Body Farm Z
by Deborah Sheldon
Genre: Horror
To solve murders, you must understand the process of decomposition.
Australia’s newest body farm, the Victorian Taphonomic Experimental Research
Institute, is hidden in bushland some four hours’ drive from Melbourne.
Scattered across its 150 acres are human donor cadavers and pig carcasses
arranged to mimic some of the ways in which police might find murder victims:
exposed to the elements, buried in a shallow grave, wrapped in tarpaulin.
Forensic scientists and graduate students meticulously track each stage of
putrefaction. Today, Detective Rick Evans of the Homicide Squad is at VITERI
for the re-creation of one of his cold cases. A human donor will be locked
inside a car. But the donor has other ideas... So begins a facility-wide
outbreak of the reanimated dead.
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This can’t be real,
Rick thought.
With her back turned, Violet grabbed the
lip of the car boot and hoisted over a leg as if preparing to descend a ladder.
Her toes splayed and groped for the ground. She was climbing out. The corpse
was climbing out. No, she was alive,
she had to be. Nothing else made sense. Somehow, Violet was alive.
“Oh Jesus,” Cheryl gasped. “Oh shit. Oh
God.”
“Fuck! Fucking fuck,” Garcia wailed.
Both their voices sounded distant and
tinny, funnelled down a pipe. Rick knew what it meant: his system was
overloaded with adrenaline. That also explained the tingling in his
extremities, the shaking hands, loss of peripheral vision, his laser-like focus
on Violet.
Another side effect of adrenaline was
overthinking.
Pointless
overthinking.
Circular reflections incapable of problem-solving.
Reflections that can get a police officer killed.
If he didn’t shake off his confusion,
panic would continue to paralyse him.
He had to act.
First, he put his hand on his gun, a
Smith & Wesson M&P40, nestled in his shoulder-holster. Then he sucked
in a breath of fetid air and took a couple of steps to force his legs out of
their jellied state.
“Madam,” he said, voice loud, stern and
commanding. “My name is Detective Senior Sergeant Rick Evans. I’m from the
Victorian Homicide Squad. Please stay where you are. Stay inside the boot. We
need to talk. I need you to stay inside the boot while we talk. Understand?”
“Shit, oh shit,” Cheryl moaned.
“That donor is dead,” Garcia said.
“Boss, she’s dead. What the fuck?”
“Madam, stay where you are.”
Violet continued to struggle backwards
out of the car. Her shoulder blades, buttocks, calves and heels were fish-belly
pale, the rest of her a bright and livid purple. Hypostasis. Post-mortem
lividity. After death, capillaries are unable to fill with blood when under
pressure. Violet must have laid supine on a hard surface, such as a floor or
mattress, while her blood circulation came to a standstill and coagulated.
No, it couldn’t be… It just couldn’t.
Sweat ran from Rick’s hairline. His
vision pinned.
Both her feet touched ground. The
blanched toes, wrinkled as if soaked in water for a long time, grasped and
found purchase in the dirt. She turned. Took a hesitant, faltering step.
“Stay where you are or I’ll shoot,” Rick
said.
He had discharged his weapon in the line
of duty only once before. To defend against a man wielding a machete. A man
running and slashing at people in the city. Rick had sprinted towards him and,
at approximately seven metres—the minimum safe distance—aimed at the man’s
chest and squeezed the trigger. Blam.
The man had survived the ambulance ride but expired in hospital. An internal
investigation had absolved Rick after a gruelling pass through the wringer. But
the nightmares Rick had endured, the flashbacks, the second-guessing…
Stop
thinking. Stop thinking and do something.
Violet edged closer, slowly and with
effort, shuffling her stiff legs. Dark green veins showed in her face. This
whole time she hadn’t blinked. Rick was sure of it.
He stared at her in disbelief, noticing
every little detail. Her breasts were long and empty as if she had recently
lost a considerable amount of weight. Below her navel, a baggy roll of skin
hung like an apron and obscured her bush. Perhaps she had a scar beneath that
apron. Perhaps a surgical scar from a hysterectomy had contracted, pulled the
skin tight as a purse-string and bisected her belly. Rick’s wife had the same
problem but from an emergency C-section, their third daughter, a breech
birth...
“My fucking God!” Cheryl shrieked.
The terror in that shriek jolted Rick
like a slap. He unclipped his holster with trembling fingers and took out the
gun, pointing it at Violet. The sight of her threatened to loosen his bladder.
Maybe even his bowels.
“Stay where you are,” he said. “Stay.”
Like talking to a dog, he thought. That
neighbour’s dog when he was twelve, the pit bull—
“For Christ’s sake, she’s a zombie!”
Cheryl cried. “Shoot her!”
A zombie?
But how on earth—
“Come on!” Garcia yelled. “Boss, shoot the fucking zombie! Do it now!”
Hidden in the bushlands of Australia is a farm a body farm
where scientist and students study the process of decomposition. Dead bodies
are laid out in different ways and different environments and in different
stages over 150 acres of land. The dead bodies consist of humans and animals. There
are pigs, possum, birds and even kangaroos.
Detective Rick Evans is visiting the farm for one of his
cold cases and needs to re-create a murder scene with a dead body locked inside
the boot of a car. After shutting the trunk lid noises start coming from
inside. I guess the dead body didn’t like being shut up in there and decided it
wanted out so began to make noise.
The dead body in the trunk is just the beginning of dead
bodies rising on the farm. Pigs, birds, possums, humans and kangaroos all
decide to come back to life and boy are they hungry. Human zombies and animal
zombies all very hungry and attack anything that gets in their way and start to
munch down on any body part available to them. The humans start to run around
trying to figure out what is going on and how to get out alive while killing
zombies at the same time.
Body Farm Z is a fast paced read filled with lots of action
and zombie killing as the scientist try to make it off the farm alive and
without getting bit. Once I picked up Body Farm Z there was no way I could lay
it down until I had turned the last page. Oh yeah I love me some zombies,
zombie biting and killing. I would love to see more in this world and to know
more about the characters and their stories before and after.
I highly recommend Body Farm Z to all zombie and horror
fans. One click yourself a copy today!
I'm an award-winning author from Melbourne, Australia. I write short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum.
My latest releases, through several publishing houses, include the horror novels "Body Farm Z", "Contrition", and "Devil Dragon"; the horror novella "Thylacines"; the crime-noir novellas "Dark Waters" and "Ronnie and Rita"; and the dark fantasy and horror collection "Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories" (winner of the Australian Shadows Best Collected Work 2017).
My short fiction has appeared in many well-respected magazines such as Quadrant, Island, Aurealis, SQ Mag, and Midnight Echo. My fiction has been shortlisted for numerous Australian Shadows Awards and Aurealis Awards, long-listed for a Bram Stoker Award, and included in various "best of" anthologies. I'm also guest editor of this year's edition of Midnight Echo.
Other credits include TV scripts such as Neighbours and Australia's Most Wanted, feature articles for national magazines, non-fiction books published by Reed Books and Random House, and award-winning medical writing.
Publisher: Severed
Press
Facebook: @SeveredPress Twitter:
@severedpress
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