Free The Rising Dead by Devan Sagliani

her razor's edge routine and a slew of copycats, including a Suicide Angel who'd gone as far as getting her face tattooed on her ribcage. From the waist down she had on skin tight black booty shorts that showed off her lean curves, a bullet belt filled with 50 different shades of lip gloss, and oversized furry boots. It was all part of the act. When she was recording her show she wasn't simply Max, post graduate communications major and part-time geek . Under the lights, she transformed into something far more magical--Asphyxia Stardust--adored by hundreds of thousands of desperate, horny, video-game-and-porn-loving boys from all over the world--some who watched the show live, others who saw it on her YouTube channel and then came over to her website. She offered a podcast version and had seen her subscriptions growing fast despite Apple's endless and tedious restrictions. She was most proud of her rabid Reddit fans who kept her name in new discussion threads and even turned her into a cool meme!
    Those guys are my bread and butter , she thought. Cool, smart, and generous.
    The truth was, she didn't even need to finish school now. The world was changing. It wasn't like the days her parents remembered, when having a degree or a postgraduate degree meant something. Those days were long gone. Nowadays every barista at Starbucks had a Masters in something. Years of tax breaks for the super rich and government deregulation had ruined the country, maybe permanently. Now the only language that mattered was money, and you didn't need a degree to get to it, you just needed to be clever and willing to do whatever it took. They were entering the era of the Golden Rule: She who has the gold makes all the rules!
    Max's website already had sponsors. She had sick amounts of traffic. Her Google analytics were through the roof and her worldwide Alexa seemed to be steadily climbing, with little help on her part. She got interviewed every week by sites like Wired and Gamespot and Kotaku and Bleeding Cool . She'd had a profile posted about her on Gawker and survived the scathing comments. She'd been invited to do an AMA on Reddit long before that. She had offers to do amazing things from big names , to the tune of six figures.
    She was in her prime and she knew it.
    Her mom wanted her to finish school, start a career, fall in love, get married, and have children. Basically, she wanted her to be taken care of for the rest of her life--by a man. Max just didn't see the sense in that. It was a dead paradigm from a repressive era when women had to fight for things like the right to use birth control or burn their bra, as far as she was concerned.
    “There is nothing wrong with having a degree to fall back on,” her mother had told her. “But a woman's first duty is to her husband and children.”
    As a rebellious teen she might have rolled her eyes at her mother, or even played along by egging her on to make more absurd and old fashioned quips. As an independent woman, however, she found it harder and harder to hide her disappointment in her mother when she made statements like that now. Over the summer her mother had tried to set her up with several ‘eligible bachelors her age’--which amounted to her having to shoot down several obnoxious law students and one completely disinterested pre-med who wanted to barter with her.
    “We're both doing this to get our parents off our backs, right?” the oily haired future doctor said, barely looking up from his plate at the restaurant. “I keep telling my mom I don't have time to date, but she doesn't listen. I propose we pretend to be a couple so they leave us alone. We can chat by text to keep our stories straight. We'd only have to see each other at holidays. Deal?”
    He didn't seem to notice when she slipped out of her chair and left.
    I wonder if he thinks we’re still dating , she thought.
    At this point, she was still planning on finishing her degree because she only had a year left and she