Afterworld: Casualty Count

Jason was fine, of course, still busily plucking venomous murder-squirrels off his spines. So was Devon, still wearing his fur and moving on all fours; Chad had had a bad time of it, but apparently the squirrel-blood was mammalian enough restore him. Jenny had taken nearly enough damage to collapse, which would have been disastrous; her fur was better armor than it looked like, but she was still staggering. I was feeling a bit staggery myself, and could barely feel my right leg; and Mary had managed to protect herself and Ishanna until Jason could step in. 

"What's the consensus?" I asked, keeping careful track of my balance. 

"Time to pull back," Ishanna said quietly. "Chad'll be all right in a little bit, but you and Jenny are barely on your feet."

Mary nodded, looking worried. Chad met my eyes and said, "Yeah. You know how it is."

I knew how it was, because I was the one who'd first told him. In situations like these, the moment you got hurt your odds of getting hurt further went way up.  

Jenny had her hands pressed to the sides of her head. "Yeah, I... I need to sit down. Somewhere. Maybe not here."

Jason said, "I could keep going, but..." He looked at Jenny. "Better if I take rear on the way back." 

Devon just grunted. 

"All right," I said, testing my leg again. "Devon, lead us back. Jason, you're rear guard. Everybody else, stay alert as best you can."

It was going to be a long walk back up the mountain. 

Afterworld: Venomous Murder-Squirrels

They really were about the size, fluffiness, and general proportions of squirrels, except for the very tips of their tails, which were equipped with stingers -- and their teeth, which spiked carnivorous instead of Rodentia. Mary fell back with Ishanna, still breathing out feline predators, but I got taken by surprise and missed everything else. 

Also, the damned little things could jump. 

So I flung my right arm up to protect my face, used my left arm to catch and crush the murder-squirrels, and took a couple of bites and stings in my right thigh while I was at it. I didn't worry too much about trying to kill things with my right hand; I was mainly using the knife to protect it, and my arm to protect my exposed head. My right leg went numb and I staggered, but I managed not to fall. I was wearing armor -- after a fashion -- but it wasn't enough.

One squirrel... another... another... Plucked off my leg or chest, crushed, and flung aide. The chain mail shirt wasn't doing nearly enough to stop the stingers, which was going to be a problem. They couldn't sink in deep, but that venom felt like the kind of shot a dentist gives you before she starts drilling on your teeth. I could feel the numbness spreading. 

I caught the last of them with my left hand, crushed it, and reached for another before realizing there was nothing else on my body. 

The forest had gone silent. The attack was over.  

I sheathed the fighting knife that I'd been using to protect my fingers -- it had knuckle guard of sorts, which wasn't enough for this but was better than nothing -- and started picking up my other weapons, in case anything else was coming this way. We used the guns as little as possible, not just because ammunition was scarce; they just attracted too damned much attention. 

Afterworld: Trouble Follows Trouble

"Holy fuck," said Chad, emerging from the woods. "Well, that was big."

"You, sir, have a keen grasp of the obvious," I told him. Like Jason, he'd been a college kid when everything had gone to hell, and he thought it was hilarious when I sounded like a professor... which I often did, sometimes by accident and sometimes as a bit.

"Thank you," he said, looking pleased. "So keen to live up to your expectations."

"Quiet," said Ishanna, and a moment later I heard it: a soft chittering, somewhere out in the trees. More than one source, out there in the trees. 

Mary looked at me and then sighed through her nose. Devon and  Jenny exchanged a look, then moved apart from us, scenting the air and studying the forest around us. 

"Oh, shit," said Jenny quietly. "Murder-squirrels. Get ready..."

They came in a wave, small packs moving in and out. They were small and fluffy and brown, and would have been cute if they hadn't been trying to eat us. Probably they'd been too lightweight for the fall from the storm to hurt them much. Beside me, Mary was breathing out cat-sized predators as fast as she could shape them from her breath. On my left, Ishanna was stepping back and Jason had moved in front of her, squeezing his fists in a way that made his spines extend. That was smart; Ishanna wasn't really equipped for this kind of assault; Jason was. Chad swallowed, but held his ground. 

I dropped the sword just like I'd dropped the bow a minute earlier. It wasn't the right tool for the job. A flamethrower would have been better; a flamethrower also would have been suicide. The best I could do was a knife I'd had since my early teens, a simple design with a finger-guard.

They swarmed over us. 

