Think about it. Without Romero’s old B&W movie, and the new spin on flesh-eating monsters he created, there would be no World War Z, no The Walking Dead or Warm Bodies, no Michael Jackson’s Thriller, no Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. No Santa Clarita Diet, iZombie, Z Nation, Marvel Zombies, Train to Busan, Return of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, Dead Set, Zombie Survival Guide, Shaun of the Dead, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, Call of Duty: Black Ops (zombie mode), Star Wars: Death Troopers, Dead Space, Zombieland, The Evil Dead, House of the Dead, Left 4 Dead, and even no Game of Thrones, because the Night Walkers are fucking zombies.

Now, we jump forward to my post-zombie-apocalypse series of novels collectively known as the Rot & Ruin series. Those novels are set fourteen years after the events of Dead/Fall. They’re young adult novels about what it’s like to grow up years after the apocalypse. There are four novels in the original series: Rot & Ruin, Dust & Decay, Flesh & Bone and Fire & Ash; as well as a graphic novel, Rot & Ruin: Warrior Smart, set between books 2 and 3; and a collection of short stories, Bits & Pieces.

In one of the stories in Bits I introduce a character known as Rachael Elle. She is a cosplayer (someone who dresses up in costumes, often those of super heroes, anime characters, movie/TV characters, etc.) who is at a convention when the end comes. Because she emulates the heroic qualities of the characters she plays, Rachael is able to both survive the attack and lead a group of other survivors to safety.

More tricky math. Rachael Elle is the cosplay name of an actual person, Rachael Lavin, who was—once upon a time—a student in my Experimental Writing for Teens program. She was also an active cosplayer and her group would do charity appearances at places like children’s hospitals. I found that so admirable that I used her as a basis for the warrior woman character in Bits & Pieces. Later still, when I decided I wanted to continue the story from Dead/Fall, I asked Rachael if she would like to collaborate on it. She would write the Rachael Elle/Warrior Woman storyline and I’d write two converging subplots featuring Dez Fox, the protagonist of my first two novels; and Joe Ledger, the hero of my ongoing series of weird science thrillers, of which Patient Zero is the first.

And, to complicate the math even more, Sam Imura was the sniper for Joe Ledger’s special ops team.

Yeah. It’s convoluted. The short version of that is this: The Joe Ledger thrillers take place more or less right now. Dead of Night and Fall of Night take place roughly fifteen years after whenever the last Ledger novel will be. Dark of Night takes place several months after that, and Rot & Ruin takes place fourteen years later. A new spinoff series, Broken Lands (debuting in December 2018), will take place a year after Rot & Ruin.