by Aleah Barley
DEAD SEXY
Aleah Barley
Mortuary attendant Gemma Sinclair hunts zombies for a living. It's messy work, but it pays the bills... right up until she stun guns the wrong dead man in the ass.
Now to keep her family business going, Gemma's forced into a partnership with federal agent D.S. Thomas Conroy. Zombies are disappearing all over town, and he needs Gemma's help to figure out why.
With a villain on her trail and a gang of zombies ready to attack, Gemma's just glad her backup is dead sexy...
Edited by Laura Hampton
Cover Design by Coveryourdreams.net
Copyright © 2014 Aleah Barley
[email protected]
All rights reserved. This book contains material under Federal and International Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the author, except for brief passages quoted for review purposes only.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.
But if a zombie ever starts chasing you down the street, call me. I’ll need the advanced warning.
Other books by the author:
Leaving Las Vegas
Too Hot to Handle
Tempting the Ringmaster
For anyone who has ever made me laugh or bought me coffee—you know who you are.
Dead Sexy
“I intend to live forever or die trying.”
~ Groucho Marx
1.
Andrea Mitchell had been alive for eleven years and dead for fifteen hours before she was released back to her family. That’s a serious breach of protocol, but her father was a government official who had some pull with the coroner’s office. He figured he could handle a hundred pounds of undead pre-teen.
Mistake. There’s a reason new Biters are supposed to be held in government facilities for at least sixty-four hours after death. It’s a real danger zone, when they’re just a bundle of nerves and instincts with a taste for human flesh.
Andrea had eaten two pounds of raw beef and the family dog before her father called in backup.
By the time I arrived, she was making a break for it over the back wall.
Fortunately, I’m a professional.
My name is Gemma Sinclair. I’m twenty-one years old, I live with my mother, and I hunt dead people for a living. My clothes caught on a piece of loose rock as I followed her over the wall. By the time, I dropped into the alley—ripping my favorite pair of jeans in the process—Andrea was gone.
There was an abandoned car on the south end of the alley—blocking out the sun—the perfect place for the Devil Child to hole up until nightfall. I eased my way forward, careful to avoid any sudden movements.
“Hey, Dead Girl,” I called out, hoping she’d rattle the bushes. “Come on, Dead Girl. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Just a trained Hunter with a stun gun and a Bowie knife. Nothing. “Dead Girl—“
“Don’t call her that,” a woman’s voice piped up. Mrs. Mitchell was standing on a ladder peering over the back wall, dressed in a pink sweater set with a strand of pearls clinging to her neck. “Her name’s Andrea. Not Dead Girl.”
“She’s a Dead Girl now. Might as well get used to it.”
“I will not.” The woman glared at me. “This whole thing is nonsense. My husband indulges my daughter. Andrea!” She called out, loud enough to wake every dead thing in the neighborhood. “Andrea!”
A bush rattled near the side of the car. Andrea?
Hair pricked up on the back of my neck. Something was wrong. Dead wrong. The bush was still moving. Too high up to be the responsibility of a girl who until the previous afternoon had been obsessed with plastic ponies and tea parties.
I held my breath, backing away, but it was too late.
A rampaging Biter lunged out of the bushes headed straight towards me. Gray skin hung in rumpled waves from his lanky frame. Blood coated his mouth and covered his hands. When he turned toward me, I could see one eye hanging from its socket.
Worse, it smelled like a combination of rotting meat, the last bodily excretions of a dying human, and sour beer. Even when the thing had been alive, hygiene clearly hadn’t been this guy’s priority.
“Get it!” Mrs. Mitchell shrieked as she disappeared behind the red brick wall. “That monster bit Andrea!”
Great. Just great.
I’d come fully prepared to bring down a baby Biter with zip ties, my faithful Bowie knife, and my favorite stun gun. I didn’t have the gear necessary to take on a full-grown feral thing.
I turned and made a break for it down the alley.
Biters are deadly, but they’re not fast.
My canvas tennis shoes pounded against the concrete. My heart was slamming inside my chest, and my breath was coming in giant gulps. I dropped my gear bag and pulled my blade from the sheath at my waist. If the Biter got me, I’d only have one chance to turn and slam the knife through its empty eye socket—the most-vulnerable part of any biter—destroying whatever’s left of its brain.
The alley dead-ended on a wide street giving me two choices. Left or right. Time to make a decision. I turned right and vaulted across the hood of a parked car. My shoulder connected with the side view mirror, and I overcorrected. My ass hit the concrete. Hard. I’d have a bruise in the morning.
If I made it to morning.
I flattened out and wriggled under the car. The sedan’s undercarriage was dark, shadowy.
The Biter lurched past at top speed.
I held my breath, hoping the thing would move on by without noticing me. Feral Biters aren’t that smart. More animal than man. Hell, the ones who are relatively socialized aren’t going to pass for geniuses anytime soon.
If he just kept walking, I could double back into the alley and continue my search for Andrea.
