Publisher's Synopsis
Not satisfied with merely surviving a zombie apocalypse, struggling daily for sustenance, hiding from danger for the last of your pathetic days? Of course you're not! ZOMBIE KILLER HANDBOOK is your practical, tested and darkly funny guide to OFFENSIVE combat operations against the undead, AND NOW IT'S ILLUSTRATED with over 50 color photographs! The backdrop for this story is the aftermath of an infectious zombie apocalypse that decimates the world population in 2012. A rural Kentucky city (Elizabethtown) is transformed into a fortress for humanity thanks to the combined efforts of survivors from the region. Taking the name Live-E-town, this survivor enclave stands up a para-military force of contracted Zombie Killers known as ZKs. These resourceful mercenaries defend Live E-town's borders and make war on the undead and human raider bands that inhabit the dangerous Dead Zones. By 2014, Live E-town's ZKs are the dominant living force in the Dead Zones in a hundred mile range. Their offensive operations have pushed a perimeter out five miles into the farmland surrounding the town, diverted and exterminated scores of undead herds, suppressed most of the raider groups, rescued thousands of survivors, and recovered hundreds of tons of survival critical resources. Live E-town is a beacon of hope for mankind's continued existence but survival remains a daily battle, the outcome of which has yet to be determined. The war to take the world back from the undead is only in its initial engagements. The Zombie Killer Handbook stands out as a unique work of fiction in the undead genre for its content and style. This is no re-edited contemporary army manual. The Zombie Killer Handbook is original, terse, focused, detailed with personal experience, always logical and laced with dark humor. It is a guide for offensive operations against the undead written by a pragmatic, knowledgeable and articulate combatant. Fictionally published in 2014 as a training manual for new recruits to the contract ZK force, it consists of a collection of essays on tactics, missions and threats in the Dead Zones, transportation, uniforms, equipment, weapons and even some social commentary. The essays are all reluctantly authored by a famed, and perhaps infamous, ZK officer called Captain Soo-Z. Little of this unlikely pony-tailed heroine's life before the apocalypse is revealed but it becomes apparent that she is Asian born, of slight stature, not out of her 20s, solitary and guarded in personality, deeply religious and violent in temperament and action to the extent that would be alarming anytime other than a zombie apocalypse. She distinguished herself in the pivotal battles that saved Elizabethtown and afterward carried the fight to its undead (and living) enemies with messianic zeal. Now in charge of the ZKs stationed at Outpost #7 on the eastern perimeter she is as much feared as respected. Beyond the fascinatingly detailed accounts of the ZKs harrowing work in the Dead Zones, her essays give the reader a glimpse of the sensibilities and values of a post-apocalyptic survivor turned warrior. She writes, "Unfortunately, not all the survivors are worth saving. Life in the Dead Zone for any length of time can do a lot of psychological damage. You develop major trust issues to say the least. The infected obviously don't go back to Live E-town. Neither do perverts, violent criminals, or the dangerously insane. A ZK makes a lot of judgment calls in the Dead Zone." In her essay on supply acquisition she laments, "Just as the shock of living through the apocalypse was starting to wear off, there was the additional shock of realizing how fast we were running out of the material things we thought we needed to live. As a woman, I think I can speak for my gender as a whole, the loss of toilet paper seemed like a fatal blow." This book is a must read for the zombie apocalypse genre fan
