Please Don't Interrupt My Nap...

...with a Taser and your baton, because I will surely overreact.

WARNING: FLESH-EATING NASTINESS AHEAD: I did promise another excerpt, though. This is from Chapter 3 of Grace Among the Dead, “The Wrong Kind of White People”:

Kim’s chin is on her chest where she bleeds out against the front of the sofa. I step around her, reaching down to snatch her wrists and pull her away from the sofa. The splinter snaps out of her belly as it catches on a corner of the overturned table.

Deputy Milner’s eyes pop comically as I lay Kim to rest between his legs. I pull my hunting knife and begin slicing away his uniform. Once I’ve got him stripped I go to the pantry and grab a couple of bottles of barbecue and steak sauce. I shake them out over his naked body, dabs of the red and brown mingling with the fat tears beading down his face. The only thing missing is an apple stuffed into his mouth. 

A high, keening whine rises through his gag as I turn to run up the stairs. I throw my books and toiletries and other loose items into my overnight bag. I zip up my suitcase. In less than a minute I’m pounding back down, suitcase in one hand, the bag over my shoulder. I look over at Deputy Milner as I reach the living room. I set my suitcase and bag down by the front door and cross into the kitchen. I take the scotch from the pantry and pour a glass. I step back into the living room, facing at a discreet distance across from the trussed deputy and the remains of the woman between his legs.

“Adam Milner,” I say, swirling the scotch in its glass. “Be it known to all and sundry, you are where you are now because you assaulted me in the course of an attempt to rob and murder me. You could have had this house, the hot running water, all of it. But for some weird pathological reason…who knows? Who cares? For ruining my nap, I sentence you and everyone you know to be eaten alive. Salud!”

I down the glass. Right on cue Kim’s corpse begins to stir. As she moans into un-life, the ruff-tuff creampuff who was Tasing me mere minutes ago squeezes his eyes shut and begins to sob.

Kim awakens to undead heaven, between the fever-hot legs of her first living meal. I accidentally thump the tip of my boot into the foot of the oversized chair and she doesn’t turn around. In the course of pushing herself up from the floor her cool, dead hand has closed around Deputy Adam Milner’s ankle.

I’d thought it would be all nice and ironic and shit if Kim had found the deputy’s junk and chowed down on that first. This is even better. The looks on both their faces—the eternal playground bully served his ultimate comeuppance, Kim’s mindless emotional hunger in full literal expression—yes, there’s the monster face!

God help me, have I turned into a monster, too? What would Claire think if she saw you right now? Or Sibyl?  Or Jack?

Well, they aren’t here, are they?

Kim chomps into the back of deputy’s leg like it was the world’s largest state fair turkey drumstick. Big yellow dollops of mustard sauce plop into the pooling blood on the floor, but Kim does her mindless cadaver best to slobber up as much as she can with her tongue and lower lip.

Shit.

No, I’m not enjoying this. That means I’m still okay, right?

Good Lord, what the blue screaming hell have I done?

Made a mess, by the sounds of it. By the sounds of it, they also had it coming. Fortunately, we have the rest of the novel to redeem ourselves.

These are the kinds of stories I like to tell. Never mind the weapons porn. I’m going beyond calibers and grains and stopping power and straight to the bleeding meat, and what it does to a man’s mind.  What mass death and the collapse of civilization does to a civilization that was well over halfway towards an every-man-for-himself hellscape long before the dead rose to take it all down.

I’m still finishing up the rewrite of Grace Among the Dead, but my first book, Bleeding Kansas is still available. It’s not your typical “the zombies came, we shot them” tale. If you’re truly fed up with things as they are and would love to see someone hit the reset button and make things interesting for a change, this is for you.

My critics say, “There’s no one to root for!” I quote Charles Bukowski: “If I bet on humanity, I’d never cash a ticket.” Check out what all the attitude cops, the Think Positive! slaves, the tone trolls, and other weeshes are whining about!

Grace Among the Dead: Book 2 of The Saga of the Dead Silencer 
Copyright © 2014, 2017 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.