A Plague on All Houses

Ashley Drake, Zombie Hunter:
A Plague on All Houses

A Ravenous Romance™ Original Publication

by Dana Fredsti

“That was nothing. But that's how it always begins. Very small.”
Egg Chen
, Big Trouble in Little China

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I slapped the head of my Giant Panda alarm clock, sending a metal spike into its adorable panda skull. Normally I'd feel guilty about hurting an endangered animal, even by plastic proxy, but anything to stop the evil ringing.

I hate getting up. I mean,
really
hate it. I would sleep until noon if I had my way, but
some
one thought it was a good idea to start school bright and early, from grade school all the way through college. Try as I might to schedule my first class at a reasonable hour, someone
else
evidently decided Pandemics in History were best studied at eight a.m. Like, do I
really
need to read about the Black Death or love during the time of cholera after just one cappuccino?

Assholes.

One. Two. Three.

I threw the down comforter off and rolled reluctantly out of bed, taking my time standing up. I'm never particularly perky in the morning—I'm the Anti-Perk before ten a.m.—but I was especially wobbly-legged and slow to start these days.

See, I'd already missed the first week of my sophomore year thanks to a case of genuine, bona fide Walker flu of my very own. Stupid, overblown pandemic warnings, yes, but damn, the Walker kicked my butt. It left me weak and cranky.
Really
cranky. I hardly ever get sick, but I'd just gotten over a case of food poisoning a couple of weeks earlier. According to Dr. Albert, our family GP since I was in diapers, I probably only caught it ‘cause of a combo of my weakened immune system and the fact it was a totally new bug and people didn't have any natural immunity built up. I'd also missed the free flu vaccine clinic while I'd been puking up my guts.

Dr. Albert is a big believer in flu shots. Kind of like an evangelistic drug pusher, except legit. He'd tried to shoot me up when I crawled into his office for an anti-nausea shot for the food poisoning, but I'd said no way. I mean, I was already sick, so putting more nasties into my system seemed like a bad idea, especially one that was still being tested. As I stood up now on unsteady newborn-Bambi legs, I thought maybe I should have listened to him.

My roommate Zara was already gone from our dorm room, leaving the bathroom free and clear. I mean, I like her, but honestly, the girl uses enough facial products to stock the local Sephora store. She takes an hour to put makeup on, and that's after all the scrubbing, exfoliating, creaming, and toning. The vegetable and fruit drawers in our little fridge were stuffed with leaking jars of face goo; evidently someone told her the cold temps were good for the products. Our apples and carrots may smell funny, but they have the best skin in town.

I took a look at my face in the bathroom mirror. Blech. I looked every bit my nearly twenty-two years (my birthday was the end of November), probably wouldn't even get carded if I wanted to buy booze. My skin still had this kind of pale-olive cast, the same color as those scary babies in Italian Renaissance paintings. And my eyes looked dull, more gray than green, like brackish swamp water. Okay, maybe not that bad. But points for using “brackish” in a sentence before my first cup of coffee.

I somewhat guiltily used a few of Zara's magic potions to try to hide the dark circles under my eyes and change the sickly pale tone of my skin to an artificially natural tint of Sun-Kissed Beige Glow.

Definitely better.

A little mascara and some peachy-pink lip gloss brightened my face enough to pass inspection. I secured the front of my hair back with an industrial-strength, decorative metal clip—I have a lot of thick, wavy, tawny brown hair and it laughs in the face of plastic hair clips. This one was in the shape of a butterfly. I admired the way the violet and red crystals set in the wings caught the sunlight shining in through the bathroom window. At least part of me sparkled.

Although not in a
Twilight
vampire way. I personally think Edward is kinda, well, gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that, okay? But I'll take my vamps like Christopher Lee as Dracula or the cute Billy Idol clone in
Buffy
. Bad boys without all the torturey angst. Just happy to be alive—well, undead—and drinking blood from sexy women.

Wait. That sounds bad. It's not like I'm into other women, although there's
so
nothing wrong with that. I'm totally for overturning Prop 8. I just like men. And I really wish Matt would stop telling me how “hot” it would be if I made out with Zara. What is it with men and lesbians? I mean, don't they get that if all of us were into other women, they would get
no
action?

