DLSnell.com

THE MARKET

• Antho:  Dark Faith 2
• Editor(s):   Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon
• Pay Rate:  5 cents/word
• Response Time:  90 after deadline
• Reading Period:  January 1st – January 31st
• Description:  Everyone believes in something and we want you to put those beliefs to the test.  We’re looking for the story only you could write, something deeply personal and at the same time universal. We’re looking for smart, literate stories that don’t proselytize or stereotype.  Stories that make you think, that comment on the human condition and the social order.  Stories that are rich in their use of language.
• Submission Guidelines: http://mauricebroaddus.com/?p=3224 

NOTE: Author D.L. Snell conducted the following interview to give writers a better idea of what the editors of this specific market are seeking; however, most editors are open to ideas outside of the preferences discussed here, as long as they fit the basic submission guidelines.

THE SCOOP
1) What authors do you enjoy, and why does their writing captivate you?
Gary Braunbeck, Cat Valente, Toni Morrison, George Pelecanos, Octavia Butler, Nick Mamatas, Amy Hempel, Ray Bradbury, Michael Chabon, Tom Piccirilli.  What they have in common is the poetry of their language use, their deft characterizations, their distinct voice, and the originality of their ideas. 

2) What are your favorite genres? Which genres would you like to see incorporated into submissions to this market?Maurice is a crime fiction junkie.  Jerry leans more toward literary science fiction, fantasy, and horror.  For the sake of this market, genre with a dark and speculative/fantastic edge is what we’re looking for.

3) What settings most intrigue you? Ordinary or exotic locales? Real or fantasy? Past, present, or future?
Interesting ones.

4) Explain the type of pacing you enjoy, e.g. slow building to fast, fast throughout, etc.
We want pacing that’s true to the story you’re telling.  That said, the story should grab us early and let us know, as readers and editors, that we’re in good hands.

5) What types of characters appeal to you the most? Any examples?
Fully developed characters with a distinct voice.

6) Is there a specific tone you'd like to set in your publication? What kind of voices grab you and keep you enthralled? Any examples?This is not an easy thing to describe because while the overall tone of stories is dark, that doesn’t rule out a humorous or uplifting tale.  One of the best ways to get a feel for the type of stories we like is to pick up a copy of the first Dark Faith.

7) What is your policy for vulgarity, violence, and sexual content? Any taboos?
As long as it is germane to the story, we’re good with it.  Gratuitous anything is bad.

8) What kind of themes are you seeking most in submissions to this market? In general, what themes interest you?Personal explorations of faith particularly interest us because they feel more genuine. 

9) Overall, do you prefer downbeat or upbeat endings?
We prefer good endings.

10) Any last advice for submitters to this market? Any critical do's or do not's?
Don’t annoy us.  Do buy us drinks at conventions.  While Maurice loves talking animal stories, Jerry is quick to veto them.  DO READ THE GUIDELINES.

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For more scoops, go to www.dlsnell.com.

D.L. Snell writes with Permuted Press. He edited Dr. Kim Paffenroth thrice, John Dies at the End once, and provided a constructive critique to Joe McKinney on his next major novel after Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead. You can shoot D.L. Snell in the head at www.dlsnell.com.

To reprint this article, please contact D.L. Snell.

• Antho: Live Free or Never Die: Speculative Fiction from the Granite State to the Stars
• Editor(s): Rick Broussard
• Pay Rate: $50
• Response Time: 3 months
• Description: Pulp-style short fiction in the genre of science fiction and strange tales, all set in New Hampshire
• Submission Guidelines: www.nhpulpfiction.com

1) What authors do you enjoy, and why does their writing captivate you?
I enjoy reading the works of writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury who have distinctive voices and who can make words do tricks at their command. On the other hand, I really admire the imaginative scope and durability of classic science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein and the rebel spirit of fantasists like Harlan Ellison.

2) What are your favorite genres? Which genres would you like to see incorporated into submissions to this market?
My very favorite genres are precisely the genres that this anthology covers: science fiction and strange Twilight Zone-style tales.

3) What settings most intrigue you? Ordinary or exotic locales? Real or fantasy? Past, present, or future?
I'm most intrigued by the workings of the human mind. After all, that's the setting where the story really takes place no matter if the environment is exotic or quotidian.

4) Explain the type of pacing you enjoy, e.g. slow building to fast, fast throughout, etc.
Short story pacing has to conform to an equation based the density of the story's essential plot points and the length of a sustainable arc for the narrative.

5) What types of characters appeal to you the most? Any examples?
I prefer protagonists who are somewhat out of their depth in whatever the situation is that they find themselves. I identify best with them. Other characters should possess more than one dimension unless it's a character from a place where there only is one dimension.

6) Is there a specific tone you'd like to set in your publication? What kind of voices grab you and keep you enthralled? Any examples?
I want the tone to be colorful and alluring and maybe a little tawdry.

