Zombies! Episode 2.1: Where in the World is John Arrick

By Ivan Turner

In the early days of the zombie plague, while people were being bitten and dying and turning, John Arrick was very much an ordinary man. The one extraordinary thing about him was his girlfriend. When she came down with the zombie infection, he cared for her until the end and then battled her when she turned. Only later did he realize the consequences of his compassion as he, too, became sick with the plague. But John Arrick did not die. His body fought off the infection. But even as his unprecedented physiology protected him from the bacterium, it could not do so from bullets. And once his body was dead, the infection inside of him was free to take over.

Now his brother has come from the United Kingdom to find him. With no knowledge of John's final fate, Malcolm will retrace his brother's life in those last few months, encountering the people who had had the most impact, Abby Benjamin, Shawn Rudd, and Marcus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ivan Turner
• Release date: Oct 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466181229

Ivan Turner

A child of the movies, I was always consumed by fantastic stories told by others and translated into adventures to be retold by me through the action figure medium. As I grew older, I put the action figures away and moved into the realm of role playing. Though I never outgrew role playing, I certainly don't have the time for it anymore. Since I was eleven years old, I've been pouring almost every ounce of creative energy I have into writing.I graduated college in 1993 with a degree in computer science. I tried my hand at programming for a couple of years and found it pretty unsatisfying. I later became a partner at a comic book store, where I spent several years. Though it wasn't a financial success, the experience I gained from running the store and the people that I met (many of whom I'm still in touch with today) was priceless. After leaving the store, I settled into a career of teaching. I still teach at a public high school in New York. Ironically, I've picked up computer programming again, which is what I mostly teach.I've been writing the whole time.I released my first book electronically in 2010. Forty Leap was a turning point for me in both style and story building. The Book of Revelations, which was written earlier but released later, was sort of a midway point between the writer I was and the writer I've become. I experimented with a very odd style and a story that employed diverse characters and controversial situations.In September 2010, I released the first installment of Zombies! Zombies! has been a tremendous success for me that came very close to being made into a television series. Since Zombies!, I have written a five part miniseries called Castes and have been working on developing tabletops games, the first of which, ApocalypZe, was published in early 2014.Now, 6 years later, a 3rd Zombies! series is due to be released in September of 2016.

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Zombies! Episode 2.02: Where in the World is John Arrick

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by Ivan Turner

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The people and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.

***

What has come before.

On a warm afternoon in September, humanity learned that it was sharing the world with zombies. As the zombie population grew and the human population diminished, the authorities fought for stability. Though there was clearly no eradicating the undead infestation, there was a middle ground to held. The world had changed, for certain. But it had not ended.

Humanity’s greatest strength is its ability to adapt. So now did humanity adapt to its new environment. While some people saw the zombies as victims that needed to be protected, others discovered a profit to be made. Still others sought conquest.

From a very ordinary life emerged a very extraordinary man. When high school English teacher John Arrick’s girlfriend turned into the living dead and bit him, he discovered that his body had the ability to fight off the plague. After the sickness left him, he found that he was unique among people. The zombies treated him as one of them. As a result, he took a job finding and corralling zombies for Marcus, who was running the zombie fights. But when the police raided the fights and the operation collapsed, John Arrick was shot and killed. Dead by normal means, the zombie infection inside of him did what it does. Arrick reawakened as the dead and began to prowl the streets.

On a frozen day in the middle of winter, an army of the undead was unleashed upon the City of New York. Caught between the snow and the zombies, many citizens of the city fought and died that night. One of those citizens was ten year old Dillon Waters. When his apartment building was invaded by the walking dead, he watched both of his parents and many of his neighbors die horrible deaths. On that day, Dillon was forever changed.

***

The current state of affairs made it really tough to get an international flight. Especially when flying from the United States. No one really wanted Americans coming across their borders for fear of them bringing the zombie plague with them. It got worse after February and the Red Blizzard. New York was labeled as a breeding ground for the zombies. At the governor’s request, the city remained open. The president had considered labeling it a quarantine zone, but changed his mind. There was still the constant presence of the military there. Trying to get into or out of New York made travel to other parts of the U.S. look like a picnic. Unfortunately, during the weeks following the Red Blizzard, those very weeks during which travel became the most difficult, Malcolm Arrick began looking for a flight to New York.

Living in London, Malcolm was pretty far removed from the zombie plague. Every once in a while, he read or saw a news report that talked about them, but they were a nightmare that other people lived. That is, until he’d received a very disturbing phone call from his brother, John. Among other things, John had claimed to have gotten the plague and recovered from it. As far as anyone knew, that had never happened before. According to John, it had changed him. The zombies weren’t interested in him anymore and that had led him to get involved with some shady zombie fighting nonsense. Malcolm didn’t have a true sense of what had happened. John had been somewhat rambling in his telling of events. And Malcolm had been his usual short tempered self. He’d made sure to tell his brother that he was screwing things up and he needed to get his affairs in order. John had promised to do so. And then they hadn’t spoken again.

The more Malcolm thought about it, the less convinced he became of John’s story. The idea that, of all of the people who’d contracted the plague, John was the one person whose body could beat it seemed unlikely. It wasn’t fair for Malcolm to pass judgment on his brother’s life, but that didn’t stop him from doing so. If his girlfriend had actually died and turned and John had actually witnessed it, he could have gone over the edge. He might have thought he was sick and then thought he’d recovered when he didn’t die. To Malcolm, that seemed more plausible.

But John had stopped answering the phone. He didn’t answer at home and he didn’t answer his cell phone. Malcolm tried the school where John worked and was told that his brother had stopped showing up for work. To Malcolm’s way of thinking, this lent credence to his theory. He called the police to report his brother missing, but the New York police were already bogged down with missing persons. They took his information and filed it away. He was sure there had never been an investigation. He’d gotten a routine email from the NYPD a week later saying that nothing new had been turned up. It was all very frustrating.

It got worse when his mother called him.

Have you spoken with Johnny? Johnny’s not answering his phone. Did Johnny say anything to you?

There was only so much of that that Malcolm could tolerate. He and his mother were not on good terms. They didn’t speak often and they saw each other rarely. He lived in London and she lived in a small Scottish town that most of Scotland didn’t even know existed. He’d never gotten on with his parents. It wasn’t easy being the second favorite son in a family with two children. Most kids would have blamed the favorite, but not Malcolm. He and John had always gotten along very well because Malcolm had had the good sense to place the blame squarely where it belonged. On his parents.

He’d tried calling John’s phone again and again every day. The voice mail box for his cell phone filled up quickly and he was no longer able to leave messages. Emails went unanswered. Text messages went unanswered. It was clear that John had forsaken all communication with the world. Malcolm refused to accept that he was dead. Even after the Red Blizzard hit New York, Malcolm knew that he had to go there and find his brother.

The plane tickets cost a fortune, but money had never been a problem for the Arrick family. While he had a substantial fortune of his own, he called upon his mother to pull the strings and foot the bill for the fare. She did so without question or regret. It didn’t occur to her that she was sending another son into the zombie capitol of the United States. She just wanted to find out what had happened to her Johnny. Even with all of the money and influence the Arrick family had, getting the tickets still took six months. There were few flights, and round trips were discouraged. Despite the fact that there had been zombie sightings all over Europe, especially in large cities like London and Birmingham, the government was very cautious about letting people fly in and out of the