by Joe McKinney
But Eleanor isn’t the only one dealing with the seemingly mutually exclusive demands of first-responder work and family life. Her boss, Captain Mark Shaw, has been passed over for promotion to Deputy Chief and feels that his assignment at the Emergency Operations Command is basically the department’s way of putting him out to pasture. But when the hurricanes hit, and his command post at the University of Houston campus becomes the only legitimate police authority in the area, Captain Mark Shaw finds himself the man on top, the place where the buck stops. He is confronted not only with the demands of organizing shelters and evacuating those shelters, but also of being the father. Shaw’s two sons are both Houston Police Officers, and he knows that there isn’t going to be much of a future for them. The city they’ve known as home all their lives is, after all, under water. Once the disaster is managed, his two sons will almost certainly be out of work, everything they own washed out to sea. As Captain Shaw sees it, he has two duties: evacuate the citizens who have entrusted him with their safety and see to it that his sons are provided for after the disaster has passed.
It seems like an impossible task, but Shaw has a plan. Through his connections as head of the EOC, he has learned of a local bank with seven-million dollars in cash abandoned in its vault. The bank is flooded and the property and the money declared a total loss by the insurance companies. He and his sons recover the money. Now, the only task is getting out of Houston alive.
Of course, the zombies make that difficult. When Eleanor Norton learns of the heist, the Shaws find themselves stuck between survival, doing their duty to the refugees, and looking out for their own futures. In a lesser man, this wouldn’t be a dilemma at all. Self-interest would take over and the problem would work itself out. But Captain Mark Shaw is not a lesser man. Some men have religion, Captain Mark Shaw has duty. He is deeply conflicted by his role in the bank heist, and this proves to be his crisis of faith, for he sees the money as his greatest sin and at the same time the key to providing for his family.
It is an issue that only becomes murkier as he and Eleanor Norton battle it out in the flooded ruins of Houston, but their debate on duty places Flesh Eaters squarely into the overall themes of family and community that run through every work in the Dead World series.
MUTATED
Mutated (Pinnacle; September, 2012).
The first three books in the Dead World series are generally lumped as post-apocalyptic literature, and I’m okay with that. It doesn’t bother me in the same way that calling Apocalypse of the Dead an epic does. But even so, I feel compelled to point out that none of the first three books are truly post-apocalyptic. They are, more properly, disaster stories. Apocalyptic stories. The “post” part of the post-apocalyptic tag is missing.
Until Mutated I hadn’t played much with the world after the zombie outbreak. My short story “Dating in Dead World” covered some of that ground, but there’s only so much you can do in the limited space of a novella. I wanted to show, in detail, where the scenarios I had put in place would lead. So, in Mutated, we have the Dead World approximately eight years after the events in Apocalypse of the Dead. It is now a world of abandoned cities and crumbling roads and a population so decimated that a traveler can walk for days without seeing another human being. And it is the Dead World’s final word on post-apocalyptic events.
Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes
For as long as I can remember, I’ve thrilled at the sight of abandoned buildings. Something about those dark, empty windows, the vacant doorways, the sepulchral quiet of an empty train station or hotel lobby, spoke of discontinuity and of trauma. There was a vacancy in those wrecks that evoked loss and heartache and the memory of dreams that have fallen by the wayside. They were a sort of negative space in the landscape, symbols of our world’s mortality.
And then zombies came along, and I fell in love with them for many of the same reasons.
But here’s the thing.
It took me a while—as a writer, I mean—to figure out that abandoned buildings, and even abandoned cities, don’t just appear because a horde of zombies happen to show up. Sure, most everybody gets eaten, so you end up with a lot of buildings and few people, but it goes a little deeper than that. Zombies and abandoned buildings, it seems to me, are actually two sides of the same coin. Aside from the obvious similarity—that they are both miserable wrecks somehow still on their feet—both are symbols of a world that is at odds with itself and looking for new direction. And in that way, zombies merge symbolically with the abandoned buildings they haunt in ways that other monsters never really achieve with the settings of their stories.
But just because the zombie and the abandoned building are intimately related symbols doesn’t mean that they function in exactly the same way.
Consider the abandoned building first.
When a building dies, it becomes an empty hull, and yet it does not fall. At least not right away. Its hollow rooms become as silent as the grave; but, when you enter it, its desolate inner spaces somehow still hum with the collected sediment of the life that once thrived there.
When we look at graffiti scrawled across fine Italian marble tiles, or a filthy doll face-up in a crumbling warehouse parking lot, or weeds growing up between the desks in a ruined schoolhouse, we’re not just seeing destruction. We’re also seeing what once was and what could be again. In other words, we’re seeing past, present, and future all at the same time.
