Praise for Married with Zombies

"…Fun, original and oh so brainy." --Rachel Gibson, NYT bestselling author

"An entertaining journey through an apocalyptic landscape of relationship issues, pet peeves, and zombies. Make sure to pack your shotgun and emotional baggage." --S.G. Browne, author of Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament

"Gory. Sarcastic. Zany. Pitch-perfect for the zombie fan." --Mario Acevedo, author of Werewolf Smackdown

“Married with Zombies is super fast-paced, crazy funny, and even a little romantic. (Not in a hot, steamy zombie sex way… but in a cute, romantic comedy way!) This is an absolute must read for everyone! I had never read a zombie book before this one, I figured that so wasn’t my thing… Um, it is. Jesse Petersen will make you an instant fan of all things zombie!” --The Bookish Brunette

“Overall, I think that this book is zombie-licious! There was action, suspense, and relationship tension with a humorous angle.  David and Sarah’s journey offers several different reactions to the crisis that gives a sense of realism to the fantasy. I would recommend adding this book to your zombie apocalypse preparation kit.” --Dark Faerie Tales

Other books in the Living with the Dead series:

Married with Zombies

Flip this Zombie

Eat Slay Love

THE ZOMBIE WHISPERER

By Jesse Petersen

THE ZOMBIE WHISPERER

Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Petersen

All Rights Reserved

EBook Edition by IGLA

27 West 24th Street, Suite 700B

New York, NY 10010

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.  Any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental

Chapter One

Bringing Up Zombie

We call it Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana. Okay, I call it Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana and Dave calls is by its real name, Tranquil Springs. It sounds nice doesn’t it? Like a bit of a throw-back to a fifties utopia that never actually existed. Sometimes I found myself looking for the milk man to deliver fresh to our door.

Of course, he’d be a zombie, but whatever.

The name was part of why we ended up landing here after roaming around through Wyoming and then up to Montana. Dave said that a place called Tranquil Springs just couldn’t have zombies.

He was right in some respects. It was the very end of winter here. April, to be precise. I know that’s Spring to most people, but up in the high elevations we still have freezing temps and snow that melts off as it gets up into the forties during the day.  And then it spits back up in storms at night to replenish the ground cover.

Just for your information, though, some of the books written before the zombie fiasco were right. Zombies don’t really care for snow. It makes them sluggish and easier to kill and that means less of them in this tiny ghost town. So, yay us and yay for winter. I hated shoveling, but I hated zombies even more.

The door to our rambling three-bedroom ranch house opened and Dave pushed in, carrying a bunch of firewood. More than he should have been able to carry, for sure. But then, Dave wasn’t really normal anymore. I was coming to accept that. I even liked some of the benefits of his “special powers”. Super strength came in really handy a lot of days.

“This will keep us going all night and into the morning,” he said as he set the logs into the wood box next to the big fireplace in the living room one by one. The box was built into the wall and made life a lot easier. The rich people who had built this place really thought of everything.

Of course, we’d still found them roaming around undead in the paddock where the horses used to live when we got here a couple of months ago. Slam-Blam-Thank-You-Ma’am and we’d claimed ownership to their little piece of mountain heaven.

Yes, sadly, it was as easy as that for us nowadays. Zombies were just… a part of life now. An annoyance like mosquitos.

Really badass mosquitos that sometimes swarmed your car and tried to eat you. But that was another story entirely.

“Um, hello?” Dave said as he flopped down next to me on the couch and picked up the book he’d been reading before he went for more firewood.

I shook my head. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”

He put the bookmark back between the pages and looked at me with that same sweet and concerned expression he always had nowadays. Like he knew something I didn’t know. He was in the zombie club now, and I felt it.

But I had a secret, too.

“So what are those deep thoughts, Sarah?” he asked. “Because I can see you’re gnawing on something.”

I arched a brow, a move I had been working on for months. It’s funny how you get obsessed on some things when you don’t have bad reality television anymore… just a bad reality.

“So is reading minds a new zombie power?” I asked, probably a little more sarcastically than I should have.

He pursed his lips. “Nope. Just know you, that’s all.”

“Yeah, you do,” I admitted and settled my head back against the rich, smooth leather of the couch. “Okay, it’s just that we’ve been here in Montana for a while now and it’s been pretty nice. Just a few zombies here and there, but you found that almanac and you know that a real thaw is coming within the next couple of weeks. And you know that means they’re going to be on the move again. So do we stay here, where we have a trek to get to supplies?”

He stared at me with this ‘what the hell’ expression I still wasn’t particularly fond of. “What do you mean a trek? The people who lived here before the outbreak were at least semi-prepared for being locked down. Their pantry has some good basics that we can stretch and we can add to that with the game in them there hills.” He pointed out the window to the snowy mountain in the not-so-distance. “We could probably stay here a year or more before we’d really have to think about our next move. Who knows what could happen before that point.”

I bit the inside of my mouth. “A year? Jeez, David, I didn’t think we’d hang out that long in any one place ever again.”

As I got up and started pacing around in front of the fire, he watched me, obviously confused by my attitude.

“What do you mean? Do you have somewhere to be?”

I glared at him briefly. “Yes, so many appointments in my day planner, you know.”

He shrugged at my sarcasm. “So do you really want to start rambling down the dangerous highway, bumping into crazies and zombie pods? Do you really want to resort to clearing houses one by one to find old Campbell’s soup, but only in flavors you don’t like and never knowing where we’re going to sleep at night?”

I swallowed. When he put it that way, it sounded stupid. It was stupid. But despite all that… I kind of liked the road. Despite every horrible thing he’d just described, the apocalypse had brought out something adventurous and free-spirited in me. My own little zombie benefit without zombie side-effect.

“We figured out how to not get a divorce, found a cure for zombie-ism and quite possibly saved the world when we were roaming around aimlessly on the road, so it wasn’t all bad,” I pointed out.

He stared at me for a minute and then he grinned. He was cute, I just want to say that.

“Okay, okay, I will grant you that point,” he said with a shrug.

I smiled in triumph. “Thank you.”

Apparently he wasn’t done, though. “But it’s been a few months since we ‘saved the world’ by turning over the cure across the border and we haven’t seen any benefit from it. Not a soldier or a flier dropped to say, ‘we’re coming to get you’ or anything. Just saying, we may have fallen short on that save the world part.”

I thought about that for a minute and tried not to dwell too long on my parents and our friends who had been left behind the wall. We’d last seen them being chased by government agents who were more than ready to kill them. If the world hadn’t been saved, that left some pretty heavy implications for them and their safety.

“Maybe that means we should try again,” I suggested.

He rolled his eyes and pushed to his feet to join me, probably hug me, which I could use at that point with all those dark thoughts in my head. But before he could, there was a shrill beep, beep, beep that filled the air.

I jerked to attention. “Perimeter alarms!”

Dave had set up some motion detector perimeter alarms up to a generator when we first got here. They were the only electric-driven thing we had left and sometimes I just stared at the little green light on the speaker that alerted us, mesmerized by power-driven color. Now they were going crazy, beeping one after another, flashing red madness.

Dave shook his head and moved for the arsenal of guns we had in every room of the house. He pulled the gun case in the living room open and started yanking out weapons. He tossed a few to me and we started loading.

“All of them are alerting,” he muttered, almost more to himself than to me. “All seven alarms. It means…”

I looked out the big picture window with the view of the mountain in the distance. It also currently provided me a great view of a shit ton of zombies roaming their way onto the property all the way across the snowy, muddy lawn.

“It means there are a lot,” I said, pointing at my view. “See?”

Dave slammed the action on the shotgun in his hands shut and let out a stream of very creative cursing. “What do you think? Twenty?”

“Twenty-five,” I said as I did quick math in my head.

“I guess Spring has Sprung.”

“Aw, the zombies are blooming early,” I agreed.

He laughed, but then he gave me the ‘let the grown-ups talk’ look again. “Um, I should probably do this myself.”

I stifled the urge to roll my eyes. That was something I was working on, the eye rolling, because I’d read in a self-help book, (yes, I still read self-help books), that it could undermine a relationship. Didn’t really want to do that with Dave, not anymore. Even if he did drive me slightly crazy every once in a while.

I drew in a deep breath, tried to find my center and said, “David, sweetheart, we’ve talked about this.”

He nodded. “I know. And it’s nothing to do with you being a badass. You are a badass. It’s just that they don’t come after me. I can make the clean kills without endangering myself.”

It made sense, I know! With Dave’s zombie benefits, the other zombies didn’t even acknowledge him. Versus if I went out there, they’d come after me in snarling, drooling, biting, clawing droves. But still… we’d been fighting zombies together forever so it sucked to suddenly be benched over and over again like a crappy quarterback who had outlived his prime.

That was football, right? I’d kind of forgotten already.

I shook my head. “At least let me go up on the roof and snipe.”

He seemed to ponder that option for a minute. A minute too long, really, and then he waved me off like he was granting me some wonderful opportunity.

“Fine, fine if you want to,” he said. “Just be careful. And if anything gets weird, duck inside and lock the doors.”

“I’ll go straight to the safe room,” I promised.

A lie. If shit went down I would stand at the front door and kill everything in sight until my last breath left my lungs. Well, I thought I would. Maybe I wouldn’t anymore.

I didn’t get to ponder that thought, though. He gave me a quick kiss before he slung his weapons, including a machete, into places where he could easily reach them and headed out the front door.

I turned toward the stairs that led to the loft space and the exit we’d rigged to get up on the roof when we got here. Dave had even built a platform for us to sit on for zombie killing… and star gazing. No lights, at least on the western half of the country, really did lead to amazing stars when the nights were clear and cold.

I ducked out onto the steps outside the master bedroom window and climbed up onto the roof. It was slanted and slick, but I found my footing carefully and got myself onto the roof deck with little trouble. I set up my rifle on the sandbag rests Dave and I had placed there and arranged my ammo into easily accessible placements on the table beside me. Dave wasn’t in view yet and I waited, wanting to be extra certain I wouldn’t be catching him in crossfire. A lot of things couldn’t kill him anymore, but we were pretty sure a bullet to the brain would do it. Just like it did to all his zombie cousins.

In that brief moment, I looked up. No stars now, being that it was late afternoon. In fact the only things to look at in the sky were the birds flocking away from the zombies. Funny how their herds were the same. Running from predators.

Except… zombies didn’t have predators. And we’d never seen so many before, not around here anyway. What were they running from?

I heard a sharp whistle from below and straightened up. Our two-way radios had died a month before and we hadn’t been able to get replacement batteries yet, so that sharp whistle was Dave’s signal that he was in position, out of the way so I could snipe at my leisure.

I lined up my sights and carefully squeezed off the first shot. The rifle jerked back with the explosion of gunpowder rocketing the bullet into flight. In my sight I saw two zombies fall.

Dave’s woot echoed from below me and I grinned despite my annoyance that he wouldn’t let me any closer to the action than this. I fired again, shot after shot, dropping the zombies as they lurched closer and closer. A few of the ones near the front looked up and I could tell they had sniffed me out. I was their food source and now they were hunting me as much as I was hunting them. That fact made the air around me shift, the tension ratcheting up.

Funny how the fear of death never went away. It faded, but it lingered, like a smell you couldn’t get rid of in the kitchen, no matter how many times you sprayed the garbage can with air freshener.

My hands shook just a little, but it didn’t matter. Dave walked out from the porch at that moment. I ceased firing as I watched him move into the remaining crowd of ten or so zombies. They ignored him, as always. They saw him as one of them now. Or didn’t see him at all. Still, at night I dreamed of them one day realizing what he was. Of them tearing him apart into little shreds during one of these strange walkabouts he did with them.

I shivered and raised the rifle again, sighting in on a zombie at the far edge of the fray so that I wouldn’t be shooting at my husband. I dropped him and reloaded quickly, always keeping my eye on the crowd. Dave had pushed and herded them into a little group now. I stared at them, milling around where he had put them. Scattering but then turning back into the center when he nudged them.

He stepped back and started firing off the shotgun. The spraying blast dropped zombies in piles, three or more at a time until finally all them had stopped writhing, stopped groaning, stopped slashing, stopped moving.

I sighed and he looked up at me with a thumbs up. “Looks like we’re good,” he said.

I nodded. “I’ll come down to help you clean up.”

He hesitated and I could see he didn’t want me to. God, it was like he didn’t want me to come outside at all. But I wasn’t going to wait for him to deny me my right to help. I ducked inside and locked the window. I left the rifle downstairs, but tucked a handgun into my waistband (like a badass from some TV show) and headed outside into the brisk spring air.

Dave was already hauling zombie bodies into the big burn pile we’d created. Once a week or so, we’d burn what we’d killed. Normally it was one or two zombies, tops. This week would be a record for our time in Montana.

“So, did you notice those birds?” I asked as I caught a zombie under the armpits and dragged her toward the pile out back. She was wearing the remnants of a cop uniform, though her weapon was long gone. She still had a badge on her waistband, though. It was tarnished.

“Birds?” Dave asked, carrying three zombies over his shoulder like they were made of paper. “No.”

“They were flying away from something. They came from the same directions as the zombies did.” I looked up at the now-empty sky. “It made me think about how they run from predators together.”

“Okay,” he said as he hoisted the bodies onto the pile and we walked back to the front and the rest of our work. “So what?”

“Doesn’t it seem weird to you that after months here we get a pod of zombies roaming into our yard? Together? All coming from the same direction?” I asked as I reached for another zombie body.

He didn’t do the same, but just stared at me. “Are you saying they were herded here?”

I straightened up and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What could herd them, Sarah?” he asked, voice filled with incredulity.

I didn’t answer because at that moment I heard something. Faint. A sound that seemed oh-so-familiar, yet I couldn’t place it immediately.

“Sarah?” he repeated, his voice annoyed.

I raised my hand. “Shush, listen!”

He pursed his lips, but kept his mouth shut as he tilted his head and listened. The stillness was broken by a sound, growing louder by the moment. A sound whose name was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t find it in my post-apocalyptic mind.

Dave could. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “It’s a helicopter, Sarah!” he screamed as the noise got unbearably loud. “Holy fuckballs, it’s a helicopter!”

Chapter Two

What to Expect When You’re Expecting… Or Not Expecting… Zombies

“There aren’t any planes, there aren’t any helicopters,” I kept repeating, even as we watched a helicopter rise up over the tree ridge. It came right for us like it was real and everything. “It’s not possible,” I whispered.

“Open your eyes,” Dave said as he pulled me back toward the house. “They’re coming right now, Sarah. And they’re probably government.”

My heart stopped. It felt like it stopped anyway. Like I was frozen as I stared at the machine coming toward us. A harbinger of death and pain.

“Get inside and load every gun we have,” I ordered as I spun for the doors.

He grabbed my arm and pulled me back to his side. “What are you going to do? Shoot them?”

“Yes?” I squeaked, but it came out as a question, not a statement. It sounded super absurd, too, once it was said out loud.

He shook his head. “We’re going to be outnumbered if it’s the government in that helicopter. And unlike zombies, they fight back, and not just with teeth. They’ll have guns and tranquilizers and fucking grenades if they feel like being real bitches about this. We can’t beat them if they’ve found us, if they’ve come for us.”

“For you,” I corrected him as tears filled my eyes. “They’ve come for you if they’ve come for us.”

The government had found out about Dave’s powers when we came to Illinois to bring the cure to the border. They’d held him, albeit briefly, and taken blood. We knew they would want him after that. After they saw what he was. Hell, I think he was what they were trying to make in the first place, back in their awful laboratory on U-Dub campus: a super soldier. The only problem they would have had with David was that he still had free will. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t take him, though.

I just never thought they’d find us in the middle of Montana where we never interacted with anyone, never made friends, never made a peep like all the big, loud peeps we’d been making since the apocalypse rushed down on us and changed everything we ever wanted or dreamed.

Yet now there was a sleek, black helicopter touching down in our front yard. As it did so, I looked closer. There were bullet holes in the metal. The windshield was cracked. There were two huge dents in the doors. Wherever the thing had come from, maintenance wasn’t the top priority.

“How far can a helicopter fly?” I asked. “I mean, not all the way from the Midwest Wall, right?”

Dave jerked his gaze at me, then back to our uninvited guests. “No… no, it couldn’t. At least most of them would need to refuel.”

“So where did it come from?” I asked as the door slid open. I shielded my eyes from the late afternoon sunshine and stared as a woman stepped from the helicopter.

For a moment, I couldn’t quite focus on her face. Everything was just so discombobulated. But then I started seeing her, really seeing her, and I staggered backward, grabbing for Dave’s arm, tugging at his shirt.

“Dave, it’s… it’s…”

“Nicole Nessing,” he breathed as the former reporter and our friend moved toward us with a big grin on her face. Behind her, another figure got out of the chopper and the appearance of this one put me straight down on my ass in the snow.

“And The Kid,” I murmured. “R-Robbie!”

Two people we’d encountered since the outbreak. Two people who had no relationship to each other except for a six degrees of separation thing through us. Two people I’d never thought I’d see again since Nicole had disappeared through the wall with the cure in Illinois and Robbie had been left in an underground lab in Phoenix, Arizona.

But here they were, at my house, with a helicopter. I turned my head and promptly puked up my lunch in the snow.

#

I stared in the mirror through the dim light as afternoon began to fade to evening. I was pale and clammy, but at least I hadn’t puked again. I splashed some water on my face and felt immediately better. At least about the clammy thing. The other stuff… well, I wasn’t sure.

I loved Nicole and The Kid with all my heart, I really did. We’d all been through hell and back, albeit in separate instances, but that didn’t mean I was ready to blindly trust them. The apocalypse did weird shit to people and I didn’t like that they a) had shown up here together and b) they had a fucking helicopter.

Worse, Dave didn’t seem to have any of those hesitations. He’d just started hugging people even as I excused myself and rushed in to brush my teeth before anyone had to smell my stanky puke breath.

With a shake of my head, I turned toward the door and the people awaiting me in the living room. I would be cool and polite and wait on any judgments until I’d heard Nicole and The Kid talk.

Except as I moved into the living room and saw Nicole standing there, my eyes welled with tears and I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing her for a hug. She was laugh-crying. Craughing, I guess, and I realized I was, too.

“You look so good,” Nicole said close to my ear. “You’ve put on some weight.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I said as I leaned back to look at her.

She was wearing a leather coat, clean black jeans and motorcycle boots. Bad. Ass.

“So do you,” I said.

She stepped away and left room for The Kid. At twelve years old, he had already seen more than anyone ever should. His Dad, a true mad scientist, had signed him up for a war and Robbie had tricked us into helping them for a long time. But in the end, he had taken our side. Saved us. But…

I reached out to him and he hugged me, though he was awkward about it, like only a tween could be. When he stepped back, he was blushing furiously.

“The last time we saw you, you were in that lab of your Dad’s making serum for the cure,” I said as a ruffled his blond hair affectionately. “What happened with that?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” he said with a sigh.

I glanced at Dave and he shrugged. “I told them to wait until you got here. I think we need to hear this together.”

I smiled at him and motioned for the couch. Once we were all sitting, I leaned forward, arms draped across my knees. “So talk. First, are my parents okay?”

As Dave reached over to take my hand, Nicole smiled. “Yes, John and Molly are fine. They’re still running the resistance over the wall and they’re making a lot of progress.”

My eyes narrowed. “But?” I encouraged.

Nicole’s smile fell. “Okay, so after we got through the wall, all we could do was run for a long time. The government was relentless, trying to get to us. They cleared hideouts, they made arrests and put innocent people in prison and on this awful reality show that is basically a death sentence.”

I shook my head. “Shit.”

Nicole nodded. “But somehow your parents managed to get everyone to a safe haven. Plus…” She cleared her throat. “The agents had more to deal with than us pretty soon. There was an incident at a zoo over the wall.”

“At a zoo?” Dave repeated.

“Yeah, they were displaying zombies,” Nicole wrinkled her nose in disgust. “And it backfired on them. Big time. The point is, they started having outbreaks and the system over there is starting to breakdown. Not only is the zombie outbreak knocking at their door, but thanks to your parents, the underground reports are starting to go more mainstream. People are beginning to realize that they’re being lied to. They’re rising up.”

My eyes felt so wide that I worried they might actually fall out of the sockets. “I-wow,” I stammered, unable to think of anything more coherent.

“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.”

I broke the gaze. Yeah, he didn’t know the half of it.

I searched my mind for any final excuse besides the one I didn’t want to say out loud.

“We only barely escaped Seattle,” I tried. “Do you really want to risk going back?”

“We barely escaped, but only because we kind of sucked at zombie hunting then,” he said, touching my cheek with unexpected gentleness. “We’ve come a long way from there, haven’t we?”

He wasn’t asking me about zombie hunting anymore. And I wasn’t talking about it either when I said, “Yeah, we have.”

Nicole rolled her eyes. “Before you two go find a room, does that mean you’re coming with us?”

Dave nodded. “Yes.”

I tensed. So that was it. He was choosing for us, and I completely understood why. And yet I wanted to turn on him and hit him with my bitchy Sarah best. I wanted to rip into him like we were back to a year ago before this started and we were on the verge of breakup.

If this was what Seattle was going to bring out in me, I was so not stoked.

“Sarah, you’re with us too?” Nicole asked. Some part of me appreciated that she at least asked me for my consent.

I sighed. “Yeah, you know where he goes, I go. And he’s determined to save the world or whatever.”

The Kid let out a woot that echoed in the room and Nicole’s grin was almost payment enough for what we were about to do. Ok, it wasn’t at all close, but it was a start.

“So what’s our next step?” Dave asked.

Nicole glanced outside. “It’s getting dark and it’s not safe to fly at night. There are no lights to guide us and the attraction for zombies and… other interested parties is too much. We’ll stay here tonight and gather up whatever supplies you have.”

“How are we going to get to Seattle on a helicopter anyway?” I asked. “Do you have gas stops?”

“No, we’re going to an airstrip not too far from here and switching to a small engine plane,” Nicole explained. “That will take us in to Seattle.”

I bit my lip. No more arguments seemed necessary. I had actually run out of things to say, which had to be a record.

“Well, get your pilot to come inside,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll warm up some homemade chili since we’re going to have to eat it before we go anyway. We have a lot of packing to do.”

“Homemade? Really? You have homemade chili?” I heard The Kid repeat as I headed for the kitchen.

“With venison,” Dave said with an enthusiastic nod.

I couldn’t manage a smile at how excited and childlike the two of them sounded at the prospect of a meal that had long ago gone the way of the dodo. I could only think about what we were about to do, and know how very badly it could turn out.

#

The helicopter jolted as we eased in for a touchdown at the Billings airport the next morning. I clutched my half-full airsick bag and groaned as the remnants of my breakfast rolled in my stomach. As much as anything, it just sucked to have wasted the food.

“You okay?” Dave asked as our pilot Brian slid the doors open and hopped out ahead of us.

“I’m fine,” I reassured him as I tossed the bag off toward the bushes next to the airstrip. “It’s just been a while since I was in the air in anything, I guess. And it certainly wasn’t a helicopter.”

“It’s common,” Brian said as he motioned us toward the small plane parked on the tarmac that would take us the rest of the way to Seattle. “Helicopters fly differently, lots of people puke in them.”

I smiled at his retreating back, appreciative of his attempt to make me feel better, even if it was delivered in short, gruff tones. He seemed like a nice guy, but something about him made me uneasy. Maybe the fact that he talked and moved like military, even though The Kid and Nicole kept telling me he could be trusted.

We moved across the field toward the plane and Brian opened up the door with a hook that had been left on the tarmac, probably when they landed.

“It will take me a few minutes to get the systems up and ready,” he explained. “Meanwhile, cover me.”

I sighed as I pulled my pistol. Of course there were zombies here. There were freaking zombies everywhere.

“Toward the terminal,” Nicole said, the picture of calm.

I turned in the direction of the big terminal building and sure enough, there was a zombie, still dressed in the remnants of his pilot’s uniform, staggering toward us. His moans and groans echoed in the still, cool air.

Nicole leveled her pistol on him, but Dave placed a hand on the barrel.

“Wait,” he murmured. “If we shoot, it will only bring more of them. Let me deal with it.”

She shrugged as he pulled the machete from the sling I’d made for him a month or two back (etsy had nothing on me). He walked toward the thing, no hesitation, no worry. The pilot zombie didn’t care, of course. He didn’t even seem to notice Dave as he sliced with the blade in one, smooth motion.

The zombie held still for a moment, and then slowly, comically, his head rolled back away from his body and hit the cracking tarmac below him. His body hit the same ground shortly thereafter and he twitched once before he lay still.

As Dave turned back and started toward us, The Kid took three steps back. Dave looked at him as he reached us.

“What?”

“So that’s what it looks like,” Robbie whispered.

Dave walked toward him. “Hey-”

But before he could finish, Robbie sidestepped him. “Just… don’t touch.”

I spun on the boy. “Look, he isn’t going to hurt you, okay? You know that. You also knew what was going on with him before you came here. That’s why you came here in the first place, right?”

“Yeah, I just didn’t know what it would look like. I’m going to check on Brian,” The Kid said with a shiver before he ducked into the plane.

Nicole and I looked at Dave. He was pale and his frown was deep as he stared up where the kid had gone into the plane.

“It’s okay,” I tried to comfort him, but he didn’t react.

“And he knows what’s going on,” Dave muttered, almost more to himself than to us. “He knows what I am and why I am this way and he still backs away like I’m a monster. Think about what other people will do, even if we do save the world.”

