To be fair to the cornhusker state (motto: “Show us corn and we shall husk it!”), I wasn’t keen on dying in Colorado or Iowa either, but hadn’t felt my life in any particular danger in either of  those two states. It was in Nebraska that our tire blew out.

The car was packed with myself, my wife, our two daughters, and a half-ton of blankets, toys, books, markers, and crumbs from the “eat this ’cause we’re not stopping for lunch” food group. The trunk was likewise packed with suitcases. We were on a road trip dressed in a black, a multi-state journey of mourning with a funeral as its destination. We’d been on the road since 7:00 and making good time.

The road was making a funny, rumbling noise. It was a construction zone, with odd pavement. No surprise. But then the noise got considerably louder and less funny. The steering wheel started tugging in my hands, like it had something really cool to show me over here, on the side of the road.

“I think it’s the tire,” I said, and started pulling over.

There wasn’ t much of a shoulder to pull off onto inside the construction zone. It was a narrow strip of highway, just wide enough for a single car and a person to squat next to it, peering at a tire. On one side was waist-high concrete barrier. On the other other was a constant death-stream of vehicles rocketing by at 75, shaking our car in their wake.

“It’s the tire,” my wife confirmed from the passenger side door. “It’s mostly gone.”

Very aware of how close the car was to incoming traffic, we got out and put the girls on the far side of the construction barrier. There was no actual construction going on over there, but there was a quarter-mile strip of mud, so they’d have something to occupy their time while not being reduced to pulp by passing semi trucks.

“Where are we?” asked my wife. I had no idea. I was just the driver; how should I know such things? There was a watertower on the horizon in front of us, suggesting a town of some sort. Behind us was… another vehicle? Yes, an SUV parked on the shoulder a little ways back with its hazards on and a woman inside. I decided to visit our freeway neighbor and see if she knew where we were.

“Outside Omaha,” our neighbor said. “I’m out of gas. Trying to call triple-A. It’s a rental. Thank you.” She rolled her window back up.

Back at the car, my wife asked, “Think we can change the tire?”

Of course! The spare! In my shock, my lizard brain had totally forgotten that we even had a spare tire. I pulled the suitcases out of the trunk and started digging under the secret floor. I found the tire, then the tire iron (which will always seem to me more weapon than tool), but not the jack.

“I don’t think it’s in there,” said my wife. She’d loaned it to a friend, who’d never returned it.

I headed back to the SUV, to see if I could borrow a cup of jack from our neighbor. She was on the phone and couldn’t be disturbed, but a Nebraska highway patrol car pulled up behind her while I was there. An officer who looked like he’d been spending all afternoon squinting into the sun looking for John Connor stepped out of his vehicle and asked what was going on. I explained, he nodded, and I headed back to the car.

“They’re sending a van,” I told my wife. “They’ll have a  jack.”

Here’s where I give a big shout-out to the volunteers of the Nebraska Motorist Assist Program. For it was these fine folks who had the van — and the jack — that made the rest of our journey possible. With the help of a retired dude in a fluorescent vest, we were able to get the spare on, get enough air in it so we could actually drive on it, and limp into Omaha to replace the blown tire.

Safe at home again, I’m thinking of writing a pair of letters to the state of Nebraska: the first praising its NMAP as the highway heroes they are, and the second suggesting they change to nickname to the “corn-and-tire husker state.”

Are you an artist? Would you like to join these illustrious (pun intended) ranks? Drop me a line, and let’s make some magic!

But sell me zombies?

Sell me a TV show (on AMC no less!) about zombies based on the The Walking Dead comic series I’ve been reading for the past seven years?

I’m so there. I’m following your Twitter feed, liking you on Facebook, and generally drinking the Kool-Aid. I’m not worrying about spoilers — I’ve already read the comics, I know what happens — I just want to stalk and devour all the info I can find.

Because I’m a tool. A tool for The Walking Dead.

