Odoru: The Dance of Death

By J.S. Frankel

Carl Silverman, and Amanda Worthington, both seventeen, dating, in love and loving their school life, have their world turned upside down when a virus--known as the Odoru (dancing) virus--spreads throughout their city of Routeville, Illinois, turning ninety percent of the population into zombies.

Only ten percent are immune, Carl and Amanda among them. Their parents became victims, and the young teens escape with the help of an older couple, Grover Plover and Genevieve Gray. They journey west and arrive in Placerville, California, where they set up camp as zombie slayers. Soon, their ranks swell as they meet Norm Barnett, another teen, and the Rodriguez triplets. Training begins, and the team of teens proves to be zombie killers supreme. While they have to contend with the usual results of the loss of modern technology--no internet, radio, or water power--they make do. They also have to contend with an incompetent city manager named Griffin who refuses to help.

Things get bad when the Rodriguez trio dies in a battle. Worse, a more intelligent zombie--King Zombie--emerges, leading the undead in disciplined attacks. Carl is consumed by vengeance, and he vows to find this king and end his unlife--before the undead overrun the populace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eXtasy Books Inc
• Release date: Jun 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781487437879

Book preview

Make the world safe for another turn of the sun.

Carl Silverman, and Amanda Worthington, both seventeen, dating, in love and loving their school life, have their world turned upside down when a virus--known as the Odoru (dancing) virus--spreads throughout their city of Routeville, Illinois, turning ninety percent of the population into zombies.

Only ten percent are immune, Carl and Amanda among them. Their parents became victims, and the young teens escape with the help of an older couple, Grover Plover and Genevieve Gray. They journey west and arrive in Placerville, California, where they set up camp as zombie slayers. Soon, their ranks swell as they meet Norm Barnett, another teen, and the Rodriguez triplets. Training begins, and the team of teens proves to be zombie killers supreme. While they have to contend with the usual results of the loss of modern technology--no internet, radio, or water power--they make do. They also have to contend with an incompetent city manager named Griffin who refuses to help.

Things get bad when the Rodriguez trio dies in a battle. Worse, a more intelligent zombie--King Zombie--emerges, leading the undead in disciplined attacks. Carl is consumed by vengeance, and he vows to find this king and end his unlife--before the undead overrun the populace.

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

Odoru: The Dance of Death

Copyright © 2023 J.S. Frankel

ISBN: 978-1-4874-3787-9

Cover art by Martine Jardin

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by eXtasy Books Inc

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Smashwords Edition

Odoru: The Dance of Death

By

J.S. Frankel

Chapter One: Here and Now

December eighth. Noon. Harry Valiant High School, Routeville, Illinois.

Three-thirty, Amanda said just after finishing off her tuna sandwich.

What?

We were in the cafeteria. It was twelve-seventeen, and my girlfriend and I sat at a table near the exit. The air was cold, due to the heating system failure three days ago. Lots of kids had the sniffles, red eyes, and coughs, and if any sicky came my way, I always covered my nose and mouth—even though I wore a mask—as an additional precaution. I also had on my jacket. Winters in Illinois weren’t kind.

Call me overly careful or even paranoid, but catching a cold wasn’t on my to-do list. My parents—government paper pushers—had been complaining of feeling crappy the past few days as well.

As for Amanda’s parents, same deal. Her father was a viral researcher, and he’d admitted that his research on the new flu had come to a standstill. It keeps mutating, he’d said to me the last time we met. Changing every day, so synthesizing a vaccine is going to be difficult until it hits its final form.

Breach of protocol? Maybe, but this latest-not-so-greatest version of the flu had been all over the news for the past few days, so it wasn’t exactly a secret. And while admitting to a civilian that a vaccine simply wasn’t around may not have been the right thing to do, I could keep a secret as well as anyone.

We’d had so many kinds of flu over the past few years it wasn’t funny. I still felt okay, as did Amanda, but that was because we wore masks in class, as did most of the other kids. Better safe than sorry, and those who didn’t wear masks seemed to get sick more than those who did.

