Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 14

Do Infected And Zombies Symbolise Different Things?

When it comes to the zombie genre, there are two quite different types of monsters. These are the true zombies and the infected. True zombies are re-animated corpses and are usually taken to symbolise a fear of death and all the rotting and decaying that it entails. In contrast, the infected are still-living humans who have been turned into zombie-like creatures by a disease or some other agent.

Rather than symbolising a fear of death, I suspect that infected represent a fear of losing our identity. As humans, we are used to being aware of our own existence and of having a sense of self, yet in the modern world, it can be easy to feel like this individuality is being sapped from us. In particular, since the financial crisis started a few years ago, many people in western countries have found that the sense of control they had over their own lives has been gradually eroded. This, in turn, and can lead to the feeling that you are being swallowed up by life and that you are becoming lost within the crowd.

It is this feeling of losing your identity, and indeed any control over your life, which is represented by the infected. They’re not dead, rather they are you with everything that makes you an individual removed. If you become an infected, there’s nothing to differentiate you from anyone else: no personality, no individuality, no self-restraint. Your consciousness and your sense of self is gone, but yet your body carries on without you.

This is, I think, an innate human fear. While our conscious self cannot exist without our bodies, our bodies can exist without our conscious self. It’s as if the bit of us which we value most, our sense of self and who we are, has been bolted on to our physical being, almost as an after thought, and this gives us a certain fragility as we live in fear of the two becoming disconnected.

This is where the infected come in, they represent that innermost fear, one we face every night when our conscious self switches off as we sleep, but our body carries on doing what it has to do without us. And it’s not just a fear of losing ourselves, but losing those we love and care for, not physically, because they’ll still exist, but mentally. There can be nothing worse than being faced with someone you love, of seeing their face, of recognising them, but there being no hint remaining of what makes them them within the body you know so well.

We are, perhaps, able to accept this when it happens as part of the ageing process, but what if this were to happen to someone who was otherwise young and healthy? And not just to one person, but everyone we know. This is an altogether more frightening prospect. To suddenly find yourself in a world where everyone you know is still present, but yet at the same time not there, is surely as terrifying as being faced with the dead coming back to life.

While the infected remain alive, you cannot argue with them, you cannot reason with them, you cannot negotiate, or plead with them, or tug at their heart strings. All you can do is fight them or run, and this is what gives them the upper hand. While we dither, trying to decide what is the right thing to do in any given situation, they simply act. While we would hesitate when faced with an infected which was all that was left of a young child, it would not do the same and it would attack with no remorse. This, therefore, is at the heart of making the still-living infected such a horrifying prospect.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Book Giveaway: Signed Copies Of ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’ and ‘Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead’

To mark the start of 2014, I’m giving away three sets of signed copies of For Those In Peril On The Sea and my recently released anthology of short stories Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead.

To be in with a chance of winning a set of these two books, just answer (very simple!) provided below:

[contact-form]

The competition will be open until the end of January 2014, and is open to anyone aged 16 or older, and resident in any country in the world. Three winners will be randomly selected after the closing date, and they will be contacted by email. After that, the results will be posted here.

In the meantime, having taken a couple of weeks break over Christmas and New Year, I’ll be back to posting on this blog on a regular basis in the near future. You will be glad to know that I’ve been putting this time off to good use and have been working away on the sequel to For Those In Peril On The Sea, and, after a trick start, it’s finally back on track to be published in the summer of 2014!

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Office Christmas Party – The Tale Of A Festive Night Out That Goes Horribly Wrong

I was never a fan of the office Christmas party, but as I cowered in a decidedly rank cubicle of a pub toilet, feet braced against the door as three of my colleagues did their best to break it down, I couldn’t help thinking this had to be the worst one ever.

It had all started so normally, with the false joviality and bonhomie of people being forced to socialise with others they’d clearly rather never see once the working day was done. I mean, half the people there would usually cross the road to avoid having to speak to the other half if they saw them on the street. Yet, here they were, having to make small talk while clutching plastic glasses of cheap sparkling wine while we waited for the signal to move on to the restaurant. As usual, there was the core group, mostly made up of secretaries and personal assistants, who were full of the festive spirit, and probably quite a lot of the alcoholic kind too. They were the ones who organised the Christmas night out, meaning it was their type of evening, while the rest of us, those who didn’t really want to be there, floated around the edges, trying to avoid getting drawn into an apparently never-ending conversation with Mike, the office bore. If you did happen to get caught, the best tactic was to try to pass him onto someone else as soon as possible, since it seemed he was more interested in talking than talking to anyone in particular. This meant if you could draw someone else in, you could then make your excuses and leave, and he’d barely bat an eye-lid.

Just as someone tried to dump Mike on me, the cry went up from the organising committee telling us it was time to head off to the restaurant. The plan was to go for that most traditional of Christmas meals, a curry, before heading off for some drinks in whatever pub would let us in on what was known as Black Friday, or even Black-Eye Friday, because of all the trouble caused by overly-drunk office workers out with their colleagues on the last Friday before Christmas.

Even as we headed out into a night chilled by a biting wind and horizontal rain, I could see a few of my fellow workers were already stumbling and bumping into each other; others were bedecked with strings of tinsel around their necks and cheap Santa hands on their heads. Two of the PAs, both of whom I knew had partners at home, had their arms round each other in a manner that suggested it wouldn’t be long before they’d be all over each other.