7) What is your policy for vulgarity, violence, and sexual content? Any taboos?
I'll edit out anything too extreme. I think shooting for PG 13 is probably a good idea but I'm always willing to bend rules for good writing. Past volumes have had their share of all of the above.

8) What kind of themes are you seeking most in submissions to this market? In general, what themes interest you?
Science fiction invites high concepts and I welcome those, but writers get extra points for actually taking the NH portion of the title seriously. The Granite State should be at least a secondary or parallel theme in every story.

9) Overall, do you prefer downbeat or upbeat endings?
No preference.

10) Any last advice for submitters to this market? Any critical do's or do not's?
Put your contact information on the manuscript.

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For more scoops, go to www.dlsnell.com.

D.L. Snell writes with Permuted Press. He edited Dr. Kim Paffenroth thrice, John Dies at the End once, and provided a constructive critique to Joe McKinney on his next major novel after Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead. You can shoot D.L. Snell in the head at www.dlsnell.com.

To reprint this article, please contact D.L. Snell.

READ: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

In a ballroom full of rabid zombie fans now actually turned into zombies, there were two people in particular whom I would want by my side. One of them was there in the ballroom already: Eloise J. Knapp—novelist, photographer, graphic designer… and one heck of a hardcore survivalist.

The other person was Jonathan Maberry. Not only was he an eighth-degree black belt in traditional Japanese jujitsu, and a fifth-degree black belt in kenjutsu (the Japanese art of swordplay), he also had published, like, fifteen books in five years, plus a bunch of Marvel comic books and short stories. Guy like that, he must have had some type of superpower equal to Peter Clines’s denial. And on top of everything, he was a super nice guy, always willing to read books from Permuted, always willing to help promote. Super nice guy. That, too, was one of his powers.

Alas, I hadn’t seen Maberry but in passing the entire zomBcon. Jacob, Eloise, and I really could have used him there in the ballroom.

“Locked,” Jacob Kier said as he hobbled away from yet another door leading out of the room. “Or maybe blocked or something.”

We had tried three doors already. They hadn’t been shut when I had first barged into the ballroom to save my friend and publisher Jacob Kier from suffering a game-over at the hands of a zombified Super Mario.

“Last one,” Ellie said.

We all looked down the outside aisle to where more and more zombies were pouring into the ballroom. It was the only open door, and we had been trying to avoid it because of the incoming horde.

I looked behind us at the gory mess Ellie’s minigun had left behind. There were still a few twitching hands here and there, a few blinking eyes on partially severed heads. But aside from this new influx of the undead ahead of us, we had pretty much cleared the room. Nevertheless, the incoming zombies had already started circling around behind us, and we could hear them back there, closing in.

There were so many. I wondered why they were all coming into the ballroom. Was there no one else out there alive?

“I’m running out of ammo,” Ellie said as she fed in her last belt of cartridges.

“Me too,” I said, plucking the last few shotgun shells from my bandolier. Jacob had already run out of rounds for his handgun, and he looked like maybe he was starting to hyperventilate, all sweaty and pale and trying to catch his breath. He was clutching his ZombAlert necklace as if it were helping him stay upright. I was proud of him: he hadn’t yet lain down and cried. Well... maybe for like a second he had.

Somehow Ellie had managed to get him back on his feet. “Think of your family,” she’d said. “There’s plenty to live for, but you have to fight for it, do you understand me?”

Now, as Ellie continued to load the minigun, I said, “Should we go back to your booth, get more ammo, different guns?”

She shook her head. “They’ve already circled around that far. We’d never make it to the cache, not with the ammo we’ve got left. We’d just be wasting our last chance.”

She finished loading the minigun for the last time. “Okay,” she said, “make every round count. D.L., you’re the cleanup crew. You get the ones I don’t.”

I nodded, and she set up her shot.

Watching her operate the minigun was like watching a construction worker using a jackhammer. It certainly was just as loud.

Jacob and I watched as she mowed down the bodies that were streaming through the doorway, watched as knees just disappeared in a bloody haze, and heads exploded. Jacob looked like he might puke as entrails slid out everywhere and the newcomer zombies got tripped up on them, slipping around in the rest of the carnage too.

The smell almost made me vomit in sympathy with Jacob. The smell of blood and raw muscle and guts, and the stinking, steaming brown and black sludge inside them. It kind of looked and reeked like the men’s room from right before the outbreak.

I looked back the way we’d come. “They’re coming up behind us!” I shouted over the minigun.

Ellie glanced back but then just kept shooting. She had to. If we couldn’t clear the doorway…

Behind me, the two leaders of the zombie pack got within range. Zombie Scully and zombie Mulder in their special agent suits and FBI laminates.

My shotgun turned zombie Mulder’s head into mist, and his tongue wagged in the meaty, gurgling stump before he fell over dead.

“Jacob,” I said, “watch out!”

