Zombie Story Excerpt -- Unedited

Image Source: unrealitymag.com




Here's a rough excerpt from the zombie story I'm working on. This is soooooo not easy. I'm not a zombie fan myself, so it is kind of hard to create a story based on them. I hope I'm hitting close to home with this one, but only time will tell...and the publisher that I'm submitting this to :)

Anyways...let me know what you think.




***********************************




Reanimateds

By Marcus Twyman


Joy has no place in this world. This ugly world full of death and decay. The sky is still diseased, its once blue expanse now full of gray soot and toxic fumes. We did this...humanity did this. We destroyed the only place that we could call home.

In our struggles to stay young forever, and drive the coolest cars, own the biggest homes, we've sealed our fate. The protesters tried to tell us – they said that we were killing our world, ruining the balance of life, playing God. Well...they were right. We got what was coming to us.

Humanity has been forced to hide, afraid of what we've released into the world. It wasn't a virus, or a parasite, it was just our full potential...we released the full power of our genome. We gained immortality...to a degree.

I was one of the big CEO's that funded the Infinity Project. My company dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into formulating an enzyme that could act like a catalyst and kick our genes into what our scientists called, resurrection mode. See, our cells age, split to reproduce, then die, then those new cells go through the same process and die. Every time our cells split, we age due to errors in our genetic code that get copied and then copied again. These errors and other cellular garbage, called free radicals, place us on the track for death. Aging is a type of disease that starts at the cellular level, and I wanted to nip it in the bud...not to mention make a fortune selling the cure to the masses.

Five years into the program my scientists found the enzyme, the catalyst for cellular rejuvenation. When taken in small doses over a period of one year, people began to age backwards! Hair would regrow, bones became denser, muscle mass increased...people were getting younger right before your eyes. Then the side-effects started. People complained of migraines, their eyes became sensitive to bright light. Motor skills became impeded and heart failure started to kill everyone who'd taken our enzyme. The backlash from both the media and society was immense. Unfortunately, we hadn't seen the worst of our creation...we'd only just touched the tip of the iceberg.

The deceased totaled more than a million all across the globe. The world was thrown into a state of mourning...that is until the deceased started to rise from their graves. These things were thought to be dead...corpses. They would shamble along and attack healthy individuals, tearing the flesh from their bodies and consuming them. Governments sent armed guards to destroy these beings and discovered that when a victim escaped an attack and had been bitten by one of the reanimated, they soon fell ill. Within thirty hours a person bitten by one of the undead creatures became just like them.

Scientists were puzzled, unable to understand what was happening to the victims of these attacks until they took a look inside some of them. It was the enzyme – the catalyst. The reanimated carried it in their saliva, but it wasn't the same enzyme that had been created and manufactured in the laboratories, it was one perfected by our bodies...




*************************


Well, let me know what you think. Thanks everyone!

Best Regards,

Marcus