The ZWD Trilogy (Book 1): Zombie World Dominance [The Destruction Begins]

by L. D. King

  Layla looked for Savannah, but she could not be found. She asked the charge nurse at the desk, whose name was Morgan, where she was. Morgan said, “Layla, I know how much you liked Savannah. I’m sorry to have to tell you that she died last night.”

  Layla turned and grabbed on to Landon. Her eyes were full of tears. She opened up and cried as he held her. With Savannah’s death, it all caught up to her. When she came to work at this hospital after graduating nursing school the year before, Savannah had been her trainer. For the last year, she had always tried to get scheduled to work with Savannah. And now she was gone.

  After a few minutes of holding on to her husband, she straightened up as she dried her tears. She was a Registered Nurse, after all. She had a job to do.

  She looked at Morgan and said, “What happened?”

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” Morgan replied. “She got scratched. It was one of the dead patients that died of a zombie attack, and they were moving the body to the morgue. The dead patient had a busted-up hand with a finger bone sticking out. The gurney tipped over. She was helping put the body back on the gurney when it happened. She got scratched by the sharp bone sticking out. We all have to be careful that we don’t get scratched by any of them. If you get a scratch or other minor injury, it looks like that means a death sentence. Are you looking for something to do?”

  “My husband and I were resting. We’re ready to go back to work. Where do you want us?”

  “We’re so short-staffed that we’re no longer assigning rooms at all. Just look around for a patient to help. The dead go out to the loading dock. There’s a map by the elevator. From now on every dead body that goes out will have two people moving it. They’ll wear leather gloves and a biohazard gown with a face mask. If anyone receives an injury from the body, they have to leave the hospital at once. We have gloves at the charge station. When you use a biohazard gown, don’t throw it away. We’re almost out of them.”

  Layla and Landon went off down the hall to find a patient they could help with. The first patient they found was a middle-aged woman that had been slashed across the face. It definitely appeared to be a zombie attack, but when Layla asked her what had happened, the woman told her that she fell in the street. She denied that her wound was from a zombie. However, as Layla sat next to her, she was already starting to slip away, and she was dead within the few minutes since Layla had been caring for her.

  Layla looked at Landon and said, “Will you go to the charge desk and get a pair of leather gloves? I’ll get a pair of biohazard gowns for the both of us. We can ask one of the aides to help. Seth is right there. I’ll ask him. Please be careful. This shit is killing the hospital staff now.”

  “I know, honey. I’ll be right back with the gloves. See if Seth can find us a gurney. I don’t want to carry her to the loading dock. Not now.”

  As Landon went to the charge desk to get the gloves, Layla asked Seth about the gurney. When Landon got back with the gloves, Layla had the biohazard gowns. Seth also brought two sheets to use to roll the woman’s body onto the gurney. That way they could pick her body up off the floor without having to touch her any more than absolutely necessary.

  When the dead woman’s body was on the gurney, Seth and Landon rolled her over to the loading dock. As they passed the elevators, they stopped to listen. They could hear the sounds of people screaming coming out of the closed elevator doors.

  “Landon, can you hear that?” said Seth. “It sounds like someone — or more than one person — is being killed. I can’t tell if it’s coming from upstairs, or the basement. Whatever it is, I don’t want to open those damn doors.”

  “I hear it, too, Seth. It sounds like they’re fighting for their lives. I’m not gonna open those doors for love or money. Whoever it is will have to do the best they can on their own. Come on, we need to get this body in the truck and get the hell back inside before something happens.”

  “You got it. I’ve been to the truck before. We need to hurry. The door on the loading dock has a tendency to fall shut. If we don’t block it open, we’re liable to get trapped out here.”

  The two men moved as quickly as they could. They opened the loading dock door, and Seth used a cinder block to block it open. They loaded the woman’s body in the trailer. As they came back into the building, Landon kicked the block out of the way of the door so it would close behind them. As they pushed the empty gurney down the hall, they saw the elevator doors open. The car was there, and a headless body was blocking the doors open. Landon looked at Seth. “I don’t know about you, but I hope that’s the only thing that was in that elevator. If there was anything else in there, I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Oh, my god — Landon, did you hear that? It’s coming from the ER. Who could be screaming like that?”

  “Come on, man. We have to hurry. Leave this damn gurney here. We need to get to the ER now! Find something you can use as a club and let’s go.”

  The two men ran the last hundred feet to the emergency room. Seth grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall. Landon found a steel pipe that came off a gurney. As they got to the emergency room door, it was standing open. The both of them stopped right where they were. In front of them were eight or ten zombies, fighting with anyone that they could get a hold of. The carnage of bloodied, ripped, torn and smashed bodies began at the door and led inside. In the time that it took for them to get to the loading dock and back, they had managed to kill 25 or 30 people in the ER. They didn’t know what to do. Seth stood frozen in place.

