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[x2yzh9]

Prologue

   John flicked a burnt piece of cigarette into the disheveled ashtray. Funny nowadays that when cigarettes were once the opium of hundreds of millions of people, its treasured now. Everything is. Ever since the infected came. It was originally confined to Africa, but almost no one did anything. "It's just Africa!". Then it was just India. Then China, Europe, Australia, America, and the whole world.

   People put up a good fight, but the infected eventually overwhelmed them. The only habitable safe place anymore is Israel, and even then they don't accept newcomers anymore, so it's hell to get in. Everyone else is in shambles, there are a few militias but the cities that are free of infected are archaic. Anything goes.

   John stood up from his seat on the barrel and smudged his cigarette into the ashtray, calling his dog.
"Good boy! Let's go and kill us some Zeds, eh?"
"Ruff!"
And so they went. Next stop, Washington D,C., Zombie Capital of the World.

[x2yzh9]

Episode 1, Atlantic-Shmantic. Chapter 1 - Sin of our Fathers

   John woke up in his tent, letting out a gasp. He just had a nightmare of when he saw his first one. Did anything matter anymore? His friends, family, loved ones, all dead, all infected. Why should he live when others aren't?

   He started to weep, and his dog awoke. It tried to comfort him, but to no avail.
"Damnit! Goddammit, why does it have to be this way! Why!"
   He picked up his gun. Wiping tears on his shirt, he sat up. "I have to get on a boat, I need to get to Israel...". He rubbed his face with his hands. Washington D.C. was one of the hardest hit, and there MAYBE one militia left there, the Lincolns. He started to pack up his tent.

"Halt! Drop your weapon and put your hands in the air!"
Bandits. He had dealt with their kind before, and he was outnumbered. He was not dumb, he dropped his weapon and put his hands in the air.
"Now, on your knees! We're taking your guns, medicine and some food. Stay put or we'll shoot."
John sighed. It was bound to happen. He was travelling on one of the biggest Bandit Highways in America.


"Thanks, we'll be on our way. Don't try anything and maybe you'll live."
   Darkness.


John awoke with a bump on his head and his dog sitting beside him. Luckily they spared the dog. He sighed and got up, retrieving the backup pistol from his shoe. He petted his dog and walked off into the distance.


   John was in the wilderness now. He had heard a Convoy of Bandits and ducked off into the woods, and they set up camp where he was. He had to leave, for he would have died otherwise. He picked a berry from a tree, and leaned on it, taking in the nature, petting his dog. Should I stay here? He thought, and thought. He got a knife from his pocket and started cutting off the limbs of the tree, maybe he could make a spear.

[Supermikhail]

We've got a zombie invasion on the forums (I think it's third zombie story in a row, as far as story threads are concerned). But please, continue. Looking forward to when it stops being cliché. Well, not very, but it's the same zombie-apocalypse, as past, what, 30 years? Or when it all started... Whoops, more than half-a-century, rather. Anyway, I think it's been spun every imaginable way already. Quick pace works for your benefit, though.

As far as the writing goes, it's very good, in its genre, except for "Should I stay here?" which is a first-person line in the middle of a third-person narrative, and should turn more reported-speech.

[x2yzh9]

Episode 1, Atlantic-Shmantic. Chapter 1 - New Rangers Association
   John cringed, he was there. The overgrown skyscrapers of Washington D.C. creaked loudly in the distance, and he saw a building collapse. Gunfire and moaning could be heard throughout the streets. He walked down the street, carefully surveying his surroundings. A broken toy-shop's alarm went off.

   They were here.

   John ran inside the storefront and blockaded the door, hiding in the back room. Within a minute, the Zeds were inside the storefront. He locked the door and looked around the small back room. Crates, crates, toys, and more crates. His heart was beating fast, and he saw a narrow window up above.

   He slowly moved the crates and crawled on top of them, getting his back-up pistol and firing it at that window, then punching through to break it. He screamed

   The door was being bashed in. He squeezed through the window, cutting his arm in the process.
"Fuck!" he screamed as he hit the ground and blood gushed from the wound and cuts. He slowly walked down the back streets and alleys, beginning to weep.

He came upon a barricaded house, with people milling around in the front.
"Freeze! Drop your weapon or we'll shoot!"

   Fuck.

[x2yzh9]

Episode 1, Atlantic-Shmantic. Chapter 1 - Winter
   John smiled, sipping from his coffee cup. Children were in the snow, throwing snowballs and laughing. He remembered the old days, when it was play, laugh, play. This little village he lived in, in New York was a quiet suburb, complete with all it's Drama.

"John, it's Emily. The credit card got declined at the store, any idea why?"
   John frowned and went online to his banking account, browsing the internet. Just after leaving his wife, Emily a voicemail about it, he heard a scream.

"What the fuck is that" shouted a teenage boy,
   Children screamed, adults came out toting hunting rifles. Hundreds of them. They were everywhere, devouring the neighborhood. John locked the door and gathered what he could carry inside his climbing backpack. Food, water, a knife, pistol, ammo, and a first-aid kit. Adrenaline was flowing through him-The Zeds were bashing in the door. He ran for it, opening the window on the back and running into the wilderness.


He woke up.

[Dasleah]

Typing as I read.

