Zombie City: Episode 1 COMPLETE!!!

Zombie City: Episode 1: Chapter 1

Author's note: Zombie City is an ongoing zombie horror serial.  I'm planning on posting the entire first episode here--one new chapter each Saturday, for a total of 20 chapters.  If you'd like to follow the story beyond the first episode, subsequent episodes are available at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks, and Smashwords.

Chapter 1

It was 3:37 a.m. on Saturday, and Shane was running late.

“Shit,” he said, looking down at his watch.  He paused his pedaling in order to tuck the watch back into his left front pocket.  And then he took hold of the handlebars with both hands again, putting a little more force into each push of his legs.

The streets were empty at this hour.  The road stretched ahead of him, lined with parked cars, punctuated by streetlights.  The only sound he could hear was the rhythmic squeaking of his bike chain.  He listened to the chain for a moment, frowning.

“Gonna have to replace that chain,” he said.

He looked up at the sky.  The fog was a thick blanket blocking the stars, the moon just a blur of light.

“Next paycheck,” he said, thinking of the chain.

At Folsom he turned left, drifted over into the bike lane.  The wet, misty air clung to his face, cold against his cheeks, but he didn’t mind.  It distracted him from the throbbing pain in his head, the nagging, sick feeling in his stomach.  As hangovers went, it wasn’t a bad one.  He’d had enough hangovers, especially in the past few years, to learn to deal with them.  Still, starting the work week feeling shitty was never ideal.

He pulled in a deep lungful of air, coughed it back out.  He pulled in another.

After a few blocks a thin patch in the fog revealed the moon.  It hung in the sky, round and bright, like a clean plate at the bottom of a scummy sink.  Shane glanced up at it, still pedaling, and sighed.

“Be 30 next month,” he said.  “And what do I have to show for it?”

Honey Guts, he thought.  Fucking Honey Guts.

He frowned.  Looked at the road ahead of him.

Honey Guts, the unfinished poetry collection gathering dust on the desk in his shitty studio flat.  It was supposed to be his offering to the world, his best efforts distilled into something better than himself.  It was supposed to be a work of art, like the Beat poetry that had changed his life when he’d first come across it at age eighteen.  Back when he’d decided to come to San Francisco, in the first place.

That had been almost a dozen years ago.  And now, he realized with alarm, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d sat down to write.

Shane guided the bike with his left hand on the handlebars, letting his right hand drop down to rest on his right thigh.  His right hand pushed down firmly with each stroke of that foot on the pedal, trying to squeeze a little more force into his pedaling.

“How old was Ginsberg when he moved to San Francisco?” Shane wondered aloud.  “How old was he when he finished Howl?  And what about Ferlinghetti?  He wrote his best stuff here, didn’t he?”

There was no one there to answer his questions.  No sound except for that squeaking chain.

Shane frowned again.  “Of course, when Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti moved here, there weren’t any tech-worker hipsters driving up the goddamn rent.  Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti didn’t even have to work.  They lived like monks, writing and drinking wine all day.”