Zombie Queen, Simulated Love

Zombie Queen, Simulated Love

Jessa Shaw sleeps through the end of the world and wakes up hungry.__The apocalypse is already in full swing. The cities are in ruins, mutant insects and killer plants roam the streets, and the few survivors left alive are stronger, stranger, and far more dangerous than the average zombie. For Jessa, that should be fine. She is no helpless human—she is an intelligent undead predator who proudly calls herself the Zombie Queen.__Then she meets Adrian Vale.__He is powerful, secretive, annoyingly hard to kill, and somehow capable of growing cherry tomatoes from his own vines—making him both an infuriating opponent and the most useful man in the apocalypse. Worse, the more Jessa stays near him inside his heavily guarded survivor compound, the more cracks appear in her memory. Adrian knows things he refuses to explain. Simon Mercer, the compound's cold vice-captain, is clearly hiding something. And Jessa's body begins changing in ways no zombie should.__What starts as a battle of teeth, tempers, and survival turns into a desperate search for the truth. Because the world around them is falling apart faster than anyone admits, and Adrian may be at the center of it.__In an apocalypse built on blood, mutation, and buried secrets, Jessa will have to decide whether to keep chasing her hunger—or finally uncover the truth behind the man who never stopped waiting for her_

Preview Zombie Queen, Simulated Love

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I’m a little zombie who slept for years.

I woke up because I was hungry.

And somehow, not a single living person was left on the streets.

Hell. It was the apocalypse.

July 7, 2034. The temperature around the world crashed. A brutal deep freeze hit, and even the oceans locked over with ice.

A layer of frost formed on the lid of my Blacksteel Coffin too.

Still, a little cold wasn’t exactly a problem for a zombie.

August 7, 2034. The planet flipped into extreme heat. Glaciers melted, sea levels rose, and floodwaters surged everywhere. The ground around my coffin got soaked soft by scalding water.

But again, a little heat wasn’t much of an issue for a zombie.

September 7, 2034. Temperatures finally returned to normal.

Too bad that was when the Long Night began.

In that endless darkness, an eerie Red Rain fell for a full month. Every living thing, humans included, mutated without a sound.

As for me, I stayed perfectly peaceful and slept like a baby.

October 7, 2034. The Long Night ended. The Red Rain vanished. Then a global earthquake tore the world apart—buildings collapsed, the earth split open, and the whole planet shook like it had lost its mind.

That lovely little planetary dance flipped open my Coffin Lid.

The thick scent of blood in the air successfully starved me awake.

Heeey there!

Stupid humans, come welcome your great Zombie Queen!

Offer up all your cherry tomatoes—cough, cough, strike that—your blood…

Huh?

Huh?!

I froze.

The streets were nothing but ruins, severed limbs, and corpses.

Not one living soul in sight.

It had only been twenty years since I went under for the second time, and the world had already turned into this kind of dump?

I dug through the wreckage of a ruined mall until I found a dress that was mostly intact, pulled it on, and started wandering with no real destination in mind.

Along the way, I ran into mutant bugs the size of nightmares—dung beetles, ants, centipedes, all pushing six feet tall or more.

Hmph. Stupid, filthy insect freaks.

Anyone dumb enough to try eating the Zombie Queen got their head and limbs smashed in by Her Majesty personally.

After I finished dealing with the pests, I looked around at the red-eyed human corpses crowding the streets.

We were both technically dead, but wow, they had absolutely no style.

They looked miserable. Filthy. Pathetic.

Their bodies were rotting, their mouths were smeared with blood, and strips of half-chewed meat still clung between their snarling teeth.

Ugh—blegh, blegh.

As a refined zombie with very high standards and a slight cleanliness obsession, I seriously looked down on them.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

I bared my teeth at them and flashed my sharp little fangs.

The zombies immediately scattered in fear, fleeing in every direction and not daring to shuffle up and whine in my face again.

Huh?

How was there still one straggler?

One zombie stood there in a daze, motionless, staring at me with empty eyes.

I walked up to him and stared him down.

Or, more accurately, we stared at each other.

Obviously, I was the one with the bigger eyes.

“What are you looking at?” I lifted my chin. “Never seen Her Majesty before?”

I gave the zombie in front of me a slow once-over. He was definitely over six feet tall.

And honestly?

He was kind of gorgeous.

He was injured, and there was blood on his face, but compared to the pack of zombies that had just fled, he was ridiculously clean. Very much the whole wounded-hot-guy vibe.

