The Post by Kevin A. Munoz Book Tour and Giveaway :)
The
Post
by
Kevin A. Munoz
Genre:
Dystopian Thriller
Ten
years after the world’s oil went sour and a pandemic killed most of
the population, Sam Edison is the chief of police of The Little Five,
a walled-in community near Atlanta, Georgia. Those who survived share
the world with what are known as hollow-heads: creatures who are no
longer fully human.
A
man and a pregnant teenager arrive at the gate and are welcomed into
the town. They begin to settle in when suddenly both are murdered by
an unknown assailant. In the course of investigation, Chief Edison
discovers that the girl was fleeing a life of sexual slavery, and
that some members of the Atlanta community were complicit in the
human trafficking network that had ensnared her.
In
retaliation for Edison’s discoveries, agents of the network abduct
the stepdaughter of the town’s mayor. Chief Edison and three
companions track the kidnappers to Athens, Georgia, where they
discover that the entire city is engaged in human trafficking. By the
time Edison has recovered the kidnapped girl, the other three
rescuers have been killed, leaving Edison alone to bring the mayor’s
stepdaughter home while evading both human and non-human monsters.
Against such great odds, will Sam ever make it to Little Five alive?
“So
it’s true? People beyond the wall? On foot?” She shoves her thick
glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “That’s
what I’m told.” “Ask
them if they have any copper wire. We’re running low, and I’d
really like to have spare wire in case Leuko has trouble again.”
Leuko is a white Volvo station wagon. “Oh, and glow plugs. That’s
what we really need. But they probably don’t have those. No one
bothers to keep them around if they don’t know what they are.” “I’ll
ask, but I don’t think they came bearing car parts.” I walk more
briskly, following Luther, until it occurs to Braithwaite that I’m
in a hurry, and she wanders back onto her property, still asking
questions but no longer directing them at me. The
tunnel is just beyond the biodiesel farm, and the tunnel wall is one
third of the way through on both northbound and southbound sides. We
built the wall closer to our side of the tunnel so that we would have
some measure of control if any shriekers found their way here and
decided to call their friends. Most days, we only get one or two
hollow-heads, and if they come too close, they’re easily dispatched
with arrows. There is always one rifleman from the sweep team on the
wall as well, but they spend most of their days playing solitaire.
Mayor
Aloysius Weeks is waiting for us with my other two officers,
Pritchard and Kloves. Pritchard has about twenty years on me, but
he’s a good shot. I brought him on mainly to satisfy the previous
mayor’s paranoia about an invasion of the infected. Pritch has done
a good job keeping the peace since then, so I haven’t seen any
reason to let him go. And Augustus Kloves was my idea: a big, powerful
black man with an intimidating voice, he styles himself as my
enforcer whenever someone winds up too drunk to go home quietly at
three in the morning. I like to tell myself that in his pre-collapse
life he had a paradoxically benign occupation, like a certified
public accountant, but it doesn’t matter. The end of the world
changes a person. I’ve never seen an exception to that rule. Mayor
Weeks is Regina’s husband, but if I didn’t already know that, I
would never have guessed it. Where Regina is friendly and
forthcoming, Weeks is closed off, reticent. He never says anything with
ten words that he could say with none. I find this to be an admirable
quality in a politician. There is a much lower risk of hearing a lie.
Perhaps it comes from his time as a professor, before the collapse.
