Deadman Walking (eBook)

Keith Jarvis jr. (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
556 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
979-8-232-95293-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Set in the time area of 1970tys in New York. A recently murdered Mobesters body has been thrown into the toxic filled swamp lands. As it descends deeper into the darkness, He begins to get reanimated and a dark lifeless corpse clinges to the surface. Fuelled with thoughts of his daughter and armed with a hunger for flesh, this living dead man rages through those who had a hand in his murder and those who seek harm against his daughter. Bloated, gasy, and decomposing he wont stop ever.

Textauszug

Chapter 1: The Drowning Man

The air in the alley was thick enough to chew, a cloying miasma of stale urine, rotting garbage, and the metallic tang of impending rain. Late seventies New York was a city perpetually sweating, its pores clogged with a century of grime and desperation. Sonny Baca felt it all pressing in, a physical manifestation of the weight he’d carried for years – the crushing burden of debts, a tangled web spun by betrayal and greed. Tonight, the threads were tightening, pulling him into a darkness far deeper than any back alley could hold.

Familiar eyes, once pools of camaraderie and shared illicit ventures, now glinted with a cold, calculating malice. Sal “The Shiv” Moretti, a man Sonny had shared more than a few backroom deals with, a man whose loyalty was as reliable as a broken watch, stood before him. The glint wasn’t just in his eyes; it was in the wicked curve of the switchblade he held, its steel catching the meager light filtering down from the grimy fire escapes above. There was no preamble, no shocked accusation, no plea for understanding. Just the brutal, efficient truth of a blade finding flesh.

 

It wasn't a clean end, not the neat, clinical execution whispered about in hushed tones among men like Sonny. This was messy, a visceral, tearing surrender of life. The steel bit deep, a sickening lurch that stole Sonny’s breath, followed by a searing agony that bloomed across his chest. He stumbled back, a guttural gasp escaping his lips, tasting copper and something far fouler. Moretti was relentless, a butcher at his work, each thrust designed not for speed but for maximum damage, for a slow, agonizing bleed-out. Sonny felt his legs buckle, his vision blurring at the edges, the stench of the alley now a putrid perfume accompanying his final moments. He saw Moretti’s face, contorted with a grim satisfaction that chilled him more than the blade. Betrayal, raw and unforgiving, was the last thing he felt before the world dissolved into a suffocating, crimson haze.

 

He hit the ground with a wet thud, his body a broken puppet whose strings had been savagely severed. The cold seeped through his cheap suit, a stark contrast to the burning torment within. He could hear muffled voices, gruff and uncaring, the scrape of something heavy being dragged. They weren’t disposing of him with respect, not even the grim respect afforded to a fallen associate. This was waste disposal, the hurried, ignominious end of a man deemed no longer useful, a problem to be eliminated and forgotten. He was being dragged, his ruined body a dead weight, towards the mouth of the alley, towards a waiting vehicle, towards a fate far worse than death.

 

The air grew heavier, damper, as they drove. The city lights, once a comforting, if dangerous, spectacle, receded, replaced by an oppressive darkness punctuated by the occasional, skeletal silhouette of trees. The stench changed, too, from urban decay to something organic and foul, a miasma of rot and chemical corruption. He recognized it, a primal revulsion stirring within his dying consciousness. The swamps. Not the gentle marshes he’d sometimes seen from a distance, but the fetid, toxic swamps of the Jersey fringe, a notorious dumping ground for all manner of ill-gotten refuse, both man-made and…otherwise. A fittingly vile tomb for a man who’d lived and died in the city’s underbelly. His end, he realized with a final, fading flicker of awareness, was not going to be in a concrete box or a pauper’s grave, but in the muck and the mire, a place that devoured life and spat out only poison. It was a grim, ignominious conclusion, the ultimate testament to the life he’d led and the company he’d kept. This wasn't just an ending; it was a statement. And it was delivered with the cold, uncaring brutality of the late seventies New York underworld.

 

The final moments before oblivion were a cacophony of rough hands, the stench of cheap whiskey and unwashed bodies, and the jarring sensation of being unceremoniously tossed. Then, darkness. A heavy, suffocating blanket that promised an end to pain, an end to the gnawing fear, an end to the relentless pressure of his debts. He was sinking, he dimly registered, through something thick and viscous, a primordial ooze that clung to him, pulling him down. The water, if it could be called that, was cold, but not the bracing cold of a clean lake or the sea. This was a tepid, oily chill, laced with an acrid burn that seared his decaying flesh. It was the chemical embrace of the swamp, a perverse maternity ward for the damned.

