Excerpt: Don't Know How to Write Zombies

Chapter 1, The Drive
The drive into Kalamazoo was a long one, just newly supported by my recent investment in a brand new car. The shiny blue and black striped hardtop MINI Cooper S had a way of making the two and a half hour trip not only bearable, but enjoyable. I hadn't been able to take to the road with this kind of feeling with my old car, and this new feeling is what kept me coming back every other weekend this past summer.

For the most part, the highways separating Chicago from "the zoo" are dull and boring, but you cross the Indiana border into Michigan, things really begin to change. The land opens up, and sloping hills begin to fill the landscape outside the road–which by the way becomes limited to three lanes with a much higher speed limit of seventy miles per hour.

As the road begins to curve northeast, and I find myself mounting large hills, I'm suddenly getting off at the Main street exit and at a country-styled crossroads of sorts at the top of it. I make a left turn, enjoying the chime that comes on when I flick down the turn signal's lever as the radio muffles the Garmin's feminine voice instructing me to "Turn left then right..."

Sooner than I imagine, I'm racing up and down a two lane sort of country highway covered in a canopy of maples. The leaves are just beginning to change, it's late September. I realize I begin to feel a little sad at noticing this, and experience an intense longing for warmer weather. I'd only been able to get out to the beach with Isaac twice this year, and both times were too cold or too windy (or actually, both) to actually swim in the lake. As fun of a summer as we'd had, it's end reminded me of all the things I wouldn't be able to do as autumn came in and fall brought down leaves and snow for winter.

I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to drive the Cooper up in the winter, well, I was fairly certain I wouldn't. When I'd bought the car, some ecstatic MINI enthusiast told me stories about getting trapped in large piles of snow in his own alley, because the body of the car is so low it actually plows the snow up and over the hood, windshield and roof itself. Not the way I want to end up when I slide off the highway and land in a ditch alongside the road.