He told me once that he used to teach a subject called “Southeast
Asian religions.” One of his books is near the bottom of a stack I
haven’t read yet. The
mayor shakes my hand as I approach the tunnel door. “A young girl,
maybe fourteen, and a man. Thirties. With a shotgun.” So
that’s why I was called out here. With a few quick gestures I
position Pritch and Kloves on the upper platform and Luther at the
reinforced door at ground level. Pritch and Kloves make themselves visible
and draw their weapons. Once they’re in position, I spin the
combination lock to the door and pull off the chain. I step through,
and for the first time in what feels like ages, I am outside the
Little Five. I
keep my own weapon holstered and my arms relaxed at my sides. Luther
closes the door and locks it behind me. Before I approach the
strangers, I scan past them at the light beyond the tunnel, checking
for signs of hangers-on. Of course, if the strangers had made enough
noise to be noticed by a group of hollow-heads, they wouldn’t have
gotten as far as the tunnel wall. Clearly, they were careful. If
there are any roaming hordes nearby, they’re here by chance alone. “Good
morning,” I say, keeping my body language as nonthreatening as
possible. The
young woman is pregnant. That’s easy enough to see; she’s at
least seven months along. Her clothes are torn and dirty. Her shoes
are missing shoelaces and held together with old duct tape. She hasn’t
washed in days, at least. She looks hungry, perhaps confused. The
man is not much better, but he at least seems to have his wits. Weeks
was right: he’s in his late twenties or early thirties. He holds
his shotgun like a hunter, with the stock under his shoulder and his
hand under the barrel. He carries it like it’s loaded, though, and
when he answers my greeting he swings the barrel a few inches in my
direction. “Good
morning,” he replies, looking up at the upper platform where Pritch
and Kloves are watching. His accent suggests he’s from South
Carolina. “We don’t mean any harm. We weren’t sure there was
anyone still living here. But we could use some food and shelter, and
the girl could use a place to rest.” Back
in the early days, we let in anyone who found us and counted
ourselves lucky that we had one more person who could help us
rebuild. From time to time that turned out to be a bad idea, but on
balance, it worked for us. I, myself, was one of the first people let
through what was a much smaller wall at the time. Even Mayor Weeks
didn’t arrive until a few years after we’d built the perimeter
fence. The
fact that the man has a shotgun doesn’t suggest anything other than
that he has a head on his shoulders. Outside of the protected
neighborhoods, Atlanta and presumably the rest of Georgia—and maybe
the whole continent—are unsafe for travelers on foot. Hollow-heads
haven’t been as much of a problem recently in this area, but I
don’t know how far these two have traveled. So I choose to give
them the benefit of the doubt. “If you’re willing to let us
secure that weapon until you leave, I’ll consider letting you
through the wall.” It
sounds reasonable enough, but most men in his position wouldn’t
take me at my word. He doesn’t know anything about us. If we take
away his only protection, that will leave him vulnerable to whatever
we might want to do with him—or to the girl with him. I expect him
to try to bargain with me, to find a way to keep his weapon and still
be permitted inside. But he offers no resistance to my demand,
setting his shotgun on the ground and pushing it out of reach with
the toe of his badly worn boot. I
glance back at my men on the wall. They have the same curious
expression that I must be wearing: they’re as familiar as I am with
how this dance is supposed to go. “Do
you have a doctor?” the stranger asks. I
rest the palm of my hand on my holstered pistol and look over the
young woman a second time. She looks far too young to be carrying a
child—but I’ve seen younger. The combination of a collapsed
population and no functioning condom factories makes for a lot of
teen mothers these days. We don’t exactly encourage pregnancy, but
we can’t quite bring ourselves to show righteous indignation when
it happens. We need the babies more than we need the morality. But
none of that is what worries me. Doctors mean illness, and that could
mean fever. And fever drags along with it the potential for something
worse. At last count, the Little Five boasted a population of
six hundred—and four people whom we call doctors. I wish we had
twice as many. They are indispensable to us. The
man must realize that I’m giving his companion more scrutiny, as he
says, “The last doc she saw said she has—” and now he says the
word carefully, to be sure not to make a mistake—“preeclampsia.”
The
air goes thin in my lungs. Had someone else been standing here in my
position, the man might have needed to say more, to plead more. But I
know the word. I lost my wife two years before the collapse and
nearly lost my unborn daughter because of what preeclampsia can
become. The thought of this young woman suffering from seizures and
stroke is enough to goad me into action. “Luther,”
I shout, “open the door.” The
chain rattles against the metal, and the door swings open with a low
creak. I usher the strangers in, and as the woman passes me, I think
I can hear her whisper, “Thank you.”
