Living With the Dead: Year One (Books 1-2, Bonus Material)

by Guess, Joshua; Ribken, Annetta; Ayers, Rachel; Whitwam, Lori

at 11:39 AM

  Behind the zombie: How Living With the Dead was born

  Josh here. This is a sort of informal, behind the scenes section. If you aren't interested in how or why this blog came to be and couldn't care less about the weird everyday inspirations that make it happen, then you can skip ahead to the short stories and Lori's novella. I won't get mad. Go ahead. Feel free.

  ...Are they gone? OK, free beer for everyone!

  OK, so a lot of people have asked me a lot of questions about LWTD. I thought I’d take a little time to give everyone a good idea of how the whole thing works, and some tidbits you won't get anywhere else but from me. Or one of m friends. Maybe from my mom. This section is pretty much all spoilers, so if you skipped ahead about five hundred pages, go back. You've been warned.

  I had the idea to start writing a zombie story a long time back, probably sometime in 2005. That was when I started reading “The Walking Dead”, the amazing Robert Kirkman comic. I've been a fan of zombies and zombie movies since I was a kid, and I really liked the idea of a zombie comic as a zombie movie that never ends.

  However, one thing that had never been done in zombie fiction, at least that I had ever seen, was a truly day-to-day account of how one would survive, what it would do to people long term. I mean, “The Walking Dead” does an awesome job of showing how characters change given the insane circumstances, but the reality is that the book comes out once a month, and all the characters deal with these huge, life-crushing scenarios. I wanted to get more detailed, go deeper, and try to do something that examined the everyday life of the survivors.

  Of course, I was also pretty lazy about my writing in those days, so I put it off forever. Jump forward to late 2009, and I'm starting to hear some very interesting things about the Kindle. I decided that I would start in on an abandoned novel I had sitting on my hard drive, and I started to work on it in earnest.

  A few months later, and I found myself barely writing. I needed something to motivate me, sharpen my writing skills, and MAKE my lazy ass write every day.

  So on a whim, I registered LivingWiththeDead.net on blogger, and wrote a post.

  I shared it on facebook, made my friends and family check it out, and kept on writing. I’d love to tell you that it went viral and got a trillion hits, but that isn't real life. Just under a year in, and I'm at about 50,000 page views. I'm happy with that.

  In the beginning, this whole thing was just a big writing exercise for me. Yeah, I got to scratch my zombie itch (which sounds like a particularly bad venereal disease), but mainly it got me motivated to write every day and to sharpen my skills. It helped that people actually started reading it.

  Most of the people in the blog, at least the main characters, are real. The idea was to write the thing from my own perspective, as if the world as it was and the world I created diverged on March 2nd, 2010. The skills that I list as my own are, for the most part, skills I actually possess. I have done martial arts off and on for years, I've got a degree in Fire/Rescue, I've been an EMT, a nurse aide, and yes, both of my parents are actually nurses and Mom taught me to read and treat a wound at the same time. I'm a generalist, so a lot of the knowledge my character has isn't just stuff I ripped from Google—it's things the me in the story would really know.

  Jess, Patrick, Mom, my brother and sister, Little David, Gabrielle...all of these people are real. I've had a great time royally fucking up the lives of their fictional selves, but by far the strangest moment was killing off my mom.

  It was something that I knew I wanted to do in the story almost from day one. Imagine my surprise a little down the road when I sit down with my mom and, totally unaware of my plans, she suggests that I kill off her character. Her reasoning was nearly identical to my own—it created an emotional turmoil that truly alters the fictional me. Plus, mom's character was a stabilizing force for everyone else, an authority figure that kept heads cool and settled disputes. As a reader, she recognized that for me to take the story where I wanted to go, that influence would have to vanish.

  Writing a serialized story almost every day is really, really hard. I wanted to balance the minute details while still keeping it interesting, which is how the entire idea of the compound got started. I needed a vast cast of characters to draw from, and the logic of grouping together fit very well. I really enjoy writing about group dynamics and working toward mutual goals, and the compound gave me a huge laboratory to experiment in.