Afterworld: The First Beast

It was something like a boar, a razorback, if you'd made it the size of a moving van and crossed it with an armadillo. It was snuffling around in the underbrush, and for a long moment I considered just backing away and leaving it to forage. Then it looked up, locked eyes with us, snarled, and charged, 

Jason grounded the butt of the boar spear and caught the beast in the throat, while I bounced an arrow off its forehead. I'd been aiming for an eye, but I missed. The spear snapped, but Jason rolled aside and sliced into its armor as it passed, his spines doing their work. Another arrow shattered at the joint of its neck and shoulder -- Ishanna's work -- and I heard a curse from back among the trees.  

Injured, the beast spun, trying to decide which of us to attack.

That was when Devon pounced on its back and sank his teeth into its neck. It thrashed, trying to fling him off, and its tusks tore up huge chunks of underbrush and scraped  gouges in the ground. I tried another bow shot but missed again. Its skin was just too thick to pierce that way, and those small black eyes were difficult targets. Jenny came in under it, clawing at its gut, but while she managed to draw blood it wasn't anywhere near a killing blow. She came out the other side and darted away, further distracting it. 

Then I heard a pff like somebody blowing out a candle, and part of its right foreleg exploded. That was the power the monks had given Mary: her breath was shield and weapon and conjured reinforcements, depending on how she shaped it. Evidently she'd decided on sniping. 

The beast reared with a grunting howl, then slammed its hooves down. Devon was still clinging to its neck, claws and teeth hooked firmly into the edges of its scales and trying to chew his way through. Jason had circled off to one side and was yelling abuse at it, trying to keep its attention on him. Then a crack of thunder split the air. 

Ishanna had given up on her bow, and gone to the rifle instead. The hole she made was cleaner than the one Mary had given it, but probably deeper. I dropped my bow and drew the Zombie Cleaver; it was my only other option, and the bow had done nothing so far. 

That was the moment the beast decided to come at me, charging at me like an oncoming train and lowering its head for a scooping slash with those massive tusks. If it managed to connect, it was going to cut me in half. 

I waited, calculating the timing. 

Then there was another pff and it stumbled, and I took that opening to dart in, kick off my altered left leg, and throw myself up and past its tusks at just the right angle to take out its left eye with the Zombie Cleaver, cutting on the pass. Behind me, I heard it squeal -- but I was busy moving, putting distance between us. 

Then the thunder rolled again, and the beast staggered and fell onto its side, throwing Devon loose. Jenny came out of the trees in a blur, found his place, and dug her claws in, ripping into its flesh.

It shuddered, squealed once more, and lay still. 

Ishanna's bullet had taken it through the right eye. 

Afterworld: Out On The Hunt

We found a lot of corpses. Even among those who survived the fall, a good number had fallen to the influence of the Sacred Trees. They were strange things, misshapen and -- when they survived -- always hostile, but I still felt bad for them. I doubt they wanted to be here any more than we wanted them here.

The trails were narrow, so we kept to single file, with Devon and Jenny alternating on front, Ishanna and Mary and Chad in the middle, and Jason and I switching out at the rear. Devon had put his fur back on, and was moving on all fours. I was carrying a bow, but had the Zombie Cleaver in easy reach, while Jason had borrowed my boar spear, both for anything that he might want to keep out of reach and for generals use as a walking stick. Ishanna was carrying a bow but had a rifle slung across her back and pistol at her hip, while Mary and Jenny were just relying on their natural abilities. Chad had borrowed a katana from my collection, and had a pistol on his belt.

We came to an abrupt stop as something stirred, groaned, reached vaguely in our direction, and then collapsed back. It was vaguely humanoid, but with four stumpy legs and four tentacles -- or I guess pseudopods, technically --  for arms. Jason came forward and put it down with the spear; it might recover and be a threat, but if it couldn't then it didn't deserve to suffer. Either way, it had to die. 

We were nearing the bottom of the hollow now, where the ground smoothed out and even with the trees it was easier to move around. With a little better footing, we might shift to a two-by-two formation, but for the moment...

Devon whined softly, and Jenny held a hand up. "There's something up there," she whispered back at us. "I can't get its scent over the corpses." She peered forward, and Devon moved slightly in front of her, instinctively protective. "I can't tell how big it is, either. But it's definitely still alive and moving."

I considered that for a long moment. "Switch positions," I whispered. "Jason and I will take front. Ishanna, Mary, spread out and flank it. Devon and Jenny, you two hit it while it's distracted with us. Watch your paths, in case there's anything else active out here. Chad, you watch our backs."

