Eden (Zombie Novels) Read online

  “INNOVATIVE AND BREATHTAKING . . . WILL REIGNITE

  LONG-LOST FEARS AND KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT.”

  —BRYAN BEATTIE, AUTHOR OF OASIS

  Inside its walls, a community of survivors scratches out a terrifying existence. Outside, hordes of undead pound relentlessly against the barriers and rattle the gates of the humans’ last sanctuary—Eden.

  Overnight, the world transforms into a barren wasteland ravaged by plague and overrun by hordes of flesh-eating zombies. In the aftermath of the gruesome destruction of New York City and its inhabitants, a small band of desperate men and women stand their ground in a fortified compound in what had once been the outer borough of Queens. Those who built the walls of Eden fell prey long ago to the undead . . . those who remain survive by sheer determination, camaraderie, and human ingenuity, making forays into the outside world through the network of pipes under the city streets.

  Harris—the exceptional honest man in this dead world—races against time to solve a murder while fighting to maintain his own humanity. Ultimately, the danger posed by the dead and diseased masses clawing at Eden’s walls pales in comparison to the deceit and treachery Harris faces within.

  “A WONDERFUL, ENGAGING NOVEL THAT WILL

  CONTINUE TO RESONATE EMOTIONALLY, LONG

  AFTER THE FINAL PAGE IS READ.”–HORRORSCOPE

  TONY MONCHINSKI a high school teacher, lives with his family in Peekskill, New York. His other novels include I Kill Monsters, Fury, and the sequels to Eden—Eden: Crusade and Eden: Resurrection.

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  The wall surrounding Eden had been constructed shortly after the beginning of the outbreak. Dozens of people worked night and day while dozens more patrolled the perimeter, keeping the zombies out, or so the story went. No one inside the walls today had been around to witness the erection of the walls.

  Harris thought how insane that must have been, building this wall with the undead gathering, hundreds of the things, thousands, innumerable.

  If he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the block as it once had been: children crying out, playing stickball and tag. A Mr. Frosty ice-cream truck blaring its tune. Kids screaming to mom and dad for money to buy bomb pops, Nutty Buddy cones, soft serve. A chopper barreling down the block, car alarms set off by the barely muffled V-Twin engine.

  When one looked at the walls and beyond, one realized just how different things had become. Normal had done a complete one-eighty.

  Praise for Eden:

  “Zombies. Guns. Chaos in New York. It’s hard to go wrong in a zombie book where the hero is infected right from the get-go.”

  —Bryce Beattie, StoryHack.com

  Gallery Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  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 events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Tony Monchinski and Permuted Press. All Rights Reserved.

  Originally Published in 2008 by Permuted Press

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

  thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Gallery Books trade paperback edition December 2011

  GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Renata Di Biase

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4684-9

  ISBN 978-1-4516-4686-3 (ebook)

  For Kilgore Trout

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  The frailty of everything revealed at last

  —Cormac McCarthy, The Road

  “Yeah they’re dead. They’re all messed up.”

  —Sheriff McClelland,

  Night of the Living Dead (1968)

  So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the

  garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which

  turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life

  —Genesis, 3:24

  “The whole burden of civilization has fallen on us.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we do not cross against the light.”

  —Night of the Comet (1984)

  1.

  The bite woke him up.

  “Motherfucker!”

  Harris exploded out of bed, naked. Julie, his woman, startled awake beside him, was sitting up and blinking. He bodily drove the rotten, undead thing that had invaded their bedroom and attacked them in their sleep, propelling it across the room, ramming the creature with his shoulder hard enough to drive it through the drywall. Something inside the beast broke audibly on impact, but its teeth were still gnashing, still straining to taste flesh as its jagged black fingernails clawed at Harris.

  He felt no pain. His senses were nearly overpowered, so much washing over him at once: the low inhuman moans, the stink of necrotic, mottled flesh, the shambling forms stumbling through their bedroom. Harris’s last night on Earth was behind him forever.

  Weak, predawn trails of sun leaked in through the blind-covered windows. The stench of putrid flesh was everywhere, nauseating. What once were human beings were now dead things, lurching through their bedroom, coming for him, coming for Julie.

  “Harris!” Julie yelled.

