Hey, gang. I've just finished writing a 10,000 word short horror story called "Til Death" and have made it available for the kindle and nook ereader devices. It is about a newlywed couple trapped in the basement of a rural home during a zombie outbreak. It is set in the same universe as Mort, so you zombie fans will hopefully enjoy it. I plan to write more short fiction so that there's not such a big gap in my releases between the full-sized novels. Caution: it is very explicit and violent. Here's an excerpt from the first four or five pages. Only 99 cents at amazon or barnes and noble!

1. In the Kitchen

Rachel Carlson inched her eyes above the window sill and peered into the backyard. Her heart was beating so hard it felt like someone was rhythmically squeezing her head, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She didn’t think she’d ever been so scared for so long. Not in her whole life. Not even close.

“Come o-oooon… where are you?” she whispered.

She had almost been too scared to venture out of the basement. She was afraid one of those… things might have wandered into the house during the night. They seemed dumb, but they could fool you. They didn’t think, and they didn’t seem to have emotions, but they had a kind of sly instinct. And they had no mercy. None. If she was by herself, she probably wouldn’t have been able to work up the courage to come out of her hiding place, but she wasn’t alone. She had Charlie, and he needed her to be brave.

It was just a little after noon, the yard between the house and the barn brightly lit. It was the Dog Days of Summer, the sun a hot, hard-boiled egg, the sky cloudless but for a few wispy smears of white near the horizon. She could see the porch and a big oak tree with a rope swing, and several feet past that, a picnic table and a stump with an axe in it. At the edge of the yard, before the property gave way to endless rolling hills of pale pink prairie grass, there was a big red barn and a garden—but as far as she could see, no monsters.

Where were they?

She’d checked the house already, upstairs and down, making sure they were all outside, no nasty surprises ready to jump out of a closet or grab your ankle from beneath a bed. There were five of them, she believed: a mother, a father and three kids. She’d locked the outside doors as she crept carefully from room to room-- something she’d neglected to do when they first fled here, pursued by those things-- trying to ignore the blood stains in the middle of the livingroom floor, which had dried the color of chocolate syrup.

Just like she tried to ignore the dead dog lying in the middle of the back yard, flyblown and pulled apart, its ribs jutting out and its entrails spread in the dirt like someone had pulled the pin on a grenade and shoved it down the poor animal’s throat.

For the first time since she’d gotten here, Rachel was hopeful. Maybe they’d forgotten about the fresh meat hiding in the house and had wandered off. It was possible.

She could see the grill of an old farm truck through a gap in the barn doors, and the question that was running through her head was: does it run? Because if it did, then maybe they could get to it and escape. Maybe she could get Charles to a hospital, find someplace where he could get proper medical attention.

She didn’t have any alternatives. The power had gone out two days ago. The radio stations were all off the air. She’d tried her cell phone first thing, when they were safely inside the farmhouse, but she’d only gotten a robot voice that said, “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try your call later.” Now it just showed NO SIGNAL.

Her phone was dead, the power was dead, the radio stations were dead… for all she knew, the whole world was dead.

And it wouldn’t be long before Charles was dead, too.

No! she thought, shaking her head stubbornly. He’s not going to die! Don’t even think that! He’s going to get better, or you’re going to figure a way out of here and get him to a hospital.

But she didn’t believe it. Not in her heart of hearts. There was no place for lies in the Heart of Hearts. No comforting untruths, no room for cowardice.

Rachel started to rise, thinking she would sneak out the kitchen door and try to make it to the barn. If she could get to the truck, she could try the engine. If it started, she would find those fucking things and run them over, maybe back up and run over them twice, and then she’d pull up to the door and fetch Charles from the basement and get the two of them the hell out of here. There had to be somewhere they could go, someplace that hadn’t been devastated by the Phage.