Nicole shrugged. “We’ll just start a campaign or something. Zombie-People are People Too. We’ll get awesome videos on YouTube. It will be fine. Now come on, looks like Brian is starting the engines.”

She climbed up into the plane and Dave and I followed. But as he closed the door and latched it, I could see he didn’t feel any better.

The trip didn’t help either. On a small plane, we were talking a five hour trip. And me without my Kindle or my Angry Birds. Of course, there were other things to keep us entertained. Like the way The Kid kept watching Dave out of the corner of his eye as if he might zombie out at any moment. Or like the view out the window.

Over Yellowstone, we saw great zombie herds half-dressed in their summer clothes, roaming amongst the buffalo in the heavy snow. In Northern Idaho, it was a still-smoldering city that greeted us.

It was weird. We knew the zombies were down there. We fought them all the time. We knew the cities had burned, had been bombed, we’d been witness to that too. But from the air, it was worse. It was stark proof that our universe had been materially changed. It was stark proof that even if we ‘saved’ the world, it would never be the same again.

Dave shut his eyes and refused to look after a certain point, but I kept staring, soaking every bit of carnage in as we moved closer and closer to Seattle.

And when we reached it?

“Oh my God, David,” I murmured, grabbing his jacket sleeve to force him to look out the window.

We came in from a northern approach, flying directly over the city in a route the National Guard would have once shot us down because of. Thanks to Brian, we had the best view anyone had ever had of what happened here less than a year ago. A year that felt like a lifetime.

Many of the downtown high-rises that had once surged into the cloudy sky had been burned all the way to the street by the bombings. Others were partially demolished. The few that remained were nothing more than skeletal remnants of a life we’d once lived. The glass was broken out of them, they listed to the left or right from impact.

Even the Space Needle, a once proud vision of the future in the 1962 World’s Fair, was obliterated. The top part of the tower, the swirling, space-like disk, had broken off and the column of metal that once held it was bent over in half, teetering gingerly on God knew how little metal.

“Jesus,” Dave breathed as he leaned over my shoulder to look. “It’s all gone.”

“They bombed Seattle by the end of the first couple of days,” Brian said around his headset. “Downtown was hit the worst. We’ll be landing at Boeing Field, it’s closer than the old airport. From there we’ll take a helicopter. You’ll see that some of the areas outside of downtown weren’t hit as hard.”

I suppose it was meant to make us feel better. It really didn’t. I reached out to take Dave’s hand and we were silent for the rest of the journey.

Chapter Four

Spare the Shotgun, Spoil the Zombie

Less than an hour after our arrival in the city we had fled the summer before, the helicopter landed in the middle of what students used to call Red Square on the campus of University of Washington. They’d used red bricks when they built it, hence the name. Although during the outbreak, where this had been ground zero of the attack, news reports had shown it running red with something else.

But now, surprisingly, it was pretty free of any remnants of the zombie outbreak. The winter rains had washed the brick clean and someone had tidied up the bodies over the months.

Dave reached up to help me down from the helicopter as Brian cut the engines and did whatever pilot-y things were necessary. I stood next to The Kid and Nicole and Dave and looked at the campus. Aside from the emptiness and a few broken windows here and there, it didn’t look much different than it had when I attended UW years ago.

“They didn’t bomb here?” I asked in wonder as I stared at mostly pristine buildings, including the big library in the square. It hadn’t even been touched.

“No,” Nicole said as she motioned us to follow her. “I don’t know what other experiments were going on here under the guise of university projects, but judging from some of the things we’ve heard since our arrival, disturbing them was apparently seen as a bad thing to do.”

“Something worse than zombies?” Dave asked in disbelief.

Nicole shrugged and I shook my head. “Awesome.”

She led us through the winding paths of the campus, but I noticed she didn’t have a gun out (unlike me, Ms. Always Prepared). She wasn’t moving like she was worried about stray zombies or even looters, either.

“So what’s up with the nonchalance?” I asked as I moved to walk beside her. “Are you trying to get bitten to become a test subject?”

She half-grinned at me. “No, but man, that would be a story to write, wouldn’t it? Zombie outbreak from the point of view of someone freshly bitten? Pulitzer!”

“The Pulitzer doesn’t even exist anymore, numnuts,” The Kid muttered from behind us.

Nicole ignored him and continued, “Anyway, I don’t have to worry about zombies here.”

“Why?” I asked. “And how? Oh, and, um, are you crazy? We have to worry about zombies everywhere.”

Nicole stopped and motioned around them. “Hear how quiet the campus is?”

I stopped too and listened. “Yeah? So? Like eighty percent or more of the population was wiped out. That will make it pretty quiet.”

“But no zombie sounds either?” She lifted a brow. “That’s because they’re outside the fence.”

“The fence?” I repeated.

“There’s a big fence that surrounds a portion of the campus now. It was put up by the military forces that were left over after the bombings to create a safe base, I guess, since it wasn’t about to contain the zombies by the time they built it. But the result is… well, it was pretty easy to clean out the few left within the perimeter and take over. We can even expand as we clear the buildings.”

“Okay,” I said, still totally uncertain. I mean, a fence? Really? That was going to be our big savior here, some chicken wire? “But don’t you think you might get breaches?”

“There are people here whose jobs it is just to walk the line, checking for weak spots. And the snipers help.”

Dave caught up to us and he looked as confused by all this as I was. Good, because I liked it better when we were on the same page.

“Snipers? Perimeter checks? That sounds like a military base sort of thing,” he said. “Are they still here?”

We turned a corner and there was a big building just across the walkway. In front of it were a couple of guys dressed in full military regalia and carrying machine guns.

“Oh shit,” Dave said and started staggering back.

Out of pure instinct, I threw myself in front of him as we both skittered away like crabs in a tank. Except just like crabs, there was nowhere to go and we were going to end up cooked.

“Hey, hey,” Nicole said, following us. “It’s okay.”

“How can it be okay?” Dave snapped. “The fucking military is fucking going to fucking make me into a fucking pincushion right before they dissect my brain.”

“Wow, so many f-bombs, babe,” I said. “Nice. And Dave is right. How can military be okay?”

“They were here when we got here,” The Kid explained. “But they weren’t affiliated with anything anymore. The government abandoned them. They’re just survivors like us.”

I eyed the men, who were watching us now with interest. Yeah, they were survivors, but we’d encountered plenty of survivors with ulterior motives before. Cults, separatists, Nicole and Robbie, at different points… the list went on and on. So I wasn’t ready to just run up and start handing out the hugs.

“You sold us out before,” I said, looking from one of them to the other. “Both of you sold us out for various reasons. So how do I know we’re not going to go in there and find General Asshole waiting to take David away?”

Nicole’s gaze got all hurt, but Robbie seemed less emotional about the whole thing. “Selling you out was so six months ago,” he said with a shrug. “Live in the now.”

Dave rolled his eyes. “Encouraging.”

Nicole sighed. “If we’re selling you out, you’re already screwed, aren’t you?” she asked. “I mean, you’re stuck within the perimeter of the campus, behind a fence that’s patrolled by soldiers. You could run, but you wouldn’t get away.”

“This is not inspiring my trust, Nicole,” I said as my breath became short with just the images she was creating.

“I told you, we’re on your side, we’re not selling you out, we’re not working as part of some government conspiracy,” she continued. “And since you don’t exactly have a lot of other options, why don’t you just come inside and let me prove it to you?”

I shot Dave a look and for a minute we held eyes. All this awesome unspoken communication went between us and finally he shrugged. The shrug told me everything.

“Okay, why not?” I said, reaching out to thread my hand through the crook of his elbow.

We followed Nicole and The Kid up to the door. The two military guys didn’t make any moves. One actually smiled at us as we went through the door. A good sign, but I didn’t put my guard down.

The building still smelled like school. That dusty, sort of wet scent that filled lots of older Seattle buildings mixed with dust from chalk boards and musty books. Nicole led us through the hallways and down a flight of stairs to a big, heavy door. There was a desk beside it and a series of electrical locks next to it that had been busted out.

“Nice security system,” Dave muttered.

“Once upon a time, it was,” The Kid said as he pulled the door open and motioned us inside. “But it didn’t really matter, did it? They still all got slaughtered and zombie-fied before it was done.”

“Thanks, that’s great,” I said, sarcasm my refuge from the massive freak-out I was trying to hold in.

He laughed as he took us down another hallway, but this one was lit.

“Generators?” Dave asked.

The Kid nodded. “Yeah, they run all day, we shut them down at night except for a couple that run refrigerated units. To conserve resources, we have a shower schedule for the people on our team. We’ll put you guys on it, too.”

I frowned. In Montana, we’d never had to schedule showers. We had a great system for heating water, we could eat and shit and whatever when we felt like it without having to raise our hands and ask for permission.

This felt like camp life all over again. Only with machine gun-wielding soldiers. Of course, they hadn’t taken our guns away… yet. So that was something.

“Are you living in the university dorms?” I asked.

“No, they’re pretty far flung from this part of campus and it seems like a risk, so we converted the classrooms above with salvaged dorm furniture. The shower was an emergency unit here in the lab. We like to keep everyone close for the safety of our group.”

“Or for monitoring?” I asked, still not completely sure if I could trust anyone in the room but Dave.

The Kid smiled. “Sarah, you never change.”

He opened the door at the end of the hallway and revealed a huge laboratory. As he stepped in, his grin doubled. “And this is it.”

“This is what?” Dave asked, staring at the brightly lit room, the back labs we could see through huge windows, the bustling people who looked up as we entered, almost in awe of us.

“Well, it’s my lab,” The Kid explained. “But it’s also where it all began. This is the lab where they invented the virus. Seems only fair that it’s the lab where we wipe it out.”

I staggered as the blood rushed to my head. This was the very lab where the outbreak had started?

“Hey, you okay?” Dave asked as he grabbed for a chair from one of the desks in the lab. He pushed me into it gently. “Put your head between your knees and breathe until you don’t feel woozy anymore.”

I probably would have argued, except for that wanting to puke and pass out thing. After a few moments, both feelings passed and I sat up straighter.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “It’s just a lot to digest.”

It was more than that, but that was the easiest explanation at the moment. Dave patted my arm gently and looked around.

“So everyone is staring at us,” he said, loud enough that the lab could hear. “I guess… hi?”

I looked up and he was right, there were at least ten people in the lab and they were all staring. I slowly stood up, ready to fight if I had to.

“Yes, sorry, let me introduce you to some of our key players,” The Kid said, motioning us to follow him. “You’ll meet everyone eventually, but I think there are a few people you’ll especially want to see.”

We weaved our way through the lab toward a back room. When Robbie opened the door, my eyes went wide.

“Oh my God, Josh and Drea?” I burst out as I hurried toward our old friends from Phoenix. Drea enveloped me in a hug first as Josh shook hands with Dave.

When Drea let me go, she turned to The Kid with a smile and a very motherly hug that he responded to with no hesitation. “Great work, buddy. You said you’d get them and you did.”

“So you guys are all still together?” I said, rather stupidly, since it was pretty obvious.

“You said to watch out for The Kid and we did,” Josh said, ruffling the boy’s hair as a greeting. “When the opportunity came to head up to this lab and keep working on cure elements, we couldn’t say no.”

Josh had been a chemist in a previous life and I could see a spark in his eyes that said how excited he was about the work they were doing. Drea put her arm around him and for a moment my fears were assuaged. The two of them had always been good people. I couldn’t imagine they’d throw us under the bus without at least looking sheepish about it.

“So you guys feel like this is legit?” Dave asked.

Josh nodded. “It is. Robbie and I oversee the production of the different elements and the mixture. We have a lot of terrific, smart people working out there, people who have risked a lot to help us. I hope you two will join us.”

“What happens if we don’t?” Dave asked, wariness in his tone.

“Then you don’t…” Drea said with a sigh. “But it will hurt our cause.”

“I just don’t know,” I said under my breath, confusion mobbing me.

“Oh Sarah, always so jaded for someone with such spectacular breasts,” said a voice with a thick British accent behind us.

I staggered around to find our old rock and roll friend McCray standing in the doorway. He was still wearing leather and he still looked like a rock god, but his eyes were clear and he had a few extra pounds on him that told me he’d lost his supply of heroin at some point.

“McCray!” I cried as I hugged him. “Nicole didn’t say you were here.”

He glanced at our reporter friend with a wink. “No? How you wound me, love.”

She blushed and I stepped back in surprise. Ah… so the two of them were an… item. Interesting since Nicole had hardly been able to stand him when we traveled together not that long ago.

“Look, it’s a lot to take in, I know,” Nicole said, waving McCray off like she’d deal with him later. “And you’ve had a long flight, plus Sarah I know you’re not feeling so great. Why don’t we show you your rooms? You can rest tonight, meet a few more people, and talk about things. Tomorrow morning, when we have a full day to get started on our work, I think your minds will be clearer.”

Dave looked at me and I shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

“Sure,” Dave agreed. “Let us absorb everything and we’ll start fresh tomorrow.”

McCray laughed as he draped an arm around Dave’s shoulders. “Excellent. Then come along, my little zombie friend. We’ll show you to your humble abode above stairs.”

Dave and I laughed as we let him lead us through the lab and up a couple flights of stairs to the old classrooms above, but there were still lingering doubts in my mind. Doubts I wasn’t sure would ever be erased.

#

Dave smoothed the sheets over the old dorm bed we’d been given and patted the flat surface for me to climb in. Instead, I sat down next to him to rest my head on his shoulder and for a moment we were quiet, even though I was pretty sure he had as many thoughts racing around in his head as I did mine.

“It’s like reunion central here, isn’t it?” he asked.

I sighed, lifting my head from his shoulder and lying down on the narrow mattress.

“Yeah, there is that. Doesn’t it seem weird that there are so many people we used to know, hang out with, fight next to in this one place?”

“While you were brushing your teeth, McCray was talking about that. He called us catalyst people. He said we’re the kind of couple who change the people we touch, so it makes sense that a lot of people we’ve met would all sort of find each other to work toward a goal.”

“Shit, that makes us sound like cult leaders,” I muttered as I flopped back on the pillow.

“Naw, we have experience with cult leaders, we’re much more awesome than that,” Dave teased. “Look, I’m willing to give them all the benefit of the doubt, at least for now, that what they’re selling us is really what they want. To cure zombieism. To use my… thing to make the world a better place.”

“Yeah, and like Nicole said, it isn’t like we have a ton of alternative choices. If they want to fuck us over, we’re a little bit trapped now.”

He rubbed his chin as he stared down at me. “So are you okay?”

I wrinkled my brow. “Um, yeah. Why?”

“You’ve just been a little more quiet than usual. Not my normal snarky Sarah. McCray has been lining up shots you would normally take all day long.”

I shifted. Here was an opening to tell him what was really bothering me. I opened my mouth to do it and… I just couldn’t. Not right now when everything else was so heavy and confusing and distracting.

“Do you really think we should be doing this?”

“Doing what? Staying in this room together?” he teased. “We are married Sarah. And when a man and a woman love each other very much-”

I swatted his arm gently. “You know what I mean, ass-hat. Should we be here in Seattle, working on something so dangerous, whatever the motives of our friends turn out to be?”

He stared at me and the teasing in his eyes faded. “Since when are you afraid of danger, Supergirl?”

“You already almost died and got kidnapped playing a part in this whole find-the-cure pyramid scheme we’ve got going here. I don’t know if I’d call it fear, I just don’t want to risk losing everything again. You haven’t had that happen to you yet, you don’t know what a number it plays on you.”

“Everything is you and me,” he said as he ignored the other bed and took a spot on the narrow mattress beside me. “Just you and me, right? For better or worse. We’re not going to lose that, I can promise you.”

“But you can’t promise it, Dave,” I said softly. “You can promise we’re going to love each other and I believe it. But you can’t promise you’re going to be okay anymore.”

He touched my chin. “I promise you all that. And I keep my promises.”

He smiled and then he closed his eyes, not even waiting for my response. I lay there for a while, listening to his breath going only out not in, and only once every so often. Zombie Breath, I called it.

“David?” I whispered.

But he was already asleep.

Chapter Five

Go with the flow. There’s a lot you won’t see coming when it comes to zombies.

Morning came just as early as always, even though our world had changed, once again. I guess we should have been used to it, but I wasn’t really. I felt discombobulated, sick, and for the first time in a long time, like I just wanted to wake up and have things feel normal again. Only I wasn’t sure what normal was anymore.

Dave, on the other hand, seemed to thrive on the new reality. He’d been up before the alarm went off and downstairs in the lab while I was still muttering and swearing in bed. Morning people were even worse when they had a touch of zombie in them.

I pushed through the doors into the main lab area. A few people lifted their heads, there were some nervous smiles (I guess people did that to the wife of the Big Zombie), but then it was business as usual.

Dave poked his head out from one of the back rooms and grinned. “Hey, there you are!”

I smiled, a forced expression. He was just a little too gleeful about all this even while I was hesitating my ass off. Weren’t we supposed to be so in tuned to each other’s moods and shit? Wasn’t that our thing? So why wasn’t he doing the thing with me now when I kind of needed him to look me in the eye, get all gooey and say, “I can sense you’re not totally on board, let’s have a latte and talk.”

Okay, everything except the nonexistent lattes.

“Come back here, you’re never going to believe this,” he said instead with another of those ‘world-saver’ grins.

My stomach turned as I walked toward him. You’re never going to believe this was never exactly a good thing to hear in the middle of a post-apocalyptic crisis. Trust me, this is just the truth.

I walked into the back room and screeched to a halt. Nicole was standing at a table, looking over some kind of map and next to her was a girl I recognized. A girl Dave and I had met in Seattle right at the beginning of the outbreak and never thought we’d see again.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, hardly looking up.

What the hell was her name? Her family had run a Korean restaurant in the International District, she’d been all badass when we bumped into her, but she wouldn’t leave with us. I could picture it all but couldn’t remember her name.

“It’s Lisa,” Dave prompted. “Remember from the restaurant way back last year?”

I snapped my fingers. “Lisa! Of course. Wow… you’re here?”

She looked up again, all annoyance. Yup, same girl, only now she had a kicky short haircut and leather pants. Right out of a novel, all she needed was a magical tattoo and a soul mate and she would have been a bestseller.

“I could ask the same of you,” she said with a put-upon sigh. “I wouldn’t have placed money on you two making it out of the neighborhood alive, let alone having anything to do with the cure. But what do you know? Miracle of miracles, you’re our saviors somehow.”

I bit my lip, trying to hold back a string of snark that would blister the ears of every person in the lab.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, too,” I finally managed with great difficulty. “But what a small world.”

“A lot smaller since we got an eighty percent mortality/zombie rate,” Lisa said with a roll of her eyes.

I was both impressed with her sarcasm skill and annoyed by them. Was this how people felt with me? No wonder Dave had wanted that divorce a year ago. But I was an old dog, it was hard to learn new tricks. Especially when snarky served me so well.

“I meant what a small world that you’d end up here where we’d see you again. How did you go from locked in a restaurant downtown to up here in the U-District working at the lab where the outbreak started?”

Lisa glanced at me briefly.

“They bombed down there,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless even though her eyes were deep fathoms of grief. “I barely got out with my life. And the city was in chaos at the point. It was ugly, I’ll just say that. But eventually I got found by a group of soldiers who had been abandoned to die in Seattle.”

My eyes widened. “The soldiers here at the lab?”

She gave one curt nod. “Eventually we came here to try to figure out if we could do something about the outbreak. We were here when Robbie and their crew got here with way more information and experience. Now we do what we can to protect them.”

I drew in a breath. I’d seen a lot of shit since escaping the city and heard a lot more from survivors over the months. But I was always impressed by those who came out on top. All of our survival stories were unique and powerful. I should totally write a book about them if we get out of this alive at any point.

“So have you had your blood tests?” Lisa asked, shaking her head in a way that said the subject of her survival was closed, probably permanently.

“Oh yeah, that’s our next stop,” Dave said with a nod.

“Blood tests?” I repeated with a quick glance at Dave. Nice that he was setting these things up for me without saying anything. “What blood tests?”

He raised a brow at my terse tone.

“No biggie. We just need to head over to Robbie and let him get a bit of our blood to run some standard tests, as well as some slightly un-standard tests. Actually, I’m sure he’ll want to take tons of mine, but for you it sounds like just a vial or two.”

I clenched my fists at my sides. Standard tests.

“I just don’t see why it’s necessary,” I insisted.

Lisa and Nicole looked at me from the table in a weird, ‘why are you freaking out’ way.

“After everything, are you scared of needles, Sarah?” Nicole laughed. “That would be hilarious. Headline: Biggest Apocalypse Badass Cries at Sight of Needle.”

“It’s not needles,” I managed through clenched teeth.

“Then let’s go,” Dave insisted, placing a hand on the small of my back to guide me toward the door away from the others. “See you ladies later.”

“Bye,” both of them said at once before they returned to their map of the campus. I could hear them talking as we left about clearing buildings and something about the schedule of perimeter patrols.

We moved back into the main area of the lab and I felt myself starting to lean back against Dave’s hand, dragging my feet so we wouldn’t have to go to the other lab room. Dave glanced at me and I felt the pressure on my back increase as he gently shoved me toward wherever we were supposed to be.

“What’s up with you?” he asked, trying not to draw attention to us by smiling at people we passed.

“I don’t want to do this,” I said under my breath and through my clenched teeth.

“Why?” he asked and I could hear the tension and annoyance in his tone despite the calmness of his expression. “Sarah, it’s just what they do here when they have new people come. We aren’t any different. You’re being paranoid.”

He ushered me into a room and shut the door. I bit my lip as I saw needles in sterilized containers and vials already ready. Our names were marked on them with a red Sharpie. The “h” in my name had dripped a little and it looked like a bloody wound.

“Why do they do it?” I asked. “Why do they need to get my blood?”

“To limit the spread of disease, not zombie stuff, but regular stuff. To see the impact of the way we’ve been living. And yeah, they’ll probably use it for tests on other things like the virus and the inoculation and all that shit.” He folded his arms. “You’ve never been freaked out by tests like this, Sarah, so why are you completely losing your shit?”

“I don’t like needles,” I tried, pathetically weak.

He arched a brow. “Sarah.”

“I’m not losing my shit,” I insisted. “Okay, I’m not.”

I might have said more and avoided a bunch of drama, but the door opened and Robbie stepped in with another girl at his side. She was probably our age, with a slick ponytail and gloves on.

“This is Nadia,” he said, distracted. “She is going to help me draw the blood.”

“Okay, Dr. Robbie,” I said with a scowl. I guess there was no getting out of it.

Dave shook his head. “She’s a little nervous, can I go first?”

The girl, Nadia, looked at him with wide eyes. “So you’re the one,” she said. “I heard about you, even in Vegas after the outbreak. You look so… normal.”

I scowled a little deeper. Nurse Beautiful was just staring at my husband and I didn’t have a lot of patience at present.

“Yeah, he’s a freaking god, can you just take his blood?” I snapped.

She looked at me and she blushed. “Sorry. I-I lost someone, you see, on a beach on the coast when this all started. I was thinking about what would have happened if I’d had a cure. I’ll take the blood.”

Okay, so now I felt like an asshole. I folded my arms and watched as she inserted a needle into Dave’s arms and dark red blood began to pump into the vial. It matched the Sharpie on the label on the vial.

“We’ll need a lot more from you,” Robbie said with an apologetic tilt of his head.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“We’ll start with a few vials, though, just for some baseline stuff,” the boy continued. “In the meantime, though, while you’re getting the blood taken…”

He trailed off as he turned toward a small refrigerator in the room. He opened it and withdrew a bottle filled with purple liquid. He drew some into a hypodermic and turned toward me.

“We’ll just give you this,” he said, moving toward me with the unknown substance.

I backed away. “What the fuck is that?”

Robbie’s brow wrinkled and Nadia looked up from her blood collection. Even Dave stared at me.

“Shit, Sarah, I’m not going to hurt you,” Robbie said, stopping his movement toward me. “This is a good thing. It’s our inoculation serum. Once you take this, we’re about ninety-eight percent certain that a zombie bite won’t turn you. In another week or two, that will probably be at a ninety-nine-point-nine percent certainty.”

I swallowed. What he held was a miracle in a bottle. A world-saver, a game-changer.

And I didn’t want a thing to do with it.

I rushed to put the table in the middle of the room between me and the rest of them and stood there, bracing against it, ready to maneuver if someone tried to force my hand.

“No,” I said. “I won’t take that.”

“Why the hell not?” Dave asked, jerking his arm away from Nadia and sending a squirt of blood to the floor that everyone moved away from like it was poison. He didn’t seem to care, he was too focused on me. “Take the fucking serum, Sarah.”

I blinked, mostly to keep tears from showing up in my eyes. I didn’t want him to see that. They wouldn’t help me in a few minutes anyway…

“I can’t,” I whispered, trying to duck his stare, trying to find a way to keep away from him and from them even for a few more minutes.

“Sarah, you have to take it,” Robbie tried, inserting himself between David and me like a peacekeeping force. “Everyone else on the base has taken it and I assure you it has not hurt anyone, regardless of bloodtype, race, weight or any other variable.”

“I doubt you’ve seen my variable,” I half-laughed even though this was anything but funny right now.

“What is your variable, Sarah?” Dave asked, his eyes narrowed. “I know you’ve been keeping something from me.”

I blinked. “You do?”

“Yeah. I’ve been waiting for you to find the right time to tell me whatever has been bugging you, but now you’re acting like a freaker and you’re making a federal case out of a miracle. So tell everyone what it is now.”

