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Green Sunday; Ramblings of a Zombie Apologist

I know the first instinct you have when you hear ‘zombie horror’ to the most cynical of hipsters is to utter a collective angsty yawn. But give me a break. I’m writing a zombie story, Green Sunday is a for lack of a better term, coined by Shaun of the Dead a RomZomCom. Just give me a chance, come back! Hey! It’s nothing like Walking Dead!… Hmm that may have backfired.
Well for the people that got through that and are still reading which is probably all of three people, I thank you and now I shall begin my zombie apologetics.

The reason I wrote this story is two-fold, I wanted to write a zombie story, but every motherfucker wants to write a zombie story, especially every crazy motherfucker like me that wants it to actually happen. But I wanted to write it from the perspective of someone like me, someone who wants it to happen. I thought this might help me understand why I want that and why that’s crazy. I realise it’s a state of cognitive dissonance, I want the zombie apocalypse to happen so I can use my collection of sharp pointy things and have a blast but I also don’t want it to happen because I like not having to cut my friends and family into bits because they’re trying to eat me and more importantly Fallout 4 is coming out next month. Maybe next year.

Zombie stories are tricky because essentially they’re too easy, you can’t write a story just about zombies. Zombies are just an inciting incident, they’re just a framing device for what is essentially a disaster movie and overall a character drama. It’s not about the zombies it’s about how the characters react to the zombies. The zombies aren’t characters, they don’t have back stories or motivation, they’re just flesh eating monsters that could be replaced by nearly anything; Aliens, flesh eating penguins, fish men, the world’s worse case of herpes.

They’re not important to the story except as an obstacle and to be honest people like watching people kill people, they don’t really want to see people killing animals and with aliens that’s sort of a grey area. There must be something in our brains that just prefers to watch people die, harking back to the coliseums.

So why choose zombies if they’re so overdone? For that exact reason. I wanted to write a story satirises the oversaturation of zombies into our culture and to mock from the inside people like me. Nutters that are preparing or at least fantasising about it really happening. Saying something is overdone is just a way of trying to lower the market value so you can do it when no one’s paying attention and come out the omega hipster, like me ha-ha. No.

I’m a writer nothing is overdone if it’s done well, everything can be turned on its head, when someone has an expectation that’s when they’re the most vulnerable to have their expectation completely levelled and you have them by the seat of their pants.

I wanted to write a zombie apocalypse story that wasn’t really about a zombie apocalypse and to mock zombie apocalypses and this spate of summer teen movies like Hunger Games just a bit. So I thought instead of making a straight up zombie apocalypse story or a post apocalyptic story, I’d write a post-post-apocalyptic story.

It’s always been the case that the most far-fetched thing about a zombie apocalypse is the idea of it actually happening or indeed ending the world. Even an air born virus probably wouldn’t end the world, it could kill 80% of the worlds’ population and would definitely change the world but it wouldn’t end it. So how could a virus spread by touch/bite spread so quickly, and how could it overcome every army/police force/pmc of the world? Or indeed happen in a country like America where ‘There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass’ as Isoroku Yamamoto Fleet Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during World War II is according to wikiquote is misquoted as saying.

But obviously I don’t live in America, I live in England, but we still have armed police and despite what you may here about our gun laws, we still have guns, knives, cricket bats. I set it in America essentially to mock America and open it up a wider audience. America is always rife for parody as it has the delightful habit of taking everything to its greatest extreme. Although this ‘prepper culture’ has spread to the UK, it started and it lives in the US. And really for the story to work it needed an isolated are and although there are small villages (like the one I’m from) and lots of open spaces and countryside. I wanted a small mountain town to really capture the isolation possible even in a semi-thriving small town.

Ok I realised I’ve been waffling around the point, the story is I suppose a little more like Dead Rising the videogame. I.e. This shit is done on purpose, it’s not an accident or a virus, this is an isolated incident done for a specific reason. Not as a test but for fun.

Green Sunday is named for the main character, Sunday is sort of a modern homage to Red Sonja, and before I start pandering telling you how she’s a ‘bad ass/asskicking’ woman and the quintessential and much sort after ‘strong female character’, I posed her as more sort of a Don Quixote character or a Sherlock Holmes. She’s the main character but as a whole She is left a mystery and the story is told through the eyes of her cohort, her Dr. Watson; TJ.

That way I felt that she could remain a mystery and through TJ she could be this tough character but waves of softness could be intermittently shone on him from time to time for a potential romance (I say potential because I’m in the process of writing it and I’m not sure Sunday really likes him, sometimes I have a scene planned out and it goes down a completely different path which better fits the character themselves).

Waffle fit yet again, tangents, tangents everywhere! The story is about a zombie game show, I got it out, there it is. Beautiful isn’t it? Not really *Shakes head*.

