The Dead Rise Read online

  The Dead Rise:

  A novel of the zombie apocalypse

  by

  David Thompson

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY:

  David Thompson on Smashwords

  The Dead Rise:

  A novel of the zombie apocalypse

  Copyright © 2011 by David Thompson

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  * * * * *

  Dedicated to my wife Amanda, my son Gabriel, and my daughter Elizabeth. Thanks for keeping me sane!

  Prologue

  Day 1 - 13:45:00 CST

  Ruins of San Perrara, Amazon Rain Forest

  The pale bluish-white light of Dr. Alexander Tomlin's flashlight illuminated a massive, apparently empty room. He stepped inside, followed by his research assistant, a dishevelled graduate student who staggered under the weight of a large backpack stuffed with all sorts of exploratory and recording gear. Somewhere behind them trailed their guide, a native to the area who had been guiding them through local customs and showing them around the area for the last three weeks of fruitless labours. The trio had spent the last two days exploring the depths of the ruins of San Perrara, a newly-uncovered ruin which would have remained hidden if not for Dr. Tomlin's extensive research pointing his team in the right direction. After uncovering the ruin, they had spent hours painstakingly mapping the area, recording images of every square inch of the ruins, and carefully cataloguing each find. This painstaking exploration had revealed a hidden stone door set into the floor of a stepped stone pyramid. Once opened, the door revealed a steep staircase down into the chamber they had just entered.

  The walls of the chamber were made of an ancient, yellowish stone that Dr. Tomlin couldn't immediately identify. Whatever it was, it didn't appear to be native to the area, and he took several samples which he scraped into small glass vials for future analysis. The stone walls were cool to the touch, built of tightly interlocked bricks of the yellowish stone that he considered to be in remarkable condition considering that they were part of a ruin which he could only estimate was several thousand years old. Everything past the hidden door had made it harder to identify the age of the ruins - unlike typical ruins in the area, there were no markings or paintings on the wall to indicate who had built the pyramid or why.

  "Let's get set up," Dr. Tomlin said. "Just be careful. We have no idea what we're going to find down here. Record everything."

  "Looks like there's nothing down here," Stephan, the graduate student, spoke up. “Not unless you’re interested in videos of dust and dirt.”

  "Nothing down here? Have you ever seen anything like this?" Dr. Tomlins asked him. The graduate student only shrugged, obviously not nearly as interested in the ruins as the professor. Dr. Tomlins turned his attention to their guide and repeated the question. The guide only threw his arms up in a perplexed gesture.

  "The entrance was hidden, in the midst of ruins found in the middle of nowhere. It's no stretch of the imagination to assume that whatever purpose this chamber served will not be immediately apparent," Dr. Tomlin chided. He sometimes wondered how the student had managed to blunder his way through his undergraduate studies and into his care. He would have cursed the situation, but the student, although not terribly bright and without much of an apparent future in archaeology, was a strong young man who excelled at carrying around the necessary equipment for an extended expedition into the rain forest. Secretly, he held out hope that Stephan would one day begin to comprehend the nature of the work that they did, and turn himself into a promising student. He remembered his own youth, and was certain that at the time he must have seemed much the same to his own mentor; it was for that reason that he was as hard on Stephan as he could be. Strict discipline and constant reminders of the basics of his field of study had been enough to bring Dr. Tomlin to become a highly skilled and respected archaeologist, and there was no reason to think that Stephan couldn't do the same, no matter how much the young student seemed to work to show everyone the contrary.

  Content to allow his mentor to do all of the actual thinking, Stephan busied himself setting up large floodlights and cameras while Dr. Tomlins slowly walked around the edges of the room, studying it carefully. Judging by the height and inclination of the staircase that they had descended, they were currently at least a hundred feet underground; the chamber itself appeared to be a roughly 50'x50'x50' cube with no visible indications of what purpose the room served. The stone walls were smooth and bare, as was the floor and what he could see of the roof. The entrance to the room was in the centre of the south wall; as Dr. Tomlins examined the north wall, he saw a very faint outline of a similarly shaped door depression slightly recessed into the wall directly across from the south entrance.

