Chapter 1.

"Jane!" my mother yells from the hallway of her family pod. "Get your but out of bed or you're going to be late!"

"coming..." I moaned half heartedly. I had already been awake for the past two hours,too frozen with fear and anticipation to budge from my green camouflage comforter. It's finally here, I thinks to myself. My first day of high school. Life is finally beginning.

Judging from the clanks and sizzles and occasional yelps from the other room, am guessing that my mom is attempting to make breakfast which, in itself, is a momentous event. She's usually much too busy in her laboratory cooking up the newest batch of life saving serum to bother with actual food.

"Rise and shine, soldier!" The captain of the zeta sector military police force stands at attention in my bedroom doorway, his silhouette blocking most of the light from the hallway. "You need to be out the door by oh-six-Hundred hours."

"Yes sir."

I sat up and felt under my bunk for my slippers.

"Aw, don't be nervous, pumpkin. You'll do fine." He pats me on the head as I pass him on my way to the bathroom. "Just be yourself."

Surprisingly, my mom's pancakes turn out to not be half bad. After inhaling a stack and downing a glass of protein drink ,I grab my backpack and head for the door. Along the way,I pick up my trusty .22 caliber pistol ( nicknamed "Opal" after the white iridescent inset on it's handle), double-checking the barrel and the side pocket of my pack."Well, I'm off. Wish me luck."

"Where do you think you're going with that ,young lady lady?" my mom asks with a raised eyebrow.

"What?" she says. You're actually going to send me to school all alone with no protection?"

She stands patiently in front of me with her hand out, she's late for work,but she looks like she could wait there all day.

As far as mom's go, her's is alright, although she's a stickler for the rules and the sector law says that the only weapon children under eighteen are allowed to carry in public is a crowbar.

"You're the boss, mom, " I say as I extend the pistol almost into my mom's waiting palm. "But since it's my first day and all, how about a little extra bullets for some dessert at lunch or something?"

My mom glares at me for a moment and then cracks a smile. She fishes in her pocket. She hands me a bullet as I hand her pistol. My mom then hands my crowbar. It's painted green and spans the length of my forearm. And its way too boring to have a nickname.

"Now, " my mom adopts her motherly tone."I know school can be cliquey.But don't limit yourself to on group of friends. You're pretty, you're smart, and you're athletic, so it's not fair to restrict yourself to a single label. Be nice to everyone, and try not to give in to peer pressure."

"God, mom, " I groaned. "You sound like one of those lame after school specials you and dad are always watching on the retro channel."

My dad laughs as he hands my mom her briefcase. "Well, those were the good old days."

The year is 16A.Z , sixteen years since the beginning of the world wide VM pandemic. VM stands for Victus Mortuus, the clinical name for the living dead. But they go by many other names too: Meatbags, Bags, un-Ds, Trips(For the awkward way they stumble around), Fectos(The low level infected who still have a chance of recovery), 20's(The worst of the worst-level 20 infection), and sprayers (For the big green mess that 20's brains make on the walls when you shoot them).

Before the VMs wiped out most of the world's population, a handful of survivors were able to find safety underground. At last count, 72,641 Americans occupied the twelve high-tech military bunkers built below Seattle sometime in the 2000s. Jane's sector, zeta, is somewhere beneath what used to be Tucson. The government had plans to expand farther underneath the entire country to create a safe haven in the event of a major terrorist event, such as nuclear fallout or bioterrorism. But no one ever expected that these plans would be interrupted by something straight out of an old zombie movie.

My mother was six month pregnant with me when she and my father entered zeta sector. Thanks to their medical backgrounds, they'd been recruited soon after the infection was discovered simultaneously in Shanghai, Mumbai, London, Johannesburg, Rio De Janeiro, Sydney and New York City. I was born in the zeta sector hospital, and I have spent everyday of my sixteen years of life safely tucked away in its residential zone.

According to sector law, all children under sixteen must be homeschooled, either by tutors or various sector-sponsored under-net site's. After that everyone is required to attend public sector high school for three more years. The best and brightest students enter either the military or the medical fields. The average citizen might accept teaching, janitorial, or service positions- either marry someone in the first two categories and start a family, or earn food vouchers by volunteering for medical experiments.

For me and my generation, it's always been this way. My only memories of the B.Z. world come from movies made long time ago in some place they used to call Hollywood. Now, the newest media personalities ( Mostly boy bands and reality television personalities) come out of Alpha sector. Movies don't get made much anymore, so me and everyone else my age obsess over old classics like Grease, Mean girls, and High school musical. And though I know they're all just stupid fantasies from a long-dead era, I still hope that Zeta high will have maybe just a fraction of their awesomeness (Except maybe for kids busting out into songs in the hallway, that I could live without).

I give my parents one last hug goodbye and head down the corridor to meet up with my best friend, Chase. Well, at least he was my best friend before he entered high school last year. I had grown apart a little bit since then, but now I hope it's going to be just like old times again. Plus , it would be great to have someone close by to show me the ropes and give advice.

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