Hi guys! Today on the blog, I have the lovely and tal­ented Char­lotte Stein! (No rela­tion to my stein crea­tures. ) Her fantab­u­lous zom­bie story, Reawak­en­ing, came out Wednes­day. I’ve already read it, and loved it! Yay, zombies!

So with­out fur­ther ado…Charlotte Stein!!!!!

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When Daisy said I could be on her blog and do things, I must con­fess. I was very excited. Mainly because Daisy is super cool (even her avatar pic is cool) and she says cool things and she writes orsum stuff about Gods and zom­bies and things.

Which makes a neat tie-in, because I too have writ­ten about zom­bies! We are prac­ti­cally zom­bie writ­ing part­ners in crime. Or so I like to think when I’m feel­ing much less of a dork and much more of a totally cool sort of person.

But enough about me and my lev­els of cool­ness! Onto my book, which has zom­bies! And humans hav­ing three­somes amongst the zombies!

Well, maybe not amongst, exactly. I mean, it’s not like the zom­bies are in a big pit and the humans in the story decide to writhe around on top of them. Mostly they just writhe in a bed­room, away from the zom­bies. But you get the idea!

And if you don’t, it’s because I’m shit at pimp­ing my sto­ries. So I’ll just let the blurb and the excerpt do the talking:

Blurb:

June has spent the last two years of her life try­ing to avoid death at the hands of mur­der­ous psy­chopaths and raven­ing zom­bies. So when Jamie turns up on the scene, care­less, still whole and promis­ing her safety on a lit­tle par­adise island, she isn’t quite sure she can trust him. Espe­cially when he tells her that it’s just him, and his equally big, burly, hand­some friend Blake.

But Jamie and Blake are even bet­ter than her wildest dreams—sweet and funny and charm­ing. And worst of all: sexy as hell. Though they’re try­ing to be gen­tle­manly with her, all she can think about is how much she wants to get tan­gled up in them, and for­get the night­mare the world has become. She’s wait­ing for her reawakening—back to life and hap­pi­ness and love.

And they seem like just the right sort of men to wake her—body and soul.

Excerpt:

All June could think was—Kelsey is dead, Kelsey is dead, Kelsey is dead—while the image of the raven­ing hordes feast­ing on Kelsey’s body played behind her eyes. She tried to shut it off, keep it down, keep run­ning before they got to her, but Kelsey’s blood was still wet and all over her right arm.
And if Jamie hadn’t shot Kelsey—right as she was still scream­ing, and beg­ging for help—she’d be one of them, now. That’s what hap­pened. Once they bit you or bled on you or hell, spat on you, you had maybe thirty seconds.

Before you turned.

She needed to stop, just stop for a sec­ond. Lean against some­thing and catch her breath. But Jamie had some­how led them into this build­ing and he just kept run­ning and running—only up instead of out.
June didn’t even know if Jamie was really his name, or if he was lead­ing them right into a dead end. But he kept going, none-the-less.

She could hear the hordes, bust­ing through the door below. He’d barred it, but they were com­ing in any­way, to this place that was an almost total death­trap. The stair­case was nar­row and blan­keted in dark­ness, one wind­ing sec­tion after the next. Even if she dared to pause and look over the rail­ing, she wouldn’t be able to see them until they were almost on her.

“Jamie, wait!” she shouted, but not because things would be eas­ier if he had hold of her hand or was there to com­fort her in this dire hour of need. She’d made it this far, on her own.

Or at least, she’d made it this far, with Kelsey.

No, it was just that—if he kept going, even­tu­ally they’d be trapped, on the roof. And she couldn’t have that. That was one of her and Kelsey’s rules—don’t run to some­place with only one exit.

Only it was just her rule, now. This guy, this Jamie…he didn’t seem to have any rules. He’d decided to run to the roof of a twenty story build­ing then poten­tially wait out­side until the hordes pushed through a prob­a­bly very flimsy fire door.

Kelsey had said to her. She had said—wait. He’s as crazy as they are. A safe island? He’s nuts. We can’t go with him. He’s prob­a­bly an insane apoc­a­lypse rapist.

And she’d been right, God help her. Maybe not about the insane apoc­a­lypse rapist part, but even so and besides—there was still time for that. He could be any­one, be into any­thing. He could have planned this all along…Kelsey’s death, the run to the roof…hell, maybe he had a whole party of insane ass­holes up there, just wait­ing to do hor­ri­ble things to her.

Even if that was as nuts as he now seemed. Why would he trap him­self on the roof, just to have a lit­tle fun with her? Noth­ing in her head was func­tion­ing in quite the way it should. Con­nec­tions had been lost. Wiring had come loose.

She still called out to him again, when they got to the level before the last one. Her voice came out hoarse and breath­less, burn­ing lungs mak­ing every­thing dif­fi­cult, Kelsey in her mind mak­ing every­thing worse. But some­how the words emerged.

“Jamie, stop. Take the nine­teenth floor exit, okay—we can go back down on the other side of the building—answer me, fuck!”

He did, then. She heard him call out over her own shriek­ing breaths, the pound­ing of her sneak­ers on stone, and the sounds of the once-were-people below, slather­ing and bark­ing like ani­mals.
There were two cracks, like he’d fired her gun into the stair­well. Though she couldn’t see where he was shoot­ing or at what. Then—

“Just keep fol­low­ing me, June-bug—come on!”