The thing ahead of us gave a series of grunts, but didn't seem to be moving our way. We shifted positions carefully, moving up to encircle it. I didn't mind having become a monster myself, but I'd never fancied hunting them. Still, at the end of the world you did what you had to do. 

Jason and I crept forward.

Afterworld: On The Home Front

"You left us swords, right?" asked my younger child who -- here at the end of everything -- was still struggling with their gender identity. The older boy had apparently never had a doubt, but that's biology for you. 

I nodded. "Swords, knives, and the rifle. I'm hoping not to have to use up any ammo--" which was only slightly less scarce than batteries "--but if you two need to make some noise, you do it -- cautiously."

Mary nodded. "Whatever it takes to stay alive," she told them. "You are my sunshines."

Hunter looked at his informally-adopted brother Cesar, and then his younger sister Sonja, who still let us call her Gavin sometimes. Cesar's sister Belleza -- also informally adopted -- was a year older than Hunter; I'd found her and her brother in Plano, Texas, outside an apartment complex where Cesar had been desperately sick and Belleza out looking for anyone who could help him. They'd fallen in easily, glad -- I think -- to have people who wanted to protect them and didn't want to take advantage of them. None of us knew what had become of their parents. It wasn't entirely beyond the realm of possibility they might find their way here; the kids had left a note in their apartment. She said, "We'll be careful," and Hunter nodded. 

"All right," I said, and went out to join the hunting party.  

Afterworld: A Band of the Strange

Chad had never intended to become a vampire. After the plagues, he'd discovered that drinking human blood made him stronger and faster, and he'd taken advantage of that to survive. Then he'd discovered that it was also addictive, and he couldn't stop drinking human blood or he'd die. None of us really blamed him; when civilization was first falling apart, we'd all been really desperate. Most of us recognized that any of us could have fallen into that trap. 

Devon, as I said, had been hunted by beasts while camping with his friends, killed one, and taken its skin to wrap around him so that he didn't die of hypothermia. After a couple of hours, he found that having the skin around him caused him to become one of the beasts, which gave him a quicker way back to what remained of civilization. I don't think I can adequately describe the expression of relief on his face when he talks about realizing that he could remove the skin and re-assume human form. 

I'd been struck by a couple of drones from a Night Mother, but managed to stumble out into daylight in time to slow the transformation into one of her children. It had turned my left forearm and calf into black-skinned flesh, harder and stronger than human flesh by far, but only slowly spreading towards my brain and full control of my faculties -- usually when I exerted myself. My right boot was equipped with lifts to help me keep my balance. 

My wife, Mary, had gained her pneuma at a hidden temple east of the Mississippi just after the incident there, after a wandering monk had intervened to help us out. The monks had stabilized my transformation, too, limiting them to my left arm and left leg... which still made me a freak of sorts, but at least I wasn't still turning into something worse. My beautiful wife, with her new gifts, had taken 'cutting words' to a new level: she could breathe out monsters of her own, or use her breath to attack or defend.

Jason was... nobody was quite sure, because nobody else had seen whatever he'd survived, and he wasn't entirely clear on where he'd come from or how he'd gotten here to join up with the rest of us. His body was covered in thorns and spines, which he used as armor, claws, and fangs. He'd married one of the survivors that Devon had brought in, and they seemed happy as a couple.

Ishanna was a hunter, equally comfortable with bows and guns; somewhere she'd picked up the ability to be all but undetectable at night. Like Jason, she had no idea where; it was just something she'd discovered she could do as she made her way through the end of days. 

Jenny had turned into something like a fox-girl, with red-orange fur, excellent senses,  and claws and fangs. She says she started changing as a result of the plagues themselves, and not anything that came after. Unlike Devon, her form was fixed; she looked the way she looked. 

"We're going to head out and see what's out there," I told Ms. Lili, who was... not exactly the mayor, but something very like. "And try to make sure none of it gets all the way here."

Ms. Lili had been a high school teacher in the Before Times, and sometimes that still showed through; the look she gave me was very much what you'd use to convey your approval to a student who was taking his own initiative on a project, and never mind that I was in my late forties and had a high-school-aged kid of my own. "Excellent," she said. "For my part, I'll make sure everybody stays on the campus and ready to shelter in place, and that the emergency squads are ready to go."

