The Dead of September

What a delightfully ironic title, a beautiful jumping-off point! Quick, while it still seems like a good idea....

And so we enter into that final third of the year I call the Chute. Labor Day is at the top of the slide. New Year’s Day and the gray abyss of January and February are at the bottom. It’s the most happening part of the year, the one we spent the other two-thirds climbing up from. The oppressive heat of summer is easing. School is back in session, and the excitement of high school football beneath the Friday night lights—the only form of America’s best sport worth watching—is in the air. There’s also professional football and college ball if you’re into that. 

Thank God for artist Evelyn Sprouse-Rowe and her tireless attention to the glass surfaces of the San Luis Valley.

Of course, Halloween, and more Halloween, until, finally, it’s Halloween. The memes about pumpkin spice this, that, and the other began showing up on my Facebook timeline as early as three weeks ago. With some effort, you can shoehorn some autumn in between Halloween and Thanksgiving before Christmas overwhelms everything—and then abruptly leaves us alone in the gray, freezing gloom.

Ironically, Old Spice still smells lively and fresh after all these years.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s an old complaint of mine, brought up by my perception of the year having moved way too fast. We’ll lay it to rest here. No, really. This is it. 

So what’s up? Well, it was a busy month with my novel in progress, The Wrong Kind of Dead....

Big weekend in Tater Town. Our spuds were coffee’d up and ready to roll.

I’ve been trying all summer long to describe what I’ve been doing. Frankly, I feared people would freak when they learned I’d stopped forward progress at Chapter 25, page 221, to go back and rewrite Chapters 2 and 5.

What happened was I’d realized my supporting cast had no supporting background to justify any kind of emotional reaction to what I had coming next. My flashback in Chapter 5 describing How Agnes Met Elyssa and Later Went On To Meet Derek was too lightly sketched, and did nothing to promote a proper understanding of their relationships to one another. 

While Agnes is a Frankensteinian creation of pieces of six women I’ve known across the years who somehow came to life one night in my Colorado Springs basement office, Elyssa was her Manic Pixie Dream Teen Sidekick with a Dark Side. This was entertaining enough to get her through that last part of Grace Among the Dead, where she and Agnes appeared midway through to complicate the Dead Silencer’s life. But the fact remained that I somehow had a 19-year-old woman overseeing the affairs of the camp’s women, many of whom were older. Even Brother Christopher, Derek Grace’s taciturn, no-nonsense 20-year-old in charge of the camp’s young men, defers to this slender girl not yet out of her teens. How does that happen?

Elyssa Marie Godwin had to make her bones and the people around her have to know about it. Therein hangs the saga of an older sister and dutiful daughter who didn’t mind taking care of the people in her life, but wished she wasn’t taken for granted. Who was slightly more mature than her peers for what her circumstances forced her into, and took a dim view of the usual teenage tomfoolery, but was tolerant. Perhaps too tolerant. Elyssa used to put up with a lot. This was the world she lived in, these were the people of that world. What else could she do?

Then that world ended in blood and horror and Elyssa was alone. She met a woman 16 years older who still had people she was responsible for, but was alone, all the same—and doing what she could on her terms as best she could in a world always working against her. My 19-year-old semi-outsider who spent her senior year of high school online so she could take care of her injured mother, now had someone to model herself on. 

The New Weird Order is ugly and mean, but she is not taken for granted. Here, she means something to the people who mean something to her. Elyssa hates and fears the living dead to the extent she prefers Agnes and Derek to do the fighting, yet she loves where she’s at what she does in a way she never knew possible in her old life. This love makes her fierce, and earns the reverence of those around her.

My wife made this. If I were to do this over again I’d have Agnes’ hair up and her big, owlish driving glasses on. In all the stories I’ve written over the years I generally avoided even thinking about what my characters looked like. Now I have to know how tall they are, their favored manner of dress, all that jazz, even if I don’t mention it outright in the narrative

Of course, show don’t tell, and all that. So I’m breaking my rule of no chapters over 10-12 pages long five-fold by showing how Elyssa comes into her own. Before one wonders if I’m getting a little too far into The Talking Too Much Dead territory, I remind the reader that the reputation Elyssa makes for herself is during the fall of civilization at the cold dead hands of the risen dead. I have an opportunity to do two things absolutely necessary for a superior zombie post-apocalypse reading experience.

