The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (10 page)

“Yeah, I know. But it’s the best we have currently. The serum dissipates pretty fast according to Robbie. You should only have to wear that thing for about five minutes after we throw the grenade.”

“Five minutes?” I repeated, shifting as I tightened it. “That sounds like an eternity. I think I might be claustrophobic.”

“Then go back to the freaking lab and be support staff,” Lisa said, digging for her keys.

“No,” I shook my head and tried to ignore the echo of my voice in the helmet. “No, I’m good. But I hope you intend to cover me while I’m wearing this stupid thing.”

At that moment, Lisa raised a pistol and fired over my shoulder behind me. I turned to watch a wayward zombie collapse a hundred yards or so behind me.

“What do you think?” she snapped. “Now let’s go before we attract more living dead attention out here.”

I waved at her to open the doors to the student union building, but as I followed her, wearing my Darth Vader reject mask, I hoped I wasn’t getting myself into a mess. Or at least not a mess I couldn’t handle. Because if I ended up living dead, Dave was going to kill me.

Chapter Nine

Baby proofing your house is an important step. Babies… and zombies… get into the strangest places.

The ground floor of the HUB had once been called the Husky Den (after the mascot of University of Washington) and was mostly an eating and study area. Now you could have called it Zombie Central and made it a killing arcade. As Lisa softly shut the doors behind us, I sucked in a noisy, steamy breath beneath my uncomfortable gas mask.

There were probably thirty zombies in here, roaming around, grunting and groaning, some even still sitting at the tables, oblivious to puddles of blood and goo and a few wayward rotting limbs scattered around them. It was like they’d gotten bitten and just kept on studying. In some ways, you had to admire them for being so dedicated to their education.

Of course all that peaceful activity would end in a second as soon as they recognized fresh meat in their vicinity. Then it would be party time, not study time and the food fight in
Animal House
would have nothing on it.

“I’m going to throw a grenade, then we’ll head to the third floor to start clearing from the top down,” Lisa whispered, her voice slightly muffled because of my covered ears. Still, I got the gist.

She pulled the pin on one of her grenades and threw it into the center of the big, open area. The metal canister clinked as it skidded across the floor and suddenly every zombie in the damn room turned toward the noise, then the source of the noise: US. Just like I predicted, the sight of yummy human flesh and brains was way more interesting than shuffling aimlessly and moaning. The group was focused like a herd of hungry lions in a second.

“Run,” I said as the grenade exploded and started purple gas expelling into the air.

It kind of looked like something out of a comic book, but I wasn’t going to quibble over that at present. Not when the zombies were starting to move.

“Run!” I repeated as loud as I could through my mask.

Lisa did as she was told, bolting forward toward the closest set of stairs. So much for covering me. I followed, slightly disoriented from the mask. Not only was it uncomfortable, but I was starting to wonder if it was actually going to work to keep the gas out of my lungs. But it was too late for such questions now.

I glanced over my shoulder. Most of the zombies were obscured by a thick cloud of the purple gas now. How long did that stuff take to kill them?

More questions I really should have asked before we threw the bomb…

Still, there were stragglers around the edges of the gas cloud. Slow moving, but still surging toward me, snarling and overcome by blood and brain lust that nothing would stop except a bullet.

Luckily I had plenty of those.

I fired a pistol over my shoulder. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly the best strategy, but it was better than nothing.

“Hey!”

I heard Lisa’s voice through the echo of the helmet and looked up to see her halfway up the staircase, her machine gun on her shoulder.

“Don’t waste ammo,” she ordered before she started firing. Bullets zinged over my head and I bent in half, covering my helmet-y head with my hands as I scurried up the stairs and got behind her.

“Good?” she asked as I rushed past.

“I guess,” I snapped. “Nice covering, by the way.”

“You’re not dead, right?” she snapped as she elbowed past me up the stairs. “So let’s go and get up to the third floor while the zombies are confused and dying. If we’re lucky, the gas vapors will rise and that will help us on our way down, too.”

