Outlaws of New Jerusalem

By Xlibris US

Welcome to Afton, Georgia, populationnearly zero. A terrible fl u has swept through the sleepy, southern town leaving almost all the residents deadbut not for long. Soon the streets are teeming with flesh hungry ghoulsa bit of a downer for the senior class of Afton High. Scared and shivery Rabbit, monosyllabic Saito, all star athlete Matt Garcia, Joy Blessing the Jesus freak, punk rock Julie Westbrook and smart ass Eric Salzburger were just weeks away from graduating; but now they have bigger things to worry about than final exams and prom corsages. They must set aside their differences and band together to fight off the living dead.

Packed with plenty of schlocky horror, grim humor and teenage heartache, Outlaws of New Jerusalem is a zombie feast galoreso good it will make you want to eat your neighbors!

Will Strange lives in his parents basement. He seldom comes out by day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499020809

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Will Strange.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2008911095

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4363-9095-8

                Softcover         978-1-4363-9094-1

                eBook              978-1-4990-2080-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/07/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

PROLOGUE: RABBIT

PART ONE: LAST DAY OF THE WORLD

PART TWO: AND THE DEAD SHALL RISE

OUTLAWS OF NEW JERUSALEM: WASTELAND

For Mom and Dad,

not your type of story, but . . .

M y labours have cheered long hours of solitude, and taken me out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from me, to one glowing with imagination and power. Will my readers ask how I could find solace from the narration of misery and woeful change? This is one of the mysteries of our nature, which holds full sway over me, and from whose influence I cannot escape. I confess, that I have not been unmoved by the development of the tale; and that I have been depressed, nay, agonized, at some parts of the recital, which I have faithfully transcribed from my materials. Yet such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or, worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain.

 — Mary Shelley

The Last Man

PROLOGUE

RABBIT

Facilis descensus Averno:

Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

Sed revocare gradum superasque evader ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est.

Easy is the way down to the Underworld: by night and

by day dark Dis’s doors stand open; but to withdraw

one’s steps and to make a way out to the upper air,

that’s the task, that is the labour.

 — Virgil

Y ou’re soft, Rabbit, too soft.

The voice belongs to his father. But his father isn’t there. His Abbi is dead. So Rabbit knows it’s only in his head, after all.

Rabbit is lying down — not in a bed. He feels something hard and damp beneath him. His hair is soaking wet. He hears noises in the darkness. But everything sounds muffled, like he’s underwater or like his ears are stuffed with wads of cotton, an after effect of the explosion.

Explosion?

His eyes flutter open and he is puzzled by the sight of some cars parked upside down. A sheen of water glistens on the asphalt, limned with a lambent orange glow, a reflection from the fire that is still burning out of control nearby. He feels vaguely puzzled over the topsy-turvy cars. Then comes the dim realization that he is lying with his body on the sidewalk and his head tilted back in the gutter. He tries to sit up but all the blood rushes to his head and for a moment his field of vision is spangled with ten thousand star bursts like the Fourth of July. He lays back down, unable to stand, but manages to roll over all the way onto the sidewalk.

Two blurry lights shine down on him from the darkness overhead. Rabbit tries to focus on one of them. For a moment the lights come closer together, almost melding like two drops of oil floating in dark waters, only to spring apart again at the last moment. He rubs his eyes, looks up again. The twin lights coalesce into one pale circle. The full moon. Its light wavers, then disappears behind a pall of black, greasy smoke.

Get up Rabbit. Get up and run.

A sense of urgency accompanies the thought. He can’t remember why it is so important that he move quickly. But he thinks it might be a matter of life or death — like his body knows to run, even though his brain is still trying to figure out why.

Slowly, he raises himself up on his elbows. He sees the fire. The Bait and Tackle, which served as Afton’s only gas station, is nothing but a hollowed out shell now. Even the blackened, matchsticks of its framework are being devoured by the hungry flames. He knows he has witnessed the cause of the fire, but he can no longer remember how it started.

Someone is coming towards him from across the parking lot, staggering like a drunk, or maybe just shaken up badly from the explosion. A tongue of flame, like Pentecostal fire, burns above the staggering man’s head. He shambles closer, bringing the fire with him.

Why doesn’t he stop? Why doesn’t he roll on the ground to put out the fire?

The man lunges suddenly to his right, grabbing for someone, a woman whose mouth is wide open in the middle of a scream. Rabbit can’t hear it. The dull, underwater feeling has been replaced by a shrill ringing in his ears.

The woman pulls back, trying to get away; but the man with the flame over his head grabs hold of her arm and does not let go. He lurches forward and the woman goes down beneath him. It looks like they are wrestling — the man on top with his fire growing — and she, kicking and squirming, beneath him.

Others are coming out of the darkness beyond the blaze, some carrying flames above their heads, too. One of them walks right through the conflagration and comes out on the other side, blazing like a human torch, untroubled by the fire melting the flesh off his bones. They gather around the woman lying on the parking lot, drop down to their knees, letting their fire join together. Some lean in to rip at the woman’s body with their teeth. Some claw at her with their hands. It looks like a scene from some bizarre, nightmarish, nature special — jackals of hell tearing at a carcass.