First, I’m taking the opportunity to tell a tale of the fall of civilization before the hordes of the living dead. This was what Fear the Walking Dead was supposed to be about until it went off the rails by the third or fourth episode. It’s a hard fact of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, whether it’s zombies or nukes or an alien invasion, that the most interesting parts of all that are when everything familiar begins falling apart. 

At best, it’s done slowly. You notice little things out of order. Awful things happening all around you getting ignored, then downplayed by the media. The military is moving large amounts of materiel from their bases. Some personnel disappear under new orders, others are left behind, others who had separated from the military are called back into service—for mass burial duty. Which goes wrong.

And then it’s a matter of sitting around waiting for the power to go out. You know it’s going out, and that when it goes out it’s going out for the last time. This is while you’re waiting for whomever shows first, the living dead hungry for your living flesh, or roving gangs of the living seeking that and everything else.

Secondly, I’m establishing characters with history and personality whom we will get upset for should anything happen to them. That’s all.

Imagine all this with no people. Just random dead lying under cars or squatting behind corners looking to grab your ankle and pull it into its mouth. That car coming down the road? Marauders. If you can’t escape or hold them off, be sure to save your last bullets or grenade to take you and your people out, because it will be a most prolonged and painful end for all if you’re captured.

For my part, I’m enjoying writing about women trying to make their way in world that’s become seriously, no-kidding-this-time hostile to their freedoms. This is my chance to show the pinch-faced ideologues how it’s done. As in, “with heart,” which is something such people don’t have, so they won’t understand it. It’ll just be loads of fun watching their heads explode when Agnes and Elyssa emerge as heroes all the more-or-less happy, well-adjusted people of both sexes enjoy, because these ladies aren’t doing anything to prove anything in the name of anything. They’re just getting by the best they can until they reach Abundant Life, and meet Brother Christopher and his crew, and eventually Derek Grace.

Craziest of all for me is writing in third person past tense as opposed to my usual first person present. It’s a sweet shift of gears, although I still don’t understand the problems people have with the most common (because effective) setup for action-adventure stories.

Anyway, I’m almost through this, and doing minimal edits along the way so I can get back to Chapter 25 and start the process towards everyone’s Darkest Hour. Who will survive? I can’t tell you, only that I intend it to hurt when the person that falls, falls.

It’s okay, he’s just looking for...food.

  

Slouching Towards Spring, Waiting To Be Born

Another progress report, accompanied by random photos. Blame it on the weather.

It looks more like May in April. Which makes sense, because it’s been more like April in March. I could use the break on the heating fuel bill, so there’s that. Note the tornado icon at top with the temperature. That’s what the widget shows by default when it’s not working. It’s almost as startling as Saturday’s predicted high and low, which are early summer numbers.

WEATHER REPORT
My wife and I like to joke (so much as we can joke about it) that this has been the hardest easy winter we’ve ever seen. For all it felt like those post-Christmas, dead-of-winter blues were going to smother us, in terms of general Colorado high country weather, it’s been preternaturally warm.

Even along the Front Range where we used to live, we would have periods of zero degrees Fahrenheit and lower during the winter. Those days can go for weeks at a time here in the San Luis Valley. As for the winter of 2017-18, we may have had a couple of near-zero events, but nothing memorable. The La Niña phenomenon in the North Pacific Ocean tends to affect winters in Colorado this way, though, so don’t expect a screed on “global warming/climate change” here. This is just that kind of year. 

Indeed, I’m grateful for the warmth, if wary of the dry conditions that come with this. I’ve stood at the picture windows at sunset celebrating every extra minute we’re getting with each passing day. It’s great to feel good for a change.

This is like 80°F in north Minnesota in February. Unusual, but that doesn’t mean “never.”

ON THE PROGRESS OF THE FINAL NOVEL IN MY ZOMBIE ACTION-ADVENTURE SERIES
As always, it seems to be two steps forward, one step back, then another step back, then three steps forward, and then something else when it comes to finishing my latest novel. Over the last couple of weeks, it’s been one-half page forward, two pages back.

This is the best development to happen in a long time. 

