Zombies v. Ninjas: Origin: Zombies v. Ninjas, #1

By R. A. Barnes

The dead are coming alive on an island in the North Atlantic Ocean. A bullet isn’t going to stop them. They feel no pain.

Flesh-eating walkers have been taking sheep and cattle from the fields. A minor inconvenience until someone, or something, starts to organize them.

A force of pure evil, building an army of undead offspring, planning the end of mankind.

Only the ninjas are suitably skilled to identify the undead, understand them and cut off their heads. So few against so many.

Will the human race survive?

Featuring Ruby Barnes, John Baptist and D.I. Andy McAuliffe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marble City Publishing
• Release date: Jan 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781908943620

Book preview

PROLOGUE

He was only seventeen years old and already barrel-chested. The light glinted off the blade as it was drawn slowly from the wooden scabbard. I felt a fizz of excitement run down my back at the promise of extreme but controlled violence. There were no Japanese words uttered, this was a sport-karate club adopting a modern approach to ninjitsu, open-handed combat and weapons.

Man, woman and child were fixated as he delivered the first few slashes against an invisible opponent. The sword was a natural extension to his abnormally strong arms. Someone else gasped first and then we all followed as he flipped the weapon in a figure of eight, making a no-go area around his body, then brought it from behind his back, over and down into the crown of the enemy’s head.

Pure power, focused into a honed edge of tempered metal that would slice apart the atoms of cloth, flesh and bone. The guy was built like a rock – I had felt the strength of his sidekick in my ribs the previous month and still hadn’t recovered from the separation of cartilage and muscle. A Japanese blade in his hands was a fearsome thing. This sword, his strength, those skills. The audience was horribly fascinated as they all looked certain death in the face. The applause at the end was composed equally of appreciation for his performance and relief that no one had been decapitated.

Soon after that the lad left to attend a college degree course at Cork University, but I kept his swordsmanship stored in my memory. I was determined to study, to practice long and hard to learn this thing. Finally, I had discovered the perfect apocalypse weapon. It was a decision that saved my life.

IT BEGAN IN A SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Sean was our pet ginger ninja. His jolly smile, wavy hair and big ginger beard kept everyone in a good mood. This day, however, he was sluggish during training. Distracted, getting caught by kicks and punches that he was supposed to deflect, running the risk of injury. After half an hour he had to sit out the session and I saw him on the leather sofa by the coffee machine, chin on his hand and a thousand yard stare on his face.

Someone had a birthday. It didn’t matter who, we jumped at any excuse to party. Work hard, play hard was our motto. A couple of hours after that training session we were all in the pub and the banter flowed as freely as the beer. Except for Sean. Usually he was the joker but that night he sat on a high stool with his back to the wooden panelling and looked out across the top of his beer, breaking the stare occasionally to down the brew. Then another, and another.

‘You have a fair thirst on you,’ I said, by way of enticing him into conversation. Being the grandad of the club at age fifty, and a clinical psychiatrist in my day job, I was used to being the agony aunt, or something.

Sean just nodded and drank his beer as if he was eating it. I waved to the barman to set up another round and then had another go at coaxing Sean into frivolity. ‘Are you okay, Sean? Working today, were you?’

‘I was.’

Two words. All he had said in three hours.

‘Still working in the same place?’ I asked, not being able to remember exactly what he did for a living. If he was a pretty girl I would have remembered. Hey, I’m only human.

He nodded slowly. ‘The abattoir. Slaughterhouse. Nearly five years now. Never seen anything like it. I think I need a new job.’

Now, I’m not a vegetarian. I’m not squeamish about blood and I’m a realist. I know how the food chain works, but wasn’t sure I wanted to hear about blood and guts on my night out. But the lad obviously needed to talk.

‘What did you see, Sean?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘I do. Go on.’

‘Seriously, man, no.’

We drank on in silence as the others partied around us. I wasn’t giving up on him. There was a juicy story to be had. I’m good at waiting. I waited half a century before starting to learn karate. I could wait an hour or two for Sean to unburden himself. Finally he started talking, quietly, as if to himself.

‘Come on, lad,’ I said. ‘Let’s go outside for a cigarette.’

I don’t smoke but it was my best chance of hearing the full details.

Out on John Street we idled against the glass front of the pub like a couple of drunks, which I suppose we were by that stage. Sean lit a cigarette, took a long drag and passed it to me. I went through the motions and did my best not to make a show of myself.

‘It was that farmer on the news,’ Sean said. ‘You’ll have heard about him. Got a jail sentence for animal cruelty, so he did, and well-deserved. There’s things you can do in the food chain and things you can’t.’

‘Right, yeah. Sure, I know what you mean.’ I didn’t but figured I was going to learn about it.

‘So we had to destroy his herd. A hundred cows. Beautiful animals, every one.’

‘You’re not getting sentimental now, are you, Sean? Five years of slaughter and you’re upset over a few cows?’

‘It was a waste, that’s what I hate about it. They weren’t for meat. Because of what he’d done they had to go. I mean, it isn’t natural. Anyhow, you remember that time I told you about that steer?’

‘Sure, yeah, I remember.’

Sean had described his worst day on another occasion. He and three others stood on a mezzanine floor and had to put a rifle bullet in the steers’ heads. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Except this one steer had refused to go down. It took four shots to bring the animal to its knees. Afterwards they found the beast had a one and a half inch thick skull and the bullets weren’t penetrating.

‘Well, this was worse today. The first one of the herd, I shot the beast right there.’ He prodded a finger in the middle of my forehead and pushed my head back.

‘What happened? Didn’t it die?’

