Necropolis: Part One: Zombie Outbreak Noir

By Max Kielsmeier

For months now Jadyn has been living in a city which has fallen to a terrible plague. A virus that harkens back to the Black Death; though, being mixed with something more like rabies, it has given rise the phenomenon of zombies. They say the quarantine has contained it, but that's little comfort to the day to day lives of people living there.

She is a woman whose life is lived at the edge. So too are the lives of the bizarre, the evil and the rare good people she encounters who scrape by in their own desperate ways.

The stakes are high, the death toll is high, the burning through lead and octane is at an all time maximum. This is the so called 'city of the dead', the Necropolis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Max Kielsmeier
• Release date: Jan 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311111807

Max Kielsmeier

Max Kielsmeier attended film school in Denver, Colorado and then spent years brushing shoulders with both the famous and the hoi polloi in Los Angeles as a screenwriter. With dream film projects being difficult to realize in Hollywood, he returned home to Colorado and has been turning screenplays into novels for years. Spurred on by a lifelong fixation with mythology, folklore and the Hero's Journey, he's the most satisfied when he's completed a new story. These days, he's perfectly happy penning novels and has sent screenwriting back into the wild.

Book preview

Necropolis

Zombie Outbreak Noir

By

Max Kielsmeier

Cave Grown Publications, LLC

Copyright © 2014, 2015, 2017

Max Kielsmeier

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 9781311111807

Cover Illustration

by

Charlie Bowater

Necropolis:

Part One

——

A Zombie

Noir Saga

For my friends and family

Table of Contents: Necropolis: Part One

One — Thy Neighbor's Wife

Two — 18th Street

Three — The Sinner's Church

Four — Last Call

Five — Bro-tastic

Six — The Anti-virus Program

Seven — Thug Life

Eight — On Through The Labyrinth

Nine — Midday in the Garden of Cold Indifference

Ten — There and Gone

Eleven — Brave Hours

Twelve — Overlord of the Underbelly

Thirteen — The New Hub of Denver

Fourteen — Prisoners...

What can kill that doggy in the window?

-Anonymous refugee bathroom scrawl

The one with the waggly tail?

-Written beneath it, by another's hand

No. It ate my neighbor's face and stalked me for days.

-The final response

One — Thy Neighbor's Wife

A zombie curled its fingers around the wires of a chain-link fence. Zombie was, at the end of it, the most decisive term they applied to those with its particular affliction. The thing was only there because it was hungry for the warm-bodied humans, still fully-animate, on the other side, but no quarter was offered to zombies at that place.

A man dressed in dark utility clothing stood on the other side of the fence and barely looked up before raising his pistol and shooting a three-inch-diameter window through its skull. That was Derrick—the man who controlled the other side of the fence. The long, black coat he wore swirled in a wandering breeze, bestowing on him a dramatic, desperado profile.

There were two cars parked next to Derrick, and a shorter man standing between them.

We have some new madams, said the shorter man, Tim, who was nevertheless dressed in mimicry of his leader. Derrick returned him an incredulous stare. It was a thing that could make him antsy, knowing Tim had returned from a raiding excursion. He watched his littler self open the rear hatch of this black hearse they had.

Out, he ordered, contemptuous sounding.

Two women crawled out of the back of the car—wide-eyed, and when Tim drew near, twitchy. He lifted up a lock of hair from the auburn-haired woman as though offering merchandise.

How about some fresh pussy? Tim said with a flash in his eyes.

Derrick chuckled.

Before the plague, the two would never have given each other a second glance on the street, but under Denver's new conditions, Derrick and Tim had borne an unexpected kinship based on a mutual joy of plundering.

Tim had developed a fondness for abusing power which extended to murdering and pillaging other survivors (beyond necessity), something that, with a chain-gun mounted on the top of the black hearse, which they dubbed The Black Plague in red paint, he was well-equipped to do. He was something of a spitting image of his leader, though more try-hard. There was also his secret nickname, given to him by other bandits in the group, (which he didn't know of)— Bishop. They gave him that one because, like the Chess piece for which he was so named, he came across slanted. This, out of a group of self-admitted bastards.

Derrick's outpost had been a condemned factory building. A small matter, but a factory-warehouse, properly. Running around the perimeter was a sturdy barbed wire fence that it had acquired—post-condemnation. The new residents, such as they were, had inherited a serviceable fortress from the undead.

Since the first days, when people had accepted, but not just accepted, when they'd finally comprehended the plague's destructive capacity, the building had been sought out by refugees. In the early days, it could have been considered a hub. Derrick changed that. When he came, he brought with him a ruthlessness that would normally be more reminiscent of conquerors of the ancient world.

The night he arrived, he slit the throats of the men in their sleep. When a gathering party of assorted refugees returned the next day, they were first denied entry, then cut down in a spray of gunfire. He left four of the resident women alive, but was not challenged for control again. In the days after he took over, he set about recruiting savage, but ambitious underlings.

All over the city, pockets of survivors came to hear about this group of marauders. They were more psychotic than the normal steal-in-order-to-eat-and-live fare going on in most other places. More comparable to a mobile execution squad of than a group of refugees; and Derrick, while not Alexander the Great, still had a dumb, devil-may-care luck that seemed to follow him through misadventure. He wanted, he pillaged, and the city continued