Ready or Rot

The first thing Riley Chen noticed was that the hallway smelled wrong.

By the end of the day, she is barricaded in an art room with a boy she has spent three years pretending not to notice, a fire extinguisher, a wooden easel, and the sound of her classmates turning into something that should not exist.

Dex Morales has spent his whole life being underestimated. It is easier than being seen. But when the outbreak starts, he is the one who swings a textbook at a thing coming through a window. He is the one who keeps the notebook. He is the one who writes it all down.

Together, Riley and Dex survive the school, the shed, the road, and the mill. They lose a teacher, a boy who counted zombies, and a girl who was the heart of everything. They gain a fourteen-year-old named Zoe, a nineteen-year-old named Jonah, and a hundred and forty-one survivors who do not know what the facility they are living in is actually for.

Then they find out.

The facility has a fence and a well and a clinic and a cure that is not a cure. It has a list of names. It has A's and B's and C's. And it has a room at the end of the hall with a yellow door.

Ready or Rot is a genre-blend novel — a zombie romance, an apocalyptic love story, and a school-setting survival drama all at once. It follows two teenagers from the first day of the outbreak to the twenty-first day of winter, and it asks the question that every apocalypse story asks but rarely answers:

What happens after the thing happens?

What happens when you have to figure out how to be a person again?

From the school to the shed to the mill to the camp to the moment the gate opens and a hundred people walk through it in the dark, this is a story about the ordinary thing — the bowl of soup, the notebook, the porch, the children playing hide and seek in the yard of a mill on the twenty-first day of winter.

This is the fourth record of what happened.

As long as it is written down, it is not gone.