Monsters Unmasked

A Living With the Dead Novella

“It should be easy to tell who the monsters are in the middle of a global zombie pandemic. The blank-eyed swarms of animated corpses who want to gnaw on your flesh are the obvious choice. The reality, though, is it’s not always that simple. I learned that less than a week after the outbreak started, and it was like getting hit in the head. In this case, literally.”

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In the early days of the global zombie pandemic, Ellen Hale learns a brutal lesson. Sometimes the shambling animated corpses aren’t the worst thing that can happen to you. Sometimes the monsters are human, hiding their thirst for violence behind deceptively benign masks.

While trying to survive the hoards of zombies, Ellen is abducted by a band of marauders and subjected to abuse almost beyond her ability to endure. When she is rescued, she is broken both mentally and physically, and fears she could become a monster herself.

Living at The Compound with a growing band of survivors, she meets Quinn. He seems determined to help her, but he looks like everything she’d ever been taught to fear. How can she trust him, when someone who had appeared so harmless had subjected her to such sadistic horrors? How can she help the teenage captive who was rescued with her, and find her own place in this altered world?

Ellen’s story is one of deep despair and emotional chaos as she fights to regain some of what she’s lost. In the aftermath of captivity, amidst the constant threat of zombie attacks, she must find a way out of the darkness and set foot on the brighter path of hope.

Set in the world of Living With the Dead by Joshua Guess, Monsters Unmasked will make you question the nature of good and evil, monsters and saviors, and how we cope when our entire reality has been changed forever.