Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 20

I’m Dreaming Of A Zombie Apocalypse …

One of the side-effects of being a writer of post-apocalyptic zombie fiction is that you can end up so immersed in the world you’ve created that it starts to spill over into the rest of your life. Once you’re deep into that zombie frame of mind, you start seeing them everywhere: A drunk staggers down the street towards you, head lolling from side to side, and your mind instantly thinks it’s started; the footsteps behind you as you walk home late at night become those of an undead flesh-muncher trying to creep up on you; the sudden noise downstairs in the night become the dead trying to break in.

Wherever you go, you find yourself eyeing up escape routes and assessing the defensive strengths and weaknesses of buildings you pass. You no longer judge vehicles by the sleekness of their body work but instead for their ability to carry you safely through a zombie horde. You even find yourself starting to look at your friends and relatives in a different light: judging them by the skills they have which could help you survive or whether they would simply be a burden if the dead really did suddenly come back to life.

The zombies start invading your dreams too, and you wake up in a cold sweat, not quite sure if the residual fear coursing through your body is real or imagined. When the dreams are particularly vivid, it can take several hours before you finally shake the last of it off meaning you start the day jumping at the slightest sound. Or if it’s the middle of the night, you end up lying there in the darkness too scared to move in case the dream was real, wondering if that sound you can hear is just your partner breathing next to you in bed – or whether there’s something more sinister out there in the darkness.

You see people, I see zombies!

The way the imaginary world of your writing can infect reality is brought home to me at the moment when I visit Buchanan Street, the main shopping area in my native Glasgow. This is the setting of the opening scenes for the sequel to For Those In Peril On The Sea , and it’s the part of this second book into which I’ve put the most work on so far.

As a result, when I sit on the steps at the top end and gaze down across the crowds of shoppers, I no longer see them as humans; instead, I see them as the rampaging infected which, in the book, stampede up the street towards where I’m sitting, sweeping all before them. It’s slightly disturbing to know my eyes are seeing the same view as everyone else around me, but my brian is interpreting it in a completely different way simply because of what I’ve been so fervently working away on in my writing.

It’s the same when I drive across the Erskine Bridge where, in my fictional world, the army makes a final, and ill-fated, attempt to contain the outbreak within the city of Glasgow. Because I’ve painted them in my mind, and on the pages of my manuscript, I can see the streams of bullets streaking through the night as the soldiers try to shoot infected clinging to debris from the recently-fallen city as they float down the river 100 feet below. I also see the infected, driven from the smouldering city, surging over the defences to attack the soldiers, who, as the realise they are trapped, start to panic and fire indiscriminately, and ineffectively, into the advancing swarm.

With For Those In Peril On The Sea, I was writing about places I once knew, but with the sequel I’m writing about a city I still live in, and it’s changing how I see it. I’m not necessarily saying this is a bad thing, just that it’s something which has been a bit unexpected. I guess once I’ve finished the book, this cross-over between fiction and reality will subside, but for the moment, even though they are fictional, the infected haunt the city around me like ghosts from another world.




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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 Will People Respond In A Zombie Apocalypse?

For the last 20 weeks, I’ve been posting a series of dilemmas which people might be faced with in a zombie apocalypse. The idea of these was mostly to have a bit of fun and get people thinking about some ethical dilemmas they might face if a zombie apocalypse were ever to happen. However, there was also another side to this. This was to examine how people thought they’d act under difficult circumstances. With this in mind, I specifically provided answers which would help identify whether people would act altruistically or selfishly. I also inserted a few answers here and there which the wording was specifically geared towards those with psychopathic tendencies just to see how often they would be selected.

With a total of 396 responses across the 20 dilemmas, I now have enough to do some analysis and see what they tell us about how people think they’d act in a zombie apocalypse. I divided up the answers into four categories: altruistic ones (where people would put themselves at risk to save others), neutral ones (where the answer had no impact on the survival, or not, of others), selfish ones (where people would put others at risk to save themselves) and psychopathic ones (where people would take actions which would potentially result in the deaths of others even though there was little cost to themselves).

How people responded to dilemmas in a zombie apocalypse

The first result, which is heart-warming, is that people chose responses which were altruistic significantly (p

Yet, if you dig a little deeper, there’s some more interesting results in there. People responded most selfishly when the dilemma specifically involved their own survival, even at the cost of others. This is perhaps unsurprising. People also responded most altruistically when the dilemmas involved the survival or not of a child or children. Interestingly, it didn’t matter whether the kids were related to the person or not (which is not what I’d have expected).

So far, so good, but then we get to something a little worrying. When I looked at which dilemmas resulted in the highest proportion of psychopathic answers, I found out that they involved either a close relative, a partner or an underling the person had power over, and in these cases over 40% of the people chose what might be considered the psychopathic response.

