Additionally, it was a lot of work for one person, and admittedly, I think I lost a bit of the spark. It was a lot of work for diminishing returns, essentially. Transitioning Cosmic Dash to prose, on the back of my positive feelings that come from Fang & Bone and The Dead Life, just made more sense for me. I feel I am a better writer than an artist.

But still, the story was left unfinished. So, I am sharing the remaining pages of the script so you can get a sense of closure as you need it. Anyway, here were the remaining six pages of the script. Be sure to check out the additional surprise at the end of the post.

The Script

PAGE THIRTY SEVEN

Mara and Illyana are at the bar. They each take their last shot.

MARA: I need to get back.

ILLYANA: Good working with you, ‘Shellshock.’

Mara steps away from the bar, takes a few steps, and turns back.

MARA: Look, I can’t promise anything if your boyfriend comes after me and mine again.

ILLYANA: I’ll do what I can to keep him off your trail. You promise to keep my secret, then?

MARA: Yes.

Illyana takes another shot.

ILLYANA: Good.

MARA: Good. Take care, ‘Ransom.’

Mara leaves the bar.

PAGE THIRTY EIGHT

Alix is leaving the outskirts of the colony, approaching the ship. She looks shocked. The sun is low.

MARA: Alix! Hey!

Mara jogs up. Alix doesn’t really pay attention.

MARA: You okay?

ALIX: Fine. Just… tired.

Mara looks at Alix suspiciously.

MARA: Yeah, I feel it. It’s getting late. Let’s get you back to the ship.

Alix continues walking, Mara just behind her.

ALIX: Yeah… Thank you.

PAGE THIRTY NINE
Illyana approaches a big fight with Vid, Quell, and Brik, tangled up with other pirates.

ILLYANA: So I take it the reinforcements arrived?

Nobody replies, still in their fight.

ILLYANA: Sigh.

Illyana fires her rifle into the air. Pirates pause mid-fight.

Brik bonks a smaller pirate on the head, knocking him out.

ILLYANA: So is this the jailbreak party?

Vid looks hyped and childish.

VID: Yep! We’re gonna go rescue Captain Crayd. LET’S DO THIS!

Illyana has her arms crossed.

ILLYANA: So what is the plan?

Vid looks annoyed at Brik.

BRIK: Plan?

Illyana face-palms.

PAGE FORTY

Dash is lying on the bed next to Guugel’s in the medbay. Mara enters, and she is pulling her shell from her back.

DASH: Oh, hey. How was your day?

Mara climbs onto the bed with Dash, gives him a kiss, and curls up next to him.

MARA: Fine.

Dash is lying back, staring into the distance. Mara’s eyes are wide, staring into the “camera.”

PAGE FORTY ONE

We are now in the garden area of Spril’s ship, Greensleeves. He is tending to the plants using magic.

CAPTION: Greesleeves, Ship of Spril Lazeleaf

A ping sounds. He smiles in response.

In the cabin, he slides into his chair. The vibe is very VW-Van.

He examines a data-readout, displaying “LUCKY STRIKE II – SIGNAL IDENTIFIED.”

Spril presses a few buttons.

SPRIL: It’s about time. Guugel, I’m comin’.

PAGE FORTY TWO

In a lavish room adorned with gold and ivory with crimson and jade highlights, a slauve sits in a massive tub surrounded by bottles of different fluids. We see a thick, hairy arm resting on the edge of the tub.

CAPTION: One Month Later, Undisclosed Location

Two thugs (modeled after the robot gangsters in Futurama) drag in Vomu, who appears to have been beaten to an inch of his life.

GUNTYR (OS): Vomu! It’s been a long time!

Vomu lies on the ivory floor, bleeding and coughing.

GUNTYR (OS): Imagine my surprise finding out that you were on the same planet as Yrian, and you just let him get picked up by the authorities.

We see Guntyr begin to rise from the tub, but he seems impossibly tall. We hear a mechanical whirr.

GUNTYER (OS): But to hear you were the one who helped my daughter run away, and then saw her again and didn’t let me know?

Dramatic panel looking up at Guntyr in his legged tub, dropping bathwater everywhere. One of his robot legs slams into Vomu.

GUNTYR: Where’s my farkin’ kid? WHERE IS ALIX?

CAPTION: The End

What did you think?

I have one more surprise, here. The only page I completed that was not published to the site before I decided to switch gears. Enjoy!

Perhaps I will complete the remaining pages in the future? I would very much like to ensure the entire volume is complete. Unfortunately, from a financial standpoint, creating these comic pages is a risk I can’t justify right now. One day, perhaps my schedule will open up, and my finances will be more open to taking time to draw new pages.

As for what is next, I should be posting the first chapter of the new novel near the end of the month. I will also be continuing to repost older prose here to help develop the central Cosmic Dash Project Hub. Lastly, I’ll also continue to compile the PDF archives so I can finally forward the Cosmic Dash site to hpkomics.com and have one less thing on my plate.

And what if people don’t vibe with the novel? Oh well, I guess. At least I’ll be happy.

The post Cosmic Dash: “Ladies Fight” – The Missing Pages appeared first on hpkomics.com.

Leaving comments and feedback on chapters unlocks new chapter images. Visit the chapter image gallery for more information and to see what chapter images have been unlocked so far.

Previously on Fang & Bone, Corea had obtained a new knife and a short bow from a corpse that Fang found. Since then, Fang and Erryl have been on edge about local bandits and have quickened their pace…

There was no sign of the bandits that Fang and Erryl were convinced were lurking in the woods. It wasn’t that Corea did not believe them, but rather that with every inspection she made of the treeline, she saw nothing but trees, shrubs, and the errant shuffling of small animals. She did not know what they saw, and as of now, she couldn’t ask them. Fang was on the alert, and she watched his ears turn and wiggle at sounds she could not hear. Erryl forced a quickened pace, pushing Corea into a faster stride that was beginning to get exhausting, nearly as exhausting as the barber’s continued utterance of “move.”

Whenever she asked for clues as to what she should watch for, the reply was always the same from Erryl – either “move” or “hush.” She dared not call out to Fang, yards ahead, for fear of making noise. Both of her guardians moved near silently, and she had quickly decided that should be her approach as well, outside of frustrated whispers that were met with, again, “move” or “hush.”

They had been teaching her things all day, for hours now, but now they weren’t, and it frustrated her. As she walked, she would periodically glance at her feet and stare at the toes of her boots as they swept over the roughshod path, conscious more than ever of her youth. She was small and something to be protected, to be watched over like a small child, and she hated it. She understood it, but she did not like it.

The awareness of the shift from contributor to burden made her face feel hot, and she clenched her fists so hard that her nails were on the cusp of breaking the skin of her palm. Realizing how tightly she had been clenching at nothing, she loosened up and flexed her fingers, trying not to let the annoyance and shame get the better of her. She wouldn’t be a burden, she decided. She was a hard worker at home. She could be a hard worker here. Soon the woods would clear, and they’d enter the field that surrounded the outskirts of Gordhurst. There would be less cover for all parties, which was probably worse than the equal cover of the woods. This was her chance to learn.

And with that, her focus shifted to the treeline surrounding the old road. She would glance between the trees into the darkened woods, despite the day. She took in the strange greenish tinge of the sky, subtle, but it had been growing more obvious as they walked along the road through the cracks of the canopy. She tried to hear beyond the sound of her steps, beyond the immediate area. She tried to discern scents. She did everything she could think of to be more aware of the woods, to reach out beyond the immediate. She was met with nothing beyond the immediate. She began to clench her fists again. She unclenched them, exhaling.

“Move,” Erryl whispered.

She began to clench her fists again. She released them, again. She picked up her pace and whispered back.

“How do I do what you do?” she asked.

Erryl was silent for a moment or two. Then he spoke.

“Surgery or swordplay?”

“Survive. See what you and him see.” She pointed to Fang up ahead.

“Do this for a while. My lupine companion and I have nearly a half-century of experience between us.” Erryl patted her on the head. “It’s time that hones the instincts.”

Corea said nothing, but felt a little comfort at the feeling of his hand on her head.

“Now, hush and move,” he added, spoiling the moment.

Corea sighed and picked up her pace, yet again.

…

Despite what Erryl had said, Corea was still seeking to pick up on little things in the world around her, trying to hone her senses for what was sure to be a trial within the old town – Trying to build up those “instincts” he had mentioned. It would take time, but surely there was some practice too, wasn’t there? It wasn’t just a passive experience; it was something that had to be honed to some degree. It had to be.

The repetition, the pace, and the focus began to come together, and before she knew it, something seemed different. A strange awareness that wasn’t necessarily of her worldly senses. She would find it impossible to describe in the years since. It was like there was a rhythm of the world, and errant notes would pique her attention, and she’d feel something, experience something like color in her head, though she could not quite understand what any of those colors meant.

But there was a familiarity. There was a blood-deep feeling about it all that she could not quite articulate..

There were blues and greens, which seemed to be the most common colors she saw, but sudden flashes of other, warmer colors would burst into subtle pops and sparks, vibrating and humming, fading in and out of the worldly rhythm. As she focused and fell into experiencing this strange layer to her experience, she found herself conscious of two worlds. She saw the road and her werewolf guardian ahead. But there was another world of color over it. It was like when she applied pressure to her closed eyes in the darkness of night when she was tired; the kind of sparks that danced in her vision after. But also not quite that, as those faded after a time. This experience persisted and only grew as she focused on it. It was like each of her eyes saw something else. She felt dizzy trying to make sense of it all, but not physically so.

This wasn’t entirely a new sensation, either. She’d been recognizing this feeling for a while now, before, in other moments, back home, back during chores, or spending time with Garen. She’d experience spells of rhythmic lights in the night, but this was different. This felt like something deliberate and something she was making happen.

She pushed further, trying to comprehend both worlds simultaneously. As she saw green and blue dancing, shimmering, and pulsing, she too saw Erryl to her left, looking at her with concern. As she heard the rhythm of the world, she also heard him speak. 

“Your nose is bleeding.”

She felt the sensation of the blood from her nostrils and over her top lip. She saw blues and greens give way to warmer hues, to yellows, golds, and oranges, and until bursts of red violently and continually tore at her vision. Her ears popped with discordant, droning sounds. She felt herself wobble and stared at the road, unsure whether the world was shaking or it was her.

Seconds later, there was a roar. She stood unsteadily and watched Fang draw his sword and heard the cracking of branches and the violent uprooting of earth and brush. An ear-piercing squeal tore through the woods, then, and the world of color dropped from her vision, as though someone had just simply pulled it away. In one moment, her altered mind snapped back into a violent, bitter reality. She felt nausea wash over her as a giant boar erupted from the tree line and dashed past the Wolf as his heavy sword swing missed it.

“Damn! Corea, hide!”

Erryl dashed past, shoving her body toward the treeline to her right, but she couldn’t move; the world still rocked, and she was having trouble getting a sense of herself. As the Barber pushed toward the boar, he turned his gaze back to her to yell, again, “Hide!”

She shook her head, trying to jostle away whatever bewitchment clouded her mind, and with an immediate burst of strength threw herself toward a large tree off the side of the old road. She pressed herself against it and slid down,, shrinking into the ferns that grew at the base of the tree. She still felt dizzy, and she swore at herself. She focused through the rocking sensation as best she could on the Barber and the Wolf. Erryl seemingly danced around the boar, looking for an opportune moment. The beast, dwarfing even Fang, the Wolf had given up his sword for his fists. 

At shoulder height, the boar looked to be a head shorter than the werewolf, but with the long, muscular frame of a swine – all front-heavy. She’d never seen such a large creature in her life, and suddenly she felt very scared. Hunters had told stories of massive boars, but this beast was larger than the surely exaggerated tales overheard by the hearth at the inn. Now, seeing this, she wondered just how exaggerated those tales had been.

Fang had not sheathed his sword, exposing his massive hands – or were they paws? – and the dagger-like claws at the tip of each finger. She’d not seen them this present yet, and he appeared terrifying and primal, barking and growling and slashing at the boar between dodged charges. Massive fingers flexed out from his hand, tipped by sickle-like tips, not unlike the knife she had found on the body less than an hour ago. The boar would take huge, striding passes while the Wolf and the Barber would strike in passing. Fang’s claws raked at the thin skin effectively, drawing red ribbons that sprayed out at each swipe, but Erryl’s sword seemed almost useless. The thin, swishy rapier did not seem to cut well, and she began to see the man wielding it lose his temper.

