We're nearing the end of the Summer of Zombie Blog Tour.
Hope you found some great new reads during the month. I know I did! (If you want to see who was up you can go back to any of the author links on the Page at the top of the blog.)
*** My teaser comes up on Saturday so be sure to check the post below.
This is the Friday and Saturday authors list:
Friday June 26
After (After Series Book 1)
What would the world be like after a zombie apocalypse? When the zombies have been destroyed and what’s left of humanity tries to pick up the pieces? What happens After…
Jenna Deluise grew up in that world. A world under the thumb of a new military police called the New Alliance which is funded by Gene Pharm, a powerful pharmaceutical company. Her father worked for them as a top scientist before he committed suicide.
When his boss kidnaps Jenna to lure her allegedly dead father out, Jenna realizes that she didn’t know her father at all and that his work on the zombie virus was more sinister than he made out.
Jenna is taken to an underground lab where she finds her father’s ex lab assistant Wesley. He is being forced to finish her father’s work. Jenna and Wesley have to work together to escape the lab, even though Jenna doesn’t trust Wesley after he almost got her killed several years before. Read the rest…
Gary tore through the hole in the fence like a bat out of hell. He could hear his fellow survivors’ footfalls behind him. In the midst of the firefight, he had been unable to retrieve his weapons and up ahead he spied a few straggling eaters headed his way. He darted right, taking yet another detour. His chest burned and his head swam.
How could things have gone so wrong?
Gary looked back only once to see Clyde and Andrew in hot pursuit; he waved an arm, motioning for them to follow him into one of the abandoned homes.
He rushed the door of a 1980’s-style brick home and prayed that it was unlocked. With a flick of his wrist, he turned the knob and let himself in, the strong scent of rot and decay hitting him instantly. He brought his hand up to cover his nose and mouth.
“Of course I’d choose this house,” he complained. Read the rest…
The Orphans Vol II
Surviving the Turned
Shaun rubbed his hands on his face, trying to remain calm. Between the Turned smacking their fists and faces on the hardware store’s windows and Ellie busting his balls, he was becoming irrational and finding it difficult to think. “If I’d realized the consequences of my actions before I did it, then obviously, I wouldn’t have blown the stupid van up. I say we get a crowbar and head up the stairs to the roof.”
They walked an aisle over, looking for the crowbars. Shaun found them and selected one that looked like it could take a lot of abuse. A sound much like a wind chime… or a hanging wrench display… came from somewhere in the back of the store. Tina was grabbing some rope and could already see horrific visions of being lowered off the side of a building to a group of blood-crazed Turned. “Wait a damn minute, why the…”
When the chime sounded, it broke her train of thought and she said, “What the eff was that?” Read the rest…
Jenna's War: Undead America
“Meat’s meat,” said Sam, thumping the butt of his ancient shotgun against the dull hardwood floor. A sound like an actual gunshot rang through the room, and the gathered collection of ragtag survivors sat up a little straighter. “We need to survive, and to survive we need protein. I don’t care where it comes from.”
He paused, letting the words sink in, and I stared at the ground beneath my feet.
Winters in Nebraska – or at least that winter, since it was the only one I’d ever experienced – were hard. The chaotic thunderstorms of the fall gave way only when the furies of blizzards took over, with snow falling so thick and heavy and fast we found ourselves paralyzed, stuck in a farmhouse whose walls cried out in agony against the winds and whose roof sank beneath the snow’s wet, heavy weight. Read the rest…
It didn’t open! What the hell? I pushed harder and looked down to see if the door was locked. My eyes were greeted by a little red sign over the release lever. HOLD FOR 15 SECONDS UNTIL ALARM SOUNDS. Crap. That’s less than ideal. They’re going to hear that sucker a mile away and make a beeline for my ass. Holding my breath, I pushed and held the release in place.
The emergency alarm blared to life and a split-second later, the door clicked and swung open. Without hesitation, I bolted across the threshold and ran. My legs pumped back and forth, my sensible shoes slapping the pavement in a rushed rhythm.
A gunshot sounded to my left and I turned quickly, almost falling over my own feet and face-planting on the asphalt. John Croxton, one of the deputy sheriffs, was firing warning shots over a crowd of people moving toward him. Coming to a halt, I opened my mouth to yell, to warn him that the mob couldn’t be reasoned with. I saw the children in the crowd, they moved faster than the adults, moved toward John… closer, closer. John fired again. I couldn’t look away. Morbid fascination- a brutal car crash on the freeway. Read the rest…
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Saturday June 27
Morning. Breakfast. The journey is afoot again.
I hit another climb. I wasn’t in the mood. In fact, at the moment, the whole business of hiking was getting on my last nerve.
“Namaste, mother fucker,” I whispered. It was a joke Erica and I shared with regards to a rather brutal hot yoga class. As the cold wind whipped across my face, I longed for that one hundred and ten degree room and the surrounding sweat-drenched bodies.
For a brief second, my mind shifted and twisted to Erica’s sweaty flesh. At that moment, purpose resurrected in my core and my legs pumped upwards toward the peak of the climb.
I could smell her skin, hear her deep breathing. As I climbed, a memory bubbled to the surface. The first class. She was a graduate assistant, teaching Chemistry 101. The second I laid eyes on all five foot two inches of her, it was over. I bypassed crush and smitten and went straight to love. I was a transplant from the States, she was a native Canadian. I had a thing for the dialect and her quirky, youthful smile. After class, I followed her to a coffee shop, pulled out my guitar, and improvised a song. Read the rest…
Full post:
Prologue: GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie
A virus. A freaking virus.
