Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Excerption To The Rule About Not Posting NaNoWriMo Excerpts

The easiest blog posts are the ones already written. Sure, this bit (haha - BIT!) from my 2010 NaNoWriMo project about undead people eaters needs a little more spit and polish, but whatever. I like it. And yes, Doug is a dog...


He held the cricket bat with his right hand and one of the 9mms in his left, told Doug to stay, then crouched down and crept, cat-burglar-style, across the asphalt to what was left of the body he'd just passed. Please have the keys, please have the keys, please have the keys, he thought. There they were - about five feet beyond the space in which she had fallen and died and been mostly devoured by monsters that until recently had been regular people. Bill tiptoed past her and wrapped his fingers around the keys, scanned his surroundings again and turned back toward the Jeep. As he passed her remains again, he couldn't help but take a closer look at her. That was when he saw it. Beneath her broken, bloody, half-eaten torso - clutched with a mangled skeletal dead hand between her mostly-intact and bloody-sweater-clad breasts - was a baby. Bill glanced around him again, then bent down low and looked more closely. It was wearing a little pink dress and appeared to be in one piece, and it was dead, staring vacantly into the parking lot with dry eyes devoid of life. "Look at that and tell me there's a god," Bill whispered, his voice shaking with a mixture of heartbreak and rage.

After learning that the Jeep had only a quarter-tank of gasoline - since it had become one of his central challenges over the past couple of weeks, Bill had taken to repeatedly saying "gasoline" with an Australian accent, like Mad Max - Bill had siphoned ten gallons from the car directly behind the Jeep. He had brought the small, battery-operated pump from the boat, but still it only had a six-foot tube, so he transferred the gay-zoh-line to the Jeep five gallons at a time, using the big empty paint bucket that had been in the back, behind the baby seat. Actually, it had been full when he found it - just not of paint. It had been full of baby toys.

While the second bucketful of gas was being pumped into the Jeep, Bill took as many of the toys as he could carry over to the bodies of mother and child. He knelt next to them and scattered the toys around. When he reached in to put a ring of oversized plastic, pastel-colored keys under the mother's half-body, close to the baby, it screamed and hissed and wriggled and bit at the keys with ghastly, toothless bites. "Shit! Zombie baby!!" Bill squealed as he jumped back, covering his mouth to prevent any other loud noises from flying out of it. The undead infant was still gurgling and growling as Bill backed away. "Okay, look at that and tell me there's a god!" He ran back to the Jeep, where the pump was sputtering, having already sucked the last of the gasoline from the bucket into the tank. He shut off the motor, tossed the pump and its hose into the bucket and threw put them in the back. The handful of zombies who had been aimlessly stumbling around in front of the convention center was now a fistful of zombies who had heard the baby and/or Bill's screams and now staggered rather less aimlessly in the direction of the Jeep.

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