Ok so the generic ‘Sinister Corporation with ties to the government’ moves into town and seals it off to play their own little internet zombie game show. So it’s basically Battle Royale meets Dead Rising or Resident Evil. I’m trying to capture the irony of the main characters being zombie obsessed Youtubers caught in what is essentially a zombie internet reality show. And they have to fight for their lives over three gruelling days of bloody violence.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I’m having a hell of a lot of fun writing it, the zombie stuff is always good fun, with a feckless neckbeard fanboy character propelling the story and lots of crazy people brought into the town to fight and rich assholes paying to hunt zombies, it’s a delicious clusterfuck of gore and black humour.

The first ‘beta’ chapter is up for you to read on inkitt, I’ve proofread it but it’s still away with my editor, so hopefully within the month I can re-upload it after it’s been professionally edited and then move onto the next chapter.

Follow this link Green Sunday to read the first chapter and review it and tell me it sucks ass just read it ha-ha.

See ya.

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First knife review; Tora tora tora!

I was a little hesitant to write a knife review, mostly because what the fuck has it got to do with writing? Nothing really, I just like it and I know what you’re thinking; ‘Oh so you’re a school shooter?’ I can’t tell you why I like knives any more than someone can tell you why they like collecting stamps.

It probably ties in with my obsession with the zombie apocalypse, of which I know isn’t coming, but at one point I sort of did. I haven’t always been sane and don’t really claim to be now, or even that there is such a thing to cling to. A little Lovecraftian? Yeah maybe.

Nevertheless I still fantasise about zombies ravaging the world for some reason. I wrestled with this a long time, I know it’s a little sad and childish but I did really fear that it would happen and I started collecting knives preparation. I literally almost breathed a sigh of relief when I bought my first cold steel gi tanto, so sad ha-ha.

But I remember when I had a dream about zombies and I started to realise that what I really needed was a crossbow or a gun or something but then I realised that that would take all the fun out of it and also be more than I was willing to pay. I realised that I realised it was just a fantasy and I didn’t really think it would happen because otherwise I would get a crossbow or learn to use a bow or something but I didn’t. I just wanted to collect cool knives and display them. It was a way of using cognitive dissonance to justify my collecting of something I liked, like I wasn’t just collecting shiny things like a magpie, I was assembling an arsenal to survive.

I used to watch these shows like doomsday preppers and I realised I wasn’t like these people, I didn’t really think it was going to happen, my brain wasn’t as broken, I didn’t feel the need to horde food or learn to eat bark or something, it was just a hobby not a way of life or an actual reality.

But it still intrigued me and wanting to understand and satirise that mentality is what drove me to start writing Green Sunday, not another zombie apocalypse story but one that tried to get into the heads of the people that actually want this. I didn’t want to write another zombie story as just a framing device for some pointless drama, I wanted to get into and satirise the minds of people not too dissimilar from myself and try to understand the fascination with zombies and more broadly the end of the world.

Ok rambled enough, bullshit ceased, now for the review for the;

Tora WW2 1/2nd Battalion Kukri

This isn’t my first Khukri/kukri/Khukuri? Fuck it, big shiny leaf shaped knife! I was kind of ambivalent towards them since being a zombie film lover I’d see their love affair with the knife and being a little contrarian hipster fuck I naturally rejected them and samurai swords and anything else lots of people liked and poopooed them. But then someone bought a samurai sword and I fell in love with Khukris after watching an episode of ultimate warrior and I’d been going through this phase and still am of loving anything WW2 related that can be used to hurt people. Pretty much anything that resembles something that killed Nazis interests me. I would collect some Nazi stuff too just for balance but it’s either a tacky replica or a ridiculous expensive antique, there doesn’t seem to be a happy medium of knife makers making quality replicas, could be the stigma I guess, guilt by association or some such silliness.

So I shopped around and I skimmed through condors and your cold steels and all manner of KLO’s (Kukri like objects), my brother has the cold steel Kukri machete and it’s functional but nothing special. I hovered over the condor and kabar but I kind of wanted something really authentic so… I bought a Khukri house. Now I know if you’re a seasoned knife collector or a Khukri lover that was probably a punch line. But I liked some of their designs and they had great prices for knives that were actually handmade in Nepal, not china or Taiwan or America, actually from their country of origin.

