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    Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 1)
    Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 1)
    Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 1)
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 1)

    By Oliver Kennedy

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    Great Britain, 2014. Civilisation as we know it has been torn apart by war. This once peaceful nation has been transformed into a melting pot of chaos and desolation.

    Death stalks the land. The towns and cities are home to the dead who have learned to walk again, driven by a single desire to consume the flesh of the living. The countryside is the abode of marauders, lawless men driven by starvation, fear and evil.

    There is talk of worse to come, dark fiends inhabiting the irradiated lands of the south, beings who have risen up from the radioactive ashes of war.

    Here and there dwell pockets of innocence, good men and women whose daily mission is living to see another dawn. But the dark tide has not receded, and the dawns are certainly numbered. Welcome to the Green and Pleasant Land.

    The Green and Pleasant Land; Old World is a short introductory book that follows the fate of the Locklear family as they deal with the unfolding crisis. Forced to flee the cities they must traverse a nation sliding into Armageddon, along the way they are confronted by cadavers, mutants and even darker horrors that are emerging in the post apocalyptic world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOliver Kennedy
    Release dateMar 30, 2014
    ISBN9781311991188
    Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 1)
    Author

    Oliver Kennedy

    My name is Oliver Kennedy, I am a writer, a father, a brother and a son, and I am proud of each of those roles which I hold in life. Just as I am proud, grateful and made happy by those people who are a part of that life.I have now been writing for long enough that I can scarce remember a time when I wasn't. During that time I have written millions of words, had thousands of dreams and been to hundreds of different places. If at the end of that I succeed in writing just one good book then I will consider it all to have been worthwhile.You can find out much more about my work at www.silverwinter.comand I can be followed under the twitter tag @oliverwpkThank you for taking the time.Oliver

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      Book preview

      Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land, Volume 1) - Oliver Kennedy

      Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land)

      Oliver Kennedy

      Copyright 2014 by Oliver Kennedy

      Smashwords Edition

      Chapter One, The Dark Inside

      Where would you like me to start? Shall I begin at the beginning, the genesis of our nightmare. Maybe I should recount every single footstep and the consequences of each stride that has brought me here today. Maybe I should tell you what it feels like to wake up at three in the morning with good old uncle Richard frantically trying to claw your face off with his bare hands? maybe you would like to know what it feels like to scoop up that odd looking bedside ornament and stave his head in with it?

      Deep breaths. It's a nice day, I don't want to ruin it.

      A year ago I found out what it is like to become a part of the news story. To step inside the bubble. I could not channel hop away from what was happening. The sky was filled with helicopters and the streets were wreathed in fire. The Deathwalker Virus was in town for lunch and it appeared that the general populous was on the menu.

      Family had been the first thing that sprung to mind. Family is god. Not for everybody, but it is for me, and nobody wants to lose their god if they can help it. The only problem was that after a frantic dash across the city, after gathering my family to me I realised that our problems had only just begun. I was relieved, for about ten seconds. Then started the long flight out of the city. Then started the traffic jams. I don't know what was worse, the early days when we were bombarded with news about the cataclysmic nuclear exchange between the US and China or the times after, when there was radio silence, a cacophony of static and recorded emergency broadcast messages which told us nothing.

      After days of people sitting in their cars peering at each other through smeared windows and exhaust fumes, the fuel started to run out. As peoples cars died they just got out and wondered up the embankment into the trees, out of sight, out of the mind of the world.

      Eventually our own trusty family car went the same way. I looked at my darling Sue, I looked in the back seat at my sons Mac and Zachary and my beautiful daughter Ellie, I looked at my best friend Greg who'd been with me on his teabreak when civilisation collapsed. We didn't speak, we got out of the car, grabbed the belongings which we'd salvaged, the tents and the sleeping bags and the meat cleavers. We joined those who had already passed from the memory of the world, we climbed the embankment and lost ourselves in the pines.

      We walked forever, over the hills and far away. We encountered cadavers, fortunately in numbers small enough that we could sufficiently deal with. In the before times on long journeys we played I-Spy and such like. Now there was another game, 'name the cadavers'. Deathwalkers was a moniker coined by the popular press and derived from the designation of the virus which had caused our downfall. But I was quite impressed with some of the names the kids came up with, 'Maggot men', 'Graveborn', 'Wormwalkers' to name but a few, it was a way to pass the time.

      This was an existence which had never been planned, every day was improvised at first, but we soon fell into a routine. Up at first light, walk all day, steer clear of towns, if we came across other travellers we would hide from them while they hid from us, and eventually we would creep past each other, casting furtive, suspicious glances across clearings and over fences. Avoid the roads, kill the cadavers, scavenge and walk, walk, walk and walk some more. We would set up a tent in the undergrowth and huddle inside listening to the imagined horrors of the night until sleep came.

      At first I'd been glad of Greg's presence, he'd helped us deal with the cadavers and the odd traveller who was not content to hide from us and thought they would try and add to the trouble of the world. But as time went by I started to get an uncomfortable feeling, especially in the tent at night when we were all squashed in together, I knew that they'd all fallen asleep except for him, without even looking I knew he was awake, laying there waiting for something.

      Greg had been my friend since senior school, he'd also had a crush on Sue since senior school, a fact he never hid but always spoke about with self-deprecation and a smile on his face, but it was a statement which could never fully conceal the wound in his eyes, the resentment which he harboured.

      We were living in a changed world and I hoped sincerely that Greg had successfully let go of the emotional anchors which held him to the old world in the wake of the bigger concerns we had. My hope was in vain.

      It started innocently enough, helping Sue wash clothes down by the lake, helping Sue cook the dinner, helping Sue dismantle the tent. She laughed off my attempts to start an argument over it, she told me I was being silly, so I bit my tongue and kept my suspicions in check. In truth I'd lost track of time, but it had been only a matter of months when Greg decided to fully turn away from the civilised life somewhere on the horizon behind us, like a dying sun whose light would soon be lost.

      It was during one of Greg's 'I'll help Sue gather firewood outings' that it happened. I heard a scream, very faintly on the wind. I told the kids to stay put and followed that scream and the ones that followed to it's origin some distance off into the trees.

      Sue's blouse was ripped, her face was red on one side and a thin trickle of blood was coming from one of her nostrils, Greg stood over her, busy loosening his belt. Sue saw me, I saw the fear and the relief in her eyes, Greg didn't notice either. Several images of the past flashed before me, Greg at school, the crying girl in the toilet who we never saw again. Greg on nights out barely saying a word as he watched the girls go by, the secretary at work who lost her harassment case. Years of denial crumbled in front of me.

      I am not a violent man, or should I say I was not a violent man before. The weight of everything that had happened came crashing down upon me, it mixed with the red mist which had descended when I saw her laying on the ground in the leaves and the dirt. My despair and my rage merged, the death of who'd I'd been occurred in the same instance as the man I needed to become was born.

      I never saw Greg's living face again, he died from the first blow of the meat cleaver as it burrowed its way into his head from behind. I didn't stop there though, I was overcome by the maelstrom of grief and fury, I was petrified at how I was going to stand up against the monster the world had become, I channelled all the rage and fear down the arm which held the cleaver. When I'd finished, when I sank exhausted to the floor there was not a whole lot of Greg left, I could feel pieces of him congealing between my fingers, but I did not move to immediately clean the stain of my best friend from me, I just lay there for a while in the

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