The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(171)
Do you see why this story is important? It is not just a matter of my survival, or even the survival of the human species. It is a matter of the survival of the entire known universe. The zombies have already taken so much from us. The few spies and scouts who have successfully mingled with them and escaped to tell the tale say that they are demolishing and rebuilding our cities. Day and night they ebb and flow through the streets in tidal masses, like army ants or swarming bees, under the flickering auroras of strange energies. They are as unknowable to us as we are to them.
Listen:
This is still our world. That it is still comprehensible to us, that we can still survive in it, suggests that the zombies have not yet won an outright victory. It suggests that the tide can be turned. We have become vagrants scattered across the face of the Earth, and now we must come together and go forward together. But the zombies have become so like us that we can’t trust any stranger. We can’t trust someone like you, who stumbled out of the wilderness into our sanctuary. That’s why you must endure this test. Like mantids or spiders, we must stage fearful courtship rituals before we can accept strangers as our own.
I want you to survive this. I really do. There are not many of us left and you are young. You can have many children. Many little observers.
Listen:
This world can be ours again. It has been many years since the war, and its old beauty is returning. Now that civilisation has been shattered, it has become like Eden again. Tell me: Is a world as wild and clean and beautiful as this not worth saving? Was the sky never so green, or grass never so blue?
Dating in Dead World
By Joe McKinney
Joe McKinney’s latest novel, Quarantined, was a finalist for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award. His first book, a zombie novel called Dead City, was recently reissued, and a sequel, Apocalypse of the Dead, will be published in October. A third entry in the series, The Zombie King, will appear in 2011. McKinney’s short fiction has appeared in the zombie anthology History Is Dead, and a zombie anthology he co-edited, Dead Set, was published earlier this year. When not writing fiction, McKinney works as a Homicide Detective for the San Antonio Police Department.
Dating is hard, and that’s under the best of circumstances. Throw in a few unusual complications, and going out on a date can quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares. In the movie 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler attempts to woo Drew Barrymore, only to discover that she’s afflicted by a rare condition that causes her to forget they’ve ever met every time she falls asleep. In There’s Something About Mary, Ben Stiller goes to pick up Cameron Diaz for the prom, only to suffer a horrifying mishap involving a zipper. But at least those guys never had to deal with the situation presented in our next story.
The author says, “After I finish a novel, I’m usually struck by a sort of separation anxiety. So much mental effort is put into worldbuilding and getting to know the characters. So what I usually do is write a few short stories set in the world of the novel I’ve just finished. ‘Dating in Dead World’ was a part of that process.” He adds, “Right before I left for my first date, my dad gave me the only bit of parental sex education I ever received. He said, ‘Remember this, you will be held personally accountable for everything that happens to that girl from the moment she leaves her front door to the moment she walks back in it. Conduct yourself accordingly.’ It wasn’t until after I’d written this story that I realized I was channeling that advice. I guess it took.”
Heather Ashcroft told me to come to the main entrance of her father’s compound. She said the guards there would know my name; they’d be expecting me.
They were expecting me all right.
Four of them had their machine guns trained on me while a voice on a PA speaker barked orders.
“Turn off your motorcycle and dismount.” The voice was clear, sharp, professional.
I did what I was told.
“Step forward. Stand on the red square.”
I did that too.
“Stand still for the dogs.”
Three big black German shepherds were led out of the guard shack and began circling me, sniffing me. Cadaver dogs, trained to sniff out necrotic tissue. No surprise there. Even the smaller compounds use them, and the one I was about to enter was no minor league operation. Dave Ashcroft controls the largest baronage in South Texas, and his security is top notch.
“I’m Andrew Hudson,” I said. “I’m here to see Heather Ashcroft. We’re going out on—”
Somebody called off the dogs and two of the guards came forward. One of them used the barrel of his weapon to point me towards a table next to the guard shack.
“Stand on that green square. Face the table.”
“You fellas sure put a guy through a lot of trouble for a first date,” I said. I gave him a winning grin. He wasn’t impressed.
“Move,” he said.
He asked me what weapons I was carrying and I told him.
“Put them in there,” he said, and pointed to a red plastic box on the corner of the table.
“I’m gonna get those back, right?”
He ran a metal detector over my body, taking extra care to get up inside the flaps of my denim jacket, under my hair, up into my crotch.
A guard field-stripped my weapons.