When I got hold of it, I quite liked it, it was a little heavy for a ten inch knife but I liked it, seemed nice and tough, I thought, ‘shit if it’s blunt I could just throw it at them’. So I was happy with that. But after a while I stumbled on Tora and realised what a twat I was.
And now holding a tora in my hand I understand the extent of my twattishness. When I first picked it up, it felt like I was picking up a piece of a downed alien space craft, made from some eldritch unknown metal. It was so unbelievably light for a twelve inch ww2 replica kukri. I was amazed by how light and agile it was.
It made me realise how pointless the Khukri house knife was in terms of its use, it’s over built with the full integral tang and the thickness of the blade and it makes it cumbersome to a point where it becomes almost unusable when you go above ten inches. Those two features are purely to sell it to American tourists who want some big knife and see the tang when really having the tang visible all the way through the handle doesn’t denote the quality of the knifes construction. So I’m not trying to shit on Khukri house and as a collector they make handsome knives and I will definitely buy from them again because they go beyond the standard replicas and make their own styles which I love.
But if you want real quality replicas, a real Khukri made to the specification of world war designs of authentic Khukris I’d go with Tora.

The blade came fairly sharp but to be frank, Khukris are like axes in how they chop, it’s all leveraging of the blade angle, it doesn’t need to be hair shaving sharp to cut, but I appreciate a little bit of an edge. The mirror polish is lovely, the sheathe is very nice quality, well stitched, I remember with the Khukri house one I could see where it was glued but it’s still functional.

The blade feels great in the hand; it has a partial tang, so the handle isn’t bulky like the Khukri house Kukri. I think the wood handle is a slippery and it takes a little practice to get the edge alignment right for cuts. But as you can see I’m a weirdo who likes ruining his expensive knives by wrapping the handles in masking tape, I’m just too lazy to use paracord and I think tape works better and I think it looks cool but I’m a retard so don’t listen to me ha-ha.
Overall the knife is great quality, I noticed a bit of a bend at the hilt but it’s to be expected from a handmade knife, it doesn’t really affect the knife; it just irked the perfectionist that lies within.

I think what amazed me the most about the Tora is something that just caught me off guard and that was the point; it actually has a functional point. Which is something I had come to expect was not something you could get with a Kukri, which is why most of them don’t come with hilts or any form of guards because they’re not knives that are meant for thrusting (Which is sort of interesting since most people seem to think they originate from the Greek kopis which has a really extensive guard for stabbing… yeah it’s the 300 sword… philistines ¬_¬).

I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually quite pointy, I’m sure it’ll come quite a shock to those hapless pumpkins.

The only negative points I could say about it is the waiting list, you have to wait quite a while to get hold of one because they make them in batches and also they use parcel force, I think it was, and they’re about as useful as an arsehole on your knee. I’d have preferred something like ups or FedEx but as it stands I’m very happy with it and I would recommend it to anyone.

I haven’t actually taken it out and whacked a tree with it and I don’t plan to (well I hacked the shit out of the box, but that’s because my daddy didn’t hug me enough as a child), but it makes a beautiful addition to my collection and I hope to get many more, salary willing.IMG_20150922_112518IMG_20150922_112521IMG_20150922_112525IMG_20150922_112537IMG_20150922_112603

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Green Sunday Chapter one ‘No Pussy Blues’

I’ve been trying my hand at writing prose recently and I thought I’d use this place as a bit of a sound board maybe, up my content at least, I’ll be posting it on Inkitt too, so these posts aren’t too long, and it keeps the chapters in order the link is at the bottom. Thanks for checking it out, I’ll post chapters intermittently throughout the month. Cheers.

The wind blew through the cherry blossoms in the Sakuragoaka gardens. Musashi knelt and cleared his mind, letting his cares drift on with that wind that blew the trees. He saw without seeing as he closed his eyes, his mind clacking in the dark of his dreams, sparking silently as he smelled the fires burning in the distance, food cooking in the town over, dogs’ barks travelling over the mountains, whispers in the cool afternoon air carried by the silence of the coming night.

The ground he knelt on was soft and grass stained his dark brown robes, he hadn’t washed for days or combed his hair. Cleanliness had become a pretence he didn’t much care for.

Suddenly the air became tighter and sharper and pin pricks of air hit his skin. His eyes cracked and let in some light as his mind came soaring back like a demon raking up the pits of hell, as it hurtled into this world. A foot touched down on the grassy earth and sent shockwaves through the ground and then another and another and another and another and another.

Three sets of two, his eyes closed again as he listened, three men or one six legged demon, he’d know only when he cut it, they’d only exist when his blade touched them and then only for a moment after.

He took a deep slow inhalation of breath as they approached, steel breathed out sharply as their swords loosened from their ramshackle sheathes; the air took on the smell of iron and copper; they approached from behind as Musashi meditated; their steel quivered as the light hit the blade; he could see it in his mind’s eye, feel them slowly oxidising.

With each step their hearts beat faster and lost more ground to his own steady beat; his heart beat like a leather drum of a mighty ship approaching a certain destination.

His attackers could feel it in the ground as they got closer to him; the vibrations through their feet made them feel numb and light headed, they lost the tip of their swords to a strange feeling of giddiness as they got close to the kneeling man.