“Hold the fucker,” Erryl barked, barely dodging another charging swipe from the boar. It had been very close, and Corea was not sure if he’d been entirely unscathed.

Fang raked the boar across the face, barely dodging the strike himself. The boar squealed a horrible swine-squeal that bellowed from massive lungs. The boar cleared some distance and began to turn, digging its weight deep into the soil and kicking up a torrent of dirt. The boar stood then, panting, sizing the pair up. Two sets of tusks raked at the path, throwing up clouds of dirt and clods of musty soil along with clumps of grasses. It looked poised to charge again.

“Near a thousand pounds. Not that strong.”

“I need to get it in the eyes,” Erryl added, not acknowledging Fang’s point.

“Fine.”

She watched the Wolf widen his stance on digitgrade legs and leaned slightly forward, lowering his body to the earth. His arms were outstretched, as though he planned to catch the boar. He wasn’t planning on doing that, though, was he? Corea noticed him breathing hard, his fuzzy brow furrowed in concentration.

The boar kicked up more dirt and dust and suddenly charged forward. Erryl took a few steps back as Fang began to shift, crablike, along the path as the boar charged. She flinched when the massive beast came upon the Wolf, but then she saw the boar lift into the air, almost like it was in a flying leap, only back-first. Time felt slower now, as she took in the sight. The boar had not willingly gone vertical, but rather she saw that Fang had locked his massive hands around the larger set of tusks that were peeking out of the boar’s maw and had seemingly lifted the boar skyward by the head. The boar was at the apex for whatever this flip was as Fang twisted his body, holding the boar upright with all his strength for a scant few moments. As soon as the boar crossed that apex, the beast slammed down, hard, on its back, and Fang stumbled backward, either dizzy or exhausted from carrying the weight.

The boar, helpless for a moment, legs kicking skyward, wiggled its massive bulk as best it could to right itself. As soon as it had slammed, Erryl had darted forward toward the gnashing ahead and with great finesse threaded the shaking needle of a blade into the beast’s eye socket. He planted the rapier tip deep into a giant, pale yellow eye and swished and flicked, finally drawing the rapier free with a sickening thread of eye jelly arcing from it.

The boar squealed and gnashed and kicked with all its might, nearly knocking Erryl over. Fang, meanwhile, still recovering, began to claw at the kicking legs, nearly succumbing to two direct hooven blows to the face. Within the ferns, Corea’s eyes shone at the opportunity, and she arose, firing her small arrows at the giant, aiming at the guts where she knew pig skin to be weaker. Yet still, several of them bounced off the thick, bristled skin. But as the beast finally gained enough momentum to right itself, a single arrow hit its mark, finding purchase in the large testicles that dangled between the hind legs. The boar screamed and whipped its massive head in her direction as it steadied itself on its hooves, one eye little more now than an oozing socket running down a thick jowl. It snarled, drooled, and tried its best to scrape the arrow from its balls with a hind leg as it began to thrash her way, knocking Erryl over and swatting Fang with a heavy tail across the chest, sending him stumbling back.

What began as a slow lurch accelerated into a charge, and Corea fired an arrow that missed the boar entirely just as it crashed into the tree where she had sought cover. The tree fell forward and nearly crushed her as she scrambled into the low ferns, crawling as far from the boar as she could. Still enraged and sure the target of its ire was in the immediate area, it began to whip its tusked snoout in the ferns and shrubs, tearing up every single plant it hit, nearly catching Corea by the ankle or ass multiple times as she crawled as fast as she could. She tried to throw herself over the downed tree as best she could, but was not fast enough. The boar howled and began to thrash on the fallen tree, and she tried to crawl over. The tree rolled and bounced, tossing her back into the shrubs.

She was exhausted and tried to crawl again, away from the boar as it slowly approached. She had turned and was now pulling herself from it as she faced it directly. Only inches away, the jaws of the beast opened, and the scent of rotting meat hit her like a gust of rancid air. The heavy breathing belayed a frustration, and Corea was now the scapegoat for the massive swine’s wrath.

The head of the boar suddenly jerked upward, exposing the fleshy neck. She saw two massive, clawed and furred hands digging deep into the jawline and pulling the head upward. Fang’s grip was so deep and powerful that his knuckles were buried in the porcine flesh. The boar thrashed, but she could see Fang straddling just behind its skull, desperately wrestling the head skyward.

“Cut!” Fang roared, continuing to jerk the massive head upward and exposing the neck flesh. The boar continued to roar and shake, but Fang held on, gripping with all his might and digging his claws deeper into the fatty jowls that began to ooze crimson.

Corea drew the new curved blade and was relieved that it was still sharp. She rose to unsteady feet and threw herself forward and upward, toward the neck as the boar stomped and thrashed, jamming the knife as far in as she could. She had nearly sunk the blade to the handle; she struggled to keep her grip as hot blood fushed from the wound. When she realized she had gone as deep as she could, she threw all of her weight into running the full length of the buried blade across the throat, showering her in even more blood as she dragged.

Finally, the blade popped loose, and she collapsed, accidentally tossing it a few feet away as the boar began to die. Directly under the thrashing beast, she breathed hard and spat out what felt like an eternal stream of blood raining all over her. She tried her best to belly crawl out from beneath the boar, but the plants were slick with blood, and the dirt had become ruby mud. There was no hold to propel her along, and each inch was hard won.

As she crawled, she watched Fang continue to pull the head upward, the new neck wound widening further and further, like a fabric sack splitting open. The sound of broken bones and tearing flesh was eerily clear despite the earsplitting gargling and mournful squeals of the boar. Within a few moments, punctuated by his inhuman growls, Fang pulled so hard that the neck broke upward and ripped the boar’s head clear from its shoulders, just as Erryl swept in, plunging his rapier into the tearing tendons with a near frenzy.

Corea had never seen so much blood. She stopped trying to move and simply watched, in awe, at the sheer ferocity of Fang. As the boar’s body collapsed, he tore the head free of the last of the tendons and the remainder of the spine, and tossed the newly freed head, weighing at least a hundred pounds, to the dirt. He crawled from off the beast’s shoulders and began to lick away the blood from his claws, staring at her, saying nothing. His eyes shone with a bright yellow glow as the forest darkened around him and he seemingly fell into the shadows themselves, with the exception of those beautiful, horrifying eyes.

It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. She passed out just after.

…

“You had no place in that fight, and you nearly got yourself killed, you idiot. You godsdamned child.”

Erryl stomped over to Corea, his rapier flexing as his wrist rolled. She flinched. He paused, whipped around, and marched back to the boar’s severed head and kicked it across its massive snout.

“Fuck!”

Fang glanced up at Erryl, as he was sitting by the trophy, and punched the man in the hip. “Don’t spoil the prize. Go kick a tree,” the Wolf said in his low growl.

Erryl sheathed his blade and placed his hands on his hips, fuming, staring downward, but not really staring at anything as far as Corea could tell. Fang sat, observing, patting himself with his massive hands and releasing puffs of dust into the air. He examined a claw and began to lick at it.

“You need to grow the hell up.” Erryl’s tone was curt as he looked back at Corea. “This is life and death.”

Fang said nothing, his eyes shifting between the two of them. Corea didn’t quite know how to make out his expression, but she had the distinct feeling the Wolf was annoyed. She was surprised how different he looked now, sitting casually by a grotesque severed boar’s head, seemingly fiddling with what would have been his nails had he been a human.

“If she dies, she dies. She’ll learn quickly or not. No sense in a tantrum,” Fang added. 

Corea felt her skin redden in embarrassment, and she quickly buried her face into some of the cloth Erryl had gathered earlier to cleanse the sticky blood from her face.

Erryl sighed. He glanced down at Corea, but she did not look back at him, pretending to be focused on scrubbing her face.

“We’ll keep an eye out for a pond or something so you can wash away that blood. Serves you right to be covered in it.” Erryl marched toward the boar’s corpse and began to look it over. He knelt and felt the thick, fatty skin. “For now, we take what we can.”

He drew a knife and plunged it into the back alongside the mane that ran down the spine. “Not the largest one I’ve seen, but a real hefty fucker nonetheless.”

Fang had shifted the boar’s head between his legs and was sawing at the flesh around the tusks. “Out west. Real brutes,” he added.

Corea couldn’t resist asking. “How big did they get out west?”

Fang continued to saw at the jaw. He paused and gripped a large tusk, trying to shake it loose. It didn’t budge, so he grunted and continued cutting into the flesh. He spoke then, “West Brakfel, furthest out I’ve been. Saw one nine feet at the shoulder. Several orc riders on it. We retreated after we lost three men in one charge.”

Corea said nothing. She watched the men work, harvesting different things from the corpse. Fang had grabbed his tusks and tossed them into a bag. He began to cut strips of flesh from the jowls and laid them out over the snout. Corea figured he planned to dry out the meat.

“Need the eye jelly?” Fang asked.

Erryl paused his work. He’d cut several large squares of thick skin from the back and was now inspecting thick bristles along the sections. He plucked at one, inspecting it carefully.

“The intact eye. Full thing, try not to break the sack, it’ll ruin the jelly.”

“Not very delicate, friend,” Fang muttered. He glanced at Corea, who had timidly approached him. She sat in front of him and gestured to the intact eye. Fang nodded.

She pulled out her kitchen knife and began to prod the socket, careful not to pierce the eyeball itself. She was so engrossed in the task she nearly missed Fang’s sniffing as he continued to carve at the jowls.

“You smell like an abattoir,” he muttered. Corea laughed under her breath.

Click here to visit the project hub for Fang of Triseria; click here to read the next installment of Fang & Bone.

Please consider leaving feedback or your thoughts in the comments. Feedback and comments help unlock new chapter images.

The post Fang & Bone: “24. The Boar” appeared first on hpkomics.com.

So, how about a quick update about the projects I am working on?

RGBots

RGBots comics took a week or two off, but are still going strong, for lack of a better word. I find it interesting that among the mirrors, the comic does most well on Bluesky,. Mastodon as a close second.

The comic has been a very, very helpful outlet for me to just tell jokes, and I think the archive is very solid at this point. As long as I keep updating, I think the project will find its fans.

While we wait for me to do another RGBots spotlight post, why not read one of my more recent favorites?

Oh, and Happy Pride.

Cosmic Dash

The outline for the Cosmic Dash novel is complete at 32 pages. This is going to be a pretty ambitious book for me, and I am still trying to figure out some stylistic choices. My two beta-readers seem excited by what is going to happen. I think the way to best consider the novel from my perspective is that it is like Cosmic Dash: The Movie compared to the episodic releases of the comics. There is a scale and ambition to this storyline that I feel is only accomplished in prose that has really sold me on moving on from the comic.

Of course, there will still be illustrations; Full color chapter headings, inserts, and things like that. Also, I am working on the cover this week. I’ll be sharing about the design process on my next sketchbook update, so keep an eye out.

More updates soon. I know I have some more archival material to repost here at hpkomics.com, for example.

Fang & Bone

With The Dead Life on a break, I am fully focused on Fang & Bone, and I will be posting the new chapter tomorrow. Now is a great time to catch up.

Part of some outreach I am doing to pull in new readers is a series of social posts that provide laconic summaries of the chapters with some details sprinkled in. You can follow those on Bluesky and Mastodon. Eventually, I’ll try that on Threads, though I have not been able to do much with engagement there. Nothing seems to break through unless it is video, it seems.

Also, keep up those comments on chapters. The more I receive, the more I am motivated to draw out chapter images.

Course Preparation

Not quite ready to spill a whole lot about this just yet, probably closer to when the class launches, but here is my shitposty class image. It’ll all make sense when I knock out another educational post in the near future.

It’s a six-week class that is meant to cover 18 weeks of material, so as you can imagine, I am pretty busy with that.

Anyway, that is about all I have for now. Sometimes these are going to be quick rundowns.

As always, share your thoughts if you feel compelled to do so.

