Zombie Chaos (Book 1): Escape from the Big Easy

by Martone, D. L.

  Escape from the Big Easy

  Zombie Chaos Book 1

  by

  D.L. Martone

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Survive the Zombie Chaos

  About the Authors

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2020

  D.L. Martone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the authors – except for brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imaginations and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, and individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Formerly known as Zombie Chaos Book 1: Bloodbath in the Big Easy.

  For more information, visit the authors’ website: dlmartone.com

  For Andy & Chris

  Chapter

  1

  “Good morning, Mr. Bassett. This is your wake-up call. Please move your ass.” – Valentine McKee, Tremors (1990)

  When I opened my eyes, I immediately spotted the axe – still embedded in the creature’s skull. The ornamental stone weapon – which my wife, Clare, had given me as a Christmas present a few years before – had proven to be more than sufficient for hacking into a zombie’s head.

  Bet that was in the sales pitch at whichever French Quarter store she’d purchased it. Probably Marie Laveau’s, our favorite voodoo shop.

  It’ll split a zombie skull open in one chop!

  Somehow, I knew Clare would hate to see the black obsidian blade inches deep in zombie gore – blood and brain matter splattered along the carved wooden handle as well as the stones, hide, feathers, and fur that decorated it. On the other hand, she’d be grateful it had saved my life.

  The lump on the back of my head throbbed as I stumbled to my feet. A patch of dried blood marked the lowest edge of the concrete steps leading into our rear apartment – likely the result of my noggin colliding with it. In fact, I’d struck it so hard I hadn’t come to until morning.

  Goose bumps dotted my forearms, no doubt thanks to lying outside all night. Rubbing my flesh to warm it up, I peeked around the left corner of the building, down the alley, to the blue, seven-foot-tall wooden gate that opened onto St. Ann Street. The path was clear of any other undead.

  Luckily, I’d managed to close and lock the gate after the first zombie clawed his way into the alley. Though the creature had tripped and tumbled onto the ground, giving me a slight head start, I hadn’t been able to escape him completely.

  Scrambling to his feet, the disgusting thing had chased me toward the courtyard at the rear of the property. Before reaching our door, I’d experienced – in the dim glow of the patio lights – my first tussle with the undead.

  It didn’t exactly go as planned, but what ever does?

  In the cold light of day, I realized the creature wore a pirate costume. I might’ve laughed if my head wasn’t still throbbing.

  Regardless, removing the weapon from his head was almost as tough as sinking it in had been. Every time I pulled on the handle, the entire body would rise, like the axe wasn’t ready to relinquish its first kill. I anchored my foot against the zombie’s face and pulled as hard as I could. The suction sound that resulted as I freed the blade almost made me puke. I didn’t know what the dark putrid liquid oozing from his head was, but it didn’t seem normal.

  Of course, at this point, what the hell is normal?

  A clang snapped me back to reality. I gazed toward the rotting fence that separated my courtyard from the one behind it and noticed the jiggling top of a ladder leaning against the other side.

  Before the zombies came, it hadn’t been uncommon for my rear neighbor, Tommy, a short, spry, seventy-two-year-old native New Orleanian to scurry up his ladder and, without notice or invitation, drop into our courtyard. He had a penchant for trimming our bougainvillea bush, a hardy, magenta-flowered vine that grew so well in the Big Easy’s humid, subtropical climate, it often drooped over the fence and spread onto Tommy’s property as well. Like most humans, it had no respect for boundaries.

  I’d never minded my nosy neighbor’s occasional disruptions because, frankly, I’d always despised that damn plant. Our landlord had put it there long before Clare and I rented our apartment, so my wife had never let me chop it down.

  But every time one of us had ventured outside to trim the branches, we’d come back looking as if we’d just been attacked by an enormous, bloodthirsty porcupine. Why? Because beneath the gorgeous flowers lay a plethora of large hidden thorns that would often leave ugly scratches and bloody trails along our arms and legs.

  So, whenever Tommy had decided to attack the bougainvillea with his big ol’ clippers, I’d never tried to stop him. The trouble was… after climbing over the fence, he’d typically have no way of returning to his own courtyard – since Clare and I kept our ladder inside the apartment.

  As a result, he’d simply exit via our front gate – which he’d always leave unlocked and wide-open. And nearly every time he’d done that, particularly when we weren’t home, some drunken Bourbon Street reveler had inevitably found his or her way inside our alley.

  Thanks to the zombie invasion, however, such an unwanted visitor could turn out to be an undead carnivore.