Now none of this us real science, and it’s all a bit of fun, but I think it tells us four things about humanity (or at least the portion of it that spend time wondering about what they would do during a zombie apocalypse!):

1. Most people are willing to respond altruistically if given the opportunity, even in a zombie apocalypse.

2. People are particularly willing to be altruistically towards children, even unrelated ones.

3. People are most selfish when if comes to making decisions about themselves rather than about others.

4. There’s quite a large portion of people out there who responded in such a way as to suggest they tend to act with psychopathic tendencies. Of course, these might just be one-off answers, in which case there’s little to worry about. If, however, there are people out there who consistently select these answers, it’s all a bit more worrying; but maybe not unexpected. After all, it’s been estimated that 1% of the population are psychopaths. In a zombie apocalypse, these are the people you’d want to avoid at all costs, because they’re the ones who won’t think twice about taking actions which may result in your death – or worse …




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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. 20 – The Lone Survivor’s Dilemma

You are rummaging through an abandoned house looking for any canned food which those who’ve come before might have overlooked. Suddenly there’s a noise outside the room you’re in. You run into the dark corridor where you see a shadow shambling towards you – or is it two? You’ve only got one bullet left so you don’t want to waste when you can just run away. With the way to the front door blocked, you run to what you figure must be the back door and dive through. Unfortunately, rather than finding yourself outside, you find yourself in a small cupboard. Before you can go back into the corridor, you hear hammering on the door. You assess the situation: you’re trapped with no way out unless you go back into the corridor, you’ve got a gun, but it only has one bullet in it and you’re really not sure if there’s one zombie on the other side of the door or two. If there’s one zombie, you’ll be able to shoot it and escape, but if there’s two the second one will get you after you’ve used your last bullet to kill the first. The chances of you being rescued is pretty much zero as you haven’t seen another living human in weeks, and the longer you wait the greater the chance of more zombies turning up. 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.

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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.

Herding Zombies …

Zombie herding is a survival tactic where you aim to intentionally attract zombies to a specific place. While, at first, this may sound suicidal, there’s actually many scenarios where this is a very effective strategy. This is because it allows you to exert a measure of control over the zombies and, for once, make them do what you want them to do.

There’s three basic approaches to zombie herding, the most dangerous of which is live-baiting. Live-baiting involves a living person going outside with the aim of attracting zombies so that they chase them. This means the zombies can then be led away from or to a specific location. This is a tactic which should only be used with slow zombies (since you can out-run them) and never with fast zombies (because you can’t!). There’s several instances where this is used on zombie stories. In particular, this is the basis of the Cardio rule in Zombieland. It’s also used to great effect in Shaun of the Dead, where the eponymous hero leads the zombie horde away from the front door of the Winchester so that the others can get in before they’re attacked and killed.

Live-baiting is exceedingly dangerous, and if anything goes wrong, you’ll most likely end up dead. As a result, it should only ever be attempted when you have a very clear strategy as to where you are going to lead them to, and also where you are certain of exactly how many zombies are present in a specific area as the last thing you want to do is run into another horde as you’re leading away the ones you are herding. If you survive, however, it’ll probably be the biggest adrenaline rush you’ll ever experience in your life, and it’s likely you’ll become a bit of a hero with you survival group: children will revere you, minstrels will write songs about you, maidens will swoon – okay, I’m going to far here, but you get the idea.

The second basic approach to zombie herding is bait-and-switch. In this approach, the aim is to herd the zombies to one location while you do something at another. This might be rescuing someone who’s trapped, recovering some stores or food, or escaping from a location where you’ve become trapped. The difference with live-baiting is that you remain within the safety of your compound while doing a bait-and-switch manoeuvre. In general, noise is used to draw the zombies to a specific location while those who are making the noise remain safely beyond their reach.

A good example of this is in the British TV series Dead Set, where some of the people trapped in the Big Brother house during a zombie apocalypse bang pots and pans together to attract zombies away from a door while others sneak out to get medical supplies from a local supermarket. The bait-and-switch approach to zombie herding is a lot less dangerous than live-baiting, but you still need to be careful. Attracting a large number of zombies to a specific point in your defences will increase the pressures on them, and it may be that if you attract enough of them they will be able to break through due to sheer weight of numbers alone.

Similarly, bait-and-switching can lead to pile-ups. This is when the zombies at the back keep pushing forward over those in front because they are so eager to get to those making the noise. If the ones at the front go down, those behind will scramble on top of them. If this happens for long enough, you’ll find a ramp of zombies forming and in the worst possible scenario this could become high enough for those zombies which clamber up to breach your defences. This possibility is demonstrated in a one of the scenes from Jerusalem in the recent World War Z movie, although in this case those who attracted the zombies did it by accident and not on purpose. Both of these dangers mean that if you’re trying to heard zombies using the bait-and-switch approach, you need to keep them moving around to ensure that your defences aren’t weakened.

