The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (19 page)

There were probably fifteen, drawn to them by the noise of the gunfire and the delightful smell of braaaaains that filled the air. Oh, right, no one but he and the zombies could smell that. But it did waft quite nicely.

“Stay back,” he ordered as he moved forward. “Let me see if I can take care of it or if they’re too brain-crazed.”

Lisa’s lips parted, but then she shrugged. “Okay. I’ve heard of this thing you do with the zombies, I guess now is as good a time as any to actually see it in action.”

“It’s creepy,” Nicole said, bored as she wiped an old fleck of brain matter from axe she was carrying. Obviously it had gotten on it in some earlier encounter.

McCray, of course, had to trump them all. His blunt weapon was a broken down electric guitar. Once a rock god, always a rock god. “It is quite disturbing, Lisa.”

“Shut it,” Dave snapped and walked into the street. “Just stay quiet and let me try my thing.”

He left them in the alley and walked halfway down the block toward the hoard. A few were sniffing the air like weirdo dogs, but they seemed to be having trouble making the location of the brain smell. The breeze would carry it, then drop off and it was lost. They weren’t exactly smart enough to figure it out on their own.

Dave took advantage, pushing the first zombie he came in contact with. He wore soldier gear, but a black uniform. As the mindless, groaning mass of flesh staggered under the force of his shove, Dave stared at him. This guy might have once been in Major Keel’s team. And that was a very good sign that the warehouses were the place Keel was keeping Sarah.

“Wish I could speak zombie, not just smell it so I could ask you,” he muttered before he got into position. “Batter up, bitch.”

He swung as hard as he could and the wooden bat connected squarely behind the ear of the zombie. It squished far into his skull, collapsing the flesh and bone until brains came out the ears and nose and the creature collapsed in a heap at his feet.

“Eh. Foul ball.”

Totally was, too. An older, further rotted zombie’s head would have come clean off for a double or even a home run. He knew his zombie ball after all this time.

Maybe the next one would be better. He swung again, this time hitting a zombie in a plaid shirt full on in the noggin. Although he seemed to be a zombie straight out of 1993, his head didn’t come off either.

The next few were little better. Zombie clown: dead but no head off, zombie goth girl: dark and brooding, but dead after two whacks. In fact, it was the naked zombie, his clothes rotted off, who finally gave David what he wanted. He took a hard swing and pop, the head tore off, flying through the air across the street where it hit the ground with a plop.

He turned toward the group of his friends to see if they had enjoyed the show, but as he did so the wind picked up again and suddenly the zombies stopped milling aimlessly and started down the block for fresh meat.

“Aw shit, I think they smell you,” he called out, swinging the bat with less goofing around and more purpose.

He dropped three more as the rest of them exited the alley and started in with their various weapons. The katana was as sharp as it looked. Lisa managed to remove the heads from two zombies in one slicing blow.

Dave rushed for them, silently cheering as Nicole, formerly useless tabloid reporter, battered an attacking zombie with the side of her axe blade until the zombie’s long blonde hair was all that was identifiable on the corpse.

Now he had to admit, when McCray had walked out of the lab with an electric guitar strapped to his back, Dave had been skeptical. But the man knew how to handle the thing, whether he was playing it or swinging it. He flipped it around like the most elegant of weapons, bashing in a zombie’s skull on one flip of his wrist and dropping a second on another, before he crushed the poor thing with a steel toed boot just to be sure.

That left two final zombies. Slowpokes who were each missing a leg, though opposite ones. As Dave jogged to catch up to them, he had to ponder how if they ever figured out how to work together, they could almost be a whole, double-headed and totally terrifying zombie. Very
Resident Evil
.

He didn’t ponder long. When he caught up, he thrust the bat downward in a quick, slicing motion and killed them both almost instantly.

The others stepped forward, joining him as they stood over the rather disgusting mound of bloody, sludgy bodies. Everyone except Dave was panting from exertion and the lingering twinges of fear.

Dave didn’t get either of those things anymore. Just a dull sense of happiness he had kept his friends safe, but little else. Who knew that zombie killing could get… monotonous after a while?

Lisa wiped a thin line of sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm (her hands were covered with blood) and pointed the tip of her bloody katana down the street.

“Warehouses should be straight down there for six blocks, then turn right for four,” she panted. “We’ll have to be careful once we make the turn or their sentries might see us.”

Dave nodded and took the lead again, heading up the street. He hadn’t been nervous about the zombies, but he was hella nervous about getting to Sarah before anyone did anything to her that he couldn’t reverse.

“Hurry,” he encouraged them as he began to run up the street. “Just hurry.”

Chapter Eighteen

Daddy’s home!

My neck hurt from sleeping with it cricked to the side and I’d lost all track of time in a way I hadn’t felt since the outbreak first began. It was funny about the passage of time. When these things happened, at first it was discombobulating and then your body adjusted. It started taking cues from the sun and the moon rather than the watch and the calendar.

But now I was back to body confusion. It was dark in the warehouse, but was it dark outside? Was it the same day as I’d been taken or the next?

Not a fun feeling.

But at least the thing they say about losing one sense making the rest of your senses stronger was true. The dark took my sight, but I could damn sure hear things. The sound that had woken me up was voices, muttering around the side of the warehouse. I couldn’t make out the words, but the sound was not happy. Good, maybe they would fight (like in a dozen awesome books and movies) and kill each other.

Except wait, then I’d still be tied up. Which wouldn’t work for me.

There was a creak from the warehouse door and dim light came in. Okay, so it was either early morning or late afternoon judging from how thin the sunlight was. Then the door closed and there were just footsteps coming toward me in the darkness.

