New Eden

So here it is, my first original story. Well, the first one I have put online. I have a GTA one online, but its not as good as this one, in my opinion. Reviews are appreciated, as they help me improve my writing and tailor it to what readers enjoy. Finding a balance between what people like and what I enjoy writing is one of the most important parts of this process. Anyway, enjoy the story.

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The house is quiet, as are most of them these days. I stand outside in the cold winter afternoon, the snow beneath my booted feet crackling as I walk in a slow circle around the run down home. My breath is visible when I exhale, and the wool cap on my head does little to protect my ears. I need them uncovered so I can hear any signs of life. So to speak. The crisp Montana air is chilling, but it's not the cold that sends a shiver down my spine. It's what i'm here to do. After going once around the house, a one story four room structure, I nod to my partner, a muscular man by the name of Spyder. His actual name is Steve, a korean guy from california. I've known him since he was fifteen and I was nineteen. I'm twenty seven now, he's twenty three. We call ourselves brothers, but we look nothing alike. I'm a white guy. Brown hair, cut short now, and blue eyes. I'm six foot one, and weigh one hundred and ninety five pounds. He's korean, has a shaved head, and wears contacts that make his eyes blue like my own. Five foot nine, one hundred and sixty pounds. He has tattoos all over his body. The mother mary on his right side with tattoos of her own, a dragon across his chest, and a huge tribal spider covering his back. It's that spider that gave him his nickname. He pulls out a quarter and flips it in the air. "Tails." I call out. It lands on the hood of the truck and I look at it. Heads. "I always lose, you're cheating somehow asshole, it's only a matter of time before I found out how." Steve laughs. "Whatever dude, you can't always win, don't be a pussy." I smile as he reaches into the cab of the truck to get our gear. The truck is a big four wheel drive chevy. It used to be a sheriff's truck, brown and green with lights on top that we have since taken off. No one was using it when we found it, so I laid claim to it. I sigh. I don't like this job, but it's time to clear house.

He tosses me a pistol grip 12 gauge shotgun. The last eight inches of the barrel are cut off. My choice of shotgun is military issue. I already have my sidearm, a 357 magnum revolver, in a holster strapped to my left leg. I prefer revolvers to pistols, they dont jam, and are easy to maintain. Especially useful in this day and age. He has his own rifle, an m4 assualt rifle. Easy to carry, easier to use. I get the shotgun because I lost the coin toss, so I'm going in first. He has his nine millimeter with him. We both have machete's on our backs. You can never be too careful in this line of work. After checking the door and seeing it's locked, I step back and kick it in. Towards the handle, on the side, never in the center. If you kick a door in the center trying to open it, you're likely to hurt your foot and alert whoever is on the other side of that door that trouble is coming in, and from which direction. The door slams open with a loud crack, and I see immediate movement. A child comes ambling up to me, a huge toothy smile on her face. I raise the shotgun and fire, aiming for the head. She had maybe been ten.

Going in fast, Steve is right behind me. We both spent a few years in the army, the massive amount of training we went through entering and clearing houses comes instinctively, we dont even have to say a word to each other. I hear two shots from his side, and I dont turn around. He's fine, or I would have heard more. Screaming, for example. The living room i'm in has three chewed bodies on the floor, lined up nice and neat. I pull out my revolver and shoot each of them in the head once. Three shots left in the sidearm, four in the shotgun. Steve comes out of the kitchen and nods. It's clear. Frowning I look down the one hallway. There are two rooms left, a bedroom and a bathroom. Experience leaves out the bathroom. In a house this small, there would be noise of anything moving around. The bedroom door was wide open. "No way a kid did all three, these guys were hunters, tough ones." I motion to the hallway, and steve nods again, moving in behind me as I go down to the bedroom. We check the bathroom on the way, nothing there, better safe than sorry. Looking into the bedroom, I see an open window with the curtains blowing outside of it, three cots, a closet with no door, and three piles of neatly stacked clothes. I lowered the shotgun.

"Well, that was easier than we thought it would be." Steve says to me, I nod, going over everything in my head. "Very little blood, bodies lined up nice and neat, one zombie. A small one too." Frowning, I head outside to the clean air. "I guess it was only one. Crappy hunters if it only took one of them to kill them all." Steve says, but he doesnt believe it either. I speak into the radio attached to my belt. "It's clear, bring up the diggers." I hear some static, then, "Ok cutie, we're on our way up, our date for tonight still on?" Steve laughs. I shake my head and we begin to drag out the bodies, lining them up and stripping them down. Should they come back, they will be easy to identify at a distance from lack of clothes. We had been called out here on the town C.B. radio, they said there were at least five. We only saw one. Four more are lurking around somewhere, goddamn zombies.

It has been one year, almost to the day, since the dead in arlington cemetery began rising up and deciding to munch on the still living. Slow, stupid, and strong as hell. The president was giving a speech on why we should move the soldiers in the cemetery to another place, so they could use the area for a new state of the art aids research center. It was a stupid idea, and the dead soldiers seemed to think so as well. He was one of the first eaten. A corpse approached him and he apparently thought it was a war veteran who was badly scarred. His screams were heard throughout the nation, thanks to CNN. After that, things went downhill. It wasnt in just Arlington that the dead were rising, but all across the nation. The military struck back with all the effectiveness of a blind man shooting at a barn wall. We quickly found out that not only were there more dead in the ground than there were living people, but that only head shots would kill them. Imagine that, the movies were actually right.

