Z 2134

popped the pill into his mouth, swallowed without water, then squeezed his eyes at the sudden pain, slapping his right palm to the side of his head as an angry intensity tore through his head.
    He stood, dizzy, then tried to sit, but was afraid he would fall flat on his ass. He lasted a second before he did. Jonah twitched on the floor, certain there was poison inside him and that despite his promises, Egan had managed to exact his revenge, after all.
    “It’s OK,” Father said from somewhere on a distant planet. “Everything will be fine. The pill is murdering your mind’s intruders. You must make it through the pain and know you’re stronger than it and that no matter how much pain you’re in now, it’s only temporary.”
    Father Truth set his hand on Jonah’s back and repeated, “Just a few more minutes and everything will be fine.”
    The world went black, and Father Truth disappeared.
    Jonah was trapped in his own head. The words murdering intruders tore through his brain, over and over until he opened his eyes.
    He was no longer in the station.
    Jonah was back at his house, deep inside a memory he couldn’t remember ever having.
    Jonah looked around the room at the aged panels of his apartment’s old wooden walls, and the grimy light made the space seem cruel. He tried to make sense of his memory.
    Molly looked up, smiling as she saw him. “Hey, sweetie, you’re home early! Did you come to check up on us?”
    Jonah didn’t answer.
    Instead, he pulled the shock stick from his belt, marched over to Molly, grabbed her by the throat with his left hand, pressing his fingers hard into her flesh as the eyes bulged from their sockets, then bashed her skull in.
    Molly never had a chance to scream.
    Her daughter did.
    Jonah turned, surprised to see his daughter standing behind him, curdling the air with her deafening scream.
    Jonah flashed awake, back in the train station, his entire body shaking. Father sat next to him, looking down with his kind face.
    “What the hell?” Jonah screamed. “No, no, no. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. What the hell was that?”
    “That,” Father said, “was the truth, Jonah.”
    To Be Continued…
    In Season 2 of Z 2134

AUTHORS’ NOTE
    A year into writing our weekly serials, Sean and I (Dave) get asked two questions more often than any others.
    “When is the next Yesterday’s Gone coming out?”
    “When are you two going to write a zombie series?”
    Having engaged readers who want our serialized take on zombies is awesome. It’s a massive compliment, like wanting to see how a director would handle your favorite book as film.
    People want to see what we’ll do with zombies, and we love that!
    Truth is, we’ve wanted to do a zombie story for a while. I’ve always loved zombies. They’re one of the few monsters (other than aliens) which scare me in fiction. They also plague my dreams more constantly than any other nightmare. One of the creepiest scenes planned for the second season of Z comes directly from a dream I had right when we were signed to 47North.
    Back when everyone else was writing vampires, and before zombies took off as “the next big thing,” Sean suggested we write a zombie book before they became too trendy . That was in 2008, before Amazon’s Kindle helped e-books explode, and before we could justify turning down paid work in hopes that we MIGHT sell some paperbacks if we spent a few months writing.
    We put a year into writing our serials each week, and had launched four series, when we finally decided to write our first zombie story. Not just a story , but the same character-driven, cliffhanger-filled, serialized fiction we love to read, watch, and write. With zombies.
    But now, it seems like everyone is writing zombie books.
    Zombies have become, as Sean predicted years ago, trendy. Which is not exactly a surprise — that’s how things work in fiction, just like all corners of pop culture. Everything takes its turn moving through cyclical trends. As with anything trendy, you have two camps — readers with endless appetites for anything zombie and … readers who see the word “zombie” and start rolling their eyes.
    I belong to the first camp — as long as it’s good, I’ll take a new zombie story, movie, or awesome video game any day of the week. But I get the people who are sick of zombies. We hope that Z 2134 is different enough to appeal to both camps.
    It wasn’t enough to write a by-the-numbers zombie book, like it