Read You Are So Undead to Me for Free Online Page A

that I figured would hold long enough for a quick rinse, I stepped into the water.
     
    “Sheeeeeesh!” I sucked in the word on a gasp. Holy crap! The water was cold—penguins-in-Antarctica-during-a-blizzard cold.
     
    My fingers were numb and my goose bumps frozen into goose bump cubes by the time I’d soaped up. As I hurriedly rinsed off, my teeth chattered loudly enough to echo through the deserted room.
     
    I was making so much noise, I barely heard the door opening behind me.
     
    “Gunh?” The groan was barely out of the zombie’s mouth before I was spinning around, screaming bloody murder.
     
    The zombie stared at me while I kept screaming, clenching my arms across my chest as I scrambled across the wet tile toward my clothes. The only thing that kept me from snatching my dirty dress and running naked from the locker room was that the zombie just stood there, rigid and unmoving. Finally, I pulled it together and stood shivering in the buzzing silence, staring at my second zombie in three days.
     
    “Welcome to your after-death session. I’m Megan,” I said, my teeth chattering. “May I have your name, last name first?”
     
    “Franklin, Terrence,” he said, a lecherous look on his face as the human part of him came online.
     
    His teeth were oddly white and clean looking against his dark, earth-covered skin, but he was just an average Unsettled, nothing more. He was a little older looking than William—maybe seventeen or eighteen—but not too old for a second-stager to deal with. And apparently not too old to be intensely interested in seeing me naked. Eww!
     
    As I hurriedly pulled my gym clothes from my backpack and put them on—the fabric sticking to my cold, wet skin—I was inwardly freaking out. Why did the first guy to see me in the buff have to be dead ? It was so unfair and potentially emotionally scarring.
     
    “Dang, girl, no need to cover up so fast,” Terrence said, making me move even faster.
     
    “No need to be a perv,” I snapped back at him, but the dead guy only laughed. What a skeeze. I didn’t feel nearly as bad about this dude being one of the dearly departed.
     
    Once dressed, I fished a notebook and pen from my backpack and tried to keep from trembling as I wrote down his name, address, and cemetery plot and number. But even as my skin warmed up I couldn’t stop shaking. This had never happened to me before! Never! Unsettled didn’t come to me during the day.
     
    I’d learned to shield to keep that from happening when I was like six years old. Every Settler knows how to keep zombies away until nightfall, when our powers are strongest and we can’t help emitting the subtle, paranormal signals that tell our deceased clients where to find us. Shielding is the first thing you learn how to do when your power starts to manifest, as simple as learning to sing the ABCs.
     
    “Um, so what don’t you like about your death?” I asked Terrence.
     
    “Not a dang thing,” he said, smiling so wide his teeth took up half of his face.
     
    “Then why are you out of your grave?”
     
    “Danielle and I were finally going to do it, but I died the day before.” He looked sad for a moment, which almost made my heart soften toward the guy until he spoke again. “So I never got to see a chick naked. Pissed me off, man. I knew I should have done it with Ladonna even though Ray said she had some nasty body odor prob—”
     
    “So you crawled out of your grave because you wanted to see a girl naked?” My tone was not pleasant, but I couldn’t help myself. This guy was topping my list of skankiest zombies ever.
     
    “Yeah, baby. And now I have.” He licked his dirt-covered lips in a way that would have been gross even if he were alive. “Now I have.”
     
    “Okay, that is totally freaking gross and—”
     
    “And not something you would have had to deal with if you were shielding properly.” I gasped as I turned toward the door, knowing I should be relieved to see