Noctuna Tales, by Lucretia Stallions
Well, as everyone knows by now, after reading Letty's blog, I'm a writer and I decided it was finally time to put up a page about my writings. So here goes.
This is Noctuna Tales, the place where I will be up loading my stories. Hopefully you will enjoy yourself. I think there's something for everyone here really.
This is Noctuna Tales, the place where I will be up loading my stories. Hopefully you will enjoy yourself. I think there's something for everyone here really.
Zombies Again (Introduction):
Hello! Welcome to the world of Isabelle Harron, its present day or her and only a few years into the future for you. Please wait patiently while Isa tells her story. It isn’t a nice story and it isn’t a normal story. It’s a Zombie story and because it’s a Zombie Story, there will be lots of Zombies. So be prepared for epic Zombie battles, flesh munchers, and terribly rotten corpses walking around, because in Isa’s story Zombies are normal it’s the sane people that are rare.
Yes, yes my name is Isabelle Harron, but I go by Isa whenever I can, which is all the time now but once was never. In the old world I was forever Isabelle, poor girl, strange person, but in this one I’m Isa, Zombie Killer Extraordinaire. There’s only one person from my old life who might stick around to call me Isabelle, but he leaves it alone because he understands, he was different too.
I’m guessing that by now you’re already wondering when the Zombies will start appearing. I figure everyone reading this came because of the title. You want some flesh-eating, rotten corpsy Zombies! Well here you go, but I have to tell you how it happened first. Like most good stories this one has a beginning, middle, and end and we’re going to start at the Beginning. Well before the beginning, and hear a little of the past.
Back then the world was “normal”. Suburbia was intact, Slumville still thrived. People were mean or nice or ugly. Women all worried about how they looked. Men tried to impress younger women. The trailer park was still the most boring place on earth. At least that’s how it was in my world.
I lived in Sahara, Georgia. A nice quiet town that was completely boring and the bane of my existence by the time I turned 12. It lacked any kind of excitement and interest. People were snotty to us because we lived in a trailer. I was used to it at school, other than the trailer park our town was considered to be a very nice well to do place. More than half the school came from the Suburb and Luxury part of town, I of course did not. How’s that for social pariah?
You’re probably thinking that this is the perfect setup for a Zombie attack. Late one night the dead stand up and walk the Earth wreaking havoc on a safe little Southern town! Except that’s not the way it happened not at all. My town wasn’t the center of the Zombie infestation. It wasn’t even hit with the Zombies first. No one really got hit with Zombies it was the Nuclear bomb that started everything.
It was mid June in Sahara, Georgia, hot and sickly sweet to step outside. Everything was normal for mid-June. Until 1:38 p.m. by my phone clock when Terra Firma started to enter self destruction mode. It was as if the floor had suddenly become the ceiling, the road a solid sturdy structure only seconds before was suddenly a crumbly ocean that you were drowning in. It rolled in waves and the earth moved with it. Houses disappeared in front of you; it was like being in a tornado! A car knocked down a house as if flung by a giant! Trees that stood for upwards of a hundred years ceased to exist before your very eyes.
It was horrible! A day I’ll never forget. A day I’ll never get out of my mind! I was too afraid to scream, too afraid to do anything! A horrible ringing filled my ears and an endless sort of pressure held me down of the rolling waves that had once been something called solid. I thought I was already dead.
In the end I don’t know how long it lasted. How long the world kept shaking and bucking. How long it took until the pressure finally stopped, but it did… I think.
When it did stop, I was completely sore, broken feeling, and in shock. I had several nasty looking cuts across my body and I think the first thing I did was puke up my guts. Don’t know how long that lasted, at least until the world stopped twirling around me like a freaking ballerina on Red Bull, but that stopped too and I was able to hobble away. Somehow I ended up back at our trailer… well, where our trailer used to be. It’s a good thing I was so deep in shock I went completely by instinct because I could never have found my way back there alone the entire town was leveled like a demolition project.
