CHAPTER SEVEN

  The rest of the weekend was uneventful. I didn’t feel like doing anything, so I mostly tried to read and watch movies. It was hard to focus on anything, though, since any time I moved my neck I could feel a dull, aching pain where the abomination had tried to choke me.

  What’s worse is that what used to be my favorite book now just made me sick to my stomach. I tried to muscle through it anyway, but all I could do was be hyper critical about it.

  The Bronze Gear series was a set of novels set in an alternate-universe, steampunk themed antebellum south where the civil war ended because of a zombie apocalypse. It had been a guilty pleasure, I’ll admit, and always had a spot on the top shelf regardless of what books I grew out of and replaced. The main heroine always ended up getting caught up in some end-of-the-world situation and managed to come up with spur of the moment plans to save everyone. She was young, attractive, smart, and had no problem speaking her mind. I had always liked to think I could identify with her, but when I tried finding solace in the fifth book, which had always been my favorite, all I could do was roll my eyes. She dove into situations too quickly when she should have taken the time to plan better. She tried using guns against the zombies.

  What made me put the book down was one of the big battles between the heroine’s stalwart crew of outcasts versus a horde of zombies. It was three humans against ten zombies. The zombies were slow and stupid, and the humans triumphed with minimal injuries. I kept telling myself that the author had no idea what “zombies” were really like and that as far as she knew she was writing fantasy, but the inaccuracies still angered me.

  I ended up reading the romance novel I had gotten from the consignment store instead, which was more of a fantasy book than any installment of The Bronze Gear series.