Matt, by the way, was a junior at Redwood “Big Red” College and somewhere between a prep and a jock. Totally wicked cute in a button-down-collar kind of way. He was on the swim team, which made him all toned and tan in all the right places. He could have been a little smarter, I suppose. I mean, he was totally smart in a numbers, business-school type of way, but he wouldn't read anything except business magazines and assigned class reading. And his sense of humor? Well, kind of limited. I mean, Jack Black and Will Ferrell have their moments, but how many times can one man watch
Anchorman
and
School of Rock?

I finally got myself dressed and out of the dorm, going for a layered look of jeans, long pink tank top, baby-doll T-shirt in a darker pink, and violet hoodie. Like most Nor Cal coastal communities, Redwood Grove is cool and foggy the majority of the time, but you never know when the sun is going to burn through the fog and make it tank-top weather. Layering is usually the safest bet.

I didn't have too far to walk to my first class—student housing is just a couple of blocks away from the campus proper—but today it felt like miles. I'd lost weight during my double-whammy of food poisoning and Walkers, and while it was great to have my clothes comfortably loose, I felt as though a strong gust of wind would blow me away. I was pretty much better, but every once in a while I'd still get hit with a wave of feverish weakness that made me want to crawl back in bed.

Did I mention I hate being sick?

Fog shrouded the town and campus this morning, condensation dripping from roof eaves and plants. The tops of the redwoods surrounding the college vanished into the mist. I inhaled deeply, loving the smell of leaves, mulch, and a hint of salt air. A coughing fit followed my inhale. Guess I'd have to enjoy nature less enthusiastically for a little while longer.

I stopped at one of Big Red's many coffee kiosks for a double, extra-hot cappuccino and blueberry muffin. It cost me an extra five minutes, but if I didn't eat something I'd spend the next hour clutching my stomach every time it growled. I have a very noisy stomach when I don't feed it regularly and I
so
didn't need to be known as That Girl Whose Stomach Growls my first day of class. And if I didn't have my caffeine, I might as well have stayed in bed ‘cause nothing would stick in my brain.

By the time I reached D.B. Patterson Hall, which housed all the science-y things like biology and Pandemics in History, it was already pretty much cleared out, which meant I was definitely in the late zone. When I reached Room 217, I opened the door as quietly as possible, hoping to sneak in the auditorium and find a seat in the back row, preferably in the aisle.

Unfortunately Room 217 has a door badly in need of WD-40, and is one of the smaller auditoriums. From where I stood, conspicuous in layers of pink and violet, almost every seat was filled, including the back row. Who would have thought so many people were dying to hear about bubonic plague, cholera, and Yellow Jack?

“Excuse me, miss?” A deep male voice hailed me from the front of the auditorium. So much for my chance to sneak in without being noticed. A tall, drop-dead-gorgeous blond guy in his mid-twenties stood near the lectern, fussing with papers and a laptop.

When I say blond, I'm talking the kind of hair people describe as freshly minted gold. I couldn't tell the color of his eyes, but I was betting on sky blue. His features were flaweless other than a bump in his otherwise perfect nose. He looked like an archangel who'd gone a round or two with Rocky Balboa. Definitely seemed a little young to be a professor, but I wasn't about to complain. Learning about buboes and black vomit might be fun after all. Damn, he was pretty.

I gave him my best charming smile and did a little toast with my cappuccino cup. He looked uncharmed. “Any reason you can't take a seat and join us?”

Okay, now, sarcasm
totally
not needed here. I kept the smile and said, “Um, not seeing any empty seats?”

He pointed at an empty seat in the very front row. “Be my guest.”

Great. I did my best to ignore the giggles and whispered conversations that followed my progress down the aisle to the front row. I noticed a couple of girls looking very pleased at my embarrassment. Dimes to doughnuts they were hot for teacher. There were
so
many other ways he could have handled this.

Cutie-jerkwad wasn't done yet. As I sat down, he leaned forward from the lectern and said, “Any particular reason you're late, Miss…?”

“Ashley,” I said, deciding he didn't deserve to know my last name.

“Miss Ashley?”

“Close enough.” Speaking of close enough, I could see his eyes and they were indeed a very pleasing shade of denim blue. Much more pleasing than his personality.

“Ashley Drake?”

