Dead City

by Sean Platt

  If she’d managed to drown, would she die? Because again, Jordache was already dead. It wasn’t just an intellectual concept. She could feel the life within her. She could practically see it, and knew its shape — not the way scientists saw shapes. This was experiential. The way a person can know a cube without looking at it, simply because she can sense it in her hands.

  With her deep, possibly habitual (and possibly not strictly necessary) breaths, Jordache became newly aware that the trailer smelled bad. Or rather, it would smell bad to most people. To Jordache’s old nose, maybe — or, really, to her new nose, given that her sense of smell had been lackluster since she’d first been infected. Now it was better. Almost like that shape she sensed — the life scientists might call disease — had infiltrated her olfactory cells. Made them better and fresher, like the rest of her.

  She hadn’t tried to run for a while. She should try it again. She’d probably be better now. Faster. Stronger.

  “Does it smell bad to you, Danny?”

  Danny had no opinion.

  Jordache stood. Began making slow, pacing lengths of the trailer. Cool air kissed her bare skin. She could feel every inch of it. Forget asking Danny about the smell; she should ask him about sex again. It felt better each time, given all that she’d changed with that odd, old sense of limitation out of the way. She wondered if it was better for Danny now, too, but she didn’t want to ask. He seemed so tired. It had been a hell of a week for them both.

  So much to see, do, and hear.

  She went to the bathroom. She turned on the light. She saw more or less the same face as always, except that her eyes had changed a little. It wasn’t a big difference. They were lighter now, still mostly dark around the edges. It was like eyeliner for her eye itself, for the iris. The look was ghostly, but her skin seemed to have most of its usual glow. She wasn’t sure if she was warm to the touch because she could only touch herself.

  “Danny, am I hot?”

  Jordache laughed and told him to never mind because she knew how he’d answer that. Danny was so immature.

  She put her palms on the sink’s edge. Leaned into the mirror. Bared her teeth. They were covered in red, black, and brown. She also badly needed to floss.

  It’s almost time, said the tall blond inside her head.

  “Okay,” Jordache answered.

  You’re the harbinger. You’re the reaper.

  “I’m just a girl.”

  You’re the crucible. The one I’ve been waiting for. The one who brings the change.

  She almost wanted to blush. But she wasn’t positive that she could still do that, either.

  “Are there others?” she asked.

  From the front room, Jordache heard Danny ask who she was talking to. She told him to mind his own business.

  Some like me, and more as the days pass. None like you.

  “None like me.”

  None like you.

  “Should I stay? Should I go?”

  Soon, he said.

  She thought of pressing him, but she’d been hearing the man for over a week now. She knew when he was done, when he’d said all he wanted to say. She knew the time was imminent. And that she’d know opportunity when it knocked.

  Jordache strolled out of the bathroom, nearly tripping on the dead mailman’s arm. It was no longer attached to the rest of him. She’d been hungry, and there was very little to eat in here.

  She looked at Danny’s turned back, suddenly sure he was giving her the silent treatment, and pushed down a wave of melancholy with no clear source. This happened lately, probably because she wasn’t getting outside enough. Wasn’t getting that vitamin D to make her happy. But looking at Danny brought it back. Often. Because they’d been together before, for a while, and they’d come close to a normal life. Her future was bright — epic, even. But sometimes she wondered what might have been, if they’d stayed as they were.

  Pancakes in the mornings.

  Donuts in the midmornings.

  And both of them somehow staying rail thin, like immortals in unchanging bodies. Except that was truer now than before, and really she was being silly.

  “Danny?” she said, moving around to his front. “Do you love me?”

  He didn’t have to say it. He never had to say it.

  Jordache sat beside him on the couch. She kissed him. He seemed cold. He’d also lost a lot of blood where she’d impaled his brain with the ice pick. So she wiped at his upper lip to clear it, draped the afghan across his body, and leaned against his side. Or at least what was left of his side. There’d only been so much mailman meat to go around.

