Zombies v. Ninjas: Exodus: Zombies v. Ninjas, #3

ZOMBIES v. NINJAS

PART 3 – EXODUS

by

R.A. Barnes

* * *

The ninjas have escaped from the undead army, but at a heavy cost.

Mount Leinster has become a killing ground; thousands lie shattered in the foothills.

John Baptist and de Nazarene will march again to eradicate the humans.

It is time to leave. All that the ninjas knew and loved is destroyed.

Is there a safe haven on this Earth?

Is this the end for the human race?

* * *

Stay informed about new books by R.A. Barnes and enter our regular prize draw.

Click to join Marble City Readers and enter

or scan this QR code

* * *

Copyright 2016 R.A. Barnes

2016 e-Book Licensed by Marble City Publishing

EPUB Edition

ISBN 13 978-1-908943-68-2

ISBN 10 1-908943-68-8

––––––––

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

* * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

My writing is dedicated to the memory of my late Scottish grandfather

Robert 'Ruby' Aloysius Barnes.

* * *

DEDICATION

To all members of Evolution Martial Arts Academy and their families who prepared so well for the zombie apocalypse. We shall return.

CONTENTS

RECAP OF ZOMBIES V. NINJAS 2: DOMINATION

THE FIELD OF NIGHTMARES REVISITED

A BLOW TO THE TOURIST INDUSTRY

THE SURVIVORS

HITTING THE ROAD

FILL UP FOR FREE

GIANT’S GRAVE

A CLOSE SHAVE

BROTHERS IN ARMS

THE CRIPPLED COUNTY

PLOUGHING A FURROW

THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE

THE PERFECT STORM

A STRANGE DANCE

RETURN OF THE FAUX VEGETARIAN

RESURRECTED

ACROSS THE WATER

WORLD’S END

ISLAND OF THE DAMNED

MORPHEUS

UPON THIS ROCK

RECAP OF ZOMBIES V. NINJAS 2: DOMINATION

The growth in numbers of undead has overwhelmed Ireland. Poison-toothed carnivorous zombies are biting anything that moves and spreading deadly reptile infection for which there is insufficient anti-venom. The backstreets and alleyways of the nation’s cities have become breeding grounds for the parthenogenic zombie mothers, giving birth to gangs of mutant clone kids who have begun to terrorise society. A futile attempt to partition the dead, the infected and the clones in the capital has tied up Army resources and let the situation get out of hand across the land.

In Kilkenny the ninjas cull as many undead as they can lay their swords upon, Ruby’s laboratory colleagues desperately try to develop more anti-venom and the hospital struggles to cope. The blood of those who have received the anti-venom becomes a precious commodity as transfusions are made to share the immune antibodies.

De Nazarene lets loose his evil hordes of mutant clones and trained undead. The last of the undertakers are slaughtered and the small city can no longer process its dead. Increasing numbers die and reanimate. The ninjas and the remaining soldiers conduct a beheading purge to cleanse the streets and they manage to lead the undead out into the countryside for extermination. But de Nazarene and John Baptist are wise to the plan and lead a zombie army to destroy them.

Hunted into the mountains, Ruby and the ninjas witness the slaughter of the soldiers and are facing their own nastily-chewed end when the weather turns and exposes the weakness of the zombie and mutant clone reptilian constitution – they can’t function in near freezing temperatures. Mrs R and the lab crew come to the rescue on the vaccine horses and so the last few remaining humans escape their mountaintop doom. John Baptist makes a desperate final attack on Ruby with de Nazarene’s Crusader sword but Maggie intercepts and saves our narrator (which is handy or else there wouldn’t be a third book!)

The survivors leave Mount Leinster, to find out if the world they know and love still exists.

THE FIELD OF NIGHTMARES REVISITED

Twenty hours of zombie culling followed by a pitched battle with an army of undead and mutant clones. No wonder we were tired. I fell off my horse just outside Paulstown, as the sun was coming up. The ground was hard and cold.