I nodded and bit into my blueberry muffin. Now that he had my name, maybe he'd drop it.

“So-o-o…” he drew the word out and I knew it meant nothing good. “This is your first class after missing a week—”

“I've been sick,” I interrupted, hoping to shut him up.

No such luck.

“—and you're late,” he finished.

“Like I said, I've been sick. Walkers,” I added, even though I guessed he wouldn't give a shit.

I could almost hear the creaking sound of his eyes rolling. “Ah yes, Walkers. The new ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse.”

Did he wake up on the wrong side of bed or was he just in permanent fucktard mode?

“I sent in a doctor's note!”

This didn't stop him. “Great. So you had the flu. Still doesn't explain why you were late this morning.”

I'd give my hair a soccer mom cut before I'd cry in front of this jerk. “It's still hard to get moving in the morning,” I said between gritted teeth.

“So don't get sick. I don't.” While I was still sputtering from this unreasonable bullshit, he continued, “If you didn't stuff yourself with processed sugar and caffeine, you'd have a healthier immune system and wouldn't get sick.”

OMG, I would kill him.

“In fact,” he continued, “Miss Drake here is a case in point of the importance to do everything you can to keep up a healthy immune system to help boost your chances of surviving a pandemic.”

I gaped at him. Did he just use me as a lesson example for class? What a tool!

“Excuse me,” I said, “but didn't a lot of the victims of the Spanish flu die be
cause
they had healthy immune systems? Didn't their immune response go way over the top and cause something like inflammation of the lungs?” Gotta love the History Channel, you know?

Jerkwad, however, didn't bat a thickly lashed eye before shooting back, “They didn't have the medical resources we do today and I guarantee an uncompromised immune system coupled with modern medicine will give you a fighting chance against the pandemics of the future.”

All around me students looked uncomfortably from their coffees, sodas, and snacks to me. The girl next to me scooted over as if I were contagious. I resisted the urge to sneeze on her Coach handbag.

I'm not sure if I would have continued to resist this urge and a few others (including kicking Professor Jackass in the nuts) if not for timely arrival of a short and skinny little Goth girl through one of the side doors. She was all decked out in black and purple, with pale pink hair floating around her face like a pastel dandelion. Her black, buckled platform boots said tough girl, but her bright smile was free of ‘tude. She went straight over to my new arch nemesis.

“Hey, Gabriel, sorry I'm late. My car broke down and I had to take the bus the rest of the way from Maberry.”

Gabriel, huh? Like the nasty angel in
Prophecy
, always blowing his own horn and causing trouble. The name fit. I waited for him to rip her a new one.
“Then don't drive cars. I don't,”
or something equally snarky.

To my surprise and chagrin, Gabriel just gave a half-smile and said, “At least you made it.”

I sulked and drank some cappuccino. How come I got ripped up one side and down the other, but Miss Hot Topic got a free pass?

Gabriel turned and addressed his audience. “Everyone, this is Jamie Ackerman, Professor Fraser's new intern.” Ah, so Jerkbutt
wasn't
the professor. Maybe I had a chance of passing class now. “She'll be helping out in class for the rest of the semester.”

The girl next to me, a total
Heathers
type, raised her hand and spoke in a high, girlish voice. “Does this mean you won't be helping any more?” Great, I was sitting next to Betty Boop. Now I
really
wanted to sneeze on her Coach handbag.

“No, I'll still be assisting Professor Fraser as well.”

A nearly audible sigh of relief rippled through the auditorium as students whispered amongst themselves. I did not join in. No matter how good-looking he might be, this guy was a major Fail for me.

The side door opened again and the whispered conversations immediately died down. Gabriel practically stood at attention while Jamie turned towards the newcomer like a flower seeking the sun. This had to be Professor Fraser.

A tall, elegant woman with patrician features, clear grass-green eyes, and blond hair drawn up in a French twist, she commanded attention immediately. Her outfit, a tailored, hunter-green trumpet skirt and jacket with a nipped-in waist. Very forties retro. She could be anywhere between thirty and fifty. Cate Blanchett would play her in her life story.

She strode to the lectern and surveyed all of us with a cool green stare. Her gaze fell on me and she raised an eyebrow. Her Vulcan forefathers would be proud.

“You're new.”