Somnambulist

A/N: HMMMM. This needs heavy editing. I love this story so much, but its taking a lot of work. I started it my freshmen year of college, but alas.... WRITERS BLOCK AND LACK OF TIME FOR RESEARCH AUGH.

In developing and writing this story I really want to create a Zombie novel that breaks many of the clichés. I also want to push the fear of Zombification (loosing the self/mindlessness) as well as the horror of being eaten alive. In my opinion many Zombie stories gloss over or don’t utilize the full potential of the Zombie, and I have never come across a realistic telling of a Zombie horror story. Many movies focus on a very short span of time following the horror movie formula, creating disposable characters and unrealistic actions to solve problems. Things such as weapons and experience as well as accuracy under stress are rarely taken into account.
I want to create a story that follows the life and development of one character and their attempts to realistically survive in a horrific apocalyptic world.

I am shooting for a novel that will eventually be between 500 to 700 pages in length.
The novel will be split into 15 -20 volumes that are furthermore split into three sections. It alternated between third person and first person.


Volume One : The Human Factor

Chapter One

Metal. It was the taste of metal. Polishing, polishing, polishing. Take it apart, put it together. Test the silencer. Take aim. Shoot. Waste a bullet for the sake of making sure that the thing still works. Waste a bullet, save your life.

It was the taste of metal. Everything tastes like metal these days. The food, the water, the air. A constant lingering of blood in the mouth. It would have driven me crazy had I cared. I stopped caring sometime ago. Can’t blame me. I’m still alive. I’m one of the lucky ones. Sure, got called crazy. But hell, it was the crazy ones that lived. The stupid ones died, disappeared in the maws of undead. The weak-willed ones; they killed themselves. Wasted themselves. Suicides.

Idiots.

I’ve seen a fate and dealt with it. Still am. A fate worse than anything you can imagine. Worse than your nightmares, your anxieties, your fears all crushed together to make an oozing mass of despair. There was no hope for our fate. No end. That’s what makes this worse than a nightmare.
There.
Is.
No.
Hope.


Chapter Two

I’m a guy who likes dramatics. Dramatics can get you killed in this world. Post-apocalyptic. I always favored the word apocalyptic. Apocalypse. Never thought I would live during one.

Polishing.

Metal.

The taste, the smell, the touch. Its all been branded in my mind; I’ll never forget it. Its cold, unfeeling. Appropriate. We’ve grown cold. Numbness settled in. A few still hold onto emotion, a few aren’t totally dead inside. But that’s it; only a few.

I’ll polish this till the day I die.

Hah, I laugh. “The day I die.”

Death is nothing. Sometimes it is more preferable than this sorry state of existence I have right now. The only way I refuse to go is to become one of them. One of those zombies.

Oh, but I’m still polishing. This is the thing that saves my life, over and over.
It may one day be the thing that ends it.

Oh, how trite. How ironic.

I live for irony.

My gun. My gun is my life-saver, my lover, my life, my everything. The only dependable thing. I take care of her and she takes care of me. The only dependable thing. Barracks can be broken down, buildings can burn, humans can turn on each other...but good old machinery will always be there for you.

My only thing.

Mine.

Chapter Three

We’ve all been lucky enough to survive. Its been a little over two years, or was it just shy of two? I can never remember. Time doesn’t mean much to me. Survival is the only thing I strive for. The others have taken to rebuilding their lives, rebuilding themselves. New persons in our remote little crevice of Hell. How quaint. I’m one of the few that’s too broken to go back. And yeah, cliches still exist in post-apocalyptic worlds. Loner. I’m one of those. I barely associate with a few. I can see our self-appointed leader shaking his head sadly in my direction. Pompous ass.

Not really.

A good guy, but he gets on my nerves. He’s all about bringing everyone together, fighting as one, blah blah blah, bullshit. I sit away from their “fire-side chats”. I give him credit for keeping most of us alive these past two years, though. In my small part, I helped keep the rest alive. I was also the one that put a few of them out of their misery. That guy though, he changed them from soft Americans, to tough and hard-as-nails...survivalists? I guess that’s the right word. Our entire purpose is to survive. If enough of us can survive the next five or ten years, humanity might have a chance. Heh, those sons of bitches have to rot sometime!

I let out a huge grin, finally stopping the never-ending act of polishing my gun, and I somehow managed to stumble up into a stand. Food was on my mind.

My name is Stolkstad.

Chapter Four

My name was Jeremy Graham.

Chapter Five

Rebecca was whispering something to John. She was smiling.
The jealousy that usually bit me at moments like this has started to fade.

