Motor City Shambler: A Bob the Zombie Novel
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Robert Johnson was out for a hike when a stranger ran up and bit a chunk out of his arm. It's a strange behavior, but Johnson patches himself up as best he can and heads for home--Detroit. When he wakes up, he sees the news--there's a weird infection out there, an infection that comes to be known as zombies.
Very funny.
Joshua Calkins-Treworgy
My name is Joshua T. Calkins-Treworgy. I'm a 26 year old father of 2 beautiful little girls in Eden, New York State. I'm a new author, and intend to make writing my career, so that my wife won't have to work so much, and I won't have to work in the work-a-day world forever. Also because I love storytelling. My writing is in the realm of high fantasy, a genre for which I have a deep love. I've been reading fantasy and sci-fi novels for years, and among my favorite authors are Stephen R. Donaldson (the Covenant novels), Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Terry Goodkind. R.A. Salvatore's okay, but I'm not so big on him. I also enjoy the writings of Stephen King, Clive Barker (the old stuff), and Dean Koontz. I'm big on video games, particularly RPGs (role playing games). This stems in part from a long-lived love of pen-and-paper role playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons. In short, I'm a huge nerd. In addition, I'm also a huge Otaku, or anime/manga freak. (Inuyasha is my favorite, along with Negima: Magister Magi Negi, and Bleach)
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Motor City Shambler - Joshua Calkins-Treworgy
MOTOR CITY SHAMBLER:
A BOB THE ZOMBIE NOVEL
Joshua Calkins-Treworgy
Published by BooksForABuck.com at Smashwords
Copyright 2009 by Joshua Calkins-Treworgy
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 person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright 2008/2009 by Joshua Calkins-Treworgy, all rights reserved. No portion of this novel may be duplicated, transmitted, or stored in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and locations are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or people is coincidental.
Contents
Act I: Introduction of a Rotted Mind
How it all Got Started
The First Day
Act II: The Scavenger Hunt
Hello Again
Picking Up where I Left Off
Acceptance and Stupidity
Act III: Preparation for Departure
Ralph, the Office, the Escape Plan
Bad News and a Touchdown
Act IV: I am Zombie, Hear me Groan
Retrieving My Suitcase
Monsters
Act V: On Your Mark! Get Set! Shamble!
Onward and Outward
Bad Times Ahead
The Break I Needed
In the End
Act I Introduction of a Rotted Mind
Salutations. I suppose, looking back, it all started about five weeks ago. I won’t be covering that entire time here, just a few days of it. With any luck, I’ll be able to save this document to a disk and take it someplace safe to continue on it.
Nobody’s sure how it all started, be it a plague, a virus, or perhaps something slightly more biblical. I certainly don’t know, nor can I often find the time to try thinking about it. I have needs now, needs that are terrifying but which must be met. I require flesh and blood, and if possible, brains.
That may seem like a disgusting diet to you. I assure you that it isn’t exactly my choice of dietary needs either. I’m a zombie, though, and zombies eat living human beings. We aren’t great conversationalists, or athletes for that matter, despite what you may have seen in certain recent zombie film renditions. George Romero had it right way back when he made the first zombie flicks. For the most part, we are a slow, methodical, and above all, stupid species.
Yes, I am a zombie. How, then, am I getting these words across to you? Slowly, painfully, and with more mental effort than I believe most of my kindred to be capable of. As I sit at this old computer, staring at the white screen and tapping away, I am only capable of typing out a maximum of about twenty words a minute. Ask any secretary and they’ll inform you that that is incredibly slow. As such, I’ll keep this diatribe to a minimum word count. Oops, hold on a while. I’ll be back. My stomach is grumbling and I can hear someone living entering the floor.
* * * *
Hey there, I’m back. Poor son of a bitch didn’t stand a chance. However, I will say this; he put up one hell of a fight. They just don’t seem to realize, in their panic, that if they took the time to actually aim at the head, they might make better effect of their firearms. And contrary to popular belief, being shot in the chest over and over again may not kill my kind, but it does hurt like a bitch! The karate instructor from about a week ago did more damage, tell the truth. He broke my right arm when I took a swing at him.
Again, how then am I typing this out? Well, I’m situated on the fourth floor of an office building here in downtown Detroit. As a result, I don’t get too many visitors. The zombie body has a limited ability to heal itself by making use of the organic tissue we consume. There were a few survivors trapped in the second floor elevator, and, well, I did what needed doing. I feel like hell having to give in to my compulsions, but survival is a more powerful instinct than you might believe.
We are more powerful in larger numbers, but trying to communicate this to others of my kind is nearly impossible. We have a basic form of semi-telepathic communication, but it only works well with a few of us. There’s one lass up here with me, and she too is a member of the walking dead. She’s been bringing me coffee now and again, and warning me when she senses a living person entering the building. She’s very helpful, though the coffee doesn’t do me too much good. Its only real result is me having to get up every now and again to use the bathroom.
Yes, the zombie body does process normal sources of nutrition. However, we tend to excrete everything into our pants, since most of us don’t have the presence of mind to use a toilet. And while normal food and drink could serve us, we need flesh and blood in the long run. It’s hardwired into our systems from the moment of our un-birth. The more often we feed, the more powerful and capable we become. A few weeks ago, I had myself a family special down the street in one of the dilapidated apartment buildings dotting the interior landscape of this city.
The wife went down quite easily. I tore her throat open with one of my now long-nailed claws. She gagged and tried to gurgle a shriek as she fell on her kitchen floor. Again, I felt terrible, but I had to do it to keep going. The husband, well, he struggled, and he was strong as an ox. He hit me over the head with every damned thing he could lay hands on. Then he retreated back to his bedroom, where he kept a small .22 pistol. He shot me a few times in the stomach before I jammed my thumbs into his eye sockets, and boy, that hurt. It was the first time I’d been shot. The dog just cowered in the corner. To be merciful, I snapped his neck with sharp twist and dug in.