  The ladder shuddered again, and I realized Tommy wasn’t the one climbing it. A rail-thin Asian man, wearing a dirty white apron, slowly stepped up each rung. He resembled one of the cooks from Moon Wok, the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Dauphine and St. Ann. Of course, I couldn’t be sure because at least half of his face was missing, and a useless eyeball dangled from his left socket, bouncing against his shredded cheek.

  Given that I’d just woken up – with a head injury, no less – I still felt a bit dazed as he reached the second-highest rung on the ladder, his good eyeball fixed on me. He moaned and stretched his torso across the top of the fence separating our courtyard from Tommy’s.

  An instant later, the ladder slipped sideways, and he tumbled over the barrier, falling headfirst into one of our garbage cans, which in turn tipped over. Despite his obvious lack of coordination, he somehow managed to right himself, though most of his body remained inside the large plastic receptacle, rotten food and other bits of trash falling all around him.

  While the former cook could no longer see me, he obviously still smelled me. Immediately, he charged in my direction and rammed my chest with his trash-can suit of armor. Stumbling backward, I tripped over the zombified pirate and landed squarely on my ass. The axe flew unhelpfully from my hand, and Sir Dead-a-Lot,
who must’ve sensed I’d fallen on the ground, launched himself at me again.

  Naturally, he also tripped over the dead zombie and promptly landed on top of me. Soon, I found myself hugging the round, unwieldy garbage can, straining to push it (and the creature it contained) off me. I saw the zombie’s feet still moving and heard his frustrated groans, but fortunately, the creature couldn’t reach me through the hard plastic.

  Following an awkward struggle, I finally managed to propel the can off me, sending it in a haphazard roll toward the other side of the courtyard. The whirling motion must’ve loosened up the dangling eyeball because, beyond all odds, I watched as it jetted through the air and impaled itself on one of the bougainvillea thorns.

  I mean, seriously, what are the odds?

  The maneuver also had another unintended effect. As he’d revolved, the zombie must’ve gotten less wedged up inside the can, so once it came to a stop near the far wall, he grunted and began violently twitching, trying to wriggle himself free. I’d just scrambled to my feet and retrieved the axe when he finally popped out of the can. Either super-dizzy from his involuntary roll or simply stupefied due to his extreme undeadness, he took a moment to get to his knees. That gave me just enough time to cross the courtyard and, as he struggled to stand, plant the goo-stained axe blade into his head. Unlike my experience with the pirate, the blade slid easily from his skull as his body dropped motionless to the ground.

  I leaned against the building, exhaling heavily, and glanced between the two zombies lying dead – or, rather, dead again – in my courtyard. Despite the dull ache invading my skull, I couldn’t believe I’d almost been eaten by two zombies. Though not for the reasons you’d think.

  For the previous fifteen days, I’d known the zombie infection would eventually reach New Orleans. If you’d followed my blog – and you were still alive, that is – what you thought were the crazy ramblings of some whack job had now become our shared reality. I hadn’t started the blog to boast about my access to inside information; I thought it might actually help some people survive the epidemic. Foolish and naive, maybe, but true.

  In my pre-zombie days, I’d never helped anyone whom I didn’t love or at least like a whole lot. The blog had been my way of atoning for more than four decades of selfishness.

  At least that’s what I tell myself.

  Naturally, I knew none of that would matter anymore. Soon enough, the blogs wouldn’t exist at all. There would be no Internet, not one website. Hell, it wouldn’t take long for the entire globe – or what remained of it – to lose its precious access to electricity, not just the billions of ridiculous sites that made up the World Wide Web. Civilization would disintegrate, if it hadn’t already, and little would remain except the desire to survive at all costs.

  Fittingly, the last-ever social media post would probably come from someone marking themselves safe… only to die after hitting enter.

  As for me, I wasn’t some conspiracy theorist with a ton of stolen data – or a government agent at the top of the pay scale. I was just a lowly entrepreneur, trying to avoid working for “the man,” when I’d stumbled onto the truth.

  My most recent home-grown business had involved creating smartphone apps. OK, I hadn’t actually created anything. I’d merely come up with the ideas and planned out how the apps would work. Then, I’d have to find someone much brainier than I was to build them for me.

  At first, I’d tried collaborating with a few college kids on the cheap, but that hadn’t worked out so well. Incompetence was expensive at any price.

  So, after much trial and error, I’d finally located the perfect guy for the job. As with so many businesses in the good ol’ U S of A, I’d had to outsource the programming to India. Like most overseas contacts, Samir had begun our professional relationship as just an electronic employee, creating whatever weird apps popped into my head. Luckily (at least for me), he was extremely skilled at actualizing my ideas – and incredibly efficient, too.

  After six months of successful releases, though, we’d gotten to know each other as more than mere colleagues. Initially, our friendship had emerged through emails and online chats, but it hadn’t taken long before we started talking on the phone or via video calls. Even though we lived in two very different countries, with two exceedingly different cultures, we seemed to appreciate a lot of the same books, movies, and hobbies.

