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  BOOK SIX OF THE DEAD HUNGER SERIES

  Dead Hunger VI

  The Gathering Storm

  By Eric A. Shelman

  Dead Hunger VI: The Gathering Storm

  is a work of fiction by

  Eric A. Shelman

  All characters contained herein are fictional, and all similarities to actual persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

  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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No portion of this text may be copied or duplicated without author or publisher written permission, except for use in professional reviews.

  ©2014 Dolphin Moon Publishing

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN 0000000000000

  Cover Art By Jeffrey Kosh

  From The Author

  When I began writing this installment of Dead Hunger, I wasn’t certain it was going to be a full-length novel. I’d started to write the zombie comedy (Zomedy!) that I had begun tossing around in my brain, but the production company developing the series for film wanted this installment as soon as possible, so I switched direction.

  You know that I’m a pleaser! I said okay and started writing this, Dead Hunger VI: The Gathering Storm.

  And while I wasn’t quite in the mood to get started on it yet, damned if it didn’t turn out to be 420+ pages long.

  Just as a note to my fans and readers, (that’s assuming that some have read my crap and are definitely NOT fans!) I was so damned relieved that all you guys accepted Dave Gammon taking a lead role in Dead Hunger V: The Road to California, that I thought you really deserved another chunk of Flex Sheridan telling another story. So I thought I’d send him off on his own for a bit, but since I needed you to know what was happening back at the homestead, I figured Gem could tell that part.

  So Flex is going to take off; you’ll see who he meets and what kind of trouble he can get into.

  As for the dedications, I can’t thank my brother, Don Shelman in this one. I didn’t brainstorm with him on this particular novel, but that’s okay. I’ve got a project with the working title of “The Camera” that he did already help me with. I’ll start on that project soon.

  I’d like to thank all my beta readers again. They are insanely helpful, and I would be remiss if I left them out. So, Cris Berget, Sharon Berget, Megan Sweetness, Carrie Herbel, Debra Allen and Jesse Donovan, THANK YOU! You were all fast and thorough, and you’ve helped me make a cleaner product for people who deserve one.

  I’d also like to thank my wife, Linda, who is so understanding about my writing that it makes it easy for me to create. No complaining about me sitting in my office two hours every night, tapping away on the keyboard. She also offers good feedback on my storylines and other things, and she is always willing to lay back and listen to me read her the latest product I’ve tapped out – as it happens.

  So, I hope you enjoy this installment of Dead Hunger. It’s going to be the last of its kind – when and if the next one comes, it’s going to be a different animal altogether.

  Thanks again, all. You’re the best. Now go and tell a friend, would ya please?

  Keep calm and zombie on . . .

  Prologue

  I’m Flex Sheridan. My wife’s Gem, and we have two kids. Trina’s almost eight and Flex Jr. hasn’t been around two months yet. Oh, yeah. We got Slider, our Great Pyrenees dog.

  Slider and my son are the only ones who were born after the world went to shit. Glad they don’t know. They’d be pissed at what they got fucked out of. Long walks without firearms, ice cream at the corner shop.

  Before some gas started leaking out of every part of this Godforsaken planet, infecting 90% of mankind, I was an electrician. Sounds pretty mundane, huh? Wiring shit up, making everyday life run.

  Gem was an artist. Oils and watercolor, everything from still life to portraits to abstracts. Clay, copper. Give her something and she’d make it prettier.

  Or at least more interesting.

  Hemp and Charlie are our friends. Like family. So are Dave and Serena, who were on the road when I started to tell this story. They went to California to see if Dave could find his uncle, and we didn’t have a timeframe for when – or even if – they’d make it back.

  Back to Hemp and Charlie. Hemp was an engineer and a scientist before all this crap hit the fan and he still is. Charlie was a punk and metal rock lover who is an expert with a crossbow, and she’s taught Gem and some others how to use it. She’s a cute little blonde firecracker to be sure, and she can rival Gem when it comes to … let’s say, expressing herself.

  Hemp’s her husband now – they got married in an Alabama church at the same time I married Gem – and he’s the one who figured out most of what I’m about to tell you. 95% of it. Get ready. I’m gonna go through it fast.

  Some sort of fissure opened up in the Earth’s core, and now a gas is bubbling out through every porous surface of the planet. The makeup of this vapor isn’t completely known – some elements in it can be found on this planet, others can’t. It’s ancient and as old as the Earth. It changes people, kills them, then almost instantly reanimates them. It reanimates the dead, too – so long as the brain wasn’t removed.

  When they come back, these mutants hunger for human flesh, brains and blood. They don’t talk and they can’t be reasoned with. They never sleep and they never tire, but they do, far too slowly, rot. Oh, yeah. They hunger. The walking dead hunger.

  Another important thing Hemp learned is that if you’re immune to a poisonous oil called urushiol, you’re also immune to the effects of this vapor. Urushiol is the oil found in poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, cashew shells and mango skins. Maybe other places, too. You never have to have seen or even heard of these plants or the urushiol; just know that if you can contact the oil without blistering, you’re immune. You’re safe.

