Fevered Hills

By Keith Deininger

Martin is disturbed. After a nightmare trek through a war-torn landscape plagued by a spreading psychosis known as The Fever, the sixteen-year-old soldier returns home to discover that not even there is he safe from The War. Soon he meets Elizabeth, who might be a witch, and Richter, a hulking, former philosophy professor with a penchant for violence. Together they will learn of the true horror they now face: dark, insane and deadly...

Thus begins The Fever Trilogy, literary zombie fiction, extreme, disturbing and masterful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keith Deininger
• Release date: Nov 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463233023

Keith Deininger

"Like Bradbury on acid" (Greg Gifune, The Bleeding Season), Keith Deininger is an award-winning author known for blending elements of fantasy with horror in his surreal, literary style. His work is often described as disturbing, surreal and cinematic, "its tutelary spirits are Barker and Lynch, Carpenter and Cronenberg" (Peter Tennant, Black Static Magazine) and he has been called "one of the finest writers of imaginative fiction out there" (Craig Saunders, Deadlift). Deininger grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado where he wrote some of his first stories while in grade school, odd tales about finding dead people in the basement and about waking up in strange worlds. He then moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico where, in high school, he won first place in a science fiction writing contest judged by Ray Bradbury, who presented him with the award and said, "I really enjoyed your story." In college, at the University of New Mexico where he received his BA in creative writing, Deininger focused for a time on poetry, winning an Editor's Choice Award in the literary magazine Conceptions Southwest for his poem "Grandma." His first novel, The New Flesh, was published in 2013 to critical acclaim, called a "dark and sinister debut" (Ronald Malfi, Little Girls), and Deininger hailed as a "prodigious talent" (Jon Bassoff, Corrosion). His follow up, Ghosts of Eden, was equally well received as a "twisted masterpiece" (Allan Leverone, Tracie Tanner thrillers) and a "psychedelic journey through alternative realities, familial relationships and the mysteries of the mind." Deininger has since published several novels and novellas, including the horror novel Within ("Best horror 2015", Michael Patrick Hicks) and the "Mcarthyesque fever-dream" (C. M. Muller) Fevered Hills. He is also the author of A Game for Gods, the first title in a highly anticipated, literary and imaginative dark fantasy series. www.KeithDeininger.com

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Fevered Hills © 2018 by Keith Deininger

2nd edition

Originally published by DarkFuse - 2013

www.KeithDeininger.com

This book may or may not be a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or evidence of fictional realism. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, may or may not be entirely coincidental.

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FEVERED HILLS

THE FEVER TRILOGY

BOOK I

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in the medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

I. MARTIN

It seemed only natural, perched upon the cliff with canvas and brush, to seek to recreate the rich vibrancy of colors laid out in the valley before him, however inadequate his paints were to the task. Green splotches of paint became the trees; blue, the river; gray, the sky. He worked in a trance of concentration, blind to all else in the world. His breathing came in shallow gasps as layers of increasingly fine brush strokes blended and became the details of the large manor house peeking above the hillside. The rest of the city was lost in a blur of earth tones at the foot of the distant mountain, but the manor house was so large, so ornate, it jutted from the canopy of green, its domed tower rising upon a set of carved marble pillars, perfectly in focus for the center of his painting—man in harmony with nature.

Martin did not know if the manor house was a place of worship, or sanctuary for the wealthy, or, perhaps, a museum of natural history. It was unimportant. To him, its value laid purely in aesthetics.

Such was his absorption in his art, he failed to notice the growing rumble, slowly pouring into the open valley, a low trembling vibrato, louder and louder. Using his tongue, he tipped his brush, selected paint carefully from the edge of a mixed sepia-swirled glob, and applied a thin highlighting stroke to one of the marble pillars, where the sun struck the reflecting surface. He looked at his painting, then at the view, then back to his painting. He inhaled, held it, and flicked the brush lightly over the canvas.

Movement caught out of the corner of his eye brought his head up, and he stared at the airship entering his view, appearing as if from nowhere and completely out of place. It was a gigantic brass behemoth of pumping pistons and whirring propellers, a dark and ugly thing. The screech of hissing engines and thump of grinding gears shattered the stillness of the air, and the peace.

Something whistled; an unnatural flash of light. A moment later the sounds of destruction reached his ears.

His mouth fell open, and he stared, watching the manor house consumed in flame, the domed roof cracking open, the marble pillars splintering, crumbling to rubble, dropping out of sight behind the hill and the trees.

Could it be, even out here he wasn't safe? Had the War stretched its twisted petroleum-slicked fingers all this way, even to where he lived, to where he'd grown up?

Martin dropped his brush—it disappeared into the grass at his feet—and watched the flames, his painting, for the moment, forgotten, as a swirl of dark images cavorted through his mind.

Sometime later, he crossed down the hill and up the pathway to the house. He couldn’t help himself, just the thought his parents might have returned while he was busy with his painting threatened to split his face open in a barely contained grin.

At the front door, however, he hesitated, his hand poised to knock, before he realized how ridiculous he was being. He gripped the doorknob, and burst through with a cry of greeting hanging on his lips.

A layer of dust shrouded everything. The shades were drawn, the living room dark and musty. The deep mahogany wood of the handcrafted kitchen table, the plump red sofa, the rocking chair in the corner, all stood in muted gray. He walked to the hutch set against the wall and peered through the glass at his mother's doll collection. He tried to open it, but it was locked; all the drawers on the hutch were locked. He felt a deep sadness, a growing loneliness. He crossed to the window and pulled the curtain aside. He looked out on his mother's garden, grown verdant and wild. The tomato plants were overburdened with their fruit, sagging in their cages. The pumpkin patch had burst from its confining fence and snaked into