Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Read an extended Excerpt from My Life in the Zombie Apocalypse HERE


Author Alain Burrese plugging my Zombie novel in a trilogy of safety tips:






Yup...I wrote a novel based on my long ago posts on this blog and I think it turned out pretty darned good...





I'm posting the excerpt below so that you can get a juicier bite of the story (over 12,000 words of the novel) so that you can make a more "informed" decision regarding this work of literary genius ;) Enjoy! This title is now available from Amazon (both print and Kindle editions) and on Barnes & Noble (as a Nook book). Links to the product pages follow. I'll be making the novel available through other channels very, very soon. 



ON AMAZON -- For the trade paperback ($9.99) or Kindle ebook ($2.99):


http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Zombie-Apocalypse-Chicken/dp/1470137127/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333514147&sr=8-1


BARNES & NOBLE -- Nook e book ($2.99):


http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1109918776?ean=2940014207607&itm=2&usri=my+life+in+the+zombie+apocalypse




1
Out of Eggs in the Land of the Undead


I WAKE UP THIS MORNING to a bit of a commotion. Our four damned cats are going nuts because their feeder is empty. Funny how God’s little creatures lose all their manners when they’re hungry. 
     I get up…
     Scrape a cold, wet fur ball off the bottom of my foot…
     Fill their feeder with kibble…
     Change their water…
     Put on coffee…
     Scratch nuts while I wonder why I ever quit smoking.
     The house is cold because I let the propane run out and now we’re getting by on wood heat while the early spring days get longer and warmer. For what it takes these days to refill the tank, I just don’t see the point. Putting up with cold tootsies in the morning is the least of our worries.
     Karol shuffles out of the bedroom wearing her red bathrobe and into the kitchen to pour a cup. She regards our fur children with no small degree of annoyance. 
     “Guys, I was really hoping to sleep in for a bit this morning,” she says.
     Koryo, Chaggi, Charlie, and Button hardly look up from their kibble. Cats. You have to love them…They’re so disdainful. A lot like women, I’ve always said.
     Karol makes her way to the computer room with her coffee. “Stop playing with your nuts,” she says as she kisses me on the cheek and passes by. A few moments later I can hear the sounds of online poker emanating from the next room.
     I think about joining her, but decide to make breakfast instead. I open the refrigerator door and peer inside. Potatoes, onions, peppers, bacon…
     Damn it…we’re out of eggs.
     “What do you want for breakfast?” I inquire.
     “Do we have any eggs?” Karol responds.
     “Nope.” 
     “Well, then that’s what I want.”
     I chuckle at that. Yep, women and cats are a lot alike. Of course, men are a lot like dogs…and I don’t really know if that’s a good thing.
     “Alright then, I guess I’ll have to go out and get some. Is there anything else you want? Creamer? Chocolate? Feminine hygiene products?”
     “Whatever you think we need, sweetie.” 
     I hear the sound of a pile of electronic chips hitting electronic felt. I don’t think she’s really listening.
     I take another sip of coffee, throw on some sweats, and then get ready to head out. I gotta tell you though…it used to be a hell of a lot easier to run out for a dozen eggs or a pack of smokes.
     I pull chain mail breeches and a chain mail shirt over my sweats…
     Leather coveralls and heavy motorcycle boots over the chain mail…
     Kevlar vest and bandoleers holding about two dozen twelve-gauge shotgun shells over that…
     And then the usual assorted knives, side arms, and other odds and ends of varying lethality.
     Yeah, it used to be a lot easier…before the world was overrun by fucking zombies, that is.
     “You sure you don’t want anything else?” I call out as I complete my ensemble with a leather duster and cowboy hat that are vaguely reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter and then reach for the sawed-off shotgun leaning against the wall by the front door.
     “Nope. Just be sure to take your phone, okay?”
     The fucking cell phone. 
     Here we are in the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse, the End of Days has arrived, but somehow we still have outstanding cell phone coverage…go figure. 
     “Okay, but this is your only chance…I’m not going to want to go out again later.” And then as I begin to fumble around in my pockets…“Damn it…have you seen the car keys?”
      
