Life After The Undead (Book 1) by Pembroke Sinclair Page A

but they no longer made me sad. She’d gotten what she deserved.
    The next morning Pearl came by my room and took me to our first class. Since we had so little space at the hotel, each grade was crammed into a separate conference room with the same teacher teaching us all the different subjects. There were about two hundred total teenagers, ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen. We learned the same things we would have at any other high school, but there was a sense of pointlessness to the whole process. There weren ’t any colleges to go to. Even if there were, where would we find jobs afterward?
    I found out the majority of the population on the East Coast had either been devoured by or turned into zombies. It was pretty safe to assume the same thing was happening on the West Coast. The most conservative estimate anyone could come up with was that eighty percent of the population would be obliterated by the zombie horde. Where they were getting those numbers, I had no idea. I wasn ’t exactly sure who “they” were, but it was the talk of the students during breaks. It was tragic and devastating, and pretty much the end of life as we knew it. Those of us who’d survived were extremely lucky.
    Besides being taught reading, writing, and math, all the teens were expected to help around the complex. Some were taught farming skills, others were trained as electricians, there were construction workers, and others were placed in the service industry. I wanted to go into the electrical field, but I was placed in housekeeping. My main duty was to make sure the suites where one of the five families lived was always clean, but I was also expected to serve meals and cleanup afterward. I was assigned to the Johnson family. The news did little to brighten my already sour mood. I was a glorified maid. The one good thing about the job was that I got to do it with Pearl, who was highly liked by the Johnsons. Since money was obsolete they showed their appreciation for a job well done by giving her things. Pearl had her own personal computer, which I used to charge my iPod. I would often stick in my earbuds and block out the entire world. It wasn ’t much, but it was better than being dead, or even worse, undead.

CHAPTER 5
     
    I woke up every morning for the next two years and went to classes. After that, I went to my job. I didn’t have any other choice. What was I going to do? This was my new life. The new normal. On the day of my seventeenth birthday, I couldn ’t do it anymore. I woke up and felt a pressure on my chest, and every time I thought about going to class, I broke out into a sweat. The thought of scrubbing another toilet made me nauseous. I was tired of pretending everything was fine. I wanted out. I made it a point to leave my room before Pearl arrived and went to sit by the lake.
    The sun peeked over the horizon, and I inhaled a humid breath. By that point, the zombies had all migrated west, and there was an invisible line, starting at the panhandle of Nebraska, extending north to Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico, that the zombies refused to cross. There had been plans in the works for several months to build a wall to keep the zombies on one side while the humans repopulated the nation on the other. It was assumed that if given enough time, the zombies would decay away to nothing.
    I put in my earbuds and turned up the volume. White Zomb ie’s More Human than Human thumped in my ears. I sat on the beach and threw some sand into the water. I watched the ripples for a second, then leaned back on my elbows. What was I going to do? I may have been tired of my “life” and ready to escape, but it wasn ’t as if there were that many options available to me. I leaned my head back and sighed. A shadow crossed my face, and I turned to see an entourage of soldiers heading into the hotel.
    The man at the front was bald with a pock-marked face and tattoos of pin-up girls on his forearms. His sleeves were rolled up