  Landon’s fire training took over. He rushed towards the first zombie that he saw. As he ran, he swung the steel pipe like a baseball bat. He struck the first zombie in the head but it had little effect. He looked past the zombie and saw Layla on the floor. Her head was twisted around backwards on her body, her eyes fixed in a vacant gaze. In the moment that it took to glance at his wife, a zombie that he missed on the floor as he ran past stood up and grabbed him by the head. As the zombie pulled Landon’s head backward, it snapped his spine, killing him. Landon was dead before he hit the floor.

  Seth backed out of the emergency room, dropping the fire extinguisher. As he started to run around the corner, he slipped on the slime the zombies left on the tile floor, causing him to slip. As he fell, his head hit the corner of the wall that he was running past. His body twisted and he injured his spine. The fall did not kill him. He was paralyzed from his neck down. He was still alive, lying on the floor.

  He could see a group of zombies coming up the stairs from the basement. All he could do was watch them coming towards him. Seth laid on the floor unable to move. He would not have to wait for long.

  A nurse’s aide on one of the higher floors above the ER called an elevator to move a body to the makeshift morgue. The dead in the morgue in the basement, however, had begun to turn. The last person to leave the morgue had left the door standing open. That was all it took. The elevator was an older one, where the door remained open on the floor that it was on. The zombies had moved out of the morgue crowded into the space between the morgue and the elevator. The elevator had stopped in the basement, allowing the zombies to move into the open elevator door.

  When an aide on an upper floor then called the elevator, the door closed, trapping the zombies in the elevator car. When the elevator arrived upstairs and the door opened, the aide took one step before he saw the zombies. He started to turn and run, but the zombies pulled him inside. He pushed random buttons as he struggled, hoping that the door would reopen and allow him to escape, but the door remained steadfastly closed.

  The button the aide had pushed was for the first floor. By the time the door opened, allowing the zombies to spill into the short hallway facing the emergency room, the aide had been torn apart.

  The zombies lumbered out of the elevator into the emergency room and began killing one person after another, continuing until they could not find any more people to kill.

  The makeshift morgue in the basement was now wid
e open. The dead stored there had all become zombies. They found the open stairwell and gained access to any floor of the hospital. Nowhere in the hospital was safe now that the zombies had moved out of the basement. It wouldn’t be long before the University Medical Center Hospital would be another place overrun by the dead.

  Epilogue

  It was Midsummer 2037. The zombie outbreak had officially started on Monday, August 18, 2036. That day had become known around the world as Australia Day Zero or ADZ. The days that followed turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months. The world was set on a path of the total slaughter of the human race.

  Over the two years prior to people becoming contaminated with the zombie virus, tens of thousands of people around the world had gone missing. With so many missing people, many accommodations, amenities, luxuries and necessary utilities that people were accustomed to were threatened. The people responsible for providing these services had to scramble to keep shifts manned in order to keep the services running. No one had any idea where these people had gone. None of them ever came back. They were never seen again, as if they had simply disappeared.

  The first six to eight days of the outbreak were terrifying. First, 40 to 45 percent of the world’s population had been infected with the virus at the initial outbreak. All around the world, it appeared that people had been contaminated with the virus at virtually the same time, no matter where they were.

  During the weeks and months that followed the beginning of the outbreak, the world had spun out of control. In that period of time, the human race became the target of a hunt by the zombies, like an animal’s prey being viciously slaughtered.

  So many people had been killed during the first few months that many of the regular services had failed or were abandoned. These services that stopped were what people had become accustomed to. Services such as electricity, water, sewage handling, police and fire protection, transportation including the distribution of food, communications, the banking system that controlled the money and many other services that people used to make their lives comfortable were now gone.

  In those first few months of the zombie outbreak, nearly all the comforts that the citizens of the world were accustomed to were gone. Everyone was in a panic. With the loss of essentially all of the services that people had relied on, it was as if the citizens of the world had been transported back to the mid-1900s. People had to learn how to live like they did 175 years ago with one exception — the addition of the zombie outbreak.

  On Friday, August 15, 2036, the first known zombie kill was recorded in the trendy section of Harlem on Manhattan Island in New York City. Three days later, the first official recorded occurrence of a zombie killing was reported in Melbourne, Australia. That zombie killing officially became known as Australia Day Zero. It would no longer be known as August 18, 2036.

  In the eight months that followed Australia Day Zero, the world had become a dangerous, deadly place to be. There was no end in sight. Australia Day Zero was the day that the world started to die.

  Cities, towns, countryside and rural areas of the world were all becoming fields of death. It all began with the hundreds of thousands of people that had gone missing. Then the first zombie killings of the outbreak started. Most people scrambled to survive. The zombie outbreak brought out the worst in some people. These were the thugs, thieves, road bandits or other vermin of society that killed to take what others had gathered to survive.

  In not quite nine months since the first officially accepted zombie killing in Melbourne, Australia, the world was no longer a safe place to live. It had gone from a happy, healthy, place for the living to a place of fear, hiding, running, darkness and death.