  Her head slipped down into Danny’s lap, into the partially congealed puddle. She closed her eyes and sighed. A tear squeezed out and ran down her shaped nose: penance for a wrong she felt sure she’d somehow committed, a right that another part of her seemed to have betrayed.

  “Promise you’ll never leave me,” she said.

  Danny, always solid and sure, seemed to promise.

  After a while, Jordache sat up and wiped at her eyes, feeling both melancholy and ridiculous. There was no point in worrying at the past. The past was over. The future — for Jordache, for the blond man, and for the revolution she carried inside her maybe-flowing blood — was at its tipping point.

  There had been a change before, and humanity had adapted.

  They wouldn’t adapt to this.

  There was a knock at Jordache’s door.

  “Miss Dale?” came the park manager’s voice. “Open up, please. I’ve gotten some complaints.”

  Jordache stood. The manager’s name was Todd, but Jordache could only hear it as Opportunity.

  The knock came again.

  “Miss Dale?”

  Jordache turned the lock.

  Turned the knob.

  Opened the door.

  And greeted Todd with her new hello.

  SHIT-FROM-BRAINS

  Dead City isn’t a new book for me (Johnny). I actually came up with the idea three years or so before writing the book you’ve just finished, known then by the uninspired working title of Zombie Book. It would have been my second book, after an irreverent “Clerks in a bagel shop” coming-of-age novel called The Bialy Pimps (and, if you’re a Johnny groupie — and who isn’t? — before Fat Vampire).

  But there was a problem. I had this really cool concept, but no real plot. That was a problem that plagued a lot of my early failed attempts: I’d have something really cool that could be in the background, but nothing for the characters to actually seek, do, or achieve.

  I thought, “What if there was a zombie plague … but instead of going all World War Z, a drug was created that stopped zombies wherever they happened to be at the time?”

  After writing a meandering 80,000 words or so on the project, I realized that a cool concept wasn’t enough. I didn’t know how to fix it at the time, though, so I moved on. I wrote Fat Vampire instead, because vampires have a really simple, tried-and-true story arc that required no actual thought. And the project that was barely known as Zombie Book — one you’ll hear me talk excitedly about and then slowly give up on if you listen to the first year of our Self Publishing Podcast — went into the proverbial drawer.

  Some time later, Sean and I stared writing together, and found a sort of magic rhythm. I had no desire to go back to my zombie project once we were rolling because fuck that; I’d have to write it alone. But then we happened to mention it to our friends, James and Greg at Podium Productions — the guys who produce our audiobooks and get us award nominations — and they drooled over the idea.

  And so it happened that we found ourselves in the lobby of a hotel in San Francisco where we’d gone to meet some partners … and Sean says, “Okay. So tell me about the zombie book.”

  I described my cool concept.

  And he goes, “Okay. But what’s the plot?”

  Right. Exactly. And suddenly the reason that my first draft went nowhere made sense.

  Sean’s a symbolic
sort of guy (not that he represents some other dude or that he uses a symbol for his name like Prince did, but that he respects symbolism and ritual in life), so for Sean, the idea of doing my old aborted project as a closing of our first writing-together phase (and the dawn of the next phase) represented a logical closing of our own personal story arcs. He leapt at the chance to take something that was “Johnny only” and make it into a true Johnny-and-Sean Realm & Sands project. And oh man oh shit oh wow, am I glad he did.

  The concept and a few of the key components — the name of the Necrophage drug and enforcement officers called “clarifiers” come to mind, but there were others — were all that survived from my original book to the reinvention. To be fair, that’s not a small amount of stuff and represents the hook that, I think, really makes this book unique. But it was the addition of Sean’s alchemy that really made Dead City into the gem we feel it became.

