Necrosis by C.L. Schneider
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is my first time reading a book by C.L. Schneider, her character and world building pulled me in and sunk their teeth in. Amy is a single mother with a 9-year-old daughter named Lila. In 4 months, the world Amy had learned to navigate had crumpled. All that mattered anymore was the need to survive and to protect.

Amy’s life before necrosis was never easy, she stumbled through life, going from substance to substance, abusive boyfriend to the next. Then the virus hit the world it wasn’t a biblical event, or a nuclear mishap it was a virus that changed the host, one single bite transmitted it to the next person. An average time of 36-48 hours and they would be lost to the feral animal instinct to eat and survive. Now was her chance to do better, the world had been reset all sins have been washed away. Her compassion to help those that she thought she could put her and her daughter in danger more than Amy could admit but now it was just the two of them again. It was them against the world and Amy refused to let her anxieties take hold of her again, it could cost Lila her life and that was not an option. A stranger trapped in a donut shop in her hometown makes her realize the biggest truth. We’ll be a people with no past. Millions of faceless, nameless creatures wandering the Earth, all lost to history. Within the moments she was distracted hordes and hordes of the undead begin to fill the streets, a group of 75 passing her with more to come. Her daughter alone four blocks away surrounded by the undead reaching for her with feral instinct for their next meal. Amy runs into the hordes fighting to reach her daughter when gunfire rings out, the undead dropping rapidly. All logic had been eclipsed by a fierce, blind determination to save her child. Rescued for now they are taken to a massive, abandoned building, hundreds of survivors existing together with the mutual desire to live. An old childhood friend, Marcus, is there and Amy and Lila finally have a true moment to relax and rest. Three days to evacuate before bombs drop on the astronomical number of undead spreads throughout the city, the promise of a save location to wait out the apocalypse in the mountains and the hopes of a cure soon.

The promise of hope from her friend, the unwavering reality that the undead were once people. The details the author gives makes you see the images in your mind, description of an undead “Remnants of chipped, red polish speckled one lone nail on the left hand.” The living, the dead, and the undead were once all a person with dreams, and a story. Will Amy be able to protect the one good thing she has in her life; or will they both become a lost footnote in history.

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