Man Eaters

by Linda Kay Silva

  “That’s—”

  “Genocide. Yes it is. Our scientists came up with the idea that if we could secretly start the epidemic rolling in the Middle East where it would be easier to contain, our military could swoop in later as the hero with the solution. We would, in essence, claim the oil reserves, the fossil fuels, plutonium…hell, even their goats. We wouldn’t just be the heroes. We would be the benefactor of all things good.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Cassidy said.

  Luke heaved a loud sigh. “Many of us were. When the boys and I got back to D.C., the rumors were rampant, but Enzo’s twin sister is a scientist and she dug and dug until she uncovered the truth.”

  “You were right all along, Einstein.”

  Einstein nodded once.

  “What she uncovered was that secrets that big are worth a lot of money to the right people, so someone sold what they knew to another country. You can imagine how scary it would be to be our enemy at this point. So the country that knew the truth went to our allies, and in turn, various powerful countries created a committee to stop us in the event we were actually successful in creating this virus. Of course, we denied, denied, denied, and fell right into the committee’s trap anyway.”

  “The trap was to smoke us out, huh? We chose to move the virus to an unknown location.”

  Luke smiled at Einstein. “You’re good, kid. Because it was so volatile, only small canisters of it were kept in a dozen different locations throughout the country. Once those locations were compromised, again, because people will always pay for good intel, this global committee decided that we, as a super power, had run our course. It was decided that we were the world’s greatest danger, and so, they let the virus loose.”

  “The terrorists got us, but we were shot with our own weapon.” Einstein could only shake his head.

  “Didn’t they realize how utterly stupid it would be to allow the virus out?”

  Shrugging, Luke turned to stoke the fire. “We’re pretty sure they had no idea it was zombies. Even if they did, who would have believed it? All they knew was that this virus could leave our infrastructure intact, our farms tillable, our water potable. They understood that we are a large cookie jar and pretty soon, there would be no one left to guard the cookies.”

  Roper held up a hand. “Wait. Are you saying the rest of the industrialized world elected to be mass murderers of Americans?”

  Luke looked down. “It’s not hard to understand why, Roper. We’ve been a nation less than two hundred and fifty years. During that time, we’ve been in the Civil War, French-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Viet Nam War, Cold War, Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the Afghanistan War. We’ve destroyed economies, ways of life, and other religions. We are, in most of the world’s eyes, the greatest evil on the planet. We consume more, waste more, and share less. We have it all and yet, we do so little good.”

  “So they opted to exterminate us?”

  Luke looked up and nodded “Yes. That was their plan, but they had no idea the virus would have two legs and mobility. They didn’t know it would create man eaters. They also didn’t know if the antidote would work, so they pulled together a world army to contain us…to keep us here while the zombies eradicated us.”

  “Oh my god,” Dallas said, her hand over her mouth. “They’re just sitting out there waiting to take us over.”

  Luke touched the tip of his nose with his index finger. “Exactly. After World War I, Germany was divided into fourths, with each ally supervising their section. The United Nations probably has a similar initiative in mind. My bet is someone was going to divide us up and share the loot. That’s the beauty of the virus: Americans are dead…everything else is unharmed. Come and get it. It’s like finally being able to raid your big sister’s closet.”

  As everyone digested this information, Luke held Butcher’s hand and Dallas clutched Roper’s, while all of them contemplated just what this could mean not only to themselves and the group, but to the nation as a whole.

  “I don’t have to tell you what this means,” Luke said softly, bringing Butcher’s hand to his lips.

  Roper gave Dallas’s hand a quick squeeze. “It means we have one of three choices: We can find someplace else to live, if we could get out. We can stay here and again become a minority in our own country, or we can band with the rest of the gay population and the few remaining straight folks and fight those fuckers for what they did to us and our nation.”

  The cabin’s small interior crackled with energy.

  “Well,” Roper said, rising. “I, for one, am gonna fight for this country of ours and if those United Nations asswipes step foot on our land, I’ll be right there sending a very gay bullet their way.” Looking down at Dallas, Roper asked quietly, “Who’s with me?”

  The vote was unanimous.

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  Coming in 2013 from award winning author - Linda Kay Silva

  The Horde

  Dallas’s Log

  It’s been a month since the deadly virus wiped out almost 3/4 of the population of the United States. Well, wiped out would imply that those 75% were gone.

  Or buried.

  Or both.

  Not so.

  They are very much still here roaming the countryside looking for human flesh to sink their blood encrusted teeth into.

  We call them man eaters. They do not eat any other flesh or each other—just human flesh. Sometimes they tear the living apart, often stuffing their rotten mouths with intestines, brains, flesh and even bones. Other times, they settle for a single bite, or what we have started calling the B.O. D. which stands for Bite Of Death. Being bitten by one of them is only slightly worse than being eaten alive by one of them because it turns you into one of them.

  Them.

  As much as we would love to be able to hate them, we can’t. It’s not their fault our government created a virus to use as a bio weapon against some other country. It’s not their fault the global community set that very weapon against us, transforming our once prosperous nation into an infested pool of rotting flesh and blood stained muck. The man eaters are unfortunate victims of bad science and a world sick of the United States government playing God in their sandbox. As a result, the United Nations created a global army to contain the virus within our own borders. We became casualties of a government project gone awry, and before we knew it, survivors turned on each other, our military became our enemy, and we struggled and fought every single day to stay safe and free of virus, from the man eaters, and from each other.

  Eight months ago, I met Roper, Butcher, and Einstein, and together, the four of us managed to get out of California’s deathbed and to the safety of the Louisiana bayou. Along the way we collected other like-minded survivors. I say like-minded because an apocalypse devolves man’s higher-level thinking skills into something base and lowbrow. We turn into Neanderthals and revert back to the survival of the fittest…or meanest…or most heavily armed. Outlaws ruled the streets using bully tactics to take what they want. We had faced a group of outlaws on our way to New Orleans and, in the end, it did not go well for them. We might have appeared like a group of women and the boy traveling in a military vehicle, but as we quickly discovered once the virus broke out, looks are deceiving. When we finally made it to the bayou, we had killed both the living and the undead along the way.

  I have no regrets for doing either.

  At 2:07 on a now memorable Tuesday, we entered a kill or be killed world, and so far, we had managed to do the former quite well. This doesn’t mean we didn’t lose some along the way.

  We did, and it still hurts.

  But the nucleus of my new family had made it all the way to New Orleans where we have been holding out for the last seven months hoping beyond hope that our scientists have figured out a way to kill those things.

  I realized after a few weeks went by that it was time we all recorded our experiences—our successes, our failures, our losses, and our gains.


  We are the survivors. I believe it is important for those who come after us to know who we were and why we managed to survive and others did not.

  It’s a story worth hearing.

  A little about Linda Kay.

  Linda Kay, AKA Storm lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of 16 years and a menagerie of animals. She wakes up happy, laughs all day long, and lives a life that had included African safaris, Thai temples, riding Harleys, and floating down rivers on bamboo rafts. By day, she is a World, American, British, Asian, and Women’s Literature Professor at a military university. By night, she is a lover of all things zombie-esque and will watch any movie where a zombie eats a human being. She’s has been known to offer parts in her books to her students, who touch her life as much as she hopes she touches theirs. She is proud to be with Sapphire Books and looks forward to a long and satisfying writing career with them. Linda Kay prides herself on responding to everyone who has ever written her, and she encourages you to join her and Sapphire Books on Facebook.

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  You can find Linda Kay’s books at www.sapphirebooks.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ibooks, Kobo, Smashword, and All Romance Ebooks.