Ride the Serpentine (Year of the Zombie Book 7) Read online

  RIDE THE SERPENTINE

  by Andre Duza

  Copyright © Andre Duza 2016

  All rights reserved

  The right of Andre Duza to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters,

  organisations and events portrayed in this novel are

  either products of the authors’ imaginations

  or are used fictitiously.

  First published in 2016 by Infected Books

  www.infectedbooks.co.uk

  @infectedbks

  Cover design by David Naughton-Shires

  www.theimagedesigns.com

  www.houseofduza.com

  facebook.com/andreduza

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE

  RIDE THE SERPENTINE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE YEAR OF THE ZOMBIE

  ALSO FROM INFECTED BOOKS

  MONTH SEVEN

  RIDE THE SERPENTINE

  A Serpentine Films Production in Association with the Martin Stone Show…

  Video

  A circular stage seemingly afloat in a sea of heads and shoulders. Hysterical feminine adulation directed toward the trio of lanky, androgynous rock stars power-posing at centre stage. Pyrotechnics erupt behind the men. The crowd approves. Their cheers are deafening.

  A montage of concert venues as a tour bus arrives. Fans waiting in parking lots. They run screaming alongside the bus.

  Narrator (Voice-over): What started out as three friends passing the time at a local band camp, became one of the most influential rock bands of a generation. In mid-to-late ’80s nobody was bigger than Serpentine.

  Concerts. Backstage. Champagne celebrations. Wet T-shirts. Fake tits. Serpentine at the number one spot on the Billboard Music Charts. Awards shows.

  Narrator: They filled stadiums and performed to sell-out crowds. They lived at the top of the charts and garnered award after award.

  Drugs. Booze. Fast women. Drunken performances.

  Narrator: But a life of excess eventually took its toll on the trio and the band once named the most influential rock group in the last decade officially split in 1991.

  The group, older now, rocks out on a small, intimate stage in a packed nightclub. The crowd goes nuts.

  Narrator: Decades of hard feelings were put aside when the boys came together for a charity event in early 2014. Reaction from the crowd was overwhelmingly positive and it quickly became obvious that the time was right for a comeback. A documentary was planned to help kick off the return of Serpentine. The film would chronicle the daily lives of the band mates while they worked on their new album.

  An ambush of newspaper headlines dated 9/6/2014: THE DEAD WALK! Chaos in the streets. The breakdown of society via security camera footage from around the world.

  Narrator: But fate had other plans…

  People fighting back against the dead. Landfills full of bodies. The evolution of settlements. The Martin Stone Show.

  Narrator: What started as a peek into the lives of three friends who became rock Gods, has evolved into a video diary chronicling humanity’s struggle to survive, and Rock ‘n’ Roll’s place in the resurrection of our once great society.

  A title fades into view…

  Ride the Serpentine!

  A Rockumentary

  Video:

  Friday, May 17, 2016

  The interior of a modified van. All black. Plush, leather seating fit for a private jet in front. The rear seating has been removed, giving the illusion of space. A leather bench spans the length of one side. A console reminiscent of a newsvan embedded in the opposite wall. A small monitor in the centre. A short counter below. Several boxes stacked against the back doors. A duo of guitar cases rest against the boxes. Tinted windows dim the natural light. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’ by AC/DC blasts from the speakers.

  A heavily inked Viking of a man (Jules Yeager, 51) is seated on the bench. A living stick-figure with a face full of wisdom (James ‘Holly’ Hollister, 50) behind the wheel. An effeminate, seemingly ageless pretty boy with long dark hair and sharp features (Graeme ‘Gramps’ Gunz, 48) riding shotgun.

  Jules blindly fingers an acoustic guitar, his eyes glued to the blank monitor across from him. Graeme is equally focused on the scenery outside the passenger-side window.

  Graeme: These backroads are all starting to look the same.

  Hollister: Tree lines and farmland.

  Graeme: …and messages spray-painted on water towers.

  Jules (V.O.): Welcome to the apocalypse of the apocalypse, folks! I’m your guide, Jules. You may remember me as the axeman and song-writer extraordinaire from the baddest band on the planet, Serpentine. And if you remember me, then you definitely remember that Skeletor-faced bag-a-bones at the helm, James ‘Holly’ Hollister on drums, and to his right, the long, tall serpent himself, Graeme Gunz on bass and lead vocals. We call him Gramps. (Whispers) His real last name is Fischback, by the way.

  Graeme: There’re less of ‘em out in the open.

  Hollister: The tree line…

  Graeme leans closer to the window. His eyes narrow.

  Graeme: I see ‘em.

  Graeme swivels in his chair and motions for the camera. The scene shakes as Jules hands the camera to Graeme, who then lowers the passenger-side window and points it out.

  Tree lines and farmland. Pockets of recovery sprinkled with reminders that the days of living death are far from over. Skeletal remains wrapped in tatters sprout from thriving grassland like calcified weeds. Buildings and vehicles abandoned and burnt out and vandalized.