I
am about to follow them back into the Little Five when I spot another
figure moving on the far side of the tunnel. “Is
anyone else with you?” I hiss at the man. He says no, and I draw my
weapon. I aim in the direction of the newest visitor, knowing that my
officers will understand the gesture. It doesn’t take long before
Pritchard grabs binoculars and identifies what I’m seeing. “Looks
like a hollow-head, Chief,” he says in his usual raspy, homespun
tone. My
skin crawls under my coat. If handled calmly, a lone hollowhead is
not a real threat. But we don’t handle them calmly, even after all
this time. They look like human beings, but they behave like animals,
and on some unfortunate occasions one or more of us will recognize a
friend or loved one who was lost to us long ago. We try to think of
them as being already dead. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a
complex combination of relief and remorse every time I have to shoot
one. They may be empty shells, but they were once like us, and they
are most certainly still alive. In the depths of our gallows humor,
we sometimes wish they were truly “the living dead.” Then, at
least, we could put them down without feeling like monsters. Instead,
they are hollow-heads. The pandemic that ended the world made its
mark by consuming chunks of its victims’ brains. The parts that
control the higher functions are little more than slop
sloshing
around inside the cranium. Personality is gone. Memory is gone.
Gone, too, are all the cares of the world and all vestiges of
civilization. There
is no cure. There was never going to be any cure. When the
hollow-heads first appeared, the good oil was all but gone, and we
were already out of time. Braithwaite
and one or two of the other mathematically inclined eggheads in the
Little Five once did what they called a “back of the envelope”
calculation and figured that ninety percent of the world’s population
succumbed to the disease. The entire world’s survivors, then, were
less than twice the population of pre-collapse America. Less than the
population of India. Of the ten million people who lived
in Georgia before, fewer than a million survived. How many are still
alive today is impossible to know. The
hollow-heads are survivors, too. But they survive in a different
world from ours, and they don’t do back of the envelope
calculations, or remember that there once was an India, or an
America, or a Georgia. They
travel in packs, most of the time, but have just enough brainpower to
send off scouts in pairs and threes to search for food—wild dogs,
cats, deer, the occasional goat, and people. They also seem to be
able to tell the difference between the run-of-themill hollow-head
and the shriekers, and use shriekers as scouts when they can. Most
hollow-heads don’t make noise: they remain uncannily silent,
even when they’re agitated. A few, though—maybe one in
twenty—still know how to scream. And because they don’t care
about their voices, and don’t have the usual social anxieties about
looking foolish in public, when they scream, they scream.
Louder than anyone I’ve ever heard. We
make sure to put shriekers down quickly, remorse and selfdoubt be
damned. The
hollow-head at the far end of the tunnel looks to be alone. It’s
female, wearing rags that were once proper clothes, with bloodcaked
bare feet. For whatever reason, the infection is a jealous god, and
hollow-heads don’t get sick like the rest of us. They don’t get
tetanus, they don’t die of gangrene, they don’t suffer from any
of the ailments that come from being bruised, scratched, stabbed, or
cut. They can bleed out like anyone, and if they get gut-shot they
will
eventually die of starvation or blood loss, but I’ve been assured
by people who claim to know that hollow-heads don’t even die from
having their own shit seep into the blood stream. Frostbite still affects
them, even if their limbs won’t rot, and some of our scouts have
seen them chewing off their own dead arms. But even that is only
helpful to people living in the north. Here in old Georgia, where
the coldest day is like a Pennsylvania spring morning, it’s not
enough. This
hollow-head is intact, all of its parts in the right places, which
makes it more dangerous than the average. Still, I’m the one with
the pistol. I wait and watch to see if it realizes I’m here, but
all it does is shamble from one side of the tunnel to the other,
munching on something hanging from its mouth. A rat, maybe. Because
hollow-heads operate entirely on instinct, I can’t rely on this one
feeling full and deciding not to bother with me. If it sees prey, it
will attack, full stomach or no, and if it’s a shrieker, it will
alert its pack. Shooting
a gun attracts hollow-heads only about half the time. Maybe
the sound isn’t natural enough, or it reminds their hollowedout
brains of thunder. No one knows. They certainly chase after voices,
loud footsteps, biodiesel engines, and just about anything else.
