As the title suggests, Snakes On A Plane-style, here is a thing with monsters for you (not, sadly, a Billy McPugh sequel though). Virginia Day Zero is completely free, gratis, etc. and you can go and get it and read it and all that malarkey direct from me as a Kindle/epub zip, from Kobo, or from Smashwords in all formats (the epub is the same bar the required SW title page, but the others are auto-converted from a .doc - which, on a Mac without MS Office, turns out to be a total cocking nightmare. If it’s a Kindle .mobi you want, I’d download from my site because the formatting is slightly better since it’s hand-carved).
As the title suggests, it’s set in the same universe and at the same time - that time being the end of the world - as Day Zero. In fact, in the first draft of that book it formed an independent sub-story showing some of what was going on outside Philly. It was excised in editing, and so here it is, free of its shackles, and very spanky and neat. Neither story spoils/aids the other, reading one will do no harm to the other, nor is either necessary to the other. Independent. Completely. FWIW, this one has more of a backwoodsy, King-ish sort of vibe to it, whereas DZ has a lot more set pieces and action. Ish.
Enough! Story infodump!
Murph and Rory Caulfield are two regular kids in the small town of Coombs in rural Virginia. When their uncle goes to fetch the local sheriff after finding “something bad” on his farm, the boys go to check it out for themselves. What they find is more than just bad, though - it could kill them and everyone they know.
The race is on now. First to escape, then to find out what’s happened to their family and their town. If they can do that, they can think about finding a safe place to hole up away from the horrors that pursue them.
But day zero is here, and maybe there are no safe places. Not any more.
There you go.
Cover pic, incidentally, is ‘Lonely nights wear on' by Gill Garrett (cc by).
(And yes, it is on Amazon, but it’ll cost money there until it filters through SW to B&N and iBooks and I can flag it for price-matching down to zero. Avoid that for now.)
(And yes, I’m still working on the last writer’s cut of the old Penguin books. The last one is a total bastard of a thing, but I am getting there.)
(And in the meantime I’m also working on careful planning for another thing for my agent. Because I’m overloaded with free time, what with having two kids and my wife back to work.)
(Quad-paragraph parenthesis chain, mothertruckers.)
