Title:
Detention of the Living Dead
Author:
Rusty Fischer
Genre:
Paranormal, Young-Adult,
Publisher:
Decadent Publishing
Ebook
Pages:
181
Purchase:
Book
Description:
Maxine
“Max” Compton is in detention when the outbreak starts; so are
several other students when Max’s best friend Brie storms in –
chomping on the thigh bone of their favorite Home Ec teacher, Ms.
Watkins!
Brie is
a zombie, and quickly starts biting everyone in the room – even her
best friend, Max!
When the
class realizes what happens, it’s too late; they are all zombies –
and they’re no longer alone.
Now a
thin gray man in a white lab coat is testing them; making them read,
and once they can no longer read, the zombies are led from the room,
never to be seen again.
One by
one the zombies stop reading, all but a few of them, Max included.
Oh, and that cute thug she’s been crushing on for years, Cory
Winthrop!
That’s
when Max learns that there are good zombies, and bad zombies. And if
she’s to survive, she has to pick a side.
Who knew
Detention could be this hard… or last forever?
Excerpt:
“G-g-g,”
the zombie sputters, black eyes focused intently on the page in front
of her, tongue tied in an endless loop, frustration oozing out of
every gray, decaying pore.
If
she could still sweat, I know she would.
“G-g-g….”
Her
cold white hands grip the pages of the comic book like the edges of a
life raft in a wild, raging sea.
If
she could still cry, she’d already be bawling.
Instead
she is locked in this endless loop, stammering, yammering, trying to
find the keys to her lost humanity.
“G-G-G….”
Her
voice is raspy, like maybe her vocal chords have been sanded down,
blow dried for days, and now look like strips of beef jerky hanging
in the back of her throat, useless at his point except for her
guttural scratching.
“A-A-A….”
It’s
been like this for five minutes; five endless, torturous, agonizing
minutes.
“M-M-M….”
Endless
because, well, you’ve never realized how long a single minute—sixty
short seconds—can stretch out until every stinking bleeding one of
those sixty seconds is filled with a “G-G-G” or an “A-A-A or an
“M-M-M.”
It’s
like waiting for a stutterer to finish reading War
& Peace,
out loud, in one sitting, while you kneel on a bed of nails, with
water dripping on your head, sitting next to your distant cousin from
Alabama, with her whispering in your ears about her favorite catfish
casserole recipe.
Torturous
because I can see the word right in front of me and just want to
finish it for her: “Gamma!” I want to scream. “Gamma! What
you’ve been yammering for the last five minutes is ‘G-G-G-G-GAMMA,’
you freakin’ moron!”
Agonizing
because this is no typical zombie; this is my best friend since third
grade, Brie Cunningham.
About
the Author:
Rusty
Fischer is the author of Zombies Don’t Cry, as well as several
other popular zombie books, including Panty Raid at Zombie High,
Detention of the Living Dead and the Reanimated Readz series of
99-cent living dead shorts.
Rusty
runs the popular website Zombies Don’t Blog @
www.zombiesdontblog.blogspot.com. At Zombies Don’t Blog you can
read more about Rusty’s work, view his upcoming book covers and
read – or download – completely FREE books & stories about…
zombies!
Deleted Scene:
Cramped: A Deleted Scene from Detention of the Living Dead by Rusty Fischer, author of Detention of the Living Dead
Below please find a deleted scene from my new YA Paranormal, Detention of the Living Dead! In DOTLD, a group of kids are sitting in detention when a zombie shuffles in. Trapped, they all become zombies themselves; and that’s where the fun begins!!
But here, exclusively on this Blog, is a “deleted” scene about what happens when one lucky student discovers the ultimate place to hide out during a zombie apocolypse. I hope you enjoy it:
One minute Sylvie is there, clinging to my hand, running from the zombie cafeteria lady and the next, I hear a bloodcurdling scream and the sound of chomping.
I turn, only for an instant, and see the zombie cafeteria lady going to town on Sylvie’s ear like it’s a bowl of tater tots during B Lunch!
