The planet has been fried by solar flares turning it into a desert. The surviving population has been effected by solar radiation, turning them into Zombies. Only a handful of people remain unaffected. A family of civilians, guided by a crack army unit who has seen more action than they can handle, must make their way to the safety of a UN base at the South Pole called New Atlantis.
But can they make it to this oasis alive or will they only reach it as the undead?
Excerpt
The shelter was completed just in time. The President gave his goodbye speech and told us to save ourselves, if we could. Tears streamed down my face as we took our most prised possessions, our pets, some plants, books to read, the usual gumph, and locked ourselves in the bunker. It was cramped, to say the least, but we were alive.
Small, uncomfortable bunk beds lined the walls. There was an open plan kitchen and dining room area. There was even a TV and DVD player, with a collection of all our favourite movies. The bathroom was specially designed to recycle the water. Our air supply was filtered and recycled. My parents had gone all out and spent their life savings building it. Money wasn’t really something we would need to worry about with the world ending and all.
We stayed down there for over a year. It’s amazing how irritating someone’s habits can get in a small confined space. There was many an occasion where I would happily have throttled every member of my family. It was basically like living in a very small prison with my immediate family. Being the only single person with a couple of twosomes can also add to the frustration, if you get my drift. Cleaning up dog shit every day is also not much fun. On the plus side, my brother and his wife were expecting their first child when we went in. Even with all the death and destruction going on above us, life was growing and flourishing in our little safe haven underground.
By the end of a year our supplies were dwindling and if we didn’t want to starve, we would have to venture out and forage topside. The risks we would have to face outside the safety of our shelter were diminished by the thought of slowly starving to death. We’d seen too many movies about cannibalism. It never ended well for anybody concerned.
Climbing out of the tunnel that led to the outside world was nerve wracking. We didn’t know what to expect. We’d had no contact with the outside world, no crackling radio signals, no emergency beacon. All we had were our over active imaginations. We hoped that we’d find the world as we’d left it. That we’d been the targets of an elaborate hoax and that the year we’d spent down there in our hole had been a waste of time.
What we discovered was far worse than any of us had imagined.
Our house or what was left of it was little more than a burnt out shell. There wasn’t much left of our small neighbourhood. There were no trees lining the streets, no grass, no flowers, just ash and sand. A desert had claimed our once lush, green garden. From the top of the hill, where the Botanical Gardens had been, I could see what was left of our once beautiful capital city, Pretoria, and as I looked around at the ruins, I realised that my apartment was gone. All my furniture and belongings were gone and most of the people I’d known were now dead. Most hadn’t been buried, there hadn’t been much left to bury or anyone to bury them. Most of the bodies had been incinerated, but those that hadn’t had been left to be bleached by the never ending blaze of the sun and eventually turned to dust, blown away by the relentless wind.
We decided to stick close to the safety of our bunker and venture out in concentric rings for foraging purposes. We found a few tins of food at the small supermarket that had once been just up the road, but was now a few sand dunes away. The store had, by some miracle, survived the initial solar flares. Sand was blown in by the wind, over the few standing walls and through every open gap it could find. We dug through the sand to find shelves and fridges and ice boxes. We’d shopped there since I was a little girl and seeing its walls broken down and burnt, broke something in me. I screamed and howled like a woman whose only child had died. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to get hysterical.
“It’s okay. Let it out,” James said. His arms hugged me tight as I pounded into his chest with my fists.
“It’s not okay,” I screamed. “It’s never going to be okay.” Sobs shuddered through my body as I tried to calm down. “We might be the last people on the planet. Do you realise that?”
“Yes, I’ve thought about it,” James said, as he pushed me out at arm’s length and looked down at me from his 6ft 3inches height. “But I can’t let that get to me. We’ve got to stay strong. We’ve got to think about little Steve and,” he paused, unable to look me in the eye. “Mary’s pregnant again.” The revelation was a shock. “We have to keep it together for them. I need you to help me. Can you do that Maxine?”
