[The Restless Dead 01] • The Restless Dead · A Zombie Novel

***"If Shaun of the Dead met The Walking Dead, you'd get The Restless Dead."***

"Somebody attacked Archie and that somebody had to be a zombie because last time I checked, the dead didn’t wake up, stinking of putrefying flesh and try and bloody eat you. No even in Glasgow.”

And so begins Emma and Scott’s battle for survival against the things they dub dead bastards.

Teaming up with self-proclaimed zombie expert Kenny, who works in Glasgow’s last remaining video store, macho man Mustafa from the newsagents and mystery man Doyle, they face a battle to survive the flesh eating hordes rampaging through Scotland.

Now they have just one aim –

JUST

DON'T

GET

BITTEN.

The Restless Dead (An Extract)

We couldn’t handle Archie staring back at us with accusing eyes, and he stank, so I covered him up with a duvet. A pink one with polka dots, which is the only spare one we have.

Scott spotted what he called the girly duvet and screwed up his face. “He’s my mate. We need to show him some respect.”

I’m irritated his pal has bled all over the new rug, yet I’m the one getting all the aggro for using a pink duvet.

Instead of coming up with an alternative to cover up his friend, Scott stood there with a stern expression on his face and shook his head. “It’s just no right.” Then his eyes grew wide and staring as he gawped at the duvet. “I think it moved.”

I snorted and shook my head. “How can it have moved? He’s deid. His stomach’s on our carpet.”

Just because Scott didn’t consider the duvet manly enough for his pal, didn’t give him the right to try to freak me out. But I looked down anyway.

At first, I didn’t see any movement, but I carried on watching. Then Archie’s feet started moving, making a tapping motion as if dancing in time to music. Before I’d seen it for myself, I thought that what happened to all those others on TV was not the same as what happened to Archie, because making that connection would open a whole Pandora’s Box of trouble.

Denial is after all a way of shielding myself from the truth. But eventually realisation dawns, especially when Archie started doing a tap dance on my living room floor. “Fuck, he’s no deid.”

While he’s doing this I realised there’s one last thing we can do for him: cave in his head.

Scott gives me his teacher-doesn’t-approve stare. “Wish you wouldn’t swear, Emma. It makes you ugly.”

As if my swearing was our biggest problem right now.

I wanted to give him an earful for chastising me like I was one of his pupils, but I’m too busy watching as dead Archie takes a hacking breath and tries to get up.

I don’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe. I simply held out my finger and pointed as if auditioning for the National Lottery’s It Could Be You ad. But this was one lottery I sure as hell didn’t want to win.

Archie flung the duvet asunder. His ash-grey face was set in a grimace that reminded me of a Mayan death mask. He looked like hell, which was no surprise considering his innards were spread out all over our carpet. But it’s his eyes that were the real giveaway that Archie wasn’t Archie anymore. He had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, but now those eyes were gone, replaced by dead orbs, as black as coal. They lacked that spark of humanity and self-awareness, whatever it is that makes us human.