I’m doing pretty good so far with NaNoWriMo. One week in and I’m about two days ahead of where I need to be, and I’m having fun with my novel-in-progress. So good, in fact, that I wanted to give you guys just a quick nugget of the book. Here’s the prologue, which I wrote on Halloween night, right after the clock struck twelve and it was officially November 1…

Prologue

If Josh Cambrie knew the crap he was in for after he died, he would have made a more concerted effort to stay among the living. He wandered the Halloween Festival of Fear, alone, his date having abandoned him for a guy in a Conan the Barbarian costume (and not a square of cotton padding to fill out the muscles, either). Josh was dressed as a scarecrow, and like Kelly’s new Conan, he had the physique for his costume. Josh was thin, spindly – even sickly if you looked at him from the wrong angle. To be frank, it was astonishing that a zombie would bother to bite somebody with so little meat on his bones. Then again, it was just his luck to run afoul of the only member of the undead in the world to count Weight Watchers points.

Wandering the park alone, not knowing or particularly caring if Kelly would have a ride home with her Cimmerian king, he decided to force himself to have a good time. This would have been a brilliant idea, had it proven even remotely possible. The roller coaster was a bust (literally, it broke down with three people remaining in line ahead of him), and the last time he’d gone on a Tilt-a-Whirl he’d been left with three days hugging the toilet bowl. The Haunted House, he decided, would be his safest bet. Not likely that he’d run into Kelly in the dark, and maybe a good scare would manage to wipe the depressed look from his face.

Of course, that was the great thing about the scarecrow costume – the mask covered his entire head. His coke-bottle glasses fit under there as neatly as his enormous ears, his matted-down haircut was invisible, his acne across the bridge of his too-small nose was as good as clear. No one could even see the small brown blob underneath his chin, the birthmark that his mother always tried telling him looked like a lion, but that he thought just looked like he’d been eating chocolate and hadn’t wiped his face well enough.

Chocolate if he was lucky.

Christ, it was amazing that Kelly had even agreed to come here with him in the first place, wasn’t it?

He was told that actors in a Haunted House are trained to leap at the most terrified-looking person in a group, but Josh was going in solo. In front of him was a giggling mob of teenage girls, each of whom seemed to make for a welcome target when someone was primed to leap out from a casket or reach a mummified arm out from behind a hidden panel in the wall. Since the actors invariably blew their wads on the girls, they were always resetting themselves when Josh walked past. He tried not to focus on the idea that actors paid to terrify people seemed to have no interest in him at all.

After about 20 minutes in the house, Josh wandered into an area lined with rows of pretty authentic-looking corn stalks, with yellow lights twinkling at him in pairs – eyes watching him from behind the rows. Interesting effect, one that worked pretty well, he thought. It would be better if they tried to shape the lights a bit, they were too round to really work as eyes, but an A for Effort. He even felt appropriately dressed here in the cornfield, even though he didn’t actually feel like he fit in any better than he did anywhere else.

There was a chill across his back when the gurgling sound began, and the zombie that moved out of the cornrows reached out at him, hissing and snapping his teeth. Josh didn’t scream – didn’t even flinch. He just rolled his eyes and said, “Dude, I really think you wandered into the wrong scene.”

He turned to continue after the girls on the path, but the zombie wrapped its clawlike hands around his arm. He turned, starting to get angry at the pushy kid in the zombie getup. “Look, man–”

Whatever threat or ultimatum would have followed was lost when the zombie’s thick, yellow teeth chomped through the burlap shirt that was part of his costume and into the admittedly thin flesh of his arm. He shouted, yanking his arm back out of instinct, but succeeding only in helping the zombie rip out a chunk of his arm. Blood spurted into the air and dripped from the mouth of the hungry ghoul. Josh screamed again, but still had the presence of mind to back away, flailing, and bolt from the scene. He rushed ahead, shoving aside the teenage girls (who threw some decidedly un-ladylike language at him, not that he was in any condition to get into a snit about it) and through one room after another. In an Egyptian crypt, he nearly trampled an old woman in a walker. In Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, he actually shoved the Monster himself over into the lab table, eliciting some joyous laughter from the kids Frankie had been trying to terrify. Finally, he stumbled through the exit door and fell right onto the pavement, rolling to the feet of a little man with a big smile.

Josh looked up at him, seeing someone dressed in all black, which wasn’t exactly unusual at this time of year. The small figure had no hair, but a wide, toothy grin spread across his face like he was looking down at a well-cooked steak. He held something in his left hand – cradled it, if one was going to be honest – but Josh wasn’t even paying attention at that point.

“Dude! There’s someone in there… someone friggin’ biting people! You gotta call someone, you gotta–”

“Joshua Cambrie.”

Josh blinked, surprised to hear his name from the lips of this stranger, startled just enough to arrest his panic. “I… yeah, that’s me, but…”

“Eighty-two years old,” the little man continued. He reached out with his right hand, grabbing the burlap mask that shielded Josh’s unseemly face from the rest of the Halloween crowd. With one fierce yank, he pulled the mask away, exposing Josh to the elements. Josh looked up, seeing a horrible gleam in the man’s eye, and suddenly he was far more terrified than he was when it was just the walking dead after him.

“You die,” the man said. “You die alone, from a pulmonary embolism in your sleep, after a tragically lonely and pathetically uneventful life.”

“What the hell?”

The little man raised his hand, and something flashed. Something long and silver.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m about to spare you all that.”

*   *   *

Ten Evernaut points to the first person who recognizes the mysterious guy that approaches poor Josh. Have a good one.