I got behind her without another word, still irritated that she’d taken off and left me with my vision restrictions and zombie baby to protect on my own. Nicole had said Lisa was a potentially sketchy person and now I’d experienced it firsthand. Made me kind of wonder what she really thought of everything… of us.

“I remember when we first met you,” I said as we moved up the stairs. I kept half an eye behind us for zombies coming up the flank, while she had her gun ready for anyone who wanted to meet us coming down.

“Yeah, well don’t congratulate yourself on that, it wasn’t that long ago,” she said. “You guys had just killed your friend and you almost got eaten by a zombie when I saved your butt.”

I pursed my lips. Okay, that was true.

“At the time, you were determined not to come out of your apartment above the restaurant, even when we asked you to join us in getting out of the city. You told us you wouldn’t be with groups of people, that you were better off alone.”

“Yeah.” She paused and fired off a shot at some unseen thing in the stairwell above us. There was a grunt and then a zombie fell down the shaft in the staircase, spiraling downward until he hit in the basement area far below.

“But here you are,” I continued, scarcely missing a beat for our dearly departed zombie buddy. “And you’re working with a huge group. Not to mention I’ve heard you and the Colonel guy… Fenton are kind of an item.”

“Office gossip,” she spat without a hint of irony at the fact that we didn’t exactly have a Dilbert situation going on here. “What’s your point?”

 “I don’t know,” I said. “Just wondering how you got from there to here. Why are you willing to go balls to the wall to protect a group now when before you wouldn’t even leave your house with us less than a year ago?”

“Maybe I just needed the right group,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at me. “There’s a zombie back there.”

I pivoted and sure enough, a straggler had started up the stairs. Zombies on stairs were hilarious. They made it up eventually, but it was a dragging, tripping study in the brain dead. I watched him for a minute, grumbling in what might have been zombie frustration as he stumbled up step after step.

Finally, though, the show wasn’t as fun and I fired off one shot. He hissed out a little sound of I don’t know… relief? Anger? Pain? Then he slumped on the steps, leaving a trail of goo beneath and around him.

“That will slow down the others, at least,” I said with a sigh. “If stairs freak them out, anything blocking stairs takes way too much out of them.” She kept moving up and I followed. “So you were saying Dave and I weren’t the right group.”

“God, you’re like a bulldog,” Lisa muttered under her breath. “I should have left you in the lab.”

“But you didn’t, so…” I encouraged.

“When they bombed, I had to run,” she bit out in frustration. “I didn’t have a choice but to leave the apartment behind. For a while, there was no place safe between the army and the zombies. I just ran and ran, I hardly slept. When Grant and the others found me, I had made it all the way to Capitol Hill, away from the bombing, but passed out in an alleyway from exhaustion, all laid out for a zombie buffet.”

“So you weren’t conscious enough to bitch them out like you did us,” I said. “Gotcha.”

To my surprise, she smiled a little at that. “Yeah, that was part of it. It’s not like I was saying, ‘yay the government has saved me.’ We had a long time where I didn’t buy into their shit. But they were organized and fought well together and pretty soon I had to respect them.”

I shrugged. “I can see that. Honestly, Dave and I were a mess when we started. If you wanted organized, you probably went with the right group.”

She didn’t answer, but made a motion with her hand. There was a painted “3” on the wall as we passed it. Three was the top floor of the HUB.

“According to the plans, prior to the outbreak this was mostly meeting rooms and admin for the university,” Lisa said, back to business again.

Too late, though, I already “got” her a little more thanks to all this new information. Still didn’t trust her.

“The outbreak started during the day, when they would have still had people up here,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, and our recon team wasn’t able to get up this far, so be careful.”

Lisa traded her machine gun for a shotgun and cocked it with one smooth motion. I reloaded my handgun and nodded to her when I was ready to move.