The monster’s body stilled. Its hulking shoulders straightened slightly and its head lifted. From underneath the car, I could make out its flaring nostrils. It started stumbling toward the car.
Not good. Biters are strong. Really strong. They can do the work of ten men, and—as the hardest hit country—the United States has been putting that strength to work in our farms and factories since the infection started twelve years ago. According to the government, it’s a new era of prosperity.
Not that you’d notice in my neighborhood, where most of the men are struggling to make ends meet. Why pay a human a living wage when a Biter will work for next to nothing?
Metal crunched as the brute batted at the side of the car.
This was it. Forget finishing my degree in small business administration. Forget moving out of my mother’s house. Forget ever getting a boyfriend who wasn’t intimidated by my job. I was going to die in the middle of the street. Torn to pieces by a rogue beast.
Worst of all, I was still a virgin.
Crack. The sound of gunfire made me cringe. What the hell was going on? Who—
The monster toppled backward onto the ground like some kind of children’s toy. It’s head landing splat on the street. Brain pulp scattered across the ground like macabre confetti. Someone had shot it dead. Really dead. The kind of dead where you didn’t get up fifty-two minutes later with a sudden taste for blood.
Fuck. The Department of Undead Americans was going to revoke my Hunter’s license. They got real snippy about anyone killing Biters except them.
I needed to get ahead of this thing.
Fast.
I grabbed for my cell phone, ready to call in a favor with my cousin over the Detroit Police Depar
tment before any nosy neighbor could dial 9-1-1.
Crunch. The car rattled for a moment and metal creaked as the vehicle was hoisted off the ground by the sexiest dead man alive.
He had to be dead. What kind of human could hoist a car over his head like it was made out of matchstick?
Lack of pulse didn’t make him any less good looking. Unlike the dead Biter on the ground, this guy kept himself in shape. Regular exercise, a healthy diet of raw meat, and a daily shower meant his café au lait skin was all in the right place—clinging effortlessly to his muscular biceps—his emerald eyes were sharp, and his close-cropped mahogany curls smelled like shampoo.
He was wearing a black t-shirt, which accentuated his broad shoulders and lean hips and a pair of tight jeans over black leather motorcycle boots. His nose was maybe a little large for his face, but it didn’t detract from his square jaw or bowed lips.
When he was alive, the dude must have been quite the ladykiller.
Hoo-boy. I really was in trouble if I was fantasizing about a Biter. I needed a boyfriend—fast—although I’d settle for a date who didn’t flinch every time I mentioned my job.
“Move,” he ordered.
I rolled to the side and landed in something foul. My jeans weren’t the only piece of clothing going into the incinerator when I got back to the office. My little black tank top was toast. I’d be lucky if I could salvage my underwear.
The car settled down into position.
The dead man holstered his gun. “Did he bite you?”
“I’m clean.”
“Good.” He reached down and grasped my wrist, hauling me effortlessly to my feet. His hand was cool to the touch. His fingers were rough and callused. He must have done something physical when he was alive. “You going to thank me for saving you?”
“Thanks,” I said.
Then I pulled out my stun gun and sent 150,000 volts into his tight ass.
2.
The police picked up Hotty McNoPulse and I hightailed it back to the office.
I live in Detroit. Dead City. A place where the apocalypse happened and nobody came.
There were riots in New York when the dead rose. And Boston. And Chicago. In Charleston, a Baptist minister convinced the entire city to get down on their knees and pray—not that it did any good—and in Louisiana the governor ceded power to a hoodoo priestess, which wasn’t much better.
Four days. That’s how long it took the infection to spread across the country, moving from its origin point in Bethesda Naval Hospital to the military checkpoints set up on the California border to keep the dead on one side and the living on the other.
Detroit was hit in the middle of the second day. No one’s sure who the first Biter inside the city limits was, but the infected started dropping around noon… and rising fifty-two minutes later.
Not that anyone cared. In a city that had already lost a third of its population—where vacant buildings and crumbling infrastructure were already the norm—people were too busy hustling to care about a few more bodies wandering in the street.
As for my family? We were just happy for the extra business.
We run a mortuary. Back before the apocalypse that meant embalming, cremation, and funerals. I used to nap in the caskets, steal food from the memorial services, and play tea party with dead bodies.
These days we still do your basic funeral—cancer’s a killer, and its victims don’t come back—but we also offer the full range of afterlife services: government registration, job placement, and creative problem-solving, aka hunting.
Not all of the dead come back friendly.
I parked my old truck in the parking lot, tapped my plastic dashboard Biter on the head for good luck, and hurried in the back door. The client meeting rooms up front are nice—lush carpeting, hardwood furniture, and paintings full of cherubic children—all of life’s little luxuries to help ease the transition into death.
In back, things are a little more economical; chipped linoleum, sage green walls, and no pretty paintings. I gave a nod to our intake specialist—Uncle Donny is great at dealing with Biters because he is one—and headed straight for my office.
Unfortunately, my mother caught me half way down the hall.