Take it away, Paul Simon.

The post Blog: Projects Projecting appeared first on hpkomics.com.

I am fine, btw.

Broken Robot

I saw a broken robot on my walk home today.

He was in the dirt near the sidewalk.

He was broken and alone.

I wondered what his final moments were.

Was he a good robot or a bad one?

I don’t know why I care.

I have always loved the good robots.

I’ve even loved the bad ones, too.

But I think of the kid. And I think of myself.

How did they see the robot?

Was the breaking a noble sacrifice?

Or had the robot finally paid for their crimes?

Why is the robot broken?

Robots did not choose to be robots.

This robot didn’t choose to be broken.

I think of the kid.

I think of myself.

I don’t think I’d ever break the robot.

I do not know if the kid made the choice.

Why do I think so much about the broken robot?

I guess I didn’t choose to be broken, either.

Don’t look too deeply into this unless you want to. It’s just some writing. No questions need be asked. Unless you have them. SEO dictates that I have an outbound link, and I must fulfill my function.

Beep-boop. Follow me for more poetry.

The post Poetry: “Broken Robot” appeared first on hpkomics.com.

The issue is the theme.

My courses are designed around a unifying theme for readings and the topics I have the students explore. Previous classes have dealt with punk resistance, urban planning, and monsters. This time, I want to explore the enshittification of the internet. In simplest terms, I want to theme the course around the exploration of why the internet kind of sucks right now and how corporate, profit-driven thinking has influenced that.

As such, I turn to you, dear reader, for help. I need some suggestions for texts.

What Do I need?

I am looking for essays and think pieces to use as required readings and options for responses. I am conducting my own search, of course, and have some pieces I am looking at. But I also realize that an outsider perspective can be hugely helpful.

Structurally speaking, the six-week course entails:

• A brief introduction to the internet
• Algorithms and monopolies
• Grifter culture (Manosphere and the like)
• Online betting markets
• AI and data harvesting debate
• A possible refuge in the indieweb

Those are my target topics, and I am hoping that you all may have some suggestions on readings I could assign. With that said, I have some requirements; they need to be found online easily at no expense to my students. That means if it is published on a website with limited or no paywalls, that is perfect. If they can be found on a database, that’s great. I can check whether my college has access to them, and if not, I can request it.

They should be general enough to understand for college students, but I do appreciate pushing them as well. My criteria for “general” is that work is written toward a college-educated audience that is not entirely versed in specific disciplines like computer sciences or sociology, but can understand the key concepts through the essay itself.

They do not need to be limited to text form; video essays and podcasts are viable options. I teach that these are forms of writing with strengths and weaknesses.

They cannot be books. I’ll explain why…

Why No Books?

Long story short, I only have six weeks, and I get enough complaints about my text selections in general. Believe me, I would happily assign a book or two otherwise, but I’ve noticed my recent incoming students have had challenges reading things (there is a whole lot of commentary I want to make here, but will not for the scope of this post).

It is easier to assign weekly readings to deal with topics than to try to work through a single book these days. It is also harder to find a book that covers everything I would like to cover.

Also worth noting is that they will be working on a podcast as a final project so a book might eat up a lot of time that could be spent on the podcasting angle.

So, Thoughts?

So, that’s it really. I am already going through some potential readings, but I am eager to see what you might suggest. You can even pitch something you wrote as well if you’re so inclined. I am hoping to get some suggestions over the week to finalize the reading selections while I spend my time building the course shell.

That then leaves me a week after to read, analyze, and critique the readings for use in the lectures.

So, what do you have? You can comment here with your suggestions, or on the social post that brought you here. I really appreciate the help. Thank you!

The post Course Design: I need your help! I need reading options! appeared first on hpkomics.com.

My Full-time Year and Transitions

A major contributor to my feeling temporary was my year-long full-time teaching contract. I had one year of full-time scheduling and faculty duties and loved it. It was only for a single year in an interim position, and as it wound down, the feelings of being temporary began to really hammer at me. This is especially because the contract was not renewed. I will be transitioning from a busy but ultimately fulfilling role that I loved, back to being part-time and needing to supplement my income because I am limited in the number of classes I can teach at my current college.

This means a lot of job applications and freelancing in the months ahead. I am dreading it because when I look for work, I find myself particularly anxious. It feels like I am selling myself, and when nothing happens, it feels like an inherent rejection of me as a person, and always has. Nothing humbles a person quite like the process of job hunting or seeking out and taking on clients as a freelancer. I am sure I can find many people who read this who would relate to that concern.

And as freelancers, we know that contracts are only ever temporary. We have the work – until the budget is cut.

Writing Center Blues

Another contributor to temporary feelings is my role as a Writing Center Coordinator. It is a job I cherish, excel at, and have wanted for years. However, this also provides me with a hard dose of reality: my Writing Center role is still interim. This position must be offered to full-time faculty first. If no full-time faculty wish to step into the role, then it opens up to associate faculty, like I was when I applied, and like I am going to be again.

This means that if a full-timer wants the role, I am out. It also means that if the role opens up, I may have to apply all over again rather than maintain the current role. I know I am good at what I do and accomplished a lot, but would a little continuity be a lot to ask for? I am sure I’ll still be Writing Center Coordinator next semester, but after that? Who knows.

Let’s talk about something else, shall we?

State of the Site, Projects, and Output

It’s clear that my year of full-time brought with it more financial stability, but less time to update material here on the website. It was a tradeoff that I felt happy to make because I didn’t have to worry about the song-and-dance that is freelancing. The reality is that now I am going to have a schedule that opens up, and I need to fill it, or I’ll go crazy.

So, let’s take a look at the projects I have and the status of various things I want to do to fill the job between my teaching and job-hunting. I am only posting what I am focusing on and actively working on, right now.

Active Projects

• Cosmic Dash: The first chapter should be out at the tail-end of June. I am transitioning from the webcomic to prose, as I outlined a few months back. This is swapping in for The Dead Life, for clear reasons if you’ve been following the site.
• The Dead Life: The Dead Life is going on a hiatus for a bit, with the completion of the first part of the five-part novel. I am very proud of where that ended up, and I am excited about what the second part includes, but I need to take a break on it for a while. I will post some material here and there, including a short story, but I do not have a definite return date on this one.
• Fang & Bone: Fang & Bone is back after a brief break. It will be my primary project in June. Once Cosmic Dash begins updating, I will swap chapters each week. Fang & Bone is still my “breakthrough” piece, I think, once it finds its audience.
• RGBots: I took a couple of weeks off. RGBots is going to update again starting next week and maintain that twice-weekly schedule. Funnily enough, my most disposable concept has been my most consistent one.
• Thorn By My Side: This comic strip is still coming. I need to continue doing art tests because I am still not entirely satisfied with the art so far. The comic has some arcs planned, and I have a couple of other characters planned, but I do not want to overthink this either.
• Supernatural Selection: Still on it, still working on research and scripts. I’ll be editing the latest zine soon, for which submissions are open until later this month.

Trying to Plan Ahead

One thing I want to do less of, as I reach the end here, is neglect the site. I need more reliable posting schedules, and I just want to write in general. I’m going to do my best to do a weekly blog, but what I need is people bugging me about it. So if you read this and comment on the site, or have me on Discord and socials, please tell me to write. It helps.

I will also be trying to post more sketchbook entries. Will it be mostly development material for Thorn By My Side? Yes! Is it me trying to mine existing work for posts here? Yes, as well! But there’ll be Cosmic Dash stuff too.

Inspiration Track: “Exactly Where I’m At,” by Ween. I’ve loved this song for a long time, and it served as a fitting inspiration for this post.

The post Blog: Exactly Where I’m At appeared first on hpkomics.com.

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“How long does it take for a werewolf to pee, honestly?”

“Child, do you not see the size of him? The last thing I would do is complain about the micturition rate of the thing that is getting us through these woods unscathed.”

Corea glanced over to Erryl. He was leaning against a gnarled old tree, with a small book, scratching something into it. She watched the featherless quill shift between his fingers.

“What is ‘micturate?’”

He glanced up from his writing.

“It means to pee.”

“I’ve never heard it that way.”

“It’s a  scholarly word, the kind you learn from studies among mages, surgeons, and doctors.”

“How did you get in with them?”

Erryl paused for a moment, pinching the featherless quill between the pages where he was writing and folding the small book closed. He crossed his arms, and she could hear him tap the book against his bony elbow.

“I went to school for it at my father’s insistence. Then he died, but I was already deeply into the training, so I continued. I had planned to open a shop, but war came to Tradewind, and I worked on the battlefield. Never really stopped.”

He paused.

“I suppose to answer your question: I went to school.”

“Is that where you get one of those weird little featherless quills?”

Erryl paused for a moment. His face screwed up into a pinch, like he’d not understood the question. But just as soon as he had done that, he glanced down toward his small book and extracted it.

“This is a pen. Virtually identical to a quill, but you can keep it much longer.”

He held the pen vertically with pinched fingers and glanced at it for a while.

“It was a gift,” he added.

He shifted his focus to Corea and held the pen to her. She had begun to teach out to pluck it from his grasp, but she held back. It had been important to the man. Upon his wiggling the pen in front of her, she gingerly took it from him and began to examine it.

It was mostly wood, but there were bits of brass. A small plate showed something engraved, but what it was she could not read. The pen had a heftiness to it and was much heavier than she had expected. What intrigued her most was the point that was something between a spoon and a blade. It was like the end of a quill she had seen, only carefully made from delicate metal.

She had been so entranced that she hadn’t noted that  Erryl had his book open to her on a page.

“Try drawing a line here, in the corner, where it’s blank.”

She could not recognize the words he had written on the open pages – they looked like scribbles – but there were pictures. There were local plants drawn in the gaps between the words, and she recognized several of them quite readily from her own experiences. The pictures were quite good.

She glanced up at him, and he nodded back.

“You have to hold the pen at an angle so that the ink will flow from the reservoir inside to the tip. Try it.”

The blank section was not very large, only about the size of a thumb, but she placed the pen tip near the top of the gap and began to drag the tip downward, angling the pen. In the first moment, there was nothing, but then suddenly bluish-black ink began to run from the tip to the paper. It was fascinating.  She rolled the pen between her fingers and was alarmed to see that smooth line erupt into a splotchy mess.

Erryl pulled the book away and reached his hand out for the pen.

“Aside from the blot, the line looks pretty good. Perhaps we can make a writer of you, yet.”

She handed the pen back.

“What is it you are writing in there, sir? I saw nice pictures of some of the plants.”

Erryl was fiddling with his pen for a moment. He tucked it, and his book, into a pocket inside his vest.

“A trick I learned from hedge doctors I’ve met. I take notes and observe unique things as I travel and make a record of different places and what resources I might use if I ever return.” He tapped the journal where it rested against his chest. “This is my third such journal. I may write a book one day.”

“What unique things have you seen?”

Erryl leaned back against the gnarled tree and thought about it.

“Many things. I find I surround myself with unique things. I’ve met a mummy. I travel with a wolfman. I’ve seen the cousins of dragons – not dragons, mind you. They’re gone.” He thought a moment more and smiled. “I can also say that I have never quite met another Corea Gorse out there. The gods blessed me with a life that helped me to learn the letters and use them quite well. It would be a shame not to use them to point out the unique things out there.”

Corea was quiet for a few moments, thinking about words – the written ones. She’d seen they were useful, but had never had a chance to learn them. There really wasn’t much use to them in a dying down.

Maybe after finding Garen, she could convince the Wolf and the Barber to take her and her brother with them to a town where learning to read would be useful.

“Do you think I might be able to read and write like you one day?”

Erryl said nothing.

…

Corea had been asking Erryl questions for quite a while, with no sign of the Fang. After a time, the conversation lulled, and some noises came from the brush. Corea kept her hands near her knife, but Erryl continued to lean against the tree, unmoved by any caution. It must have been Fang.

And it was. The Wolf took heavy steps from behind a tree and emerged onto the road.

“Took you long enough,” Erryl muttered.

He glanced at Fang. Corea could not tell what sort of expression the Wolf  had on his face, but Erryl did, and he moved from the tree and placed a hand on his rapier’s hilt.