I finally reached the place where the front door of the trailer usually was but instead all I could make out from the remains was a door handle on the ground. Our dented, broken, fake little metal door handle from our crappy little trailer was the biggest piece still remaining, all the rest had crumbled. The last thing I did was pick up the door handle before I completely blacked out.
The place I woke up to was not Sahara, Georgia, quiet little town, where the most exciting thing to ever happen involved a lady trying to shoplift a TV in broad daylight. This was Sahara, Georgia Disaster Zone. We were no longer citizens, we were survivors, trying to do just that, survive. The town I was once forced to call home was like a horror story; little did I realize that it was only the beginning of one.
I awoke in a survival center some surviving emergency personnel had had the wherewithal to put together on the spur of the moment. I served mainly as a Medivac center, but people gathered here, coming in clusters and trails. Stunned, shocked people searching for their loved ones, looking for families they’d left early this morning and had expected to see again in a few hours, people that were dead now.
In that first day, everyone was in shock. Some couldn’t handle it and went mad or sat in some kind of lost silence, wandering off eventually with no one there to watch them, perhaps disappearing forever. Others used everything they could to make it through, praying, crying, chanting, hugging, helping; everyone had some way to try to cope. The universal mindset, except for those completely beyond hope, was to stick together. Everyone stayed in some kind of cluster, living people helping those slightly worse off than themselves.
My dad had found me and he was the one who’d brought me to the center. He was a hard working manual laborer, and possibly my favorite person in the whole world. He always had something helpful to say, even though he didn’t say much; something motivational. Between Kimmy and my Mom, he was the only silver lining in my family. I can honestly say that I have a great dad, a hard worker, happy with the life given to him; doing the best with his lot. I’ve never been able to understand how he does it but I’ve always admired him for that.
My mother and sister are complete opposites of that. My Mom’s what you might call a lost cause. A hopeless case, she’s a druggy and an alcoholic. On a regular basis she runs off, like she’s actually going to leave us and I get my hopes up again, but she always comes back when she runs out of money or her new boyfriend can’t get hold of the crack she wants. Then she comes sniveling back begging my father to forgive her and he always does. Sometimes I hate him for that. I can’t help it, he’s too kind. He should have made her leave years ago, but I think he still holds out somehow that she’ll change. Fat chance.
Want to know why I’m poor? Why we live in a trailer? It’s not because my dad makes horrible pay. He doesn’t. He may be just a manual laborer but he’s the Foreman and he makes good pay, enough to provide for two girls and a house that is. The reason we’re poor, the reason I’m a social pariah at school, is my mother and sister’s fault but mostly my mother.
You see, Kimmy is a lot like Mom in many respects. She definitely took after the maternal side of the family, but as far as I know we could only be half sisters, it’s the truth. We’re nothing alike. My sister lives her life angry that she wasn’t born rich that she is poor and has to steal if she wants something. Kimmy will blame anyone in a mile radius for being the reason her life is so horrible. My sister constantly bitches and complains about why we don’t have any money (it would be awful for her to get a job of course). Kimmy also hates us all just for being related to her. Everything is our fault.
My dad of course, being the soft hearted creature he is always gives in. When Kimmy begs he gives her money to buy more clothes (never mind that we’re flat broke at the moment). Surviving from pay-check to pay-check never even works in our trailer, we survive until the money runs out (always before the pay-check) and then have to resort to desperate measures.
I can’t say that it’s all Kimmy’s fault, though part of the blame definitely goes to her. No, I blame that on Mom. My “Mom” steals or borrows money from us to waste our dad’s pay-check on drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. Every time I wake up in the morning and head out to go to school to find her unconscious in the dirt or partially under the cinderblocks holding the trailer up, I hate her all the more.
So, I can at least say that I got some kind of dangerously vicious satisfaction when my mother came up after The Disaster, holding a cigarette stub and bawling her eyes out. Even if it was just possibly because she’d used up her last joint.
My dad of course let her back in hugging her and telling her it would be all right. He didn’t really get long to play the paternal head of house role because he had to find Kimmy. However he never succeeded. We found out what happened to Kimmy from a few of her “friends” who had survived the Disaster. She didn’t make it. At the time she’d been in the mall, possibly shop-lifting again, but when the Disaster struck the mall collapsed almost instantly.