Martina Matthews-Sinclair has the dress sense of a 1950’s housewife, the mind of a calculator, and the supernatural ability to know when I’ve screwed up. Her dark eyes narrowed slightly when she saw my clothes. “Do you have the check from Mr. Mitchell?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars for catching their daughter?” I shifted uncomfortably, suddenly aware that my clothes were covered in brains, mud, and the unfortunate detritus that gathered in the city streets. I looked like I’d been run over by a dump truck, and I smelled worse.
I patted theatrically at my pockets. “Can’t say I do.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t catch their daughter.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “When they called in the job, did they happen to mention whether the Biter who got their daughter had been subdued?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You should have. I want hazardous duty pay the next time you send me after a zombie—.”
“Gemma Sinclair! You know we don’t use that word around here. ‘Biter’ is bad enough. They’re Undead Americans.”
Okay, so political correctness isn’t exactly my thing. “This one was a zombie. Completely feral. Skin falling off. He was a missing a freaking eye.”
“Did you turn it into the police?” Mom demanded. “Was there a reward?”
“He got dead. More dead. Another Biter shot him in the head. With a gun.”
Biters might be officially ‘Undead Americans’ according to Congress, but that doesn’t mean they’re full citizens. They can’t vote or carry guns. The Second Amendment Rights group protest the restriction on a regular basis, but most of the Biters don’t seem to care one way or the other. When you can pull a man’s arm out of the socket, who the heck needs a gun?
My mother didn’t say a word. Typical. If I stuck around, she’d probably ask if I got a reward for turning in the gun toting dead thing.
“Way to show some concern for your only child.” I pushed past her into my office. The small room isn’t much, but it’s the closest thing I have to private space. At home, Mom doesn’t think twice about barging into my room or going through my things. At work, she tries to maintain some level of professionalism.
The first thing people notice when they walk into my office is the books. They’re hard to miss. Bookshelves line every wall. The fantasy novels I inherited from my Dad and the textbooks for my college classes. There’s a metal desk in the middle of the room and a steamer chest full of weapons near the back. I only have one chair. Mom would have a heart attack if any clients saw the messy pile of paperwork on top of my desk.
I do have a couch that I liberated from the waiting room the last time Mom bought new furniture. It’s more of a settee, but at five foot two I can curl up on it a few nights a week when I’m working late—or trying to avoid Mom. I covered the boring, floral print with a blood red sheet that matches the ornate Oriental rug on the cement floor.
Closing the door, I skirted the rug carefully to avoid getting any muck on the scarlet and gold threads. I pulled my shirt off over my head and tossed it into a corner. My tennis shoes were the next to go. I shimmied my pants down and kicked them off. Dancing in my underwear, I turned, popped open my laptop, and hit play on my favorite album. Dying for Love. An acoustic rock group made out of Biters and humans.
My desk drawer is fully decked out with an industrial strength first-aid kit and plenty of wet-wipes. I cleaned up as best as I could then slipped on an oversized t-shirt, bundled up my ruined clothes, and padded over to the incinerator. Most of the building is kept at a cool sixty-two degrees—perfect for our undead clients—but the crematorium can get pretty hot when the furnaces are on. Close to a thousand degrees.
These days they’re going nearly constantly: grieving
relations pay extra to make sure their dead relations don’t come back… even if Grandma kicked it from a heart attack.
I chucked my clothes in through the safety valve near the back and—
Arms like iron bars wrapped around my waist, hauling me backwards. I kicked out hard, connecting with my attacker’s leg. No response. Not even a groan.
A Biter. How had one of them gotten past Uncle Donny?
I kicked again, this time aiming for the thing’s vulnerable spots. The best weapon for taking out a Biter is a stun gun—or a shovel to the brainpan—but it's still possible to incapacitate one barehanded if you take out their major joints. Knees. Ankles. Elbows. Wrists. Break any one of their major joints, and even the most nerve deadened Biter will be screaming in agony. More importantly, it’s hard to stand upright without knees.
I kicked him in the shin, using the force of the motion to propel my shoulders forward and twist at his arm.
The force of the move sent us rocking forward. My knees slammed into the crematorium’s cement floor. My head connected with the side of the incinerator. The Biter was heavy on top of me. Dead meat. His grip tightened. Muscles surged. I could feel him try to lift me again, using his height to his advantage.
Smart move for a dead man.
I elbowed him in the knee. Hard. There wasn’t enough force to break a bone, but the thing was definitely surprised. His grip loosened for half a second.
That was all the time I needed. I darted forward, scrambling across the hot room. If I could get some room then, I might be able to come up with a plan. Hopefully, something that involved putting the Biter head first into the top-heavy incinerator. No muss, no fuss, no clean up.
A hand wrapped around my ankle, pulling me backwards. This time the dead man wasn’t taking any chances. He slammed me up against the nearest wall, forcing my arms straight out. Strong arms gripped my wrists and his muscular torso pinned me in place. There was no going anywhere.