A/N: Actually, I may keep the title... what do you all think? Again, feel free to tear apart ---Myjaspercat
Death wasn't quite dead anymore, or really not what you would expect death to be. Instead of someone lying peacefully six feet under and depending on your religion, at home with their one true father; death stood on two feet and walked the streets of its once living life. In fact, the dead weren't really dead, more like the person who once occupied a body just up and disappeared and in its place there was an emotionless, mindless machine that lived off of one factor; kill or be killed. That's what scared most people in the end, I think. That these things weren't really human anymore but a creation of the devil himself, that the time had come for the human race to be erased and cleansed from this planet.
During the beginning of the end most people thought that the dead were only sick and instead of putting them out of their misery (if they could even feel that) they were hell bent on trying to heal them. There was a case up in Washington, where a collection of scientists even put one of those damned things in a pressure chamber thingy because they thought that the infected only had some sort of oxygen deficiency and that regulating the amount of oxygen the infected received would solve all the problem. Like come on, this isn't some good damn Sci-Fy movie. Not surprisingly however, it didn't work. When a few months had gone by and the numbers of infected increased to alarming rates, people started to really panic. It was then, I believe again, that everyone saw them as more then just fucking sick people but as of monsters; an abomination to the world.
It didn't take long from then for the government to get involved. First they started to collect everyone that had symptoms of the infected or of those who were obviously infected and placed them in high security concentration camps. However it wasn't long for things to get so far out of hand that the Senate passed a law to the people; that the public had an obligation to gun down the infected if spotted. Eventually, even that wasn't covering the mass numbers of infected that roamed the cities and with everyone that went free -unnoticed, another was made, then another and another. Their numbers grew so rapidly that the military bombed every large city on a regular basis. The object was to get rid of as many of them as possible, even if that meant a few lives had to be sacrificed in the process.
Curfews were put into place, no-one walked alone down the street and unnecessary doors and windows were bordered up. People lived in constant fear of what they couldn't see or understand. By the time a year passed, the numbers of infected went from hundreds to thousand to eventually millions. Every where you turned a rotting corpse was there, ready to great you with a welcoming grin and fingers that grasped for your flesh. At one point in time, people actually started throwing themselves into the clutches of the dead because they were sick and tires of waiting for when their life would end. People just wanted to get the inevitable over with, to suffer a few minutes of hell so they didn't have to live in an unforgiving, broken world anymore. This mentality led to the end, or what I believe of as the end. Where the infected was the dominating race of our beautiful mother earth and that to see someone with a beating heart was a once in a lifetime oppertunituy.
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125,027 Literary Works • 672,774 Reviews
Upon reading, there were some sentences that felt as though they were run-on sentences or fragmented. An example would be "People lived...eventually millions", the wording you used was great and really had a good ring to it but this feels like a fragmented sentence (At least to me, it does). You really seem to want to get down many events that had happened in the story but it feels as though you're force feeding the reader a lot of information, not that there is nothing wrong with that. However, sometimes a lot of information about a series of different events can overwhelm the reader (Something that had happen to me) and I would suggest either slowing down a bit by getting some character dialogue or by cutting some parts. Again your diction is great, that you managed to choose words that create a picture and this seems to be one of your strong points.
When I read both parts, I wonder if it was possible for you to sort of combine them and paste some of your first part with the second part. Looking at both stories, I sort of could tell how you could bring both parts together and once you got how to clean up you prologues, I'm highly sure you could make a great story.
Love your story and hope that you would continue it.
So moving on from part one to part two, I'm still wondering a bit about what went wrong--I mean, not that anything went wrong objectively speaking, but subjectively speaking it did go a little south. The first major change was the fact that it changed from third person to first person. I mean, that had to be a big jump, and it's sort of jarring for any reader hopping on from the last part. The second major change is, of course, the sudden choice to make this into the 'summary of what had happened' part. Personally I don't think that was a very good decision. As I said before, the zombie apocalypse gig is running it's course, there's not much you can do for it on a large scale--if you want to make a good and memorable zombie story, you need to go for the small character interactions. And in this case, you opted to tell us everything that happened all in one sitting.
