Page 1 of The Dead Don't Talk
Prologue
Journal entry #1
There was a timewhen life was … different.
The rain wasn’t red, and the dead didn’t rise back up to live again.
I’m told that infections could be cured with pills, sickness didn’t mean turning into something less than living, and the plants were sometimes considered organic.
Whatever that means.
Now, people grow their own shit, inside the walls that they protect.
That’s where we come in.
It’s been seventy-six years since the biological leak wiped out life as it was known to those that came before me, and in that time, those left learned to adapt. To live. To reproduce. And to fight off the decomposed that walk the earth and threaten to take over.
Our community is one of the few left standing in this area.
I know there’s others out there.
But for me and for this story, there’s only us.
Until the end.
Chapter 1
Don’t fall in love during a zombie apocalypse
Amo
No one ever answerswhen I askwhen did the apocalypse ever actually end?
Or are we in that state that just becomes the norm, and it never really ends, but it isn’t widely accepted as fact until all the earlier generations die off?
I mean, most of our community is either immune or uninfected already.
Only those whose blood runs dark with the infection end up as Guard with only a few exceptions. Like me, and my pal Cassia.
So, to me, it looks like we’re surrounded by just zombies, minus the apocalypse part. Undead that walk half decomposed. Gross and gnarly motherfuckers that seem to run quicker thanthey did yesterday but what do I know? I’m just a closeted queer guy, who’s constantly told I’mtoo youngandinexperiencedby everyone that ever bothered to listen.
“At least my name doesn’t meandeath,” I mutter under my breath to my grumpy as fuck trainer and refocus my sight through the scope.
He just grunts.
He’s always fucking grunting.
Like … like it’s his own fucking language or something.
If he weren’t the only openly queer guy in our community, I’d think he reverted back to some kind of caveman mentality or something. Which, I guess the cavemen could have been gay, too. Bet they didn’t make the queer people feel strange about their sexual conquests like the commoners back at the community do.
Or lack thereof.
“Just point and shoot, kid.”
Ugh. Kid.
Rolling my eyes, I zero in on a target through the iron sights. The cranium is already half missing and appears to be oozing something puss-like from its loose jaw that dribbles down its front in dark patches of tainted blood and whatever else it ate last. It wanders around driven by a hunger it’ll never be able to fulfill, looking but not seeing. Alive but not living.
