Among The Dead (Book 1): Shadow of Death

by Colley, Ryan

  AMONG THE DEAD:

  Shadow of Death

  Part One

  Ryan Colley

  AMONG THE DEAD: SHADOW OF DEATH

  Ryan Colley

  KINDLE EDITION

  Copyright 2017

  ***

  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 Amazon.com or Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

  ***

  Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services

  www.moniquehappy.com

  Cover art by oliviaprodesign

  DEDICATION

  This is for my mum (Michaela) who is awesome and my first reader, my sister (Blaize) who is just as obsessed with the apocalypse as me, and for my partner (Charlotte) who stuck with me through the good times and bad.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are too many people to thank for this book, and I wish I kept better track of everyone who helped me, but here goes:

  Thank you to Monique Happy, who edited my book

  and accepted my British way of writing things.

  Thank you to the numerous authors who offered me advice when I asked:

  Shawn Chesser, Joshua Dalzelle, R.R. Haywood, Craig Martelle, John O’Brien, Frank Tayell, Mark Tufo, and Thomas Watson. All of your help was phenomenal.

  Thank you to all the people who made this book possible through constructive criticism, proofreading, taking time out of their day to help me, or just listen to my nonsense.

  Finally, a thank you to you, the reader.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  TAO OF SAM – HYGIENE: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  TAO OF SAM – WEAPONS: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  TAO OF SAM – CLOTHES: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  TAO OF SAM – WATER: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 15

  TAO OF SAM – SURVIVORS: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  TAO OF SAM – HOME: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  TAO OF SAM – FOOD: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  TAO OF SAM – MEDICINE: THE BASICS

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  SAM’S LETTER TO HIS FAMILY.

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  I remember learning about something called the Cotard Delusion. The common and more exciting name for it is Walking Corpse Syndrome. Simply, it’s when people believe they are dead. They believe they have died and are living in the afterlife. There was a well-known case of a man who suffered from the Cotard Delusion, and everything that happened to him just contributed as evidence to reinforce his delusion. He travelled to South Africa and believed the heat of the country was due to the fact he was in hell. Evidence surrounding the Cotard Delusion has always been a little indistinct. No one has ever been sure what to make of it. Even I thought the delusion was a ridiculous concept. With everything that happened in my life, I don’t feel that way anymore.

  I saw terrible and horrific acts. I committed even worse. I changed. My thoughts. My feelings. My ideology. My attitude about life. Something that changed is my belief about the Cotard Delusion. With everything that has happened, I feel that there is irrefutable proof that it genuinely exists. I constantly think back to that day on the coach, and how everything went from good to bad to worse. However, I realised something that causes everything else to make sense. I think on that day, so long ago, I died on that coach. It wasn’t what I expected. There was no everlasting peace. I didn’t see the faces of my loved ones. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. It all just … carried on. Everything that happened since is the afterlife and I’m in hell. That is clear to me. It had to be. If it wasn’t true, then how would I be able to carry on living with everything I’d done?

  ****

  The early days of the infection were unique to put it simply. Not because people were killing each other. As a species, we had done that ever since the first caveman bludgeoned their neighbour to death with a rock. I wouldn’t even say it was unique because people were eating each other. That happened before everything started as well. What made it unique was that it was the fastest noticeable social change since public fear of a global terrorist attack. The news wasn’t just full of reports on people attacking other people, but it was all about the level of brutality and animalistic nature of the attacks. That is what made it different. Teeth were used to rend flesh. Fingers were used as claws to maim and kill. That was before any mention of an infection, or “Daisy” as the news referred to it. I watched news reports of people trying to tear out eyes, and of family members attacking their own kin. Dying patients attacked doctors. Doctors attacked patients in the same hospital. Yet, they weren’t planned attacks, or some sort of protest. Attacks were feral and bloody. Attacks happened in the night. Attacks happened in the day. In the street. In the home. In your home. People just weren’t safe. The rich, poor, and homeless were victims. It didn’t matter if you were the working class, the upper class, or anywhere in between. You just stopped going out at night. You stopped going out at all if you could help it. It was no longer classed as a domestic problem contained to homes, it was a public concern. It was insanity.

  The police, and government, tried to find some link between the early attacks. The rumour mill believed it was a new drug that made people act crazy. The only problem with that theory was that it assumed an elderly couple in Manchester took the same drug as a homeless man in London, as well as a few school children in Liverpool. Another rumour said the cause was some sort of mental illness that caused people to act on their most primal instincts, to attack and feed. There was no logic. Research teams were just grasping at straws to find a reason behind the new epidemic.