My sister was dead. My irritating, messed up, addiction prone, bitch of a sister was dead. I felt horrible in an entirely new way (I had loved her on some level after all) but I was also relieved and for that I felt guilty. It was just hard to get out of my mind the sight of what Kimmy would say if she was here. Honestly her life would be crushed, she would be no help and we’d
spend all our time taking care of her. In some ways I was happy my sister was dead, less misery for both of us this way.
It wasn’t like this came as too much of a shock. The death toll from the disaster was rising, it would be impossible for me not to have lost at least someone in this. Better it be my sister instead of Dad. On the other side, I looked at my shaking drug addict of a mother and thought that perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t made it out instead of Kimmy, at least Kimmy was my sister. This diseased woman had done nothing but gave birth to me and did a sorry job at that too.
Somehow or another, perhaps it was guilt, my mother was overcome by the news that her oldest daughter, was dead, regardless of her never giving a crap about Kimmy before. Dad however apologized and pushed it off, leaving her
to her own devices, not the best plan, and I was supposed to be in charge of her.
This was about the same time someone somewhere had the idea to start the body search. To begin looking for trapped survivors among the rubble. Suddenly that was the only thing on anyone’s mind, “Find the survivors; find the bodies.”
Dad was one of the first to volunteer, and I insisted on coming too. I didn’t want to be trapped behind in the nurse’s tent with only my mother for lucid company. Some company! So we all went, Mom following along behind us as we joined the swelling search party.
While we worked theories began to fly about what The Disaster could have really been. That’s what everyone called the big boom that destroyed our lives, but it was fitting, because we really had no clue what it was. Everyone had a theory though!
Some people believed it had been an extreme act of terrorism, that someone, some faceless enemy, had dropped an atom bomb on us or some other kind of attack to the United States. Others chalked it up to natural causes, a record breaking earthquake, (never mind that we never have earthquakes in Sahara, Georgia). Still others thought something must have gone wrong at the relatively nearby nuclear plant. “Gone wrong” was a bit of an understatement, but regardless they were the closest to the truth.
Even though no one knew what had happened and most of our technology was either downed or destroyed after The Disaster, so no communication was possible, people believed that we would be rescued. It wa just some random act of violence, a horrible natural disaster, or a government mistake, but soon people would start coming. Soon the rest of America would come to protect and help us and give us food and water and shelter, just like we’d done for Haiti. People would come, people would come. People had to come.
But while we waited for help to arrive, the body search continued. We searched for four days straight. People barely took shifts; falling asleep beside the very houses they were trying to clear away. Some fell dead, some fainted from the exhaustion of it all and prolonged shock, some people just couldn’t take it and stared in dismay at the scene before them, slowly slipping into madness.
Crazies were abundant during those few days. At one point I wondered if they were the only people to survive. As if the world was suddenly stripped of all sane people. However by the fourth day I began to pick up on something. It wasn’t the crazy ones from before who were crazy now. No, it was the sane ones, Mothers who had the perfect houses with the A+ children were now mumbling and talking to walls. The odd people who gathered at street corners were now helping the search.
In those first days, I worked hard with everyone else, until exhausted my father told me to go to sleep. I moved walls, called out to people who may or may not be there, and pulled countless dead bodies out of the ruble. After the first day specialization began to occur and both my father and I were placed in the body line. We showed no squeamishness about touching the smelly flesh so we were called forward. I had no wish to be a hero. I only wanted something to do at a time when there was nothing to do excepthelp.
As the days passed we moved further and further along down streets and through subdivisions and as the rescue party moved, a body line began to pile up behind us. At first people tried to bury them but then they gave up and just left them there for someone, perhaps a missing relative, to find and bury if they chose. Sometimes we didn’t even pull them out of the building, just left them there uncovered and moved on. We couldn’t care about the dead now, we had to care about the living. Now we know we really should have been paying more attention to the dead, and for that we paid dearly… with our lives and our remaining sanity.
On the fifth day after The Disaster it happened.
The dead rose and walked the Earth. Armageddon was upon us.
