About this ebook
Rita Hicks works Route 103 with a pitchfork, a dump truck, and the only two men in Bledsoe she can stand. Quarantine lifted two weeks ago. Everybody takes their Necrophage with breakfast. Hemisphere says the dead stay dead now, and Panacea pays well enough that Rita stopped asking what the job really was.
Then her count comes up wrong.
Fourteen bodies tagged at dark. Thirteen at dawn. Fourteen again by noon, one of them a quarter mile from where she left it.
Then she rolls a corpse off the shoulder and finds a little girl underneath. Half rotted. Wearing an ankh. Looking right at her, and asking Rita, in a voice that should not work anymore, not to kill her.
Panacea wants the girl alive. Seventy-five thousand dollars alive. They won’t say why, and they’ve given Rita until first light. By then her sister will have heard about the money, the deputy who has loved Rita since high school will have picked a side, and two brothers who would sell their own mother for scrap will be loading her bodies into their trailer.
And all along Route 103, the dead Rita cleared this morning are starting to move.
Bodywork is a standalone zombie novella from Sean Platt and Sawyer Black, set in the world of Dead City.
Gallows humor, a sister you will want to slap, and one last day on the job that nobody walks off clean.
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About the author
Sean Platt has always been an entrepreneur, but stories were the business he was born to build.
When his wife bought him a laptop for his birthday in 2007, he dropped everything to write fiction.
After a short stint as creative director at a marketing agency — where he learned the kind of copywriting that could turn cliffhangers into an art — Sean wrote hundreds of novels (including international bestsellers), penned Hollywood scripts, and founded Sterling & Stone, an IP incubator where more than two dozen writers turn wild ideas into world-changing stories.
Originally from Long Beach, California, Sean now lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Cindy, and their dog, Fisher — both of whom remind him that real life makes the best stories.
Sawyer Black writes dark and violent fiction for people who secretly love puppies and rainbows. In addition to being a U.S. Army veteran, he’s also a beardsman. In fact, that’s where all his ideas come from. The beard. Speculative stories about struggle and triumph and brutal emotion, written mostly for his ideal reader, his wife of nearly twenty-five years. He’s an independent woman who likes cigars and margaritas, and he holds the deep belief that the earth is round.
