A young man and a woman sit on a hilltop, doomed to watch the same scene play out before their eyes again and again. For how long? Until they remember. {Written 2013.}

And at each period, her heart broke a little more. - "Sometimes love isn't about staying. It's about leaving when you need to." Cover by @-ADEELAJ-

"Give me ten days, and I can give you ten reasons not to die." Evan paused. "And if I can't change your mind by then, you can go jump off that cliff."

❝ do you know what it's like to be in love? ❞ all rights reserved

After escaping a stalled elevator into a zombie apocalypse, Emily must learn how to trust people again or risk losing everything in this terrifying world. ***** For Emily, every day of the last two years have been a blur. She keeps her head down, takes her college courses online, and only goes out to work at her mandatory internship. But all that changes on the day the office elevator breaks down, leaving her trapped when the screams begin. And when the doors finally open, revealing a dystopian world ruined by bloody teeth and disease, Emily is launched into a terrifying run for her life, caught between the strangers she's not sure she can trust and the man-eating monsters that hunger for her flesh. Now she must learn not only how to survive in this new and dangerous world, but also how to overcome her own inner demons before they cost her something more precious than her life. [[Wattys' Shortlist]] [[Promoted by AMC]] Content and/or Trigger Warning: The story contains some gore, violence, strong language, and dark themes. [[word count: 100,000-150,000 words]]

When you are infected with the virus, there are four stages. 1) Your fever will shoot up and everything will become intensified on a maximum level. You'll lose grip on what's reality and what's illusion. 2) You'll start to slowly fall down the rabbit hole, forgetting the past and everything and everyone that you knew. 3) You face your imminent death. 4) You wake up with a pressing hunger for the living. It's been seven months since the pandemic hit with this virus and the world has been ravaged and left to ruins. Society has crumbled to nothing and more than three fourths of the population have been infected with the mysterious virus that took the world by storm. The virus has turned anyone infected into crazed flesh-eating freaks, with decrepit skin and red puffy eyes. The only way to kill them is by obliterating the brain. Elise Alice Gordon, Lease for short, led a simple life until the virus hit. Seven months later she is just barely scraping by. She's done what she's had to do to survive, and in that process she has created demons that haunt her every time she closes her eyes. See, it hasn't been easy trying to live in a dead world. She's lost friends, family, and everything she's ever known. The only thing she hasn't lost is her humanity and her hope. But she's afraid she's starting to. Because in this new world, there's only her, the dead, and the restless. © 2012 by Ashtyn Mane. All rights reserved.