“Come,” was all the Wolf said.

…

The corpse was, from what Corea could tell, a day or two old. She did not recognize him, no matter how many times Fang and Erryl had asked her or painted out some detail. She was just glad he was not Garen. She was content in the fact that she knew nothing of the man, given the state of the body. He was just a stranger who met with a grim fate and not someone she knew. The two roadmen spoke to one another in hushed tones, and Corea kept at a distance from the corpse. She couldn’t help but stare.

A rumbling question of “what killed him?” snapped her attention to Fang, who was staring at her. Not just Fang. Erryl as well. Their attention was upon her, and it appeared they expected an answer.

“I’m not sure.”

“Not good enough,” Fang responded. “Really look. Get closer.”

Corea felt she had seen too many corpses today, but stepped closer. They expected an answer. It was some kind of lesson, and this one was at Fang’s urging. The last thing she wanted to do was to keep him waiting.

The corpse was a man she did not recognize. He was against a tree, his head lolling down, chin on his chest. Blood had soaked through the top of his shirt just around the neckline. His arms hung loose, and his fingers twisted and curled over open palms that lay up from the ground where he sat. Before she moved closer to investigate his neck, she took in the state of the scene. He was not quite sitting in a camp, but it was apparent he had been sitting down and resting. His gear had been set aside, his weapons laid out within grabbing distance had there been an attack, but to no avail, clearly, given the fact that he was dead. She spied some rations that had yet to be picked up by a scavenger. Nor had the body attracted much beyond bugs and the ever-present maggots found around rotting meat. The denizens of the woods claimed the dead quickly.

This was beginning to feel like it was a matter of hours, not a day or so, since the man met his end. No slimes. No dismemberment. Just a dead man, alone.

Behind her came the sounds of muffled chewing, and she looked back to see Fang and Erryl observing the situation, clearly judging her, while eating some of their own packed rations. Fang had a rather large serving of saltpork and tore at it with vigor, and Erryl seemed to be picking at some croutons.

“How can you eat in front of a corpse?” she asked.

Erryl continued to pop croutons into his mouth. Fang looked down at her and shook his head as he chewed through his sizable bite of meat.

“You eat when hungry. You eat when you have a moment to spare.” He gestured back to the corpse with a nod. “Tell us what you see, girl.”

Corea knelt and paused for a moment. She took a breath, grabbed at his hair, and began to pull the head up from the chest. A sticky, unfurling sound made her uneasy and turned her stomach, but she continued to pull, shifting her gaze from dead, shocked eyes and staring at his neck. Several gashes came into view all over, just above the neckline. She’d thought, maybe, it had been a slit throat, but she hadn’t expected it to be so jagged. She was no stranger to butchery. With chickens, quail, and other birds, it was a quick chop. She’d bled goats and pigs for Mr. Gorten in the line of duty. You learned that a single, strong stroke was the way to go. This did not appear to be that. Those required a smooth slice at the neck to bleed them rapidly. The first time she was tasked to slaughter a goat, she’d fumbled it and got kicked in the face by a flailing leg. She didn’t let that happen again. The pigs still bothered her, though, and she was thankful pork was not something New Gordhurst had a lot of access to.

But this – this was clumsy and violent.

“He must have been resting, and someone snuck up and stabbed him several times. Would have been more proper to slice him.”

Fang grunted, nodded, and crouched beside her, still tearing at saltpork. He pointed to the wounds. 

“Not unusual for bandits. Touchy ones at that. Dangerous places make dangerous men.” He sniffed the air and peered around before he continued, “I doubt they’re far.”

“Idiots at that,” Erryl added. “Took his gold purse but left just about everything else that would be useful for survival. I doubt they are locals and know what else lingers in these woods.”

Corea has risen to her feet and taken several steps back from the corpse to take in the scene, visually sorting through the scattered belongings. She noticed a knife.

Within an instant, Fang was within earshot, having risen without her hearing him. His hot breath near her face was like the steam of a boiling stew. His massive, snouted face snuck into her range of vision as she continued to look at the corpse.

“Take the knife. Take the short bow.”

She would do as she was told and pick up the knife.

“Good. Learn as you go.”

The knife had an accompanying wooden sheath that could be tied on one’s person with a basic cord, and she did just that. She didn’t really care to think about what the notches on the sheath had meant. Knife secured, she drew it, noticing the blade was blackened. It was roughly an inch or two shorter than her kitchen knife, but also slightly curved. This was a bleeding knife, and the man’s killer would have had a much easier time with this blade.

“A good knife,” Erryl remarked. Corea nodded and sheathed it, turning her attention to the shortbow near the corpse. Erryl had already been picking at what arrows he could find and had found the small quiver. He finished slotting a pair of arrows and handed her the quiver. He turned his attention back to the corpse, picking through what had been this dead man’s few belongings.

The shortbow was a small weapon of stealth, as she understood it, talking to some of the town guardsmen, but it did not have the power of a longbow. But then again, Corea was shorter than those men, and in her own hands, the bow did not feel very small at all.

Again, Corea was caught off guard as the Wolf crouched before her, as she had studied the bow. She had heard nothing, again, only just catchingt a sudden, massive form slide out in front of her. He looked at her with his large, yellow eyes. She could read his expression here, one of concern, his browline raised and curious.

“Ever use one?” he asked in a low, soft voice.

“Never.”

“We practice as we go. You fire past me. I collect them. I’ll point out the targets. You don’t have the strength to kill with it. But you can maim if you attack the legs. Do not fire at me.”

Corea heard Erryl cast a muffled laugh at Fang’s words. Her face flushed, and she felt a surge of shame recalling that morning. She glanced into Fang’s eyes, but there was no sense of annoyance. There was a softness that felt odd, but reassuring. She nodded.

“But ghouls don’t really get hobbled by arrows, sir.”

Fang rose to his feet and looked down at her.

“Not ghouls that worry me.”

…

Erryl had scrounged up cloth from the man’s pack as well as his small, thin bedroll. As the party moved forward, he would tear up cloth for bandaging, wrapping the scraps into tight bundles, and then tucking them into the bedroll.

As for Corea, she and Fang had been at work training her archery skills, which were far from satisfactory. He would point out a tree, she would miss, and she would inevitably empty her quiver. Fang would fall back from his lead position and return, handing over the arrows he had collected.

The first time this had happened, she had cracked a joke about playing fetch, and Fang told her that he would eat her. She had not made that joke since.

She was hitting the trees more often now, after what felt like a quarter-hour or so, but the problem was getting the arrow to stick. She was strong enough to hit the range given her life of choring, but the arrows mostly bounced off the bark, barring one or two instances of the arrowheads finding purchase and hanging loosely. Hardly a true success.

After the third quiver of arrows was returned, she asked for a break. Fang shrugged and obliged, darting back ahead. Erryl snorted.

“Corea, how do you expect to be of any use if you don’t push yourself?”

She didn’t answer.

“Children’s games, I suppose,” Erryl mused. 

She felt a radiance of annoyance from behind her, the words lapping at her like a cold wave. It was just a break; what was the concern? She shrugged his words off and kept her pace. Besides, she had already contributed. She pulled the small slime bottle from a coat pocket. The pale green substance sloshed in the bottle, but the organ inside, the clear bubble, did not really move.

She had earned it. Sure, she was not as strong as Fang, nor as experienced as Erryl, but she was holding her own, and she was learning. 

She put the bottle away, pulled out a strip of saltpork from another pocket, and began to eat as she kept up her pace.

…

“Godsdamn it, Corea, I told you to stay inside.”

Garen looked quite funny, wrapped in blankets and wielding a broom.

“These bats can give you the sickness if you’re bit. Go back.”

Most of the local bats were largely harmless, but a new, larger bat had begun nesting just outside under the shack roof, pushing the old bats out. Garen had asked around, and from what he could gather, this was a type known as an Iskaran Wraith. It was huge with coarse black fur and giant red eyes. Some in town even suggested they drank blood and preferred children and goats, specifically. There were werewolves to the north, and this could just as easily have been a vampire, as he saw it. It wasn’t, but if a vampire were going to take the form of a bat, then the bat would be an Iskaran Wraith – at least, that is what he reasoned to her.

The local Red Furs ate the insects of the area, and their guano helped fuel fires all over New Gordhurst. Their local cluster that lived under the roof was harmless and helpful, and Garen had decided that the Wraith had to go, for their sake, and definitely not because it was probably a vampire.

“What’s a broom gonna do?”

Garen looked over at Corea and shook his head.

“The broom is just to knock it down, dummy. I’ll stab it once it’s on the ground.”

“I can help.”

“You can help by leaving me alone.”

“I can go tell Mr. Gorten?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don’t need him.”

“But he’s tall, he can probably get at it easier than you.”

“I’m tall for my age,” Garen chuffed.

“Kent is taller than you, and he’s nine.”

“Kent stretched himself by tying his feet to a mule and hugging a tree. We all know that.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“He did. Now hush. I’m gonna kill it.”

Corea watched her older brother awkwardly wave the broom around in the gaps and corners where the roof met the shack walls. Shit, twigs, and cobwebs clung to the broom, which would be up to her to clean. What wasn’t trapped by the broom had now fallen onto the blanket armor that he had swaddled himself into. Again, it would be on her to clean that too.

Garen’s yelp snapped her out of her grumbling as she saw him frantically flap and toss the broom as the black bat was darting at him, annoyed.

“My knife. Shit! I’m tangled!”

She watched his swaddled form practically dance, his bagged body unable to get a grip on the knife, wherever he had been keeping it. This would go nowhere beyond some kind of sickness for her brother. 

She dashed to her frantic brother and grabbed at a flapping corner of Garen’s blankets and pulled enough fabric free to arch it high above the bat. She pulled the fabric down and pinned the bat to the ground, trapped beneath cloth, as Garen lost his balance and fell, hollering and thrashing all the while.

The bat’s shrieks and chirps filled the air, along with Garen’s confused yelping. The creature would be going nowhere, and with all her weight, Corea hopped upon the rustling lump and felt the body shatter and squelch beneath her boots.

Garen saw what Corea had done and went silent. Then he vomited.

…

Corea swirled the substance in the bottle a couple of times, having fished it back out of her pocket, marveling at the remains of the slime she had killed.

She would have a fun story to tell Garen when she found him.

Click here to visit the project hub for Fang of Triseria; click here to read the next installment of Fang & Bone.

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The post Fang & Bone: “23. All Things Wicked and Wild” appeared first on hpkomics.com.

You can read the prior chapter here.

Day 25

The shattered glass door funneled into a darkened space, blocked off by a hastily assembled barrier of office desks, cabinets, chairs, and whatever else had seemed practical to jam into a pile. There was even a rocking horse, which ultimately would have done nothing to stop a more intelligent invader, but given the lack of sense the dead seemed to show, it was just another defense in the tangle. The rocking horse, upright, rocked as the ghoul on the opposite side of the doorway repeatedly bumped into the waist-high barrier, flailing desiccated arms toward Dani. Periodically, it would slump, not quite falling onto a desk in the barricade but bending over it, scratching at the surface with broken fingertips and slapping at the horse, which would rock silently. The ghoul would pant, moan, and gargle at Dani. It’s dead eyes staring nowhere specifically.

The eyes were unsettling. They were cloudy, and it didn’t seem like these things could actually see through them; the lens was scuffed by dirt, grime, and who knows what else came with the seeming inability to blink. As it flailed, bumped, and tore at the surface of the desk, which was covered in streaks of rancid blood, it did not blink once. The perpetual stare almost seemingly peering at, inside, and past her. There was rapid movement of the eyes themselves, but they were locked at a point she could not comprehend, as though the corpse’s eyes were always fixated on something unknown. The fact that she was in the path was just a result of the body of the dead woman being aimed at her. The motions did not seem personal or of the ghoul itself – it was being driven by some sense or alien force, hijacked by some apocalyptic agent and puppeted in the most grotesque way imaginable.

Dani stared at the ghoul for a few moments before shifting her attention to the lot behind her, noticing the group of ghouls approaching from behind, rocking and swaying as they shuffled to her. She wondered if any governmental remnants or the CDC had any idea what the hell these things actually were – maybe if there was a solution in the works to reclaim the area. All she and the others had was a hope and Sandy’s insistence that her brother would rally a rescue mission and sweep into Emmet, guns blazing and tanks rolling down the central highway. Ooh-fucking-rah.

