Dirty Rotten Love: Diet Coke and the Living Dead
an excerpt

"You don't have work tomorrow? So just class then?” Charlotte asked. I nodded, worried. “All right then. Go to a SALAD meeting with me.” She grinned, satisfied. Unfortunately, I had no idea what she was talking about. And her expression said that I should.

“Salad, huh? OK.” I said, hoping that it wasn't anything too weird. She nodded again.

“Ok, see you after your class. I'll meet you on the way out... And I'll be there early, in case you forget. Going to bed now?” I nodded, because it was late, and I had to get up early to get work done. Charlotte didn't have morning classes, so she was usually up later than I was. She climbed over the back of the couch and sat, grabbing the remote. The movie started up again, and I watched a few seconds as I took my shoes off and headed out of the living room area. There were three people rhythmically beating an old man with pool cues, set to music – a song by Queen. Weird. This is why I was worried about the salad meeting, whatever that was. Charlotte was a great person, and appeared very normal, both in personality and physical appearance. But she could be very strange, sometimes, and usually had some random interest or fact to discuss.

I sat down at my computer and wiggled the mouse. A little research wouldn't hurt. I pulled up a search engine and typed in "salad". Of course, a bunch of salad recipes came up. I tried it in all caps, in case it was short for something. SALAD. That got the same results. Obviously, the engine didn't care about capitalization. I left it, and tried adding my city and state. Charlotte wouldn't make me go to a different city, would she? Still nothing that seemed useful. Maybe it was a university thing. A student club? I added the name of my university, in quotes, and partway down the page I saw the link. My memory jogged, I clicked, and was taken to the school's magazine. The article was about a student club, Students Against the Living Animated Dead. SALAD. I understood. That was something that Charlotte had talked about several weeks ago. Zombies.

I was going to have to go to a zombie meeting. That was like spending an hour (or more!) seriously discussing unicorns. That's what I thought, anyway. I skimmed the article, instinctively putting mental edit marks all over the awkwardly written article. The article was an interview with the club leader, discussing potential threats to students from zombies. Did he know that zombies aren't real?

The tone of the article was serious, and it gave me the creeps. I jumped as the wind gusted outside the window, then scoffed at myself and hit the power button on my screen. I fell asleep thinking about zombies, with that damn Queen song running through my head.