His breathing remained steady and smooth; he breathed in deeply, taking in the last of the sweet smells of the cherry blossom tree; the pink petals fell and swayed on the wind. Musashi brought his sword forward in his waist wrap and turned the blade in its scabbard pushing out his bottom lip as he did. His grizzled lower jaw cocked to the side as he felt the greasy stubble on his face with his other hand. He sighed a little as he turned the blade up in his belt and slowly pushed the hilt, gently popping the blade from the sheathe with a slight jerking motion from his thumb, the blade sticking with the coming cold of the autumn months.

The blank figures flapped slightly as the sails of a ship in a changing wind and their nerves were caught on a wire, cutting deeply as they sprang into life having come too close to turn back. Their fear pushed them onto this mortal stage to face blood and sweat and bone and will in an afternoon showing only the sky would be far away enough to enjoy.

They tense their legs and took stances each similar and dissimilar from each other, trying to gain strength from the earth that bore them vagabonds. They swallowed and took their pride up like an iron flag and bound towards the old man resting his eyes in the cool breeze, listening to the gears of the world slowly turn, smelling the sweet and tart smells of the grass and the blossoms mixing in the dying evening over the hushed voices of careless people.

Their swords were heavier than his and they bolted unsteadily forward shaking like they were held together with string, his sword was that of a dancing feather and cut through the air like a blossom from the cherry tree. His hand had barely touched the sword; his grip was light and nourished the blade with his will; it stayed straight and did not falter in the wind; it moved with it, flowed on it and cut it like a ship parts waves. A natural exhilaration of what was meant to be; men travelling towards their destinies, whatever that may amount to.

The men set up on him, their movements that of men underwater encountering a great eye seeing all their movements but recognising them only as insignificant shapes in the dark depth of a boundless ocean. His mind only thought of cutting, his blade sharpened by his burning will, a searing desire to be seen by the ambivalent god of the moon and stars.

They scattered like leaves; their bodies wanted to be cut; they were made complete by his blade, a cut for each and each in place; not a drop of blood fell until it was ready to fall and Musashi sheathed his sword once more.

Suddenly as if from the sky itself a crack appeared and Musashi felt a foot on his shadow, a tightness in his chest as his guard had been penetrated by some unholy force; he quickly drew his sword again; it was already halfway out when he heard it’s scream tear through the heavens, a star falling with the force of the earth itself, eclipsed him like an insect in the wake of a great mountain.

“TJ STOP SCREWING AROUND IN THE YARD AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!”

“MOOOM, I’M FILMING FOR YOUTUBE!”

“-AND YOU BETTER NOT BE PUTTING HOLES IN MY FENCE WITH THAT SWORD!”

“NO MOM”.

TJ sighed heavily as he looked at the jagged cut in the water cooler bottle he picked up on his way home from school; it bled out on the unevenly cut grass as his fantasy faded into the corners of his mind. He scratched his neckbeard as he looked at his crappy mall katana sticking out of fence that ran around the back of his back garden, still twitching from the force of the swing. He must have let go when his mom called him.

He looked into his digital camera and sighed audibly into the vacant lens.

“Hey fat ass” A nasally voice rang out from over the fence and TJ turned like Michael Jackson in thriller.

“Yeah you, neck beard, over here” His neighbour leant on the fence that parted their gardens like a crow with a superior sneer sitting atop his pointy douche bag goatee looking like a hipster Ming the merciless with a pair of poser shades dangling from his fingers over the fence.

“You better watch it son, you almost put another hole in my ass with that pig sticker of yours, hommie doesn’t play that, my exit hole remains an exit hole feel me?” His neighbour flailed his sunglasses in his fingers and tried to sound like a black guy for some reason.

“Err Wut?”

“What are you doing man? No one wants to see some fat re-re in his mommies yard cutting up bottles with a butter knife when they can see handsome motherfuckers like me and my associates chopping on some real meat with some big… mmm weapons!” He smiled and motioned with his sunglasses at TJ’s camera set up and his bottle massacre, sneering and preening in one self satisfied breathe.

“We’ve got over sixty thousand billion subscribers nigga, wut chu got, like one-two thousand maybe? Some tight fisted jackers fapping their flaccid nubby dicks over fat retards getting sweaty in black extra large tees.”

TJ averted his gaze as he attempted to jossle his sword free from the fence, his pits were wet and stinging, shame and anger swelling as he said nothing and shook his head from side to side trying to get his emo black bangs out of his sweaty face, he just took it.

“Stay off my fucking youtube asshat, and keep that mall sword crap in your pants.” He hopped off the fence laughing.

“Now where the fuck were we? Oh yeah” He said as he turned to the camera as it focused on his goateed smug face, putting his sunglasses back on; He slicked his floppy black hair back on his head.

Thanks for checking it out.

You can read the rest of the chapter on inkitt.
http://www.inkitt.com/stories/25507

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