Fear of the Dead (Book 1): Fear of the Dead

  FEAR

  OF

  THE DEAD

  Tales from the Zombie Apocalypse

  By Mark Woods

  © 2018, Mark Woods, Black Hart Press

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International copyright law and any unauthorised reprint or use of this material in any way, shape or form is prohibited. No part of this book, including the cover and photos, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

  Any resemblance to any persons, living, dead, or undead, or any places or locations in real life is purely coincidental.

  No Zombies were hurt in the production of this book.

  Dedicated to Faye Le Bon for helping me to come up with the name of

  Black Hart Press. I hope you like the character I wrote for you…

  Also to Roma Gray for help sourcing the cover art, along with all her other help and support.

  And finally, to Catt Dahman, as always, for first starting me off down this crazy journey…

  A few words from your friendly Neighbourhood horror author…

  The first story I ever had published five years ago (not included here) was a Zombie story.

  Veteran horror author, Catt Dahman, had encouraged me to write and so, at her behest, I sat down and started writing a short story for an anthology called The Tall book of Zombie Shorts, all the proceeds of which were going to be donated to a charity for wounded veterans and soldiers.

  Much to my utter disbelief, the story was not just accepted, but also very well received.

  I got a whole lot of love for that story and as a result, it ended up being what made me want to continue being a writer.

  All that was six or seven years ago now, and I haven’t looked back once since.

  Some might say that when Catt encouraged me to write, she created a monster.

  All I know is that from that day forwards, my life changed forever.

  Since then, I have written several other Zombie stories and it was not until I wrote something like my third or fourth zombie story that suddenly I started to realise something - all my Zombie stories were connected.

  Anybody who reads any of my stuff regularly will know full well that all of my writing is connected in some way, but this was the moment that I first realised that all of my Zombie fiction was set in the same world and just like that, so the idea for this short story collection was born.

  There are four stories featured here in this collection, and they all detail the early days of the Zombie apocalypse – or Z-pocalypse as I have decided to call it. The collection starts with the day of the initial outbreak, and then goes on from there to cover some of the events that occur in the first few days and weeks that follow.

  Like I say, the first short story I ever had published isn’t included in here, but there’s a reason for that – that particular story is set much later than the time in which these stories occur – but rest assured, it is coming.

  My plan is to give it a quick edit, a quick re-write, and then release it as part of my next short story collection in this series.

  After that, my plan is to release a full length book that ties in to all these events and links them together, but we’ll just have to see how that goes.

  For now, feel free to just kick back and enjoy the ride.

  I hope you’re ready.

  Because the Z-pocalypse starts right here…

  Some of these stories have been published before – Santa Clauz is coming to town was released as a free book for a short while over the Christmas period of 2017; Dairy of the Dead was released with it, but also first appeared as a bonus short story at the end of the book, Time of Tides: Collector’s Edition, and as a story in the anthology, Midnight Remains, both published by J. Ellington Ashton Press.

  Solitary Confinement first appeared in the Zombie anthology, Undead Legacy, also published by J.E.A, whilst They came with the cold is entirely new and exclusive to this collection.

  I hope you enjoy my stories and I’ll see you on the other side.

  And just remember…if you have to shoot anyone, always make sure you aim for the head!

  Sparkymarky, December 2019

  SANTA CLAUZ IS COMING TO TOWN…

  One

  Christmas seems to be getting earlier and earlier each year, Harry thought as he made his way through the centre of Norwich, pushing his way through all the hordes of Christmas shoppers, getting in his way as he tried desperately to reach the bank before it closed for the day.

  It was barely even December, the month having only just begun; it felt like Halloween and Bonfire night had only just been and gone, and already the Xmas decorations were up in most of the shops, as they had been now for several weeks.

  Christmas muzak was playing in almost every store – artificially recreated versions of Michael Bublè songs playing alongside other such butchered classics as ‘Little Drummer boy’ and ‘When a child is born’, barely even recognisable anymore because of everything that had been done to them – and Harry knew it wouldn’t be much longer before the city held its official switching on of the Christmas lights. No doubt hosted as usual by some Z-list celebrity no-one had ever heard of, like the latest winner of Big Brother, or someone else from one of those other lame reality shows that Harry steadfastly refused to watch on principle such as The only way is Chelsea or Made in Essex or whatever the hell either of them were called.

  It’s all gotten ridiculous now, Harry thought. Not like when I was a kid.

  The true meaning of Christmas had been lost, had been put out to pasture and then sent to sleep, laid to rest, and was by now, well and truly dead and buried. No-one cared about the true meaning of Christmas nowadays, or even knew what Christmas spirit was anymore. No, the season had become all commercialised; was now all about how much money you could spend, and how much more gaudier and tackier you could decorate the outside of your house than last year, rather than what it should be about.Which, to Harry’s mind, was all about caring for and thinking about your fellow man, and all those who might, through circumstances that might not necessarily be their own fault, be less well off than you.

