Our zombie hours, p.1
Our Zombie Hours, page 1
part #1 of Our Zombie Hours Series
Praise for Robert’s Work
Chute sucks you in from word one and pulls you down his post-apocalyptic rabbit hole! You will sleep with the lights on, covers pulled over your head, and dust off the old teddy bear for comfort. Chazz ranks among the top tier of our generation's storytellers. ~ Alex Kimmell, Author of The Key to Everything
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Robert Chazz Chute is such a skilled spinner of tales that the reader is more than willing to suspend any possible disbelief to go along for the ride. ~ David Pandolfe, author of Jump When Ready
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It's not very often one finds a writer with such a dark side that has such a great sense of humor. ~ Glenn Roberts, Amazon reviewer
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The author has a definite talent with words and ideas. ~ Love to Read!, Amazon reviewer
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His words lift and dance off the page, bringing the story to life. ~ Kindle Customer, Amazon reviewer
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The world-building is horrifically well done with twists and turns and deceit around every corner. ~ Wanda, Amazon reviewer
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RCC blends characters' beliefs & worries concerning society's failures, plus vivid action scenes skillfully. ~ RMerkl, Amazon Reviewer
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Nothing but sheer exhaustion could tear my eyes from the captivating dance of words choreographed by Robert Chazz Chute. ~ Halph Staph, Amazon reviewer
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Wonderful action constantly holds your interest. ~ Sharon Finn, Amazon reviewer
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The complexity and attention to detail throughout absolutely blow me away. ~ Kindle customer, Amazon Reviewer
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Very few authors impress me with their actual writing style, it's usually always about the story. But this author paints such beautiful vivid pictures with words that I found myself not only enjoying the story but enjoying the way the words created images in my mind. I know that sounds corny, but it is true. ~ B.H., Amazon reviewer
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Chute gives us a story worthy of Stephen King. A read both thoughtful and fun. ~ Linda Beer Johnson, Amazon reviewer
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The author does an excellent job building the characters and getting you invested and involved. ~ Michele L. Hebert, Amazon reviewer
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I just can't say in words what a powerful author this is! ~ Delinda L. Calkins, Amazon reviewer
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Robert Chazz Chute writes so skillfully as to make the supernatural seem perfectly logical - and terrifying! There are twists, turns, and surprises galore. You will be glad you bought this book - until you lose sleep because you can't put it down. ~ johligo, Amazon reviewer
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When I want to read apocalyptic books or zombie stories, those books have to also be extremely well written and something that I could recommend with zeal and confidence to everyone I know. Robert Chazz Chute's books are exactly that. ~ Mazie Lane, Amazon reviewer
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He makes the stuff that is obviously fiction, believable. ~ W. Nickels, Amazon reviewer
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I am a lover of paranormal, dystopian novels and depth of story as well as intelligence in writing style, and Robert has it all. Humor, wit, depth, intelligence, and an awesome way with words/writing. ~ Amazon Customer, Amazon reviewer
Our Zombie Hours
Robert Chazz Chute
Licensing Notes
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Our Zombie Hours
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ISBN (ebook) 978-1-927607-80-0
ISBN (paperback) 978-1-927607-79-4
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Copyright © 2021 by Robert Chazz Chute
All rights reserved.
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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 author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Please direct media and rights inquiries to expartepress@gmail.com.
Introduction
During the global pandemic, I hid in my blanket fort and poked away at my big book, the one I hope will become an instant apocalyptic classic. After nearly two years of writing Endemic, it was almost ready for publication. However, due to COVID, there was an unexpected delay in my editorial pipeline. Couldn’t be helped.
Something good happened, though. I got my writing mojo back. I suddenly couldn’t wait to write more. As Halloween approached, I thought, how about I come up with a quick read for zombie fans?
In many of my books, I’ve played with the tropes of the genre. In This Plague of Days, some zombies evolve to become sentient. (What’s a sentient zombie, you ask? That’s a vampire.) In AFTER Life, nanotechnology has its way with humans and zombies alike. In Endemic (soon to be released as I write this), the infected are zombie-adjacent. It was time to do something pretty much tried and true for the purists.
Most of the afflicted in this anthology are closer to the expected tropes of the genre. I bend some rules here and there, but some horror fans (“true horror fans?”) need zombie fiction closer to what they expect. Still room for surprises, though. That’s the fun of it.
Enjoy Our Zombie Hours, and celebrate Halloween all year if you want.
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Cheers and all the best!
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~ RCC
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editorial team. Editrix Supreme Gari Strawn of strawnediting.com and beta reader Russ Sawatsky are always on point.
My writing career would be dead in the water if not for all the love and support from Janice AKA She Who Must Be Obeyed. Thanks Boo.