Where am I going with all of this? Oh, right, I remember now. I wanted to tell you, whoever may eventually read this, what it was like being a sentient zombie in a world going to hell and breakfast. Having access to the Internet and newspapers, I’ve kept up on the human perspective of this world-changing event. Believe it or not, this whole series of events started in Ohio, but I’ll get to that later.
Oh, by the way, the name’s Bob. Bob the Zombie.
How it All Got Started
Bob the Zombie, as you may well imagine, was not the name my loving parents graced me with upon birth. My living name was Robert Steven Johnson. I was a partner in a young soft drink company called Blast-Off Cola. My job entailed going from city to city and attaining vending rights in the larger metropolitan areas. The concept of the small company I worked for was relatively simple. We would supply vending machines full of our product, but only machines. The beverage would not be made available to grocers on a package scale until we could generate solid profits.
My job had a few perks. I have always enjoyed being out in the wilderness, and one perk was that I always had a few extra days, where I went, to explore the outskirts and rural areas of the cities I visited. It happened during one such trip into the woods surrounding the city of Buffalo, New York.
I was turned into a zombie.
There was nothing magical about the pathways I walked in the woods around a small suburb called Angola, about a half-hour’s drive outside of Buffalo. I had on a blue checked chambray shirt, an orange hunter’s jacket, and black jeans tough enough to keep the bites of pesky insects at bay. The peaceful solitude of the woods around me seemed otherworldly, as though I had been transported not to a simple woodland, but to a sanctuary away from the modern world.
While walking between the towering trees that stood sentinel over this area for untold centuries, I spotted another nature lover along the trail. Or so, I thought. Using a walking stick to propel myself toward him, I called out for his attention. Hey, mister,
I called, attempting to gain his attention. Do you own this property? It’s a lovely area.
I lowered my voice as I approached, then reached out and grabbed the man’s shoulder, and turned him toward me.
That was when he grabbed my arm and bit off a nice section of my biceps.
I had only been bitten once before in my life—by a heavyset Doberman. Allow me to tell you that the pain of being bitten by a human being (or zombie, in this case) is far worse than being bitten by an animal. Revulsion churned my stomach’s contents as I flailed away from the man busily chewing on the chunk of fleshy tissue he’d torn from my body.
What the fuck?
I grabbed at the bleeding wound on my arm.
The stranger merely grinned and groaned savagely, his teeth working over what should have been a part of my physical makeup. The wound burned, and I knew right away that it was infected. The thick scrim of yellow and black pus coming from the man’s mouth gave me a visual clue that I would indeed need to sterilize the wound. But not now. For now, all I wanted was to run out to the place on the side of the road where I’d parked my rental car and get the hell away from Angola.
With leaves and branches rustling and breaking underfoot, I sprinted blindly through the woods, coming out on the shoulder of the road a hundred yards south of my vehicle. Still clutching my arm, I raced to the car, clambered in, and shot like a bat out of hell in the direction of the nearest medical facility. I was bleeding severely, splashing crimson life fluid all over the upholstery of the rental as I wove around other vehicles on the road between me and the hospital.
When I arrived at Lakeshore Hospital about twenty minutes later, my head felt fuzzy, my mind clouded. They drugged me, cleaned and dressed the wound, and told me that I’d be staying in their company for at least twenty-four hours. I lied to the nurses and doctors who asked how I’d got the injury. Blamed it on a wild dog. They were only too happy to tell me that thankfully I didn’t have rabies, but they suggested I see my personal physician about the oddity that they did find in my blood work.
Dopes.
* * * *
The next day, after my release, I boarded a plane at the Niagara Falls airport and took myself back west, to O’Hare International. I picked up another rental and drove to my hometown of Detroit, where everything at first seemed to be normal. I entered my apartment building through the main lobby doors. The building I lived in was once an upscale hotel. The floors above the sixth story were apartment suites that used to rent for top dollar. Everything from the second to fifth floor was one and two-room economy lodging. Now, everything about that structure remained, but the building served these days as permanent or semi-permanent housing for its residents.
My apartment stood up on the eighth floor up. I crossed the large, open-spaced lobby area with its lush new red carpeting with golden trimmed patterns of diamonds. The scents of coffee (available free to residents) and pipe tobacco filled my nostrils, odors that combined to make me feel a little light-headed, but more at home. Into one of the three elevator cabs I stepped, and pressed the dull plastic eight button on the panel to the right of the cab’s interior.
Closed in and slowly ascending (I secretly suspected that I would die one day when the cables snapped, spilling the cab and myself down into the second subbasement) towards my apartment, another odor caught my attention, but it wasn’t pleasant at all. I could smell the cloying odor of something fetid and perhaps spoiled, rotted. I performed a brief examination of the elevator cab’s floor, but found no scraps of food.
When the elevator rose from the seventh to the eighth floor, a loud ‘ding’ sounded in the cab, and the doors shuffled apart gently to admit me to my floor. Whilst I padded down the hallway, digging in my right pants pocket for my keys, I tried once more to identify the foul scent. As I stood finally before my apartment door and bent down to fit the key into the lock, I realized the source of the stench.
The odor wafted up from my bandaged arm.
Turning the key and pushing forward, I admitted myself to my two-bedroom suite apartment, flipping on lights along the front hall and in the living room as I passed toward the back hall and my bathroom. I had been told to clean the stitched wound and change the bandaging as needed after leaving the emergency room back in New York State, but I didn’t expect I would need to do so already. My nose and, a few minutes later in the