Pale Rider: Zombies versus Dinosaurs
Pale Rider:
Zombies vs Dinosaurs
James Livingood
~~~
Copyright © 2015 James Livingood
All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One: A Bargain
Chapter Two: Too Easy
Chapter Three: Hunger
Epilogue
Meet the Author
PROLOGUE
An article from the New Eye City Government
Titled “Janus”
Published on the network
Date unknown, Author unknown
Blue brains, blues, or zombies as they are commonly referred, did not happen overnight. Like most medical issues, the problem started with a child. Janus Sands, a young toddler from a rural farm community, had trouble walking. Janus’s parents took the child to their pediatrician who then referred a developmental specialist. After extensive and expensive probing, the prognosis was “Metachromatic Leukodystrophy”. A genetic disorder and the second biggest misdiagnosis in history. Faced with mounting medical bills, Janus’s parents chose to wait and try home remedies.
While Janus gained some semblance of mobility, he often shook like a Parkinson's patient. Janus’s parents filled the home with walking bars and canes to help ease the child’s progress. Perhaps surprisingly, speech is thought to have occurred during these formative years. Most agree that mumbling did take place, but the idea of Janus creating fully formed sentences is unknown.
The first real clue came from a cat scan near Janus’s 7th birthday. The scan was repeated several times to verify the accuracy. Janus’s grey brain matter was increasing while his white brain matter did not increase. Unfortunately for humanity, this was the largest misdiagnosis in history. If they had been able to open Janus’s skull, they would have seen blue brain matter, not grey. No one knows if a parent was a carrier, or if both parents were carriers. What is known is that Janus’s myelin, the “white matter” had mutated. Fearing an auto-immune disease, Janus’s doctors began a regimen of drug sampling. Some focused on the symptoms while others were wild guesses at the illness.
When Janus was reaching near 12, his parents tried a bone marrow transplant. After a year of looking for compatible donors, they found a match. History is no longer sure if something went wrong in transplant, or if puberty was a factor. What is known is that shortly after that procedure, the first blue entered the world.
Janus began to crave flesh and started hunting small animals. As his little victims increased, his humanity shrunk back. Nearing 16 Janus attacked and killed his parents. After eating them for a week solid, he disappeared into the woods.
Mislabeled a psychopath, the hunt began for Janus. During the days that followed, it is well documented from the police report that:
“I shot him in the mid-section, beneath the navel. Instead of slumping over he kept coming at me. The wound appeared to stop bleeding nearly instantly. He bit me, but I was able to push him off. It took almost the entire squad firing several dozen shots to finally kill him. The brain was blue.”
As others turned, it was thought that Janus was the start of a rare virus. A virus that allowed a near instant coagulation of blood from wounds and increased rage. We now know, after extensive DNA mapping, that Janus’s kiss is both a DNA defect and a spreadable virus. Furthermore, while rare, there is film of blues mating. Blues often form in small packs of 4-5.
Blues are easy to mistake for human. While human in appearance and movement, they rarely use tools and hunt like wolves. Young blues do not take part but are often spectators. Those exposed to the virus through blood or saliva lose their humanity. We refer to this event as “the clearing” and the process can take 3-4 days. Symptoms often involve shaking and short term memory loss within a few hours. As the days progress, long-term memories are wiped out. The victim becomes more aggressive and agitated. Speech moves from short sentences, to grunts, to nothing at all. By the end of the process, feeding and mating appear to be the primary motivations.
We do not understand the virus or genetic mutation Janus encountered, but we do know that blues appear to focus on eating humans. Blues have been seen feasting on small prey, but only when human hosts are not available. It is not known why “Janus’s Kiss” does not spread to other animals. Testing with chimps would be helpful, but there are none in this part of the world. Several enterprising young minds have tried rats, but they are not changed by the saliva or blood from a blue.
If you encounter a blue, follow this advice:
Don’t Run, Stun!
Blues often hunt for weaker and sick humans. Standing your ground and appearing strong will scare off blues. In the beginning, we had become so used to being the top of the food chain, that the thought of being hunted was frightening. Most of the population ran, and that led to massive feasts. Furthermore, our distaste for mandatory physicals meant pockets of blues formed. Gun owners and others brazen enough to stand their ground often kept their ground. Yet, as humans became replaced, the blue’s tactics became more complex. Soon, only standing your ground with a gun was not enough. The practice still works in isolated regions, but the best escape from a blue is to retreat to a safe city.
New Eye City was formed for just that reason. Survivalists knew how to build flash communities, which would then focus on walls. As many of you know, gasoline fuel was no longer an option as the infrastructure collapsed around humanity. Cars, trucks, and farming equipment gathered rust from disuse. Humanity needed a new approach to surviving.
An enterprising young man noticed the size of birds increasing every year. With the idea of combining a carrier pigeon and package delivery service, he captured several birds. He manipulated DNA from the birds and added in sequences found in Janus’s myelin deformity. A multitude of generations of experimentation later, a series of useful franken-monsters were created. Because of their small brains and massive sizes, these beasts make quick work of farming and clearing land. These large creatures are immune to Janus’s kiss and perform excellently in loud conditions. They are easy to train. They behave like war horses, prone to help charge in and defend our livelihood.
In honor of the past, and to help build our future, we named these creatures dinosaurs.
CHAPTER ONE
A Bargain