Feed

Meet the Author

Born and raised in California, Mira Grant has made a lifelong study of horror movies, horrible viruses, and the inevitable threat of the living dead. In college, she was voted Most Likely to Summon Something Horrible in the Cornfield, and was a founding member of the Horror Movie Sleep-Away Survival Camp, where her record for time survived in the Swamp Cannibals scenario remains unchallenged.

Mira lives in a crumbling farmhouse with an assortment of cats, horror movies, comics, and books about horrible diseases. When not writing, she splits her time between travel, auditing college virology courses, and watching more horror movies than is strictly good for you. Favorite vacation spots include Seattle, London, and a large haunted corn maze just outside of Huntsville, Alabama.

Mira sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests that you do the same. Find out more about the author at www.miragrant.com.

Interview

Have you always known that you wanted to write novels?

I’ve always known that I wanted to be a writer—I was one of those kids writing six-page “books” in elementary school and harassing the other kids to buy them—but it was a long time before I realized that writers actually produce novels. I spent a long time viewing novels as these magical things that just sort of happened.

Once I figured out that people actually create novels, I absolutely knew that I wanted to be a novelist. I couldn’t imagine anything better in the world.

How did the idea for Feed develop?

I love zombies and I love epidemiology, and my big problem with a lot of zombie fiction is that “Well, it was a disease” seems like an easy answer, but really isn’t. So I started thinking about what sort of a disease you’d need to actually have a zombie apocalypse—and the thing about diseases is that they don’t actually want to be slatewipers (diseases that wipe out the entire susceptible population) because doing that also destroys the disease itself. I started tinkering with my postzombie world, trying to figure out what it would take to rebuild society, what kinds of social structure would arise…

I’m also fascinated by the difference between terror and fear. Fear says, “Do not actually put your hand in the alligator,” while terror says, “Avoid Florida entirely because alligators exist.” I figured terror would be a huge component of the postzombie world. Everything arose from there.

What kind of research did you do while writing this novel?

Feed was a fantastic excuse for me to watch every zombie movie made in the last thirty years and call it serious research. It was an even better excuse for me to audit epidemiology courses and read books with titles like Virus X, The Speckled Monster, and Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer. It was a good time.

I also did a lot of practical research. We “staged” several of the fight scenes, to confirm that our distances were accurate. I went to firing ranges and watched how people handled their firearms. I was unable to drive across the Sacramento River railway trestle, but believe me, the desire was there.

Are there any particular people, events, or places that you draw your inspiration from?

I draw inspiration from just about everything. Many of the locations in Feed are places that I’ve actually been, or adapted from places I’ve been. The Republican National Convention conference center, for example, was largely inspired by the crowds at the San Diego International Comic Convention. In terms of people, I read a lot about Hunter S. Thompson and Steve Irwin while I was working on the book, and I tried to embody some of their more iconic character traits in my lead characters.

Feed offers a distinctive take on a postapocalyptic zombified world by viewing it through the eyes of three young bloggers. Do you think blogs will ever overtake mainstream media—without the assistance of a zombie plague?

I think it’s already happening. Newspapers are adapting and moving online, but much like how more and more people are looking to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show for their news, I think more and more online readers are looking to the blog community. Once you figure out the signal-to-noise ratio, it’s a great way to get your news. I think what we’re getting here in the real world is much more organic than the functions of blogger society in Feed because they were actually forced to organize, while here, the blog society is allowed to evolve.

At one point Georgia explains to the readers how the infrastructure of the blogging world is set up: Newsies, Stewarts, Irwins, and Fictionals. What kind of blogger do you think you’d be in their zombie-infested world?

I’d be a Fictional. A seemingly suicidal Fictional, given that I have a lot of Irwin tendencies—my first reaction to something horrible is usually “Ooo, let me see” and reaching for the stick—but I’d totally spend most of my time writing epic poetry about the movement of viral bodies.

Is there any particular scene in Feed that you love?

That’s like asking me to pick my favorite zombie kitten! I have several favorites, but at the end of the day, I think I have to go with Georgia and Shaun in the van, after Rick leaves, and through her blog entry. I cried like a baby the day I wrote that. I actually hadn’t realized how hard it would be until I had to do it.

Zombies aside, is there anything (fictional or otherwise) that sends you screaming in the other direction?

I can’t stand leeches or slugs—anything without bones just creeps me out completely. Also, I can’t take things being pulled out of people. That horror movie standard where the infected character starts pulling out their teeth or pulling off their fingernails? Yeah, that’s where I go for popcorn. I freak out.

At the same time, if you have something horrific and decayed, I am so there.