  The world would be doomed if the outbreak could not be stopped.

  Why did this happen? Was someone responsible for all of this? If someone was responsible, why would they have begun this? To what end? What were they trying to achieve? If this was all a grand plan, how did it all go so wrong? Did they have a scheme to stop the killings? Or if this was a military or government experiment that had gone horribly wrong, how could they fix it? Or could this be Mother Nature’s way of dealing with all the wrong and illness that the human race has inflicted upon the earth? In the last nine to twelve months, no one seemed to have any idea of how or where the zombie outbreak originated, nor did anyone know how to stop it.

  As the outbreak continued, like-minded people gathered together to build secure, safe camps for themselves and others. They had made these locations that could provide the necessary food, water, safety and other needs for the people occupying these camps. The problem with the camps was there were simply not enough of them to make much of a difference. The camps were scattered throughout the world. In and of themselves, they provided small islands of hope for the inhabitants behind the walls. Several of the larger camps were capable of accommodating several thousand people each. Two of the larger camps were in Nebraska, USA (called The Nebraska Survivor Camp) and in Spain (called The Spanish Survivor Stronghold). These two camps were not the only ones in the world.

  There were also some smaller encampments such as the enclave of a few Saudis in Buraq, Lebanon. There was a small group of people from Leova, Moldova who had walked as far as Karditsa, Greece, before finding a secure location to stay in.

  All of the survivor camps around the world would have to support the survivors inside until the zombie outbreak had run its course, whatever that end was to be.

  Counting every person that had taken refuge in one of the survivor camps, the number was less than 100,000. This number of survivors, if they all survived to the end, was not nearly enough to quickly repopulate the world; that is, if the zombie outbreak ended at all.

  The zombies were described as resembling corpses that could move about. They were never thought of as living beings. Zombies, worldwide, appeared fixated on a single task. The task was to hunt and kill as many humans they could catch.

  People found that the zombies held to a schedule to hunt humans. They were nocturnal, coming out as sundown approached, hunting until just before sunrise.

  As the outbreak continued, people found that the zombies were afraid of fire. They would not cross a burned or scorched area. They would flee from a burning building or other similar structure as well as a field or forest on fire.

  One of the more disconcerting things that was discovered about zombies was that it appeared that they had only a limited amount of time that they would exist as a zombie before they died. Zombies were never really “alive” in the manner of a living, breathing human being, or any other type of animal, for that matter; it was as if a zombie was a moving, walking, killing undead corpse as the old folk legends spoke of. A zombie was an undead being that was created to terrorize the living. It was as if each zombie had a specific amount of time to complete their single task of slaughtering humans before they ceased to exist themselves.

  When a zombie’s time to die arrived, they simply stopped where they were, sat or lay down, and gradually their bodies dissolved into a puddle of sludge or slime. It was almost like they had built up too much internal heat, causing them to melt down into a puddle of goo. As the zombie’s dying process became complete, the puddle of slime would contain the clothes that it was wearing at the time. The sludge would have some of the larger bones that did not melt down. The only thing that did not reduce was the stench that all zombies excreted.

  No one could say that they were alive. Nothing could live with the bodily damage that some of the zombies had.

  One of the unnerving finds was many of the humans that the zombies killed would come back to life as zombies themselves. If this happened while anyone was watching, the regeneration process was horrible to watch. What they saw was the shredded body lying on the ground beginning to tremble and shake as it turned over on its back with the legs straightened. Then the body would rise to a sitting position. Shortly following that, the corpse would struggle to stand as a new member of the zombies. This occurred to
those who had been killed no matter how much damage the zombies inflicted as they were slaughtered.

  There were some small advances made in the war against the zombies that gave the world a glimmer of hope. To some, this was all that they needed to smile at least once during their day. Maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance for the world.

  These small advances would not be enough to prevail over the zombies and eventually win the war, however.

  The humans had to find a way to prevail or they would perish off the face of the earth.

  Something needed to be done to stop this.

  To be continued in book two:

  Zombie World Domination:

  The Stratagem

  Coming early 2017

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  I would like to salute the following people, for without their tireless work I could not have finished this book.

  My Beta Readers:

  Melinda Miller-Davies of Mystic Moon Publishing

  Emily Davies

  Emlyn Welsh

  FM Burgett

  My Editor:

  Alan Seeger / Five59 Publishing, Five59.com.

  My cover designer:

  Johannus M. Steger / Steger Productions.

  Please watch for my future releases:

  Zombie World Dominance: The Stratagem

  Due out early 2017

  Zombie World Dominance: Taking the World Back

  Due out late 2017

  Contact me:

  Email – author@ld-king.com

  On the web – www.LD-King.com

  Facebook – www.facebook.com/LD.King.Author

  Twitter – @LDKINGAuthor

  LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/LDKingAuthor