The Return Man: Civilisation’s Gone. He’s Stayed to Bury the Dead. (50 page)

‘Being retrieved. Due to your man’s demise, there will be an unfortunate delay,’ the American explained, not bothering to hide his annoyance. ‘Certainly you understand. Additional precautions must now be taken to hide this discreet transaction of ours. But I assure you, Director Zhang–China will have the vaccine as its own.’

The walnut cracked in Zhang’s strong hand. ‘When?’ he demanded.

‘Soon,’ Owen Osbourne promised. ‘And I expect you to honour our deal.’

Thank you dearly to all who made this adventure possible:

My father, who taught me to work hard and do it right;

My mother, who taught me the possibilities found in books;

Both my parents, who stayed beside me through twists and turns;

My sister and all my family, who’ve been great cheerleaders;

My wife Krissy, who gives the world’s best pep talks and is my true soulmate;

My girl Maggie, whom I love more than I can say aloud, so I’m writing it here;

Francine T., who granted me this opportunity and then guided me to make the most of it;

Jason B., Penny I. and everyone else at Hodder & Stoughton who added their talents;

Everyone who joined the hunt at
TheReturnMan.com
;

Zombie Ed of
The Zombie Times
, who put me in the right place at the right time;

Everyone who sent me encouraging words that were so deeply appreciated;

Noah L., who politely corrected my gun errors and voiced his support;

Jordan G. for contributing your mad skills;

Sherry H., Julie O., Ashley C., Justin W., Paul B., Jamal L.,
Ben S., Boe P., Kari M., and Nancy J., who have been great friends to the book;

George Romero, who gave us the subgenre;

Richard Matheson, who led the way.

And finally, thanks to J��rg Tatzelt, Stanley B. Prusiner and William J. Welch, whose research into prion diseases–(1996) ‘Chemical Chaperones Interfere with the Formation of Scrapie Prion Protein’,
The EMBO Journal
, 15, 23: 6363–73–provided the inspiration for Roger Ballard’s vaccine in
The Return Man.
Their study may someday save us all from a prion-triggered zombie apocalypse.

V. M. Z
ITO
resides in Connecticut, USA with his wife and daughter. When not writing, he spends his weekdays working as Creative Director at a New England ad agency and his weekends running on forested trails. THE RETURN MAN is his first novel.

V. M. Zito

What made you want to write
The Return Man
?

I’ve been a zombie fan since I was twelve, gobbling up every zombie movie or book I could find. But around five years ago I started to feel like it was all mostly the same story, told over and over with interchangeable characters–or, sometimes, it was too different, too far astray from the ‘classic zombies’ I loved. I wished somebody would write a cool book that felt new but still adhered to the Romero zombie mythos. Then I thought, hell, why can’t that somebody be me?

If you’ve ever seen the (non-zombie) movie,
Apollo 13
, you’ll remember the scene where Ed Harris dumps a bunch of random junk on the table in front of NASA scientists and says, ‘Build something that will save the astronauts.’ Writing
The Return Man
was a little like that. I knew the parts that I felt had to be in the book, the elements of a traditional zombie tale: dead and mindless zombies, a crumbled society, a brave survivor, a military presence, and of course the mandatory disembowelment of the bad guy. The challenge was, how could I arrange them into a fresh story that I’d
want to read as a zombie fan myself? Soon I was daydreaming scenarios. In May 2008, I put the first words to paper.

Where did you get the idea for the novel?

Many zombie movies touch upon the fact that the dead ‘monsters’ were once human. I extrapolated this logic a bit further. If they were human, they’d had families. And what if the families were still alive? Wouldn’t it be horrible to know that your dead wife or child was out there in the world somewhere as a zombie?

From there it all seemed to snap together. The main character would be a professional corpse killer, operating out of love and mercy rather than a ‘zombie extermination squad’ mentality. Although the zombie apocalypse had arrived, there would need to be a large number of grieving survivors as well–and so I split the United States into two zones, one for the dead and one for the living.
Dawn of the Dead
had long ago hinted that zombies might gravitate to ‘places that were important to them,’ so I decided to explore that further–the idea of using insight into the living person to find their zombie.

What draws you to zombies in particular?

Zombies are scary because they de-humanize us in every way. They violate the most ancient hallowed rule of society–an agreement by our ancestors not to eat each other, thus allowing civilisation to function–and they strip us down to our most basic, animalistic fears, like the fear of being devoured. When a zombie kills you, you’re nothing but a piece of meat. At the
same time, if you become a zombie, you’re nothing but a piece of meat. Being the killer is arguably worse than being the victim. And yet, for all that intellectual mumbo-jumbo and theological implications, zombies are my favorite monster now for probably the same reason as when I was twelve: I can’t imagine a death more mind-bogglingly bad than being surrounded and pulled apart by hungry dead people.

Do you prefer fast zombies or slow zombies?

Slow zombies give me the creepy, dreadful sensation of seeing my death lumber toward me, one tortuous step at a time. Slow zombies are what I consider real horror, a black, incomprehensible revulsion in your stomach, fearsome and fascinating at the same time; fast zombies are terror, adrenaline-fueled fear that whips your heart into a frenzy and ignites your ‘fight or flight’ instincts. From a horror aspect, I prefer the slow Romero zombies, but I’ll be honest–I like my survival odds better against them, too. Fast zombies would kick my ass.

