Free Hungry for Your Love: An Anthology of Zombie Romance by Lori Perkins Page A

tonight. It was a beautiful death. He swallowed a quantity of sleeping pills, washed down with the bottle of champagne he’d been saving for the day I accepted his marriage proposal, and I held him in my arms as he quietly slipped away.
    Mark was there, too, to bite him as he faded into unconsciousness. It’s the one sure way, the doctors say, to turn someone into a zombie. Given Brody’s powerful desire to be with me, whatever it takes, I know it won’t be too long before he’s pushing up through the dirt they so recently shovelled over his coffin and knocking on the door of this apartment, ready to join Mark and me in the most unusual of threesomes.
    I’ll admit I don’t know exactly what the future will bring, but I’m dying to find out.

    73

    Through Death To Love
    by S. M. Cross

    "It's a good strategy," she says. "You just have to make it your own, put your mark on it. We all use fillers to maintain our turn, to signal interest and attention.
    Frankly I've never heard that particular one put to such elegant use."
    It's a bit disconcerting actually; a hunger sound slowed and softened, an
    ‘mmmmmmm’ with the slightest breath in front, an oddly appealing mix of rampant desire and precarious restraint. Fear and anticipation flutter against her stomach walls, a delicious feeling she hasn’t had since high school.
    The fear isn't surprising since it hasn't been that long since zombies and humans were predator and prey. The world has changed a lot in ten years, economic necessity turning the lemons of a near depression into the lemonade of a miraculous global economic recovery, all thanks to ex-consumers who no longer are dead but not ex-.
    No, the fear she gets. It's the anticipation that startles her, a delicious frisson sweeping over her, something akin to reading a horror story late at night all alone, hearing a thump and a bump, and the accompanying mix of dread, despair, hope, wanting and not wanting, tumbling together. And isn't that the essence of attraction, the fear of ends, the dread of them, the despair at all that has passed and yet, when confronted with the promise of what could be, the hunger rising, the risk you’re willing—no, forced—to take?

    "Now let's see how you are doing with your oral motor exercises." These are drudgery; there’s no way around it, but critical if he's to keep his speech intelligibility, 74
    not to mention a prosody that's more music than growl. Speech therapy for zombies is all about compensatory strategies, blurring the lines between dead and living so we can all just get along.
    As he goes through the exercises, following each with production of the target sound in a word and phrase, she carefully observes the pursing and retraction of his lips, the movement and accuracy of his tongue, the lovely, miraculous dance of speech, one motion following on the heels of another, future sounds shaping the present, molding the memory of the past. He's so fluid it's startling, nearly human in rate and rhythm. Shows you what's possible with money, opportunity, and force of will. One thing you have to admire about zombies is their single-mindedness. They may not get points for imagination, but for sheer stick-to-it-tiveness, they can't be beat.
    Yes, he's had every opportunity and it shows. Beyond a slight hesitation now and again, a gesture that seems more appreciation than inability, as if he chooses to linger as opposed to being forced to it, his speech is nearly human. There's not an ounce of self-consciousness in his attempts; even his mistakes seem delightfully purposeful, designed to enchant. You've gotta love a man with this much aplomb, even a dead man.
    "You're doing wonderfully."
    "Mis-s-s-stakes," he sighs.
    He’s so hard on himself, another zombie trait she can’t help but admire. It pushes him toward excellence, being all he can be, resolving to do better next time, always sure there will be a next time which, because he’s a zombie and already dead, is a pretty