‘Come on, Ruby,’ Edwina said and helped me back onto my feet. ‘We need to keep up the pace.’

We made quite a posse – thirty ninjas, young and old, and Mrs R’s intrepid bunch of laboratory technicians, plus Bob the Fly Reaney and his gangster cronies. Those who knew how were riding solo. Others who had never really ridden a horse, like me, were passengers. I would need to learn.

The zombie army had cut a swathe through the Irish countryside like an Oklahoma tornado. We made our way through the wreckage, cantering across fields, barely needing to heed the trampled hedges.

Mike pulled his horse up to Mrs R’s and directed her towards the place where we had forded the River Barrow. When they took up the chase, de Nazarene’s aquaphobic undead and mutant clones would have to detour by miles to take a bridge across. The icy waters drenched us up to our waists, but anything was worth it to put more distance between our troupe and the horrors of Mount Leinster.

We crossed the river and gathered at the top of the hill in the warming morning sun as it rose to the east. At the summit, Toni was heartbroken to see the smashed statue at Our Lady’s shrine. ‘He’s the Devil!’ she cried. ‘What sort of person would do this sort of thing?’

‘He’s not a person,’ Dr Alice said. ‘Strictly speaking, he’s not human.’

‘That bastard’s the Anti-Christ!’ Toni cried.

‘Now, let’s not get hysterical,’ I said, but we all looked as Toni’s outstretched hand aimed her wrathful digit at the dark silhouette of the Blackhill Mountains. My hand patted the sheathed sabre that had belonged to the fallen second lieutenant. Ten good Army men had met their fate on the mountaintop, giving their lives to protect us.

We moved on hastily, hoping that de Nazarene and his evil reptilian hordes were still frozen immobile on the top of Mount Leinster. When the thaw came, they would regroup and follow us. I could think of no other strategy than to run far away.

The cawing of crows reached across the fields to us. Then the stench of reptile became too strong to ignore. This was the killing zone.

‘Oh my God!’ Mrs R said.

Every crow in the county had descended upon the feast. Undead were just as attractive to crows as regular road kill.

‘I’ve seen some things in my time,’ Bob the Fly Reaney said, ‘but never anything like this.’ His two henchmen moved close to him, as if he needed protection from the sight before us. Bobbie Reaney Junior had a strange look of awful fascination on his face.

‘This was where we made a stand and the Army let loose with the Piranha’s cannon,’ Maggie said. ‘How many of them do you reckon, Ruby?’

I gazed out across a sea of body parts and carrion eaters. Here and there something moved, prompting a cacophony of caws and a flapping of shiny black wings. A few shattered remains of undead, those that hadn’t been blasted in the brain or heart, still retained some motor function. It was diabolical, like a scene from the trenches of World War I, or Dante’s Inferno, and yet awesome that so many undead had been cleansed from the land, their souls finally put to rest.

‘I dunno,’ I answered. ‘Maybe three thousand. Four, five thousand. Difficult to tell.’

As we entered the zone, one of the undead moved on top of a pile of others and Jerry absentmindedly beheaded it with his sword in passing.

‘Look at all these undead heads,’ Edwina said. She had been leading the lab’s development of the antidote to the poison bite of the undead. ‘All that good venom in their teeth and jaws, going to waste.’

‘You have a point,’ I said, ‘but we can’t take any with us. We don’t have time and we’ve nothing to carry them in.’

Our horses picked their way slowly through the carnage. Now and then a functioning zombie flinched away as a horse came into contact. I wondered what the basis for the undead fear of our four-legged friends was, and if we could somehow put it to better use.

‘Dad, can I have a sword?’ Hannah asked. ‘I lost my kama in the river last night, remember?’

