The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (3 page)

“That’s great, well, mostly great except for the zombie reality shows and zoos, which are just disturbing,” Dave said for me.

“Yes to both,” Robbie said and stuffed a cookie in his mouth that Dave must have gotten out of the pantry to celebrate our guests.

“But it doesn’t explain how you ended up back on the West side of the wall or how you two got to each other,” Dave said.

“Thank you,” I said, nudging him. “My brain is so overloaded I couldn’t say that exact same thing.”

He patted my leg. “That’s what I’m here for, completing your thoughts.”

“Gross,” The Kid groaned. “Stop being gross.”

Dave shook his head. “Trust me kid, someday soon you won’t mind so much. But explain anyway.”

Nicole shrugged. “With everything going on, the corruption, the zombie threat coming there, we knew we had to get someone back on this side. Someone to continue our work. So I went.”

“You volunteered to come over?” Dave repeated in disbelief. “What about your Pulitzer or whatever?”

“Won’t win it until I can do the full expose of how we all saved the world or whatever,” Nicole said with a shrug that totally dismissed how killer she was being at present. I hadn’t always been sold on her, being a tabloid reporter and all once, but I was a Nicole booster for sure now.

Except, of course, for that little piece of doubt that lingered, a nagging curiosity regarding why she was here.

“And that’s when she found me,” The Kid chimed in.

“That’s a big jump,” I said. “Explain that.”

“Well, during our travels you’d talked about Robbie and the lab and the mad scientist-”

“My
dad
,” Robbie said as he folded his arms in true tween dismissiveness.

“Yeah, whatever,” Nicole said. “So I headed straight for Phoenix to find him. We needed him for… well, we just needed him. I wasn’t exactly thinking I’d find a six-year-old.”

He glared at her. “Twelve. I’m twelve. And I’ll be thirteen next month, if I survive that long.”

I flinched at the jaded quality of that statement, but I was too overwhelmed by everything else to make any comforting attempts at lies to make him feel better.

“The point is, six, twelve, twenty-three, we found Robbie,” Nicole said. “And took him back to our base.”

“Base,” I repeated. “What?”

She ignored my question. “Since then we’ve been working on the final stages of the cure. The
real
cure. For everyone.”

Dave had left his hand on my leg while everyone was talking and he squeezed it in shock, hard enough that it hurt and I jerked away from him.

“What?” we asked in unison.

Dave swallowed. “I don’t understand, a cure for everyone?”

“Sure you do,” Nicole said softly. “That was why you brought the serum to the wall, isn’t it? That was what we’ve been doing this for, right? To cure everyone. Or at least to wipe out the zombies.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “But I didn’t think we’d actually do it.”

I looked at him in surprise. “You-you didn’t?”

He shook his head, staring at me but I could see he wasn’t really seeing me in that moment. “No, I didn’t. I mean, it’s impossible to think that the two of us could make that happen.”

“Well, the two of you are paramount,” The Kid agreed with a frown. “But, um, you aren’t saving the world all by yourself, you know.”

Nicole was looking at Dave with much the same expression I guessed was on my own face: surprise, concern… but then she had all the details I lacked. All the ways to prove to him that we actually had made a difference.

“We have a lab, a larger one than the one in Phoenix,” she began.

The Kid grinned. “It’s awesome. Way more advanced for my work.”

I almost laughed because it was suddenly ludicrous to picture a pre-teen whose voice hadn’t dropped working in a lab on a zombie cure. I mean, I knew that was what he’d been doing down in Phoenix, but still… shouldn’t he have been listening to bad teen rock and riding his bike around the neighborhood toilet papering houses and generally being a little shit?

“Robbie and the other researchers have taken what you brought us,” Nicole continued. “And they’re on the verge of a breakthrough. A two-stage solution to that pesky zombie problem.”

She smiled like she was on an infomercial and I reached up to rub my suddenly throbbing head. It was so full of information that I felt like it was going to explode. I would almost welcome it, except I really wanted to know what was going to happen next.

“What are the stages?” Dave asked.

Nicole raised a finger. “One, airborne extermination.”

His eyes went wide. “Airborne?”

She nodded and I could see how bright and filled with excitement her eyes were. Nicole was trying to Edward R. Murrow it, but she was a little more Maury right now, all excited and smarmy since she knew more than we did.

“We’re fairly confident we can do a mass drop,” she explained. “That should exterminate up to seventy percent of the current zombie population.”

I blinked. “Good God, that will take out thousands, hundreds of thousands in one fell swoop.”

She nodded. “That’s our hope. Imagine if they weren’t out there roaming the countryside. The danger level would drop. We’re also in final stages of a development of a personal spray that survivors can carry for face-to-face combat. It’s just coming up with the system to discharge the spray.”

“You can’t just use regular spray bottles?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. And yes, it
did
sort of undermine the relationship because I wanted to slap her suddenly.

“It’s not exactly like there are factories working over here,” she explained. “So we’re cobbling together the parts. It’s not going to be retail friendly, that’s for sure. Speaking of which, if there are any spray bottles in this house-”

“Yes, of course, take them,” I said. I could definitely live without them if it meant killing some zombies.

“Still, so airborne and personal devices are your two stages,” Dave said with a whistle. “That’s great.”

“No, airborne and personal defense are all part of stage one,” Nicole corrected him.

I felt my brow furrow. “So what’s stage two?”

“Inoculation,” The Kid said with a proud smile. “We have reason to believe we could dose out a cure that would keep people from being turned, even if they’re bitten. So they’ll be injured, maybe killed if the attack is bad enough, but not reanimated into zombies. We
know
that one will work thanks to Dave’s results.”