  "Bring those lights over here," he called to Stephan. He did as requested, carefully illuminating the depression and focusing the video camera upon it. Dr. Tomlins spoke to the camera. "This depression appears to possibly be a door mechanism of some sort. I'm going to attempt to activate it. I will begin by applying pressure upon the depression itself."

  He applied pressure lightly to the depression in the wall. Much to his surprise, it slid back easily, pushing backward nearly an inch into the wall with a solid click. As soon as it clicked into place, the room vibrated and rumbled; a thick slab of stone slid into place over the south door, trapping them inside. At the same time, the east, west, and north walls slid down to reveal that the chamber was even larger than it had first appeared.

  "Ummm, professor?" Stephan stammered. "Looks like we're trapped."

  "Be silent, fool!" The professor snapped at him. "Learn to keep your mouth shut and look around at what we've found!"

  The newly-revealed sections of the room were nothing like the stark spartan walls that they had originally seen; the walls were painted with bright, vibrant murals dotted with embedded gemstones and gold inlays. Each mural depicted a scene of idyllic pastoral life - men and women ploughing fields, sharing food, building homes, and other scenes that seemed entirely out of place on the walls of a temple hidden deep in a rain forest. In stark contrast to these murals, no less than four dessicated corpses lay around the edges of the walls, each arranged carefully under a separate section of the mural. The bodies all bore visible gaping wounds through their hearts, presumably caused by the wickedly pointed daggers held in each of their right hands.

  Suicide, he thought. It must have been. Some sort of ceremonial sacrifice, perhaps?

  Although the corpses were dessicated, dry flesh still hung to them, and they were preserved better than anything Dr. Tomlins could ever have expected, given how old they had to be. He could only assume that the corpses had been preserved by virtue of their shelter from the elements; the chamber had been so well sealed that even insects could not have penetrated inside to lay their larvae in the bodies. Stephan was busily investigating one of the other corpses; he ran his finger across the edge of the knife held in the corpse's hand and yelped, cradling his now-bleeding hand against his chest. Even after what had to be thousands of years, the knives were still razor-sharp. Dr. Tomlins shot a look at Stephan, a mixture of contemptuous reprimand and caution mixed with bewilderment at the student’s carelessness. As much as he needed Stephan on the expedition, he couldn't bear the thought of such amazing artifacts being damaged
through the graduate student's carelessness.

  "Keep your hands to yourself," he hissed. Stephan shuffled his feet and stared at the ground in embarrassment. Satisfied that the young man was suitably censured, he continued his examination of the chamber.

  The north wall of the room had slid down to reveal an altar raised on what appeared to be marble steps. Behind the altar, the murals which covered the room's walls met in a bizarre and perplexing image; agricultural and pastoral scenes transitioned to a series of images of buildings, starting with small stone houses and growing in size and complexity until they met directly behind the altar in the shape of what was unmistakeably a steel-and-glass skyscraper, brightly illuminated and surrounded by what appeared to be some sort of aircraft, although they did not match the description of any sort of vehicle that Dr. Tomlin was familiar with. They were squat and curved, a strange cross between a stereotypical flying saucer and a sports car. The architecture illustrated in the mural was nothing like anything developed by any culture on Earth; it was all smooth, graceful lines, artful arcs and spirals that extended far above the ground below.

  "Is that..." Stephan had also seen the mural which had drawn Dr. Tomlin's attention, but couldn't quite manage to formulate a sentence that could actually express his beliefs about the picture in front of them.

  "Flying cars," Dr. Tomlin whispered. "And a skyscraper. This isn't possible. And yet, if it's a practical joke, it's the most elaborate one I've ever seen. Speak up, boy - did you have anything to do with this?"

