Read Chapter 1 of Undead Impact!
Today's the day! Chapter 1 of Undead Impact is here!
I’ve been touched by the response to my newsletter news that Undead Impact is finally on its way. This book took a lot longer to finish than I anticipated. I really appreciate how patient everyone has been.
Below is your first look at Chapter One, where we meet Araminta—and the apocalypse crashes the party in an extremely rude fashion.
UNDEAD IMPACT, CHAPTER ONE
The carry-on bag Araminta pulled behind her twisted and turned sideways, forcing her to stop.
“Bloody hell, I’m going to miss my flight,” she groaned, a frustrated scream boiling in her throat.
She pressed the button on the grip and slammed the handle down. Then she picked up her bag and continued her headlong dash through Heathrow Airport. If only she could travel by Floo Network, like Harry Potter and his friends. She didn’t have a fireplace in her flat, but she’d move if it meant she could use that magical travel apparatus.
In the press of the crowded airport, a creepy-crawly feeling made her skin prickle. She hated the tight confines of crowds. Being packed into a plane like cattle in a cattle car was her own private version of hell, but if she wanted to see Imogen, she had to do it. She wormed her way through the other travelers, trying not to bump into too many people and leaving a string of “Pardon me,” and “Excuse me,” and “So sorry” in her wake.
“Delta flight 5993 for New York is now boarding in terminal three,” the overhead speakers announced. “Passengers must report to the gate immediately.”
Araminta picked up the pace, pushing her tired body to comply. She glimpsed herself in a shop’s plate-glass window and grimaced. A wild cloud of dark curls bobbed around her head as she ran. Despite the drops she’d used, her amber eyes were bloodshot, and they would probably charge her a fee for the bags under her eyes. Between scouring hers and Graham’s laptops and backup drives for the missing paper, then packing and scrambling to get to Heathrow, she’d never gone to bed.
Such an idiot, she thought, her emotions mired in both anger and a cringing, embarrassed self-reproach. She’d known it was a mistake when she agreed to co-author a paper with her ex-boyfriend, Graham. He hated Frankenstein and its author almost as much as she hated academia’s preoccupation with deconstructing dominant paradigms through a post-modern lens. Graham had always been sly, however, and sucked her in with the genuine possibility of publication in the University of California’s Nineteenth-Century Literature journal.
Somehow, he had managed to make the prestige so appealing that she couldn’t say no? She loved literature, and she loved teaching, but being a university lecturer? Not so much.
Her area of study—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the intersection of classical literature, horror, and science fiction—filled her with as much excitement as her first reading of the novel, hot on the heels of the last book of the Altered Carbon trilogy. That a sci-fi detective story about consciousness shunting between bodies could trace its lineage to a book written by a teenaged girl in 1818, before the steam locomotive, photography, or even anesthesia, had captured Araminta’s imagination. It still did.
But academia’s committees and service commitments were mind-numbing, the publish or perish merry-go-round exhausting, and the department politics soul-sucking. Even worse was her colleagues’ exaggerated sense of importance about the minutiae of the scholarship they mired themselves in, as if it were going to change the world. Academic scholarship was important. Sometimes the results were life-changing, but literary academic advances simply didn’t affect the day-to-day lives of ordinary people that much.
The prestige part of how Graham had convinced her to finish the joint paper didn’t confuse her. Who in her area of study didn’t want to be published in Nineteenth-Century Literature? As for the rest, put simply, she owed him. Graham knew she couldn’t stand to leave a debt unpaid. And then he “Accidentally” deleted the bloody thing, she thought. The seething anger that had receded in her panicked dash through the airport returned in a clench of her jaw. Finishing “Stitching the Subaltern: The Creature’s Body as Site of Postcolonial Resistance in Frankenstein” alongside her charming but passive-aggressive ex was, by far, the most painful undertaking of her unhappy professional life. She’d be damned if she would let him punish her for breaking things off by putting her through that agony and then deleting the finished product. Even if she missed her flight, the look on Graham’s face when she found the file on one of her backup drives would be worth it.
She glanced at her watch, brow furrowing. She could make it. Maybe.
