PRAISE FOR ROTTING TO THE CORE
“S.P. Durnin is a unique voice in the world of horror. This book will leave you wanting more! Well written and well-paced, you won’t be able to put it down!”
-Eric S. Brown, author of BIGFOOT WAR and KAIJU APOCALYPSE.
“S.P. Durnin’s masterful storytelling and well developed characters pull you in from the first chapter, grabbing you by the throat and holding your attention to the very last sentence. Fiction this powerful is nothing short of addicting!”
-Devan Sagliani, author of UNDEAD L.A. and ZOMBIE ATTACK!: RISE OF THE HORDE .
“The Crowbar Chronicles is a rousing good tale. S.P. Durnin takes you on a wild ride at high speed into the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. You’ll fall in love with the characters, and there’s someone for everybody. I highly recommend the novels in this delightful series!”
-Sean Liebling, author of BLOOD, BRAINS AND BULLETS and THE REAPER: NO MERCEY.
“Durnin pulls no punches in this thrill ride through the apocalypse!”
-Jason Brant, author of ASH and THE HUNGER TRILOGY: DEVOURED, CONSUMED, and RAVAGED.
***
PRAISE FOR KEEP YOUR CROWBAR HANDY: THE CROWBAR CHRONICLES
“…There’s a reason the characters, and the reader, will want to keep that crowbar handy!”
-Tony Monchinski, Author of I KILL MONSTERS and the critically acclaimed EDEN novels.
“KYCH is a rollercoaster ride of action, adventure, suspense, horror, gore, and personal relationships at the end of the world as we know it. If this is only the first book in the series then hold on to your socks, the rest will blow them off!”
-James Jackson, survival instructor/weapons advisor, and author of UP FROM THE DEPTHS.
“S.P. Durnin manages to bring a shining light into the quivering darkness of the apocalypse!”
-Michael S. Gardner, author of DOWNFALL and BETRAYAL.
“…The humor is great, the survivors are fun to follow, and each truly speaks with a voice of their own.”
-Stuart Conover, via ScienceFiction.com
“I found myself hooked into the book early on and kept getting mad that I had to stop reading it to do things like work my day job, sleep, and tend to other annoying but necessary interruptions.”
-Richard Baker, via Zedprep.com
“…A high-action story of survival, love, betrayal and sacrifice. If you enjoy the zombie genre, they you’ll definitely enjoy this book!”
-Tiffany Clark, via Zombie and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Fan Club
“KYCH keeps you intrigued from start to finish. S.P. Durnin’s writing style is compelling, and he clearly enjoys creating vivid characters and story sequences…”
-Patrick S. Dorazio, author of COMES THE DARK, INTO THE DARK, and BEYOND THE DARK.
“…S.P. Durnin takes you on a wild ride through the zombie apocalypse, all the while showing us both the best and the worst in people. If you like zombies, you will love this book!”
-Cedric Nye, author of THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH ZOMBIES
ROTTING TO THE CORE
Book Two of the Crowbar Chronicles
S.P. Durnin
A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK
Published at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-61868-657-2
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-658-9
ROTTING TO THE CORE
Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2
© 2015 by S.P.Durnin
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Roy Migabon
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Permuted Press
109 International Drive, Suite 300
Franklin, TN 37067
http://permutedpress.com
For Tonia.
Love you wife.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
About the Author
-Acknowledgements-
Once again, I should take this opportunity to profusely thank a few people, even though most already know Who They Are. Those who, through advice and encouragement (which sometimes entails putting a swift boot upside my butt cheek), keep that crowbar swinging.
Tony (The Beast) Monchinski, Sara (Baconhugs!) Beverage, J.L. Bourne, Bowie V. Ibarra, Michael (Our Benevolent Overlord) Wilson and all the Mighty Minions of Permuted Press for their herculean efforts, my editor Bobbie Metevier (who –once again- didn’t lynch me over my “comma fetish”), Jason (because the apocalypse should be fun!), Brant, James R. Jackson of The Ward Room (author resource extraordinaire!), Roy Migabon (for another awesome cover!), Shawn (Walking Corpse) Riddle, John (The Camel Spider) Brewer, Jackie Chin and the Merry Marauders of Zombiepalooza Radio, Guy Cain (ZASC!), Brian (Gnash) Parker, Thomas (OMI) Wolfenden, Devan (ZA!) Sagliani, Eric S. Brown, Danielle Pascale and Jeffery Clare of All Things Zombie, Chris Claremont (for years ago taking the time to talk with a young punk at a comic book shop, back when I was a young punk), Michael S. Gardner, Shana Festa and the gang at The Bookie Monster, and George A. Romero and Tom Savini (the High Lords of Harmful Matter) for paving the way.