Steve and I were scuba diving when it happened. We were searching through a well known shipwreck off of the coast of california. There was no treasure, we held no illusions that we would find something, but it was cool to be able to say we were there. Steve saw it first, a man walking along the bottom of the water, simultaneously floating up and sinking down. We thought he was drowning, and swam over. When we got there, we saw that his flesh was coming off of him in strips. He tried to claw at us, but I shot him with my speargun, pinning him to the hull of the ship. He still struggled and bled. That attracted some sand sharks in the area. We left quickly, we didnt want to be there when they went into a frenzy.

When we got back to shore, there was chaos. People eating people, then those people getting up and eating others. The second part took a bit to set in, in the last year, we've timed it over a hundred times. It usually takes about four to five hours for them to get up and begin the hunt for flesh. If they are bitten near a major artery, then they come back within the hour. If a person is bitten but gets away, they have twelve hours tops before they turn. If they manage to get through the skull and into the brain, they dont come back. Once the brain is destroyed, they die. The good news from that was that only people who had died in the last few years would come back if already buried. Bad news, in the last few years before this chaos, tens of millions of people died. Very few from brain damage.

We found some other survivors, and fought our way to the beverly center mall in hollywood. It's stereotypical, but it was the closest place we could think of that would have everything we needed, and a way to keep them out. It lasted nearly a month. Supplies were good, its an eight story building, with the bottom three levels being parking. We blocked it off, but some people were not able to adjust. A single mistake with someone driving a truck through the gate sealing us off from the outsiders was all it took. It was at that moment I decided that I didnt like most teenagers. We managed to get out of the city and headed to the desert. We were going to try and stay out in the open, where we could see everything coming, plus, we both knew about Ft. Irwin, a military base in the Mojave. By the time we arrived, we were down to four people besides Steve and myself. By this time things had settled down for the most part. Most of the country was assumed dead and dying. They stuck to the cities, not liking the open wilderness. They didnt eat small animals, such as dogs or cats. They did like the primates at the zoo, and lizards, surprisingly.

Large animals, like lions, tigers and bears, they liked to eat the zombies. But the side effect of that was that they in turn got infected. Infected animals are like normal animals, but they dont feel pain, or get scared. Its something entirely different and much more terrifying than the normal zombies. They dont lose mobility or intelligence, and they gain a desire to taste human flesh. The good side is they dont discriminate between the zombies and regular humans. Discovering this by accident cost us five survivors. I kick myself every day for not considering that the larger animals might turn. I wont make that mistake again.

Ft Irwin was abandoned. It wasn't very well protected, the zombies had no problem getting in there and killing everyone. My own experience in the army was different than steve's, he went infantry, I went military intelligence. We both went ranger from there. All jokes about irony aside, one of the benefits of the training is that you learn a little about everyone else's job as part of your own. Infantry does the same thing, but only in as far as they can learn themselves. So when it came to getting into the arms room, we had no problem. We procured two vehicles, a fuel truck and a five ton. We filled it with supplies, such as MRE's and ammo, and as many people as we could find that were still alive. Our total went from six to fifteen. We decided to head north, into the mountains. The trucks could go pretty much anywhere, and we needed an advantage if we were going to survive for much longer.

Montana had been decided on, and so we went. We stuck to the desert as much as possible, but we eventually hit mountain roads. We immediately found out that the zombies hated the cold. They might not feel the cold, but it slows them down considerably. They still have to use muscle to move, and frozen muscle doesnt move very well. We also discovered that they are attracted to heat. The first night we lost three people. Thats when we learned that vision doesnt play into their senses. Some of the ones who attacked us had no eyes, but they locked onto a living person like they had twenty twenty vision. During the next day, we discussed where exactly we were going. So I told them. When I was a kid, maybe ten years old, I had lived in a small town in montana called Libby. It had a population of maybe five thousand, and the best part was there was only one cemetery, and it was over a hundred years old. It was in the rocky mountains, where even during summer it was fairly cold. The chances of survivors there was good, they were all lumberjacks, mill workers, and hunters. They were tough people, and they were used to fighting for survival in harsh winters. We werent disappointed.

Nearly two hundred people had survived. They had even blocked off a part of town, stocked the area, kept regular guard patrols, and welcomed any survivors. Our supplies were welcome, the extra fuel was desperately needed, and there were only four of us who couldnt fire a gun. Two elderly women, one child, and one teenage girl. She was petrified since the night before, her parents had been two of the three to go, the third had been the husband of one of the women. We were welcomed with open arms, and once it was discovered that we had military experience, we were almost immediately put into authority positions. One year later, and we are on the council that leads the community. I hope it lasts, but something is nagging at the back of my head. I wish I knew what it was. Something about that house.