 

He felt the mud and slime engulf him, not as a burial but as a shroud, a viscous cocoon. The world above was a distant memory, a hazy dream of neon and noise. Here, in this liquid grave, there was only the press of the mire, the silent, suffocating weight. He was a drowned man, his lungs filled not with water, but with a noxious cocktail of pollutants, a slurry of industrial waste and natural decay. The air he could no longer breathe was replaced by the very essence of corruption. It seeped into him, through him, not as a poison that hastened death, but as something… else. A slow, insidious invasion.

 

The sounds were muted, distorted by the thick medium. The sloshing of his body being deposited, the hurried footsteps of his executioners retreating, the distant hum of unseen insects, the mournful croak of a frog—all of it warped and alien. Yet, beneath the surface, a different kind of sound began to emerge, a low thrumming, a deep, resonant pulse that seemed to emanate not from the swamp itself, but from within him. It was the echo of his own dying heart, perhaps, or something far more ancient, stirred by his ignominious arrival.

 

He was aware of the pressure, the relentless embrace of the muck, but it was changing. The initial cold was giving way to a strange warmth, not the heat of life, but a feverish, internal combustion. The acrid burn of the chemicals was becoming a stinging sensation, like a thousand tiny needles pricking at his skin, breaking through the barriers of his dead flesh. His sight, already gone, was replaced by a new kind of awareness, a sensitivity to the subtle currents shifting around him, to the faint luminescence of decaying organic matter.

 

This was not the end he had anticipated. Death, he’d imagined, would be a void, a blank slate. But this… this was an immersion, a descent into a tangible, palpable darkness that promised not oblivion, but transformation. The swamp was not merely a tomb; it was a crucible, its foul waters a perverted baptism. And as Sonny Baca’s corpse sank deeper into its toxic embrace, something began to stir within the stillness, a nascent spark of unholy life, born not of divine intervention, but of the city’s filth and the devil’s own desperation. The mire was not his end; it was his genesis.

 

The pressure intensified, a crushing weight that should have pulverized bone, yet instead seemed to be… reknitting it. A grotesque parody of healing. The stinging became a burning, a deep, internal inferno that radiated outwards from his core. He felt his limbs twitch, involuntary spasms that disturbed the muck around him. Rigor mortis had set in, making his body stiff and unresponsive, yet these twitches were not the natural stiffening of death, but the violent rejection of it. It was as if his very cells were screaming, fighting against the tomb that held them.

 

Then came the awareness, not a sudden flood of lucidity, but a slow, crawling tide. He knew he was submerged, knew the taste of rot and chemicals in his mouth. He felt the ooze clinging to his skin, the cold, dead weight of his own limbs. But alongside these physical sensations, a new one began to bloom: a visceral, all-consuming rage. It wasn't the calculated anger of a man wronged, but a primal, guttural fury, a beastly roar trapped within a decaying throat. It pulsed through him, a venomous tide that mirrored the toxic waters surrounding him.

 

This rage wasn't directed outwards, not yet. It was inward, a desperate, clawing desperation to escape the suffocating darkness, to break free from the mire’s suffocating grip. It was the echo of a life brutally cut short, the phantom pain of betrayal resonating through dead nerves. But more than that, it was a burgeoning awareness of something

else, something precious and fragile that was now in peril. A connection, faint but undeniable, to a life beyond the swamp, a life he had failed, a life that was now threatened by the very same forces that had ended his own.

It was a dawning realization, a whisper of a thought piercing through the fog of reanimation. His daughter. A flicker of memory – her laughter, her small hand in his, the fierce, protective love that had always been his anchor in the murky waters of his profession. And with that flicker came a surge of something more potent than the rage, a paternal fury that burned with an unholy intensity, far hotter than the chemical inferno raging within his decaying flesh. This nascent consciousness, birthed from the grave and fueled by the swamp's corruption, was beginning to understand its purpose. It was not merely to escape, but to

protect.

The psychic echoes began subtly, like phantom vibrations resonating through his decaying bone. At first, he dismissed them as the last vestiges of his dying mind, the hallucinatory detritus of trauma. But they persisted, growing stronger, more insistent, coalescing into a terrifying, fragmented narrative. It wasn't words he heard, not in the conventional sense, but pure, unadulterated emotional resonance, a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Horror
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: 1970 • ghouls • Hope • MOB • Murder • revenge • Zombie
• ISBN-13: 979-8-232-95293-8 / 9798232952938