The operative force at work here is memory. Within the mind, memory links past, present, and future. But in our post-apocalyptic landscapes, our minds need a mnemonic aid… and that aid is the abandoned building. The moldering wreck before us forces us to consciously engage in the process of temporal continuity, rather than blindly stumble through it.
Put another way, we become like Wordsworth daydreaming over the ruins of Tintern Abbey. Like Wordsworth, we’re witnessing destruction, but pondering renovation, because we are by nature a creative species that needs to reshape the world in order to live in it. That is our biological imperative.
And so, in the end, the abandoned building becomes a symbol of creative courage.
But consider the abandoned building’s corollary, the zombie.
Zombies are, really, single-serving versions of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic stories deal with the end of the world. Generally, they give us a glimpse of the world before catastrophe, which becomes an imperfect Eden of sorts. They then spin off into terrifying scenarios for the end of the world. And finally, we see the survivors living on, existing solely on the strength of their own wills. There are variations within the formula, of course, but those are the nuts and bolts of it.
When we look at the zombie, we get the same thing—but in microcosm. We see the living person prior to death, and this equates to the world before the apocalypse (or the ghost of what the abandoned building used to be). We see the living person’s death, and this equates to the cataclysmic event that precipitates the apocalypse (or the moldering wreck of an abandoned building). And finally, we see the shambling corpse wandering the wasteland in search of prey, and this equates to the post-apocalyptic world feeding off its own death.
In this final note, the symbolic functions of the abandoned building and the zombie diverge. As I’ve mentioned, the abandoned building, so long as it stands, calls to our creative instincts to rebuild. But the zombie, so long as it stands, speaks only to our ultimate mortality.
And so, the ruined hotel or office park becomes our mind’s cathedral, the spiritual and creative sanctuary of our memory, while the zombie becomes the devil that drives us into it.
I see a satisfying sense of symmetry there.
Old Friends
Writing Mutated gave me the chance to tie up loose ends from previous books. For example, the last time we heard of Ken Stoler, he was leading a national campaign to protect the rights of the infected. Dr. Sylvia Carnes, the University of Texas English professor and acolyte of Ken Stoler, was last seen driving off in a chartered bus after losi
ng all her students in an ill-fated trip into San Antonio. And when we said good-bye to Ben Richardson and the rest of the escapees from the Grasslands cult at the end of Apocalypse of the Dead, they were walking into a military convoy. So not only is Mutated unique in that it is the only truly post-apocalyptic book in the series, but it is also the only novel in the bunch that can truly be called a traditional sequel.
The book begins with Ben Richardson, who never quit working on his history of the zombie outbreak. Since escaping the Grasslands at the end of Apocalypse of the Dead, he has crisscrossed the United States, searching out survivors and gathering their stories and writing about his observations. Excerpts from his book are peppered throughout Mutated, and from those excerpts, it becomes clear that Richardson knows that his work will never be finished. The idea of writing the book has become his crutch, the one thing that enables him to get up every morning and go on living in a world that has otherwise lost its meaning for him.
And then, while hiding from a roving band of zombies in the ruins of a St. Louis Pizza Hut, he runs into Dr. Sylvia Carnes, in the company of two young women and two bodyguards. Unbeknownst to Richardson, Carnes and her group have fled a compound run by Stoler to meet a doctor who may have developed a cure for the necrosis filovirus.
But the world Carnes and the others have escaped into is not so simple. Stoler’s community is at war with a man known as the Zombie King. This man, whose skin has turned a dark red from rosacea, has built an army of zombies and uninfected human soldiers. The Red Man also wants to capture Carnes and her people. Thrown together in the ruins and dodging common foes, Richardson and Carnes join forces, and together they go on a quest down the Mississippi River to find the man who might be able to save the human race from itself.
A Note on the Dead World’s Geography
The Mississippi River was a deliberate choice for Richardson and Carnes’ quest. Not only is it an iconic American landmark, and not only is it the roadmap for Huckleberry Finn’s far more famous quest, but it also happens to be dead in the middle of the continental United States.
Go back through all the stories in the Dead World and you’ll see that they all converge on middle America. While no one part of the United States is more or less American than any other part, the Heartland is just that… the heart of America. Taking the story to the Heartland is a metaphor, really, for the series’ overall theme that our survival is based on our ability to form a strong, healthy community.
Walking With Zombies: A Natural History of the Undead
Let’s talk about zombies for a bit more. In the Dead World, the necrosis filovirus spreads through exposure to the bodily fluids of an infected zombie, and the usual vector is a bite. The virus causes the complete depersonalization of the infected person, essentially turning them into a zombie.