  We don’t know why. This means that 90% of humankind isn’t immune, because only 10% is. If you’re not, what you become is the thing of fiction; of old black and white thriller episodes on midnight television. But they’re real this time. We call them ghouls, walkers, rotters, diggers, abnormals, infecteds, stinkers, corpses and biters. Oh, yeah. We call them zombies. We finally started to call them what they really are.

  A bit about the things themselves. They have offenses and defenses. First, we’ll cover the offensive tools in their rotten pouches. The ones we know about, that is.

  Their tear ducts emit a vapor that constantly leaks out and give their eyes a pink hue. The vapor isn’t the same as the invisible shit coming out of the earth. It’s a knockout vapor that paralyzes you and keeps you down until someone touches you. You’re just lucky if it’s not them hunched over you when you crack your eyelids. If it is, you’re likely gonna be dead in short order. When they get close, they can pump the stuff out like a fog machine, but not if they haven’t eaten in a while. They’ve got it real good when they first turn, but it starts to dissipate if they don’t get fresh food. Yeah. Us.

  One of their defenses is that they recognize things that can hurt them. Like guns and knives, even crossbows. Stuff like that. Maybe it’s a little leftover memory from when they were alive, maybe not. Maybe it was inserted in there by one of the red-eyed females.

  I’ll get into them later.

  So when they see things that can hurt them, they change u
p a bit. Nothing dramatic, not so that you’d really notice if you weren’t looking for it. But their brains are working when they sense danger, and they will hold up if advancing. Notice I didn’t say they’d retreat. These things don’t retreat. The red-eyed females do to a degree, but typically they just re-adjust and advance again. You know why I think that is? I think because that particular red-eyed brand of zombie thinks she’s gonna win. Every time. I don’t think they even consider losing or dying at the hand of us breathers.

  They also know when they’re deficient. If they’ve got a broken limb or something else that might make them unable to perform a certain task – they just won’t do it. Again, it’s instinctive, Hemp thinks. Anyway, let me get into the red-eyes, since I’ve already whetted your whistle.

  At any given time, just in the United States of America – and believe me, I sure wish the old USA meant shit anymore – about 3.13% of all women are pregnant. I won’t get into childbearing years at this point, because you just gotta figure that if they’re pregnant, they are of childbearing age, whether it’s socially acceptable or not.

  And yeah, I wish that meant shit anymore, too Since the population at the time the gas started seeping out of our planet was around 317,000,000, and women make up around 50.8% of the population, you can see that we’re looking at around 161,000,000 women in the US alone. Now, using that calculation above of what percentage of all women are pregnant, we can estimate that number to be around 503,930. Yep. Over half a million.

  Here’s a kicker you probably don’t want to know about: all the above calculations were based on studies of live births. In 2011, there were over a million abortions, just in the US. How about miscarriages? Add another 900,000 to a million. Either way, we’re talking some pretty big numbers, considering their frightening capabilities.

  If 90% of the population isn’t immune to the Earth gas, that means, just based on the numbers I’ve thrown at you above, that around 2,253,000 women were pregnant when they became zombies. So now you know the scope.

  Know what happens when you’re pregnant? Suffice it to say that women who were pregnant when this modern-day apocalypse hit now have the advantage. The estrogen levels in their bodies were so off-the-charts high when they were turned, their supercharged brains mutated into something more powerful; they can communicate telepathically with one another. How they do it, what they say and how they say it, we don’t know. We do know they can push these mental voices out for about a mile, calling their own, and controlling the idiot, walking dead masses.

  All this means when you see a red-eye, you kill her first – if you can.

  The vapor from the red-eyes is different from the others. It doesn’t have any chloroform-type properties, and they only seem to use it on women of child bearing years. The red-eyes’ mist affects these uninfected women by allowing the creatures to take psychic control of them. With this control, they can tell them to open doors or windows, essentially making the rest of their friends vulnerable.

  Sacrifice everyone. Again, even the women and girls who have experienced it can’t say what they’re hearing in their heads, but they do speak aloud before they take action – perhaps so that their brains know what they’re supposed to do. Things like open door, or unlock door, or break window, for example. Either way, if a young woman is sprayed with the red-eyes’ vapor, she has to be restrained until she receives a dose of a new counteractive wafer we’ve developed using the properties of the zombie vapor itself.

  Yeah. We’ve pulled a polio vaccine-style trick with that vapor. I’ll get into that later, after I tell you about our main defense.

  We’ve come up with a ingestible wafer we call WAT-5. That stands for Walk Among Them 5-Hour. It consists of a mixture of the standard zombie vapor, urushiol and the gas coming from the ground – blended together under freezing conditions. We use liquid nitrogen for that, but in a pinch, ice will work fine, too.

  Yeah, we’ve got the equipment to make it. Once it’s in its solid, wafer form, it can be taken anywhere in a baggie. Couple of points, though. When you take this wafer, you’re going out. I mean dead asleep and that means the moment it goes down your gullet. Sit down before you eat the thing or have a nice bump on your head when you wake up.