  For the most part, I take inspiration for each post from things that are really happening to me. When I say I'm sick on the blog, I am in real life. When I wrote about Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson, and how the Wheel of Time would never be finished, I was re-reading “The Gathering Storm”. I see so many little things in daily life, and have to ask the question—how would this work or not work in the zombie apocalypse? Would we need it? Could we do without?

  Don't get the wrong idea: this is not a solo project. I talk to mom on a regular basis about the blog, and she gives me some amazing perspective to work with, and a lot of good ideas. Which I steal blatantly. I should add here that mom HATES zombies, really hates them. I tried to convince her at first that good zombie fiction only uses the undead as a device to tell human stories, but she didn't believe that. Understandable, since she doesn't watch or read anything that deals with the undead.

  Well, she does now, I guess. She started reading because I'm her son and she loves me, but she kept reading because I realized that to draw in a larger audience, I really had to make the daily life of a survivor something that just about anyone could get into. If my zombie-hating mom could do that, anyone could. So I tinkered and came up with ideas, fleshed them out, and kept her attention. Now, she's fan numero uno, and not because I'm her kid. If you knew her, you'd understand just how quickly she'd shoot me down if she hated my work. I love her for that.

  There are many others. Patrick has given some great advice and made very keen criticisms over the last year, and when he started writing on the blog, his observations got even better. Pat isn't a writer, or at least he isn't trying to do it professionally. He has powerful and moving ideas, but he's years out of practice. He started writing on the blog in late 2010, and each of his posts has gotten better. If you've read through this eBook, you might have noticed it for yourself. He overcomes severe Dyslexia to write, and while sometimes I do edit his posts for simple errors (Dyslexia makes that hard to avoid), his prose has become very good in a short period of time.

  Courtney and Treesong were two of my earliest cohorts on this project, and their posts are always wonderful. Tree is more reactive, and doesn't criticize much. Living so far away from me and being super busy, it's hard for us to talk often. Courtney lives far away also, but is less busy, so we talk a fair amount. She kept me from making some HUGE errors early on, and one piece of her advice changed the entire course of the story.

  And then there's Aaron. He started reading the blog after he saw the link on Patrick Rothfuss' website. Aaron emailed me, we started shooting them back and forth for weeks. He's been a great sounding board for ideas as well as a source of them. I love his posts, because they capture what I love about the zombie genre—the everyman trying to get by.

  I've been asked a few times what my favorite post is. It changes over time as I and others write new ones, but right now the winner by a country mile is “Homemade Hero”, which was an interesting one to write, and incredibly fun. I wanted to put Jess and I into a situation that was realistic and didn't involve any miraculous saves by unknown parties. I wanted to create a scenario in which we were trapped and had to find a way out with nothing but what we had on hand. When I got us stuck in that rest area, I had no idea exactly how we were going to get out. It took me about two hours of really hard thinking to come up with the idea for body armor made of all the junk we found around the place. I like that whole series of posts because I feel like I did my job perfectly for them—incorporating humor, suspense, horror and even a creatively creepy catch in the sm
iling zombie.

  Telling this story has been one of the most fun things I've ever done, and at times one of the most demanding. There were times when I thought I was going to burn out and give up, but milestones got reached and friends supported me. They kept me going, and now that I'm having a reasonable amount of success with Kindle sales, I get excited to write every day in a way that I've never experienced.

  And it's all because of you, my readers. You are the ones that make this worth it in time and in money, and I can't ever thank you enough. Enjoy the short stories ahead, and the novella that is dark enough and beautiful enough that by itself, it was worth the price of this work.

  Stories

  As a special bonus to you, the reader, this section contains several short stories and one novella, all set in the Living With the Dead universe. After each tale except my own, there will be a short bio on the writer. I strongly recommend that you check out the links for the talented ladies that have put so much love and care into crafting wonderful stories for you to read.