I nodded. He only ever called me Maxine when he was being serious. This wasn’t a time for self-pity or weakness. This was a time to grow up and be tough. Time to be a survivor and put on my big girl pants.
“Have you told Mom and Dad she’s pregnant?” I looked up, squinting so I could see his face and not get blinded by the sun. He shook his head.
“We’re waiting for the right time. We don’t want to worry them.”
“But it’s another life. It’s something that should be celebrated,” I said, trying to sound as happy as I could. I was happy, but I was also worried about Mary. Stevie’s birth hadn’t been easy. James was a paramedic in the old world, before all of this and his medical training came in handy, but he wasn’t a doctor and we didn’t have all the medical supplies necessary for a safe delivery. We didn’t have any prenatal vitamins for Mary to take. There was no way to know if the baby would be healthy. I tried not to focus on all the things that could go wrong. We had to accentuate the positive, even if there wasn’t all that much to be positive about. We were alive and that had to count for something, right?
Carting back the few supplies we’d found at the store, James and I trudged up and down sand dunes in silence. We each had our own morbid thoughts to deal with. Being a survivor was hard work.
I’d once thought that having a day job and a career was hard, but going to work and dealing with clients and an annoying boss was easy in comparison. I longed for the normal days when the only thing I had to worry about was which outfit I’d wear or if I’d worked hard enough for my clients or if a guy in the building liked me. No amount of therapy or training could have prepared me for this.
“Look at what I found,” My mother stood next to our old Weber barbecue, looking rather proud of herself, as James and I walked through what had been our garden gate, but was now little more than twisted metal that still hung from a piece of burnt concrete. She must have found it lying somewhere in the sand. Her white, long, cotton dress flapped in the breeze.
“Where’d you find that?” James asked with a grin and touched the Weber as though it were some ancient relic worth a fortune in gold.
“It was across the road …” She frowned. “Well … you know what I mean,” she said, as she gestured in the general direction of where the house across the road had been. “How it got there, I don’t know.”
“Are you sure it’s ours?” I asked walking towards her and giving her a quick hug and a peck on the cheek.
“Does it really matter whose it is?” James asked, looking at me with a sad, lost look in his eyes.
“Guess not.” The thought of the old couple who’d once lived across the road not needing their barbecue anymore threatened my resolve to be strong. My mother put her arms around me and hugged me tight. The softness of her body against mine was comforting. I was grateful to be alive and that I wasn’t completely alone. We had each other. Our family was still intact and in that there was hope. Perhaps there were other families out there going through the same thing, thinking that they were the only ones. And maybe, just maybe, by some miracle we would find each other and be able to rebuild together. Stupid and naive, I know, but a girl can dream. Can’t she?
Professional Reviews
The Eloquent Page
I know, I know, I said less than a month ago that I was going to take a break from zombie fiction but when it comes to the undead, it’s like the Mafia – just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in. I couldn’t resist though when this novella popped into my inbox. As soon as I spotted the cover I knew I was going to read it. A zombie head partially obscured by desert sand with a bullet hole in the temple; I ask you, what’s not to love?
We follow the action through the eyes of Maxine, a young women who dares to believe that the end of the world doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the human race. Maybe she’s right but perhaps not quite in the way she is expecting.
Oasis treads classic Romero-esque ground and has a suitably downbeat ending that I really enjoyed. I have to admit I do enjoy my zombie stories to be grimmer than grim and I’m glad to say this novella delivers on that score.
This story acts as the perfect introduction to the new indie publisher on the block, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on their future releases. I’ve already had a look at their website and Joan De La Haye also recently had a serial killer novel, Requiem in E Sharp, published by Fox Spirit. I reckon I’ll check that out soon as well.
Kat's Book Shelf
Oasis is a novella by South African author Joan de la Haye.
Solar radiation has fried the planet and those affected by the radiation have turned into zombies. Those few remaining survivors who have not been zombified are led by a team of crack military commandos making their way to an army base in the South Pole referred to as ‘New Atlantis’.
