by Joe McKinney
Two and a Half Graves
I had a dream one night that zombies were eating my fingers. Seriously. One of the craziest dreams I’ve ever had. Anyway, when I woke up, I was a little freaked out and I started writing down some ideas on what it would feel like to have zombies eating your fingers. Those notes turned into this story.
Starvation Army
Stories take on a life of their own after they’re published, and that was certainly the case with “Starvation Army.” Written for Kim Paffenroth’s anthology of historical zombie fiction, History is Dead, “Starvation Army” was not well-received by readers. In fact, quite a few seem to have genuinely hated it. Most of the reviews criticized it for being more of a ghost story than a zombie story. And yet, for all the negative feedback, the professional critics gave it a warm reception. It was listed as an Honorable Mention in one of Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and it got great write ups from half-a-dozen major magazines. I don’t know what any of that says about the story, but I do know that I’m proud of it.
State of the Union
There’s no quick answer to that question: “Where do you get your ideas?” Ideas come from everywhere. Even the most insignificant moments can give way to ideas. “State of the Union” came from a conversation I had with my wife one night while watching TV. It was during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the news show we were watching had collected six experts for a roundtable discussion. Well, it didn’t take long before these six experts were talking over each other, getting angry, and generally acting like children. My wife turned to me and said, “My God, this country is eating itself alive.” Boom, a story was born. To make it work, though, I needed a frame, and for that, I turned to Mark Twain’s masterpiece of social satire, “Cannibalism in the Cars,” which is why this story is dedicated to him.
A Reader’s Guide to Dead World
by
Joe McKinney
Featuring everything you ever wanted to know about Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead, Flesh Eaters, Mutated and the other stories making up the Dead World Series.
I didn’t set out to become a writer.
Growing up, I used to write the occasional spooky tale, drafting it out longhand with a cheap ball-point pen on a yellow legal pad. Once the story was finished, I’d tear out the pages, staple them together, and leave them on the corner of my desk for a week or so before throwing them away. I never placed any significance on what I was doing. I never had any intention of doing anything with my stories. Writing wasn’t something I saw myself doing one day. It was just something I did.
And then, in the winter of 2003, I became a father. I remember leaning my head against the glass, looking in on the nursery, watching my baby sleep. Proud as I was, I felt this overpowering need to preserve the essence of the man looking in on that nursery, because I knew that one day, the little girl sleeping in there would want to know something about her father that growing up with him and living under his rule would never teach her.
Sometimes a thought like that is merely an impulse, a momentary thing that slips away like a dream upon waking.
That wasn’t the case with me. Over the next few months, the thought gained traction, until I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I took up my pen and my legal pad and got to writing. Eventually, I did about eighty pages of an SF novel called The Edge of the Map. It was high space-opera in the classic 1950s vein. And it was pure crap. Every time I started writing, I wondered what in the hell I was doing. I wondered why I bothered. Not a word of it felt genuine.
And even worse, I wasn’t doing a thing to answer the original impulse that made me want to start writing in the first place.
Briefly, I considered taking up painting.
But then I realized that if I was going to do this thing right, I needed to be true to what I loved. Love, after all, was what this was all about.
I grew up on a steady diet of monster movies and horror fiction. My first literary infatuation was with horror, and it occurred to me that if I had any chance of doing this thing the way it ought to be done, I needed to write what I loved. Dead City, my first published novel, sprang from that decision.
I was lucky Dead City landed when it did. It put me on the crest of the zombie revival that began around 2005 with Brian Keene’s The Rising, and because Dead City came out through a large publishing house, I got some good exposure. The book sold well, which in turn led to a career in writing.
Dead City has grown into the Dead World series, which to date includes four novels and half a dozen stories. The novels are easy to come by, the stories less so. At least for the time being. But even if you haven’t read the stories, or in case you missed one of the novels, there’s no need to worry. I wrote each and every entry in the series in such a way that a reader can come to any novel, any story, in any order, and still feel like they’re caught up with the overall storyline. This makes it easy on the reader coming to the Dead World for the first time, but has also caused more than a few readers to ask what I think the overall series’ preferred chronology is. So, just because I like doing things like this, I’ve put together a little reader’s guide to walk you, the reader, through the Dead World I’ve created. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers, while at the same time providing useful information. If you have specific questions, please feel free to add them to the comments section below. I’ll answer those questions in full, without regard to spoilers.
Enjoy your tour.
DEAD CITY
Dead City (Pinnacle; November, 2006). Reprinted with a new cover and the first five chapters of Apocalypse of the Dead (Pinnacle; November, 2010).
Why zombies?
To answer that, I have to turn back to the summer of 1983. I was fourteen. That summer gave me two landmarks in my education. The first was George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a movie that scared the ever-loving crap out of me. I watched it one night on cable and slept cradling a baseball bat for the next month. I dreamt of the living dead circling my house in the night, rattling the walls with their endless moans, forcing their way inside. No movie had ever done that to me before. Very few have done it since.
