Z 2134 (38 page)
Authors: Sean Platt,David W. Wright
The small globe
had a little screen a few inches wide. It looked like a mini-orb, though not
quite like a Network orb or any other orb Jonah had ever seen.
“Is this State
made?” Jonah asked, turning it in his hand.
“Not exactly,”
Father shook his head. “But I can’t tell you anything more than that, so I
suggest you not ask.”
“Can I ask what
it does?”
“Wouldn’t give
it to you if you couldn’t,” Father said. “It taps into the TV feed, so you’ll
be able to see the same thing folks behind The Wall are seeing, while they’re
seeing it. That’s your best bet at finding Ana. Besides this,” Father held up
the bag, bulging at the sides, and handed it to Jonah.
Jonah sat down
and pulled the bag into his lap, and peeked inside, eyes widening at the
contents. “This is for me? All of it?”
“It is,” Father
nodded. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Inside the bag
were two guns, four boxes of shells, dried fruit, four vials of something
marked “health,” five bottles of water, and a hand-drawn map of The Barrens,
which seemed to offer a good trail to where Ana might be.
“So can I go
now?”
“Yes, at least
in a second. We’ve gotta destroy your chips first.”
“I thought you
said it was dangerous,” Jonah said.
“A little bit,
but it’s far more dangerous if you get tracked by hunter orbs. There’s an
energy field surrounding the station that prevents the orbs from tracking you
here. But once you step outside the field, you’re fair game. So you want to do
this if you want to live.”
Father unzipped
a small pack at his waist and pulled out a long, thin box, about the length of
his hand. He unfastened the latch at the top, lifted the lid, then shook a
translucent blue pill into his hand and handed it to Jonah.
“A pill? You’ve
gotta be kidding.”
“Not at all,”
Father said. “The pill has nanotech scrubbers, to destroy the chips. In your
bag, I’ve also included another pill to give your daughter once you find her.”
Jonah liked that
he said “once” instead of “if.”
“Now I have to
warn you, once you swallow, you will be disoriented. You’ve convinced yourself
that you can’t afford any time to rest, but I’d argue, and loudly, that you
can’t afford not to rest if you expect to save your daughter. I suggest waiting
at least two hours before leaving, though you and Egan will both likely argue
for one, and for different reasons.”
“I have to go. I
don’t have two hours.” Jonah shook his head. “Every minute I’m down here
instead of up there looking looking for Ana is another minute I put her at
risk.”
“If they set
hunter orbs on you, you're dead. So is she. Have faith in the daughter you
raised, Jonah. Clear the chips and clear your mind, then rescue Ana.”
Father handed
the pill to Jonah. “Unleash yourself.”
Jonah popped the
pill into his mouth, swallowed without water, then squeezed his eyes at the
sudden pain, slapping his right palm to the side of his head as an angry
intensity tore through his head.
He stood, dizzy,
then tried to sit, but was afraid he would fall flat on his ass. He lasted a
second before he did. Jonah twitched on the floor, certain there was poison
inside him and that despite his promises, Egan had managed to exact his
revenge, after all.
“It’s OK,”
Father said from somewhere on a distant planet. “Everything will be fine. The
pill is murdering your mind’s intruders. You must make it through the pain and
know you’re stronger than it and that no matter how much pain you’re in now,
it’s only temporary.”
Father Truth set
his hand on Jonah’s back and repeated, “Just a few more minutes and everything
will be fine.”
The world went
black, and Father Truth disappeared.
Jonah was
trapped in his own head. The words
murdering intruders
tore through his
brain, over and over until he opened his eyes.
He was no longer
in the station.
Jonah was back
at his house, deep inside a memory he couldn’t remember ever having.
Jonah looked
around the room at the aged panels of his apartment’s old wooden walls, and the
grimy light made the space seem cruel. He tried to make sense of his memory.
Molly looked up,
smiling as she saw him. “Hey, sweetie, you’re home early! Did you come to check
up on us?”