It was midday; the hot unforgiving sun beat down like it did every summer in Sahara, Georgia causing the dead bodies to stink of putrefaction, like rotten meat. We all stank of sweat and the exhausted rested in what little shade there was left. We were all grouped together, working together like one large mass of people. I think it must have been a comfort to
everyone to be close to other living people after what trauma we’d been through.
Once again, that was our downfall.
Who knew that hell could descend upon the Earth in two very simple words?
Yes, yes my name is Isabelle Harron, but I go by Isa whenever I can, which is all the time now but once was never. In the old world I was forever Isabelle, poor girl, strange person, but in this one I’m Isa, Zombie Killer Extraordinaire. There’s only one person from my old life who might stick around to call me Isabelle, but he leaves it alone because he understands, he was different too.
I’m guessing that by now you’re already wondering when the Zombies will start appearing. I figure everyone reading this came because of the title. You want some flesh-eating, rotten corpsy Zombies! Well here you go, but I have to tell you how it happened first. Like most good stories this one has a beginning, middle, and end and we’re going to start at the Beginning. Well before the beginning, and hear a little of the past.
Back then the world was “normal”. Suburbia was intact, Slumville still thrived. People were mean or nice or ugly. Women all worried about how they looked. Men tried to impress younger women. The trailer park was still the most boring place on earth. At least that’s how it was in my world.
I lived in Sahara, Georgia. A nice quiet town that was completely boring and the bane of my existence by the time I turned 12. It lacked any kind of excitement and interest. People were snotty to us because we lived in a trailer. I was used to it at school, other than the trailer park our town was considered to be a very nice well to do place. More than half the school came from the Suburb and Luxury part of town, I of course did not. How’s that for social pariah?
You’re probably thinking that this is the perfect setup for a Zombie attack. Late one night the dead stand up and walk the Earth wreaking havoc on a safe little Southern town! Except that’s not the way it happened not at all. My town wasn’t the center of the Zombie infestation. It wasn’t even hit with the Zombies first. No one really got hit with Zombies it was the Nuclear bomb that started everything.
It was mid June in Sahara, Georgia, hot and sickly sweet to step outside. Everything was normal for mid-June. Until 1:38 p.m. by my phone clock when Terra Firma started to enter self destruction mode. It was as if the floor had suddenly become the ceiling, the road a solid sturdy structure only seconds before was suddenly a crumbly ocean that you were drowning in. It rolled in waves and the earth moved with it. Houses disappeared in front of you; it was like being in a tornado! A car knocked down a house as if flung by a giant! Trees that stood for upwards of a hundred years ceased to exist before your very eyes.
It was horrible! A day I’ll never forget. A day I’ll never get out of my mind! I was too afraid to scream, too afraid to do anything! A horrible ringing filled my ears and an endless sort of pressure held me down of the rolling waves that had once been something called solid. I thought I was already dead.
In the end I don’t know how long it lasted. How long the world kept shaking and bucking. How long it took until the pressure finally stopped, but it did… I think.
When it did stop, I was completely sore, broken feeling, and in shock. I had several nasty looking cuts across my body and I think the first thing I did was puke up my guts. Don’t know how long that lasted, at least until the world stopped twirling around me like a freaking ballerina on Red Bull, but that stopped too and I was able to hobble away. Somehow I ended up back at our trailer… well, where our trailer used to be. It’s a good thing I was so deep in shock I went completely by instinct because I could never have found my way back there alone the entire town was leveled like a demolition project.
I finally reached the place where the front door of the trailer usually was but instead all I could make out from the remains was a door handle on the ground. Our dented, broken, fake little metal door handle from our crappy little trailer was the biggest piece still remaining, all the rest had crumbled. The last thing I did was pick up the door handle before I completely blacked out.
The place I woke up to was not Sahara, Georgia, quiet little town, where the most exciting thing to ever happen involved a lady trying to shoplift a TV in broad daylight. This was Sahara, Georgia Disaster Zone. We were no longer citizens, we were survivors, trying to do just that, survive. The town I was once forced to call home was like a horror story; little did I realize that it was only the beginning of one.
