Today I am super excited to welcome our friend Kari Gregg back to the blog. Kari is here to talk to us more about her new release, Half a Million Dead Cannibals. She has also brought with her some goodies for a giveaway. So please join me in giving Kari a big welcome!
I’ve been watching zombie movies since I was ten. No kidding. Camp or gore, on film or in fiction, zombies have been on my brain (nom nom nom) since…forever. You can’t invest a few decades in the undead without learning a trick or ten thousand so if you aren’t ready for the coming plague (and it’s coming, she says, cackling with glee), no worries. Behold, my misspent youth’s (and misspent adulthood’s) acquired wisdom:
- Choose your apocalypse survival buddies carefully. Preferably, s/he should be sexier than you and run slower. Referring to your survival buddy as Emergency Zombie Bait or Raider Bait, however, is unwise. Disregard the Zombie/Raider Bait Plan only if you happen to be best buds with ninja assassins.
- Hide out with the oldest people you can find. If they join the ranks of the undead, odds are pretty good they won’t have any teeth left so they’ll just gum you to death. Big whoop.
- If you live in a city, shelter in place and by that I mean, pretend that you’re hiding from your kids for ONE GD SECOND OF PEACE & QUIET, PLEASE. Choose an interior room with no windows. Take your laptop and/or smartphone. As long as the electrical grid holds, you may confuse this with every other Tuesday of your existence, but Twitter will remind you why you’re hunkering in a closet with emergency Nutella.
- Prepare for the apocalypse by stockpiling resources NOW. Forget food and water. Do you want to sprint through a herd of undead for coffee? Lube? Toilet paper? Didn’t think so.
- Forget guns. If you’ve ever fired a gun, you know how loud they are and guess what guns require? Ammo. The more you fire the gun, the more noise draws zombies, requiring still more ammo. Lose/lose. Plus, everyone and their Great (undead) Aunt Gertrude will sprint to gun shops when the first reports of zombies pop on the radar. Screw that. Forget the grocery store, too, unless you want to join the lunatics wrestling over the last loaf of bread. Nah, head to your nearest adult/porn store. If you’re going to die, you might as well go in some kick-ass leathers, no? If you feel like you absolutely must scavenge some manner of food, raid the novelty displays for edible underwear and penis suckers. You’ll be the coolest zombie in the apocalypse. Guaranteed.
Giveaway
Leave a comment below with your email address and your tip for surviving the undead horde (fleeing to the mall like Dawn of the Dead? the eternal caravan of Resident Evil Extinction? vamping Daryl from The Walking Dead?) for a shot at a Zombie Outbreak Response Team car decal like the one on the left.
Commenters will also receive an entry into my Half a Million Dead Cannibals Zombie Survival Kit Contest (details about the prize and moar chances to win it here). Please leave your comment by Thursday, March 7 at 11:59 pm EST.
Zombies are coming, guys. Comment, comment, comment! While you still can…
Blurb
All that’s keeping Riley from the man he’s falling in love with are the ruins of a city filled with half a million dead cannibals.
Strangers, Riley and Graham sheltered together in a basement storage unit when the zombie outbreak slammed into the world three months ago. They lived through the first blast of the plague, but they may not last much longer among survivors scrambling for dwindling resources. They agree to hike from the city and to the safety of the mountains.
They didn’t count on the storm they hoped would cover their exit developing into a Nor’easter, though, and they sure didn’t think their visibility would shrink so badly that they’d hike into the leading edge of a zombie swarm, either. In the chaos of escaping the ravenous horde, they are separated, with Graham racing toward feral dog packs to the east and Riley sprinting to hostile survivors hunting them to the west.
Nobody said finding and keeping a quality guy (alive) during the apocalypse would be easy.
Book Trailer
Author Bio & Links
Kari Gregg lives in the mountains of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia with her Wonderful husband and three very Wild children. When Kari’s not writing, she enjoys reading, coffee, zombie flicks, coffee, naked mud-wrestling (not really), and . . . coffee!
- Website: http://www.KariGregg.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kari.M.Gregg
- Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4366316.Kari_Gregg
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/karigregg
Heck I’ll just hang out where I am! I live in the smack middle of a big old cornfield. There’s gotta be people before they can turn into zombies, right? Plus, I’ve got a dirt basement to hang out (barricade myself) in if things start going downhill (atmospheric, no?).