Looking back, I remember thinking to myself at that precise moment, that, given previous Christmas nights out, it was all following the same old routine. As I snorted derisively at how wrong I’d been, the door under my feet me shook and shuddered as the people outside continued to throw themselves against it. I wasn’t too sure exactly who they were, but my best guess was a couple of the rugby players from the accounts department because the door was already starting to splinter and it wouldn’t be too long before they get through.

Everything seemed normal in the restaurant too. The food was ordered, a choice between having one of the usual curries off the menu or the special turkey curry which had been added just for Christmas. Predictably, almost everyone chose that, despite the fact that it sounded disgusting. I went for a chicken tikka masala, which caused Mike, the bore, to start rambling on, to no one in particular, about how this wasn’t actually a traditional dish from India, as you might at first think, but rather it was invented in Britain, most probably in a restaurant in Glasgow, in the 1950s. This would have been quite an interesting story, if he hadn’t told it at exactly the same point of the Christmas night out for at least the last eight years in succession. Looking across the table, I caught Mark’s eye. He nodded towards Mike and held up nine fingers forcing us both to stifle a laugh. You see, the reason I know that Mike has done this for the last eight years, well nine now, even though I’d only worked for the company for five, was because Mark had started keeping a count, and had told me about it on the first Christmas night out I’d been forced to go on. Mark was one of the good guys, and with a bit of luck, once we moved on for drinks he and I could find a table in the corner and amuse ourselves by watching the others make complete fools of themselves.

By the time the food arrived, we were all pretty well-oiled and the conversation had grown loud and boisterous. As I tucked into my tikka masala, I heard Mike launch into his story again, just in case someone hadn’t heard him the first time. Sam, one of the PAs who was sitting to my left, poked at his turkey curry. He spiked one of the lumps of meat onto his fork and sniffed it, ‘It doesn’t really look like turkey, does it?’ He gingerly nibbled a bit. ‘Doesn’t taste like it either.’ He took another nibble. ‘I mean it doesn’t taste bad, it just doesn’t taste like turkey.’ He took a larger bite. ‘Tastes more like pork or something like that. I thought turkey was meant to be white meat …’

On hearing this, Mike immediately switched seamlessly from talking about the origins of tikka masala to talking about the difference between brown leg meat and white breast meat on turkeys, and which he preferred to eat. To give him credit, it was a new story, but that didn’t necessarily make it interesting. Everyone turned to the food in front of them and did their level best to ignore him.

Soon enough the food was finished and we were heading back out into the night to find somewhere for drinks. Giving everyone the once over, I noticed that almost all of them seemed a lot more drunk than they should have been given how much alcohol they’d consumed: tripping over their own feet and hanging onto each other for support; even those who usually kept themselves pretty sober seemed heavily intoxicated. If fact, it seemed that Mike, Mark, me and the girl Sam was currently clinging to were the only ones who weren’t having trouble walking. We must have come across as a bit of a drunken rabble because we were turned away from the first five bars we tried.

Eventually, we found somewhere and trooped in out of the wind and rain. Inside, it was a real dive, but rather than head back out into the night to try to find somewhere else, we decided to stay put and make the most of it. While Mark commandeered a table where we could watch the rest of the bar, I got the drinks in and joined him there after a couple of minutes. We clinked out glasses.

‘Cheers!’ I clinked my glass against Mark’s, being careful not to spill too much as I did so.

‘Here’s to another easily forgettable night with some of the most banal people on the planet!’ Mark’s opinion of our colleagues was about as high as mine. ‘Although …’ He glanced around the room, ‘… they seem to be a lot more worse for wear than usual which might make it memorable after all. I mean, look at that,’ he pointed to the far corner, ‘Sam’s already passed out, and it looks like Janet’s about to do the same over there.’

No sooner were the words out of Mark’s mouth than Janet fell forward, her head hitting the table with an audible crack, but even that didn’t wake her.

‘Yeah, but some of them are up to their usual tricks.’ I nodded towards the bar, where Mike had two of the temps cornered and was telling, if I wasn’t mistaken, the tikka masala story for the third time that night as they swayed gently back and forth in front of him. ‘That’s got to be new a new record!’

‘You’d have thought so, but it’s not even close.’ Mark sipped his pint. ‘He’s still four short of his personal best.’

‘Should we go and rescue them?’

‘Nahhh, wouldn’t want to cramp anyone’s style.’ Mark tipped his head towards the far end of the bar where three lads barely out of puberty were trying to pluck up the courage to mount their own rescue mission in the hope of securing the girls undying gratitude – or at least a quick snog under the mistletoe before the end of the night.

By the end of the fifth pint, Mark and I had long since given up on all that was going on around us and had set out to put the world to rights. I think this is why we didn’t notice what was going on until it was too late. A sudden scream brought us back into the room.

‘What the fuck …’ Mark was staring across the room to where Sam was now clearly wide awake because he’d lunged at the girl sitting next to him and was all over her. The attention was obviously unwanted, but no one seemed to be doing anything about it. I cast my eyes around the room and that was when I noticed how many people were slumped over tables beside half empty glasses or on the benches that ran along two sides of the room. Mike was still rambling on to the people around the table where he was sitting, ignorant to the fact that they’d clearly been passed out for some time. The bar staff didn’t really seem to mind and were having their own conversation out the back, but the girl’s scream brought them running through, one of them grabbing a bat from behind the bar. He pointed this at Sam, ‘Oi! You! No means no around here!’

Sam ignored him and carried on pawing at the girl, and trying to kiss her despite her protests. The barman shouted again, but this only seemed to rouse the rest of our co-workers from their collective stupors: that was when I realised we were in big trouble.

