The world of The Seven Habits can best be summed up in a
line from the song Electric City by
Firewater: “You don’t have to be a soldier to fight, but you better have a
killer in ya.” This is best exemplified
by Ocean’s post-apocalyptic world. No
one who survives in these wastelands is weak; they can’t afford to be. Life has been reduced to a bleak struggle for
survival where you look out for yourself first, the people you care for second,
and everyone else only as the situation dictates. This hierarchy comes into play when Ocean
kills her mother in a struggle over a dead rat.
In that situation, if Ocean had thought of her mother first, the young
girl would have died then and there. Her
mother would have carried on with her life as if nothing happened. Is it any wonder that Ocean’s father is
dead? He loved her very dearly and put
her best interests before his own. That’s
not how you survive in that world. But
Ocean had what her father lacked, that killer within. It
possessed her just when she needed it most, enabling her to rip out her mother’s
throat with her teeth and ensure her own continued survival. Since she’s struggling to transition between
childhood and what her world thinks of as adulthood, she’s still conflicted at
times. This is why I’ve said Ocean will
have to get progressively more calloused as the series progresses. At heart, I think, she’ll remain a good
person. But there are a lot of hard
choices in store for that young girl.
Much as Ocean is going through a rite of passage, so is
Bosley. His world is also in transition,
but it’s at a stage where very few people have realized that there’s something intrinsically
wrong happening. Bosley knows, of
course, because he’s been up and down this timeline so many times he’s got a
birds-eye view. He knows what’s going
down. But there are a handful of people
out there who’ve noticed how a lot of their friends are changing, how it almost
seems as if they’re slowly losing their minds, until one day they just erupt in
a geyser of violence. The virus is just
now beginning to break the news and there are ripples of unrest among those
connecting the dots. The living dead, however, are not yet among those dots. They're right around the corner, but at this point none one could have guessed what was to come. Which is why the vast majority
of them will not survive. They’ll flinch
when they should have struck without hesitation. They’ll break down into extended states of
shock, their brains overloaded by atrocities continually witnessed and too
many surges of raw emotion. They’ll
allow old prejudices and preconceptions to dictate their paths toward death. Or any one of a thousand other reasons. This is the moment of change; when each and every person has to reach deep down
inside and find the killer lurking there or be devoured by the new reality.
As a slight teaser, I’m attaching a link to the first
chapter of book 2, The Dead Trap. I think this may very well be one of the
darkest scenes I’ve ever written, but keep in mind that this is extremely rough
draft material. It hasn’t been edited or
polished in any way and needs refinement. But it really sets the tone for book two and
overall I’m happy with it.
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