It’d been weeks since a substantive broadcast from The White House or whatever was there, and most radio now was either emergency broadcasts on loop, mysterious messages from some sources she could not discern, or the obscene and conspiratorial rantings of sovereign citizens. She had borrowed Bob’s ham radio one night a week back to reach out to someone, anyone, but the immediate response was so horrid she never reached out again. At least the ghouls didn’t threaten to rape her or promise to make her a brood wife.

The thought made her shudder, and she was very much aware again of the rifle slung over her shoulder. She would need to be a much better shot in this world. For now, it was just reassurance – or more of a panic button. She felt the reassuring weight of the fireplace poker and stared down the ghoul. It continued the pattern of swiping and nearly falling onto the surface of the desk. Dani took a step toward, still out of reach of the ghoul’s grasping, nubby fingertips. It appeared agitated further. The flurry of outstretched arms finally sent the ghoul tumbling over and slamming down onto the desk, flailing. Dani took the moment to slam the hooked end of her poker into the back of the ghoul’s skull. The ghoul continued to flail, but not in response to Dani’s attack. She grunted as she slid the writhing corpse across the desk, through the doorway, onto the concrete and glass, where it crumpled into a face-down heap. Her foot resting on the undead’s shoulder, Dani ripped the hook from the back of the skull, which again the ghoul did not seem to respond to. Disgusted, she jammed the tip of the poker back into the hole with force until the resistance of the concrete stopped her; for good measure, she began to stir the poker tip inside the skull, and soon the writhing stopped. She drew the poker back with a little resistance on exit and flicked all the brain matter she could from it.

Though now, taking in her current circumstances, Dani was beginning to realize, to a degree, the folly of her impromptu mission. She was opting to walk into a darkened hellmouth, and she wondered what use the walkies were for if she and everyone kept leaving them behind. Next time, she thought, there has gotta be a next time to bring the goddamn walkie.

She climbed over the desk, across the bloody streaks on the surface, and set off into the darkened building. The inside was quiet aside from the whistle of wind coming from the broken door and faint sounds within. The kid had certainly made a choice running from her back into this building, but she was not about to give up on the chance to save his life. As she saw it, he was small and had proved his tenacity so far; as frustrating as it was to try to reason with him given this shit and chaos, she had to press on. But she could not bear to see the child die, or become one of the living dead. 

Dani moved slowly down the short hallway, careful of where she stepped. She glanced back and forth, her eyes adjusting in the dark, scanning ahead between what appeared to be a more open room ahead and the tiled floor, which had been strewn with the detritus of holdouts and the leftovers of survival. Just how many people had been holed up in here, and for how long? She knew of four based on what Edgar had observed, and only one of them was now alive – presumably.

Her head spun with questions about what had happened here in the weeks since the outbreak, though Dani didn’t quite know when it actually started. Had it been New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day? The days after? It didn’t take long for things to really fall apart when they finally, inescapably fell apart. It seemed maybe six days in total, give or take a day or two. How soon did people find themselves hiding in this district office? How many, when the time came, chanced an escape and may have inadvertently gotten others killed? There were so many layers to all of this, and the most frustrating part was never really knowing. Everyone who might have had an answer was probably dead or in a bunker beneath a mountain.

Dani crept toward an open door to her left, which was slightly ajar. She clung to the wall, paused, and listened intently for motion within. Hearing nothing, she whipped her head past the frame, peering into the space that was partially obscured by the door. Inside was an office, ransacked but still filled with sweet, homey decor, reflecting optimism and assertive effort, like that of an H.R. lady. A poster depicting a climber on a rock face read “Keep on Climbing!” and Dani chuckled at it. She’d been to the college counselor once or twice before dropping out and had seen a similar poster – maybe even the same one. It was just vague enough to be considered empowering, technically, but practically useless in any specific context. Cloying bullshit made all the more darkly ironic given the circumstances.

She nudged the door open wider, carefully, wincing at the sustained, slow creak. The rest of the room was a mess; anything seemingly valuable was probably gone. No silent ghoul was lurking within, thankfully, but she wasn’t prepared for a bloody dog bed next to the desk. There were no signs of remains beyond reddish-brown staining on the teal pillow. She winced and closed the door, silently damning the creaking but relieved to shut the image away. Dani noted the placard attached to the door as she pulled it shut – Melissa Gutierrez, Human Resources – and a taped photo of a cocker spaniel, and a nametag stuck to it that read “Homer.”

God-fucking-damn it. 

Dani shook her head. She leaned back against the wall next to the room and stared nowhere in particular, just away from the door. Inevitably, she saw the door directly opposite the H.R. office and noticed the sign – Gary Watts, Requisitions and Warehousing – and several bloody streaks on the door. Dani stepped toward it and, finding a spot not covered in blood, pressed her ear to the door, listening in. Hearing nothing, she tapped at it with the tip of the poker, and after a moment, there was moaning and shuffling, unmistakably that of the living dead. She glanced back toward the way she had come as the group of ghouls from outside collided with the rudimentary barricade, unable to navigate over it. She stepped back from the requisitions door and took one last look at the H.R. door behind her.

Fuck this. Dani pushed deeper into the building, her eyes adjusting to the dim lighting; she was searching for whatever signs she could of the kid as she approached the larger room. She didn’t quite know a name for it – maybe it was an atrium?

The room appeared to be the heart of the building, where the main entrance had been reinforced with a similar pile of furniture to the rear entrance she used. She also noticed bike chains in the darkened room; though the front was mostly glass, it had become grimy and discolored, and the mid-morning sun was not quite at an angle to shine much direct light within. All she had was a yellowish ambience, which rendered everything far more sickly and aged than it technically was. One desk against the glass had piles of papers that had spilled onto the floor in front of it, and dozens of papers pasted to the windows – there had been a plan to cover sightlines, and Dani was not sure if that was a good idea or a bad one.

Dani still had no idea if the ghouls actually saw anything, or what drove them. Instead, staring at the papers, she wondered if the inability to see the ghouls was the actual point. Even back at the storage yard, the group, as exposed to the elements as they were, had reduced sightlines with the exception of gaps they could use. It made sense, in a lot of ways, to keep the terror of the outside world out of sight. The papers on the glass were beginning to make more sense.

The atrium itself wasn’t tremendous. It mostly combined what appeared to be a line to some sort of teller-style window, three hallways, and some seating, which had been shoved toward the glass in the front entrance. The space was mostly devoid of anything comforting, nor did it look like a space where anyone would have spent much time. The amount of exposure from the glass probably had a lot to do with that. 

As she approached the pile against the entrance, she glanced out to see her former apartment complex across the street. She hadn’t noticed it right away, but a ghoul swept into view, wandering on the walkup to the entrance of the district office. Dani flinched whenever it looked in her direction, though it was clear it did not seem to perceive her. The apartment complex across the street stood passively with no sign of motion. She’d considered returning, once or twice, to see what supplies could be rounded up. But there was always a hesitation that always emerged. It wasn’t about the ghouls within – Stephen and Julie’s corpses flashed for an instant in Dani’s mind. She turned from the window and stepped back toward the center of the room.

She peeked in the teller window and saw what seemed to be a former supply hub. Wrappers, cans, and boxes were strewn across the floor or on whatever desk space was available in the small office. The computer – the novelty of computers made Dani feel nostalgic for a moment – sat, covered by a layer of fine dust except for a single smiley face sticker stuck to the powerless screen of the monitor.

It came down to two choices – left or right. She hadn’t been shot at so far by the kid, which was either a good sign or a horrible one. She hoped, desperately, that he was scared and holed up in some office, quietly waiting her out. She could reason with him; she knew it. She could help him get back. He could apologize to Edgar, and they could make a go of it. She just had to figure out how to get the kid to stand down so they could escape together. At the end of the hall from which she had emerged, she saw ghoulish silhouettes framed against daylight, and though their forms were darkened and obscured. She saw they were still trapped by the desks of the makeshift barricade. How these things had managed to decimate so many already confused and frightened her, and she wondered what all this said about humans like her. She did her best to tune the ghouls out, as she listened to ambient noise in the largely quiet building. There was the sound if motion to her left. In lieu of any other evidence, she chose to head that direction.

Peering down the darkened hallway, she could make out four doors on either side, a fire escape door at the very end of the hallway, and a right turn. She tried to make sense of what she saw of this layout with what she observed of the outside of the district office, but gave up, realizing she hadn’t observed much over the years living across from it, or the less-than-an-hour so far rescuing Ed and trying to reach out to the trigger-happy child.

Of the four hallway doors she saw, two of them were open: one to the left, one to the right. She was no Daredevil, with super hearing, but she felt confident there was shuffling from one of the rooms to the left. 

Christ, I’d kill for those billy clubs and ninja training.

She crept down the hall, feeling exposed, taking in everything in front, below, and behind her, wary of any potential movement. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark to the point where she could navigate with relative confidence, but not with enough detail that she could entirely avoid caution, especially across garbage-covered tile. She’d just barely brushed a grocery bag with the tip of her foot and nearly shit herself at the crinkling. The first pair of doors, opposite one another, were now just a couple of feet away. The door to her right was closer, so she shifted gradually toward the wall to the left, tiptoing over soda cans. As she approached, she noticed that this room did not have a solid wall, but rather a large pane of glass from floor to ceiling – maybe like a conference room, but it was hard to tell at this angle. The opposite room looked to be an office, but also a bit smaller, with a similar floor-to-ceiling window. About a foot from the doorway, she paused, holding her breath, and listened.

There was a shuffling of feet on the carpet and the crushing and rattling of things on the floor. The loudest, though, was the telling moans and gargles of the undead. They had been seemingly alerted to something, and Dani wondered if it had been something she had done before realizing more than likely it was the kid running by. Whatever was happening in the room was small; she’d seen these things wander over the past couple of weeks, until something grabbed their attention, they were content – though that word didn’t seem to apply, really – to wander in small, set spaces, waiting for some sort of signal to move.

Dani glanced at the floor, holding her breath as she nudged a can away from the doorway so she could sidle a bit more toward the opening. Content that she had alerted nothing within, she scooted closer so she could crane her head around and look inside. The vision of a ghoul biting at her face and knocking her to the floor worked to caution her from peeking, but she had to press on.

After a deep breath and a silent count to three, she turned her head past the door frame and looked inside. Her view had been immediately obscured by a shambling corpse within a foot of the room, its back to her. She covered her mouth with her forearm to keep from gasping in surprise and did her best to look past the ghoul, realizing she could see at least three others a few feet further. Dani retreated around the doorway and shoved the sleeve of her hoodie even deeper into her face, muffling her panicked breathing as best she could. She listened intently for any change to the ghouls’ movement, but she’d apparently gone unnoticed. There would be no guarantee of that if she tried to cross. There was one thing to do, and if she fucked up, things would be even worse for her and the kid.

With a sharp breath, she stepped into the doorway and kicked the ghoul in the small of the back, sending it stumbling forward just as the other ghouls in the room, seven by her quick count, shrieked and shuddered upon noticing her. She looked to the door and was surprised by what seemed to be a belt tied to the handle. She grabbed the handle at the belt knot and pulled the door shut as she stumbled backward out of the room, sealing it with a click. She continued stumbling backward until she fell against the opposite door, rattling the frame and the glass window next to it. She scrambled to her feet in a panic and then stopped to take a deep breath between the two rooms. The ghouls in the newly closed room pressed themselves against the glass, clearly aware of her. She could swear she heard the strain of the glass under their weight and clumsy slaps. Taking in the whole space, now, the room was a conference room, as she thought, but the number of ghouls did not line up with her admittedly hurried count a second ago. 