As the barman vaulted the bar and started towards Sam, there was a cacophony of scraping and clattering of wood against concrete as the others clambered unsteadily to their feet. Almost immediately, it became apparent there was something not quite right about them. They no longer seemed drunk, but rather they appeared stiff and uncoordinated; yet with each passing second their movements became more fluid. As one, they rounded on the barman, taking him by surprise and pulling him to the ground. He tried to fight back, but there was little he could do against so many and within seconds he’d been ripped limb from limb, sending his head skittering across the floor. This attracted the attention of Maree, the slightly plump secretary of the managing director, and she chased after it.

Meanwhile, in the corner, Sam was still all over the girl, but it was now clear he wasn’t trying to kiss her; instead he had his teeth bared and was trying to bite her. That was when I noticed his eyes: rather than being clear and blue, they were now dark and dull, and they stayed still and lifeless despite his frenzied attack. I looked round at those attacking the barman and saw they were the same.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I stammered to Mark, half under my breath.

He ran his hands through his hair, ‘I don’t know, they can’t be that drunk, can they? Maybe someone spiked something …’

I ran this scenario through my head, but there wasn’t any drug I could think of that would make people act like this.

‘Whatever’s happening, I think we need to get the hell out of here,’ I whispered across the table.

I glanced around the room. Our table was tucked out of the way and while we couldn’t make it to the main door without being seen, it seemed like we could slip into the corridor leading to the toilets and, more importantly the rear fire exit, without attracting too much attention. As quietly as possible, we got to our feet and with Mark behind me, we crept along the wall towards what we hoped would be our way out. We’d got no more than a few feet before the sound of breaking glass echoed round the bar. I turned and froze. In his inebriated state, Mark had bumped a table covered with empty glasses and bottles, sending several spilling onto the floor where they shattered into a million pieces. We looked at each other for a moment and he mouthed ‘Sorry’.

There was something slightly comical about it, and being quite drunk, I almost laughed, but then a roar brought my attention back to the rest of the room. I turned my head and was greeted by bizarre: most of our colleagues, dressed in their Christmas finery, complete with tinsel and Santa hats, stood over the bloodied and broken body of the barman, while Sam had finally looked up from where he’d been chewing through the face of the girl he’d pounced on. Further along the same wall there was another, smaller knot of people with blood dripping from their hands and faces. All of them were now staring at us with dark, soul-less eyes.

I felt Mark’s hand pushing me forward as he hissed one word into my ear: ‘Run!’

At the same time, the others surged towards us and we made it to the door way just ahead of the fastest of our colleagues. We sprinted along it as quickly as possible and, as we rounded the corner, seeing the exit ahead of us for the first time, it seemed like we’re pulling away from those who were pursuing us. We reached the door and, without even slowing, crashed into it, expecting to burst into the night – that didn’t happen; instead, we crumpled against it. Confused, we looked down and saw a heavy metal chain looped tightly through the handles and secured with a heavy-duty padlock.

‘Shit!’ I glanced down the corridor where our colleagues were just turning the corner, ‘What now?’

‘In here!’ I looked round and found Mark pointing the door to the men’s toilet. We pushed it open and leapt inside before throwing ourselves against it in case they tried to follow us in. For a moment, it seemed like we had got away, but then we felt the first of our colleagues hammering on the door. Within moments, there were so many of them trying to get in that we knew we’ll never be able to keep them out.

I turn desperately to Mark, ‘What now?’

‘The cubicles. The doors have locks on them.’

It didn’t seem like a great idea, but it was better than staying where we were. ‘Okay. On the count of three. One. Two. Three!’

We leapt to our feet and dashed across the grubby, tiled floor. The door crashed open behind us as we slide into the cubicles; me into the right hand one, Mark into the left. There was just enough time to get the door shut and the latch flipped before our colleagues reached it and started trying to break it down. I wedged my feet against the door, just in case the lock didn’t hold, but it seemed pointless as the door looked too flimsy to hold out for long.

I called out to Mark, ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘I don’t know …’ He sounded as scared as I was.

For some reason, I had a flash back to the restaurant and what Sam had said about his food; about how the meat didn’t look like turkey. That’s when something occurred to me. ‘Mark, what did you eat?’

‘What?’

‘At the restaurant, What did you eat?’

‘What the hell d’you want to know that for?’

‘Just tell me.’

‘I was going to go for the turkey curry, but I remembered how bad it was last year so I went for a prawn makhani instead.’

‘Who else didn’t have the Christmas special?’

‘Only you, Mike and that girl Sam was chewing on in the bar. Everyone else had the turkey curry. Why?’

‘I don’t think it was made from turkey.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, Sam said it tasted more like pork.’

‘So it was pig not poultry,’ there was a confused tone in Mark’s voice. ‘Why would that make them act crazy?’

‘I don’t think it was pig; just something that tasted like it.’ I tried to think of what it might have been, but I couldn’t come up with any possible answers. ‘Whatever it was, I think it must have been tainted or infected or something …’

I heard the sound of splintering wood and glanced up to see the top hinge had separated from the door, and I knew it won’t be long before they’d break through.

Mark called through from the next cubicle again, ‘How the hell are we going to get out of here?’

I looked round for a window or some other way of getting out, but find nothing. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Shit!’ There was a brief pause before he carried on. ‘Knew I should have stayed at home!’

