Deadlocked by A. R. Wise Page B

to grab its leg. I pulled it down and back toward me. It turned as if shocked I was there. It must not have realized a living person was right at hand, and it quickly turned its attention to me.
    I grabbed its head as it squirmed toward me. It seethed in starving anger and I spit in its face. Then I screamed at it with every ounce of fury I could manage as the zombie at my side bit into my waist. My voice was a battle cry that echoed over the water of Hailey’s Bay. No zombie on this dock would ever mistake me for dead and try to run past. No zombie would make it past me while I still drew a breath. I screamed so that my girls might live as the coming horde swept over me.
    The last sound I heard, over the growls of the zombies that were biting into me, was the motor of The Casper sputter to life.
    The last thing I saw before my world turned black was my family sail away to safety.
    The last thing I knew before I died was that I had won.
     
    The End of David's Story
     

    Laura's story continues in Deadlocked 2
     

 
    AUTHOR'S NOTE
     
    My main character's dead, but that doesn't mean the story ends here. The Deadlocked series is going to get into the head of a few different characters and show things from their unique point of view.
    Part two will be Laura's story and will start right where part one ended. It focuses on her struggle to both protect and nurture her girls while dealing with David's death. It is far, far more intense than part one and many people (especially women) have told me that it is better than part one.
      By the way, whatever happened to those cops on that pontoon boat? I guess you'll have to wait to find out.
    I never imagined myself writing a series of stories about zombies. The zombie apocalypse has become a tired setting for books, games, and film. It seemed like every story that could be told about the undead had been written into the grave (puns are fun!) Yet that was exactly what drew me to the motif. I wanted to see if I could put together a story that challenged the norms while staying true to the expectations people have of a story about zombies. In creating Deadlocked, I went through a series of steps before I started writing.
    Step One: It's not really about zombies. Any zombie story worth a grain of salt is about more than just the shambling corpses. In Deadlocked, or at least in this first part of the series, we are introduced to a man that just found out he might be dying. David starts off worrying about the very real threat of cancer. This ties in to what I have always thought zombies stood for in any good story they were featured in: our own death. Their rotting faces are a constant reminder of our own impending death. Having them as the antagonist (or the weapon of the antagonist) reminds us that we're all going to die. That's just plain creepy, and it's a big reason why zombie stories are so successful.
    In Deadlocked, there are zombies, but what I was really trying to expand upon was David's fear, and ultimate acceptance, of his own death. It didn't have to be zombies that killed him - you could easily take the scenes of people being eaten alive by zombies and replace them with scenes of David watching someone die from cancer and you would still get the point of what was going through his head. Imagine this was a completely different story, one that focused on a man dealing with terminal cancer. Imagine him standing at the bedside of a friend dying of the same disease and then reading David lament that it was the worst way he could ever imagine dying. David's death was the true antagonist of this story, and getting his family on the boat at the end was analogous to a man getting his family financially and emotionally stable before he passed on. The final sentence of every chapter even focused on either David's impending death or his desire to save his family. I tri Ne fed to make sure this story would be better the second time it was read, when you already know what is going to