And you know, I thought, "Well maybe they're trying to tell us something important and unique that hasn't happened in any other zombie storyline and would be difficult to show in the actual storyline without an explanation", but no--there isn't anything from the premise that an avid zombie fan couldn't conclude from. Heck, I'm not an avid zombie fan, and I recognize the setting here. Trying to find a cure for zombie-ism? Last of Us. The crumbling of a government system? Last of Us. Marshall Law and a curfew system? Yeah, Last of Us. The only thing you don't have here is that this is the literal zombie apocalypse and not a sickness thing, unlike Last of Us. And then you made a comment about it, and it was hilarious to me (for reasons you'll see later on). I don't know, I just thought summing everything up without any notable characters wasn't a good idea.
But anyway, that's just what I thought. Let's go ahead to the highlights and see what I can help you with, other than my rants.
Problems, since you started saying "ALL THE PROBLEMS".
Okay, this is the comment I was talking about. I think this was meant as a joke, and this just highlights how the main character may be lacking in intelligence or something, but I'll give you two situations here--a plague that wipes out an entire nation, or skeletons walking out of their graves, probably stirred by some supernatural force. Which is more likely to happen here? Assuming that they're diseased isn't copying from a Sci-Fi movie, it's the logical thing to do. This is the 21st century we're talking about! We don't burn random women because they might be witches anymore, we go to science to check if we can solve our problems! Yeah, it didn't work, but that doesn't mean it was a stupid decision. It was the rational choice when you have no idea what to do. The main character can say "Jesus, this isn't a Sci-Fi movie" when he acknowledges the insanity of the fact that these things are being driven by an unexplainable force that may or may not be supernatural . Sci-Fi is more reasonable than horror because at least sci-fi tries to scientifically (albeit fictionally) explain it's shit. Unless this was supposed to be a joke--and if it was, I think you should've played it out a bit longer so the audience gets it--a character from a horror movie should never be able to call out another character for being 'irrationally sci-fi'.
Than, not then. Also, try to guard your language, be careful with cuss words. The more you cuss, the less powerful the cuss becomes, so you better use it in a creative and colorful way. From the angle I'm seeing it, you look like you're just throwing cuss words around to make the work sound 'edgy', when really it doesn't add anything to the flavor of the work. Try using it in a lighthearted but dark joke, that usually highlights the cuss' flavor--but in any other case, especially if used for emphasis, it backfires way more than it works.
Signing out,
--EM.
thank you for the review, to clear up something, the difference in tense change between the first few parts is because part one is actually a flashback of sorts while the main story will be written in first person. I was actually having trouble deciding how I was going to type out the flash back so yeah if you have any suggestions. Thank you again, and i get where you are coming from about the zombie genre getting overused, I entered a contest to write an apocalyptic novel so I'm trying to create a more original zombie novel... or at least I hope I am. Also, I'm sorry about the fact that this entire part is pretty much a backstory, I wanted it out of the way to set up room for the rest of the plot but if it doesn't work I am willing to work through it and lace it in with the rest of the work. Thanks for all the help I really appreciate it and yeah...
thank you for the review, to clear up something, the difference in tense change between the first few parts is because part one is actually a flashback of sorts while the main story will be written in first person. I was actually having trouble deciding how I was going to type out the flash back so yeah if you have any suggestions. Thank you again, and i get where you are coming from about the zombie genre getting overused, I entered a contest to write an apocalyptic novel so I'm trying to create a more original zombie novel... or at least I hope I am. Also, I'm sorry about the fact that this entire part is pretty much a backstory, I wanted it out of the way to set up room for the rest of the plot but if it doesn't work I am willing to work through it and lace it in with the rest of the work. Thanks for all the help I really appreciate it and yeah...