I swallowed hard. Here it went.

“I can’t take the serum because… because I’m pregnant,” I admitted. I held stares with David, only because I felt like I owed him that much after all my recent lies.

He stared at me, the color bleeding from his cheeks, the light in his eyes dimming. He looked angry, confused, shocked, sad and even a tiny bit excited all at once. All the same emotions I’d been feeling while I kept the truth to myself and tried to figure out a way to tell him everything. Some way to soften a blow neither of us had seen coming, certainly hadn’t planned for.

“And because of Dave’s… thing…” I continued with a sigh. “I don’t know what your inoculation might do to the baby.”

Chapter Six

And zombie makes three.

The moment my stunning announcement left my lips Nadia and Robbie began talking at once. I’m sure they were saying very important things that I should have been listening to, but all I could do was stare at Dave. Dave who was glaring at me with ultimate betrayal in his eyes. Dave who hadn’t moved or spoken since the word pregnant left my lips like the worst curse in the world.

Finally, he stepped forward. “What. The. Fuck. Sarah.”

His voice was so loud and so strong that it silenced the other two in an instant. There was a moment of shocked silence between us all and then Nadia grabbed Robbie’s arm and began hauling him to the door.

“Come on, kid, let’s go.”

Robbie resisted even as she dragged him out. “But-”

“They need a minute, Jesus,” she said as she shut the door behind them. All the animosity I’d felt when I met her faded in that moment of kindness.

Of course, staring at Dave and his ‘how could you’ face, I sort of wished Nadia and The Kid had stayed and kept it awkward. I preferred awkward right now.

“Are you sure?” he asked, folding his arms as he stared at me like I was a stranger.

I nodded. “I took about twenty of those at-home tests, at all times of the day. They all came back positive.”

I watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple working hard. His hands had started to shake, too. Not good.

“How long have you known?” he asked.

That one was a harder question to answer.

“Um, a couple of months,” I finally whispered. “I found out when we were on the road from Wyoming to Montana. I guess it’s why I’ve gained some weight lately. Remember how you kept joking about all I needed was hamburgers? Well, I didn’t just need hamburgers.”

He clenched his fists on the metal table between us, then turned away.

“Fuck, fuck, mother fucker,” he said, mostly to himself, I guess. Or the world at large. Probably also at me.

“Dave, it’s not like I cheated on you,” I said.

The moment he turned toward me, eyes wide and filled with betrayal, I knew it was the wrong thing to say.

“Well, that’s good to hear,” he said with a shake of his head. “I mean, that makes it all better, doesn’t it?”

“No, I realize it doesn’t make it better,” I admitted, hating myself as much as he seemed to hate me in that moment.

“You kept me in the dark about a decision that affects both of us,” he said. “Aren’t we supposed to be a team?”

I ducked my head, unable to look him in the eye anymore. “Yes, yes we’re a team. But it isn’t a decision, David! It’s not like I woke up and thought, hey a baby would be a great way to trap this dude. It just happened. An accident despite any precautions we were taking to prevent it.”

He let out his breath in a long, frustrated sigh. “Okay, okay so decision is the wrong word. I get that there aren’t exactly Planned Parenthood Clinics operating anymore. But you could have told me in the beginning,” he insisted. “No, you should have told me.”

“Oh God, yes, I should have,” I admitted, fighting those tears again. “I should have. But I freaked out at first and didn’t. Then the longer it went, the harder it was to tell you. I wanted to so many times, I started to, but something would always stop me. And then Robbie and Nicole showed up and started talking about world-saving and I panicked.”

“That’s why you hesitated to come here,” Dave breathed, awareness dawning suddenly.

I nodded. “Yes. David, they’re not kidding here. They already have an inoculation, they’re working toward destruction. And I don’t know. If we’re going to have a kid, what’s the right thing for us?”

His mouth turned down into a deep, heavily lined frown that broke my heart. “A kid. Huh. Will it be a kid, Sarah?”

“David,” I whispered, because I knew where he was going and it was a place I had been trying to avoid for months.

He didn’t care, he pressed on. “If my DNA was altered by the zombie bite, which everyone says it was, does that mean the second our baby isn’t bean-sized that it will eat you from the inside out?”

“Shit, man,” I said, leaning on the table for support.

The baby already didn’t exactly feel bean-sized, even though I knew it had to be from the few peeks at baby books I’d been able to sneak. Hell, sometimes I thought I felt it moving in there. Not that I was going to say that with Dave ranting.

“Or will it burst from your stomach like in Alien?” he continued. “Maybe play a little song and dance routine while you bleed out in front of me?”

“Stop, enough with the imagery, Dave!” I insisted, feeling so sick that I wished I’d eaten just to have something to puke up now.

“How can I stop with the imagery? Didn’t you think about all this while you were keeping your little secrets?” he asked.

I nodded. “I did. I do. But I try to block it out because I’m not sure about the alternative.”

He frowned and for a long moment he seemed to ponder that. “Maybe in Montana, in that house when we were alone, there wasn’t an alternative. But now we’re here, with a bunch of doctors and nurses and chemists and whoever. There are options now, Sarah, and you know it.”

“So what do you suggest?” I asked, my tone so flat that it hardly squeaked past my pursed lips.

“I want you to get tested. I want them to test you, to test the baby, to test whatever they can test,” he said.

I sucked in a breath. I thought he was going to say he wanted this baby yanked out of me, but the alternative wasn’t much better.

“David,” I began.

He shrugged. “I doubt you’re going to have much choice in the matter anyway, Sarah. They know you’re pregnant and now you’re like me. You have something they want.”

I shivered. “That’s true,” I whispered.

I guess we were both in the zombie club now. At least until they figured out what the deal was with my kid.

“I want to know you’re safe,” he said.

“What about…” I hesitated and then pointed toward my abdomen, pantomiming a pregnant belly for him.

He winced. “He/she/it is not really my concern right now.”

We locked eyes and the coldness in his made my heart hurt. Not coldness toward me, though. To my surprise, all his concern was toward me, even though I’d kind of screwed the pooch here. No, he just felt nothing for the life inside of me. The one he’d helped create.

The door opened and Nicole stepped inside. She was pale, so I knew she had already been told about my… situation. Which meant that Robbie and Nadia had probably already screamed it from various rooftops. I could just picture it:

“Not only do we have a zombie-Dave, but we have a zombie-baby, too! Everybody come look at the Freak Family!!”

Okay, maybe not.

“Hey,” Nicole said, her voice strained. “Um, I’m sure you two have a lot to discuss, but you need to come with me. We’re going to need to have a long talk about this.”

Dave nodded and took my hand. She left the room first and he leaned down close to my ear.

“Let me do the talking,” he hissed.

I glanced at him. “Why?”

“I’ve been a half-zombie longer.”

#

The room we were taken to was outside of the bustling lab, away from the prying eyes of the techs. It was on the top floor of the building in an old room that looked like it had been a faculty office at some point, but it felt like the principal’s office and we were the naughty kids caught smoking behind the school.

Dave and I sat at a table, facing off with a panel of four. Nicole, The Kid, Lisa and some guy we hadn’t met yet in an old army shirt and ragged jeans were our interrogators.

“So you’re pregnant,” army guy said, his voice cool and unemotional.

I opened my mouth to respond, but Dave lifted a hand to stop me. He shook his head.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, protective caveman Dave to the hilt.

“I’m Colonel Grant Fenton,” he said. “Or I was.”

“Before the government abandoned you here to die, you mean, Grant?” Dave asked.

I reached out to grip his hand. Fenton’s lip twitched and I wasn’t sure he was the guy you wanted to ultra piss off. Especially since we’d dealt with military asshole types before.

“Something like that,” he said softly. “But whatever happened before, what was left of my platoon came here, David. And my duty is to keep everyone safe from all threats.” At that, his gaze shifted to me again. “Are you pregnant?”

“Yes.”

He arched a brow as if to encourage me to continue.

“About three months, if my math is right,” I said, blushing a little. I wasn’t a blusher, but this was all so personal.

“Are the symptoms unusual?” Nicole asked and the lack of color on her face somehow made up for the steaming heat of mine.

I shrugged. “I’ve never been pregnant before, so I don’t know.”

Before the outbreak, Dave and I had talked about kids. But then things had gone so sour between us, and the topic had left the table with a clanging finality that had scared me at the time.

“You can be snippy,” Nicole said softly. “But you know what I’m asking.”

I cleared my throat. Okay, so the time had come for full disclosure. Awesome. I was soooo looking forward to this and to Dave’s reaction and to the fact that I might be soon put in a cage for observation. But I’d made this bed. Accidentally, but still. I guess it was time to lie down.

“I have had some mild nausea, but not very often,” I started, easing into the worst. “In fact, I’d say my appetite has been increased rather than decreased.”

The Kid was scribbling down everything I said like a Bart Simpson/secretary, nodding and hmming along with every word.

“And what else?” he pressed.

I looked at my hands, clenched in my lap. “Um, I have been… stronger.”

Dave squeezed his eyes shut, I could see it from the corner of my vision. His jaw was clenched and his hands kept opening and closing like they were on a timer.

“What about your sense of smell?” he asked.

“What about it?”

He glared at me. “Is it more attuned?”

I swallowed. Hard. “Yes.”

Dave shoved his chair back so hard that it bounced off the wall halfway across the room. He ran a hand through his hair as he paced off toward the door.

“I want you to test her. Test… it. And if it can hurt her, I want that thing out,” he growled, a bit zombie-like actually.

“Wait-” I started. No one had talked about anything getting out of me. At least not in enough depth for him to be ordering people around about it.

“No!” He spun around and faced me, one finger extended toward me. His hands were shaking. “If that thing in you, a thing I put in you, could hurt you-”

“That thing,” I said, getting to my own feet. “Is your child. And mine. I’ll take whatever tests anyone wants to do to me. But I’m not agreeing to anything to my baby beyond that until we know more.”

“Wow,” Nicole breathed. “That is very motherly.”

I stared at her and slowly sank back into my chair. “Well, it’s the first time since I found out that I’ve felt motherly. And it’s weird.”

It really was. I had this raging tiger inside of me, ready to pounce. To be fucked with, I was definitely not. Because I would flip a car on someone right now.

Dave leaned against the door for a moment, letting out a long sigh. Then he moved back to my side and reached down to place a hand on my shoulder. I felt that touch all the way through me. It was his support, his love.

I smiled as he said, “Will you just set up the tests? Everything else we’ll talk about later.”

The Kid nodded as he got to his feet and motioned for the door. “Yes, of course. We can do everything we need to do right now.”

Chapter Seven

Rock-a-bye Zombie…

“Am I really about to get an ultrasound from a teenager?” I asked as I watched The Kid collect all the vials of blood he’d taken in the last few minutes. He glanced up at me with a heavy blush and a dark glare.

“No,” he said. “Ew, that’s not my thing.”

“Actually, it’s mine.” Nadia said as she came in through the cracked door. She smiled at me as she rolled a couple of machines up next to the table, but it was filled with false brightness. Like a ‘sorry, you have cancer’ smile from a doctor. “I was a nurse once upon a time. Well, almost a nurse.”

“I almost feel better,” I muttered.

Though to be honest, almost medical training was better than what most people had out in the wilds. I’d often wished I’d almost been anything in the healthcare field during the months since the outbreak.

To my surprise, she laughed at my quip and motioned for Robbie to go. “I don’t think any of us want you involved in this.”

“I have tests to run anyway,” he grunted with a half-wave. “See ya.”

“Stupid Kid,” I sighed as I propped a hand behind my head. “He acts like this is no biggie. I’d forgotten how annoying he can be.”

“Eh, he’s thirteen… almost. Even with the world the way it is, I don’t think he gets it entirely. Ramifications don’t always stick at that age,” Nadia said as she turned plugged in her machine and started fiddling with settings. “Hence drug use, crazy driving, teen… um, pregnancy.”

She broke off with a blush.

“So what are you going to do?” David asked, his voice cracking as he watched her set up.

She glanced up at him and this time her smile was softer, more reassuring. “The first thing I’m going to do is an ultrasound. It’s not invasive, we’ll just do a scan basically and see if we can get a look at the fetus.”

Dave nodded, but when he took my hand, his fingers were cold and clammy.

“It’s fine,” I reassured him even as I flinched when Nadia started pushing my shirt up and spreading cool goo on my abdomen. She pressed a wand to my flesh and suddenly an image appeared on the screen.

It wasn’t that interesting really. Just a big cavern that was my stomach, I assume.

“I don’t see anything,” Dave said, his voice suddenly filled with hope. “Maybe Sarah’s just wrong. Maybe she has that gymnast thing.”

I jerked my face toward his. “Gymnast thing?”

“You know, where they get so skinny they don’t have a period anymore.”

I laughed. “Honey, I ain’t that skinny.”

Nadia smiled too. “No, actually…” she moved the wand a little and then pointed to the screen. “There. See that?”

Both of us leaned forward and I caught my breath. There in the picture was the image of a… well, it was a baby. A real live baby and it wasn’t exactly the bean I’d been expecting. It was kind of… big.

“Oh my God,” Dave whispered, though I couldn’t tell if it was ‘oh my God, get it out’ or ‘oh my God, look at a baby I made’ in his tone.

“That’s her. Or him,” Nadia said, her smile wide despite the circumstances. “Huh, you said you thought you were three months along?”

I nodded. “Yeah, three months ago is when all my normal womanly fun stopped.”

She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything else about her question. “Want a print out? I think this machine does that.”

I nodded. “Please.”

She messed with a few buttons and then a picture popped out of the machine. She handed it over and I stared at it as she continued to roll her wand over my belly.

“So what do you see beyond that there really is a baby or something in there?” Dave asked.

When I looked up I noticed he wasn’t looking at the baby picture. Like, at all.

“Well, there is a heartbeat,” she said, pointing to a flutter on the screen. She turned a dial and suddenly there was a faint sound, sort of like a wub, wub, wub that filled the room. “But-”

He jerked straight. “But?”

“It is a bit slower than I would expect,” she said. “Especially given the stress you’re under, Sarah.”

I nodded. Okay, so my baby had some kind of slow heartbeat syndrome. It could be that, right?

“Does that mean it’s a zombie?” Dave asked.

Nadia shrugged. “I’m going to be honest and tell you, I don’t know.”

“Well, do you know how far alone I am?” I asked.

She stared at me for a second too long. “Um…”

“What? What is um?” I asked, my voice elevating.

“You say you noticed a shift in your cycle three months ago, but based on measurements and some other technical crap, I’d say you’re closer to four, maybe even four and a half.”

I blinked. Halfway through a pregnancy? “How is that possible?”

She shrugged. “Stress can cause fluctuations in cycle. Hormone imbalance. It’s not totally uncommon, though I’m surprised you didn’t notice morning sickness and other signs earlier.”

“So how and when will you know if that thing in there is a zombie?” Dave interrupted, his voice elevating. “I’m sorry to be a dick about it, but we’re all chatting like this is a baby and it might not be a baby and I need to know what it is.”

I squeezed his hand. “Dave, take a breath.”

He didn’t, but Nadia didn’t seem especially phased by it. “I’m going to take amniotic fluid next.” She swallowed. “There are risks involved and I admit I’m not especially experienced in it, a doctor would normally do it, not a nurse. But then Robbie and Josh can study that in the lab and compare it to zombie chemistry.”

“And then we’ll know,” Dave said.

She shrugged. “We’ll be closer to knowing.”

She put the wand away and the screen went ominously black. She flicked the machine off and said, “I’ll go get the rest of the equipment. Be right back.”

As soon as she was gone, I tugged on Dave’s hand. He sat down next to me on the bed and I leaned my head against his shoulder as I looked again at the picture of the life inside of me. A life I hadn’t exactly planned for or wanted, but there it was, all baby-ish.

“We should leave here,” he said when it had been quiet for a while. “We should go back to Montana.”

I looked up at him and I know my surprise was written on my face like a messed up prison tattoo. “What? No!”

“What do you mean, no?” he asked. “You’ve been making me drag you along this whole time. I thought you’d be thrilled when I said that.”

I lifted up the picture. To my surprise, he moved away from it like it was acid and might burn him.

“Okay, so you don’t want to look at the picture, but shit, you saw it on the screen, you can’t pretend you didn’t. There’s some little thing inside of me. And it changes everything, David. We have to fight for her or him. So he or she can grow up in a good world, not one where they have to be afraid of zombies.”

“You assume it’s a he or she,” he grunted. “What if it’s not.”

“Whatever it is, I can’t help that I want to make a better world for it.” I wrinkled my brow. “Turns out I have motherly instincts, David. This is a miracle.”

He stared at me for a minute, but then his lips started to twitch with a smile. “The baby’s first word is going to be fuck.”

“David!” I laughed and covered my stomach. “Not in front of Little Zombie.”

“Not funny,” he said, but he was still smiling.

“Besides, I’m sure you’ll teach Little Zombie to speak like a lady,” I said. “Cause I sure as fuck won’t be doing that.”

He laughed. “Yeah, you do have a mouth on you. But I’m not calling it that.”

“Okay, how about LZ?” He shook his head and my smile, which was pretty weak anyway, fell. “Come on, if we don’t have a sense of humor about it, I’m going to lose it, Dave. I’m not stupid, I know what it could be and what it could mean and when I think of it, it makes me want to go to sleep and never wake up. Help me out, man. Make this okay.”

He swallowed and there, somewhere in his eyes, flickered the protective instincts I knew would make him a great dad to any non-zombie children we one day had. He nodded.

“You know I’d never let anything happen to you or LZ,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said as I motioned him over. He bent to give me a kiss just as Nadia came back into the room with a bunch of other stuff. She had Nicole with her, too. A very uncomfortable looking Nicole in surgical gloves.

“Just lay flat,” Nadia said as she started wiping off my stomach with iodine. “And I’ll try to do this as quickly and safely as I can.”

Nadia motioned to Nicole and she grabbed the ultrasound wand and turned the machine back on. She pressed it to my belly and there was the image of LZ again, hanging out in my uterus, doing whatever babies did when they were hardly more than a romantic evening with too much wine when your zombie husband said, “hey, these stars are pretty great” and-

Sorry.

Anyway, Nadia pulled out a needle. A big, fucking needle and suddenly all my shit about not being afraid went out the window.

“You aren’t putting that thing in me, right?” I asked.

“It won’t hurt,” she insisted, but looking at that thing, it was hard to believe it.

Nicole arched a brow. “Chickenshit.”

I glared at her. “You want to do it?”

“I don’t have a baby in me,” Nicole said, shaking her head. “I don’t have to have huge needles jabbed into me.”

“Not helping,” I insisted but then I sucked in a big breath because during the bitch exchange with Nicole, Nadia pressed the needle into my flesh.

“Huh,” I said as I watched it disappear into me and appear on the screen near the baby. “That actually doesn’t hurt much.”

“Don’t hit it,” Dave said, waving his hand around near the screen. “I don’t think it wants to get poked.”

“Stop backseat driving and let Nadia do it,” Nicole said, motioning to Nadia.

She was sweating as she maneuvered the needle into place and then started withdrawing a little fluid from the sac where the baby was housed. Slowly, she withdrew the needle and then set it aside with a huge sigh.

“Sorry if I hurt you,” she said.

I smiled at her. “You did great. Though I’d work on the sweating if you’re going to do that again.”

“I hope I don’t have to do it again. Um, see, I was a veterinary assistant before the outbreak,” she admitted, apparently driven to confession now that she had finished her work.

“I thought you said you were a nurse,” Dave said, tone flat.

“Yeah, I figured that would make you less nervous. But I do have medical training, I was almost a vet, and I have experience doing procedures. I’ve even kept my dog, Duncan, safe since the outbreak. He lives upstairs with me and helps Lisa and her guys patrol the area.”

I stared at her. “Okay, so you’ve kept your dog alive. Great.”

She blushed. “Look, we all do the best we can with the skills we have.”

“And she’s been great,” Nicole interrupted. “She has stitched people up, kept us all healthy. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

“And you didn’t poke the baby,” Dave said. “That’s something.”

“Thanks,” Nadia said with a sigh. “Okay, I’m taking this sample over to Josh and Robbie.” She handed me a cloth. “Just wipe off and you can come out when you’re done.”

She left, but Nicole lingered at the door, watching us. She had always been a little hard to read, probably due to journalistic training or some silliness like that. Right now was no different.

“What?” I asked as I swabbed the gunk off my stomach. There was a little bulge there that I’d been ignoring for about a week when it had just appeared magically.

“Nothing,” Nicole said, raising her hands like she was surrendering.

“They’re all freaking out aren’t they?” Dave asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, having you is one thing. But this? They don’t know what to think, what to do about the possibility of genetic alteration of a fetus.”

I sat up and pulled my shirt down. “Gee, tell them welcome to the club.”

“Are they going to force us to stay here?” Dave asked. “I mean, seriously. You know these people. You keep saying they’re on our side, but could the pull of a zombie baby or a half-zombie baby or a whatever baby make them put us in a cage?”

Nicole seemed to ponder that for a minute. Probably too long, really, but I guess you had to appreciate that she was really considering the question.

“Robbie and Josh and the lab rats, I don’t think they’d make anyone stay, though they would hate to lose the research opportunity that your being here offers them. They really do want to create a cure and they really think you’re the key.”

“Which may be true,” Dave said. “But what about the others?”

“The military guys, it’s harder to say. I think most of them have good intentions.” She shrugged. “But can I promise you no one will go rogue on you? No, I can’t.”

“Who would go, if you had to hazard a guess?” I asked. I hopped down from the table.

“The guy who you met with earlier this afternoon, Colonel Fenton? He’s hard to read. And he and your friend Lisa… well, they are more than friends if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“I’m not telling you that either of them is dangerous,” Nicole insisted.

I nodded. “You’re just letting us know that we want to make sure we stay safe. I get it. And I appreciate it.”

And I did. Even though, as we followed her out into the main lab room, with all the lab rats now staring at me the same way they had been staring at Dave, I wasn’t sure if I felt better knowing the real score or worse.

All I knew for sure was that I was going to find a way to keep an eye on Lisa and the Colonel. For the sake of my husband, myself and even for LZ. Because until I knew otherwise, I was about to become a mother and nobody was going to fuck (sorry, LZ) with this mother.

Chapter Eight

Ready, Set, Eat Brains

The next three days passed like molasses. Even though everyone liked to stare at me, whisper about me when I came down from the bedrooms into the lab, as far as I knew, none of my results were in yet. Apparently medical bureaucracy, like cockroaches, Cher and us, had survived the apocalypse just fine.

Actually, I think the wait was based more on the fact that everyone in the lab was so focused on Dave. Having a real, live semi-zombiefied person around… well, it was like Christmas for the nerds. They had him run on treadmills, then ran tests. They drew blood. They tested how long he could hold his breath, how much weight he could bear, how hard he could punch.

And Dave ate it up, becoming the center of the universe, just like he’d been born to take on the role.

Now I love the guy, don’t get me wrong. But sitting in a lab on day three since our arrival, watching him go over numbers and tests with Robbie and Josh was mind-numbingly boring, even if he did look pretty hot with his shirt off and sensors stuck all over his chest.

I got up from my chair across the room from them and said, “So I’m going to get a drink, anybody want anything while I’m out?”

My question was hardly registered as they all huddled around their computer monitors, looking at data together.

“Guys?” I repeated.

Dave glanced up finally and spared me a rather dismissive look. “No, thanks babe.”

I sighed as I pulled the door open and stepped out in to the main lab. I weaved my way through the computers and tables with beakers filled with mysterious chemicals and pushed through a pair of swinging doors in the back of the room. Down a short hall was what had obviously been a break room when this was still an active facility.

The military guys hadn’t included this room, or our bedrooms above, in the areas hooked up to the generators, so there was a little battery operated lantern hanging by a hook next to the door that I grabbed as I stepped inside.

I clicked the switch and set it on the counter next to the fridge. When I opened it, I was greeted by a stale, ozone scent from the warm fridge. They had removed all the real food, transferring what meager portions of it that was left to a fridge in the lab that was kept running at all times. The shelves were still full of bottled waters, sealed flavored beverages and soda. Lines and lines of soda.

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…”

“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.

Of course, we had the second, first and ground floors, as well as the basement to go. I’d been in awesome Montana so long, not having to deal with this shit that I just wanted to sit down and take a nap. Which I’m sure Lisa would have been all judgy about. So I sucked it up and followed her down to the second floor of the HUB building.

“What was this floor?” I asked, scrambling my brain to remember my college days.

“Um, ballrooms and some student activity offices,” Lisa said as she flattened against the wall and peeked around the stairwell into the main hallway. “Huh, don’t see anything.”

I pursed my lips. “You know, I keep thinking maybe there was some kind of evacuation set into motion. As the top floor people moved down, they bumped into the student zombies that were waiting for them.”

“Could be. After all, the first, ground and basement floor had a lot more come and go with their banks and restaurants and services,” Lisa admitted. “So let’s clear this fast and get to the floors that are going to make us sweat a little more.”

I nodded and the stupid gas mask shifted on my head, conking my nose on the front. “Shit, this thing is annoying,” I muttered as I followed her into the first ballroom. Empty.

“You look awesome,” Lisa offered. “Straight out of a video game.”

I shuddered to think which one, but didn’t argue as we moved into the hallway and secured the door behind us. We moved on to what were labeled ‘pre-function’ rooms, warming rooms (whatever the hell those were), the bathrooms, securing doors and thanking our lucky stars that we weren’t finding anything ‘interesting’ to contend with.

