by Joe McKinney
(You in the back. Sit down and stop waving your hands in protest: Lucas never finished the Star Wars series, and if it ain’t finished, it ain’t an epic. I’m not budging for Edmund Spenser, so I’m sure as hell not gonna do it for George Lucas. You can’t move me on that point.)
And here’s why Moby Dick is as close as an American author has ever come to the epic. Epics encapsulate the sum total of a nation’s experience, and the way they do that is by being encyclopedic. In other words, they absorb all other poetic forms current in their day and age and therefore make them subservient to their narrative.
Melville does this with drama, with biblical exegesis, with shipping news, with science, with action, with comedy, and on and on.
I was aware of all this when I wrote the outline for Apocalypse of the Dead. I knew the book would—undeservedly—be called an epic. And for that reason, I threw in a couple of nods to those who, like me, cringe at the misuse of the word.
The most conspicuous of these nods comes on pages 320 and 321 of the first Kensington edition, when Ben Richardson quotes some of the bad poetry he’s seen pinned to the shirts of zombies they’ve encountered.
Students of English epitaphs will notice several vaguely familiar poems, the most obvious of which are for William Bunn and the dentist John Hannity. Both of these poems, and several of the other zombie-themed epitaphs quoted in this section, are loose adaptations of famous folk rhymes from the British Isles. I expect my English and Irish cousins will recognize the rhymes before most American readers, simply because the poems are a part of their culture and not the American one, but just in case some American reader figures it out first… Bravo to you! You got the joke.
The Quarantine Authority
I’ve already mentioned that Ben Richardson is one of the most important characters in the entire Dead World series, and here’s why.
Aside from being an active participant in the book’s events, Ben is also my stand in. Ben Richardson began the post-apocalyptic phase of his life as a journalist, determined to describe every aspect of the zombie apocalypse in what he intended to be the definitive history. When Apocalypse of the Dead begins, Ben is already compiling his book. Not only does he narrow in on the human cost of the tragedy, but he also writes authoritatively on the political machinations behind it. Through him, and specifically, through his journals, we learn the shape of this world that is devolving into anarchy.
In the early days of the Outbreak, the only thing that divides the American people from complete destruction is The Gulf Region Quarantine Authority. These men—and yes, they are a not-so-thinly veiled commentary on the U.S. government’s pathetically inept approach to illegal immigration—are basically the modern equivalent of the Little Dutch Boy with his finger in the dyke. They are a Band-Aid for the patient who is rapidly bleeding to death.
Here’s what Ben Richardson has to say about them:
From the notebooks of Ben Richardson.
Houston, Texas: July 5th 5:40 am
We’ve got about twenty minutes until takeoff, and I wanted to jot down a few notes about the quarantine zone. Sometimes I find it hard to wrap my mind around how big it is. The logistical scope of the project is simply staggering.
Back in its heyday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency patrolled the 2,000 miles of border land between the United States and Mexico. Of the Agency’s 11,000 agents, more than 9,500 of them worked along that 2,000 mile stretch of desert. They hunted drug dealers and illegal aliens with a huge array of tools, everything from satellite imagery and publicly-accessible webcams to helicopters, horses, and plain old-fashioned shoe leather. Even so, the border had more holes in it than a fishing net.
In comparison, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority only has to patrol 1,100 miles of wall reaching from Gulfport, Mississippi to Brownsville, Texas, paralleling the freeway system wherever possible to aid in supply and reinforcement of problem areas. The GRQA keeps this stretch of metal fencing and sentry towers and barbed wire secure with just over 10,000 agents, most of them former CBP and National Guardsmen and cops. They are aided at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and in Mexico by federal troops.
Yet despite their numerical advantage over the old U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, their job is infinitely harder. Nobody in the old CBP thought too much of it that a steady stream of illegals got through the border every day. They just shrugged and went on with life. But the GRQA can’t afford to let even a single zombie through. That would spell disaster. The pressure is high, the price of failure is apocalyptic.
Their job terrifies me. These guys are frequently posted outside of major metropolitan areas where the zombie populations are thickest. Day and night they have to listen to that constant moaning. They have to stand by and listen to the plaintive cries for help from the Unincorporated Civilian Casualties, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority’s official designation for the people who were unable to make it out of the zone before the walls went up and who were sealed inside. Hearing that for just a few weeks is demoralizing. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear it every single day for months and years at a time.
Even worse, I can’t imagine what it would be like to grow used to hearing it.
It is little wonder that so many of the GRQA go AWOL at least once or twice a year. Or that they are never punished for it when they do. Most don’t even get their pay docked.
And it’s no wonder that the leading cause of death among GRQA agents is suicide.
Actually, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often than it does….
The Chosen One
Playing opposite Ben Richardson is the Dead World’s second most important character, Nate Royal.
Nate is an unlikely hero. When we first meet Nate, he’s a small fish in a small pond. He’s sitting on a park bench, watching the world go by, feeling impotent and angry at the deal he’s been given, when suddenly he sees the sexy young wife of the town’s leading attorney. Nate, who’s dealt with this woman before, zeroes in on her as the cause of all his problems, and he sets out to abduct her.