I’d been sick before, you know, measles, mumps…kid stuff…but not really sick.
Never like this.
This . . . this couldn’t be happening.
I tuned back in to the doctor’s explanation…new diet, pills, blah-blah-blah…and let his words fade again into the background.
Gone was the golden tan I’d nurtured over the summer with tanning cream and hours sunbathing by the pool with one of my cousins. My skin had a weird grayish tone, like I’d rubbed myself with fireplace ash.
I gazed at my legs, now mottled with strange gray blotches, and my pretty pink toenails peeking out from beneath the sheet.
The machine next to me made a frantic beep-beep.
I turned and caught my reflection in the metal canister sitting on the table next to the bed. Whimpering, I rubbed a hand over my cheek, wondering at the scaly texture, while at other times I felt almost nothing.
Large, deep brown eyes under ebony bangs stared back. I saw a decent nose.
Spots.
I took in the pinkish patches and my uneven skin tone, which reminded me of those old battleships on the PBS show I’d watched with my aunt.
For the first time in my sixteen-year-old life I was . . . ugly.
I struck the bed frame over and over, the pain barely registering. The machine’s whir-click-whir turned into a wail almost louder than mine—beep-beep-beeeeeeep.
A nurse in blue scrubs rushed in and tried to reassure me, even as she attempted to keep me immobile on this slab they called a bed.
“Relax, it’ll be fine,” she said.
“No, it won’t,” I yelled, “it won’t!”
How could looking like freaking King Tut without his wrappings ever be fine?
Excerpt – Where Becca is helping fight off a zombie family:
The other three, Mama, Papa and Sister Zombie, clung to the car, their shrieks and screeches getting louder as they fought to gain entrance. Maybe it was sick, but I couldn’t resist. I took aim with the paintball gun and squeezed the trigger. Pop-pop-pop. They landed in an arc, hitting each in turn. The paintball sizzled, the neon poison spreading across the one creature’s back. The second ball splat on the arm of Mama Z, who puller her hair and screeched before she fell. The third Z turned its rotten face my way and hissed like a snake, its rot-pocked tongue wiggled at me, before it, too, fell into the pile.
Yikes. If this wasn’t good for nightmares, I didn’t know what was.
Excerpt – Becca comes face to face with an old lady zombie:
An old lady Z in a ratty housecoat, the puffs of hair left on half of her head still sporting pink curlers, her mouth ringed with blood like she’d missed while applying her lipstick, limped toward us from the opposite direction.
She stumbled along, taking mincing steps in dirty pink slippers. A small plastic handbag dangled from a chain around her arm. I watched her progress, unable to shake the thought of somebody’s grandma heading to a tea party before she went missing.
Carm’s poke at my arm barely registered, my focus solely on Grandma Z shuffling along. “Bec? You good?” my cousin asked.
I shook my head, but didn’t trust myself to answer. My eyes blurred and got a little moist. I’d never expected this sudden stab of emotion. Up until now the Zs hadn’t bothered me, but this little old lady was different. She could’ve been anybody’s charming little grandma who unfortunately had somehow become infected.
I couldn’t do it. Not this time.
As if she sensed my hesitation, Grandma Z gave another little growl and reached for me with chubby hands, her fingers pocked with rot, bits of bone sticking out. I stared at her and screamed when Carm pushed me aside. “Bec, watch out!”
Carm pumped her gun, the paintballs hitting the senior Z full in the face. She made mewing sounds like a baby and grabbed at her dripping flesh.
It was too much for me. I averted my gaze. The sight of her agony and the reality of her body falling to pieces bothered me like it never had before. Read the rest…
Links:
Halfway down the concourse they came to a wide stairwell. Signs hanging from the ceiling indicated that they led to the main tunnel network, two levels above them. At the far end of the concourse, tunnels branched off in three different directions. Another set of signs above those tunnels directed them to surface access, the airfields and a series of research labs with long, confusing titles that Jacob didn’t even try to figure out.
Jacob walked a little farther down the concourse and squinted at the signs. “Chelsea, what’s your aunt’s lab called?”
“Morphic Field Studies and Application.”
Jacob shrugged. “I need somebody with better eyes than me. I can’t read those signs.”
But behind Chelsea, Kelly looked terrified. She was staring up the escalators, wide eyed, shaking her head. Read the rest…
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled against his mouth.
And I was. I was sorry that I hadn’t told him the truth, that I hadn’t trusted him to keep that truth to himself, and I was sorry that I had been too stubborn to realize it. Trust went both ways, and while I had been deliriously angry with the fact that he hadn’t trusted me, I equally hadn’t trusted him.
“No, don’t apologize, that’s my job. I was a total dick to you. I know that, I know I ruined what we had. That’s on me.”
I shook my head, but he pulled away and looked carefully into my face, his eyes burning with intensity.
“None of us are perfect in this world, we’re both far from it, but when you find someone worth dying for, you have to believe that they’re worth living for too. You are worth living and dying for, and I’m sorry that I hurt you.”
“I’m sorry too.” I blinked away the tears and smiled at him. “I have so much to tell you. I want to tell you everything.” Read the rest…
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) in more ways than one when her cousin, Spence, came home with an unwanted "surprise" - he was turning into a zombie. Sadly, Becca became infected via an accidental scratch. 
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with works by 13 