He had been so steeped in shock he hadn’t noticed the undead Scully moving in on him. I couldn’t shoot—not a shotgun. Not with Jacob and my target in such close proximity. And as I raised the shotgun to strike the special agent with the butt, I wondered… could I really hit a girl? At least she wasn’t wearing glasses.

She latched onto Jacob’s arm and pulled him in for the bite… but got a mouthful of the shotgun stock instead. It was like hitting a tree with a baseball bat. The impact hurt my arms. And I could hear her teeth cracking, could feel the ragged remnants of them scraping the stock.

I shoved her away from my friend and blasted her neck and lower jaw so that the top of her head went flying, staring at us and tracking us with its eyes as it flew back into the oncoming mob.

“Eloise!” I shouted as Jacob and I backed up against her.

Just then the rapid fire stopped, and the minigun’s barrel wound down.

“All right,” she said, and she started forward, leaving the minigun on the floor.

I blasted a few more zombies behind us, and then slung Jacob’s arm over my shoulder and helped him along. We could hear shouting from out in the hall where we had been signing books. Someone shouting at the zombies and grunting, as if working hard at something.

“Hear that, Beavis? There’s someone alive out there!”

Jacob perked up a little and nodded. “Uh huh.”

He seemed to be feeling a little better about the whole thing now that we weren’t mercilessly slaughtering everyone.

There were only a couple zombies left standing. One looked completely intact, except for a vicious belt of gunshot wounds along his belly, and the other was missing a leg. Ellie pushed the intact one, and he slid apart at the belt of wounds. His top half hit the one-legged zombie, who toppled too, unable to keep his balance.

“Clear!” Ellie called.

Then she threw down a segment of pipe and draping to cover the mess she’d made. It would help keep our shoes somewhat clean.

Ellie walked across it, drapery squishing beneath her boots, and when she reached the threshold of the door…

I heard more shouting from in the hall, and Ellie started backing up, actually looking surprised for the first time that evening.

Permuted Press author Bowie Ibarra came stumbling in over the lumpy drapery, carrying an almost empty bottle of Dead Man Ale. Once he’d caught his balance, he immediately locked in on Eloise.

“Uhhhh…”

The sound actually came from behind us. I leaned Jacob against the wall and turned to blast more zombies.

Bowie, either drunk off his ass or infected with full-blown zombie AIDS, swiped at Eloise, who nimbly arched away while also swiping the bottle from his outstretched hand. She danced back a few steps and then, swinging the almost-empty bottle up so that the bottom pointed right at Bowie’s face, she slammed her palm hard against the glass mouth. The pressure, combined with the dregs left in the bottle, caused the bottom to explode. There was a loud pop as it shattered right into Bowie’s eyes. Shards stuck out of his face, and he staggered around, blind.

“Yeow!” he cried, clutching at his eyes. “I was just… offering you a toast—yeow!”

He tripped and fell face-first into the wettest part of the drapery. There was a squishing sound of blood pushing up through the fabric… directly into Bowie’s injured eyes.

Eloise looked horrified. “Bowie!”

She raced to his side and helped him up. He was crying blood. His and everyone else’s.

“Please…” he said, and then he vomited off to one side. “Please…”

BOOM!

I shot my last shell as one of the zombies finally reached our group from the rear. The blast only took off the bottom left half of his face, and didn’t put him down.

“I’m out!” I screamed, and then Jacob and I started backing up away from our approaching doom—all those hungry mouths.

“Please,” Bowie said again.

“I’m so sorry,” Ellie said. “I’m so sorry, Bowie.”

“Just—” He vomited up blood this time. “Just...”

Then he stopped talking.

Slowly, deliberately, he raised his head toward the sound of Ellie’s voice.

“I’m so sorry,” she said one last time before jabbing the long shard of the beer bottle through Bowie’s eye socket, into his brain. She caught him as he fell, and laid him gently down.

Then she stood up, and with a steely look in her eyes, she said, “Let’s go.”

I followed her, helping a weak and weeping Jacob out over the black-drapery funeral shroud as the zombies behind us followed too.

The hallway was almost completely deserted, except for Peter Clines and the group of twenty-or-so survivors huddled in his safe zone of deniability; he was leading them out the front doors, just chatting with them casually, like nothing was going on—as if he weren’t walking across a slaughterhouse floor; he stepped on a stomach, which deflated under his foot like a whoopee cushion.

“Oh hey, you guys!” he said, waving at us cheerfully.

Craig DiLouie was out in the hall too. He held a long metal pole with a U-shaped yoke welded onto one end, and he was catching the last few zombies by the neck with the yoke so that he could steer them into the ballroom. He was shouting and grunting as he worked.

Suddenly it all made sense: the locked doors, the sudden influx of the undead; the yelling.

“Oh jeez,” DiLouie said, struggling with the zombie trapped in his yoke. “I didn’t… I didn’t realize there was anyone else alive in there!”