There didn’t seem to be any way we’re getting out in one piece, but I felt I needed to say something to lighten the mood. ‘Look on the bright side, we won’t ever have to listen to Mike’s chicken tikka story again.’

‘What d’you mean?’

There was another crack from the door as a second hinge gave way. Now the door was only held in place by the remaining hinge, the latch and my feet.

‘The last I saw of him he was being eaten by the managing director, two of the interns and that work experience girl everyone kept flirting with.’

‘Well, at least there’s a plus side then!’ Mark shouted back as I heard his door give way.

At almost the same moment, the final hinge gave out on mine and I knew it’ll only be seconds before the creatures that had once been my colleagues finally got hold of me and tore me to pieces, just like they had to done to the barmen, ‘Yeah, happy bloody Christmas!’

***

This is the second of the two Christmas stories I’m posting this year (you can find the first one here). It was inspired by the many office Christmas parties which I’ve been to over the years. Most of them ended better than the one in the story. Then again, some of them ended up worse!

A PDF of this story can be downloaded from here.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Waiting Up For Santa Claus: A Cautionary Tale

This is the first of two festive zombie stories which I’ll be posting here over the next couple of days. If you’ve been with this blog from its very early days, you may have read this one when I originally posted it here last year. However, many of you will not have been following my work for that long, so I figured it might be worth re-posting it for those who haven’t come across it before. This is also one of the 23 stories which features in my recently released anthology titled Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead, so if you want to read it offline, you can purchase the Kindle ebook edition, which is only $0.99, and read it from there.

Tomorrow’s story will be a brand new festive tale which tells of an office Christmas party that takes a sudden, and unexpected, turn for the worse …

Waiting Up For Santa Claus: A Cautionary Tale




‘Look!’ The girl pointed excitedly, ‘It’s him, it has to be.’

The boy glanced at the clock on the wall, slightly confused, ‘But it’s not midnight yet.’

‘So?’

‘So it’s not Christmas Day, is it?’

‘But it looks just like him. And besides,’ the girl said knowingly, ‘It’s already Christmas somewhere. Maybe he’s just early.’

The two children were peeking through their curtains, trying not to be seen. Despite their mother’s frequent warnings that he wouldn’t come unless they were asleep, they’d been determined to catch a glimpse Santa Claus. They tried every year but they never quite managed it. This year it seemed they might have finally succeeded. At five minutes to twelve, they’d heard a noise and had scampered from their beds to investigate.

Outside, their front yard was covered with snow, the snowman they’d built earlier in the day still staring off into the distance. Beside him was a new figure, his red coat stretched across his portly belly. They couldn’t see his face, but curly white hair hung down below a hat edged with fur. Beside the man lay a large sack from which spilled brightly wrapped packages. He stood slouching, one arm around the neck of the snowman. The man wasn’t really moving, just swaying slightly from side to side.

The boy looked up at his sister. ‘What should we do?’

The older child scratched her head as she surveyed the room they’d shared for as long as either of them could remember. A Christmas tree stood decorated in one corner while home-made streamers were strung across the ceiling. Finally, her eyes landed on the stockings that hung expectantly from the ends of their beds and an idea popped into her head. She grinned at her brother, ‘Let’s go out and see if he’ll give us our presents now, before we go to sleep.’

‘Yeah, that would be really cool.’

‘We’ll need to be quiet though. We don’t want Mom waking up.’

The younger kid rubbed his backside, remembering how it had felt when he’d been spanked for getting into a fight at school. If she’d been mad because of that, she’d be madder if she caught them out of bed on Christmas Eve. She’d already shouted at them earlier in the evening when they were still bouncing round their room long after they should have been tucked up in bed. Twice. But this was an opportunity not to be missed. After all, how many other kids would be able to say they’d got their presents from Santa Claus himself rather than just waking up on Christmas morning and finding he’d visited them in the night?

They grabbed their stockings and crept to the door. The elder child inched it open, making sure it didn’t squeak. Once there was enough room, they slipped through and snuck down the stairs, remembering to jump over the loose one at the bottom, the one that always creaked loudly when anyone stood on it. At the front door, the girl turned to her younger brother, ‘You sure about this?’

He nodded enthusiastically.

She reached up and took the key from its hook before sliding it into the keyhole. It first turned smoothly and silently, then there was resistance followed by a quiet click that told her the door was now unlocked. The girl pressed down the handle and pulled it open, letting in a blast of frigid air. The two children shivered in their thin night-clothes. Outside the street was silent, the snow muffling the usual noises of the night. The man had moved away from the snowman and now stood on the far side of their front yard with his back to them. The snow round his feet was messed up as if he’d been shuffling through it rather than walking across it. His sack still lay open on the ground by the snowman, seemingly forgotten.

Leaving the door open, the girl stepped forward, feeling the snow crunch under her weight, the cold shooting up through the soles of her feet. For a moment she thought about going back for her shoes but that would take time and he might be gone before she got back. She’d just need to be quick. Running forward, she called out quietly, ‘Santa, don’t go, we’re here. Can we have our presents now?’

Just as the girl reached the snowman, the figure in the red suit turned and she saw his face for the first time. She skidded to a halt, causing her brother to crash into her from behind, and stared at the face beneath the fur-trimmed hat. The man’s pale, sallow skin was splattered with red and his white beard was stained by a thick dark fluid that dripped slowly onto the snow. His deeply sunken eyes were a dull black with no spark of life in them.

‘That’s not Santa Claus. Is it?’ There was a frightened tone in the young boy’s voice. He clung to his sister’s arm. He didn’t know why but the man scared him. Maybe it was something to do with the eyes and the way they seemed to stare right through him.

