The Horde by Gregory Thompson is a novella that starts out with a kick and continues that pace all the way through. Set a few months after a Zombie Apocalypse, we are introduced to an eclectic group of survivors. They are living out of a recreational vehicle in a state park that is an ad hoc refugee camp. The park is a few miles outside of a town that is set in Tornado Alley. I mention Tornado Alley as it’s a tornado siren that starts wailing signaling not a natural disaster but a wave of infected coming in.
The cast of characters are varied and diverse, ranging from mid 30ish to a 15 year old girl. While the rest of the park inhabitants scatter the RV group decides to abandon their vehicle and head deeper into the woods in an attempt to throw off the zombies. During their rapid exit and effort to strip the vehicle of anything and everything useful, the siren stops which is not a good sign.
As the group moves deeper into the woods, they notice that instead of hearing woodland creatures, they hear instead only silence.
Never a good sign.
Taking a break at a river, the group relaxes only to be interrupted when a zombie floats through their midst. At first, they think it’s only one of the dead heads that fell into the water from a bridge or maybe slipped on the bank somewhere upstream. But then they spy someone dumping infected bodies into the river from the opposite shore.
Curiosity gets the better of them so they head on over to investigate. They find a small cabin set deep in the woods with zombie bodies laid out in the carport. Shades of the film Wrong Turn ran through my thoughts at this point. The group soon discovers that the owner of the cabin is Frank Munson, Doctor Frank Munson who is experimenting with a serum that somehow controls the zombies. One side effect is that they are now devoted to the protection of Munson. The other side effect is that their strength and speed have been increased.
Do I need to point this out again? Not a good thing at all.
Munson detains the group by locking them inside a storage shed and placing two of his ‘enhanced’ zombies outside as guards. Inside, the group is trying to decide if the man is insane and how they can get out of their predicament.
Escaping from the shed they contain Munson inside his cabin where he explains the reasoning behind his experiments. He plans to send what he calls his ‘half-zombies’ out to remove the full zombies. As it turns out, by mixing an uninfected human’s blood with zombie blood then injecting it into a full zombie you can create a half zombie that obeys the human whose blood was used to create it.
Yeah, I know a little bit out there.
The story concludes with a battle between the half-zombies and the full zombies as the humans direct the action like sending out surrogates to do your bidding. This is another interesting take on the genre and one that I haven’t seen before.
Overall, the story has plenty of action, suspense, tension and drama. The characters are developed just enough that the reader actually cares about what happens to them. There is no need to go into great detail about their backgrounds as Gregory Thompson neatly intersperses that within the first chapter. Thompson has created a new direction to take the zombies in and could quite conceivably make a series out all this and title it ‘The Zombie Wars’.
Available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