Contents
Illusions and Delusions
Clarity
Promises
Death Squad
Planted Seeds
More post-apocalyptic & dystopian fun
All Books by Robert Chazz Chute
About the Author
For all those who enjoy quick hits of horror and want Halloween to last all year long.
Illusions and Delusions
Jayden drove me to the Las Vegas suburbs in his whisper-quiet Prius, and there was not a zombie in sight. As he drove, he told me what a hero I was about to become. “Nate, it’s going to be easy. We’ve hardly seen a single predator in weeks.”
“Maybe that’s because the people doing our supply runs don’t dare to go farther into the city,” I replied. “The cannibals are sticking close to their food source. They’re rabid and we should stay away from them.”
Jayden beamed a toothy grin to reassure me. I told him to keep his eyes on the road. “If you barrel into one of these abandoned vehicles, it’s a long walk back for both of us. You know, assuming we survive.”
He was quiet for a few minutes before he tried again. Finally, he said, “Everybody gets a turn at this job. Think of how Cheryl is going to look at you when you lure them into the trap for us. You’ll have everyone’s respect, man!”
“Have I lost anyone’s respect?”
His answer was a careless shrug.
I’d seen how he looked at my girlfriend. Cheryl seemed to enjoy his attention, too. When I asked her about that, she laughed it off. “He’s just a flirt and so am I. That’s how I got you.”
“You do have me. Does he know that?”
She took a little too long to answer before she said, “Sure.”
The deeper we went into the suburbs, the more I suspected Jayden didn’t want me to succeed in the mission. Before Jayden joined the group, I never worried about being perceived as a coward. But, of course, I was scared. If I didn’t make it back to camp, he’d have Cheryl to himself.
Weaving past abandoned cars, Jayden told me, “We can’t stay out on the edge of the city forever. We weren’t meant to live in the desert.”
“Live? Maybe not. It’s how we’ve survived, though. Haven’t enough people died? We can do supply runs into the city, stick together, work together, and — ”
“Our people are exhausted,” he said.
Until a month before, Jayden had been a stranger, and our little band of survivors had been my people. It was as if he’d moved in and taken over without the courtesy to tell me I was fired.
“We can’t live in an RV park forever, circling the wagons as if we’re pioneers in the Old West, always terrified of the next raiding party. The grind and boredom are wearing us down. We can end this and get back to normal.”
“Can we? Isolation has kept us alive. People who stayed in the cities got eaten. Or went crazy and became eaters.”
We’d had this discussion before. It had been civil at first. Jayden’s argument was that the plague had run its course. His hypothesis was that the cannibals had run out of food and were dying off.
I urged the committee to be patient. “If they’re becoming extinct, all we have to do is wait to be sure. Better than messing up and giving them a meal to sustain them. As far as we know, we’re the last humans left. It’s our duty as survivors to avoid getting infected. Starve the beasts and we’ll hurry their extinction. We’ll stay safe and eliminate the threat without sacrificing people.”
The committee listened to my advice then. For a while, all was calm. Then I caught a few impatient whispers that repeated Jayden’s claim: “Can’t win a war without fighting.”
Some die-hard survivalists in our group wanted to launch raiding parties. The more recklessly the new arriv al from Reno spoke, the more of our group looked to him around the nightly campfire.
“Let’s go downtown and play Shoot a Predator before all the targets are gone,” Jayden told the committee one night. “It might be our last chance for some target practice.”
“Until you’re trapped by a horde and run out of ammunition,” I said. “You’ve got this fantasy you can wade in there like it’s a video game on easy mode. What happens when you get bitten? Do you expect me to shoot you in the head so you don’t turn? How am I going to make time to save you from that ugly fate while we’re being overrun? That’s a helluva burden you’d be putting on us just so you can experience some wild escapist fantasy. That’s not a survivalist fantasy, by the way. It’s escapism. I want to escape as much as you do, but the apocalypse shouldn’t be an excuse for you to go out and enjoy a few pleasant afternoons shooting people who are out of their minds with hunger and disease.”
“But it is, though!” Jayden said. “By your own words, we’d be putting sick people out of their misery. You wouldn’t let a starving dog suffer.”
“I’m worried you’ll feed the starving dog and give him the strength to attack us,” I said.
“I’m not the bad guy in this scenario, Nate.”
“Then stop getting sexually excited when you clean your rifle, Jayden.”
Jayden laughed, good-natured to a fault. He pretended he was joking when he called me Do-nothing Nate. We all had a good laugh, but Jayden and I became enemies the moment he arrived. When he met Cheryl, their eye contact and handshake went on a little too long. I knew he was going to be trouble. I shouldn’t have even gotten into the car with him.
At my urging, the committee agreed to wait another month before sending a scouting party deeper into the city. Tension in the camp climbed with the midday heat. People were too idle. There was no farming out in the desert. We lived off canned goods we’d raided from the suburbs. Even playing a card game to pass the time reminded us of the city we’d abandoned for the safety of isolation. The towers of Vegas sat on the horizon, mocking us.