And then, just when I thought I had learned what real scary was, Hurricane Alicia made landfall. I grew up in Clear Lake City, a little suburb south of Houston. We were just across the lake from the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel and the numerous shrimp camps down in Kemah, and we were square in the bull’s-eye of the storm.
I spent all night in a closet, listening to the storm trying its hardest to rip my house from its foundation and send it sailing off like a kite. The next morning, I went to the front door and looked out over a sea of caramel-colored water. Every roof was missing shingles. Trees were toppled. Cars and trucks were submerged to their roofs. I saw a water moccasin glide through the swing set in my neighbor’s back yard. And at the entrance to my subdivision was a shrimp boat that had been carried seven miles inland by the storm surge. The destruction was staggering, and for a boy of fourteen, it felt a bit like the world had been turned upside down.
Of course, my fear didn’t last long. Later that day my best friend came by in a canoe, and we paddled all around the neighborhood, acting like river explorers heading up the Amazon in search of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was a blast.
But even as the fear of those two landmark events subsided, my fascination with them grew. So when I sat down to write a story about how terrifyingly complex the world had become for me as a brand-new father, I found myself turning back to the two most frightening encounters of my youth.
The Rise of the Zombies
A basic principle of disaster mitigation theory is to plan for the disasters you’re most likely to face. It does little good for a police department in North Dakota, for example, to plan for a hurricane. But here in San Antonio, we are only 170 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. That makes us far enough away from the coast to avoid all but a few gusty rain storms, yet close enough to act as the evacuation point fo
r every coastal city from Brownsville to New Orleans. So when the San Antonio Police Department trains for hurricanes, they train for the near-total evacuation and relocation of multiple coastal cities, including some, such as Houston, that are nearly three times San Antonio’s size.
The mission is enormous, requiring all the logistical planning of a military invasion—only in reverse—and the analogy was not lost upon me when I started thinking of a cause for my zombie outbreak.
Before the action in Dead City, Houston has been hit by four major hurricanes. The first of these storms was a Category 3 storm named Gabrielle, that fizzled to a tropical storm just before making landfall. Most of the population in the Houston-Galveston area, which totals about five million, did as they were asked and evacuated in anticipation of a huge storm. But when Gabrielle turned into a lot of nothing, most of those who evacuated felt cheated and stupid for wasting their time. And then, a week and a half later, a second mandatory evacuation order was issued, this one in preparation for Hurricane Hector. With Gabrielle still fresh in everyone’s mind, the majority of the Houston-Galveston area refused to evacuate.
Hector knocked Houston back on its heels. The storm did enormous damage, managing to flood most of the sea-level communities between Galveston and South Houston, where the majority of the nation’s oil and gas and chemical plants are located. Millions of people were trapped as the flood waters carried spilled oil and chemicals into the flooded suburbs. All electrical power was knocked out. Fresh water was unavailable. The city’s sewage lines back-spilled into the flood waters. That sewage mingled with the oil and the chemicals from the refineries and the drowned bodies rotting in the scorching Texas heat.
The federal government has a long tradition (one going back at least as far as the Johnson Administration) of getting caught with its pants down when it comes to disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, and then compounding that negligence with painfully slow, inadequate follow up. It’s just the way things go, and in the Dead World, Hurricane Hector was no exception. For a critical span of eight days, local authorities received only token aid from Washington. And when the federal government finally did decide to act in a meaningful way, it was too late, for Hurricane Kyle was waiting just offshore, and it was bigger and badder than Hector ever thought of being.
Kyle tipped the scales. The storm surge was immense and flooded the entire city. So severe was the flooding that most experts believed Kyle permanently altered the shape of the coastline. What was once the nation’s third largest population center became the bottom of a shallow sea.
In the midst of the destruction and suffering, the military begins evacuating refugees by the hundreds of thousands to San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force Base. But what nobody realizes at this early point is that some of these refugees are infected with the necrosis filovirus, a hemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola, Marburg, and the Crimean-Congo viruses. The necrosis filovirus is a level 4 biosafety hazard, but unlike its more well-documented cousins, the necrosis filovirus is incredibly fast-acting. Whereas a person contracting Ebola or Marburg exhibits headache, backache, and other flu-like symptoms within five to ten days, a person infected with the necrosis filovirus shows symptoms within a few hours. Complete depersonalization and aggression and a near invulnerability to pain rapidly manifest, turning the infected person essentially into a zombie. The illusion is all the more complete when observers see the clouded pupils and encounter the smell of rotting flesh. The only difference between the zombies in the Dead World and the zombies developed in the Romero mythos is that the Dead World zombies are still alive.