Her anxiety had zoomed as high as the stratosphere at the Delta ticket counter, where it took an ice age to rebook the ticket. She’d tried to rebook over the phone in the taxi, and then while on the train from Euston Station, but she kept getting the “All circuits are busy” recording. The change fee and fare difference ended up being over a thousand pounds. She’d taken the hit and would worry about her mushrooming credit card balance later. She still hadn’t a moment to let Imogen know that she would be arriving tomorrow.
“This is the final boarding call for Delta flight 5993 to New York. I repeat, this is the final boarding call for Delta flight 5993. All passengers report to the gate for immediate boarding.”
Araminta tripped over a stationary object. Regaining her balance, she looked back and groaned. It wasn’t an object she’d struck, but a small girl! The final boarding announcement echoed in her ears as she stopped to help the child to her feet. The girl’s blue eyes had gone wide. Her packet of crisps had scattered over the floor like fallen leaves.
Araminta crouched beside her. “Are you all right?”
The girl watched passersby crush the crisps beneath their feet. Her lower lip wobbled. Araminta skimmed her hands over the child’s arms and legs, but she didn’t appear injured, just startled. Her disappointment over her lost crisps might change that, however. Araminta said, “But aren’t you a lucky girl today?”<
The girl looked up at her, forehead creased in confusion, caught in the moment between deciding whether or not to cry. Araminta dug in her purse for the snack packet of crisps she had snatched from her kitchen counter on her way out the door. She pressed it into the girl’s greasy fingers. Settling on not crying, the girl nodded and smiled. Araminta grabbed her bag and sprinted away.
“Hey! Stop! You knocked my child over!”
The churn inside Araminta’s head silenced the parent’s angry voice. She had checked on the girl, who was fine, and replaced the lost crisps. For her trouble she was going to miss her flight, but she couldn’t knock the child over and keep going. She glimpsed the gate ahead and poured on a burst of speed, but her heart sank when she saw the gate agents chatting and looking pleased with themselves, their task clearly finished.
“Has the plane left?” Araminta asked.<
The female gate agent glanced up at her, then picked up the phone. Was she asking if they could hold the door? The other agent reached for her boarding pass and said, “Run!”
Araminta slapped the boarding pass against the scanner, ignoring the man’s outstretched hand, and thundered down the gangway. When she saw the half-closed door, she shouted, “Wait! Wait!”
A flight attendant leaned out. “The gate just called. Hurry up!”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!”
Breathless, Araminta squeezed past the flight attendant, feeling triumphant.
Is that what you’re proud of?
Araminta scowled, then gave her head a shake to dismiss the intrusive thought. Sod off, brain.
She stopped at the head of the nearest aisle while she caught her breath. Imogen was right; she really should take on an exercise regimen. She dropped her carry-on case to the floor and extended the handle so she could pull the bag behind her. The flight attendant looked at her boarding pass and frowned.
“You’re going to have to check that. The overhead bins in coach are full, and you have a bulkhead seat. They don’t have under-seat storage. You’ll be lucky to get your purse into one of the overhead bins.”
“Just let me check, please. I’ll miss my connection otherwise.”
Not waiting for an answer, Araminta started down the spacious aisle of first class. The individual seats that turned into lie-flat beds had walls high enough that the occupants could see only the flight attendants if they desired. Privacy screens offered superfluous overkill. She wasn’t walking by seats but self-contained capsules of luxury. The announcement informing passengers of their imminent departure buzzed from the overhead speakers.
Araminta checked her ticket to find her seat number: 10-C. For the extra thousand pounds, she had a bulkhead seat in the first row of what the airline euphemistically called premium coach. In the common vernacular, that meant a slightly better version of cattle car. Besides the seat reclining an additional half a centimeter, there was no difference between premium and regular coach apart from the price. Passengers were still squished like sardines in a tin. Premium economy did, however, disembark the plane sooner. This aircraft offered a glimpse into first class that let one know just how crappy their overpriced ticket was.
Doesn’t matter now, she told herself. She had found and submitted the paper; she and Graham were even. She made her flight instead of trying to find another flight. And in ten hours she would be with her favorite person on the planet. Weary and famished, she longed for the crisps packet she had given away, but she wouldn’t change a thing. It had worked out in the end.