Romance After The Dead Rise

Chapter 1

First Kiss in the Lockdown Hallway

The lockdown alarms started like a mosquito and climbed into a roar that made the light fixtures tremble. Mara Delaney kept her palm flat against the cool brick by the stairwell, using it like a compass as she edged down Ridgeview High’s hallway - out of sight of the front office, out of the cameras’ red, blinking stare. The place smelled like damp wool and bleach, with that iron tang the dead left behind clawing through everything. Her throat burned from holding her breath. She wasn’t sneaking through the hall to survive it. She was sneaking toward something. The science wing was only a few turns away, and if she didn’t get there before the lockdown tightened - before teachers abandoned hiding kids and started slamming doors like barricades, before the dead figured out the school had a second pulse - Theo Alvarez might be gone. Theo. He’d been last seen near the science stairwell, moving with that quiet, urgent kind of motion that made Mara’s chest a raw, hopeful bruise, even when her brain told her not to believe in hope. She rounded a corner and nearly walked into a student flattened behind a trophy case, eyes huge and shiny, lips clamped shut as if breath itself could betray them. Mara lifted a finger to her mouth and slipped past, keeping her shoulder from grazing the glass. The case clicked anyway - one ugly, tiny sound - and her stomach clenched. Somewhere down the corridor came a heavy thud, then another, like something testing a locked door. The alarm screamed on. Mara sped up, sneakers whispering over scuffed tile, forcing herself not to glance back at the stairwell. If she looked, she’d convince herself to hide. She couldn’t hide. Not when Theo was the only thing pulling her forward. Lockers yawned open along the wall like teeth missing their bite. Mara flattened against bricks where the fluorescent lights stuttered, shadows carving her into stop-start shapes. Farther on, the science-wing entrance waited - a sliver of hallway under a stubborn green EXIT sign that still glowed, meaningless to whatever hunted. Theo’s last text, two hours earlier when the world still pretended to have rules, had been blunt: Meet me before they lock the science doors for good. She’d read it three times and then watched the screen go black, afraid that wanting him would make her stupid. Wanting him already had. The air tasted like dust and bad decisions. Her hands were cold in her sleeves. Another thud, closer. Her pulse kicked into a new rhythm - less thrill, more alarm. She slowed at the science corridor and listened. Human voices - scrambled and tight - cut through the alarm. “Mara?” A voice she knew, pulled raw. She turned too fast and nearly pitched forward. Theo stepped out from behind a bulletin board plastered with a smeared lab-safety poster, hair wild, hoodie damp at the shoulders, a fresh cut on his cheek that probably stung. He held his hand out, palm up, not touching her, a question without words. Relief hit her like heat - sharp and dangerous. “You’re here,” she breathed, hating how much it sounded like a plea. His eyes flicked past her shoulder, cataloguing the hallway, the angry red alarm, the way she’d chosen the wall over open space. He let out a single, tight breath. “I tried to get to you sooner. But the main hallway - ” He stopped, jaw clenching. “They’re pushing people.”

End of chapter one. 4 more chapters in the full book.