Finally the only room left was an international student office. I cracked the door and we peeked through the spot we’d made.

“Looks dead, quick clear,” Lisa said as she pushed inside. She took one side of the room, I took the other, checking under desks, clearing corners. We were almost back together in the middle of the room when Lisa paused behind a desk.

“This is the easiest floor clear I’ve ever made,” she said as she opened a couple of drawers and looked through them.

“What are you doing?” I asked, peeking into a storage cupboard. “There aren’t going to be zombies in the desk.”

“Once we clear the area and fence it off, another team comes through looking for any useful items. If I can make a note for them on where to look, it helps.”

I shrugged and was about to respond when the vent behind Lisa burst outward. She spun toward it, but before she could fire off a shot or even bolt out of the way, a zombie arm darted out and grabbed her, yanking so that she flipped backward and landed hard on her back. Her gun flew from her hand and out of reach.

“Fuck!” she squealed as the zombie dragged her toward the vent, growling and snapping its teeth at her ankles.

I dove over the furniture to her side. The zombie in the vent was ragged, skinny and obviously underfed. Except now it had dinner and was progressively hauling Lisa into the vent with it, despite her kicks and attempts to hold herself back.

I looked for a shot, trying to get around Lisa’s kicking feet, but every time I lined one up in the tight spot, she moved and blocked it.

“Girl if you don’t want me to blow three of your toes off, hold the fuck still.”

She glanced up at me and I saw the fear in her eyes. The disbelief that I would be able to help her. But she did as I asked and froze, clinging to a desk leg and pulling back against the zombies super-strong grip, but not kicking her legs anymore.

“And…” I said, lining up the shot.

I pulled the trigger. Perfect shot. I hit the zombie between the eyes and it slumped forward, its mouth on the steel toe of Lisa’s boots where it drooled out black sludge into a pool on and around it.

For a long moment, she just stared at the zombie still shoved in the vent, then she looked up at me. “Do you think there are more up in there?”

I motioned her to move aside. “Only one way to find out,” I responded and yanked the zombie out of the vent.

Behind him… her? It was hard to tell, the thing was so rotted and broken down. Anyway, behind it was an old fan that circulated the air in the building. Nothing could fit behind it.

I wiped my hands off on my jeans. “It probably climbed in here after it was bitten, while it was still human and just never had a reason to come out until it smelled you. Aw, you denied it its first meal as a zombie.”

“You denied it that,” Lisa said as she shoved to her feet. She collected her gun from across the room and glanced over at me. “Um, we’re even.”

I blinked. “Huh?”

“I saved your life the day we met,” she explained. “So we’re even now.”

“Do you take back all your implications that I’m an idiot who could barely tie her shoes, let alone get through the apocalypse?” I asked.

She considered that for a minute. “Maybe. Your shoe is untied, by the way.”

I glanced down and she laughed. “Made ya look. Come on, we still have the next two floors to do.”

I shook my head as I followed her out of the room and toward the staircase that would take us to the main floor of the HUB. The one where all the zombies had been waiting for us earlier. Now we would see how great that grenade and its cocktail of zombie killing chemicals was.

Chapter Ten

The most important thing when dealing with kids is consistency. Same is true with zombies.

When we got to the bottom of the stairs back on the first floor, I have to admit, I was ready to fire off a million shots to kill a bunch of zombies. And yet, as we peeked out into the main floor, mostly silence greeted us. Silence and a shit ton of bodies.

“Are they dead?” I asked, looking at the piles of zombie corpses draped all over, including ones that were reaching toward the stairs as if they’d died trying to chase us up the first time.

“Should be,” Lisa said. “But we’ll check anyway. Stay sharp. Sometimes there are some stragglers.”

I watched as she started nudging corpses with her rifle, finger on the trigger and ready to blow a head off if anyone dared to move.

Obviously this was a girl who didn’t get caught unaware twice. I shrugged and started doing the same, poking at the zombies with the greatest of care.

Lisa waved to catch my attention and motioned toward a zombie over on the other side of the room. It was half on the ground, but kept trying to get up only to fall on its face again and again. It muttered to itself constantly, making those gurgling sounds they sometimes did. Only these were a little more… coherent.

“What is it doing?” I muttered.

“The closer they are to being a fresh zombie, the more human they get when exposed to the chemical,” she explained as she motioned me closer.

“It’s human?” I repeated in shock as I stared at the struggling creature in horror.

She shook her head. “No. Once you’re fully turned into a zombie, we don’t have a way to come back. The serum can only prevent turning from a bite, whether administered at the point of a bite or as an inoculation. The brain damage done after a turn is instant and permanent. It’s still more than half a zombie and it’s dangerous.”

I flinched as she raised her gun and fired, dropping the poor thing in a pool of blood. Not goo. Blood.

“Good thing is, that sound will bring any other stragglers.” She reloaded and smiled at me. I couldn’t return the expression and her brow wrinkled. “You okay?”

I shrugged. “It’s just different if there’s even a tiny bit of something human left in them, isn’t there?”

Lisa pursed her lips. “That thing I just shot? He was one of our guys, taken because he wasn’t paying close enough attention about three weeks ago. I didn’t like killing him, but you have to set your mind, Sarah. They’re already dead. Just like when you got over killing the zombies the first time. This is no different.”

I glanced at the man-zombie laying there a few feet away. His face was bloated, but the grey tones weren’t as dark as a zombie corpse, his eyes were glassy, but clear, not red.

It sure felt different.

But there was no time to debate as a few of Lisa’s stragglers did, indeed, come at the sound of the dinner bell that was gunfire. Again, these were clearly fresher zombies, damaged by the serum bomb, but not completely wiped out thanks to whatever small part of them retained their humanity. Lisa shot them down while I stood there, staring and filled with discomfort and a sick feeling in my gut.

Finally there was only one left and she glanced at me. “You have to do it, Sarah. Get it out of your head.”

I flinched. “Right now?”

“It’s a zombie, look at it.”

I did look. The last one was a woman, dressed in fatigues, boots all cockeyed since her ankle had been broken and now stuck out at a weird angle. That was definitely zombie of her. Her skin was grey, her teeth were black with sludge, she reached toward us with clawing hands. Zombie, zombie, zombie.

The difference was that somewhere deep in her red, blood-lusty eyes, I saw something. I saw… pain. Pain inside the levels of zombie rage that made her want to eat my brains.

An animal in that kind of pain used to be put down for its own good. And as I lifted my gun and fired off a shot, I realized I was doing the exact same thing. I couldn’t fix that girl, so it was best to put her out of her misery. I certainly wouldn’t want my humanity retriggered in any way if I had been zombie-fied. I couldn’t think of a worse kind of hell, honestly.

“Good.” Lisa reloaded. “Let’s clear the basement and get back to the base before it gets too dark, okay?”

She walked away and for a moment I hung back, still looking at the poor dead zombie I’d just shot between the eyes. She had the same color hair as David’s sister, who I shot almost a year ago as she turned into a zombie.

“Come on, Sarah,” Lisa said, her voice sharp as she blocked the stairs and climbed over to the basement floor side.

I shook my head and followed, trying to swallow back my discomfort and my concerns with every step. The basement stairwell was way darker than the others had been. There was less sunlight downstairs, fewer windows and the afternoon was starting to wane, adding a bit of desperation to our charge. Nighttime in the world of zombie infestation was terrifying and super dangerous. You just didn’t want to risk getting caught off guard.

It was as if my thoughts triggered a reaction because Lisa’s spine straightened and she started walking faster toward the bottom of the stairs and our last duty for the day.

“All right, I’m going to throw a grenade,” she whispered. “We’ll let the gas dissipate and cover the stairs like before.”

I shrugged. Seemed like as good a plan as any, though I didn’t look forward to the remnants of more human-zombies, thank you very much. Still, it was preferable to a roomful of zombie-zombies.

She pulled the tab and tossed the grenade. We both backed up and readied our weapons as the metal canister clanked along the linoleum flooring below. There was a pop and I held my breath as the hiss of gas filled my ears (though muffled by that stupid, sweaty helmet).

“How long do we have to wait?” I asked. “Last time we sort of went and took care of some errands, so is it a minute, ten minutes?”

“Gas will clear in about five and that tends to wipe out the general population pretty well,” she said. “We’re still working on the timing, to be honest.”

“Great,” I muttered as I leaned against the bannister.

There wasn’t to be any thumb twiddling, though. Out of the fog below us, a zombie appeared at the bottom of the stairs. It was making a wheezy noise and had a bowling ball still attached to its swollen fingers. It swung the thing around, crashing into the wall and leaving a huge hole in the drywall.

Lisa sniffed and fired off a shot that dropped the thing.

“Oh yeah, the bowling alley,” I said as I fired another shot at a zombie that peeked its head around to look up into the stairwell at the noise.

This one was in some kind of cheer uniform and had her stringy hair in a high pony that flipped as she jerked back from the bullet to her brain.

“There are a lot of benefits to clearing this area,” Lisa said with a tiny smile that seemed pretty real.

“Are you thinking date night?” I asked.

She glanced at me. “Seriously, Sarah? I’m not answering that.”

“Just curious,” I chuckled.

She rolled her eyes. “Follow me, let’s do this thing.”

She stepped out into the main hallway. There were signs directing us to the bowling center, billiard and table tennis room and a couple other entertainment venues (including a movie theatre, though I doubted we’d waste electricity on that).

“It’s so closed off,” I said as we looked around.

She nodded. “Yeah, I’ll toss one in the billiard area and one in the bowling alley, then we’ll clear the rest. It should cover a majority of the space.”

“Outbreak was in the mid to late afternoon,” I agreed. “I doubt they were playing movies then. That space may have even been locked.”

“Thank God for small favors. Now let’s go.”

She pulled the pin on another grenade and tossed it into the billiard room. She pulled the door shut and did the same for the bowling alley. With an exchange of smiles, we headed off the clear the rest of the floor and declare our mission to reclaim the student union building a rousing success.

#

As we re-entered the lab building an hour later, I ran a hand through my sweat dampened hair and handed the gas mask back to Lisa. She shook her head.

“Keep it. Until we know what the deal is with the baby zombie, you’re going to need it to protect you and it from the gas.”

“Thanks.” I tucked it under my arm. “And thanks for taking me with you today. I didn’t realize how much I missed kicking zombie ass until I was doing it again.”

Her brow wrinkled. “So how come you don’t do it as much? You are…” she sighed. “Good at it.”

I laughed. “Well, that must taste pretty bitter coming from your mouth.” She shrugged and I continued. “Ever since Dave got his ‘powers’, it’s been easier to let him go out and handle the bad guys.”

“Following the ol’ gender roles, are we?” she snarked with a laugh.

I shook my head. “No, it’s not that. Dave isn’t being a caveman about it… much. The thing is, it does make sense. They don’t attack him, ever. Versus, they want to eat me. Even if he had a roomful of guys begging to head out with handguns, he would go out on his own. It’s just safer.” I sighed. “Anyway, I clear zombie from a distance while he herds and dispatches the bigger groups.”

“Sounds… awful.” Lisa shivered.

I shrugged. “I get it. He wants to protect me.”

“By keeping you in a zombie-free bubble,” Lisa muttered.

I knew I should defend Dave even more, but what she said wasn’t exactly inaccurate. Sometimes it did get frustrating to know there was work to be done zombie-wise and be ushered into a back room while he took care of it all.

She waved at a couple of military looking guys in the hall and pushed into the lab area. She looked like she was about to say more but never got the chance. Why?

Because Dave was standing right on the other side of the door, arms folded and face red with complete and utter anger, frustration, fear, and a bunch of other emotions I couldn’t even list. All of them bad, though.

“Where the fuck have you been?” he snapped.

“No caveman, huh?” Lisa said, her eyes going wide at his sharp, aggressive tone.

“Stay out of this,” Dave said with a glare for her. “Just stay out of it.”

I looked around. The lab was still half-full, despite the waning day and everyone was bustling around, pretending to work… and totally staring at us. I blushed.

“Hey, dickwad, how about not doing this in front of the world?” I said, grabbing his hand and dragging him off into the same room where they’d done my ultrasound a few days prior. I slammed the door and stared at him, my anger bubbling just below the surface.

“Oh my God, seriously?” he barked. “You’re shooting me the pissed off look?”

“Just because we’re back in Seattle doesn’t mean you can be an asshole to me in front of everyone we know, David!”

He flinched. “You know that’s not what’s happening here,” he said, his tone slightly calmer, though I could see that was a struggle.

“Then what is it?”

“So I’m all getting tests, going over results, talking to Robbie and Josh and the others about cures and serums and suddenly I realize you never came back from getting a drink. And I’m all, ‘hey, where’s Sarah, she must have been waylaid talking with someone’. So I start looking. And looking. And panicking. And looking. And looking…”

“Okay, I get it,” I said, also softer because I could see the fear in his eyes as he recounted his search for me.

“Do you? Do you, Sarah?” he asked, sinking down on the edge of the table with a shake of his head. “I looked for half an hour, yelling, screaming, begging anyone for word on you. And then someone tells me you went off with Lisa to clear a three story building of zombies. Just the two of you.”

I cleared my throat. “Technically it’s four.”

“What?” He looked at me like I was crazy.

“Um, see they call the first floor the ground floor and the second floor the first floor and so on, so it’s technically four floors.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

I shifted. “No, no, just debating semantics to distract you and hopefully get you to stop yelling at me.”

I hoped for a smile at my honesty, but nothing. Nada. Not even a half-grin. Not a dimple. So he was… really pissed.

“Sarah, why don’t you just tell me what the hell you were thinking?” he asked, his tone surprisingly calm and collected for a man who was turning three different shades of purple.

I sucked in a breath. “I should have told you that I was leaving with Lisa, I am sorry for that. I didn’t think you’d even notice I was gone, what with everything you were doing.”

“Okay, thank you for the apology,” he said, shaking his head. “But that’s kind of the least of the problem, right? You took off into the zombie wild, with one other person who we might not totally trust, and you aren’t inoculated. You should have been more careful.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. Here I was, back in that zombie bubble Lisa had talked about.

“How long were you and I out in the wild together before you became Super Dave?” I asked softly.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Four or five months maybe? It all blends together out here.”

“Yeah, it does,” I agreed. “So maybe you don’t totally remember that for those four or five months I stood right next to you… and sometimes you weren’t even around… killing zombies like a badass. I saved lives, including yours.”

He shifted a little and pushed off the table to stand. “I’m not saying you don’t kick ass.”

“Yeah, you are,” I disagreed, pacing away through the room. “Jesus, Dave, you keep saying you know I can take care of myself, but you never let me anymore.”

“Because you don’t need to anymore,” he said, raising his hands in frustration. “Shit, if you need zombies killed, you’ve got me to kill them without any risk to anyone.”

I moved a little closer, reestablishing intimacy like I’d read about in all those marriage books all those months ago when things were fucked up. Difference was, now those things just came naturally.

“Have you ever thought that maybe I don’t always want to sit around, waiting for you to be the big hero?” I asked. “It’s not like you can go be a hero and there’s something else important for me to do. I don’t like being useless. So today when Lisa asked if I would help her, I said yes because the idea of going back into the lab and just watching you do your thing like a dutiful 1950’s stereotype wifey made my stomach turn. I wanted to get out, to carry a gun and actually use it, to have a little danger thrill go up my spine.”

He pursed his lips. “I’m trying really hard to understand that, Sarah. The fact that you’d endanger yourself like that just to feel a ‘danger thrill’, which I’m not sure is even a thing.”

I frowned. “You used to know it was.”

He ignored my interruption. “The point is that you went out there and you endangered yourself… and Little Zombie. Did you even think about Little Zombie?”

“You mean the baby you can hardly stand to think about?” I asked. “The one you kind of hate on principle and want out of me as soon as possible? That baby?”

He shrugged. That was his entire reaction.

“Please, don’t try to manipulate whatever maternal instincts I’m randomly growing at present. Because I did think of the baby. I thought about him or her and I knew that I would be extra careful for his or her sake.” I folded my arms. “But this is about me, and we both know it. You and me.”

“Once again,” he sighed. “Like you said, Seattle brings it out in us, I guess.”

I looked at him for a minute. The old Sarah would have jumped on that and kept the fight going. The old Sarah would have said fuck a lot (the new Sarah totally used fucked a lot, I know, I know). The old Sarah would have goaded him.

But we’d come so far from that. Both of us. Looking at him, shoulders slumped, I could see he really had my best interest at heart. He might be misguided, but honestly I hadn’t exactly been in my best form either.

I slid up next to him and took his hand, resting my head on his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have said the thing about Seattle,” I said. “We’re not those people anymore. It’s totally reasonable that you would be angry I snuck out without saying anything.”

He glanced down at me with his first smile since the fight had begun. “You’re admitting you snuck out now?”

I shrugged. “Come on, I knew you would be all Protective Dave if I came to you and told you I was going to clear a creepy building full of zombies with a semi-psycho bitch. So yeah, I snuck out. A little. And I’m sorry.”

He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me closer. “And I apologize for not realizing you didn’t feel useful. I get that it must be frustrating to hang back while I do the heavy lifting.”

“Thanks.”

He leaned down for a kiss and I smiled into it. Yeah, working out these problems was so much better.

“So tell me about the student union building, was it super creepy?” he asked when he drew back.

I laughed. “So creepy. And Dave, that stuff they have, the serum… it really does kill zombies.” When he looked at me with worry, I continued, “I wore a gas mask before Caveman Dave makes another appearance.”

“I like Super Dave better,” he said. “But whatever. The serum works.”

“It does. Lisa would throw a grenade and five minutes later, there’s a shit ton of dead zombies just lying there waiting to get piled up.” I hesitated. “There’s only one bad thing about it.”

“What’s that?”

I swallowed and told him about the other ones. The ones who had been turned more recently and their little flashes of humanity. He shuddered and I realized he was thinking of himself, of the monster parts that lived in him and made him stronger, faster, able to smell brains through skulls… the usual.

“Well, that is disturbing,” he said when I was done. “But if the brain damage done is so bad, that flash of humanity doesn’t necessarily mean anyone is at home. Just someone left a few lights on.”

I nodded. “Still, I hope future versions of the gas might just kill them all outright.”

There was a knock on the door and Dave and I exchanged a glance. We’d been in here so long, probably everyone figured we’d killed each other or we were on to the make-up sex. Why we weren’t was now a mystery to me.

“Come in,” Dave said, keeping his arm around me. I smiled. I liked that about him. I liked pretty much everything about him, caveman or not.

“Hey,” Nicole said as she poked her head into the room.

When she saw us standing there together she looked both relieved and disappointed. Pervert.

“Hi, what’s up?” I asked with a smile for her.

“Um, you’re going to want to come with me,” she said without returning the smile.

“Why?” I asked. “What did I do now?”

“Nothing,” she reassured me in a tone that wasn’t reassuring in the slightest. “But, um, they have some test results back about the baby and they want to talk to you. Now.”

Chapter Eleven

The Happiest Zombie on the Block

Test results. Want to talk. Now.

Nicole’s words rang in broken fragments in my ears as I staggered down the hall and up the stairs, Dave at my side. He was holding my arm, talking to me, but my ears were ringing and I couldn’t fully understand him. Or maybe I just wasn’t listening, what with everything else in my head.

All I could think about was that my baby was a zombie and they were going to rip him or her out of me. And that I didn’t want that.

I mean, I didn’t want him to eat me from the inside out, either, but the other thing sucked, too.

“I’ll-right-back-” Nicole’s fragmented voice said and she stepped into a room.

As soon as she was gone, Dave swung me around to face him and shook me. Hard.

“Hey!” His voice pierced my fog and I blinked. “Hey, you need to snap out of this weird little fugue state you’re in and get it together.”

I stared at him, still a little iffy on what he was saying even though all the words made sense.

“Listen to me,” he snapped, his time closer to my ear. “They could want to take you, to hurt you, if this meeting doesn’t go well. I need you alert because I won’t be able to fight them off alone. They aren’t zombies.”

I blinked at that. Dave needed my help. LZ could need my help. And the fog cleared because this was about my family.

“Yes, I will. I’m okay.”

I wasn’t. He wasn’t either. We both knew it. But that was another story entirely.

Nicole opened the door and motioned us into the room. “We’re ready.”

I found myself reaching for Dave’s hand and we walked into the room together, us against the world… the way it was supposed to be. The group before me was very familiar, in fact it was virtually identical to the one we’d met with after my bombshell that I was pregnant. Robbie, the Colonel, Lisa (with a smirk) and Nicole sat before us. But they were joined by Josh, Drea (who I assumed was there for moral support based on her sympathetic expression) and the almost nurse/almost veterinarian who had done my ultrasound, Nadia.

“Seems like the gang’s all here,” I said, lifting my chin in defiance. Dave squeezed my hand, but in a supportive way rather than a shut up way.

“It’s important,” the Colonel said with a thin smile.

I shifted with his cool tone and the way he looked at me. Like a shark. Empty and merciless. To him, we were just another job to deal with, a part of his checklist to destroy the zombies.

“Stop stalling and being dramatic and tell us what the deal is with the… baby,” Dave said.

I smiled that was the first time he’d called him or her a baby rather than a thing. Apparently he was developing his own parental instincts. Faint, but there.

Robbie motioned to Josh and the two of them got up. I braced myself for an attack, but instead they pulled out a white board on wheels and spun it around to reveal a bunch of numbers and test names.

“Wow, you prepared everything but a Power Point presentation,” I breathed.

Josh nodded. “We didn’t want to waste energy building a slide deck.”

I blinked. “It was a joke, but okay. Go ahead, tell me about my zombie baby.”

The room collectively gasped and all eyes jerked to me. I shrugged. “I’ve never been one to ignore the elephant in the room.”

Dave gave a snort. “That’s for damn sure.”

“Shut it,” I advised gently. “We have to hear this.”

Josh cleared his throat like he didn’t know how we could joke around, but then he motioned to the chart. “We ran a series of tests on your blood and the amnio fluid. We then ran comparisons on known zombie samples and samples from Dave’s collection.”

“What kind of tests?” Dave asked, all the joking gone from his tone.

Robbie shot him a look. “We tested against the serum, we compared profiles for typing and we did a DNA test.”

I folded my arms. “But I’m a thousand percent sure I know who my Baby Daddy is.”

Nicole snorted. “A Maury reference, nice. You know, he was on the West Coast during the outbreak. Zombie-fied.”

“Not much of a leap, but we can talk about that later,” I said. “Right now, finding out about zombie baby and all.”

Nicole shrugged. “Sorry.”

“You did start it,” Dave whispered helpfully.

I glared at him, said nothing and motioned for Robbie or Josh to continue. “What were the results?”

Josh paled and Drea touched his hand like she was trying to support him and in that moment my whole world seemed to fade a little. To get quieter, more focused and oh, so much worse. No one made that face before they gave good news, that was for sure. No one hesitated this long, either.

Luckily, Robbie didn’t have the same squeamishness. He got up and pointed to the white board.

“There are a variety of results. First, the comparison of the baby’s blood to a zombie sample was conclusive.”

He smiled at me and I shook my head. “Conclusively what? Is the kid a zombie or not?”

“Oh, sorry,” Robbie said. “Not. Not a zombie. The amnio fluid is clear, not black sludge, which would probably be a first indicator. And the blood samples don’t match as far as make-up and consistency.”

Relief flooded me and I was glad I was sitting down. Little Zombie was not a little zombie after all.

“But?” Dave pushed, seemingly less affected by the good news and pressing for bad like it was going out of style.

Josh cleared his throat. “We did find some zombie properties when we compared your blood to the baby’s.”

“Wait, I thought you said no zombie properties?” I asked, pushing to my feet. Josh took that as a threat, apparently, because he backed up a step.

“Okay, so here’s the thing about Dave. When you look at normal zombie samples or fluids, the cells are completely enveloped by zombie DNA mutation. The cells are dead, but pumped alive by this… this invading force caused by the virus created here in this lab. They’re all just… surrounded.”

“Okay,” Dave said, but I could see the interest in his eyes. He wanted to know what the deal was with his zombie-ism. “And?”

“The difference between you and them,” Robbie picked up where Josh had stopped as Josh searched through a pile of papers for something. “Is that your cells are being attacked by the zombie mutation, in fact it’s happening all the time, but because you were exposed to the serum immediately after the first bite, your cells constantly regenerate, rebuild, so a cell is attacked by zombie infection and it immediately regenerates. That’s why you’re stronger, you’re faster, you have like twice the amount of cells you should.”

Josh held up a still photo that looked like it had been taken off of a microscope. Pink cells, probably from a stain placed on the on the sample, were being attacked by black stuff. The ones damaged were already black around their ragged edges, some were grey and solid, like they were dead. But there were others, dozens of others, hundreds.

“These are pictures from Dave’s sample?” I asked as I reached out to take it and we put our heads together to examine the evidence of his super powers closer.

“No,” Josh said. “Um, that’s from the baby.”

“Okay,” I whispered as pressure stated to build in my chest. “Okay…”

Dave put his arm around me waist and pretty much held me up. “What does that mean? You said no zombie but this black stuff looks pretty zombie to me.”

“It is,” Josh said. “But like you, the baby is super-producing healthy cells. Cells that defeat the zombie cells, cells that just overpower them due to their sheer volume. Nadia, can you-”

He waved in my direction and Nadia nodded, then got up and started toward me.