Here: Watch the trailer, drink some Kool-Aid, and join me on the edge of my fanboy seat as we wait for the Halloween premiere to roll around.

I had nightmares as a kid, same as everybody. Most of them are lost in the fog of growing up, but one from when I was four or five stands out: My grandfather, who I loved, sat at the foot of my bed in the middle of the night, smiling and motioning for me to come to him for a hug. But when I did, the toys on my dresser behind him leered and leaped toward me like evil jack-in-the-boxes. (Jacks-in-the-box?) And so I sat in bed, terrified and torn between the loving patriarch and demonic playthings that he, of course, couldn’t see or hear.

I think the worst nightmares are those that take place in your bedroom, in your bed. Because upon waking, there isn’t that moment of “Oh, good, I’m in bed, it was just a dream.” There is no sudden relief, but just the exhausted peace as the dread slowly seeps away.

…Until you hear that sound again, somewhere in the dark of your room.

No bad dreams last night, but I did finish a new Worth a Thousand entry, a story of childhood fears called Under the Bed and in the Closet, inspired by the always-creepy artwork of Brad McDevitt. Give it read, give it a Tweet, pass it along to all your Facebook buddies, and be sure to swing by Brad’s site to say hi and thank him for the artwork.

Six months later, I got around to looking into how to actually do this. Specifically, I explored the world of virtual tabletop RPG software. The point of such software is simulate the round-the-table, Cheeto-munching, Dew-swigging experience of an actual RPG session, but online. It doesn’t (usually) handle the rules for you; it’s just a tabletop. Our group tried out a couple different systems, but in hopes of passing our experience along and saving other gamers some time, here’s what we’ve found works best:

• MapTool is our VT of choice. It’s free, easy to set up, and easy to use. It doesn’t have any audio, but it does have chat, and comes with enough playmats and tokens to get anyone up and playing a DnD game in minutes. The specifics of the playmat are based on the d20 system, but you can tweak them to accommodate whatever you’re doing. (While at their website, check out TokenTool, which turns any graphic on your hard drive into a DnD-style battle token. Yes, random guy from Google images, you’re now an NPC in my zombie apocalypse RPG.)
  

• Skype is the obvious choice of software to let everyone talk to each other. The conference call option lets everyone talk at once, and it has built-in chat software, so the GM can privately chat with any of the players. The only thing we haven’t been able to force Skype to do is play music while we game.
  

• For our most recent game, our GM figured out how to use Ventrilo to stream a soundtrack for the session. I suspect that with more fiddling, we might be able to condense our voice-chat and soundtrack both onto Ventrilo, but we haven’t figured it out yet. And maybe we won’t; I like the option of adjusting the soundtrack volume separate from the VOIP volume. I love Bear McCreary as much as the next guy, but sometimes you got to turn those drums down.

If you don’t have your gaming friends nearby, I recommend giving the virtual tabletop thing a try. If you, give ‘em a hug — a big, awkward, sweaty geek hug that says, “I’m glad I don’t have jump through a bunch of internet hoops just to toss dice with you, ya big lug.”

I hadn’t intended to revisit that world. But one of readers expressed some additional interest in the setting, and when kicking around ideas for Nine Tenths of the Law, it occurred to me it would be a good fit, so I slapped my muse around until it agreed to help make it happen. (Sometimes my muse needs some convincing. It helps jump-start the creative process.)

Las Vegas after dark holds few surprises for me. I’m not a local. I’m not even a regular. But I’ve been there often enough to get a feel for its primal rhythms, its drunken grinning stagger, its fratboy howl. The details change with the ever-evolving skyline, but the heart of the place is the same as was the first time I visited. I suspect it’s the same as it was twenty years ago, thirty, more.

