Flip This Zombie (30 page)

“I’ll stay,” I said softly.

Dave flinched, but he didn’t protest, even as he reached out to take my hand.

Robbie was the one who leapt forward. “No! You two are
not
breaking up!”

I blinked to clear the tears from my eyes. “No, but I’m not leaving you alone here, either. So unless you have a better idea…”

There was only silence for a minute, but then The Kid smiled. “Hey, who were those people in the library? The chemist and the girl.”

I shook my head, but then I remembered what he was talking about. “Josh and Drea?”

“Yeah, that’s them. If he really studied chemistry, he could help me more than you.” The Kid chuckled. “Moron.”

“Hey!” I said with a laugh, but then I thought about what he had said. Dave and I had figured we might call on Josh and Drea to help us one day. And this one was as good as any. “You’re right, though.”

“So why not let them in on this shit?” Dave mused. “And they could stay with The Kid while we go to the Wall.”

I nodded. It was the best solution. The only solution since the last thing I wanted to do was lose Dave. Again.

Robbie nodded. “As long as they don’t treat me like a little kid, I could live with that.”

“You
are
a kid,” I reminded him, but I ruffled his hair while I did it.

Robbie smiled up at me. “I’ll be waiting for them,” he said, then he turned and started back into the warehouse. “Better get to it.”

We watched him go and waited until we heard the hum of the elevator inside fade away. I stared at David, still stunned by the fact that I’d almost lost him, almost lost everything. But he was whole. Or at least so far.

But we both knew full well we’d just have to wait and see if that was going to change at some point.

“So,” I said softly as I reached for his hand. “
Do
we still want to save the world?”

Dave grinned as he opened up the driver’s side door and waved me in. He shut it and leaned in through the open window.

“It’s about time we did
something
,” he said. “And I think world saving has a better health plan than exterminating.”

Then he came around to the passenger side and pulled out the GPS. I watched as he entered in Chicago, IL, into the system, our ultimate destination after a quick pit stop to the camp and our friends.

And I put it in gear and we rolled.

A Facebook application once told
Jesse Petersen
that she’d only survive a day in a zombie outbreak, but she doesn’t believe that. For one, she’s a good shot and two, she has an aversion to bodily fluids, so she’d never go digging around in zombie goo. Until the zombie apocalypse, she lives in the Midwest with her husband and two cats.

Find out more about the author at
www.jessepetersen.net
.

If you enjoyed FLIP THIS ZOMBIE,

look out for

EAT, SLAY, LOVE

Book 3 of Living with the Dead

by Jesse Petersen

Have you ever felt like you were on a treadmill, but no matter how fast or far you ran, you never dropped those pesky last fifteen pounds? Yeah, welcome to my life. Only I’m not trying to lose weight (okay, I’m a girl, I’m
always
trying to lose weight), I’m trying to lose the slobbering, moaning, growling group of mindless zombies that always seems to be on my ass.

Every fucking time I look back over my shoulder, it seems like they are right there. Their feet pound on the
pavement, their clawing fingers (complete with long, dirty, dead person fingernails—um,
manicure
people!!) reach for me, trying to give me one scratch, one bite, one little nick that spells certain death… living death… for me.

They never fucking stop. And so
I
never fucking stop. I just run and run and run…

“Sarah?”

With horror movie slowness, I turned and there was David, my husband, my partner in crime and fighting for our lives. He smiled at me, only as his lips pulled back his gums were black. His teeth were beginning to rot. His eyes were red-rimmed and focused on one thing. Eating me.

And not in the porn movie way.

“Stop running,” he said, his voice garbled with infection and transition as he reached for me.

I sucked in a breath and sat up, but as I did so my forehead collided with something. Something metal that I smacked into hard enough to make my vision blur.

“Fuck!” I grunted as I reached up to touch my head.

Already the knot of a bruise started to throb just under the skin. Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked around. I willed my heart to slow down. There were no zombies near me. No reaching hands, no frigid breath, no clawing fingers straining to tear and pull at flesh. Just a dim room filled with dusty gym equipment, including the treadmill I had apparently fallen asleep on.

“I
knew
I was on a treadmill,” I muttered as I ducked my pounding head from under the bar of the machine and pushed to my feet.

“Did you say something?”

It was David’s voice coming from the other room.
Not garbled by infection, though. Just plain old David. I smiled as I moved through the entryway to a weight room. The lack of power made the other equipment in the gym useless except as very uncomfortable beds, but the weight sets still did their job. No juice required.

“Nope, just dreaming,” I said. “Nightmaring, I guess, is a better description.”

I tilted my head as Dave braced himself on the weight bench and pressed a bar filled with weight plates… a
lot
of weight plates… over his head

“Need a spotter?” I asked as I stepped closer.

“Nope,” he grunted. “I got it.”

Dave’s face was red with strain and sweat rolled down his cheeks to drip on the dusty mat below him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and even more sweat collected on the muscles of his chest. Yeah, you heard me right. My once unemployed, gamer husband with the little beer belly now had ripples of muscle on his chest. He was even starting to get some abs.

Hot.