The final approach to zombie herding is the-hunter-becomes-the-hunted. While the other two approaches are defensive, this is strictly an offensive manoeuvre. Here the aim is to bring as many zombies to a specific point where they can then be killed. Again, this is usually done using noise and it can be done on a range of scales. In a recent episode of The Walking Dead I watched (I’ve only just started series three), they used this zombie herding approach to bring a small number of zombies close to a fence where they could then kill them by stabbing them in the head.

In contrast, there’s a great scene in the World War Z book where they talk about using defensive squares to clear an area of zombies. The idea here is that you drop troops into a zombie-infected zone and they form a square with guns pointing outwards. Within the square there’s enough room to rest, as well as to stockpile ammunition with more capable of being delivered by air. Once everything is set up, they turn on a device to start attracting nearby zombies. When they get near enough they’re shot, but not before their moans have attracted more zombies and so on. Soon every zombie over hundreds of miles is heading for the troops (attracted by the moans of other zombies heading towards the square in the hope of finding fresh flesh). As long as the troops keep firing at a rate faster than the zombies approach, and don’t run out of ammo, eventually they’ll be left surrounded by a massive pile of dead zombies in the middle of a zombie-free zone. Of course, this technique requires a lot of courage and even just one soldier breaks ranks it can spell disaster.

In case you’re wondering, this is actually based on a real military strategy that has been used to great effect over the years from the Romans onwards as it is a very effective formation which allows a small number of troops to defend themselves against a much larger force. Probably the most famous example of the successful deployment of this strategy was at Rorke’s Drift, where a small garrison of 150 British and colonial troops defeated an army of several thousand Zulu warriors.

This type of offensive zombie herding could also be used to drive a horde of zombies over a cliff or into a canyon where they could be killed by people massed around the edges. In such cases, this would be very similar to the approaches used by pre-historic humans to hunt large and dangerous game, such as woolly mammoths. However, I’ve not come across zombie-herding being used in this way in any zombie stories (although I’m sure people will correct me if I’m wrong).

So, hopefully this post has shown you that while most of the time you want to make sure you stay off the zombies radar, there may be times when you’ll want to just the opposite. Sometimes this will be for defence and sometimes it will be for offensive, but either way, zombie herding is a high-risk, high-octane strategy which will get your heart racing as you do everything that your basic survival instincts are telling you is just plain wrong and the zombies start streaming towards you. It might be easier than herding cats, but it’s also a lot more dangerous!




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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.

Apocalypse Apartments Incorporated – A Short Zombie Story

You can download a PDF of this story from here.

Who’d have thought my biggest problem in coping with the zombie apocalypse would be boredom? I know it’s different for others, I can see them struggling and fighting and dying through the telescope mounted in the observatory in the top tower, but there’s nothing I can do for them. I’m stuck here in the castle, set high above the nearby town, all safely locked away. Yes, there’s zombies all around me, well I suppose they’re not really zombies since they’re not dead, but because of the disease they act just like the zombies you see in movies, so that’s what I call them. Either way, when they first appeared all I had to do to keep them out was pull up the drawbridge and I was safe. The 30 foot wide moat is more than enough to stop them getting close enough to know I’m here, and even if they could cross it, they’d never get through walls which are six feet thick and made of solid stone.

Unlike those in the settlement below, I don’t need to go outside to look for food, or, indeed, any other supplies. There’s a well in the main courtyard and I’ve got enough stores stashed in what were once the dungeons to last a lifetime. I’ve got solar panels and a couple of wind turbines, and for those days which are dark and still, I’ve got a diesel generator and enough fuel to run it day and night for fifty years. When I was bringing all this stuff together, I wasn’t worried about zombies or infected or whatever you want to call them, I simply did it to make enough money to stop the buildings around me crumbling to dust. You see, this had been my family’s home for six hundred years, and as an only child it fell to me to look after it when first my father, then my mother died in quick succession.

