Cover for Vol 2 of the "Bag Men" series, available on Amazon.com -- written by Silas Jackson and me, J.R. Traas. Download this cover and snag a copy of the book using the handy Premium Content feature for just 50 cents! That's 50% off the list price, my friends, because we love ya. Ooh, also: you get Volume 1 entirely FREE! <3

Here's the book blurb:

Our parents survived the undead, but humanity wastes away.

A thrilling evolution of the zombie genre.

Bag Men: Waste is volume 2 of the Bag Men series, containing episodes 3 and 4. Volume 1 is also available on Kindle.

Witness the struggles of a failing humanity, forty years after the undead apocalypse.

In 2028, the North American continent looked something like it had in the aftermath of the Civil War. Ghost towns dotted the country, boarded up houses and hotels, acres of farmland with unharvested crops either rotting where they stood or trampled down by hundreds of feet. Ripe wheat wasted like trash. Highways were cracked and dusty. Emaciated animals roamed through muddy streets—pets that had been forgotten and turned feral, or grubby herds of cows that had burst out of their barns after long, lingering days without anyone coming to feed them.

It was an age that bred strange travelers, a shadow-nation of vagrants. 
Some resettled the land. Farmers in those days dug up weird harvests. The ploughshares always dragged up tons and tons of bullets and spent cartridges. There were bones mixed into the soil. The undead, in those days, were just another fact of people’s struggle to survive. The roving bands of shambling carcasses were a danger, but so were the land-mines left behind by the military’s doomed campaigns; so were the unmaintained gas-lines that exploded periodically, reducing already half-ruined buildings or city blocks to fireballs and burnt out husks. Malnutrition was a danger. Bandits were a danger. Wild animals and disease were dangers. Life was brutal, difficult and short. The remaining zombies, like everything else, were something the survivors learned to deal with.

Years later, a man chopping firewood in a field, carrying a rifle on his shoulder, might see a band of zombies walking towards him across the grass. Hands moving mechanically, he would cock his rifle and pick them off with head-shots as they came, and go back to his work as if he had never been interrupted. 
Day by day, year by year, the undead grew less common. Until finally, years after SHTF, most people agreed that the plague was over.

Only in the emergent city-state of Sacramento did people know the truth: the virus had evolved. It didn’t kill and reanimate victims anymore. It infected the brains of living hosts. They looked normal on the outside. The plague could spread through new populations without anyone realizing it was happening, until the carriers finally snapped, and could no longer resist the deep, primal drive to kill that had drowned out their personalities.
Like a curse from God that had cracked and destroyed mankind’s civilization, the virus endured in the new world in a new form, as if it had the especial purpose of purging the human race from the earth.

The year is now 2070 and, in the Republic of Sacramento, knowledge is power. Decades ago, the government understood the threat and took steps to contain it, creating the Bureau of Public Health, a super-agency tasked with identifying and eradicating "Sleepers"—those undead that can blend in with the crowd. The BPH was granted, by a terrified population, supreme authority over life and death. And, so far, humanity within the city has survived. Beyond its walls, however, there is no safety. The virus can trickle into human populations totally undetected, and plunge them into anarchy, hysteria and carnage before anyone realizes anything is wrong…

Bag Men: Waste gives readers a window into 2027, the year the world ended, before returning to Troy, Dara, and Bernard, as they journey to Resurrection City.