“Bowie was alive,” I said.

“Oh my G—really? I didn’t… I didn’t realize.”

“It’s okay,” Ellie said, “neither did I...”

Craig shoved the zombie into the ballroom and spotted the horde coming through. He tried to shut the doors, but couldn’t because of all the bodies lying just inside.

He turned to us, and I realized just how pale and sickly he looked. “You should go.”

“Huh-uh,” Jacob said, still leaning on me.

“Yeah, Craig,” I said, “we’re not leaving anyone behind.”

He shook his head and started rolling up his sleeve. “You don’t understand. One of them, it…” He didn’t have to finish. We could see the nasty teeth marks indenting his skin.

Jacob started crying.

Eloise stared at Craig with a glazed look.

The zombies made it to the threshold and Craig jumped into action, holding them back with his yoke. “Go!” he said. “Go before I can’t hold them any longer!”

I nodded. “Ellie, Jacob, remember… there’s plenty to live for. We just have to—”

“We just have to fight for it,” Ellie finished. And then she was helping me pack Jacob to the elevator. We easily dodged the stray zombies Craig hadn’t cleared from the hall; he’d saved the slowest for last.

We took the elevator down to the second-floor parking garage, where Ellie was parked. I kept an eye on Jacob from my peripheral vision. He had stopped weeping and was just staring at the elevator doors.

DING!

The doors slid open onto the parking garage.

Black belt, prolific author, and super nice guy Jonathan Maberry suddenly stepped inside. “Not this way!” he said, repeatedly jabbing the button to close the doors.

I caught only a brief glimpse into the parking garage, but the way looked clear. It made me wonder what Maberry was running from.

“We’ll go to the first floor,” he said, pressing the button.

The elevator started to move, and Maberry glanced over his shoulder at us. I noticed a huge bloody fingerprint on the back of his coat. A red slash, like the imprint of an incision, seemed to cut into the large fingerprint, and it reminded me of something. Something I had seen in the men’s room earlier that day…

I started to ask Maberry if he’d seen Big Daddy anywhere, when suddenly he was pressing the emergency stop button. The elevator jerked a little as it stopped somewhere between floors. Jacob almost collapsed, and while Ellie and I were struggling to stay upright beneath his dead weight, Maberry took advantage.

He grabbed Jacob and spun him around, then locked him in some kind of one-arm chokehold that only a superhuman could maintain.

“Get back!” he told us, pointing a Glock at Ellie and me. Then he pressed the gun to Jacob’s head. “I’m sick of you foiling my plans. So let me tell you all about them conveniently…”

“Mr. Maberry, don’t you think that’s a bit—”

“I’ve been planning this for years, you see, building up a fan base, for myself and the entire genre. Working tirelessly for five years. In fact, where do you think I got the idea for Patient Zero, hmm? It wasn’t just fiction… it was a plan. And now with zomBcon and Occupy Seattle getting people out on the streets and vulnerable... I knew the timing was right.”

As he kept talking, I glanced at Jacob.

“Why, you might ask? Hah! There is no reason! It’s simply because… I want to. Because… I’m not even human.”

That got my attention. “Not human?”

He chuckled. “Yes. Haven’t you ever wondered how I’m able to write so many books?”

Jacob said, “Uh-huh…” and then suddenly he started puking. It poured over Maberry’s arm and all down the front of Jacob’s Permuted tee.

Maberry reacted, shoving Jacob away and flinging vomit off his sleeve.

“He’s infected!” Maberry screamed, and then he marched forward, aiming the gun at Jacob’s head.

“No!”

Ellie and I both ran forward, pushing Maberry into Jacob, shoving until the two were practically hugging. We felt Maberry’s muscles wind up in his back as he coiled to spin himself around. But then Jacob was sinking his teeth into Maberry’s neck, clamping down and then pulling back, tearing off a huge chunk of muscle and stretchy strips of skin.

“ARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!”

As it turns out… Maberry was most definitely human. But I could see it in his eyes as Ellie and I held him against Jacob and let our friend rip out his throat: I could see that the man had just realized for the first time in his life that he was not, in fact, anything more than mortal flesh and bone.

I hit the button to resume our elevator ride to the first floor.

Jonathan Maberry gurgled one last time and then…

DING!

… Jacob let him drop.

Ellie and I backed out of the car, backing away from Jacob. His face was completely painted with Maberry’s blood. He came toward us.

“No gun,” Ellie said, patting the pockets of her black tactical vest. “Not even a knife.”

I stood there, staring at Jacob, thinking about what he’d said he’d do if his wife ever turned into a zombie.

“He’s got a… thingy…” I said, gesturing at the ZombAlert necklace around his neck. Maberry’s chokehold had kept it clean and free of vomit.

Quickly, nimbly, Eloise snatched the necklace from Jacob’s neck, snapping the chain. She looked at it and then handed it to me.

