Who Are These Cats?

...and will we be seeing them again after this?

The following opens Chapter 25 of my work in progress, The Wrong Kind of Dead:

We follow the gentleman in the gray suit, sunglasses and earpiece to the elevator bank. He mumbles something under his breath we don’t quite hear, a report into his lapel mic, I presume. We enter the elevator behind him and watch as he holds a card over an otherwise nondescript panel, causing a glowing ROOF button to appear on the touchpad. This button fades as he presses it.

We rush upward.

It’s not until our stop that we hear the helicopter. The doors open and we follow the man in the gray suit and sunglasses as he runs to the Blackhawk astride the big circle-H on the pad. The hatch slams behind us, the ground falls away. We barely have time to get our butts in our seats.

The morning sunlight bronzes a high, wooded valley of houses and streets below us, then more woods. The chopper covers the distance to the airport in less than a minute. We touch down beside a Gulfstream jet in an area well away from the concourses.

The hatch bangs open. We jump out and jog away beneath the pounding wash. The hatch slams closed, and the Blackhawk is already banking over the hangar and out of sight. I admire this pilot’s reflexes. I have a feeling he’s done much work in the “wilderness” outside of the Redoubts.

These grafs are all about getting Derek and Agnes Grace to a meeting that will take them jetting over zombie country where they will get an idea for how deeply screwed they’ll be in all those pages I haven’t written yet. But the characters here, the man in the gray suit and sunglasses and the quick-reflex chopper pilot are too good to let go. They may indeed help me solve some problems in the Final Boss.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, the first two books are available for those who enjoy zombie action with gore and wit and intrigue, available in Kindle and paperback, in Canada and the UK:

Thing 1.

Derek Grace leaves his sick wife in Colorado Springs for a job interview in Kansas City. But in a few short days the early summer cold becomes the Final Flu, and as infrastructure breaks down, Grace finds himself miles from home, trapped between anxious police and National Guard, and all those Final Flu victims arising from their mass graves to attack the living. The long-unemployed Grace soon discovers a new skill set that serves him well in the New Weird Order. He’s a long way from home, and the risen dead aren’t the only ones in his way.

Only the strong will survive BLEEDING KANSAS.

Thing 2.

Returning too late from his Kansas adventure to save his wife and teenage children, Derek Grace loses himself in booze, books, pills, and the occasional killing spree among the undead. But then a stowaway and her fatal secret flush the Dead Silencer from hiding and back into a busy post-apocalypse in progress, where he must decide whether life is worth living when he’s already lost everything that matters.



In the heart of darkest horror, you will find GRACE AMONG THE DEAD.

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