It does not kill them, however. Living, infected people exist as mindless husks, intent solely on aggression. They can’t care for themselves in any meaningful way, and they have no sense of danger or the ability to avoid it. And in most cases, they are so badly injured by the contact that caused their initial infection that secondary infections are rampant. What this means in practical terms is that most of the infected die off soon after getting infected, either from their initial injuries, from injuries incurred while hunting food, or from the food itself. Imagine a zombie feeding on something that’s been dead in the middle of the road for a few days, and you can see what I mean.
In Apocalypse of the Dead, Ben Richardson and Michael Barnes get trapped on a rooftop. Richardson realizes that the zombies below are using strategy to flush out prey. The shock is nearly too much for him. He had been so certain that the infected needed to be exterminated outright after his trip to San Antonio with Dr. Carnes in “Ethical Solutions” that he had ceased thinking of them as humans. But now, watching them use strategy, all his certainty disappears.
But what he doesn’t realize, at least right away, is that the longer they live, the zombies change. To be sure, the change is gradual. But it is happening.
The zombies Eddie Hudson and Eleanor Norton face are Stage 1, freshly infected and almost completely depersonalized. They are incapable of reason and have no capacity to anticipate the actions of others. In some cases, they are so far gone that they can’t even recognize other zombies. Most of the time, these zombies are the traditional slow movers of the Romero movies. There are a few, however, who can move with great speed. Eddie Hudson calls these “fast movers,” infected persons who were in excellent physical condition at the time they were turned and who were infected by injuries so minor that their ability to move was not impaired. Luckily, they are few and far between.
Assuming a zombie survives his or her first eight months or so of undead life, they begin to change into Stage 2 zombies. These are the zombies that Ben Richardson and Michael Barnes face in the flooded ruins of Houston. They are capable of using simple strategies, such as cooperative hunting, to corner prey. In most cases, Stage 2 zombies are still slow moving.
It is extremely rare for a zombie to advance beyond Stage 2, but a few live long enough to manage it. Stage 3 zombies have regained a much of their fine motor skills and are even capable can even approximate language through grunts and primitive gestures. Dr. Mark Kellogg experiments with a few Stage 3 zombies in Apocalypse of the Dead. It is rather like trying to keep chimpanzees as pets, he realizes. Left alone for too long, they can, and will, break locks, feign injuries or sleep, and in some cases respond to their names and other verbal cues. They are, however, still aggressive to a fault, and unable to contain their impulses.
Before the Red Man, no one envisioned a Stage 4 zombie. The idea of someone completely, or even mostly, regaining their sense of self after being infected seemed too implausible to be considered a threat. But that is exactly what the Red Man is, a Stage 4 zombie. The Red Man has regained nearly all of his memories and his sense of self, but the necrosis filovirus has left him hopelessly insane. It has also given him the ability to communicate through normal speech with his army, and through grunts, smells, and moaning, with the zombies. He is the next step in evolution in this world made up of two different species of humanity.
The Red Man’s only natural enemy is the man who doesn’t play by the rules that have made him Mutated.
Nate Royal Returns
Nate Royal, for all his many faults, is immune to the necrosis filovirus. This puts him in direct opposition to the Red Man: the man who becomes the ultimate zombie versus the man who can never become a zombie. A meeting between the two is inevitable.
While hiding in an abandoned farmhouse from an army of zombies, Ben Richardson and Sylvia Carnes witness Nate Royal’s first confrontation with the Red Man. What they see is impossible, at least according to the rules by which they’ve come to live. It also opens up new realms of possibilities. A man immune to the zombie virus could redefine the struggle they have spent their lives fighting for.
The only trouble is Nate himself.
Nate has never had things very easy. Dr. Mark Kellogg was able to help Nate along, but only after many hours of shared suffering and individual attention. Now that Kellogg is gone, Nate is like a compass needle spinning aimlessly around the dial, trying to find his true north.
But Nate remains vital, for even after all these years, he still carries the flash drive that Dr. Mark Kellogg put around his neck just before he died. Contained in that flash drive is the answer that humanity has been waiting for, the cure to the necrosis filovirus. The trouble is that Nate has run out of gas, spiritually speaking. Kellogg’s guidance has brought him only so far. And now, eight years after Kellogg’s death, Nate finds himself once again ready to give up and die.
Then he finds Ben Richardson. While the two of them float down the Mississippi, Nate rediscovers the true north he has been missing. He takes from Ben Richardson the guidance he needs to confront the Red Man.
Whether, ultimately, he is successful, depends on your point of view. What kind of future do yo
u want?
Dating in Dead World
“Dating in Dead World,” originally published in THE LIVING DEAD 2, edited by John Joseph Adams (Nightshade Books; September, 2010).
“Dating in Dead World” is the last entry, chronologically speaking, in the Dead World series. The main character is Andrew Hudson, the baby Eddie Hudson spent a night of hell trying to rescue in Dead City.
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 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, nothing is as easy as it seems.