‘No.’ The girl was frightened too. She tried to think of what to do next, but it seemed her brain had stopped working. She wanted to run, but couldn’t; she was rooted to the spot.

Then the man started towards them, slowly at first but becoming faster with each faltering step. Suddenly, the girl was no longer frozen with fear. She turned and fled, pulling her younger brother with her, but it was difficult to run across the snow in bare feet. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the man in the Santa outfit was gaining on them. As he moved, he let out a moan that sank deep into her soul.

The kids were almost back at the house when the girl’s foot slipped on a patch of ice. She tumbled to the ground, pulling her little brother with her and landing heavily on her back. She pushed the boy onwards, towards the safety of the front door. As he disappeared inside, the girl rolled onto her front. The snow crumbled beneath her as she desperately struggled to get back onto her feet.

The girl yelled when she felt the man’s hand close around her leg and start dragging her backwards through the snow. But it didn’t feel like a real hand. While it gripped her so tightly it hurt, there was no warmth in it. Instead, it felt as cold as ice. She turned and saw the man’s face again, this time much closer. His red hat had fallen from his head, but he didn’t seem to have noticed or even to care. While his eyes looked lifeless, maybe even soulless, his jaw moved back and forth, causing his teeth to gnash against each other.

The girl kicked out, trying to break his grip, but even though she hit him as hard as she could he didn’t seem to notice. She heard someone screaming. It seemed distant at first, but quickly grew closer and closer. For a moment, the girl wondered who it was, then it dawned on her that it was coming from her own mouth. She struggled frantically but it was no use, she couldn’t get away. As the figure in the red suit loomed over her, blocking out the stars, the girl felt his fetid breath on the side of her face and realised she was going to die.

The man sank his teeth deep into her neck, ripping at her flesh. Although the girl could see her own blood spraying across the snow-covered yard, turning it a deep crimson red, she felt no pain. As the life drained from her body, the girl wished she’d listened to her mother. She wished she’d gone to sleep instead of trying to stay awake until Santa arrived.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Need For Conflict In Zombie Apocalyse Fiction

A key element of zombie apocalypse stories is, of course, zombies. However, good zombie apocalypse stories also need some sort of conflict. Think, for example, of The Walking Dead. By series three, they seem to have got a pretty good handle on how to deal with the zombies themselves, but add The Governor to the mix, and suddenly everything is so much more difficult for the survivors because they have to deal with not just one thing, but two. The same can be seen in 28 Days Later, where Jim and his fellow survivors are caught between the infected and the remnants of the British Army.

However, not just any old conflict will do. The conflict needs to be such that the survivors have to choose between keeping themselves safe from the zombies, and dealing with the other source of danger (what every that might be). This can be seen in 28 Days Later, where in order to survive Jim must leave the safety of the stately home and take his chances amongst the infected if he is to survive long enough to be able to rescue his two female companions from the soldiers who are holding them.

Conflicts can take a number of forms. Firstly, the conflict can come from within a group of survivors. Such internal conflicts are usually driven by either a difference of opinion on how to deal with the zombie threat (e.g. stay put or move on), or by a battle for control. Sometimes both of these can be happening at the same time (think of the conflict between Rick and Shane in series two of The Walking Dead). These internal conflicts often cause the survivors to take their eye off the other ball which is in play (i.e. the zombies), usually with disastrous, and deadly, results.

Secondly, there can be conflict between groups of survivors. Such inter-group conflicts are often the result of ideological differences between either the groups themselves, or their leaders. In series three of The Walking Dead, much of the conflict between Woodbury and those in the prison is driven by the different leadership styles of Rick (listens to others in the group, and gives them freedoms to do things on their own) and The Governor (requires total control and loyalty). Clearly Rick’s way of doing things is incompatible with The Governor’s, and this results in needless death and destruction as they fight it out. Again, this lets the zombies cause more havoc than they otherwise would if the survivors could concentrate all their attention and energy on dealing with them.

Thirdly, the conflict can come from the need to get somewhere. In these stories, staying locked away in a nice safe place would be the best for all concerned, but instead, for some reason or other, the survivors must leave the place of safety and head somewhere else. This is essentially the conflict in movies such as Zombieland and Shaun Of The Dead, and also in the TV mini-series Dead Set.

Finally, there are conflicts with the environment. Sometimes, it’s not just the zombies but landscape they are in which causes the survivors additional problem. For example, in Dawn Of The Dead, the shopping mall creates a conflict. At first, it seems to be the perfect place to hole up, keeping them safely locked away from the zombie threat. However, as the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the shopping mall is also a trap, and it’s one they will have to leave at some point if they are to survive in the long-term, and that will mean facing the zombies. In fact, by apparently attracting the zombies, the shopping mall is actually making their inevitable departure more and more dangerous as time goes on.

We, as humans, find these types of conflicts, where you have an increased risk of dying simply because the conflict is present, regardless of how you respond to it, naturally intriguing, and we will continually discuss what we would have done in the same circumstances. This may be because these are the types of decisions are brains evolved to have to cope with. In fact, they are something which many animals have evolved to cope with, and there’s a whole field in ecology devoted to studying them. Most notably are starvation-predation trade-offs. These are created when animals are hunted by bigger predators. This means animals face two choices: they can carry a lot of extra energy stores (in the form of fat), meaning they’re less likely to starve if they run into problems finding food, but they’re also more likely to be caught by their predators because it makes them less manoeuvrable. If, however, they choose the make themselves slimmer so that they can better escape from predators, they risk starvation if food supplies run low.