I awoke in a survival center some surviving emergency personnel had had the wherewithal to put together on the spur of the moment. I served mainly as a Medivac center, but people gathered here, coming in clusters and trails. Stunned, shocked people searching for their loved ones, looking for families they’d left early this morning and had expected to see again in a few hours, people that were dead now.
In that first day, everyone was in shock. Some couldn’t handle it and went mad or sat in some kind of lost silence, wandering off eventually with no one there to watch them, perhaps disappearing forever. Others used everything they could to make it through, praying, crying, chanting, hugging, helping; everyone had some way to try to cope. The universal mindset, except for those completely beyond hope, was to stick together. Everyone stayed in some kind of cluster, living people helping those slightly worse off than themselves.
My dad had found me and he was the one who’d brought me to the center. He was a hard working manual laborer, and possibly my favorite person in the whole world. He always had something helpful to say, even though he didn’t say much; something motivational. Between Kimmy and my Mom, he was the only silver lining in my family. I can honestly say that I have a great dad, a hard worker, happy with the life given to him; doing the best with his lot. I’ve never been able to understand how he does it but I’ve always admired him for that.
My mother and sister are complete opposites of that. My Mom’s what you might call a lost cause. A hopeless case, she’s a druggy and an alcoholic. On a regular basis she runs off, like she’s actually going to leave us and I get my hopes up again, but she always comes back when she runs out of money or her new boyfriend can’t get hold of the crack she wants. Then she comes sniveling back begging my father to forgive her and he always does. Sometimes I hate him for that. I can’t help it, he’s too kind. He should have made her leave years ago, but I think he still holds out somehow that she’ll change. Fat chance.
Want to know why I’m poor? Why we live in a trailer? It’s not because my dad makes horrible pay. He doesn’t. He may be just a manual laborer but he’s the Foreman and he makes good pay, enough to provide for two girls and a house that is. The reason we’re poor, the reason I’m a social pariah at school, is my mother and sister’s fault but mostly my mother.
You see, Kimmy is a lot like Mom in many respects. She definitely took after the maternal side of the family, but as far as I know we could only be half sisters, it’s the truth. We’re nothing alike. My sister lives her life angry that she wasn’t born rich that she is poor and has to steal if she wants something. Kimmy will blame anyone in a mile radius for being the reason her life is so horrible. My sister constantly bitches and complains about why we don’t have any money (it would be awful for her to get a job of course). Kimmy also hates us all just for being related to her. Everything is our fault.
My dad of course, being the soft hearted creature he is always gives in. When Kimmy begs he gives her money to buy more clothes (never mind that we’re flat broke at the moment). Surviving from pay-check to pay-check never even works in our trailer, we survive until the money runs out (always before the pay-check) and then have to resort to desperate measures.
I can’t say that it’s all Kimmy’s fault, though part of the blame definitely goes to her. No, I blame that on Mom. My “Mom” steals or borrows money from us to waste our dad’s pay-check on drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol. Every time I wake up in the morning and head out to go to school to find her unconscious in the dirt or partially under the cinderblocks holding the trailer up, I hate her all the more.
So, I can at least say that I got some kind of dangerously vicious satisfaction when my mother came up after The Disaster, holding a cigarette stub and bawling her eyes out. Even if it was just possibly because she’d used up her last joint.
My dad of course let her back in hugging her and telling her it would be all right. He didn’t really get long to play the paternal head of house role because he had to find Kimmy. However he never succeeded. We found out what happened to Kimmy from a few of her “friends” who had survived the Disaster. She didn’t make it. At the time she’d been in the mall, possibly shop-lifting again, but when the Disaster struck the mall collapsed almost instantly.
My sister was dead. My irritating, messed up, addiction prone, bitch of a sister was dead. I felt horrible in an entirely new way (I had loved her on some level after all) but I was also relieved and for that I felt guilty. It was just hard to get out of my mind the sight of what Kimmy would say if she was here. Honestly her life would be crushed, she would be no help and we’d
spend all our time taking care of her. In some ways I was happy my sister was dead, less misery for both of us this way.
