The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (9 page)

I grabbed a Diet Coke and cracked it open as the break room door swung open behind me. I turned and watched Lisa step into the room. In the dim light of the lamp, she looked super pale and a little ghostly. Creepy.

“Hey,” she said.

I nodded as I took a swig of Coke and cringed. As soon as we saved the world, I was getting a cold diet soda. With ice. And a beer, baby or no baby. And some nachos.

“Hey,” I grunted, mostly to stop the wandering of my mind, which was making me hungry and irritated. “Haven’t seen you around for a while.”

In fact, as I thought about it, it had been almost two days since I saw Lisa last. She was hardly ever in the lab, I never saw her up in the sleeping quarters or even in the big classroom they had converted to a makeshift dining hall for the rest of us.

“Well, I have shit to do, Sarah,” she said as she grabbed a water. She tossed the plastic lid into an old recycling bin (something that made me laugh, saving the earth was taking a backseat currently to saving the world) and swigged the bottle in a few long chugs.

My eyes widened, “Crap, I guess. What are you doing anyway?”

She set the empty bottle aside and looked at me evenly. “I don’t know if you can handle it, Sarah.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, everyone tells these ‘Sarah is a Badass’ stories around the campfire, but all I’ve seen you do since you got here is sit around waiting for Dave to take tests and for someone to tell you if you have a kid or a thing in your belly. I’m not sure a pampered princess like yourself is up to even hearing about the shit I do on a daily basis.”

I knew she was baiting me. I mean, you couldn’t be much more obvious. And yet, despite that, and despite the fact I didn’t trust this girl as far as I could throw her, I couldn’t help but fall right into her trap.

“Okay, dude, seriously,” I started as I set my can down on the counter next to her empty bottle. “Don’t start on me. You think I
want
to sit around in the lab all day, waiting on someone to tell me if I play a role in the world-saving business or not? Do you think I want to be the errand runner and drink fetcher and possible mother of a zombie hoard? C’mon.”

Lisa leaned a little closer, like she was trying to examine me in the light. See if I was serious.

“Okay,” she finally said with a half-smile. “So do you want to do something more interesting?”

“Like what?” I asked, my interest so piqued that I couldn’t maintain a cool, whatever façade.

“Come out past the perimeter with me,” she said. “I could use a hand or two outside.”

I hesitated. I wouldn’t have even a few months earlier, but now things were different. There was a kid to think about. If I got hurt, so did the baby. There were new motherly instincts reminding me I was killing for two now, not just one.

But the one thing I knew I could do was handle myself. Hell, I’d seen pregnant women in the camps doing hard work and battling zombies. Why was I different? I had a baby inside me, I wasn’t made of glass or anything.

Of course there was also the Dave thing to consider. He was so uber-protective of me. He had been before the baby thing, he was even worse now. If he thought I was going to go out into the zombie wild, he would shit a brick.

But to be honest, he might not even notice I was gone if I didn’t tell him. Going out and doing zombie detail sounded a hell of a lot more fun than going back to the lab to read year-old issues of Cosmo and twiddle my thumbs.

And wasn’t it better to apologize after than ask permission first?

“Yeah, okay,” I said, shoving away all the reasons to stay put and stay relatively safe. “I’d love to go hunting with you.”

She smiled and motioned me to follow her.

We didn’t go back through the lab, but down another hall and through a series of turns I wouldn’t remember later if someone paid me in chocolate to tell them about it. Finally, though, we reached a classroom, or what had once been a classroom. When she opened the door, it couldn’t have been further from that now.

It was an arsenal. So many guns. Big, beautiful guns. Tiny, cute guns. Bullets, clips, knives, machetes, pretty much anything a person might need to battle zombies… or take over a small country. I was willing to try for either at this point, honestly, I was so bored.

“Holy shit,” I murmured as we stepped into the room.

She grinned. “I know, right? Let’s load up.”

And load up we did. Aside from the pistol permanently attached to my hip, I got a shotgun and an AR-15 to strap across my back, plus plenty of ammo for both. She took a couple of glocks and a big-ass machete.

“For the close up work,” she explained as she slipped the razor-sharp weapon into a specially made holster. “Ready?”

“I guess,” I said as I followed her down a couple more hallways and out into the cool spring Seattle day. It was drizzling (surprise, surprise), but my jacket was more than enough to keep me cozy and dry.

People underestimate the value of good clothes in an apocalypse. The fact is, though, the wrong shoes, a coat that’s too puffy, gloves with fingers… all of those things can lead to a quick and sudden Death by Bubblegoose.

And nobody wants that.

That was why my jacket was light, but lined, my gloves had no fingers and I didn’t wear earmuffs so I could hear everything around me with perfect clarity.

“How big is the area that you have fenced in?” I asked as we walked through the campus, behind our lab building and toward the Husky Union Building, or HUB.

“It’s always changing,” Lisa said. “We started with just Red Square and some tents. But as we cleared out buildings, we could expand the fence line. We’d love to get the whole campus, but right now our goal is the HUB.”

“Why?”

“There’s a radio system there that used to be the campus radio station. We think we might be able to use it for larger level communications. Plus, there are some dining facilities that would make cooking a lot easier,” Lisa explained. “Oh, and there’s a bowling alley.”

I laughed. “I guess recreation has its advantages.”

“Stephen King said it best, all work and no play…”

“Of course, Jack went crazy in that book,” I said with a sigh.

“There is that,” Lisa agreed.

She stopped and motioned in front of us. There was a big, heavy chain link fence with razor wire on top of it in front of us. There was a gate section, but it was locked with several industrial padlocks.

“Wow,” I breathed as I stared. Just outside the fence, there were a handful of zombies milling about. As they caught a whiff of us, they turned and began to shamble in our direction, their moans increasing.

