In reading these novel excerpts you should know a couple things. First and foremost, the novel is unfinished and so it is still a rough draft. Secondly, my excerpts are bouncing around a little bit. For example, the first excerpt is actually something like twenty pages in, while this is somewhere around thirty or forty pages in.
Well enjoy!
The alarm was blaring and as much as he wanted to hit the snooze button, Steve Dwyer HAD to get up and hit at least 20 pages today. At least that’s what he told himself as he groggily got up out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom.
Steve was an out of work writer. He’d been writing for the local paper for almost four years when he suddenly had an itch. An itch he hadn’t had since he was twelve when he thought he immediately HAD to write a novel. Since that failed experiment, he’d written lots of short stories, a few screenplays, plenty of news stories, poems, songs, and such but only one terrible attempt at finishing a book.
Tara told him that the book had been waiting until he was ready to write it.
Jesus, he couldn’t believe how goddamn supportive she was. He didn’t deserve her. But it was her after all that had suggested everything from the start. The second he’d even mentioned that he was thinking about writing a book, she was so frustratingly assertive that he should quit his job and focus only on that.
He remembered that dinner very well and wish he could’ve seen himself through her eyes as his mouth hung open and spaghetti dangled from his fork.
But it was more than that. She also saw something he couldn’t see. She believed in him and more importantly she KNEW he would finish the novel and she KNEW it would be a success.
So he had quit his job. She earned enough to support them for the time being, and he had enough in his savings to help out here and there. Thank God he’d bought her that rock before any of this had come up!
And then came the hard part. Sitting in front of his computer and tapping out the story that he hoped would start the long process towards at least a somewhat successful writing career. Surprisingly, it was easy. He loved it and he got into the zone more often than not, the words just flowing through his arms, down into his fingers which then tapped it onto the keyboard. It was amazing.
Tara had called it something else, she said it was destiny.
Damn, she was incredible. Such a beautifully positive force in his life. He actually believed she was right.
And he would NOT let her down, so he got up about a half hour after she had left for work and would write all day, striving for a goal that seemed at the moment, without coffee in hand - unattainable. Somehow he’d make it work.
He took a quick shower, dressed and then brewed some coffee as he toasted a bagel and then applied a generous layer of cream cheese upon it.
Sitting in front of his computer in the “office” (read: spare bedroom), he read over the last few pages he had written last night and thought about where he left off and where he wanted to go.
Something rocked the house accompanied by the sound of thunder, shaking the pictures on the walls and making him wobble a bit in his chair.
An explosion?
Steve got up and walked down the short hallway to the front door.
He’d never forget this moment. Because it was at this moment that the world would change FOREVER.
Opening the door, Steve lay his eyes upon disaster:
The first thing he saw was the giant cloud of smoke coming from just behind the homes across his street. He thought he could see lick’s of flame between two of the houses but he wasn’t sure, nor did he really have a chance to examine the situation. People were running down the street - for their LIVES. A few other “people” were chasing them, but they moved strangely, meanwhile across the street one of his neighbor’s (Todd, he thought was his name) was lying on the grass while his wife (Sheila) CONTINUED to gnaw on his arm. He was screaming and she didn’t even seem to notice.
There was a little girl crying on the sidewalk right in front of Steve’s house. He started to cross the lawn towards her when a large almost morbidly obese man came out of nowhere and toppled over her, taking her to the cement.
As if he was having an outer body experience, Steve watched in horror as the man raised his head and then leveled his jaws down upon the girl’s face.
“NO!!!” He screamed without hearing himself, charging forward, moving without thinking.
Within seconds he was toppling over the man, using what little body weight he had to carry himself and the mountain of lard that was this monster trying to chew a little girl to death into the asphalt of the blacktop.
The fat man sluggishly got to his feet and ROARED at him.
Steve got a good look: Standing there, crouched in a pale blue tank-top and plaid boxers, the flesh around the man’s left eye and heading up to the depths of his scalp was mostly missing, looking as though he had been chewed upon. Blood coated the front of him, caking within the parts of his chest hair that you could see. His eyes were lifeless, almost without color.
Then the man started to move towards him and all he could do was shy away in terror.
He heard a blast and a millisecond later the man’s head was gone.
As the body fell, Steve crawled backwards away from it. And looked around warily.
A woman of about fifty stood close by, dropping the double-barreled shotgun she had been aiming to her side.
“What are you waiting for, let’s go!” She shouted at him.
Steve just stared at her.
Sighing, the woman came up, grabbed him by the elbow and tugged him upwards. She was a strong one that was for sure.
“What did I miss?” Steve asked exasperated.
“A lot, now we have got to get out of here. Just trust me.”
For some reason, Steve was extremely apt to trust her.
He started towards the little girl that was almost fat man food. She was moaning and rolling on the sidewalk in agony.
“No!” The woman screamed and got in his way.
Steve ignored her and tried to get around.
She held her ground, bringing the shotgun level to his chest.
“She stays.”
“I don’t know who you think you are, but that little girl-”
“That little girl is already dead, now you come with me or you die here, trust me. She’s already dead!” It was the second time this woman had asked Steve to trust her, and both times he found it hard not to.
“Oh shit.” She almost cried as she said it.
Steve looked to where she had turned. Down the street about a hundred yards away, there were more people running, and MANY more of those other kinds, the ones who ran but didn’t run. THEY were like the fat man.
The woman grabbed him, “you either move along now or take your chances staying here, either way, the girl is dead and needs to stay here.”
“But she’s just a little girl.” Steve whispered.
Without a second’s hesitation, the woman turned to the sidewalk, pressed the gun to the girl’s head and pulled the trigger.
“YOU FUCKING BITCH!”
The woman turned, reloading the gun as she broke the barrel open and exchanged unused shells with used ones. She barely even seemed to notice that she had just MURDERED a child.
“I just SPARED that poor little girl. I was too late to save her, but not too late to save you. We have to go NOW.”
The crowd of running people was getting closer.
A small voice within Steve spoke softly but sternly. He saw the chaos around him, and felt the world spinning terribly. Without fully grasping the situation, he knew sanity from insanity. Indeed, in his writer’s imagination he had so many ideas floating around his head about what COULD be happening. But he knew he had to trust this woman. Maybe he had a thing about chick’s with guns.
Probably not, but you never could tell.
He made the decision, nodded at the woman and began to follow her as she made her way, running at a brisk pace down the street, the opposite way that the horde of crazies were coming.
As he ran he wondered where was Tara and if he could even hope that she was alive within all this madness.
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