On the back I found Jacob’s custom engraving, his last wish if he ever were to be turned. It almost made me laugh and sob, all at the same time.

“Molest me,” I read aloud.

Jacob looked at me with sad eyes even as he came forward, groping for my throat. He moaned. Moaned like someone who had just lost everything that meant anything in the world.

I met his eyes, and, despite his abject plea, I didn’t see anything. No spark.

“Beavis...” I said.

I heard glass shattering behind me, and before I could even turn around, Ellie was beside me with a fire axe. She stepped forward, but I stopped her. Without a word, I took the axe from her. Then I stepped forward as Jacob stepped forward too…

“Uhhh…”



I sat at the bottom of the parking lot stairs, just staring at the two corpses that had fallen out the window: Timothy Long and the coconut-bra castaway. They were hugging even as they lay practically flattened and burst on the pavement.

“Come on, D.L.,” Ellie said. “We can get to the parking garage from here. It’s clear.” She reached out for my hand to help me up.

I shook my head. “Ellie, I heard what you said. During the Permuted panel. What you’d do in the instance of a zombie outbreak. You should go… be with your family on the farm. Protect them. They need you.”

“No,” she said, “no way. I’m not just leaving you here.”

I shook my head. “Well, I can’t leave. I need to… I need to go find the other Permuted guys. Tony Faville, Jason Hornsby… Iain McKinnon. Jacob would want… they weren’t at the table when this all started, and he would want them to be safe too.”

Ellie nodded and considered something for a few seconds. “Then we’ll go get them together,” she said. “And then…”

“And then I can lie down and cry.”

She put a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe we all will. But in the meantime… let’s go save Jacob’s press.”

And so she helped me up, and we went, knowing that neither of us was likely to survive, but knowing that it didn’t matter so long as we died in service to our second family…

Permuted Press.

“God,” I said, “I hope Crypticon 2012 is nothing like this…”

And Ellie said, “Actually... I’ve heard it’s way worse…”


The End! (Until Next Year... Duhn-Duhn-Duhn!)

READ: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

At dinner, the night before the outbreak, editor Felicia A. Tiller-Sullivan had asked Jacob Kier, “What would you do if your wife got turned?”

Jacob looked down at his burger. He was kind of hunched over the table, ready to take a bite.

“Would you be able to…?” She trailed off when she saw the look on his face.

Still staring at his burger, Jacob said, “I would probably just lie down and cry.” Then he took a big old juicy bite, and I laughed.

I laughed until tears were streaming down my face. The laughter was infectious, and Jacob, chuckling, said, “I’m glad my grief amuses you.” The truth is, he was sincere in his answer to Felicia’s question. You could hear it in the way his voice broke.

Now, as I bolted into the ballroom at zomBcon, following the direction of Jacob’s voice, I prayed he was alive.

The ballroom was chaos. Tables were overturned, and zombies and survivors were running everywhere, trampling discarded comic books and crunching over zombie figurines. I glanced around, trying to spot my tall friend. My eye caught somebody in a red-and-white striped sweatshirt and beanie: how was it that Jacob was somehow more difficult to find than Where’s Waldo?

“Beavis!” I cried, hoping he would once more answer to his true name.

Then I heard him, shouting for help.


He was lying on the ground near the Optimystical Studios booth where they sold ZombAlert necklaces, stamped with customized final wishes to let your family know what to do with you in the event that you get turned into a zombie. Stuff like “Shoot Me” or “Kiss Me.” A zombified Super Mario was jumping on Jacob’s head as if Jacob were some sort of Koopa or Goomba he could squash for points, or perhaps extra lives.

I didn’t have a weapon.

Luckily panel moderator Marshall Popham had told me about the Zombie Tools booth, where they sold very long and very sharp blades, and killing instruments of all kinds. I hurried over to their booth, a dark space with a blackened metal roof, some old looking furniture, and a naked zombie bust nailed atop a column of wooden planks, which also served as a display wall for all the different knives.

The blades were all gone.

Every single one.


People had ransacked the entire booth and were using the Zombie Tools to hack their way out of the ballroom. All that was left were some T-shirts that said, “A Fist Full of Fuck Yeah.” I grabbed a bunch and ran toward Super Mario, who was still pouncing on my friend’s head.

“Hey, Mario!” I shouted.

He looked up midair, and I threw a fistful of fuck yeah right into his pale moon of a face.

He landed and stumbled back, caught up in the shirts, pawing at them. I ran and kicked him hard in the chest, and he went reeling. But he quickly recovered, and when the shirts fell away from his face… he snarled and came back running.

“Here!” Jacob said, holding up some sort of machete he’d gotten from Zombie Tools.

I snatched it up and charged headlong toward the classic videogame character. As we met in the middle, I slid like a runner at a ball game and swung the blade as hard as I could. I cut Mario down at the knees and he suddenly shrank.

