An Excerpt

In case you didn't get the idea from the last post, I'm writing a novel. Here's an excerpt thats from my Nanowrimo page (because I love Nanowrimo and anticipate it's coming each year with an eagerness that I can hardly conceal but that's a story for later.)

Excerpt:

It was the beginning of the end. At some level in her tortured mind, Angelene knew that. As she stood there and stared down at the woman she’d just killed, she found herself… second guessing. In a moment where her mind had always been clean and clear and wonderful, this thing, this doubt was casting a blight upon her ease.

She was just lying there. It wasn’t like she could do anything else, not with that hole in her chest made by Angelene’s knife. You would have thought that over the years she would have learned to take someone out neater, to make it look as if nature had done the deed and not her- but no. Poison wasn’t an option because it took too long, had the potential hurt others who were not her intended targets. A while back, she used to stage suicides, but Angelene couldn’t muster the will to stage the elaborate set-up for it- she just wanted to get it done.

'This is not discreet.' Her mind said, always the one to bring these things up when she had something else to do. It had been doing that a lot lately, especially now that the doubt was seeking sanctuary in it. 'And this was discreet? I don’t think so...'
'It’s the way it’s always been done.' Angelene took refuge in this thought; there was something calming about being in familiar waters, something comforting about being in her same ‘groove.’ In ‘It’s the way that it’s always been done,’ Angelene found all the comfort and warmth that her body couldn’t supply anymore.

She reached down and methodically cleaned the blade of her knife on the woman’s skirt, for the purposes of hygene obviously. It wasn’t hygenic to just leave blood on a blade like that, moldering away- someone could get sick. The blood was hard to get off- she had to scrub the cold metal hard with her thumb until the red smeared to a yellowish stain and then was gone. She pushed so hard her thumb slipped and the blade bit deeply into her skin. The knife scraped against the bone and pushed a section of flesh on her finger in agony.

Angelene yelped, and then turned fast to see if anyone was alerted by the sound of her voice. There were footsteps in the hall outside. She swore in her head and quickly pressed herself up against the wall where she couldn’t be immidiately seen from anyone entering the door clutching her thumb to her.

“Phaela? Are you alright?”

Angelene tried to pinpoint where the voice had come from in the outside hall. The shadows hid her, but the body was displayed prominantly in the room like there was nothing else to look at. She wondered if she had time enough to drag it somewhere that would buy her some time, but even then she would have to clean up the blood. The window at the end of the room beckoned to her, but she didn’t know if she could get to it in time. Her hand twinged at her, but she knew enough to keep quiet. God, the window was so far away, but why was she hesitating? The only option there had ever been from this point was flight. She didn’t need to kill the others because they didn’t concern her.

How had she ended up here? How had she submersed herself this far into madness? How had she… How?

The dagger felt good in her hands. She didn’t have one before, or couldn’t get to it. He’d taken it off her after he’d tied her up. That was why.
Her hands were shaking.
She closed her eyes.

--

It had all started… with an innocent experiment. She’d decided to see the enemy, and find out for herself if they were truly so terrible after such a long time, if they could be so terrible as they had been so long ago.
She’d tied her hair up, but that was acceptable. Every woman tied her hair up here, and she didn’t look out of place- as long as you didn’t count the fact that her pale skin was bright in the hot air. And though her clothes were almost outlandish to the natives, they didn’t question her- she slipped in and out of the public consciousness.

A hand reached out from behind a building, and took her by surprise. It pulled her back and pushed her up heavily against the wall, and another clapped over her mouth to stifle her scream of surprise.

“I know what you are.” The man said, his lips barely distinguishable from underneath the great mess of hair that grew from the lower half of his face. “You can’t hide it from me.”

Angelene tried to say something, and put her hands up in a desperate, useless attempt to placate the man. She tried to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ but was silenced when he beat her heavily across the cheek.

She fell to the side with a cry, blood in her mouth. She tried to call out for help, but there was no one around.

There was a hand in front of her mouth, but his hand was so big that the misshapen, knobby thumb blocked any air from getting into her nose. Her fingers clawed madly at his arm, but he was wearing something thick and she couldn’t tear herself free to breathe- she quite wanted, quite needed to breathe; the feeling of his rancid breath scalding her ear, the horrible pressure of his lips just barely brushing against her skin when he spoke to make sure she heard him, made her sick. Angelene could feel her stomach wanting to heave, but she knew she couldn’t act on anything because she didn’t want to drown herself.

‘You think… I would never figure it out? I know your kind, they always think they can get away with anything, always think they can take advantage of anyone-’ The voice of the man was getting agitated now as he became more enraged at his own words.

Angelene felt the grey darkness eat at her vision before she felt herself droop and her body slump over in his grasp. For a moment, she tried to drag herself back, determined now to use what she had been determined before not to use because she would do anything to get out of this alive, anything to get back to…

--

But then there was darkness, almost like what she was sitting in now, in the slow, split seconds between the footfalls outside the door that swallowed her up.

She leapt across the room, but as she did she could already hear the door opening behind her- maybe if she was lucky, she could get out the window before she was noticed, but she heard the scream before she had her hands on the window sill and knew she had been spotted.

