Agonies of a Young Author

So several weeks ago I entered a contest here on campus that asked for reworkings of classics in literature to include zombies, in the style of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Well, I didn't win, but I was included in the online magazine, so that's something I guess. I'm not quite excited about it all, since I'm not sure the basis of being included in the emag, whether it was everyone who entered, or just specific entries, but I'll post it up anyways. *

* I really shouldn't be so disparaging. I really did like my entry, and I think I attained my goal of seamlessly inserting the zombie references in the same voice as Dickens originally had.

Please enjoy!


Book One: Recalled to Life
Chapter One: A New Period

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, it was a modern era, it was a primeval era, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way, or would, if we were not already living in a sort of Hell- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its nosiest and most ravenous authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the supernatural degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a half-rotten jaw and a queen with a plain grey face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a half-rotten jaw and a queen with a fair grey face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than Cv1 positive serum to the lords of the State that things in general were settled for eternity.

It was the year of Our Lord three thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Supernatural revelations appeared in England at that favored period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed deathday, of whom a prophetic private in the TrueLife Guards had heralded the supernatural occurrence by announcing that arrangements were made for the literal swallowing up of all of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane heralds had been crying out warnings of this new sort of doomsday only a round dozen of years, after abandoning a tradition of preaching the coming of the Christian apocalypse, as the street-corner crazies this very year past (supernaturally deficient in originality) finally abandoned theirs. More dire messages in the mortal order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from an isolated bunker of British subjects besieged in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more disturbing to the human race than any other horrific communications yet related.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters supernatural than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness into Hell, making false vaccinations and actually infecting themselves. Under the guidance of her Conservative politicians, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a mid-transformation Cv1 youth to have his hands cut off, his poisoned heart torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not submitted to a group of dirty doctors who had captured him for clinical trials of a new antidote, which knowingly contained poison of some fifty or sixty milligrams. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were already growing trees, when that double sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into stakes, to make a certain stacked configuration, circular in form, cruel in purpose, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespeckled with rustic mire, sniffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work dead silently, and no one heard them as they about with shuffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were alive, was to be re-animated and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely any amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring infections done by transformed men, and highway feedings, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publically cautioned not to go out of town without applying for armed security; the unnatural being in the dark was a disguised City tradesman in the light, and, being recognized and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he had infected in his alter-ego of "a creature," gallantly shot the tradesman through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven zombies, and the guard shot three dead (or rather, unconscious for a time, for in his anxiety he forgot that no gun will permanently hinder those creatures unless aimed directly at the head), and then got torn apart by the other four, "in consequence of the failure of his ammunition": after which the mail was robbed in peace, a freedom from violence but not necessarily from infection; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one zombie, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue, proving the Lord Mayor to be a vile zombie himself; prisoners in London Cv1 think tanks fought bloody battles with the scientists, and the TrueLife Guards fired in among them, with rounds of tranquilizers and combustibles; the undead snipped off diamond and garlic crosses from the necks of noble lords, foolish enough to think that protection from one race of supernaturals applies to all the rest; the Creature Intelligence Agency went into St. Giles's, to search for a contraband human meat ring and the pro-reanimation mob fired on the CIA, and the CIA fired on the mob; and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in contrast requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous offenders; now hanging a man on Saturday who had been bitten only on Tuesday; now, burning the trigger hands of vigilantes gone too far by the dozen, and now burning pro-creature pamphlets; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious feeder, and tomorrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of a sixpence "cure."

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year three thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the half-rotten jaws, and those other two of the plain and fair faces, trod with spirit enough, and carried their undead rights with a high hand. Thus did the year three thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Unworldliness, and myriads of unnatural creatures- the creatures of this chronicle among the rest- along the roads that lay before them.