Our city, just over fourteen thousand in terms of population, a nice suburban area near Champagne, was a good place to live. It had a cool local mall where Amanda and I usually hung out after school for a few hours before going home, and it was safe. We never had to worry about crime. We never had to worry about anything...

Three-thirty, Amanda repeated and snapped her fingers for attention, putting on a mock-severe tone of voice. Gosh, Carl, I don’t see why I put up with you.

When you say that, pilgrim, smile.

My answer made her laugh. Her father was a big John Wayne fan and loved the late actor’s westerns. Good for him. After reading about Wayne, the less said, the better. He had his fans, natch, but his way of thinking simply didn’t jive with mine.

I’d never mentioned that to my girlfriend, though. Amanda was very open-minded, but she’d always supported her father, and blood was blood, after all.

Ah’m smiling, Amanda drawled and then switched to speaking without her drawl. I was thinking, after school, let’s go to the mall. I want to buy a blouse, and they’re on sale.

So I get to watch you model clothes, I replied after thinking that I’d miss fooling around on the internet. I loved playing a first-person POV shooting game named Calling Duty, and while I wasn’t great at it, the graphics, dialogue, and music were prime. In fact, they were all at least a light-year beyond what anyone else had ever come up with.

My goal was to someday be as good as the all-time leader, a person with the screen name Depth Charge. I had no idea who he or she was, but they were good. No, better than good. Their high score was over seventy million. In contrast, the second-highest result was forty-two million, the magical number, and as for me, I never got past the ten-million range...

Hey, Carl, are you home?

What? I’d been spacing out again, thinking about games and whatnot instead of thinking about the special girl I was with.

Amanda tossed me a slow, lazy grin. I’ll forgive you for not listening to me, Carl...once. Like I was saying, when we go shopping, you get to be with me. That’s better than watching me show off a new blouse.

I couldn’t disagree with that. We’d met earlier this year in September, our junior year at school. Homeroom class, just before nine, Amanda walked into the room on the first day of the term, and everyone’s gaze immediately went to her.

It was easy to see why. She was medium height—five-seven, same as me—with long blonde hair, green eyes, a sylphlike figure, and an attitude of you-can’t-touch-this.

Said attitude showed in her no-nonsense stride, the way she sat as if erecting an invisible barrier around her... everything. Perhaps she realized her effect on people, perhaps not. But all the same, she remained kind of aloof. It was a deal-with-it scenario. Either people accepted it, or they didn’t.

For the first two weeks, she’d sat with a different student every day, as if she was putting them into the friend-slash-no-friend-slash-maybe-friend categories. She was never unfriendly, always civil, but the divide was there.

Divides were something I understood all too well. I was a minority in the school, and in my freshman year, a few students had made it clear that my presence wasn’t welcome due to me having a Jewish family name. Silverman was a lot different than West or Smith or Collins.

And when I ran across people who said bigoted things simply because they knew it would piss me off, with people like that, you couldn’t talk to them, reason with them, or ever hope to be friends with them, much less sit in their circle.

Fights? In first year, I’d had a few, but most of the time, I went my own way. Just how it was. I attended class, did my homework, made a couple of friends, and that was that. No girlfriends, though, and after that year’s summer vacation, I vowed to find a girlfriend. I hated the thought of going through high school single. No one wanted that, and when Amanda stepped through the door on the first day of junior year, my heart practically jumped out of my just-turned-seventeen-year-old chest.

Amanda had that effect on me—and on everyone else. All the girls wanted to be her bestie, while several of the guys—the jocks, the brains, and the dudes in the cool crowd—tried hitting on her.

Like that worked. Some people had poker faces, never betraying their emotions, but with Amanda, a person could read her expressions like a book. If she was indifferent to someone, then she gave them a false smile, as if to say screw you—but she did it politely.

On the other hand, if she didn’t like someone, she’d stare at them like a scientist would eye an extremely ugly bug. No thanks, or, Get lost, were her standard answers.

I had to admit it—she had style, and she was no one’s puppet. I tried not to stare, but it was hard. At least I didn’t drool. Some of the other guys did, and that killed any chance they might have had with her.

On day sixteen, Amanda sat next to me. Empty seat, she said with a genuine smile. Amanda Worthington.

Carl Silverman.