Any interesting tidbit or teaser you can share about the next book in the Newsflesh series: Blackout?

Well, as you probably gathered from the end of Feed, Shaun’s now the main narrator, and he’s trying to cope with living in a world that doesn’t have Georgia in it, which is something he just isn’t equipped for. So he talks to her, and she talks back. Georgia is, in fact, still a main character because she’s constantly advising Shaun and communicating with him—and if you tell him he can’t talk to his dead sister, he’ll hurt you.

Blackout is really focused on Shaun looking for revenge. He wants to know just how far the conspiracy goes because he wants to make absolutely everyone who was involved pay for taking her away from him. The After the End Times team isn’t new, exactly—they were all in the first book—but they weren’t in the field with the Ryman campaign, and they aren’t entirely sure how to handle what’s ahead of them.

Also, there are epileptic teacup bulldogs.

A Preview of Blackout Introducing _{If you enjoyed FEED, look out for} BLACKOUT ^{BOOK 2 OF THE NEWSFLESH TRILOGY} by Mira Grant

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, the head of the After the End Times Irwins, three-time winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens. Because, hey, there’s always the chance that this time, maybe things will go differently. I know I always thought it would be different for me. George told me I was an idiot, but I had faith.

At least Becks was being smart about her stupidity and was using a crowbar to poke the zombie, which greatly improved her chances of survival. She’d managed to sink the clawed end under the zombie’s collarbone, which made it a pretty effective defensive measure. It would eventually figure out that it couldn’t move forward. When that happened, it would pull away, either yanking the crowbar out of her hands or dislocating its own collarbone, and then it would try coming at her from another angle. Given the intelligence of your average zombie, I figured she had about an hour before she really needed to be concerned. Plenty of time.

It was a thrilling scene. Woman versus zombie, locked in a visceral conflict that’s basically ground into our cultural DNA by this point. And I didn’t give a damn.

The guy standing next to her looked a whole lot less sanguine about the situation, maybe because he’d never been that close to a zombie in his life. The latest literature says we’re supposed to call them “post-Kellis-Amberlee amplification manifestation syndrome humans,” but fuck that. If they really wanted some fancy new term for “zombie” to catch on, they should have made it easy to shout at the top of your lungs, or at least made sure it formed a catchy acronym. They’re zombies. They’re brainless meat puppets controlled by a virus and driven by the endless need to spread their infection. All the fancy names in the world won’t change that.

Anyway, Alaric had never been a field situation kind of a guy. He was a natural Newsie, one of those people who is most comfortable when sitting somewhere far away from the action, talking about cause and motivation. Unfortunately for him, he’d finally decided that he wanted to go after some bigger stories, and that meant he needed to test for his Class-A journalism license. To get your Class-A, you have to prove that you can handle life in the field. Becks had been trying to help him for almost a week, and I was rapidly coming to believe that the kid was hopeless. He was destined for a life of sitting around the office compiling reports from people who had the balls to pass their exams.

You’re being hard on him, Georgia chided.

“Don’t really care,” I replied, under my breath.

“Shaun?” Dave looked up from his screen, squinting as he turned in my direction. “Did you say something?”

“Not a thing.” I shook my head, reaching for my half-empty Coke. “Five gets you ten he fails his practicals again.”

“No bet,” said Dave. “He’s gonna pass this time.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Why are you so sure?”

“Becks is out there with him. He wants to impress her.”

“Does he now?” I returned my attention to the screen, more interested now. “Think she likes him back? It’d explain why she keeps wearing skirts to the office…”

“Maybe,” said Dave, judiciously.

On the screen, Becks was trying to get Alaric to take the crowbar and have his own shot at holding off the zombie. No big deal, especially for someone as seasoned as Becks. At least, it wouldn’t have been a big deal if there hadn’t been six more infected lurching into view on the left-hand monitor. I flipped a switch to turn on the sound. Not a thing. They weren’t moaning.

“… the fuck?” I murmured. Flipping another switch to turn on the two-way intercom, I said, “Becks, check your perimeter.”

“What are you talking about?” She turned to scan her surroundings, raising one hand to shield her eyes. “Our perimeter is—” Catching sight of the infected lurching closer by the second, she froze, eyes going wide. “Oh, fuck me.”

“Maybe later,” I said, standing. “Keep Alaric alive. I’m heading out to assist evac.”

“Empty promises,” she muttered, barely audible. “Alaric! Behind me, now!”

I heard him swearing in surprise, followed by the sharp report of Becks shooting their captive. Every infected within range would add to the intelligence of the pack. That meant that Becks and Alaric needed to cut the numbers by as much as possible. I didn’t see her shoot; I was already heading for the door, grabbing my shotgun off the rack along the way.