  Almost from the get-go, Sean imagined this as a sort of investigative-reporter thriller. I remember sitting at a Denny’s together and Sean saying, “We need a whistleblower!” He said it with an exclamation point that was visible, as he does when discussing any story. I was eating waffles. It was a real landmark moment. But once I got the outline package from Sean to read before starting the draft, I saw that whistleblower in Ian Keys. I saw the reporter, Alice Frank (originally Ellis Frank; swapping genders was my idea). And internally, we started to think of Dead City — soon to be followed with Dead Nation and Dead World to complete the trilogy — as “All the President’s Men meets The Walking Dead.”

  Having that tagline in mind really, really influenced the way the story unfolded. I knew it would be tense, whereas my original stab at this book was funny — almost slapstick. I knew it would be dark and filled with secrecy, whereas the first version was dopey and full of zombie clichés. I knew that the book needed to do a few jobs: to hit the hook from the first book well enough to do it justice, but then to pay homage to zombie mythology while also turning that lore on its head. That called for a serious story with a lot of intrigue. And holy shit, did it call for research. (You can read about that in the acknowledgments. It was geekily thrilling.)

  I’ve gotta say, now that Dead City is wrapped, that it’s absolutely nothing like I would ever have imagined. And that’s a good thing, and a perfect example of why “Johnny and Sean” is so much better than “Johnny or Sean.” Sean came up with Jordache, the trailer park necrotic who we knew would be the story’s downfall … though it took us a hell of a long time to work out how, exactly. He came up with Holly, who began as a Hollywood archetype but became our mouthpiece for zombie evolution and the possibilities of the drug that almost was. And he came up with Golem, who I’d never thought of at all: the general of the old guard, awaiting the arrival of a prodigal daughter.

  The whole concept of a company bent on “upgrading nature” was Sean’s, though I got to figure out how that worked in — how Archibald succeeded even when he thought he’d failed — while writing. There’s a lot about evolution and preconceptions in here, too; the idea of “people sometimes ‘turn’ in advance because movies have made them think of the undead in certain ways” is something we’ll explore in future books. We wanted to ask a bit about social lines and prejudices without, I hope, being pompous. Because I mean, really. It’s a fucking zombie story. How high-brow can it be?

  If you dug Dead City, there’s a really good chance you’ll dig our other stories. Any fiction co-written by Platt and Truant falls under a publishing imprint we call Realm & Sands, and Realm & Sands’s tagline is “inquisitive fiction.” We’re always wondering about the nature of reality in our books. Or good and evil. Or right and wrong. Or perception versus fact. We’re genre agnostic; we’ve written oddball fantasy westerns (yes, that’s a thing) and a hard sci-fi serial that’s earned us award nominations alongside flattering names. We’ve written page-turning bestsellers and literary mindbenders that barely sell at all. We don’t care about bullshit distinctions like any of that at Realm & Sands. We just care about Inquisitive Fiction. We want to wonder. And our readers — who are one hell of an amazing group — are people who like to wonder along with us.

  This is the part where I point you to other shit to check out, but I’m going to keep it brief because I’ve been up since 5am and I’ve got a call in just over an hour with a guy who does a great Morgan Freeman impersonation. Sean will go over it anyway, so whatever.

  The best place to hook up with us is our mailing list. Seriously. I know how unsexy that sounds (“Come join our mailing list! Yay!”), but our mailing list is pretty badass and we send shit out all the time that you will actually want to get, win, or read. You also get (there’s that word again) two free books when you join our list: the first two books in our Alien Invasion series. So why not sign up? I mean, you’d be crazy not to.

  You can join our list and get those two free books here: https://sterlingandstone.net/rsfb

  Oh, and here’s another reason to be on our list: so you can know when this book’s sequel comes out. We have plans for it already and it’s going to kick unholy ass.

  What else? Facebook, I guess. We’re total balls on Facebook. Seriously. We suck. I do sometimes post project updates and shit like that, and I once posted a photo from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum of myself morphed into a Neanderthal. Good times.

  So yeah, please at least “like” our Facebook page here because when we ignore it too long, our friends who care about Facebook yell at us: https://www.facebook.com/realmandsands/.