This is our introduction to Nate Royal, and from the start, we find him difficult to like. But then something happens. Nate gets attacked by a zombie. He’s wounded, and because he’s heard on the TV about what happens to people who get infected by a zombie, he slinks off to die in a neighbor’s tool shed.
Only Nate doesn’t turn. He is immune to the necrosis filovirus. When the military doctors in the area discover his unusual condition, they pack him off to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Once there, Nate meets a military doctor named Mark Kellogg, and while the two of them never really become friends, they develop a unique relationship.
Kellogg is an intellectual. He’s a military officer, true, but he doesn’t think of himself that way. In his mind, he’s a doctor who just so happens to wear a uniform to work. Kellogg ends up taking Nate under his wing, and as the two men get to know each other, the novel’s key theme of rejecting nihilism comes to the forefront. Because Nate is most certainly not an intellectual, he lacks the specialized language to discuss nihilism like a philosopher. He only knows what he feels.
This presents Dr. Kellogg with an obvious problem. Nate Royal, because of his immunity, represents humanity’s greatest hope. And yet Nate, who so despises the universe’s seeming lack of concern for his fate that he seeks comfort in suicide, is unwilling to play the hero. Their relationship is as much a statement on how an older generation attempts to hand the baton of responsibility to the next as it is a rejection of the classical hero archetype. Nate is definitely not a hero, yet is called upon to play one. If Apocalypse of the Dead had been a World War II story, he might have reluctantly lived up to the challenge. But I don’t think modern American culture quite believes in heroes. Comic books are more popular today than ever before. So too are songs and movies about superheroes. And yet, time after time, those same modern offerings on the hero give us flawed characters who don’t live up to what’s expected
of them. The phenomenon even extends into politics, where Barrack Obama failed to live up to the media image of hope and change that propelled him into office. I’ve been watching this trend over the last decade or so, and perhaps that explains why I selected a hero who not only rejects the role of hero, but can’t even be convinced to take on the challenge reluctantly. Time and again, Dr. Kellogg has to lift Nate and push him in the right direction. And can one truly be called a hero if there is no free will in the actions that would traditionally qualify one for hero status?
The Persistence of Jonestown
The original title of Apocalypse of the Dead was Resistance. I changed the title after a lengthy and at times heated discussion with my editor and agent. Though I’ve come to like Apocalypse of the Dead as a title, I still, in many ways, prefer the original title. Resistance is not quite so in your face, and it conveys the book’s central theme of rejecting nihilism. Each of the book’s character sets—Michael Barnes and Ben Richardson; Dr. Mark Kellogg and Nate Royal; Ed Moore and Billy Kline; Jasper and Aaron; Colin and Kyra—to some degree play out this theme. When I was plotting out the book, I knew I wanted to end with a microcosm of the apocalypse. I also wanted that ending to speak directly to nihilism. And, as has become my modus operandi when I need to craft major plot elements, I turned to my youth for inspiration. What I found there was Jonestown.
I was ten years old when the news broke about the mass suicides in Jonestown. I remember watching the seemingly endless footage of dead, rotting bodies stacked on top of each in the ditches surrounding Jonestown—my parents on the couch behind me too horrified to snap to the fact that their ten-year-old probably shouldn’t be watching such things on TV—and feeling completely repulsed. How, I asked, could so many people just give up on life? How could one man convince so many people to do something so ridiculous?
Those questions stayed with me, even as I made jokes with my friends about drinking the Kool-Aid. Over the years, the legacy of Jonestown continued to bother me. I read a great deal about Jim Jones and his followers and the final days there in the jungles of Guyana, and I’ve never made any secret that I drew a great deal of the conclusion of Apocalypse of the Dead from that research, but in all my studies I never found an answer to my original question. I found lots of wild-ass guesses concealed as educated theories, but nothing that really, solidly, answered the question.
I think we have a deep-seated need to belong somewhere. We’re social animals, and in many ways, successfully fitting into our given society is emotionally healthy. But beyond fitting in, we also want to know that our lives have value, even if we never grow rich or get famous or add to the collective knowledge of mankind. Cults, of course, provide for this by a creating the illusion of family, a sense of inclusion. Gangs do the same thing. So does high school football, and turning out in droves to support a pro-sports team, or blogging, or belonging to professional organizations and gardening clubs. The point is we seek out ways to be included. That’s a healthy instinct, up to a point. The problem with cults like the People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate or political institutions like the Nazi Party is that our desire for inclusion gets easily perverted into a rabid fervor that grows beyond our individual ability to control. And when that happens, all hell breaks loose.
At one point in Apocalypse of the Dead, Dr. Mark Kellogg tells Nate Royal,
We are put into this hostile, alien world as isolated individuals. We can learn to like other people, even love them, but we can’t ever truly know them, and so we remain isolated. We’re not allowed to know why life has meaning, not for sure anyway, and yet we feel compelled to create some sort of answer. It’s an absurd downward spiral of impossible things, and yet it’s our lives.