*Special thanks goes out to my Beta (reader) Corps. Tim (Good Stuff) Wendt, Keith (Jitterfreak!) Rogers, Anthony (X) Masten and Leslie B. Foster (See? Told ya you’d make it into the book kid).*
Lastly (and certainly not least) thank you to my Better Half. Not only because she’s the buxom, intelligent Ginger that haunts every Irishman’s dreams, but because she’s able to quiet the horrors that reside in the deepest, darkest, most terrifying corners of my back-brain.
Even the ones that scare the shit out of me...
–S.P.
People don't appreciate what they have.
It takes something pretty drastic to shock the average person out of their own head—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Benghazi, something to that effect. A traumatic, usually bloody and well-televised, event that reminds them that neither they nor their loved ones are immortal.
Except for now, of course.
Anyone left alive is very appreciative of said fact, and most likely feel lucky enough to roll double-sixes all night long.
Four months ago, much of human civilization came to an end. Don't get the wrong idea. There wasn't a nuclear war, no sudden polar shift and (as far as we know) the Ozone layer is still up there. We weren't hit by a rogue comet from space. I'll bet the sky-watching doomsayers were all pretty upset planet Nibiru never showed up. Aliens didn't invade either. No super-intelligent, highly-evolved space badgers swooped down to raze cities in flying saucers, and there was no cataclysmic volcanic activity that blotted out the sun causing an ice age. Some of those scenarios would've almost been preferable actually...
What happened? The recently deceased got up and started chowing down on the living.
Yep.
You read that right.
Zombies. Mobile corpses. We call them Maggot-heads. Kat thinks the lab
el is hilarious, and Foster insists it's good for morale. You know, comedic objectification of something frightening?
Yeah. I didn't buy it either, but what can I do? The name stuck.
Now, as to what caused dead bodies to get up and kill? Nobody has the first clue. Space-borne, parasitic organisms? An Amazonian super-virus? Hell was full so all the dead were sent back? Who knows? No one cares at this point. Believe it or not, when you're fighting (or more often running) for your life, there's normally not a lot of free time to ponder the mysteries of the universe.
It's no picnic, let me tell you. Almost every day is a new lesson in disturbing with a side of That's Just Fucking Nasty in Unheard Of Ways. The maggot-heads (the dead) are shambling around everywhere, there are people out there preying on the living for food, weapons and other less, shall we say, “innocent” reasons. It shouldn't surprise me how little time it took for much of humanity to regress back into what amounts to barbaric tribalism.
Gods, what a crock. Ignore me. Occasionally, I have bouts of contemplative naval-gazing and spend too much time thinking about what I should do, instead of what I have to do. That's Rule One in the zombie apocalypse. “Do what ya gotta do,” as the Chief says. Good advice, but difficult to adhere to sometimes. Maybe it's easier if you're alone, without anyone to look out for, or to watch your back when you need it. I couldn't be that way though. The survivors we've gathered since this whole thing started? I wouldn't trade any of them. Alright, yes, we're each a little crazy in different (and sometimes disturbing) ways. No problems admitting that here. But together we're stronger than any of us could be on our own. No matter how screwed up our little group is, it's a really good feeling to have people you care for and who care about you. Especially when one of them is the woman who ended up...
Well. Maybe I'll write about that later
Above excerpt taken from the popular “The Chronicles of Jacob O'Connor: Year Zero”
-Chapter One-
“Are they still there?” Katherine asked.
Jake O'Connor glanced briefly towards the ugly, plaid couch where Katherine Cho lounged, absently kicking her feet. She sat with her legs hung over the headrest, shoulders beneath her on the seat so she was nearly upside down, toying with an equally ugly and threadbare throw pillow.
“Yes. Just like the last time you asked me, ten minutes ago.” Jake replied, tensely.
“No need to be snippy. I was just curious.” Kat pouted adorably and flipped her ugly pillow across the couch. “Besides, there's not much else to do cooped up in here.”
“It's been a long two days; I'll give you that.” Jake shook his head.
Roughly forty-eight hours prior, the duo had been motoring east with the rest of their friends—having just rescued Jake's long-time friend Allen Ryker and the muscular blonde EMT Maggie Reed from a band of well-armed and (partially) trained marauders. Said marauders had raided, and then incinerated, the safe-house their rag-tag little group had sheltered in just outside New Holland, Ohio. They'd also taken Allen and Maggie, along with the teenage Karen Parker and Allen's squeeze-of-the-month Heather Bell, captive as another quartet of Jake's companions had watched helplessly from within their zombie-pulping transport, the Screamin' Mimi. After reconnecting with Jake's party, they'd all decided to track the hostile abductors and take their friends back by force.