I’m at a very difficult part of The Wrong Kind of Dead. I’ve transported my main characters from the thick of the flesh-eating undead mobs to a remote sanctuary in the Wyoming mountains, where our heroes learn that even some television sitcoms remain in production for the pleasure of the overclass, for whom the Black Resurrection was merely a matter of inconvenience.

These parts of a zombie story, in which the living protagonists change venue, adjusting to new human antagonists by way of setting up for the final confrontation involving the living dead, are stupid-tricky, for reasons you can see for yourself watching TV’s The Walking Dead. The narrative can bog down in a thick, gray mud of who’s-mad-at-whom, what’s-this-shady-character-up-to? soap opera. The living dead, when they show up, aren’t so much objects of mortal terror, they are a relief.

Thank goodness, you finally made it! They’ve been arguing with each other all season, DO SOMETHING!

Here, I have an separate, alien world to build in the midst of an uncanny valley. I’m already playing with one touchy theme, now I’m playing with some serious metaphorical/ philosophical nerve agents here. The charges must be set just so, and quickly. At the end of the day this is an action-adventure novel set in the zombie post-apocalypse. The audience must never be permitted to forget this.

I had a story bible started for all of my books. I’ve only detailed them so far. It’s time to detail them a little more. All aspects of the three-book narrative arc must harmonize.

Above is the complete guide to Chapter 1. I’m not giving that much away here, but you can see where I set rules regarding portrayals of the zombies, along with initial themes I’m playing with. Each chapter description opens and closes with the opening and closing sections of the chapter. Isolating them thus from the manuscript has enabled many an improvement on these transitions.

This has occasioned yet another reading of the complete manuscript, which has resulted in two pages of it falling away. Striking redundant sentences and punching up the action made for a far more powerful narrative. I’m still combing through the earlier chapters while adding onto the latest. So far, everything is making sense beyond those points where this book and the one before it went off the rails in the past.  

It’s great to feel great about my writing for a change. Everything is up and running at optimum. Best of all, this book, along with the rest of the trilogy, will have legs. For years to come The SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER will be the kind of story by which other zombie stories will be judged. I certainly hope to have people working harder at them. A little effort goes a long way towards keeping things fresh and fun, especially in a limited genre like this one.

Speaking of fun....

This might have been the place to put a photo of me sitting at my desk looking thoughtful, but I’m a mess.

SOCIAL MEDIA FUN
Given the controversies surrounding the Internet-ancient institutions of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, I’ve been looking at expanding to the emergent alternatives. I have a Minds.com account, but I’ve done very little posting to it. Frankly, I’m still not sure what to do with it. No one I know is there. What do I even talk about among these total strangers? It’s the same problem I have starting a podcast.

I’m grateful these backups are there, though. (Just off the top of my head, see also: Spreaker, Hooktube, Gab, Voat, Bitchute.) I don’t see myself giving up on the Big Three until I’m forced to, although I am making changes to how I do business with them. For instance, Facebook has been too handy for keeping up with people I like keeping tabs on. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a few...I don’t know if I could call them “fans,” or what. They’re good people, though, so I’m not ghosting them. 

It was a week or so ago, however, that I noticed birthdays for people on my Friends list coming up—and I had completely forgotten these people even existed. Going through my list, I found half a dozen deactivated accounts. Many of the rest were simply inactive. That was an easy pruning job.

I did come to wonder why I was still Friends with some people, though. I wondered why I bothered with some groups.

This pruning was not done so cavalierly. However, I did welcome the opportunity to reflect upon whom and what I want in my life. I’ve been through more changes in my general outlook and attitude in this sixth decade of my life than any other time in my existence, most of them in the last two years. This is a spring cleaning years overdue. 

This, too, feels good. So much lighter and freer. 

“There’s a feeling I get/When I look to the West/And my spirit is crying for”...breakfast, as I cross an uncharacteristically empty US 160 in downtown Monte Vista. It’s an early Wednesday morning in April, though. It’ll fill with cross-Valley traffic soon enough. In seven weeks, come Memorial Day Weekend, it’ll be wall-to-wall campers and RVs.

