Zombie Nation

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Chapter 2

A brief history.

The zombie nation was a misnomer, it was a nation, but it did not consist entirely of zombies. Encompassing the entire state of California, parts of Arizona, Nevada and spreading north like a disease all the way through British Columbia to Juneau on the coast and ending at Whitehorse in the Yukon. The north east border followed a line down Canadian highway ninety seven until it hit the old united states border, then the nation was a narrow lane of civilization, not many things went into the woods of Washington, bad things lived in those woods, things even super zombies and enhanced humans avoided. The nation expanded once it got into old Oregon, filling much of the old state, then divided Nevada almost in half.

The nation was wealthy and prospering, nothing like in the heyday of California at the turn of the century, but everyone had electricity, everything had food and the trains ran on time. Television was back, cell phones worked, there were even new video games and movies to entertain the populace, both the dead and the living kind. The nation was home to almost seven million living people and more than twice that number of undead, or 'zombies'. Twenty one million survivors out of an estimated sixty million people who were there before 'z-day'. Z-day, the day when the zombies came. It was a decade and a half ago that Doctor Thomas Sentry, in a quest to free mankind from the shackles of time created the first flesh eating zombie. The good doctor had come up with a way to stop aging in any human exposed to his bio-injection, the caveat was they died and then came back as a mindless puppet with a taste for blood. Anyone they bit was doomed to rise in the same circumstances, unless their brains were destroyed in the eating process.

After eating of the flesh of man the zombies would regain some of their intellect, then their speed and hue. If they over ate very good things tended to happen, they were endowed with super human speed, unlimited stamina and a wide range of abilities that made super heroes from the movies pale in comparison. Sentry engineered his own death and come back in a controlled environment and that was when he discovered another useful property of being undead, his children were under his command. It took effort, but 'super zombies', could communicate with any of their unnatural offspring at long range, stop them in their tracks and compel them to do virtually anything. The more aware the child was, the harder this was for the parent to do, however it could still be done. Mentally the parents could rifle through the surface thoughts of their offspring too, making secrets hard to keep.

Sentry came back, he took over a small town, then a larger section of the Florida coastline, then he sent his children out to conquer the world. He only half succeeded, the world fell, but so did he. One day his super zombie children all woke up knowing he was gone, he was killed and the supers in charge of taking the west coast knew he was gone. There were four of them in total, Sherman Chu, Neil Tift, Katy Duhaime and Carrie Stowe. Their job was to create as many zombies and spread the perpetual life of Thomas Sentry to the west coast. They did that well until the doctor died a few months after 'z-day'. This left the west coast in the hands of four clans of zombies, two of whom were subdivided by the loss of their clan founders, the Tift and Stowe clans both lost their leaders in the fighting, and not by some punk off the street. No the old USA government used tactical nuclear weapons to rid the world of those two super zombies.

The two clans bereft of their leaders at first fought...everyone, then some of the smarter clan member realized the situation and called a halt to the inter zombie violence and went on a mass conversion spree to build up their numbers. Not being naïve the two clans realized that the other two, the Chu and the Duhaime clans would ultimately control them unless they suffered a similar setback to their parents. Katy Duhaime was killed by a mass of super zombies after most of her children were assassinated over a series of months. The Tifts and Stowes used the remaining humans as patsies to eliminated the lower level zombies and then came in for the kill on Katy when she was vulnerable. The Chu clan was not oblivious to what was going on either and while the other zombies were fighting, Sherman was gathering assets, living assets in this case. He successfully demonstrated that zombies could live off of and thrive on human blood alone and he made his clan very powerful, not so powerful that they could face the orphans of the other two clans alone, but powerful enough to destroy the source of food that all the zombies realized was starting to get scarce. Under a threat of destroying a common food source Sherman held a summit with the other clans and a peace accord was signed, even the humans had a delegate at the table. Sherman did want want blood slaves he wanted willing participants in the human bondage. Ironing out the agreement was the single hardest thing Sherman had ever done, there were three assassination attempts at the summit alone and eleven more in the three months following. Even now, twelve years after the signing Sherman dealt with at least one attempt on his life every few months, and this was over seven years since he held the presidency.

The humans in the Zombie Nation were all tagged and controlled, they all had identity cards to back up their implanted Radio-frequency identification grains and at any time they could be stopped and detained by the authorities, many of whom were humans too. Sherman had gotten a propaganda machine into place as his first order of business. Education was state controlled and the 'civilized zombies' of the nation were heroes, holding back the savages in the wasteland that would otherwise kill the humans without a second thought. Children began giving blood at an early age and humans were required to make donations monthly. Zombies would reach a point where they actually did not require blood anymore, they would still consume it and doing so made them better, faster and stronger, but those supers zombies in power didn't relish the idea of all their children being as strong as they were. Everyone wanted blood. Sherman set it up that way, the black market was rife with blood from 'double givers', who sought favor or concessions from those who would give them or from 'wasters', surviving, non-tagged humans who lived on the fringes of society, typically in the wasteland that had grown under Sherman's reign to encompass the entire world except the western coast of North America. Of course given a preference a zombie would eat an entire human being, stripping the body of flesh was not unheard of, especially if a 'waster' was caught. It was, in fact, one of the fringe benefits of being a hunter. Hunters ate what they killed.

Sherman knew this was not true, there were still human societies out there and a few zombie based ones as well, most approached the level of city-states, at least the ones Sherman found out about. The sole exception was the known nation called the Mid-western Alliance, which had control of the heartland of the former United States, stretching from southern Canada all the way to the gulf of Mexico, with Iowa at the nation's core. Sherman didn't send envoys to contact the Iowans and the other nation's very existence was a tightly controlled state secret, no small feat in what was still an information age. Zombie Nation still had satellites, in some areas the internet was routed through them and the Iowans, well they had access to the satellites too. There was an ongoing cyber war being fought between the two states, with the Iowans essentially trying to find out who was controlling, or partially controlling the dwindling resources. Others were out there too, Sherman remembered the briefings, the English, the New Zealanders, some islands in the pacific. If truth be told there were hundreds of pure human islands in the world that were zombie free. None could threaten Zombie Nation, none would dare. After all the number of nuclear states in the world had shrunk, as far as anyone could tell to number just one.



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