Afterworld: Rain of Monsters

The storm is a bad one, spitting out monsters along with wind and rain, lightning and thunder. We don't usually get them like that, up here in the forests of the plateau. The Sacred Trees usually hold them back. They're more common out in the plains, where a bad storm in the right season can wipe out half a city, I'm told. Regardless, we're going to have to organize a troop to go out there and wipe out whatever survived the fall -- which will be the strongest and the worst of them. We'd better be ready.

"How bad?" asks my wife, carefully modulating her voice so as not to do us any damage. 

"Not disastrous, but it'll be trouble." I shrug. "It's more water for the reservoir, but we'll be hunting Things for a couple of weeks after this -- and in the woods, yet."

"They'll be weaker there, at least," she said, and I nodded agreement. 

None of us were entirely sure what the trees on this particular section of the Cumberland Plateau were doing to weaken the apocalyptic intrusions, but it it was impossible to deny that they were doing something. The beasts and stranger things that tried to come up the mountain weakened, sometimes died on their own, and frequently just turned back. It made occupying the former University of the South almost safe, despite concerns about food, fresh water, and our fellow refugees. 

There are cracks in the world now, almost like overlays in some places. Strange things emerge from them, bringing multiple apocalypses all at once. Some of that has settled back, but some of it hasn't. Miami was devoured by a spreading infection so bad that the government nuked it -- back when we had a government, and working nuclear arms. Most of the Everglades are an irradiated wasteland now. The city of London, I'm told, remains haunted by killer ghosts -- unseen things that walk through walls and kill instantly with a touch. The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex was taken over completely by the zompires, who have been expanding more slowly ever since -- their need for blood holds them back, now that the surrounding communities have fled or been consumed. Seattle, on the other hand, had banded together to turn back the massive beasts prowling its streets, and was now considered a sanctuary of sorts. I had word of this from one of the skin-changers, Devon, who had skinned one of the beasts all the way down in Arkansas and could now use that skin to assume its likeness. 

Of the ones who'd managed to survive, not all had come through unchanged. The plagues that preceded the intrusions had been bad enough on their own, but they'd laid the groundwork for worse and stranger things.

"I'll come with you," my beautiful wife said softly, knowing that I wouldn't stay back when the troop formed. Too many of them would be ordinary, unaltered, still purely human. They would need the support of the Strange, like us: the ones who'd been altered by the end of the world. It would keep their casualties down, and here at the end of all things we desperately needed to keep their casualties down. 

Out of Office

Sean Keegan sprinted down the corridor with a single-minded determination he hadn't displayed since high school. Something small and dark buzzed past his head, but he didn't break his stride. His heart was pounding, his lungs burning, and his gut seemed to get in the way of every movement. He could hear the thing behind him, crashing into the walls as it gave chase. He was pretty sure it would have caught him by now if it hadn't been almost too large to fit in the hallway.

Two more of the buzzing things -- they moved like insects, but they were too large for any insect Sean knew -- were suddenly ahead of him, and coming straight towards him. He flung up a forearm to protect his eyes, and one of them slammed into it. The other one buried itself in his calf. He missed a step, recovered, and kept going: even the burning pain that followed their impacts couldn't compete with the sheer, adrenal panic that filled him.

He could see what was happening to his arm, and it wasn't possible. The insect wasn't biting or stinging; instead, it seemed to be dissolving into his flesh. Skin and muscle darkened and swelled, making a charcoal-colored lump on his arm. That was the source of the burning pain, and he could see it every time he brought his arm up to help propel himself along. It was spreading rapidly, and the burning in his leg said the same thing was happening down there, too.

He didn't so much open the door as slam into it so hard that he bounced off at an angle. That finally stopped his headlong flight. He landed on the sunlit concrete outside the office.

The thing reached the door a heartbeat later, and... stopped. It stood there, hunched over with one charcoal-skinned hand on the door frame, looking out through the glass. Sean lay helplessly on the concrete and stared back at it; he was too busy gasping for air and writhing with pain to move any further.

Except... his arm was suddenly cold, not hot. The dark lump was shrinking, smoothing out against the rest of his arm. He turned his hand, and the dark spot moved with the rest of his skin and muscle. It was still part of his flesh, just... darkened. Even the pain was fading.

His leg was still burning, though. It's the sunlight, he realized. The infection reacts to the sunlight.

He tore at his belt and unfastened his slacks, then shoved them down to his ankles. It worked: as soon as the sunlight touched the dark swelling on his calf, it stopped swelling, stopped expanding, and began to shrink. I'll be damned.

