Zombie Dirt

Monster Island
by David Wellington

http://www.brokentype.com/monster/
p. 288

Dekalb has a problem. He's a newly single father in a world that teeters on the edge of ruin as a tidal wave of walked dead threaten to wash across every corner of the Earth.

The story opens in a rather unusual setting. Prior to the corpse party, Deklab was a UN weapons inspector in Africa. As zombies begin to occupy the continent, he finds himself and his daughter taking refuge with a band of female, Somali fighters. Having nothing of value other than his life, Deklab must find something to exhange for his daughters safety and to that end he's provided a quest: return to America and procure drugs. It seems the leader of the horde he's tagging along with is rapidly running out of AZT to keep her HIV infection in check. In exchange for this duty, they promise him citizen ship within their tribe and protection of his daughter even if he does not return. And with that Dekalb sets off to cross the Atlantic and take a wild crapshoot that he'll be able to find, obtain and return with the drugs.

Along the way the run into a peculiar creature, Gary. It dawned upon Gary that if you bite the bullet, you'll come back as a zombie, but the mindless, glazed eye effect was the destruction of intelligence though lack of oxygen to the brain. So, he begins a crazed idea: Killself, but while hooked up to the aid of life suppot, and it works! He returns as essentially, a zombie, but possessing his full mental capacities.

Monster Island is a great read, that throws a little bit of everything at you. Barricaded suvivors, intelligent undead, mummies and hordes and hordes of ravenous, goo dripping creatures.

If you'd like to sample the book, Mr. Wellington originally created it as a serial novel and has it posted at: http://www.brokentype.com/monster Do yourself a favor however and pick up the hard cover novel, it's well worth it.