Flip This Zombie (20 page)

Kevin glared at him. “I admit, I’ve done some testing using the head specimens in my lab. I developed a
sedative that uses the zombie virus itself to drive forward to the brain of the infected.”

I stared. “You use the zombie virus
on
zombies?”

He nodded. “It’s a remarkable agent—”

Dave interrupted him with a snort. “You
would
think so.”

Kevin ignored him, though his jaw tightened. “—it’s almost totally self-driven. It doesn’t require a beating heart to make its way to the brain.”

I blinked. “Th-That’s remarkable,” I said with a smile over Dave’s head at him.

He smiled back. “Thank you.”

Dave was less impressed. “Before you start sucking his dick over this wonderful invention, I have a question,
Doc
. How long have you had this miracle
serum
in your possession?”

I stared at Kevin. To my surprise he was going pale, his eyes wide and filled with something like guilt merged with intense and righteous anger.

“Well?” I asked, my voice as soft as Dave’s, though less accusatory.

“I came up with the formula about a month ago.”

“He had this
miracle
the entire time we’ve met with him and he never thought to offer it to us, even though we’re out there with our asses hanging out trying to snag him some monsters,” Dave snapped, turning on me like I needed convincing. “We could have avoided the whole accident today if we’d just had some of that shit on us.”

Dave was right, of course. But I clung to the hope that maybe it wasn’t some kind of nefarious thing that had kept the doctor from sharing his invention with us.

“Why
didn’t
you give it to us, Kevin?” I asked, trying
to ignore my throbbing head and sore body to concentrate on the very important answer.

He shrugged. “I hadn’t been able to test it on a true live specimen, just like the cure for the infection,” he explained with a sheepish shift. “I wasn’t certain it would work until the moment I injected your specimen out in the van. I certainly had no idea how long the drug would be effective or what was the proper dose.”

I looked at Dave. He was leaning on a piece of equipment in the room, just staring at the doctor. And although Barnes’s explanation made logical sense to me, Dave remained angry.

“Can you give us a minute?” I asked as I reached out to take David’s hand.

Kevin hesitated and then nodded as he backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. Once he was gone, I looked at my husband evenly.

“You okay?”

He shook off his angry glare to look at me with worry. “
Me? You’re
the one who lost consciousness.” He squeezed my fingers gently. “It scared the shit out of me, Sarah.”

I nodded. “Sorry, I’ll try not to do it again.”

When he smiled slightly, I continued, “You know, you can’t be so hard on the guy. I can understand not wanting to give us something that might not work and having us get hurt when we depended on it.”

Dave stared at me for a long moment before he shook my hand off and backed away a step. “Gotta defend him, eh Sarah?”

“No!” I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender mostly because I was too fucking tired and hurt to argue about this. “I mean, he
could
have told us and offered us
the opportunity to try the stuff out in the field. He
should
have. But come on. The guy was a lab rat before the outbreak, and now he hasn’t had human interaction for months. He isn’t so great at it if you haven’t noticed.”

Dave shrugged. “He seems to do just fine when it comes to
interacting
with you.”

I stared in total disbelief. “Is all this piss and vinegar because you’re
jealous
of Barnes? Are we on the fucking
Bachelor
now?”

He didn’t answer for a long time, long enough that the answer was pretty clear. It would have been kind of cute if his fury didn’t interfere with our mission and maybe even put our lives in danger.

“Do you remember the pattern that was painted or dyed into the fur of the guinea pigs?” Dave asked.

I blinked. The stupid concussion made me woozy and now my husband had apparently changed the very important subject that I didn’t consider closed by half.

“Huh?”

“In the lab when we first came here, did you happen to notice the pattern in the guinea pig fur?”

I tried to think. “Yeah, I guess. Something with some dots and a line, right?”

He nodded. Looking around, he moved closer and dropped his tone. “I noticed something today when I put the zombie down on the table. There was a brand or something with the same pattern on it waiting there for him.”

“Why are you whispering?” I whispered with a shake of my head.

“
He
might be listening,” Dave said, just above a breath, and motioned around the room wildly.

“The zombie?” I teased.

Dave glared at me. “The fucking doctor.”

I sat up a little straighter and was rewarded by a burst of pain through my skull.

“So what?” I snapped in reaction to the pain coupled with annoyance at Dave’s paranoia. “So he marks his test subjects, it’s probably how he keeps track of them. Dudes have done it on farms for years.” Oh wait, there weren’t farms anymore. “Or… they used to.”

Dave leaned in closer. “Okay, then why did that… that
bionic
zombie we saw yesterday have the same marking as Kevin’s guinea pigs?”

I stared. “What?”

“It was on his neck,” Dave said softly.

I wracked my scrambled brain. “Look, I don’t remember anything like that,” I said, but I found myself lowering my voice just like he was. Great, now he had me going all covert ops, too. “And if you noticed it yesterday, why not say anything?”

Dave’s lips thinned. “When I looked through the sight, I saw some kind of mark, Sarah. I’m not making it up. It just didn’t click with me what it was until I saw the brand here today and remembered the guinea pigs.”