Even so, I don’t want to waste a bullet at this distance, with this
light. I inch forward, keeping as quiet as I can, trying to stay out
of its field of vision. It reaches the northbound side of the tunnel and
stops to rub against the concrete like a dog scratching an itch. A
few steps closer and I will be confident I can get a good shot to the
chest. But that’s not enough: I need to shoot the head. If she’s
a
shrieker and I leave her with one good lung, she can still cry out in
the few moments she has before she dies. A
perverse part of me wants to holster the pistol and use my knife, but
I’m not that stupid. Being bitten by a hollow-head is almost always
a death sentence. Sepsis sets in, the fever comes, and then
you get six hours of feeling better than you ever have before, as
every bad bug in your system is eradicated by the resurgent
infection. But from there the descent is quick as your brain melts
away in
your skull. I’ve seen it happen more than a few times, and the
worst part, without question, is being aware of your own devolution. It’s
like suffering from an aggressive dementia that destroys you between
breaths. The
hollow-head stops pressing against the wall and turns, its glassy
eyes finding me at last. Its shambling motions give way to the
instincts of a predator in sight of large prey, and it propels itself toward
me, arms reaching, blood-caked hands grasping for me. It shows
blackened teeth and opens its mouth to scream, but I lodge a bullet
in its throat. The body collapses immediately, a gurgling sound
pouring out of its neck along with the blood. My
gun arm feels heavy, as if the moral ambiguities had weight. One
would think that after ten years this would get easier. And maybe it
has. Just not enough. I don’t recognize the one I’ve killed, but
it—she—used to belong somewhere. Her face once made her mother
smile. I take a deep breath and remind myself not to think about such
things.
I
holster my weapon and return to the wall, fetching the stranger’s
shotgun along the way. Luther chains and locks the door behind me,
and my other officers come down from the upper deck. Before
I turn my attention back to the visitors, I tell the guards on duty
to watch for more hollow-head scouts and to clear the body from the
road.
Kevin
Muñoz grew up just outside of Philadelphia. After wandering across
the country for a few years, he received a PhD from Emory University
in 2008. A little later, he decided to leave the academic life behind
to pursue his first passion: writing. He has lived in seven U.S.
states over the years, observing and adopting each new place as
settings and inspiration for his fiction. He spent fifteen years in
Georgia, where the seeds of THE POST were planted. He now lives near
Seattle with his two beagle traveling companions.
I started work on The Post as a challenge to myself. The genre isn’t one I’d worked in before, and I was curious to see what it felt like from the inside. The thing is, “zombie post-apocalyptic fiction” is a well-trod path. Most stories in the genre focus on the tropes of zombie invasion and are set during the peak of whatever precipitating disaster sets the stage for the story. There are some stories, novels, comic books and films that break the mold, however, to varying degrees. I wanted to break the mold and then grind it into powder.
The result is what I like to call a “zombie-slash-detective adventure novel” that has almost nothing to do with zombies. They are there - on the periphery, and occasionally right up in your face - but they don’t drive the story and aren’t the main antagonists the characters are facing. Some say that supernatural monsters, like vampires and werewolves and zombies, are metaphors for prosaic human evil. But human evil, I find, is more compelling than any artifice that masks the depravity in the shell of something that is very obviously not real.
The Post started as a challenge to myself, but it became something greater, more insistent, the deeper I got into it. This was a story I really wanted to tell, using all of the practice and skill I’d developed over the prior 16 years of writing. And now four years later, and a week out, I’m pretty happy with the result.
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