Coming Together: Hungry for Love

By Sommer Marsden

Coming Together: Hungry for Love is a collection of zombie-themed erotic fiction edited by the fabulous Sommer Marsden. Sales proceeds benefit the American Diabetes Association.

CONTENTS: Little Deaths (Cora Zane); My Name is Brighton (Alana Noel Voth); Dead in the Water (Lynn Townsend); Head Full of Zombie (Alison Tyler); Zombie Apocalypse: First Responder (Kissa Starling); You Look Better Dead (Jeffrey L. Shipley); Zombie Goddess (Sadey Quinn); Dark Hunger ( Erzabet Bishop); Love Never Dies (t'Sade); Meat (Bobby Diabolus); Annie Morgan (Armand Rosamilia); Queer Zombie Disco (Kirsty Logan); The Tenderest Meat (Elise Hepner); Last Man on Earth (Blacksilk); Zombie Factory (Kiki Howell); Screen Siren (Annabeth Leong); You Make a Dead Man Come ( Sommer Marsden)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coming Together
• Release date: Oct 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301003679

Sommer Marsden

Sommer Marsden has been called "Erotica royalty…" (Lucy Felthouse). Her numerous erotic novels include Boys Next Door, Restless Spirit and Learning to Drown. Sommer currently writers erotica and erotic romance full-time from her east coast home. The wine-swigging, dachshund-owning, wannabe runner author's work runs the gamut from bondage to zombies to humour.

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Coming Together: Hungry for Love

Sommer Marsden, editor

Coming Together: Hungry for Love

© 2012 by Sommer Marsden, editor

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover art © 2012 by Alessia Brio

All digital rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

A Coming Together Production

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Coming Together is intended for adult readers only.

Please keep this ebook away from children.

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License Notes

Piracy robs authors of the income they need to be able to continue to write books for readers to enjoy. This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of ONE reader only. This ebook may not be re-sold or copied. To do so is not only unethical, it's illegal. This ebook may not be forwarded via email, posted on personal websites, uploaded to file sharing sites, or printed and distributed. To share this book, please purchase an additional copy for each intended recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for you, please notify the author immediately. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this—and every—author.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Little Deaths © Cora Zane

My Name is Brighton © Alana Noël Voth

Dead in the Water © Lynn Townsend

Head Full of Zombie © Alison Tyler

Zombie Apocalypse: First Responder © Kissa Starling

You Look Better Dead © Jeffrey L. Shipley

Zombie Goddess © Sadie Quinn

Dark Hunger © Erzabet Bishop

Love Never Dies © t'Sade

Meat © Bobby Diabolus

Annie Morgan ©Armand Rosamilia

Queer Zombie Disco © Kirsty Logan

The Tenderest Meat © Elisa Hepner

Last Man on Earth © Blacksilk

Zombie Factory © Kiki Howell

Screen Siren © Annabeth Leong

You Make a Dead Man Come © Sommer Marsden

About the Authors

About Coming Together

Foreword

Zombies, Sex and Romance

When people think of zombies, they rarely think of sex and romance. Why? Because zombies, in their modern incarnation, are deliberately conceived to be grotesque as possible. They've been deliberately built to have nothing sexy about them. They're supposed to repulse you, and not to attract you at all. And in that trait, zombies stand virtually alone in monster film and fiction.

See, many if not most modern monsters are easy to romanticize and sexualize. Since Stoker and even before, vampires have married blood with prissy Victorian stand-ins for mating rituals. Whatever one's personal tastes may be for body hair or the lack thereof, werewolves evoke the obvious roots of human existence—our animal nature, and therefore our raw sensuality, our sexuality, our need not only for pack-level bonding but for the very dance of dominance that has long served as the formulas for both romance novels and romantic comedy. The mummy—which is arguably the zombie's less-contagious brother—has been adapted, in recent years, to explore themes of undying love that is undeniably portrayed as erotic, most vividly in the '90s reboot of Universal's Mummy franchise. Ghosts are often domestic and therefore sensual creatures. Demons whisper of congress with the Devil.

And that most modern, most Mad Men, of all movie monsters...aliens?