  A handful of undead amble eastward. One or two of them cast curious eyes toward the sound of the passing van’s engine. The camera moves in, past the eastward march, toward the tree line, further back. An indelible shape haunts the open spaces between rows of trees; people, once living, now living-dead. They stand half-hidden by wooden stanchions and the lower shrubs that congregate at the trees’ bony, finger-knuckled roots.

  Jules (V.O.): They stay mostly in the tree lines now, almost as if they’ve learned to fear open spaces where they could be easily picked off. You get enough of ’em together – like in the big cities – and it’s a different story.

  Jules: Musta been some activity come through here recently. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

  Hollister: Nobody’s gonna fuck with us in this beast.

  Jules (V.O.): Holly was right to call this thing a beast. What you have is essentially a Ford Sportsmobile four-wheel-drive wrapped in Spectra Shield, Ballistic Nylon and bulletproof glass, and off-road front and rear bumpers with full grille guards. A rear-mounted 12-Volt winch with an 18,000 lb capacity. Full perimeter LED light bars. You name it. All sitting on top of Rugged Compound Runflat tires. Whatever the fuck that means. We clipped her from Alex Zamora, the East Coast Porn King, when we high-tailed it from his bunker in Princeton. He was the guy behind those, ‘Plump Asses Sitting on Opened Palms,’ videos that were the shit in the late ’80s. Don’t act like you never heard of ’em.

  The van was built on a lark to navigate a theoretical post-apocalyptic wasteland. Some car-mod show that never aired because Zamora’s affiliation with pornography spooked the advertisers. The thing had been sitting in his garage ever since along with his collection of classic cars.

  The car-mod show was produced by the same team behind Guitar Godz. They did an episode where Graeme and Holly surprised me with a replica of my old axe GiGi. You remember GiGi
? She was my first electric guitar. A candy apple red Les Paul Standard that I swore was alive. I liked to imagine that she was infused with the soul of some tortured musician who never realized her dream. Maybe she died of a freak accident while GiGi was being built.

  I lost my GiGi when the Holt Sound Studios in Philly burned down in 1989. That shit hit me hard, man. She was my first love. The diehards will remember all the flack I got about the ’68 Strat with the maple neck that I used from then on. The critics whined that it affected our signature sound. They blamed it for our ‘decline.’ In hindsight, maybe they were right. But it was the favorite guitar of one James Marshall Hendrix. So, at the time, my thinking was that any change had to be for the best.

  Live and learn...

  The backroads give way to turnpike townships. The battered old ghosts of chain restaurants and gas station mini marts. Tumbleweeds of man-made refuse. Twice dead bodies piled in parking lots.

  The undead meander on the sidelines. A brave few wander in the open. They react to the approaching van. They turn, and sway, and oddly lurch toward the engine’s smooth bellow. Some make moves toward the nearest shelter.

  The boys talk over the images.

  Graeme (re: piles of bodies): Probably not a good idea to be piling them up this soon.

  Jules: People are in a hurry to wake up from this nightmare. I don’t blame ’em.

  Hollister: Long time before the disposal trucks make it out this far. They’re just gettin’ started in the big cities.

  Jules: I don’t know. It seems to be keeping the rest of ’em back. Maybe they’re onto something.

  Jules (V.O.): There were other signs that Project Reboot was taking hold out here in the sticks. The roads had been cleared in a few of the counties we passed through. Bright colored collages painted on abandoned cars and buildings dressed up the horizon. Even the watertower prophets were showing signs of hope. I get caught up in the vibe.

  Graeme hands the camera back to Jules.

  Indecipherable dark tones... Flashes of muted daylight... The image clears on the interior of the van. Jules is right up on the lens working to secure the camera to some kind of base. His bulk darkens the frame.

  He leans away, hesitates as if half-expecting the camera to topple over, and then settles into his seat. He slides the guitar across his lap and gently fondles the strings. Hollister and Graeme in the driver and passenger-seats respectively.

  Jules (V.O.): A year ago I had all but accepted the fact that the world was ending and we had front row seats to it. And now here we are on our way to the Weather to rock the fuck outta this deadfuck-infested planet. That’s the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Facility in Bluemont, Virginia. Compliments of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Martin Stone Radio Show. In case you live on Mars – which don’t sound like such a bad idea at the moment – Martin Stone was a controversial Shock Jock who ruled the airwaves for as long as I can remember, and hands-down the best celebrity interviewer on the planet.

  Holly must be feelin’ it, too. He turns up the volume on the stereo and starts rocking out to Sugerloaf’s ‘Green-Eyed Lady.’ We used to cover the shit outta that tune in the old days. For the next 7:25 we rock out with him.