“Yeah, best get out there and close the gate so we don’t have to bother with them on the inside,” Lisa sighed, pulled out a fat key and unlocked the padlocks with a swift efficiency that said she really did do this every stinking day.

When the last one was opened, she swung the gate open and ushered me out.

“You lock up,” I offered as I pulled out the pistol on my waist. “I’ll cover you.”

She shrugged, but I could tell by the way she looked at me and the way she unclipped her holster, that she wasn’t sure of my skills. Damn, I hadn’t had to prove myself for a long time.

I was kind of looking forward to it.

Of course, I didn’t have to wait long. The slowly shambling zombies who had noticed us behind the fence got faster as they got closer to their first meal in what I would guess was quite some time. The first one to come into a reasonable range was a female dressed in sweatpants and a tanktop. She still had a backpack on, though its straps had long since sunk into her rotting skin to rest on her bones.

“Gross,” I muttered before I leveled the pistol and fired, putting a bullet through her forehead and dropping her.

The gunfire seemed to startle the other zombies who were coming toward us, but that didn’t slow them down at all. I think gunfire must have just been a sign to them that they were doing their job in life: eating people and freaking them out enough that they resorted to violence. It had to be sort of like instant job performance feedback to them.

Or a dinner bell.

A couple more moved together toward me, one from one side, one from the other. One had been campus security, by the look of what was left of the ragged cotton uniform and the utterly useless taser that dangled by a few threads of leather that had once been his belt.

I dropped him first, then shifted my attention to the other. Her clothing had long since disintegrated, leaving her embarrassingly naked as she moved on me. She had just been shambling when I shot the other guy, dragging the stub that had once been her foot behind her. But now she started to sprint, surprisingly fast for a rotting pile of flesh and bone.

“Shit,” I barked as I jumped back a step. Just as I fired, Lisa did the same and between the two of us we dropped the woman, right at my feet, mid-charge.

“God damn, I hate when they run,” she said, stepping over the woman with a shake of her head. “And you are a good shot, it turns out.”

“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, raising my pistol to catch a straggling zombie in what was left of a suit who had appeared from between a couple of buildings.

“It does make you wonder what the hell their actual lifespan is,” I said with a sigh. “I mean, how long can they just… run like this, dead, rotting, no brains left to power anything but basic movement and a drive to kill.”

“Yeah, that’s a whole other study,” Lisa replied. “I’m guessing it will be long term.”

“You guys are studying that here?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. If you want I can show you in a couple of days, after we clear the HUB.”

“What do you mean, show me?” I asked, jerking my attention to a zombie cluster on the front lawn of the huge HUB building.

“Hang on, let’s deal with this, first,” Lisa said.

She pulled a shotgun, but I decided to go with the AR-15. It was a superlight carbine version of the rifle and the semi-automatic quality of it made it easy to fire off a bunch of shots, one after the other, to mow down the zombies on the lawn in neat little rows of death and goo.

Lisa’s shotgun was an axe compared to my precise scalpel of a weapon, but it was just as effective and soon there were only bodies littering the lawn.

She handed me the machete from her back. “Make any end kills if we didn’t cleanly take them out,” she suggested. “You aren’t inoculated, so you want to make sure you don’t get ankle bites.”

I shivered at the reminder. I couldn’t take a chance with the serum until we knew more about the baby inside of me, but I sure knew that a zombie bite would make my day a lot worse… and a lot shorter since I doubted Lisa would risk taking me back to the lab to see if there were some kind of heroic actions to be taken to fix me.

With all that in mind, I swung as she passed by piles of zombies, slashing through soft, rotting skulls to sever brains of any corpse within snatching distance.

Better safe than zombie.

Finally we made our way through the zombie body fun run and up the stairs to the front door of the HUB.

“We had recon in here a couple of days ago,” Lisa whispered.

I blinked. “You mean reconnaissance?” 

“Just pretend you’re a soldier in this war, sweetheart,” Lisa said with a snort. “And yes. They presented a plan to clear from the top down. We can block the stairwells as we drop so that nothing flanks us and the entire building can be cleared this way.”

I shrugged. “Makes sense. What did
recon
say about numbers?”

Lisa smiled like I was learning or something. “Unknown on Floor 3, scattered on 2, pods on 1, ground and in the basement.”

“Shit, so two of us are going to clear all that?”

“Yeah, but we’re going to have help.” Lisa dug into her utility belt and brought out a grenade holster, filled with dangerous little bombs that made me want to run screaming back behind the fence rather than lose a hand or something from operator error.

“Um, if we blow up the building, we’re not going to be able to clear it, let alone use it.”

She rolled her eyes. “They aren’t to blow up the building, stupid. They contain serum. They’re basically gas bombs and they’re going to wipe out a bunch of these things if the testing is right.”

“
If
the testing is right?”

She huffed out a sound of frustration. “It’s worked on specimen, but this is our first field test. It’s going to work, Sarah.”

I stared at the grenades and my hand slipped to my stomach, almost against my will. Lisa watched the movement, recording it with an unreadable expression. Then she shrugged.

“I have a gas mask for you since we don’t know what it might do to your… zombie baby.”

I frowned. “You know, it’s one thing for Dave and I to refer to the kid as Little Zombie, Zombie Baby or whatever other nicknames we come up for it. It’s another for a bitchy stranger straight out of a bad fantasy movie to do it. So knock it off.”

She pursed her lips. “What part of me is from a fantasy movie?”

I pointed to her leather kick ass boots. “Um, exhibit A.”

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. But do you want the gas mask or what?”

“Yes,” I snatched it from her as she pulled it from her backpack. I settled it over my head and was immediately hot, uncomfortable and very aware that my peripheral vision was now for shit. “Um…”