State of the Apocalypse: A Lunch Date with Abby Cadaver

This is exactly where I am with The Wrong Kind of Dead as of 3:39 p.m., GMT -7, on 13 December 2015. What follows from pp. 217-218 of my work-in-progress is NSFW, NSFL, not safe for anything. If you puke, don’t say I didn’t warn you. This is flat nasty:

The camera follows Abby as she jerks and pulls the big man alongside of her. Once she gets to a spot near the bridge over the creek, with the trees in the background, she halts, and slaps the man hard across his face. He stops his whimpering long enough for Abby to grasp his naked buttocks and pull him to her. She silences whatever else might follow with her lips on his.

Judging by his build, this soldier invested many hours in the weights room. All that strength and power he worked so hard for proves useless against the monster animating the firm, feminine form of whoever’s child this used to be. By the bulging of his eyes and cheeks, she’s working her cold white tongue inside his mouth. He squirms helplessly as one hand grips his gluteals, the other claws around the back of his head.

Abby pulls back, her face alight as if she just found love, before burying her face into the pectoralis major above his left nipple. The naked man screams as Abby gnaws and pulls a chunk of muscle-meat with her teeth, throwing her head back to gulp at the blood while masticating the tissue. The hot red blood stands out starkly against her cold ivory flesh. Her legs wrap around one of his and her hips grind and pump as she plunges her face into the soldier’s chest for a second helping.

“Can you just tell me the takeaway here?” I say. “Other than there are some dead skanks out there who get sexually aroused eating hunky boys?”

I’ve got to shovel the snow from the driveway while thinking of Dr. Hearn’s reply to Derek Grace. The living dead have evolved throughout the SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER but there’s nothing magical to them. They don’t use telepathy; they don’t sprint. They have developed hierarchy, however. The elite practice discipline to improve themselves while their lieutenants enforce unit cohesion among the rank and file. They communicate via body language and chemical signals, like ants. 

Although they don’t talk, the upper caste dead have distinct personalities. If you think Abby Cadaver here is a pip, wait until you meet the Emperor of Ice Cream.  

As the living dead’s preferred food source has managed to make itself scarce in every sense of the word, they have determined an ecologically lethal way to flush it out. The Emperor’s plan is so brilliant Derek Grace and the best minds among the surviving humans might not be able to stop his millions-strong hordes of flesh-eating corpses. The numbers are against them as it is.

To quote Tommy Lee Jones’ character in No Country for Old Men, if this ain’t a mess, it’ll do ‘til the mess gets here. I’ve got a lot to sort out. Good thing I have a driveway full of wet, heavy snow. It’ll be good to get this head full of monsters out into the sunshine for a change. Too much time in the basement makes me strange.

Meanwhile, here are the first two books building to this final flesh orgy of macabre apocalyptic mayhem. My saga starts off very basic, then gets subtly weirder as it goes along. These books are 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.