She looked into the room behind her, and seeing nothing, was content to move her back to it to take in more of the chamber of horrors she had just closed off. When she had counted, she had just seen bodies and assumed they were the living dead, but now it was clear there were only four of them, with three other corpses in the room – eerily still. Why they had not been turned or consumed was a mystery, but as Dani took in the state of the room, past the writhing clamor of the ghouls against the glass, she saw the room for what it had been: a triage space. It was hard to make out explicit detail between ghouls sliding along the glass, following her motion, but she did see three bodies on the large central table, each covered slightly, with no sign of blood or tampering by the ghouls. It was almost as though the bodies served no interest to them. Nothing made sense anymore, but this seemed to irritate her in particular. Bob had mentioned he’d taken time to observe them, but if they really wanted to understand what they were up against, they’d need to study them. Jimmy agreed with him. But Dani always said that she would just rather kill them off. But it looked like Bob and Jimmy had a point. Maybe there was something up with the bodies that they seemingly hadn’t touched? As Bob had said, “know your enemy.”

As Dani scanned the room for whatever clues were left in such a state, she picked up on something she had not noticed earlier – something large beneath the conference table. She squatted slightly to get a better view of what it was, and she jumped when she saw a ghoul seemingly staring directly at her from under the table. But she could only catch glances because of the tangle of bodies in front of her. She wondered if there was a way to get a better view, and on a whim, she tapped at the door to the side. Sure enough, the four standing ghouls clustered toward the door as Dani held still. She managed to divert them. She slowly crouched down, careful of any sudden moment, eager to get a clearer view beneath the table. As she did so, she studied the ghoul beneath, which wasn’t so much a single ghoul, but a tangle of three or four. Just how many bodies did they shove into this room, she wondered.

It would be hard for her to explain what exactly she was seeing back at camp. There was a central ghoul below the table that seemed to be aware of her presence, staring at her, accusingly. She appeared to be a small woman, and due to decomposition, Dani could not guess at her age – she could have been a teenager, Dani guessed, but there was no way of ever knowing. Besides the disturbing awareness present in her gaze, however, was the fact that three ghouls below the table had her in a sort of embrace. Dani had to count the arms to be sure. The other ghouls seemed to press their bodies into the girl, wrapping her in their spindly arms, shielding her, shying her away from some harm Dani wasn’t sure they could comprehend. It reminded her of sparing someone from the cold, like in a survival movie.

The whole time Dani observed, the ghoulish girl did not take her eyes off her. Periodically, the jaw would shift, and it seemed like the ghoul would murmur in silence. It was the most uncomfortable thing Dani had ever experienced, and she found herself overwhelmed, wretching against the glass. After a few agonizing moments, she wiped the vomit from her mouth on a sleeve – the ghoul hadn’t stopped staring once.

A sudden burst of noise back from where she had entered – she thought – caught her off guard, and she turned to focus on the sound of the clatter and a series of hollow moans. Perhaps one of the ghouls had knocked something loose from the barricade, or even spilled over a desk onto the floor.

She didn’t want to look back in the conference room and the staring ghoul, but some force – a morbid curiosity, perhaps – compelled her to do so. As she shifted her eyes back to beneath the desk, she was alarmed to see the ghoul had retreated further back, and the embrace of the others tightened and obscured her form, except for her gaunt, blank face – her eyes still staring intently at Dani.

Dani scrambled to her feet, terrified, and made her way down the hall past the window, pressing her shoulder against the wall. She felt the world around her spinning violently.

“What the fuck was that?” She gasped. “Jesus. What?”

As she waited to see if the world would stop spinning, like the New Year’s quake weeks ago, she tried to pick a point in the office window across from her, first at a mobile whiteboard with frantic notes, and then began staring at something on a desk. As her senses began to return, she noticed various tools – pliers, scalpels, and other things; she thought of the contents of a doctor’s bag. And then she saw a human head in a pan, jaw moving slightly, dead eyes staring toward nothing.

Dani couldn’t help but yelp.

Her eyes darted, wary of any movement or reaction to her loss of control. There was a seeming response further to her left, down the hall – a moan, but not much beyond. To her right, where the clatter had been, there was the sound of a cluster of hollow exhalations. As she slowed her breathing as best she could, hoping to calm herself, she noticed the door to the office with the severed head. On it as well was a belt tied to the handle, and across the floor, something she’d overlooked with everything going on, were a few other belts. They had been tied from handle to handle as an added measure to keep the doors shut. It seemed that the idea was that some lucky ghoul would not be able to open the door by accident. Dani considered the girl within. She wondered if this group had observed something more alarming.

But the line had been severed. Dani wasn’t sure what it all meant, but a dark thought crossed her mind. Maybe the belt had only recently been severed by the kid, a trap for his pursuer, a trap for her. She wasn’t going to let that theory stop her. She’d club the kid upside the head and drag him back if she had to. There were the living and dead, and from what she had witnessed, precious few of the living.

More clattering from where she had been drove her to her feet. Dani stabilized herself against the drywall and, taking a moment to steel herself, pressed forward, wary of any sound from the kid. Wary of a gunshot. Ahead were two doors on either side, along with the chained-up fire exit. One door had been shut, but the other was open, which led to a breakroom and kitchenette. She didn’t bother with the shut door and kept low as she crossed the frame of the open room; on the counter near a microwave was a carcass – bone and gristle stripped of usable flesh. Dani did not want to dwell on the sight. She took a step back, out of the room, back into the hall. She’d seen enough, including the other doorway; the space would come into view as she rounded the corner of the hallway.

The sound of hushed breathing hit her ears as she approached the corner. Someone was winded and doing their best to keep their breathing muffled. But neither her nor the child had any illusions of successful stealth at this point, as she saw it. Her back to the wall, just at the corner, she held back from peeking around. The boy was near.

Dani tried to keep her voice low, calm, and sweet. “I’m not going-”

There was a small yelp, followed by a wild shot that echoed through the district office and tunneled into the drywall near the fire escape. Moans echoed within the building from dark, unexplored spaces.

“I’m not going to hurt you. Please, we have a safe place, right across the street. I can take you there. Nobody is mad about you shooting our friend. It was a mistake. What’s your name?”

She realized how hurried that had come out as she finished speaking – her attempt at being a soothing presence had given way to panic in the moment. She hoped desperately as she waited in silence, wound tight against the wall.

Dani waited patiently, despite the sound of motion around the corner and increasing sounds from near the atrium.

“They’re gone,” the kid responded, his voice cracked and parched. She wondered when he had last had water.

“I know, Edgar, the big guy, he saw them hurt each other. He tried to stop it. Maybe you saw that and thought he hurt them. He’s a good man. I swear. Please. What is your name?”

Another pause. More noises in the distance. Sniffling and restraining tears.

“Tyler.”

“Tyler, good. I’m Danielle, but my friends call me Dani. If I come around the corner, are you going to hurt me?”

“No.”

“I’m trusting you, Tyler. I want us both to get out of her together. Do you want some food? We can get you food. We’re right across the street. We need to go soon, I think those things are getting in.”

“There’s a door out. I won’t shoot,” he added. There was a quaver in his voice, an uncertainty that Dani could not read.

“Tyler, I am going to come around the corner, now, okay? I am going to trust you, and I hope you can trust me.”

“O-okay.”

Moment of truth, Dani thought. She rounded the corner and stopped, squatting slightly, setting the poker down on the tile floor.

Tyler was young, maybe ten. He was thin – half-starved – based on the fit of the clothes that hung off him. He wore a black shirt with cartoon monsters from a Nickelodeon cartoon, and his jeans were bunched up around his Nikes. He looked worn, and his clothes looked like they had been on him for weeks, maybe since this started. His arms hung slack, and in his right hand was the pistol he’d clipped Edgar with.

On his left forearm was a bloody gash, and in that moment, Dani’s heart sank.

There was something in the bites. She learned that with Stephen and Julie, hadn’t she? Everyone back at camp had a story about bites. Whatever this plague, disease, or virus actually was had been connected to the bites. Maybe it was a sickness or an infection. Maybe fluids. But there were bites or scratches. Always.

“Sweetie, what happened to your arm, there?”

Tyler looked down, seemingly surprised at what he saw. “I think when I was trying to close the trailer outside, one of the people bit me, but I don’t feel it.”

Dani kept staring at the wound, and Tyler stood there, awkward and frightened. She was desperate enough to ignore it. They weren’t sure it was the bites – not really. But everyone else at camp…

Dani glanced at the poker on the floor. Fuck. The grief took her as she looked at the small, half-starved face of the boy named Tyler. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, and he shook – he hadn’t noticed, but Dani did. A fever would eventually take him.

She calmly, or as calmly as she could make it sound, asked a question. “Is that the exit behind you?”

Tyler glanced back and nodded. He looked back at Dani, and a faint smile crossed his lips. “One way. Mom and Dad… we didn’t need to do anything. No handle outside, and those sick people can’t get it. Most of them.”

“Ready to go?” he asked.

Dani swallowed. She crouched down to pick up the fireplace poker. It felt heavier than it had in a long time. She turned her head as she heard noises from behind her. She saw the first of the ghouls step into the large room at the end of the hall. There would be no going back.

Tyler was at the door, ready to push it outward. Dani stepped forward, silently, and Tyler’s expression soured upon seeing the poker in her hand. Dani felt herself fidgeting with it. He turned back to the door, ready to go.

“Tyler. I’m sorry.”

Dani took two huge lurching steps toward him, poker raised for an overhead swing. He turned back in time to see her approach, screamed, and threw his weight against the door, swinging it open and stumbling into the late morning sunlight. He drew the gun as he stumbled back and fired a shot, just hitting the door as it began to swing shut, missing Dani by inches, and she pushed her way through, horrified and frenzied and damned.

Tyler scrambled backward, sobbing, his gun hand shaking. “Stop! Leave me alone!”

As Dani moved to clear the distance between them, a sudden motion from her left caught her off guard, and she watched Tyler’s head cave in – a bloody implosion where his face had once been. Dani froze at the sudden violence. Her ears rang, and the world began to spin again. Her poker slipped from her grasp as she stumbled backward. She looked up at the figure who had swept in with such violence.

Alicia stood, panting, wide-eyed. She held a bloody baseball bat outward and away, shaking, staring down at Tyler’s body. Alicia glanced at Dani, and Dani said nothing, turning her gaze back to Tyler.

Tyler took in a sharp, gagging breath. Soon after, he began to gargle and choke on blood and teeth.

“He had a gun.” Alicia’s voice was distant.

The ringing in Dani’s ears continued as she grabbed the bat from Alicia and began to smash it at Tyler’s broken head.

Click here to read the next chapter of The Dead Life when it is available. Thank you for reading the first part of The Dead Life novel. The second part will begin at the tail end of 2026. Follow hpkomics.com for more updates.

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The post The Dead Life #25 – Aftermath appeared first on hpkomics.com.

You can read the prior chapter here.

Day 25

As Dani passed through the open gate, past the disabled bus, she was confronted with far more ghouls than had been there just minutes ago. She couldn’t be sure there wasn’t another entrance on the distant end of the district campus. The kid’s shots had drawn roving dead toward his presumed position, and Dani began to approach, fireplace poker at the ready.

From what she could tell, the ghouls had begun clustering around the far end of the lot opposite from her, toward a small pair of trailer offices. She couldn’t make out the kid’s position in the area. She had kept herself to a sort of hunched crouch, aiming to make herself less noticeable without sacrificing mobility. She did her best to keep completely silent so as not to alert any of the undead ahead of her. The idea, as far as she had considered any sort of plan at this point, was to get a sense of where exactly the child was. From there, she would alert the ghouls to her position and give him a window to run across the street, where she would meet him afterward. But that all depended on where the child even was, and what his condition was. It wasn’t much of a plan, she would be the first to admit, but she was running on adrenaline and chance.

Dani began to close the gap between her and the stragglers of the pack. By her count, there were twelve of them between herself and the trailers. About eight were immediately surrounding the rightmost trailer from her perspective, clawing and slapping at the siding with discolored, wet hands and broken fingertips. That left four of them that were slowly lumbering toward the rest of the group. They were being drawn, but it wasn’t clear how it all worked.

But what it told her is that the kid was likely in that trailer. That meant he could be safe, but he just as easily might have accidentally let one in, and he was now dead, or even undead. It was a box of suck she was hesitant to open, but if there was a chance she could help him, she had to. These past couple of weeks of fear and sadness, of not being able to do enough for Julie, her neighbor. She had heard the struggle next door and did not intervene. She sat in fear in her apartment as Julie and her boyfriend suffered, died, and returned as inhuman things.