It doesn’t take long for the infected to be transported to San Antonio’s hospitals, where the infection spreads. As Dead City opens, the infected have already overloaded the hospitals and spread among the general population. The Outbreak, as the first wave of the zombie apocalypse in the Dead World universe is called, is underway.
Eddie Hudson
The narrator of Dead City is Eddie Hudson, a young patrolman, husband, and father stationed on the west side of San Antonio. Eddie’s nothing special. He’s not a very good shot. He has no special knowledge or skills. And he’s certainly not the brightest bulb in the box. I’ve read several reader responses on Amazon and other book forums that see this as some kind of deficiency, but I think those readers miss the point. This is not a book, after all, about kicking tons of zombie ass. Sure, a lot of zombie ass gets kicked, but that is incidental to the main point of the book, which is both to show the fragility of our modern world and to suggest a possible remedy for that fragility.
I’ve read several other zombie novels that feature main characters that are unmitigated bad asses—Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero and J.L. Bourne’s Day by Day Armaggedon come immediately to mind—but I didn’t want that for Dead City. I wanted someone who could stand in for the reader, someone with whom they could identify rather than hero worship.
There is a medieval play called Everyman. Most people who took a freshman English Lit class are probably familiar with it. The play opens with Death informing Everyman his time is up, it’s time to go. Everyman pleads to stay. Death tells him no, he has to die, but if he can get somebody to come with him, he’s welcome to bring a companion. One by one, the allegorical figures of wealth, friends, family, and all the others turn their back on Everyman, saying they’d gladly go with him on a journey of life, but not of death. Eventually, only Good Deeds agrees to go with Everyman into the grave, and through a combination of Good Deeds and contrition Everyman eventually ascends to heaven. Nearly everybody gets that the play is an allegory meant to show the importance of confession and penance in the Christian’s journey to salvation. But Everyman is also, in many ways, the basis for Eddie Hudson’s journey through the first night of the zombie apocalypse.
Eddie’s journey takes place over three acts. In the first act, most of the San Antonio Police Department, and in fact much of the City’s ability to respond to any sort of crisis, is completely destroyed. Eddie Hudson is used to being part of a large army of sorts, with the full might of the Department ready to come to his aid at the touch of a button. That is gone at the end of the first act.
The second act opens with Eddie emotionally adrift. With all of his former advantages gone, he doesn’t quite know what to do. And then, while wandering through the ruins of a gas station in his old patrol district, he finds his best friend and former partner, Marcus Acosta. Eddie and Marcus are basically a variant of the Odd Couple. Eddie is a family man, with all the attachments and obligations that implies. But for Marcus, the end of the world means nothing more than the end of alimony payments. Still, they are best friends, committed to each other’s welfare.
But friendship can only take Eddie so far, and like Everyman before him, eventually he has to go on without Marcus at his side, and at the beginning of the third act, we find Eddie standing alone once again, surrounded, facing certain death. Of course he manages to escape (he is narrating the story, after all, so you know he has to live through it), and his experiences here prepare him not only for his reunion with his wife and child, but also for his ultimate redemption. And now that he has achieved control over part of his world, the real challenge of rebuilding that world begins.
The parallels to Everyman are pretty obvious. Both characters get their friends and resources stripped from them by events outside their control. Gradually they are left with nothing but themselves, their ultimate salvation dependent upon their actions.
But despite the parallels, Dead City is by no means a religious allegory. It’s purely secular. My intention in Dead City was to show how thin the veneer of our society really is. And you don’t need a zombie apocalypse to prove that. Even a localized disaster can show that our control over our lives is tenuous at best. But unlike a flood or a forest fire or a train wreck, only a zombie apocalypse can turn one’s friends and family into insensible agents of destruction, and that’s why Eddie Hudson has to fight a city full of zombies.
A Note on the Geograph
y of Dead City
Before I leave Eddie’s part of the story I need answer one of the most common questions I get about Dead City. If you were ever in the Air Force, chances are you’ve been to San Antonio. And nearly everyone, even the non-Air Force types, has heard of the Alamo. In fact, tens of millions of Americans have visited it since the late 1960s. In other words, San Antonio is well known to a great many Americans, and even a great many foreign travelers.
Quite a few have contacted me and remarked that, while they know San Antonio well, they don’t recognize most of the street names I reference in the book.
They’re quite right.
In fact, though the locations I describe are well known, and in most cases easy to recognize, I’ve given them different names.
I did this for two reasons.
The first reason is that I was completely ignorant of professional publishing and its rules when I wrote Dead City. I didn’t know the rules about using real places fictitiously, and so I figured that if I didn’t know if it was okay to say a particular incident occurred at the corner of Zarzamora and Culebra, I probably shouldn’t do it. My reasoning was that I was writing about a big city. What was the harm in making up a few street names?
