on writing (III)

The Procyon Strain: Book Two has been coming along well. I'm about a quarter of the way through, at about 100 pages, and Ashley has been reading through my work, giving me pointers and thoughts. "When you told me you write zombie books, I was kinda weirded out," she confessed. "But when I started reading some of what you wrote, I was actually really impressed!" She likes that the story isn't primarily about zombies; rather, it's about the characters in the midst of the zombies. She tells me I'm a great writer, but I think she may be biased. I need to send it to Ams and get her thoughts.

The first book of The Procyon Strain reads as a journal written by the main character detailing the events of the burgeoning zombie plague. Book 2 begins two years later at a survivor's compound on Green Lake, Wisconsin. The narrator begins telling the story of how he got from Cincinnati to Wisconsin, and that story will take place through Books 2, 3, and 4. Thus the bulk of the book is written as a journal, with "present-time" scenes taking place in Wisconsin as the narrator's recording his story. This sort of layout worked well with 36 Hours: A Tale of the Undead, and I'm hoping it'll work well here, too. Below is a scene from the first chapter. (you might like it, Blake; Amos is in it!). 

*  *  *

I’m driving down the road, weaving the snowmobile around stopped or wrecked vehicles cocooned in snow. I’m seeing this world as it was thousands of years ago in the receding clutch of the last Ice Age. Woolly Mammoths wander along the lake’s shores, and giant armadillos waddle through the snow, titanic against the backdrop of narrow shagbark hickories. I take the snowmobile around a bend and see snowmobile tracks leading off the road and down a gravel drive. I twist the snowmobile down the path, snow-covered trees flashing by on either side; the drive ends against a squat brick building facing the lake. The other snowmobile sits quiet beside it. I turn off the engine and dismount, following deep footprints around the building to a wooden pier jutting out over the lake. A stocky figure donned in heavy winter clothing stands on the dock’s edge, and he’s fitting a bolt into a smoke-black mechanical hand-bow. He hears my footsteps crunching in the snow as I make my way down the pier, my facemask a flimsy protection against the stiff wind blowing off the lake.

A few yards from the edge of the pier, three bodies jut out of the ice, their clothes shredded and flesh splotched purple. Two men and a woman. Their mouths hang open in silent screams, their eyes frosted blue. Bolts protrude from their frozen chests. I stride up beside Amos, his thick charcoal bear streaked with bits of ice and snow. He raises the hand-bow and aims along the knotted sight; he squeezes the trigger, and the bolt slices through the air, wedging into the frozen woman’s swollen right breast.

“Target practice?” I muse.

He begins fitting another bolt. “I was sent out after you.”

“And you got sidetracked?”

He nods to the bodies wedged in the ice. “I saw them from the road.”

“And you couldn’t resist the opportunity.”

“You don’t see opportunities like this that often.”

“No, you sure don’t. But how’re you going to get the arrows?”

“The ice is pretty solid, it should be able to hold me.”

“Uh-huh. Who sent you?”

“You seriously need to stop going out alone,” he says. “If something happens to you, we’re down to one snowmobile.”

I ask him again: who sent him?

“Who do you think?” he says.

“Andrea?”

He fires another bolt. This one sticks in the woman’s calcified throat.

“She badgered the hell out of me,” he says.

“Didn’t she talk to Amanda?”

“Yeah, and she told her you could handle yourself out here.”

“She didn’t believe her?” Andrea, she’d been at Green Lake since all of this began. She lived behind the Fence for more than a year and a half before Amos, Amanda and I showed up.

“You know how Andrea is,” Amos says. “All protective and shit. Really, it’s your own doing: you’re like an uncle to her daughters.”

Andrea has two little girls: Cassandra, she’s six; and Zeta, she’s going on two and a half. Zeta’s never known a world other than this one, and Andrea believes she can cocoon her on the shores of Green Lake so that she’ll never have to face what lies beyond the Fence. But Zeta, she’s stir-crazy and curious; it won’t be long before she sneaks out from the compound and goes exploring. Cassandra’s already tried; luckily we were able to find her before she saw anything unsettling. God knows there’s enough to give you nightmares behind every thicket of trees.

Amos fires another bolt. This one strikes the woman’s outstretched hand.

The bolt doesn’t stick: the hand shatters, frozen fingers and fragments of her palm scattering over the ice. The bolt skitters across the half-frozen lake, coming to a rest twenty yards from the corpses lodged in the ice.