 

FIRST THREE PODCASTS OUTLINED
I tried writing scripts for these things. It proved to be a fun exercise in stream-of-consciousness, write-like-you-talk composition for all of two pages before I realized it wasn’t going to work. What might be fun to write would be drudgery to read. 

I might read off some short pieces already here on the blog for added content—provide, provide, as the poet advised—but to script an entire half-hour show is just more than I care to do. Moreover, I’ll need to do 45-minute to hour-long shows if I care to hit to hit the big time with this, which I need to do to pay these bills. That’s a lot of pages of script to be writing when I should be writing my novel, or blogposts.

So, based on a couple of other podcasts I’m studying, I’ve got the sections mapped out. I don’t even have to record the pieces in order. Select a topic, put down the bullet points I need to elaborate upon, and go. It’s more than I ever did when I was in Toastmasters. My best speeches for them, as enjoyable for myself as it was my audience, was when I got up with just the vaguest outline in my head. Honestly, it wasn’t even an outline. I had a couple of ideas, and I simply improvised with what I knew. 

The irony here that almost makes me laugh—it’s more pathetic than funny—is that, if there’s one thing I learned in Toastmasters, I don’t enjoy public speaking as much as I’d thought I did.  Moreover, unlike years past, I don’t feel the urge to share my opinions, even with friends.

It’s taken long decades to come to this blessed state. I can only imagine how much more successful I’d be as a working American citizen if I’d come to this peculiar mental state sooner. Now I have to turn that around. That is, if I want to be successful as an author and, by necessary extension, Internet personality. 

Which I must. I’ve got bills to pay. Time to be a song-and-dance man again. It never was enough to be an author, after all.

Any day now. I have a feeling April 2018 is going to be one of those life-changing affairs.

A long road across flat, dusty, grease-grassed high valley floor to...DESTINY.  Or something.

State of the Apocalypse, Mid-January 2018: What’s Happening with THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER

Number 8 will cause severe gastrointestinal distress! Or something.

This story is good for two, maybe three podcast episodes, so I can’t give the whole thing away. Suffice it to say that, over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season, I passed a major narrative milepost with my third book. With this major change in setting/venue comes a bit of world-building I need to square away as quickly and unobtrusively as possible on my way to the narrative’s Darkest Hour.

Longtime readers of this blog will note I’ve made this announcement before, three, nearly four years ago. I’m unclear how I got slowed down so hard in 2015, except that the pressures to get our house in Colorado Springs ready for sale were making themselves known. I was coming back from my three-mile daily walks more and more depressed for the accelerating deterioration of the neighborhoods and parks, the crumbling and increasingly garbage-filled and graffiti’d aqueduct. 

If I were to look it up, I could pinpoint the exact date all writing on THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER stopped in early March 2016. That was the night after my Jeep got broken into at the once-upscale supermarket where my son worked. The thieves had pulled fuses from the fuse box with the apparent idea of disabling the vehicle. We’d leave it overnight in the parking lot; the thieves would come, reinstall the fuses, and collect a sweet, well-cared-for Jeep. 

Fortunately, the vehicle started and we managed to get it home. While my son and I fretted over getting replacement fuses and what appeared to be damage to the electricals in the steering column, my wife fell into severe pain that necessitated her being checked into the hospital.

In April, the busted up futon that pulled the room together from that right wall was taken apart and taken out by my wife. There were good reasons for doing this in regards to selling the house, but my office at Deep Haven Drive in Colorado Springs no longer felt like home.

I’ll never forget that moment I plopped down in my desk chair after visiting my wife at the hospital. I looked at the screen and I knew. An iron curtain had dropped inside my head. I no longer had access to that part of my brain that figured out how to write novels. 

I could spend another 3,000 words describing all that piled on throughout this depressed period, which included us moving 200 miles away from our grown children. As it turned out—and it pains me to confess this—I was lost in the psychic horse latitudes, dead in the water on finishing THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER for eleven straight months. 

That’s right. From near the beginning of March 2016 through the beginning of February 2017. Despite forcing out a few blogposts here and there, I had several panicky periods in which I wondered if I remembered how to write at all.

It would take more than 3,000 words to describe how I broke the spell, undertaking one chapter per day rewrites of Bleeding Kansas and Grace Among the Dead, and rewriting, re-plotting, re-everything redux though The Wrong Kind of Dead to the point I’m at now. 