  It wasn’t long before city councils called quarantine. There was a mass exodus out of cities as people returned to their respective homes and homelands. Trying to quarantine a whole city was next to impossible. Besides, it’s human nature to resist authority. Well, my human nature at least. Then the military began moving. One day you could go out and there would be nothing, the next day there were military personnel everywhere. There were checkpoints set up throughout the city. The military were posted at hospitals, bus stations, the mall, and any other major institutes. The military ran everything the day they decided to turn up. I
remember going into a local supermarket and I saw armed military standing around telling jokes while they handled their weapons – like it was the most casual and everyday thing in the world. Yet, we accepted it without any explanation from the government. It just happened and the citizens of Great Britain had to deal with it, and we were happy too for the most part. Conspiracy theorists went into overdrive. I imagined some of them needed a change of underwear just from the thoughts going through their heads as they connected photos on a wall with pieces of string. Some theorised that the government was rooting out the Russian sleeper agents living amongst us. Then again, those same theorists were also the sort of people you would see on a Saturday night yelling at meat in a supermarket. Most people didn’t believe the theories, but they knew something was happening. I knew exactly what was happening, and I had mentally prepared my whole life for it.

  Over the first few weeks of the occupation, I made my presence known to a few of the military folk, especially the ones at the local bus station. I spoke to them daily and got to know them all personally. The plan was for me to become a friendly face and, eventually, they got to know me by name too. That was the first part of my master plan.

  I wanted to drag my plan out over a much longer time period than I eventually did, but something happened that meant I had to move things to a closer date. During the quarantine of the cities, I had lost contact with the love of my life, Alice, who lived a full two hundred miles away in Essex. She was the reason my secret plan had been created in the first place. The goal was to go to Essex and bring her back to Bristol, my home city, so we could live out the infection together. That was until she stopped replying to my messages. Alice and I had met at a university in Bristol. However, she was originally from Essex and, as a result, had to travel between Bristol and Essex to visit her family. Alice was back in Essex when the quarantine had kicked in, so she became stuck there. I kept track of what was happening in Essex and found that the military presence had been much more advanced compared to what I witnessed in Bristol. They were taking all sorts of initiatives to prepare Essex for the eventual apocalypse, even if they didn’t know the chain of events would be of apocalyptic proportions. The preparation in Essex made sense, however, considering how close Essex is to London. Especially since the troubles started in London, or so the reports made it seem. It made sense for the nearest cities to be on alert and fully prepared for whatever headed their way. The world slowly became a horror film, and Alice never liked horror films, so that doubled my resolve to save her from a potential living nightmare. Then again, not watching horror films was probably what would keep her calm; she wouldn’t even begin to think of all the horrors that existed out in the world.

  I would ring Alice every day, repeatedly, until she picked up. Just to ensure that she was safe and well. That happened for a few months, and then two things happened simultaneously. The first thing was that events in London escalated on a grand scale. What started off as a containment effort of a few afflicted individuals evolved into full-scale street wars. The news reports began to show the military gunning down individuals who were running at them. Bullets pounded into those individuals but they just kept going. If you looked at the footage closely, you could see it was only headshots that brought down the attackers for good. There was escalating warfare erupting on the streets of London and all that the rest of the world could do was watch. Hell, even we, the citizens of Great Britain, could only sit and watch.

  Eventually, the government intervened and stopped the violent footage being played on television networks. The news stations were then given public-friendly propaganda videos that spewed the message of hope. The situation in London was being contained and everything was under control; so we didn’t need to worry. I stopped watching when they pulled out the classic image of Winston Churchill doing the “V” for victory. That is where online resources became useful. Venturing onto the Dark Net provided completely unfiltered and uncensored access to video files for a time. That spilled over onto the internet and people began to study them to see what extra information they could garner from the footage. Imagine a group, over a million strong, studying the same videos and all the various conclusions they came to. Let’s just say, the collective people of the internet got a hell of a lot more right than the fine members of Parliament.

  The second thing to happen was the mass evacuation of London. When events took a turn for the worse, the military began evacuating people by the coachload at random. Coincidently, the “random” coachloads were the wealthy. It was good to see that even when the end was near, money still had a hold on people. Next, the coachloads of people were taken to evacuee camps all over England; one of which was in Bristol. On days that the coaches arrived, I would go to the bus station and watch. It was oddly satisfying to see hundreds of the upper class in their Armani suits sharing makeshift housing with one portable toilet between all of them. I felt an odd sense of justice.

  I continued preparing for what was to come, and the online world played a major part in it. In a week I had learned how to field strip and reassemble some of the basic military guns as well as their proper maintenance; visually anyway. I used tutorials to learn how to drive; in theory. I learned how to hotwire a vehicle, change a tyre, and when your vehicle was beyond saving. I also spent every spare moment I had honing my body to perfection. I lost my excess weight that had accumulated from a lazy student lifestyle and soon had a reasonably toned body, something most people would kill to have. I learned first aid basics and read as many books on survival as I could. I needed to know everything, just in case I found myself in any dire situation. I even learned how to open a can of food without a can opener or knife, which I thought was fairly impressive. All of those skills, while seemingly useless, could very well save my life.