He held the bar above himself, suspending it as his arms shook ever so slightly. With another grunt, he eased the bar back into place on the rack. Once it was steady, he reached up to wipe the sweat away from his brow with the back of one gloved hand. His gaze came over to me slowly.

“So what was this one about?” he asked as he set his hands back in place and pressed the heavy bar upward again.

This time I counted the weight plates and blinked in surprise. He had to be pushing over 350 pounds. Pretty impressive since I don’t think he’d ever topped out
over 250 before the zombie outbreak that had changed our lives, and ruined my sleep, forever.

“Sarah?” he asked, his voice strained as he held the bar above his head.

“Huh?” I shook my head. “Oh, just the usual. You know… getting chased by a horde of drooling zombies.”

He lowered the bar again and this time he ducked under and sat up on the bench. He grabbed for a dingy towel that he’d draped across another nearby machine and wiped himself off before he said, “And was I in this one?”

I turned away a little. Dave knew about my dreams. Only because sometimes I talked in my sleep, though. Nothing like screaming out, “Dave, please don’t eat me!” to let a guy know you’re thinking about him.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said softly. As he peeled off his weight gloves, he pushed to his feet. When he opened his arms, I stepped into them without hesitation. “I’m okay, you know,” he whispered after he’d given me a rather sweaty hug for a few minutes.

I nodded, but out of the corner of my eye I looked at his right hand. On it was a scar, black tinged and gnarled, that covered both the top and palm of his hand. It marked the place where a zombie had bitten him over a month ago. If we hadn’t had a miracle serum… a
cure
… my Dave would have been nothing more than a roaming, mindless eating machine.

Oh, who am I kidding? He would have been a stain on the wall courtesy of yours truly. There’s not enough self-help books in the world to get over that one. Trust me, I’ve looked.

“I know,” I whispered as I pulled away with a smile I admit I had to fake. “But you might not have been.”

“But I
was
,” he insisted with a shake of his head as he patted off his forehead and motioned toward the dressing rooms in the back. I followed close behind.

“I know. And I guess it proved the cure worked. So now we just have to get it to the Midwest Wall.”

Dave was silent as he hesitated at the door marked M
EN
. His frown made my own fake smile fall. Okay, so this rumor about a wall in the Midwest, a way to cut off the zombie infection from the rest of the country… we both knew it was a long shot. But we kept moving toward it. Kept hoping it wasn’t all a colossal fake out.

If it was… well, I had no idea what we’d do then. We’d have one vial of a cure and no one to give it to. Plus, since it had taken us a month to get to Oklahoma City, we had to figure it would take us another month to get to the wall, which would put us smack dab in the middle of a Midwest winter, complete with snow, ice, and frigid temps. Fun, eh?

Yeah, sounds like a fucking laugh riot to me.

He motioned me into the dressing room without any more discussion on the touchy subject of walls, or lack thereof. Inside he had set up a portable shower we’d managed to grab from a camping supply store somewhere around Albuquerque. The shower would be cold, but it would do the job. Although since I hadn’t actually worked out at the gym we’d taken shelter in, I didn’t exactly need it. I was mostly there to stand guard.

Which I did (along with taking a couple of peeks by lamplight at my sweetie soaping up… what? We’re married!!). But pretty soon he was changed and we started toward the vestibule of the gym, with Dave loading up a shotgun as we went.

“Okay, so I’d like to get at least thirty miles today,” he said as he cocked the shotgun with one hand.

I nodded. So I’m sure that sounds crazy to you. Thirty miles in a day? In the pre-apocalypse days we would have been talking thirty minutes, maybe less. But these are not pre-apocalypse driving conditions, people. There were several things that kept us from getting much farther:

1. We tried to stay off main roads. I mean, big roads meant abandoned cars to move, fires to put out (literally and figuratively), and the occasional highwayman to avoid.
   

2. We tried to avoid cities. So I’d said we were in Oklahoma City, but that wasn’t exactly true. We were actually about fifteen miles north of there in a town called Guthrie. Unlike the real city, which had over five hundred thousand residents who were probably pretty much all zombies now… Guthrie rocked a little less than ten thousand. See what I’m saying?
   

3. Finally, the last reason we moved so slow became very clear as we stepped up to the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led to the outside and the parking lot where we’d parked our big old SUV right in a pimp spot.
   

That reason would be the zombies.

“I guess they saw us come into town,” I said mildly as I peered outside. It was early still and the sky was dark from dawn and from the heavy rain clouds that were gathering.

Oh yeah; also it was dark because there was a crowd of about twenty zombies all gathered at the windows, climbing up on top of each other, growling and pawing the glass
until they streaked it with sludge and blood and…
goo
of an undefined nature. Which is more disturbing, by the way. Definable goo is way better. Trust me, I’m an expert now.

“I guess they did,” Dave said with a long-suffering sigh. He turned toward the check-in desk where we’d left a pile of our shit when we entered the gym last night. There were all kinds of guns in a big mass there, including a super cool multi-shot cannon.

“Well,” he said with sigh. “Ready to do this?”

I grabbed two 9mms and slipped clips into place in a smooth motion that had taken months of practice to perfect.

“Fuck yeah. Ready as I’ll ever be.”

With a half-grin in my direction, Dave flipped the flimsy lock on the glass door and let the horde in.