It’s mid-January already, though, and there are few more things to be done. That is, aside from getting to this Darkest Hour, and resolving a three novel series that’s been growing and kicking around two different hard drives since 4 November 2011.

Never mind that. Let’s get to the good stuff. What’s the new book about?

Directly beneath the Great Wall of Bukowski lies the 2017 yet-to-be-released digital remasters of my first two books, and what there is of the galleys for Book 3.

A year has passed since the fall of civilization in The Wrong Kind of Dead, and through a series of fortunate/unfortunate events, Derek Grace and his people learn where the elites disappeared to when the dead rose to eat the living.

In an effort at post-nationalism, the surviving elites call their confederation of remote rural redoubts the Network. The outside world where the dead roam is the Wilderness. The people in the Network entertain themselves with narrated drone-cam footage of survivors struggling and fighting in the Wilderness, which is how Derek Grace and his people come to Jackson Redoubt in Wyoming.

As aficionados of the genre know, there is no such thing as safety in the zombie post-apocalypse. Reunited with Dr. Clyde Hearn from Bleeding Kansas, Grace learns that the colonies of flesh-eating bacteria animating the dead are evolving. They’ve developed hierarchy, with the smart ones at top learning not only how to find living meat, but how to husband it. It turns out there are living people who work with the upper level dead to manage other living captives for food as at least one millions-strong horde they know of travels.

How did such a system come to be? Moreover, how can this horde know how to head for the Redoubt? How is Derek Grace going to save his family, when movement outside the Redoubts is restricted by armed perimeter drones? They’re caught between the pincers of a capricious totalitarian society and sheer numbers of increasingly clever, evolving dead which threaten to overwhelm all.

Well, that was a lot more fun than talking about my stupid personal problems. I haven’t even gotten to the rogue colonel, what we learn of the fate of the rest of the planet, etc.

I’ll have to save it for the podcasts. When I get the  nerve to do them, that is. Which has to be soon, because it’s Patreon or bust for the old man here. Gotta get that ancillary content going.

Personal problems, again. Feel free to hit my PayPal while I work through this.

Chapter 1 of The WRONG KIND of DEAD: “Unbearable”

From the ALL-NEW, Yet-To-Be Proofed and Published FINAL BOOK of the SAGA of the DEAD SILENCER

Most people know to make quiet and back away upon discovering a mama bear with her cubs. I’m sure even the dead obeyed this essential instinct a few months ago, before the winter’s hard freezes immobilized them.

Like the bears, though, the bacteria animating the dead went into hibernation. When the thaw came, it awoke ravenous. The urgency to devour raw, living flesh shuts down all sense of self-preservation in the host cadavers’ brains. Roaring furiously, mama bear rears up on two legs and swats these humanoid beasts into spinning pieces. Still, they come, hooting jubilantly for their meat.

Round-the-clock exposure to the elements has weathered the corpse-flesh of every race, color, and creed into the same pale, jaundiced leather. Their clothing hangs in ribbons of blood-rotted cloth, the backs of their trousers and skirts eaten away by the toxic scat they pass after consuming living flesh. It looks like mama bear climbed with her two cubs to this rocky shelf to get away from these ghouls. Unfortunately, the walls around this shelf are 25 to 30 feet of vertical rock. They’re trapped. I’d need a rappel to get down to them from where I am.

But to get up to where the bears are from the base of this ridge, one would have to climb nearly 75 feet of steep, naked rock. The dead wouldn’t have attempted anything like this when they were last active. Judging by the slimy brown wetness on their hands, the successful climbers still had flesh left to wear off in getting here. The dry-boned ones can’t keep a grip. Much angry wailing follows as they flip and tumble down the slope, taking out many of their fellows on their way.

Mama bear rears up again, in a halting, staggering motion, and for a moment I fear she might fall over. The outline of her ribs shows through her fur. I’d ease over to the wooded ledge on my level of the ridge to see how many ghouls are still coming after this starved and cornered bear, but I don’t dare move. The first thing these monsters do when they find their feet is twist their heads to either side, sniffing the air. They smell us; I’m sure of it.