“Jacob,” I said, running over to help him up and drag him behind a rack of magazines where we’d have a second to regroup.

His glasses were crooked on his face. I straightened them for him. “Are you all right? Were you bitten?”

The first thing Jacob said was, “The other Permuted authors. Are they… ?”

“Well, Timothy Long is... um... Craig DiLouie was still alive last I saw him, and he’s out there fighting the infection tooth and nail. Peter Clines is in denial, and—”

“Yeah, I know about Peter’s power.”

“You mean you knew about his secret identity and you didn’t tell me?”

Jacob looked away.

“I thought we told each other everything.”

“Hey,” he suddenly said, “did you see my necklace?” He held up his ZombAlert necklace from Optimystical Studios.

“Yeah, that’s pretty,” I said, and then I changed the subject; the current one just hurt too much. “I’m not sure where the other Permuted guys are. Hornsby and Faville and McKinnon… I’m not sure. Bowie I’m pretty positive is a dead man. And… you never answered me, are you all right?”

Jacob looked off into the ballroom with a frightened look on his face, like he had just remembered he’d left the stove on at home.

“Ellie,” he said.

“What?”

“She had her own booth, away from the Permuted table.”

Suddenly I understood. Eloise J. Knapp, the very first female Permuted novelist, had gotten a booth inside the ballroom. She was sharing her space with Lyle Perez, the guy from Undead in the Head Book Reviews.

Without another word, Jacob started off in her direction. He was limping badly.

I followed him, and some zombies lurched out at us. I decapitated a few cheerleaders and a few survivalists who hadn’t survived. I knew Eloise dressed in Blackhawk tactical gear, but none of these newly undead survivalists were women—all men.

Jacob rounded the corner to Ellie’s booth first, and I could see his face when he saw what was there. I hurried up and pulled my machete out of the neck of a Boba Fett zombie, then scurried to catch up with Jacob.

“Oh my God,” I said when I saw the remains of Eloise Knapp’s booth.

The banners promoting her first book The Undead Situation still hung there, looking great, and it looked as if she had sold out of books. She still had a few copies of Z Magazine—for zombies, by zombies—but even that had almost sold out.

However, not everything in her booth looked quite as pristine.

A corpse was slouched in one of two chairs. A zombie figurine stuck out of the body’s head where someone had jammed it. It looked as if the little zombie were ripping and climbing its way out of the skull.

“Lyle…” Jacob said. “Lyle Perez.”

“Where’s Ellie?”

We glanced around, but this aisle was almost vacant. We could see survivors screaming past as they ran around the outside perimeter of the room, escaping zombies.

I spotted Carmen Sandiego, just briefly, and then she was gone.

“Where in the world is Ellie?” Jacob said. I could see tears in his eyes now.

For Lyle. For everything.

I tapped him on the shoulder as a zombie caught sight of us and turned up our aisle. “We’ve got to go. Maybe the other Permuted authors have seen her?”

He nodded, and we turned to leave, but then one of the pipe-and-drape walls that separated the aisles toppled, and a horde of zombies came rushing at us: construction workers, Pocahontas, Alice in Wonderland, a few zomBcon volunteers in white shirts.

Jacob and I turned to flee up the aisle, but another group of zombies was closing in on us from that direction as well.

We glanced at each other. I tightened my grip on the machete, knowing I wouldn’t let us go down without taking out at least twice our number in zombies.

The closest one growled. Her eye was covered in some sort of black fabric to make it look as if the eyeball were missing; the surrounding makeup made the socket look like a ragged, bloody hole. I swung out at her, but she caught my arm and pulled me in for a deadly kiss.

BLAM!

BLAM BLAM!

The zombie with the fake missing eye, now truly missing her eye, suddenly fell back, along with a few other walking corpses nearest us.

Eloise J. Knapp, in full Blackhawk tactical gear, strode out from behind another segment of pipe and drape, gun in hand.




BLAM BLAM BLAM!

Before the outbreak, Jacob and I had taken an elevator with Ellie, and she had told us how one time the power had gone out in her town. She had gotten geared up and had grabbed her baseball bat. She thought, if there were zombies out there, she wanted to be there to help put them down. “This is my time,” she had told her family before heading out the door.

Here in the ballroom, where everyone else was running and screaming and being victimized, Eloise Knapp looked totally in her element.

BLAM BLAM BLAM!

She emptied her magazine into the rest of the zombies surrounding us, and then, still striding toward us, she ejected the spent mag and slammed in a new one.

She tossed the gun to Jacob and said, “Cover me.” Then she vaulted over the table into her booth.

“We need to go!” I said. “What are you doing? They’re just boxes!”

She was opening one of the tubs she had brought with her to the convention. I had assumed they were full of supplies like bookmarks and stuff, but then I saw just how big of a badass Ellie truly was.

“Is that a Gatling gun?” I asked.

