other shit to worry about. Like my family. Is that wrong?

  As I stared at the table, trying to will myself to go back inside, I heard soft grunts and shuffling footsteps in the adjacent courtyard, just beyond the fence that had long separated us from our nosy rear neighbors. That decrepit wooden barrier — with its broken slats, rusted nails, and half-ass patches — was the only downside of our private oasis. For years, our landlord and the owners of the house behind us had battled over who should repair the run-down fence, which just got weaker with every windstorm, rainfall, and hurricane.

  Perhaps what happened next shouldn’t have surprised me then. I might’ve secured the front gate, after all, but I’d done nothing to fortify the back fence. So, it did little to prevent two zombies from crashing through the already rotted slats, the sound of splintering wood jolting me from my reverie. The shuffling I’d heard had no doubt become a desperate sprint once the two creatures had caught a whiff of my scent.

  “Shit!” I cursed as the first one stumbled toward me.