My Zombie Honeymoon: Love in the Age of Zombies Book One by James K. Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

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    The air is getting cooler by the day. Looking around, I began to wonder if Lake Michigan was still warm enough to wade in. It’s probably too cold for swimming unless you’re a polar bear.
    In years past, September and October have been my favorite times to go to the beach. The fudgies are gone, the kids are back in school. I’ve had extremely warm and pleasant days when I had the beach to myself. Once or twice, the water was warm enough in early October for me to skinny dip. I’ve also found some of my best Petoskey stones in October.
    It’s a whole different experience, looking for beach stones in the fall. Facing north, the view towards Frankfort is spectacular. The slant of light is different than during summer, and at their peak the trees on the dunes are radiant, especially close to sunset when surrounded by darker evergreens and pines. Offshore, the color of the water is darker, and few recreational watercraft dot the surface. No paragliding this time of year. And maybe it’s just my imagination, but the water sounds like fall. Less celebratory, more resigned.
    It’s almost sacred, being surrounded by such transient beauty while getting distracted by the search for pretty fossils of coral that lived millions of years ago. The brief and the seemingly eternal both impressing themselves upon my consciousness.
    So I was daydreaming about the Lake when I heard a scraping/crunching sound. It took me a minute to place it—it was the sound of fallen leaves being walked on. I couldn’t tell exactly where it came from, so I quietly crept to the front corner of the house to look around, being careful not to step on any leaves myself. As I peered around the corner, I saw a man. Or what used to be a man. He was sort of staggering around, aimlessly walking through my yard just shy of the street. I kept out of sight and watched him.
    He looked to be in his late fifties, but that’s just a guess. It was hard to tell. He wore what used to be a white V-neck t-shirt. Only now it was filthy, ripped, and stained with dried blood. The whole left side of his face was a dried up, unhealed wound. I could even see some of his sinus cavities. It looked like most of his hair on the other side had been burnt off. Gore had dripped down onto his shoulder, and the left arm hung limply at a strange angle.
    It moved forward down the street, occasionally jerking its head this way and that. I can only guess it was looking for flesh. I crept back inside and locked the door, then watched it until it was out of sight. I was nauseated and shaking. What used to be simply a concept for me has now become a reality. I’ve seen a zombie. They are real.
     
    “We have met the enemy and he is us.”— Walt Kelly (Pogo)
    November 1 st
    The last ten days have been pretty quiet, if you call hiding in the basement of my house while more and more zombies mill about quiet . After my last entry, I started to see one or two a day, then I started seeing more . . . four or five, sometimes six. Sometimes two or three at a time. Yesterday I counted 12.
    It feels strange to lurk around my house, listening to the silence. Except for them. Everywhere they go, they make that snarling, rasping noise. When several of them get together, it sounds like a horrible, monstrous Barbershop quartet.
    I saw Michelle yesterday. I happened to be upstairs, peeking out the window (no, not toward her bedroom) when a huge explosion rocked the house. If I have my bearings straight, I think it came from the airport. But who knows, surely it wasn’t the Marathon refinery—it’s over twenty miles from here! Wherever it was, the explosion was huge, and like I said, it shook the house. It didn’t seem to frighten the zombies, but they all turned and started gravitating toward the sound. Evidently sound attracts them—which is good to know. Soon most of them were out of sight. I unbolted the side door and sprinted to Michelle’s house. I knocked quietly on the door, nervously