  Bull-fucking
-shit! In a pure, white-hot rage, his fists balled, Harris aimed three feet past the head of the undead pinned against the wall. As the monster struggled to dislodge itself, Harris punched it with everything he had and then some. The soft, decaying skull collapsed under his clenched fist, and he was wrist deep in its head. He pulled his fist back; gore and gray matter clung to his hand, stuck between his fingers, gobs of it dripping to the floor.

  The thing was truly dead now: a death it wouldn’t be coming back from.

  Julie was fully awake, her revolver retrieved from the bedside—Boom! Boom!—the sound was deafening in the confines of the bedroom, the hammer dropping repeatedly. What feeble sunlight filtered into the room illuminated each blast from the Magnum. A zombie’s body jerked, head-shot, its skull contents spraying off into the shadows as the thing dropped. But a troupe of them still surrounded the bed, reaching for Julie. She methodically dispatched them one by one.

  The darkness battled the light of the false dawn, casting so many more black stains on walls already shadowed.

  Another of the undead attacked, this one moving fast, loping, wearing dreadlocks under a tam that, miraculously, had not become dislodged during its undead adventures. It charged as Harris yanked the sheet from the bed, draping it over his shoulder, his nudity awkward, uncomfortable, and vulnerable. Harris was capable of coherent, linear thought again; he was no longer only reacting to a waking nightmare.

  The zombie made noises, clacking what teeth it had, intent on making a meal of him.

  Harris roared gutturally, something human but only just, a primal fury unleashed as he launched himself forward to meet the thing, colliding with it in a diving tackle. Both of them sprawled.

  Harris scrambled around on the floor, got above the zombie, and punched down on its head repeatedly. This one’s skull was solid and refused to yield.

  The undead shifted its weight, dislodging him. It clawed its way around the bedroom floor, finally losing the tam, its ratty dreadlocks splaying around its head. It greedily sought its prey, looking to grab onto a foot, a limb, to drag Harris close, to sink its teeth into his flesh. Its hunger was insatiable and instinct driven. The beast knew no fear.

  Looking up, it saw the man with the bedsheet about his torso and shoulder like an improvised toga.

  Harris had the 12-gauge, the pump always kept barrel up beside the bed. He thumbed the safety, no need to trombone the slide. As the undead creature sprang shrieking from the floor toward his throat Harris squeezed the trigger—

  The headless thing flopped onto the floor. Cordite and gunpowder competed with fetid putrescent flesh. Harris pumped the shotgun, vaulting on top of the bed where Julie—her revolver emptied and now being used as a club to bat at the zombies groping for her from the other side—grunted as she kicked and swiped at their heads, fighting for her life, determined not to—

  The shotgun blast was devastating in the confines of their bedroom. It yanked both undead from their feet, slamming one against the wall, the brunt of the buckshot buried in its torso. The second beast was dumped on the floor, half of its face and its entire jaw missing.

  Harris tromboned the shotgun and stepped down from the bed, the empty shell bouncing off the mattress and clattering across the hardwood floor.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Julie.

  She was cool and calm in her actions, quietly reloading the revolver from one of the speedloaders on the nightstand beside their bed. The key to survival was to keep one’s head straight at all times and in all situations. Julie was aware of this. Only her voice betrayed her, trembling, barely concealing the shock and revulsion gripping her.

  “I’m okay,” she lied. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” Harris breathed deep, working one foot and then the other into his low-rise chukkas, still loosely laced from the night before.

  He could hear them coming, more of the zombies beyond the bedroom door. They were creeping down the hallway, searching. Leveling the shotgun in the direction of the door, Harris skirted the bed to the bureau. The chair there had toppled in the confusion of the early morning melee, and his shoulder holster holding the twin 9-millimeters was somewhere on the floor.

  A faint rustling, an undead—its spine severed by the shotgun blast—slapped with one hand at the wall against which it lay. Its eyes followed first Harris, then Julie. The zombie couldn’t move any more than to pound the wall with an open palm, a fish out of water, doomed to flop about on solid ground.

  Julie flicked on the lamp at her nightstand as Harris spotted his shoulder rig and pistols under a corpse. He pulled the leather strap from beneath the limp body, slinging the holster across one shoulder the way Buddy used to do with his saddlebags.

  A soft moan came from the doorway. The zombie was revealed in the light from the lamp. It had been a nurse once; its stained uniform bore a smudged nametag. Harris had no inclination to know its name; such a thought was a strange one to have anyway. Whatever had once constituted its humanity was long absent. The thing staggered into the room looking for breakfast.