--
Please please please tell me what you think. Even if you think it's horrible. Especially if you think it's horrible.

My Novel

I'm writing a novel. If it had a name it would be 'The Angel of Death' or something like that, and it has all manner of undead things prowling between the pages.

She has had many names- Martyr, mother, murderer. Often the only thing she is addressed by is a scream, abruptly cut off by the deft slice of a blade.
Angelene is a broken woman, striving to make something livable out of her unnaturally extended life, kept moving and in a state that is similar to living by the glass heart around her neck. 'Udwolmir,' they would have called her in her native tongue, if she ever spoke it- Deadwoman.
For an eternity Angelene has trekked the world over and over- a murderer- her hands covered in the blood of countless victims. Each one of them brought down before their prime, each one silenced before the world came crashing down. She labors through her penance- her own personal hell, as she dubs it- for a mistake she made: trusting another living being.
"Never Again."

Angelene is this wonderful little angsty creation of mine. How I adore her cynicism! Anyway the story itself,despite what the excerpt above may suggest, is not just one long whine from an unfortunate woman; I attempted to put lots and lots of fantasy violence in there too, because they say you should only write things that you would want to read and the entirety of my early childhood revolved around J.R.R. Tolkien.

Angelene, the Deadwoman, is one of the few surviving members of a decimated race that has nearly gone extinct after a war with the now-reigning humans of the land. They would have called her the Martyr had anyone known about her, but of course no one knew- doomed to haunt the shadows forever she would have thought, doing a thankless job.

A spirit was let loose years ago when everything started; slinking through the countryside and possessing those it deems fit enough to carry out it's malevolent will. Destruction. Terror. Hatred and Fear. For this demon to take root in the minds of an unsuspecting victim would mean a inviting these things upon the world. Angelene knows this, and has known it for centuries. She has been tracking down and killing those possessed by the force from the Darkness to keep the world she once was a part of from being torn asunder. Perhaps it is the lingering imprints of the past world that will Angelene from letting this one go to waste, as a heartbroken lover would still cherish the torn-up pieces of an old photograph, or perhaps it is guilt that has trapped her in this rut. It was the guilt of her own involvment in the freeing of the spirit that has walled her in until she could do nothing but her job, and has done it for longer than she can even remember. For all intents and purposes, Angelene is a shadow, slowly fading until there is nothing left of her to speak of. All she is is pain and death and memories kept alive by an unnatural curse and a trinket around her neck.

But now, after all this time during which the real Angelene has faded into this shade of herself, the Udwolmir is ripped back in to a past she watched burned. People she'd thought were dead and buried have clawed their way out of the abyss of the past. Little did she know the events that had started everything so long ago are still unfolding, and she is still an integral part of a massive conspiracy of which she herself had barely uncovered.
--

Now I think I've burned a fair amount of words up in rambling about my novel, but I hope you get the idea...

School and the like...

So as it turns out, this whole blog is a school assignment.  That's why it's covered in blood and mentions zombies all the time; because as least I can have some fun and mess with people while my mind lays dormant throughout the day.  Don't look so shocked, it's not like I'd willingly talk about school- the loathing I have for [SCHOOL NAME REDACTED BECAUSE I DON'T WANT YOU STALKING ME] High School  sometimes knows no bounds.  Just like every other teenager.  It's not like this is a particularily bad place to be, I'm sure there's worse places, but I don't like people.  And if there's anything a suburban school has, it's a concentrated population of wise-ass idiots.  That's just the way it is. 

Anyway enough about my passive bitterness about this damn school We're supposed to blog about school security, so I'll work some zombies in to the mix because why not?

Imagine a prison... 

Like this but with more sex.
Now take out any windows that a prison might have and add a color scheme from the 70's and lockers.  That is my school.  As the Zombie Survival Guide suggests, a prison layout may not be that bad for a group of survivors to live in after the initial damage of the outbreak has been done; however if I, god forbid, happen to be inside the school when everything starts the place is a deathtrap.  All the rooms have one door and no windows; we'd be packed in like sardines.  Go School.  Woo.

I don't know.  I believe I think about this too much.  The point is you wont see me running to the school should there be zombies.  

Zombies!

So I decided I'd get this whole thing started off with something simple, just to ease people into it.  Zombies.  How I love zombie stories, zombie books, zombie pictures, and planning for the zombie apocalypse.  I don't know how evident that was from the title of this blog.  The thing that got this whole infatuation started was the veritable Bible of the genre, The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks.

When I'm not reading First Blood again, or my magnificent tome of H.P. Lovecraft stories, I'm reading a zombie book.  Zombiebooklist.com is my haven.  Imagine this:


But instead of chocolate, everything is made out of zombie books (and antiques.  Zombie books and antiques.)

So.  Here.



ZOMBIES
This is a picture I did when I was reading the awesome book Dying to Live: Life Sentence by Kim Paffenroth.  It's rather odd for a zombie book; yes there are survivors struggling to live on in a world full of undead (as all zombie books should have) but half of the story is written through the eyes of a smart zombie who helps the humans.  They are two zombies on the right of the picture who are not actively trying to kill the girl.

I think that wraps it up at least for the moment.  I'll be back for more antique-loving, gun-toting, zombie-killing, kitten-saving fun later.