Good point! By the time they get through everyone in town maybe they will be full!
I am reading this now as the snow blows outside… very timely!
Ashley, that sounds like a FABULOUS apocalypse story, right there!
J, any rumors that I arranged the snowquester storm for promo purpose were completely fabricated (by me). LOL
There’s a suit of armor at the art museum. If I get that, and my armored, solar powered ATV, I think I can head for the Ozarks and live off the land. You know, try to rustle up some food.
Is it functional armor, though? A lot of the swords & whatnot around nowadays aren’t functional. They’re just for show. Swords suitable for weapons are ungodly heavy. If it’s light, it isn’t intended for use as a weapon and instead of slicing off a zombie head, you become an undead canape. 😉
I have actually studied the crap out of the zombie apocalypse, so I have many resourceful tips. The one that I think people forget most often is how do you find water? Because obviously, drinking water straight from a creek will only make you sick. Water needs to be purified.
Rain buckets are a good idea. Also, distillation. The old tarp-and-sun trick. Boiling. I’ve heard leaving it out in the sun for 12 hours works, but I’m a bit skeptical on that one.
I can’t wait to read your book! It’s everything a good romance should be.
Filtering water is astonishingly easy and anybody should be able to find the materials on hand. You drip the water through a layer of charcoal first and then through a layer of sand. It won’t take out heavy metals if your water source is heavily polluted with industrial waste, etc, (which you’ll want to stay away from anyway), but that’s something anybody can do. To be completely safe, of course, you need to purify — boil it or add a very small bit of bleach. But if a fire isn’t safe and bleach isn’t available, filtering’s better than nothing at all.
I LOVE dreaming up plans for the apocalypse. ;D
I once discovered that I have absolutely zero chance of surviving a zombie apocalypse. I have three people in my life, however, that are garubteed to survive. One of them even has a shirt that says “the only hard part about a zombie apocalypse is pretending I’m not excited”. I figure, I stick with them and do exactly what they say, my chances go up to about 50%. After that, I’m zombie bait.
HA! Love that shirt!
I want that shirt!!!
Heh. I bought it for him on Zazzle. I might have gotten the phrase a little bit wrong, but that’s basically what it said. 🙂
I’ve seen them before. May have been Spencers. Wherever it was, I didn’t have the coin at the time to buy and I’ve regretted it ever since. 🙁 I do have the ZORT T-shirt in the grand prize as well as a T that reads: When I come back as a zombie, I’m eating you first. LOVE.
I love that! I’m so going to work that into my personal catchphrases!
I plan on hiding out in the middle of nowhere Virginia with my gun toting relatives. And you can use guns, so long as you have silencers and know how to make your own ammo (sometimes, it’s nice having rednecks in the family).
tiger-chick-1(at)hotmail(dot)com
Making your own ammo? Wow, I am *impressed*. 🙂
I have some interesting family members 🙂
LOL, I thought I did too! 😉
Oh, Kari, that was HILARIOUS. I’m a fan of zombie reading/watching, too, so I love the idea behind your book. My husband has read/watched so much more than I, and like you (and many others apparently) has his mental plan in place. I’m going to stick with him and whatever he says, I do (won’t that be a nice change for him), but if something happens to him or we get separated, I’m screwed (and not in the good way)! Thanks so much for you awesome primer and the chance to win that survival kit.
To survive, I’ll simply close my eyes and become invisible. I’ll be able to do anything I want and the zombies can’t see me. Didn’t work when I was a kid but still sounds good.
I guess my zombie tip would be stocking up on the necessities of life: chocolate, water (if not available tequila can be substituted), and books 🙂
I actually figure that if a zombie apocalypse ever starts, I won’t last long. So I will just hole up in the basement with my supplies (see above), and try to read through my TBR pile 🙂
June
manning_J2004 at yahoo dot com
If there’s one thing I’ve ever learned while watching a Zombie movie is that there’s never ever snow where there’s a zombie outbreak. So my advice would be to get somewhere extremely cold, bundle up and have food.