14-year-old Zack Thornwood's life is turned upside down one day after baseball practice when he spots an 8-fingered man with a hole in his head disappear into the ground. Hole-in-Head Man is quickly followed by Xander Moon, a self-titled 'Hunter of the Dead' who explains that there are tons of dead people walking around pretending not to be dead. They look alive, they act alive, but they are most definitely not alive, and this is most definitely not a good thing.
Xander gives Zack the ability to tell the dead from the living through their unique odor (he smells dead people) and the two follow Hole-in-Head Man (whose name is Gus) into an ancient tomb hidden underground in the middle of suburbia. There they beat Gus to the prize contained within--a squishy spleen. The spleen is one of the legendary 14 Pieces that, when assembled, create The Osiris Machine which will bring about the end of the world.
Zack tries to go back to his normal life, but when Gus tries to kill him in the middle of a playground, he discovers the Deadly Dead are not through with him just yet. When Zack touched the squishy spleen, the location of the next Piece of the Osiris Machine was more or less downloaded into his brain. Gus and the people he works for, including the mysterious and utterly evil Miss Bubbles, want that information, and they will stop at nothing to get it. 
The Chronicles of the Deadly Dead is created by David Neilsen, an eGlobal Creative Publishing Signed Author.

The Chronicles of the Deadly Dead

What they’d come up with a plan both simplistically ingenious and embarrassingly mortifying. Since Xander and I were the only ones the green ninja snakes could actually harm, we were the only ones who needed to cross without going into the water.


So Cecil and Cassandra picked us up and held us over their heads.


Cecil lifted Xander up and marched across, oblivious to the sudden feeding frenzy taking place around his legs. The snakes were too small to do any actual damage, and their poison didn’t bother him in the least. For his part, Xander amused himself up in Cecil’s arms by hacking down at the ninja snakes with his sword. They crossed in about thirty seconds. Cecil set Xander down, yanked off the two or three stragglers clinging to his corpse, and tossed them back into the river in a perverse display of catch and release. Then it was my turn to be carried across by Cassandra.


Chapter 37: Dead Man Running