2
The Notorious Bettie Page
      
WHEN I WAS A KID, my mom had this car…A 1971, red, Ford Torino GT with the 351 Cleveland V8 engine, 4-barrel carb, Hurst shifter, and the crazy laser stripe running down the side. 
     What a car. 
     She used to pile the five of us kids into that car (shotgun!) and then tear ass on US Highway No. 2 along the Kootenai River towards Troy at about ninety miles per hour with Led Zepplin cranked on the eight track stereo. Now, in those days that road was about as wide as my dick, and I don’t think anyone had bothered to invent seat belts yet. Of course, the lack of seat restraints (or did we just ignore them, I forget) greatly enhanced the half-dozen or so moments of free-fall we experienced when the car caught air at various points along the way. Sometimes we would even sing Beach Boys tunes as we zipped past the pine trees and startled deer. We called it our “roller coaster ride.” 
     The hippie days and simple pleasures…I have to tell you, there are times that I really do miss my mom.
     Anyway…
     I step outside and shut the door. A half dozen locks and deadbolts on the other side of the door automatically clank home behind me. The morning air is cold and metallic in the back of my nose and the morning sun is going to peek over the mountains soon. From my vantage on the second floor deck of the Big House I can see most of the property, which is all arranged a bit like a military compound.
     There’s the greenhouse where we grow our herbs and vegetables. It’s also where we grow our dope that we trade with other survivors for necessities. Neither of us actually smokes the shit since it makes both of us paranoid as all get out, which isn’t a good feeling to have on top of everything else these days, but it’s a nice sideline to have in the land of the undead if you don’t mind doing business with potheads. But then again, most people are in agreement that potheads are a better class of people than deadheads.  
     Not far from the greenhouse, surrounded by drums filled with fuel oil, diesel fuel, and about a hundred cans of gasoline, sits the power generator shack where we use a couple of gas-powered Honda generators to generate some of our electricity. Most of the juice we use for the lights, cameras, and to keep our computers going comes from batteries charged by the thousand square feet or so of solar cells up on the roof, but it does snow in Montana, and you really can’t count on anything for long anymore, so you need back-up after back-up for everything. 
     Then there’s the work shop where we work on various projects and do our repairs, a mountain of cordwood for heat (especially now that we’re out of propane), and, under blue tarps, crates and crates and crates of…well…crates of everything you could ever imagine that might prove useful during a Zombie Apocalypse. 
     And that’s a hell of a lot more than you might imagine.
     Now, if I say so myself, we’ve also been pretty successful at making the old homestead just about impenetrable to deadheads and outsiders over the past three years (knock on wood). About 100 feet out is an eight foot chain link fence topped with razor wire that runs all the way around the property, another fence topped with razor wire twenty feet beyond that, and then yet another for symmetry (I like threes). Beyond THAT is the moat…a twenty-foot wide, ten foot deep ditch loaded with sharp spikes, barbwire, and about a hundred IEDs designed to turn unwelcome guests into so much zombie mulch with a mere twitch of a trip wire or flick of a switch from inside the Big House. Of course we also have video cameras monitoring the entire perimeter, which makes the whole process of dissuading undead visitors a bit like playing a video game sometimes. All the crispy-fried arms, legs, and other assorted body parts scattered all over the moat are a testament to our (if I might say so) exceptional skills. I have to laugh sometimes. People used to tell me that all those Mad Max and George Romero zombie flicks I used to like to watch were a huge waste of time…
     And finally, waiting for me down in the front yard not far from the draw bridge, sits Bettie Page. 
     Sexy curves, classic lines, black hardtop…yes, I’m talking about a car. My mom’s ’71 isn’t my only Torino experience or memory. In high school I knew a guy, not really a friend, but a drinking buddy of a drinking buddy named Jamie Johnson. Jamie had a big, black, ugly behemoth of a 4-door ’74 Gran Torino that we used to take out drinking on Friday and Saturday nights. That car was a rolling, flat black piece of shit, but we could get eight people and a couple cases of beer in it with ease. Jamie spent most of his spare time cutting holes in every available space and surface where you might possibly install a Jensen 6X9 speaker (this was the early 80’s, and a pair of Jensen 6X9s was the height of car audio technology in those days). It was big, ugly, and loud…and it also could easily be coaxed into blowing flames out the exhaust pipes while we drove up and down the “gut,” which is what we called our main drag. 
     Jamie loved that car. Sadly, he made the mistake of leaving it with a friend for “safe keeping” one spring when he went down to California for some work. Six months later he came back for the car, only to discover that during a drunken free-for-all one night, his “friends” had…
     Slit the tires and kicked out the windshield and all the windows…
     Shredded the upholstery with assorted screw drivers and hunting knives…
     Taken a sledgehammer to all the doors and quarter panels… 
     Torn off the hood and lit a fire in the engine compartment…
     And tried to cut a moon roof into the top of the car with an ax and a chainsaw (this part of the country used to be full of loggers after all). 
     About the only thing they didn’t do was shit on the dashboard.
     I was along for the ride that day, and I really did think Jamie was going to start crying at what they had done to his cherished Gran Torino. It might not be surprising to note that I never saw Jamie again.
     Now, as hideous as that car was, it was fucking indestructible. With AC/DC blaring at ear-bleed decibel levels, blasting over stumps and gravel logging roads at redneck stupid velocities, we did our damndest to blow the engine in that car for at least two years. All the 351 under its hood ever did was belch smoke and flame and beg for more. In the end it took a dozen drunken rednecks and a shop full of tools to finally kill that car, and I’m not convinced that it was dead even then. Say what you want about more “modern” cars…there’s nothing better than an old American muscle car with a bad attitude.
     So, when the shit came down and Karol and I were scrambling to set up our little fortress of solitude safe from the zombie hoards, we agreed that we needed to find a massive American 70’s juggernaut with some balls and a big V8 engine that we could actually work on ourselves. We were leaning towards Mopar (I love old Chargers, and my mom actually exploded an entire cow with a Duster one time, but that’s another long and very weird story from what my brothers and I call “the hippie days”), but then we stumbled upon a shiny black ’72 Gran Torino Sport tucked away in some (dead) old dude’s garage while scavenging for tools, and I remembered Jamie Johnson’s car.