For a second, I was dazzled by the view.

Then I snapped back to myself just in time to see him raise one finger and poke me right in the dimple.

The corner of his stiff mouth even curved a little.

I was scandalized.

The nerve. Absolute disrespect toward the Zombie Queen.

I bared my teeth with a growl and bit down on his wrist. My fangs broke the skin, and because I was starving, I instinctively sucked once.

Oh wow.

That smelled amazing.

Too bad it wasn’t living blood.

As a noble and exalted Zombie Queen, I had standards when it came to food quality.

But still.

It smelled so good.

I licked my lips and looked up at the zombie, who was standing there with his head tilted, all blank and dazed.

If I drained all the blood from his body, he’d shrivel up into a dried-out corpse, and that would be hideous.

But if I didn’t drink, and I couldn’t find anything alive soon, I was going to starve.

I wrestled with it for a while before finally deciding that dead blood or live blood, whatever. Filling my stomach came first.

I shut my eyes and bit down again.

But what flooded my mouth wasn’t the thick, sweet taste of blood.

It was… fresh. Bright. Sweet.

My eyes flew open. I smacked my lips, stunned.

That taste was—

Cherry tomatoes!

I stared at the tiny green sprout poking out of the zombie’s palm—and the cherry tomatoes hanging from it—and completely froze.

Unbelievable. We were both undead, and somehow he’d evolved all the way to growing cherry tomatoes out of his own body.

As I shoveled the tomatoes into my mouth at top speed, tears of envy—no, drool—nearly ran down my face.

I knew the difference between one full meal and a lifetime meal plan, thank you very much.

So I made an executive decision on the spot.

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

“Buddy, you’ve got a seriously bright future ahead of you. From now on, you’re working for your queen.”

This zombie seemed like he had a brain.

Just… not much of one.

After hearing my grand declaration, he didn’t react at all. He only reached out again and poked the little dimple in my cheek.

Whatever.

I took that as silent acceptance of his new role as my subordinate.

And considering he’d just fed me, I generously decided not to punish him for the crime of disrespecting the Zombie Queen.

Honestly, for a zombie, the apocalypse was boring as hell.

So I kept wandering through the ruined city with my new subordinate in tow.

We still hadn’t seen a single living person, but I’d discovered something important: it wasn’t just the bugs that had mutated. The plants and animals had changed too.

And these mutant creatures didn’t just eat the living. When they got hungry enough, they’d eat zombies too.

Or each other.

Tsk. Gross.

Case in point: my cherry-tomato zombie and I got targeted by a man-eating flower that could actually move.

The delicate-looking blossom opened wide—

and inside was a whole mouth full of sharp teeth.

A long vine whipped around my waist and tried to drag me straight into its mouth.

Then its teeth shattered.

Please. My body was basically indestructible. If that thing thought it could eat me, it was dreaming.

The toothless carnivorous flower started drooling all over me, which felt absolutely disgusting.

If I hadn’t wanted to show off a little in front of the cherry-tomato zombie, I never would’ve bothered fighting it myself.

I tore the flower apart without breaking a sweat.

Then I turned around—

and my long-term meal ticket had run off on his own.

Because I’d tasted the blood of the cherry-tomato zombie, I remembered his scent. It didn’t take me long to track him down again.

He was standing guard in front of a warehouse wrapped in green vines, fighting off a pack of zombies.

His eyes were so red they looked ready to bleed, and he was crushing zombie skulls like overripe melons.

It was, for a moment, spectacularly gory.

I lifted my nose and sniffed.

Got it.

There were living humans inside the warehouse.

So the cherry-tomato zombie was protecting his food.

He made quick work of the other zombies trying to steal it.

Then the warehouse door flew open.

A fireball shot out from inside and streaked straight for his back.

If I hadn’t grabbed him and yanked him aside on instinct, he would’ve been turned into grilled zombie on the spot.

I was furious.

That had been way too close. If anything happened to my little tomato supply, what then?

I glared at the people inside the warehouse.

The nerve. Mere food trying to rebel? Sneak attacks now? No honor at all.

To my surprise, someone inside was even angrier than I was.

“What the hell are you doing? The captain was protecting us just now, and you attacked him? Are you insane?”

“His eyes were still red. That means the mutation failed. Anyone who fails the mutation turns into a zombie. We have a responsibility to put him down.”