At first I’d hated the fact that the dilapidated and ancient edifice was now my responsibility. At thirty-two I wanted to be out exploring the world and having fun, not worrying about leaking roofs, rotting timbers and rising damp. Then, one day, as I drove away after yet another disaster which would cost more money than I had to fix, an idea suddenly came to me and I realised how I could fund not just the repairs but the complete renovation it had need for at least a century. It would mean some rather drastic changes, but it would also mean I’d never have to worry about being able to afford it’s upkeep again. My business plan was simple: I had a building which had some pretty serious fortifications and there were lots of very rich but very paranoid people out there who feared civilisation was about to be brought to its knees by some disaster or other that was looming just over the horizon. If you look at it one way, you could say I was selling them insurance against their worst fears, in another you could say I was ripping them off because I never believed any of it would actually happen. All I did was build up the supplies and guarantee each of my subscribers a safe, secure and, most importantly, luxurious environment where they could ride out whatever catastrophe they feared was about to turn the world upside down. I converted otherwise unoccupied and unused rooms into up-market apartments, complete with self-contained plumbing and water filters and even air-scrubbers. That was just the standard stuff, depending on each subscribers own personal paranoia, I also offered customisations. Stuff like heavy-duty fire power, six-inch thick steel doors and built-in radiation shields. The only limitation I placed on the subscribers was that, in the event of any crisis, they had to find their own way to the castle; it would be once they arrived that my duties would begin.

Almost from the moment word started leaking out about what I was offering, I was inundated with requests from the rich and famous, and within the first week I’d filled every available apartment; that was before I’d even started any of the renovations. By the time I had all the conversion work finished, the apartments were changing hands for almost ten times what I’d originally charged. You’d have thought this would have annoyed me, but it didn’t. You see they weren’t buying the apartments, only leasing them, and every time a lease was sold, I got ten percent of the price. I also had the right to veto any sale if I thought anyone would be too high maintenance. After all, you’ve got to be selective if there’s a chance you’ll end up cooped up with people for months on end during some disaster or other. Each time an apartment changed hands, the new owner would want to change the decor, and the security options, and that had to come through me too – and as you might imagine, my prices weren’t cheap.

It was funny, within a matter of six months, owning one of my apocalypse apartments, as they were being called by then, had become a status symbol for those who could afford them; that drove demand, and prices, up even further. I started to branch out, buying up other castles and lighthouses and old military bunkers wherever I could find them, and setting up apartments there too. I even adopted the name everyone was using for them for the company I created to run my little venture and officially I became Apocalypse Apartments Incorporated. That was ten years before everything fell apart, and in that time, while everyone else with ancient family piles was fighting just to keep them from falling down, I was making enough money to keep eight castles afloat as well as all the other buildings I’d picked up over the years. I’d become an expert in the ultimate home defence and I was the person everyone turned to when they wanted to do something crazy just in case their wildest nightmares ever came true.

Then came the zombies, or rather the infected. That was one eventuality I’d never counted on, but luckily it seems my defences are perfect for keeping them out. The moment the first hints something odd was going on started appearing on the news, I expected the subscribers to start turning up, but weirdly they didn’t. No one ever even came near the place. That’s one of those little mysteries of the apocalypse I’ll probably never find an answer to. I mean, I’d specifically installed a helipad to allow people to get here even when the roads were over-run but, despite the millions they’d paid to have a safe place to hole up in the event of something quite so world-changing actually happening, not one of them ever made it.

This meant I was all alone; totally secure, but all alone. And oh so bored. In the two years since everything kicked off, I’ve read every book in the place and I know all the films I have on DVD backwards and forwards. I can repeat the entire script, word for word without making a mistake, for each and every one of them. I’d tried alcoholism but I wasn’t really built for it; I found being drunk on my own very dull, and hangovers without anyone to commiserate even duller.

When the world first fell apart, I spent a lot of time in the observatory, keeping an eye out for the subscribers I was sure would be on their way, but once it was clear they weren’t going to appear I stopped hanging out there. It was just too depressing watching all that death and destruction and people struggling for survival. But after a while, I started going back. I can’t remember why but one day I found myself walking passed the door and I thought I’d take a look to see what was out there. I was surprised to find there were still people living amongst the zombies. Well, maybe living is stretching it a little. More like eaking out a meagre existence, struggling every day to find food while avoiding being torn apart by the hordes of zombies which haunted the streets around them.

By then, I’d been without human company for so long I found myself drawn into their struggles. I made up names for the survivors, and even some of the more memorable zombies, and I started making up back stories. It was like my own little soap opera and I couldn’t resist it. It was the first time in months I’d felt alive: I knew I was living vicariously through their struggles and part of me felt uncomfortable with this, but the rest of me revelled in it. The telescope was so powerful, and the town so far away, I felt detached from them and it was like I was watching some fictional drama unfolding on a television rather than real people living and dying.

You might think of me as callous, but it’s not like I didn’t try to help. Once I knew they were there, grimly hanging on under the worst imaginable circumstances, I spent weeks and months trying to work out how I could help them but there was nothing I can do. There’s no way I can let them know I’m here, and there’s no way I can do anything to help them without risking being over-run, which would pretty much defeat the purpose of the exercise. So, here I am, living in total security with enough food to keep all the little groups of survivors I watch each day fed for as long as we all live, yet there’s no way to get the people and the food in the same place. All I can do is sit here as the zombie apocalypse engulfs the world but passes me by, leaving me with nothing to do but stare through my telescope, bored and lonely, unable to do anything to ease their suffering, and my own.