This is ...not very good at all. Simple things like spelling, grammar. Learn the difference between its and it's. The organisation of the paragraphs is all over the place - in one spot you start a new paragraph with a comma, for instance. Random capitalisations everywhere. Odd mood swings - you seem to try and use the prologue to set the 'oh man everything is so dirty and bad and pretty much exactly like Fallout 3 only with ZOMBAYS' mood, but the first line of dialogue we get from the protagonist is "OH BOY C'MERE MY BESTEST PAL DOGGIE!!!! WE CAN MAKE IF WE ONLY BELIEVE IN EACH OTHER AND YOU'RE CERTAINLY NOT GOING TO GET KILLED OFF IN A COUPLE OF CHAPTERS FOR CHEAP DRAMA AT ALLL!!!!!" And calling cigarettes the 'opium for millions' doesn't sit right. Opium was the opium of millions. You're trying to inject some anti-tobacco connotations there by comparing it to a substance that is much, much worse. It's like saying that video games are the LSD laced with Cocaine made from dead baby hookers for this generation. It's cheap and there are far better ways to get across the fact that "THIS DUDE IS COOL BECAUSE HE SMOKES EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE REALLY RARE AND HE COULD GET A LOT OF FOOD IN TRADE FOR THEM?".

The bandits (which doesn't need to be capitalised, you know, unless they call themselves The Bandits, which is kind of redundant) attacking is weird too. Our hero WAKES IN TEARS ;-; for a spot of cheap drama, and then they mug him and take his shit, fair enough. But if things are as hard as you seem to want them to be, they'd probably just kill him, or at the very least kill and eat his dog. No point in leaving a prisoner made of meat. Anyway, his gun and shit gets stolen, and he pulls a spare out of his boots (which is bullshit - in any post-apocalyptic setting, a pair of good walking shoes is one of the most important things ever, so they would have been the first thing they would have taken) and decides "Hmmm. I've got this gun now. But fuck that shit, what I need is a spear, which is far more effective at hunting!" Also why didn't they take the knife off him as well? And why is he sitting around literally contemplating nature? Where's all these god damn zombies.

So if the toy store alarm went off, things can't be all that bad, because whoever is left in the city seems to have enough capacity to generate a stable supply of electricity to dish it out to things that aren't even remotely useful for survival, like making sure zombies or looters don't steal toys. Where the hell is his dog in all this? Oh and hey, he starts crying again.

Okay so we have a flashback. Suddenly people are totting hundreds of hunting rifles! They must be very talented, but unfortunately the hunting rifles were everywhere, devouring the neighbourhood. His first reaction upon seeing hundreds of rifles or zombies suddenly appear (these must be STEALTH ZOMBIES, god damn you military scientists!!!!111!) is not to jump immediately back on his phone to try and contact this Emily person who he presumably cares about, but to suddenly open his convenient Everything You Need To Survive cupboard and scarper off into the woods.

So yeah, not good at all. This needs a lot of work.

[Jackrabbit]

I have to agree with Dasleah, not because he needs a yes man but because I get the feeling you don't like Dasleah and I don't want you to ignore him comments by telling yourself he's the only one.

I'm not saying you can't get better though, just that everything Dasleah said is very valid and you need to work on that.

[Cthulhu]

Dasleah has plenty of yes men.

And yes, man.  All of Dasleah's points are very valid.  I lol'd pretty hard at the hunting rifle thing though.

[x2yzh9]

.At that point the dog got lost, I guess I didn't go over it.

[Willfor]

When posting on the internet, I (personally) find it better to not indent. It increases readability (in my opinion).

A new paragraph should be made whenever the speaker changes, or the subject changes. The first one is a very solid rule that every writer should live by, and the second is somewhat subjective. I tend to start new paragraphs whenever I feel the previous one has become unwieldy. They can also be used to great effect as meta punctuation, but you seem to have a grasp of that already.

In school it is best if you follow the rules as much as possible, and out of school it's best if you learn how to best break the rules with personal style. There are some rules that should never be broken, and there are some that you can get away with using artistic license. Learning which is which is a matter of both reading what other people have gotten away with, and taking constructive criticism. One voice may be just an oddball that you shouldn't bother listening to. However, one person may also be the guy willing to point out the emperor's new clothes.

[Supermikhail]

Oh My God! My Internet Cred! It's ruined! What Am I gonna do now!??

Well, I still stand that it's very good. At least for this forum. When I looked through Creative Projects for the Writer Guild's Library, I grabbed quite a bit of things with grammar much worse than that. Would it have been better if I said that Bay12 forumites hadn't written anything worthy of being called literature?

But the main quality upon which I base my impressions of this story is that it's fast paced and has got short installments. It appears that the number of replies agrees with me. After all, books don't become classics by themselves, people read them and share their opinions on them. I'd say, this guy with unpronounceable nickname nailed the current literary trend, as far as this forum goes, and therefore is worthy of praise and formal conversations with knowledgeable looks.

Also, I, for example, don't know anything about survival in zombie-apocalypse conditions, so, as far as an average me is concerned, the author can do whatever he wants with wilderness, zombies and The Bandits. I think zombie stories have always been about entertainment, not philosophy or science.

[Jackrabbit]

When it's glaring, it's glaring and the fact that there are people out there who won't notice doesn't make it any better.

[Cthulhu]

Praising something bad doesn't do the writer any favors.  In fact, it can really stunt their development because they never figure out what they're doing wrong (See: Fanfiction)

[Supermikhail]

You won't see me bow to Dasleah!

Saying that this story has got no positive points, like in his post, is also no good, so let's say I'm trying to be a counterweight.

[Jackrabbit]

It's not no good, if it's valid then he can learn from it.