I told everyone, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. In this case, that means all the killing and disease stays within city limits. You are meat-based and uncooked! Do not feed the zombies!”
Opinion’s tide turned in Jayden’s favor when he came back from Reno with a five-ton truck full of heavy ordnance. “The National Guard made a stand there. They got overrun, but fortunately for us, the horde moved on. That fight was back when there were so many more hungries. Imagine the mop-up we can do with heavy machine guns now!”
I managed to shoot down Jayden’s original plan to take Las Vegas back. He wanted all of us to drive around the city streets firing at every cannibal we saw.
“And what happens when your big truck meets an unforeseen obstacle? For all we know, an overpass or a building has collapsed in the last year.”
“Now you’re reaching for excuses not to deal with the threat head on,” he said. Several of our group nodded in agreement.
“When we went into quarantine,” I said, “so much traffic snarled, people abandoned their cars in the middle of the street. You want to go in with no plan and no clear path? What happens when you’re surrounded? You’re going to get us killed that way.”
“But we’ve got all this firepower and shiny unused ammo now!” he enthused. “We could clean out the hungries in a week!”
“That big truck makes plenty of noise. You’ll draw them all out and they’ll surround you. You’ll be dead within an hour if you blunder in blind. Go if you want, but don’t take anyone with you. Worse, maybe you’ll just get a few bites taken out of you. If you do make that run to the strip and fail, please don’t lead the infected back to camp.”
If I hadn’t uttered that last sentence, I wouldn’t have been in Jayden’s Prius zipping into Las Vegas. I’d meant to push the point home that Jayden was a careless fool, not a hero. However, I’d given him an idea the committee decided was a fine compromise. We wouldn’t go into the cannibal’s lair. We’d draw them out into the open and shoot them at the city’s limits.
“We’ll set up a kill zone,” Jayden said. “It’ll be glorious. Even better, there'll be fewer dead people in the city. The cleanup is going to be a big enough job as is. The more we can lure out of the city, the fewer stinking bodies we’ll have to haul ourselves. Nobody wants to survive the zombie apocalypse only to die from some other awful disease festering in the city’s corpses!”
“What if there are too many of them? You’d be leading them right to us.”
Jayden gave me a smirk that several of the council shared. “We’re all in RVs, Nate. We’re mobile. Any other concerns or are you just here to shoot down every good idea with nothing good of your own to contribute?”
Despite leading sixty-eight people to safety and organizing them long enough to survive 387 days, suddenly I was Do-nothing Nate, a coward. When the committee voted, even Cheryl gave me a helpless shrug and raised her hand in favor of Jayden’s plan.
“There’s the marker.” Jayden suddenly slowed the Prius and pointed to three bright-orange paint cans in a net sitting in the middle of the road. “This is where I walked back from when I did the first mission! Pretty rad, am I right? I’ll take you a few more blocks so you can get the attention of baddies in the area. We’ll rendezvous at the paint cans, okay? By then, I’ll have the tin cans in the trunk tied to the bunker. Whoever you lure out, we’ll drive back slowly, just like last time. We’ll be the Pied Piper, bringing the enemy to our guns.”
“Pied Piper makes it sound neat and easy,” I said, “but I’m bait and I feel like I’m wriggling on a hook.”
“That’s how it’s done if you want to catch the big fish, big guy!”
“Big fish get the hook, but they get the bait, too.”
“You worry too much.”
“I was an accountant. I do the math.”
“That’s no way to live. We’re men of action now … or at least I am.”
“We’re the leftovers after the biggest, ugliest feast in human history.”
“The first thing I’m going to do when we clear out Vegas is get you some antidepressants,” he said. “And if you won’t take them, I will. Your always-say-die attitude is really bumming me out.”
I stopped him at five blocks from the marker. “That’s plenty. Constant stress has helped me lose some weight, but it’s not like I’ve been working that hard on my cardio. It’s too hot to jog out in the desert.”
“You, Nate, are what my mama and daddy used to call a whiner.”
“Yeah? Didn’t you tell me they got eaten on the first day of the outbreak because they didn’t believe in it?”
Jayden gritted his teeth and said nothing. Instead, he opened his door abruptly and hurried to get three more orange paint cans out of the trunk. Together in a net, the cans were quite heavy and made a loud clunk when he tossed them on the pavement.
“Sh!” I said. “Be careful! We don’t want them popping out at us before we’re ready!”
“I’d be fine with that. Whose side are you on, Nate?” He handed me one of the two M-16s he’d scavenged from the National Guard post. Besides the weapons and ammunition, the trunk was full of empty tin cans tied together with string and filled with gravel. After I’d done my duty as zombie bait, the cans would make plenty of noise when dragged behind the vehicle. Our group was waiting to spring the trap on whatever hungries we managed to trawl.