Well...they do love their probes, don't they?

As you probably know, the zombie is a relatively fresh creation. It appeared throughout the pulp fiction era in last century's early decades, but in forms that viewers of The Walking Dead very likely wouldn't recognize—or wouldn’t like. As recently as Lugosi's 1932 film White Zombie, zombies were the products of scientific and occult mind control, in a mythology that would be ripe for romantic and erotic exploitation. But the mind-control model of zombie mythology has been almost completely wiped from pop culture, with occasional exceptions—1988's The Serpent and the Rainbow being the most obvious.

What zombies are now was invented, more or less, by George Romero and his associates, who cribbed from earlier sources but were guided as much by the demands of their movies' low budgets as by any creative consideration. The zombie that rose with 1968's Night of the Living Dead was a substantially different creature than earlier incarnations of the same monster. It was foul. It rotted. It puked green slime. It stank. It shat. It shambled. If you let it get close it would bite off your latex and spew red-tinted corn syrup everywhere, if you didn't stick a shotgun in its face and—well, in that case, things got even less sexy.

Romero's zombies changed the world of the dead, as did those of the artists who followed his lead. John Skipp and Craig Spector's 1989 anthology The Book of the Dead asked horror writers of the time to take Romero's Living Dead and its sequels to date as a given, and explore the zillion ways that the world would disintegrate around people in the event of a global contagion—or maybe not a contagion, since the genre developed the important convention that no one knows what's causing this.

Today, The Book of the Dead is hardly known outside a very small fringe of extreme horror fans and genre historians. But its influence is colossal, because, as with the Velvet Underground, it didn't sell a lot of copies, but every single person who read The Book of the Dead seemed to go out and start a band...er, that is, write novels, make movies, and found small-press publishing enterprises that feed on the zombie apocalypse—the all-zombies, all-the-time Permuted Press being the most explicit example.

Virtually all of the movies and novels that descended from Romero are explicitly non-sexual and grotesquely unromantic. In their ranks, I count my own 2011 novel, The Panama Laugh, which was the first long-form fiction I ever wrote that had basically no sex at all. And yet, it was partially set at a porn company, and the chief conflict of the three primary characters was explicitly one of undying love—wide-eyed schoolboy, follow-her-around-like-a-puppy kind of love.

So why should the zombie apocalypse be the time to think about romance?

The stories in Hungry for Love make it obvious, and not just by the clever bon mot in the title. Love is what we need.

Romero's zombie mythology is partially a comment on growing consumer culture—grown much more extreme since the genre's 1968 birth. But the Romeroesque genre's gross-out portrait of consumers can only make sense if there is a counterpoint. And that counterpoint becomes critically important when writers build a zombie mythology that explores all the aspects of human interaction, as The Walking Dead tries to.

Like flesh for the zombies, romance is the stuff of life for the living. We shamble through life searching desperately for it, and nothing but love fills our need.

As a benefit for the American Diabetes Association, Hungry for Love makes a stirring comment. The U.S. epidemic of Type 2 diabetes is caused, complicated and in many cases comorbid—there's a good word, huh?—with such maladies as obesity, poor eating habits, and chronic unsuccessful dieting. But the American Diabetes Association is concerned with Type 1 diabetes, which dietary habits and lifestyle does not prevent. It is a genetic disease, but at a base level, Type 1 diabetes has a cause as unknown as any mysterious zombie virus. It can exist in a patient who never knows it's there until they develop health problems; only screening and treatment can improve outcomes. The ADA for the health of a class of people for whom, in an unmanaged patient environment, blood sugar—that romantic sweetness that lives within us—can become a kind of poison.

Neither type of diabetes may be contagious, but those living with the disease require a self-care that has as its central premise the idea that we are all capable of checking our consumption. With the help of loved ones and professionals, vigilance makes the disease manageable—just like the disease of consumption that plagues Romero's vision of the world, which can only be fended off by characters working together.

In the pages of Hungry for Love, people find each other and love each other in a world of contagion, consumption and consumerism gone mad.

What could be more romantic?