     The old dude’s name was Will, or Ward, or Walt something or other (Polish I think) and he’d taken really good care of that old car. I told Karol about my mom’s GT, and Jamie’s death-mobile from my misspent youth, and we knew right then and here that the search was over. It was Karol’s idea to name her after one of her heroes, the “notorious” Bettie Page.
     Now, there’s one other thing to like about American muscle cars. Unlike today’s cars that crumple when you brush up against them too hard (I guess this is supposed to be a safety feature), you can weld shit to them. Things like steel mesh over the windows, metal plates over the wheel wells, and a badass V-style snow plow blade to the front for scraping zombies off to the side of the road. All of which, of course, we did.
     And now she’s a true thing of beauty. An industrial work of art. A screaming bitch with an attitude, an agenda (killing zombies), and the muscle and metal to back it up.
     So, I go down the retractable ramp that leads to ground level, over to the greenhouse for a bag of our home grown weed to trade with the Chicken Man, and then jump into Bettie through the driver side window (the doors are now welded shut, of course). I turn the key and the engine immediately responds with a low rumble.
     Goddamnit…where’s the clicker? 
     For some reason, I can’t keep crap from piling up in the passenger side of the car, which drives Karol crazy. I find the Sears garage door clicker on the passenger seat under a bunch of empty soda cans and use it to lower the bridge over the moat and open the gate. Then, slipping a copy of Rush 2112 into the CD player, I stomp the accelerator.
     With a roar, we’re finally off to see the Chicken Man…
      
3
Miss John 3:16
      
AS BETTIE TEARS ASS towards the main bridge into town, kicking up a rooster tail of dust and gravel as I speed down all that’s left of State Highway 37, I make a mental check of the route I have to take to get to the Chicken Man’s “ranch.” 
     The highway is a mere shadow of itself, having been broken up into a ragged patchwork of asphalt chunks by the treads of M-1 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and a fleet of dozers and other big pieces of equipment during our “last stand” with the zombie hoard. It’s passable, but only barely, and especially at the speeds at which I prefer to travel (the undead have a harder time clinging to Bettie’s plow blade when I have her going balls-out — and yes, I know it’s weird to refer to a car named “Bettie” as having balls). But it isn’t bad if you know where to zig and where to zag…especially where to zag, since there are still a few unexploded mines, claymores, and IEDs to be found by the stupid and unwary…
     And the undead.
     It isn’t safe to go into town, which is exactly what I’m planning to do. Unfortunately there’s only one passable bridge over the Kootenai River for many, many miles to the north or south and the Chicken Man lives on the other side of the river, so…no choice.
     But that’s okay. It’s always good to see how things are going in town.
     I come up on the bridge and I’m thankful to see that someone has taken it upon themselves to do a little spring cleaning. The high school football team’s blue and gold painted bus (at one time full of emaciated, flyblown teenaged corpses — go Loggers!) that since the whole thing started had been high-centered over the rail and blocking almost the whole right lane as you come into town, has finally been pushed off the bridge and into the river. Now it’s almost a straight shot if you ignore the craters from mortar blasts, the dozen or so smaller stalled vehicles waiting to be shoved over the side and into the river, and the occasional deadhead wandering around. 
     I don’t.
     I have to slow down to maneuver through the slight maze of wreckage and debris…a lot slower than I would like…and so I reach for the sawed-off shotgun so that I can cradle it over my left arm with the end of the barrel poking out the driver’s side window. It’s times like this that a deadhead always seems to pop up like an evil clown in a carnival shooting gallery. Grabbing, clawing, snarling, and drooling (at least the fresh ones drool) with their white eyes rolled back and their teeth clicking. Thankfully, the cold really slows them down, and during winter they pretty much hibernate until the spring thaw. That period of inactivity allows us to move around in relative safety and gather supplies and equipment for a couple of months, however, then you have to worry about other survivors — wandering bands of scavengers and the like — who can be as bad as or worse than the deadheads.
     So, knowing all this, I shouldn’t be surprised when a zombie pops out from behind a burned-out Toyota pickup and attaches itself to the welded steel mesh covering the driver’s side window. But I am. In fact, I almost shit myself when it happens.
     I slam on the brakes and just sit there for a second. Bettie’s engine throbs and hums and I just stare at the stupid, pitiful creature clinging there, feebly clawing at me, shredding what’s left of the flesh on its fingertips to expose the bone. It is still pretty cold, so it’s not moving with a whole lot of purpose or urgency, though that will change pretty quick once it catches scent of me. It might have been a woman once, but most of its yellowish-gray hair has fallen out in clumps and the gnawed-on skin covering its face and neck has turned a putrid pale green to pinkish gray and is pulled so tight over its skull it looks like it might split and slough off in waxy sheets at the slightest touch. It’s wearing shredded polyester slacks and a baby blue t-shirt emblazoned with a flaming gold crucifix and “John 3:16” written in bold red letters. Something that might have once been a breast jiggles beneath the tattered fabric and my empty stomach lurches a bit in revulsion. I ponder the irony of that Bible verse briefly before what happens next.
     In a moment that seems so perverse and ridiculous that I almost burst out in hysterical laughter, it starts to gnaw on the end of the barrel of my shotgun as if it is intent on giving the damned thing a twelve-gauge blowjob. Staring at me with its milk white eyes like something out of a Hustler pictorial, it takes about four inches of the barrel into its mouth, and then it moans the way they always do when they get a whiff of the living…
     I pull the trigger and its head disappears in an orgasm of reddish-black ooze, bone shards, and brains. I hear what’s left of it slump against the side of the car and then slide to the ground like a sack of soup bones and meat scraps, coming to rest on the asphalt in a heap.
     Jesus H. Christ…
     Now I do laugh. But it’s not that “good” sort of laughter. Nah…it’s that “oh shit, I could have died” sort of laughter that I’ve heard far too often over the past few years.
     The smell of spent gunpowder permeates the air inside Bettie and it smells damned good to me. I break open the breach, eject the spent shell casing, and reload the shotgun. My heart is beating about a thousand beats per second.
     The sun is up over the horizon and I know that I need to get moving. Soon there will be a lot more deadheads wandering around. Geddy Lee is singing something about Jamaican pipe dreams when I slam my foot down on the gas pedal. 
     Bettie burns rubber and I continue on…
      