Chapter Six

The life that we knew has ended. In 2007, everything changed. I couldn’t say it happened overnight, but it happened fast. Everything turned upside down in the span of a few months. At first, the attacks were rare. Unconnected. The work of madmen. We didn’t pay much attention. We had become that desensitized to violence and crime. But when the attacks started happening more frequently and started spreading, then we began to notice. At first it was the supposed work of a cult. Then some kind of Mass Hysteria... a biochemical weapon that had been engineered to cause delusions and murderous inhibitions. Contaminates in the water, some kind of drug in the food. Word came to us that it had started in other countries days before anything happened in the US. It had to be some kind of disease. Every single theory for this madness was exhausted until finally, the ridiculous was accepted. Zombies. Mindless, soulless, flesh-eating zombies.

By then, as the cliche went, it was too late.

Luckily, Gregory had managed to convince myself and Rebecca that it really was happening. That way, we managed to get out of the city before swarms of people tried to flee, blocking the roads and inevitably, signaling the death sentence for everyone. The place turned into a buffet.

The zombies went where the people were.

I saw some of it. I saw the massacre, the feeding-frenzy. Nothing I ever saw before that or after even came close to the magnitude of fear and horror I felt because of that one moment.

Lucky Aces draft

A/N: Piece handed to my fiction class a month or two ago. Haven't edited it yet, (edited since some of my friends took a look at it though) since I'm working on expanding it for the second round. Got a lot of good crits on this, and now that I haven't looked at it for a month, I can see how annoyingly superfluous and pretentious parts of it are. But I still like it. If my second piece goes over well, I'll be doing that style for all the back stories for Somnambulist. Planning on busting out work on that this summer. Plan to get the first draft done at least, since i have the entire story worked out. Blah, blah, blah. Zombies, what what?

Lucky Aces


With no effort at all he had managed to strike it big. His friends slapped him on the back and called him lucky.
He hadn’t felt lucky. When he walked into the gambling station, he felt numb. Placing the money down in rhythmic repetitive motions, he whispered to himself the amount he was betting, slightly shaken at his uncharacteristic banality.
$2 straight trifecta. Numbers 2, 8, and 3. The heavyset man behind the counter never glanced up as he took his money.
When he stepped out of the gambling station he lit up a cigarette. The day was windier than he would have liked, and windier than usual for summer. He flicked his cigarette and the ashes disappeared almost instantly into the air, swept up and swallowed by Mother Nature.
His ebony hair fell into his eyes. He reminded himself that he needed to get it cut. He knew that he would remind himself again and again before he finally got around to doing it. It wasn’t important.
Unabashedly, he watched as the racing track’s many visitors shuffled past him. He liked to watch them. He liked their obliviousness and ignorance. He felt pretentious leaning up against the building’s cold gravel wall, with his black hair and leather jacket, eyes covered with dark sunglasses and a cancer-stick in hand. This was not his intent.
Twenty-two and at a loss for where he wanted to take his life, he knew that today was the last day he would speak to his father. Facing disownment, he began envisioning the conversation that was coming. The only saving grace was that he had the luxury of explaining everything to his father, instead of the older man hearing it from a third party, like his now ex-boss.
That would be worse. So much worse.
He ridiculed the thought of it being a conversation. It was going to be more of his father berating him with his stern militaristic tone. He hated that tone. Something along the lines of how he was not the son his father wanted would follow his confession, how he embarrassed his family, how a good military education would have beaten the coward out of him.
No, his father didn’t have what most people thought of as conversations. One day the old man was probably going to keel over from a heart attack, chronic anger the only enemy he didn’t see coming out of the bushes. Edgar just wished that the hour glass had run out already for him so he didn’t have to face him. He could deal with never having to speak to him again, but his dear old ma - that was another matter entirely. He was never close to his siblings – older brother went off to Iraq, tattooed dog tag on his torso, gun in one hand, bloodlust in the other. His sister was a widowed military wife - she hasn’t spoken to anyone in the family in two years. Last he heard, she was doing programming work, single mother of a three year old girl.
He knew how much a life could change. At the kickoff of a race, everyone started out on the same playing field. In mere seconds, their name would be celebrated or forgotten.
Edgar Valdez was twenty-two and had quit his job, but he was not without regrets.
The wind tugged the cigarette out of Edgar’s hand, as if finding the act of smoking it offensive. He cursed and watched what little of it was left land in the small pond on the other side of the gate fencing the race track in and the rest of the world out.
His father was going to kill him once he told him. Working in the Air Intelligence Agency wasn’t something you just quit. Besides that fact, Edgar had gone back on their agreement. It was one of the few jobs he could have to get out of going into the military. That was the deal. His father had pulled strings. He had to serve his country.
The race he had bet on was going to start soon. He pushed his sunglasses back up his nose. When he made his way to the fence he politely wove through the people to find a place that suited him. It was the downfall of being shorter than the average man. When he could see fine, he pulled out of his pocket the scrap of paper with his carelessly picked numbers printed on them.
The race had started.
He wondered what he was going to do with the rest of his life as he clutched that white ink-smeared paper.
In mere seconds, three horses coming in in three different places in an exact order made him over seven grand richer.
Edgar Valdez hadn’t felt lucky.