She had just risen to full height, in view of the barnyard, and one of the monsters came stumbling from behind a brilliant yellow bush that was just on the other side of the oak tree. It was the fat one. The one in the bloody coveralls. Mr. Frobisher, she thought, recalling the name that was hand-painted on the family’s mailbox. She’d seen it when they first arrived-- The Frobishers, writ cheerfully among bright painted sunflowers. For some reason, she had remembered the name. She didn’t know why.

The fat one stumbled to the center of the yard, walking stilt-legged, like his gears were about to seize up. His thin hair blew in the humid breeze, flapping upon the bald spot he’d probably tried to comb it over when he was still alive. His skin was a mottled, cyanotic blue, with black mold winding up his bloated neck from his collar. The mold had begun to spread to his jowly cheeks, she saw, and when he opened his mouth to groan, she noted his lips and tongue were black with mold as well.

Rachel dropped back out of view, trying to restrain her yip of surprise.

She squatted below the window sill, cursing her bad luck, but she was glad she hadn’t tried to make a run for the truck parked in the barn after all, because Mr. Frobisher had been lurking out there behind the yellow bush the whole time, and he would have caught her halfway across the yard.

They were dumb… but they were sly.

Rachel eased back up to see what Frobisher was doing.

“Ew!” she muttered, pulling a face.

The redneck was kneeling in the yard beside his dead dog now, chewing on one of its legs. She was glad his back was turned. Bad enough to know what he was doing; at least she didn’t have to suffer the gruesome details.

A moment later his wife came lurching around the corner of the house, dressed in a tacky satin nightgown, and the two began to tussle over the dog leg, snarling and hissing at one another in the middle of a cloud of agitated flies. Mrs. Frobisher howled, teeth gleaming in the mangled mess that was her upper lip and jaw. Her husband pushed her down and returned to chewing on the family pet.

Chivalry wasn’t just dead, Rachel thought. It was un-dead.

Feeling nauseated, Rachel slid to her hands and knees and withdrew to the basement door. She scooped up the bottle of antibiotics she had found in the second story bathroom and reached up for the doorknob. She eased through the door and pulled it to behind herself, then stood, took a calming breath and headed down to check on her husband.

2. In the Basement

“Hey, beautiful,” Charlie murmured.

It was hard to hide her despair, but Rachel forced herself to smile and replied: “Hey, funny-face.”

Her husband was lying on a cot, his wrists bound to the metal frame of the headboard. In the joyless white light of the Coleman lantern sitting on the crate beside him, his face looked ashen and skeletal. His eyes had sunk in and his cheeks were hollow and his skin had taken on a decidedly unhealthy pallor. He was sinking fast, she knew. He seemed to have wasted even further, just in the short time she’d been upstairs checking to see if the Frobishers were still hanging around.

As if he’d read her mind, he swallowed thickly and asked, “They still out there?”

Rachel nodded as she crossed to an old-fashioned freezer. There was a plastic jug of purified water sitting atop it. “Yes, they’re still shambling around outside,” she said, and she filled a Styrofoam cup with water. As she carried the cup to him, she added, “I think there’s an old truck in the barn out back. I was just about to make a run for it when Old Man Frobisher came shambling out from behind a bush. He probably would have gotten me if I had actually made a break for it. Here, take a couple of these. They’re antibiotics.” She put the pills into his mouth, then brought the cup to his lips. He drank noisily, then smiled at her in gratitude.

“Thanks, I was so thirsty,” he sighed.

“No problem, babe,” she said, sitting on the edge of the cot. She stroked his thigh, hiding her shock at the heat she could feel coming through the fabric of his pants. His fever had risen. The Phage was cooking him alive, using him up. There were already faint blue splotches on his forehead and cheeks, and his eyes looked rheumy and cataract. He was in the final stages of the transformation, she knew, and with that realization came a desperate feeling of helplessness she could hardly bear.

“I don’t think you should try for that truck,” Charles told her. “There are plenty of supplies down here. You could hold out for quite a while. Long enough for the government to get things back under control, or for the virus to burn itself out.” He spoke with his head hanging down, exhausted. Even speech had become an effort for him.

