First Raid

by Tom Noel-Morgan

In the future, nature has recovered from the abuses of mankind and there is no more war. Sounds like heaven, but it really is not, for the price we paid was the end of the world as we knew it. Between latitudes 55° north and 55° south, there is a region known as the "Red Zone", where hordes of zombies inhabit ghost cities in the hundreds of thousands. But there are worse things than zombies lurking in the Red Zone. Mutant creatures have evolved that prey and thrive on the flesh of ghouls. To these beasts, a normal human is as appetising a meal as any zombie. More than 50 years after the Zombie Riots, the surviving nations of the world have all migrated to the Polar Regions, where the mutants can't survive. Trouble is everyone else has trouble surviving there too. Even after 50 years, foodstuffs and other reserves are in relative short supply in the wintery regions of our planet. For that reason, independent adventurer-capitalists venture into the forbidden regions of the globe to seize resources and salvage equipment invaluable to the survival of mankind. They are the Zone Raiders, and young Rex Raleigh has decided he wants to be one. Yet the question remains: did he do it for the right reasons? Book 3 of the series explores Rex Raleigh's very first adventure into the Red Zone, as a trainee surveyor, and explains what made him decide to follow the dangerous career of a Zone Raider.