  You can be awakened moments later, but someone has to shake you out of it. Otherwise, you’ll just lay there and sleep for an indeterminate amount of time.

  The good news about that is if the zombies show up, they’ll pretty much ignore you, because you’re on the WAT-5. They can no longer detect you as food; as flesh and blood. But again, it only works for around five hours.

  The bad news? While the zombie masses don’t know you’re food, the red-eyes aren’t as easily fooled. We’re not certain if it just doesn’t work on them, or if it does work and they just instinctively know you’re food anyway. Either way, they’ll sick their slow-moving, rotting, zombie friends on you. In a New York minute. (Which to be fair, is probably like any other minute these days, including a Texas minute.)

  Their goal seems to be more about controlling their own and killing humans than eating us. Again – if a red-eye is around, kill her first.

  As I said earlier, there is another version of the wafers; this is made the exact same way as the WAT-5, only instead of using the regular zombie tear duct mist, these wafers are made from the vapor of a red-eyed female. If a young woman who was doused with the mist from the red-eyes takes this wafer soon after being sprayed, she won’t be compelled to follow the instructions transmitted telepathically to her by the strong female abnormals. She’ll still utter the word that her brain feels was the intended command, but she’ll be able to resist any urge to act on it.

  Another word about the red-eyes. They’re capable of incredible bursts of speed, but we’ve never seen it sustained for any period of time. They can jump like a motherfucker and they’ll drop down fast to avoid a shot to the brain. To put it bluntly, they’re nimble and quick, just like that Jack dude.

  Last, but certainly not least, is the urushiol itself. We’ve developed stills of a sort to extract the oils from the leaves of poison ivy plants. We mass produce the shit. Then we blend it with water and spray zombies with it. They melt, pop, hiss and dissolve when even a micron of it contacts their rotten skin. Fill yourself a super soaker with this solution and you might as well have an Uzi, just so long as a red-eye isn’t around.

  Them again. They don’t much like urushiol, but it doesn’t do them near as much harm as it does to the standard variety of zombie. The red-eyes do get a surface burn, but it could just piss them off if you don’t put a bullet or ten in their brains, pronto.

  Which brings us to the brain. That’s where you wanna put your arrow, bullet, sword, knife, rebar, ice pick, or whatever the hell you’ve found lying around to use as a weapon. Once you traumatize the brain, they’re dead. That includes the red-eyed females.

  I hope this has helped bring you up to speed. Now I’ll pick this thing up where it seems most logical.

  When Dave, Serena and Dave’s uncle got back.

  Along with some other interesting folks.

  *****

  Chapter One

  Early September, 2013

  Rocky Mountain Way by Joe Walsh was blasting from the speakers at the house, and we could see Charlie sitting on the porch from our vantage point, Bunsen and Slider at her feet.

  A good breeze had begun to blow the evening before, and distant storm clouds would appear every so often. It had increased by the morning, but it wasn’t so bad that we had to put off our work, because so far, no rain had reached us.

  We could hear the music floating on this breeze from the field where Gem, Hemp and I worked, putting in perimeter fence posts in preparation for our multi-purpose pasture.

  I looked over at Gem now and then, just making sure everything was cool. She’d caught me looking a few times and gave me a wave and a smile, but then her eyes turned right back down to the baby carrier where our son, little Flex Sheridan Jr., was kickin’
it while his mama, daddy and Uncle Hemp worked on the fence.

  Just a glance, then back to her post hole digger.

  Impressive, she was. Hands together, jamming that digger down into the soil, spreading it apart, lifting, turning and making a pile of dirt.

  We initially considered using a gas-powered auger, but because of Hemp’s suspicion that the red-eyes had regained significant audible senses, we were only willing to take chances with Joe Walsh.

  I could see Gem’s glistening muscles from two post holes away, wet with sweat, working hard beneath a blazing sun that was busily heating Whitmire, South Carolina to a toasty 85 degrees, despite the wind.

  We were setting the posts about 18” deep, using concrete that Hemp was busily mixing small batches of and rolling over in a wheelbarrow. When he got there, Gem would have the post down in the hole, and he’d dump the appropriate amount of concrete in and pull a level from his belt to make it straight and true.

  Then on to the next one.

  Occasionally, our progress was interrupted by a walker or two, but they’d been stragglers mostly. No sustained, horde-like onslaughts, and we hadn’t even seen a regular rat, much less one of the ratz with a “z” for months. Hemp was right. They were dying off, and we just weren’t certain why. Hemp confirmed the gas was still bubbling up like Jed Clampett’s Texas Tea, so how their metabolisms varied from the human zombies was anybody’s guess.

  Charlie was enjoying the music, but for the most part she stayed at the house being pregnant, and she didn’t like it one bit. Every once in a while she’d ride over on a golf cart and bring everyone water and iced tea, but Hemp ordered her back in the house because of the heat and the fact that she was ready to pop any day.