4
Taking a Drive through Zombie Town
      
THE CHICKEN MAN — his real name is Robert, but one look at him and no one ever calls him anything but “Chicken Man” — lives out on Farm to Market Road, so I have to drive straight through the heart of town. Up the “gut,” turn left on US Highway 2, and then back out of town for a couple miles before arriving at his “chicken ranch.” 
     I make my way more or less unmolested after my encounter with Miss John 3:16. Town is pretty much a french-fried cinder of what it once was and about half the buildings are burned to the ground. Most of the others have been left to the undead, who I observe are starting to rise stiffly from their slumbers to shuffle about in the morning chill on their perpetual quest for fresh meat. 
     There are living people in town, people who actually choose to live there instead of finding or building safer refuges in the outer lying areas. They’re bug shit crazy if you ask me, but I suppose there are some advantages. The whole Zombie Apocalypse thing came down on us and overwhelmed everyone so fast that a lot of valuable resources and supplies got left behind. If you have skills…and big fucking balls…you can do really well, but for Karol and I, it seems to be a stupid risk.
     I see some of them sitting up on their rooftops, sipping from their morning cups of coffee. Some of those guys have entire patio sets up there with grills and everything. They’re scanning the areas around their boarded shut and fortified homes for deadheads through the scopes on their deer rifles. Every once in a while I hear a round pop off and imagine another zombie pitching over in a cloud of gore and skull fragments. 
     Most of them know my car (a lot of them are good customers, after all). They wave.
     I wave back.
     We’re all good neighbors and it’s reassuring sometimes to know that all civility hasn’t been completely replaced by barbarism. One thing I have always liked about small towns…people wave hello to one another when they pass by. 
*   *   *
     Not long before our so-called “last stand” with the undead, our Mayor and his hand-picked Chief of Police — a long-suffered and deeply entrenched local politician named Dixon Turner and his wife’s youngest brother, Curtis Fischer — got it into their heads that best way to run the zombie hoard out of town was to burn them out. So that’s what they tried to do, and it was a fucking massacre. Unfortunately, it was the living who got massacred — a lot of them at each other’s hands — and the undead just kept getting stronger while the living got weaker.
     In his films, George Romero, it turns out, vastly overestimates the abilities of rednecks when it comes to eradicating the undead. While they have lots of guns and lots of ammo, and testosterone-fueled enthusiasm to spare when it comes to using them, they have the abstract reasoning skills of inebriated monkeys. 
     So anyway, the Mayor and the Chief — ignoring the learned advice of the local National Guard company commander — rounded up everybody in town who owned a truck, a gun rack, and at least four guns to put in it, down by the boat launches adjacent to the newly dedicated Memorial Riverfront Park. There, they handed out a few hundred or so Molotov cocktails, and then the fun began. Block by block, street by street, house by house, dressed in myriad forest camouflage patterns and jumping in and out of the backs of their pickups like an assemblage of half-assed SWAT teams, they started setting fire to every building in town. Only they hadn’t counted on a few things.
     First, they had vastly underestimated just how many deadheads there were walking and crawling around. Their little barbecue started off well enough, and even cynics like me started to think they might have a good thing going. But soon, the whole shindig degenerated into dozens of fire fights all over town when they couldn’t coordinate their “battle plan” effectively and zombies started to appear from behind every bush and out of every dark corner to literally take a bite out of the vanguard. 
     Now, if anyone had actually thought to, they might have been able to regroup to come up with a strategy to handle that, but then they found themselves in an even stickier situation when some of the living locals started taking pot shots at them from windows and rooftops all over town. It seems that there were quite a few folks — mostly the same fundamentalist Christians who spent all their time hoping and praying for the end times — that were in utter and complete denial about the undead state of their loved ones. Turns out that they were ready, willing, and able to protect them, too…as crazy and dangerous as that might now seem. 
     Now, your average, run of the mill atheist, agnostic, or even Catholic has no problem plugging Aunt May or little Peter in the melon the moment their eyes roll back white and they start to gnash their teeth and claw their way towards the nearest warm bit of human flesh. Call it a .45 caliber exorcism. Whatever you want to call it, then they’re off to meet the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (or “Cosmic Muffin” as my mom liked to call her, which makes about as much sense to me as anything else). If you believe, then it can’t really be bad, and if you don’t believe…well, what’s it really matter? In either case, over time they just learned to accept it and deal with it.
     Unfortunately, the flip side of that was that a lot of born-agains, evangelicals, and home-grown, basement preaching apocalyptic fundamentalists, when it finally became clear that the long prayed-for End of Days had in fact arrived…well, they just couldn’t believe that the Rapture hadn’t followed close behind. Never mind that they also seemed to conveniently forget — when talking about themselves — about the Tribulation, which supposedly would last for seven years…they couldn’t accept that they weren’t going to be instantly whisked away to Paradise while the rest of us rolled around with the undead in the mud and the blood.
     It couldn’t be the will of God, they complained. They — whoever was speaking at the time — were God’s “chosen people,” after all. It wasn’t…well…after all that hoping and praying for the End of Days and the Rapture and Armageddon…it just wasn’t fair.
     What the fuck is fair?
     Stupid fucks.
     Maybe it’s just what you get for wishing for it.
     So while the more pragmatic among us got on with the business at hand…survival…there were many others who boarded themselves up in their homes and either found ways to meet Jesus on their own terms, railed against the injustice of it all as they waited for the end to come crashing through their windows and doors, or prayed that they and their loved ones would be spared the ravages of the Zombie Apocalypse as a reward for their faith and devotion. The crazy part of all that was a lot of zombies and almost zombies and soon to be almost zombies ended up tied to four-poster beds and chained to the rafters and walls in attics and basements while the “faithful” pleaded to their Lord for deliverance. Maybe God would heal them if their families just waited long enough and prayed hard enough? Maybe, but I don’t think I would try a laying on of hands, if you know what I mean. Whatever the case, I guess it just hasn’t been long enough yet. 
     So the whole thing just blew up in their faces and it was around this time, in the midst of all the chaos, that the Mayor and the Chief just up and disappeared.  The fires got out of control and the deadheads got out of control and the religious nuts started shooting at the rednecks and the rednecks started shooting back and there were people running around on fire, but the deadheads didn’t mind their barbecue a little on the crispy side, and then, maybe even worse of all…
     Well, eventually they just ran out of beer.
     Karol and I watched all this through binoculars from the far side of the river. All we could do was shake our heads in dismay. 
     Three days later, when most of the fires had burned down to smoldering embers and the majority of the deadheads had been pushed back far enough for the living to assess the damage, the Mayor and the Chief were found barricaded inside a local tavern — Buck’s Frog Pond — together. I guess they just couldn’t face the blame for the debacle and all that senseless, stupid death and destruction they had created, so they put the barrels of their pistols in each other’s mouth, counted to three somehow, and pulled each other’s trigger, so to speak. 
     It was a bloody, nasty mess…made worse buy the fact that they were both butt-naked when they were discovered, surrounded by piles of porn magazines and DVDs, lubricants, and half-empty liquor bottles. I don’t want to speculate on what that was all about, except to say that this whole experience has led some people to exhibit some damned strange behavior. Maybe all they wanted was to have it off one last time before going off to meet their maker? Who knows…perhaps the Mayor’s decision to appoint his brother-in-law Chief was about more than just garden variety nepotism…and at times I do wonder what their wives thought…but, really, given all the other crazy going around, what do I know and who am I to judge?
     Up to that point, the so-called “experts” estimated that about ten percent of the town’s population was “undead.” Afterwards, most of those same experts were lunch and the accepted wisdom was that about three-quarters of the town’s population was about to have the other quarter for their next meal. People finally stopped listening to “experts” around that time and started looking out for their own-selves with a vengeance. At one time there were eight thousand people living in our little valley. But now? Well, the last time I tried to make a reasonably informed guess I figured there were fewer than three hundred. 
     I don’t like to think about how many zombies there are walking around.
*   *   *
     I turn off on the highway and head out of town. Over the last couple of years, there have been efforts to clear some of the main roads. It’s dangerous at best, and the most anyone can hope for before the deadheads start to show up en mass is a quick run through town with one of the county’s big snow plows to knock a path through all the stalled and wrecked vehicles. But in spite of all that, now there’s a pretty clear path out of town so I’m able to open her up and start to make good time. Eventually I’m passing empty house after empty house. Most are boarded up. If you didn’t know better you’d think the town died of natural causes. 
     Lumber mill shut down…
     Zonolite and silver mines closed…
     Opportunities dried up as the people simply drifted away like so much dust on the wind.
     If only it was so.
      
