History Sandbox / TheCompanyOfDeath

* BiTheWay: In a casual dialogue with Rosa, two of Emily's exes are briefly talked about: one male and one female. This is the only time Emily's bisexuality is explicitly mentioned and it has no bearing on the plot, but it makes it possible to interpret her interactions with either Rosa or Ramon as potentially romantic.

* BiTheWay: In a casual dialogue with Rosa, two of Emily's exes are briefly talked about, one male and one female. This is the only time Emily's bisexuality (or at least biromanticism) is explicitly mentioned and it has no bearing on the plot, but it makes it possible to interpret her interactions with either Rosa or Ramon as potentially romantic.

* YoungerThanTheyLook: Despite being the squad leader and something of a mentor figure for Emily, Ramon is only 23, two years ''younger'' than she is.

* ItIsDehumanizing: The narration in the Scott chapters insistently refers to Leif as an "it", not a "he" after their first encounter.

* VampiricDraining: Vampires use humans who come to them as both menial servants or guards and as a food source in exchange for giving those humans a shelter against zombies. Supposedly. They ''can'' technically feed on the blood of any living being, including other vampires, but none is as tasty or nutritious as human blood, hence why they avoid killing their humans considering how few are left.

Two years have passed since a mysterious incident called the Ecuador Explosion, which resulted in 99% of the human population turning into zombies. Emily Campbell, along with other survivors in what used to be California, spends her days between the elimination of zombies that now swarm the cities and trying to destroy communes of vampires, who revealed themselves to the world as it was ending and frequently recruit humans as slaves they can feed on in exchange for "protection".

* DemonicSpiders: There are normal zombies, called the "slow ones", and then there is a minority of "fast ones", which are much harder to deal with. It is later explained that [[spoiler:the fast ones were initially humans bitten by vampires.]]

* PurpleProse: Played with. The Leif chapters' narration tends to feature a more sophisticated vocabulary to fit his pseudo-refined personality.

* PurpleProse: The Leif chapters' narration tends to feature a more sophisticated vocabulary to fit his pseudo-refined personality.

* DrillSergentNasty: Daisy is described as this for Emily's unit, putting them through a TrainingFromHell that Emily begrudingly thanks for her survival. As a slight subversion, Daisy apparently sports a wicked smile even during the brutal sessions.

* ButNotTooForeign: Emily is half-Fillipino from her mother, which apparently makes her [[ButNotTooWhite more attractive to vampires]] (hence why she's initially chosen to take part in Mission 12). Several of her teammates also have some kind of Hispanic or central American heritage since the early parts of the story take place in Southern California.

* FeministFantasy: Outside of the protagonist being female, none of the women in this story are to be trifled with. Daisy the instructor is stated to be the main reason Emily's team hasn't gone soft, Emily herself decides to stick with Death whether he likes it or not, [[RidiculouslyHumanRobot Carol]] regularly rebuffs the man she bodyguards, and the leader of the Manhattan vampires is also female.

* UndeathlyPallor: A distinctive trait of vampires is their extremely white and unnaturally soft skin, while Emily's skin becomes permanently gray-ish after her… little accident.

* UndeathlyPallor: A distinctive trait of vampires is their extremely white and unnaturally soft skin, white Emily's skin becomes permanently gray-ish after her… little accident.

* UndeathlyPalor: A distinctive trait of vampires is their extremely white and unnaturally soft skin, white Emily's skin becomes permanently gray-ish after her… little accident.

* DevelopingDoomedCharacters: The first quarter of the book is almost entirely spent with Emily and her squad preparing for the dreaded "Misson 12", the inflitration of a vampire commune by using three team members as bait. We see Emily interact with Ramon the squad leader, her friend Rosa, the HotBlooded Sherice, Daisy the merciless instructor and Carlos, who's scared out of his wits after seeing Death with his own eyes. We get attached to this team as a family, each member having their own doubts and issues. [[spoiler:When they stumble across a small travelling commune and they naïvely try to wipe it out − not expecting the vampires to use ''hordes of zombies'' as a defensive weapon −, mission 12 is aborted and absolutely none of them survive. And Emily "survives", but not in the way she hoped.]] That point also coincides with the book's relative tone shift.
* NotUsingTheZWord: [[DefiedTrope Defied.]] Emily first refuses to call the flesh eaters "zombies", making up all sorts of semantic excuses to claim that they're technically something else. Daisy calls bullshit on all of that and tells her straight up that yes, they're zombies and she should stop denying it.

But not all of those missions go right. One, in fact, goes ''horribly'' wrong, in which Emily is bitten by a zombie… But something else goes wrong: while her body becomes zombified − making people obviously wary of her − her mind remains entirely human. A case on which Death himself − who is an actual, sentient being − is stumped. And Death has issues of his own: for some reason he also lost his horse, his scythe and most of his powers, and the cycle of life and death has been thrown off balance by the new dominance of the undead. His and Emily's only hope seems to be a cure pesumably developped in Manhattan, last bastion of human life where the Life Preservation Initiative (LPI), of which Emily is a member of, has its headquarters. These two non-human beings whose ways of thinking don't quite align will have to form an uncanny alliance and travel across the continent to restore the rule of life… and death.

But not all of those missions go right. One, in fact, goes ''horribly'' wrong, after which Emily is bitten by a zombie… But something else goes wrong: while her body becomes zombified, her mind remains entirely human. A case on which Death himself − who is an actual, sentient being − is stumped. And Death has issues of his own: for some reason he also lost his horse, his scythe and most of his powers, and the cycle of life and death has been thrown off balance by the new dominance of the undead. His and Emily's only hope seems to be a cure pesumably developped in Manhattan, last bastion of human life where the Life Preservation Initiative (LPI), of which Emily is a member of, has its headquarters. These two non-human beings whose ways of thinking don't quite align will have to form an uncanny alliance and travel across the continent to restore the rule of life… and death.

* DeveloppingDoomedCharacters: The first quarter of the book is almost entirely spent with Emily and her squad preparing for the dreaded "Misson 12", the inflitration of a vampire commune by using three team members as bait. We see Emily interact with Ramon the squad leader, her friend Rosa, the HotBlooded Sherice, Daisy the merciless instructor and Carlos, who's scared out of his wits after seeing Death with his own eyes. We get attached to this team as a family, each member having their own doubts and issues. [[spoiler:When they stumble across a small travelling commune and they naïvely try to wipe it out − not expecting the vampires to use ''hordes of zombies'' as a defensive weapon −, mission 12 is aborted and absolutely none of them survive. And Emily "survives", but not in the way she hoped.]] That point also coincides with the book's relative tone shift.

!!Tropes featured in ''The Company of Death''