by Joe McKinney
Then I took up the post I’d just stolen from him. I looked through the scope and watched the battle taking place around the fountain. Ashcroft’s men, who had a reputation as the best private army in the Zone, were earning their stripes. I saw at least fifty of Nessel’s soldiers dead in the courtyard, and it looked like their advance was starting to break apart. Despite their numerical superiority, they just weren’t as well-disciplined, or as well-trained, as Ashcroft’s troops.
Ashcroft himself was leading the fight. I saw him waving a machine gun over his head, yelling at his men to hold their positions.
I went to work on Nessel’s men, and as I started putting them down, one by one, I swept the scope across Ashcroft’s position. He stopped yelling long enough to look my way. All at once he realized it was me doing the firing now, and he gave me an exaggerated overhand salute.
The tide of the battle turned, and soon, Nessel’s men broke ranks and ran. Ashcroft followed up their retreat, and his men carved the retreating enemy up into pockets, showing no mercy.
Gradually, the steady, thunderous roll of the battle faded, and all that was left was the occasional sporadic popping of small arms fire. Ashcroft’s men were still dealing with the infected, but those too were getting mopped up.
I could see the mood among Ashcroft’s men changing. They had won big, and now they knew it.
With nothing left to shoot at, I got down from the wall and went over to where I’d left Nessel to die. I tossed his body onto the hood of the Humvee and drove straight through the gates to the hotel.
I parked in front of the fountain.
Ashcroft’s men stopped their celebrations to watch me, and Ashcroft himself came over to see what was going on. He took one look at Nessel’s body and whistled. Then he looked at me and smiled.
Behind him, coming out of the hotel at a run, was Heather. She ran right past her father and straight into my arms, pressing her lips into mine with an eagerness that I think surprised us both.
Then I felt a strong hand clamp down on my shoulder, pulling me back. It was Ashcroft. “You did real good,” he said and offered me his hand.
“Thank you, sir.” But I noticed he had planted himself squarely between me and his daughter.
“I owe you big, Andrew.”
I shrugged.
In the background I heard Naylor giving orders to the men to start damage control. After he got the men moving, he came back to Ashcroft and gave a report. Ashcroft listened in silence, nodding his head, and when Naylor was finished, he gave him some more orders to relay to the troops.
Then he turned to me and said, “Andrew, it looks like we’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do.” He glanced down at Nessel. “And I seem to have inherited several new businesses. I’m going to need some good men to help me run them. You interested in a job?”
Heather was smiling.
“Uh, a job would be great,” I said.
His smile wavered. “I heard a ‘but’ in there.”
“Well sir,” I said, “a job would be great, but to tell you the truth, what I really want is a second date with your daughter.”
Dating in Dead World: Coda
Joe McKinney Interviewed by John Joseph Adams on Dating in Dead World
I’ve done many interviews over the years, but the one that I did with John Joseph Adams as part of the promotional drive for his anthology The Living Dead 2 was my first devoted entirely to one of my short stories. Here’s part of that interview, originally published at his website:
John Joseph Adams: Tell us a bit about your story. What’s it about?
Joe McKinney: It’s been almost twenty years since Hurricane Mardell swept through Houston, flooding the city and giving birth to a virus that turns the living into the walking dead. The world has been overrun by zombies and left in ruin. But there are still groups of people left alive, and they are carving out an existence in the wasteland. Some of the survivors have moved into protective compounds, but Andrew Hudson wasn’t lucky enough to grow up in one of those. He was raised as a street urchin in the ruins of San Antonio, where he makes a living as a special courier between the strongholds of the dead world’s warlords. During one of those runs, he had the good fortune to meet the daughter of the area’s most powerful warlord, and he won her heart.
Now, they’re going on their first date. How hard could that be, right? Kids have been dating forever. Well, when taking your date out involves high-speed pursuits through zombie-infested ruins and being used as pawns in an underhanded power-grab scheme, nothing is as easy as it seems.
JJA: What was the genesis of the story–what was the inspiration for it, or what prompted you to write it?
JM: “Dating in the Dead World” was written right about the same time that Kensington Publishing came asking me to do another zombie book. I had made a few readers mad with the ending to Dead City, and I wanted to address the criticism before I went on with the rest of the series.
The first person narrator of Dead City is a police officer named Eddie Hudson. The thing to remember about Eddie Hudson is that he is not a reliable reporter. Most people get that wrong about him. He’s deeply fractured by the events he recounts in the novel, and the optimism he expresses at the end of the story is… well, let’s just say he’s not telling you everything. He’s telling you about the world he wants to believe in, not the world as it really is. “Dating in the Dead World” came from that issue. And because “Dating in the Dead World” was written to refute Eddie Hudson’s optimism, the logical lead for the story was Eddie’s son, Andrew Hudson. So this story really becomes as much a conversation between father and son as it does a commentary on the Dead City series itself.