If fact, many zombie stories can be viewed through this exact same ecological trade-off lens, with the conflicts being between the need for finding food and safety, and the need to avoid being killed by ‘predators’ (in the form of either the zombies, or other survivors). This was something I noticed when I was writing For Those In Peril On The Sea, and there’s even a specific reflection by one of the characters on the fact that they’d find it easy to survive if it was just one threat they we up against, but not when it was two or, in this case, three, each of which required conflicting responses in terms of how they live their lives (this is surreptitious reference, for those who know me in my other life as an academic, to a paper I was working on at the same time).

Of course, a lack of conflict doesn’t mean that a zombie story won’t be any good. In fact, in short stories, adding such conflicts can just disrupt the flow. This is because short stories only really have room to explore a single theme rather than complex interactions between different themes. However, in films and full length novels, a conflict of some kind it needed to drive the story forward. Without it, the story will quickly become boring and repetitive as the survivors run from one zombie attack to another. With it, the story will become much more compelling, leaving the reader wondering how exactly the conflict will be resolved as the story builds to its final conclusion.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

How Outbreaks Spread … Or Why I’m Moving To St. Helena Just In Case There’s A Zombie Apocalypse

For there to be a zombie apocalypse, the disease which turns people into zombies must spread. Traditionally, it’s always been assumed that diseases spread geographically, and that the closer you are to the source of an epidemic (whether zombie-related or not), the sooner you are likely to encounter it. For most of human history this was, indeed, the case. However, in the last fifty years or so this has gradually changed, and now things are quite different. This is because, thanks to the ubiquity of modern air travel, the way the world is connected has changed. This has led to a disconnect between the geographic distance between any two points on the planet and the transmission distance (which measures the ease by which a disease can get from point A to point B).

This means it is now easier for a disease to spread from London to New York, despite the several thousand miles of water between them, than between London and Cape Wrath at the far northwestern tip of Scotland, which is only a few hundred miles away on the same island, but which has no direct connections of any kind to London (the two are not even connected by road). Indeed, a disease might find it easier to get from London to Sydney, Australia, on the other side of the world, than from London to Cape Wrath because of the way airlines now connect the world.

While this might be intuitively obvious once someone points it out, it’s only recently that this has started to be incorporated into our understanding of how diseases spread. Of particular interest here is the work of theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann, who, along with a number of colleagues, has created a mathematical model of how the connectivity resulting from modern air travel affects how diseases, such as SARS, swine flu or (in theory at any rate) a zombie virus, spread around the world, but you don’t have to understand maths to be able to see what’s going on. This is because he’s used his model to produce some really beautiful and interesting videos, like the one below, to show what’s going on.

The video below starts with an outbreak of a disease in Atlanta, Georgia, and shows how it rapidly spreads around the world along the air routes which radiate out from this air hub.

For those of us interested in creating zombie apocalypse stories, these new models of how diseases spread in the modern world can help us create more realistic scenarios for how a zombie epidemic caused by a disease might be transmitted around the world. For those who worry that it’s only a matter of time before a zombie apocalypse actually happens, it can also be very informative as it highlights where in the world you’d have your best chance of avoiding being caught up in the outbreak.

For this reason, I’ve been looking around for possible places to relocate to just in case there’s a zombie apocalypse looming over the horizon, and based on the connectivity suggested by the above model, I think I have the perfect place: the small tropical island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. It has no airport and is two days by sea from the nearest airstrip (on Ascension Island, which, in itself, is hardly a major air hub!). I think I’d be pretty safe there. As it happens, I’ve also been there as part of my day job as a marine biologist, and I can tell you from experience, it’s a really nice place and I could think of a lot worse places to hole up while waiting for the world to come to an end.

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If you want to find out more about Dirk Brockmann’s research on how diseases spread, click here.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

New Zombie Anthology: Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead

Front Cover For Zombies Can’t Swim Anthology

I’m pleased to announce that my zombie anthology, Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead is now available as a Kindle ebook and in paperback from Amazon.

It consists of 23 stories which explore a variety of zombie and post-apocalyptic related themes in tales ranging from ones short enough to fit in a Twitter posting, through flash fiction to full length short stories. They take their inspiration from subjects as disparate as the real life mystery of Flannan Isle through dilemmas you may face in a zombie apocalypse to why you shouldn’t try waiting up for Santa Claus (a nice little seasonal read given the time of year!).

Those of you who regularly follow this blog will have seen all but one of these stories before, since they were originally posted here at various points over the last year (and have also been available as PDFs on my main website). However, to give a bit of added value, there’s one brand new story, called The Black Heart Of The Sea, which will only ever appear in this anthology. I’ve also taken the opportunity to do a bit of editing where the stories needed it, and to add some author’s notes to the end of most of the stories which provides information about where the story ideas came from. Finally, there’s a nice wrap-around cover design which I created specifically for this anthology.

The paperback costs $7.99, while the Kindle ebook costs just $0.99, and would make the perfect stocking-filler for the zombie-lover in your life who hasn’t already come across these stories via this blog or the For Those In Peril website.