  My family consisted of my mother and sister, Tracey and Kelsey, respectively. My mother was a kind, caring, and overweight lady who desperately tried to lose said weight; she was pretty good at it too. My sister was a cow. Not a literal cow but a figurative one; she was so annoying. I suppose that is what siblings do though. She was the sort of girl who cared more about her looks than most other things. She would refuse to take out the rubbish without makeup on just in case someone saw her. They both had their quirks and their ways to annoy me, but they were family and I would miss them. My father, although dead to me, was still alive and not a nice man. For years I wished the status of the former would change.

  I was kind of a misfit in terms of appearance when compared to the rest of my family. I was taller than all of them, which wasn’t hard when you’re six foot two. I had dirty blond hair which, if left to grow too long, ended up looking like Lego hair; kind of one texture and just placed on top of my head. It wasn’t a good look. When asked how I would describe myself, personality wise, I often went back to a quote a college teacher had used to describe what I was like. It was after class and two teachers and I were sat around chatting.

  The teacher, who had never had me as a student, asked my regular teacher, “So what is Sam like as a student?”

  My teacher looked between me and his colleague before answering, “It’s like having a genius sat in the class, albeit an evil genius.”

  He was joking of course. Sure I was intelligent, but no more than most. Still, that description had always stuck with me and I used it. Mainly because it was funny and I felt as though I was a funny guy. I never said I was a humble person …

  CHAPTER 1

  “Alice, I don’t know how many times I’ve called you. I know you’re probably busy, but it is crucial you get back to me as soon as you can. I’ll chat to you later. I love you,” I said as I left yet another voicemail.

  The situation in London had already been bad, but it had gone from bad to hellhole. There were rumours that the infection spread beyond London, although the media heavily censored any news which would contribute to the nation’s decreasing morale. Regarding the infection, it was determined by the government that anyone who got bi
t or scratched by an infected individual would later die and then reanimate as infected themselves. Although the government never used the words “die” or “reanimate,” everyone knew what they actually meant. Most people in the Western world had watched a zombie movie and, even if they didn’t want to admit it, knew what was really happening. About the time the infection had spread out of London, if you believed the rumours, Alice had missed three days’ worth of calls. A system I had set up to keep track of her wellbeing. With no contact and the infection spreading, I naturally expected the worst. I hadn’t expressed my concerns to my family. I knew they would just give me false hope with empty words. They would just tell me to leave her be. They needed me to keep a level head because, in all our hypothetical scenarios concerning the end of the world, I did most of the planning. I was a key player in the survival of my family should the infection spread to Bristol, which is why what I did was so selfish and disloyal. The Judas act I committed? I left Bristol.

  ****

  Over the few days after I had lost contact with Alice, I wrote out every scenario for survival I could think of. By the time I had finished, I had a printed document ready to give to my family. It was every thought I had ever had about an infection like the one which spread through England: a zombie outbreak. It was around one hundred and thirty pages, double-sided, with diagrams; I had even bound it with a spiral spine and laminated covers. If I was going to do something, I wanted to do it right, and with some awesome presentation. I hadn’t even put that much care into my university work! I had packed a bag of basic survival tools in case I came across harsh conditions. I even purchased a combat knife and wristwatch from the nearest military surplus store; a pricey item which I hoped I wouldn’t need. I also managed to find a pair of military-grade boots in the same store. They took ages to wear in properly but once they had, it was like wrapping my feet in clouds they were so comfortable. I packed a sleeping bag, a torch with batteries, and a few other bits and pieces. My next move was to leave in the middle of the day. It would seem less suspicious than if I left in the middle of the night. It was also a lot less cliché. With my heart full of self-anger for what I was about to do, and an edge of excitement at the prospect of something different, I told my family I was “going out for a walk.” They said “bye” and “see you soon,” not expecting me to leave for good. They barely gave me a glance as I began to leave. I hesitated at the boundary between the inside of my home and the outside of the world. I stared at my family. It was how I would remember them: my mum in the kitchen preparing food, and my sister with her horrible noise she called music upstairs. I took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in my throat. I left them the survival document, jokingly named “The Tao of Sam” by the telephone so they would see it next time it rang. I also left a letter which explained my intentions, even if it felt like an excuse for my betrayal. I scooped up my bag of supplies and left. Had I not trained my body over the months, the large rucksack would have seemed heavy, but now it felt more of a minor inconvenience than a burden. I walked quickly, drawing as little attention to myself as possible. I avoided neighbours and friends when I saw them and continued onwards to the bus station. Not that they would have suspected anything anyway. I wore jeans, my military boots, a t-shirt and a hooded jumper. Just comfy clothes which I could move in. I momentarily doubted my choice of underwear and considered going back to change, but I knew that was just procrastination to delay the inevitable. If I went back, I knew I would never leave again.