Zombies! Episode 3.2: Love Lost

By Ivan Turner

Martin Benjamin is one of only a handful of people to survive the battle of Lion's Run. Like all except two of the heroes, he is infected with the zombie plague and sentenced to take the drug Olexynil for the rest of his life. For him, the drug is only enough to stave off the disease. It's not enough to make him secure in the knowledge that his family is safe...from him. For three years he has been pulling away. And now his wife, Abby, wants him back. While she is pushing harder and harder, someone else comes into his life, someone who also has the plague.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ivan Turner
• Release date: Nov 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370231782

Ivan Turner

A child of the movies, I was always consumed by fantastic stories told by others and translated into adventures to be retold by me through the action figure medium. As I grew older, I put the action figures away and moved into the realm of role playing. Though I never outgrew role playing, I certainly don't have the time for it anymore. Since I was eleven years old, I've been pouring almost every ounce of creative energy I have into writing.I graduated college in 1993 with a degree in computer science. I tried my hand at programming for a couple of years and found it pretty unsatisfying. I later became a partner at a comic book store, where I spent several years. Though it wasn't a financial success, the experience I gained from running the store and the people that I met (many of whom I'm still in touch with today) was priceless. After leaving the store, I settled into a career of teaching. I still teach at a public high school in New York. Ironically, I've picked up computer programming again, which is what I mostly teach.I've been writing the whole time.I released my first book electronically in 2010. Forty Leap was a turning point for me in both style and story building. The Book of Revelations, which was written earlier but released later, was sort of a midway point between the writer I was and the writer I've become. I experimented with a very odd style and a story that employed diverse characters and controversial situations.In September 2010, I released the first installment of Zombies! Zombies! has been a tremendous success for me that came very close to being made into a television series. Since Zombies!, I have written a five part miniseries called Castes and have been working on developing tabletops games, the first of which, ApocalypZe, was published in early 2014.Now, 6 years later, a 3rd Zombies! series is due to be released in September of 2016.

Book preview

Zombies Episode 3.2: Love Lost

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 by Ivan Turner

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The people and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.

Special thanks to Chris Hanson for his brilliant cover artwork.

Table of Contents

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Afterword

Other Books By Ivan Turner

Chapter I

Abby was dreaming. It wasn’t a pleasant dream. She and Martin were back in the old apartment, that tiny one room apartment they’d given them in Hoboken after New York City had been evacuated. They’d lived there for almost seven months. It hadn’t been so bad at first. They’d been glad to have the place and to have each other and just to be alive. Then the fighting had begun. It wasn’t just a little bit of fighting, the kind of fighting that results from bickering over insignificant idiosyncrasies. These were full blown tempests brought on by the realization that Martin was not as cured as they thought he was, brought on by the realization that he never would be. That’s what Abby was dreaming about now. That fight.

And all of the fights that came afterwards.

They were in their little one room, just the two of them, yelling at each other. Martin was wearing the New Jersey Nets t-shirt that the hospital had scrounged up for him and a pair of brown pants. He looked ridiculous. He sounded ridiculous. The words didn’t even register to Abby. They were spoken and then gone as her dream self moved on to the next statement. The next fight. Martin was dressed in a suit and tie, still yelling. Then he was dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and a short sleeve button up shirt. He’d worn that on the day they’d thrown Sam’s fourth birthday party at her parents’ house. He hadn’t yelled that day, but he was yelling now. Then he was dressed in Dockers and a blue shirt and tie. It was what he wore to work nowadays. Dress casual at the office. He didn’t yell at the office.

But he was yelling now.

It was all of the fights in all of their married life and they all took place in that one little apartment in Hoboken.

Then the alarm went off and Abby came awake. It was 6:00 am.

She slept turned away from Martin’s side of the bed. Even if she fell asleep facing it, she always awoke with it to her back. She’d asked one of the therapists at work about it and she’d been given a vague answer about the unconscious mind avoiding trauma and unhappiness. Well, the dream that was still rattling around in her conscious mind stood in stark contrast to that. Sitting up, she forced herself to look at the empty half, to put her hand on the pillow and smooth out the blanket. It was a ritual she followed every morning whether she was getting up for work or simply coming awake on a day off. She did it gently and with love because she missed him terribly, but she also did it to remind herself that it was real and she would need her resolve to face another day.

Abby’s morning ritual consisted of a shower, dressing, breakfast, and then Sam. Getting out of bed, she practically fell into the master bathroom, shut the door behind her. And began. Abby had slimmed out a bit over the last three years. Apparently, marital strife was good for her figure. She was lucky if she at one meal in a day. Often, at dinner, she would pretend to eat for Sam’s benefit while really only taking a couple of bites and moving things around on her plate like a child trying to avoid mom’s meatloaf. If they’d had a dog, it would be fat. Still, there were always those nights, after Sam was asleep, when the pain got to be too much for her and she would grab one of the pints of ice cream from the freezer. She usually ate it in bed while watching the news. It was good to know that there were whole countries out there suffering much more than she was.

Abby was still a counselor for the Zombie Victims Foundation. It had moved its offices from New York City to Newark, but many of the same people still worked there. Her clientele had changed over the years. She still counseled people who had been traumatized by the zombie plague, people who’d fought and people who’d lost loved ones. Now, though, she often counseled those who were infected. These people were no longer serving a death sentence. Like victims of HIV, theirs was a life sentence. They had the medicine to keep the infection at bay, but the battle would forever be waged. It was hard for her to counsel those people because it hit close to home. After all, Martin was one of those people.

She dressed casually but appropriately. It was important for a counselor to present herself as a professional, but not dress to intimidate or separate herself from her client. That’s what they called the patients nowadays. Abby wasn’t a doctor. She didn’t see patients. She met with clients.

Done in the bathroom and the bedroom, she moved out in the hallway. Over the railing, she could see downstairs to the foyer. The staircase was just to her right. Sam’s room was at the end of the hall, right next to the second bathroom. The house was a big, modern, four bedroom affair. It had been more than they’d needed when they bought it, but they could afford it. Martin had argued that the downstairs bedroom would be ideal for Abby’s parents if it ever came to that, but his motives had become clear once they’d moved in. Abby’s parents were very comfortable in their house in Queens. The downstairs bedroom was for Martin.

They had never divorced. Technically, they weren’t even separated. Once they were in the house, Martin had claimed the fourth bedroom as his office,