5
Chicken Ranching and the New Undead Economy
      
FINALLY, I ARRIVE at the Chicken Man’s chicken ranch. Situated at the edge of the Fisher River, it’s a miracle of redneck engineering. To tell the truth, from a distance it looks like a fucked up Zombie Family Robinson tree house. A cluster of more than a dozen buildings built on stilts sixteen feet off the ground, it covers better than an acre of real estate when you add it all together. 
     Surrounded by a wall of pointed logs buried in the ground and a moat filled with barbed wire, there’s the main house, two shops, a handful of storage and supply sheds, a greenhouse (he’d better not be growing his own weed in there), and a ridiculously long chicken coup, all of which are linked together by a spider web of wood and rope gangways. The whole thing started as a simple shack squatting on four telephone poles that the Chicken Man found down by the rail yard. Actually he found a lot of telephone poles down there (and lumber and other building supplies), and over time the operation — with the help his wife and son and one surviving brother — had just grown almost out of hand. 
     But why chickens? 
     Well, in the emerging “economy” of the Zombie Apocalypse it pays to have a specialty. Ours is weed, his is fowl. I know a guy who does nothing but reload spent shell casings that people bring him by the bucket full, part of which he keeps as payment and then trades for food and supplies. There’s a family that lives out by the falls that does a booming business in fresh, smoked, and canned fish that they pull out of the river using a series of nets and drop lines. If you’re smart, you find a way to play to your strengths because try as you might, you’re just not going to be able to find or gather, to grow or make, everything you need to survive in the upside down world we now live in. Out here in the sticks at least, trade and barter are the new currency, and so it pays to specialize in something other people have trouble getting for themselves. 
     In more populous areas these days, people are gathering together to create fortified gated communities, which makes it possible to better pool resources and labor. Free markets spring up, limited industry gets going again, and larger scale agriculture is even possible under the watchful eyes of militias and sniper teams because you end up having enough people to protect the people who are doing the work. But that only works in places where the natural geography lends itself to creating an easily defended home for the living, and when you have a suitable number of people to maintain a large army of zombie killers and eradicators to protect the workers. According to the Internet (yes, along with cell phones we also have the Internet again…they were the first two bits of infrastructure to get reestablished after things settled down, if you can believe that) the minimum seems to be around a thousand able-bodied men — anything less and the waves of zombies are too much to handle — but when was the last time you saw that many able-bodied men in any one place at any one time? 
     Oh, some folks have tried it on much smaller scales — say a half dozen families or so — but having all that fresh meat in one place always causes the deadheads to mass and swarm in ever larger numbers. Before you know it, you can be outnumbered hundreds to one with no way out. Most of the time the results are easy to predict
*   *   *
     Once there was a local basement preacher, “Preacher Dave” they called him, who — before the dead took to walking around — was situated down at what we used to call the “Bloody Jesus Church” on the main drag through town. He was one of those preachers that believed in and sermonized all about the pissed off, spiteful, vengeful, wrathful God who had a specific grudge against white, working class Americans of northern European descent because they had, in Preacher Dave’s words, “pissed away their birth right and handed the whole damned country over to the niggers, the spics, the chinks, and the Jews without so much as a fight.” 
     Now, never mind that the town we lived in was perhaps the whitest place in America outside of Salt Lake City, and never mind that ninety-nine percent of its inhabitants had never in their lives even met someone who was African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or Jewish and probably never would…there wasn’t a whole lot about the love of Jesus in his sermons. Nope…his twisted, bigotry-fueled vision was all about the coming Apocalypse and the Rapture and fear and white trash conspiracy theories with a healthy dose of anti-intellectualism and xenophobia stirred into the mix to keep his flock on the right path, at least as he saw it.
     One day, after he was fully convinced that the End of Days had finally arrived as promised and long hoped for, he took his flock up river and built a pretty impressive stockade — called “Fort Uriel” after the angel of repentance — back in the woods where he planned to start a little fundamentalist Christian community and wait for the Rapture that was sure to come. All the hate mongering, fire and brimstone crap he spewed aside, he was actually pretty smart about it. 
     Their stockade was sensibly built as close as they could get to the edge of a twenty foot high natural rock wall overlooking the river. They dug a moat that they filled with spikes, barbed wire, and IEDs. Then they put up a ring of parallel twin palisades set into the ground three feet apart constructed from thick pointed logs. That created a void that they then filled with river rocks and capped with planks so they could walk on it. Like most people do these days, they put all their houses and buildings on stilts high up off the ground. They piped water down from the river and then they were pretty well set. They even went as far as to fence in part of a nearby old apple orchard and some pasture land that they were planning to farm (with snipers posted in a watch tower, of course). 
     Now given that God — according to the likes of Preacher Dave — was supposed to whisk away all the righteous at any moment, that sort of long-range planning seemed a little strange to me, but I always thought he was full of shit anyway. Apparently he secretly suspected it was going to be a long haul. Yet, things went pretty well for them in the beginning. 
     March, April, May…it looked like they were going to have a bumper crop — corn, beans, peppers, squash, melons, potatoes, and tomatoes — to harvest in the fall. But as spring turned into summer and the deadheads got more and more active in the ever-increasing heat as they always do, they slowly started to notice that more and more of them were emerging from the woods every day. For the undead, the scintillating aroma of thirty-three juicy souls praying and singing hymns inside those fortifications were just too much to resist. It was like setting out a salt lick for deer. Before they knew it there were hundreds of zombies shuffling and shambling all around their little safe haven, with the number growing by scores each day. After that, there was no getting away and it was just a mater of time.
     Actually I should correct myself on that point. There were two survivors — otherwise, how would anyone know what happened? — a fourteen year old girl and her nine year old brother, Dawn and Danny Douglas. Right at the end (they never could remember exactly how) they somehow got to the river and then floated downstream, back into town, where an old saw mill hand named Georgie Three-Fingers fished them out. The boy, Danny, was pretty much zapped in the head when Georgie got him out of the water and into his aluminum fishing boat. He still doesn’t say much to this day, but his older sister, Dawn, was able to fill us in on the details.
     By mid-July there were more than a thousand deadheads camped out all around the moat that surrounded their stockade. The moaning was so loud that Preacher Dave and his flock could barely think, and no matter how many deadheads they put down with deer rifles from the tops of the palisades, it hardly seemed to put a dent in the wall of undead flesh that surrounded them. 
     Inside, Preacher Dave — who’d led them there, now seemingly to die horribly — had a nervous breakdown and thereafter was good for little more than moaning bible quotations from Revelations for hours at a time before exhausting himself and passing out. One of the flock’s elders, a grizzled old hippie named Ron who wore a gray ZZ Top beard that went down to his belly button and was also a Kyokushinkai black belt who’d done two tours in Nam, took over leadership at that point.  