“No!” I scream, but that only makes cafeteria lady zombie look up and clamor to one knee. Sylvie is already gone. I can tell by the way her eyes are fluttering, just like John Taylor’s did before he turned zombie.
Just like that cute foreign exchange kid’s eyes did before he turned zombie. And the rest of them, every classmate I ever knew, all of them, their eyes flickered the same way… yup, now she’s up, groaning, black goo pouring out of her mouth and the cafeteria zombie lady is helping her up so they can both come after me.
Fat chance! I peel out, past the trophy case and the water fountain and the Homecoming banner torn and bloody and out toward the east exit.
I’m almost there, dodging gurgling zombies and random body parts lying in my path when I see a dozen or more zombies just lurking around the exit, waiting for anyone dumb enough (i.e. me) to get anywhere close to them.
I turn, about to bolt in the opposite direction when I spot Sylvie Zombie and Cafeteria Lady Zombie shuffling arm in arm in my general direction.
I make a “grrr” face and turn, spotting a red door marked “Custodial.”
“Gross,” I grunt, shoving it open and slamming it shut, locking it from the inside.
It won’t do much good, the locked door I mean, but it might buy me enough time to find someplace better to hide. I look around, whispering, “Hey, Mr. Simmons, are you in here?”
I don’t know Mr. Simmons, but there is a plaque on the wall for Custodian of the Year, 1998 and underneath it says, “Claude Simmons,” but I was taught you shouldn’t call old people by their first names unless they tell you to.
I listen but no one says anything back. Outside the door shapes shuffle and shadows blur but nobody jiggles the door handle so I use the last few minutes of my life to find a better hiding spot.
There are three walls in the custodian’s closet, plus the door. The wall across from the door has three lockers buried behind a fleet of mop carts. Seriously, there must be six, seven, eight mop carts lined up.
The wall to my left has a big boiler, angry and red, which would explain why I’m already sweating buckets. The wall to my right has Mr. Simmons’ plaque and a hook for his raincoat.
So, that’s about… bang. Someone, or something, has started banging on the closet door. Bang. Shuffle. Bang. Bang. Scrape. I sweat some more and squeeze between two mop buckets to bang open the first locker in the row, the one tight against the wall.
It smells like feet and is hotter than the rest of the room, which is saying something, but I squeeze in anyway and shut the door behind me.
It’s bigger than it looks inside, and I can actually stand up. And move around. And see! There are five slats in the top of the locker, which is about as big as a shower stall and, if I keep sweating, going to be just as wet in about ten minutes.
Once my eyes adjust to the dark I can look around and see a janitor’s uniform hanging from the bar behind my head, and a lunchbox at my feet, and a flashlight and a six pack of soda and holey moley, I’ve hit the mother lode of zombie Armageddon hideouts.
As long as the zombies don’t… oh, but wait, here one comes. No, two, wait, three. Four! They smash through the closet door, stumbling in and tumbling into the mop buckets.
I flinch and kneel down, looking for something to defend myself with. The zombies are closer now, grumbling, groaning, pounding, tapping, looking for a way to get in.
I open the lunch box, quickly, thinking maybe Mrs. Simmons packed a knife for her hubby to cut off his own crusts with.
Uggh. I almost gag. There’s no knife but Mrs. Simmons must have been made at her hubby this morning because she packed him a triple limburger, sauerkraut and toe jam sandwich on moldy rye. God, just opening up the lunchbox fills the entire locker with the funk of 10,000 years and… wait a minute.
The zombies, they’re… they’re… backing up. Grunting, stumbling over themselves to clamor away from the locker, shuffling out of the room.
The sandwich! It’s so gnarly, it’s instant zombie repellent!!!
So there you have it, a scene that never made it into the book and that you can only find here, on this very blog! Thanks for reading, and I hope it will add to your enjoyment of the book if you ever get to read Detention of the Living Dead, out this month from Decadent Books!
Yours in YA,
Rusty
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