Jade: Earth's Last Hope Against the Undead by Kenneth W. Cain

 
     
    CHAPTER 1

    A World Torn

    Jade remembered what it had been like before
all this madness: fanatics professing the world would end in 2012,
then latching on to 2013 and every year after. As the years passed
the human race hardened, more confident the world would last
forever. Then in 2020, space freighter Pioneer, serial number
37246, returned home seemingly empty. The readings the ship fed to
the tower signaled no life onboard.
    What ensued upon opening those doors hadn't
been telecast and Jade was thankful. She'd seen enough while holed
up in her apartment, looking down on the streets in awe from her
bedroom window. They said the crew had been infected somewhere on
Kepler-20e with a virus that had turned them into awful
abominations. When they opened the Pioneer's doors those beasts
burst out and what became known as the end of civilization
followed.
    Only it hadn’t been the end, not really.
Each zombie that wasn’t exterminated went on to thrive and infect
others. The world wasn't ending so much as mankind was slowly being
eradicated. After two years, the news reported fewer than one
million humans were left on Earth.
    Like Jade, all survivors hid. The only
way to live was to hide. They ate what food they could find and
remained in what places they wouldn't be found for as long as they
could. It wasn’t much of a life. Jade had truly thought it the end,
until the day they arrived.
    Her people should have been excited to meet
life from another planet, yet Earth’s citizens were too devastated
to appreciate any such miracle. Jade herself had once wanted to
honor these extraterrestrials who'd come to rid Earth of the
undead. But she soon learned the truth about the aliens who only
acted to protect their primary resource.
    Apparently they too had suffered great loss
at the hands of these infected zombies. These great warriors had
learned how to handle weapons because of this intergalactic plague.
Their planet had been nearly decimated, leaving very few survivors.
They hated the zombies with a passion and would do anything to
slaughter them.
    At the same time, they had tried to discover
how the virus originated. They claimed to have ended all
possibility of future infections by obliterating their home planet.
However, Jade wasn't convinced destroying a planet would ever put
an end to anything.
    These aliens had experience with killing
zombies and wouldn't hesitate to do so. They had adapted to the
virus and grown somewhat immune either chemically or through
science. But it was their other needs that troubled humanity. They
had a voracious appetite for human blood.
    Jade remembered how they had tried to stave
off those appetites by offering pigs and goats and cows. However,
the zombies had devastated much of Earth’s livestock. Earth, as a
collective, had very little to offer as a substitute.
    These vampires were not interested in such
creatures to whet their appetites. They had other plans from the
onset of their arrival. Their population was small and their main
food source now in peril. They had come to protect their cattle.
They would want to drink human blood and possibly turn them, thus
further dwindling mankind’s numbers. The more humanity diminished
the less opportunity there would be for the vampires to thrive.
    They told stories of abduction. Jade
remembered hearing strange tales of such things long ago and
thought them the ramblings of the insane. The vampires had been
feeding off of Earth’s population for hundreds of years after
finding the planet by happenstance. It wasn’t the only planet they
fed on, and Jade thought this might be part of the reason the crew
of Pioneer had come back infected. These vampires had eliminated
whatever population once inhabited Kepler-20e before setting their
sights on Earth.
    Earth was left victim to a triangulation of
needs and the battle had only just begun.
    Jade hid among the rubble, staring up at the
sky. She often wondered what other life existed beyond what