Welcome to 2013...time to step up.

Greetings to you as the calendars open to page one around the world. So...resolutions? Sure. Made 'em. How many will survive the month of January? Can't tell you. However, this year brings with it a clean slate and a promise of unknown opportunity that I plan to take full advantage of as I plan to make this one special.

So...time for the first announcement.

The DEAD books will no longer be released every six months. After book six, Dead: Confrontation, releases on May 30, 2013, the books will come out in FOUR month intervals instead of six. Yep, you read it here...A new DEAD book will start coming out every four month! My intention is to really focus on completing book six, and then going right to work on book seven even before book six even reaches the public. In fact, my hope is that book six will be finished by no later than the end of March.

To that end, here is the open of Dead: Confrontation. This is raw and right off the fingertips, so excuse any errors.

Vignettes XXXI

Over the years, science grew in leaps and bounds, yet the brain continued to baffle. What is certain is that the brains of children were developing exponentially in the first dozen years of life.

When the dead began to walk, another certainty was discovered: the only way to kill the undead was to destroy the brain. Nobody could explain why, and there would be no opportunity to explore this phenomenon in a properly outfitted laboratory.

That is why nobody could explain the peculiar behavior demonstrated by the zombies of the young ones. There was obviously something different at work in the child-zombie. Perhaps it was the fact that the brain was still going through such dynamic change and growth. Whatever the case, it was becoming clear that the ‘children of the dead’ (as some would begin to call them) demonstrated a marked difference between themselves and their brethren.

***

The world was awash in varying shades of gray. It was only for the first few seconds that images of ‘before’ remained. In those fleeting moments, there were faces that came and went. One in particular seemed to linger the longest. It was the face of a woman with creamy skin and a petite nose with eyes that sparkled despite their dark coloring. The upturned slant of the eyes only made them more beautiful.

A word tied to that face, but it was more of a feeling. Something about that word sent a feeling of what could only be described as peace through the last sparks of electricity that powered the mind of this newly dead person. The word tried to form on dead lips, but the only sound that came was a rasping wheeze. That word?

Mom.

Then, there was a moment of absolute nothingness. The creature stood in snow that came to its thighs. It turned its head one way and then the other after several moments of complete stillness. Like so many of its kind, the images had faded. Yet, something remained.

It began to move. There had been a single source of heat nearby, but it had already forgotten. What it did “remember” was that it needed to move in a certain direction. Away. It needed to move away from that source. Yes, it craved the heat, and a desire to feed on that heat was present (if this thing could be given the human trait of desire). Yet, it was alone. And it did not like being alone. Something hummed in a tiny part of the almost completely dead brain. For some reason, an occasional spark would build like a teardrop, and then fire through the wasteland of that mysterious organ: the brain.