Thomas Roche

thomasroche.com

October, 2012

Introduction

I’ll keep this short and simple. When asked to do this book, my first response sounded very much like Scooby Doo’s inquisitive sound. Runh? Then I said yes. Just…ya know, before I could really think about it. There were so many reasons not to do it. I mean, sex and zombies… what?

But there are three things about me you must know. Thing one: I love my husband more than life itself. The idea that I could earn even one Andrew Jackson to donate to the American Diabetes Association in his honor, was too tempting. He ‘became’ a person with type 1 diabetes a few years back thanks to a pancreas that gave up the ghost and stopped doing its job properly. He’d been born with a pancreatic defect and the poor thing finally got tired. My husband—the man to those of you who read me regularly—amazes me every day with the grace and patience with which he deals with the routine that must be his life. Routine and vigilance is a must when you deal with diabetes. It is not an easy life, to say the least. Now on to thing two: I love zombies. Something I did not know about myself until I got a wild hair up my ass and accidentally started a zombie exterminator series of books. Go figure. Thing three: I do like an insane challenge. A normal challenge I can pass up, but a challenge that would make most cringe and run… well, there’s my temptation.

Zombies and sex. Who’da thunk it, right? Some writers were afraid, I had to extend the deadline and clarify: sex must be present, zombies must be present, zombie sex need not be present. However, we weren’t shunning it either. In the end, when I read through the submissions I was amazed at the creativity. Things I’ve never ever imagined, scenarios so clever they made my head hurt and yes, sex. These stories run the gamut from humorous to sweet to action packed to…well, raunchy.

Final words: Thank you, readers. Enjoy this book with someone you love—wait for it—to death. And remember, you’re doing a good deed while being highly inappropriate. And thank you to my writers. You surprised even me. Not an easy thing to do. Final thanks to Thomas Roche for his foreword. Apparently, Thomas cannot pass up an insane challenge either ;)

XOXO

Sommer

Little Deaths

© Cora Zane

Rachel Jamison was sitting in her cubicle reconciling a column of numbers when a loud rumble shivered through the office building, rattling the floor to ceiling windows. Several pieces of framed corporate art dropped off the walls, and as the florescent lights flickered overhead, gasps and worried murmurs chased around the office.

When the shaking and flickering finally stopped, Blythe, an elderly woman who occupied the cubicle directly across from Rachel's, rose from her desk. Was that an earthquake?

Rachel pushed her chair back and stood up. I don't think so.

Fear curled through her, a bone deep sense of dread that made her want to run, to hide, even though she wasn't sure of the nature of the threat.

Seconds later, an ear-splitting boom fell to earth like the deliverance of Heaven's wrath, ripping cries of terror from everyone alike. A ball of light, staggering in its brilliance, flashed along the horizon and radiated outward, creating white-out conditions on the entire third floor of Murray & Sanders. It lasted for what seemed like a full minute.

When the light receded, the office erupted into a frenzy of panicked screams and fluttering paper. People stampeded in a mass exodus toward the elevators and stairwells. Someone wailed loudly about a nuclear strike. Someone else declared it a terrorist attack.

Spots still dancing in her vision, Rachel clung to her cubicle, her stomach twisting in knots. She squinted through the stretch of windows overlooking the Houston Industrial Complex, and a chill raced down her spine. In the distance, a massive fireball was billowing up into the sky, and a thick, rolling fog was rapidly sweeping across the cityscape.

Charlie!

She grabbed her purse off her desk and raced toward the stairs. Cell phones were going off all around her, a cacophony of overlapping ringtones, while off to her left, two men fought over a crowded elevator. She knew with heartsick surety the explosions had nothing to do with a nuclear bomb or a terrorist attack; they had originated from the chemical plant where her husband worked as an instrumentation specialist. Her worst fear had come true.

Buoyed between dozens of other fleeing workers, she took the stairs down a level, and emerged on the second floor where the building connected to the parking garage across the street via a glass catwalk.

Minutes later, she exited to the parking garage and immediately covered her nose. The wave of fog she'd seen coming had since hit the building and dissipated into a semi-opaque haze that smelled like a sickly mixture of wet dog, weed killer, and ozone. Sirens rose up from the city streets, and far in the distance, a column of black smoke billowed into the August sky.

