Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Another day another edited chapter, it’s almost over people, almost over and almost I mean never and by ‘over’ I mean bitches. That doesn’t make sense.

Ok well day job grinding and shitty and deadend as it is has given me the desired resources of my condensed wasted time to allow me to have more of this silly ass zombie novel I’m not entirely sure why I wrote edited haha. Of which will be coming soon.
I’ve only got one chapter left to proofread and then it’s all downhill from there.

In other news I’m reading some cool noir shit, some grade Richard Stark shit and it’s starting to show in some of the recent stuff I’ve done. I’ve actually made a start on one of those novellas I was toying with to keep me busy until nanowrimo when I unleash the beast of my next hurried giant word salad hah.
It’s turning out really nicely, I mean I actually gave enough of a fuck to open up google maps and plot routes for the story, research locations and plants and other such real life shit. I virtually walked the route of this story I’m doing and I think it’s turning out really nice, my style is evolving and it’s a lot of fun. It still has that evocative bullshit I like but it’s framed by this anal attention to detail which really nails the tension down.
Anyway the first chapter of that should be ready soon enough so you can ignore it at your leisure haha.

As per usual you can check out the full chapter on inkitt.

Chapter 6 ‘Smooth Sailing’

~

Roy held the camera low, trying to be discreet. It created a shaky low shot of TJ’s front door. A doorbell ringing sound; a cool morning mist starting to creep up on them.

“Who’s there?” TJ’s mom said from an upstairs window. The camera panned to the window as she leaned out in her yoga gear.

“Oh hey, Mrs Kincaid, a lovely morning, am I right?” Zed said with a tinny laugh, like he was selling Jehovah.

“Oh you’re those nice neighbour boys. TJ’s not home right now; he’s out getting milk; he can’t come out to play.”

“Err, yeah, you see… TJ kinda said we could come and borrow some of his stuff for our show, for the Internet”. Roy stumbled over his words, his frantic nerves stripping all charm from his voice.

“Oh well, he didn’t say anything to me about it. But I suppose, since you only live next door, and it’s for the Internet, you said?” TJ’s mom ditsily mused on what that might mean as she leant out the window.

“Err, yeah,” Roy said, a tired indifference climbing into his voice as he realised he’d been up all night. Was he holding up the camera or was it holding him up?

“The door’s open; his room is at the top of the stairs. How’s your mother doing, Teddy? You boys want some green tea and rice cakes?”

“Err, no, we’re good, thanks; she’s fine,” Zed said, surprised at how easy that was.

A brief cut and it was a shot of TJ’s stairs as they climbed up towards his room. All TJ could see was a POV shot of the back of Zed’s legs as he went up, followed by Roy.

Zed stopped on the stairs and turned to Roy with an odd smile on his face, the camera uncomfortably close.

“Dude, why’d you stop?” Roy said, behind the camera.

“How much you wanna bet the fat fuck’s a brony?” Zed sniggered childishly, forgetting the blood under his fingernails.

Another brief cut and whoever held the camera was elbow deep in TJ’s drawers. “Where the fuck is it?”.

“Dude, I found it.” The camera panned impatiently to Zed who stood in front of the closet, smirking.

“Friendship is fucking magic.” Zed chortled as he spoke. Parting the clothes in the closet, Zed revealed a secret ‘My Little Pony’ poster on the back of the wardrobe. “I fucking knew it.”

“Yeah, that’s great; the dude’s a fucking faggot who wants to fuck a horse. Can we get back to finding the weapons now, so, you know, we can fucking live through the night?” Roy snapped, gripping the camera harder, until it was audibly creaking.  He span the camera around and it fell on the red toy box at the bottom of TJ’s bed. “Here we go.”

“Yeah, I’m betting porn and an inflatable pony.” Zed chuckled in the background as Roy lay the camera down on TJ’s bed. He knelt in front of the box. Zed went through TJ’s action figures and miscellaneous cosplays, giggling fecklessly in the background.

Roy opened the box. “Look at this shit – fucking mall crap! Gotta bag this shit up.”

“Then what?” Zed said, some ice closing in on his voice.

“We gotta deal with Gil. If he’s bit, we gotta cut his head off; that bitch too, just to make sure.”

“I don’t know-”

“It’s fucked. It’s so different from how I thought it would be.” Roy sighed as he started to pack the weapons into a ‘Naruto’ duffel bag. “Fucking otaku pussy.”

He put his hand on his knee and eased himself off the ground.

Zed sighed; the character he had created had crumbled and he felt like a kid. His skin sticky and dry from where he had washed off Christie’s blood. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

Roy fumbled as he picked up the camera and turned it off.

Another cut. The camera seemed to be resting on the edge of a sink, turned on by mistake as if placed there in a hurry.

Scuffling sounds, sounds of muffled whimpering. The camera was out of focus. A blurred figure came into frame and snatched it up. Fumbling sounds of plastic creaking. It was still being held low, around waist height; there was nothing to see just yet.

“You’ve got to do it.”

“Why do I have to do it?”

“Because I’m holding the camera,” Roy said, a cold smile in his voice.

Roy raised the camera, like a shield, to put the spotlight on Zed’s pale and drawn face. Zed sat on the bed in his room; he knew it had to be him. He swallowed hard, took TJ’s crappy mall sword in both his hands and unsheathed it a little to check it didn’t stick. He hesitated. “Oh, fuck it,” he said as he unsheathed the sword all the way. He threw the cheap scabbard across the room and held the handle as if it was a machete. The sword wasn’t quite a katana; it was one of those cheap ninja swords with a straight blade and no guard. He grabbed at his knee a little, rose with a jerky jolt of energy and began to march out of his room. Roy struggled to follow him out into the hall.

“Wait up, dude.”

They got to the inner door of the garage and Zed stood sullen with his hand on the doorknob.

“I thought he locked himself in?”

“He did, but I’ll try the door and then we can go around the front and open the garage door. He might be OK. Garage door makes a lot of noise,” Zed said.

“Yeah, best episode of ‘Zombie Stump Fuckers’ yet.”

Zed sneered and a sickly smirk passed over his face. He swallowed hard again and twisted the knob. The door opened with an uneasy jerk. Zed froze. He stopped breathing and then breathed out. Then in again with a low, shallow, silent breath.

He began to open the door wider, inch by inch, praying for it not to creak. It did. He took a deep breath and launched himself into the garage. Roy followed. The camera fell on Zed as he swung the sword awkwardly, nerves and adrenaline making it shake in his hands, creating an annoying rattling sound.

“What the fuck?” Roy said as he panned the camera up to a tense close up of the garage, lined with black bin bags. He zoomed out to Zed in his uneven warrior stance, a small pool of congealed blood on the floor. “Where’d he go?”

Just at that moment, a clichéd woman’s scream rang out and they both knew where he was.

“Mom?” Zed’s voice broke as he spoke, the sword shaking in his loose grip.

~