I put my hands up, ready to defend myself even as Dave shoved me behind him.

“What the hell are you doing?” he snapped.

She flinched. “I just want to look at Sarah,” she reassured him softly. “I’m not going to do anything.”

I peeked around his shoulder at her. She didn’t look crazy or like a zealot. She looked kind of… sad. Like she felt bad for me.

“Fine,” I said I moved toward her. “But if you do anything to me or my baby, he’s going to go zombie on your ass. You won’t like it.”

I motioned to Dave and she nodded. “Understood. Can you lean on the edge of the table there?”

She pointed to a table up against the wall behind us and I did so. She lifted my shirt a little and glanced at me. “Have you noticed changes in your body?”

I shrugged. “Pants were tight today, I figure it’s part of, you know, growing a fucking baby in my uterus.”

“Yeah, but your stomach didn’t look like this three days ago.” She pointed and I looked down. There was definitely a bigger swelling there. A real baby bump, as the stupid tabloids used to call it when referring to celebrities a year ago.

Robbie nodded. “The cell issue is making the baby grow faster. Considering the growth we saw in the lab and the progress we’re just seeing visually, I’d say you’ll have him in six months rather than nine and he’ll be fully developed. If the rate increases, which it might, we could see a baby from you in even as little as four to five.”

“Wait, I thought you said I was already four and a half months along!” I burst out, touching that belly swell protectively.

Nadia nodded. “Actually, that explains the misalignment of your last cycle with the growth of the baby. You are three months pregnant, but the baby’s growth was charted at about four and a half months along. Three days ago, anyway.”

I swallowed. “So what does that mean? When this baby comes out in two weeks or six weeks or six months-”

“It won’t be six months,” The Kid interjected and I glared to shut him up.

“When it comes out,” I continued. “What is it going to be?”

Colonel Fenton shoved to his feet suddenly. He had been curiously quiet until now, but he stared at me as he said, “That’s the big question, isn’t it? Monster or man? Super soldier in child form? Or just a zombie after all?”

I swallowed at the possibilities. At the look in his eyes.

“What are you going to do?” I asked, straightening up from the table to meet his eyes. He didn’t look away, though I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.

“What is there to do, Sarah?” he asked with a shrug. “We wait for your baby to come and then we see.”

Another wave of relief crested over me. “So you aren’t going to take it.”

“Him,” Josh corrected.

I glanced at Dave.

“Him?”

Nadia nodded, as if to verifying Josh’s statement in case we didn’t believe him or didn’t understand. “Closer inspection of the pictures, plus the DNA analysis says it’s a boy.”

Dave stared at me, just stared. “A boy,” he finally repeated under his breath. “Well, that’s… something.”

“I assume we aren’t under lockdown,” I asked.

Fenton smiled slightly. “You’ve never been under lockdown. I think your ability to go outside the perimeter of the fence today should have shown you that.”

“I had your girlfriend as escort,” I hissed. “And she had plenty of ways she could get rid of me or stop me. It wasn’t exactly the freedom train out there.”

He frowned and shot a quick glance to Lisa, who shrugged.

“Well, if it hasn’t been made clear, you have never been under lockdown,” he said. “If you want to go, feel free, though I can’t spare the fuel to return you to Montana. You’d have to find your own way home.”

I dug my fingers into my palms at that. We’d escaped this city once, I knew we could do it again.

I just didn’t fucking want to. Once was more than enough.

“Seems like we have a lot to discuss, so since we aren’t in lockdown, my husband and I are going,” I said, grabbing Dave’s hand and dragging him toward the door. “Thanks for the information.”

With that, we left, slamming the door behind us. We headed down the stairs toward the sleeping quarters in silence, but there were all these unspoken questions, all these unspoken fears between us. And they were going to have to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Which sucked since I could kill a zombie like nobody’s business, but I still sort of hated interpersonal conflict and avoided it whenever possible.

Chapter Twelve

Baby books are great, but never underestimate the power of the advice of other moms… or your own instincts.

I stared out the window of our room. It was dark outside, of course, but there were still some flickering lanterns around the fence line for the watch to see by. Behind the fence, I saw the occasional dart of movement and I knew what it was.

Zombies.

“I’m sorry.”

I turned from the window to look at Dave. He was standing in the candlelight by our bed. In the weird light, he looked a little… gray. Not quite zombie gray, but still…

“What? Why?” I asked.

He sat down with a thump on the hard and uncomfortable dorm mattress (in Montana we’d had a king-sized super awesome bed, I would like to mention) and shook his head.

“I should have been more careful,” he explained. “I shouldn’t have let you get pregnant.”

I know I should have acted with a little more compassion, but I admit, I snorted.

“Please, that’s the most ridiculous statement you’ve ever made. And that’s saying something, David, because you’ve said some hella ridiculous things in all our years together.”

“No Jokey Sarah, please,” he said, covering his face with his hands.

I pursed my lips. Shit, he was really busted up. With a sigh, I came over and sat down next to him, wrapping my arm around his shoulder and smoothing my hand over his warm skin to comfort him.

“Baby, come on,” I said. “You and I are married and we do what we do when the lights go off. It’s not 1952, you aren’t somehow gender-bound to ‘protect’ me from babies… or zombie babies. Or zombies with babies, even, when you come right down to it.”

He lifted his face from his hands and shot me a look.

“Sorry,” I said with a smile. “Jokey Sarah has a strong grip on me. I try to make her hide, but she is mean and powerful.”

He smiled back and then stared from my face down my body to my poochy stomach. “So, how are you digesting this?”

“Not well,” I admitted. “I mean, super baby with zombie attributes, growing in my stomach at some kind of accelerated growth rate. Sounds… scary.”

He nodded. “Totally scary.”

I touched the newly swollen stomach that said, “Hey there’s a kid in here, check it out.”

“But, you know, it’s not a zombie. And it’s a boy. And he is probably going to be sort of awesome.”

Dave seemed to ponder that for a while. “I hope so. But, um, what if we fuck it up as parents.”

I laughed. “I’m sure we’ll totally fuck it up as parents, David. We’ll swear too much and I’ll be snarky and you’ll make him read comic books that will scare the shit out of him. He’ll probably end up just like The Kid, God help us.”

Dave laughed. “That wouldn’t be so bad, I guess. The Kid is a little shit, but he’s also sort of amazing in his own way.”

“So we’ll shoot for that, okay? We’ll make sure our little boy is a little shit, but amazing in his own way.”

“Seems like a plan.” He lay back on the narrow bed, toeing off his shoes as he yawned.

“Dave,” I said. “I still want to help here. That may mean I’m going to go out sometimes. That may mean I’m going to fight zombies.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Yeah, I know. And you know that I’m still going to be snippy about it and overly protective.”

“Yeah.” I smoothed the hair back from his forehead and smiled. "It's kind of our thing, isn’t it?”

He nodded, but I could see he was getting overcome by exhaustion. Emotional sleep I used to call it (though I was much pissier about it back then). Dave had always gotten tired when he was super stressed.

“I won’t be up too late,” I promised.

He grunted and rolled over and I left him there, doing his zombie breathing thing and headed into the hallway.

#

I don’t know what I intended to do as I roamed the hallways. But unlike Dave, I couldn’t sleep when I was stressed. My mind would race, running over options, scenarios, fears, plans until I wanted to scream from how loud all that shit was in my head.

Tonight was no different and I moved through the hallways, pondering everything that had happened since all this started so long ago.

Only one thing pierced my thoughts and that was the faint sound of voices as I turned a corner and headed down a dark hallway. At first I thought they were from people in the makeshift bedrooms in the old professor offices, but there were too many, they were too loud and I moved toward them like a little bee to honey.

I found an open door and a large room filled with light from lanterns and candles. It looked like it had been a conference room of some kind, but the old table had been shoved to a back wall and replaced with some couches in a half-circle. Couches currently inhabited by Nadia, Drea, McCray and Nicole. There was a big, black dog lying next to Nadia and she stroked his head gently.

“Hey,” I said softly as I stood in the doorway. The group all stopped talking at once and turned to stare at me. I could see it in their eyes that I had been the topic of conversation. “Is it okay if I join you, or will that mess up anything you’re saying about me?”

Nicole shrugged. “Of course, come in.” She motioned to an empty seat near Nadia.

She and McCray smiled and they were totally real, but I could see the others were more uncomfortable.

“I get it,” I reassured them as I sat down on a comfy chair and tucked my feet up under me. “If I knew someone carrying a sort-of-zombie baby, I would totally talk about them. So if you think I’m pissed or something, I’m not. I’m happy to even talk to you about it, answer questions, though I don’t really know any more than say, Nadia or Nicole or Josh or the freaking child who runs the lab.”

Drea chuckled. “Man-child, you mean,” she said with a shake of her head. “You certainly gave us a handful when you asked us to keep watch over Robbie.”

Nadia wrinkled her brow. “You guys gave Robbie over to Josh and Drea?” she asked.

I nodded. “He’s really competent, obviously. And smart as a whip, as well as annoying as hell. But he’s also still a pre-teen. When we left Phoenix, we knew we couldn’t leave him alone. And he wanted to stay with his lab and keep working. So we tortured our friends by giving them The Kid.”

Drea’s face softened. “He grows on you. You’ll see when you have your own son.”

“We’ll see,” I said, noncommittal because I honestly didn’t know how to answer. “I might be one of those awful Moms who hands off her kids to the help or something.”

“I doubt it,” Nicole laughed.

“Yeah, Sarah, you run everything around you, I can’t imagine you won’t have that boy marching to your drum five minutes after he pops his head out and says ‘ello,” McCray agreed.

“Spoken like a bunch of people who never had kids,” I laughed. I turned my attention back to Nadia. “How about you? You said you lost someone on the beach when it started, but do you have kids?”

She motioned to the dog. “Just Duncan here.”

“Then you’re the biggest expert among us,” Drea laughed.

“I wanted kids,” Nadia continued, her eyes going all faraway and sad like pretty much everyone’s did when the subject of Before Zombie came up at any length. “But my boyfriend, Randy, didn’t want them. He said yet, but he meant never. And we had… issues that sort of trumped any ticking biological clock, so I didn’t push it.”

I nodded. “I get that. So was he the one who died?”

She hesitated. “Yeah. Well, got turned.”

I flinched. That was worse. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I headed for Vegas at first, hoping to find my sister, but that didn’t work, obviously. Then I wanted to get to the East Coast and my parents, but… well, there aren’t many ways to get across that wall, are there? So I ended up back here. Like a salmon.”

I laughed at the image, but said, “Go with a homing pigeon.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because salmon die once they return to their home stream and spawn.”

“Ah.” She saluted me. “Gotcha.”

“And you’ve been alone all this time,” Nicole asked and I was surprised that she placed her hand over McCray’s. Yup, totally an item.

Nadia paled a little. “Mostly.”

Obviously there was a lot more story here than she wanted to tell. Maybe more than we wanted to hear. We all had seen and heard and even done things during the apocalypse that we didn’t want to share, to remember. Nadia deserved her secrets as much as the next guy. Girl. Whatever.

“Sarah,” Nicole said and I could see she was trying to give Nadia her space, too. “You’ll be fine.”

“Assuming Colonel Fenton doesn’t snatch my baby the second it leaves my body or something,” I said.

McCray frowned and he and Nicole exchanged a brief look that I didn’t particularly care for.

“Fenton is…” he began.

“McCray,” Nicole said softly and he shut his mouth.

I pursed my lips. “If the guy is dangerous, I think I should know that for my own safety.”

Drea shifted a little. “Look, I came into this lab after everyone else, with Robbie. I don’t work with the lab rats, I just organize the kitchen, work on the supplies, that sort of thing, so I don’t hang with Fenton all that much or anything, but he’s… I think he has the right motives. At least in his own head.”

I stared at her. “Not exactly a ringing endorsement if his ‘right motives’ prompt him to steal my baby or kill my husband or take me off to get probed or something.”

“He’s a Colonel, not an alien, I doubt he’ll get you probed,” Nicole said with a smile.

I did not share in it. “You know what I mean.”

“I won’t say you don’t have to be careful, Sarah,” Nicole said, getting up and motioning for McCray to join her. “We all have to be careful now, don’t we?”

I nodded. I got it. They weren’t sure of Fenton either, but they weren’t exactly ready to go out on a limb against a guy who was protecting them. Us?

“At this point,” Drea added. “Getting the serum done and ready to distribute has to be our main goal. It’s how we’re going to save the world. And Fenton is a necessary part of that equation.”

“Yeah,” I said, but as everyone, including me, got up and started to disburse, I had to wonder what the cost of that necessary part might be in the end.

Chapter Thirteen

Expose your child to all different kinds of people and experiences. And zombies. Make sure he knows about the zombies.

I sat in an office overlooking Red Square and stared out at the rainy red bricks and beyond them to the fence where zombies sometimes shambled by. There were other things I could have been doing, of course. Dave wanted me to come down and help with some of the tests, Drea had offered me a place helping with the supplies, even The Kid had said he didn’t mind having me around (high praise, indeed) but for the moment, all their offers were turned down.

I just wanted to sit. By myself. Okay, not by myself, with my zombie-benefitted son, and ponder what the fuck I’d done in my life to lead me to this place. My answers were very navel-staring and melancholy, so I won’t get too far into them. Besides, I didn’t have too much time to wallow, because there was a light knock on the wall of the office after I’d been there for only a half an hour or so.

I swiveled the office chair and was surprised to find Lisa standing there.

“You don’t look like a Stephen,” she said as she leaned on the door jam and motioned to the name plate on the desk that had once belonged to Professor Stephen Garret.

“I don’t feel like one, either. Maybe a Stephanie.”

I laughed and touched the belly that seemed like it had swelled a little more overnight. Once that baby went supernova, it seemed like he wasn’t screwing around. Which proved he was my boy, for sure, I guess.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked. “I figured you’d be out and about already, being a super soldier.”

Her mouth quirked in a half-smile. “Well, I wondered if you wanted to come out with me.”

Both my eyebrows lifted. “You want me to come with you? Even after everything we heard yesterday about super zombie babies and my rapidly advancing condition and all that jazz?”

Lisa shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t give a crap about that stuff. I just need help killing things and you are much better than the yes, ma’am/no ma’am soldiers who follow me around like a puppy. It’s like, shit, you’re not in the army anymore, buddy. Just be a dude.”

My brow wrinkled. Here was a new version of Lisa, all nice and kind of funny. Were those warning bells going off in my head now? Screaming, “Danger, Sarah!! Danger!!!”

Yeah, if they were, I ignored them.

“I have to admit, I did enjoy zombie killing again. What do you have in mind for today?” I asked.

She grinned and flopped down a map in front of me. It was one of the ones for new students, all pretty colors and funny little keys with things like food and fun hangouts marked. The thing that was less cute was the big perimeter that Lisa had penciled in with red pencil out in the middle of the map.

“Well, they’ve gated off the student union now, so we’ve reclaimed a bit more of campus.”

She indicated Husky union, which was within the fence line. I smiled: accomplishment!

“But right behind that building-” She indicated on the map. “-here, is Hall Health.”

I jerked my face up. “You want the medical supplies.”

“Bingo.”

I pushed to my feet. “Well, considering I’m apparently going to have a baby in five to ten minutes, I’m all for it. I’ll definitely help.”

“And the bonus is that the building is way smaller than the HUB,” Lisa said.

“Then what are we waiting for?” I asked. “Let me leave a note for Dave so he won’t be super pissed like last time.”

“Just moderately pissed?” she asked.

I hesitated. “Yeah, he doesn’t want me going out. But we’re not attached at the hip and if he has to do what he has to do, I guess the same is true of me.”

Lisa smiled. “Okay, write your note and I’ll get us loaded for bear, er zombie.”

“Just not zombie bears,” I laughed as I walked into the hall with her and headed toward the room I shared with Dave to leave my note. “I think there are some things I just couldn’t take.”

#

Within forty-five minutes, we were stepping from the lab building, loaded to the hilt with weaponry, walking in the cold rain toward the HUB we’d cleared the day before and Hall Health behind it.

“So looking at your map, I was surprised you didn’t have more of the campus within the fence line,” I said. “How did you get the amount of supplies you have?”

Lisa shrugged. “When we first got here, what we really wanted to secure was the lab. We went out to different buildings in groups and got what we needed, then brought it back. In the beginning, it was a guard and shoot thing. Then the soldiers drove out and got the fencing. Little by little, we built it up.”

I nodded slowly. That would explain why everyone was so hesitant to blame the military force here for anything. They really had saved the day. Still did by providing a larger and larger safe haven.

“You still do guard and shoot, though,” I pointed out.

She nodded. “Oh yeah. The fences aren’t always completely perfect. So we keep up the guard and have them out checking the line, too. So far, the system works.”

“I’d say so if you’re willing to expand to create a larger and larger ‘city’ within this wall. What happens when stragglers who aren’t zombies come in?”

Lisa ducked her head, like she was looking for something, but I saw the look on her face. The pain.

“There aren’t a lot of stragglers left. They hit this city hard, both in terms of zombies, since it was ground zero, and in terms of wiping out any population, zombie or human, with bombing runs.”

“Sounds like we got out just in time.”

She looked at me for a minute, her face unreadable, and then motioned to the fence. “Here’s where we’ll duck out to get to Hall Health. Ready?”

I pulled a pistol and checked that it was fully loaded, ran a hand over the rest of my shit just to make sure I had a sense of where it was and nodded.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

She popped the gate and we hurried out and locked it behind us. A couple of zombies roaming the fence line, banging on it like they were looking for soft spots, immediately started over toward us, growling and grunting.

“Use silent weapons,” Lisa advised. “Might as well not bring the hoard.”

“Comforting,” I murmured as I replaced my pistol and exchanged it for a machete.

The first zombie was naked, rotting breasts swinging in the wind as she run up on me, growling and grunting as she waved her clawed hands around. I slashed the machete and it thudded as it whisked through the softening bone and tissue of her skull. She wheezed as the top part of her head slid away and she sank to the ground in a pile.

When I turned, Lisa had done something similar to the other zombie, a half-dressed man in what had likely been a very expensive suit.

“Onward,” Lisa whispered.

Luckily, Hall Health wasn’t much behind the HUB and we were able to maneuver ourselves behind trees and buildings to avoid being spotted (or scented) by the handful of zombies on the path between our current position and the one we wanted to reach. Soon enough, we were at the door.

I had always been confused by Hall Health. A clinic was supposed to look clinical, but the building had been designed in that same “Ivy League” quality of the rest of the UW buildings. It looked more like a lecture hall than a place where you’d get your free birth control, but whatever.

Lisa leaned against the side of the building near the door, checking our flank and getting ready to cover me as she motioned for me to open the building.

I sucked in a breath and placed my hand on the door. But before I could push, it was yanked open, out of my hands. There in the doorway, stood Nadia.

I stared at her. She wasn’t zombie-fied. She was just in the building, waiting for us.

“What the hell are you doing here, Nadia?” Lisa asked as she whipped around into the doorway to look at our friend.

She shifted. “Yeah, well, here’s the thing.”

To my horror, she lifted what looked to be a pistol and fired it directly at Lisa. I recoiled, expecting her to fall in a spurt of blood as a bullet pierced her flesh. But it wasn’t a bullet that came out of the gun, it was a little dart that embedded itself in Lisa’s neck.

Lisa stared at Nadia, then lifted her hand to her neck and pulled the dart free.

“What-?” she began, but then collapsed in a heap in front of the door.

I backed up. I’d put my pistol away, so I held my machete up like it could somehow stop her.

“What are you doing?” I whispered. “What are you doing, Nadia?”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured as she leveled the tranquilizer gun toward me. “It’s the only way.”

She fired. I swung the machete like a bat, like I could hit a home run with that dart, but I’d never been much good at sports. I missed and there was a tingling pain as the dart entered by chest, just at the flesh of my breast.

I looked down. It was a tiny dart, so small and yet immediately the world began to spin, spin, spin around me. I staggered, trying to run toward the fence, but I didn’t even manage to turn around before I fell into the wet grass next to the door and everything in the world went pitch black.

Chapter Fourteen

Zombie Knows Best

Dave held the note Sarah had left him in a fist, so hard that the paper was crumpled. How many times did he have to say to her that he didn’t want her to be unsafe? Sometimes it felt like she did shit just to piss him off.

Only it wasn’t like that anymore. She didn’t poke at him for fun. Sarah was just… Sarah.

He turned and stalked out of the room and down the stairs. In front of the door that led outside was a sleeping little sentry in half-military gear and a UW t-shirt.

“Hey, you!” Dave snapped.

The boy straightened up and his eyes went wide when he looked at Dave. He was kind of famous that way. Nadia the Nurse (as Dave referred to her in his head) had even implied that there might be a few “Cults of David” out there in the Wilds. Some kind of weirdoes who had heard of his powers and thought he was the second coming. Ridiculous.

“Where is my wife?” he asked, trying to keep his tone calm so he wouldn’t end up with the nervous young man’s bullet in his skull.

“Who?” the boy replied.

Dave shut his eyes and counted to a slow ten. He could smell the kids sweat and the sweetness of his brains. Utterly disconcerting, no matter how long he’d had the advanced sense of zombie smell.

“My wife, Sarah. The pregnant one that everyone is so concerned about. She left here with the Colonel’s girlfriend, Lisa.” He held the boy’s stare so he would be able to know if the solider was lying when he answered.

He shifted, sweating even more. “Oh, um, yeah. They left a few hours ago, to clear out Hall Health.”

Dave clenched his fists. Wonderful. Sarah was outside the semi-safety of the fence again, roaming around with Lisa, who he didn’t trust and who was certainly a bad influence. He pulled the pistol from his belt and started outside, leaving the boy at the door to sputter after him as he slammed the door shut behind him.

Sarah called it his “caveman” thing. Which he hated, by the way. Shit, why couldn’t a guy not like it when his pregnant wife put herself in danger just for the thrill of it? Especially now, his reaction just didn’t seem that outrageous. And he wasn’t even sure Sarah thought he was being ridiculous. She just still went out without thinking.

Hall Health… Sarah had gone to school here what seemed like a million years ago and he recalled heading to Hall Health with her when she had the flu or something. He sort of vaguely remembered it being behind the HUB, so he headed in that direction.

He didn’t have to worry as he walked. Even if zombies had somehow made it past the fence line, it wasn’t like he was their prey. Where once he had battled and fought, now he herded and fired. His life was so utterly boring.

Okay, so maybe he wasn’t all that far from Sarah and her desire for a thrill.

He moved around the big university student building and there he saw the fence, freshly put up behind the HUB to signify that Lisa and Sarah had cleared the place the day before. And when he looked at how big the damn building was, he was pretty proud of his wife for covering all of that pretty much by herself.

Sarah was a badass, that was never something he would debate.

He stopped as the fence line became clearer from behind a couple of overgrown bushes. There, lying just inside the gate that led to the buildings that hadn’t been cleared, was a body. A woman’s body, judging by the size of it.

He took off running toward her, holding his breath as he prayed, actually prayed, that it wouldn’t be Sarah crumpled there. Zombie-fied maybe, because that was all he could think that could have happened to the victim. They just hadn’t gotten back up yet.

He dropped to his knees beside the person and flipped her over from her stomach to her back. Relief swelled in him as he stared at the bruised face before him. It wasn’t Sarah, it was Lisa.

More interestingly, she wasn’t zombie-fied. There was no greyness to her flesh, a small wound on her cheek bled red, not black sludge. She was just unconscious.

But where was Sarah?

“Lisa,” he said, shaking her. “Lisa, wake up.”

She grumbled at his sharp tone and slowly her eyes came out. Nope, definitely not a zombie, there was life and light and recognition in her stare.

“David?” she moaned. “What’s going on?”

“You tell me!” he burst out, unable to control his emotions. “Where is my wife? Where is Sarah?”

Lisa started to sit up and he helped her, resting a hand on her back to help support her as she rubbed her forehead and then her eyes.

“They-they took her,” she said.

He stared at the woman beside him, almost unable to comprehend what she was saying. It didn’t make sense.

“Who, zombies?” he asked. “Zombies don’t take people, Lisa.”

“No, not zombies… men. There were men and-”

Dave stopped helping her sit up and jumped to his feet, staring at her and trying, with every human fiber left in his being, not to go ape shit on her.

“Men,” he repeated. “Huh, interesting since this place is so heavily guarded and all. Or do you mean men who you let in? Men who you and your little boyfriend are allies with? How much did you get for getting Sarah and the baby in her? What did you trade?”

Lisa stared up at him like he was speaking some foreign language. “What the hell?”

“She never fully trusted you,” he continued. “Neither did I. She said, be careful, the military isn’t a good thing. And I told her it was fine and rambled on about the cure and now you guys have screwed us just like she thought you would.”

He moved toward Lisa one long step, but before he could continue a tirade or make demands about Sarah, he felt the barrel of a shotgun against his back. He froze. Zombie powers or not, he really didn’t want half his chest blown out. He doubted that would go well for him.

“Stop screaming.”

The voice he recognized. Colonel Fenton, come to save his girlfriend’s day. How super-fucking-romantic. Except that they were the bad guys in this tale. They weren’t supposed to get a happy ending.

“God damn it Fenton, stay out of this,” he growled.

“Shut up and turn around,” Fenton continued.

Dave did as he was told and found himself facing ten fully armed military guys, all aiming various and sundry guns toward him. The military goons included the little sentry from the lab. Nice, so he’d gone to tattle.

Not that Dave could really blame him.