Dave half-stood, asking, “Should I…?”

“Negative. Stay here, get ready to drive like hell.”

“Check,” he said, scrambling from his seat toward the front of the van. I didn’t really pay attention to that, either; I was busy kicking open the doors and stepping out into the blazing light of the afternoon.

When you’re going to play with dead things, do it during the daylight if you possibly can. They don’t see as well in bright light as humans do, and they don’t hide as well when they don’t have the shadows helping them. More important, the footage will be better. If you’re gonna die, make sure you do it on camera.

The tracker on my wrist indicated that Becks and Alaric were two miles away. That’s the federally mandated minimum distance between an intentional zombie encounter and a licensed traveling safe zone, such as our van. Not that the infected would avoid coming within two miles out of some sort of respect for the law; we just weren’t allowed to lure them any closer than that. I did some quick mental math. If they’d already attracted a group of six, and the infected weren’t moaning yet, that implied that there were enough zombies in the immediate vicinity to form a thinking pack. Not good.

“Right,” I said, and swung myself into the driver’s seat of Dave’s Jeep. The keys were already in the ignition.

Unlike most field vehicles, Dave’s Jeep has no armor to speak of, unless you count the run-flat tires and the titanium-reinforced frame. What it has is speed, and lots of it. The thing has been stripped down to the bare minimum, rebuilt, and stripped down again so many times now that I don’t think there’s a single piece that still conforms to factory standards. It offers about as much protection during an attack of the infected as a wet paper bag. A very fast wet paper bag. It’s evac-only when we’re in hostile territory. We haven’t lost a man yet while we were using it.

Dropping my shotgun onto the passenger seat, I hit the gas.

After the Rising, large swaths of California were effectively abandoned for one reason or another. “Difficult to secure” was one; “hostile terrain giving the advantage to the enemy” was another. My personal favorite applied to the small, unincorporated community of Birds Landing in Solano County: “nobody cared enough to bother.” They had a population of less than two hundred pre-Rising, and there were no survivors. When the federal government needed to appoint funds for cleanup and security, there was nobody to argue in favor of cleaning the place out. They still get the standard patrols, just because letting the zombies mob is in nobody’s best interests, but for the most part, Birds Landing has been left to the dead.

It was the perfect place to run Alaric’s last field trial, or should have been, anyway. Abandoned, isolated, close enough to Fairfield to allow for pretty easy evac if the need arose, but far enough away that we could still get some pretty decent footage. Not as dangerous as Santa Cruz, not as candy-ass as Bodega Bay. The ideal infected fishing hole. Only it seemed that the zombies thought so, too.

The roads were crap. Swearing softly but steadily to myself, I pressed the gas pedal farther down, getting the Jeep up to the highest speed that I was confident I could handle. The frame was shaking and jerking like it might fly apart at any second, and, almost unwillingly, I started to grin. I pushed the speed up a little farther. The shaking increased, and my grin widened.

Careful, cautioned George. I don’t want to be an only child.

My grin died. “I already am,” I said, and floored it.

My dead sister who only I can hear—and yes, I know I’m nuts, thanks for pointing out the obvious—isn’t the only one who’s been worried about me displaying suicidal tendencies since she passed away. “Passed away” is a polite, bloodless way of saying “was murdered,” but it’s better than trying to explain the situation every time she comes up in conversation. Yeah, I had a sister, and yeah, she died. Also yeah, I talk to her all the damn time, because as long as I’m only that crazy, I’ll stay basically sane.

I stopped talking to her for almost a week once, on the advice of a crappy psychologist who said he could “help.” By the fifth day, I wanted to eat a bullet for breakfast. That’s one experiment that won’t be repeated.

I gave up the bulk of my active field work when George died. I figured that might calm people down, but all it did was get them more worked up. I was Shaun Mason, Irwin to the president! I wasn’t supposed to say, “Fuck this noise” and take over my Georgia’s desk job! Only that was exactly what I did. Something about shooting my own sister in the spine just left me with a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to field work.

That didn’t change the fact that I was licensed for support maneuvers. As long as I kept taking the yearly exams and passing my marksmanship tests, I could legally go out into the field any time I damn well wanted. I was close enough now that I could hear gunshots up ahead, accompanied by the sound of the zombies finally beginning to moan. The Jeep was already rattling so hard that I probably shouldn’t try to make it go any faster.

I slammed my foot down as hard as I could.

The Jeep went faster.