  Never mind the fact that all the money being paid to the National Grid at this time of year to light peoples’ homes could be better off spent helping feed poor people in Africa or other war-torn countries where they had nothing, let alone help to feed and clothe and even house people in this country who might be homeless, oh no.

  So long as people’s homes were lit up so bright they could burn out the retinas of anybody passing by within a three mile radius, enough to permanently blind anyone foolish enough to look at them for too long, then that was all that seemed to matter to the majority of people nowadays.

  Harry hated Christmas.

  Hated it with a passion.

  He didn’t just hate it, he despised it.

  He was all too aware that, at this time of year, he was in the minority, and knew full well how other people thought of him because of his views – he had heard all the names that people called him, both behind his back and to his face, more than a hundred thousand times or more - ‘Ebenezer Scrooge’, ‘The Grinch’, ‘Old Bah Humbug’ to name but a few – but the fact was Harry simply didn’t care.

  It didn’t change the fact that, to him, Christmas meant nothing any more.

  It was dead to him.

  And it was the selfish and cruel nature of others – those same people who now criticised him and chastised him for not wanting to take part in what was,
essentially, a made-up celebration - that had killed it for him, stone dead, once and for all – just like the infamous parrot in that old Monty Python sketch.

  Harry refused to play his part and be a good little consumer; just another cog in the big Capitalist machine that the holiday season had become; refused to toe the line or allow himself be brainwashed by all the hype generated by the big corporations that essentially now ran and controlled Christmas; or be sucked in by all the big, blockbusting advertising campaigns that they always ran around this time of year in an attempt to ram their Christmas message down your throat – essentially, spend more money, but also, if you’re going to spend it, spend it with us - until it was all you could do to stop yourself from throwing up bile in the form of festive glitter and tinsel.

  No, Harry refused to be like everyone else around him.

  He refused to be a sheep and follow the rest of the flock; refused to play the part of the sacrificial lamb singing Christmas carols all the way whilst simultaneously being blindly led towards the slaughterhouse.

  No, Harry was a shepherd, not a sheep, and this year, he decided, he was going to spend this Christmas the same way he spent every Christmas – on his own, alone; his house totally devoid of any unnecessary decoration, the same way he did every year.

  It was the same way he had celebrated Christmas for the past ten years, ever since his wife had left him for the postman one year on Christmas Eve - taking with her everything they’d ever bought together, leaving him with just an empty house.

  Harry wasn’t bitter about that, not in the slightest. In fact, he thought, the bitch had probably done him a big favour if he were being totally honest. She had always been an annoying cow anyway, had badgered him into a marriage that, by the end, neither of them had really wanted, and he’d actually been kind of glad when she left.

  It had given him a chance of a fresh start, a chance to begin his life anew, without all of the constant nagging and complaining that he had been forced to endure for the majority of the time they had spent together.

  It had given him a chance to wipe the slate clean and reinvent himself and since that day, ten years ago, Harry, personally, thought that his life had never been so good.

  It wasn’t even as though Christmas was a real holiday, Harry thought.

  The majority of people that you spoke to on the street would all tell you the same thing; that Christmas was all about celebrating the birth of Our Lord, Jesus Christ - for that was what they had always been taught – but this, in fact, was a lie.

  As any decent historian worth his salt could tell you, Jesus wasn’t even born in December - hadn’t been born in the winter time at all. At some point during Roman times, the calendar had been changed and in actual fact, if Harry remembered correctly, the birth of Jesus was now thought by historians to have much more likely happened more around late August or September time than December.

  The whole notion of Christmas hadn’t even originally been a Christian celebration, but instead a pagan festival that, just as they’d had a habit of doing in those days, the Roman Catholic Church had stolen and adopted for their own in a bid to try and brighten up the winter months. Around the same time as they had been going around eliminating and eradicating any and all other faiths they didn’t agree with.

  By integrating the pagan celebration of Christmas into their own faith, so the Roman Catholic Church had hoped to win over those people who might not have followed them before and to a large extent, it apparently seemed to have worked. Catholicism and Christianity had taken over and as a result, many of the older religions had pretty much all died out.

  The whole Nativity scene, long traditionally associated with Christmas, was a lie. The birth of baby Jesus, supposedly at Christmas time, was a lie.

  All of it, all Christmas was a lie - one great big, massive falsehood perpetrated by the Catholic Church.

  Christmas was a celebration based solely on nothing more than falsehood and deceit, bullshit and deception.

