Death, Murder, and Zombies

What would it take for an ordinary person to become a killer? Not rage, not desperation, not poverty or trauma — but logic. Careful, patient, internally consistent logic applied to a premise that is simply wrong.

That is the question at the heart of Death, Murder, and Zombies, a psychological horror novel that follows Karl Hendricks from directionless twenty-year-old to self-appointed assistant to Death itself.

Karl is living in his father’s basement when his best friend Mike dies in a shooting that wasn’t quite an accident. In the hospital aftermath, Karl has an encounter that changes everything: he meets Death — not as a concept or a metaphor, but as a supernatural entity going about its work. Death tells Karl he might become something else entirely. Karl takes this as a calling.

What follows is a methodical transformation. Karl studies death from a distance, then up close. He builds a false identity, funds his operation through ransomware attacks on small businesses, and begins selecting victims he believes are suffering and ready to transition. He kills with clinical precision and tells himself it is mercy. His logic is airtight. His logic is also completely wrong.

When Death finally confronts Karl directly and names him what he is — a serial killer with delusions of cosmic purpose — the encounter forces a decision that will have consequences far beyond anything Karl anticipated.

Death, Murder, and Zombies is told in the first person by a narrator who is always wrong about himself and always right about the facts. The horror is not supernatural, though supernatural elements are present throughout. The horror is the gap between what Karl believes he is doing and what the reader understands him to be doing. That gap widens with every chapter until it becomes something vast and irreversible.

For readers of Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, and Thomas Tryon.

Questions

Read the Opening

Chapter One

Meet Death

I stopped dead in my tracks. The wrongness hit me. Something was coming. Something bad.

I’d felt this before, this sense that the cosmic order was about to get royally fucked. Tonight it pressed harder than usual, like a migraine building behind my eyes.

I stood on cracked pavement in the worst part of the city, surrounded by condemned buildings and broken dreams. The wrongness didn’t come from any one place — it was everywhere. A sour note in a symphony I’d been conducting for millennia.

A siren wailed in the distance. Ambulance. Someone was dying, which meant I had work to do. I pushed the wrongness to the back of my mind and headed toward my destination: a crack house that had been killing people for the better part of a decade.

I walked through the front door without opening it. Physical barriers stopped mattering to me long ago. The living locked themselves in. Death walked through walls.

The smell hit me first. Sweet approaching death mixed with burned chemicals and human waste. Somewhere in this building, a soul was getting ready to leave, and I felt the familiar pull of duty.

The first floor was a maze of collapsed walls and improvised rooms. Bodies lay scattered on stained mattresses and bare concrete. Some breathed in shallow gasps. Others had fled into chemical oblivion, their minds escaped to whatever landscapes their drugs provided. None of these were ready for me yet.

The third floor had been chopped into smaller rooms, each one a private hell where addiction played its final hand. I followed the sensation to a corner room where a young woman lay on a mattress that had seen better decades.

Tina Morrison. Seventeen years old, though her body looked twice that. Born to a mother who sold food stamps for crack and a father whose name appeared on no documents. On the streets since thirteen. Now the bill was coming due.

I settled beside her, invisible to any living witness. Her breathing had turned irregular, each breath requiring more effort than the last. Her heart fought against the poison she’d shot into her arm.

This part never got old. Every death was unique, every soul’s departure a singular moment. Some fought to the end, raging against the inevitable. Others welcomed me like an old friend. Most just accepted what they’d always known was coming.

Her heart stuttered, paused, then beat once more like an engine running on fumes. Then it stopped.

When the last electrical impulse faded and true death claimed her, I reached into her chest. My hand passed through skin and bone like mist, searching for the essence that had animated this collection of matter for seventeen hard years. There. Nestled between liver and spine, a sphere of light no bigger than a pearl, pulsing with its own glow.

As I extracted her essence, she appeared beside her abandoned body. Not as the ravaged girl who’d just died, but as the bright spirit she’d been beneath all the damage.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked, her voice rough despite being freed from her damaged throat.

A friend. I’m here to help you move on.

“Am I dead? Shit, I’m dead, ain’t I?”

Your body is. You’re not. You can never truly die, Tina. You’re more than flesh and bone. Now it’s time to burn bright again.

She looked down at her corpse with relief. “Damn thing hurt so bad.”

Tina nodded and let herself be drawn into the pouch, where she would rest until Fate could weave her into a new life, new body, new chances to learn and love.

As I sealed the pouch, the wrongness hit me again, stronger than before. Somewhere in this city, maybe right now, choices were being made that would ripple through time. Someone was planning something that would threaten everything I’d spent eternity maintaining.

But who? And what could any mortal do to disrupt death itself?

Death could afford to be patient. I had all eternity to solve this mystery. As I moved through shadows toward my next appointment, I couldn’t shake the feeling that eternity might not be as long as I’d always thought.

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