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This was one of my favorite chapters to write. The firetruck scene was a blast to imagine. I pulled from my time in the Navy on firefighter training to write the scene. At one point in boot camp we spent a week in firefighter training where we sink the buttercup; this flooding simulation ship and we have to save it before we all go under. I don't think anyone ever saved that ship. Another day we had to take control of a live hose like I describe in the chapter. They charge the hose to about 30% and open it up and you must jump on the hose and scramble your way up it to the brass head and take control. It's a necessary practice and a skill you need to know on a ship. What if you shipmate who's on the hose gets knocked out for some reason. A fully charged hose will kill a person flailing around.
We once on the tug boat has just such a moment when a hose got away from a crew member and I had to along with two other guys scramble up that hose while it beat on us and take control. One person alone can't do it. That moment, that struggle, stuck with me and I thought what if our hero has a fully charged firehouse and was surrounded by zombies what would the outcome be. As you have read by now, not very well.
I don't know what kind of pressure firefighters have pumping through their hoses but on ship we always gave it everything we had for the main hose, the covering hose or secondary hose was a little less if I remember right, that was over twenty years ago. But it looks something like this.
Introducing Harold; as I have said before the shovel was a nod to my father who was a Marine for 27 years. All great weapons need a name and so it was with our hero's weapon of choice, a shovel, a little shovel, a shovel that when folded is even smaller. Not a great weapon of choice. But we see he becomes very comfortable with it and it works for him. I don't know where I got the name Harold from. I know when I wrote it the first few times I giggled because compared to Excalibur or Thor's Mjolnir hammer or any hero's trusty weapon Harold is . . . well Harold, a small, compactable, shovel. to me it was just funny and that's why I used it.
As my editor pointed out to me that after our hero said he wasn't going to call it Harold anymore he just kept calling it that. She even asked me every time if that was intentional. Yes it was. It was a good bit that worked I thought.
So there you have it; the Mighty Harold is just amusing to me so I put it in and kept it.
Burning Things. Let's face it burning things is kind of fun. In High school we use to go to the dump and grab an old tire. Carry it down to the Mississippi river where we all partied and pour a little gas on it and have a bonfire. We were kids and didn't know just how dangerous it was back then. Before that at my grandmothers home we burned trash. All of it. Paper, aerosol cans, you name it if it was trash it went in to the can and was burned. That's where I learned about aerosol cans exploding.
It all gave me the idea of how to attract the zombies downtown. From their last visit they left a bunch of zombies at the library doors. Unless a new food source presents itself they weren't going to move much. If you remember our hero's have the key tot he front door of the library but it's blocked by zombies. Why not catch a few things on fire and blow up a can? It seemed like something I would do if it were me. So that's what they did.
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