Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts

Tuesday 30 September 2014

Dead Bastards by Jennifer Lee Thomson (An extract)




Dead Bastards (An Extract)


We couldn’t handle Archie staring back at us with accusing eyes, and he stank, so I covered him up with a duvet. A pink one with polka dots, which is the only spare one we have.
Scott spotted what he called the girly duvet and screwed up his face. “He’s my mate. We need to show him some respect.”

I’m irritated his pal has bled all over the new rug, yet I’m the one getting all the aggro for using a pink duvet.

Instead of coming up with an alternative to cover up his friend, Scott stood there with a stern expression on his face and shook his head. “It’s just no right.” Then his eyes grew wide and staring as he gawped at the duvet. “I think it moved.”

I snorted and shook my head. “How can it have moved? He’s deid. His stomach’s on our carpet.”

Just because Scott didn’t consider the duvet manly enough for his pal, didn’t give him the right to try to freak me out. But I looked down anyway.

At first, I didn’t see any movement, but I carried on watching. Then Archie’s feet started moving, making a tapping motion as if dancing in time to music. Before I’d seen it for myself, I thought that what happened to all those others on TV was not the same as what happened to Archie, because making that connection would open a whole Pandora’s Box of trouble.

Denial is after all a way of shielding myself from the truth. But eventually realisation dawns, especially when Archie started doing a tap dance on my living room floor. “Fuck, he’s no deid.”

While he’s doing this I realised there’s one last thing we can do for him: cave in his head.
Scott gives me his teacher-doesn’t-approve stare. “Wish you wouldn’t swear, Emma. It makes you ugly.”

As if my swearing was our biggest problem right now.

I wanted to give him an earful for chastising me like I was one of his pupils, but I’m too busy watching as dead Archie takes a hacking breath and tries to get up.

I don’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe. I simply held out my finger and pointed as if auditioning for the National Lottery’s It Could Be You ad. But this was one lottery I sure as hell didn’t want to win.



Archie flung the duvet asunder. His ash-grey face was set in a grimace that reminded me of a Mayan death mask. He looked like hell, which was no surprise considering his innards were spread out all over our carpet. But it’s his eyes that were the real giveaway that Archie wasn’t Archie anymore. He had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, but now those eyes were gone, replaced by dead orbs, as black as coal. They lacked that spark of humanity and self-awareness, whatever it is that makes us human.

Something clicked in that brain of his. He stared at us like a starving dog eyeing someone's dinner. His mouth dropped open and rancid black sludge spilled out. Then he howled.
I thought I was going to puke.

He grabbed for my arm, his blackened teeth as sharp as knives snapping at me. I managed to sidestep his reach.

A scream shrieked out of my throat before I could stop it.

HOW TO KILL A ZOMBIE

The thing about being confronted by zombies is that we all think we’ll know what to do. We’ve all seen the movies, watched the TV shows. To kill a zombie you need to splatter the brains all over the shop with a gun. But the reality is different for those of us living in Scotland where we don’t have guns in our wardrobes or locked in a box, because we don’t keep guns, period. That makes killing the zombies damn difficult.

My boyfriend is useless as a handyman, so there’s no toolkit in our third floor tenement flat. We have no hammers, chisels, or drills to destroy the brain of the zombie who used to be my boyfriend’s best pal.

Okay, this so-called pal drives me mental, like the time he got Scott, who’s not a big drinker, steamboats one night and dragged him along to a lap dancing bar where he ended up slipping crisp twenties into Monique or Cindi’s g-string. (I know this because he kindly recorded footage on Scott’s mobile phone.) I’m still pissed about that, but I don’t hate him to the extent that I want to cave his head in. 

So when the thing that used to be Archie, struggles to its feet and lumbers towards us, arms outstretched, as if pretending to be rent-a-ghost, I snatch the first thing I can get my mitts on, an iron I’d forgotten to turn off, and I scud him across the head with it.

