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GS Chapter 12 edited ‘Live through Death’

Hola people of ‘teh’ world, me again here to spout a mini blog type thing that I do over the chapters of my insane meandering in the world of fiction.

Gonna keep it mercifully short today because reasons, just usual shit. I’m gearing up for nano, wrapping up Ladies Close Your Eyes, I’m pretty happy with it, and the reception on that nepotisitic fart box known as ‘inkitt’ is fairly good. But who gives a shit? I’m enjoying writing it, it was a nice change to do focus on something smaller and different. I’ll try and find a place for it some magazine or contest when it’s done, maybe I’ll get it edited, but judging by the amount of time it’s taking for GS to come back I’d be lucky to get it out before the next ice age. Oh also currently in talks with an artist acquantance of mine for the cover, which should be fun, his art is really… arty. I look forward to spend too much money on that haha.

I’m excited about nano (Almost said about the next ice age), my personal life is in ruins, got no career to speak of but hey I can write some decent shit and that’s a reason not to off myself which is wearing thin haha.

This chapter is the more feelsy one, grab those tissues lads and laddettes, its about to get real up in here.

As usual head on over to those good smarmy twats over at inkitt to get your peepers all over it for free by following this here link. And if anyone wants to send me more pictures of green haired chicks, feel free haha.

Live through Death

~

Candlelight flickered on the counter top in TJ’s kitchen, a weary flame tossed back and forth by a careless breath or a sigh. TJ, his mother and Sunday huddled around the small kitchen table and ate in silence.  A restrained rattling of cutlery hid polite coughs and awkward glances across the table. No one dared utter a word.

TJ’s mom smiled at whomever cast an eye her way, but her smile was a little cracked on one side.

They finished a humble meal of frozen pork chops and a garden salad from a re-sealable pack, which TJ’s mother put back in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge. She cleared their plates.

“Mom, let me help you.”

“It’s fine. You two wash up and get to bed. I set you two up on the couch until we can get your room tidied up.” She sighed. “It’s such a mess; you said an animal got in?”

“Yeah,” TJ said as his hands slipped from the plates. He turned his head away and felt a cold steel ringing in the emptiness that was growing inside him.

His mom smiled as she took the plates to the dishwasher and loaded them in.

“It’s OK. I didn’t like any of those posters anyway; we can get it cleaned up in no time.” A weak laugh tried to escape her diaphragm, but it didn’t quite make it and instead came out as a pained hiccup.

TJ sat back down and looked at Sunday anxiously. She sat with her feet up on her seat, poking at a very dry piece of lettuce, trying not to be noticed.

“I’m done,” she said as she pushed the table away and hopped off the seat. She swam through the tension in the little kitchen and escaped to the cosy solitude of the living room.

TJ bit his bottom lip and swallowed a dry lump, his chest feeling tight and hot.

“Good night,” he said as he got up from the table and walked away. His footsteps, light, barely made contact with the floor. The image of his mother at the kitchen sink got smaller and smaller as he left the room. That image of her burned into his memory.

~

“It’s almost time,” Evergreen sighed. He felt a strange elation washing over him. He kept it to himself. “What do we have in stock?” he said through gritted teeth. A closeted eagerness leaked out in his voice as he leant against a high back chair in the operations van.

“Err, a couple of chimeras, one of those big bastards and that new one,” the tech said as he handed Evergreen a small tablet computer over his shoulder.

The tech seemed to be getting high off of Evergreen’s steely excitement. He sat in his chair, craning his neck to watch. Evergreen smiled, flipping through the pictures on the tablet as it lit up his dark, shark-like face. The mobile command centre was dark, lit only by a series of monitors. They covered the inside of something that looked like a large tanker truck from the outside.

Noticing the attention he was getting from this eager little whelp, Evergreen cast a disparaging eye towards the tech. He was a young guy, maybe late twenties, early thirties, with shaggy blond hair. A set of boxy glasses perched on his sharp nose. His name tag said his name was ‘Murray’. Tossing the tablet into his lap, he said, “Fuck it, ‘Murray’, use ’em all.”

Murray, feeling a little exposed, tilted his eyes down, cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses and got back to work. “Yes, sir. T minus two hours to full release of specimens.”

~

In the dimly lit living room, Sunday had commandeered the roomy sofa and had spread herself across it like Cleopatra. She wore another one of TJ’s zombie-themed shirts with no bottoms. ‘Evil Dead’, this time, with a picture of Ash lifting his chainsaw, ready for root canal work.

“Got a big day tomorrow,” she said as she rolled onto her side, away from TJ, revealing a set of pink panties with a picture of a little cartoon, a smiling green ice cream cone, on the back.

He turned away, trying not to look and burst a blood vessel; a sudden rush of sadness hit him. “Tell me…” He pulled a blanket off the coffee table. His mother had set out a bunch of folded bedding for them both. He began to lay it down flat on the wooden floor. “…Are we gonna make it?”

“What are you doing?” She turned to watch him laying the blanket on the floor. “There’s enough room for both of us on here.” She rolled back over onto her side.

“Err.” A cold sweat began plummeting down to TJ’s ass crack, like cold corpse fingers running down his back “What?” His breath came out in short bursts now.

“You need to get your rest for tomorrow.” She paused and took a deep breath. “You can’t sleep on the floor; I won’t let you.”

TJ swallowed hard, harder than he’d ever swallowed, and began to shake his head up and down like a dog.

“O-K.”

TJ edged his way closer to the couch. Each step felt like jumping on a slippery rock in a fast flowing stream. The image of Sunday’s warm back jostled in his field of vision as he tried to get closer. He reached the edge of the couch. He stopped dead, trying not to make a sound.

She rolled sleepily onto her back.

Without opening her eyes, she yawned and said, “TJ, get on the fucking couch.” She then rolled back onto her side, showing him her lovely back again, with that signature green quaff of hair sticking up from where she had just lain on it.

“Yeah, I’m just…”

He turned away and edged his roomy behind onto the tip of the couch, praying to himself in his head, Please don’t fart. Please don’t fart. Please don’t fart. When all his weight was equally distributed, he let out a little sigh, followed by a small yet squeaky fart that he hoped only dogs could hear. He froze, swallowing hard as he waited for her to say something. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! he said to himself. She stirred. His heart pounded in his chest. His throat became drier than a cough sweet sitting at the bottom of an old lady’s purse.

After a moment of nervous pause, he deduced that she was asleep and hadn’t heard, so he began to gradually lower himself into position on the couch. Pulling the cover up over himself and Sunday, he ever so delicately slid his large body in next to hers. His belly pressed against her warm back and, as he put his head down to rest next to hers, he could smell her hair. It smelled a little musty but not bad musty. Like the stump of a tree with fresh moss growing on it, fresh and rich and intoxicating. Her smell made his hair stand up on his pudgy arms. He tried to position his arms behind her back without touching her butt or making too much noise.

Don’t get a boner, don’t get a boner, don’t get a boner, don’t get a boner, he said to himself, under his breath, as he slithered his arm around her waist, angling for a more comfortable position while holding his breath. It was not unlike someone trying to defuse a bomb in an eighties action movie.

Sighing and releasing the tension in his arm, he grinned like a monkey and took a large inhalation of her hair as he settled into his dream position: the big spoon of a girl he couldn’t have imagined would say more than three words to him if the world wasn’t ending.

His heart leapt in his chest as if it wanted to climb out of his throat and give him a high five. For a minute he forgot what he was even doing on the couch. Oh, yeah, sleep.

He settled and forced his eyes closed. And he glided off to sleep on rainbows and bullshit.

~

Live through Death

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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