The stories which have been included are:

The Bookshop

I’m With The Band

Zombies Can’t Swim

Last Flight Out

Waiting Up for Santa Claus: A Cautionary Tale

Nightwatch

The Watcher

Leaving

The Lighthouse At The End Of The Road

The Wall

The Girl At Little Harbour

A Plague On Both Your Houses

When Death Came To Flannan Isle

Family

Three Men In A Boat

The Emergency Room

Survival Skills

The Custom Of The Sea

Winter’s End

When The Comet Came

The Labyrinth

Apocalypse Apartments Incorporated

The Black Heart Of The Sea

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Reviews All Great And Small…

As all writers know, their books can live or die based on the reviews they receive, and at one time, only a precious few ever got to write them. Now, with the growth of the internet, and of social media, anyone can write a review. This allows light to be shone on works which would once have lain undiscovered.

This system where anyone can review anything at any time is, however, also open to mis-use and abuse. Some of this is pretty shameless, such as authors creating false accounts to write positive reviews about their own work or to trash the work of others.

Yet, there’s another, more mischievous side to the mis-use of reviews, and they can be highly amusing. This is when people en-masse start leaving reviews for other purposes than to simply provide a review for others to read, sometimes for the most mundane of products. In some cases, they are providing social commentary, sometimes they are tales of woe, sometimes they hilarious, and sometimes they’re all three.

Take the Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer, for example. It’s just a simple piece of plastic for, you guessed it, slicing bananas, yet it’s gathered just over 4,500 reviews on Amazon.com, and reading these reviews you get the impression that few of them are meant to be taken serious. Take this one for example:

‘I tried the banana slicer and found it unacceptable. As shown in the picture, the slices is curved from left to right. All of my bananas are bent the other way.’

or this one:

‘For decades I have been trying to come up with an ideal way to slice a banana. “Use a knife!” they say. Well…my parole officer won’t allow me to be around knives. “Shoot it with a gun!” Background check…HELLO! I had to resort to carefully attempt to slice those bananas with my bare hands. 99.9% of the time, I would get so frustrated that I just ended up squishing the fruit in my hands and throwing it against the wall in anger. Then, after a fit of banana-induced rage, my parole officer introduced me to this kitchen marvel and my life was changed. No longer consumed by seething anger and animosity towards thick-skinned yellow fruit, I was able to concentrate on my love of theatre and am writing a musical play about two lovers from rival gangs that just try to make it in the world. I think I’ll call it South Side Story.’

If banana-slicer based comedy is not your thing, what about the reviews of a book called Cooking With Pooh… Now, the title is literally correct, since it’s a Winnie-the-Pooh-based cookbook, but you can also see how it has left itself open to scatological-based humour in the reviews, like this one:

‘A refreshingly simple entry into the cookbook publication industry, this book brings affordable gourmet cooking to the masses by focusing on a single inexpensive and abundant ingredient. It finally answers the nagging question of “how much sugar does it really take to make my food re-edible?” It also teaches us valuable lessons about the beautiful and endless cycle of life.’

Want a bit more social commentary in your reviews? What about the ones for the $40,000 Samsung UN85S9 85-Inch 4K Ultra HD 120Hz 3D Smart LED TV (yes this is a real product and a real price), such as:

‘I was going to fund my daughters wedding in Hawaii, but I figured this Samsung TV would last much longer.’

or

‘I bought it just to watch the garbage man struggle pitifully as he attempted to fit the box into the back of his recycling truck. Worth it.’

Then we start venturing into the world of the surreal with the Proporta Elephant camouflage kit (which apparently was on sale for a cool £1,000,000 on Amazon.co.uk). One review reads:

‘This stuff is brilliant. I too have made my herd of elephants invisible to the human eye. I’m sure you know what’s coming next.

I have no flipping clue where my elephants are. Only by carefully inspecting the butter dish can I tell when they have been in the fridge. For all I know they have left the country or are carrying out a series of bank robberies. Keep ‘em peeled, folks.

So 5 stars for effectiveness but only 1 for utility. I can’t for the life of me even remember why I wanted to paint my pachyderms in the first place.

I am now in the market for a cohort of zebra as I have invented a giant bar code reader and I want to try it out. Can exchange for some roller brushes (used once); some fencing which is almost certainly not elephant proof, but to be honest I have no real way of knowing.’

Finally, I’m going to end with those telling a cautionary tale, and that highlight why men should always be forced to read the instructions before using a product (and indeed to read other people’s reviews properly before buying a product!). These are reviews of Veet For Men Hair Removal Cream, on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Oddly, there’s only 31 reviews on the first site, and almost 750 on the second. I think this tells you something about the differences between the US and the UK, but I’m not quite too sure what.

Many of these reviews follow a similar, rather hilarious vein, and many are worth perusing, but the one I’d particularly recommend reading is by a certain Mr A. Chappell, and can be found here. Men, you might wince a little (or more likely a lot!) as well as laugh when you read it; women, you’ll just laugh your head off at the stupidity of men. Either way, the lesson to learn is always read the instructions AND do what they say, and if you don’t, you can always post a review to help others avoid your own mistakes. Not that they’ll heed your advice…

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Learning To Write

Recently, I’ve been giving quite a bit of thought about how people learn to write, and in particular how they learn to write fiction. You might assume that this is something which they learn at school, but I think in many cases this is not true. Instead, all school teaches you is a few of the most basic rules about the English language and then leaves you to get on with it. For example, despite them being important to writers, I don’t think I was ever shown how to use a semi-colon or colon by any of my teachers. In addition, while I might have been taught the mechanics of how to put a sentence together (all that stuff about having a subject, an object and a verb to tell you what the subject was doing to the object or visa versa), I was taught little about how to do it in a way which would have any sort of impact. So, if writers aren’t taught how to write in school where do they pick it up from?