I’m fairly certain (I think) they can’t get up the walls around the shelf, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try. As berserker reckless as they are, there is also an eerie sense of purpose about these post-freeze dead. It’s not something I want to test.

Mama bear swats one gore-swollen tick of a man so hard his head flies from his body. Claws out, she slashes one former cubicle drone stem to stern. He falls in halves, one side, then another, about the growing pile-carpet of corpses.

The numbers are against her, though. At first it’s one, then two that manage to avoid mama bear’s swinging paws. Soon, half a dozen of them are staggering about the bodies and body parts in the clearing. While mama fights four deaders, two others are going after the cubs. Mama bear’s preoccupation allows one more to surmount the lip of the shelf, then three more after him.

Squealing piteously, the cubs charge up a narrow slope of scree to a rocky outcrop eight feet up from the floor of the shelf. For a moment both seem to be running in place as the scree rolls and slides beneath their paws. Only one finds the traction to get there before the other.

The second cub cries out as a woman in the rags of a floral print dress grabs it by its rear legs, adjusting her grip to bring its soft belly to her mouth. She falls backwards, a shock of fur poking from her mouth as a young man in a metal band shirt pulls the cub away. He grapples with the man whose shirt front and tie are rotted away from the multiple bibs of gore he’s slobbered there. The remaining knot of his tie resembles a dog collar. He grabs one leg and rips it away towards himself, making barking, laughing noises at the man in the remains of the T-shirt. 

I hear the bone snap in the cub’s leg, the cub shrieking, mama bear’s anguished roar as she sees and hears but can’t get away. A teenage girl in a dirty bra, the shreds of flannel pajama bottoms flapping about her legs like filthy pennants, clings to mama bear’s back, pulling her fur away with her teeth as the burly young thing in a muscle shirt circles behind, and the shirtless middle-aged man in soiled Bermuda shorts goes straight for her belly. 

Mama bear falls forward, crushing the man in the Bermuda shorts. The remaining ghouls pile upon her back. She attempts to roll over on top of these newcomers, but her strength is gone.

As is my tolerance for the sound of that little cub’s cries. I pull the crossbow from my shoulder harness and nock an arrow. I spend more time than I’d like getting my breathing under control. 

I want to take the cub out of its misery but its head thrashes in agony. I have a better shot at Barking Laughing Man. I’m nocking another arrow as he falls. Metal Band T-shirt is next. Now the cub, but a large woman in a soiled pink shift lumbers into my line of sight. The shaft thumps into her back. 

It might as well be the kiss of a gentle breeze for the way she sets upon the twitching and mewling cub. I aim for her head. It takes two more precious shafts to drop her sprawling atop the little bear, smothering its cries. Her generous mass requires the efforts of three large ghouls to wrestle her from the remains.

They’ll have her off in a minute. Mama bear is down, her face in the dirt. These hijacked remains of humans, people who once had names, jobs, and debt, even siblings, parents, children, and pets, they sprawl across her body, rising and falling with her dying breaths. They cling with their rock-sharpened finger-bones exposed through their bloodied hands, burying their faces deep into her fur as they gnaw through to the pale flesh beneath.

At last, one of my arrows finds mama bear’s head. I drop three more ghouls, but that still leaves six to feast on her carcass. I don’t have many arrows left, and we’ve got to get home. At least no more are climbing over the edge of the shelf. Even better, the ones already there, tucked into their respective meals, have taken no notice of their downed fellows. An empty cage of ribs lies where a baby bear was once. A lanky young man tugs at the head. He nips at the face, then figures what the hell and curls up with the cub’s head between his knees, greedily gnawing the flesh from its skull. 

I feel her small hand slipping into mine. “Daddy?”

I look down at nine-year-old A.J. She took to calling me Daddy around Christmas. She tugs my arm and nods towards the cub on the outcrop. I’m about to open my mouth in a doomed attempt to convince her I can’t afford the arrows when I see something that makes me pull her to me, my hand over her mouth to stifle the scream I know must come. 

The dead not snorting and gulping down every bloody gobbet of flesh from mama bear and the dead cub are closing in on the surviving cub. Three groups of two each carry the remains of their fallen between them. The first couple throws the body at the foot of the wall beneath the ledge. The other two couples follow suit. 

