Book Info
Zombie, Incorporated
by Jill Elaine Hughes
Publication Date: March 25th, 2013
ZOMBIE, INCORPORATED
Twilight. With zombies.
Eighteen-year-old Katie Allred is socially awkward and unpopular at school. The only child of parents who had her right out of high school, Katie is herself about to leave the nest, even though she hardly feels ready.
Katie’s new after-school job at the Zimble Box Corporation draws her into the complex social strata of high school cliques and backstabbing friends in ways she never imagined. Katie soon discovers there’s something very strange about the “in” crowd at school---and about her employer, too. Shortly after starting her new job, the Contagion breaks out, plunging her town and the entire nation into chaos as zombie shadow forces come out into the open, ravaging the streets. Katie goes into hiding and her parents disappear, along with almost everyone else she knows.
But Katie soon discovers she has special powers that help her survive. She’s a Beacon, someone with the innate ability to help zombies produce children. It’s a power her employer — and what little remains of the U.S. government — both want to exploit for their own ends. Not only that, it runs in her family---which has a secret past Katie never knew about until now.
Enter Agent Morehouse of the FBI Special Zombie Control Unit. A reformed zombie working undercover, he suppresses his urge to eat human flesh in order to serve and save humanity. But Agent Morehouse can’t help but be attracted to a Beacon like Katie, and she to him. Even as they fight zombies the world over, they must fight their intense attraction to each other, hoping to keep Katie from suffering Agent Morehouse’s terrible zombie fate.
Excerpt
The security guard, a grandfatherly-looking man who smelled
like a combination of cherry pipe tobacco and Aqua Velva, smiled and tapped the
side of his nose. “If you’ll just have a seat, ma’am.”
Mom obeyed, visibly flinching at the use of the word “ma’am.”
She’d had me so young that she often tried to pass herself off as my older
sister in public. Obviously she wasn’t fooling anybody today.
Mom
plopped down in the nearest chair and clutched her purse tightly against her
chest, muttering something unintelligible under her breath. Then she cleared
her throat and looked up. “Go on in, Katie. I’ll be waiting for you. And don’t
blow it. You won’t be able to pay your rent when you move out after graduation
without a job. And you are going to
move out no later than July 1, even if I have to toss you out onto the street
myself.”
Subtlety
has never been my mom’s strong suit. Neither has parenting. She’s always
treated me more like a financial obligation than a daughter. I guess that’s
what happens when you get married and pregnant right out of high school like
she did.
Mom
reached into her purse for her lipstick and compact and touched herself up a
bit, though I didn’t understand why. She
wasn’t the one going in for her first-ever job interview----I was. I stared at
her, my feet frozen to the floor. This was really, really happening. I was
going into a real job interview in a real office like a real grownup. Not bad
for someone who was still in high school. I knew I should feel proud of myself
or something, but I didn’t.
Mom
applied a fresh coating of frosted peach lipstick and smacked her lips. “Good
luck. Hurry up, don’t keep them waiting. Otherwise they’ll fire you before you
even get a chance to get in there.”
I
sighed. Not exactly a good way for a mother to inspire confidence. But I was
used to that where Mom was concerned. She’d never get the Mother of the Year
award. But I’d never get the Daughter of the Year award, either. Between the
two of us, we pretty much cancelled each other out.
I took several deep long breaths, and willed my feet to
unfreeze themselves from the threadbare gray carpeting. I pushed through the
double doors, more than a little frightened of what I’d find on the other side.
As I
stepped into Mr. Zimble’s office, I ended up not in an office at all, but
something else entirely. At least it
didn’t look like any office I’d ever seen before. It really looked more like a toy store.
Lining the walls were floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves.
But instead of books, they were lined with brightly colored cereal boxes,
mostly childrens’ cereals like Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms. In between the
cereal boxes were unopened boxes of toys. Toys of all kinds—Star Wars action figures, Strawberry
Shortcake dolls, Bakugan games, GI Joes, and a bunch of stuff that looked like
it was from the 70s and 80s that I’d never even heard of. There were lots of Halloween-themed toys,
too—werewolves, Frankensteins, mummies, and zombies.