And Dani sat there. Alone. Afraid. Was it possible she could have helped? She didn’t know. She never would, not really. But fuck, she could have tried. 

She could have tried.

Dani kept her even pace and approached the back of the closest ghoul. It had not noticed her, still slowly stumbling toward the trailer. She looked the ghoul over and noticed it had been hobbled. The foot had bent in completely sideways at the ankle, and each step ground down the ankle more and more.  As the ankle raised from the ground, blood and bits of flesh would sluice off in ribbons, attached and tearing off from the asphalt. The foot was less a foot now and more a foot-like hunk of flesh, flopping uselessly every time the ankle hit the asphalt.

She rolled the fireplace poker in her hand, swung her arm outward, and swung in, aiming the hooked end right above the top of the torn ear of the ghoul with the ground-down ankle. The poker connected with an audible crunch as the ghoul lifted off the ground, collapsing onto its side with a thump on the asphalt. The impact point, covered in closely cropped brown hair, began to leak brownish blood, and small chips of bone carried by the pooling of blood slipped through thin, broken skin.

The ghoul was thrashing violently. Was it in pain? Was it just some rudimentary nervous system response?

It didn’t matter, really. The ghoul began to moan, but Dani thwacked it twice more in the same spot, leaving a sizable crater in the side of the skull. After the first hit, the ghoul had stopped thrashing. But the second hit made the body shudder slightly, and she thought for a second that maybe it wasn’t quite gone as it twitched.

The closest ghoul had apparently heard nothing and continued moving forward. It piled into the crowd, reaching and grasping between the tangle of bodies, trying to find some kind of hold on the trailer.

The sound was maddening. The strange, airy moans punctuated by pounding and scratching of the siding – relentless with no pattern. An hour of hearing that from inside the trailer would drive anyone crazy. She had to get him out.

Dani crouched and tried to listen for another sound. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear from the kid. IF he was smart, he was quiet. Maybe she wanted to hear him scream or cry, just as a sign he was still kicking. Something that justified what she was about to do. But there was nothing but the chaotic cacophony of the risen dead against the box that held something they wanted.

Dani sighed as she rose from her crouch. She glanced behind her and took several paces back. One thing she had learned about herself in the days since she had settled in at the storage yard was that she was dogshit with guns. Bob had told her as much. But she didn’t have to be good here, just distracting.

She slipped the poker into the pseudo-holster she’d made on her belt. It was a temporary solution and wasn’t designed for anything beyond brute-force functionality. It was just meant to give her a free hand without setting the poker down. As far as she was concerned, it would be best to have a hand on it at all times. The solution was simple: a slit in the belt wide enough for the hooked end of the poker to slip through, but not open enough for the handle to slip through easily.

She unshouldered Bob’s rifle and aimed. Her hands were shaking in her agitation and hurry, and she had to pause. She inhaled and exhaled slowly, feeling more control flow into her grasp. She did her best to line up a shot, and much to her surprise, when she pulled the trigger, she had dropped one of the ghouls instantly, watching a puff of gross spray emerge from the back of the head out of a flap of flesh and bone. The ghoul collapsed so fast it took her a moment to take in the luck here. Of course, Bob didn’t see that one.

But the noise, bright and sharp against the dull moans, hoarse groans, scratches, and slaps, did what it was meant to do, and now the ghouls had begun to turn toward Dani – their attention no longer on the potential prize within the trailer.

Dani took a breath and looked down the sights. She had lined up a shot and fired just as the ghoul had tripped over the recently fallen companion. The ghoul hit the ground hard, and the bullet hit the trailer.

“Shit! Sorry!”

She paused and took a breath. She lined up another shot as the ghoul on the ground struggled to find some footing. It had tripped in her direction, and its crown was mercifully pointed right at her. She fired – another puff of gore, and then a collapse.

The remaining ghouls were well aware of her presence and seemed to pick up their pace, reaching toward her. Their gaits were still stiff and mostly lumbering, but there was a frenzy to it. It was an urgency she had only seen in apparent excitement, a burst of energy as their target was in reach. Nine rotting killers were converging on her, but that’s what she wanted, as fucked as that notion was. They were clearing away from the trailer.

“Kid, if you’re in there, I’m clearing a path! Run!”

She did her best to listen for something from inside the trailer over the gargles and moans of the approaching undead, but it was too much to filter through. She took another couple of steps back and lined up a shot on one of the two closest to her position. This ghoul had once been a young man, maybe a teenager. His left arm was broken, and she wasn’t sure if it was something he’d had before he turned or not. It was impossible not to think of what they once were. As much as she wanted to see them as monsters, she kept finding herself sucked into the speculation of it all. 

She pulled the trigger.

Whoever they once were was gone, and their shadow now, too. It was the only thing she and the others could do for them now.

As the ghoul fell forward onto the asphalt, another chorus of wheezing gasps erupted from the companions. For the slightest second, Dani wondered if they were shocked or mourning their fallen companion. She shook her head, shoving that thought as far back as she could, not willing to entertain the notion. It was just the frenzy.

As she began to aim again, the trailer door swung open and slammed into the railing of the access ramp with a clang. The kid emerged, a boy. He couldn’t have been older than twelve. She locked eyes with him – it was hard not to – they were so wide and white, contrasting with dirty and bloodied skin. The kid was a mess, and she had no idea what his condition was besides alive, and for now, that was all that mattered. She did her best to smile at him, an attempt to put him at ease, but a pair of the ghouls had already begun to turn toward his position, alerted to the sound of the door. Breathless shrieks erupted, and she watched their bodies shudder as they caught on to the kid’s presence. The kid scanned the ghouls nervously, his gaze rapidly shifting between them and the stranger with a gun.

“Run to the storage place across the street, you’ll be safe! We’re safe!”

The boy said nothing as he bolted. He swung down beneath the railing and dodged the two ghouls. He began to run from them as fast as he could despite obvious exhaustion. Dani began to follow, but his path seemed strange, as though he was running from her.

“Head right, out that entrance! Near that bus!”

“Leave me alone! Go away!”

Dani skid-stopped as she saw the kid run into the trashed entrance of the district building. She watched him climb over stacked desks and shelves, into the darkness of the building.

“Shit.” She groaned.

The kid was frightened of her. It was understandable why; companions gone, ghouls everywhere, and a pursuing stranger who had been coming directly for him. From what Edgar had said, the kid seemed to think Edgar had killed the others. How could he not think she was here to finish the job?

Dani glanced behind her, back toward the trailers. The nearest of the remaining ghouls was a good thirty feet away from her position, but that, she figured, was close enough for them to see her enter the building. They might struggle with the pile of office furniture in the doorway, but that was in no way an impenetrable barrier. The darkened entrance made her nervous. She’d be entering a dark place, with no sense of the layout, pursuing ghouls, and a scared kid with a gun. It was hard not to spiral out, thinking of all the bad things that could happen. But he was just a kid, and he needed the help.

Dani’s cuts on the top of her thigh began to throb, and she rubbed at them with the butt of Bob’s rifle. She thought back to Julie and her boyfriend in the apartment next door. Dani could have reached out earlier or been proactive. She knew that.

It was like a damn breaking. Steven. His name was Steven. Why had she forgotten? She knew. She knew the whole time. Steven and Julie. She’d known him well enough to fuck him once, when Julie was at work. She wasn’t sure who had initiated it, nor did it matter. It had happened once. Nothing about that mattered now. All she knew now was she’d pushed his name away in guilt and shame. She’d displaced the tangle of that life and cut and tied around it, like an old net with some shitty repairs just to wring out a little more life from something that didn’t need to eb around anymore. But the damage was still there. 

Steven had volunteered to check the neighboring apartments for some food for the three of them. Dani could have gone too. But it was too awkward, knowing what she had done with Steven. And poor, cute Julie, not knowing what had happened. So he went by himself, climbing down from the demolished stairs. And she and Julie pretended to be good neighbors in the apocalypse, making idle chatter as Dani kept a secret from before the world ended. And then Steven came back, a bite on his arm, and they all thought it was so strange that these sick people were biting one another. It had been nearly two weeks of lockdown. They laughed it off and split their share of the food he’d brought back. She could have helped him gather it, even if she’d fucked him once, and it would have been awkward to be around him.

Dani hadn’t mentioned the broadcast to them the next day – they’d been so limited and so low quality, most had been nothing of note. She was sure it was some doomsday jockey ranting into his private radio. But the man, whomever he was, warned about the bites. The broadcast was less than a minute, but it was so important. She listened to it and then said nothing. The pain of being around them with what she did before, it didn’t matter, but it also did, then, and Dani said nothing, staying in her apartment. She locked herself away as she heard panic and fighting through the dryway behind her couch, listening to Julie’s updates on Steven.

“He’s not looking good. His breathing is laboured. I’m scared. Dani, help.” All the markers of the infection were behind the drywall. And yet the shame was too much. Dani sat by herself, knowing deep down what she was hearing and what it meant. And in time, Steven turned. Then Julie turned. And Dani was alone.

One of her cuts had opened again, and she felt warm and sticky blood seep from the broken skin. She glanced down, seeing the small red blotches spreading on her blue jeans.

The ghouls behind her were clearing the distance. Ahead was the entrance to that district office. Inside was the scared kid who shot big Edgar. 

The rifle’s weight was reassuring, and for a moment, she entertained the thought of turning the gun around on herself. The world was hard enough before it fell apart. She considered checking out back then – what kept her going now? She waited for an answer to emerge. Some sign that there was a reason to keep at any of this. All she received was a stench on the wind, of death and smoke, and the caws of crows.

The wind also carried the coolness of the January air, and she felt a chill. Maybe it was warmer inside the district office?

She sighed, shouldered the rifle, and drew the fireplace poker from the slit in her belt. She marched to the entrance and began to climb into the dark.

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The post The Dead Life #24 – Lost Child appeared first on hpkomics.com.

You can read the prior chapter here.

Day 25

Bob had scarcely picked up his rifle, which he had leaning by the side of the RV door, when he noticed that Dani had already cleared the parked car and was in the outer lot, running toward the commotion.

“Dani! Fuck, wait for me!”

Bob was still a pretty spry man, given he was mid-60s, but he felt the years catching up the moment he had begun to climb over the hood and past the open gate; he could not scramble or crawl, and instead belly-dragged himself slowly across the cadillac, losing momentum in the pause to pivot so he could throw his legs over the other side of the car, escaping the makeshift barricade. Dani, in her youthful fucking exhuberance, pressed on, leaving him behind. Goddamn kid.

By the time Bob’s sneakers hit the asphalt again, a pair of ghouls had already emerged from around the corner of the front office building and had taken notice. The closest one moaned out of a slackened jaw; the jaw hung limply, not due to death, but rather it was only tethered in position by a few strings of cheek muscle holding it aloft along the right side of the ghoul’s face. It couldn’t be helped, as Bob watched the ghoul emerge and approach, he watched the jaw dangle like a cat’s toy on a string – possibly at any second, tearing completely, leaving a limp mandible swaying. The ghoul, who was nude from the waist down, no longer appeared to have genitals that Bob could identify. He shuddered at the sight of the dark brown gash of rotting meat that had dripped dark fluid that ran down thin, bare legs.

The other ghoul, by comparison, appeared untouched beyond some superficial rot. That was until its outstretched grasp revealed a hand torn down the center, down to the wrist, between the middle and ring fingers. It was like the poor woman’s hand had been the Thanksgiving wishbone, greedily tugged at by overzealous children. Two loose fingers and a chunk of the rest of the hand hung off the palm loosely, almost unmoving beyond the bounce of motion. The other three fingers wiggled wildly at Bob’s presence.

Dani was out of sight completely by now. Bob’s lungs were itching. There wasn’t a fire in them yet.

Bob drew his rifle into position, something instinctual, a muscle memory still very much sharpened from three decades of living with wholesale slaughter. He never believed in the cause, but he did his duty. Everything expected of him. Everything. 

His reward was shitty lungs and a skull full of bad thoughts. From Viet Cong to the living dead; more faces for haunting the quiet hours.

