I thought I would repost a sample of
Shreds of Humanity. This will begin to give you some insight into the
'thinking man's zombie', or is he? Once a simple man caught in the crux between good and evil, instincts and emotions. What has this man's world become and how will he ever get out of the hell that the world around has thrust upon him?
Prologue
I was sane
once.
Sane?
That single
word seems like such a clean and tidy word.
It wraps my whole mind and body in a thick blanket of normalcy which no
longer seems possible.
But I was normal once, just as I was once
sane. That sanity is gone now,
though. As gone as my wife and
child. As gone as everything
normal.
That word
keeps ringing in the emptiness of my skull.
Sane. Seems to chase my very soul, or what is now
left of it, and I have to wonder if I was ever sane. And if I was sane, then what am I
now?
Crazy?
That word was
even tidier than the other option, but just as incorrect. If I was crazy, would I know that I’d driven
my mental bus past the right exit? If I
was crazy, would I feel the loss of
my sanity just as I felt the loss of my family?
No, I wasn’t
crazy any more than I was sane. My brain
bus was just stuck in neutral, unable to shift into drive or reverse—forever
stuck on the psychological highway without the ability to simply unbuckle and
step away from the bony cage surrounding it.
These
wandering thoughts and images were all that was left of my mind now. They were the wisps of imaginary smoke
trailing from the ethereal crack pipe of reality and, no matter how hard I
swatted at those hazy tendrils, they simply evaded my mind and left me grasping
at the nothingness before me.
Nothingness. That was a better word for what I was left
with—the nothingness of a soul trapped between sanity and insanity. Like an empty balloon so full of nothingness
that it has to burst, I am an empty vessel which could never be filled
again. Everything that I had once known
and loved was gone now—my child, wife, job, life, mind—all gone like a
screwdriver in the junk drawer.
But that left
only me in this great mental wasteland; unable to form complete and rational
thoughts, yet just as unable to completely bend to the comforting quilt of
insanity.
Chapter
One
As lonely as
my mind might have been, my body had joined the rank and file of an army so
immense that it nearly enveloped everything in the world now surrounding
me.
I hadn’t
signed any enlistment papers for this army.
Nobody had ever asked me if I wanted to join, nor had they ever given me
a choice. I had been an unwilling
draftee with no options to dodge.
At
first.
The
unwillingness had quickly evaporated and this army was now my own. I had been indoctrinated into it and had
eventually become it. I was a soldier
now, though I wasn’t part of any organized army. This army had no commander to guide us or
ranks to manage. This army had no rules
and only one purpose.
To
kill.
And we were
good at killing. We hunted our prey in
packs. We hunted them in large
waves. We even hunted them alone. We killed our prey for food, yet our bodies
no longer needed that food. We killed
them because we had to; because that was what we were now wired to do. And we did it without thought and without
sympathy. We didn’t fight for our
families or our fellow soldiers. We no
longer cared for the soldier beside us or even the families we had once
cherished. We cared for no one—and that
was our strength. The inability to care
for others gave us a power that the uninfected could not possess. The uninfected—the humans—still cared for
each other and still died for the ones they loved. Such a silly concept—love—yet the humans
seemed to value it above all else, cherishing the sickening fragrance of
devotion enough to lay out their own skin in ridiculously futile attempts to
save their families and friends.
I had once
felt that need to protect. It had flowed
through my veins like smooth Kentucky whiskey and the sense of duty to my own
family had once been as strong as the pull of gravity upon my tall and mighty
body.
But those
feelings were gone now. I no longer
suffered from the weaknesses of humanity.
I was no longer one of them, only a mere shade of my former self—I was infected.
Infected was
another simple word, but this one did fit me now. Once, that word had brought visions of simple
colds, sneezes, and runny noses. Yet it
meant so much more now—to both sides.
The uninfected feared us,
feared becoming one of us. We, the infected, were driven by some unknown
hand to feast upon those still free of this cursed disease which slowly rotted
our minds and killed our souls. The
infection had stripped me of everything I once considered strength. I knew it was tearing me down, possibly even
tearing me apart. But it wasn’t
weakening me. Even as it broke down my
muscles and my mind, this disease had also built new muscles above the others
and thick rings of semi-consciousness around my psyche.
This disease
had made me strong and made the humans weak.
They were our prey and we were the greatest of predators. That made us strong; that made us the kings
of this new world.
At least at
night.
The night
belonged to us.
The days were
still the time of the humans. We
couldn’t risk the sun’s touch. That
light, which had once fed our bodies with nourishment and our minds with sanity,
now burned through the pale skin stretched across our thinning bodies and drove
us even closer to the precipice of total insanity. Or maybe we had already jumped off that cliff
and it only reminded us of our few weaknesses.
Both armies—human and infected—had long adapted to the laws of this new
war. They controlled the days and did
whatever they did during those long and hot hours, but we ruled over the nights
and did what we did then.
And what we
did at night was…
death.
That was the
only word that could fully describe what we did, but even that word fell short
of capturing the true horror that we inflicted upon our enemy. It did little to explain how we tracked the
humans through the darkness and took their lives without remorse or mercy. Those were human emotions, built upon the
cornerstones of culture—we didn’t suffer from those obstacles, though, and were
free to feast upon the humans’ flesh without emotion or conscience.
Imagine what
a perfect army I had been dragged into—singular of mind and purpose with no
leadership to guide us astray and no emotional baggage to hold us back. Thousands, millions, maybe even billions of
soldiers united by a single disease, a single thought, a single cause, a single
appetite.
We were
united against the humans, as we feasted upon their flesh and sought only to
extinguish their kind.
We were the
perfect soldiers in the perfect army.
http://www.amazon.com/Shreds-of-Humanity-ebook/dp/B007U7JSLI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358051489&sr=8-1&keywords=shreds+of+humanity