They’re building a ladder of corpses to their terrified prey on the ledge. The three men and two women stand aside as the alpha of their group, a tall man in the rags of a suit, puts his foot upon the bodies and lifts himself up, his long, yellow fingers stretching towards his meal.

The cub leaps off the ledge, its hind paws tearing into the face of the alpha. The cub manages to land without hurting itself, but the dead are turning to catch it. The cub bounds over the corpse-littered floor of the shelf, straight for the ledge. A.J. cries out into my hand as it leaps over the edge into space.
Forgetting my previous avoidance of the ledge alongside our terrace, A.J. and I grab hold of the trees along the edge in time to see the cub hit the slope one-quarter of the way down. It bounces and splays in midair before landing in the writhing pile of corpses and corpse-parts at the foot of the ridge.

The stench is eye-watering. The widening streaks of thick, brown corpse gravy oozing down the rock have joined to make one vast, slippery sheet of old, dead blood. What was merely difficult to climb is now impossible, and the latecomers slide downwards to join the masses groaning at the foot of the ridge. 

I squeeze A.J.’s shoulders and we begin creeping away. With the bears dead and no more ghouls coming over the ledge, the only noises from the rock shelf below us are slurping, smacking, and moans of pleasure as the new lords of the food chain take their meat. Baby bear is thoroughly skeletonized. Things will get nasty once mama bear’s carcass is stripped. 

It’s a long walk into the trees before we escape the foul sounds. There’s got to be some place where the people aren’t. Where the dead would have to roam far to find us. So what if the gasoline is going bad and I have no idea where to lead our tribe, now with six newborns and another mother ready to pop? It’s hero time. 

“When are we leaving?” says A.J, jogging alongside of me. 

“I need to talk to your mother first,” I say. 

“We have to go,” she says. 

“Tell your mother what you saw, then.” Agnes will raise hell at me for having A.J. anywhere near the stinkers, but it should help emphasize the urgency of our situation. 

“Brother Christopher would have saved those bears,” says A.J.

“If he’d had everyone in his squad coordinated around the rim, maybe. Even then, there’s no way those bears were getting down from that shelf. They were dying there one way or another. They should have run along with the first two waves.”

I’m talking about the stampedes across the mountain a couple of weeks back. Rabbits, squirrels, deer, mountain lions, and bears—even dogs and cats, swarms of rats and mice, foxes and coyotes—charged through our yards and kept us inside for two days at a time. Christopher and his men tried culling what they thought would be easy meat from the charging herds. Not a chance. You were as liable to be trampled as anything. Or attacked, as happened to Justin with that one big dog of the pack that nearly took his arm off. Everything, everyone is hungry and scared.

The tears brim in A.J.’s eyes. “You still coulda—”

We freeze at the sound of engines. Multiple vehicles, and not the kind we own. A.J. follows me up the rise overlooking the road below. Where I left the golf cart out in plain sight.

“All right, warrior princess, time to put on your cloak of invisibility.” I look around. Smart kid, she didn’t wait for me to tell her. If they stop here by the golf cart…well, A.J. should be able to find her way home. 

Whether she still has a home by the time she gets there is another matter.

NEXT EPISODE: Chapter 2, “Uphill Both Ways”

For the price of a happy hour drink, you can enjoy many delirious hours among the delightful hellscapes of my first two SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER books, available in Kindle and paperback from Severed Press. We commence the crash of civilization in Bleeding Kansas, wherein our intrepid hero Derek Grace must survive a plane crash, combat with the undead at the local Wal-Mart, an exploding fire truck, a female hardbody assassin, and lots of hungry walking dead people-things.

Book 1 has ONE exploding head
on its cover.

I’m told it reads even better in German. This edition from Luzifer Verlag also sports a hellacious one-of-a-kind cover courtesy of ace artist Michael Schubert:

You can buy this German version stateside here.
You know you wanna.

Book 2, Grace Among the Dead, steps up the game with a tale of love and redemption, the living dead, and a flame-throwing monster truck. We’ve got an arc going from decadence to...respectability?...for our hero. As close as it gets, anyway. You should savor this big book o’ hell while it lasts, because things are about to go completely to shit.

Book 2 has TWO exploding heads.
See the pattern here?

They’re also available in Canada and the UK.

###