Lots of zombies. There
were a bunch of Evil Dead toys on one
shelf, and about sixteen different versions of one of the zombie villains from Scooby-Doo. I recognized it right away
because they still ran that episode of Scooby-Doo
on Cartoon Network all the time, even though it was ancient, like from the
sixties or something. All untouched and perfect and sealed in the original
packaging.
In
between the regular toys and cereal boxes were tiny little cheap cardboard
toy-things, the kind that you usually find in cereal boxes and Cracker Jacks.
Stupid stuff like stickers, cardboard footballs like the kind you’d toss around
in study hall, and those little thin pieces of plastic that show different
pictures when you flick them back and forth. At the end of the room was a huge
mahogany desk, also covered with toys and brightly colored boxes—leaving just
enough space for a laptop, desk pad and phone. Behind that desk sat a
funny-looking little old man that I assumed must be Mr. Zimble.
And
when I say funny-looking, I really mean funny
looking. He reminded me of something
you would see in a cartoon. Or maybe a
video game.
He
was short. Very short. So short that
his head barely made it above the edge of his desk, and he sat in a huge
leather-upholstered chair that was almost twice as tall as he was—looking at
him reminded me of seeing one of my toddler cousins sitting in my grandfather’s
old La-Z-Boy. He had a perfectly bald
head that shined under the florescent lights like Mr. Clean. He wore huge black
hornrimmed glasses that were almost twice as wide as his head, along with big
bushy white eyebrows and gray hair growing out of his ears. By the looks of him he had to be almost
ninety years old. Or maybe just sixty. But definitely old.
Mr.
Zimble saw me come in and smiled wide.
So wide, in fact, I thought his face would break in half. He had large, white even teeth that looked
fake. He pushed back his huge leather
chair from the ginormous desk and stood up.
But it looked like he must have been sitting on a box or something,
because when he got down from the chair he disappeared behind the desk for a
moment. I didn’t see him full-length
until he came out from behind it.
Mr.
Zimble was a midget.
Or
rather, a little person. I think I read somewhere that little people
find the term “midget” offensive or something.
He
held out his tiny hand, and I reached down to shake it. “Hello there,” he said
in a deep voice that didn’t match his small stature at all. “You must be Katie Allred. Tell me, are you
any relation to Gloria Allred?”
“Who?”
He
laughed—a deep, resonating laugh that reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the
West’s singing guards in The Wizard of
Oz. I blinked my eyes a couple of times just to make sure they weren’t
playing tricks on me, but when I opened them, Mr. Zimble was still just as
short as he’d been before. “Gloria
Allred is a famous Hollywood lawyer,” he said. “She’s on TV a lot, I thought
you might be related.”
I had
no idea what he was talking about. “We definitely don’t have any lawyers in the
family,” I said. No, we were mostly a bunch of working stiffs. I remember Mom
talking about a second cousin who worked as a high-level computer programmer
someplace, but as far as I knew that was the most important job anybody in my
family had. Except maybe for my uncle Lou who worked as a garbage collector on
a military base in Kentucky. You know, for like a government pension and
everything.
My
family isn’t exactly what you’d call successful. At least not in the
traditional sense. If you could afford rent and gas in your car, that was
successful enough for us. At least, that’s what my parents always said. Small
wonder they’d never bothered to put away a college fund for me. For the past
four years, the recurring mantra at our dinner table was, “Katie, forget
college. You have to go out and get a job and support yourself the minute you
graduate, just like we did.”
“Well,
here I was thinking you could get me Gloria Allred’s autograph.” Mr. Zimble
seemed a little disappointed. “I do know for a fact you’re related to Bud
Weidle, though. My top line foreman in the box plant. I understand Bud is your
uncle?”
“Yes, he is. Uncle
Bud is on my mother’s side. He’s
technically my great-uncle since he’s my mom’s uncle, but we don’t call him
that.”
