About As Serious As the Grave
Written by Kiernan Kelly
40 pages / 15000 words
ISBN: 978-1-60370-452-6, 1-60370-452-3
Available file types - html,
lit, pdf, prc
Tyler Grayle has really had it. Dying is a big part of his trouble even if it was only for a few hours before being brought back by the mysterious power of the Dante Comet. But he's adjusted to life with no heartbeat; it's the lack of any guy wanting to date him that's bothering him now.
Until the weekend he discovers his best friend Daniel wants to be more than a friend. Then finds out that there are people out there who hate his kind and will do just about anything to make sure he stays dead for good.
Can he make his afterlife work for him?
Sample
All things considered, Tyler Grayle was doing very well – for a dead guy.
Better than some of his counterparts, at any rate. Take poor Will Fenton in cubicle seventeen for example. Will had a bad case of the grunge, having been dead for at least three months before reawakening. Poor guy couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it – pun fully intended. Women tended to shy away from men with less skin on their bones than the Heart Healthy Chicken Platter at Denny’s.
Tyler himself had been dead for only a few hours before his reanimation, the popular term for what had happened to a fairly large percentage of the deceased population. It had all started five years ago when the Dante Comet passed within a few hundred thousand miles of the Earth.
Afterwards, there had seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to which corpse might blink awake after rigor mortis released its hold, or when. Most went right on being dead. Some didn’t.
Animals had reawakened as well, which had delighted pet owners and pissed off the guys in the slaughterhouses.
Personally, Tyler hated the term, reanimated. He thought it made him sound as if he were a caricature, like Wyle E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons, smacked in the head with an Acme anvil with little stars and birdies flying in circles around his head.
In any case, Tyler had been more than a little pissed off when he’d awoken on the hospital gurney with a tag tied securely to his big toe, his face covered with a sheet, thinking that he’d been the victim of mistaken identity or someone’s very ill-conceived sense of humor.