I came screeching around the final bend in the road to find Becks and Alaric standing on top of someone’s old abandoned tool shed, the two of them back to back at the center of the roof like the little figures on top of a wedding cake. The figures on wedding cakes aren’t usually armed, however, and even when they are—it’s amazing what you can order from a specialty bakery these days—they don’t actually shoot. They also aren’t customarily surrounded by a sea of zombies. The six I’d seen on the monitors had been quiet because they didn’t need to call for reinforcements; the reinforcements were already there, and now a good thirty infected bodies stood between my people and the Jeep.

Becks had a pistol in each hand, making her look perversely like an illustration from some fucked-up pre-Rising horror/Western. Showdown at the Decay Corral or something. Her expression was one of intense and unflagging concentration, and every time she fired, a zombie went down. Automatically, I glanced at the dashboard, where the wireless tracker confirmed that all her cameras were still transmitting. Then I swore at myself, looking back toward the action.

George and I grew up with parents who wanted ratings more than they wanted children. It was a form of grief for them; their first son died, and so they stopped giving a damn about people. Lose people, they’re gone forever. Lose your slot on the top ten and you could win it back. Numbers were safer.

I was starting to understand why they had made that decision. Because I woke up every day in a world that didn’t have George in it anymore, and I looked in my mirror expecting to see Mom’s eyes looking back at me.

That won’t happen, you idiot, because I won’t let it, said George. Now get them out of there.

“On it,” I muttered, and reached for the shotgun.

Alaric was a lot less calm about his situation than Becks was. He had his rifle out and was taking shots at the teeming mass around them, but he wasn’t having anything like her luck with his shots; he was firing three or four times just to take down a single zombie, and I saw a couple of his targets stagger back to their feet after he’d hit them. He wasn’t aiming for the head properly, and I had no idea how much ammo he was carrying. Judging by the size of the mob around them, it was nowhere near enough.

Neither of them was wearing a face shield. That put grenades out, since aerosolized zombie will kill you just as sure as the clawing, biting kind. The Jeep wasn’t equipped with any real defensive weapons of its own; they would have weighed it down. That left me with the shotgun, George’s favorite .40, and the latest useful addition to my zombie-hunting arsenal, the extendable shock baton. The virus that controls their bodies doesn’t appreciate electrical shocks. It won’t kill a zombie, but it’ll disorient the shit out of it, and sometimes that’s enough.

The mob still hadn’t noticed my arrival, being somewhat distracted by the presence of known meat. Attempting to lure them off wouldn’t have done any good. Zombies aren’t like sharks; they won’t follow in a flock. Maybe a few would have followed me, but there was no way to guarantee I’d be able to handle them, and Becks and Alaric would still have been stranded. Recipe for disaster.

Not that what I was about to do was likely to be any better in the long run. Moving to a position about ten feet behind the mob, I pulled George’s gun from its holster and fired until the cartridge was exhausted, barely pausing to aim between targets. My aim might still be good enough for the exams, but it was getting rusty in field situations; seventeen bullets, and only twelve zombies went down. Becks and Alaric looked up at the sound of gunshots, Alaric’s eyes widening before he started to do a fascinating variant on the victory shuffle.

Becks was more subdued in her delight over my brainless cavalry charge. She just looked relieved.

There was no time to pay attention to my team members. My shots had alerted the zombies to the presence of fresh, less-elevated meat, and several outlying members of the mob were turning in my direction, starting to lurch, shuffle, or run toward me, depending on how long they’d been in the grips of full infection. Snapping another cartridge into the .40, I holstered it and raised the shotgun, aiming for the point of greatest density.

Fact about zombies that everyone knows: You have to aim for the head, since the virus that drives their bodies can repair or route around almost every other form of damage. This is very true.

Fact about zombies that almost no one knows, because you’d have to be a damn fool to take advantage of it: An injured zombie does slow down a bit, since you’ve just forced the relatively single-minded virus that controls the body to try its hand at double-tasking. What’s more, the right kind of injury can make the difference between having time to reload and getting mowed down.

Bracing the shotgun against my shoulder, I emptied all three shots into the points of deepest concentration. A standard shotgun shell can blow a zombie’s head clean off, if that’s what you’re going for. I wasn’t firing standard shells.

Using live grenades when you have people on the ground is antisocial at best and grounds for a murder charge at worst. Shotgun grenade rounds, on the other hand, can be calibrated to have a much more focused charge, one that doesn’t throw the resulting spray as high into the air. The wind still has to be with you, but as long as your people are more than eight feet away, you should be fine.

