It was the look of pure hunger.

Hi again, everyone!  This is another exciting post for me, as yet another of my stories has been released in print!  The book is titled “Dead History: A Zombie Anthology,” and all the stories contained within are about zombies existing in different eras of time.  Even though many stories will put zombies hundreds if not thousands of years in the past (or future, I suppose), my story, “The Eagle Has Reanimated,” deals with the not-too-distant past of just a few decades ago.

This is the big one, peeps…this is the story that I am the proudest of, a 12,000-word novella that really was a labor of love for me.  Not only does the work stem directly with the “original ” zombie outbreak from George Romero’s classic 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead,” I was able to incorporate another of my “loves,” astronomy and the NASA space program in particular.  When i first decided to submit a story for this anthology, I knew I wanted to tell a tale that could put zombies in a place that they may have never been before.  The viable locations here on our planet seemed sorely limited, so I thought to my self, “Self, why not put zombies on the Moon?”  That thought was followed immediately by the thoughts, “Great idea!  I don’t think that’s ever been done before,” and “Okay…now how the Hell are you going to get them up there?”  Since man has only been to the Moon once, it seemed the logical choice to tell the story of how zombies might infiltrate NASA and get their hungry little mouths up to our satellite.

A ridiculous amount of research went into this story.  I wanted it to be as historically accurate as possible, and the vast majority of what you read in the story — with the exception of the zombie-related mayhem, of course — is based on the information about Kennedy Space Center, the Apollo XI mission, and the people associated with NASA that I painstakingly learned from various factual websites, encyclopedias, and other historical data.  The resulting story is, I believe, a great one, and was selected to be the first story of the book, a definitive honor, as many anthology editors unofficially put the “best” stories first so that people picking up the book in a store get hooked by the first stuff they read.

In any case, I of course want to share an excerpt from the story with you.  There are only 13 stories in this book, whereas the other anthologies I have been a part of have had 20+ stories each; this most likely means that my story takes up a good chunk of this book, probably at least 20% of the total pages.  I strongly encourage anyone who is intrigued to read my writing to buy this book, as this will give you the most words I have written so far all in one place.  You can CLICK HERE to buy the book from Amazon.com — and if you buy, be sure to give it a nice review so others will be encouraged to buy as well! 🙂  Okay, here’s the snippet…enjoy!

Albert quickly stood back up, the mental haze of being awake in the middle of the night suddenly replaced by his training taking over and telling him what to do.  He turned and looked through the windows of the tiny station to the north, where the sound had seemed to come from.  Beyond the halo of the streetlight that hung directly over the guard station, all was dark and seemingly calm.  Albert picked up his flashlight, instinctively patted his gun holster on his right side to ensure that the firearm was still there (it was), and stepped out onto the road.  He walked a few steps to the edge of lighted circle, clicked on his flashlight, and swung the beam around in the darkness.

“Hello?” he called out authoritatively, using his army training to keep his voice calm and his nerves steeled.  “Is there anyone out here?”  Traditionally Post 12 was a very quiet duty, but occasionally there would be a larger animal that would try to wander out of the reserve and onto the Space Center property, or a civilian car would wander down the unmarked Avenue J and wind up, miles later, at Post 12’s crossbar and barbed-wire fence that separated wildlife reserve from government base and research center.  But those instances were usually few and far between, and rarely happened in the middle of the night on a Monday morning, so Albert had to make sure he thoroughly checked out any strange situations.

After piercing the darkness with his flashlight for a few minutes, directing the beam up the roughly-paved street and off onto the sides of the road where the underbrush wasn’t so thick, Albert was just about to give up and head back into the guard station when he heard the noise again.  A groan, a noise a man or an animal might make if hurt or in pain.  He saw movement slightly up the road, and as the figure drew closer, he could see it was a human – a woman.

She looked like she was badly hurt.  She was walking with a severe limp, and had what appeared to be blood splattered all over her pants and most of her shirt.  Albert looked more closely, and he could actually see one of the woman’s leg bones jutting out through her skin at a gruesome angle.  She looked up at him with vacant eyes and groaned.