It was at precisely that moment that Sean looked up and realized that his boss was standing on the sidewalk, gaping at him. Some explanation was clearly needed, so he sucked in a lungful of air and gasped out the first thing that came to mind: "I forgot to set my Out Of Office."

(As a reminder: I'll be out of town all next week, and I don't have anything prepared. So, blogging will resume sometime after the 15th.)

"Well... They aren't exactly zombies..."

I'm working on another short story -- basically an earlier episode of the story I submitted to Swords vs. Cthulhu, with the same characters and setting. It's basically a mid-apocalyptic... I can't decide if it's more "survival horror" or "action adventure". Bit of both, really. The apocalypse itself is of the phantasmagoric, anything-goes variety, except that at no point will conventional physics "stop working". (That places some interesting restrictions on what I can get away with in terms of the fantasy elements, but that's all part of the fun.) In addition to introducing a couple of the characters, this story plays with the zombies that (for reasons of elementary physics and biology) aren't exactly zombies. There are guns, swords, fighting, rescues, and narrow escapes.

So: writing. I might be slow or erratic about updating the Blog o' Doom, here.

Submitted!

My story has been written, read, tweaked, proofread, corrected, re-re-read, tweaked again, given one last it's-really-final-this-time re-re-re-read, re-tweaked, and -- finally -- submitted. In celebration, I'm going to repost a picture which I commissioned from Noodly Appendage Designs to go with this world/story/character. (Click to enlarge it. I love this picture. It so perfectly captures the feel of this world.)

Your plans for the End of the World?

The plague burned itself out three weeks ago. Or maybe they were plagues; nobody seems to be sure. The immediate effects were obvious: "flu-like symptoms", and possible death. There was no vaccine, no cure, and every attempt at quarantine failed miserably. With a worldwide death rate of seven percent, that was horrible enough. There wasn't any particular pattern to the deaths, either; the elderly were slightly more likely to succumb, but only slightly.

We were lucky. We survived, all four of us. The wife and I got it first, and then the boys came down with it just as we were starting to recover. "Lucky" doesn't seem to cover it, when more than one out of every twenty people we knew had died. For a week or so, it looked like most of the world was going to slide into a full economic collapse, but civilization held together. Barely. Mostly.

Things are different in the wake of the plague. It's not just the reduced population, though we're still feeling the effects of that. It's not just the shell-shocked look on so many faces, or the way that people will suddenly break drown crying in the middle of their work. It's not even the suicides, or the disruptions in water, power, and other services - fortunately, we haven't had too many of those.

No, things are really different. It's like the plague opened the door for other things. The parasites that make the zompires, for example. Or the big, scaly dogs that a friend of mine said are spreading through the woods around the Cumberland Plateau. The flying leeches. The Ghost Plague that made them evacuate London. People claiming that drinking blood now makes them stronger... with YouTube videos purporting to prove it.

We're doing what we can, of course. Keeping the servers up, keeping the information flowing: emergency announcements, safety advice, reports on new developments and how they're being dealt with. And waiting, of course. To see if this is going to level off, or if things are just going to keep getting worse. We've got the cars loaded, in case we have to leave... but I don't see anywhere that's particularly safe to go.

There's been hoarding, naturally, along with calls for repentance and the usual predictions about the end of the world. First time since I was sixteen that I've taken those seriously. But like I said, right now we're just waiting.

How about you?

I realize I've asked this sort of question at least once before, but I'm a bit burned out so I'm asking it again. What would you be doing if the world seemed to be spinning out of control en route to some sort of apocalypse?

Zompires Ahead

I eased my head over the top of the hill, and saw them: zompires.

Different people might call them other things, but we called them zompires. Unless they were particularly weak and damaged specimens, in which case we called them Vambies.

If you saw them in the early stages of the infection, half-blind and off-balance and uncoordinated, you wouldn't think they were much of a threat - and you'd be right. But as the parasite spread, killing and replacing human flesh like some fungous cancer, they grew faster and stronger and much more stable.

Smarter, too.

Fully developed zompires looked like nothing so much as a black-and-white photo of a skinless corpse, the grain of the muscles and the lines of the veins sketched in lighter and darker grays. Here and there they might be missing a limb, where something had rotted off before being completely assimilated, but that was usually just fingers and toes. It wasn't enough to slow them down or throw them off.