Mr.
Zimble motioned for me to take a seat in one of the hard wooden chairs in front
of his desk. I sat down and instantly felt at least a foot shorter. The huge wooden desk suddenly towered over
me, as if it were the Grand Canyon and I were standing at the bottom of it
looking up. Mr. Zimble climbed back up into his chair, and now he looked like a
giant. It reminded me of a room at the carnival funhouse, the one with the
tilted floor and the funny mirrors. You
know the ones—at one end of the room you’re a fat midget, at the other end
you’re a tall, thin giant and your head knocks up against the ceiling. Mr. Zimble was kind of like that, except he
was like what would happen if the carnival funhouse room got turned into a
person.
He gazed down on me from his high perch like
an evil king out of a fairy tale. I craned my neck to see if there was a wooden
box on his chair to give him more height, but I couldn’t tell from such a steep
angle.
Okay, so this was weird. I suppressed an urge to bolt for
the door. If I screwed up the interview after my Uncle Bud went to all the
trouble to arrange it for me, Mom and Dad would be furious. I knew I’d never
hear the end of it for as long as I lived.
“Your
Uncle Bud is one of our best employees,” Mr. Zimble went on. “He’s been with us
for almost forty years. I remember when
I first hired him. He wasn’t much older
than you then, we hired him right out of high school. He started at the bottom
and worked his way up. He runs the secondary production line now, a big step up
from when he swept the factory floor and took out the trash. I like to see my
employees work their way up the system on their own merits.”
“Does
that mean I’ll be sweeping the factory floor and taking out the trash?” I
blurted out. “I thought this was an office job.” Before the words even made
their way out of my mouth, I was already embarrassed.
He
laughed again, somewhat higher-pitched this time. In fact, his laugh started out low and deep,
but then seemed to get higher and higher, faster and faster, like when you
speed up a recording, until he almost sounded like one of the Chipmunks. But
then when he started talking, his voice sounded just like it had before. So
maybe I just imagined the whole thing.
“It is an office
job, Katie. I won’t have a pretty young lady like you working on the dirty,
loud factory floor. You’re not strong
enough to lift the pallets or run the pressing machines either, I can tell just
by looking at you.
I
probably should have been offended by this, but I wasn’t. Feminism and equal
rights were fine and all, but you’d never see me lifting pallets or running
machines. No way. That was sweaty work made for fat hairy old men. Fat hairy
old men like my Uncle Bud who smelled like a mixture of cherry Jell-O and
trash. (Seriously, he did. So did his entire house. Don’t even get me started.)
“Well,
that’s good,” I said. “What exactly will
I be doing? Uncle Bud said it was just typical office stuff, typing and filing
and answering phones and stuff. Or maybe packing boxes to put on the
train? I saw on the way over here you
guys use the trains to like, ship stuff.”
“Yes,
that’s exactly right, Katie,” he replied, picking up a tiny plastic werewolf
figurine and toying with it between his gnarled fingers. I saw that the skin on
the backs of his hands was paper-thin, almost transparent, showing a roadmap of
knobby blue veins pressing up from underneath. “I can see right off the bat
that you’re a real go-getter. To answer
your question, you’ll be doing all the typical office work, plus things like
making coffee and running errands. You’d be working under the supervision of
our chief office manager, who started out ten years ago right out of high
school as an entry-level office girl, just like you’ll be.”
I
realized with some trepidation that this really wasn’t an interview at all. Mr.
Zimble had already decided to hire me sight-unseen. Which on the surface seemed
great, but there had to be a catch. I might be only eighteen, but I wasn’t born
yesterday, either.
But
what was the catch? Other than the
fact this whole place seemed like something out of the Twilight Zone and Mr. Zimble reminded me a lot of a cartoon
villain, it still seemed just like any other place to work. “So, um, does this
mean I got the job?”
He smiled wide enough to show the tops of his
dentures. “Yep. Your Uncle Bud says you can type and you’re a nice girl and a
hard worker, so that’s good enough for me. When can you start?”
Giveaway
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