“What’s going on?” Fenton asked. His gaze was still on David, but it was pretty clear he was talking to Lisa.

She struggled to her feet and staggered slightly. Shit, was she still pretending to be hurt for her boyfriend’s sake?

“Sarah is gone,” she said and then promptly fell over in a new heap.

Fenton’s lip tensed, but he didn’t race to her, he just flicked a wrist and one of the bigger guys moved to her side and swept her up.

“David, we’re going back to the lab for a talk.”

Dave looked at him, but said nothing. Not much to say with so many guns pointed at his chest.

Fenton ignored his silence and his sour look and continued, “Henson, carry Lisa and make sure she goes straight to the med staff. In fact we’ll have our meeting there so she can explain herself once she’s awake.”

He glanced at the younger man who was the guard at the lab. “Ward, you retake your post at the lab entrance and try not to let hell break loose this time. The rest of you, fan out, if Lisa’s statement is true, we seem to have a breach of some kind. Check all the fences, radio in if you find pods and keep your eyes out for enemies with brains, as well as brainless ones. Go!”

He returned his attention to Dave as the crew fanned out. He leaned in, pressing the gun barrel right into Dave’s chest. There was anger in his stare, Dave could see it, he could smell it, too. So he really did have feelings for Lisa… maybe was blaming Dave for her injuries.

“After you,” Fenton growled, pushing him toward the lab with the gun.

“No, I need to find my wife,” Dave said, just as low and angry. “If she’s been taken, we don’t have much time.”

“I agree,” Fenton said with a raised brow. “And you’re wasting that time by arguing. Let’s go back to the lab, let me find out what’s really going on and then we’ll decide the best course of action when it comes to Sarah. Now move.”

Dave wanted to scream. To zombie roar. To rip Fenton’s arm off. None of those things were going to happen in this scenario, at least not without taking a shot to the chest first. And, more importantly, none of it would help Sarah. He clenched his teeth and started moving.

#

“Did you do this?” Fenton asked later, motioning to Lisa and her bruised and battered face as The Kid and Josh looked her over. Somehow they couldn’t find Nadia, so chemistry nerds were as good as it got.

“I doubt it, unless you have a dart gun, Dave,” The Kid said as he pushed some of Lisa’s hair out of the way and pulled a tiny dart from her skin. “I think that should help with the wooziness.”

Fenton stared as Robbie handed over the dart and stared at it. He stared at Dave.

Dave shrugged. “Shit man, I don’t have a dart gun. Why would I want one? I kill zombies by roaming into the middle of them and firing off shotgun blasts. Those darts wouldn’t do a damn thing to any of them.”

Josh nodded. “I’d say that’s true. As Robbie knows, it’s very difficult to manufacture a serum that would incapacitate a zombie or affect it in any way due to the compromised circulatory system.”

“So whoever fired this was targeting humans,” Fenton said softly.

Lisa groaned and sat up, steadying herself on the table she had been laid on. “They were targeting us, not just any humans.”

Fenton swallowed, but the relief wasn’t exactly covered up. Dave could almost smile. He got what it was like. But right now, he wanted to know where his wife was.

“Tell us what happened,” they both ordered at the same time.

Fenton glared at him. “How about you let me run this interrogation, David? You’re a little emotional.”

“You think?” he snapped, but then folded his arms. He had to stay cool, if only to get the information about Sarah. Then he could figure out how to get the fuck out.

“We were going to clear Hall Health,” Lisa said, rubbing her neck where the dart had been stuck in her skin. “We exited the gated area and shut it down behind us. We followed entrance protocol. Sarah was opening the door, I was cover. But before she could enter, the door opened and Nadia was there waiting for us.”

“Nadia?” Dave repeated. “What was she doing there?”

“A very good question,” Fenton agreed.

“She shot me with a tranq gun,” Lisa said, her face twisting in anger. “So you hazard a guess as to what she was doing there.”

Dave blinked. The little nurse who had been so kind of Sarah when she was scared during the ultrasound?

“I dropped and everything was blurry for a long time. I kept fighting the tranquilizer and managed to wake up. Nadia wasn’t alone anymore, there were guys dressed in full black, military gear, high level. Sarah was unconscious, I assume from the same tranquilizer. They were loading her onto a cart of some kind. I got up to try to fight them off, but one of the men turned and saw me. He hit me. I tried to fight him off, but he was stronger.”

She flinched and Dave saw in that instant that she was being utterly truthful. She was afraid. She felt guilty. She had tried, very bravely, to fight off whoever had taken Sarah.

Fenton reached over and touched her hand. A brief moment of comfort, but Lisa seemed to relax with it.

“Then what happened?” he encouraged her gently.

She shifted. “I kept trying to get up, but he was too big and I was too groggy. Nadia shot me with the tranquilizer again and I faded out.”

“How did you end up back in the fence line?” Dave asked.

She shrugged. “I vaguely recall being moved. And Nadia’s voice saying sorry. Maybe she moved me back into the fenced area.”

“But why?” Fenton asked, pacing the room slowly. “Why wouldn’t she leave you for the zombies? It would have taken us far longer to determine that Sarah had been taken if you’d been ripped to shreds. Why leave a witness?”

“Who cares?” Dave snapped. “I need to leave and go look for my wife. I need to find whoever took her and get her back.”

He stood up, but Fenton sidestepped in his path. “You go off half-cocked and you’ll get nothing from this but probably shot and that won’t help Sarah. What is important now is to know who Nadia was working for. Who took Sarah and where? Then we can figure out a plan of action to save her.”

“You really have some intention to save her?” Dave asked, his jaw so tight that he could hardly speak.

Fenton nodded once. “No man left behind, David. No man. We’ll get her back. Trust me.”

And for the first time since their arrival, Dave actually did.

Chapter Fifteen

Baby-proofing is about more than covering your outlets, it’s about changing your lifestyle and making your child’s safety your top priority. Check everything… can your child get to that fixture? That breakable or heavy item? The zombie you keep chained in the backyard?

My whole concept of consciousness was not right. I kept trying to wake up, but I felt like I was watching television and the signal kept coming in and out. God, I missed television.

There were moments I was in what seemed like reality. Moments of Lisa swinging at some guys in weird, black uniforms. The next moment she was gone and I was racing along back streets in a golf cart.

Next, the men in black were firing at a pod of zombies, throwing grenades and generally acting like something out of one of Dave’s old video games. Finally, I remembered a helicopter, a gurney, and the feeling of lifting away toward… well, who knew where?

And now I sat in a very dark room, tied to a chair. My head hurt, but at least I could stay conscious for more than ten seconds at a time. I tugged against my ropes, but they didn’t budge. Military knots, no doubt. I thrashed a little harder, but still nothing.

“Okay, calm down,” I said out loud, so that I’d hear my voice saying it.

Freaking out wasn’t going to help. I couldn’t escape right now, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be opportunities later. At this moment, I had to try to figure out all the details of where I was being held so that I could.

First off, I’d been taken. That part was crystal clear. Worse was that Nadia, who I’d actually liked and trusted, had been involved and poor Lisa, who I’d given eight tons of shit to, had tried to save me. If she’d been left outside the fence line, she was probably dead. Even if the serum in her blood kept her from getting zombiefied, it wouldn’t keep her from getting torn from limb to limb by any hungry zombies who stumbled upon her.

I shivered, but pushed the thought away. I couldn’t think of that now if I wanted to escape. I had to be in this moment, wherever I was, really focusing on what was around me. Later I could freak out about poor Lisa. And that bitch Nadia.

There was a steady drip, drip, drip in the room, meaning there was a leak that let the rain inside. And the sound echoed massively, so the room was large, maybe a warehouse type set-up. Okay, good. I was getting recon, as Lisa had called it, from this. What else?

There were other sounds. Swishing sounds… but I couldn’t place them. What were they? What were they? And then it struck me.

Waves.

Were we moving? Were we on a ship? No… not moving. So I was in a warehouse by the waterfront. Since we’d taken a helicopter, I had to assume we hadn’t gone far. In fact, we were probably still in the city itself. So if I got out, and if I wasn’t completely guessing as opposed to really gleaning facts, I could, in theory, get back to University of Washington and to Dave.

Poor Dave who might or might not even know I had been taken. If Lisa was dead, they could just assume I’d encountered the same fate. In fact, since I hadn’t gotten any serum, they might even assume I was a zombie. God, he would torture himself over that. But if he thought I’d been taken…

Well, I knew the guy. He’d stop at nothing to get to me, just like I’d stopped at nothing when he’d been taken from me. If he managed it, I guessed it would make us even.

Or just two idiots who kept getting caught by cult leaders, separatists, government operatives, bitchy Judas-like nurses… the usual in a zombie reality.

Now… how to get out.

The door to the warehouse opened, sending a bright column of light from the outside into my eyes. I turned my face, squinting as they adjusted. In a second, a figure blocked the light and entered the room. He was carrying a couple of lanterns and soon the room was bright with the false light as the door was shut behind him.

I straightened up, staring at my captor as he got close enough to really examine. He was one of the same guys who had taken me, all dressed in snazzy black uniforms, armed to the hilt with every weapon imaginable.

“Hello, Sarah,” he said as he stepped forward.

He did not take a seat, he just stared down at me, enjoying his position towering over me. I guess it was meant to intimidate, mostly I just wanted to sucker punch him in the nuts.

Since I couldn’t, I looked at him instead. He was a middle-aged man. Probably in his late forties, though in the apocalypse, who knew? He could have been twenty-five and just fucked up by whatever he’d seen. Not that I felt sorry for the guy.

I didn’t respond either way, just stared at him. He smiled at my silence.

“Ah, I see. Well, let me speak then if you won’t.”

I turned my face to indicate I wasn’t listening, but of course I was. I needed intel if I was going to get out of this. Plus, maybe he was going to tell me this was just an elaborate prank, like in summer camp. They were the camp from the other side of the lake and they’d kidnapped me but would return me after a rousing game of inter-camp dodge ball or something.

Yeah, not likely.

“My name is Major Roger Keel. I’ve been sent in by the government forces on the other side of the wall.”

I jerked at that and couldn’t help but look at him. That explained the real uniforms, rather than the hodgepodge our guys in the lab wore.

“I see you remember encountering our forces not that long ago,” Keel continued with a thin, very humorless smile. “As do I. I believe you and your husband killed eight of my men in your escape from our temporary holding area.”

I stiffened. “You were responsible for Dave’s kidnapping?.”

His smile broadened. “She speaks. Excellent.”

“Were you?” I pressed, less interested in playing mind games than in getting at the truth.

He nodded once. “Our division is a tactical squad and we acquired our target, your husband. Your escape plot counts as treason.”

“So kidnapping an innocent American citizen is cool, but trying to get away is actionable.” I spit on the ground. “Great. Glad to see government hard at work on the important stuff.”

His lips pursed. “Your husband is hardly an innocent citizen. He is a thing, unnatural and disgusting.” He hesitated. “But ultimately useful.”

“I bet.”

I stared at him in the weird glow of the lantern. His face was almost twisted, deformed by hateful anger. To him we weren’t people, we were targets, weapons, acquisitions.

“How long have you been Westside?” I asked.

His eyebrows lifted. “You mean on this side of the wall?”

I nodded once, not expecting an answer. But to my surprise, he actually seemed to ponder what I’d asked.

“Right after your escape I was… demoted to this duty,” he said.

“So, a couple of months,” I pressed. “Same for the rest of your group?”

He nodded.

I shook my head. “No wonder you aren’t impressed by what you see here, by what we’ve done here, no wonder you don’t get it. You’re just a tourist.”

His lip twitched. I’d pissed him off, which maybe wasn’t smart, but it was pretty damned satisfying.

“So why are you taking me?” I asked. “Plot to lure my husband in?”

Smug pleasure spread across his face and the look sent away any satisfaction I’d been feeling.

“Your husband is an interesting target to us, certainly,” he conceded. “If it appears that we can obtain him, I will make the order to do so. But no, my dear, you are what we want. Or rather… that thing you carry inside of you.”

“What thing?” I managed to say in a pretty normal tone, considering how loud my heartbeat suddenly was in my ears.

He arched a brow. “Come, come, Sarah. Your… child.”

The way he emphasized the word, heavy with sarcasm, made me want to punch him. But now was not the time, even if I could get my arms free. I drew in a deep breath and considered my options carefully before I spoke.

“I guess you hadn’t heard,” I said, willing a few tears to well in my eyes. It wasn’t hard. “I lost the baby. A few days ago.”

There was a moment’s flash of uncertainty on his face and he reached into a pocket on his belt to withdraw a radio.

“Send in Nadia,” he ordered over the crackling emptiness, then quickly shut the radio off. Probably so their frequency wasn’t picked up. Which meant we likely were close to the campus.

In a moment, the warehouse door opened again and another figure was shoved into the column of light. As they slammed the door behind her, I heard her approach rather than saw it, the thump of boots on concrete, the swish of pant legs rubbing together.

When she reached us, she sent me a quick, guilty look.

“Bitch,” I said as a welcome and she flinched.

“Shut up,” Keel said, then turned his attention to Nadia. “Sarah says she lost her child a few days ago.”

I stared at her, willing her to keep quiet, willing her to help me even though she was nothing short of a betrayer. Maybe I had ‘bitched’ too soon… Dave would tell me I had. Stupid boy, always being right at the most inopportune moments.

“I examined her more recently than that and she remains pregnant,” Nadia said, shooting me another apologetic look.

He nodded. “As I suspected.” His attention returned to me. “You’ll carry that baby to term, which I’m told could be a very short wait. Then it becomes property of the government. We will learn a great deal from its dissection.”

He turned on his heel as those words sunk in.

“No!” I screamed after him as he disappeared into the dark, his boot falls echoing away. “Stop!”

He didn’t, of course. He had the upper hand. All the blood seemed to leave my brain in the same moment, making me lightheaded even though I was sitting. I tried very hard to keep my reaction from my face, but I wanted to weep, to kill every one of these bastards who were threatening my son.

Instead, I sat there, utterly helpless as he opened and slammed the door behind him, leaving me with Nadia.

“Fuck you,” I screamed at her, thrashing in my chair. “We trusted you!”

She flinched at every word. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she responded, turning her back on me. “You think this is what I want?”

“Considering all of it is your fault, yeah, I think it’s exactly what you want.”

She shook her head, hands raised in some kind of entreaty. “It’s not. Look, I just want to go home. I just want to get back to West Virginia and my parents.”

I stared at her. “So you are willing to sacrifice me and my baby so that you can go see your Mommy? Shit, don’t you think all of us want that? But I don’t go throwing people under the bus so that I can get a hot shower and watch a little Mad Men, you stupid cow.”

“You don’t know what I’ve lost,” she whimpered.

And you know what? She was right. I had no clue. More to the point, I didn’t really care. Because her story, while likely very sad and highly compelling, was just like the story of a ton of people who had never arranged my kidnapping at the hands of military goons and handed over my baby to them for ‘dissection’.

“Maybe I don’t, but you know what I’m going to lose, don’t you?” I said softly. “How’s that sitting on your conscious Miss First Do No Harm?”

I could see the answer in her eyes. She was wracked with guilt. Truly sorry for the consequences she had reaped on me.

“I-I didn’t know they would hurt the baby,” she said softly.

“Well, they’re going to,” I said.

The baby we were talking about was moving around inside me, proof that that ‘thing’, as the Major referred to him, was my kid.

My very delicate, totally helpless and utterly breakable kid, zombie benefits or not.

“Hope it’s worth your trip to West Virginia. If they even intend to get you there,” I said as I turned my face to indicate the conversation was over.

She caught her breath, like she wanted to say something. She didn’t. As she turned, she caught both the lamps next to me and trudged out of the warehouse, leaving me in the dark with my equally dark thoughts and fears.

“Dave,” I whispered. “You better come for us. Soon would be good.”

Chapter Sixteen

Confessions of a Tiger Mother… er, Father. Er, Zombie.

Dave flipped over the mattress in Nadia’s quarters, watching in satisfaction as it bounced off the wall and slid down to be pinned behind the box spring.

“Okay Hulk-Smash,” Fenton said. “Why don’t you calm down a touch or we’ll miss something.”

Dave shot him a glance. Not a bad reference or a wrong sentiment really.

“I don’t know what to think of you, man,” he admitted as he looked under the bed, itself. There were a couple of duffle bags there and he yanked them out and set them on the hard box spring to go through them.

“What do you mean?” Fenton asked.

Dave shrugged. “Well, you don’t make sense. You’re a military guy and I don’t trust you, but you’re going out of your way to help me, even going so far as partnering with me on the search for shit on Nadia even though you could have just assigned the grunt duty to one of your… your…”

“Grunts?” Fenton supplied with a half-smile.

“Yeah.”

Fenton pulled open each drawer of Nadia’s dresser and searched them with the precision Dave didn’t exactly have in him at present. Not when his thoughts kept going back to Sarah in captivity.

“I know you don’t trust me,” Fenton said after a moment. “I knew that from the moment Sarah saw our team and looked like a deer in headlights.”

“Yeah, well we have our reasons,” Dave muttered.

One of Nadia’s duffel bags was filled entirely with shoes. Who needed so many shoes, especially in an apocalypse? Actually, Sarah would probably have a long-winded answer for that. She liked shoes, too. There had been plenty of mall shopping trips over the months where she’d just tried them on for fun.

“I’m not saying it as slur against your character,” Fenton said with a shake of his head. “I can’t blame you for how you feel. One thing you learn in a zombie outbreak is listening to your gut. That keeps you alive nine times out of ten. But there’s something else you forget.”

“What’s that?” Dave asked, frustrated by the lack of evidence in the duffels. Aside from the shoes, there were dirty clothes in there, but little else.

“I’m not really military anymore,” Fenton said with a sadness in his tone that made Dave look up. He had stopped searching and was just staring into nothing. “They abandoned us, just like the civilians. They bombed without notice. I lost dozens of men. The thirteen in this area are the survivors, but we’re not a real team anymore.”

“But they still salute and call you Colonel and-”

“Makes them feel better to have that normalcy,” Fenton said with a shrug as he went back to the drawers. “Hey, look under the fitted sheet on the mattress you flipped.”

Dave looked at him a second more before he followed the order… actually it was more of a suggestion… and tugged the mattress back down to the bed.

“So why do you hang out here? Why keep up the charade of military unity besides the normalcy?” Dave asked, struggling with the tight sheet. It was a size too small and really on there.

“There’s a chance we can save the world with this serum,” Fenton said. “That is awe-inspiring. I have to give my men that chance to be a part of something bigger. I have to give myself that chance.”

Dave chuckled. “Plus there’s the girl.”

Fenton glanced up at him. For a minute, it looked like he was going to deny it, but finally he just shrugged. “Yeah. There’s the girl.”

“I get it, man,” Dave said and grunted as he finally managed to get the fitted sheet loose. “I’ve got one of the most frustrating and amazing girls around.”

He pulled the sheet down and his eyes went wide. There, tucked into the fold of the sheet was a slim volume, a journal.

“That looks promising,” Fenton murmured as he stepped closer.

Dave sat down on the cock-eyed mattress and opened it. The journal had been sporadically written in during the outbreak, hardly more than ten entries…

Until the past few weeks. Then the entries had increased to daily, and sometimes multiple times each day.

“What does it say?” Fenton asked, perching next to Dave to read over his shoulder.

Dave skimmed. “Nadia encountered someone when she was gathering supplies outside the wall.”

Fenton’s lips pursed. “She was briefly separated from a salvage team around the date of that entry. On her own for several hours. She said she just got turned around, but clearly it was more than that.”

“It’s pretty detailed,” Dave said as he read further. “Said they were part of something called Team Twelve. There’s stuff here about special forces. Shit, she’s got to be making that up, it sounds like something out of a bad movie.”

He glanced up, but instead of a smile, he found Fenton’s face pale and his eyes wide.

“What?” Dave asked.

“Team Twelve. I’ll be fucked,” he murmured.

“What is Team Twelve?”

“It’s this sort of legendary task force in the Army, meant to gather enemy combatants. They were really active when our biggest national security threat was terrorists, not zombies. Their tactics were… questionable. I heard they were disbanded after a raid went bad and some innocents were slaughtered. That explains the black uniforms Lisa saw.”

He was more mumbling to himself the last thing, but Dave didn’t care. “Were they deployed when the zombie outbreak started?”

“Not that I knew of. But it’s been nine months, David. A lot could change and it’s not exactly like I’m in the chain of command anymore.” Fenton rubbed his chin slowly. “Honestly, I could see it, them sending Team Twelve out in a do-or-die situation like this.”

“Look here,” Dave said as he scanned further. “She says the name. Keel.”

“Major Keel.” Fenton leaned away. “Shit, that confirms it.”

Dave flipped through the pages. “There’s a lot of whining and prevaricating over what they want her to do, lots of talk about her Mom and wanting to go home and all she’s lost… And she seems really concerned about leaving the dog behind, Duncan. Nice that she worries about the dog, but not betraying her friends.”

Fenton shrugged. “Priorities, I guess. I remember her saying the dog’s been with her from the beginning.”

Dave tossed the book aside with a scowl. “Fucking bitch,” he muttered. “There’s nothing in there that can help us find out where this Team Twelve is or what they want from Sarah.”

He pushed to his feet to pace the room, but Fenton grabbed his arm before he could.

“Hey, what’s that?” He motioned toward the discarded book.

“What?” Dave snapped, but all that anger faded. Sticking from the later pages of the journal, where Nadia hadn’t yet written, was the corner of an envelope.

Fenton reached out and grabbed the book, pulling the envelope free. He held it up. “It’s addressed to me.”

“Read it out loud,” Dave whispered.

“‘Dear Colonel Fenton’,” he began. “‘If you are reading this, I can only assume that I have finally come to a gut-wrenching decision about my future. I’m sorry for betraying you and your men, especially after all the kindness you showed me. Please understand that I only did so because I had no choice. But I don’t feel good about what I’ve done, so I’m going to provide you with some more information so that you may perhaps be able to stop the plans that Major Keel has laid out.’”

Dave backed up a step. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Let me continue,” Fenton said, waving him off. “‘Major Keel first approached me to trade when my diary indicates. Please read it if you have no already done so. At first he wanted David. He said he had taken him before but that Sarah and her friends had orchestrated his escape. He saw this as a bit of an affront to his personal pride, and he wanted to get his escapee back.’”

“If that’s the guy responsible for me being taken in Illinois…” Dave breathed.

Those short hours had been horrifying. They had taken his blood, tested his ability to heal with torture, and he had known they would kill him in order to run tests on his corpse.

They had Sarah now. And his son.

“‘But when I told him that Sarah was pregnant, his interest shifted to the child,’” Fenton kept reading.

Dave saw red. He’d heard that expression before, of course, but never experienced it. And yet there it was, totally red veil over his vision, desperate desire to strangle one lying nurse, maybe eat her brains a little just to complete the image.

“Hey, um, David.” Fenton was staring at him. “You’re looking very freaky. I kind of want to get my sidearm out, can you take a breath and stop looking so… zombie?”

Dave gasped, taking in air for the first time in what he realized was a very long time.

“You okay?” Fenton ventured softly.

“No,” Dave ground out past clenched teeth. “Not even a little.”

“‘I don’t want to hand her over,’” Fenton continued. “‘I really don’t. But I want to go home and they’ve offered me a way past the Midwest Wall in trade. I don’t know for sure their plans, but they have had headquarters in the warehouses near Ballard right on the Sound. He’s also talked some about a location in Snoqualmie Pass. I’m sorry.’” Fenton sighed. “That’s where it ends.”

Dave stared at his hand. His wedding ring seemed to be screaming at him. In Sarah’s voice nonetheless.

“I need to get to my wife and my kid.”

Fenton hesitated, but then he nodded. “Yes. Of course. Come on, let’s go downstairs and talk to the others. We’ll need their input.”

Dave snatched up the journal to supplement Nadia’s note and followed. Even if no one else was going to help him, he had to get to Sarah. Now.

#

“I want to help,” Nicole said, stepping forward. “I’m going with you.”

“Not without me, you aren’t,” McCray added, grabbing for her hand.

Dave smiled as he looked around the room at the others assembled there. After a quick explanation about what was going on, he was happy that his old friends would once again be on the case with him.

“I’m coming too,” The Kid said, folding his arms.

Dave saw the way Drea’s lips parted. She might have had Robbie thrust upon her, but she took being his mother very seriously.

“Look, Robbie,” Dave said. “I don’t think so.” When The Kid started to argue, he rushed to continue. “I know you’d be a great help, but the cure is the most important thing now. You need to stay here with Josh and the others, to finish the work you’ve started.”

“Then let me go,” Fenton said, stepping into the center of the room.

Dave stared at him. He and Sarah had really underestimated the dude. He was good people, uniformed or not.

“I appreciate it,” Dave said, “But no and for the same reason. This lot needs you as their leader. You and your guys should stay here and protect the lab. If Keel wants Sarah, he might also want a whack at what you’re developing here. We can’t let him get to it.”

Fenton seemed to consider that for a moment, then he nodded once. “Okay.”

“But you still need a military liaison,” Lisa said, pushing her way from the back. “And I’m the closest thing left.”

She shot a glance at Fenton. He seemed stoic, but Dave could see the bright fear in his stare. Still, he said nothing, just respected her decision. Hmmm, he might be able to learn from that, himself…

“Lisa, you got hit by two darts and cracked pretty hard in the head,” he said, for Fenton’s sake as much as for hers. “Are you sure-”

“If I’d been more on top of it, Sarah wouldn’t have gotten taken in the first place.” Lisa lifted her chin. “I owe her, bitch or not. So I’m coming and we’re done discussing it. Plus I can fly the chopper, which I assume will make your life a lot easier.”

