Undead Flesh (an excerpt)

 My zombie novel is now available on Amazon. It's the story of Jack Garret who's thrown into a zombie apocalypse after a sudden catastrophic earthquake. Here's an excerpt from the book after Jack climbs to the roof of an old gas station.
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              The sickly aroma of rotting meat hung heavily on the breeze. Jack realized it was coming from the undead circling the gas station, and it brought him to a startling conclusion: Even though the zombies were animated, their bodies continued to rot in the heat of the day. How long would they last before decomposition reduced them to nothing? Six weeks? Six months? The key to human survival could mean outlasting the living dead until they collapsed into nothing but piles of decayed bones.

            Jack needed to know more about his enemy. He slipped the safety off the rifle and walked carefully to the roof’s edge. In the gravel lot below, a dozen zombies immediately stopped moving and turned their dead faces up to stare at him. From their mouths escaped a chorus of loud moans beckoning more to join their numbers. Soon they amassed into a wailing crowd of undead wanting to devour his flesh. They threw themselves against the side of the station, clawing and tearing off fingernails in a frenzied attempt to reach him atop the wall. The stench rising from their collective corpulence sickened him to the point of revulsion, and he stepped back to reflect on what he had just learned.

            The undead had seen him the instant he’d walked to the roof’s edge, but how was that possible when most possessed lifeless milky-white eyes and others just empty sockets? Jack realized that something other than sight had to be at work here. A psychic sense that detected the presence of the living? It explained why the zombies hadn’t left the area and moved on. They sensed the living flesh within the gas station. But what process granted them that ability, and for that matter, what had created them in the first place? He had been so busy running from zombies that he hadn’t considered the source of their mass resurrection. He assumed it was some sort of virus as portrayed in countless zombie movies and books, but in reality, it would take days or weeks for a contagion to infect so many. This event had happened in a single cataclysmic morning. The work of some unknown radiation from outer space? Interstellar atoms do pass through the human body every second, but why would they suddenly re-animate the dead? It didn’t seem plausible to Jack. A force unknown to science had to be the culprit.

            Something supernatural.

            It was the only conclusion that made sense.

         Until today, he had always been a die-hard skeptic and believed that such things as vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and zombies were mere figments of man’s dark subconscious. He now knew such horrors were very real. He suspected they had always existed hidden beneath the veneer of modern civilization.  In man’s blind quest to build towering cities of glass and steel, he had forgotten the supernatural world, dismissing the superstitions of past generations in the name of science.  First with fire and then with electricity, man had pushed back his fear of the dark over the centuries. But the darkness was patient. It lay beneath the modern world like a volcano waiting to erupt, and Jack knew that the time had arrived. But what triggers a supernatural apocalypse? The wrath of God? The end of the Mayan calendar? No more room in hell? He had no answers, but he had to deal with its terrifying aftermath nonetheless.

            He stared at the darkened sun. How was he going to keep his family safe in this terrifying new reality?

                                                   Find Undead Flesh on Amazon