He was right, of course. Finding this farmhouse had been a stroke of luck. The Frobishers had been a paranoid lot. Their basement was stocked with supplies. It had thick concrete walls and air vents near the ceiling. There were several cots to sleep on, and the walls were lined with canned food and medical supplies-- and plenty of drinking water, too, in rows upon rows of plastic one gallon jugs. Old Man Frobisher had probably built it during the Y2K scare, when everyone was freaking out over a possible technomeltdown. She remembered her own parents stocking up on drinking water and canned foods at the time. She and her husband probably could have stayed down there for months, if Charles hadn’t gotten infected.

She didn’t argue with him about abandoning their refuge. They’d already fought bitterly about it, and he was so sick. There was very little fight left in him.

But she just couldn’t let him die! She couldn’t!

She was just about to rise and return upstairs—monsters or no monsters, she was going to try for the truck in the barn!-- when he spoke.

“Not much of a honeymoon,” Charles said softly. He said it with a little snort of a laugh.

Suddenly there were two Charlies lying there with his wrists tied to the bedframe. Then three. A dozen. Rachel wiped her glittering eyes and sniffed. “I’m such a selfish bitch,” she said bitterly. “I’m so sorry, Charles.”

“Sorry? For what?” he asked, trying to raise his head.

Tears tumbled down her cheeks like jewels. She let them fall into her lap. “For making you wait,” she answered. “For making us wait for our honeymoon. I was so stupid. I thought it would make it more special.”

They were driving to South Carolina, to the hotel they’d reserved at Myrtle Beach, still picking bird seed from their wedding out of their hair. That’s when the whole world went crazy. They’d stopped at a service station to fill up the car. Rachel was sitting in the passenger seat, checking her makeup, and Charles was filling the tank. She remembered she was so nervous about getting to the hotel, because they were married now, and they were finally going to do it. No more excuses. She’d looked up at Charles in the side mirror, and he saw her and made a silly face, and then the car rocked as a horde of howling lunatics came running into the gas station parking lot. They surrounded him, clawing and yelling. Charles had fought them off, getting scratched and bitten before escaping them into the backseat. As the lunatics snarled and beat at the windows, Rachel had slid behind the wheel and driven away, tearing the hose from the gas pump in the process, screaming at the top of her lungs all the way down the block. As Charles lay in the backseat, bleeding, she drove through a world that had plunged into a nightmare.

There were people running wildly through the streets. Buildings were burning. They were hit twice by other vehicles driven by panicked survivors, but somehow she managed to keep the car moving. She drove past a knot of infected people eating a woman alive on the sidewalk. The newsman on the radio said a supervirus had escaped from a government lab, was spreading like wildfire, that the world was in chaos, and foreign nations were threatening to cauterize the infection by nuking the United States.

They’d fled to the country, driving until the car was out of gas, and then they’d hoofed it. After being forced to flee into the woods when they tried to hitch a ride with a truckload of crazed rednecks, they started hiding in the weeds whenever a car passed. Charles sickened within 24 hours of being infected, growing weaker by the minute. They came upon the Frobisher’s farmhouse and decided to ask the family for assistance, hoping for someplace to hide out. But the Frobishers were already infected—Ma, Pa and all three kids—and the two of them had fled from the crazed clan the only place they could: the Frobisher’s own house, hiding in the basement from the family’s cannibalistic designs.

“If only I wasn’t so silly, we could have… And now we’ll never…”

Charles had refused to make love to her here in the basement, though she had wanted to that first night. He was afraid she would get infected. And now he was too far gone to do anything of the sort, even if he had wanted to.

But he was laughing. His shoulders shook with his weak exhalations.

“What? Why are you laughing?” she demanded, her feelings hurt.

“Darling, you might not have done it before, but I have… so don’t feel guilty on my account,” he gasped.

“Oh, you--!” She slapped him lightly on the leg. “Why do you always have to tease me?”

