“True, I could do without all these funeral home rejects stumbling around looking to bite my ass off.”

I always chuckle at the heroes in other writers’ zombie apocalypses when they have their, “We will take it back” moment. It’s even more ridiculous than the boilerplate “We will rebuild” line you get at the end of most disaster porn stories, because...well, let Mr. Derek Grace, the Dead Silencer himself, explain this through first-person narration:

“You’re not much of a people person, are you?”

I laugh. “The only real ‘people persons’ left are the dead. They sure like people, don’t they? Mmm-mm. Yum-yum, eat ‘em up.”

“That’s just mean.”

“We brought it on ourselves, Kim. Finally, the human race is the next best thing to extinct and I can’t say I mind it.”

“You know you don’t mean that. If people come together, they could take it all back.”

“You’d think so. We could hunt the smelly yellow and green people-eaters to extinction, like we’ve done so much else. People need motivation, though. The woolly mammoth, sabre-tooth tiger, all those had value as either food or skins. All you get from killing walkers is a toxic pile of rot. People would rather scurry around like rodents from trash pile to trash pile than to….”

I shake my head clear of the “profundity” of these drunk-stoned thoughts. I might as well be speaking in tongues. I top off my glass, hoping the alcohol will dull my buzzing, stinging nerves.

“You’re really angry, aren’t you?”

“True, I could do without all these funeral home rejects stumbling around looking to bite my ass off.” I look at the woman across the table from me, and I’m almost startled sober by the realization. “You’re the first survivor I’ve seen since I got back to Colorado. My God, I suppose they’re all gone….”

There’s good news and bad news on that score. The bad news is they’re not all gone. The good news is...they’re not all gone. Grace Among the Dead is a story of Love, Redemption, and a Monster Truck. We meet some bad guys right out the gate. But we also meet some good people worth saving. (I know some of you bitched about that in regards to the denizens of Bleeding Kansas. Hey, what can I tell ya? I’m not exactly a people person, either. Most of us aren’t, which is why we apocalypse in the first place.)

Book 1 has ONE exploding head
on its cover.

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

They’re also available in Canada and the UK.

Yet Another Self-Absorbed Twit of a Writer Ruminates on Suicide and What It Means to Him

You no longer see it as death
so much as the end of worry
the finale of fatigue,
the null of aches, chills & coughs

and glorious emancipation
from that most hateful tyranny 
of other people’s schedules

“It’s just so selfish!”
screeched my ex-
girlfriend when I mentioned
having these thoughts. “You
don’t even think about
how this will affect 
everyone else
around you!”

“Maybe I’m just
tired of worrying about 
everyone else around me,” 
I shouted back.
“Maybe I’d like to
do something for myself
for a change.”

Really, all I wanted to do
then was sleep. I’d been up
nights and nights and nights
and the days were getting more
and more awkward 
as if the very sunlight 
was disgusted with my
presence.

“You’re still here?” Mister Sun
seemed to say

“Get off my ass” I’d snap back.

From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 2017 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

It’s One Goodbye After Another in the Post-Apocalypse

This scene from Chapter 2 of Grace Among the Dead is all the more poignant for me at this point in A.D. 2016, as I also find myself saying goodbye to a house of long years, and the memories of better times:

It was Sunday afternoon when I pulled up at my house on the north side of Colorado Springs. The streets were clear, but it was as hot as it was bright, which meant the dead haunted the doorways, or wherever they could find shade. I saw one getting to her feet from behind a hedge as I passed, another staggering out from behind a tree. I might as well have been the ice cream truck playing a merry tune, bringing all the half-rotted kiddies from their yards.

I parked in the driveway outside of the garage. I killed the engine and pulled out my house keys. “It’s me,” I said, as loudly as I dared as I opened the front door.

I pulled the screen door shut behind me and locked it before closing the front door. “It’s me,” I said again. I could feel the emptiness of the house. Not even a cat. I went into the kitchen. 

There was an odor coming from the door leading into the garage. I drew a deep breath and held it before throwing open the door. I should have known; this was the only place they could take the trash out. A good thing they weren’t here too long. 

The pantry stood empty. Even the plastic trash bags were gone. On the stove was a thin, battered, red spiral notebook with “DAD” written in bold Sharpie marker across the front. The pages in front were torn out so that only Sybil’s three-page note and some blank paper in back were left.

The date at the top of the first page was Thursday, May 15. That was my second day of more-or-less consciousness in Natalia, Kansas, still shaking off the painkillers given me after my plane crash the previous Saturday. While I was getting myself together, it was already too late for Sybil and Jack.

I left the kitchen to make my last tour through the rooms where we’d spent the last seven years of our lives. The last…it was all I could do to keep from being overcome by the very sound of this word in my head. 