Despite the shocking nature of the flesh rending murder, Rabbit is not surprised. He has witnessed this sort of grisly scene before.

Rabbit tries to push himself up, but collapses, groans at the pain. The force of the explosion has done some damage. It feels like all his guts have been mashed inside him.

A shadow blocks the moon again. Not smoke this time. Someone is standing over him, one of those ghoulish cannibals. Fear twists his stomach. He wants to run.

Too late.

This is it, Rabbit. This is the end.

The thing reaches down, slips a hand under each of his arms with surprising gentleness and starts to lift him up.

Is it carrying me off somewhere, to its dripping lair, to shred me to pieces in private?

But that doesn’t make sense.

Those things — they don’t do that. They just fall on you where you lay, tear you apart and devour you right then and there.

Rabbit is on his feet now, leaning shakily against the stranger for support. His head flops forward and he sees one skinny leg ending in a low-cut, dirty blue Converse. The person isn’t wearing any socks and there is something tied around his right ankle — a piece of pink cloth with cartoon panda bears printed on it. It looks strangely familiar. Seeing it brings back a vaguely humorous memory and even in his pain, fear and delirium, Rabbit smiles.

He raises his head, catches a glimpse of a familiar face. The kid is Rabbit’s age with a swoop of dark hair — so black it is almost blue, hiding one of his almond shaped eyes. The kid’s lips are moving. He is saying something, but Rabbit can’t make it out, even though the ringing in his ears has quieted.

Rabbit wobbles drunkenly, starts to topple backwards, but the kid catches him, steadies him, takes him by the hand and starts pulling him along. Rabbit takes one painful step, crumples. No time for baby steps, the kid at his side lifts him up and slings Rabbit over his shoulder, starts moving, taking long, unwieldy strides away from the fire and the parking lot and the things that are hunkered down together devouring the slow-roasting woman.

It’s agony for Rabbit, being jostled like this. He wants to tell the kid to stop, to lay him back down, to let him rest, but all that comes out is a weak moan.

The ringing in his ears has died away to a faint, housefly buzz. He can hear the steady, labored breathing of the kid carrying him. He can also hear pine needles crunching under the kid’s feet as they pass beneath the shadow of a pine thicket bordering the parking lot. They start uphill now. Rabbit’s chin bumps painfully against the lower part of the kid’s back with every teeth-jarring step. His mouth is filled with a sickly sweet metallic taste. He spits out a glob of blood.

Oh shit, am I hemorrhaging? That explosion, it must have shook something loose inside me. Please, man, you gotta put me down. It’s too much. You’re killing me.

The kid stops at the top of the hill, lays Rabbit on the ground as gently as he can manage. Even so, the shock is too much. Rabbit’s consciousness does a little jig on the edge of oblivion, loses its balance and pitches over. He chases after it, but cannot catch hold of his senses and goes tumbling down into darkness

Earlier that day . . .

PART ONE

LAST DAY OF THE WORLD

Death twitches my ear; ‘Live,’ he says… ‘I am coming.’

 — Virgil

T he last day of the world begins with a fall of sparrows from a grey, mid May morning sky. Most people in Afton have been sick a few weeks prior, but it is the startling and inexplicable shower of dead birds raining down all over town that leaves everyone feeling unsettled and a few local visionaries with the black certainty that the unseasonal, late spring flu plaguing the town is just the harbinger of something far more insidious that has yet to reveal itself.

That’s certainly how Vera Griswick feels.

With God as her witness.

Don’t you agree, Pastor Dan?

She still calls him Pastor Dan, even after his firing. It has been three weeks since he delivered his fatal, career ending, Sunday sermon, the one where he thundered from the pulpit that AIDS was the good Lord’s unfailing arrow aimed at this country’s Sodomites.

Daniel Metcalf has not heard a word Vera Griswick has said, except the final, pointed statement of this morning’s harangue. His eyes have been fixated on the grotesqueries of the painting hanging above her mantelpiece.

A city in flames. A host of angels swooping down from the darkness, some sounding trumps, some, swords drawn, making war with a great red dragon in the sky. Below, Death on a pale horse leads his fellow horsemen as they trample down the terrified living, driving them over the edge of a flaming pit. Behind them an army of the undead marches across the devastated land, swords in hand, slaughtering any survivors.

At the bottom, painted in a childish scrawl, a quote from the Book of Revelation.

Woe to the inhabitors of the earth and of the sea! For the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time . . .

At the sight of Death riding right at him, scythe raised, Pastor Dan shifts uncomfortably in his seat. The springs of the ancient, high backed armchair groan under his weight. Even on this drear, overcast day he is sweating. Dark stains are bleeding out beneath his armpits and a sheen of sweat glistens on his forehead. It is as if Vera Griswick’s house sits atop a gateway to the Infernal Realms.

