Bodywork

The outbreak is over. Somebody still has to pick up the bodies.

Rita Hicks works Route 103 with a pitchfork, a dump truck, and the only two men in Bledsoe she can stand. Quarantine lifted two weeks ago. Everybody takes their Necrophage with breakfast. Hemisphere says the dead stay dead now, and Panacea pays well enough that Rita stopped asking what the job really was.

Then her count comes up wrong.

Fourteen bodies tagged at dark. Thirteen at dawn. Fourteen again by noon, one of them a quarter mile from where she left it.

Then she rolls a corpse off the shoulder and finds a little girl underneath. Half rotted. Wearing an ankh. Looking right at her, and asking Rita, in a voice that should not work anymore, not to kill her.

Panacea wants the girl alive. Seventy-five thousand dollars alive. They won't say why, and they've given Rita until first light. By then her sister will have heard about the money, the deputy who has loved Rita since high school will have picked a side, and two brothers who would sell their own mother for scrap will be loading her bodies into their trailer.

And all along Route 103, the dead Rita cleared this morning are starting to move.

Bodywork is a standalone zombie novella from Sean Platt and Sawyer Black, set in the world of Dead City.

Gallows humor, a sister you will want to slap, and one last day on the job that nobody walks off clean.