     Now Ron…he surely loved Jesus, but he also knew how to kick ass. He was beating himself up for letting this self-styled messiah lead him and his family into a death trap. Maybe the “bloody Jesus” poster in the front window of Preacher Dave’s church should have been a clue, and he had started to feel mighty uncomfortable about the way Preacher Dave looked at his twelve year old daughter sometimes…so after all they had been through, and all that they had seen up to that point, he decided that he wasn’t about to follow the man screaming into hell.
     On the last day of the zombie siege of Fort Uriel, someone noticed that all the deadheads that were falling into the moat were actually starting to pile up…pile up enough so that all the spikes and barbed wire and IED’s weren’t really doing their jobs anymore. Some of them were getting within a couple arm lengths of being able to get all the way across and so it became obvious that within a day or so, maybe sooner, they would be streaming across and throwing themselves against the outer palisade. 
     Now, the rock-filled wall was strong enough to withstand a barrage of clumsy, slow-moving deadheads until the Rapture did finally come, but Ron took one look at the way they were piling up in the moat and figured out something everyone else might have overlooked…the wall was only about ten feet high. Eventually the deadheads would trip and fall and start to pile up against the outer wall at various points, and then it would be all over. They would start pouring into the compound and that, as they say, would be that.
     Ron didn’t waste any time. He assembled the rest of the elders and adults and told them what he thought. They all agreed with his assessment of the situation. Someone asked him, “But what about Preacher Dave? Shouldn’t we be going to him for spiritual guidance?” and Ron replied, “Fuck Preacher Dave! Haven’t you seen the way he’s been looking at your little girls? He can go to hell. I’m for getting my kids out of here right fucking now!”
     There was an old school bus parked inside the fort that they had used to transport everyone out there when it had been completed. Like Bettie, it had a plow blade mounted to the front and steel mesh bolted over the windows. Everyone was told they had five minutes to grab whatever they could carry, say goodbye to their short-lived home in the woods, and pile in. Ron wasn’t going to risk wasting another minute.  Get everyone on board, drop the bridge, and punch a hole. They could figure the rest out once they were clear of the undead ring of meat that surrounded them like a noose being pulled tight around their necks.
     It was a good plan. A simple plan. And it probably would have worked, but no sooner had Ron issued his marching orders to everyone, the drawbridge came crashing down, leaving the entrance into Fort Uriel wide open and providing the deadheads with an easy path over the moat.
     Preacher Dave.
     Preacher Dave was standing at the edge of the drawbridge, silhouetted in the afternoon light that was streaming in through the opening in the stockade wall, with a hatchet in one hand and his bible in the other. While everyone else had been talking things over, he had dropped the bridge himself and cut the ropes used to haul it back up for good measure. He was smiling back at his flock — smiling, for Christ’s sake — when the deadheads started to lurch and jerk their way across. 
     One of the girls screamed at the sight. Preacher Dave just waved his bible at her and said, real soft and sweet, with a creepy southern accent that he hadn’t had before, “Hush now, child. It’ll be all right. Me and the Lord…me and the good Lord are going to set things right, so don’t you worry.”
     Ron and the thirty-one other inhabitants of Fort Uriel — which included twenty-one children — who were not about to follow their deliverer out into the middle of the zombie hoard, scattered like terrified rats to see how they might possibly survive the tearing and biting wave of undead flesh that was about to crash down on them.
     Preacher Dave dropped the hatchet and then, with the bible pressed tight against his chest, he walked up to the first deadhead to make it across the bridge and did a peculiar thing. With the palm of his right hand, he smacked it on the forehead like a faith healer intent on channeling the healing powers of Jesus Christ into a sickly true believer at a revival meeting. Then he said something even more peculiar than that. “By the power of Christ I compel you!” he cried. He said it over and over again as he thunked one zombie after another on the forehead with his palm and the healing power of Christ.
     I guess in the end he just got confused and couldn’t remember if he was Pentecostal or Catholic. Or maybe he’d just seen The Exorcist one too many times.
     Now, deadheads are pitifully stupid creatures intent on doing exactly one thing and one thing only…eating the living. But that girl Dawn said that for a minute they actually seemed to hesitate as if confused by Preacher Dave’s actions. Be that as it may, about the fifth time he tried it, the zombie he was trying to either heal or exorcise just leaned its head back, caught his “healing instrument of Christ” in his teeth, and tore the preacher’s hand clean off at the wrist.
     Preacher Dave was so dumbstruck by this that he couldn’t even manage a scream as blood spouted high in the air and the undead fell on him in a feeding frenzy. They ended up tearing him into pieces and, according to Dawn, when they pulled his head off he made a high-pitched screeching sound like two cats fucking under your front porch, but only if you ran it through Alvin the Chipmunk first.
     Praise Jesus.
     After that there was nothing left to do but retreat to their hovels on stilts and pull up the ramps as the undead filled the compound inside the fort like a bloody tide that would never, ever go back out to sea for as long as anyone inside it still lived. Days and weeks passed. Hardly anyone ever came out that way — Preacher Dave’s ranting and raving had seen to that — so there was never any real hope for a rescue. They had water, but very little food. In the end, with the heat of August beating down on them mercilessly like a hammer, the zombies weren’t the only ones who had developed a craving for living flesh.
     It was then, in a starvation-induced delirium during which someone dropped one of the ramps that led to the ground level, that someone helped Dawn and Danny get to the river. It was all a nightmarish red blur, but Dawn thought it might have been Ron, though she couldn’t be sure. 
     When someone finally got out to Fort Uriel, there was nothing left of its former inhabitants. Aside from the usual signs of a mighty struggle and piles of the now inanimate undead, the structure itself was in pretty good shape. A goat farmer named Bill and three kids he more or less adopted took it over. Karol and I go out there for milk and cheese about once a month. They also make an apple butter that’s to die for.
*   *   *
     So, out here in the sticks, we don’t cluster up. It seems that by keeping spread out we also keep the undead threat spread out. As long as you keep an eye out and “pull weeds” every day as Karol calls it — dropping any deadheads that might wander onto your property right away so their numbers don’t become unmanageable — you’re all right. 
     But I’ve gotten way off track. 
     Right…so back to the point. 
     Why chickens?
     The Chicken Man figured out that short of hunting in the woods — which is damned treacherous now that the woods are full of zombies — meat and eggs were going to be hard to come by. Deadheads, generally speaking, don’t try to eat anything but people and so they usually don’t bother the chickens. Chickens are omnivores like us, so they’re easy to feed and raise. They can also sort of fly, which means they can get from the ground to the coop where the food and their nests are when there are deadheads around. In the end it works. His hundred or so chickens provide enough meat and eggs to keep his family fed while they also provide him with something to trade for all the other things he needs…like our weed.
     Of course, there’s the smell…and the mountains of chicken shit he has to deal with…and the smell. Did I mention the smell? The Chicken Man has a theory that the smell of the chickens and their copious piles of shit — as well as other livestock people have taken to raising like goats and pigs — might actually help mask the scent of the living and make it harder for the undead to zero in on potential victims. Maybe there’s something to it. He usually doesn’t have much of a zombie problem out by his place. 
     Karol and I thought about raising our own chickens, but in the end we decided that growing weed alongside our own herbs and vegetables was a lot less nasty…and the truth is, I get a kick out of The Chicken Man and Earl, and Karol and his wife get on, so these chicken and egg runs get us out of the house and around other folks from time to time to play cards and what not. 
     Actually, Karol is getting to be quite a fine Pinochle player.
      