She knew he wasn’t a virgin. He was five years older than her, a man of the world at twenty-four. She hadn’t expected him to be a virgin, either, although she was. She had always wanted to wait until her wedding night, a special gift to give the man she wanted to live the rest of her life with. Such a stupid sentiment, but he had gone along with her, charmed by the idea and hopelessly in love with her, and now this…!

He didn’t speak for a long time. His respirations had become very shallow.

“Charles?” she whispered.

Feeling the icy claws of horror sink into her belly, she cupped his cheeks in her palms and raised his head.

He opened his eyes. They were milky and filmed over, but he smiled at her. “Remember… the fireworks…?” he breathed. “I said… I was going… to marry you.” And then the life went out of him.

3. Head, Meet Axe

“This is probably going to sting a little,” Rachel said, raising the axe above her head. She was trying to make a joke of it in honor of the man she had fallen in love with, but it came out sounding cruel and mad to her own ears, and she started to cry. She dropped the axe to the concrete floor of the Frobisher family bomb shelter, sobbing, and sank on her ass beside it.

The Phage had revived her husband shortly after he died, and now he was like all the rest of the monsters: dead and yet not dead. He tugged mindlessly at the ropes that bound his wrists to the bedframe, snarling and hissing at her, his handsome features twisted in rage, his eyes rheumy and soulless white marbles. It was Charles, but it was not Charles. It was a hideous caricature of the man she had married.

You have to do this, Rachel said to herself. You can’t just let him… BE like that!

But it was hard. Maybe too hard.

She thought about the gentle prankster who rubbed her feet whenever they were sore, who had been so proud when he won a stuffed animal for her out of a coin-operated crane machine—just like a kid!— who had, just days ago, promised to love, honor and cherish her forever, and it seemed like blasphemy.

She had to chop her husband’s head off.

The only way to kill them for sure, the newscaster had said before all of the radio stations fell silent, was decapitation. That or some other kind of severe damage to the brain: gunshot, blunt trauma… chainsaw.

Guns were out, because Rachel was scared of guns, and she didn’t think she had the strength to bash his head in with a can of Ravioli either, so she decided on the axe she’d found at the far end of the basement, near the stove.

Eventually, he was going to get loose, whether he tore the bedframe apart or sawed through his own wrists with the ropes that were binding him to the bed, so she might as well do it and get it over with.

In a way, she would be setting him free, she reasoned. Putting him to rest. Besides, it wasn’t even really him. Not anymore. His soul had taken flight the moment he died-- had gone straight to heaven, she was sure-- and left behind this horrid thing. Not even a “him” anymore. A violent, slavering “it”. She had tried to talk to it, but it was mindless… just a crazed animal that jerked and twisted at the ropes that bound its wrists, sawing relentlessly through the meat of its arms.

Maybe… maybe if she covered its head with something…

Wiping her eyes, Rachel clambered to her feet. She looked around, spotted a burlap sack of potatoes. She pulled the cord that held the end of it shut and shook the bag out, watching the spuds go rolling every which way along the concrete floor. Then, holding the empty sack in her hands, she cautiously approached her dead husband.

Charles snarled and jerked more vigorously on the bed, trying to get at her. Tarry black blood oozed down his forearms. He had sawed his wrists almost to the bone, she saw.

“Charles?” she murmured as she eased closer.

He lunged and snapped at her.

“Baby?”

He hissed and bucked his hips.

“Just hold still, now. Don’t bite.”

His teeth clacked together, but she jerked the sack over his head and jumped back without getting injured. She stood for a moment with her hands over her mouth and nose, trembling, then turned and went to fetch the axe.

Just do it fast. Don’t think about it, she counseled herself.

But when she returned, axe in hand, she saw that he had fallen still. He’d quit struggling, was no longer even snarling.

She watched the burlap sack turn left and right, like a kitten with its head stuck in a box, and then he made a whining sound in his throat, and she thought: I can’t do it. Not like this either.

To purchase the full story, and support this humble wordsmith, click the link below:

Til Death for the Kindle

Til Death for the Nook

If you enjoy it, maybe you can leave me some positive feedback. I'd appreciate it!

Rod