Author Interview: Julie Rudolph

30/3/2014

I'd like to introduce to you today the lovely Julie Rudolph, author of several novels including The Complex & The Highway from her Reanimates series,

She's a lovely woman, who I've chatted with a couple of times now, and if there were to be an apocalypse, I'd totally want to be on her teamfor several reasons, one being that she's a nurse/heart monitor tech, and two, she REALLY seems to know her apocalypse stuff!
But I'll hand over to her and let you get to know her and her work a little more.

Hi! I'm Julie Rudolph, but I publish under the name J. Rudolph.

You can find me all over the web. My main site is http://www.jrudolph.com

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/JRudolphAuthor
On twitter my name is @JRudolphDotCom
Book Link: The Complex: The Reanimates Book I [Kindle Edition]
Genre of writing:

I am a horror writer, mostly zombpoc but I also have a ghost story out called Hadley's Haunting.

Tell us about one of your books?

Title: The Complex: Book One of The Reanimates.

Blurb:

Nothing stays the way we want it to, and Cali Anglin learned this the hard way. Before, her life was simple. She was a mom, a wife, and a nurse. Now, she also must fight to save the lives of her family, her neighbors, and herself after a virus went awry and a plague of zombies took over life as she knew it.

No one is immune and no one is coming to save them. If they hope to be able to make it through the impossible, the survivors must create a safe zone within the walls of their gated apartment complex. It's up to this group of people to make life worth living now that the dead have come back.

There's just one problem...

How do you survive the zombie apocalypse with your humanity intact?

Published by:
Rudforce Intragalactic

Anything in particular that you want to say about it?

This is the first book in the Reanimates series. The Reanimates Series is all about the everyday person surviving the apocalypse. The Complex focuses on a group of people living in a small apartment complex as they work together to survive the end of the world.

What are you working on next and when can we expect to get our greedy little mitts on it?

I'm working on the final book of the series, and I expect to have it out by June. Book two The Highway is availible now on amazon.

Excerpt: The Complex:The Reanimates Book One

The following is an excerpt from The Complex: The Reanimates Book One, available now on Amazon

**
Threshold

The day that the virus hit critical viral threshold was much like the day before, in the beginning. I had worked the night before at the hospital on the cardiac unit. The night itself didn’t stand out that much on the heart unit, though the ER was hopping like the 4th of July. Had I not known better, I’d have guessed it was a full moon, a notorious omen for hospital staff. The hospital I worked at is in a small town, small for southern California anyway. Being the only hospital for 25 miles around, it made sense to be a trauma center. Throughout the night, trauma codes had kept being announced over the PA, one or two an hour. Our floor had mused over what could be going on out there in the world that could elicit this sudden spike in traumas but no one knew of any reason. It wasn’t a holiday. It wasn’t a weekend. It was a Tuesday. Just any old Tuesday in the end of May.

The drive home was fairly quiet. The usual activity of a weekday morning wasn’t there. The roads were light. I figured that since the schools let out for summer break the day before that maybe the neighbors were taking a day off. I wondered if maybe that was why the trauma count was so high. Yeah, that probably was it. The high schoolers must have had a party that had gotten out of hand. I chuckled to myself as I pulled my truck into the carport for not having had that realization last night.

I lived in a gated apartment complex. I loved it there. I loved the grounds of the complex. I loved the neighbors. I loved the trees. There were many tall trees and that gave a sense of quiet, essential to life in southern California. I glanced over the common area to see that the neighbor kids had left their bikes out on the common grounds. Again. How they had managed to not get those bikes stolen was beyond me. The sidewalk had been decorated with sidewalk chalk and scattered patches had been washed away by the sprinklers. As I walked up the stairs, I began to plan out what I was going to do that day with sleep being high on my ‘to do’ list. I emptied my pockets and walked down the hall. I stuck my head into my ten-year-old son’s room. Drew’s room was chaos now that he was on break. It made me happy to find him sprawled out across the bed; sound asleep, although how such a little person can take up so much area is beyond me. My husband, Trent, was sleeping in the next room enjoying that he had the day off. Trent had often commented on how he loved working for a small cabinet shop because he could make his own hours, a definite plus when kiddo goes off track for his break, since his school was of the year round variety. I had envy issues. People got sick regardless of what my son’s school schedule was, or what holiday it was. I couldn’t just close the hospital to suit me.