JJA: Was this story a particularly challenging one to write? If so, how?
JM: “Dating in the Dead World” came surprisingly easy. After I finish a novel, I’m usually struck by a sort of separation anxiety. So much mental effort is put into world building and getting to know the characters that it seems a shame to simply cut and run. I personally have a hard time leaving it all behind. So what I usually do is write a few short stories set in the world of the novel I’ve just finished. They don’t always involve the same characters, or even take place at exactly the same time, but they all help me, in their own way, go on to the next book. “Dating in the Dead World” was a part of that process, and because I knew the world of the story already, the story developed without a lot of birthing pains.
JJA: Most authors say all their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal to you?
JM: Personal accountability is a big deal for me. I don’t respect a person who can’t accept responsibility for their actions. That’s something I learned from my dad, and something I’ll always be thankful for.
But he also gave me a related piece of advice. Right before I left for my first date, he gave me the only bit of parental sex education I ever received. “Remember this,” he said. “You will be held personally accountable for everything that happens to that girl from the moment she leaves her front door to the moment she walks back in it. Conduct yourself accordingly.”
It wasn’t until after I’d written “Dating in the Dead World” that I realized I was channeling that advice. I guess it took.
JJA: What kind of research did you have to do for the story?
JM: Well, the “world” of this story was one I already knew quite well, but I did do research on the use of cadaver dogs, and on building protective compounds. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of material out there on how to create your own fortress to guard against the end of the world. To me, that’s almost as scary as the end of the world itself, you know?
Bug Out or Hunker Down
This is an experiment. Part fiction, part speculative essay, this piece started with one simple question: If the zombie apocalypse came today, how would I handle it? Would I stay put or would I make a break for it? And what of my family? I’m a husband, and a father, and a cop who took an oath to
protect the community that has paid me so well over the last two decades. What do I do with all that obligation, all that responsibility? What would I really do, given conditions exactly as they are now? Would I bug out or hunker down?
My goal is to answer this scenario as truthfully as I can, allowing myself only those options I really possess and given only the resources currently at my disposal. No wishful thinking, no cheating. I can’t tell you that I would turn my Nissan Altima into an armored zombie killdozer because, well, I don’t have anything to armor plate my Nissan with, and, truthfully, wouldn’t know how to go about installing that armor even if I did. As I said, no cheating. This is basically a reality check. What could I do—what would I do—if Z-Day came today? Let’s find out.
But first, a few ground rules.
What Kind of Outbreak Are We Dealing With?
Everybody’s idea of what the zombie apocalypse will look like is different. For this scenario, here’s what’s happening:
The outbreak is viral in nature, and the virus is transmitted by a bite or some contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.
Only the living and the very recently dead are affected by this virus. The buried dead play no part in this scenario.
The virus has a 100% mortality rate, meaning all persons infected with the virus die from it and, in turn, become zombies.
The virus begins in some part of the U.S. other than my home city of San Antonio. However, due to the fluid nature of our society, the outbreak spreads rapidly. Cities with major airports can expect to see incidents of infection within 36 hours. Cities that serve as major air-travel hubs and international ports of call will be in complete confusion for a period of perhaps four days, after which the outbreak will spread to the rest of the country and then, at an exponential rate, to the rest of the world.
Martial law will be instituted within the first week of the outbreak but will break down almost completely within the first three weeks of the outbreak.
Within a month of the first reported zombie incident, it will be every man for himself.
Given these conditions, I think this is how the outbreak would go for me and my family.
Right Now
It started on a Monday, just after lunch. I’d taken the week off work because I had some writing deadlines to meet before I left for the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City that coming weekend.
My wife was home too. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t be. She was a college professor at a local university, and though she was feeling a bit under the weather that day and had to cancel her classes, she was diligently grading papers on our home computer.
Our two kids, nine- and six-year-old girls, were at school a few miles away, near the entrance to our subdivision.
I usually wrote my rough drafts out long hand, which meant I was bent over my desk, scribbling on a yellow legal pad. My iPad was next to me, though, and I used that to check my email periodically throughout the day. The first indication I had that something was wrong was a rapid-fire series of notification chimes on my iPad. Curious, I opened it, and saw Facebook updates from several of the groups I belong to. Some included links to news stories out of Boston and Philadelphia.
The stories were confusing and contradictory. They mentioned rioting and people tearing each other apart. Local police departments were scrambling to deal with the situation, but so far, they weren’t having much luck.
Homemade videos started popping up on Facebook, including footage from iPhones and video cameras. I watched a few of those, my mouth hanging open, and then I went to my wife’s study, where I found her watching videos from a friend in Boston. A man covered in blood, part of his face missing, was pawing drunkenly at her front door. He spotted her filming him from the upstairs window and began groping the air, moaning frantically. I could hear our friend breathing in the background, panic-stricken. The choppy, bouncing video and off-camera panting reminded me of something out of The Blair Witch Project, but the growing dread in my gut was very real.