Very little threw them off. They didn't have a circulatory system, like we did; no matter where you cut them, they didn't bleed out. Their organs were redundant and distributed; a shot to the heart or head might stun them, but it wouldn't finish them. Even decapitation didn't always do it. You needed something systemic: intense heat, or extreme cold, or truly massive physical damage. They could starve, but not as easily as human beings could; ditto suffocation.

This wasn't a large group; maybe a dozen specimens, but they were all fully developed. That meant that they would react intelligently to whatever we did. It also meant that they had access to their full range of senses, which we didn't completely understand. We knew they could spot us up to about three hundred yards out, but we weren't sure how they did it; and we knew they had some other way of finding people, since they drifted towards us - or anyone else - across much longer distances than that.

Ordinarily, we dealt with zompires from as far away as possible, using rifles. With blood-addicted bandits sniffing our tails, we couldn't afford to make that much noise. And the ground ahead was pretty open; if we tried to circle them, we were pretty much committing ourselves to running. Maybe we'd make it, or maybe we'd end up cornered and overrun; no way to tell in advance.

I eased back down, and went to rejoin the others. "Drive through them," I said. "If we don't find shelter, we're done."

Healthier boys, better night

So, last night the Beautiful Wife decided that she wanted to work with Firstborn on his homework, and sent me off to get Secondborn to sleep. Admittedly, for the previous two nights she'd had to give Secondborn breathing treatments for this horrible cough of his, but apparently that wasn't why she wanted to trade bedtime duties. Apparently she really wanted to help Firstborn work on his homework. Which, you know, I don't understand at all, but whatever.

So, after a bit of negotiating, I got Secondborn to go to sleep. I managed this without using a breathing treatment, though that's more because he's getting better than it is any sort of tribute to my parenting skills. Unfortunately, part of the deal involved me stretching out on the bed with him.(Secondborn, despite his limited vocabulary, is a remarkably talented haggler.) This, to the great surprise of absolutely nobody, meant that I quickly passed out on my son's bed, and stayed there for... I don't know, maybe half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

Then he started coughing again, though not as badly as before. So I set up some pillows and arranged the boy so that he was sleeping upright (kind of like he was sitting in a car seat, but just leaning back against a pillow). That seemed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it also meant that I couldn't go back to sleep.

So I got up, played a little bit of Bulletstorm (which is exactly the kind of game it sounds like), then read for a while, and finally went back to bed. (Where I slept like a rock, though I was a little annoyed that Patrick Swayze didn't want me to play on his volleyball team. Apparently it was my night for dreaming about being left out of things by the Cool Kids?)

...Anyway, somewhere in there I came up with a solution for a problem I'd run into on the Afterworld project. The problem was, basically, that I'd ripped out my opening scene and replaced it with something different. The new scene is, I think, stronger than the original scene, but the change creates some logistical problems: I need the main character to do a certain sort of planning, and that sort of planning doesn't make sense as a direct response to the new scene.

But, as I was lying in bed waiting for Morpheus to drop by with his bag of sand, I came up with a solution. A good, solid, workable solution. And, even better, I still remembered it when I woke up this morning. So I have a plan, and the writing can continue.

So, all in all, I'm going to call this a victory.

Pimp my Art Friends 1: Robyn Seale

Visual art has been something of a theme in my life just recently. This isn't deliberate; it's just one of those funny little bits of synchronicity. But, since it has been prominent on my mental radar, I thought I'd take a moment and promote some of my artist friends. Some of these are people I've known in person for decades; others are Imaginary Friends (iFriends), people I only know through the Internet. All of them are awesome.

First up is Robyn Seale, whom I first encountered through her comic, The Watcher of Yaathagggu. She's also a writer, and has a story in the Future Lovecraft anthology. Since she shares my deep, strong love of Eldritch Horrors and fantastic settings, I was delighted to discover that she has started taking commissions. (Apparently this has something to do with being able to afford food? Anyway...) My current writing project (Afterworld) seemed like an excellent fit for her work, so I commissioned a portrait:

Do I really need to explain just how cool I think this is? I love the way it came out; I think it captures the character and the setting perfectly. So check out Robyn Seale's work, and if (like me) you have characters or scenes that you'd love to see, but you lack the skill to create them yourself, consider throwing 'em her way.

"Pimp my Art Friends" will be a semi-regular feature. Originally I was just going to put everybody together in a single post, but even if I had time to write that all at once - ha! - I don't think it would work as well. So, for the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting about artists that A) I know, and B) I think more people should know about. In between, I'll also be publishing the usual random anecdotes, commentaries, and rants.