I passed the second lieutenant’s sabre across to my daughter, who was on the back of Alice’s horse, and she joined us in delivering the coup de grace whenever we came near any still-functioning zombies. Our progress was so slow that several of the younger ninjas jumped down from their mounts and went to work with their weapons on anything that moved. My son Matt stabbed several zombie skulls with his sais, the heavy sharpened iron daggers plunging straight through eyes and ears into the brain. Then he let out a shout as an undead hand gripped his ankle.

Maggie, as fast as a shot, was off her horse and struck the undead torso with her metallic glass bo staff, knocking the yawning jaws away from my son’s leg. Her next strike broke the neck.

‘Stay up on the horses,’ Maggie shouted to everyone. ‘We don’t want any more bite injuries. You haven’t all had the vaccine and we don’t know what state our immune blood bank is in.’

It was a reminder that we wouldn’t know what to expect when we returned to the city. In the past twenty-four hours the situation had reached tipping point.

We walked on across the battlefield.

My poor battered and burnt out Range Rover stood forlornly in the middle of the bodies, windows smashed, tyres flat, spattered with roasted zombie bits and full of Browning M50 bullet holes.

‘It served us well,’ said Sean, who had driven my pride and joy out of the city with a dead dog in the back, the scent luring legions of undead to their final doom.

‘Where did they all come from, though?’ Mrs R asked as we finally reached the gate that led onto the road to Paulstown. ‘I thought only a couple of hundred escaped from St Canice’s?’

Kilkenny city’s mental health facility was my main place of work and our buffer for storing patients who had died in the general hospital and then regenerated, but the doors had been opened by de Nazarene and John Baptist, setting free zombies and lunatics alike. It was only the female undead of child-bearing age that they wanted, but the havoc the others caused had been calculated to distract us.

‘I think it’s spread much wider than we thought,’ Alice said. ‘I’ll bet you that all the villages and small towns are full of undead and infected.’

There was no traffic at all on the road. It was like the day of a GAA seniors hurling final. That illusion soon disappeared when we found the first car on its roof, in a ditch.

We all pulled up our horses and the ninjas dismounted. The vehicle was a people-carrier, the doors dented as if it had been rushed by a herd of rampaging rhinos, a species not indigenous to the island of Ireland.

‘Ruby, you’re the doctor,’ Maggie said. ‘See if the occupants are still alive.’

Alice, although she was also a doctor, didn’t perceive any slur in Maggie’s assertion. Neither did Prof. de Burca, although he had long since put his stethoscope aside for his hat of craziness.

I reached through a broken rear side window but it was angled awkwardly to the ground and I couldn’t see or feel anything. So I hacked away at the hedge until that side of the car was accessible and stretched a hand in. It was unlikely that there would be hungry undead lurking inside – they weren’t known for their driving skills – and, in any case, I was immune to their poison bite.

My fingers touched a hand that was still gripping the steering wheel. The skin felt cool. Cooler than the twenty-five degrees of the reptilian undead. I felt for a pulse in the wrist, couldn’t find one. Just to be sure, I reached for the neck to test the carotid artery for the tell-tale sign of life. It wasn’t there. Not just the pulse – the neck wasn’t there. My hand lowered onto the wet stump of the headless body.

‘How’s it looking, Ruby?’ Alice asked.

‘Not good,’ I answered. ‘The driver doesn’t have a head.’

Maggie joined me in squeezing into the hedge to look through the windows. A family of five, all upside down, held firmly in place by seatbelts. Their heads were there, just not attached. The inverted roof of the car was awash with blood, five heads partially submerged in it. A couple of hands were floating in the crimson pool.

‘They must have been shunted off the road by the marchers,’ Maggie said. ‘Then slaughtered in their seats. It would have been quick. Better than a slow agonising death from a poisonous bite.’

‘A quick, horrific death from a not very sharp sword, by the look of it,’ Alice said, joining our gruesome investigation.

~

Although the old Dublin road had been superseded by the new motorway and tended not to have a lot of traffic, that was just the first of many wrecks we came across.

Most, like the first, were shunted off the carriageway, bodywork battered as if a giant had kicked and rolled them out