So, I entered
Nathan Bradford's The Essential First Page Contest. I'm not sure why, because he's already seen my query and my first 30 pages for Corpse Blood. I'm not sure what we'd talk about if I got a 10 minute phone call with him either. Mostly I entered it just because I'm proud of Rot.
Rot is the novella that I'm gonna finish today (I swear!). So that you get all the fun without having to go over to Nathan's blog and scroll through all the entries to read mine here's a slightly expanded version of my first page.
Oh, and please remember that I haven't edited this at all, period, so please excuse any mistakes.
* * *
When I met Amy she'd been dead for four days. She'd been at the facility for three of those days. At that point I'd only been there two. Not that anyone needed more than a few moments to get the gist of the place.
She was more bitter about being at the facility, than about the being dead part, and quite honestly I didn't blame her.
She had a scowl on her face as I walked into the office at Silver Springs Retirement Facility. She was pretty, pale skin graced with freckles, chin length soft-looking brown hair and the palest hazel eyes I had ever seen set into the mildly chubby body of an early twenty-something.
“You're dead.” I couldn't stop it once I'd though it. Her scowl deepened and I felt bad immediately.
“You know I hadn't noticed. Thanks for telling me.”
“I didn't mean... Look, all of the zombies I've seen so far have been...”
“Like them?” She pointed out the window to the grounds where I could see a keeper leading a train of dessicated corpses on their daily walk.
The facility employed people with enough skill at raising the dead to keep the zombies' urge to chew on people at bay. Me, I didn't have a talent for commanding the dead. What I had was twenty plus years of military experience and the ability to look someone's ninety year old grandmother in the eyes and shoot her.
The job called for all sorts of skills.
“Some of us still retain our own thoughts and personalities. I'm Amy.”
I nodded. “I'm Dean.”
“Which would you prefer, Dean? Being one of those thing out there, rotting and mindless? Or being locked in a body that's already dead and knowing that's the future you'll face?”
Personally, I thought both options sucked.
* * *
It used to be that death, maybe even a long or violent death would be the worst thing you'd ever have to face. In the few skirmishes I'd served in other soldiers had taken some comfort in knowing that. But the, that was before they started raising people from the dead.
My nephew, not that long ago, used to play a video game where the point was to just wander around shooting zombies. There was more to it than that, a bit of mystery, a touch of evil corporation or government conspiracy. The games said that zombies were the result of a disease.
When they started showing up in real life people assumed the same thing. Government experimentation, biological terrorism, some sort of corporation poisoning the public-- the fear and the outrage from the living humans caused more damage in those days than the few confirmed zombies did. I was privy to a few case reports of home grown terrorists plots against global corporations who had nothing to do with the occasional walking dead.
And there was Black Wednesday too. Forty five civilians dead. They never did confirm how many employees of that soda company burned in that building.
Then the truth came out, and I still wonder how many people harbor the secret memories of doing violence that day in the name of protecting themselves or their families from a mistaken target. Creating zombies, it turned out, was just a matter of will. The first few we caught in public had likely raised themselves. A few assholes too stubborn to die.
The problem came when people started to make zombies for fun and profit.
