Untitled Epistolary Z Novel (Wow, What an Attention Grabber)
Dec 11, 2016 23:35:46 GMT -6
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Post by keithtaylor on Dec 11, 2016 23:35:46 GMT -6
Hi guys. I'm a newbie to the forum, and right off the bat I want to let you know that I have dark, sinister motives for being here. I'm shamelessly promoting my debut LAST MAN STANDING zombie series, finally completed this month with the third and final novel VACCINE. HUNGER, CORDYCEPS and VACCINE are now available exclusively at Amazon, and if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription you can read them free of charge on your Kindle. HUNGER hit #1 on Amazon's post apocalyptic chart on its release in August, and I'll never stop trying to get it back to those heights because I'm a greedy capitalist pig dog 
Now that unpleasantness is out of the way, here's something completely different...
Now that I've finished the LAST MAN STANDING series and I've started to grow my fanbase I've decided to go back and play around with the narrative style of my favourite PA novel of all time, World War Z. Like Max Brooks I'm coming at the apocalypse from the other side, looking back at the events that led to the end of the world through the eyes of the survivors who lived through it.
This is a very rough first draft of what I have so far, written in a caffeine induced frenzy. Be gentle.
I recognise his face the moment he looks up at me through the cracked, dust-coated panes of the greenhouse, and as he wipes his hands clean on his pants and begins to shuffle slowly towards the door I try not to stare at the aged, limping figure who was once a nightly fixture on TV screens around the country. Gone is the perfectly coiffed head of salt and pepper hair, and his bespoke Brioni suit and tie have been replaced with an oversized white t-shirt and a pair of unflattering cargo pants.
As he reaches out to shake my hand I notice his sunken cheeks and pallid skin, and - perhaps I'm not hiding my shock as well as I'd hoped - he's quick to inform me that the doctors say he'll be lucky if he has six months at best. He blames the cigarettes he snuck at the anchor desk during the ad breaks, but he doesn't seem at all bitter about his prognosis. He tells me he'll be happy if he gets to see just one more harvest, and jokes that once he's plucked the last tomato from his greenhouse he'll be racing to leave before winter sets in.
Despite his illness there's at least one thing unchanged about James McIntyre, the firebrand lead anchor of CNN's nightly news broadcast for the 15 years leading up to the crisis. From beneath his gaunt, drawn visage and wrinkled brow he still looks out at the world with the same piercing blue eyes that won him his reputation as a 'silver fox', melting the hearts of female fans around the country with an arch of an eyebrow. After he lowers himself painfully to a plastic chair and covers his balding pate with a threadbare Yankees cap to shield his eyes from the sun he settles into the same easy, comfortable fireside tones I remember so well, punctuated with his trademark soft chuckle.
Nobody wanted to be the first to use the word, obviously. I mean, can you imagine the embarrassment? Can you imagine trying to get anyone to take you seriously ever again? There's just no way. The Internet would turn you into a damned piñata before you even got off the air.
No, it just wasn't going to happen. Not to one of us, anyway, there was just too much to lose. You spend your entire career trying to build a solid reputation, to sell yourself as the next Murrow... the next Cronkite. You want your name spoken in the same breath as the greats after they put you out to pasture, and nobody wants to jeopardise their place in the hall of fame. And deep down all of us believed that's where we were headed, don't you doubt it for a second. Even the guys who reported on highway wrecks for the graveyard shift of a Wichita affiliate all believed they were just paying their dues before they got the call up to the big leagues, so nobody was eager to volunteer for such an obvious career killer.
It was... OK, cards on the table. Here's what it was. None of us wanted to be the next Dan Rather. You know who I'm taking about, right? The way they treated that guy. Jesus. One little mistake after a lifetime as an honest to God newsman, one of the all time greats, and they dragged his name so far through the muck he couldn't find work checking for typos at a high school paper. That's just the way things were in the Internet age. It's no wonder we were all a little gun shy.
So, yeah, I guess that's why we waited for the tabloids to start calling them 'zombies' before we dared say the word out loud. Let those guys take the fall if it turned out to be... I don't know, some kind of hoax or something, know what I mean? That's what we were all thinking. Call me a coward if you must, I just didn't want to be the subject of a Leno monologue.
