Saturday, October 25, 2014

NoQS Minion 10: LIFE AFTER REDBY, Adult Thriller/Horror

Title: LIFE AFTER REDBY
Genre: Adult Thriller/Horror
Word Count: 74,000

My Main Character's Most Fearsome Obstacle:

Cassandra's most fearsome obstacle is overcoming her insanity.  It is, initially, what she wants most in the world, but when she discovers that being sane means losing the voices in her head, the cost becomes too high.  Besides, her best friends would never forgive her if she off'ed them a second time.

Query:

You die.

You get back up.

You do it all over again.

In the town of Redby, zombies weren't the enemy. They were just one step in a never-ending cycle. Die, become a zombie, get a needle full of nanotech and live to die once more.  Immortality.  Or the next worse thing, at least.  But that was how life went in Redby, otherwise known as Zombie Hell on Earth.

Now Redby is no more.  The unfortunate participants in the zombie experiment are free and mortal again.  Including Cassandra Saratores, former soldier turned zombie hunter (and sometimes zombie).  After a decade spent in Redby, caught in the endless cycle of death and resurrection, Cass is scarred inside and out.  Now she spends her days trapped in a mental hospital, reminiscing on life as one of the undead.

Ten years in Hell changes a person.

When news arrives that Almesa, the company responsible for the zombie virus and its cure, isn't as dead as they were rumored to be, Cass has to make a choice: Remain in the hospital and work toward a normal life, or suck it up and reclaim her mantle of the last zombie hunter?  If Almesa's plans succeed, the world is going to need as many hunters as it can get.




First 250 words:

Once upon a time there was a little town called Redby that nobody cared about. Some evil pricks from Almesa Corporation built giant walls around the town, filled it with zombies, then sat around and watched all the little people run and scream and die. We lived that way for ten years, screaming and dying and starting all over again. Being immortal kinda sucks like that. Then my friend made a cure and we got out. Redby burned to the ground, zombies included. Almesa collapsed. I went nuts, and the rest of the world went back to being full of sunshine and rainbows and blissful ignorance.

The end.

On the inside of the glossy green journal, neatly typed out on a name tag, sat my name and current residence: Cassandra Isabella Saratores, resident of North Texas State Hospital, Vernon Campus. The doctor gave me the journal with my name tag already attached.  I guess he figured I wouldn't remember my own name if I didn't see it every day. Some days, he wasn't far off.

Inside the journal, filling exactly half a page, scrawled the details Doctor Brown had asked me for. A quick summary of all the shit that had happened over the ten years I'd spent trapped in Zombie Hell, otherwise known as Redby. Alright, he might've been hinting that he wanted more, what with giving me the journal and all. I'd heard "summary" and made my own interpretation.

1 comment:

  1. I'd love to read the first 50 pages. Please send to query@elizabethkaplanlit.com, with NoQS in the subject line.

    ReplyDelete