Suspicious Character Reported

I'm working on a surreal horror-survival story (Afterworld), basically for my own amusement but also in hopes of maybe having something publishable at some point. Like most horror stories, it's set in the real world - at least until things start to go wrong. My narrator works for a city government, just as I do; he's a very deliberate author-insert. Now, it would have been easier to use the building I actually work in, but it would also have been tantamount to giving anyone who reads the things directions to my cubicle. Instead, I placed him in a completely different city... which meant that he works in a building that I actually knew very little about.

So, yesterday evening on the way home from work, I stopped by that other City Hall to take some pictures and look around. This would, I hoped, lend some verisimilitude to the upcoming scene where Our Hero gets chased out of his office by a monster. All I really needed was a realistic idea of where the offices were located, and how the people in the offices would get out of the building.

The girl at the information desk was a bit puzzled, but I was wearing a work shirt for [MyCity], and I'm a white male, so she didn't object to me wandering around taking pictures of empty rooms and hallways. Once I had what I needed, I put the camera away and went home to think about how best to arrange the scene.

Well, today I got an entirely different scene of my very own. Apparently the head of my department got a call from MyCity's Police Department. They called him because they had received a call from OtherCity's Police Department. OtherCity's Police Department was concerned (as best I can decipher this) that some terrorist had stolen a shirt and an employee ID from MyCity and was plotting to blow up OtherCity's building. Apparently they were busily reviewing security camera footage and everything. So our CIO dropped by to see if I'd been over there taking pictures. Which, of course, I had been.

"Why?" he asked.

"So I'd have an idea of which way you'd run if you worked in the building and were being chased by zombies," I told him. "It's for a story."

He blinked.

"...Why am I not surprised?" he asked.

"Hey, I can call over to OurOfficer and tell him about the zombies..." I offered.

He answered just a little too quickly. "No, don't tell him that." The CIO shook his head. "I'll talk to him."

So I wasn't arrested, and OurCity's police presumably explained to OtherCity's police that it wasn't anything nefarious, and all is basically right with the world again.

But if anybody does blow up that building, I'm in real trouble.

Sometimes it works like this...

Had a very nice development on Sunday; I was thinking over one of my perennial writing projects - Afterworld - and it just sort of fell together. I've been working on this thing off and on for, I don't know, at least two years. I've never made it past the first chapter; it's mainly been a series of false starts. I'd write a bit, decide I wasn't happy with that approach, and start over.

On Sunday it occurred to me that in order to get the full effect of the build-up that I'd originally wanted to create, what I really needed to do was start at the absolute beginning and go forward... and that I could do that by connecting (with only minor tweaks) a bunch of the false starts into a single narrative. And once I started looking at it that way, I could also see the structure I would need in order to connect them. So in the course of an hour, I went from having maybe a page and a half, to having more like ten pages - the better part of the first chapter. And I know where it ends, and how it crashes into the second chapter.

Now I just need to pry loose enough time to finish putting it together, and then move into the second chapter. Fortunately, I have a plan for that, too - I'll post more about that in about two weeks, after my busy season is over.

How about you? Any projects coming together? Any moments of inspiration and/or revelation you'd care to tell us about?

Zombie Defense For Exhausted Parents II

Let me set the scene. It was about eleven o'clock on a Saturday morning. I'd been up most of the night with my son, who had a fairly nasty case of croup. They'd sent us home from the emergency room - after a heavy dose of Tylenol and two hours on a nebulizer - with a prescription for some sort of steroid. On top of that, we'd used the last of the children's Tylenol, and needed more. So I was getting ready to drive over to the pharmacy when it happened.

After a night like that, I was not exactly at the top of my game. I probably looked it, too: I'd splashed some water on my face and brushed my teeth, but I was still in the same outfit I'd worn to the emergency room. But what the hell, it's not like I was heading out to a club to pick up chicks. I was thirty-six and married, with a three-year-old boy and another son on the way. What I wanted, more than anything else in the world, was to get the damned meds so I could go back, lie down on the couch, and watch videos with Firstborn until we both felt better.

