ZOMBEES
(Or why you should really stomp the shit out of that bug that raid won't kill… seriously think of the children!)
Prologue
He FUCKING hated nature, he was a botanist and he damn well loathed it! In fact he had decided that Mother Nature was a pissy old cunt who'd been a few too many years without a good ride on a hard cock and had both feet firmly planted in menopause. "Bitch," he mumbled through a sour whiskey belch. Running a calloused hand over his face he refocused on his task. Sniping wasn't particularly easy during the day, but it was almost impossible at night (it didn't particularly help that since the INCIDENT, he hadn't been able to get his contact prescription refilled and the fatty with the epi pen down stairs crushed his glasses). Even if your…. Targets? Were bioluminescent fuck heads "Bastards," came his mumbled slur. "Your momma's hair would positively curl if she heard your mouth tonight sugar." He forcefully ignored the laughing southern lilt and glared harder at the black horizon. How long had he been staring at this same horizon? How many nights had he spent on this tin roof gazing into the blackness smelling rotting flesh and ashes? Two months, three? Or had it been years? Taking a long hard pull from a rare bottle of whiskey, he closed his eyes. The burn in his throat was a comfort, he'd never been a lush (as she called it) but the end of the world seemed like a fantastic time to assume AA really was full of quitters and start killing his liver.
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis is one of nature's weird little experiments. It is a parasitic fungus that actually controls the minds of ants, tells said ant to attach itself to a branch and then kills the little picnic destroyer by growing a branch like appendage out of its head. Now if you asked anyone from the south when then the fungus first started mutating and killing fire ants by the millions, well they'd say the little summer ruining fuckheads had it coming. If you asked any southern woman who had survived the 80's and 90's with the trauma of Gap jumpers and the horror of ant trapping jelly sandals, they'd laugh in rather 1930's villain way and promptly haul ass outside to witness such a miracle. He knew one such southern belle, who had been so excited at the prospect of revenge for her poor formerly jelly clad feet, she'd promptly made a Team Ophio shirt and wore it religiously. That had been 15 years ago. The fungus began to rapidly mutate two years ago.
It started infecting bees. Entire hives would fall victim to the parasite, scientist began a frantic search for a way to stop it. With the bee population already on the decline, the world's crops really couldn't handle another blow. The fungus wasn't content to stop at bees, wasp were the next on its hit list. They became more aggressive, thrusting their stingers at anything and everything, falling out of the sky in a morbidly beautiful aerial ballet. The streets and suburbs quickly filled with the dead and decaying remains. The first human victim was found in his back yard, in a quaint little Indiana town. Branch like appendages sprouting from his neck and spine, hunched over a quivering bloody mass, angry red lines on his arms and chest pulsating in a warning "STAY BACK! I'M DEADLY!" nature always made warning signs. When the authorities finally downed the man, he pulled his lips back in a sneer and spat his dog's front paw at their feet. The cops unloaded into his head until their guns clicked without ammunition. The body was swept away to a lab while the world held its breath. One tiny stinger was what they found. It could've been scraped out with a credit card, written off as a common gardening annoyance. That one tiny stinger was a marker, thrown carelessly into a biohazard bag, never tagged as the killer and history maker that it truly was. But then again humans had always been foolish.
Author's Note: Hello my twisted little minions! Who's ready to jump on the zombie train and get covered in entrails?! My muse (whore that she is) decided I hadn't been on a bloody panic inducing killing spree in too long, and quite frankly I agreed with her. Blood, guts, bad humor, and smut its m y happy place.
Chapter On
"Memories of the past are the spackle we use to patch our presently broken hearts"
Dorian Cross LOVED nature, he was a world renowned botanist and he couldn't think of anything he would else he would ever want to do. Mother Nature with all of her wondrous secrets and riddles made his mind positively tingle with the need to solve and unravel. A self-satisfied grin etched itself onto his face as he navigated the sharp turns and sandy shoulders of old roads on the outskirts of new Orleans