But he tried not to dwell on them.

The first shot was perfect; the round drilled into the temple of the closest ghoul as it wobbled-walked on unsteady feet, swaying in wide arcs. The ghoul had dropped instantly, and its companion, the woman with the split hand, had not acknowledged its fall, still pushing forward. The ring and pinky fingers, along with their respective fleshy metacarpals, continued to bounce passively.

He couldn’t stand to see the things. He drew his rifle again, just as the ghoul approached the remains of its companion. Not looking, she took a wrong step and collapsed right onto the parking space in front of the body. Bob watched silently as the ghoul fell on an outstretched arm and watched it break. The arm did not reduce the impact, as the ghoul smashed face-first into oil-stained asphalt – a crunch and pooling of blood marking the violence.

And yet, the ghoul stirred. Bob didn’t know if these things could be disoriented, but it had trouble getting up. It may have been more from the broken arm not bearing weight, but he wondered if the dead could also be rattled like he could after a fall.

But, he supposed, it didn’t really matter. He began approaching the commotion, hip-firing into the ghoul’s skull, and making his way to where Dani had run off to. He scratched at the center of his chest – the itch was still there. Always there.

As he walked, Jimmy jogged up from behind him, a golf putter in hand; Jimmy only hung around for a moment to confirm where the commotion was, and sped past.

“I’m not that old,” Bob muttered. He started to jog, eyes darting around, wary of movement. 

He caught up with them. Dani and Jimmy had settled into crouches, covering Edgar, who was on the ground, belly-down, wrenched back, trying to apply some sort of pressure to the back of his leg. It looked to be near the knee.

“Bob, watch out! Someone has a gun!” Dani shouted.

Bob ducked down just off to the side of a thinning brown hedge that ran along the metal-barred gate that encircled whatever this school district building was. Any ghouls on the street outside were a good distance away, and none had managed to wander over toward the storage yard’s gate. Even then, the parked car would provide an obstacle, but Bob wondered if maybe he should have stayed there and held down the entrance for the return of the youngsters.

“IT WAS A FUCKING KID. A GODDAMN KID SHOT ME.”

Bob whirled around. He hadn’t heard that high of a tone out of Edgar and was caught off guard, more so by the delivery than the words themselves.

“What do you mean you were shot by a kid?” Jimmy asked.

A shot rang out and hit the bus. Everyone flinched. It was a wild shot, but in their direction. The kid must have had some training – most panic fire came off in bursts. This was a single shot, and while the shot was off the mark, it was not quite off the mark. The bus was covering Bob and the others.

“That little fuck shot me as I was trying to get away from all those dead shits. There was some kind of fight that broke ou-OWWW!”

Edgar stared at Dani, who was checking his leg by unflexing it to get a better sense of the wound. 

“Sorry,” she said. She pulled his leg back further and gingerly felt around the injury. “Bob?”

“Looks like a .22,” he added. Could have been much worse, he thought.

Dani continued. “They missed your knee, thank god, this is just at the top of the calf. Looks like it hurts.”

“IT FUCKING HURTS,” Edgar shouted. “I got clipped by a fucking fifth grader.”

Bob chimed in. “You said you were running from the dead – where is the kid?”

“Still back there, I didn’t get a good look at him,” Edgar grunted. “I saw three people spill out of a building trying to kill one another, and they got overrun. He must have been with that group. Maybe he thought I killed them or something?”

He paused.

“I… put them down after they’d been attacked. They weren’t gonna make it. She… one of them, her face had been bashed in, and she was drowning in her own blood. I couldn’t…” Edgar stopped as Jimmy gripped his shoulder.

Bob nodded at Edgar, and he kept his expression flat. “Makes sense. Though maybe the kid didn’t understand it. You did what you could to help.”

Dani, still crouched, duck-walked toward the front of the bus. Bob watched her take a couple of quick breaths and glance past the front before he could tell her no.

After a couple of seconds, she pulled back, and then the sound of another shot followed. Another hit to the bus.

“Goddamn it, Danielle.”

Again, the kid appeared to be a good shot. Whomever he had been with had taught him some trigger discipline.

“I don’t see him, but there are a lot of dead things moving toward a spot. I think he might get overrun if we don’t help him.”

Bob said nothing, still thinking about the kid’s aim. Jimmy and Edgar were trying to get Edgar to his feet. Jimmy was having a tough go of it due to Edgar’s heft.

“Guys, that kid is going to get overrun. We need to-”

Jimmy cut Dani off. “We need to get Edgar back to safety first and figure out a plan. We need to remove the bullet.”

“I can get back myself,” Edgar added. He was sweating, doing as much as he could to not put so much weight on Jimmy, but it wouldn’t last. Bob could see the man was tapped out. He was big and strong, but now he came off as helpless.

“Danielle, Dani. We need to get Edgar looked at. We can regroup there and figure something out,” Bob added.

Dani looked up at Bob, who had already risen to his feet, hunched just behind the hedge. He looked back at her, trying to convey that he understood her thinking. And he did, but the kid was too accurate a shot to do this safely with an injured man.

“It’s just a kid,” she pleaded.

“With a goddamn gun,” Edgar added.  Bob sensed the bitter tone. “He’s in a panic, and you’re gonna get shot if you approach him.”

Bob took a couple of steps toward her. “I don’t like it either, Dani, but we need to get out of here. The kid has a gun and a chance. We need to get Edgar to safety and not risk this injury getting worse. We’re not trading a man for the chance of a kid. We care for our own.”

The itching in his chest had grown more intense. He felt the start of a cough but stifled it by clearing his throat.

“I can go by myself,” she pleaded.

“Goddamn it. Dani, it’s gonna take all of us to get Edgar out of here. He’s too big for just Jimmy to support him, and we need someone on point for the way back.”

Edgar chuckled, out of breath. “Fuck you, Bob.”

Bob flipped Edgar off and flashed the man a smile. Edgar nodded. He was still sweating but seemed to be less panicked.

Dani said nothing, turning from the men, staring toward the front of the bus. Bob wondered if she was planning a path and if she would bolt forward. He hoped not. She sighed. She turned back, clearly pissed.

“Shit. Alright, let’s get this done.” She swept over to Edgar’s left and positioned herself under his armpit, bearing as much of his weight as she could, and Jimmy focused on the side with the wounded leg.

“Bob, keep the path clear,” Jimmy said.

Bob, still hunched, moved into the street and straightened his back, rifle drawn. His chest began to burn; the stifled cough was seeking its vengeance. 

As he could make out, there were three ghouls on North Lyon, two coming up from South Lyon. He took up a position in the middle of the street and aimed at the closest of the northern group. He glanced back at the storage yard, wary of motion outside of the rest of his unit.

A sudden coughing fit sent his shot veering off into the top of the ghoul’s chest, sending it stumbling back a step or two, but otherwise did not cut the momentum.

“Shit,” Bob continued coughing. “Move!”

He did his best to suppress the cough as Dani and Jimmy, supporting Edgar, came up behind him. With them behind, he was free to shoot again. This time, his mark was felled, and he watched the ghoul collapse onto the street. The two companions noticed nothing about their third, only moaning as they became aware of Bob’s position. They were still a distance off, far enough that there would be time to get to the gate. It was better to be reactive than aggressive, here.

He also hoped that maybe his shot had alerted the ghouls across the street. He hadn’t heard anything there. Maybe the kid had managed to run in the moment.

He turned to see Dani and Jimmy struggle under the weight of Edgar’s body on their own from his one-legged hops, like they were stakes to be driven into the asphalt. Both of them were puffing nearly as much as Edgar was.

He whirled south and observed that the other two ghouls had cleared the distance surprisingly fast. He took a few steps back, following his companions, observing them. They didn’t seem that fast – he wasn’t sure how they’d gotten so close.

His chest still burned, but the cough had seemed to clear out most of the tension. He wanted desperately to rub his chest, to soothe it as best he could, but he didn’t loosen his grip on the rifle.

As Bob and the others made their way into the small outer lot of the Storage Yard, he took point again, waiting for Edgar to crawl over the hood of the car.

Sure enough, the pair from the south rounded past the fence. They looked “fresher” for lack of a better term, and he wondered how recently they had been living people. Their bodies were still fleshy, and there was no sign of bones just beneath the skin being drawn too tight.

One ghoul’s neck had jagged tears, and the blood was not merely a brown stain, but looked tacky. Maybe a couple of hours old. The other ghoul had a similar, tacky stain around its mouth. Where had this drama played out?

But that was a question for another time.

Bob held his breath, lungs burning. He fired off a shot, hitting the ghoul with the neck injury in the throat. He swore under his breath, took aim, and fired again, this time sending the ghoul reeling back, red blood arcing as it fell back.

Edgar had managed to slide off the hood of the Cadillac and collapsed within the safety of the storage yard. Bob glanced over his shoulder as he watched Sandy march up to the man, simply staring from a yard away from him. He turned back to the ghouls as Jimmy began scrambling over the hood.

“Fuck, Sandy, go grab our aid kit,” Jimmy shouted.

Bob steeled himself as Dani approached and stood next to him. He took aim and fired, dropping the second of the South Lyon ghouls. He began to cough again.

Dani placed her hand on the rifle.

“Got two more coming from the north,” he said.

“Bob, you need to get over the car. It’ll take you longer. I can handle this.”

“Take me longer?”

Dani said nothing, glancing away from Bob, awkwardly. She didn’t want to say it. 

“How old do you think I am?” he pressed.

“Eighty?”

Bob began coughing again, and he tugged back the rifle. “I’m 64, kid. I’m not that fucking old.”

“Just get inside.” She snatched the rifle from him. “You’ve been coughing. Go. I’ve got them.”

Bob sputtered between coughs, “Alright, but you follow right after, got it?”

Dani nodded and took a firing stance.

“‘Eighty’ my ass,” Bob muttered as he approached the gate. He glanced back to see the first of the two North Lyon ghouls round the corner of the storage office.

Bob began to climb the hood of the car and belly crawl back into the yard. As he slid over, he watched Alicia approach, carrying a duffel bag. In the distance, he saw Sandy wheeling around in a golf cart, heading toward the RV where Mary and Alicia had been staying.

“I’ve got the bag, Jimmy, here!” Alicia tossed the bag toward the front of the car. Jimmy caught it and unzipped it, dipping into the supplies with what appeared to be a practiced hand. Alicia continued speaking as she jogged toward them. “Ms. Gunderson is picking up my mom. She used to work at a clinic. She can help!”

Alicia came to a stop in front of Bob and stared down at Edgar, who was on his side, breathing heavily. His brow was furrowed; he was concentrating on anything but his injury.

“Face down, bitch,” Jimmy told him. Edgar glanced back at him and grunted, doing what he was told. He lay on his stomach.

“Alicia, help me down.” Bob outstretched his arm, and she took it, helping guide him off the Cadillac. His feet had clipped Edgar in the head during the dismount.

“Cuídate, estúpido,” Edgar muttered.

“Cállate,” Bob added, winded. His chest was still hurting. He was breathing fire.

Alicia stared out the gate, toward where Bob had left Dani. “Holy shit.”

Bob glanced up over the hood of the car and saw Dani, standing over two crumbled ghouls. She hadn’t fired a shot. She had just finished dislodging her fireplace poker from the skull of one of them, with the rifle strapped over her shoulder. The poker’s hooked end was caked in gore, and the ghouls at her feet looked as though their heads had been bashed in, and the asphalt was covered in a browning slurry with spacklings of white and grey.

“Jesus, kid.”

A distant shot rang out. It had to be the kid again. He was on his own for sure, now. Still measured, still dangerous.

Dani looked toward the direction of the sound – across the street. She looked back at Bob, her eyes wide. Her mouth had been drawn tight. 

Bob remembered that look from Quý on a joint patrol along the Song Gu Via in ‘71. He’d heard a distress call and walked into a trap, quite literally. Bob had never seen a man skewered so thoroughly.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Dani!” Bob shouted.

Dani said nothing. She whirled away from the gate and ran off, toward the sound of the gunshot.

Click here to read the next chapter of The Dead Life when it is available.

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The post The Dead Life #23 – We Care for Our Own appeared first on hpkomics.com.