Under A Graveyard Sky by John Ringo
There's a new entry into the world of end-of-the-world Zombie tales. It's called "Under A Graveyard Sky" by John Ringo, and it's the first in what will probably be a series of zombie apocalypse novels. This book was a good read, and it goes on to cover an area of ZA lore that I haven't seen covered before in depth.
The story starts out as a fairly typical ZA outbreak story. This time it's a manmade flu outbreak that masks an underlying zombie infection. Book One introduces a family of survivalists and details their plans to escape the epidemic by staying out at sea. Along the way it deals with the search for the culprit, and the cure, against the backdrop of societal collapse. It's fairly typical John Ringo military story telling, with uber-competant protagonists and lots of weapon details.
Book Two is where things get more original. The family of survivalists hide while they hear the story of cities being over-run and civilization dying. After two months at sea their boat is damaged in a storm, they run across a larger boat that's been over-run with zombies, and they decide to clear that and take it over. In the process they find a young girl who's been locked in a cabin, surviving on dwindling supplies. This leads to the realization that there could be large numbers of survivors trapped on boats, and the family sets about finding and rescuing them, in the process building up a fighting force dedicated to assist them.
In "We're Alive" I know a lot of us have spent time speculating about what happened to the Navy and the people who were at sea at the time of the outbreak. "Under A Graveyard Sky" goes a long way toward explaining what life might be like for survivors at sea, which makes for an interesting addition to the zombie apocalypse lore.
