The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (12 page)

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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.