“A minigun,” she said as she hefted it up onto the table. I saw a ton of other pistols and rifles and shotguns inside, plus a few stacks of various ammos.

“They’re coming,” Jacob said, raising the pistol.

Ellie looked up. Then, as if she’d planned for this, she walked right over, grabbed a stack of Z Magazines, and threw them out into the shambling horde.

The zombies stopped and looked down at the magazines.

Then they looked up at Ellie.

Then they looked at me.

Then at Ellie.

Then at the gun in Jacob’s hand.

Then at his ZombAlert necklace, or maybe his throat.

One of them farted.

And then they all fell to the ground and started fighting over the few issues of Z Magazine.

Ellie looked at us and said, “For zombies, by zombies,” and then she continued to pull out a few weapons from her tub. The last thing she grabbed was a go-bag.

She handed a shotgun to me, plus a bandolier of shells. To Jacob, she gave extra magazines.

“D.L., you’re close quarters—keep them off us. Jacob, you pick off the ones behind, keep them from ever getting to us.”

“And what are you going to do?” Jacob asked.

Ellie picked up the minigun and said, “Why, I’m wholesale crowd control. Now let’s go find the other Permuted authors.”

And then, like it was any other day, Eloise J. Knapp was on the move.

READ PART 3!
   Featuring Jonathan Maberry (for real this time), Jacob Kier, Eloise Knapp, and more!

   Find out who dies and who… prolongs the inevitable…

I wish I could say zomBcon 2011 went well.

Held in rainy Seattle, the event had all the elements for a successful zombie horror convention: a group of seven fellow Permuted Press authors, plus owner/publisher Jacob Kier; a great volunteer staff who tended to the exhibitors like waiters who deserve big tips; guests like Tom Savini, Judith O’Dea, Sam Trammel, and Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead; tons of people dressed up like walking corpses and zombie survivalists; and of course… cupcakes decorated like brains.

It should have been great.

But the moment I saw the actor who plays Romero’s Big Daddy tending to a cut finger in the men’s restroom… I knew something was wrong.

Earlier, I had been joking with Jacob Kier about the best place to release the zombie virus, if you were some kind of weirdo who wanted to engineer the outbreak. Sure, you could release it at an airport and it would travel all the way around the world, but… wouldn’t it be way cooler to release it at a zombie convention? If you think about it, everyone there’s already disguised as a zombie, right? Like a wolf in wolf’s clothing—obviously fake and zippered wolf’s clothing.

There was one costumed fan in particular, a blonde dressed in a bloody nurse’s uniform, her jaw ripped off and her tongue hanging out far enough to rival Kiss’s lead singer. She was fully in character when she shambled toward the table I was sharing with Permuted authors Craig DiLouie and Peter Clines.




The table was set up in a long hallway right outside the doors to the ballroom, which served as a giant exhibition space for the other vendors of horror comics, frightening sculptures, counterculture T-shirts, and all other kinds of scary wares.

Most people at conventions, when they approach my table, have their eyes fixed on my books. If they make initial eye contact, it’s usually just to say hello, but then their attention goes right back to my covers. This nurse... she didn’t even glance at the cover of DiLouie’s The Infection as she picked up speed, dragging behind her a Land of the Dead poster she’d just gotten signed by the guy who played Big Daddy.

“Hi,” DiLouie said, engaging the nurse like the great salesman and exuberant author he was. “Can I tell you about my work?”

The jawless nurse let out a shrill cry, and Craig suddenly looked very terrified.

The nurse lunged… only to snatch up a copy of The Infection.

“Oh my gosh—oh my gosh!” she said. “Mr. DiLouie, I’m a rabid fan!”

On the other side of Craig, Peter Clines sat down in his chair after having jumped up, ready to tear open his overshirt for some reason, as if to bear the chest of his black tee underneath. He kept an eye on the blond nurse as he continued to sign and sell copies of Ex-Heroes to his fans. If it’s one thing people love, it’s superheroes vs. zombies.

After practically giving DiLouie a five-star review right then and there for The Infection—the kind of review where the reader openly wishes that the rating system allowed for, like, infinity stars—the tongue-wagging nurse went on to ask about his first book, Tooth and Nail. DiLouie forgot all about his own mortality.

“Well, my book asks the question, what happened to the military during the zombie apocalypse? You know, in most zombie books the military is either cannon fodder or… they go insane and ruthless and take rule over everyone around. But in Tooth and Nail they—”

Craig stopped when he spotted a bloody hand reaching from behind the blond nurse, reaching for her mouth. She noticed it a second too late, going cross-eyed as she glanced down at it.

It grabbed her by the fake tongue and yanked her around.

A man dressed like Captain America stood behind her, zombified, his mask ripped, his cheeks and shield bloodied.




The nurse screamed.

The captain opened his mouth, and, groaning, letting gory pieces of someone else’s throat tumble out over his teeth, he moved in for the bite.

“This is not happening, this is not happening,” Peter Clines was saying.

