Chicago author Ling Ma never thought she'd write a zombie apocalypse novel. Here's what changed her mind.

CHICAGO - About seven years ago, when writer Ling Ma was a fact checker in the Chicago office of Playboy, as work at the magazine began drying up and layoffs loomed, she started writing a novel. Right there, while sitting at her desk, watching her coworkers called into an office then leave the building hours later with severance packages and boxes of personal items. "There were always rumors of moving the magazine to Los Angeles, but gradually. Chicago fell apart in slow motion. They encouraged people to retire early, then they cut the maximum number of vacation days you could roll over to the next year - stuff like that. Of course I knew I would be laid off. There was this definite sense of foreboding."

So she wrote, imagined her firing, her end