“That’s great,” Dave breathed. “God that would end this on every level!”

Nicole nodded and everyone in the room looked so damn happy. But I couldn’t help but have a niggling hesitation, a question that I couldn’t keep to myself. There was no way I could just kumbaya my way into blissful happiness that everything was going to be okay.

“It
is
great, don’t get me wrong. I totally support wiping out the zombies and everything,” I said, folding my arms. “But how did you find us?”

Nicole smiled. “You talked about Montana a couple of times when we were together heading toward Illinois. The state pretty much has no people left so before we left we stared doing analysis of some satellite imagery we tapped into from the government grid. We found lights. And that took us to you.”

Dave leaned back. “Wow. Impressive.”

“Big Brother can be useful when you know how to use him without him figuring it out,” Nicole said with a shrug.

I tried not to ponder too deeply the fact that the government could have found us at any point through our light usage. There were other thoughts that were more important.

“Okay, so I get the how,” I said. “But
why
are you here? If you have your big boy lab and your whatever, why would you come find us?”

The Kid and Nicole exchanged a look and in that moment I knew I wasn’t going to like the answer. Not even a little.

“Because we need your help,” Nicole said slowly.

The Kid stood up and waved her off. “We need
Dave’s
help, actually, to complete our work.”

I swallowed as all eyes in the room shifted to my semi-zombiefied husband.

“You want us to come to Phoenix,” I said softly and my voice shook a little. Phoenix, where I’d almost lost Dave, in more ways than one.

“No,” Nicole said and cleared her throat like she was about to say something that would stick there. “We need you to come back to Seattle.”

Chapter Three

When you travel, make sure you bring enough for zombie to do. A busy zombie is a happy zombie.

I was blinking. Just blinking. Over and over. Until I felt like I had a tic in my eye. But I couldn’t stop. In my head, my brain was screaming
Seattle
and that translated to:
pain
,
fear
,
death, divorce
.

Well, maybe not the last one. Close to divorce, but not quite. Either way, Seattle meant a lot of bad things to me. We’d barely gotten out of there. My stomach turned when I thought of going back, hell of even going
near
that city I had once loved and vowed to stay in forever.

“Seattle?” Dave repeated through my fog. He sounded like he was checking his emotions, trying to feel out our unexpected visitors before he really reacted.

Or maybe he was just as numb as I was at the prospect.

“Yeah, we moved the lab up there,” The Kid said and he broke his gaze from Dave to look at his feet. “There were a lot of motivations for the move and they’ll all be clear once we get there. The point is, we’re up there and we need you.”

I turned away. My anxiety for the whole “Seattle” thing was growing by the second. For a whole host of reasons. Some of which, I wasn’t about to go into. Not with anyone.

“Um, I don’t know,” I said as I shook my head. “This is a lot.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Nicole said, her voice filled with shock.

I stared at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I supposed to jump at the chance to go back into the genesis point of a zombie outbreak? I didn’t get the crazy person memo, can you send it again? My fax number is 1-800-fuckthis.”

Nicole rolled her eyes. “I just can’t believe you, of all people, would hesitate to finish what you started. You risked everything to get that cure across the border and now that you are so close to seeing it all pay off, you hang back and say, ‘I don’t know’?”

Nicole had done this stupid voice when she said the last part. My voice, I guess it was supposed to be. Not exactly endearing. And yet Dave smothered a laugh. Traitor.

“Thanks, babe,” I said with a glare toward him.

He reached out to touch my arm and damn it, but I couldn’t stay mad at the big goof. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged “It’s not a big deal.”

“Um, yeah it is. I
need
your help,” The Kid insisted, louder than before. “And you’re all back and forth about it like I’m asking if you want an extra piece of cake.”

“I would never hem and haw about cake,” I said. “Never. I’d always take the extra cake.”

The Kid stomped his foot, a little bit of the child in him taking over. “Sarah!”

I stared. He was seriously freaking out. Not that I totally blamed him. And I wasn’t going to be able to wave the shiny wand of my sarcasm around to distract him, or Nicole... or Dave, who was now staring at me as expectantly as the two interlopers.

“Okay, I get it. You’re doing very important work, I support that very important work down to my very core. I want this bullshit to end as much as anyone. But the last time someone wanted to use my husband for research, they nearly killed us all.”

“We actually killed more of them,” Dave pointed out.

I shot a glance his way. “Because we were lucky. The government would have happily ripped you to shreds to figure out how you work. And no offense, kid, but your father was the person who ran experiments before, and that was just as terrifying an encounter.”

“So it’s a fear of needles thing, then?” Dave teased. When I shot him a look, he raised his hands in mock surrender and shut his mouth.

“But the difference is that the government and my father didn’t give a shit about Dave,” The Kid said with a sad sigh. “My Dad, in fact, didn’t give a shit about anyone. But I’m not him. I want to help, not hurt. I promise you, we aren’t taking Dave off to be a science experiment.”

“Just a pin cushion,” I muttered.

Dave slung an arm around my shoulders. “What’s a few pin pricks between friends?”

I stared up at him. “How can you be so nonchalant about this? Hell, how can you joke about it?”

“Um, that’s what we do under stress,” he said. “Have you met us?”

I rolled my eyes, damn it. I had been trying so hard not to do it, but he made me.

“You told me, not three hours ago, that you were thinking about setting up camp here for the next year, Dave. That you all of a sudden wanted to become a homebody. What happened to that?”

“And you told
me
you wanted to be Adventure Sarah, riding off into the great zombie unknown. This is just about the biggest zombie unknown we’ve ever encountered, but you’re going all freaky about it,” he countered. “Things change.”