  Our wives had similar interests as well – although Dibya, Samir’s wife, had beaten us all when it came to brains and a career. Like Samir, she was a programmer, but while he and I had been developing an app to help people locate their vehicles in a mall parking lot (or something equally trivial), she’d been working for the United Nations to establish a network of satellites that would essentially provide free Internet access to the entire planet. Dibya was wicked smart: If not for her, we’d never have learned the undead would soon be a real-life dilemma.

  In truth, most people had been rather skeptical of the I-World Initiative – the project she’d been a part of. They’d wondered how the U.N. could possibly provide free Internet access without any ground-based towers. Despite such criticism, the U.N. had approved – and fully funded – the program.

  During a five-year period, the U.N. team had launched forty geo-synced satellites – and ultimately run into problem after problem. Satellites had lost power and become space junk. One had plummeted back to Earth, costing a whopping twenty billion dollars to replace.

  By the time the U.N. team had discovered that almost half of the satellites were misaligned – meaning users would have to be in outer space to send and receive email – the public skepticism had turned to anger. People all around the world had labeled the I-World Initiative a complete failure, and the media (including all the late-night talk shows) had spent almost a month bashing it.

  Then, while trying to remotely realign several of the satellites, Dibya had discovered a signal – well, there was no other way to say it – from “somewhere else.” No matter where the mysterious signal originated, it had served as a warning to the human race: Earth was about to be invaded by creatures that, for lack of a better term, resembled the living dead. Worse, they’d bring with them a virus that would allow a zombie infection to radiate across the planet.

  Dibya had done her best to spread the word – about the signal and its aftermath – but it was an uphill battle.

  Don’t you remember the day you initially heard the warning? The first time the media released the oh-shit-we’re-all-gonna-die! message on national television?

  That’s right, you don’t remember it – because the media never issued such a warning. Local, regional, and national government fucktards throughout the world never revealed the bad news. Difficult as it was to accept in the digital age, the powers-that-be had managed to clamp down and lock up any whispers of Armageddon.

  Yep, great plan. What a bunch of asshats.

  When the breach had occurred – and the infection, virus, or whatever it was started to spread – the whole damn mess had been covered up. As country after country went dark, those in the know had used every excuse they could. First, solar flares had been the supposed cause of any lost communication. Then, borders had been closed due to an advanced version of the Ebola virus. In fact, thanks to denial or ignorance or just plain selfishness, they had done everything possible to prevent the world from finding out… it was all coming to an end.

  Chapter

  2

  “They’re coming to get you, Barbara! There’s one of them now!” – Johnny, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

  Not long after having learned about the undead invasion, Samir and Dibya had virtually vanished off the face of the planet. Yet, the only reason I knew about any of it was thanks to Samir: Turned out the last app he’d prepared for me wasn’t an app at all.

  One afternoon, a couple weeks before the zombie wave hit New Orleans, a mysterious overnight package had arrived at the French Quarter Postal Emporium, where Clare and I kept a mailbox for our various
business ventures. Labeled URGENT and addressed to Joseph Daniels (not one of our business names), the package contained a solitary flash drive – in itself an unusual occurrence since Samir normally uploaded the latest program to our shared cloud server.

  Once I’d learned the truth, though, the puzzling flash drive made a whole lot of sense.

  Following the breach and the ensuing epidemic, the powers-that-be had likely tracked Samir and Dibya’s outgoing communications. Leaving snail mail as their last resort. And somehow, by the grace of someone, the package had reached us. Not snow, not rain, not heat, not even zombie invasions could thwart some couriers.

  More than a little curious, I’d loaded the app onto my phone and entered the password Samir and I typically used for all our unreleased programs. But what was supposed to be our version of a white noise generator – to help people sleep or meditate or just calm the fuck down – had actually contained an audio message explaining everything that would happen.

  As an unwelcome bonus, Samir and his wife were apparently in extreme danger and, consequently, wouldn’t be able to contact me anymore. It saddened me to think I’d never talk to him again, but I also felt grateful he’d thought of me in his darkest days and managed to send me anything at all – much less classified information that had likely gotten him and Dibya killed.

  Then, at the end of his message, came the kicker: I had only three weeks to get ready for the end.

  However the epidemic had started, it had spread alarmingly fast – via direct bites or any other zombie fluids people managed to get into their systems. At first, the disease simply killed its hapless victims. Then, it animated the dead cells in any infected human bodies (with their brains still intact), effectively bringing recent corpses back to life as flesh-seeking monsters. Just like any good zombie flick, except without the benefit of make-believe.