  Our lives have been a series of close calls since 9/6. We were celebrating our comeback album at Alex Zamora’s place in Princeton when the shit hit the fan. It was going to coincide with the release of the film. We hadn’t written a lick of music for the damn thing yet, but the fact that we had finally put aside all the bullshit for the sake of the group was a feat worth drinking to. Zamora was one of those guys whose obsession with preparation seemed a little nutty before 9/6. Nowadays you’re lucky if you know someone like that.

  He had this badass bunker that no one knew about underneath his four acre estate. He called the place The Grotto. That’s where we stayed until things got, well… complicated. Try to imagine being stuck in a single-story, 2800-square-foot space dressed up like an upscale condo along with the current queen of porn, who we nicknamed Cinderella, three washed-up, junkie actresses who were part of Zamora’s current harem of sister-wives. Then you had two animated mannequins who used to fuck these chicks on film. One of them couldn’t get it up anymore and the other one’s claim to fame was working as ‘stunt cock’ for two A-list actors. Rounding out the group were four random associates of Zamora’s who were each about as trustworthy as a record company exec on a good day. Top it off with one stoned-out-of-his-mind porn kingpin with a considerable arsenal at his disposal and a messiah complex that would’ve put Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now to shame, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

  Did I mention that one of the fucking associates was the porn queen’s Star 80 boyfriend?

  It was doomed from the start. Me, Holly and Gramps seemed to be the only ones aware of that fact. Zamora would stay in his bedroom surrounded by his sister-wives, who hated everything about Cinderella, especially all the attention she got from the other guys, including their husband. The mannequins and associates had each made a play at fucking her despite the best efforts of her Star 80 boyfriend to derail that process. Of course, Cinderella only had eyes for Gramps. The sister-wives wanted a piece of him, too. But Gramps wanted no part of it. Between the three of us, we’d bagged enough top-shelf pussy during our run that a few months without it didn’t seem to affect us the way it affected the others. Especially when the alternative is sticking your cock in the garbage, which is what screwing any of Zamora’s girls amounted to.

  It was too bad really. The place itself was fucking balls out! Zamora had spared no expense. Solar powered generator. A fully stocked walk-in freezer. Flatscreen monitors made to look like windows. They worked together to broadcast a continuous outdoor scene. Sounds silly, but they helped you forget that you were actually sealed up in a box seven feet underground. There was an elaborate security system, which we later found out Zamora had been using to spy on everyone. A gym. A weapons room. Tons of camera equipment and a state of the art editing suite/screening room where he shot, cut, and screened some of his more controversial films. The Hatefuckers series comes to mind.

  We used his equipment to put together this little ditty you’re watching, in fact. Gramps’ idea. That was Gramps doing his best Jim Forbes in the intro. Forbes was the voice behind VH1’s Behind the Music. Always hated the one they did on us.

  Zamora had this antique Celtic throne in his bedroom, just to give you an idea… He would go on and on about the damned thing.

  ‘Just imagine the asses that’ve warmed that seat,’ he’d say. And I’m thinking, Not enough to make it worth the 200k you shelled out for it.

  He had this ritual where he’d sit in the thing. An assortment of hardcore narcotics laid out buffet-style on this fancy-pants, stone coffee table. Then he’d go down the line from right to left until he was so fucking smashed that he’d sometimes forget who you were.

  Me and the guys had been clean for almost a year up to that point and we had no intention of falling back into the shitstorm of addiction, even if the idea of escaping reality was more appealing than ever. These days a clear head is essential to your survival.

  The three of us had initially tossed around the idea of mutiny rather than leave our cushy accommodations. It was a few months in. The height of the collapse. It was starting to look like the deadfucks had won. Information from the outside world was minimal. The last we had heard from the Emergency Broadcast System was essentially, ‘You’re on your own, folks.’

  Gramps gasps... yells ‘Shit,’ so loud I heard it over the music.

  Graeme leans out of the window in a sudden burst of movement, his face pointed at the road behind them, his tangled mane whipping in the wind.

  A startled Hollister whips his head toward Graeme.

  Hollister: What?

  Jules (V.O.): I could tell who it was by the way Gramps’ voice cracked and, as usual, it sent chills down my spine.

  Graeme leans back into the vehicle, looks to Hollister, th
en Jules. A mixture of frustration and mild shock on his face.

  Graeme: Her again.

  Jules (V.O.): Our number one fan... I dare myself to look, thinking that maybe the tinted rear window would somehow lessen the impact of seeing her again. It doesn’t. She’s standing at the side of the road; a dead girl wrapped in soaking wet clothing – ripped jeans, boots, and a sleeveless concert Tee from our ‘Ride the Serpentine’ Tour back in ‘88. Wet blond hair clinging to her porcelain-white face. Even at a distance I could tell that her eyes were locked on the van. Maybe she could even see me looking at her through the small, tinted square.

  As usual she steals the moment and we sit there marinating on her spooky ass to the music. I wonder about her eyes. If they’re in fact green, like the song…