Drop Dead Sexy (Box Set)

By Kiernan Kelly

The dead have arisen, and all they want is their old lives back. Can love eternal exist for those who are dead but not gone? It takes a brave zombie to find out.

As Serious as the Grave: Tyler was only dead for a couple of hours before he reanimated, and he’s still handsome and drop dead sexy. What makes his unnatural life worth living? Daniel, a big hunk who just might be the special person Tyler’s spent his life looking for. Will his chance for a lifetime of love with Daniel be taken away before they even get started?

Lights, Camera, Zombies! Jericho’s never been one to shy away from the facts of life… and death… and re-life. Not everyone gets the memo that Zombies are humans with rights, however. When his life is threatened on the set of a new movie, Jericho and his lover, Dex, must decide which is more important, their Zombie pride or their lives.

Destination Dead: When Cal and Holden open Afterlife, a tropical island resort for zombies, not everyone is thrilled. Guests begin to arrive for the grand opening, and trouble arrives with them. It’s a race against time for Cal and Holden to find and stop whoever is trying to destroy their resort and send them back into their graves for good.

Publisher's Note: Drop Dead Sexy contains the previously published novellas As Serious as the Grave, Lights, Camera, Zombies! and Destination Dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changeling Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2020

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Drop Dead Sexy

Kiernan Kelly

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©2020 Kiernan Kelly

BIN: 009565-03100

Formats Available:

Adobe PDF, Epub

Mobi/PRC

Publisher:

Changeling Press LLC

315 N. Centre St.

Martinsburg, WV 25404

www.ChangelingPress.com

Editor: Kira Stone

Cover Artist: Bryan Keller

Adult Sexual Content

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Table of Contents

Drop Dead Sexy

As Serious as the Grave

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Lights, Camera, Zombies!

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Destination Dead

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Kiernan Kelly

Drop Dead Sexy

Kiernan Kelly

The dead have arisen, and all they want is their old lives back. Can love eternal exist for those who are dead but not gone? It takes a brave zombie to find out.

As Serious as the Grave: Tyler was only dead for a couple of hours before he reanimated, and he’s still handsome and drop dead sexy. What makes his unnatural life worth living? Daniel, a big hunk who just might be the special person Tyler’s spent his life looking for. Will his chance for a lifetime of love with Daniel be taken away before they even get started?

Lights, Camera, Zombies! Jericho’s never been one to shy away from the facts of life… and death… and re-life. Not everyone gets the memo that Zombies are humans with rights, however. When his life is threatened on the set of a new movie, Jericho and his lover, Dex, must decide which is more important, their Zombie pride or their lives.

Destination Dead: When Cal and Holden open Afterlife, a tropical island resort for zombies, not everyone is thrilled. Guests begin to arrive for the grand opening, and trouble arrives with them. It’s a race against time for Cal and Holden to find and stop whoever is trying to destroy their resort and send them back into their graves for good.

As Serious as the Grave

Things for Tyler are as serious as they can get. Being dead is just the start. What makes his unnatural life worth living? Daniel, a big hunk who just might be the special person he’d spent his life looking for. However, not everyone has Daniel’s level of acceptance of the mortally challenged. Trying to live like an average stiff turns out to be hazardous for Tyler’s state of being. Will his chance for a lifetime of love with Daniel be taken away before they even get started?

Chapter One

All things considered, Tyler Grayle was doing very well -- for a dead guy.

Better than some of his counterparts, at any rate. Take poor Will Fenton in cubicle 17, for example. Will had a bad case of the grunge, having had been dead for at least three months before reawakening. Poor guy couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it -- pun fully intended. Women tended to shy away from men with less skin on their bones than the Heart Healthy Chicken Platter at Denny’s.

Tyler himself had been dead for only a few hours before his reanimation, the popular term for what had happened to a fairly large percentage of the deceased population. It all had started on the day five years ago when the Dante Comet had passed within a few hundred thousand miles of the Earth.

Afterwards, there had seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to which corpse might blink awake after rigor mortis released its hold, or when. Most went right on being dead. Some didn’t.

Animals had reawakened as well, which had delighted pet owners and pissed off the guys in the slaughterhouses.

Personally, Tyler hated the term reanimated. He thought it made him sound as if he were a caricature, like Wyle E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons, smacked in the head with an Acme anvil with little stars and birdies flying in circles around his head.

In any case, Tyler had been more than a little pissed off when he’d awoken on the hospital gurney with a tag tied securely to his big toe, his face covered with a sheet, thinking that he’d been the victim of mistaken identity or someone’s very ill-conceived attempt at humor.

He’d soon come to understand that it was neither. Doctors had explained to Tyler that he’d succumbed to the viral infection that had landed him on his back in the hospital a week before, hooked up to whooshing and beeping machines within a spider web of IV tubing.

A form of encephalitis, his balding doctor had told Tyler afterwards, without looking him in the eye. The physician fidgeted with his clipboard, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere but in that hospital room. Most likely contracted through a mosquito bite.

Is it serious? Tyler had asked.

You could say that, the doctor answered, his eyes never lifting to meet Tyler’s.

Will I live?

That’s one way of putting it.

As it had turned out, Tyler had been done in by something as innocuous as a mosquito bite, but he’d had the last laugh. The mosquito was most likely dead by now while he, Tyler, was alive and kicking.

In a manner of speaking, that is.

Tyler! I need the VanHilton reports! Get what’s left of your worm-eaten head out of your ass and get on it! Barry bellowed from the other side of the milky glass wall of Tyler’s cubicle.

