well i got a hankering to try my hand at a long zombie novel. i don't have many of the ideas hashed out but i had to start writing something or i'd go crazy. i was wondering what you guys thought of the first bit i have. i'm worried there's too much exposition in it for the beginning of a novel, and i'd like opinions.
Cancellation Human Race (working title)
Barricaded in his only place of safety for five months and twenty-nine days, Zachary Hithrain was beginning the process of going stir crazy.
It wasn't so much the surroundings, as he had tailored his abode to such an occassion as had occurred. The only deviation from his plan for post-apocalyptic survival was that instead of that instead of live intruders, he was killing ones that should already be dead.
No, the problem here was the fact that he needed to know what sort of survival rate he was looking at. Judging from the numbers of walking corpses that had meandered around and into his fence, it wasn't high.
He sat in his customary place atop his armored sanctuary, eyes closed, head lolling back, drinking his last beer on the last day he would spend here. He had drunk his beer very sparingly since the infrstation came to his little patch of land, only breaking it out on particularly good days, like the day he saw a one-seater Cessna fly overhead. He'd been too slow to the flaregun that day, but it was his first and only affirmation that there were other people nearby, ones that weren't braindead.
Frank Sinatra blared from the wind-up phonograph behind his cheap folding lawn chair. He'd placed it facing the shortest side of his fence - the one that held the front gate. The bodies were getting high there, high enough for the rotting things crawl up and almost over.
"You go to my head, and you linger like a haunting refrain, and I find you spinning round in my brain, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne," Zachary sang along with Frank. He tapped the trigger of his Viet-Nam era M14 with his finger in time with the beat.
"You go to my head, like a sip of sparkling burgundy brew, and I find the very mention of you, like the kicker in a julep or two."
He opened his eyes and scanned the no man's land outside his compound. There were roughly thirty of them out there, mostly at the front gate, attempting a jail break in reverse. One was at the top of a pile of permanently dead corpses that had accumulated that day, trying to climb over and only succeeding in getting tangled in barbed wire. Zachary shouldered his rifle, aimed and fired in the space of a second. The zombie's face collapsed, blood and brain matter spraying from the back of its head, and it fell backward off the fence.
Zachary lay his rifle back on his lap. When this all began, he'd kept a log of how many he'd killed. He'd stopped after the second month. The count was at four hundred thirty one then.
"The closest is Johnny. Seven hour drive. Won't have enough gas. Ain't like to be any left at the stations, neither. After the first three hundred miles, it's a hike."
He thought Johnny, one of his HAM radio buddies, might be able to meet him about a hundred miles outside his own town. He had a farm where the infection hadn't spread, and lived with his family and several farmhands. Limitless food, clean water. A paradise in hell.
Zachary took a swig of Samuel Adam's as he reflected on this. He wasn't happy about leaving his compound. His two-story house surrounded on all sides by twenty foot high steel fence, except in the front where it was ten feet, all topped by barb wire, was his own fortress. Not a single zombie had bested his defenses, and not for lack of trying. They knew he was up here. And they wanted him.
it's unedited so there may be some grammar mistakes and misspellings.
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