I stiffened. I hadn’t been able to tell who my visitor was, but there wasn’t anyone I was looking forward to see in my current state.

“Sarah?” a voice whispered.

A voice I recognized.

“Nadia, is that you?” I asked.

“Yeah.” Her tone was flat and grim.

“What are you doing here? I thought you needed a babysitter when you came to check on me.”

“Yeah.” I heard the scratch of a match and suddenly her face was surrounded in a halo of glowing firelight as she lit a candle. “They’re definitely going to wish they’d kept a better eye on me when we’re done.”

“Huh?”

She pulled out a switchblade and flicked it, popping the sharp blade free.

“Oh, hey,” I said, flattening myself against the chair. “I know I’ve given you some shit, but-”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to cut you, idiot.” She leaned down and sliced through the ropes around my wrists. “Now get up.”

“What is going on?” I asked.

“We’re getting you out of here,” she explained as she grabbed my hand and pulled me from the chair and toward the front door. “Now.”

I pulled my hand away and started running after her on my own. “What? Why? I’m not arguing, but why?”

She hesitated at the door. “Something is going on, I’m not sure what, but the soldiers are starting to freak out. The guy who was standing here guarding the warehouse door ran off to join a bunch of the others and I saw my opportunity.”

My heart lurched. There were two possible causes to the soldiers freaking. The bad one was that a pod of zombies was coming. I had no weapons at this point, and since I hadn’t been vaccinated against the virus… well, who knew what would happen to me if I was bitten.

The better side, the one I was hoping for, was that Dave was coming. Super-Dave who would swoop in with all his zombie benefits glory and save me like we were in some silly novel.

Actually, silly novel happy ending sounded awesome to me. I kind of felt like I’d earned it.

“But why are you helping me?” I pushed.

She didn’t answer, but lifted a finger to her lips to shush me as she cracked the door. There was no sentry standing watch over my door, so we stepped outside.

This group of warehouses had once been part of a port that took goods into Seattle. Probably smaller goods considering its location in Ballard. It was set right up against Puget Sound and smaller tankers had once lined up there to offload boxes of imported goods.

Now one of them listed on its side out in the Sound, boxes floating around it like fishing bobbers. I saw bodies on the boat, too. Not zombies, just bloated bodies.

With a shiver, I looked away from the boat, searching out the source of the uproar in Keel’s camp. And then, dodging in and out between the big containers stacked all over the dock, I saw him.

Dave.

He wasn’t alone, either. Lisa, to my shock and relief, as well as Nicole and McCray were with him, weapons ready, being all stealthy awesome as they moved steadily toward where I was being held.

I lurched to move toward them, but Nadia grabbed my arm.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “If you draw attention to yourself, you draw attention to them and these aren’t zombies they’re going to be fighting. Keel and his men fight back and they have tactics.”

I nodded. Sometimes it was easy to forget that part when you were accustomed to battling the rather moronic walking dead.

She pulled me toward a broken railroad car that had once been part of the trains that took goods from the warehouse to the stores all around the country. Inside, she grabbed for a big section of railroad tie and handed it over.

“As a weapon,” she whispered.

I nodded, grateful for anything, though I fully intended to take a gun off of somebody’s dead body before we were finished with this very long, very tiring day.

“We should wait here a little bit,” Nadia said, resting her head back against the inside wall of the train car. “I saw a zombie pod coming in and that will distract everyone. We can make our move then.”

I nodded, but I couldn’t help staring at her. She seemed to have aged ten years since she helped in my kidnapping.

“So why
are
you helping me?” I asked. “Doesn’t that fuck up your big West Virginia plans?”

She bit back a bitter laugh. “Oh yeah, you can see how sincere they are about that,” she said. Tears filled her eyes, but she blinked them back quickly. “Sarah, I fucked up, okay? I fucked up by letting these assholes convince me that they could save me from this world. It was a big time moment… series of moments, I guess, of weakness. But the second I got here with you, the second I saw the plans they had in place for you, for us, I knew it was wrong. And I’m going to try to fix it by helping you get back to Dave and the others.”

“I appreciate that,” I said in all sincerity. “Though I really wish this epiphany had come before all of…” I waved my hand all around me. “…this.”

She shook her head. “Me too. But look, I see some zombies out there. Time to move.”

I didn’t have a chance to respond. She was out of the train car and running without even looking back at me. I jogged after her, wholly aware of how much slower and more awkward I was with this ever-increasing pregnant belly. It was really very inconvenient to have a magical zombie-like child when you came down to it.

I could only imagine what the Terrible Twos would be like.

I shoved the image from my mind and caught up to Nadia as she dropped to her stomach behind what was left of a loading machine. I tried to do the same, but ended up on my side. I peeked over the top and saw Dave leaning with his back against a crate a few hundred yards away. Shit, it was like so close but so far away.

I didn’t have to worry about calling out in a moment though, because from our right came a group of three of Keel’s men. One was wearing some kind of infrared glasses and he motioned toward Dave’s crate.

“Got ‘em. Fire!” he called out.

I watched in horror as the soldiers in Keel’s unit began to fire at the crates where Dave and our friends were hiding. They reacted fast, of course, firing back around the sides of the crates, but they were pinned down now with bullets bouncing off the sides of their crate.

To make things worse, the zombies started to swarm in, moving toward Dave and the others first so that they had to split their fire between the two groups.

“I have to help them,” I said, more to myself than to Nadia since I didn’t think she’d help me… not with this.

To my surprise, she nodded. “If we could swing around and start taking out some of the soldiers, they could get out from behind that crate,” she suggested.

“We don’t have weapons, though beyond my railroad tie and your… what do you have?”