Tyler rolled his eyes. On it Barry! he yelled back. Barry Fenton was Tyler’s immediate supervisor, three hundred pounds of bluster and bullshit, and a royal pain in Tyler’s ass. Tyler noticed that Barry didn’t bother to look over the wall of the cubicle at him, or duck around the corner to peek into the doorway. Barry would rather scream through the wall than look at Tyler.

Barry is a necrophobic, pure and simple, Tyler thought. It was widely believed that he only tolerated the Living Challenged in his office because of the anti-discrimination laws that had been passed recently. Nobody, Barry included, wanted to end up in court being sued by the ACLU, especially not when the Prosecuting Attorney was likely to be Clarence Darrow or Johnny Cochran.

Luckily for Tyler, his reanimation had come late, well after the worst of all the brouhaha over the dead coming back to life had settled down. When the first wave of the formerly deceased had sat up and demanded explanations soon after the Dante Comet had passed by, they’d faced more than simple superstitious fear from the living.

All across the nation the newly returned had been met with axes and flamethrowers, and had been returned to the afterlife posthaste in little, stinking puddles of people goop.

Home Depot and Wal-Mart had been sold out of kerosene and gas cans. Army/Navy stores had seen their shelves wiped clean of anything with a sharp edge. Movies like Night of the Living Dead and Last Man on Earth had been shown in local libraries and town halls as training films. People like Stephen King and Clive Barker were suddenly sought-after experts, hot commodities on the talk show circuit.

Tyler’s death had come two years after the comet had passed. By the time Tyler had cracked his eyes open underneath the gurney’s starched white sheet, the worst was over. The numbers of fatalities coming back to life had dropped to no more than a handful a month, rather than the many thousands that had burst from their graves day after day in the beginning.

Eventually, authorities had brought the bloodshed under control. Laws had been put into place (mostly, Tyler was sure, because torching the dead was wreaking havoc on the firefighting budgets of every major American city), and a good majority of the reanimated had found places in society as useful and productive, if slightly decomposed, citizens.

The last reported case had been nearly two months ago, almost five years to the day the churning, purple and yellow ball of gas had streaked across the sky like a big, smoking bruise. Whatever virus or bacterium or alien magick the Dante Comet had farted upon the earth in its passing had finally faded away, leaving the newly dead properly stiff and unmoving in their graves.

There was still an awful lot of bigotry and prejudice to be dealt with, especially in the workplace. For example, Barry never passed on the opportunity to rub in the fact that his circulatory system was still in working order, with snide little comments like his "what’s left of your worm-eaten head" remark.

There’s nothing wrong with my head, Tyler thought, although his fingers automatically flew up to check that everything was still intact. He’d heard stories of some people losing bits and pieces of themselves every so often. Urban legend, he reminded himself. Nothing more. He didn’t personally know anyone who’d sloughed off a piece of something vital after his or her Awakening -- it had always happened to a friend of a friend of a friend. Still, he couldn’t keep himself from checking every so often, just to reassure himself.

Payday, a voice called. The wall of Tyler’s cubicle shuddered as the mailroom clerk, a skinny intern with bad skin and a prominent Adam’s apple, banged his fist against it.

Tyler accepted his paycheck, noticing that the kid’s hand was shaking. No matter how long it had been since the undead had rejoined the ranks of the living, some folks were still gun shy about having to interact with them. Thanks, Steven, he said, smiling.

Steven nodded curtly, quickly backing out of the office. Tyler watched the mail cart zip by the door to his cubicle, and shook his head. The kid had worked for the company for nearly six months, but Tyler still scared the shit of out him. If Tyler frightened him, he wondered how Steven dealt with someone like Will Fenton, who looked like a Rob Zombie wet dream.

Turning his attention back to the computer monitor that glowed on his desk, Tyler typed in a string of numbers in rapid succession, and hit print. The printer whirred and began spitting out the pages of the report.

Hey, Tyler, ready to go?

Looking up, Tyler saw Daniel Norris’ bright blue, bespectacled eyes blinking at him from over the edge of the cubicle wall. A lock of his curling, thick black hair fell over his forehead, giving him a distinctly Clark Kent-ish look.

Be ready in a minute. Need to get the VanHilton report to Barry before I can leave. He’s been yammering for it all afternoon.

The meeting with the VanHilton people isn’t until the end of next week! Barry’s just busting your balls, Tyler. Quitting time is five o’clock, and the fucking jack-off knows it. I swear, the man’s asshole must weep with envy over the amount of shit that comes out of his mouth.

Tyler laughed, nodding his head. I know it. But it’s printing now. I’ll be ready in a minute.

Well, hurry up. There’s a pitcher of Bud with our names on it waiting for us down at The Pit.

We don’t have to go to The Pit again, Daniel.

We always go to The Pit. It’s traditional on Friday nights.

In case you’ve forgotten, The Pit is a gay bar, Danny, and you’re straight, remember? Why do you want to hang out there? We could go to the Ale House instead, Tyler offered.

Because you need to get laid. Just hurry up, will you? It gets crowded in there on Friday nights. I want to get there before we end up standing in a corner holding up the walls. I’ll meet you in the garage. Daniel’s head disappeared behind the cubicle wall, and Tyler shook his head, watching Daniel’s shadow ghost behind the opaque glass as he walked away.

Scooping up the pages of the report, Tyler stapled them together neatly. Powering down his computer, he quickly cleaned off his desk. Slipping on his leather jacket, he left his cubicle, depositing the report in Barry’s inbox on his way out of the office.

Barry, Tyler noticed, had already left for the night. Guess the world wasn’t going to end if he didn’t have the report in his fat sausage fingers before five after all, Tyler thought wryly. Not that Tyler had ever believed otherwise. Daniel was right -- Barry was an asshole.

Night, Will, Tyler called as he passed cubicle 17. A line of cardboard evergreen air fresheners had been strung