Dave blinked. He’d been planning on a long, miserable drive to both locations. “Yeah, that would help.”

“Good.” Lisa turned to look at Fenton again. “I’ll come back.”

He arched a brow. “You better. Or I’ll have to come after you.”

She smiled, but then it was gone, replaced by her usual ‘kick ass girl’ scowl.

“All right, enough bullshit. Let’s load up and go. We’ve got something to do.”

Dave began to follow as the lab rats went back to their stations. He had reached the door that would take them to the hallway, the weapons closet and eventually the copter, when he felt the tug of someone’s hand on his jacket. He turned.

The Kid was standing there, looking shifty.

“I have something that could help,” he murmured.

Dave wrinkled his brow as The Kid pressed two grenades into his hand. “What are these?”

“The original purpose of the virus was a weapon of mass destruction. Biological in nature.” He glanced at the grenades. “The soldiers on this Team Twelve haven’t been vaccinated. If this detonates near them it will turn them into zombies, but not you guys.”

Dave stared at the grenades. “But Sarah wasn’t vaccinated.”

“Josh and I have been looking at the blood work, running more tests. We think… we think… that the baby’s DNA has altered her. We think she’ll be immune.”

“What if she’s not?” Dave asked in horror.

Robbie was pale, he hesitated way too long. “We know for sure that the baby will be. We can extract him in the lab and probably save him if his growth rate has been calculated correctly. Use them as a last resort.”

Dave briefly considered handing them back, refusing this thing. But he didn’t. He shoved them in the pack he’d slung on his back and patted The Kid’s head before he headed after his team and tried not to think about a last resort scenario that would leave him considering turning Sarah into a zombie in order to save his child.

It wasn’t going to come to that. It couldn’t.

Chapter Seventeen

Don’t mess with Mama.

The light came on again, this time brighter because there were more people coming into the warehouse carrying their stupid lanterns. I sat up straight from my position dozing in the chair I was tied to and watched as they all strolled toward me. Major Keel, a couple of his guys and Nadia, who was stone-faced and pale. Good, I hoped she felt like shit.

“All right, Sarah,” Keel said as he motioned to his cronies to loosen my ties. “Here’s how it’s going to work. We’re going to hook you up to some machines and let Nadia get a look at you, see how that thing you call a baby is coming along and if we’re safe to move you. If you don’t follow directions, I will shoot you in the eye with this tranq gun.”

He held it up and leveled it at my eyeball as if to accentuate what he was saying.

I’m a tough girl, okay, but anything entering the eyeball totally squigs me out. And my eyeball? Forget it.

“Okay,” I said, flexing my hands as I was freed. “I’m not going to try anything. I promise.”

“Good,” he said, but he looked a little disappointed as he motioned his guys to take my arms.

They pulled me to my feet and turned me toward the back of the warehouse, an area I hadn’t been able to see due to being restrained and in the total dark. There were pieces of medical equipment there, including an ultrasound and a table with stirrups. A delivery table.

I shivered as they moved me closer.

“I thought you were going to take me out of here to deliver the baby,” I said. “What do you need that for?”

“In case of unforeseen circumstances,” Major Keel said and motioned for the soldiers to get me onto the table.

“You know, I can do this,” I said, pulling away gently and pushing myself up on the table. “No need to shove or shoot my eyeballs, okay?”

I laid back, watching as Nadia motioned to the door. Someone had hooked up a generator apparently, because the lights suddenly came on, nearly blinding me after hours of pitch dark to dim lighting conditions. I squinted, but I could still see well-enough to see she was hooking up the ultrasound. My second in a handful of days.

And to think, before the outbreak, I would have had to pay an arm and a leg for such personal medical attention. Zombie Outbreaks were a revolution for health care, honestly.

I tensed as she started pushing up my shirt.

“Does everyone have to be part of this?” I asked, looking at the soldiers who were staring at me.

Keel pursed his lips. “Men stand back. But don’t leave.”

“Gee, thanks,” I muttered. “Cause I’m so scary.”

“Don’t forget how many of my men were killed in the past, Sarah,” Keel growled, but he turned away as Nadia rubbed the gel over my stomach and started her procedure.

I glared at her. “Aren’t you supposed to be in West Virginia?”

Her gaze slipped to Keel and held there, then she shrugged. “They need my help first.”

I stifled a laugh. “Sounds like they’re altering the deal. Pray they do not alter it further.”

“I don’t think Empire Strikes Back is appropriate at this moment, Sarah,” Nadia snapped.

Yeah, she said that, but I’d gotten to her and with nothing more than the truth that she’d compromised herself and for what? What was possibly a very empty promise. Sucked to be her.

“Cut the chatter,” Keel said. “What can you tell me?”

Nadia stared at the screen. “The growth rate is pretty amazing and seems to be increasing,” she admitted with a whistle. “The last time I looked, the child’s size indicated about a four and a half month fetus. Now it’s closer to six to seven… in less than a week.”

“How soon until we could pull it?” Keel asked.

I gasped, my hand coming to protectively cover my stomach, which really was quite a bit more swollen. “Hey, he’s not a damn weed!”

“Isn’t he?” Keel sneered. He looked at Nadia. “We can take him now, can’t we? Research says twenty-four weeks is the base for survival.”

She shook her head. “Not without respirators and a neo-natal care unit, Major.”

“You could-”

“No.” She folded her arms. “I can’t. You aren’t taking this baby until it is the equivalent of at least thirty weeks. I would be far more comfortable at over thirty-four weeks since we don’t have anything approaching medical intervention out here.”

I could have interrupted, but kept my mouth shut. I might not like the girl, but she was standing up for my baby. At least for now.

“And how long will that take?” he snapped.

She glanced at the screen again. “If one week for Sarah equals about two months? Another week to ten days would make me most comfortable and then only if we do another ultrasound to see the growth of the baby at that point.”

“Then we move her,” he snapped. “On the plane today, we could be over the wall by tomorrow.”

I caught my breath. If I was taken away, taken to the stomping grounds of this crazy ass, the chances of me ever seeing Dave again were minimal. The chances of me saving Little Zombie were even less. I reached out and caught Nadia’s hand without even thinking, squeezing hard as I willed tears not to fall in front of this asshole.

She glanced down at me, held my stare for a moment and then, to my shock, she shook her head.

“Major, when Sarah came in from Montana, she had a highly adverse reaction to the flight. In fact, that was how we determined she was pregnant, she almost lost the child then.”

My eyes went wide. Lies, all of it! But lies with a very important design.

“It’s true,” I said, sniffling because now it seemed like it could help me. “We barely were able to stabilize me or the child. Just the thought of another flight-”

“She seemed fine on the chopper,” Keel interrupted me. The dude was a sociopath, he had no empathy for me and my fake ailments. So rude.

Nadia shrugged. “The chopper flies lower, there’s no cabin pressure issue. Plus, she’s looking pale.”

“And not feeling so good,” I lied, again touching my belly. Was I laying it on too thick? Or not quite thick enough? Hard to get that balance right.

“Fuck,” Keel muttered, staring at me like he was trying to read me.

I’m sure he had a feeling we could be bullshitting him… but with even a small chance he would lose his bounty, he had to hesitate. I was counting on it.

“Put her on the plane, you risk losing any information you want out of a live birth for the mother or the child,” Nadia said in a firm, don’t-fuck-with-me medical tone. “But I guess if you just want a cadaver, you can fly her out tonight.”

He clenched his fists at his sides and then pivoted away. “Fine. We stay. Unhook her and I’ll send someone back to tie her up.”

I could hear him barking orders as he headed toward the exit to the warehouse. For a moment, Nadia and I were alone. I squeezed her hand again, this time in thanks.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

She drew back, truly surprised.

“Not that I don’t still hate your guts,” I added.

She stifled a laugh. “I wouldn’t expect anything else. I deserve that hate.”

She shut the machines down and handed me a towel to wipe off my stomach.

“Look, Sarah, I am not trying to hurt you or that kid,” she said softly, casting her glance toward the guard who was slowly making his way toward us. “I swear to you, I wasn’t part of any plans Keel has.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I actually believe that, Nadia, but whether you meant to involve yourself this way or not, you’re in this now. You’re in this and you know what he’s going to do to me, to the baby…” I bit back a gasp as the air left my lungs when I pictured it too vividly. “I’m begging you to help me like you just did. The fact that you did it at all makes me think you want to save us. I need you to save us.”

She opened her mouth, but she wasn’t able to answer one way or another before the soldier was right on top of us, snapping about us shutting up, dragging me off to be tied to my chair again and leaving me wondering if Nadia would come through.

And if she did, who she would come through for.

#

The helicopter was landing, but it felt like it moved at a snail’s pace, hovering and dipping little by little. Dave knew the reason. He had eyes in his head. He could see the zombies that were being attracted from all angles by the whirling blades. They were runners, too, hauling as fast as they could toward the food source.

“Gas bomb,” Lisa announced, tossing a canister out the door.

It bounced on the pavement and began to exude a faintly purple gas. The zombies who encountered it staggered, slowed and fell in piles. Dave reached into his pocket and felt the two gas grenades there that The Kid had given to him before they left the lab just a short time ago. They would do something similar to what Lisa’s bombs were doing… only they would kill, or worse really, humans.

And maybe Sarah.

He pushed the thought from his mind because the helicopter dropped quickly, taking the limited window the gas bomb had afforded them. Lisa cut the engine and they all jumped out, pulling weapons to protect her while she secured the chopper so it would be ready for their return.

“I had to land about a mile from the warehouses,” she explained as she withdrew a machete for close work. “So Keel and his men wouldn’t hear the engine. We’ll have to huff it the rest of the way.”

Dave couldn’t complain. It was better than miles and miles on foot through zombie-congested streets and confusing blockades. That might have taken him a day instead of a few minutes travel time.

But he sure as hell hoped Sarah would be at this location and not up in Snoqualmie where weather would hamper both the helicopter’s ability to land and their maneuverability once they had feet on the ground. There was snow up there even this time of year, blocked roads, avalanches. All around crap.

He shook his head and tried to focus as they walked up the street toward the warehouses.

Back in the days when carnivals weren’t abandoned and absolutely terrifying, there had been this game Dave had liked. It was a shooter where cardboard cutouts of people would pop up and there would only be a split second to decide where to fire. Some of the cutouts were innocent people, some were scary targets.

That was what the next ten blocks were like, except with no innocent cutouts in the mix. It seemed like every fifteen feet, a zombie would pop out of a building or drag itself on broken limbs from an alley. They kept firing, reloading, firing, reloading until Dave started to wonder if they were going to have enough ammo left for an actual rescue attempt.

After about half a mile, Lisa crouched down next to a burned out shell of a building and glanced at the map they’d found of the area before they left the lab.

“Okay, we’re getting close. And that means we need to switch to silent weaponry.” She pulled a katana from a sling on her back. It was a beautiful blade, sharpened to razor perfection. “First, it will reduce the encounters, second, we don’t want to telegraph our arrival to Keel and his band of assholes.”

“Keel and the Assholes,” McCray quipped. “I think I knew them back before Lead Tongue hit it big. Sort of a bunch of wankers, terrible lead singer.”

Nicole was stifling giggles at his ridiculousness, but she managed to smack his arm. “Babe, not really the time, okay?”

He grinned at me. “Just trying a thing. You know, Dave, the snarky asides really do help in these life or death situations.”

Dave rolled his eyes. “You’ll have to tell Sarah. I’m sure she’ll appreciate this epiphany of yours, McCray.”

“Are you morons done?” Lisa asked, her tone laced with frustration. “I’d like to go save the girl and get home for a lukewarm beer if you don’t mind.”

Dave nodded. “Yeah, yeah, sounds good.”

He holstered his pistol and pulled the baseball bat from his sling. Ah, the old standby. He did love a classic. Good thing, too, because judging from the big pod of zombies coming their way around the corner from the alley where they’d hunkered down, he was going to be using it quite a bit.

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?”

She lifted a blade she’d made out of a rusty piece of metal attached by rope to a handle of some kind of broken tool.

“Yeah, whatever that is,” I said. “It’s a risky thing.”

She arched a brow. “Zombie apocalypse. Everything is a risky thing. Besides, if we can take out a couple guys before we’re detected, we’ll have their weapons.”

“Let’s do it,” I agreed.

“Stay low and follow me, I know the best routes through here,” Nadia said as she started crawling toward the soldiers.

I didn’t have much choice but to listen and follow. After all, it wouldn’t make sense for her to turn on me now. Even if she did, I couldn’t exactly stop her.

We belly crawled for a while (which Little Z didn’t really care for, if his kicks and movement inside of me were any indication). Then, when we were situated at some crates just behind a few of the soldiers firing at Dave and company, Nadia made a few hand motions. I couldn’t be sure, but I figured she was saying, “Sneak up behind them and bash their heads in.”

It was either that or something about Martha Stewart shouldn’t have gone to jail for that fraud thing. But I was going to stick with the first one since that was in my best interest.

We ran up silently and I swung the railroad tie. It hit one of the soldiers directly in the back of the head and he lurched forward and smashed the front of his head against the box car they were sitting behind. He was dead in the same moment Nadia swung her cobbled together blade at the second one, half-cutting off his head in one stomach-turning slice.

The third soldier started to turn, but I didn’t give him much chance to turn his weapons on us. I smacked him hard across the face and Nadia did the rest with her blade. Once they were just bodies in a pile, we went to work pulling their weapons and ammo from various pockets in their uniforms.

I loaded up one of the dead men’s carbines and grinned.

“Much better,” I whispered.

She nodded as she loaded herself up with a couple of 9mm.

“The rest of the soldiers are going to figure out what’s going on in a second. Best alert David as to what’s going on while I cover our backs.”

I sent out a shrill whistle and then made a sound of a dying giraffe. Okay, it wasn’t a real giraffe sound, but an in-joke from a favorite utterly vulgar movie of ours from years ago.

To my relief, Dave’s voice called across the void. “Sarah?”

“Yes,” I called back. “Nadia and I disabled the men firing at you, but there are at least…”

I shot Nadia a look and she nodded. “Eight.”

“Eight more men to contend with, one of whom is General Keel. Have you taken care of the zombies?”

“Most of them,” Nicole called back. “Nice to hear your voice.”

“Yours too. Now move forward while you can,” I encouraged them.

“Wait, is Nadia is helping you now?” Dave asked, his voice coming closer as their group dodged through the containers.

“Can we talk about it once we’re heading home?” I asked. “Time and place, babe.”

He might have said something in response, but I didn’t hear it. The sound of Nadia grunting in agony, then firing her weapon overshadowed everything else. I spun around from facing the direction of Dave’s voice and found her slumped back against our hiding place, blood gushing from a wound in her shoulder.

“Fucking sniper,” she growled out, her voice strained by pain. “I saw him just as he fired.”

I looked up. “Did you get him?” I asked.

She motioned upward and I followed her indicating finger. There, perched on some high equipment, was a dead body draped precariously against a metal piece.

“Nice.”

“Not nice enough.”

I looked up to find General Keel moving toward us, low and slow, his gun trained on me.

“Aw shit,” I muttered.

“Set your gun down,” he ordered.

We had no choice but to do so. As soon as Nadia’s was set aside, Keel fired, putting a bullet between her eyes.

“No!” I screamed as she slumped, dead before she even hit the ground.

“What’s happening?” Dave called out, voice laced with fear. “Are you okay, Sarah?”

“David, I presume,” Keel called as he reached out to pull me toward him, human shield style. “What’s happening is that I’ve shot Nadia and I have your wife. This could turn out well, indeed. You see, I would greatly love to have both of you for our collection of oddities.”

I heard Dave swearing, but other things were catching my notice now. Movement in the cluttered spaces between the containers. Keel’s men, working to flank Dave, McCray, Nicole and Lisa.

“They’re coming around,” I called out. “To flank you.”

“Fuck!” It was Lisa’s voice this time.

“Indeed, you most definitely are fucked. But everyone doesn’t have to be captured in this scenario. If David and Sarah were to come with me, I don’t see any reason not to let the rest of your party go,” Keel offered.

“He won’t do it, he’s a double crosser,” I called out, but he clamped a hand over my lips to shut me up.

“Or you can fight and all end up like poor Nadia,” Keel said. “Dead because of poor choices just like hers.”

My eyes welled with tears. Nadia was the reason I was in this mess, but I didn’t want her dead, staring up at me with blank eyes. The girl had only wanted to go home and like it or not, I totally got that drive.

“So are you going to come out on your own, David?” Keel pressed. “Because my men outnumber you, even after the three killed by your not-so-lovely wife. And they may shoot to kill without thinking, you see.”

There was a long pause and I knew Dave was considering the lives of our friends, the life of our child, as well as our own lives. Damn, but being a grown-up sucked sometimes. There was so much bullshit to consider.

“Dave,” I called around Keel’s meaty hand. “Don’t do this.”

“Sarah, you weren’t vaccinated,” he called out.

I wrinkled my brow. What did that matter now? “So?”

“There’s something I have that could get us all out. But it might… it might do something bad to you.” His voice quavered.

I squeezed my eyes shut. Something? Something from our lab that could save us, but might hurt me could not be good. And judging from the fact he’d talked about vaccines, I also had to assume it was something zombie-related.

“What about the baby?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t hurt the baby. Worse case, the lab rats could extract him.”

I saw the men from Keel’s unit easing ever closer to cutting Dave and our friends off. There was no time to think beyond the safety of my husband and our child, of our friends, no time to question what it could all mean for me.

“Do it!” I ordered. “Now!”

He cursed and then a canister clattered down in front of Keel and me. It popped open and gas started leaking from it. Grey gas this time, rather than the purple for the cure. I heard another clink of metal against the ground somewhere behind where Dave and the others were gathered, I assume for the approaching platoon of soldiers bent on killing them all.

I couldn’t worry about that, though. The gas poured from the canister in front of us. Keel released me, backing away from it as his eyes went wide.

“What is that?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. First, because I didn’t really know. Second because I was trying to hold my breath. The gas twisted toward me, around me and I couldn’t wait anymore. I gasped in a breath and tasted a metallic flavor as the gas entered my mouth, my lungs.

Keel was already thrashing on the ground, vomiting green and black as his eyes bugged out and his weapon clattered away from him. My vision was starting to blur, but I staggered to my feet and started toward David. I had to get to David. There was only David now.

He popped up and rushed toward me, grabbing me as I collapsed into his arms, my breath coming in shallow panting, my blood burning in my veins as the gas permeated every part of me.

“Oh shit, Sarah,” he wailed, smoothing hair away from my forehead. “What did I do? What the fuck did I do to you?”

I smiled up at him. “I really love you. I hope you remember that.”

Because I had a feeling that in a few more minutes, I wouldn’t remember it. Or him. Or anything except how much I wanted brains.

Chapter Nineteen

Goodnight Zombie Moon.

Dave stared down into Sarah’s face. She was graying rapidly, her eyes dilating, rimming red and his heart felt ready to burst from his chest. The Kid had said the baby’s special abilities might protect her, but she was turning into a zombie right before his eyes.

He had made her into a zombie.

“What did you do? What did you throw?” Lisa asked.

He never took his eyes off Sarah.

“It was a zombie serum bomb from Robbie. He thought Sarah might be protected because of the baby if we had to use it. We had to use it.”

“Well, that explains why all of Keel’s men are reanimated as zombies and they’re coming!” Lisa screeched.

He didn’t look up. He could hear zombie growls from the soldiers who had breathed in the zombie serum gas. But who gave a fuck?

“Just cover them!” Nicole sobbed.

She was firing her gun right next to his ear, but he hardly heard it. All he could hear was Sarah’s shallow breathing.

“Please don’t do this,” he murmured, holding her against his chest. “I can’t do this without you.”

She smiled as she looked up into his face. “That’s just what I said when you got bitten back in Phoenix. But you’re much tougher than I am. You’ll do fine. Just make sure I don’t bite McCray or Nicole or Lisa on the way back to the lab to rescue Little Z from his zombie Mommy womb prison. Tie me up if you have to, baby. I don’t want to hurt anyone who risked their lives to save me.”

“Fuck that, Sarah, you aren’t turning into a zombie,” he sobbed.

She smiled that annoying ‘Sarah knows best’ smile she sometimes got. “But I am. You’re right about the brains. You can smell them. Hey, Dave?”

He nodded, unable to get enough breath to speak for a second. “Yeah,” he finally managed.

She didn’t answer. She just hissed out breath from her lungs and died. In his arms. She died.

There was screaming in the air. Screaming he wanted to silence but he couldn’t. And then he realized it was him screaming. Howling out every bit of pain he felt that he had just killed his wife in a last ditch effort to save his own ass.

“It’s not your fault.”

He glanced up. McCray was standing there, squeezing his shoulder. The once coked up rocker had been a borderline narcissist when they first met him, but now he wept along with Dave. And so did Nicole. Even Lisa swiped at her eyes.

“What about the zombies?” Dave murmured, looking around.

“Dead. We’ve got your back this time. You’ve certainly had ours more than enough,” Nicole reassured him as tears smeared down her face and smudged her eyeliner. Sarah had always made fun of her for that damn eyeliner.

How was this happening? How was the dead woman in his arms his wife?

“We’ve got to tie her up before she reanimates,” Lisa said, all business again as she pulled some rope from her pack. “And get back to the lab right now.” Dave must have looked rather blank because she stepped closer and added, “To save your kid, David.”

He blinked. The baby. His son. If that was going to be the last vestige of what he’d shared with Sarah, he had to save him.

“Tie her up,” he said, positioning her so that they could get the rope around her body. “And hurry.”

Nicole and Lisa worked together with swift, rather cry-y efficiency and soon he was able to sweep Sarah into his arms, all bound up in rope. He stared down into her face and frowned. She looked a little less… gray. There wasn’t even sludge around the corners of her mouth or anything. She should regenerate at any moment, become a zombie and-

He didn’t even finish the thought when her eyes opened and she sucked in a gasping breath that cut through the air like his screams had moments before.

“Sarah?” he asked, even though he knew she wouldn’t answer.

God, this was the worst thing ever, to look down at her, still Sarah in body and know she wasn’t Sarah in mind. Know she’d never look at him and say-

“Oh my God, that sucked!” she gasped, wiggling in his arms against the restraint of the ropes. “Shit, that was fucking awful.”

Dave stared at her, just stared. The warmth was re-entering her skin, the light was in her eyes. Eyes that weren’t red and searching for brains and flesh. Eyes that looked at him, not through him.

“Sarah?” Nicole screeched, rushing to his side. “Oh my God, are you alive?”

She coughed. “I think so. Was the alternative an option?”

“Yeah,” McCray said, eyes wide. “Since you stopped breathing for like four or five minutes.”

“Ew.” She looked at Dave again. “Sorry, that must have freaked you the fuck out.”

“But how are you… what are you… what the hell?” Lisa stammered.

“If I’ve stunned you half-speechless, it must have looked dire,” Sarah laughed.

“If you die after a zombie bite, you’re supposed to be brain damaged beyond repair,” Lisa said, still shaking her head.

“The Kid said the baby might protect you,” Dave muttered. “That he had antigens thanks to my exposure to the cure and those could be shared in your blood. He must have… he must have saved you once you started to turn.”

Sarah looked down at the stomach hidden under layers of rope. “Wow. I guess he’s going to hold that over me when I threaten to ground him, isn’t he? Can you guys untie me now?”

Lisa hesitated. “Um, are you going to eat us?”

“Do you know any zombies who can hold a rational conversation?” Sarah asked, eyebrow arching.

Lisa shook her head. “No. Well, except for Dave.”

“Of course, except for Dave,” Sarah laughed.

“I’m not a zombie,” he said, his tone flat as he set her down and untied her.

She wrapped her arms around him, tugging herself so close to him that they were practically one body (except for that pesky baby bump).

“Turns out,” she whispered. “Neither am I.”

#

Zombie benefits or not, having a baby really hurts. I found that out about three weeks after I was turned into a zombie by my husband and saved by the same baby that was now determined to rip me in half as he made his grand entrance into the world.

“Push,” Dave encouraged, clinging to my hand.

He’d actually been holding my hand pretty much nonstop since that afternoon when I’d come back to life, new and improved. Not that I blamed him. I knew what he’d gone through, having watched him start to change myself. I could forgive him the constant bodyguard routine.

For now.

“I’m pushing as hard as I can,” I panted. “Isn’t he out yet?”

“I see his head,” Nicole told me, looking up from between my legs. Drea stood beside her, assisting.

Thank God it wasn’t Robbie. There were some things no one should have to endure.

“How does he look?” Dave asked.

“A little gray,” Drea admitted. “But considering that he saved his mama from zombieism, let’s reserve judgment.”

Her tone was very perky, but my heart rate increased a little anyway. After everything we’d gone through to get here, there was no way we weren’t coming out with a healthy half-zombie baby. No. F’ing. Way.

What? I had to start working on my language sometime.

“Come on Sarah, give it another push,” Nicole said.

I bore down and pushed with all my might. The pressure I felt gave way and then there was silence in the room. The baby was out.

“Why isn’t he crying?” I asked, sitting up straighter.

Drea and Nicole were fussing over him, wrapping him in a towel so I couldn’t see him. I didn’t even know if he was alive.

And then he let out the cutest, most normal baby squeal ever.

