The Survivor Devil_ to a book of stories in which she described a man, a "survivor devil," who is born in the last few days of an apocalypse. She told me, "I wanted to keep telling the story but add in enough information so that it didn't become so obvious who the main character was. As the stories continued, you knew. You could just tell." When I interviewed Stephen King about this kind of writing, he told me that "the main character is always some other sort of monster" (which is another example of the "monster's" point of view, this time with a twist). The devil is "not just a person; he's something like an amalgam of the things that killed the world, a metaphor," she said. "He's a fusion of what destroyed the world and of who survives." But what if, for the devil, he _is_ just a person? This thought sent me on a journey into my imagination—and an exploration of what I knew. I know, for example, that a person can be a terrible, evil person, no matter how well she tries to mask her intentions. I know, too, that the opposite is true. There are good, and sometimes very good, people whose lives can be changed in an instant. It happens in movies and TV shows and books and plays, over and over again. But what about the person who is _both?_ Some of my friends know about that question—especially the ones who had experience with that kind of person who exists on the edge of reality, often in dark alleys or in the middle of nowhere. And some of my friends know that in writing a story, the writer can make that person a reality, if only in fiction. Now, to find the line between fiction and reality: that's the tricky part. But that's what I did. I read. I watched. I researched. I talked to my husband and with my kids, and I tried to draw a line between reality and the story. One of my best friends, Billie Dean Howard, was shot as she ran for the car she had been ordered to get. We were both teenagers then, friends since high school, and now we have daughters the same age—and daughters who know each other and have played together. So we don't talk about the night that "turned her life upside down," as she described it to me years later, or the time she nearly died in a car crash in which another driver was drunk and hit her at ninety miles an hour. But when I interviewed her about the experience, it came up in her answers. In a story where the central character is a survivor, the storyteller can't help but include what's behind it all—the "gifts" the survivor has received for surviving, the horrors that haunt him in his sleep and that he wishes he had never seen. It's part of the survivor's fate and burden to face those horrors and to see things that are difficult for him. To survive is also to be marked by the things he or she has survived. Her answers were not long in coming, but she did not shy away from telling me what that was like. "I couldn't tell my mom," she told me. "I knew then that it was not her story to tell. I think my mom would have been devastated to know what I was going through." And then she added, "The story is in front of me. I saw it. And I remember the sound of the bullets hitting my car, and I remember the smell of the blood. "I don't think I could have told it to her, but I told it to you," she said, "because you were safe." I think that what I know now about her experience, and what I share about it in the _Survivor Devil_ series, is true and can be verified. But at the same time, the _survivor devil_ exists only in the pages of the book, not as real. The character of the survivor devil was created only in story form. As I wrote my own books of fiction, including _The Survivor Devil,_ that experience and that fear became part of me. And it didn't change me; it didn't change my heart. I am the same person I was before all that happened. But when I wrote _The Survivor Devil,_ I wrote with that fear in mind, so I felt that same fear in the pages of my story. And readers responded to that fear with their own. Readers were inspired to buy more books. They were fascinated by stories they read, and those who lived through similar things began to talk to me. They wanted to know the stories of how the survivor devil was created, what it was like for him to live through those horrors and the horrors of the end of the world. In turn, as I talked with people about the _Survivor Devil,_ I began to discover that survivors in real life are just like characters in stories. They are often quiet, because of the strength they had to endure, and perhaps because they are afraid to talk about their experience. They are sometimes angry, frustrated, and sad. But they are also determined to not let anyone else have that experience. And even if someone else does get a peek of it—even if the secret is out there for everyone to know—they'll keep it to themselves, because that is what survivors do. I had so much to say and so many questions to ask; I began to wonder why so many things happened as they did. I began to wonder about the _Survivor Devil_ and what the writer does and what the devil knows, if anything. I began to wonder what it was like for the survivor devils I had written about and how their experiences touched me. So did the words in my own story that were meant to create suspense, yet also were the real reason readers were drawn to it. I felt inspired to write this book. I knew from experience and in stories that survivors are not always defined by their actions, or their abilities, or their losses and triumphs. And I knew from experience and in stories that the devil can be as real as any person. That's how stories work, because humans and humans' abilities to love, hate, survive, and kill can never be understood or explained completely by one person. Sometimes humans become more than themselves, though, and grow larger, like the creatures that go against human nature and against "surviving." They are the kind of monster who makes monsters real. And I wanted to know more about them, to be inspired by their stories. So in this story, I have made up a few words. I have put them in quotes at the beginning and the end of the book, to remind you that these are words that I made up, to give you more mystery for the story. The story itself is real. The story comes from my love of horror. It's inspired by the words and stories of others and by what I know. It's based on what I believe in and what I know about people. It is what happened when the words made a reality—a reality with the power to touch your heart and turn you into a person who believes in something. And I hope it inspires you to learn more. * * * The words that appear at the end of _Survivor Devil_ in quotation marks are fictional, even though I used the real words of a real survivor—and even though I put them there to open and close my story, and even though they contain the reality of my ideas. I used those real words because I wanted you to see that they gave me ideas, or the inspiration to write. * * * For more stories from me and about my journey and my writing, you can find me at www.emilydavisfiction.com Chapter 1 I knew that I was going to die. I had been right there, ready to die—in that ditch, in that dark field, and in that house. I was ready to die because I had seen so much in the past four years, and I had faced it all, somehow. I had survived it all. I thought I was ready. I wanted to die. And not just now but many times in the past, but I survived. I survived against all odds, even when those odds were against me, even when it looked impossible. I survived by knowing that no matter how many times I was about to die, how many people didn't like me, or left me, or abandoned me, or pushed me into corners and didn't even know that I was still standing, I was going to live. I was going to live. So I survived. I kept running. Running in a way that I didn't realize I was running, with my head down and my shoulders hunched, with my eyes squeezed shut so tight and so hard that I couldn't even feel what I was doing as my bare feet kicked up puffs of dirt and little stones and fallen leaves that became clods in the dirt. I was running and running in a way that made me feel like I had no choice but to keep running and make it through whatever it was that was waiting for me. There was nowhere for me to hide. No place where I could run into the ground and disappear and find peace. No