UNDERDEAD, by Liz Jasper, page one

This is the first page of UNDERDEAD, my cozy mystery about science teacher Jo Gartner who thinks her students are monsters… until an inept vampire leaves her UNDERDEAD and bodies start piling up—the traditional way!

UNDERDEAD

Chapter One

I would have shot him then and there if I thought it would do any good, but Roger was such a troll the bullet would have bounced off his thick, ugly hide. Maybe poison…

Becky interrupted my pleasant daydream with a whack on my arm. “Okay, don’t turn around and look,” she said, “but a guy is staring at you. And he is hot!”

“How nice for him.”

All I needed to cap off this fabulous evening was Becky’s matchmaking. I knew her taste. He probably wore chains and had a Mohawk. Becky herself was dressed in what was best described as slightly toned-down punk, not exactly your typical high school chemistry teacher garb. It went with her spiky hair, which she wore bleached and dyed silver, though a red fringe had been added in honor of the holidays. I should mention that she is Korean, so the dye job isn’t exactly subtle. The headmaster turns a blind eye to this display of “personal expression” because she’s a first-rate teacher and, at twenty-seven, cheap.

Around us, hip twenty-somethings in denim and black sipped cappuccinos and talked knowledgeably about the band that was setting up in the bar area. But we weren’t sitting with them. We were at a long rectangular table in the back of the restaurant, where a small balding man in a hideous sweater was lecturing passionately about the insidious evil that was grade inflation. If I’d ever imagined a fate worse than death, this was it—the science department Christmas party.

****

Short page, but the first always is. All that space taken up by...printing conventions (Who wants opening words to start way at the top of a page?). I'll be posting page two on Tuesday, Sept. 25th. For more information about UNDERDEAD or to purchase the ebook from Cerridwen Press, visit my website at http://www.lizjasper.com/.

Happy Sunday,

Liz, who is at work on the sequel.