That's why I called them 'the attackers' in my broadcast, rather than anything specific. I just wanted to be non-committal, but the idea that these attacks were something new had been in the air supply for a couple of months, bouncing around social media and the conspiracy sites. People had been whispering about 'incidents' everywhere from Central Asia to South America since the start of the summer, but the Japanese attack finally brought everything out into the open. It forced the idea of the living dead out of the world of movies and into the mainstream.
My memory isn't quite what it used to be, but I'm fairly certain we were in the middle of a dull, procedural segment on the deficit when the news broke. My producer jumped in through my earpiece and gave me the signal to wrap it up ASAP, and the first thing I noticed was the edge in her voice. I couldn't tell if it was panic or excitement, but if you ever met Sarah you'd know that anything that flapped her was a seriously big deal. That woman had steel rebar running through her bones. In five years of running our control room she'd never once so much as raised her voice, so when I heard that nervous energy I felt a little shiver run down my spine.
She fed me cold copy through my earpiece as we cut to the footage from Tokyo, delayed from live by just a couple of minutes. There was a shot of... well, I'm sure you know which footage I'm talking about, it's iconic. It was the Shibuya film, the first clear, unambiguous attack ever caught on camera. Beautiful, perfectly framed and lit high def shots, a producer's dream. Some second string BBC crew just happened to be filming B-roll for a travelogue with one of those old Monty Python guys. Palin, I think. Anyway, it was just blind luck - for us, not for them, I should add - that they were standing there in front of those towering neon signs at the right time to catch the moment, that they had the equipment to broadcast to satellite, and that they had the stones to stand there and keep rolling.
Do you know Shibuya? Did you ever see it in person? It's quite... I mean it was quite a sight, especially at night in the rain. It was like stepping inside the kind of video game that has to come with a warning for epileptic kids, and beneath those massive, hypnotic neon boards twenty five hundred people crossed the street every time the lights changed. It was like nowhere else I've ever seen.
The cameraman was standing maybe fifty yards from the entrance to Shibuya station when it started, facing north west to catch the sea of commuters crossing the street on the diagonal. Now that crossing always ran like clockwork. Total Japanese efficiency, so I guess that's why the cameraman decided to bring the shot in tight when people started to scatter. My first thought was that maybe a small sinkhole had opened up in the street. That alone would have been big news in such an iconic location, so as I watched the footage I was already trying to remember a few facts and figures I could toss out while I waited for a script to appear on the prompter.
That's when Sarah said it: "Tell them to watch the man in the blue suit."
I spotted him in an instant. An older guy, I think. It's always hard to tell with the Japanese - they don't seem to start ageing until they hit fifty - but he looked to be somewhere in his sixties. He was down on the ground and he seemed to be convulsing, but his hand was tightly gripping the sweater of some girl beside him, stretching it out behind her as she tried to run away. That's why people started to scatter. I think they must have seen something the camera didn't pick up, and the girl was... well, I've never seen anyone in so much terror.
We caught the bite perfectly. I mean perfectly, like something from a nature documentary. The guy lunged out and closed his teeth over the girl's calf as she tried to twist away from him, and as she fell she let out this awful scream that rose above the sounds of the crowd. Everyone turned to look, and that's when the fear turned into terror, and the crossing turned into a stampede.
The problem was that most of the crowd couldn't see the guy and didn't know what they were running away from, or in which direction they should run. Some of them tripped right over him in their rush to get away, scrambling on hands and knees to stay out of reach. I tugged the earpiece from my ear and just watched, my mouth hanging open like some kind of yokel.
The cameraman, God bless him, held his nerve like a pro. As everyone ran he actually approached, bringing us within maybe ten yards of the guy in blue. No sense of self preservation whatsoever. That's when we saw the guy's right hand was wrapped tight in a dirty white bandage. Poor bastard must have had been one of the slow burners. He could have been simmering for days before he finally went under.
