31 Days of Halloween – Matthew Lang
Nine days since all hell broke loose and started overrunning the
town. Checked perimeter defences and UV spotters—the vamps don’t like those—and
put up more silver crosses around the internal walls. Sarah and Max lugged a
generator back from Bunnings and rigged it up so we have electrified fences
now. That should keep most of them out. Everything hates the electric fences,
even if the zombies aren’t smart enough to not walk into it. Or pull away. The
entire compound is starting to smell like a BBQ according to Max. Told him I
was going to turn vego. Shen’s still going on about the countdown to Armageddon
on the 31st, but Sarah pointedly reminded him the Mayan calendar
restarts after it finishes, just like our own. Shen just shrugged and smiled
enigmatically the way he does. Sometimes it’s like he knows something we don’t,
but it could just be that Asian thing of smiling when you’re upset, rather than
getting aggro the way my dad used to.
have chainsaws and Sarah’s scored herself a gun from a copper we found dead six
days ago. Got ambushed by trick or treaters gone wrong if the candy was
anything to go by. We lost Shazza that day. Rule 1: Don’t eat the candy. Set up
a series of webcams on our LAN to act like security cameras, but have to hope
none of the vamps out there were hackers or IT techs before everything started.
Don’t think they could crack my passwords, but with some of the software out
there…it’s doable. Finally got some down time after all that but frankly, even
when stood down you’re on edge all the time.
Halloween my Lover Gave to Me,
was nice, but I pointed out I wrote the book and then it was all “but this is
extra royalties and encouragement for places to stock your work” and that was
all good, ‘cept of course if this thing is happening globally there won’t be any more royalties and then I was
like, “wait a sec, this wasn’t released in hardback,” and he was all innocence
and “wasn’t it?” And then I opened the front cover and found a large print
version of Twilight inside. With
movie stills.
take him to task for murdering my book.
which was much more like it—if you don’t get the reference, I refer you to this
video:
right about now. Shazza fancied herself one—the things she could do with a
gardening stake would have landed her a stunt job if that show was still going.
One slayer, brought low by a mintie.
Hell of a way to die. Gotta go now. Just got promised the ‘treat’ part of
‘trick or treat’. Apparently I need to relax more. You try relaxing in the
middle of a bloody supernatural uprising, I said, he’s not taking ‘no’ for an
answer. Probably a good thing. Gotta wind down when and how you can, I suppose.
on the tram and sometimes backstage at amateur theatre productions. He has been
known to sing and dance in public, analyse the plots of movies and TV shows,
and is a confessed foodie. He has dabbled in film, machinema, event management
and even insurance, but his first love has always been the written word. He is
suspected of frequenting libraries and hanging around in bookstores, and his
therapists believe he may be plotting some form of literature. He was going to
do a character interview around Halloween with Jake and Nathaniel from The Secret of Talmor Manor, but they
refused. “We don’t do Halloween,” Jake was later quoted as saying. “After the
crap he put us through last time, we just
can’t get into the holiday.”
Secret of Talmor Manor is available in print and
ebook from select bookshops, Amazon.com
and direct from MLR
Press. Matthew can be found at his website,
or he can be stalked on Facebook
and Twitter.
