Shelley Youngren

When the boy genius, Zebulon, decides to run away from home in his hand-made spaceship he fails to discover his sister, Marsyas, who has hidden herself on board. With her extra, uncalculated weight on board he finds that the ship has veered far from its course.

A meteor strikes a houseboat in the swamps near a southern town populated by Yankees with fake accents. The people on the houseboat become zombies who feed on the alligators in the swamp. Once they run out of alligators, they start going for the citizens. A local scientist tries to figure out what's happening to people once they start disappearing.