The shotgun went off with the usual sharp report, followed by several loud, wet bangs as the projectiles found their targets, fragmented into multiple slammer pieces, and exploded. Several zombies went down as shrapnel caught them in the head or spinal column. Others fell as their legs were blown out from under them. Those last didn’t stay down; they started dragging themselves forward, the entire mob now moaning in earnest.

Say something witty now, moron, prompted George.

I reddened. I never used to need coaching from my sister on what it took to do my job. I dropped the now-useless shotgun and hit the general channel key on my watch, asking, “You guys mind if I join your party?”

Becks responded immediately, relief more evident in her voice than it had been in her face. Maybe she just wasn’t as good at hiding it there. “What took you so long?”

“Oh, traffic. You know how it goes.” The entire mob was moving toward me now, apparently deciding that meat on the hoof was more interesting than meat that wouldn’t come out of its tree. I snapped the electric baton into its extended position, redrawing George’s .40, and offered the oncoming infected a merry smile. “Hi. You want to party?”

Shaun… said George.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I muttered, adding more loudly, “You guys get down from there and try to circle to the Jeep. Hit the horn once you’re in. There’s more ammo under the passenger seat.”

“And you’re going to do what, exactly?” asked Becks. She sounded sensibly wary. At least one of us was being sensible for a change.

“I’m going to earn my ratings,” I said. Then the zombies were on top of me, and there was no more time for discussion. Quietly, I was glad.

There’s a sort of art to fighting the infected. It was almost a good thing that this mob had started off so large; we were cutting down the numbers rapidly, since we had the ability to think tactically, but the survivors were still behaving like members of a pack. They wanted to eat, not infect. “They wanted to kill me” may not sound like much of an advantage—just trust me on this one. A zombie that’s out to infect will spit at you if it can. It’ll try to smear you with fluids. That gives it a lot more weapons. A zombie that wants to eat you is just going to come at you with its mouth, and that means it only has one viable avenue of attack. That evens the odds, just a little.

Just a little can be more than enough.

Using my baton, I swept a constant perimeter around myself, shocking any zombie that came into range and trusting the Kevlar in my jacket to keep my arm from getting tagged before I could pull it back. The electricity slowed them down enough for me to keep firing, and more important, it kept them from getting positions established behind me. I could track Becks and Alaric by the sound of gunshots, which came almost as regularly as my own. I was taking out two zombies for every three shots. Not the best odds in the world. Not the worst odds, either.

I was grinning as I backed toward the Jeep, letting the zombies think that they were herding me while I kept thinning out their ranks. I couldn’t help it. Maybe facing possible death isn’t supposed to make me happy, but years of training can’t be shrugged off overnight, and I was an Irwin for a long time before I retired.

Aim, fire. Swing, zap. Aim, fire. It was almost like dancing, a series of utterly soothing, utterly predictable movements. I couldn’t hear gunshots anymore; either Becks and Alaric had made it to the Jeep, or my brain had started filtering out the sounds of their combat as inconsequential. I had my own zombies to play with. They could deal with their own. Even George had fallen quiet for once, leaving me to move in a small bubble of almost perfect contentment. It didn’t matter that my sister was dead, or that the assholes who’d ordered her killed were still out there somewhere, doing God knows what to God knows whom. I had zombies. I had bullets. Everything else was essentially just details.

“Shaun!”

The shout came from behind me, rather than from inside my head or over the intercom. I barely squashed the urge to turn toward it, which could have been fatal in the field. I put two bullets into the zombie that was lunging at me, and shouted back, “What?”

“We’ve made the Jeep! Can you retreat?”

Could I retreat? “Well, that’s an interesting question, Becks!” I shouted. Aim, fire. Aim again. “Is there anything behind me?”

“Don’t move!”

“I can do that!” I fired again. Another zombie went down. And hell opened up behind me. Not literally, but the sound of a belt-fed automatic shotgun can be very similar. Becks, it seemed, had found more than just ammo under the seat. Dave and I were going to need to have a long talk about making sure I knew what my assets were before we let me head into the field.

“Clear!”

“Great!” My throat was starting to ache from all the shouting. I surveyed the zombies remaining in front of me. None of them looked fresh enough to put up a real chase, and so I did exactly what you’re not supposed to do in a field situation if you have any choice in the matter:

I took a chance.

Turning my back on the mob, I ran for the Jeep, whacking anything that looked likely to move with my electric baton. Becks was in the back, covering the area, while Alaric sat in the passenger seat, looking shell-shocked. Nothing grabbed me, and in just a few seconds, I was using the stripped-down frame to swing myself into the driver’s seat.

Not bothering with the seat belt, I hit the gas, and we went roaring out of there, leaving the moaning remains of the Birds Landing zombie mob behind.