Category Archives: This Plague of Days

The Sutr Virus: What happened?

From this morning’s revisions of This Plague of Days.

Grant Ave. in Chinatown, San Francisco.

Grant Ave. in Chinatown, San Francisco. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It seemed it was already too late for most cities. However, many small towns that had survived the plague by brutally defending their borders, shooting trespassers and discouraging strangers. Successful survivors rooted out contagion and walled it off quickly, staying apart from the infected and shooting anyone who would compromise their security. That’s why the hospitals were dead. They took people in. The VA hospital on his own base had become a death house before word of the plague had spread through the forts’s hometown of Helena.

Similarly but on a grander scale of destruction, Carron knew San Francisco had been forced to billet soldiers returning from the Middle East when all the troops were recalled. San Francisco had fallen first and fastest than any American city for that reason. Citizens had welcomed the veterans (some of whom already had Sutr before they deployed from the ships) and so everyone died of compassion. San Francisco had been too kind to survive the New World.

From the safety of a military bunker in Montana, Lieutenant Carron had read the reports, watched the world fall, and passed the incoming intelligence reports to his superiors until his superiors fell sick, too. Some lived through Sutr’s fevers. Most died. Lieutenant Francis Carron didn’t so much as catch a cold and he would not give a sliver of compassion the chance to infect him.


NSFW: Quotes from today’s revisions of This Plague of Days

Jaimie and his family try to cross a bridge to Canada as they flee the cities and disease runs rampant. However, they find evidence of a massacre on the Mackinac

English: Mackinac Bridge between Mackinaw City...

English: Mackinac Bridge between Mackinaw City and St. Ignace, Michigan, photographed on August 1, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bridge. Here’s an excerpt:

Mrs. Bendam gasped and cried at the sight unfolding before them. She reached out to touch Anna’s shoulder and grasped hard until the girl relented and offered her hand. The old woman gripped too tight all the way across the bridge. She closed her eyes to the carnage, but Anna stared out the window. 

Jack ordered her daughter to close her eyes, too.

“No, Mom.”

“Anna! I don’t want you to wake up screaming with nightmares forever.”

“No,” Anna said. “I’ll look. Years from now, I’ll tell my son or daughter what I saw here.” She gazed at tangled horrors as the van bumped along over a sprawl of bodies. The uncaring Sutr Virus had not done this. People had done this to people.

Many of those murdered had no eyes now, but their gaping jaws suggested anger, fear, pain and surprise. She saw torn flesh. White bones rose. Skeletons emerged from their hiding places. 

“If I don’t look…” Anna said, “it’s not right. Someone has to bear witness. If I don’t look, it’s like saying this doesn’t matter or it means I won’t be around later to pass it on. Someday soon, the animals will be finished eating and what will be left but me and my memory? Not looking is like…”

“Giving up,” Theo said. “Yes. Look, Anna. It’s a heavy load, but someone who can tell the story should carry the memory.” 

Jaimie reached out and surprised his sister by grasping and squeezing her free hand.

Jaimie and his father held hands, too. “There really are no dictionary words for such atrocities, are there, son?” Theo whispered. “It would be obscene if there was such a word. There shouldn’t be just one word for this.”

The only bridge denizens left were rats and gulls and blackbirds. Their teeth and beaks tore and ripped and their heads shook as they winnowed the dead.


Another snippet from This Plague of Days


This Plague of Days III

From tonight’s revisions:

Farther north, they saw their first lynchings. Women and men alike hung naked from overpasses. Their crimes were carved into their torsos. The knife writing was opaque crytography to Jaimie as they passed under the bodies.

However, if the birds didn’t get in the way and if the flesh was not rotted through or torn too badly to decipher, Anna read aloud: “Looter…thief…Adulterer…looter…looter…killer…carrier…looter…thief…fool.”

And this…

“I’ll turn around. We’ll find another road as soon as I see a spot for a U-turn.” But there was no such spot and no time.

Ahead, a man in camouflage stood on an armoured personnel carrier. He wore a gas mask. The large glass circles for eyes made him look like a bulky praying mantis. He pointed his machine gun at the line of cars. 

Jack felt a long icicle of fear pierce her diaphragm. “Anna, switch places with Jaimie! Quickly!”

Me B&W~ Robert Chazz Chute is the author of This Plague of Days. His friends call him Mr. Sunshine.


This Plague of Days: Today’s taste

This Plague of Days 0328From today’s revisions:

She had been wrong to trust Chester, but the man with the long knife and the stolen Mercedes had taught her a few things:

First, there was fuel everywhere. Second, she was lucky to have a length of old garden hose in her hand to siphon gas. Third, she’d overestimated her ability to judge people. Fourth, life and death situations make English majors with unfinished masters theses in Elizabethan poetry feel awfully stupid.


The Art of This Plague of Days

TPOD 0420 3 

As I work away on the revisions for my coming serial, This Plague of Days, I have a key supporter in my corner. Kit Foster is the multiple award-winning graphic artist behind KitFosterDesign.com and he does the covers for all my books.

To encourage me to work faster (and because he loves creating art so much) he sends along ideas he’s noodling with for the serial art and advertising. Isn’t this cool? I particularly love the distressed type and the treatment he did with the foreboding sky. The tiny daisy is a nice accent, too. Or do you like the darker version below better? (I grabbed the type to slip into the header for this page, too.) As we go forward with this book, I don’t just see book covers. I see movie posters. 

TPOD 0420 2

And now, with this goose to my bum, I’ll get back to work. Won’t be long at all before the release is here. Click the pics to check out more of Kit Foster’s excellent art portfolio.


A lighter quote from This Plague of Days

Last night, I shocked myself. While revising This Plague of Days, I wrote something so dark I was gobsmacked. Worse? It was horror based in reality. I won’t divulge what it is because you should have the opportunity to opt in before I sling it on you in the book. I will say it’s something about what happens to a body after death and it is freakin’ insane! Such problems are common in the Plague of Days universe.

Here’s a safer, lighter quote from the manuscript:

“Things won’t get back to normal until everybody runs out of bullets and they take those masks off,” Theo said. “People act worse when have anonymity and no regulation. All those masks they’re wearing? The apocalypse is like the Internet, only instead of nasty troll comments on YouTube, it’s with gunfire.”

Oh, and a progress report:

I’ll break 100,000 words on this serial’s manuscript today. Closing in on the end, but I think I have a serial in two seasons here! More details to come soon. We’re beginning to close the noose on the publication date.

Have a great weekend. You already know what I’ll be doing.

 


This Plague of Days: The Serial. The Novel. (The Movie?)

English: This plague patient is displaying a s...

English: This plague patient is displaying a swollen, ruptured inguinal lymph node, or buboe. After the incubation period of 2-6 days, symptoms of the plague appear including severe malaise, headache, shaking chills, fever, and pain and swelling, or adenopathy, in the affected regional lymph nodes, also known as buboes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From a recent revision of This Plague of Days (my current work in progress):

It was only four blocks, but it seemed much farther in the dark. They moved slowly, following Jack’s flashlight beam.
A dozen pairs of eyes followed them in turn — wary but fierce — unseen and circling, closer and closer. The ragged creatures, drooling and impatient, ached with hunger.

Only meat could slake them now.

~ I wrote This Plague of Days a couple of years ago. I’m enjoying rediscovering it as I revise the serial for publication. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too. (Coming end of May. Prepare yourself.)