Zombieaplooza’s guestblog today comes from Jeff Bryan, author of Jenny Pox, Helix, and Dominion. He offers a new take on the debate between old-school slow zombies and the new hyper speed modern ones.
A giveaway for e-copies of Jenny Pox follows after his guestblog…
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As someone who loathes jogging, I’m starting to feel a little unprepared for the zombie apocalypse.
It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, all you needed to do was hook up with some survivors, find a good solid building, and board up the windows. The biggest problem was deciding who had to kill that sweet little girl with the nasty zombie bite.
If you ran into a zombie, you just aimed for the head. You had plenty of time to line up your shot while the zombie dragged and shuffled toward you.
No more. Zombies are getting faster every year. You knew it would happen.
Americans are just too impatient to turn into the traditional, sluggish walking dead anymore. We can’t even tolerate the indecisive customer ahead of us at Starbucks. People risk life and limb to get one car length ahead in traffic.
When we’re always gulping down caffeine and 5-hour energy tablets, that’s going to have an effect on how we behave in our second life as zombies. Gone are the gentler, slower zombies that menaced our grandparents. As we rush from one errand to another, our nervous systems are programmed to hurry, hurry, hurry. That won’t just go away when the radiation/toxic waste/black magic reanimates our corpses. High-speed is all we’ve ever known.
You can’t count on modern zombies to loiter around outside your house for hours while you debate strategy with the other survivors. And forget about that desperate sprint to the truck outside—your brains will be snack food before you reach the tailgate.
Zombies are single-minded and nigh-unkillable. Their sloth was the only hope we had. Like South American army ants, they were fairly harmless as individuals, and only became a threat when they swarmed in large numbers. But even one fast zombie is a serious threat.
I’m not sure how they got so fast, but it makes sense. Imagine the first zombie who was only slightly faster than the others. He (or, more likely, she) got to eat more brains and bite more people, spreading the faster zombie-juice around. It’s evolutionary pressure—once a single zombie speeds up, the others have to speed up or starve.
Before you know it, zombies are racing through your city, ripping off heads, not even stopping to savor the intestines.
How do we prepare for a fast-zombie apocalypse? The usual rules apply—store up ammo, water, food and fuel. But now, you need to add one extra bullet, just for yourself, just in case.
Otherwise, you’ll have to take up jogging.
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Jenny Morton is a quiet small-town girl from South Carolina whose touch spreads a deadly supernatural plague–she can’t touch anyone for long without killing them. Jenny can’t control her power, so it controls her life. The kids at school call her “Jenny Mittens” because she wears gloves year-round, even in the broiling Carolina summer.
Occasionally, she makes a mistake and spreads disease and death. She struggles to keep her fatal touch a secret from everyone.
Her life is friendless and lonely until she meets Seth, a boy with a healing touch. Seth is the only boy Jenny can touch, but Jenny’s affection for him brings the wrath of his devious, manipulative girlfriend Ashleigh, who secretly wields the most dangerous power of all–the power to make people feel love.
Jenny must master her own power–the deadly “Jenny pox”–before Ashleigh can destroy her…
Jeff is offering TWO ebooks of Jenny Pox in eformats supported by the Kindle, the Nook, and most other ereaders.
The giveaway for the TWO e-copies of Jenny Pox has the same rules as the other Zombiepalooza giveaways –
1. To enter to win, comment on this blog, leaving an email address to contact you in case you win.
2. The giveaway runs from now until October 28th at midnight. On October 29th, winners will be chosen by random.org and contacted. They have 72 hours to reply before the prize defaults to the runner-up.
3. Only one entry per giveaway. (But you can enter as many different Zombiepalooza giveaways as you want.)
4. US only. Sorry to our international friends. 🙁
Amanda Hocking
haytham zalta says: