Love and Decay, Boy Meets Girl

By Rachel Higginson

The Zombie Apocalypse couldn’t be more boring.

For the last two years, Hendrix Parker’s life rotated in a constant routine of fighting Zombies, finding a place to spend the night and keeping his family safe. While all of those things were admirable pursuits, they had begun to blur together in monotonous gray lines and a haze inducing fog.

Reagan Willow and Haley Gable tumble into the Parker’s lives with helpless charm and sarcastic cynicism. The boys can’t help but feel the strong need to protect them.

Especially Hendrix, who can’t ignore the irresistible pull Reagan has on him. She’s everything he never thought he would find, and the shot of life that digs him out of the corpse-like stupor he’s fallen into.

She might not feel the same way, but that won’t deter Hendrix from pursuing her. Maybe there’s nothing more than friendship between them, but their futures are now entwined, one way or the other.

Just as long as they can escape the Zombie horde alive first.

Love and Decay, Boy Meets Girl, is the first episode in the Love and Decay, Novella Series told from Hendrix’s point of View; and a Dystopian Romance about Zombies, the end of the world and finding someone to share it with.

This story takes place over multiple episodes, with a release date every two weeks. Approximately 20,000 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rachel Higginson
• Release date: Nov 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310999437

Book preview

Chapter One

647 days after initial infection

One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.

You’re obsessing again, Vaughan, my oldest brother and resident Confucius, noted dryly.

I grunted. Mostly because I didn’t want to admit that he was right. I was obsessing- counting my brothers and sister over and over, as if their numbers would change from one second to the other.

Only, the thing was…. they could change. In a heartbeat, another piece of my family could be ripped from me and then what?

I couldn’t- wouldn’t- let that happen ever again.

And there were just so many of them. How could I keep them all safe? How could I even begin to fathom how to keep them all alive? There were too many that needed my protection; too many important lives that could not fall to the greedy hands that would take them.

Nelson, the carefree but responsibly low-key one of the family dropped off a couple bottles of water for Vaughan and me before scooping up Page and walking her into the kitchen where they would start throwing something together for our dinner.

I watched them with a feral possession that honestly scared me. I had never known responsibility like this before. I’d never believed a weight this heavy would be put on my shoulders or gifts so precious and costly could be given to me to protect and keep safe. I didn’t have to go at it alone, we all shared this duty together. But that didn’t lessen the obligation in any way or take any pressure off my shoulders. I felt pulled in every direction, strung tight with a task I was ill-prepared for and pathetically under qualified.

We’d survived almost two years now, getting by from the survival obsession my father had instilled in us and sheer luck and determination. For now we were safe, but how long would this last? We had already experienced more loss than we ever should have.

And I would never go through that again- I would never give up those I loved to this world and the evil creatures that haunted it again.

In another corner of the room, my younger brothers, Harrison and King, were having a free throw competition using a metal trashcan and crumpled up pieces of paper. They were laughing, acting like the immature idiots they were and ignoring the fact that we were trapped on the upper level of some hillbilly department store with a town of Feeders underneath us.

I watched them for a moment, entertained by their carefree spirits and jealous of the easy way they approached this circle of hell we’d been assigned. They adapted to this purgatory better than I had, or even Vaughan and Nelson. They were resilient to the upheaval, the abrupt change in our lifestyles and quality of living. They’d even bounced back from the death of our parents better than the rest of us. Part of that had to do with their personalities, I knew that. But the other part stemmed from their age. We allowed them to be the teenagers they were, struggling to keep the heaviness of responsibility from them. Sure, we asked more of them than anybody should, but only because we had to, we had no other choice. And we only demanded the bare minimum of what we could survive with.

Then there was Page. Our eight year old sister, so purely innocent and youthfully naïve, she was like the lone diamond in a mine full of coal. She was our saving grace, our pilgrimage to Mecca, she was the reason we fought, killed, survived. And she brought us light. In this world there seemed to only be darkness. When I knew I would drown in it, be pulled to the depths of an endless abyss, she shone bright enough for me to remember my path, she lit up my life until I could see the way again.

I opened a bottle of water and took a healthy pull. It was important to stay hydrated and nourished. We had the resources now, so we were obligated to use them. And when we needed to, we would find more. We were mentally and skillfully equipped to survive the basic elements after the fall of civilization; it was the other factors- the roaming undead and demoralization of mankind- that made me fear for our longevity.

Hendrix, Vaughan bit out in a low voice that made me think he had been trying to get my attention for a while.

I half turned to him, keeping my hawk eyes on my little sister. She was sitting on the counter, laughing at Nelson while he tossed crackers in the air and caught them in his mouth. Yeah?

I’ve been trying to talk to you for the last five minutes. Where’d you go?

I turned to him fully, meeting his wise eyes. I met him steadily, conveying the path of my thoughts without saying them out loud.

There was a time in my life when we weren’t this open with each other, when we had thoughts and plans we kept from each other. We were brothers after all and had always shared a competiveness that could be dangerous at times. But that was a luxury left behind in a different life.

As the oldests in our family, the responsibility of keeping everyone together and alive fell to us. We had to keep communication open and honest or this family unit would implode. We were together constantly, without any break from each other or individual privacy. We had to make