Tourniquet

Tourniquet is a story written by neomeruru and illustrated by lihsa. It ran in Issue 33 and can be found at http://s2b2.livejournal.com/197034.html and shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/tourniquet/.

Summary

Childhood friends find themselves brothers in arms against a zombie infestation. Bad things happen to them both.

"It's on all the channels," says Emmett's youngest sister, cell phone open in hand but the screen dark, forgotten for a while. "On Twitter, too."

"Oh," says Sam, and the room goes quiet and tense again as everyone watches the television as if committing it to memory.

"I'm going to fight zombies," Emmett breathes, barely loud enough for Sam to hear.

Sam swallows, watching stock footage of troop deployment play on CNN. "Me too," he promises.

This story contains graphic depictions of bodily harm, elements of body horror, vore fantasies, a fleeting depiction of racism against Japanese-Canadians. It has an ambiguously happy ending.

Related Media

Failure to Thrive, a fanmix

Related Links

This story has been featured as a weekly Group Read at Goodreads.

Author's Notes

So Tourniquet started when I got this crazy idea that someone could survive after being bitten by a zombie if they managed to remove the limb before the virus traveled to the brain. And then I thought, wow, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off if that happened, if I was like a front-line soldier in a zombie war or something. I'd probably also ask for the strongest opiates available if someone was chopping off my arm! And probably get addicted to them! And I should throw in some gay, so I can write it for SSBB!

Yeah, a heroin-addicted, one-armed, bastard soldier and the man who inexplicably loves him, that's a great story!

And then I realized I was writing Yellow Fever, and I had to drop everything I was doing and go apologize to ladysisyphus right away.

(If you haven't read Yellow Fever, you should. I'll wait.)

So a few nights later I was telling the story of my near-miss plagiarism to my husband as we were just about to drift off, and he asked me: why not just write it anyway? So we talked and talked, and on a sweltering night in mid-August I got up and I wrote seven pages of just the outline, replacing heroin for rats. And enough people told me it didn't suck, so here we are.

True facts: the filename for this story was zombieboyfrands, and thus it will always be so in my head.

Also true facts: the last story I wrote was basically breathplay snuff, and this is basically thinly-veiled vore fantasy. God, there is so much wrong with my brain wiring.

Many thanks are in order to eternalsojourn and ladysisyphus for, as mentioned, assuring me it does not suck. And for cheerfully perforating the parts that did suck, so now perhaps they do not suck as much anymore. If there is any weakness in the story, then rest assured it is my own, because they did their level best to take it to the ground, and I am most appreciative.

This is literally the longest thing I've ever written -- it surpassed my thesis, even. And it has, like, a plot and everything. So I kind of like it, and it's kind of tender at the same time! I hope you like(d) reading it. Or, at the very least, it made you do the mental equivalent of reading through your fingers. That's mission accomplished for me.

Also, hello, three pieces of incredible art by lihsa, who heard my battle cry of 'I'm writing a gross thing!' and was not afraid to sign on. Her art blows me away, and if you have some time, please leave a comment for her too. You don't even have to comment on my story if you don't want, that's fine, but she did a great job and it takes significantly less time to look at a picture than it does to read 15k. :D

(from neomeruru.livejournal.com/302811.html)

External Reviews

• http://whitmans-sampler.tumblr.com/post/98367769924/tourniquet-shousetsu-bang-bang
• varietyshow.tumblr.com
• pinboard.in: "It's the zombiepocalypse! So Sam joins the army to follow his boyfriend Emmett. The first half of this story has some wry and convincing worldbuilding, the initial horror of the undead soon overtaken by the irony mill and the news churn. But when Sam finally hits the warzone, he finds it's not what he expected and that Emmett's changed, and the story turns quite dark."