Maybe that would have been cool-I’ve never had a head cold or a stuffy nose, and I understand that those were right annoying-but it met up with another nifty synthetic virus, and the two of them hit it off right away. It dropped back down to Earth and got to work infecting people.

Only the virus didn’t stay up there, where it wasn’t hurting anybody. That was the year when everything changed, when a bunch of bored jerks broke into a lab and let a nifty synthetic virus out into the world to have a party in the stratosphere. Maybe it wasn’t like that before the Rising hit and the dead started to walk, but hey, guess what: All that shit happened, and now we’re the rats in the wreckage, living and dying in the aftermath of our parents’ mistakes.Ģ014. Good death, bad death, slow death, fast death-the modern world is the fucking of dying. We can give you death in any shape or size you want. The world isn’t so good with funerals anymore.ĭeaths, sure we have plenty of those. From That Isn’t Johnny Anymore, the blog of Ben Ross, The world will never know what my mama did to save us. She was seven in 2014, and she wrapped herself around me like a blanket, and we both rode out the storm. It’s just flashes, little glimpses of things my mind has mercifully decided I don’t really need to know. Too big to keep locked in a playpen, too small to understand what was happening, or why Mama cried all the time, or why the apartment was suddenly full of guns and strangers. Four years old, full of piss and vinegar and random fits of defiance.

She lived in Oakland before the Rising, and she was there when everything started going down. You haven’t experienced real joy until the first time you’ve improvised a zombie trap from six yards of chicken wire, a bunch of old lumber, some string, and a guinea pig. It’s what people remember when the dust dies down. The two of you helped so much in writing mine. This book is dedicated with joy and gratitude to Kathryn Daugherty and Leslie Stewart. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright.

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