The morning sun peeks out from behind grey clouds as lifeless bodies shuffle into a dimly lit building in Virginia. They bump into one another. They grunt and moan. They crave only one thing: the taste of freshly ground coffee. Although people sure seem like it in the mornings, there are no zombies in this coffee shop. At least not physically.

Two writers have a table to themselves, going over storyline ideas listed out on a cellphone while cycling through internet tabs of military history. Joshua Rader and Brandon Macready have kept this routine during the creation of their graphic novel, Z-Day.

“I have always wanted to write stories but knowing Josh has inspired me to actually start doing it,” explained co-author, Brandon Macready. “I keep a list of ideas that I want to write about in my phone. On our first meeting I read the list to Josh and one of the ideas really stood out because he had an idea to write a story along the same lines. So we started meeting on a weekly basis and after a while inspiration struck us and it was like we couldn’t stop. The story really began to write itself.”

Z Day is a about a team of Marines deployed into a zombie infested Nagasaki, mere hours before the ‘Fat man’ bomb was dropped. The story follows them as they look for the origin of this biological weapon.

“The Idea for Z-Day came about through hard work and cohesive team meetings between Josh and I,” said Brandon. “Together we spent many hours with bad ideas, and trying to make them better. Eventually, we started working with the idea of Zombies during WWII.”

“In one of [my college creative writing] classes I started outlining a small story idea about an American soldier somehow stuck in Japan during WWII.” remembered co-author Josh Rader. “ The idea was he would be fighting off monsters created by the nuclear bombs. I shared this idea with Brandon and we just started throwing ideas back and forth and the story just kept growing and growing.”

Josh has a degree in history and he put it to use in the writing process. “It was important to me that we stayed as realistic as possible…for a zombie story.” Josh laughs. “ I’m sure including era specific weapons and vehicles made it more challenging on our artist. The story uses zombies as a main device but ultimately I think it becomes a good horror/war story that in small ways even comments on American Imperialism. Our story is historical fiction. We are telling a war story just as much as we are telling a zombie story.”