Rachel pushed her way through the crowd that gathered near the catwalk door. A young couple in business attire making out frantically against the concrete pillar marking the C block, and apparently that was what caused the hold up.

Most of the passersby simply stared at the couple, but a few others wolf whistled or cat called. Three men she recognized from the administrative staff, as well as several people she didn't know, were hanging around, using their cell phones to record the skin-fest.

Aw, yeah, she definitely wants it.

A man with thinning brown hair went down on his knees and tried to angle his camera up the woman's dress. Do it, Mike. Take her panties off.

Pigs, she grumbled as she walked by.

Still, her gaze lingered on the man and his girlfriend—or maybe it was his wife. Her thigh was tugged high on his hip, and her glossy black heel dug into his backside as if to spur him on. A rush of heat swept across Rachel's face when she realized it only looked that way because the man was slowly grinding against her.

On the way to her car, she put the couple from her mind and dug through her purse for her keys and cell phone. The hurried click-clack of her high heels only added to her anxiety and sense of aloneness. She dialed Charlie's number right away. She needed to hear his voice, to know he was alive and well, but the line rang and rang without answer.

Worried and frustrated, she left a quick voicemail for him then hung up and climbed into her car. The doors locked automatically, and for a long minute, she sat in the silence.

Charlie's okay. Her hand shook when she plugged the key into the steering column. He's going to be fine.

He had to be, because the alternative was too much to bear.

****

Come on, already! Rachel drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The beer truck in front of her hadn't budged an inch in at least ten minutes.

She wiped the sweat on her brow and gazed out the driver's side window at the visible stretch of overpass. Traffic along the South Freeway was at a standstill, which explained why the feeder road was backed up for miles.

What worried her more than being stuck in traffic was the chemical fallout from the explosions. Charlie had once told her the Pharma-UniChem plant made bio-fuels. God only knew what that meant, or what kind of cancer-causing, nerve-killing toxins they were breathing while inching along in the miserable Texas heat.

She peered through the windshield at the sky. Unlike a normal fog, there was no burn off under the glaring sun. Instead, a hazy veil of foul-smelling mist lingered over the city, and turned the sky white as bone.

If we're not all poisoned by now, we're going to fry out here!

She reached over to turn up the air conditioner, but it was already on full blast.

Cursing under her breath, she turned down the news blaring on the car radio and tried to call Charlie again. It rang and rang, but there was no answer. She sighed and waited for his phone to go to voice mail.

Charlie? Are you there? Call or text me when you get this, okay? I don't care which. Just let me know you're all right. Her mouth trembled. I love you. I'll be home as soon as I can.

She didn't know what else to say, so she ended the call and dropped her phone onto the passenger seat. Surely if he was okay, he would've called by now, if not from his own phone then from someone else's. What if he's dying right at this moment, and I'm not there?

Just stop it!

She chewed at her thumbnail, unable to stop herself from imagining Charlie burned beyond recognition, or lying somewhere alone and critically injured.

A loud squelch followed by an incoherent, amplified voice drew her attention. Up ahead, along the chain-link fence separating the feeder road from a steep, grassy slope leading down to a pocket neighborhood, four men wearing orange road construction vests were hanging out with their fingers hooked through the chinks in the fence. One of the men, and older man in a yellow hard hat, was talking into a two-way radio.

What's going on here?

Rachel watched them a moment longer, then glanced in the direction the men were staring. Her mouth dropped open in shock. A naked woman with thick, curvy hips and short brown hair was on her knees in the middle of the street giving a man in a blue bathrobe a blowjob.

Thin and plain, the man looked like he could have been anyone, a professor, a lawyer, or maybe an insurance salesman. However, he didn't look like the kind of person you'd expect to see getting his rocks off in broad daylight. Yet there he was, his hands fisted in the woman's hair as if to hold her in position while he thrust against her face.

Cars swerved to miss the couple, and Rachel could've sworn she heard faint shouts and catcalls coming from the passing cars. A crowd had gathering on one of the busier street corners, and a few people appeared to be recording the incident with their cell phones.

Rachel wasn't sure what it was about the scene made her so