There’s an almighty hiss as it scorches his flesh, accompanied by the smell of burnt barbecue. The iron trundles onto the floor where it lies, scorching the carpet. I can’t believe what I’ve just done, and my hand goes limp.

Archie’s makes a throaty noise and lurches towards me. That's when Scott gets busy, bludgeoning his best mate over the head with an ugly, heavy lamp his parents had bought us as a housewarming present.

Globs of sticky brain matter splatter the wall as though someone dumped mince in a blender without the lid on and switched it to turbo, but Scott still keeps whacking dead Archie, because dead Archie keeps coming at me.

My back's to the wall. Will he not die, again?


The Restless Dead is available on Kindle and in Paperback 



Saturday 17 November 2012

Dead Bastards (A Scottish zombie novel) is coming soon

----------Publication date to be announced------
Delighted to announce that my zombie novel set in Glasgow, will be published by TWB Press as an ebook. To find out more, please click on the book cover and while you're at it why not check out the other great books available.
I'm so pleased to be working with Terry Wright, proprieter of TWB Press, author, screenwriter and all round good guy who is one of the most enthusiastic people I've ever met.

Anyone who knows me will know I'm obsessed with zombies. In fact, I even keep one in my closet (okay, he's about 8 inches tall, is made of plastic and is battery operated, but Fester still tries to eat me).
P.S. No, that's not a picture of me on the cover. I'm much zombier looking.

UPDATE - IN December 2014, the book was renamed The Restless Dead and given a brand new cover. Check it out on Amazon. 

Saturday 19 May 2012

Zombies & Living Cruelty Free is out on Kindle


This is probably not the cover for Deid Bastards.


Sorry, I haven’t posted in a wee while. A few weeks ago, a publisher expressed an interest inmy zombie novel Deid Bastards and I’ve been working away on that trying to perfect it. You know them zombies, they sure keep you busy.

I have a lot planned for them. I'm already the proud owner of www.deidbastards.com where I hope to be bringing you some zombietastic stuff in the near future. So stay tuned. The wecsite is currently under construction.


I’ve also been working hard to promote my book Living Cruelty Free: a guide for anyone who wants to live a more compassionate life and I am delighted to announce that as well as the traditional books, it’s now available on Kindle.

At the moment it's available on Amazon.co.uk, but I hope that will change soon.


Thursday 20 January 2011

Brain Dead Entertainment

My first film review has been posted on fantastic site shadowlocked.com. If you are considering watching this movie, please, please read my review as you need to be warned.

If you like big breasted women who like to take their tops off at every opportunity, appalling acting and a seriously bad script, watch Brain Dead. Go on. I dare you.


One of my favourite scenes in the movie, because it killed off yet another bad actor


Wednesday 8 December 2010

S'now fair

No buses or trains.  People abandoning their cars in freezing weather and trudging down the motorway like refugees, turning the M8 into one giant car park.  ‘It was like The Day After Tomorrow’ my brother told me. 



He spent four hours running around Glasgow trying to find a way home.  Went to the Bus Station.  No buses.  Went to Information,’ What do I know?’ shrugged the man in the booth.  Some information perhaps?

Same story at the train station.  ‘Oh, but there is a train ten miles away from where you really want to go and it leaves in five hours.’  Bloody fantastic info, especially when they tell you AFTER you bought your ticket.

Eventually he got home seven hours after his brother went into get him in a Land Rover.  Something about their gears makes them good in the snow apparently.

Anyway, I’m listening to this and whilst I’m thinking how terrible it is, I’m also thinking wouldn’t it be great to write a zombie novel set in the snow?  Imagine it, survivors walking by and they see a snowman and think,’ how lovely it is that kids are still doing normal things like building snowmen.  Then the thing moves and it’s a blooming zombie!  I can just see folk jumping in their cinema seats when I sell the movie rights to Night of the Killer Snow Zombies!.  

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