She nodded. Nice to meet you.

Amanda had a faint drawl, the result of being born and brought up in the south. It was charming and deceptive. Other people thought her the stereotypical hillbilly or redneck. She was neither.

Scholastically, she was way ahead of the curve from everyone, me included. When we suffered through our first term’s preliminary tests, she aced them all. However, she never bragged about it. That wasn’t her style.

At any rate, after the final bell sounded for school that day, she collared me at my locker and asked me to follow her to the gym. Uh, what for? I asked, somewhat mystified.

Target practice, she replied as we passed through the doors to our place of physical activity. My uncle taught me to hunt as a little girl. He used a rifle, and I learned how to shoot, but I liked using a bow much better.

She hunted? Did you hunt, like, deer or some other animals?

Amanda shook her head. No, I never shot anything but targets because I love animals, but my uncle taught me what I needed to know, just in case I ever got lost or had to, you know, defend myself.

I wondered if we were going to shoot at targets or if I was about to become one. I was used to shooting in games, but this was reality, and as it turned out, Amanda meant shooting at targets.

A net hung from the ceiling about thirty feet away, and in front of the net, a series of archery targets had been set up. She walked over to the wall and picked up a bow and a quiver of arrows. School equipment. She sniffed while examining the bow and its arsenal of flyers. I got better gear at home.

Since it was just us—Amanda said that the teacher would come soon and waved me back to the far wall, roughly eighty feet behind her—she started out by shooting at a target ten feet away. Then she stepped back a few paces, nocked and loosed three arrows in quick succession, and then she repeated the process until she reached my position.

Fortunately, the gym was still empty, so that minimized the danger. Some shooting, I said in a tone that verged on kiss-butt territory. All those arrows?

I only used around thirty, she said and pointed to the target. Most quivers can carry more, but this is what I usually carried when I used to practice at home, back in Texas, I mean. Anyway, I think I got a pretty good grouping.

Pretty good? The center of the target looked like a pincushion. I think that’s better than good.

Amanda turned to me with a grin. Ya think? I’m just warming up. And you’re going to work with me.

Like I had a choice? I did, but being with Amanda was fun, and if doing archery allowed me to get to know her better, so be it. And so, my life as an archer began. At the beginning, I sucked, but over the next couple of months, I improved to the point where I could hit the target but not always dead-center. Usually blue and red, sometimes gold, but never dead center consistently.

Really, Amanda was in a class of her own, and I knew that I’d never be as good as she was, but I still enjoyed our shooting sessions, and that was all that counted. She gave me pointers, had me practice my stance, breathing, drawing the bowstring, and holding it in position... everything.

And a bonus came with that. After our fifth practice, Amanda invited me over to her house, which, in a happy coincidence, sat a few doors over from ours. Double bonus!

No, better than a double bonus. Her parents met mine, they got to be friends, and Amanda made it clear a month after we met that we were together. We’d spent every single day that month together eating lunch at school and studying, talking about things we had in common—action movies, Star Trek, blue—dark blue ruled while light blue sucked—and Italian food.

Things in common aside, I wondered why she’d picked me. I’d never felt confident around women. Either I said the wrong thing, or they didn’t like the way I looked, or I simply didn’t think I had a chance.

Looks-wise, call me average at best. I had a hatchet face, grayish blue eyes, and in contrast to my face, a slightly chubby physique—one-hundred-seventy pounds on a five-seven frame. My mother used to call me stocky. In my mind, I was chubby. Bottom line—I looked totally unremarkable.

But the one thing that made this relationship work was that I felt comfortable around Amanda. When we talked together and walked home from school and studied in class, and even ate lunch together, it was like I was talking to a best friend. Call that a relationship that couldn’t be beat. Being comfortable was what it was all about.

In fact, on our twenty-minute walk to school every day, about three weeks into the getting-to-know-you period, I decided to go for it. I took her hand in mine, she squeezed it, and when she came over for dinner that night, after I’d walked her back to her house—all fifty paces—she sealed the deal with a kiss.

On her front stoop, she laid that kiss on me, my very first, and... whoa. That was... something, I said when we came up for air.

Special?

More than special.

