He just has a single favorable outcome: find Raven and Brook still alive, or die trying. Unable to reach Raven and Brook and not willing to just leave them at the mercy of some distant politicians’ inability to keep the nation together, he starts an impossible 3,000 mile journey over a reeling United States with what should be about millions of infected in the way. Then he loads his truck with supplies and dusts off his tools of war.

That is, until he learned of its odd method of transference, unprecedented virulence, and the fact that, according to those talking heads on the news, brought the newly dead back to life, semi-mindless, and with this insatiable desire to feed on the flesh of the living.Ĭade, armed with this new information and seeing the larger cities like New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles being rocked by this rapidly spreading scourge, ignores the volley of contradictory edicts the White House drew up and then set in motion by DHS and FEMA. Whether the virus was naturally occurring or was an escaped lab experiment of some sort Cade had no clue, and was not all that concerned.

While the first waves of injured Guardsmen, bystanders, and rioters showed up at hospitals in and near Portland, it soon became obvious that there was a new lethal disease was unleashed on the population.

However those hopes quickly get dashed and his life’s forever changed when news broke of a clash in downtown Portland between soldiers from the Oregon National Guard and hundreds of anarchist protesters all of sudden became violent and, by one anchor’s account: cannibalistic and blood-thirsty. With Brook (his wife) and Raven (his daughter) visiting her parents in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Cade hopes that his immediate future holds nothing but the Mariners on television, an easy chair, and paring down a honey-do list that’s a mile long. For Cade Grayson, dad, husband, and ex-Delta Force operator, that warm sunny Saturday in July (later called Z-Day by some anonymous person that’s probably long dead) started like any other, and none since. “Trudge” is the first novel in the “Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse” series and was released in the year 2011. When he is not writing, he spends the rest of his time doing whatever his wife says and doting on his two kids. And as for the agile, fast, and screaming specimens, not so much.

Having been a zombie fanatic for decades, he prefers his creatures moaning, shambling, and trudging. Shawn’s a major fan of the apocalyptic horror genre, with writers such as George Romero, Stephen King, and Cormac McCarthy being major influences. He studied writing at Harvard on the hill (PCC Sylvania) many years ago. Author Shawn Chesser lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two kids.

Allegiance by Shawn Chesser