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This short story was inspired by the idea that boredom could be a major obstacle to survival in a zombie apocalypse. You can find out more about this 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.

Boredom: The Unexpected Killer In A Zombie Apocalypse

Right, I know what you’re thinking, how can anyone be bored in a zombie apocalypse? You know, all that running around, escaping by the skin of your teeth and smashing zombies in the head. Surely you’ll feel more alive than you’ve ever felt in your life, won’t you? Well, the thing is while you’ll have moments like that much of the time you’ll find yourself sitting around in your safe house, bored out your skull waiting for something, anything to happen, and if you don’t find a way to deal with this it’s going to drive you mad. Why do I think boredom will be a major factor you’ll need to overcome in a zombie apocalypse? It’s based on the old adage that war consists of long periods of tedium interspersed with moments of sheer terror, and a war against zombies will be no different.

Think about it, you’ve managed to get enough food together for a few weeks, or maybe even just a few days, you’ve found a secure location and you’ve barricaded yourself in: what do you do next? You can’t exactly play Angry Birds, or Google Brad Pitt to see what he’s been up to because you won’t have your iPad with you, or if you do the battery will have run out after the first few hours. Anyway, the web will have collapsed by then and Brad Pitt will probably be shambling along Hollywood boulevard looking for brains to snack on. You could chat with your fellow survivors, but it won’t be long before you’ve heard all their stories, and know all their jokes. You could read, but carrying books around it hardly going to be a high priority. Before you know it, you’ll be resorting to childhood games, like eye-spy – and there’s only so many times you can pick something beginning with Z without it becoming mind-numbingly repetitive.

The trouble with boredom is that once it sets in, humans stop thinking rationally. Once cabin fever kicks in, you’ll find yourself looking for any excuse to do something different. This is when you’ll start thinking about going outside just so you feel like you’re doing something. After all, bashing in the brains of a few zombies will make a nice change from staying inside and having the same arguments with your fellow survivors for the umpteenth time. All you need is one person to get so bored that they flip out and do something daft like open the door and go charging out into the zombie hordes waving a baseball bat, and your safe house will fall.

So how do you prevent boredom turning pathological? Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do other than be aware it’s a problem you’ll have to face. Probably the only strategy which has a chance of working, at least in the short term, is making plans. It doesn’t matter if the plans are realistic, or even if you’re ever going to carry them out, it’s the process that’s important. A bit of planning will at least leave you feeling like you’re doing something.

However, as the days … and weeks … and months … and years drag on, eventually boredom will get to you and an idea will suddenly pop into your head do something that if you were thinking rationally you’d realise wasn’t a good idea. But by then you’ll no longer be thinking rationally and you’ll do it anyway just to break the tedium – and that’s when you’ll end up dead. Maybe just before you get torn apart, a certain truth will dawn on you. What’s that true? Unlikely as it seems, boredom is as big a threat to your survival in a zombie apocalypse as the undead that lurk out there in the darkness.




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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. 19 – The Doctor’s Dilemma

You are a doctor in a remote field hospital tending refugees who have fled from the advancing zombie swarms sweeping across the country. Ever since you arrived, you’ve been working in a children’s ward and in your care are twenty patients ranging in age from a few years old to ones who are almost teenagers. Some are so ill they cannot get out of bed, while others are up and about most of the time. After yet another long day, you are ready to head to your tent in the camp, but no one comes to relief you. You try calling the headquarters but, yet again, the phones are down. Going outside, you see that the refugee camp is in turmoil, with everyone scrambling to leave as soon as possible. You flag down a man in an old army truck and ask him what’s going on. He tells you there are rumours of a zombie horde sweeping up the valley towards the camp, and that everyone who can get out is leaving as soon as possible just in case. Then he asks if you want to come with him. You think about this for a moment, if there really are zombies coming and you go with him, it will be your best chance of surviving, but you will be abandoning any children you leave behind to a certain death. If you stay, while you might survive a zombie attack on the camp, it would be very unlikely. On the other hand, though it prove to be just a rumour, as has been the case before. If this is the case, neither you nor the children are in danger if you stay, yet if you leave, any of them that remain in the hospital will die because you’re not there to look after them. 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.

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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.

I’m With The Band – A Short Zombie Story

A PDF of this story can be downloaded from here.