It wasn’t like this came as too much of a shock. The death toll from the disaster was rising, it would be impossible for me not to have lost at least someone in this. Better it be my sister instead of Dad. On the other side, I looked at my shaking drug addict of a mother and thought that perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t made it out instead of Kimmy, at least Kimmy was my sister. This diseased woman had done nothing but gave birth to me and did a sorry job at that too.
Somehow or another, perhaps it was guilt, my mother was overcome by the news that her oldest daughter, was dead, regardless of her never giving a crap about Kimmy before. Dad however apologized and pushed it off, leaving her
to her own devices, not the best plan, and I was supposed to be in charge of her.
This was about the same time someone somewhere had the idea to start the body search. To begin looking for trapped survivors among the rubble. Suddenly that was the only thing on anyone’s mind, “Find the survivors; find the bodies.”
Dad was one of the first to volunteer, and I insisted on coming too. I didn’t want to be trapped behind in the nurse’s tent with only my mother for lucid company. Some company! So we all went, Mom following along behind us as we joined the swelling search party.
While we worked theories began to fly about what The Disaster could have really been. That’s what everyone called the big boom that destroyed our lives, but it was fitting, because we really had no clue what it was. Everyone had a theory though!
Some people believed it had been an extreme act of terrorism, that someone, some faceless enemy, had dropped an atom bomb on us or some other kind of attack to the United States. Others chalked it up to natural causes, a record breaking earthquake, (never mind that we never have earthquakes in Sahara, Georgia). Still others thought something must have gone wrong at the relatively nearby nuclear plant. “Gone wrong” was a bit of an understatement, but regardless they were the closest to the truth.
Even though no one knew what had happened and most of our technology was either downed or destroyed after The Disaster, so no communication was possible, people believed that we would be rescued. It wa just some random act of violence, a horrible natural disaster, or a government mistake, but soon people would start coming. Soon the rest of America would come to protect and help us and give us food and water and shelter, just like we’d done for Haiti. People would come, people would come. People had to come.
But while we waited for help to arrive, the body search continued. We searched for four days straight. People barely took shifts; falling asleep beside the very houses they were trying to clear away. Some fell dead, some fainted from the exhaustion of it all and prolonged shock, some people just couldn’t take it and stared in dismay at the scene before them, slowly slipping into madness.
Crazies were abundant during those few days. At one point I wondered if they were the only people to survive. As if the world was suddenly stripped of all sane people. However by the fourth day I began to pick up on something. It wasn’t the crazy ones from before who were crazy now. No, it was the sane ones, Mothers who had the perfect houses with the A+ children were now mumbling and talking to walls. The odd people who gathered at street corners were now helping the search.
In those first days, I worked hard with everyone else, until exhausted my father told me to go to sleep. I moved walls, called out to people who may or may not be there, and pulled countless dead bodies out of the ruble. After the first day specialization began to occur and both my father and I were placed in the body line. We showed no squeamishness about touching the smelly flesh so we were called forward. I had no wish to be a hero. I only wanted something to do at a time when there was nothing to do excepthelp.
As the days passed we moved further and further along down streets and through subdivisions and as the rescue party moved, a body line began to pile up behind us. At first people tried to bury them but then they gave up and just left them there for someone, perhaps a missing relative, to find and bury if they chose. Sometimes we didn’t even pull them out of the building, just left them there uncovered and moved on. We couldn’t care about the dead now, we had to care about the living. Now we know we really should have been paying more attention to the dead, and for that we paid dearly… with our lives and our remaining sanity.
On the fifth day after The Disaster it happened.
The dead rose and walked the Earth. Armageddon was upon us.
It was midday; the hot unforgiving sun beat down like it did every summer in Sahara, Georgia causing the dead bodies to stink of putrefaction, like rotten meat. We all stank of sweat and the exhausted rested in what little shade there was left. We were all grouped together, working together like one large mass of people. I think it must have been a comfort to
everyone to be close to other living people after what trauma we’d been through.
Once again, that was our downfall.
Who knew that hell could descend upon the Earth in two very simple words?