Our guy got in closer as the crosswalk finally emptied. The only people left were the man in blue, hunkered down over the body of the young girl, and another guy who looked like he'd caught a bite to the neck before he collapsed a few yards away. That's when Sarah cut the feed and came back to the studio. Can you believe it? She was worried we'd have Standards and Practices on our ass for airing deaths in prime time. Seems kinda funny now, but I guess at the time it made sense. Anyway, I was sitting there staring at my monitor beneath the anchor desk, where the feed was still coming through. I didn't even realise I was back on the air until I heard a little tinny yelling noise coming from my dangling earpiece.
I forget what I said next, it's all a bit of a blur. I think I just sat in silence for a few seconds, trying to keep my eyes away from what was happening on the monitor. I put the earpiece back in and heard the producer screaming at me. "Camera two! Face camera fucking two!" That snapped me back into it. I closed my mouth and put my serious anchor face back on long enough to say a few words. I think I managed to get out a quick recap of what we knew so far, which at the time wasn't much at all, and then rolled off the standard filler about the harrowing images we'd just seen.
The only thing that came to me at the time was the dreaded Z word, but I sure as heck wasn't going to suggest this guy was a zombie. I was careful not to say anything about the dead rising, either. I mean of course we'd all heard the rumours, but there was nothing about the footage that suggested the guy in blue was anything but mentally ill, or maybe on drugs. I didn't want my name within a million miles of a suggestion that he might be undead, or some other wacky horror movie nonsense.
That's when I started swearing. I'm sure you saw the broadcast later on YouTube just like everyone else, right? That's why the show was seen by around two hundred million people rather than our usual seven. Hell, if I'd known I could bump the ratings like that I'd have started cursing like a sailor years ago.
What the viewers didn't know - and the reason they may have thought I was having some kind of mental breakdown - was that my monitor showing the feed from Tokyo was beneath the lip of my desk between my legs, just out of shot. The viewers couldn't see anything, but just at the edge of my vision I was still watching what was going on while I desperately vamped my way to the next ad break, and when I saw what happened next...
Well, there's no need to go into the gory details. We've all seen much worse in real life in the years since, but suffice to say it... it shook me. The cameraman was still hovering over the man in blue, trying to document as much as he could and no doubt dreaming of the promotion he'd get for catching such amazing footage. He was too tightly focused. He didn't notice the guy with the neck wound pull himself back to his feet until it was too late.
That's when I jumped from my seat and just yelled out without thinking. I don't even know what I said, but I remember screaming at him to run as if he could somehow hear me. Sarah had the presence of mind to cut to commercials, but the damage was already done.
A few months later and it wouldn't have mattered. Nobody would have cared about a few curse words on a live newscast, but back then it was enough to force the network to 'invite' me to take early retirement. I can't say I blame them. They needed a steady voice the nation trusted, and once the video went viral... well, it was obvious I was no longer the right man for the job. You can't trust an anchor who jumps out of his seat and starts cursing like a lunatic while staring at something between his legs. I was an early Christmas present to the makers of Internet memes.
You know what, though? I'm glad it happened. At the time it felt like the end of the world, but now I look back on it I think I dodged a bullet. I don't think I could have forgiven myself if I'd taken part in the massive - massive - dereliction of duty from the media in those final few months. And of course it meant I didn't have to be in Manhattan every night for the live show, which I guess is the only reason I'm sitting here today.
I don't know if I believe in Hell anymore. I just don't know, but what I do know is that if I ever fall into that fiery pit the first people I'll see will be the news anchors, producers, network heads and print journalists who decided to treat the outbreak like old news just a few weeks after Tokyo. The way they moved on the moment the advertisers started complaining? Jesus. They let us all sleepwalk to the end of the world for the sake of ratings and ad buys.
Now don't get me wrong, I know it's not just the media who should shoulder the blame. It's all of us. It was our entire damned short attention span culture that led us to disaster. It was our complacency, our arrogance and our hubris. If we'd all just been a little more on the ball we might have avoided all of this, but we decided to change the channel.
