The year is 2034.
Times are rough.
Not only has the global economy sunk into an even darker and abysmal state, but mass violence has begun breaking out all over the globe; every nation seeming more like a third world nation every day. Even in America, where politicians promised change and swore things would be better soon, news stations began to broadcast nothing but reports of violence on the home front on special channels.
Today, in a small city in Wisconsin, the scene turned from jovial to bloody in an instant. Twenty-five people were murdered in a mass witch hunt that began at a local bar.
Headlines such as these were announced all day long. The cause for the chaos and violence was not only the economic situation, though being broke never helped anyone. The one thing that had gotten everyone up in arms was the dead.
The reanimated dead, to be exact. In every corner of the globe, zombies had become an increasingly serious problem. The living, being as sure of themselves as they were, thought they had things under control for many years. This all changed with the Great Awakening.
The Great Awakening was used by the living to describe when they finally awoke to the real problem that faced them. The medicated dead had been mobilized and gathered to take control of the world, and the living finally had to admit they needed even more extreme measures.
The reanimated dead have taken on the name themselves. The dead refer to the Great Awakening as the time when their mission to control the world became clear. This happened through the actions of several men, over the course of several years. It was one man in particular who paved the way and lead the moaning dead into the Great Awakening.
Richard Roslun was the man responsible for bringing the dead to life. It was his company, Roslun Global, that created the Second Birth Serum. This serum allowed the recently deceased to be brought back to life. The fantastic part of the Second Birth Serum is that it allowed the newly reanimated to think and speak as if they were still alive.
These medicated zombies still had some unfortunate drawbacks. They still hungered for living flesh and were able to transmit the disease through scratching or biting. When the living were infected by these medicated zombies, they did not come back as themselves. Instead, they arose vicious killing machines. They knew nothing of their former lives, only hunger and violence.
These drawbacks caused outbreaks worldwide as the rich paid for immortality, only to infect others around them. These were done for numerous reasons, mostly out of stupidity and arrogance. Wealthy folks would bring back loved ones, thinking they were immune to any side effects, only to find the truth in terrible bloodshed.
After awhile, all of this trouble caused Richard Roslun to lose his powerful seat atop the world. Roslun Global was taken over by Will Lohman, Jr., the son of an early Roslun zombie experiment, when it became public that Richard Roslun had used the Second Birth Serum on himself. With his company gone, Richard became a recluse. For years he would just stay inside his large Blake Island compound. No one knew what he was up to, or if he was even still alive.
Until one day, late in 2030, when Richard Roslun held a press conference that was watched by the whole world. In this speech, Roslun claimed to have seen the problems with the world and where he had gone wrong in his involvement. He did not claim his mistake as creating the Second Birth Serum, but instead apologized to the medicated dead of the world. Richard Roslun said that turning his back on his ‘zombie brothers and sisters’ was his biggest mistake. He continued on, explaining what he had been doing on Blake Island for so long.
With the help of his long-time associate, Dr. Taki Ito, Richard Roslun worked on new versions of the Second Birth Serum. He claimed to have a better version of the Second Birth Serum ready, but only for those that decreed allegiance to the dead. His goal was to bring everyone into his ‘new world’, where the dead ruled the Earth.
Medicated zombies swarmed Blake Island, bringing with them their amassed wealth. With this newfound power in numbers and money, Richard Roslun began recruiting the living to join his ranks. As his numbers grew, so did his visions of grandeur. It was not long before he was vowing to take back his company, preferably by force.
Roslun Global had been renamed Lohman Industries by its new head, Will Lohman, Jr. Will was not an easy man to push around, and had done more than his fair share of pushing. When Richard Roslun went public with his threats to ‘eat Lohman Industries alive’, Will began to take them seriously.
Will beefed up security around the Zombie A.C.R.E.S. compound, now the heart of Lohman Industries. Extra security teams were flown in from around the world to protect Will and the Zombie A.C.R.E.S. compound from the impending threat of Roslun’s attack. This public show of force and muscles by both sides did nothing but aggravate the global tensions.
This is the new world of Zombie A.C.R.E.S. Our story picks up fifteen years after the incidents of AiZ and the upcoming comic series. The inevitable zombie apocalypse is always looming over the shoulders of the world, threatening to take hold at any moment. Come and join me as I begin to bring you the free weekly stories of this new world, only here at ZombieACRES.com.