Only it sounded more like come own, because of the Texan twang Kelsey had sworn up and down was fake. And he’d called her June-bug again, because he was crazy, he was crazy, oh dear Lord he was prob­a­bly lead­ing them to their deaths.

This was all just some final mad hur­rah. He was sui­ci­dal, and this was how he wanted to go out. Death by stairs or death by zombies—because they were zom­bies, no mat­ter how much she tried to pre­tend otherwise—or even worse, death by roof.

Was that what he was going to do? Hurl him­self off? Plum­met to his untimely end? She didn’t know. All she could really think about was how close the first raven­ing can­ni­bal was get­ting, and how unfit she really was. She’d started believ­ing all the car­dio was really begin­ning to pay off, but as it turned out, eigh­teen flights of stairs and she was out for the count. Her heart clawed at her ribcage. Her thigh mus­cles screamed and screamed.

While her zom­bie pals kept com­ing and com­ing, as though the stairs were noth­ing, really. Why, leap­ing up eigh­teen flights was like a morn­ing stroll to them! They could have climbed these stairs for­ever and still had the where­withal to eat her innards, once they got their claw-like hands on her.

She hit the fire door to the roof just as one of said claw-like hands brushed the back of her shirt.
It made every­thing inside her leap, includ­ing the heart she’d thought had escaped. When­ever they got really close—that was when you real­ized just how ter­ri­ble they were. How awful the world had become. How much it wasn’t like a movie at all, but like a con­stant and unbear­able pres­sure against your san­ity, always threat­en­ing to make you go over.

She felt like going over, when the door wouldn’t close on them. For a sec­ond of push­ing and heav­ing with their hands com­ing through and all over her, her mind tried to fly away. It told her to start scream­ing uncon­trol­lably, while claw­ing at herself—that doing so would really be her best bet. No more run­ning con­stantly. No more pain over Kelsey—and before Kelsey, Joanne and Pat and the old lady whose name she never learned.

Just peace, finally. One moment of agony, then peace.

Only it wouldn’t be, would it? No, it wouldn’t be. If she stopped push­ing at the door and jam­ming it at them and just God, let the door snap their arms, let it crush them, let it kill them all for­ever, if she stopped…they’d turn her into one of them. And no mat­ter how much she tried to let it hurt her that Jamie had pointed the gun and shot Kelsey between the eyes, it didn’t. It couldn’t.

Being one of them was worse. After all, it could have been that they’d caught a dis­ease. It might have been that they were infected with something—like in 28 Days Later, rather than Night of the Liv­ing Dead. But part of her won­dered when­ever she stared into their hol­low, ink-black eyes, if they’d sim­ply lost their souls.

He looked like it. The one who’d man­aged to squeeze his mot­tled face into the crack she was strug­gling to close in the door. He had no pupils, no irises, no whites to his eyes. It was all just black­ness, empty and weirdly unsee­ing, as though they oper­ated on no more than a blood­lust now. Like upright land sharks roam­ing the land, blindly search­ing out prey.

She wrenched the door from him for just an instant then smashed it back into his face. It was a risky move, but oh so worth it. Worth it for the sat­is­fac­tion, worth it for Kelsey, worth it for every­thing these things had taken from every­one. People’s souls hadn’t left. These things had stolen them.

And when it slith­ered away and the door quite abruptly shut, the idea didn’t go with it. It stayed, and festered—so much so that she wanted to open the door for one mad moment, just to smash it back in their faces again, and again, and again.

She wanted to, but Jamie was call­ing to her. And other sounds were start­ing to flood through her now, too, other big, big sounds that she should have noticed ages ago.

At first she thought it was some kind of weapon. That he’d found a chain­saw or a pneu­matic drill or a wood chip­per. Some­thing he’d known was up here all along for them to use against the enemy.

But then the wind whipped up and she turned to see some­thing far more incred­i­ble than a zom­bie eat­ing wood chip­per. It was so incred­i­ble that she for­got the zom­bies bat­ter­ing on the fire door, for a sec­ond. They’d bust through it soon enough because although they couldn’t fig­ure out han­dles, the sheer pres­sure of them would fig­ure out the release bar.

Though it didn’t seem to mat­ter. For the first time in these two years of hell, it didn’t mat­ter. She found her­self laugh­ing out loud, high and prob­a­bly hysterical.

Jamie had only gone and got­ten him­self a heli­copter. And not only that, but he appar­ently knew how to fly a heli­copter. The rotors were going. They were kick­ing up the fine gravel that lined the roof of what­ever build­ing this was, and he was yelling to her—

“Come on, June-bug, get your ass in here!”

She thought of him talk­ing about the island. About his buddy who was wait­ing for them. How they’d just wanted to find sur­vivors, and pop­u­late their safe haven, and how crazy that had sounded when he first started yakking about it.

Then she ran to him.

Link:

http://www.resplendencepublishing.com/m8/318–201-107–490-1–reawakening-forever-dead-series-book-one-by-charlotte-stein.html

Thank you for hav­ing me, Daisy! As ever, you were fab­u­lous, dahlink. *smokes cigarette*