by Alexander Kjerulf
What if one group fighting the Zombie apocalypse were not complete dysfunctional idiots? When the zombie apocalypse happens, a group of four highly gifted college students have to work together to build a safe base, study the zombies closely and design and build weapons to take them down, all while making as many gratuitous Firefly references as possible, They also have to create a stable, well-functioning society for themselves and other survivors and eventually try to figure out what caused the outbreak and how to stop it. This darkly humorous story is The Martian meets World War Z (the book, not the terrible movie). I have written the first 65,000 words of the book already and will post here regularly. I would LOVE to hear any comments or feedback. This book was written100% by a human with LLMs used occasionally for research.
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 6 Oct 2026, 04:08 UTC
Entry forecast updated 6 Oct 2026, 04:08 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Not enough recent follower history to estimate a shadow rank yet.
beats 83% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 34% of similar stories
Hidden gem — exposure is the bottleneck
Readers who find this story follow it at a high rate; there just aren't enough of them. In our cohort data, near-daily posting lifted the odds of reaching 25 followers from ~0% to 17% — more chapters, shoutout swaps and ads buy the eyeballs this conversion deserves.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 10–19 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.