  "No," Stephan replied, and the professor believed him. There was nothing that could convince him that Stephan was creative enough to do this, or an accomplished enough liar to feign ignorance as well as he was right now.

  Atop the altar rested an artifact the likes of which Dr. Tomlin had never seen before - a dinner plate-sized stone disc engraved with intricate carvings. Fascinated by the sight of this artifact, he leaned in towards it, until his nose was nearly touching the surface of the disc. He squinted, but couldn't quite make out some of the finer details of the carvings. Intricate characters from an unknown language scrawled across the entire surface of the artifact, written in a script much too small to have been created by any tools that Dr. Tomlins was aware of any native culture ever using. The language was even more fascinating than the techniques demonstrated in its construction. The letters - or perhaps more aptly, runes - bore a passing resemblance to cuneiform, though their elegance was far greater than the comparatively primitive scrawling of that script.

  "What is it, Dr. T?" Stephan asked, breaking the professor's concentration. Dr. Tomlin suppressed a groan at the affectionate appellation.

  "I don't rightly know," he replied. "This language is not one which I am familiar with. Certainly not something that's native to the area. If only I could make out some of these details...bring that camera over here."

  While Stephan busied himself moving the camera into position, Dr. Tomlin gently blew across the surface of the disc, hoping to clear away some of the dust that obscured the more detailed portions of the engravings. Although he blew only very softly, the disc cracked and shattered inward as if it had been struck by the force of a hammer. As it splintered inward a solid thump resounded throughout the room, followed by an ethereal ringing tune, almost as if there were wind chimes hidden out of their sight.

  "What happened?" Stephan's voice squeaked up into an octave normally reserved for castratos and prepubescent girls.

  "I...I don't know. I didn't...there's no way it should have been that fragile," all of the professor's self-righteousness melted away in a flash. He knew that it would be difficult to explain this to the board of Regents when he returned. "I just blew some dust away. That's not..."

  Dr. Tomlin's voice faded away, interrupted by a quiet groaning from behind them. All three of them whirled to face their guide, but he did not indicate that he had been the one to make the noise. He stared with his gaze transfixed at the corpses which had littered the edges of the floor; immediately upon the shattering of the stone disc they had begun to vibrate and writhe uncontrollably. The uncontrolled movements quickly settled into frenzied scrambling to regain their feet; within a matter of seconds, all four of the corpses had stood up, and each shambled towards one of the explorers. Despite the fact that their musculature was so ancient and atrophied that what little remains of it split and tore as they moved, they were surprisingly active. Their hollow and sunken eye sockets burned with baleful inner light, a different shade for each of them - red, blue, white, and brown.

  The vast emptiness of the Amazon rain forest swallowed the hopeless screams of the explorers as the walking corpses descended upon them. The screams did not last long, and a peaceful silence returned to the lush forest. There was not a living soul for hundreds of kilometers around; this left no witnesses to see seven mutilated corpses slowly shamble forth from the entrance to the ancient pyramid. They moved slowly, but in unison, stumbling forth into the thick underbrush.

  Chapter 1

  Day 1 - 14:45:00 CST

  Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada

  Tap, tap tap. The thin black pen in Jeremy's hand rose and fell softly against his note paper. Tap, tap, tap. The soft tapping was as arrhythmic and disorganized as the thoughts spinning through his head. With each tap of the pen came a new thought. Tap. So bored. Tap. Differential Calculus test tomorrow afternoon - should probably study. Tap. Damn, Michelle Thomas' ass looks amazing in those pants. Tap. Still another half hour of this damned class left.