‘You know I was in a band before all this happened. God, it seems like such a long time ago, almost a different life time. We weren’t exactly world famous but we had our fans, and we did pretty well in our home town. We were playing the night it all kicked off, we were actually on stage. It was the largest gig we’d ever done, in an old cinema which had been converted into a club. It had this massive glitter ball in the middle of the roof, and I mean massive. It must have been like three feet across, maybe four; supposed to be the biggest one in Europe or the country or something like that. Anyway, we were up there on stage just finishing off our set. We were doing our signature song, a real anthem which always brought the house down. I was knocking out this crazy rhythm on the bass while Baz was doing his thing on the drums. Mickey was noodling away on his guitar while Leon had both hands on the microphone; he was leaning on it, nodding along. Leon wasn’t his real name, that was Donald, but he didn’t think it was the right name for a rock star so he changed it. He chose Leon, after Trotsky, because he thought it was all left wing and right on; he didn’t really know anything about politics though, he was just doing what he thought was cool.

‘Anyway, everyone seemed to be really digging the music, jumping up and down, moshing along, but then something changed. At first it was hard to put a finger on it, just a slight shift in the energy in the room. I looked across at Mickey and saw he’d noticed it too. He shrugged and tipped his head towards Leon. He was still nodding along at the mike trying to look cool but I could see by the tightness in his shoulders he’d noticed the change in the atmosphere too. Baz, as usual, hadn’t noticed a thing. When he got really into it, I swear you’ve could set a bomb off right in front of him and he wouldn’t have missed a beat.

‘Then I noticed people weren’t really paying attention to us any more, instead they were looking round, showing each other their phones. I’d got used to people having phones at gigs over the last few years, holding them up in the same way people used to hold up cigarette lighters, or filming us as we played but I’d never seen this before. I felt my own phone go off in my pocket, but I just ignored it, letting it go straight to voice mail. It rang off just as we came to the climactic ending of the song. It was this great crescendo, with Baz and Mickey and me all giving it laldy* while Leon faced us, arms held out, mike in hand, head thrown back. We ended, expecting the usual rapturous applause, but instead all we could hear was people talking. I could tell from the look on his voice Leon was really pissed off at this reaction. He always was a bit of a diva, but then what lead singer isn’t, and I’d seen him lose it with audiences before. I glanced across at Mickey, wondering if we should do something to intervene but he wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he had his phone out and was staring at it with a confused look on his face.

‘As I stepped towards Leon, he turned and faced the audience, his face like thunder and just started yelling at them. Saying how disrespectful they were being; that we deserved better. That was when my phone when off again, this time telling me I had a text message. I looked around. Baz was sitting there behind his drums, arms crossed, watching Leon with this amused look on his face while Mickey, unbelievably, was now speaking to someone on his phone. That’s when I realised there must be something big going on so I pulled out my phone and opened the message I’d just got. It was from my Mum and all it said was that my Dad was at the front door, trying to get in and that I should come home as soon as possible. This really confused me because we’d buried my Dad the week before. I was just as I was about to call home to find out what was going on when I noticed a movement at the back of the room. Two bouncers rushed through the double doors, and were trying desperately to pull them shut – yet they couldn’t because of all these people trying to get in. All around the room, I could see other security guys speaking frantically into their radios and running towards the doors but before they could get there, they flew open and all these people started pouring in. Except they didn’t really look like normal, they were all, like, beaten up and disfigured.

‘I glanced round at my band mates but none of them seemed to have noticed these new arrivals. Mickey was still talking urgently into his phone, while Baz pissing himself laughing as he watch Leon. Leon was getting more and more angry as the crowd continued to ignore him and was now in full rant mode just screaming and swearing at them, threatening to jump off the stage and take them on, all of them all at once. Meanwhile, the odd-looking newcomers were surging through the audience. At first I thought they were just pushing them out of the way, then with horror, I realised they attacking them, biting them, tearing at their clothes and their flesh. People were trying to fight back, but they were out-numbered as more and more of these dishevelled, dirty people streamed into the room.

‘All I could do was stand there and watch in disbelief as this carnage unfolded in front of me. There was blood and guts spilling everywhere as people fought for their lives, all surreally lit by the spotlights glancing off the giant glitter ball that hung above them.

‘Then the first of them, a woman, made it to the stage and started to drag herself onto it. Still it seemed I was the only one in the band who’d noticed what was going on in the audience. I stared at the woman: her hair was lank and streaked with dirt, her skin grey and sallow, and it was clear she wasn’t alive. There was no life in her eyes, instead they were just these dark holes which seemed incapable of seeing anything, yet she knew we were there, or at least she knew Leon was. Reaching forward, she grabbed his left ankle and started pulling him towards the end of the stage. Leon finally stopped ranting and looked down. One glance at the woman holding his leg, and Leon recoiled in disgust and fear, only her grip was firm and he’d managed to get the microphone lead wrapped around his body while he’d been yelling abuse at the audience. As he fell, another of the newcomers, this time a man, grabbed him and together the two of them pulled Leon, struggling and screaming, off the stage and into the audience. This was when Baz finally noticed something was wrong. There were more and more of these dead people pulling themselves onto the stage and before I could even shout a warning they’d surrounded Mickey and were biting and tearing at him.