Amos curses.

“You didn’t expect that to happen?”

He shakes his head No, and he turns and hands me the hand-bow, steps down onto the ice. He takes a breath, as if he’s waiting for it to splinter and suck him down into the dark depths, but the ice holds. He looks back at me, a wry smile, and he begins plodding across the ice. He reaches the copse of corpses, placing a gloved hand on their shoulders and twisting the bolts out with his other hand. He slides them into his deep pant pockets, eyes the bolt lying twenty yards away.

I tell him he should just leave that one be.

“Andrea’s had too much of an effect on you,” he says. “We’re in Wisconsin. The ice, it’s frozen solid.” He begins walking across the half-frozen lake, taking the steps slow.

He’s nearly to the bolt when the ice groans, cracks radiating outwards.

My heart lodges in my chest and Amos looks back at me.

I beckon him back.

His beady eyes return to the bolt, just feet away, and he takes a step forward.

His foot plunges into the lake, his opposite knee smashing against the ice.

I shout his name, pure instinct, and I drop the hand-bow and clamber down from the pier, scrambling towards him. The ice is buried beneath three feet of snow, and I can almost hear it splintering beneath my footfalls. Amos writhes his foot from the jagged hole and stands, his face contorted into a grimacing mask of pain.

He bends down, grabs the bolt, and begins limping towards me.

We return to the pier and clamber up onto the frozen planks. He grabs the hand-bow, says his foot feels afire. He lost three toes to frostbite last winter; he didn’t need to lose a whole foot. I tell him we’ll never make it back to the compound before the cold begins to corrode any remaining toes. He points to the squat brick building facing the lake. There are two entrances on either side, one marked Men and the other marked Women. He suggests we go into the latter, says they might have a sofa.

I draw the military knife from my belt and have him wait outside. I push open the door and step into the bathroom. Sunlight from the open door rolls over the urinals and stalls, the cracked mirror. There’s no sofa, but there’s movement near the last stall. I grip the knife and move forward.

The stall’s door has opened a crack.

Ragged breathing comes from inside the stall.

I stop five feet from the door and call out to whoever’s inside, just in case they have the capacity to respond. This one doesn’t. An emaciated hand feebly presses against the door, and a man covered in a two-year’s growth of beard stumbles from the stall.

His eyes, they’re cold and lifeless, devoid of feeling.

His skin has marbled in the cold, pulled taught against fragile bones.

His beating heart throbs against washboard ribs.

He reaches towards me, razor-sharp ingrown fingernails aimed at my throat.

I let him come to me, gauging his steps, his speed, his precision.

He’s nearly to me when I dart forward and drive the knife under his chin.

I withdraw the knife, blood staining the blade.

The man teeters, his eyes swimming in his head, blood soaking his bare and mottled chest. He collapses to his knees, those opaque eyes looking up at me, feeling neither anger nor resentment, and he pitches forward, lying face-down on the linoleum. Blood spreads through the tile’s cracks.

I wipe the blade on my pants and return to Amos, beckoning him inside. We pay the corpse no mind. I shut the door and prop a flashlight against one of the urinal’s handles so that its beam washes over us. Amos sits beside the body and tears off his soggy boot, setting it beside him. I remove my Old Navy winter coat and strip off one of my sweatshirts, wrapping it tight around his foot to soak up the water. With his foot mummified, we lean with our backs against one of the stalls. I dig into my pants and pull out a pack of Pall Mall Reds. I light one for him and one for me, and we sit in the bathroom, bathing in the white light of the flashlight, and we smoke our cigarettes, the embers reflected in the cracked wall-length mirror above the sinks whose pipes have long since frozen and burst.

“What’re the chances you won’t tell anyone about this?” Amos says.

“Slim to none,” I tell him.

When his foot’s feeling warmer, he clutches the boot under his arm and we make our way back to the snowmobiles. I tell him to let his lead foot do good work, and we mount the snowmobiles and leave Sunset Park.

The deepening dusk wraps the frozen corpses in shimmering shadow.

Our snowmobiles reflect the setting sun, the evening sky bleeding pink. Wisconsin sunsets, they’re always beautiful. There are times, few in number, when I feel this could almost be a wintry vacation. Our snowmobiles pass under The Hanging Tree: three bodies, bloated in the cold, swing from nooses latched to the thick branches of an oak. Though it may feel like a vacation at times, this isn’t the sort of vacation you plan for.