  The class he couldn't wait to escape was English 30 with Mr. Barton, a tall, overweight man with a monotone voice and absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever. Combining the teacher with the subject matter meant that the class had the unfortunate characteristics of being both mind-numbingly boring and capable of stretching time to a crawl in ways that seemed to violate the very fabric of time and space. Even worse, it was the last class of the day for Jeremy and his classmates, which did absolutely nothing to speed things along - even the students who normally leaped at the chance to be the teacher's pet were reduced to near-catatonic states as they mindlessly watched the clock tick away second after second. Although it was a struggle to stay awake through Mr. Barton's monotonic droning, Jeremy had discovered that he could generally maintain his sanity by letting his mind wander to any and every subject that he could think of. Even if it didn't help time pass any more quickly, it at least made the time a little more interesting.

  Amidst all of the disjointed thoughts and absent-minded pen-tapping, Jeremy stared intently at the closed textbook sitting on his desk. As he stared at the book, a curious pressure built up in his head, like his brain was pushing against the middle of his forehead. It started as a gentle pressure, no worse than the sort of headache that he had come to expect around this time of day as he struggled to wait out the clock. It quickly got worse, and his head thumped and pounded, as if he was suffering from a powerful migraine, despite the absence of pain. The pressure built up quickly until it felt like he was going to black out, and after only seconds it felt as if the pressure had burst through the wall of his skull and into the air beyond. Rather than being painful, it felt as if a third arm had emerged from out of his forehead, plunged itself into icy-cold water, and then flailed clumsily at the textbook. The analogy didn't seem entirely inept either, as he could barely perceive a faint silverish outline of a projection of force sweeping out of his forehead and towards the book on his desk. This nearly invisible third arm smacked the book, knocking it to the ground with a clatter that instantly drew the attention of each and every single otherwise-bored student in the room. As quickly as they had appeared, both the mental pressure and the translucent appendage vanished. As all of his classmates searched around to see the source of the commotion, Jeremy tried to cover up what had happened by smiling weakly and diving to recover the fallen book.

  "Sorry," he muttered, adjusting his thick glasses by pushing them up to the bridge of his nose. "I guess I'm just a little clumsy toda
y."

  Clumsy, he thought as his heart pounded while he tried to wrap his head around what had just happened, is a reasonable explanation. I must have just been daydreaming, and accidentally knocked the book off the side of my desk. That seems to be well within the realm of possibility and abides by the laws of physics and the known universe. He was not quite ready to accept the possibility that things had actually just happened as he had perceived them, despite the numbing cold that he felt spreading across his forehead, originating from the point where the mysterious force had sprung from. Clumsiness was indeed a reasonable explanation - indeed, it was reasonable enough that he almost believed it himself.

  "See that you take more care in the future," Mr. Barton droned without missing a beat, as if it were part of his lesson plan. Before Jeremy could acknowledge the reprimand, the teacher had already jumped back into his lesson plan with all the smoothness of someone who had given the same lecture a hundred times before, and knows that he will continue giving the same lecture for many years to come. Jeremy thought for a moment that things had gone rather smoothly despite his gaffe, until he caught the eyes of Chris Johnson, a burly football player who sat in the desk directly across the row from him. The look in Chris' eyes was one of disgust - he had a reputation for disliking anyone who didn't meet his criteria of manhood, which generally involved spending all free time either lifting weights or playing sports - neither of which were criteria which Jeremy or any of his friends met.

  "Fucking freak," Chris mouthed silently at Jeremy while shaking his head. He pounded his fist against his hand in the universal gesture which indicated that Jeremy could look forward to being on the receiving end of Chris' wrath at some point soon. Chris and Jeremy had a long history together; the former had been a bully and tormentor to the latter for his entire life, starting with Kindergarten and moving on all the way to their final year of high school. As much as Jeremy hated being tormented by Chris, he had never found any way to stop it. Although Chris wasn't the biggest or strongest of his classmates, he was athletic and much larger and stronger than Jeremy. It was a common theme of the bullying sessions that Jeremy must deserve everything he got from Chris because he was barely five and a half feet tall and didn't even weigh a hundred and twenty five pounds. In Chris' books, this made Jeremy a runt, and runts existed in his mind to serve his every whim.