  If You're Bitten By Zombies, You're Off The Guest List

  by Rachel Ayers

  If you’re reading this then you already know about Josh, and the Compound, and everything that happened there. This isn’t a story about that, although we got there eventually.

  My name is Rachel, and this is part of my story, and part of the story of the end of the world.

  The funny thing is that one of the reasons Chris and I knew we were good together was that we’d both owned a copy of Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide. We both spent idle hours planning what to do in a zombie attack; where to go, who was in charge of grabbing the guns and ammo, who was in charge of barricading the house. All of it a silly thought exercise.

  It saved our lives.

  Chris and I had been dating for a year when the zombies started showing up on the news. Like everyone else, we laughed it off uneasily and thought it was some kind of disease. I was in the middle of planning a wedding—a simple, quiet wedding with a handful of family and friends, but a wedding nonetheless, and I was wrapped up in my own world. I could afford to ignore the news: it was on the other side of the country and my friends were gathering for my shower.

  The best present I got that day turned out to be a twelve inch grand gourmet Santoku kitchen knife. I don’t even like to cook.

  The day of my wedding bloomed hot and bright, a spring day, my mother’s garden a chaos of red and white flowers. Precisely planned for my perfect day.

  Chris was still upstairs getting ready. I was downstairs, greeting friends and relatives, when it happened.

  Of course.

  Zombies came to Kansas on my wedding day.

  The first one, an old man in a jogging suit, staggered up the driveway and bit Adam’s new girlfriend Paige’s jugular clear out of her throat before anyone could do anything.

  She was kind of a bitch. But still, harsh way to go.

  At least it let us know, in no uncertain terms, what was going on. I mean, there are times when you just don’t question your horror movie upbringing.

  “Chris!” I screamed.

  Something in my voice must have let him know that this wasn’t simply a hey-you’re-running-late or a where-did-you-leave-my-hair-dryer scream, because he came hurtling down the stairs, coat-tails flying out behind him.

  He looks freaking good in a tux.

  He assessed the situation and then came over the porch rail and kicked the zombie into the neighbor’s azaleas. I ran into the house, grabbing the Santoku from the display table, and sped outside.

  The neighbor had already backed over the zombie with his pickup truck. I stared at the driveway, nauseated, looking back and forth from Paige’s mangled body to the lumpy remains of her attacker.

  “Is this for real?” I asked.

  Chris took my hand. “Come on,” he said.

  We got everybody inside and locked the doors. We turned on the news. It wasn’t good, but it was very clear—finally. “Stay in your homes. Don’t let strangers approach you. Let the authorities take care of things.”

  Chris turned me to face him.

  “Rachel,” he said. He’s always serious when he says my name. “I’m going to get the guns.”

  “What? You can’t go out there now.”

  “I have to,” he said. “It’s only a couple blocks. We’ll be fine. Patrick, Gregory, we’ve got a mission.”

  He kissed me and they hurried out the door

  It was all very dashing and heroic.

  They left, jogging down the street in their wedding splendor, a groom and two attendants. My bridesmaids, Shannon and Danielle, stood and watched them with me.

  We saw another one of the zombie creeps shuffling down at the other end of the street. None of them moved quickly at that point. The guys would be fine, I told myself.

  “All right,” I said to the rest of the wedding party. “We’ve got work to do. Danielle, lock all the doors. Shannon, get some of the other guys to prop furniture against all the downstairs windows. Use the dining room table and the big bookcase in the living room. Aunt Janet, move all the food back to the kitchen. Mom, help me finish getting dressed.”

  It may have been the apocalypse, but I was still getting married.

  I came downstairs fifteen minutes later, glorious in my white summer dress, red shoes, and sparkling necklace. My hair was up in a curly, bouncy bun, a red and white flower tucked in next to it. I had turned this way and that in front of the mirror in Mom’s room: I looked good.