Who, or what else, influences your writing?

In terms of how I write and what I write about, a ton of great writers have influenced me (and still do)–Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Paul Auster, Jack Ketchum, David Morrell, Bentley Little, John Banville, John Gardner, Shirley Jackson, to name a few. Another inevitable influence seems to be my personal uncertainty about religion. Questions about a god who does or does not exist seem to creep into many of my stories, whether I’d originally intended to go there or not.

Characterwise, are you more similar to Marco or Wu?

I’m probably more like Marco–introverted, cynical and agnostic, more trusting of empiricism and science but hopeful for a higher power. Except I’m not good at witty retorts. I never say anything clever when arguing with my wife.

What was it that inspired you to choose the settings of California and Arizona?

My wife and I honeymooned in Arizona, and it just stuck in my head as a unique location–beautiful in its spartan way, carved in rock, shaded every kind of brown. It was so alien compared to New England, where I live, where you’re surrounded by trees and green grass everywhere you turn. When I was ready to choose the setting for
The Return Man
, my mind just gravitated to Arizona as the perfect backdrop for a zombie apocalypse–superficially dead and barren, yet teeming with life that has adapted to the environment. It also represented Marco’s state of mind, echoing his removal from civilised society, far far away from the Safe States. In that regard, I began to envision Marco’s spiritual progress as measurable by compass directions–any motion to the east, toward the Safe States, was positive, while motion to the west was a regression. To achieve his goals, Marco had to travel physically away from the Safe Sates to confront his past failures. In a good hero myth, the hero achieves his salvation at the moment he seems farthest from it, and for that reason,
The Return Man’s
culminating events take place in California, as far west as possible.

How much research did you have to do, when writing the novel?

Filling in the details of the Arizona environment–the flora, the fauna, the geography and eccentricites of the desert–was a key focus. Also big was the ‘scientific’ basis for the Resurrection; I didn’t want to rely on the common ‘virus or bacteria’ explanation, so I did a lot of digging around to learn about proteins called prions. And, of course, I also learned about Sunset Limited dining cars, deerhorn knives, prison layouts, Chinese history, how to drive a locomotive, how to treat birth asphyxia, and how a gas pump works. And I learned about the Resurrection Plant. It’s a real thing. Google it if you don’t believe me!

Do you have any particular habits or a strict routine when writing?

My writing routine during
The Return Man
was strict: Every night after dinner and homework with my daughter, I’d run out for a large Dunkin Donuts coffee with milk and two sugars, then head upstairs to my office and write for 2 to 3 hours. The coffee was an absolute necessity. In fact, I might ask my accountant if all my DuDo’s receipts are tax-deductible. Besides that, I’d listen to ‘creative energy’ music on iTunes–nice soothing instrumentals to keep my vibe positive.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Read good books, and think, ‘That’s what I need to do.’ Read bad books, and say, ‘Hell, I can do better than
that
.’ Practice a lot. Expect some failures, but remember that failure is a required step on the path to
success–in a two-hour movie, the hero doesn’t succeed until the last 10 minutes. And finally, don’t worry about getting published. Just focus on writing something that makes you proud.

Will we see Marco again in the future? Are you planning any more books?

There are still millions of survivors in the Safe States who need Marco to return their zombified loved ones, so whether it’s in a second novel or some episodic format like television or graphic novels, I think it would be pretty cool to follow more of Marco’s adventures, contract by contract. And I do have ideas!

And… if there was an outbreak of The Resurrection, what would you do?

My household is very prepared. Each morning I run a twenty-minute zombie escape drill with my wife and 10-year-old daughter. At night I clean and arrange the guns while my wife monitors the police scanner for any reports of an outbreak. I keep the car running in the driveway all night long, ready to go. Meanwhile, my daughter works hard in the basement, digging a vast underground tunnel system that will eventually connect to a remote cabin in Vermont. She is making progress, although the late hours are beginning to affect her grades at school.

If you enjoyed
THE RETURN MAN,
look out for

FEED

Book 1 of The Newsflesh Trilogy

by Mira Grant

“Alive or dead, the truth won’t rest. My name is Georgia Mason, and I am begging you. Rise up while you can.”

The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED.

NOW, twenty years after the Rising, Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives-the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will out, even if it kills them.

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot—in this case, my brother Shaun—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. As if we didn’t already know what happens when you mess with a zombie: The zombie turns around and bites you, and you become the thing you poked. This isn’t a surprise. It hasn’t been a surprise for more than twenty years, and if you want to get technical, it wasn’t a surprise
then.

When the infected first appeared—heralded by screams that the dead were rising and judgment day was at hand—they behaved just like the horror movies had been telling us for decades that they would behave. The only surprise was that this time, it was really happening.

There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing. The initial shock was followed by running and screaming, which eventually devolved into more infection and attacking, that being the way of things. So what do we have now, in this enlightened age twenty-six years after the Rising? We have idiots prodding zombies with sticks, which brings us full circle to my brother and why he probably won’t live a long and fulfilling life.