SCREAMERS - CHARACTER INTRO #1

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DUNCAN WHITECLOUD

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Duncan’s a little pissed about the zombies, honestly.

If supernatural creatures were gonna be a real honest-to-god thing he had to deal with – why couldn’t they have been werewolves? Shapeshifters? Skinwalkers? Werewolves were cool as hell. They had fangs and claws and an innate sense of pack. Yeah, fine, okay, they had to, you know, cater to the whims of the lunar cycle and all that, but they at least got stuff out of it. Like superpowers. And oil tycoon sideburns.

Zombies, though?

Zombies?

They smelled bad. They lurched. Their bones were softer than a wet kitchen sponge, and they couldn’t fight for shit. You ever try to get a zombie to punch you? Duncan has. It didn’t work. Their gross, clammy, dirt-mottled hands couldn’t even make a proper fist because their knuckles were too swollen with, like, knotty cartilage and corpse gas and whatever weird radioactive sludge their blood had turned into.

They were just so lame.

Duncan looked at them and didn’t feel much of anything. They were scary, maybe, in the very beginning – but that was because they were impossible, not because they were threatening. Who’s threatened by a partially decomposed skeleton with Gumby dentures? Who’s running from that? They can’t track. They can't hunt. They can’t talk. They can’t strategize. They aren’t huddling around a little zombie whiteboard at halftime, gnawing on the spouts of their Gatorade bottles and drawing up their next play – there’s no plan, there’s no endgame, there’s no teamwork, there’s just, like, a groaning, shuffling, seemingly inseparable horde with lemming syndrome and a mindless thirst for body heat.

Why was that apocalyptic?

Why was that worth dismantling modern civilization?

Who fucking decided that?

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SCREAMERS is a Young Adult horror/fantasy novel that I'll be finishing a first draft of for NaNoWriMo this year. It features a motley crew of irreverent teenagers, several reminders that the concept of "survival" is always relative, and a century-old murder mystery that ultimately matters a lot more to the story than the zombies do. I will be posting six character intros prior to November 1st, as well as a weekly excerpt/progress update once NaNoWriMo begins. Thanks for reading!

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