My Soldier in the Zombie Apocalypse
Stella Lovegood
Copyright © Stella Lovegood 2024
All rights reserved.
Any reproduction of this written work, in part or in whole, is
prohibited
without express written permission of the author.
Blurb
A 14k word spicy military adventure romance at the end of the world...
When the world comes to an end, I initially stay at a camp for survival.
But, the camp is replete with rather unsavory characters, men who equate the new lawless times to permission to bring back old-world, 'pioneering' patriarchy.
Where women are nothing but chattel.
About to leave, I'm stopped only by a man of chivalry, a soldier who claims he can extend his hand of protection by calling me his woman.
Should I face the zombie apocalypse alone, or with a soldier by my side?
End-of-days, apocalyptic spicy romance. HEA guaranteed.
Trigger warnings: While the main couple engages in consensual sex, there are mentions of sexual violence at the camp, threats, etc.
The Handler's Inspection
When the world ended,
When the cities went up in flames,
When government crashed to the ground,
When hospitals got overrun,
When people turned into zombies, cannibalizing the living,
I knew my days were numbered.
Truthfully, I knew my life had already passed its expiration date. When people first started being turned into walking piles of rotting flesh hell-bent on devouring the living, I seriously contemplated just putting a gun to my mouth and getting it over with.
Who was I kidding? There was no way that I—little old five-foot-four Olivia Wells who looked like it'd take just one huff from the big bad wolf to blow me away—could survive the
end of the world
.
It was too preposterous.
I had been determined to ride out the rest of my days in my apartment, hunkering down as the streets became drenched by blood rain. I'd imagined myself hiding under my bed, barely even brave enough to move to the bathroom to piss in case the sound of trickling pee riled the zombies shuffling in the hallways.
In the end though, I'd ended up riding out on the last militia evacuation from New York City. The soldiers in tanks had been bulldozing through the streets, calling out for any last survivors who wanted to join the colony they were setting up outside the city.
Their loudspeakers had crackled in the dying embers of random fires blazing on the streets, speaking boldly of a new beginning, where survivors would be part of a new community. They boasted of self-sufficient technologies and infrastructure, of greenhouses and other regenerative food stores.
The camp, they claimed, would be safe from zombies, with plenty of resources to go around.
It sounded so good.
Probably too good to be true.
And that should have been my first warning.
Based on the hope they sold, I'd forced myself to throw together a quick knapsack of personal belongings, things that reminded me of my old life, the good old days: my favorite soft toy (Mrs. Snugglepants, a fluffy rottweiler plushie), some printed photos of my family (stranded now all the way in California; without any means of communications, I had no way of knowing whether they had made it), my mother's jewelry, a notebook and some pens, and my most well-worn clothes.
I'd donned a good pair of running shoes, then waved at the tanks frantically from my third-storey balcony. They'd had the means to rescue me, using an extendable ladder like from a fire truck, which had given me faith in their facilities, their access to resources.
But, really, that shouldn't have been the only thing I concerned myself with.
After a two-day ride in an overly cramped bus with soldiers patrolling the center aisle, scanning us with such scrutiny that I felt almost like a criminal, we'd arrived at a facility in the middle of a forest. We'd filed out, collectively weary, then been ushered urgently into the building, the wide metal doors shutting behind us like the mouth of a haunted mansion clownhouse.
That had been the last time I'd seen sunlight.
We'd been corralled into processing rooms divided by gender.
That was when things started to seem shady.
In the women's section, it was almost exclusively male soldiers issuing orders and getting us to move down the line.
Even though we'd all been sitting in the bus for two days and none of us had turned into a zombie, those in charge insisted that we each be individually inspected, with painstaking thoroughness, to ensure that we hadn't been scratched by a zombie and therefore wouldn't be a risk to the rest of the camp once admitted.
Thus, we'd been forced to strip our civilian clothes and shower in plain sight of an inspector.
I'd been shoved none too ceremoniously into a corner of a long hall that was segmented into squares by flimsy blue plastic curtains for privacy screens.
The soldier that had followed me towered over me by a good foot. He stood at attention, blocking my only exit from the 3x3 foot square I was in the middle of. With short tawny hair and the lightest blue eyes I'd ever seen, a strong jaw and defined cheekbones, he was pretty easy on the eyes. In another setting, he would have looked like the top-gun sheriff rolling into a cowboy ghost town. He was wearing a standard short-sleeved faded green army uniform which showed off his bulging biceps but otherwise lean and muscular frame.
