Dead 2 Synopsis, Part 1

Hello again...I'm kinda busy at the moment, because I'm going out to California on Saturday, to visit my daughter, meet her boyfriend, and hit Joshua Tree National Park, Yosemite, and Monterrey. In the meanwhile, I decided to photograph a new model (her name's Hannah) and put a skazillion new pictures on my computer and print them out, and boy does that eat up your time. I did want to do a couple more posts, however, and so I'm going to use something ready made...if you're fans of The Dead, you'll probably find it pretty interesting. For what it's worth, I've been contemplating a sequel to the book for quite some time...maybe The Dead will take off sufficiently in its permuted press incarnation that they'll be able to buy a follow-up...you should pester them about it. Anyway, posting this stuff here might be the only light of day that any of these ideas see.

This is what I’ve been contemplating.

The book takes places two or three days after the end of The Dead. Lead character wakes up from a really nasty dream about being thrown by zombies into a swimming pool full of oily sludge and corpses who are just coming round...he’s relieved to find it’s all a dream...then remembers he actually escaped from a similar situation, and that he and six other folks are hiding in the Barclay’s US building in Wilmington, DE. Things are getting colder and darker. Wilmiongton’s already been swept by the dead, and partially burned...for one reason and another, the zombies get up to the top floor at Barclay’s.

We’re introduced to the characters...Haven’t settled on a lot of names, of course. One of the characters is going to be an objectivist...one’s going to be a shithead musician...he’s going to have a relatively sympathetic girlfriend...there’s also going to be a badass convenience-store Sikh who actually carries a saber. There really isn’t any debate about what’s going on...we’re mainly concerned about a wounded guy who’s about to croak.

He dies...they debate what do with him...he’s a real problem, because he’ll know where they are when he comes back. Putting him outside won’t help, and they can’t quite bring themselves to cut him up. Outside, there’s a big fire....they sneak out after dark and toss him in...but a sleetstorm puts the fire out, and the corpses sweep the city again, and bivouac near the Barclay’s building. Going back up to the fifth floor, our protags watch and wait helplessly until their friend comes crawling out of the charred ruins and rats on the to his new compadres. A horde of zombies invades the building. Our protags have given some thought to an escape route, and they manage to shoot their way free...this is all in the first forty pages or so.

For the next couple of chapters, they’re on the run...they see a lot of ghastly stuff and have a bunch of near-misses. But finally they’re caught...a platoon of corpses brings them to a giant truck-park south of Wilmington, which has been functioning as a kind of death-camp for the Dead. The corpses have maintained a few big tractor-trailors as carbon-monoxide gas-chambers, but they seem to phasing that stuff out...now that they’ve built their army, they can really settle down and play with their victims. But the dead are also using the truck park as a place where they bring mangled zombies so they can regenerate...the ones who aren’t too messed up just come back, but the ones who’re really impossibly fragmentary are all jumbled together, and fuse to form some really horrible conglomerates...the head zombies are also creating bonewolf and Cairn type critters, and if they’re really pissed off at one of their own number, they dismember and unravel them and put the bits in with the bones...we wind up with bone-monsters with all these coprses kind of threaded through them. The fence surrounding the camp is made up of a similar arrangement...great skeins and tangles of barbed wire with corpses strung through it.

Our POV people serve as horrified eyeballs for a while, and then the dead turn their attention to them in earnest...one character dies hideously...then there’s a storm of explosions and gunfire, and three guys blast through the wire and save our buddies...these intruders are well-armed and very formidible, shrugging off massive wounds, and even though two of them are brought down, enough chaos is caused for our protags to escape, led south by a very tough dude who identifies himself as Max.
Although we don’t find this out till later, this is indeed Max from the first book...all sorts of stuff gets revealed slowly. He is, however, back down from heaven...while his final afterlife disposition is assured, he required some addtional work, because of his lack of charity...offered a chance to purge some more of his sins, he’s come back down to help dimwits out...he can be fearfully mutilated, but not killed...actually, he’s not unlike the zombies in that respect.

Anyway, our ragged bloodied band keeps on heading south...something is happening at the Delaware Memorial Bridge...columns of corpses are converging on the western end of it, and our protags get driven that way. Turns out a small armored column from a fictitious army base in NJ has stalled on the bridge...they’ve got two M1 tanks and a bunch of APC’s, along with supply trucks...the tanks have broken down at either end of the central span...there’s an army of corpses, commanded by Legion, blocking the eastern approach to the bridge...and after our POV characters get up on the bridge, the western approach, commanded by a second Legion, block the Western approach. Manual systems allow the M1's to turn their turrets and aim their guns, etc, and high explosive rounds hold the dead at bay, but basically, we have a hold the fort situation set on a big suspension bridge...