Events are told through the eyes of Maxine, a young woman who has spent the past year holed up in a shelter with her parents and her brother and his wife. Her brother and his wife have a lot of sex in the bunker which irritates Maxine and reminds her of her own single situation (until the commandos arrive and she has a passionate but ultimately short-lived affair with their leader).
The group encounter many zombies along the trail and Maxine laments the destruction of all the places she used to frequent and especially misses the ability to contact her friends through social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. I think it’s quite a comment on society today, with social media so ingrained in our lives, that in the event of a literal apocalypse, people still miss the ease in which they could communicate at the mere click of a mouse. That’s not a criticism of course; I thought it was quite wry.
Zombies of course, don’t communicate too well. All they want to do is kill people and eat them; they are hell-bent on destruction.
The group are followed along their path to ‘New Atlantis’ and Maxine narrowly misses being shot in the head after one of their number becomes infected. However, the bullet grazes her forehead (after passing through the infected person’s skull…), breaking the skin and Maxine begins to develop some very strange feelings indeed…
One thing I especially enjoyed about Oasis is that it didn’t take itself too seriously. I thought Maxine was a great protagonist and having a zombie story that is told from the viewpoint of a zombie was excellent. It reminds me a little of Dust by Joan Frances Turner (which I also enjoyed), although not as sombre in its tone.
It’s quite a brief read, at around 43 pages, but it’s worth it for a short, sharp shock.
I also enjoyed its rather bleak ending despite all I said about how funny I thought it was.
It’s the end of the world and zombies are tearing up the place, what do you expect to happen!
Tentacle Books
Maxine and her family had decided that they will survive the end of the world in a bunker – especially built to keep the solar rays from killing them – but when a year passes, they have no other option than to leave their sanctuary. What they found on the outside is terrible though. The chances of them being the last people alive is probable and Maxine isn’t sure she can cope. However, when they hear gunshots one day, it becomes blatantly clear that perhaps they were wrong… Unfortunately, with their rescue comes something even more dreadful than the near-extinction of mankind too and if they want to survive, they will have to go to New Atlantis, which is a base situated in the South Pole. Will they get there in one piece?
Oasis by Joan de la Haye is a novella set in 2013 – South Africa. This post-apocalyptic tale gives the reader the opportunity to diverge from the norm, which coincidentally always seem to play out in the Northern Hemisphere. However, even though it’s short, Oasis is one hell of a story that any zombie lover would devour in a single sitting.
The pace of the book is fast, even though it’s evident that the story stretches on for weeks (perhaps even months) and although this is probably the only problem I found with the book, it’s mostly because I wish that this was a full-length novel instead. As soon as the reader falls in love with the characters, the novella comes to an abrupt end – and even though I’m typically one of those people who hates over-descriptiveness, I actually yearned for it for this particular story. That being said, as far as the writing goes, it’s good and I only found one little grammar error in the whole book. What’s more, I liked the zombies in this book and yes, I do know that there is still a heated on-going debate as to whether or not zombies should be fast or slow, but I quite liked how these particular zombies acted. They were predators, they stalked the living and tormented them with their sheer brutality… in my view, that’s all a zombie is. However, Joan de la Haye was able to make these particular zombies her own in some inexplicable manner. I’m not quite sure how to explain it, but I must attribute the fact that Zulu – a South African military man – turning into a zombie kind of made the zombies different than your ordinary ones. It could just be me, but I think the local flavour was exactly what the book needed.
Oasis isn’t a very long book, like I already mentioned, but it does have its appeals to the zombie community. Quite frankly, I liked it. I wish it was longer, but other than that, I’d suggest this book to anyone who’s looking for a different type of zombie book.
The Butcher's Boy
- 2011 Readers Favorite Award Silver Medal Winner in Horror - Fiction
A Paranormal/Chiller by Michael Robb
Thirty-one years ago, Buxly the Butcher went to trial for killing h
The fortunate inherit riches, prestige, positive notoriety. Those not so lucky bear legacies filled with poverty, infamy or, worse yet, the unhinged insanity and murderous urges of their ancestors.
