Reign of the Dead
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Reign of the Dead is a book series by Len Barnhart.
There are two books so far and a prequel is due out soon.[when?]
Description from the first book: A strange virus causes the recently dead to rise with an insatiable desire to eat the living. The epidemic is worldwide and quickly rises to catastrophic proportions as civilization collapses under the burden of a horror unmatched in human history. The survivors at a rescue center must work together to find a way to make it though the waking nightmare, but time is running out and there's more to worry about than the reanimated corpses filling the streets and parking lots of our cities.
Tropes used in Reign of the Dead include:
- Apocalypse How: Class 2: Six weeks after the start of the "Infection" only 5% of the US and British population is still alive, and that's huge compared to the rest of the world: Russia, Spain is at 4%, China, France at 1%, and the whole of Africa is reduced to 3%.
- Big Damn Heroes: Happens twice in the first book. First when Jim comes back from a long vacation during which the dead first started to rise he is trapped in his truck at a gas station by some of the undead. Mick and Chuck show up and take care of the three zombies and rescue him, explaining on the way what happened while he was out camping. The second is just when a prisoner is about to die of starvation, the heroes show up and break him out.
- The Brigadier: General George Johnston.
- The Dragon: Jake to Hathaway, Jim to Mick.
- Government in Exile: Brownlow and the others in the Mount Weather complex, after the fall of NORAD.
- Infant Immortality: Subverted: At one point while clearing a building, the heroes kill a large group of zombies, afterwards while getting ready to dispose of the bodies one of them notices movement from a pregnant woman's stomach, and pukes upon figuring it out. Another member finishes it off.
- The Mutiny: Johnston, and the soldiers under his command, rebel at the thought of nuking their own soil. At the cost of their own lives, they manage to stop Brownlow's plan.
- Nuke'Em: Brownlow decides that nuking every major american city is the only option to stop the undead, even though there are thousands of survivors still in those cites and the resulting radiation would render them inhabitable for decades if not more.
- The Umbridge: Brownlow in the first book, Robert Hathaway in the second.
- Undead Child: See Infant immortality
- The Virus: Everyone is infected with it, but it only seems to actually do anything unless you are bitten or die of anything besides brain trauma.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Follows Romero Rules for the most part, though zombies are smart enough to be afraid of fire and deep water. Luckily the infection only seems to affect humans.