I owe a real debt of gratitude to DeadKev of Allthingszombie and Paul of F-Train, our contest winners who did a lot toward getting us some attention in the early days.
Fred VanLente watched me write a big part of this book and sometimes he even contributed advice without which I would have been lost. Thanks, Fred.
Big, big thanks go to Elisabeth Wellington, my lovely and well-loved wife, who inspired some major portions of the story and who took me away from all this just when I needed a break and who made me the happiest man in the world by kicking serious zombie ass for me and supported me throughout. Love ya, sweetie. Mean it.
And finally… to Alex Lencicki, who made it all possible, major league thanks. Alex is the mastermind creator and proprietor of Brokentype, which some day will be the first and foremost among online publishing houses that started out as blogs. At a time when I was almost ready to give up on writing Alex posed me a single question: what did I really want? Fame, money, power, women on yachts and heaps of jewels on the women? The answer was that I wanted roughly two hundred people a day to read whatever I wanted to write and that they would enjoy it and be able to tell me that they enjoyed it. Alex made it happen. If you had fun during your visit to “Monster Island” you owe him your thanks, too.
Oh, and if you’re wondering-Alex and I were eating sushi at the time. We planned out everything from how the site would look to the plot to how I would post entries. All we needed was a title. I looked up and saw a plastic Godzilla statuette, part of the restaurant’s dйcor, and immediately said, “How about ‘Monster Island’?”
Thanks for everything, everybody. See you in a month!
–David Wellington
Teaser
Author's Note: Some time ago a few readers expressed an interest in hearing what happened to Dekalb's daughter Sarah. What follows is my answer to that request, set four years after the events of “Monster Island” when Sarah is eleven years old. It's also a bit of foreshadowing for the third book in the trilogy.
If this is your first visit to the site or if you have not read all of “Monster Island” be warned that this piece contains SPOILERS. Instead of reading this please go toPart One, Chapter One of “Monster Island” and do not pass Go.
–David Wellington
Dearest Daddy:
I haven’t written one of these letters in years… after Ayaan came back, after she told me you were dead I wrote you a lot. I still have those notes in the bottom of my kit bag. Weepy scrawlings, folded and tucked into careful little square packages, not really fit for re-reading but I take them out and touch them now and again as if they were something you had actually seen and held.
I don’t have anything else from you, not even a picture.
Why I’m writing this down now, I guess… I don’t know… I guess maybe you would understand, even if I don’t.
It was yesterday when it happened, a couple of kilometers outside of Oduur. We were riding in a half-ton truck we’d liberated from Ethiopian refugees. Fathia had the mounted gun, Ayaan was on the roof of the cab with a pair of binoculars. The rest of us kept our heads down mostly, out of the dust. We hadn’t seen any movement in days and we were pretty lax, bad form, sure I know that but if Ayaan was relaxed the rest of us tended to let our guard down. We drove right over a mine, an old Soviet model that had corroded and leaked with age but still it had some punch. The truck went right over on its side and two of the girls were dead before it stopped bouncing. Three more of them were injured. Fathia took them aside, letting them lean on her, looking for the bad news. If their skin was broken, if there was any chance of them catching something, something fatal, well.