As the first one approached me, I pulled off my bass and, grabbing the neck, I swung it as hard as I could. I felt it make contact, crushing the skull of this old man who was staggering towards me, half his face already missing. Behind me, I could hear Baz trying to make a run for it, but he must have tripped over his high hat because I heard it crashing to the floor. This seemed to attract the dead people away from me and towards him. For a moment I thought about trying to help him, but looking around, I realised that if I was going to get out alive, I’d need to leave there and then. I heard the sounds of the dead people crashing through the drum kit and Baz shouting as he tried to fight them off, but there was nothing I could do for him. Still clutching my bass, I fled off stage and towards the back door. Behind me, I could hear the sound of the dead chasing after me.

‘I know I should have done more to help the others but the way I see it, if I’d done anything differently, I’d have ended up dead too. I still think about them sometimes, but most of the time I try not to. I think it’s the only way I can cope, trying not to think about how the world used to be, trying not to dwell on the past. Instead, I try to focus on keeping myself alive and fighting the dead as we try to take back the land that once was ours. There’s no music in the world any more, no one has time for it, instead there’s just the sound of battle, of destruction, and of death. That’s why I’m in here drinking when I should be trying to get some rest before I head back to the front line. So here’s to how the world used to be and may it be like that again someday.’

***

*Laldy is a great Scottish word which, if you’re not familiar with it, meaning to do something with great gusto.

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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.

After ‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’ What Comes Next?

With the Kindle edition of For Those In Peril On The Sea currently on the edge of the top ten best-selling books in the horror genre on Amazon.com, I figured now might be good time to give my readers an idea of what’s coming next. Well, at the moment, I’m planning on writing a total of three books in the For Those In Peril series, with the possibility of a fourth book lurking in the back of my mind.

I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of the second book, with the rest of the plot sketched out on paper. This book will be set in the same world as For Those In Peril On The Sea, and will start with an outbreak of the same disease in my home town of Glasgow in Scotland. It will feature a new cast of characters and will be about people struggling to survive in the initial days and weeks after the virus breaks out of the Americas and reaches Europe. As with the first book, much of the action will take place on and around boats, with the waters of the west coast of Scotland, and its many remote islands and mountains, providing a perfect backdrop for the scramble to survive. This will also create a marked contrast with the balmy sub-tropical setting in the first book.

The third book in the series is still very much in the planning stage but will see the characters from the first two books meet up. Rather than focussing on the immediate aftermath of the collapse of civilisation, it will deal more with the challenges of long-term survival face by a small group of survivors in a world where the infected rule the land. The fourth book, if it happens (and, at the moment, I’m still not too sure if it definitely will) will go right back to the beginning and will focus on the events within the biotech company that led to the creation of the vaccine which sparked chain of events leading to the first three books. In many ways, this will be a book for the geeks who really want to get into the nitty-gritty of the real science behind the world in which these books take place.

At the moment, the second book, which has the working title of On The Edge Of The World, is scheduled for release in June 2014 (to coincide with Glasgow hosting the Commonwealth Games), and the third book for sometime in 2015. However, before either of these comes out, there’s going to be an anthology of short post-apocalyptic and zombie stories called Zombies Can’t Swim And Other Tales Of The Undead. These stories will be familiar to those who read this blog as all but one will have been posted here before. However, the aim is to bring them all together, give them a bit more of a polish and issue them as a print and Kindle ebook at a nominal price for those who prefer reading short stories in a more traditional format. There will also be one completely new story that’s never been available elsewhere. I completed the last of the 22 stories which will go into this anthology yesterday and now all that’s left is the fiddling around needed to get it into a publishable format. At some point, there will also be a curious volume called The Little Book Of Zombie Mathematics: Fifty Zombie Based Maths Problems. As the title suggests, this will consist of 50 zombie-based maths problems from my Maths With Zombies blog.

In amongst all this zombie stuff, there are also a couple of other books which I wish to write. The first of these is called West End Rats, which would be very loosely based on my student days in Glasgow spent listing to rock music, riding around on motorcycles and doing lots of things that mean I’m very glad neither Facebook nor mobile phones with cameras existed back then. This is a book I’ve had sitting on the back burner for more than a decade, and I’m really not too sure whether it will ever see the light of day. In fact, this is the book I moved back to Glasgow to write in 2010 only to get side-tracked by zombies and writing For Those In Peril On The Sea.

