Surviving Zombies

When the power dies in Savannah, it doesn’t come back on—it wakes the dead. As the city collapses into chaos, the Leesburg family is torn apart across multiple frontlines. Dr. Sharon Leesburg barricades her floor inside a failing hospital, sealing herself in with women in labor, newborns barely hours old, and staff already breaking from exhaustion. Below them, emergency rooms become feeding grounds. Above them, there is nowhere left to run. Every decision she makes costs lives—she just has to choose which ones. Her husband, Dr. Ellis Leesburg—a top-clearance military neuroscientist stationed at Hunter Army Airfield—races to contain an outbreak he helped study, only to realize it has already breached the base. Whatever safeguards were in place failed quietly, efficiently, and far too late. Their children are scattered through a city gone dark. Six-year-old Ella Belle, the heart of the family, never makes it home from school. She vanishes somewhere between early dismissal and total collapse—leaving no answers, no trace, and no time. Twenty-three-year-old Justin Leesburg is forced into leadership on the streets, navigating dead zones and back alleys with dwindling supplies, a handful of traumatized survivors, and the constant fear that every step away from home is a step farther from his missing sister. His younger sister Tally—volatile, reckless, and desperate to matter—keeps dragging danger toward them, mistaking noise for courage and control for heroism. Mari, Justin’s partner, is pushed past patience into brutal honesty. Kenzie, a quiet survivor carrying her dog and the memory of her family’s deaths, learns quickly—because silence, not strength, keeps you alive. This is not a story about clever zombies or easy survival. The dead react to sound. The living react to fear. Every choice is loud. Every mistake echoes. And while the horde closes in from the outside, the real danger fractures the people still breathing—grief, guilt, rage, and the unbearable question haunting them all: Where is Ella Belle? Surviving Zombies is a visceral, character-driven apocalypse that strips away hero fantasies and replaces them with moral collapse, trauma, and the brutal truth of survival: you don’t just fight the end of the world—you fight each other, and yourself, while it’s happening.