I went to the living room and fired up the laptop to check the message forums. My favorite forums are for Kindle fans. Yeah, I was ‘that geek.’ I loved to read and I loved electronic things and as it turned out, I was not alone in my obsession. I found the general chat thread and was surprised to see that there had been over 200 new posts in the 12 hours that I was at work. I must have missed out on some flame war. When I started reading the posts, people kept talking about they couldn’t believe the news stories. Posts continued on about being scared.

What had I missed?

Posts about the news scared me, they had ever since 9/11. Being totally unaware of what was going on when a huge event happens gave me a sinking feeling in the gut. It had me recall that 9/11 when the attacks occurred. I was at home and we didn’t have internet or TV. I found out that the world was ending when my mother in law called me and broke the news over my prepaid cell phone.

I stared at the still turned off television screen for a bit. If I didn’t turn it on then whatever it was that was scaring my internet friends was not real yet. The remote control sat on the coffee table taunting me. I finally reached over, picked it up and pushed the power button. When the screen came to life, the newscaster on the screen looked as though she was frightened by the story she had to tell us. She went on about how surreal the story was and how never in a million years did she think this was a real thing. Pretty much she said a whole lot of nothing.

I started flipping through the channels looking for someone to just say something useful. I finally landed on a channel that gave a smattering of statements that seemed to cross over one another. A virus of unknown origin has struck with certain fatality. Transmission of the virus is unknown. Origin of this virus unknown. Hospitals are overrun. I leaned closer in to pay more attention. Again, it’s the geek in me, anything weird and medical drew me in, just like the electronic things did. I wondered if the H1N1 flu that had the country in a panic a few months ago had done some sort of weird mutation. Finally, on some news channel, the reporter who was shuffling papers about said that the Centers for Disease Control had released the following press release:

“It is believed at this point that a virus is responsible for the deaths of at least 10% of the population. Symptoms are that of a sudden onset febrile condition that is not manageable by traditional cooling measures. The fever results in a seizure that appears at this time to precede death. The infected individual then ceases to exhibit signs of life. Cardiac and neurological monitoring show no activity. Following death the infected individual appears to reanimate. Monitoring continues to show no cardiac activity, despite the fact that this patient is once again moving. Minimal neurological activity resumes. Infected individuals are nonverbal and are extremely violent. Extreme caution around the infected is advised. It is advised that you remain in your home at this time.”

My head swam with that short statement. I couldn’t believe that they said reanimate. You can reanimate a frog with electricity once they died. Reanimating. Wow. It was just such a weird thing for them to say. Reanimating wasn’t a real thing, it is not a thing a disease is capable of doing. That’s the premise behind every zombie story. They reanimated.

Oh. My. God. That was exactly what they were saying, wasn’t it? The patient died. It was after they died that they came back, without a heartbeat, moving and violent. They were talking about real life zombies.

I sat unmoving. While I faced the television I couldn’t see it. All I could see was my son sprawled across the bed. All I could see was walking towards Trent on our wedding day. How would I tell them that there were zombie apocalypse was actually happening? How could I destroy the world as they knew it?

I walked softly down the hall into the pitch dark of the master bedroom. It didn’t often occur to me how dark it gets in there with the extra window coverings I had up to block out the sun in there. Night shifters like me tend to have a cave for a room. That morning it hit me how truly dark it got. I climbed into my side of the king sized bed and just lied there. What was I supposed say? I put my hand on my husband’s arm and he stirred.

Trent pried open his eyes. He smiled when he realized it was me. We’d been married for 13 years and every time I woke him up when I got home he gave me a smile when I saw him. Every morning it looked like he was happy to see me.

“Hey,” he said, still groggy. “How was work?”

Work. Wasn’t that a lifetime ago?

“It was fine.” Gulp. “There’s something going on with the news. I’m gonna turn it on.”

He rubbed his crystal blue eyes and stared at me confused. He reached for his glasses and I fumbled for the remote. I hit the power button and as the older CRT television screen warmed up, playing the audio well before the video feed kicked in. We heard the reporter go on about the release issued by the CDC. The reporter kept on talking about the biggest part of the story, the reanimation. My husband gaped at me with wide eyes.

“Did I have a brain melt just now? Did she say death then reanimation? I seriously must not be all the way awake.”

Just as my lips started to make words the CRT screen lit up and his head whipped to the screen. The anchor woman said now they were going live to the CDC in Washington DC.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Read the full story for only $2.99 on your kindle or free kindle app. If you are eligible for the Kindle Lending Library you can also borrow it for free. The Complex: The Reanimates Book One