The second of these non-zombie projects has a working title of Jongleurs (an old French term for itinerant minstrels) and while there are autobiographic elements in much of my writing, this will be the one which draws the most from my actual life. It’s the story of two street performers trying to make into the big time as jugglers, and the woman who comes between them. For much of the period between 1994 and 2000, while building my fledgling career as a marine biologist, I earned my living working first as a juggler and then as a magician, in a similar double-act both on the streets of Glasgow, and at official events and festivals. While we were good enough to have made it quite big, I found the amount of practice needed to keep my skills at a sufficiently high level was too all-consuming, and that while it was fun, I was only really doing it to help pay the bills as I worked my way up the academic ladder. However, I look back on those days, and the people I met and worked with, with a certain level of fondness and sometimes I still wonder just how big we could have got if I’d made different decisions about which career path to pursue. In many ways, writing Jongleurs would allow me to explore this alternate reality.

So this gives you a rough idea of where I see my writing going in the future. Not all these projects will happen, and some might not happen for many years. In particular, my main focus at the moment is completing the Zombies Can’t Swim anthology and then the next two books in the For Those In Peril series. This will easily fill the next few years, and after that, who knows exactly where life will take 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 Are The First Three Things You Should Do In A Zombie Apocalypse?

First the dead started to twitch, then sit up, then take their first faltering steps. Everyone looks on in amazement, unsure of what’s happening. Before you know it, they’re everywhere; attacking the living, tearing them apart. The zombie apocalypse has begun. The question on everyone’s lips is simple: if I’m to stay alive, what should I do next?

You might not realise it, but whether you live or die will most likely be determined by the actions you take in those initial moments. Make the wrong decision then and you won’t live long enough to regret it. Make the right one and you might live to see the end of the day, and if you can make it to the end of the first one, then your chances of survival will be greatly enhanced. With this in mind, what are the first three things you should do if you are unlucky enough to find yourself caught up in zombie apocalypse?

Well, the first one is to get off the streets as soon as possible. Most people who succumb to the zombies in the initial phases of the outbreak will be those who are caught in the open. This means you must get inside as soon as possible and at all costs. It doesn’t really matter where, all you are doing is putting a barrier between yourself and any marauding zombies. This will give you your most precious commodity in those first few minutes the zombie apocalypse: Time. Specifically, it will give you time to do step two.

The next thing you need to do is assess your situation. You need to work out how many zombies there are in your local area. If there are too many of them then you will have no choice but to barricade yourself in to your current location. If the density of zombies is sufficiently low, then you have the option of moving to a different location. However, you will only want to do this if the location you are moving to is more secure and better suited to survival than the one you are currently in. This means you also need to assess the suitability of your present location as a safe house for surviving in a world filled with zombies. Look at how easily you can seal all the entrances and exits, assess the likelihood of zombies being able to break in and whether you will have an escape route if they do. You also need to assess what provisions you have available to you: is there access to food and water and, if there is, how much is there? Are there any weapons? Will you be able to communicate with others, and possibly form a survival group? In this way you can formulate a plan of what to do next to maximise you chance of surviving both in the short-term and in the long-term.

The final thing you need to do is put the plan you have formulated into action. If your decision is the stay where you are, you need to set to work making it zombie-proof. If you’ve decided to move, you will need to leave your temporary location and set off into the zombie-filled world outside. Whichever you choose to do, don’t waste time. Instead, you will need to move fast. This is because the number of zombies will be multiplying exponentially with every passing minute, and the more zombies there are around, the greater the chance of you being attacked and killed. It’s also important to be decisive. You’ve made your plan and you have to fully commit to it. Anything less than this and you are likely to greatly jeopardise your survival. In particular, don’t try to hedge your bets or keep your options open. If you’re going to move, move; if you’re going to stay, stay. Don’t sleep on it and see whether things are better in the morning (they won’t be and all you’ll find is that you can no longer implement the plan that by then you will know for sure was your best chance of survival!).

So there you have it, the first three things you should do if you get caught up in a zombie apocalypse: Seek immediate shelter to buy yourself some time to assess the situation and create a plan based on the situation you find yourself in, and then put this plan into effect as soon as possible. Of course, this is easy for me to say, sitting in the comfort of my own living room while an old episode of Star Trek runs in the background. Whether I’d be quite so calm and objective when faced with a horde of zombies is quite another question, and it is one I hope I never have to find the answer to.

However, it does strike me that these are also the same initial steps you’d need to take to improve you chances of survival in a wide range of situations ranging from natural disasters to civil unrest or a terrorist attack. So while some might consider all the time you spend working out what you’d do in a zombie apocalypse a complete waste of time because zombies are fictional, they are wrong. Instead, you are actually developing key life skills which can help you survive in a wide range of real world scenarios which you might find yourself suddenly thrust into. So keep thinking Zombies whenever you have the time. You never know, even if the dead don’t rise, it might still, one day, save your life.




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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.