Vera is staring at him, awaiting his answer. Pastor Dan looks uncertainly at her for a moment before offering his usual token response, Glory be.

Vera purses her lips, gives a curt nod. This is exactly the right thing to say.

Glory be.

She sips from her Blue Willow china cup then looks at Pastor Dan, eyebrows arched, expecting him to do the same.

He does not like tea or the cups, they are too dainty for his tastes and the loop of the handle is too small for him to fit even one of his sausage sized fingers through. He pinches the handle between thumb and finger, raises the cup gingerly to his lips. His hand falters. A lukewarm trickle of tea dribbles down his double chin, from one to the next like a minute cataract.

Vera Griswick, satisfied at the attempt, continues. A fine man of the Lord, such as yourself, betrayed by his flock. Of course, a prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, as you well know. We are both sufferers in righteousness, you and I.

Last year, she had checked out all three copies of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the Afton Public Library. She took them home and burned them in her backyard. She had rather pay for the books, she said, than let the little lambs of Afton be exposed to such devilry. Children are not the point. Pastor Dan knows this. For Vera Griswick, God is a means to an end. Religion is a hallowed veil for her unholy wrath. She wants to see people suffer. Red or yellow, black or white, the zeal of her hatred knows no bounds.

She had to pay for the books, of course. Her money was used to buy three new copies and Andy Verner, the assistant librarian, had placed a decorative sticker inside each cover stating that their purchase was made possible by her charitable donation.

Thoughts of Andy Verner causes her face to curdle.

Yes, I am well acquainted with the godless treachery of the people in this town. Your flock has revealed itself for what it truly is — a pack of slavering, demonic wolves run straight up out of the deepest pit of hell. Their betrayal must come as a great shock to you, but I have been well aware of the insidious prerogative of these backstabbing blasphemers for years. Indeed, I tried to warn you how deep the devil has his pitchfork thrust into the heart of this country, so deep that, even here, in our modest town, God’s supposed elect have openly defended the rights of anal stabbing homosexuals.

A pause. A breath. A sip of tea.

That old serpent, the devil, he wants Afton for himself, she hisses, wants it so bad and will stop at nothing to set the seal of his fiery hoofprint upon this whole town.

Through the years, she has endured stoically the toilet paperings of her trees, the eggings of her house, pulling down the crown of thorns tighter on her brow, knowing that her prolonged suffering will make vengeance taste that much sweeter.

Pastor Dan is feeling queasy. He finds himself repulsed and, at the same time, inexplicably drawn by the Satanic magnetism of this self righteous Gorgon. She possesses a sort of hell blasted beauty of her own, but whenever she is seized by the tentacles of her dark inner-god her face twists into the semblance of an inhuman basilisk. She struggles now to contain it. But he can see it peeking through and is struck by her resemblance at this moment to a graveyard ghoul.

What a terror she could be, what a god awful, unholy terror.

Vera Griswick’s presence has always unsettled him. During his two year tenure at Afton First Baptist, he never once saw her attend church. Thoughts of the eldritch, abyssal horror she must surely worship in secret gives Daniel Metcalf the shivers. Before his fall from grace, he avoided her like the plague, worried it might tarnish his reputation. But now, friendless as a leper, it’s just like his ex wife, Janice the Jezebel, always said — 

You’re just along for the ride, Danny boy, just along for the ride.

A war is being waged, Pastor Dan, all around us, between the righteous and the sinful, a war for the dominion of the earth. To arms. To arms!

Pastor Dan, softened by his recent tribulation is no longer feeling as zealous. Perhaps, Miss Vera, we may live in the world, but not be of the world, as the Good Book says.

Her eyes narrow on him, lit now by a spark of hellish flame. Vera Griswick brooks no dissention, not even from her beloved Pastor Dan.

You dare to challenge me, in my own home? You. Just. Try.

Don’t make excuses for the sinful. This perverse, back talking, nose pierced, tattooed generation has been raised to reap the wind. They have chosen to tread the path of perdition of their own, free will and must be shown no mercy. They must be ground to pulp and powder under our righteous heels, lest they turn on us and rend our flesh.

Pastor Dan can fathom no response to this.

A shower of what sounds like little stones clatters down suddenly on the roof overhead. Vera’s eyes dart up, freeing Pastor Dan of her gaze. She listens, displeased, looks back at him.

Well, I suppose I’ve kept you long enough.

Pastor Dan heaves himself up, only to happy at this chance to escape. He brings down one elephantine foot heavily on the floor in a pronounced stomp made more defiant owing to his wearing fake rattlesnake skin boots. The Blue Willow cups rattle in their saucers.

Vera’s eyes are drawn to the boots. She gives an unnatural coquettish giggle, touches her cheek gingerly and coos, Why Pastor Dan, those are some sharp looking boots.

He bought them because he thought wearing cowboy boots would make him look like a real salt of the earth kind of man. Shit kickers, he called them. Over the past month he has rubbed his feet raw trying to break them in.

Vera walks him to the door, clutching his arm all the way. He steps gingerly, owing to the blisters