But as the sun lurches white and burning back into the sky, the Vegas night shift gives way to the morning shift. The strip is empty where, at midnight, a pack of dead-eyed people in hot pink t-shirts reading “Hot girls to your room in minutes” were handing out pornographic business cards (“Candi, $99, 555-121-2233″). In their place are slightly younger, slightly more lively people in hot pink t-shirts reading “Grand Canyon Tours” and handing out discount tickets to tourist attractions.

The crowds of sweaty, smiling drunks are gone. Sweaty, serious joggers have their place. They run in pairs, rather than full packs. They speak in hushed tones to each other, if at all. They are not here for a good time. They’re racing the sun: jogging in 85 degrees is one thing; jogging in 100 is another.

As the morning heats up, perhaps the joggers will be replaced by middle-aged and elderly tourists, who might give way in turn to young and foolish as the sun sets and the cycle begins anew. I don’t see it happen, but I can imagine it, on my way to the airport and back to the real world.

Good question. Let me answer it with a brief overview of the setting:

Dragon Ninjas of the Undead (DNotU) captures the coolness of dragons, mixes it with the sweetness of ninjas, and adds a tub of gooey zombie goodness for a heady mixture that is as unique as it is familiar.

On the Nature of Heroes:
In the land of DNotU, some of the heroes are mighty dragon warriors waging an eternal war against the warriors of shadow (that’s ninjas) and rotting flesh (that’s zombies). Other heroes are dragon-folk going on quests for their dragon lords, raiding zombie warrens and ninja temples, securing their enemies’ gold and magic items.

Ninjas are heroes too. Ninja heroes sneak into dragon lairs and zombie warrens, stealing their gold and magic items. Sometimes they sneak so deep into dragon or zombie territory, they walk up right behind a dragon lord or zombie master and just assassinate him. They loot his body, taking his gold and magic items.

Are there zombie heroes? Yes, there are. They are the most heroic of all, in an angst-ridden sort of way. Not all zombies are mindless monsters shambling about in constant search of brrraaaaaains. Some of them are smart enough to know what’s going on, and have the will to resist their fiendish urges. As long as they retain their resolve, they can use their supernatural abilities to hunt down dragons and ninjas, eat them, and take their gold and magic items.

Finally, the truly legendary heroes of DNotU are the dragon ninjas, the dragon zombies, and the zombie ninjas. These stalwart champions live in two worlds at once, fighting dragons, ninjas, and zombies on every front in their on-going quest for power (usually in the form of gold and magic items).

There are no dragon ninja zombie heroes. That would just be silly.

On the Nature of Villains and Conflict:
One faction’s hero is another faction’s villain. See above. You’ve got three mighty factions, constantly in conflict with each other. How much more conflict could you want? Oh, I suppose there might be mutant wizards around too as a common enemy, but they don’t get top billing.

On the Nature of Magic:
Magic is a powerful force of nature. No one knows where it comes from. It’s just there, like gravity or mud. Dragons have really powerful rituals that take years to perform, but can change the shape of the world when they are complete. Ninja magic is fast, adaptable, and can be used by anyone with the training. Zombies aren’t so good at magic, but it flows through them and gives them neat supernatural powers like super-strength and great digestion.

What? That’s not enough for you? Well, stop yer bellyachin’ cuz I’ll be filling your eye-holes with more DNotU goodness over the next few weeks.

Check out this week’s Worth a Thousand entry, Gone Native. It may be the only story to ever feature Lady Ashwood and her man Huxley.

Mostly Cloudy
The missiles fell like rain and
cleansed the earth.
Father says I must not be grateful.

Before
Since then, “Before” mutated into a proper noun:
a place, a time, a world of bliss and innocence captured in
a single, perfect crystal.
No one speaks much of the Before these days.

Inside
The Leader gives us water and hope
in exchange for our wives and daughters.
“It’s better than being out there,” we say.
Yes. Better than being out there.

Compound Rules
All gates are to be kept locked.
All doors and windows too.
Check and double-check — bring a rifle.
This is the law of life.
Break it, and you will die. Break it, and we may all die.