Prologue
THEN...
Becky Smith's father was a bully and a racist. He often beat B and her mum, when he wasn't working hard to stop the flow of immigrants into the country. B loved and feared him equally. She swore to herself that she didn't share his vicious, racist tendencies, but at the same time she never challenged him about them.
One of B's teachers, Mr. Burke, warned her that she risked becoming just like her dad if she continued to play along with him. But B had never paid much attention to what teachers said.
B was a tomboy and could hold her own with any guy her age. She liked music, surfing the Web, hanging out with her mates. Just an average girl who thought she'd lead a normal life and never do anything special.
Then zombies attacked her school. B and her friends didn't know how the dead had come back to life, or why so many of them were on the loose, or what the strange mutants who could control them were. And there was no time to find out. They had to run or die. So they ran.
B's dad rescued her. He led the group to safety, playing the part of a hero to perfection. Until they hit a snag and zombies closed in on them. To delay the zombies, he told B to throw a black boy named Tyler Bayor to them. And because she had always obeyed her father when he gave her a command, she did. The zombies bit into the screaming Tyler with relish as he begged B to save him.
Horrified by what she'd done, B abandoned her monstrous dad and raced back into the school, to search for another way out. But she only found zombies and mutants. Or rather, they found her.
On a staircase, the freshly zombified Tyler caught up with B. She had been scratched by another member of the undead and was terrified that she was about to turn into one of them. But Tyler took her mind off that worry when he ripped her chest open. The last thing she saw was Tyler biting into her still-beating heart.
Then she died.
***