  Julie put it down clean, one between the eyes.

  “I’ll clear out the rest of the house,” Harris told her. He worked as he spoke, retrieving his utility belt with the holstered .45, the extra magazines, the sheathed machete, strapping it onto himself around the bedsheet at his waist. “You stay here. Stay safe. Let me see what the hell is going on downstairs.”

  “Harris.”

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “Don’t go pulling a Richard Simmons on me.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her.

  She gestured.

  “Your balls.”

  Harris adjusted the sheet.

  The paralyzed undead was propped up in the corner, a streak of blood and viscera dripping down the wall above it. Its eyes darted between them. Though it appeared grievously injured, the thing felt nothing, darting a marbled tongue in and out of its drooling mouth.

  Harris caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror. In any other situation, he would have laughed at how he looked now, decked out as he was, wrapped in a bedsheet, bristling with guns, a foot-long machete strapped to his back. In another situation.

  A bandolier of shotgun shells went over his shoulder, the one covered by the bedsheet.

  Harris knew he’d been wounded, bitten. He just didn’t want to think about it yet.

  Four easy strides took him to the bedroom door. They were out there, a lot of them. He could see two of the undead bouncing against the walls, reeling down the hall toward him. The first wore jeans and an open flannel shirt over a bare chest. Its bloated belly was sagging. They would eat until their stomachs burst and then they would keep eating.

  The second wore a bathrobe and one slipper. Harris wondered how it’d managed to keep the one slipper all this time.

  Behind the two on the landing, a third undead spied Harris and howled at the top of its lungs, something both evil and intelligent in its gaze.

  The first two caught sight of him and also started to make noise impatiently. The sounds they made never ceased to send chills up Harris’s spine.

  He pumped the 12-gauge, all business. Thumbed another shell into the slide.

  He looked back at Julie.

  “Honey,” he said, motioning at the thing on the floor, the zombie impotently palming the wall. “Do me a favor and take care of that one.”

  “I will,” said Julie. Now dressed in shorts and one of Harris’s T-shirts, she checked the safety of the tricked-out black rifle. The collapsible stock, vertical foregrip, rail-mounted flip-up front site, M-7 bayonet, and carbine-length free-floating rail system all lent the AR-15 a ventilated look.

  They always slept with their guns next to their bed, fully loaded. It was what one did.

  Harris turned back to the hallway, stepping out onto the cool carpet, determined to drive the undead invaders from their home.

  His curse had woken her, had saved her. Julie had only heard Harris curse once before. She
wouldn’t describe him as a prude. He claimed his job had taught him patience, taught him to temper his tongue. Harris reserved what he considered strong words for situations that required them.

  The one time Julie had heard Harris curse, the words had accompanied actions she considered out of character for the man she knew better than anyone else.

  Julie spread her legs above either side of the felled beast, the thing spastically flapping its one hand against the wall faster than before, excited. She lunged with the AR-15, embedding the fixed bayonet into its braincase under one eye. She jiggled it there, feeling the tip of the bayonet scraping the back of the zombie’s skull. The hand had gone limp in its lap.

  She pulled the bayonet free, the eyeball collapsing farther back into the socket.

  Harris walked the house, dispatching the undead, clearing rooms. He could hear gunfire from outside as the residents of Eden joined the fray. It seemed like there were dozens of zombies in his house. He wondered how many all told had breached their walled enclave.

  Five of them had Mr. Vittles trapped under the entertainment center in the living room.

  “Vittles,” Harris called, alarmed. The zombies looked up at him from where they crouched and squatted, swiping at the cat in his hideaway. Vittles hissed from somewhere unseen, presumably safe, still in the fight.

  Propping the shotgun against the living room wall and unsheathing the machete, Harris waded into the zombies. Their arms, outstretched and reaching for him, dropped to the hardwood floor, their skulls cleaved.

  The zombies moaned outside, audible even over the whoops—human sounds—and staccato gunfire.

  Harris brought the cutting edge of his machete down as hard as he could, missing the intended skull, splitting a zombie from sternum to stomach. It was unfazed and wrapped its arms around Harris’s knees, threatening to take him to the floor. Harris wrenched free from its embrace, brought his booted foot down once, twice, again, and mashed the zombie’s head into the floor, dislodging an eyeball from its orbit, cracking its skull. Still Harris pummeled it, switching to his other foot now, all sorts of gore adorning the steel-toed chukkas.