I took a book from my son’s room (he had a good picture book on firearms we’d given him for Christmas), then some other books from my downstairs office. I found one of our overnight bags on the floor in the hall, as if someone had dropped it in their haste to get out. I put the books inside, along with some clothes from my bedroom. I spared a moment to look at the unmade bed, and the yellowy outline a heavily sweating body left on the fitted sheet. 

Standing in the light of the picture window looking over the backyard, I read as much as I could of Sybil’s note. Later, I would have it all but memorized.

The note goes on to detail Sybil and Jack’s ordeal holding down the house before they took the opportunity to leave their undead-infested neighborhood for rural Pueblo County. In reviewing this chapter for rewriting/remastering for the eventual omnibus edition of my series, I was struck by how heartbreakingly dark the story got, especially in regards to what happened with Claire Grace, and what the children were forced to do with their pets.

For all the choppy-chop, shoot-’em-up hijinks, the zombie apocalypse is a dark and sad place. Ultimately, THE SAGA OF THE DEAD SILENCER is about redemption through action. But there must be loss. So much loss.

Why Thomas Wolfe and I Are Getting the Hell Out of Dodge

I wrote this shortly after a road trip I took to the Baltimore/ Washington DC area in 1987. It’s strange how the American Deep South creates some of the best artists and art, yet so many of us have to put it in the rear view mirror to make that art happen.

The scrub oaks on the rolling sand hills,
the pines greening the ancient sand dunes

fade into the bare white bones of 
trees I recognize as 
alien. The familiar flattens 

into the coastal plain of 
Northern states and those 
Northern states of mind 
where restless Southern boys,
aloof in strangeness, might

furiously reproduce 
the diseases of their souls
in the laboratory
of another world far more friendly
than where those viruses incubated.

a common ground to be
as uncommon as I like
as the aches I’ve 
carried with me become
the only familiarity
which threatens but soon 

will flounder and drown
in a depth of distance
my car easily conquers.

___________________________________________________________________
From the forthcoming collection Nymphomagic Electroshock and Other Middle-Aged Complaints.
Copyright © 1987, 2017 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.

“To prepare a face to meet the faces”

There will be time, there will be time 
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; 
There will be time to murder and create 

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Here, our intrepid, soon-to-be-legendary zombie fighter realizes he’s not fighting people. These reanimated dead are human only in general appearance:

There’s no way Angie could have made a face like that when she was alive. Not on tequila, not on angel dust, not on a dare. Her teeth are dry like her eyes; they don’t glisten so much as glow with menace. This is a monster’s face. I realize now the worst wasn’t leaving her on the floor like a pair of dirty socks. It was letting this dutiful, sweet daughter of the paved-over prairies turn into this.

There will be a lot of dead-for-good bodies lying around like piles of dirty socks by the time this is all over. Read the full chapter with this passage here, or go ahead and get your copy of Bleeding Kansas in Kindle or paperback, and get your apocalypse on already.

“Like regular TV programming, this is all going away”

In which we find our hero cooking breakfast in a luxury hotel kitchen the morning after the first night of the living dead, awaiting the inevitable.

The timer beeps over the fry vat. I pull up the basket, bang it to the side to knock the oil off, and hook it to drain. The snap-clicks as I shut off the fryer and the grill—I wish I had something less trite than “sounds like the slamming of coffin lids,” but it’s all I got.

I hear the TV outside in the bar. I look around the kitchen. The bright overhead lights. The fry vats and electric grills. Humming. Buzzing. Functioning.

Like regular TV programming, this is all going away. 

I doubt there was even an evening shift to relieve at the power plants this a.m. How about the water and sewage treatment plants? How many of those workers were straining against the yellow tape when the dead kicked out of their winding sheets and clambered out of the trenches on each other’s backs?

 I pull up a stool. I could sit outside at the bar but I need to take all this in without the distractions of Tanner, the TV, and whatever might be pawing at the front plate glass in the lobby.

I’ve got the full chapter in serial form here. There’s so much going on in Bleeding Kansas and its sequel, Grace Among the Dead, I can afford to print up entire chapters. As it is, the Kindle editions cost less than a happy hour beer, yet deliver hours of deliriously crunk entertainment.

We commence the collapse 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 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.

###

Jack and Puff on Watch at the Basement Window Well

It’s a fine Colorado spring morning, and when it’s warm enough, I open the window of my office. The Call Smell of the Wild comes through, attracting our two youngest household feline units, Puff and Halloween Jack.

What's that?

What?

That. Over there.

Whoa, hey, what?

Now what were we looking at over here?

Never mind.