The Conscript the Girl and the Virus

By Phillip Donnelly

A drop out is conscripted to defend city against imminent zombov attack. Buddied up with the girl of his dreams, Private Fluffy lurches his way through basic training. Will the heifferfolk be as difficult to deal with as Captain McGuire?
Echoes of Catch 22, traces of Zone 1, a whiff of Adrian Mole and a dash of World War Z – what more could you want from an apocalypse novel?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip Donnelly
• Release date: Jan 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311385604

Phillip Donnelly

After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet. Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence. He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon France and Vietnam. In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be most obliged if any aliens reading this work could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension. About two dozen of his pieces have appeared online -- mainly travel writing and short stories, and one of them, The Interactive Classroom, won a Bewildering Stories’ Mariner Award in 2010. His latest novel, Kev the Vampire, which will be released in early 2014 by Rebel ePublishers. He can be contacted at [e-mail]

Book preview

The Conscript, the Girl

and the Virus

Book 1

By Phillip Donnelly

Copyright 2014 Phillip Donnelly

ISBN: 9781311385604

Smashwords Edition

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for Sandra

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Message from the Author

I

Captain McGuire strutted his way to the podium. He scowled, by way of introduction. Perhaps it was our make-shift uniforms, or the way we slouched rather than stood. Maybe he just had a scowlly face, but I think he no more wanted to command this army of shreds and patches than we wanted to be part of it.

But here we were, nonetheless. Some are born soldiers, some become soldiers and some have no feckin’ choice in the matter. We were conscripts, some of the last conscripts. Bottom of the barrel conscripts. You could cut the apathy with a knife, if you could work up the antipathy to wield it.

I could have dodged the draft, I suppose. There were plenty of ghost estates to lay low in, but what was I going to eat there? My belly was empty and so was my bank account. Not that you could buy much by that stage anyway, even on the black market. I could either join a gang or join the army. I figured there was less chance the army would rape me, kill me and eat me, so I took my draft papers, got on my bike and cycled to the training grounds. Nothing else to do now but hold a gun, button up some second-hand khaki, and head off to war. Anything for a free lunch.

Captain McGuire clambered his way up to the top of the stage and called for order. A large stained flag covered most of it, but it was torn in one corner, and you could see the wooden pallets underneath it. Our jabbering turned to mumbling, but when sergeant Driscall blasted a yell at us, we fell silent. He called us to attention, in that stupid way you see sergeants do on TV, making all the syllables merge into one and stressing the end of the word. We shifted about a bit and tried to stand up straight. A girl beside me stuck her chest out and that called my attention.

The captain said there was no time for formalities and went straight into the official debriefing. He warned us that the information he was about to disclose was top secret and that any attempt on our parts to divulge it would be treated as an act of treason, in accordance with Emergency Law such-and-such.

The top secret stuff got us all excited, but he didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. The government had been lying to us for years (managing information), but it was all for our own good (in the public interest), and it was all legal, thanks to the Information Management Protocols (hiding the truth).

He had a strange way of pronouncing long words, Captain McGuire. Slowly, with unnatural reverence. I guessed he wasn’t used