Humanity Gone: Facade of Order (22 page)

             
“While we were still at the Resistance, I went through the case and on one of the papers was a list of radio frequencies used by New America. We were setting up the equipment here and thought I'd test them. Most channels are static or random military chatter. However, about ten minutes ago this message began and has been repeated several times. I can't,” he stumbles with the words. “I can't believe it.”

             
“What the hell is it?” Jo asks.

             
“It's a Washington radio bulletin.” Ryan says. His hand grabs the headset's chord and pulls it from the radio. Static emits from the speaker on the radio. The Ax is silent except for the muffled droning of the coal generator outside. The static changes into a voice. The voice sounds urgent. It sounds scared.

             
“New update from Paris Island City. Six hundred people have fallen ill. They have terrible rashes and they have fevers near 105 degrees. The victims are of all ages. I repeat all ages. The plague is back, and it's worse.”

End of Book II

Thanks Again

             
Whether you are one of my few students who actually reads, a longtime friend or family member, or perhaps a complete stranger, I want to thank you again for your support. When I published
After the Plague
, the kind words that followed meant much and they were encouragement for me to begin Book II promptly. Despite having a basic outline of the novel, it has changed and warped each time I sat down at my computer. After many long hours, it finally became the product you hold in your hands: the story of a family managing to find each other.

             
Theme became important to me. I want each book to have one big idea that each chapter continued to run back to. Book I was survival. It was about doing whatever it takes to live and pondering how far our own humanity will let us go to protect not only ourselves, but those we love.  In this book, I wanted everything that was fought so hard for in Book I to be taken away. Worst of all is how the loss comes to fruition.  However, at the end of the day, each of them has family to pick them back up. We all will experience loss, but it is those we love that make it bearable. Therefore, along with loss, bringing a family back together took center stage.

             
Facade of Order
is really meant to raise the ante in the Humanity Gone Saga. I wanted everything to be bigger in the second book. Many sequels, from
The Two Towers
to
The Empire Strikes Back
, everything becomes bigger. The initial stories concentrate on a very tight group, and then the entire world explodes on the pages in the sequel story.
Facade of Order
was meant to do just that, yet I wanted it to still maintain focus on the central characters throughout the narratives. Considering the addition of nearly a dozen new characters, it was not easy to maintain the focus on the original five “heroes.” However, the different perspectives and the references to the old book glued it to a familiar ground that hopefully the readers loved the first time through. Still, it was a personal struggle to work with a much larger picture.
After the Plague
was naturally easier because it dealt with a single thread whereas
Facade of Order
felt like a knotted mess until the very end. Initial drafts of this book were too plot driven as I tried to cover so much ground. It took a while, but I learned to spend some time on the characters that I spent so much time developing.

             
Making connections between the two books was always essential in its creation. Despite the addition of many new characters and much larger problems, I wanted the similarities between the two to be jarring at a few key moments. In several examples throughout the novel, some narration is nearly verbatim to
After the Plague
. Yet, they have a whole new meaning or give minor foreshadowing into the events ahead. At least that is what I hope I managed to do.

             
Working with Dean in the last book helped to give me the courage to write this book by myself. However, his input in the final stages of this novel still was essential in assembling the final creation. My constant ability to gloss over tense errors still fries my mind. Most of all, fellow author and zombie enthusiast, Jay Wilburn, has been instrumental again in helping to make this worthy of being read. The initial draft was borderline rubbish at times, and hopefully my adaption of his criticism raised it to be at least recyclable.

             
Thanks to my editor Sandra Finley for making this work shine just like
After the Plague
. This needed her polish too.

             
I hope you enjoyed the tale and join me one last time for the conclusion to the
Humanity Gone
Saga in Book III.

             
All bets are off.

Derek Deremer

4/21/2013

About the Author

Derek Dereme
r
continues his pursuit of educating America's youth. He hails from the outskirts of Pittsburgh. After learning that he could actually major in writing stories and reading books, he studied English at Westminster College.  Typically you can find him reading, playing a video game, diagramming a sentence, or something else nerdy.

Follow him on Twitter: @DerekDeremer