I don't know... I know it sounds dumb, and I'm damned sure it sounds heartless, but maybe this was just what we needed, you know? I mean, just look around. The air's getting cleaner. I can drink the water straight from my faucet without wondering if some damned fracking company has made it flammable. Did you see the story about black bears living in New York? Can you imagine that? Right there in Central Park, looking up at the shell of my old apartment on West 72nd.
James looks back at his greenhouse and smiles.
They're welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned. I've got my tomatoes.
Now that I've finished the LAST MAN STANDING series and I've started to grow my fanbase I've decided to go back and play around with the narrative style of my favourite PA novel of all time, World War Z. Like Max Brooks I'm coming at the apocalypse from the other side, looking back at the events that led to the end of the world through the eyes of the survivors who lived through it.
This is a very rough first draft of what I have so far, written in a caffeine induced frenzy. Be gentle.
Bakersfield, California
I recognise his face the moment he looks up at me through the cracked, dust-coated panes of the greenhouse, and as he wipes his hands clean on his pants and begins to shuffle slowly towards the door I try not to stare at the aged, limping figure who was once a nightly fixture on TV screens around the country. Gone is the perfectly coiffed head of salt and pepper hair, and his bespoke Brioni suit and tie have been replaced with an oversized white t-shirt and a pair of unflattering cargo pants.
As he reaches out to shake my hand I notice his sunken cheeks and pallid skin, and - perhaps I'm not hiding my shock as well as I'd hoped - he's quick to inform me that the doctors say he'll be lucky if he has six months at best. He blames the cigarettes he snuck at the anchor desk during the ad breaks, but he doesn't seem at all bitter about his prognosis. He tells me he'll be happy if he gets to see just one more harvest, and jokes that once he's plucked the last tomato from his greenhouse he'll be racing to leave before winter sets in.
Despite his illness there's at least one thing unchanged about James McIntyre, the firebrand lead anchor of CNN's nightly news broadcast for the 15 years leading up to the crisis. From beneath his gaunt, drawn visage and wrinkled brow he still looks out at the world with the same piercing blue eyes that won him his reputation as a 'silver fox', melting the hearts of female fans around the country with an arch of an eyebrow. After he lowers himself painfully to a plastic chair and covers his balding pate with a threadbare Yankees cap to shield his eyes from the sun he settles into the same easy, comfortable fireside tones I remember so well, punctuated with his trademark soft chuckle.
Nobody wanted to be the first to use the word, obviously. I mean, can you imagine the embarrassment? Can you imagine trying to get anyone to take you seriously ever again? There's just no way. The Internet would turn you into a damned piñata before you even got off the air.
No, it just wasn't going to happen. Not to one of us, anyway, there was just too much to lose. You spend your entire career trying to build a solid reputation, to sell yourself as the next Murrow... the next Cronkite. You want your name spoken in the same breath as the greats after they put you out to pasture, and nobody wants to jeopardise their place in the hall of fame. And deep down all of us believed that's where we were headed, don't you doubt it for a second. Even the guys who reported on highway wrecks for the graveyard shift of a Wichita affiliate all believed they were just paying their dues before they got the call up to the big leagues, so nobody was eager to volunteer for such an obvious career killer.
It was... OK, cards on the table. Here's what it was. None of us wanted to be the next Dan Rather. You know who I'm taking about, right? The way they treated that guy. Jesus. One little mistake after a lifetime as an honest to God newsman, one of the all time greats, and they dragged his name so far through the muck he couldn't find work checking for typos at a high school paper. That's just the way things were in the Internet age. It's no wonder we were all a little gun shy.
So, yeah, I guess that's why we waited for the tabloids to start calling them 'zombies' before we dared say the word out loud. Let those guys take the fall if it turned out to be... I don't know, some kind of hoax or something, know what I mean? That's what we were all thinking. Call me a coward if you must, I just didn't want to be the subject of a Leno monologue.
That's why I called them 'the attackers' in my broadcast, rather than anything specific. I just wanted to be non-committal, but the idea that these attacks were something new had been in the air supply for a couple of months, bouncing around social media and the conspiracy sites. People had been whispering about 'incidents' everywhere from Central Asia to South America since the start of the summer, but the Japanese attack finally brought everything out into the open. It forced the idea of the living dead out of the world of movies and into the mainstream.