And Nate, with dawning comprehension, asks, “So what does that mean? Are you saying that a world based on bad reasons is enough?” The two eventually decide that this is so. A world based on bad reasons is enough. Their answer makes sense within the context of their relationship but falls short of satisfactory in light of Jonestown and the fictional counterpart of those events in the novel.
Apocalypse of the Dead doesn’t provide any real answers. Indeed, I don’t know if there are any. But each character wrestles with what happens at the Grasslands in their own way, and maybe readers will find a branching-off point that helps them to answer the real life mystery of why good people can abruptly lose their minds, as happened in Jonestown.
We shall see.
But for now, the mystery of Jonestown persists.
FLESH EATERS
Flesh Eaters (Pinnacle; April, 2011)
For about a year after Dead City sold to Kensington, I did nothing but write short stories. I was cranking them out at a fevered pace, sometimes as many as three a week, and selling most of them. It became almost like a drug for me.
“Ethical Solutions” was a product of that addiction.
And then, at the end of that year, my agent came calling for another book. “A sequel to Dead City, maybe?”
As I said, I never had any intention of becoming a writer. I just wanted to write. I hadn’t given any thought whatsoever to another book. I told him my thoughts on sequels, and he seemed disappointed, but asked what else I had.
I didn’t have anything written, but I did have an idea for a police procedural set against the backdrop of a pandemic flu outbreak. “I could expand that story idea into a novel,” I said.
He liked the idea, and I got to work on Quarantined. The book sold and went on to garner a Stoker® nomination from the Horror Writers Association for Superior Achievement in a Novel.
But the thrill of selling a second novel, coupled with my agent’s interest in another zombie novel, got me curious about the rest of the world I had created in Dead City. Specifically, I turned my attention to Houston. I had left most of the city under water, and because the city had been evacuated so poorly, and then shut off behind quarantine walls shortly afterwards, all the treasures of the nation’s third largest city lay ripe for plundering. All those banks with their vaults full of cash… all those museums with their walls covered in priceless art… all those jewelry stores with their diamonds on display… they got me thinking. Imagine someone desperate enough, someone skilled enough, someone brave enough… they could run the Coast Guard blockade out in the Gulf, scuba dive into the flooded ruins, and take anything they wanted. All they had to do was avoid the soldiers guarding the walls and the nearly two million zombies still wandering inside the city.
From that, the third book in the Dead World series, Flesh Eaters, was born.
Disaster Mitigation
I knew I wanted a heist story to act as the plot’s spine. Originally, I planned to have a team of four men and women scuba dive into the flooded city, grab the cash, dodge a few zombies, and maybe make it out alive. Along the way, they would do battle with the Quarantine Authority and a wild bunch of gangsters. It was going to be great fun.
And then, after I started writing my plot synopsis and story outline, I realized I was making the same mistake I’d made with The Edge of the Map, my failed SF book from several years earlier. The heist story I’d envisioned didn’t have anything authentic to it. Sometimes a writer’s best ally is that little voice inside his head that yells “Bullshit!” and luckily mine was working that day.
Luckier still, I listened.
Once again I turned to my personal experiences. Living through a hurricane was one of the most frightening events of my life, while the weeks I spent working in the shelters after Katrina and Rita were some of the most exhausting I’ve ever spent. It occurred to me that if I was going to write an effective storyline, it would have to involve those two elements. I decided I would tell the story of how the first zombies appeared and spread to the rest of the Gulf Coast. I would tell the story of the hurricanes that sunk Houston and created the Dead World. I would tell, in other words, a prequel to Dead City.
Oh, and there would be a heist in there as well.
The Crucible of Duty
As the novel begins, Eleanor thinks she has a handle on this question. She has done her homework and has thoroughly prepared her family to shelter in place during a hurricane. Her husband and daughter have more than enough food, water, and medical supplies to get them through a few weeks without power and running water. Eleanor, in fact, has made preparation a near obsession. But, as she finds out, mere preparation is insufficient. There is a greater danger than raw sewage and flood waters, and its name is boredom. While she’s at work, her family is stuck at home, literally unable to leave their front door, and while they have plenty to eat and drink, the perpetual boredom leaves them angry and restless.
Meanwhile, at work, Eleanor is being pulled in a hundred directions at once. Because of its unique placement near the nexus of Houston’s freeway system, the University of Houston’s campus is turned into a refugee center. As the nearly 2.5 million people living between Galveston and the City of Houston proper flee northwards, the sick and the old and ill-prepared stop at the campus for protection. The shelters quickly swell to unmanageable numbers, which leads to many more problems, such as dysentery, cholera, starvation, and a host of sanitation problems and medical shortages generally found only in third-world nations. Between salvaging boats to evacuate the refugees and struggling to maintain order, Eleanor spends long hours, and sometimes days on end, at the campus. When she returns home, which is surrounded by flood waters, she finds her husband and daughter have been fighting their own battle with boredom and that their resentment of her apparent freedom has reached a boil. Being home soon becomes as much work as being at her job.