“Is he okay?” I asked. “Please!”

Nicole turned and held out my son, placing him on my sweaty chest. We looked down at him and saw that he was perfectly pink, with ten fingers and toes. He opened his eyes and they were brown. Brown with just the slightest, faintest tinge of red.

I looked up at Dave. “Um, he gets that from you.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “I’m okay with it.”

“Me too,” I laughed and nearly passed out from joy and relief. He was here. He was okay. He was ours.

There was a sound outside the window and I lifted my head. “Is that them taking off?” I asked.

Nicole moved to the window and lifted the shade in time for us to see several helicopters and planes buzz the lab. In the weeks since our return, the inoculation had been finished. The first phase of our plan was to crop dust everyplace we could, wiping out zombies and dropping leaflets so that people could come to our stations and get inoculated.

“That’s them,” Nicole said with a nervous smile. “They’re off.”

“Holy shit, I think we just saved the world,” I said, watching as the last plane faded into the distance.

Dave slipped an arm around me. “If it works.”

I stared at the empty sky and then down into the eyes of my son. “It will work. I just… know it. And as you know, I’m never wrong.”

He might have laughed, but I hardly heard him. All I could see was the future in my arms, the future out the window and both were brighter than they had been in months.

Epilogue

Six months later

I still wasn’t entirely used to the fact that I could turn on a light whenever I wanted, so as I stepped into my son’s nursery, I fumbled in the dark before I turned back to the switch.

“Fudge,” I muttered.

Yeah, fudge. I really was trying with the swears. Not succeeding most of the time, but trying.

“You ready to wake up?” I asked the baby in the crib.

He sat up and pulled himself to his feet, smiling at me with two teeth already. That zombie aging thing was really still working. Though Robbie’s tests showed it was slowing and he would likely return to a regular growth curve within another six months.

I picked him up and carried him to the changing table next to the window. I pulled the shade and light poured in, showing us both the rapidly rebuilding skyline of Seattle in the distance across the Lake.

As I changed him, I heard Dave behind me.

“How’s Little Man?” he asked.

The boy grinned at him in response. Daddy’s Boy.

“Is the news still talking about the Wall coming down?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah, big story. They’re also talking about the arrests over on the other side, the cover up. The story is really spiraling now. Nicole looks great.”

Nicole and McCray had headed back to the Midwest as soon as the drops had been made, with tons of research and proof of what was happening on the Westside. She was going to get that Pulitzer after all. The Nobel Prize was more likely to go to Robbie, Josh and my David.

“Your Mom and Dad texted,” he said as he held up the phone. It had spotty connections a lot of the time, but honestly, it wasn’t much worse than Before Zombie. “They’re getting clearance to travel next week. They say to expect them by Friday.”

I smiled. We’d been talking since the first connections had been re-established to this side of the country. Now they were going to meet their grandson for the first time.

“Well, I guess we better get the guest room ready, then,” I laughed as I handed the baby over to him.

“Guest room?” David said as he followed me down the hall. “What about the guest house? We didn’t take over Bill Gates’s house for nothing, you know?”

“I guess not,” I agreed with a laugh.

Yeah, everything was going to be okay. I knew that now. And one day I also knew we would be asked to tell the tale of how we’d saved the world. Maybe for a class project by the little boy in David’s arms. The boy we had named Future. Yeah, one of those dumb celebrity names, I know. But who the fuck would mess with my kid with all this powers?

Nobody. Because if they did, they’d have to mess with his half-zombie parents. And that was not a good idea.

A Note to My Readers

Once upon a time, though not so long ago, I wrote a snarky zombie tale mostly to entertain myself. Whoever could have thought that so many of you would love it so much? My deepest thanks to you for sticking through Dave and Sarah’s story and letting me tell it.

A few notes. Yes, I realize there isn’t a warehouse compound in Ballard, WA. The real estate there is just way too nice. I took artistic license, sorry if I made your mansion into a train depot. Oops.

Second, my love to my husband who supported this entire journey. You are the Dave to my Sarah, except far more awesome. And hopefully my Sarah is a little less bitchy.

I hope you’ll enjoy a sneak peek at the first chapter of my upcoming book, Club Monstrosity, which will be released from Pocket Star on April 29, 2013:

Chapter One

The basement of the Holy Heart Church on East 125th Street in New York City smelled like a strange combination of dust, hundreds of years of age, and the leftovers of charity dinners cooked in the kitchen hovering just above it. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, but spoke of the age of the building and the fact that thousands of people had passed through there, many with their eyes down and faces averted.

And that made it the perfect place for the meetings now hosted there. AA and Narcotics Anonymous and Compulsive Gamblers Group and Trumping Testicular Cancer—and a host of other vice and disease meetings that required support or a kick in the ass on a day-to-day basis.

All of them met in the little room in the basement. It was tiny, cold in the winter, broiling in the summer, and with an odor like a concentrated version of old pot roast and lasagna mixed with the sweet scent of stale holy water.

Natalie Gray was late to her meeting in said locale. That was typical, actually. Even she would admit it, though she had an excuse. Working nights at the morgue made her world all . . . discombobulated, and sometimes it was hard to remember what time it was. She couldn’t quit, though. She had rent to pay and food to buy, just like everyone else. Not to mention the job helped her cover up . . . other things. Things she had to deal with at the meeting, actually.

And so as she hustled her way down the back stairs toward the tiny, smelly room, she cursed in her head (not out loud, it was a church after all and she had standards, low as they might be). She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes late. There was going to be hell to pay.

The door to the meeting room was closed, but a little window near the top allowed her to see inside.

It was weird; the church allowed the various “anonymous” groups to meet in their basement, but then they forced them into a room with a window on the door. Sometimes Natalie felt like they wanted you to deal with your shame, but never forget it was shame and that everyone, including God, knew it. If there was a group for obsessive voyeurs, Natalie guessed they’d love it all the more.

The worn-out sign hung on a plastic holder outside the door said MONSTOFELLDOSIS (MFD) ANONYMOUS. Someone had stuck a creepy butterfly sticker on it that was beginning to fray around the edges.

“Stupid name for a stupid made-up ‘disease,’” she muttered as she looked through the glass.

Yup, everyone was there in their little sharing circle . . . well, almost everyone. Bob didn’t seem to be present. Odd, since, as the group's facilitator, he was almost always first to welcome them and get them all seated, hopefully not near someone they hated. That in itself was no easy task. Over the years, most everyone in the group had developed some kind of aversion to everyone else, either through hurt feelings or worse. Natalie certainly didn’t envy Bob his role.

She opened the door and stepped inside. The room fell silent and everyone’s head pivoted to look at her. What they spoke of in this room was definitely not for outsiders to hear, so the group was always careful about the door opening. Once they saw it was Natalie, the faces were relieved, and then annoyed.

“The meeting for the chronically late is down the hall,” Kai, one of the other women in the group, said as she dug for a cigarette from the purse beneath her chair. The purse’s logo said Michael Kors and Natalie couldn’t believe Kai had set it on the dirty floor. But then again, money never seemed to be an issue for her.

Kai was tall and slender, with an exotic olive complexion that made it hard to place her ethnicity, as did her long blond hair with dark streaks dyed through it. She had an I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude and Natalie had learned over the years that it wasn’t a put-on.

“Ha, ha, ha,” Natalie said as she took one of the few empty places in the circle. “I’m not the only one who’s late. Where’s Blob?”

Next to her, the older man dressed in a bizarre cape over wrinkled jeans and a black shirt glared in her direction with surprisingly intense eyes. Natalie felt a weird pull and broke the eye contact. It was so annoying when he did that.

“Careful, little one,” he hissed.

She glared. Just because he looked so much older than them, he always thought it was okay to be condescending.

“What? It’s just us,” she snapped.

“Bob,” said another of the group members, this one named Alec, a good-looking man with long shaggy dark hair, bright amber eyes, and a scraggly beard that was borderline homeless chic, “didn’t show.”

“That’s weird,” Natalie muttered. “He’s never late.”

“Yeah, we went over this while you were staggering off the subway fifteen minutes ago,” Kai said with another perfectly arched eyebrow. She was a gorgeous woman, no one could deny that, but she always looked on the verge of smacking someone.

Currently that someone was Natalie. Scary.

“So what are we going to do?” Linda, the only other woman in the circle, whined as she scratched at her hands absently. She was plain except for her stunning green eyes. Or at least they would have been stunning if they weren’t always puffy from crying. “We’ve never done group without Bob.”

“It’s not like we can’t. We’re all grown-ups . . . mostly.” Kai shrugged. “Let’s start with the usual. Everyone introduce yourself and give us the ‘therapeutic’ spiel about your . . . um . . .”—she looked back over her shoulder, double-checking that the door was shut—“issue. Natalie starts.”

Natalie shut her eyes. Everyone knew she hated this part of the group meetings. It was so awkward and clichéd. Even after all these years she wasn’t sure exactly what to say. Obviously having to kick things off was her punishment for being late.

“Bitch,” she muttered under her breath.

Kai didn’t react except for a tight, expectant smile. There was clearly no getting out of this, so Natalie hauled herself to her feet. She shuffled those same feet in complete discomfort and started to speak.

“Hello, my name is Natalie and I’m a”—like Kai, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure the door was shut—“Frankenstein’s Monster. It’s been . . . um . . . sixty years or so since anyone last discovered my true identity.”

“Hi, Natalie,” the group droned in sync like a bunch of zombies. God, she had always hated that term . . . zombie, it hit way too close to home.

She sat down with another glare for Kai, one which was ignored, of course, and watched as the older man in the cape next to her stood up.

“Hello, my name is Dracula, though I’m forced to go by Drake in this city.” He folded his arms. “I hate that name. Why I cannot simply be called by my real moniker—”

“We’ve gone over this before,” Alec interrupted with a roll of his eyes. “Dracula attracts a lot of attention. And ridicule. You’d be a joke. A bigger one than you already are with that cape.”

“Alec,” Kai interrupted, her tone sharp and frustrated. “Your circle etiquette. Let him finish.” She glared at Drake. “But hurry it up, we don’t have a century for you to drone on with one of your monologues. It’s not the 1500s anymore. People have places to go and things to do.”

Drake scowled. “I am a vampire and it’s been twenty years since anyone last discovered my true identity.” He hesitated, then added, “But those sparkling whippersnappers running around out in the open aren’t helping. They whine and go out in the sun. Are they trying to get themselves killed? Don’t they know they’re attracting the wrong kind of attention by mooning all over the place, over some silly little girl who-”

Kai squeezed her eyes shut. “Drake, we’ve gone over this in several meetings. Those ‘sparkling vampires’ aren’t real. They’re from a movie. You must know what a movie is, you’ve been around for, like, a thousand years.”

Drake opened his mouth to argue, but before he could, the shaggy guy leapt up and started talking. “Hi, I’m Alec. I’m a werewolf. It’s been seventy years since someone last discovered my true identity.”

As the rest of the group said hi, Natalie watched Alec. Sheesh, he was good. With all that scruff and the literally puppy-dog eyes that he could make so forlorn, he pretty much got laid all the time. He even winked at her as he sat down.

“I’m Linda,” said the nervous woman who had been picking at her hand. “I’m a Swamp Dweller.”

Before she could continue, the bonding adhesive that had been used to hold her fake skin on her hands loosened and a chunk of skin dropped away, revealing dark green scales beneath.

“Oh shit,” she said as she dropped down to grab for it. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“It’s okay,” Kai said, but her tone was less than soothing and she barely spared Linda more than an eye roll. Not that Natalie could blame her. Linda was a bit . . . needy; the constant attention and comfort she required did get a bit old.

Still, it was hard not to feel sorry for her. Like all of them, Linda had to constantly battle to keep the monstrous parts of her appearance from becoming too obvious. Being part amphibian, part human, meant extensive makeup, constantly watery eyes (which Linda exacerbated with her emotional outbursts), and gills that only Blob had ever seen.

Natalie could sympathize. For her it was the scars all over her body, the fact that she was super-tall, and the slightly different skin tone of one leg versus the other. There was a reason she never wore skirts. But at least she didn’t have green skin or bolts sticking out of her neck. Stupid movies.

Linda knelt on the floor and tried to force her skin back on with the now-dingy adhesive. “It’s really not okay.”

Kai sighed. “Oh my God, Fishlady, chill out.”

Linda shot Kai a look. “Don’t call me Fishlady. And Bob wouldn’t have said ‘chill out.’”

“Well, I’m not Bob, thank God . . .” Kai sighed. “Next.”

The next man stood up and said, “I’m Dr. Henry Jekyll—”

As if about to hiccup, he shut his mouth and paused. After a moment, he opened his mouth to continue—but before he could speak, he tensed, his body twitching like he was having a seizure. Of course, no one moved to assist. It wasn’t like they hadn’t seen this before. Kai did rush over to the door and stood in front of it to block what was about to happen from unexpected passersby.

With a lot of groaning and grunting, Jekyll staggered forward. There was a sound of rending flesh and he groaned in pain. His body tensed and he arched backward with another half roar, half whine.

Slowly, his body separated in half, the back of him staying put as the front pulled free. And suddenly a second man stood in the middle of their group. One who was almost a mirror image of Jekyll except for the wicked gleam in his eye and the disheveled quality of his appearance.

As Jekyll bent over at the waist, panting with the exertion of what he’d just done, the twin version of him said, “And I am Edward Hyde. It’s been four weeks since someone last discovered our true identities.” He smiled, thin and unpleasant. “Although they won’t be speaking about it.”

Natalie shivered. Of all the members of their meeting group, Hyde was the only one she thought of as a “monster.” He actually liked being what he was, liked being some kind of weird twin who had never been fully separated from his brother.

The two men shared a face, but Hyde had gotten all the wicked impulses, the frightening desires, and Jekyll all the ability to control those things. When they were formed as one person, it was fine. Jekyll had the control and could rein his brother in. But when they weren’t . . .

It was creepy. Partly because the more evil he was allowed to be, the more twisted and ugly, the more monstrous in form, Hyde became.

Jekyll reached forward to grab for Hyde and re-form as one . . . entity, but Kai slammed a fist down on the podium before her and shook her head. “Oh, no, no, no! If you two are going to rejoin, do it in the bathroom. No one here wants to see it.”

The rest of the group nodded with various expressions of boredom and disgust. Seeing the two men go through what they called the “Bonding Ritual” was pretty troubling. There was lots of coughing and growling and sometimes even screaming and blood . . . Not good.

Jekyll frowned, though he did as he’d been asked and stepped away from Hyde. “You know we can only stay like this for a short time.”

“An hour,” Kai snapped. “Enough time to get yourselves into trouble on a regular basis, so don’t give me the you’re-threatening-my-existence speech.”

“Excellent.” Hyde laughed as he took the seat the two had once occupied as one person. “I’ve wanted some fresh air for days.”

He folded one leg over the other and smiled at the group. Jekyll turned and realized his . . . brother, for lack of a better term, had taken his spot. The doctor let out a heavy, put-upon sigh as he stomped across the room to grab another folding chair from the corner and added it to the circle beside Hyde. The two exchanged a glance before Jekyll folded his arms and turned his face.

“Okay,” Kai said. “That leaves me—”

Linda had collected her skin and climbed back in her chair with a glare for Kai. “Unless Ellis is here.”

Kai shut her eyes with a groan. “Oh, right, that asshole.” She looked around. “Ellis, are you here?”

There was no answer, but that didn’t mean anything. As the Invisible Man, Ellis often liked to play tricks. He hid right out in the open (often giggling like an idiot), followed people home to play tricks on them, and God knew what else. Natalie had heard he’d once watched Kai get undressed, but she’d caught him and beaten the snot out of him for it.

"Ellis . . . ?"

But despite . . . or perhaps because of his invisibility, he also loved attention. He was obsessed with being on the stage, with being seen. No discouragement from the group kept him from regularly going out on casting calls for Broadway and commercials. He never got any parts, but he kept trying, certain he’d win a Tony if “they” would just recognize his talent.

“I’ve never known him to be quiet for more than five minutes,” Natalie pointed out. “Maybe he had an audition.”

Drake nodded. “He was rambling on about that the other night when he called my new smartphone. What do they call it? An Ephone? Aphone? Some vowel with phone after it. . .”

Natalie turned on the man beside her with a blank stare. “You have a cell, a six hundred dollar cell, but you think sparkling vampires are real?”

Kai bit back a laugh. “Okay, we’ll just assume he isn’t here, because if he is, ignoring him will drive him crazy.”

Alec let out a burst of laughter. “I like that idea.”

Kai tilted her head. “And I guess we are back to me for introductions. So I’m Kai. I am a mummy, reincarnated by some idiot archaeologists in 1922.”

“That makes you the oldest and the youngest of our group,” Alec pointed out, just as he did at every meeting.

And just like at every meeting, Kai pursed her lips in annoyance and continued, “It’s been since . . . I guess 1940 since I was last revealed to anyone, though there were some close calls in the nineties. Stupid mummy movies . . .”

She shook her head and adjusted her suit jacket. Natalie blushed as she caught a glimpse of the white gauze Kai always wore beneath her clothes. She’d once admitted it was a way to keep moisturizer trapped against the dry skin, but Natalie always felt like she was seeing her underwear whenever she caught a glimpse of it.

“Hello, Kai,” half the group droned, while the other half was distracted by other things.

Kai sighed. “Great, so that’s done. Now, does anyone have anything they want to talk about?”

“Ellis might be at an audition, which explains his absence,” Linda whimpered. “But what about Bob?”

Natalie stared at Kai. Yeah, what about Bob? Blob. The Blob. She was kind of wondering that herself.

Hyde snickered. “Perhaps he got stuck on a subway car. Literally. Fat ass.”

Natalie folded her arms. Hyde was a nasty bastard and she refused to encourage him. “Look, the guy might be big, but he’s never missed a meeting in all the years we’ve been doing this. Plus, he runs Overeaters Anonymous in the room after us. I can’t picture him skipping out on two meetings without some kind of notification for someone. It’s just not in his nature. You know he takes this shit super-seriously.”

“Unlike some of us,” Kai said with a pointed glare for Natalie. “All this talk and speculation won’t do us any good until we actually know what’s going on. Has anyone called him?”

Linda nodded her head quickly. “Oh yes. Every day. He didn’t answer this morning.”

Natalie blinked. “You call Blob every day?”

Linda’s green eyes narrowed at Natalie’s tone. “Lay off the attitude, Zombie Girl. I like to check in.”

“Shit.” Alec chuckled. “That might explain it right there. Maybe he just needed a vacation from Linda.”

Kai ignored them all. “Whatever the reason for his absence, can someone do a welfare check on Blob tonight?”

Silence hung heavy over the group. They might meet a couple times a week, brainstorm on how to stay hidden, and keep each other informed about things that might be of interest to the modern monster . . . but none of them had ever been all that big on actually helping each other.

Kai shook her head in disbelief. “Seriously, no one is willing to do this? Drake, you live near him, don’t you?”

“He’s just a few blocks from me.” Drake nodded. When Kai gave him an expectant stare, he sighed heavily. “Fine, I’ll stop by.”

“Great, thank you. Are there any other issues?” Kai asked, though by her terse tone and tapping foot it was clear she was done with all of this.

Alec ignored her signals and waved his hand low at his side. From his grin, Natalie couldn’t help but think he was doing it on purpose just to piss Kai off.

“Yeah,” he said when Kai pointed at him with annoyance. “One. So I actually just got another warning from my nighttime delivery job.”

Drake shook his head. “Young man, you are only drawing attention to yourself.”

Kai nodded in agreement. “For once Drake isn’t wrong. Were you caught stealing razors from shipments again?”

Alec shrugged sheepishly. “Look, you have no idea. I have to shave three times a day to keep from being wolfed out all the damn time. And when it’s this close to a full moon? Forget about it. It’s more like six times a day. And each shave is, like, three or four heavy-duty razors.”

Jekyll tilted his head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Why don’t you just buy them?”

Alec glared at him and the teasing in his tone and on his face faded to something a bit darker. Not Hyde dark, but a little monstrous nonetheless. “Not all of us have family money, Doctor. We don’t all live on Park Avenue and wear thousand-dollar suits.”

“Three-thousand,” Hyde said with a thin smile as he smoothed the fine line of the suit he currently wore.

“Hyde,” Jekyll said softly, without looking at Hyde. “You know that isn’t true.”

Hyde shrugged. “Only because you’re cheap. Honestly, a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit is hardly fit for peasants, brother.”

“You think too much about money. Among other things.” Jekyll rolled his eyes, then shook his head apologetically, as if to imply they all knew Hyde. And they did.

“Whatever.” Alec shrugged. “I make, like, fifteen an hour at my job—”

“Fifteen hundred?” Jekyll interrupted with wide eyes as Hyde snorted in amusement at his brother’s inexperience when it came to normal people.

Alec stared for a moment, then slowly shook his head. “No, numbnuts, fifteen dollars. U.S. currency, a ten and a five. Shit, you are clueless. What that means is that I don’t have the cash to pay for that kind of expenditure.”

Natalie shook her head. “But Alec, if you lose your job because you’re caught stealing too many times, you won’t have any money at all. Plus, I’m sure the amount of razors you take has to seem super-weird. Don’t you worry they might get nosy if they start the paperwork to let you go—ask too many questions about why you need that many razors? It draws attention to you in a way that could be dangerous.”

He grinned at her, crooked and utterly charming. “I’m not sure I’m going to lose anything, sweetheart. This is my third warning and there’s been no consequence so far.”

Drake tilted his head. “How do you manage that if they keep catching you in the act?”

Alec laughed. “Female supervisor.”

Kai rolled her eyes. “So did you bring this up to brainstorm ideas on how you can manage to get razors and keep your job, or did you bring it up to brag about all the tail you get?”

“Both?” Alec said with a shrug.

“Eh,” Kai groaned. “You’re on your own, jackass. Anyone else have something to say?”

Linda raised her hand and the group as a whole sighed. There weren’t many movies about Swamp Dwellers. The closest one had been the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and in that feature the monster didn’t talk and he/she (that part wasn’t really clear . . .) was always portrayed as a bit of a badass. A thing that could get things done, even when they were totally evil things.

Linda . . . not so much. In fact, she was living proof of what everyone in the room already knew: authors of books and directors of movies got their lives so consistently wrong. Those hacks took a fraction of truth and then exploited and twisted it beyond recognition.

So Linda, unlike her movie counterpart, was timid, needy, and . . . well, flaky. Kind of like cooked fish. A joke Linda did not find funny in the slightest, so Natalie kept it to herself.

“Seriously, Linda?” Kai asked. “Really?”

Linda’s hand came down slowly and she slouched in her chair. “I like Blob better.”

To be honest, so did Natalie. He was the calming influence on a grouchy bunch of freaks. They didn’t argue as much when he led the proceedings. Hell, sometimes they even had a breakthrough, not that any of them would admit that if asked. Poor Blob had been trying to get someone to acknowledge a breakthrough for years.

Kai shrugged. “Well, maybe he’ll be back where he belongs on Wednesday, okay? And then you can tell us all about your cats and your neighbors you don’t like and whatever other tedium constitutes your day. Until then, why don’t we break this up for the night?”

Although Linda still looked pissed, the rest of the group appeared as relieved as Natalie felt. After all, they shared a common bond of what they were, but other than that, she felt very little connection to these people . . . er, things. And she had to go to work anyway. The medical examiner’s office waited for no man, nor beast. Not in New York.

Everyone gathered their things and Jekyll and Hyde ducked into the bathroom to perform their creepy ritual. No one waited for them. Instead they trailed out onto the street in a disorganized and silent group. No chitchat. No offers to share a cab or a walk to the subway station.

The church was on an iffier end of the street where there were no doormen at the apartment buildings. To Natalie's mind, that made it the perfect place to be mugged, and so as she half-assed waved to the others and trudged toward the station, she kept a wary eye out for people. She was made of various parts from dead people, convicts, mostly, which she tried not to think about (thanks a lot, "Dad"). Whoever had “donated” her ears to the project had exceptionally good hearing in life. Natalie used that to her advantage in the city, where danger did occasionally lurk, though admittedly not as much in the last fifteen years when the city had been “cleaned up.” (Translation: freaks were not welcome).

In the distance she heard a woman arguing with a man, probably over a purse. Part of Natalie thought about heading in that direction, of using her super-Frankenstein’s-Monster strength to be a hero.

But she’d learned the hard way that a hero’s path didn’t really get a person anywhere. Hell, she’d been chased out of a German village a century ago by people brandishing pitchforks and torches because she’d tried to help a child. And afterward? The brat had turned on her and started screaming and running.

She shivered. Not again. Nope, not in this life.

So instead of putting on her superhero cape (which she just knew would be far more stylish than Drake’s Dracula cape), Natalie walked down the steps into the train station and off to work with the dead. None of them talked, none of them caused her any problems whatsoever.

About the Author

Jesse Petersen grew up a geek in love with Star Wars, video games (King’s Quest, anyone?), books of all kinds, and even the occasional RPG. Eventually she grew up, at least in body, but she still loves anything with whimsy, and her books reflect that. Whether it’s funny zombies or monsters in group therapy, you’ll find books that mix giggles with gore. You can find Jesse at her website JessePetersen.net, her Twitter @jessepet and on Facebook, where she talks about Weird Al, cats, and even her books.

Table of Contents

Praise for Married with Zombies

Other books in the Living with the Dead series:

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

A Note to My Readers

Club Monstrosity Preview

About the Author