My memory isn't quite what it used to be, but I'm fairly certain we were in the middle of a dull, procedural segment on the deficit when the news broke. My producer jumped in through my earpiece and gave me the signal to wrap it up ASAP, and the first thing I noticed was the edge in her voice. I couldn't tell if it was panic or excitement, but if you ever met Sarah you'd know that anything that flapped her was a seriously big deal. That woman had steel rebar running through her bones. In five years of running our control room she'd never once so much as raised her voice, so when I heard that nervous energy I felt a little shiver run down my spine.
She fed me cold copy through my earpiece as we cut to the footage from Tokyo, delayed from live by just a couple of minutes. There was a shot of... well, I'm sure you know which footage I'm talking about, it's iconic. It was the Shibuya film, the first clear, unambiguous attack ever caught on camera. Beautiful, perfectly framed and lit high def shots, a producer's dream. Some second string BBC crew just happened to be filming B-roll for a travelogue with one of those old Monty Python guys. Palin, I think. Anyway, it was just blind luck - for us, not for them, I should add - that they were standing there in front of those towering neon signs at the right time to catch the moment, that they had the equipment to broadcast to satellite, and that they had the stones to stand there and keep rolling.
Do you know Shibuya? Did you ever see it in person? It's quite... I mean it was quite a sight, especially at night in the rain. It was like stepping inside the kind of video game that has to come with a warning for epileptic kids, and beneath those massive, hypnotic neon boards twenty five hundred people crossed the street every time the lights changed. It was like nowhere else I've ever seen.
The cameraman was standing maybe fifty yards from the entrance to Shibuya station when it started, facing north west to catch the sea of commuters crossing the street on the diagonal. Now that crossing always ran like clockwork. Total Japanese efficiency, so I guess that's why the cameraman decided to bring the shot in tight when people started to scatter. My first thought was that maybe a small sinkhole had opened up in the street. That alone would have been big news in such an iconic location, so as I watched the footage I was already trying to remember a few facts and figures I could toss out while I waited for a script to appear on the prompter.
That's when Sarah said it: "Tell them to watch the man in the blue suit."
I spotted him in an instant. An older guy, I think. It's always hard to tell with the Japanese - they don't seem to start ageing until they hit fifty - but he looked to be somewhere in his sixties. He was down on the ground and he seemed to be convulsing, but his hand was tightly gripping the sweater of some girl beside him, stretching it out behind her as she tried to run away. That's why people started to scatter. I think they must have seen something the camera didn't pick up, and the girl was... well, I've never seen anyone in so much terror.
We caught the bite perfectly. I mean perfectly, like something from a nature documentary. The guy lunged out and closed his teeth over the girl's calf as she tried to twist away from him, and as she fell she let out this awful scream that rose above the sounds of the crowd. Everyone turned to look, and that's when the fear turned into terror, and the crossing turned into a stampede.
The problem was that most of the crowd couldn't see the guy and didn't know what they were running away from, or in which direction they should run. Some of them tripped right over him in their rush to get away, scrambling on hands and knees to stay out of reach. I tugged the earpiece from my ear and just watched, my mouth hanging open like some kind of yokel.
The cameraman, God bless him, held his nerve like a pro. As everyone ran he actually approached, bringing us within maybe ten yards of the guy in blue. No sense of self preservation whatsoever. That's when we saw the guy's right hand was wrapped tight in a dirty white bandage. Poor bastard must have had been one of the slow burners. He could have been simmering for days before he finally went under.
Our guy got in closer as the crosswalk finally emptied. The only people left were the man in blue, hunkered down over the body of the young girl, and another guy who looked like he'd caught a bite to the neck before he collapsed a few yards away. That's when Sarah cut the feed and came back to the studio. Can you believe it? She was worried we'd have Standards and Practices on our ass for airing deaths in prime time. Seems kinda funny now, but I guess at the time it made sense. Anyway, I was sitting there staring at my monitor beneath the anchor desk, where the feed was still coming through. I didn't even realise I was back on the air until I heard a little tinny yelling noise coming from my dangling earpiece.