He laughed. ‘Well, that’s the funny thing. It died all right. Or at least we thought it did. Crashed to the ground after the shot. But it was tea break so we went off for a cuppa. Supposed to be just ten minutes but we take our time. We came back and started to tie the carcass to the hoist. The thing twitched and got back on its feet, nearly crushed me against the rails. We climbed back up on the mezzanine and my mate Joe put another bullet in it.’

‘Maybe the first one just stunned it?’

‘Maybe. It went down again and this time we were cagey in case it stomped on us. I felt its neck – you can do that, like a human – no pulse. The beast was getting cold. Tried to hoist it and the beggar jumped up again, a bit wilder this time, kicking. Joe took a hoof in the thigh, near broke the bone.’

‘So then what?’

‘We shot it again. Several times. The foreman came over to see if we were messing with all the shooting going on. The thing didn’t seem to be in any pain, but we couldn’t finish it off.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘In the end...’ he stared at the ground and fumbled for his cigarette packet. His hand was trembling. ‘We used a chainsaw. A fucking chainsaw. Cut its head right off.’

‘Nasty!’ I grimaced.

‘It didn’t seem to be in pain. Just stood there while we cut up like this.’ He motioned with his hands. ‘And that wasn’t the weirdest thing. The sucker didn’t bleed out. It just kind of oozed blood, not a gush like when we nick an artery or something.’

‘And then?’

‘What do you think? You’re a doctor. A body can’t function without a brain. It was fucking dead then with the head cut off, like.’

‘Nightmare,’ I said.

‘That was just the start. It was the same with the whole herd.’

‘You what?’

‘Took a couple more until we worked out the best way. One shot in the head, let them go cold and then they stand up again. Then the chainsaw. All one hundred of the fuckers.’

I shook my head in sympathy.

‘Now listen, Ruby, don’t be getting crazy ideas and go writing one of your mad novels about this. It’s not something I want other people to read about.’

Sean passed me the cigarette and, as I took it, I noticed for the first time that his fingernails, knuckles and every line in the skin of his hands was ingrained with blood.

MY DEBUT

The ceiling vibrated as bodies crashed down from above. We were crowded together in the heat of the basement, watching events unfold on a monitor up in a corner of the room, next to the mini-kitchen. The thuds and groans were strangely out of time with the pictures on the screen, some delay between the action on-stage and relayed events in the Green Room.

Three members of the O’Dowd family were hurling themselves, and being hurled, across the wooden boards of the Watergate theatre stage in front of an audience of three hundred or so friends and family. In a carefully choreographed routine that had won gold medals across America and Europe, the father and older son acted out the bullying of the youngest to a well-known pop song. Flips, kicks and punches were executed without injury, but the break-falls were genuine and when the youngest pounded his fists on the back of his prone father we could hear the ceiling resonate a split second before the sound came through on the monitor.

Eamonn called to me from the door and I picked up my sword, ready for my performance debut. Words of encouragement from those waiting to perform, and others who had completed, followed me up the stairs. ‘Good luck, Ruby. Kill it!’ I felt no nerves at all. The painkillers I’d taken were great. I didn’t even feel the pain in my left shoulder from all that lunchtime practice in the garden over summer and autumn. The neighbours had thought I was cracked, rushing home to sweat in my shirtsleeves and suit trousers, tossing the blade high above my head in the sunlight, cutting down the hoards of invisible attackers.

‘Hey, Ruby. You’re on after Toni,’ Jerry whispered from the control desk as I waited in the wings.

I did a few stretches, thought about the opening bars of the music I had selected for my one and a half minute display, and made a few cursory slashes in the air.

Toni completed her open-hand form to thunderous applause and everything went quiet.

‘Now we have our first sword display of the evening,’ Jerry announced over the sound system. ‘Our veteran member, Ruby Barnes, will perform a solo form. Ruby is the oldest member of the club and one of our newest recruits.’ I looked at Jerry and mouthed the words he said at every public gathering. ‘It’s never too late to start with karate. He’s living proof.’

Complete silence greeted my entry on stage. I walked to the centre, executed a stylised turn on my heel and strode determinedly to the front. I bowed, announced myself and took to one knee, laying the sword on the ground before me, slightly drawn from the scabbard. My left arm rose into the air as if on a string, signalling the music to start.

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet leapt from the speakers around the room, that menacing Montagues and Capulets section from Dance of the Knights. A favoured walk-on accompaniment of many a pop and rock star, and me. My routine of around one hundred and fifty moves was intended to follow the beat closely, a pattern of sword-work strikes on every second beat and then the whole thing again double-time, with some embellishments. This I had performed in my garden a hundred times, in my consulting room at the hospital a thousand times, in my sleep a million ... well, you get the idea. I was prepared.

I gave the sword a quick figure of eight as the start beat approached, the air swishing along the blood groove of the blade. A child cried out in fear from the audience. Just the reaction I was hoping for. Then we were off. First cut was left shoulder to right hip of an oncoming opponent, second cut the opposite direction, each accompanied by a shout. Hah! Hah! Then ... I had forgotten what came next. So I made a pause as if it was supposed to be there and improvised. The point in my sequence of killer strokes where the routine was supposed to go double-time arrived several beats ahead of the music and I had to indulge in some flashy impromptu twirling to use up time. Then I was off again but I didn’t feel like a samurai slicing up the enemy – more like an old man trying to kill a rat with a shovel. Soon it was over, I was down on one knee, breathless, and the blade was thrust behind me for the last stab at a foe approaching from the rear. I finished on time, if nothing else. A split second of silence and then the crowd went wild. I had got away with it.

Somehow I managed to perform all the niceties and get off-stage before the shakes set in. Jerry gave me the thumbs-up. Back down in the Green Room there were pats on the back and younger club members asked to look