Alan Dale - Death Nation's Army 01

THE DEAD NATIONS’ARMY

DNA: Code Flesh

Part I

War within the War

between the Flesh

By Alan Dale

The DEAD NATIONS’ ARMY SERIES

© 2011, is the creative property of Alan Dale, and is registered with the Library of Congress. Any attempt to reproduce this product without consent from the author is prohibited and is subject to legal action.

DEDICATION:

I want to dedicate this first part of Dead Nations’ Army to those who have supported my zombie/social message cause. I can’t start without Andrea Stender who listened to parts of the story while working the late shift and now represents us in the national military. Bless you. Obviously, all my Facebook fans who helped keep me going, especially the guys from Zombie Apocalypse Preparation (Just got off the phone with you Scott!) Also, thanks to Dan Chek, Amy Durst, and Ken Policard. Special thanks to Thia Allen who is my best friend and the woman that may have to follow me anywhere I go…

INTRODUCTION

Feed me…

They never knew…they don’t know…how can they??

I can smell them. My mouth, what’s left of it, can still know what they taste like.

Barely.

Just barely.

I don’t really care about the taste anymore. I only need to feed. I have to soon. It won’t stop asking for more.

It consumes me.

Feed me…

I don’t even remember when it happened to me. Truly, I don’t. All I know is I am here. Here, in this destroyed land so many of us called home. A home that is now destroyed and left for dead is as gone as I am.

I am dead or so they said.

I died the day they came, or well, when what is now, “we,” came.

It is so hard to remember things.

So hard.

Didn’t I once have a wife? Two kids too, Brenda and Bobby. Billy? Bonnie?

My brain isn’t mine anymore, it is the damned Hell coursing through my veins even when there is no more blood in them. I lost my blood the first time when they bit me. They bit me so many times. I didn’t know if I should scream.

Cry.

Pray.

For now I prey.

Feed me…

The news. Yes! Television? Or was it the radio told me about the day the “scrats” arrived in New Jersey. A boat, boats, planes? How the fuck do you expect me to remember any of it. My brain is rotting. I am supposedly dead and I haven’t eaten in days.

I haven’t found you. I haven’t touched you. I haven’t grabbed you.

I haven’t eaten you yet.

Feed me…

God, what is happening to me?

To all of us?

God?

What God does this to me?

Plop.

What on earth was that? I look down and I see my right arm. It is on the ground. It is no longer a part of me anymore. When I don’t eat, I fall apart. When I fall apart it means it is not being sustained and it is making my body pay. My body is being killed by what keeps me moving, keeps me needing, forces me to move, to hunt.

To kill.

Feed me…

But they don’t get it. Those live ones don’t get it. They never get it. Even when they shot at me and those similar scrats like me, they never get it.

They are my food. I am their enemy. All those who “live” simply want me to die.

Again.

But they don’t get it. They don’t understand. I am not the enemy. I am them trapped in a body of a dead man. I am still here. Still knowing everything I am doing. What I do to you. What I did to your neighbor. When I ate her liver and chewed off her fingers.

I knew.

And it tasted so fucking good the whole time I hated myself for doing it.

But what can I do about it? I am dead, or so they say.

A scream.

I am near. It is a live one. It is someone who calls for me. They don’t even realize they are in my dish and I am the diner.

I am going to eat that scream.

Because you need me to…

Feed you…

I see others who
were like me no longer like me because they lie on the roads I walk. Gone, rotted away bodies of the dead forever finished in their hunt to survive. They couldn’t find you. But I am. I am. I am. I am going to eat that screamer. Unless someone else like me beats me to it.

I am dying.

Again.

Why can’t I move faster? This thing. This Hell in my body consumes me. Pushes me. Tells me to keep going. To go get fat. To get fed.

Feed it…

How can I? I haven’t in days. And I am now slowing.

Plop.

I see at an angle. I feel like a see-saw. Of course that’s what happens when I see my left leg below the knee has fallen away. They bit me there a lot of times when I was still real. When people still cared about me. When I mattered. Now they only want me dead…

Again.

Those fucking DNA. They think I am the enemy. How can I be? It is not my fault this happened to me. It is not about me wanting to eat you.

I just really have to or I am going to stop being dead-alive.

So what if you taste good when I do eat you? It is not my fault.

None of this was our fault.

Well it was someone’s fault.

God damn it.

Feed me…

I can’t. The scream is too farcie hear more. Oh please, move closer, put your firm thigh across my lips so I can tear a heaping chunk of flesh off of it and stop the terror driving me. The hunger is not mine I am just the vessel. We are all the vessels of this evil thrown upon us.

Plop.

No arm. No leg. Just me. I have fallen. I don’t see you. I see nothing. I am fading. I am dying.

Again...

But I was never dead. I wasn’t dead. You didn’t get it. You didn’t get it. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t. You didn’t.

I won’t forgive you. I can’t forgive you. None of us should. No we shouldn’t. We will just keep being hungry. We will keep eating you. You will keep dying.

Like we never really did and you always wanted us to.

We will simply continue.

Feed me…

Scream!

I can’t feed you. It is too far away. We are so far away because none of us really got it did we. I am going now. I am finally getting rid of you. I won’t be hungry anymore. Sad to think my last two thoughts are.

What the fuck did we do to ourselves? Do we really hate ourselves this much?

And…

Yummy, I bet you would taste real good…

Feed…

I. What We Are

“
Taste it? Yes. We do. We do. We are. We exist. What was it we were supposed to be? What was it we ultimately became? We like this. We do, we do, we do. They were so silly. So silly. Stupid little people…”

The scream.

Loud.

Intense.

Full of fear.

Immersed with desperation.

No hope. No help. No one.

But them.

“
Roxanne, knock that shit off,” the man, presumably her husband, boyfriend, lover, told her, asked her, recommended. He tried to pull her close, the obviously pregnant and screaming woman. He tried. Things had changed so much. Maybe now they were changed too. She wanted nothing to do with him. All she wanted, this Roxanne, was to scream.

So she did, again.

This time her response was silence from near.

Not from below, however. Not at all.

She stood on top of a roof of a two-story condominium inside Heavenly Gates community living.

Heavenly Gates. The irony. The joke. Could make anyone scream. So she did and all it did was bring about the chorus, the punctuating response of those on the other side, the ones they tried to survive every day. To not get eaten by a rotting, animated corpse, had become the newest and biggest fad since the iPOD.

And the iPOD didn’t have teeth even.

Roxanne had been screaming for over ten minutes and all it was doing, maybe, was make her feel better, but it also brought at least five, six, ten, forty, new scrats to the gate. Now instead of 45 or 50 walking dead seeking a good meal before they dropped for good they saw a nice sized concert of flesh seekers ready to hear a new song.

Ripping of flesh, noshing of teeth against bone. Human bone. Living human bone. Deli of the undead.

“
Roxanne, please,” he pleaded again and looked down off the roof and onto the adjoining street below. This particular building was the furthest one toward the entrance/exit of Heavenly Gates. Literally separated by three feet of air and the walls of the home they stood upon were a cast iron fence, 10-feet-high, with spaces of three inches between bars.

And rotting, growling, hungry, scrats on the other side of it.

It was now
over a week since the DNA arrived to refill their supplies. A week? A fucking week?! Really??!! How do people survive without medications, food, clean water, first aid, and bullets in a world gone dead?