Seventy miles, one smelly crawl through a sewage plant's drainage ditch on Jake's part, and eight dead marauders later, they'd managed to retrieve Allen and Maggie, but Karen was still missing and Heather had been killed. The dark-haired young woman had managed to escape her captors just as they'd reached their waste treatment plant hideaway outside Mulberry, Ohio, but not for long. After escaping her restraints, Heather had been mowed down by a flurry of gunfire from the rest of the aggressor convoy and left where she'd fallen in the field across the road. Jake and the others would've buried their companion, but the mobile dead in the area had all but consumed her body. The survivors had settled for killing every bandit within the sewage plant, and making good their escape with a marauder safely trussed like an ugly turkey in the bed of their Hummer.
Then the survivors made their way back to a small, little-used airport in Wilmington, where the rest of their party awaited their return with supplies, weaponry, and their transport.
That had been the plan anyway.
It all went right out the window when Jake's rescue party encountered a large pod of the dead. George Foster (Special Forces “fixer” and Navy veteran) had brought their Humvee screeching to a halt and they'd all stared at zombies that filled the road before the upcoming overpass, from shoulder to shoulder, in far greater numbers than the survivor's ammunition supply could have dealt with. Not even the modified Humvee they'd obtained, with its thick crash plate over the front bumper (tastefully painted with a large fanged smile) and windows covered with a grid of inch-thick steel bars, could make it through a horde that size. They'd fled back the way they'd come, at speed. Realizing there was no way past the horde, Jake reluctantly decided it was his responsibility to provide a distraction and lead the rotten, staggering crowd away, allowing the others access to the airport and relative safety. His decision hadn't been received well, especially by his red-haired lover Laurel, but they didn't have other options. At least none that would keep them from becoming zombie-kibble. So Jake had convinced his friends to make tracks, while he once again played a life-and-death game of Pac-man with the oncoming dead.
Over his repeated (emphatic) protests to the contrary, Kat had invited herself along for the jaunt.
After dodging zombies through miles of Wilmington's abandoned streets, the pair had taken refuge in the town's Collage Hall, or “Old Hall” as the plaque out front read. The four-story, brick building had bars over its first-floor windows, which were high enough to prevent even the most determined zombie from clawing its way in, but it also had one drawback: It only had one door. Granted, said door was a thick, steel, security job that wouldn't cave even if the maggot-heads outside got it into their molding skulls to mob the entrance, but there was no rear access.
So much for adhering to fire code, Jake had mused as they'd searched hurriedly for an alternate entrance.
It was Kat who'd found their way in. Noticing the newly-painted fire escape, she'd run at the wall, leapt high, planted one biker-booted foot on its brick face, jumped skyward off its surface, and caught the bottom rung of the fire escape with one hand as Jake watched open-mouthed from the sidewalk. She'd then proceeded to hang down head-first from the ladder like a trapeze artist and catch Jake's hands in a firm grip when he'd jumped skyward for all he was worth.
After powering up by the main-strength in his biceps, O'Connor had gained the lower rung and awkwardly muscled his way up the ladder past Kat's inverted form. She'd aided his efforts by pushing him up from below by way of (shamelessly) taking a double handful of his buttocks as he slid by her. She could have simply retained her grip on his vest, but had decided that wouldn't have been half as much fun.
Besides, he'd been looking up her shirt, so fair was fair.
As Jake dangled there, he'd been treated to a view of Sir Isaac Newton's discovery acting upon a world-class set of breasts beneath the taunt fabric of Kat's thin tank top. Her cut-off, belly shirt gaped quite a bit normally anyway, because she liked showing off the firm lines of her slim midsection, but hanging upside down? No one could blame him for a bit of discrete ogling. Kat was damn attractive, and he was only human.
Katherine Bright-feather Cho made no apologies for her looks. Mama-san had fallen for a hunky, Native American Air Force pilot back in the day, and she’d received her exotic features from both parents. Her complexion was that of mild Earl Grey tea and many people asked whether her ancestral heritage was Japanese or Chinese. Her reply was always, I’m Squaw. Kat's facial features displayed the high cheekbones and dark eyes of her Navajo father, and her trim form moved with panther-like grace due to daily lessons in several different styles of martial arts vi
a her mother from the time she began to walk. That, coupled with her habit of wearing midriff shirts to show off her well-defined abs, hair chopped into a ragged pixie-cut (dyed blue, of course), tight black leather pants, biker boots, a quirky sense of humor, and an unreasoning tendency to mask her intelligence by faking a “vapid vixen” personality type, made her an appealing (if somewhat intimidating) young woman.
Once they'd pried open a second story window, the leery pair had scoured the building's interior until they were satisfied there wasn't a zombie or ten lurking in any of the rooms, waiting for its next unlucky meal. Afterwards, they'd cautiously made for the ground floor and decided to keep an eye on the stumbling horrors as the crowd passed on the avenue outside.
Unfortunately, the horde did not simply continue flowing along the desolate side street and pass obligingly by as Jake and Kat had hoped. The awful corpses began stumping onto the grounds of Old Hall and spread out, almost filling the lawns, completely enveloping the shaken pair's hiding spot.
Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) Page 1
