Konrath, J.A. - DRACULAS (A Novel of Terror)

Chapter 3

A husband and wife in the maternity ward. She’s in labor, expecting twins.

Chapter 4

A lumberjack, recovering from a chainsaw accident. His truck is parked outside, filled with axes, saws, and other useful tools.

Chapter 5

A good ole boy cop, who is the boyfriend of the historian. He’d been planning on asking her to marry him that day, and meets her at the hospital to do so. He’s a gun nut.

Chapter 6-Chapter 30

We alternate POVs, following each group of characters as the outbreak goes from some isolated incidents to a full-blown hospital takeover.

Vampire Rules

These aren’t brooding, charismatic charmers. These are feral pyschopaths who exists only to gorge themselves on blood.

After mutating, their teeth grow long and sharp. All of their teeth (not just their canines), and they extend so big they shred through their own lips and cheeks.

Claws grow. Able to see in dark. Can smell blood like sharks. Strong and fast, but no other supernatural abilities, and no trace of humanity left.

The draculas must drink blood every hour, or they die. Any blood. If one of them is cut and bleeds, the others turn on him and devour him. Lick up every drop off the floor and walls. Fight over bones to get the marrow.

Without blood, they autocannibalize themselves, sucking their own blood until they die.

It takes less than an hour to mutate.

No vampire gimmicks. Crosses, sunlight, garlic, stakes—nothing kills them but fire and beheading and blood draining. No turning into bats or mesmerizing victims.

No humanity, no higher thinking. These are rabid dogs with bigger teeth. They exist only to drink blood. Rudimentary, childlike thoughts. Problem solving skills and cooperation, but this dissipates the hungrier they become.

Blake and I have also got some set-pieces we’d like included in the story: big scenes that will be a lot of fun to write. I’ll let him describe those…

Joe

May 8, 2010

I kinda like the gun-nut cop…like many gun nuts, he’s something of a gunsmith and he customizes weapons…he’s off-duty and was on his way to a gun show with a trunkful of all his super-cool heat. He was going to take the historian along so he could propose to the woman he loves most among the things he loves most. His guns have been keeping them apart - she hates them. But she’s going to learn to LOVE them.

Paul

• • •

I’ll take the lumberjack, unless Joe or Blake desperately want him.

This sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. Good work, you two. Pat each other on the back…violently.

Jeff

• • •

Mornin’ Fellas - I talked with Joe, and I’ll take the pregnant couple (my daughter was born just a year ago, so I’m still pretty close to the birthing experience)…Joe will have the nurse/mother dying of cancer.

I wanted to list out some big set pieces Joe and I have talked about:

(1) We imagined this scene where, initially, Moorecook goes into the ER convulsing, and then goes ape-shit and bites everything in sight, essentially killing 3 people and a seeing-eye dog. Hospital staff is freaking out, they put the dead in the refrigerated morgue drawers to isolate them while they wait for the CDC to show up…There’s a beat of “whooo, disaster averted, let’s call the CDC, and someone on staff at the morgue late at night, suddenly hears four metal doors begin to rattle, and then this awful screaming coming from the drawers, which begin to be kicked out.

(2) A woman undergoing a blood transfusion wakes to see a dracula slurping down the contents of her blood bag

(3) A nurse running in terror, tries to get to the hospital chapel, thinking she’ll be saved. 30 draculas flood in, shattering the safe in a church/with a cross myth.

(4) As Joe mentioned, end of book, a 28-year-old we’ve never seen before is saved…this is Moorecook, who has glutted himself on enough blood to return to this eternally-youthful undead state which was his goal from the beginning…

(5) a blind man who’s seeing eye dog has been bitten by Moorecook is trying to find his dog, who is now a dracula dog and turns on him.

(6) a character hears what sounds like gunshots out in the parking lot, looks out the window, sees a pack of draculas going through the parking lot, shredding tires.

(7) I think it’d be funny if either Paul’s or Jeff’s semi-redneck character always calls these things draculas instead of vampires.

A little about the mentality of the draculas: Of course, they’re voracious for blood, b/c on some primal level, they know the more blood they drink, they might return to their previous state. No blood in an hour = death. Imagine they need it like we need oxygen.

In addition to the character ARCS we’ve all chosen, we each take one of the initial people bitten by Moorecook, so we each have a dracula POV. I’ll take Moorecook, Joe wants to take a child, the dog doesn’t count…Jeff & Paul let me know what person you want to take and I’ll make sure Moorecock bites your guy/gal in the ER…in terms of the dracula POV, I really don’t want to say too much about it. It shouldn’t be too extensive, but I think we should all at least play around with writing a scene or two from a dracula POV and seeing what we come up with.

I’m going to write the opening, up to the point where everyone can begin their character’s arcs…I think when you see what I’ve done, where I’ve left it off, it will make sense.

Peace!

Blake

• • •

Paul, you’ll do great with the cop/gun nut.

Jeff, the lumberjack is all you. One thing I was thinking about his character is his chainsaw injury is on the back of his leg. And everyone who meets him is like, “How did you cut the back of your leg, dumb ass?” This actually happened to a buddy of mine.

Blake is going to take the pregnant couple. He’s also writing the set-up scene. Here’s the basic idea:

Once Moorecook is taken to the ER, he goes nuts and bites three people in the waiting room, ripping out their throats. These three are taken to the morgue, put in the meatlocker drawers. CDC is called to come look at a potential outbreak, but they’re several hours away.

Then, a morgue attendant hears scratching from one of the drawers. Then two of the drawers. Then three. The scratching turns to pounding. The draculas, oblivious to pain, break and smash their own bodies bursting out of the drawers.

Blake is going to follow Moorecook as a dracula. But Joe, Paul, and Jeff will each follow one of these newly created draculas. So we all get to start our own mini-epidemic in the hospital, however we want.

In other words, we each write for a main POV character, and various secondary characters we create, including one of the draculas who wreaks havoc on our characters. Dracula POV is fine, as long as we agree on the ground rules for the creature’s thought processes.

Let Blake and I know the type of dracula you want as your main villain. My dracula will be a twelve year old kid. You need to each pick a bad guy character.

Another note—Moorecook is the alpha male, and retains the most of his intelligence. He’s going to destroy the phone junction boxes, and eventually also the electricity in the hopsital.

This is a newer hospital, so it is set up with cell phone jammers, like modern airplanes. No one will be able to use their cell phone.

Paul’s cop will be able to use his radio in his car (which is loaded with weapons) but he’ll have to get outside in order to do it, and I predict the hospital will fill up with draculas pretty quickly, and these things are HARD to kill.

The hospital is isolated. Ten miles from anything. Once the epidemic starts, it hits fast and hard—no one has time to get away. The only remaining survivors after the initial onslaught are the ones hiding in their rooms. Moorecook also directs some of the other draculas to cruise the hospital parking lot and pop tires on all the vehicles.