  The first floor of my parents’ house was a shuffling mess of activity. The living room and dining room were both big hollow spaces. Dad was directing a couple of the cousins in pushing the couches up on their sides in front of the big picture windows.

  Everyone stopped and applauded when I came into the room. I grinned and turned around and did a little curtsy. There was a murmur of “Oh you look so good”s and “Aren’t you just lovely”s.

  “How are we situated?” I asked Dad.

  “Well, everyone’s here, at least, so no one else should be traveling to get here, which is good from what they’re saying on the news. Chris and the guys aren’t back yet, though.” He didn’t seem worried, unless you knew him very well. Mom came and put her hand in his.

  I found a corner of window to peek through. Another of the creeps was stumbling down the street. I heard the radio click on behind me: another news report.

  “I repeat, stay inside. The authorities have been notified. The infected are growing in number, and the streets are not safe—” The radio was shut off amidst a mutter of angry voices. I turned around to find guilty faces regarding me.

  “Sorry,” Danielle said.

  “They should have been back by now,” I said.

  I thought of the game on Chris’s smartphone: Zombie Run. It tracked your GPS and set you up with Zombie opponents you were supposed to avoid. He could make it from my parents’ house to his in eight minutes flat at a jog.

  Then we heard the fierce reports of gunfire.

  “All right,” I said. “We’re going after them.”

  I rearmed myself with the Santoku. “Danielle? Shannon? Are you coming?”

  They looked at each other and back at me. Shannon snatched up the shovel from beside the fireplace. Danielle took the poker my dad handed her.

  I kicked off my red shoes and put my tennis shoes on instead; the girls followed my lead. “Lock the door behind us,” I told Mom. “But watch for us! We’ll be back soon.”

  I ran outside, Shannon and Danielle right behind me, our makeshift weapons clutched tight in front of us.

  We ran toward Chris’s apartment. Thank god I’d been working out steadily for the last three months of wedding preparations: I was in the best shape of my life. We dodged two of the zombies, dead women who made halfhearted, moaning grabs for us before we turned a corner.

  We were half way there when we heard more gunshots and the zing! of ricochet from down an alley. “Come on,” I said, s
kidding to a stop as I spotted another zombie at the street corner.

  We bolted down the alley, and at the end came out to find Chris, Gregory, and Patrick cornered by a dozen zombies—they looked like a group of preppy high school guys, aside from their obvious deadness. Chris was trying to reload the handgun while the three of them juggled two rifles, two swords, another handgun, and boxes of ammo.

  “You brought the swords?” I said, surprised. “Come on, those things are crap.”

  My voice distracted the zombies. They turned toward us and most of them took reeling steps back toward us. Gregory dropped the box of ammo, sending bullets skittering across the street, and grabbed one of the swords out of Patrick’s arms.

  It was one of those cheap katana knock-offs you see at hippie stores at the mall. He swung at one of the zombies that was still focused on the guys, aiming to chop the thing’s head of.

  It stuck halfway through the neck. Gregory let it go in disgust as the zombie careened sideways. Patrick sent it tumbling over backwards with a snap kick.

  Chris had gotten his gun loaded, but one of the other zombies was on him. I heard a cry of rage and realized it was me as I charged toward them.

  Those fake katanas may have been junk, but the santoku went through zombie neck without a snag.

  Chris and I stared at each other, both of us splattered with zombie blood down the fronts of our finery. Then he shoved me behind him, took a stance, aimed, and blew the heads off the rest of the zombies in the street.

  The six of us stood in the sudden deaf silence of our ringing ears. Finally Shannon walked up to me and said something.

  “What?” I yelled.

  “It’s time for your wedding!”

  “Oh!” I grabbed Chris’s hand and started pulling him along the street. “Come on, guys!” I said, and they followed me.

  We got back to my parents’ house, only dodging one more creep. They let us in and barricaded the door once again.