Well, I think the answer here is from reading other people’s writing, and working out what you like and what you don’t, and then applying these rules to your own work. I think it’s no accident that most writers are also avid readers, often from an early age, and that it’s this experience with other people’s books which inspired them to become the writers they now are. This means that the only way in which you can hope to become a better writer is to read lots and write lots. Yet, this is not how we’re taught, at least not in British schools. Instead, at least in high school, we were generally assigned maybe one or two books a year which we would read and critique in detail, seeking out meaning in the most minor and mundane of details. And to be honest, most of what we were assigned to read was by dead white men (some of whom had been dead for a very long time) and were things which were considered classics.

Yet, these weren’t the books that interested me, or the type of thing I might actually want to write myself. The result, and I think this is the same for many people, I pretty much lost interest in creative writing, and indeed in reading fiction at all. Instead, throughout much of my teenage years and into my early twenties, pretty much all I read were non-fiction books (primarily biographies, travelogues and popular science books). It wasn’t really until my late twenties when I was spending a lot of time on boats, where sharing your books around is the social norm, and to not do so would be considered rude, that I started picking up fiction books again simply because that was what was available. Except these weren’t the dry ‘classics’ of my youth. Instead, they tended to be what my teachers would probably have called (using air quotes and a derogatory tone) ‘popular’ fiction. I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on (when you’re sitting on a boat waiting for the weather to clear so you can get to work, you get bored very quickly without a book to read), and while I’d be the first to admit that a lot of it was pretty bad, there were some hidden gems in there too which have been really influential on my own writing style. Things like the work of Carl Hiaasen, the novel Spares, and, indeed, the Harry Potter books (which I first picked up as a last resort because I’d read all the books written for grown-ups). Later I got into the works of writers such as John Wyndham, Iain Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and the late great Iain Banks.

Through this, I started to learn what I liked and what I didn’t, and also things like how pull a plot together, how to develop characters and so on. This was all the stuff I should’ve been taught at school if my teachers had really wanted to inspire me to love the English language rather than alienate me from it, and I think it’s no coincidence that it was also at this time in my life that I started writing short stories for what was probably the first time since I was in little school.

My point in all of this is that our education system seems to have it all wrong when it comes to teaching kids how to write. It tells them read this book, and only this book, which the education system has deemed acceptable and if kids don’t like it, the aren’t provided with an alternative. As a result, many simply choose not to read. Yet, there’s no reason to think you can only learn to appreciated what’s good writing and how to do it by reading classic literature. Instead, I would argue that you can learn this from reading almost anything. This means what we should be doing is letting kids choose what they wish to read, and if they don’t like it, then get them to think about why they didn’t like it before allowing them to move on to something they like better. The key thing here is to make sure they keep reading, and exploring literature in all its forms rather than telling them that it’s the classics or nothing. In this way, we would be giving them the tools to write if they want to (or not if they don’t – and there’s nothing wrong with that) rather than leaving them with so little knowledge that they can write their name and little else simply because they were put off learning about English because of the books which were forced upon them.

It may be that it’s different in other countries, but I suspect it’s not. And I suspect the reason for this is because of a fundamental problem with education. This problem is that it assumes that every teacher is capable of teaching every pupil, and that everyone can be inspired by studying the same set of limited texts. Yet, this fails to recognise that not everyone’s brains work in the same ways, and nor does it take into account that all humans, even teachers, have personalities. This means that not everyone sees the world in the same way, and it can be very difficult for some one who sees the world one to teach, or be taught by, someone who sees the world differently. This is, after all, why one person will absolutely love a particular book while another will absolutely hate it. And this is why each writer has their own set of books and stories which have inspired them to write.

So, learning to write isn’t about learning a set of rules, or about learning what someone else thinks some long dead author meant when they were writing a book which has, possibly more by chance than quality, survived long enough to be considered a classic. Instead, it’s about reading everything you can get your hands on (whether classics or not) so that you can learn what you like and what you don’t, and then apply in to your own writing. Of course, this is all just my opinion, and if you see the world differently, feel free to disagree with me.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 30 – The Astronaut’s Dilemma

It’s the middle of a crew change-over and you’re the only astronaut on the international space station, circling some 220 miles above the Earth. You’ve just received a consignment of food and other supplies which will last for the next six months, and you’re waiting for word of when the next new will arrive. Suddenly, your radio crackles into life. It’s ground control and at first what they’re saying isn’t making any sense. There’s a lot of noise in the background, which sounds like people running around in a panic, but you definitely heard the word disease. You also thought you heard another word, but you can’t have. Did ground control really just say something about zombies? You ask for clarification, and they repeat that they said: there’s a new disease which is turning everyone into zombies, and that it’s spreading fast. Before you can get much more information, ground control stops transmitting. You try every other channel, but there’s nothing on any of them. It might just be a technical glitch, but it seems there’s no one left broadcasting anywhere on Earth. You look out the window, and you can see what looks like New York burning in a massive fire. A few minutes later over China, you see what looks like a nuclear explosion in Shanghai. There’s clearly something very wrong going on down there, but without any communications, you don’t know exactly what. You assess the situation: you have plenty of food, water and air, at least for the time being, but you also have an escape capsule which could take you safely back to Earth. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

This dilemma was posed to me by my girlfriend after we’d been to see the film Gravity. If you haven’t seen this film yet, I’d strongly recommend you go and see it on as big a screen as possible, and in 3D. There’s no zombies in it, but still a great disaster movie…

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.