“What do you think is happening?” my wife asked. “Is this real?”
But we both knew the answer to that. It was very real.
Still, we’d never talked about what came next. I wrote this stuff, but it’d never been more than fun for me. My wife hated reading about zombies. What that amounted to was that we didn’t have a plan for zombies. Natural disasters, which in San Antonio meant flash floods or possibly forest fires, sure, those we had covered. But not zombies.
“What about the kids?”
It was the only point that really mattered, and it stopped me. I was a cop. I was in decent shape...except for my high blood pressure, which I controlled with medication. I knew tactics. I knew how to handle guns, how to fight if I had to. But doing the zombie apocalypse with kids. Well, that was a different matter.
“It’s just now 2 o’clock,” I said. “They get out at 2:45. Let’s figure out a plan right now. We’ll go get them as soon as school lets out, bring them back here, and we’ll make ready on whatever we decide to do.”
That sounded reasonable to me. The part of my brain that had been trained to deal with critical situations liked that idea.
But my wife was looking at me like I’d just grown an extra head.
“Make ready? Are you serious? Joe, we’re dealing with zombies here. Zombies! What in the hell are we going to do?”
That Night
We hadn’t said a word to the kids, and we kept them away from the TV. We didn’t want to scare them, but they wouldn’t be going to school in the morning. Things were looking bad on the news, with outbreaks reported all over North America and a few in Japan and China and Europe. So far, the individual outbreaks had been contained, but if my own stories had shown anything, it’s that a zombie scenario is always a war of attrition, and no matter how dedicated the military and the local responders may be, collapse was inevitable. It wouldn’t be long now, I realized, before the first cases hit San Antonio, and I would have to meet this inevitability head-on.
“Okay,” my wife said as she stepped down the stairs, “the kids are in bed. Let’s talk about what we’re going to do.”
“I’m guessing my parents’ place, right?”
She nodded.
My parents lived on fifty-three acres in the Texas Hill Country, about forty miles northeast of San Antonio. Their property was remote enough that the only way to get there is to want to get there, if you know what I mean, but it was close enough to civilization that getting supplies and medical aid wasn’t impossible. Also, they had their own well, lots and lots of deer, a few chickens, and even a creek running through the lower twenty acres. My mom was also a pretty fair gardener, so we’d have food.
“Tomorrow morning we’re gonna head out there. I want you and the kids to stay there.”
“And my parents?”
“Your parents, my brother and his wife, your sister, and your brother, his wife, and their kids...all of them can go to my parents’ house. There’s room. Plus, for the kids, it’ll feel like a big adventure.”
“Your parents don’t mind?”
“You know them. Family is first.”
My wife nodded. She knew it was true. My parents are saints.
“You have the lists for everybody, right?”
“Yeah, I’m going to email them right now.”
I had given her several long lists to email to the various members of our families. The idea was for everybody to buy the gear they would need and bring it with them to my parents’ place. That way, we’d have far more than we needed.
At least at first.
“Okay,” I said. “You email the lists. I’m going to pack up the cars.”
Earlier that day, while my wife was picking the kids up from school, I went through our family disaster kits. About ten years ago I worked as a disaster mitigation specialist for the SAPD, and I learned the importance of having a good disaster-preparedness kit. I’ve made kits for the family, smaller ones for each member of the family, an
d one each for my car and my wife’s. The family kit is of the homemade, 72-hour emergency shelter-in-place variety. It includes:
1. Flashlights (one for each member of the family and two large extra ones)
2. Extra batteries (for the flashlights, radio, and camera)
3. Canned food and MREs (the MREs take up a lot of space, but the idea of having a “kit” from which to make your own meal has a “Wow, this is neat!” factor that keeps the kids busy, which is critical for good morale)
4. Three 5-gallon water jugs
5. Water purifying tablets
6. A hand-crank powered emergency radio (ours is a Kaito KA500 Voyager 5-Way, but there are several other reliable brands just as good)
7. Manual can opener
8. Paper plates, plastic serving ware, cooking supplies, and a small, one-burner Coleman camp stove
9. A large first aid kit and a quick guide to first aid procedures
10. A pocket folder containing copies of our birth certificates, home owner’s insurance and policy number, car insurance and titles, social security cards, passports, IDs, a lengthy phone roster of family, friends and other important numbers and addresses, photographs of the family, a list of medications and my older daughter’s allergies
11. Rain gear for each member of the family
12. Heavy work gloves
13. Three disposable cameras and one waterproof digital camera
14. Unscented liquid bleach, eye dropper, and measuring spoons
15. Hand sanitizer and soap
16. Two large plastic sheets, duct tape, and a utility knife
17. A package of dust masks
18. A crowbar
19. Hammer and nails
20. Adjustable wrench
21. Bungee cords of several lengths
22. Two safety ropes, one 25 feet long, the other 50 feet
