I am now 30 days from my presentation, 2 weeks from the informal version I'm giving to a writing group. They will be confused, I am sure.
While the bike ride was tough, it has left me with a feeling of melancholy that would be peaceful if my neighbors were not ruining this beautiful afternoon with all of their leaf blowers and mowers. It sounds like the inside of a noisy factory. Maybe I will go get some earplugs and enjoy it anyway.
While this blog occasionally blows and is mostly about physics, I have finished my christmas story adn thought I would share the first chapter to see what my audience thinks about that..
It's over 25,000 words and officially a Novella. I started to put in these dickens quotes to fill it out to 27k words which is a much worse cop out than it sounds, but I think it might help to keep the story cohesive in a way.
Anyway...
A zombie Christmas
Copyright Gregory Friedlander (2018)
All Rights Reserved
1.
Waking up
Again the spectre
raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands. From “A
Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens
The eyes open part of the way and
see a large white light on an arm. It is
a very bright looking light fixture, but it is not lit. The eyes close again. Fluttering eyes, then shut again.
Then they are wide open. The man in the gown sits up on the hard table
banging his head on the light. There are
medical devices all around him but none of them are working. The lights are all out, the room is only lit
from sunlight through a window in the nearby hallway. It smells antiseptic and musty as if the air
condition has been out, but it is unnaturally cool.
He gets up, he has nothing but a
medical gown on. His head is wrapped in
gauze as if it had been opened and closed back again. He has black circles around his eyes. He stumbles weakly around the room.
“What the…”
There is a sound from a closed
door. He looks at it. It’s in the shadows of the room.
Slowly he approaches it, “Who’s
there.”
No one answers, but there is the
sound again.
“Hello?” He looks around. There are no weapons around, but he grabs a
sheet off the operating table and wraps it around himself. He shivers and approaches the door,
vulnerable in his weakened state.
The door moves slightly. He reaches out and turns the knob.
The door blows in!
A crazed looking woman, bloodshot eyes,
dead looking skin and wearing a blood stained nurse's outfit with reindeer
antlers for a hat bursts into the room.
She has bared teeth between foaming lips lunges at him. She is moaning and growling at the same time. He backs up, stumbling over the sheet and
falls hard. The nurse, blood shot, milky
eyes comes at him.
He rolls out of the way just in
time as snarling she falls upon the spot where he fell. Thinking fast, he wraps the sheet around her,
leaving her squirming to free herself.
Weak, he clumsily Crawls his way out of the room while the nurse
struggles in the sheet.
He is below the level of the
window so he cannot see out. His view is
of a hospital hallway in disarray. With
trembling arms and legs, he crawls toward the nurses station at the end of the
hall. He fears that he has lost his
mind. His eyes are wide. There is a
pillar.
He
looks up at the post. The focus turns
onto a poster mounted on the pillar.
“Mayor encourages entire city to dress up for ‘The Great Santa Race,’”
it says with pictures of runners in holiday regalia.
“Oh
no he says,” dragging himself up by the window ledge. It is a slow process. “It cannot be.”
“For
the love of god,” his face is filled with horror. The picture pans to the streets of the city
below the hospital. There are wrecked
and burning cars, spilled garbage and everywhere zombies dressed in holiday
costumes milling around the street.
The streets are
filled with Santas, Reindeers, snowmen and other characters milling about
making zombie noises.
“Noooo!” the
patient yells.
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