Dead Set: Available now on Amazon!
A corpse slammed into me from the side, the scent putrid and
gut wrenching. Brute force sent me flying, and I careened into a crumbling
wall.
The job was supposed to be easy, but when you hunt the dead
for a living, easy is relative.
I rolled back onto my feet and checked my stun gun. It had
less than half a charge, enough to take down a human or a charging mountain
lion, but not enough to incapacitate a full-grown Biter with a taste for human
flesh.
Damn.
The stun gun clattered to the floor, and I grabbed for my
Bowie knife. The best way to incapacitate a Biter is to jolt them full of
150,000 volts of electricity. Second best is to take out the major joints,
knees, elbows, wrists, and ankles. Take out a kneecap and even the most nerve
damaged dead man will pay attention. More importantly, without their kneecaps
they can’t keep themselves upright to attack.
The pair of dead men I’d been fighting circled warily.
Strips of skin were hanging like Christmas ornaments off their faces, but they
weren’t completely feral. They still had enough sense to watch out for my
knife.
“What’cha. Doing. Little. Girl?” The one on the right
growled. “You. Shouldn’t. Be. Here.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself.”
My name’s Gemma Sinclair, I’m twenty-one years old, and I’m
a mortuary attendant. Back before the rising that would have meant preparing
bodies for viewing and holding the hands of grieving relatives. These days, it
means that I hunt dead people for a living. Monsters. Biters. Zombies.
Not that I’d ever
use the ‘z-word’ in polite company.