Her smile was devilish, but the look in her eyes was filled with what I took to be affection. Good, and if you’re going to ask me why, it’s because I like you as a person. I like the way you talk, that you try to do well in archery, and that you didn’t try to pick me up the first day. I was watching you. You know that, right?

No, call me unaware. Well...

I couldn’t really tell her that I’d never had a girlfriend or even kissed a girl before her, but perhaps she already knew how new to the dating game I was. Well, nothing, she declared. You, Carl Silverman, are mine, and I’m not about to let you go.

Since then, we’d been inseparable...

Carl.

What?

Amanda giggled. You’re spacing out again. You sure you’re okay?

Yeah.

I felt okay, but a friend of mine, Mickey Stone, wasn’t. He was staggering around, laughing... and about fifteen other students were doing the same thing. Staggering, reeling, waving their arms in the air like they were ready to take off into the wild blue yonder, it was a mass dance of spasticity, and it was simultaneously fascinating as well as horrifying.

The laughing was especially terrifying. It spoke of surrender to primal instincts, an abandonment of a sense of self, and a return to the simplest form of existence.

It was also wild and uncontrolled and so not needed, but the ones in the fit of those throes of ecstasy and agony couldn’t help themselves. They were at the mercy of some force they couldn’t control.

Everyone stared at them, some of the students chuckled, but most didn’t. Call this one event more than disturbing, and it wasn’t like they were on drugs. Mickey was straight edge, and over there, one of the afflicted girls... Meredith Foxworth... she was more than straight edge.

Most people described her as a Bible pounder, and that was apt enough. Meredith was very religious, and she came across as a nice person who was openly foursquare anti-drug, anti-smoking, and anti-drinking. On the plus side, though, she never preached, and everyone knew she wasn’t into anything that would harm her.

Not now.

One of the students who wasn’t afflicted got up and ran for the exit, yelling for a teacher. I stared at the dancers... it was like they’d gone mad.

Amanda got up, her eyes wide with more than a bit of fear, and I got up with her. What the hell is going on? she whispered.

This had to be bad. Amanda was pretty much fearless. She took crap from no one, and when one jock on the football team asked her why she was going out with a loser—and he’d asked her when she’d been talking to me—Amanda hauled off and kicked him in his nether regions. My boyfriend’s got balls, she said. You don’t.

End of the conversation, and my mind came back to the present when she asked, Carl, what’s happening?

No idea.

My girlfriend pulled her smartphone out of her pants pocket. I’ll check what’s happening. News stations should help. A second later, she said, What the hell?

What’s wrong?

No service.

She tapped a few buttons, muttered, Calling my folks, and then ended up saying, What the hell? There’s no connection.

I took out my smartphone. Same deal. The servers must have been down, and what was going on?

Mass screams erupted when all the dancers fell to the ground, writhed around, and then lay still. The cafeteria crowd went silent, and finally, one muscular dude who was on the school’s powerlifting team asked, Are they dead?

Go and find out, another student said.

The jock stared at the person who’d made that comment. You kidding me?

You a wimp or what?

Having his manhood called out made Powerlifting Guy hesitantly approach Mickey and nudge him with his foot. Nothing happened... at first. Then Mickey’s finger twitched. No, not dead... and he and the others rose in a herky-jerky manner as though someone or something else was pulling their internal strings. They swayed slightly, staring at the floor, and then en-masse, they began to laugh again, something hysterical and unholy.

Holy Christ, they’re... changing, Amanda whispered.

My breath caught in my throat, as in a lightning-fast display of genetic shifting, their hair fell out, their jaws elongated, as did their teeth, and their skin became a horrid grayish white. They almost looked like...

Zombies!

A student howled out that warning just before he was tackled by two of the now undead and savaged, with blood spraying in every direction and body parts flying hither and yon. It was horrible to see the gore and hear his screams, but it was one of those situations where you wanted to look away but couldn’t.

Amanda grabbed my hand. Time to go.

She repeated her order, this time more urgently, and then the immediacy and danger of the situation hit me like a punch between the eyes. Yep, time to go... but Mickey ran over, blood and drool and flesh dripping from his mouth. He’d been feeding on the powerlifter,