“I’m Ben by the way,” he called out to my back. “Ben Tyler.”
I snorted to myself at the two first names; it somehow seemed appropriate for the handsome life-long bachelor, but ridiculous all the same.
“Liz Carlson,” I called over my shoulder. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Uh, the towels?” he shouted after me when we’d reached the gate.
I turned around with a dropped mouth, thinking a hundred different vile things about my new neighbor. “Can’t we… I…” I glanced down helplessly at my bare legs poking out of the bottom of the towel he’d just lent me.
“Liz,” he laughed familiarly, and I tried not to resent him. “I’m just teasing. Bring them back whenever.”
I growled something unintelligible that I hope sounded like “thank you” and spun on my heel, shooing Abby onto the lawn between our houses.
“Nice to meet you, neighbor,” he called out over the fence.
“You too,” I mumbled, not even turning my head to look back at him.
Obviously he was single and unattached. He was way too smug for his own good. I just hoped he would keep his gate locked and loud parties few and far between. He seemed like the type to throw frat party-like keggers and hire strippers for the weekend. I had a family to raise, a family that was quickly falling apart while I floundered to hold us together with tired arms and a broken spirit. I didn’t need a nosy neighbor handing out Pop-Tarts and sarcasm interfering with my life.
Please enjoy an excerpt from Rachel’s zombie novella series, Love and Decay!
Chapter One
647 days after initial infection
Oh, god.
The smell was the worst. The absolute worst.
It wasn’t enough that I had to pick my way through dismembered and half-eaten bodies, or that at any moment one of them could spring up from the ground and make an afternoon snack out of me.
It wasn’t enough that I hadn’t had a shower in over a year and a half, hadn’t worn eye liner in even longer than that and my hair was somehow simultaneously disgustingly greasy while frizzing into a perpetual fluff ball.
Oh no, that would never be enough. My ugly tan work boots were a size and a half too small, I ripped my too big Grateful Dead t-shirt off a very, very dead man, and my jeans…. or what was left of my jeans was the last of my stash from my once excessive closet.
After all of that-and I mean, the shower alone should have been enough suffering for any living being to suffer through-it was the smell that got to me.
Putrid, rotting flesh from both the dead that littered the ground around me and the remnants of stench that lingered in the air when the Feeders were finished was what triggered my gag reflex and watered my eyes. There weren’t enough words in the English dictionary to describe my revulsion, or the way my empty stomach flipped with every breath.
I probably would have puked if I had eaten anything in the last two days.
The best thing about the Zombie Apocalypse? I was no longer addicted to sugar and caffeinated beverages.
I wiped my forearm across my sweaty forehead and re-aimed my handgun in the general area in front of me. This is the point of the story where I’m supposed to tell you what kind of gun I’m carrying, but let’s be real…. Before the end of the world I was a cheerleader at a small town school, where I was the debate team captain and student council secretary. I lived for throwing parties when my parents went out of town, making out with my football captain boyfriend and doing the occasional trip to the homeless shelter where I would put in my monthly two hours of good deeds.
I’d never even held a gun-- scratch that-- I’d never even been in the same room as a gun until the world went to shit. Who knew the cure for herpes would turn all those sexual deviants into people-eating, brain-dead, infection-giving assholes?
Not me.
The whole phenomenon gave a girl a serious complex about safe sex.