Jonah didn’t
answer.
Instead, he
pulled the shock stick from his belt, marched over to Molly, grabbed her by the
throat with his left hand, pressing his fingers hard into her flesh as the eyes
bulged from their sockets, then bashed her skull in.
Molly never had
a chance to scream.
Her daughter
did.
Jonah turned,
surprised to see his daughter standing behind him, curdling the air with her
deafening scream.
Jonah flashed
awake, back in the train station, his entire body shaking. Father sat next to
him, looking down with his kind face.
“What the hell?”
Jonah screamed. “No, no, no. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. What the hell was
that?”
“That,” Father
said, “was the truth, Jonah.”
To Be Continued…
In
Season 2 of Z 2134
A
year into writing our weekly serials,
Sean and I (Dave) get asked two questions more often than any others.
“When is the next Yesterday’s Gone coming
out?”
“When are you two going to write a zombie
series?”
Having engaged readers who want our
serialized take on zombies is awesome. It’s a massive compliment, like wanting
to see how a director would handle your favorite book as film.
People want to see what we’ll do with
zombies, and we love that!
Truth is, we’ve wanted to do a zombie
story for a while. I’ve always loved zombies. They’re one of the few monsters
(other than aliens) which scare me in fiction. They also plague my dreams more
constantly than any other nightmare. One of the creepiest scenes planned for
the second season of
Z
comes directly from a dream I had right when we
were signed to 47North.
Back when everyone else was writing vampires,
and before zombies took off as “the next big thing,” Sean suggested we write a
zombie book before they became
too trendy
. That was in 2008, before
Amazon’s Kindle helped e-books explode, and before we could justify turning
down paid work in hopes that we MIGHT sell some paperbacks if we spent a few
months writing.
We put a year into writing our serials
each week, and had launched four series, when we finally decided to write our
first zombie story. Not just a
story
, but the same character-driven,
cliffhanger-filled,
serialized fiction
we love to read, watch, and
write. With zombies.
But now, it seems like
everyone
is
writing zombie books.
Zombies have become, as Sean predicted
years ago, trendy. Which is not exactly a surprise — that’s how things work in
fiction, just like all corners of pop culture. Everything takes its turn moving
through cyclical trends. As with anything trendy, you have two camps — readers
with endless appetites for anything zombie and . . . readers who see the word
“zombie” and start rolling their eyes.
I belong to the first camp — as long as
it’s good, I’ll take a new zombie story, movie, or awesome video game any day
of the week. But I get the people who are sick of zombies. We hope that
Z
2134
is different enough to appeal to both camps.
It wasn’t enough to write a
by-the-numbers zombie book, like it wasn’t enough to write by-the-numbers
post-apocalyptic book with
Yesterday’s Gone
or a by-the-numbers Young
Adult book with
ForNevermore
, or a by-the-numbers sci-fi book with the
oddity that is
WhiteSpace
)
.
If it’s worth our time, it’s worth
our time to make it amazing. Our premise needed something different to deliver
more of the experience our readers (that’s YOU!) are used to.
Premise is a weird thing for us as
writers. We like to think we can take any premise and make it interesting with
the right story, characters, and scares. Distill any book or movie down to a
few lines, and you have a bowl of boring oatmeal. It’s the little extra
ingredients and attention to detail that make a book, movie, or TV show
memorable.
For instance,
Signs
was a movie
about an alien invasion. Yet, it was the characters and their relationships
with one another, that made the movie so much more than that. The TV show
Breaking
Bad
, is about a teacher turned meth dealer. On paper, it sounded like the
worst plot ever. But when you watch it — holy shit, it’s one of the BEST shows
ever!
So you can take a plain premise and make
it awesome. But in most cases, you need something unique to draw readers in.
We first considered doing a different
zombie apocalypse sort of book. For a few minutes, anyway. But it lacked a hook
that would sell it to readers who didn’t know us.
We needed a hook to make this story stand
out among the hordes (bad pun intended) of zombie books.