So I went into the garage, and I pushed the button to open the garage door. And as it was going up, I realized there was somebody standing just outside. By then I was between the car and my wife's van, but I stopped and waited. By the time the door was all the way up, I could see the sagging, pale flesh, the torn clothes, and the unkempt hair. It was looking up at the ceiling - at the garage door, I think - and then it looked down at me. That's when I knew it was a zombie: its eyes were withered. That wasn't possible, but at the time the impossibility of the situation didn't bother me. My first thought, I swear to God, was this: Oh, this is just what I need right now.

The zombie lurched and started shuffling towards me. I backed up a couple of steps, then went around the front of my car. It stopped, because the car was now between us. The smart thing to do would have been to go inside the house and block the door, but to be honest I barely even considered it. We needed medicine, and I was going to get medicine. Besides, all the weapons were here in the garage.

So I moved up along the driver's side of the car, and the zombie came to meet me. Or, at least, it tried.

In life it had been an overweight, middle-aged white guy. In death, its fat had... solidified, I guess, and it couldn't quite wedge itself in between the side of the car and the camping equipment. I think it was then that I noticed the broken arm - you know, just in case I'd needed any more evidence that this wasn't just a prankster in a costume. It was reaching out with both arms, but the left arm just kind of... dangled. Everything below that elbow was hanging loose.

Well... Back when my son was born, I put all the weapons in the garage. I locked up the ones I could, particularly the ones that might seem attractive to a small boy or his friends. (I've dabbled in a variety of martial arts over the course of my life, and I have a wide variety of weapons and training equipment.) Some of those weapons were too long to fit in a case, so they wound up leaning against the cabinet where everything else was locked away. As a result of this arrangement, the first thing that came to hand was a hardwood staff.

That was fine with me. I held it like a spear and jabbed the zombie in the chest. I wasn't gentle about it; I heard something crack, and a sort of groaning exhale escaped the corpse's lips. It grabbed for the staff with its good arm, but I kept pushing and drove the zombie backwards. It weighed more than I did, but I had braced myself - and its balance was horrible.

It stumbled back a step, then fell over backwards. I wrenched the staff back as it fell, and managed to keep hold of it. I heard the back of its head strike the concrete with a crack.

So I changed directions again, and went back around the other side of the van.

The zombie was still lying on its back. Its arms were moving, but it didn't seem to know how to get up - or even roll over. The staff gave me plenty of reach and more than enough leverage: I hit it in the face, again and again. I basically just kept smashing the staff down until it quit moving. Then I did it a couple of more times, just to be sure.

And then I used the staff to shove the thing off my driveway. For a moment I just stood there looking at it. Then it occurred to me that there might be more of them, so I looked down the side of the house, then went and looked both ways down the alley. Nothing was moving. All right, then.

I went back inside and told my wife to call the police. Then I got in the car and drove to the pharmacy... because God damn it, we still needed medicine.

This actually came to me as a sort of vision, in much the circumstances I just described - just, without the zombie. The garage door was going up, and I thought, "What if there was a zombie outside?" And then I realized I was just too tired to care. I was, however, vastly amused by the idea of a lone parent averting the Zombie Apocalypse just because he was too tired to panic properly. Thus was this scene born.

Character Sketches: Sean

I approach the ramshackle farmhouse carefully, watching for signs of movement, listening for anything that might be more than just the wind. I called out from the edge of the yard, but nobody answered: either the place is empty, or its inhabitants don't care to respond. With luck I can scavenge some supplies without finding any trouble, but that sort of luck is scarce these days.

My progress is steady, despite the limp. Beneath the worn cloth of my pants, my left leg is strangely deformed: longer and heavier than it once was, the skin black as coal. I wear a combat boot on my right foot, an old sneaker on my left. The difference is almost enough to compensate for this thing... this infection, this mutation... that's claimed my leg from just above the knee to just above the ankle. My left arm, tucked into a sling across my chest, is a match for the leg: the flesh is heavy and black from just below the elbow to the tips of my fingers. Another small piece of my humanity, traded away for a few more days of safety...

I reach the door, knock, and listen. Nothing stirs. I wait, knock again, wait longer. The others are somewhere behind me, waiting as I wait, ready to help if I need it. My family, and others... I guess I'd call them my tribe, these days.

Nothing. With my still-human right hand, I try the knob. It's unlocked, and the door swings open. I check the position of the weapons on my belt: wakizashi on the left hip, pistol on the right. The pistol is a last resort, because ammunition is a finite resource, but the guns are also the best defense we have against some of the things that share the world with us these days.

I leave the weapons in their places and pull out a flashlight instead. Batteries are even more scarce and valued than ammunition, but I switch it on and step inside...