“Peter, what are you doing?!” I shouted as I reached for the three-pound copy of my newest epic thriller, just something to throw at the star-spangled monster. “Get up and help!”

I threw the thriller and scored a headshot, dinging the captain’s eyebrow with the edge of my book’s spine. It opened a gaping wound in his eyebrow, which didn’t bleed.

I groped for anything else I could throw, but came up with a handful of marshmallow eyes we’d been handing out as freebies.

“This is not happening, this is not—”

“Peter!”

Clines turned on me then, ripping open his overshirt to finally reveal the black tee underneath. I was surprised to see an insignia emblazoned on his chest, a big silver stylized “D” in an even bigger silver oval.

I couldn’t believe I had never recognized him before, even without the mask. He was a real-life super hero, like Phoenix Jones. In the Permuted Press panel earlier that weekend, Clines had even said his weapon of choice against zombies was denial. I just hadn’t put two and two together. I hadn’t realized he was talking about...

His superpower.

“This is not happening!” the King of Denial shouted one last time, and the dead captain exploded like some kind of plague bomb, splattering everyone in the vicinity with bits of flesh and gore, and shards of bone that cut into them like shrapnel.

One girl picked the captain’s eyeball off her cheek and stared into its glassy black hole while she screamed.

Then she vomited.

And everyone around her started vomiting too.

Everyone who had been tainted by the captain’s explosion, at least.

They all started vomiting blood.

Clines, realizing his mistake too late, slicked his hair back in shock and disbelief. The real-life superhero sank down in his chair behind the table, slipping into a force field of complete and utter denial.

The blood-splattered zombie fans stopped vomiting and started turning on the rest of the crowd. They moaned. One lunged forward, biting.

Screams erupted. A few of the survivalists, acting on instinct, raised their guns... and threw the useless pieces of plastic at the infected.

“Craig!” I shouted at DiLouie.

He looked at me, and I indicated that we should corral as many healthy fans as we could into Peter Clines’s growing shield of denial.

DiLouie knew instantly what to do. He started tossing out the marshmallow eyeballs as bait.

The infected glanced down at the crinkly packages thrown at their feet.

They looked up at Craig.

Then down again.

Then up.

Then they looked at me.

I looked at them.

They looked at my book.

I told them what it was about.

They seemed interested and I thought I was going to make some sales. But then they all fell to the ground and started clawing for the eyeballs, fighting each other for them, growling.

While DiLouie reached into a box for more eyeballs, I hurdled our table and started helping people over into Clines’s personal bubble. One girl was dressed as a zombie castaway in a coconut bra.

“Are these bites?!” I asked her, pointing out the nasty, realistic looking wounds on her forearm and throat.

“No, I swear!”

I didn’t know what to do.

So I snatched up the fake severed arm that one of the other Permuted authors, Timothy Long, had left sitting on his table next to mine.

Earlier, DiLouie had stuffed the fake arm down his blazer sleeve and had extended the hand to shake with another fellow novelist, Jason Hornsby. Hornsby had gotten quite the shock when he’d ripped off the arm of one of Permuted’s bestselling authors!

I dangled the fake limb in front of the castaway’s face like I was teasing a dog.

She glanced at it.

Then glanced at me.

Then glanced back at the arm again.

Then glanced at my book, but there was no time for a sales pitch.

I launched into one anyway.

“Hey!” Timothy Long—who, for whatever reason, had been standing there the whole time just laughing at everyone getting killed—grabbed his fake arm from me and whopped the female castaway over the head with it.

“Ow!” she said. “What was that for?!”

“Nothing,” I replied as I lifted her over the table into Timothy Long’s capable arms. She hugged him around the neck, and her grass skirt dangled over his powerful, manly guns.


With her secured, I started glancing up and down the long hallway outside the ballroom, trying desperately to spot our publisher and my good friend Jacob Kier. Jacob was tall, about as tall as the guy who played Big Daddy. About as tall as the titular character in that horror movie Jacob. I couldn’t see him.

I formed a megaphone with my hands and shouted his true name: “Beavis! Beavis!”

Nothing.

But then… from deep in the ballroom, where there was nothing but screams and the sound of fighting and things falling down, I heard…

“Butthead?!”

“Beavis!”

I went running after my friend Jacob.

I only looked back once.

Behind me, back at our table, the castaway in Timothy Long’s arms leaned in as if to kiss him on the cheek, but then suddenly she was vomiting in his face and all down his front, and Tim went stumbling backward with her still in his arms, and they both crashed through the big windows of the convention center, and they went tumbling down three stories to the parking lot below while the Seattle rain blew in.

“Tim!” DiLouie screamed… and Peter Clines’s field of denial grew more and more...


READ PART 2!
   Featuring Jonathan Maberry, Jacob Kier, Lyle Perez, Eloise Knapp, and more!

   Find out who dies and who… prolongs the inevitable…