OVERCOMING THE CURSE OF THE ZOMBIE TREND
We never chase trends.
If anything, we try to aim ahead of the
trends, like we’ve done with serials, writing them a full year before Amazon
announced its awesome Kindle Serials program, and publishing them weekly since
January. We write the stories we want to tell and hope enough people enjoy our
work to fuel our momentum.
In a year when
The Hunger Games
was
the biggest thing in literature (or at least the literature that didn’t come in
a
Grey
wrapper), a simple sentence during one of our weekly story
meetings, “Hey, what if
The Hunger Games
had zombies?” gave us the seed
for a sprout of an idea.
The idea took immediate root. After many
conversations, story sessions, and several drafts, the newest story in our
Collective Inkwell was born: a strange brew inspired by
The Walking Dead,
The Hunger Games, The Running Man
, and
1984
, going places only Platt
and Wright can go.
Z 2134
is a mash-up of many inspirations, but with
our sensibilities, pacing, and killer cliffhangers. This is the zombie show we
would create for television, which is how we think up all of our serials — what
TV show would we want to watch? Let’s write that.
We’re especially thankful to Amazon
Publishing and 47North for helping give
Z 2134
a larger life, out of the
gate. As our first non-indie title, we couldn't be happier with the experience.
We've been waiting since Stephen King's The Green Mile for a publisher to
embrace the possibilities of serialized fiction. I think with Amazon
Publishing, we might just be seeing the resurgence of a format too long
ignored. I'm excited as both a writer
and reader
for the next golden age
of serials!
Thank you, Dear Reader, for joining us on
this ride!
David W. Wright & Sean Platt
::OUR SERIALIZED SERIES::
by 47North
::Z 2134 — the futuristic zombie serial
thriller::
Season
One (Episodes 1-4)
::Monstrous — a hellish revenge and
redemption serial thriller::
Season
One (Episodes 1-6)
Coming Soon
by Collective Inkwell (our indie
publishing company)
::Yesterday’s Gone Series — the
post-apocalyptic serial::
Season One (Episodes 1-6)
Season Two (Episodes 7-12)
Season Three (Episodes 13-18)
Season
Four (coming summer 2013)
::WhiteSpace Series
— the sci-fi/horror serial::
Season
One (Episodes 1-6)
::ForNevermore Series — the dark fantasy
Young Adult serial::
Season
One (Episodes 1-6)
::Available Darkness — the new breed of
vampire thriller::
Season One (Episodes 1-6)
Season
Two (coming November 2012)
::OUR
SHORT STORIES::
DARK
CROSSINGS: Volume One
Chris Wakes Up
Diner Faded
Pull The Trigger
Respero Dinner
The Watcher
The
Visitor
DARK
CROSSINGS: Volume 2
Are We There Yet?
Hide and Seek
If You Don’t Finish Reading This, Then
Everyone You Know Will Die
What Would Boricio Do?
The Good Deeds Society
Monsters
Sean Platt
is coauthor of the serialized sagas, Z
2134,
Yesterday’s Gone, WhiteSpace, ForNevermore and Available Darkness
.
He is also author of
Writing Online
, and co-founder of Collective
Inkwell.
Despite having a big plate, full of dark horror
and serialized mayhem at Collective Inkwell with his co-author David Wright,
Sean is also cohost of the Better Off Undead, and Self-Publishing Podcasts.
Sean helps tomorrow’s authors with David, and Johnny B. Truant with the
Self-Publishing Podcast, and Sean nurtures his tribe of “digital writers” at
his home site, SeanMPlatt.Com
Sean is currently developing super cool
serialized fiction for children, available some time before spring, 2013Sean
lives the writer’s life and dreamer’s dream in Ohio with his wife (who
endlessly listens) and two children (who sometimes don’t). He wakes up happy
almost every day.
Connect with Sean at:
http://twitter.com/seanplatt
http://www.facebook.com/DigitalWriter
https://www.facebook.com/CollectiveInkwellPublishing