  That’ll do for now, I guess. We both really hope you loved Dead City, because this one took a lot out of us — and, when we read it back, we really thought it was worth the effort. We’re both chomping at the bit to write Dead Nation and Dead World, too, so if you don’t want to miss out on those, be sure to join our list. We’ll let you know the second it is out. (And we’re not lame about our list like we are about Facebook. Seriously, you want to be there.)

  Stay cool. Stay inquisitive in your fiction.

  Johnny and Sean

  September 2015

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I just typed out the title of this page as “Acknowledgement” because I really only have one to make, but then I saw how stupid it looked singular like that and added an S to the end. I guess in books, you have to acknowledge at least two people if you acknowledge anyone. Such bullshit.

  (So, okay, I guess Sean and I should acknowledge our wives to make it official. But hell, we acknowledge them ALL THE TIME for putting up with our crap. It’s totally implied.)

  My single real acknowledgement for this book — the first acknowledgement I’ve ever put in a novel, in fact — goes to my friend and college roommate Eric Alexander, who helped me figure out all the science in this book.

  That’s right, Dave: SEAN AND I DID RESEARCH FOR A BOOK. So there!

  I fondly remember the moment when I realized this would be necessary. I was about halfway through the first Ian Keys chapter when I got the distinct impression that I might just be talking out my ass. I have a background in biological science; I actually got a year into a PhD in molecular genetics before deciding I hated working in a lab. It was my major in college and a nerdy hobby before that. And so I figured, “Hey, a book where zombies make a semblance of biological sense? I can do that!”

  Anyway, it was during this chapter that I realized that maybe I couldn’t. I was tossing out some good jargon (“enzymatic digest,” “nuclear magnetic resonance imaging,” “electrophoresis”) but was 1) maybe using out-of-date terms (college was a while back) and 2) was, again, talking out my ass as far as how an actual zombie plague might work, and how a cure might arrest it. This brought to mind paranoid fantasies of scientists pelting us with tomatoes at book signings, and I couldn’t sleep. Something had to be done.

  You can hear this full tale of my research and our idea of how zombies might actually work in the Backstory that goes with this book (http://sterlingandstone.net/go/dead-city-backstory), but
the short version is that I just took a shortcut by calling Eric, who does shit like this for a living.

  (Not making zombies. Doing biological work. Unless he does make zombies? It’s possible. He’s an odd dude and I wouldn’t put it past him.)

  Eric is the one responsible for steering me away from prions (misfolded, self-replicating proteins) as a disease agent and toward a host of possibilities, including stem cells and, ultimately, simple viruses. I didn’t give him an easy task beyond that (figuring out how a drug could stop zombieism where it happened to stand, then how the whole PhageX/PhageY debacle with Jordache might be feasible), but he helped me work it out. I owe Eric a big thanks for hopefully keeping Sean and me from embarrassing ourselves.

  Eric endured phone calls, emails, and a 15-minute voice memo of me blathering on and contradicting myself. He also read the draft for us.

  So: BioFuse mutates into Sherman Pope? Cleared by a real scientist, folks.

  The idea of Necrophage competitively inhibiting against natural receptor-binding agents and then being usurped, in turn, by PhageX? Also cleared.

  Ditto less-central concepts like whole-genome sequencing as an at-birth procedure in the near future and the ability (again, in the near future) to “proofread” epigenic changes in stem cells against that “original” genetic code.

  (My favorite is the synthetic cell receptor component of Necrophage. I never would have thought of that. To me, that one conjures images of blood that’s polluted by extension cords with exposed prongs. So what do you do? Shit, you flood your system with electrical outlets for those things to plug into, of course.)

  Oh, and as it turns out, viruses can shuffle their DNA with other viruses and the host cell in a phenomenon called “genetic shift” — another thing that made them perfect for the disease agent over a prion like mad cow disease. That will be important later, so that means he’ll have to read the sequels, too. (Sorry.)