“We should go as far back as we can,” I suggested. “Block the stairwells as we go.”

She nodded, though she seemed impressed I could come up with even that basic a plan. Seriously, it was like she thought I was an idiot despite my whole involvement in the saving the world thingy that she was oh-so-impressed by. It was super annoying.

The rooms farthest from the stairwells we’d come up were admin offices. Back before this had begun, it had been the place to come to ask about fees or make payments. I remembered it well from my days on campus what seemed like five lifetimes ago. Now, as we walked into the big back office, it was obvious what had come here.

Hell.

Dead bodies were strewn everywhere, laid out in dried pools of blood, hunched under desks. The smell of death and rot was overpowering and I fought back bile and was happy for the filter of the mask and whatever protection it gave me.

“They never had a chance,” I murmured, my words echoing in my helmet. I sighed. Until we were done with the building, I wasn’t taking it off, I didn’t care what Lisa said about five minutes.

“None of them ever did at the beginning,” Lisa said with a shrug. “We all survived by luck and circumstance. Theirs was just…” She shivered as she stepped over a big pool of dried blood. “Different.”

Still, there were no zombies. The ones who had come here, had gone in search of others to eat. There had been plenty. We were about to declare the rooms clear and close them up, when I noticed one door way in the back. It was closed.

Lisa noticed it the same moment I did and our eyes locked. Closed doors… bad. I motioned toward it, making all kinds of military sort of hand signals. Finally Lisa rolled her eyes.

“Shit, just say it.”

“I’ll open the door, you be ready for whatever is in there,” I said. “Sheesh, don’t you know what waving your fingers around and pointing means?”

She shook her head without answering and lined herself up so that when the door opened she’d be ready. Only when I turned the handle it was locked.

“Kick it,” Lisa said with an impassive shrug. “Probably it’s empty.”

I moved back and did exactly that, kicking the door once, twice, three times. On the third, the door splintered (yeah, I’m a badass) and I was able to shove it open.

I expected an empty room, someone’s office who hadn’t been in the day of the outbreak, or had been out to a meeting or something. I did not expect to see a woman, sitting at her desk, slumped over dead.

She was thin, her skin leathery as it barely clung to her bones. Her fingers were curled around the headset of a phone, holding it for dear life.

“Zombie?” Lisa asked.

I grabbed for something to poke her with and settled on a ruler off the desk. I reached out and tapped at her hand. No response. Another tap on her head and it lolled to the side, revealing that the woman was dead-dead, not zombie-dead.

“Shit,” Lisa said, lowering her gun. “Look at her emaciated frame, the way her nails are bitten to the quick. She… she starved to death.”

I nodded. That’s what it looked like to me, too. “She must have seen what was happening and locked herself in. Then she was too scared to leave.”

“Or thought someone would eventually come to get her.”

“Poor woman,” I said as I turned away from one of the few dead bodies we didn’t have to worry about. “It would have been a horrible way to die.”

“Let’s lock her up,” Lisa said with one final glance at the dead body’s twisted, pained face. A mask frozen in utter despair. “And move on.”

I nodded. Walking on from death was about all we could do anymore. Maybe one day we’d walk far enough to escape the horrors of what had happened here and all over half the country. At least I kept hoping that would happen. Especially now when I had to start thinking about the future in a whole new way. The future wasn’t just mine anymore.

At least, I hoped it wasn’t.

We shut the remnant of the woman’s office door, checked any remaining rooms in the admin area and closed it. The rest of floor three was actually pretty quiet. It made me wonder if they had done an evacuation on campus when the shit really started to go down. Of course, the people who had left would have walked straight into the nightmare on the lower floors.

We were quiet as we blocked the stairwells with furniture and other crap spread all over the third floor. We blocked the last one and as Lisa climbed over the top back onto the stairs leading down, we exchanged a quick smile. There was nothing better than that feeling of accomplishment of clearing a room or building of zombies. You could say, “hey this place is safe, go me” and move on.