  And don’t even get me started on Santa Claus, Harry thought. Whoever thought it was a good idea to lie to children, and tell them that a stranger would come down their chimney and leave them presents – but only if they were good – should be shot.

  What sort of a parent doesn’t just lie to their child, but then encourages them to go on and do the same to their own offspring when it becomes their turn to have children of their own?

  We are always telling children to be honest – telling them not to lie and that honesty is the best policy, isn’t that what we’re always telling them – and then, come Christmas, we expect parents to just go on and throw all that out of the window, simply because it’s become traditional to believe in a fictional made-up character solely invented to make children behave themselves once a year?

  Bullshit, he thought. It’s all such bullshit.

  It was fair to say Harry had a problem with Christmas.

  But it was more than that.

  His hatred of all things festive went far beyond just a dislike of Santa Claus and his belief that Christmas was a made-up festival.

  No, Harry, amongst other things, suffered from christougenniatikophobia – a phobia of everything and anything to do with Christmas, but more specifically, with people dressed up as Santa Claus.

  It was not crippling, but neither was it something that he was comfortable enough with sharing with other people.

  Where most people saw Father Christmas as a warm and bubbly character, who perfectly encapsulated and summed up everything to do with Christmas, Harry instead saw Santa Claus as someone much more darker and threatening.

  It could be absolutely anyone hiding behind that beard, Harry thought, absolutely anyone – any Tom, Dick or Harry, and no-one would ever know.

  At this time of year, what could be a more perfect disguise for any paedophile or pervert to hide behind, and which parent ever thought twice about letting their kid sit on Santa’s lap?

  When people ever asked him if perhaps he didn’t think he might be being a little paranoid, Harry would always laugh off the question and tell people that he had been touched inappropriately by a department store Santa one year, back when he, himself, had still been a child, but this was a lie.

  In actual fact Harry had never been touched up or groped by anyone pretending to be Santa, but that didn’t mean he was blind to the whole possibility of it happening.

  In his opinion, people were just entirely too trusting nowadays…

  It wasn’t just the whole idea of Santa being a paedophile though - there were other reasons too why Harry had a whole issue with people dressed up as Santa.

  Harry found the whole concept behind Father Christmas creepy, and completely failed to see why anyone else didn’t seem to have a problem with a man who, not only was able to sneak into your home in the dead of night via your chimney and then leave the same way, but was also able to do so without even leaving so much as a single sign of his presence other than a few, cheap presents, a half-drunk glass of sherry and a half-eaten mince pie.

  The whole idea just did not sit right with him, and never had.

  How come no-one ever questioned how Santa was able to get around so many peoples’ homes in one night?

  Or how such a fat, jolly character could even fit down a person’s chimney in the first place?

  What about those people who didn’t have a chimney? Harry had always wondered. What, Santa Claus just had a skeleton key that allowed him access to every house in the world?

  How creepy was that?

  Of course Harry knew full well that Santa wasn’t actually real but still, whoever had first thought it would be a good idea to propagate such a myth deserved, in his opinion, to be strung up by their Christmas baubles.

  At any other time, the very idea of some strange man, able to gain access to your home while you were all safe in bed asleep, would surely send alarm bells ringing, but just because it was Christmas, suddenly the idea was socially acceptable?

  I do
n’t think so, Harry thought.

  It was just one more reason, amongst a whole long list of reasons, that made him hate Christmas even more.

  Bah fucking humbug, Harry thought, and having finally arrived at his destination, stepped into the bank.

  Just as in every other store he’d been past this evening, Christmas Muzak was playing and the bank was absolutely heaving. Thankfully, most people were queuing up to use the cash machines. Harry joined the queue for the cashier’s desks and was fairly quickly served. As he went to leave, after paying in his wages a few minutes later, the cashier looked up at him and wished him ‘a very Merry Christmas’.

  Shove your merry Christmas up your fucking arse, is what Harry wanted to say, but instead he just nodded and smiled.

  “You too,” he said, trying to sound as least sarcastic as possible, and then turned around and walked away, out of the bank, to go and finish his shopping.

  And with any luck, it might just be your last…he thought, unaware right then just how prophetic those words would end up turning out to be.

  TWO

  Harry headed back out into the busy street outside. It was late night shopping tonight and now Harry had paid his wages into the bank, he could finally get around to his real reason for coming into the city tonight – to do his one and only annual Christmas shop, the same as he did every year.

  Though he did not believe in celebrating Christmas, his family still did – his parents and both his sisters – and so he still made a point of buying them presents even if he did not expect – and in fact, asked them not to – buy him anything in return.

  Harry normally liked to see his family the day after Boxing Day, when everything was all over, but he always liked to buy their presents early because you could often pick up some good bargains and this way at least, he knew all his Christmas shopping was done and out of the way with plenty of time to spare.