I shook my head. “That’s crazy. Kevin has told us more than once that all his lab assistants were killed during the initial weeks of the outbreak. And he hasn’t had any live specimens to work with, that’s why he needs us to collect zombies for him. So why would a crazy, jacked-up mutant zombie be running around in the world with his mark on it?”

Dave ground his teeth. “Well, maybe he fucking
made
it, Sarah. Maybe he’s been making them all along. He
is
a mad scientist.”

I threw up my hands. “
Scientist
, Dave. That’s all. You
just don’t trust him because you’re jealous for some weird reason and because scientists are what started the outbreak. But that’s not his fault—”

He stared at me. “Do you
want
to be naïve or are you that badly injured?” he snapped. “I. Saw. The. Marking.”

I struggled for an explanation. “That thing was far away and seeing it freaked us all out. Are you sure you didn’t just imagine it?”

He backed away even farther, the chasm between us suddenly uncrossable. “I didn’t imagine it. I
saw
it.”

But I’d looked at that thing for a long time, too. And I
hadn’t
seen it. My head was too cloudy and pained to try to figure that one out.

“I don’t know,” I sighed as I rubbed my eyes. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense, Sarah,” he said, folding his arms and staring at me. “If only you pay attention.”

I opened my mouth for what I hoped would be a stinging retort when the door behind Dave opened and Kevin stepped back in.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wanted to check Sarah again,” he said with an apologetic smile.

Dave snorted. “I bet you do,” he snapped, but he stepped away regardless and let Kevin in between us.

He checked my eyes and took my pulse, his hands cool and clean against my skin. “Better now,” he reassured me as he stepped away. “But I’d give it a day or two before you start capturing zombies again. I have two specimens to work with in the interim.”

Dave’s jaw dropped open like it was on a hinge and he stared at Kevin blankly. “Wait, go back out and catch more zombies?”

Kevin nodded, his own expression just as confused as my husband’s. “Of course. I realize there was a little accident today and I can understand how that might throw you off, but I
do
hope you’ll continue to bring me infected things to work with.”

“You are fucking batshit crazy,” David roared, pushing forward.

He grabbed Kevin by the stark white lapel of his lab coat, smudging it with blood and sludge as he slammed him against the door and held him there.

“We
aren’t
going out again. I’m done. And she’s sure as hell done. We’re done.”

There was silence in the room for a long moment and then the sound. A sound I knew all too well. The sound of a Colt .45 being cocked between the two men.

And I knew for a fact that Dave wasn’t the one holding it.

I
edged over to the end of the bed and slowly found my feet. When I got up, I was greeted with an entire war’s worth of explosions of pain in my head and all through my body, but I fought through it. Oh, and also through the waves of nausea that came with it (you didn’t want to see beef jerky and breakfast bars come back up, especially
together
, I assure you) and managed to wedge myself between the two men. One thing was for sure, if they made me, I was going to puke on both of them just to teach them a lesson.

Jackasses.

“Stop it,” I said, placing a hand on the .45 Kevin held and turning it away from Dave and me. “Stop it
both
of you. You’re acting like schoolboys on a playground except the guns are real. Shooting each other will get us nowhere. Don’t forget who our enemy is.”

“I know exactly who the enemy is,” Dave growled behind me. “Mr. Comic Book Villain here. All you need is a thought bubble, asshole.”

I spun to face him. “
Stop
,” I insisted, grabbing his arms. “I know you think you’re right, but you are being crazy. And as much as I appreciate your protection, you
don’t
speak for me on this.”

Dave stopped glowering at Kevin and instead jolted his face down at me. “What?”

“You told him that
she
isn’t going out anymore. But you didn’t ask me what I want to do,” I said softly.

He stared at me for what seemed like forever, eyes wide and face pale, before he finally pushed my arms aside. “You can’t be serious.”

I looked at him and then at Kevin, who was smiling slightly, I suppose in support of what I was saying. Or maybe he was just a smug son of a bitch.

“I realize you two have wildly differing views on this, but I do think that what Kevin is working on could change our world,” I began.

Dave snorted. “Oh, I totally agree, Sarah. I’m sure all those bionic zombies will change everything once there are enough of them.”

I froze in my spot. I never thought he’d go straight at Kevin and accuse him of something so vile. Especially without more proof than a marking he thought he’d seen in the heat of a really crazy, unbelievable moment.

Kevin moved forward. “Bionic zombies?” he repeated, blinking behind his glasses. I noticed now that there were flecks of…
something
on them. “What are you talking about?”

“So your major at the University of Crazy was mad science and your minor was bad acting, right?” Dave asked.

I backed up to the bed and sat back down because my head was throbbing.

“Over the past few weeks we’ve heard reports of a new kind of zombie.” I sighed. “Yesterday we saw one for ourselves. They appear to be bigger, maybe more alert, stronger. I started calling them bionics.”

Kevin drew back, but after a moment he nodded. “Bionics. And
you
think I created them?”

The question was directed toward Dave.

My husband folded his arms. “I’m pretty fucking certain, actually. Hell, maybe that’s why you want us to bring all these zombies to you. Maybe you’re making your own little souped-up army.”