[softsponge]

This is the first part of a story set in a world overrun by zombies, it begins just a few short days after the outbreak,feel free to comment below...



DAMOCLES Chapter 1


As the Damocles bobbed up and down in the water; lifted and caressed by the neverending sigh of the Atlantic Ocean, the skipper looked across at Christopher and shook his head. “Look lad, we can’t waste any more time out here, there’s no one left, alive that is……..”. Chris looked at the old sailor with a mixture of contempt and pity. The skipper had lost family too but he hadn’t lost his life like the poor souls of Providence.

Chris felt the next wave lift the prow and not only did he feel his lunch coming back to greet him but he also saw the impressive figurehead of Missy rise with the force of natures own power. Seeing the contents of his stomach empty into the sea, Chris was reminded once again that he would never be a sailor, even if he sailed the waters off Rhode Island for the next forty years.

Maybe not a sailor but he was a writer by trade, an author, a storyteller in a profession second in age only to prostitution.
The stories he wove; for a sometimes adoring public were of perhaps a less horrific vein than the tapestry taking place across the world today but they had their moments of fear and terror, even if his target audience was children.

The Closet… never heard of it, number one in five European nations and a bestseller in Ecuador, Chris chuckled at the thought of corpses flicking through his books in undead libraries across the globe. Still it had earned him a tidy sum; enough to buy his own apartment and take six months off from writing while he researched his next novel, “Rhode’s War “. This was going to be the make or break novel, a tale of high seas piracy in 1798; cursing to himself when he thought of how little he’d accomplished before God or whoever had smacked the world in the face.

Just one week ago Chris had approached the skipper about buying passage on his tourist ship the Damocles. It was a beauty of a ship based on a design of a nineteenth century three mast sailing ship. For thirty years the skipper had taken fat tourists up from Florida and states further south out into the Atlantic to “experience” the life of a real sailor. Of course $20,000 had turned the skippers initial reticence into something approaching civility and so Chris had spent the last few days learning how to “run” a ship.

Seventeen blisters and eight lost meals later he was beginning to wonder why anyone actually wrote anything that required researching. However in light of current events his money had been well spent; he was alive and while his wife and children were dead, or at least he assumed so, he had been given the unique opportunity to chronicle mankinds end.

There had been no radio signals for two days now and the skipper’s powerful binoculars showed a welcoming party of corpses lined up against the docks. All was not lost though; Block island was free of corpses and several boat load’s of survivors had reached safety before the mainland had been overrun but a thousand people was a drop in the ocean compared to the billions who’d perished so far. Chris; his face the colour of a blade of fresh grass, rose from the deck and continued his argument with the skipper.“There’s bound to be someone, we saw that helicopter fly over two days ago and there’s no way they’d fly in if there was no-one to rescue, surely?.

The skipper his weather worn face tightening around the eyes said “ damn you to hell city boy, have you any idea what those things will do to us if they get on board here?, I tell you son, I fought in Korea , I’ve seen death up close at Inchon and I’m not going to kill myself on some fools errand today..”

Chris rolled his eyes and walked unsteadily away; he couldn’t believe that everyone was dead, and he was going to find out for sure, one way or another………..

Later as the sky darkened and began its struggle against daylight; the skipper looked around, and after checking that Chris was below deck raised the binoculars to his eyes. On the shore the mirror was flashing again, sending the same message in morse code that the skipper had been watching for days…….

SAVE OUR SOULS…….