6
The Flying Undead and Other Fowl Creatures
      
AS I TURN DOWN the last bit of the drive leading into the ranch I can immediately tell that there’s something wrong. Right off I’m concerned about the thick black smoke billowing up from somewhere behind the stockade wall. Then there’s the unmistakable sound of an AK firing in short bursts. And finally there’s the thirteen or so zombies swarming the combination front gate and drawbridge.
     Crap.
     I stop the car about a hundred feet from the moat, throw her into park, and then reach behind me towards the back seat. My searching hand quickly finds the M4A1 carbine my brother Joseph gave me for Christmas last year. Selfish bastard kept the M203 grenade launcher for one of his other guns, but that’s not what I want it for anyway.
     I take my time checking around the car for stray deadheads. If there’s one thing you learn quick if you’re going to survive in the land of the undead, it’s that you don’t leap without looking…once, twice, three times…unless you have a death wish. Satisfied that the coast is clear, I crawl out the driver’s side window with the M4. Clicking the safety off, I walk around the car to make doubly sure and then I go to the front where I pull out the bipod and set up the carbine on Bettie’s hood. 
     The deadheads still haven’t taken notice of me when I peer into the Trijicon ACOG 6x48mm scope mounted on the carbine instead of the usual reflex sight, and settle the red dot in the center of the “horseshoe” reticle on a skinny little zombie fuck wearing a Halo t-shirt that is pulling at the chains that the Chicken Man uses to raise and lower the bridge. It’s having a hard time getting around because its right foot has been gnawed off just above the ankle, but the fact that it’s trying to walk on a sharp piece of bone instead of a foot doesn’t seem to bother it all that much. In any case, I don’t like the fact that it’s messing with those chains and so I decide it’s going to be my first “Moe.”
     Relax…aim…breathe…squeeze…
     Pop!
     A dark red dot appears on its forehead just over its left eye as the hair on the back of its head flutters and gore splatters like a shiny red butterfly against the stockade wall. Halo-boy goes down.
     It’s like washing your hair after that…lather, rinse, repeat.
     After the third deadhead goes down they catch scent of me and start moaning as they begin to shamble up the road towards my position in a slow-motion frenzy. That’s when I notice that something or someone has blown a gap in the barbed wire that normally cris-crosses its way along almost every inch of the moat. 
     Well for Christ’s sake, Robert, no wonder you’re having a zombie problem.
     Relax…aim…breathe…squeeze…pop!
     Three more times after that and I’ve reduced the swarm by half, but the undead fucks are getting a lot closer than I would like. That’s the thing about zombies. They’re slow, and they’re stupid, but if you’re not careful their single-minded persistence will always catch you napping with your dick in your hand.
     I decide that I’m going to pop just one more and then skedaddle when I see some movement on the elevated walkway that leads from one of the storage sheds to the main house. It’s the Chicken Man. He waves to get my attention and I lean in through the driver’s side window to honk the horn and let him know I want to drive Bettie into his compound. I look through the scope on the M4 to see that the goofy toothless bastard is giving me the thumbs up and then I jump back into the car.
     By now the deadheads (six of them — they’re my lucky thirteen today, I guess) are about twenty yards away. Way too close for comfort. I rev the engine and press a button on the dash. There’s a hydraulic whine as the v-shaped plow blade mounted to Bettie’s front end lowers to scrape the surface of the dirt road leading up to the Chicken Man’s ranch. I give the deadheads another minute or so to form a more optimal cluster in front of me and then I punch it.
     Bettie’s tires spin, kicking up a shit storm of dirt and then there’s a staccato series of thumps as I plow through the zombies and tear down the Chicken Man’s “driveway.” Undead bodies and undead body parts fly in every direction and I have to hit the windshield wiper button to wipe away the splash of gore and putrid body fluids so that I can see where the hell I am going.
     The Chicken Man drops the bridge unceremoniously over the moat and I’m able to roar into the compound without even easing up on the gas. In my rear view mirror I see it go up just as fast.
     Once inside, however, I can see that things aren’t much better. One of his ground level generator shacks has been demolished — almost smashed flat, actually — and is now belching diesel smoke into the clear morning sky. There’s also a ragged hole about four feet across punched all the way, from roof to floor, through the chicken coop. And oh yeah…there are zombies inside the compound, too.
     I kill the engine and jump out of the car with the carbine and my shotgun. There’s practically a snow storm of chicken feathers flying and chickens running and squawking in every direction as three deadheads — two male and one female — try to shamble up one of the retractable ramps leading upwards from the ground level to the Chicken Man’s elevated homestead. 
     One of them is smoldering. I guess it was too close to the generator shack when it went off because it looks like a blackened hotdog left on the grill for far too long on a too hot August afternoon. The other two are more or less intact, but all three of them move strangely — even for zombies — and that’s when I notice that they all have broken bones sticking out all over them, piercing their flesh from the inside out at weird angles.
     The Chicken Man’s brother, Earl, suddenly appears from the back side of the main house with a semi-automatic shotgun. He runs down a gangway and then takes half-assed aim at our crispy-fried wiener boy. He fires once, twice, a third time before he actually hits anything, blowing the deadhead’s left arm off and sending it reeling back into the two behind it before spinning off and falling to the ground. Earl can’t shoot for shit, but I’ll give him points for trying.
     Earl finally calms down a bit, takes a deep breath, aims more carefully, and…
     Boom!
     …puts a slug in the undead thing’s brain pan.
     One-third of the problem at hand solved, but the other two are still coming up the ramp.
     “Earl!” I shout. “What the fuck? Where’s Robert?”
     Earl waves and then points towards the gate. “He’s securing the bridge,” he shouts back. “Just give him a sec!”
     I nod and then stride over to the ramp where the two remaining zombies are just having a hell of a time. The one in the lead — a mullet-wearing, three hundred pound piece of white trash wearing cowboy boots, a pair of skin-tight Wranglers, and a blood and tobacco-stained wife beater that spills over an NRA belt buckle the size of your head like the belly of a sperm whale — is caught up somehow. Upon closer inspection I can see that the problem is the jagged end of its right femur, which is sticking out through the denim covering its thigh and is getting snagged in the ropes. Moan and strain and try as it might, that good ole boy may have to tear the leg clean off if it is ever going to get up that ramp. Of course, the problem is that eventually it will do just that.
     Earl has repositioned himself at the top of the ramp with the shotgun. I nod to him and start to make my way towards the other one that is farther down the ramp.
     “You got ole Billy Bob if I go for the other one?” I ask.
     Earl shoulders the semi-auto and nods in the affirmative. “Yup, I’ve got him,” he replies.
     “No fucking around, Earl,” I say. “You’re a goddamned lousy shot and it’s already turning out to be a crappy day.”
     “Fuck you, Alan,” Earl says.
     I smile. “Well all-righty then…just let me get clear before you fire.”
     And with that I step up to the second deadhead — which has by now taken notice of me and is trying to get back down the ramp — and press the business end of my shotgun against its forehead. Funny…it looks familiar. A skinny, dark-haired woman about my age wearing a single “knock me down and fuck me” pump on one foot and the shredded remains of a purple camisole. The image of a long-forgotten yearbook photo flashes before me. A fifteen year old girl with painstakingly feathered Farrah Fawcett hair, wearing a blue and gold cheerleader’s outfit and trying not to show her braces too much in the picture…
     I pull the trigger. Its head flies apart, and I step out of Earl’s field of fire. I take a long, deep breath and shake my head. There are some things I just don’t like thinking about too much.
     A second later, Earl’s shotgun goes off with similar results and the crisis, at least for the time being, is over. 
     There’s a brief moment of silence that’s finally interrupted by the sound of the Chicken Man’s cursing.
     “Goddamned motherfucking cocksuckers!”
     I sling the M4 over one shoulder and then reload my shotgun before heading up to the ramp to the main house. I do a quick scan from the upper level to discover that there are a lot more deadheads — now permanently dead — scattered around the chicken ranch than I had first thought. And there’s a lot more damage to the sheds and buildings, too. Finally the Chicken Man joins Earl and me on the deck that wraps around the main house.
     “Robert,” I say.
     “Alan,” he replies.
     We nod to one another.
     “What the fuck is going on?” I finally ask.
     The Chicken Man shrugs. “C’mon into the house and I’ll explain,” he says.
     We go in through the kitchen and I am surprised by what I see. There are three deadhead corpses lying on the floor in the living room (sans heads, which have been disintegrated to varying degrees by gunfire), splashes of blood and gore on the walls, and broken furniture everywhere. The windows have been boarded up and the Chicken Man’s wife Claire and son Timmy are sitting at the kitchen table furiously reloading rifles, shotguns, pistols, and magazines. Claire and Timmy nod at me when I walk in, but they don’t stop what they are doing.
     The Chicken Man — impossibly skinny, wearing chicken shit-stained work boots, coveralls with no shirt, splattered with zombie blood, and missing pretty much all of his front teeth — drops his AK on the floor and collapses in an exhausted heap onto one of the wooden chairs pulled up to the table.
     “Would you get me a beer out of the fridge, Earl?”
     Earl shakes his head. “Dude, it’s barely eight in the morning…”
     “Just get me a fucking beer, Earl!”
     Earl complies without another word and then shuffles off to the living room where he goes about dragging the undead remains outside.
     “What’s going on, Robert?” I ask. “Why are they still reloading? Is it over or not? What’s happening here?”
     The Chicken Man pops the cap off of one of his home-made brews and nearly drains it in a single gulp.
     I look at Claire and Timmy. They regard me warily but say nothing.
     “It’s the Gein brothers,” he finally says.  “Teddy, Wayne, and Jeff…they’ve decided to start their own chicken ranch and they’re trying to put me out of business.”