I forget what I said next, it's all a bit of a blur. I think I just sat in silence for a few seconds, trying to keep my eyes away from what was happening on the monitor. I put the earpiece back in and heard the producer screaming at me. "Camera two! Face camera fucking two!" That snapped me back into it. I closed my mouth and put my serious anchor face back on long enough to say a few words. I think I managed to get out a quick recap of what we knew so far, which at the time wasn't much at all, and then rolled off the standard filler about the harrowing images we'd just seen.
The only thing that came to me at the time was the dreaded Z word, but I sure as heck wasn't going to suggest this guy was a zombie. I was careful not to say anything about the dead rising, either. I mean of course we'd all heard the rumours, but there was nothing about the footage that suggested the guy in blue was anything but mentally ill, or maybe on drugs. I didn't want my name within a million miles of a suggestion that he might be undead, or some other wacky horror movie nonsense.
That's when I started swearing. I'm sure you saw the broadcast later on YouTube just like everyone else, right? That's why the show was seen by around two hundred million people rather than our usual seven. Hell, if I'd known I could bump the ratings like that I'd have started cursing like a sailor years ago.
What the viewers didn't know - and the reason they may have thought I was having some kind of mental breakdown - was that my monitor showing the feed from Tokyo was beneath the lip of my desk between my legs, just out of shot. The viewers couldn't see anything, but just at the edge of my vision I was still watching what was going on while I desperately vamped my way to the next ad break, and when I saw what happened next...
Well, there's no need to go into the gory details. We've all seen much worse in real life in the years since, but suffice to say it... it shook me. The cameraman was still hovering over the man in blue, trying to document as much as he could and no doubt dreaming of the promotion he'd get for catching such amazing footage. He was too tightly focused. He didn't notice the guy with the neck wound pull himself back to his feet until it was too late.
That's when I jumped from my seat and just yelled out without thinking. I don't even know what I said, but I remember screaming at him to run as if he could somehow hear me. Sarah had the presence of mind to cut to commercials, but the damage was already done.
A few months later and it wouldn't have mattered. Nobody would have cared about a few curse words on a live newscast, but back then it was enough to force the network to 'invite' me to take early retirement. I can't say I blame them. They needed a steady voice the nation trusted, and once the video went viral... well, it was obvious I was no longer the right man for the job. You can't trust an anchor who jumps out of his seat and starts cursing like a lunatic while staring at something between his legs. I was an early Christmas present to the makers of Internet memes.
You know what, though? I'm glad it happened. At the time it felt like the end of the world, but now I look back on it I think I dodged a bullet. I don't think I could have forgiven myself if I'd taken part in the massive - massive - dereliction of duty from the media in those final few months. And of course it meant I didn't have to be in Manhattan every night for the live show, which I guess is the only reason I'm sitting here today.
I don't know if I believe in Hell anymore. I just don't know, but what I do know is that if I ever fall into that fiery pit the first people I'll see will be the news anchors, producers, network heads and print journalists who decided to treat the outbreak like old news just a few weeks after Tokyo. The way they moved on the moment the advertisers started complaining? Jesus. They let us all sleepwalk to the end of the world for the sake of ratings and ad buys.
Now don't get me wrong, I know it's not just the media who should shoulder the blame. It's all of us. It was our entire damned short attention span culture that led us to disaster. It was our complacency, our arrogance and our hubris. If we'd all just been a little more on the ball we might have avoided all of this, but we decided to change the channel.
I don't know... I know it sounds dumb, and I'm damned sure it sounds heartless, but maybe this was just what we needed, you know? I mean, just look around. The air's getting cleaner. I can drink the water straight from my faucet without wondering if some damned fracking company has made it flammable. Did you see the story about black bears living in New York? Can you imagine that? Right there in Central Park, looking up at the shell of my old apartment on West 72nd.
James looks back at his greenhouse and smiles.
They're welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned. I've got my tomatoes.
I'm sure I'll be back shortly to share further chapters, because I'm far too impatient to wait the two months it'll take to finish the book before sharing the final product