     I really have to stop and think about that for a minute.
     I think about that for a really long minute.
     “Say again?”
     Another beer has magically appeared in the Chicken Man’s hand and he drains that one, too. Claire is nodding in the affirmative. Timmy runs into an adjoining room for more guns and ammo. Earl reappears, having finished disposing of the deadheads from the living room. Their combined solemnity is making the hair on my neck stand on end.
     “Those inbred m-o-t-h-e-r f-u-c-k-e-r-s!” He says it just like that, all drawn out so you can feel the acid in every syllable. “Somehow they’ve gotten it into their heads to start their own chicken ranch and now they’re trying to create a goddamned chicken and eggs monopoly. This has been going on for three fucking days.”
*   *   *
     Now, before I continue, I have to stop here for a sec and talk about the Geins…brothers Teddy, Wayne, and Jeff. 
     Teddy, Wayne, and Jeff are the product of…well…let’s call it “selective breeding.” Selective in the sense that their father, Double-H, is also their grandfather (and in one case possibly even brother), their mother Aileen is euphemistically known to many folks around town as “Aunt Mama,” and no one in their clan has ever seemed too concerned when it comes to bedding down with close family members. It is — or perhaps was, given the current state of things — a “family tradition,” with the results manifested in a clan of low-brow troglodytes that have been the stuff of local legend for generations.
     In spite of their collectively low IQ and a median reading level that makes Koko the gorilla look like Einstein, they pretty much all inherited the gene for mechanical aptitude, which helped them carve out a place in the local community. You might not want one of the Gein brothers screwing your daughter, but if your Buick was belching smoke and going into coughing fits every time you pulled out of the driveway, the Geins were your guys. Unfortunately they also have hair-trigger tempers and a well-earned reputation for violence, often going into berserker rages and, without giving it a second thought, beating the living blood, piss, and shit out of anyone foolish enough to look at them sideways. Apparently that tendency towards barbarism has served them well now that the End of Days has arrived.
     Double-H and Aileen haven’t been seen since before the shit went down and are assumed to be in the bellies of the undead, but the three brothers emerged from the smoke and rubble intact. Actually, they are among the few people who seem to be able to move around town without a care or concern for the zombie menace. It is a common occurrence to see the three of them scavenging with nothing more than an ax handle or spiked club for self-defense.
     But chicken ranching? They don’t seem to need it or be capable of it. If nothing else, why wouldn’t they just barter their mechanic skills for whatever they need? It just doesn’t make sense…
*   *   *
     “That just doesn’t make a damned bit of sense,” I say.
     “You’re right,” the Chicken Man says. “It doesn’t make sense. But there’s more to it than that. It’s the Great and Terrible Oz, too.”
     This day is just getting weirder and weirder. “What the fuck are you talking about, Robert?” I ask.
     The Chicken Man stands up and goes to the door to look outside. Anxiety is making him twitch like a frayed nerve on a lit match head. He comes back to the table and continues. 
     “That’s right…you haven’t been by in quite a while. The ‘Great and Terrible Oz’ is this guy who’s real name is Elmer. Elmer Bittle, I think. Like that British kids show. Anyway, he blew into town…literally blew into town in a home made balloon…about a month or two ago and somehow got hooked up with the Gein brothers. The story is that he crashed his balloon not far from their place and they helped him get it going again. You know how freakishly good they are with mechanical stuff.”
     I nod.
     “Anyway, this Elmer guy, being as he travels around in a balloon, I guess he thinks the Oz reference is clever. But he’s not. No, he’s some kind of sick pervert, which is why I think he gets along with those twisted fucking Gein brothers. But he’s sure put a lot of strange ideas in their heads.”
     “Like setting up a chicken ranch?”
     “Yeah…like setting up a chicken ranch and using deadheads to squeeze out the competition.”
     “Hmmm…I still don’t…”
     “But that’s not all…last time anyone I know was by their place they said it looked like they’re trying to diversify even more than that. Liquor stills everywhere, a weed growing operation…”  
     “What?”
     The Chicken Man nods gravely. “Yeah…pretty soon they might be looking to squeeze you out, too. But that’s not the worst thing I’ve heard.”
     “How could it get worse?”
     The Chicken Man pauses for a moment before going on. He starts to speak…stops again…and then waves Claire and Timmy out of the room before leaning close and finally continuing in a hushed voice.
     “Whores,” he says. “Zombie whores. They’ve been going around town in a big panel truck collecting deadheads. Mostly the women, and the fresher the better and maybe some even fresher than undead. The rumor is that they’re planning to set up some sort of fucked-up zombie saloon with barbecue, moonshine whiskey, and gambling where they’re also set on running undead whores out back.”
     Suddenly there’s a dull ringing in my ears and everything gets a bit slanted and cock-eyed around me. “Jesus Christ,” I mutter.
     The Chicken Man and Earl both nod in agreement.
     “Okay, so this Elmer guy obviously has the Gein brothers doing his bidding and thinking way beyond their usual aspirations. That still doesn’t entirely explain what’s going on here. What happened to your generator shed and chicken coop? Why is their a gap in your barbed wire? And where did all these deadheads come from?”
     “It’s the fucking balloon,” the Chicken Man replies. “Once about every three or four hours…”
     He’s suddenly interrupted by a strange whoosh! and a thrump-thrump-thrump-thrumping sound from outside.
     “Oh crap,” Earl says. “There it is again.”
     “It didn’t take them as long this time,” the Chicken Man replies.
     Earl and the Chicken Man each grab a pistol off the table and run for the door. I un-sling the M4 and follow close behind. I’m not really prepared for what I see next.
     About a hundred yards over a neighboring pasture where someone once raised cows and horses, a hot air balloon is slowly making its way towards us. But it isn’t your normal hot air balloon. This is some sort of crazy hybrid blimp-balloon like something out of Frankenstein’s comic book collection. Obviously patched together in someone’s back yard, it looks like a massive pregnant guppy with “The Great & Terrible Oz” painted on the side in sloppy green calligraphy. Weird fins are sticking out of it for stabilization and there’s a sail-like rudder that is being used to steer the thing. There is an armor plated basket of sorts hanging beneath it to which is attached a pitiful yet functional gasoline-powered propeller that is obviously being used to drive it forward.  Every once in a while there is another “whoosh!” as a propane burner kicks in to keep the air inside the balloon warm enough to provide lift. It isn’t fast or agile, but like a zombie, it doesn’t really need speed or agility to get to where it wants to go.
     “See!?!?” the Chicken Man exclaims. “This is what we’ve been dealing with for the last three days. Look at what’s tied to the bottom of the basket!”
     I raise my M4 and peer through the scope.
     “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
     Tied to the bottom of the basket by their necks, kicking and thrashing in that weird, jerky, almost slow motion way that they always do, are four deadheads. The implication is pretty clear right away.
     “He’s been bombing your chicken ranch with zombies?” All the jagged, broken bones sticking out now make sense.
     The Chicken Man hastily aims and then fires off a whole clip from his Glock. “Fucking-A rights that’s what he’s been doing,” he says as he rams a fresh clip home. “Goddamned deviant isn’t gonna be so bold and brazen when I shoot his balloon out of the sky and cut off his pecker.” He fires off the new clip, too, in frustration.
     I shake my head at the waste of hard to find 10mm Glock ammo and then peer back into the scope. The range isn’t bad and I’m honestly surprised that the Chicken Man and Earl haven’t thought of it already, but I’m not going to say anything. 
     Relax…aim…breathe…squeeze…
     In less time than it takes to describe it, I send four bullets on their way and the deadheads stop their twitching for good. I watch through the scope for a minute and a pudgy, greasy hand appears from behind the armor plates with a buck knife to cut them loose. They fall for a long time before thudding to rest in the pasture.
     The Chicken Man and Earl look at one another for a long moment but say nothing.
     “Is that this Elmer guy…in the basket I mean?”
     “Yeah,” the Chicken Man replies. “That’s him, hiding chicken shit behind the armor plates.”
     I take aim again and fire off a half-dozen rounds that bounce uselessly off the plates. The greasy, pudgy hand reappears — over the top this time — giving me the finger. 
     “Fucker.”
     I fire one more time and it disappears almost instantly. 
     Then the blimp-balloon starts to turn away in a slow wide arc. The three of us finally let ourselves collectively relax and we head back inside. Earl gets a round of beers for us without a word of protest this time, which we drink in silent contemplation. Another round appears and I make up my mind.
     “Well fuck me,” I say. “If what you say is true, we can’t just sit idly by. A chicken ranch war is one thing, but getting into my dope trade and running zombie whores? Well, fellas…I don’t know about you, but right now I am righteously pissed off.”
     “Fuck yeah,” the Chicken Man replies.
     “Bet yer ass,” Earl adds in agreement.
     “Okay then…you guys gather up your guns and gear and as much ammo as you think we’ll need and load them into Bettie. Well work out our plan on the way.”
     “Okay,” the Chicken Man says. “But what are you gonna do while we’re busy with that?”
     I stand up and start to make for the back of the house. “Well, first I’m going to take a piss. But then…well, then I have to call the wife because, I don’t have to tell you, she’s not going to like missing out on her breakfast for this. Not one damned bit.”


So...if you want to know what happens to our heroes as they delve deeper into the mystery of the Great and Terrible Oz and try to resolve their issues with the Geins...well...I guess you have to buy the book :) 


ON AMAZON -- For the trade paperback ($9.99) or Kindle ebook ($2.99):

http://www.amazon.com/My-Life-Zombie-Apocalypse-Chicken/dp/1470137127/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333514147&sr=8-1


BARNES & NOBLE -- Nook e book ($2.99):


http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1109918776?ean=2940014207607&itm=2&usri=my+life+in+the+zombie+apocalypse


THANKS FOR CHECKING IT OUT!