He held my gaze for a long moment and then shook my arm off. With a grunt, he started down the hall toward the bathrooms we’d seen the day before.
“I’m going to hit the showers,” he muttered. “I don’t suppose you left any fresh panties for me, eh Doc?”
He was gone before any of us could respond. My cheeks heated with blood at his comment and I looked at Kevin with an apologetic shake of my head.
“Sorry. He’s a hothead,” I muttered. “He’ll come around.”
Kevin smiled, but there was something kind of pitying about it. “I’m sure he has many wonderful qualities. And I’m sure he was a great help when you caught the zombie.”
My brow wrinkled. “Well, to be fair, we caught the zombie.”
But Kevin was already starting away from me and I didn’t think he heard me as he turned the corner and left me standing in the sterile hallway with The Kid watching me, a little smug grin on his face.
By the time we had all showered (The Kid protested loudly, but we insisted. Two words for prepubescent boys: Pee. Ew.) at least a couple of hours had gone by. So when I stepped from the bathroom, my hair still damp and freshly dressed in a new t-shirt and cargo pants, I was surprised to see Dave waiting for me, arms folded, in the hall.
“Ready to load up?” he asked, his tone no longer the angry one from earlier.
I tilted my head. “What do you mean, load up?”
“I mean get the fuck out of here.” He rested his head back against the wall with a heavy sigh. “Go to camp, get some rest. Get rid of The Kid and move on with our lives. Whatever.”
I stared. “Dude, it’s pitch black outside by now. There’s no fucking way we’re going out on the road now.”
He pushed off the wall to face me. “Wait, are you suggesting we stay in Dr. Weird’s Lab of Secrets for the night?”
I smiled, reaching for some kind of levity. “That sounds like a Harry Potter title.”
He shook his head. “I’m not doing it, Sarah. I’m not staying here.”
“Why?” I burst out in exasperation. “Because you don’t like him? That’s a stupid reason to go out to certain death and you know it.”
When he didn’t deny that, I moved closer and slipped my arms around his waist. With a smile, I leaned up to kiss him.
“Jealous Dave may be a Neanderthal, but he has to know he’s the only boy for me.”
Dave tried not to smile as he kept staring at the ceiling, but he failed. “Yeah,” he said, “But Neanderthal Dave doesn’t like his woman wearing other man’s clothing.”
I laughed. “Well, you can take them off… if you agree to stay here tonight like a good boy.”
“Sarah is right.”
Dave instantly tensed as Barnes’s voice drifted from down the hall toward us. I sighed as the doctor approached us. So much for that hint of a good mood (and maybe even some nookie later).
“Thanks, I don’t need your advice,” Dave said as he let me go and glared at Barnes.
“You do if you’re thinking of leaving. You can view the monitors yourself. Right now night vision shows twenty to thirty of those creatures at the warehouse entrance and I have no intention of wasting good ammo on them. Even if you got through, God knows how many hundreds stand between you and the camp.”
Dave clenched his fists, but there was no arguing with that logic.
“Stay here tonight and I’ll help you load up all your new materials for the fresh hunt tomorrow.”
Dave snorted. “I don’t think we’ve even established we’re going on a new hunt for you tomorrow, Doc.”
Barnes cocked his head. “Oh, I’m sorry. I understood from Sarah that you would be.”
Dave turned toward me with a glare. “Did you now?”
“Dave—” I started, but he turned away.
“Well, she is the braaaains of our operation, right? Guess the brawn better get to bed and leave you two to plan our next step.”
He took off down the hall toward—well, I don’t really know where he was going, but he was pissed. Barnes’s attempt to help had only made things worse.
But as I turned toward the doctor, I guess to apologize again, I caught the end of a smug smile on his face. It was gone almost instantly, but there was no denying its existence.
And that made me wonder what ulterior motive this guy had for causing problems. And how hard I’d have to work to solve them in the morning.
Dave put our fully loaded van into gear and drove away from the warehouse with morning sun glinting off the windshield cheerily. He hadn’t spoken… not one fucking word… since we woke up.
I settled back in my seat and turned my head to look at him. I’d slept like a baby in the comfortable twin bed Kevin had provided, but Dave looked like hell. The circles under his eyes told me everything I needed to know without asking that good ol’ sitcom conversation starter, “How did you sleep?”
“So you want to become dear Doctor Kevin’s zombie hunter professionally now, eh?” he finally asked. “I thought you said we shouldn’t confuse the ‘brand.’ ”
I shut my eyes. With The Kid still in the back of the van, I really didn’t want to go into this, but apparently this was going to be the moment we hashed it out.
“Come on. You know all that brand stuff is bullshit now,” I muttered.
He shot me a look. “You didn’t think that before Barnes… I’m sorry, Kevin started asking you for favors. You were all about killing zombies for as much profit as we could manage.”
“But that was when I thought all that was left was this,” I said, waving my hands around at the empty desert. “In a wasteland, why not destroy, destroy, destroy? But now… I mean, come on, David. You saw what that serum did to the infected guinea pigs. You know that if Barnes could translate that to infected people it just might change everything. Don’t you think that’s nobler than just killing a bunch of zombies?”
He blew out a humorless laugh as he got off the freeway and made his way toward the camp. He had an answer on his tongue, but before he could say it, The Kid stuck his head between us and pulled his blindfold down away from his eyes. When he saw where we were, he gasped.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he asked Dave.
I flinched. “Language!”
He ignored me, of course. Dave looked at him. “What? Where the fuck do you think we’re going, Robbie? I’m taking you to the camp. You’ll be safe there.”
“No fucking way!” The Kid responded. “I’m not going to that camp.”
I turned on him and the stress finally took over. “Look, you little brat, we’re not taking you with us, so forget it. In the camp you’ll be taken care of. Why the hell wouldn’t you want that?”
He folded his arms. “Have you ever seen the way they treat kids in the camp? Oh yeah, some of them, the little ones, get taken by some nice lady who lost her own brats. But most of them get put into one big fucking tent. Sometimes some religious jerk comes in and tries to teach us to pray or whatever. But we don’t get to do shit. And we can’t leave. It’s prison. And I’m not going to fucking prison.”
He touched the gun in his waistband and suddenly I felt a scene from Boyz n the Hood or something coming on. I rubbed my eyes with my fists hard enough to see stars. Seriously, the drama boys create…
“Well, what do you want us to do, Kid?” I finally asked as calmly as I could. “We can’t just leave you running around in zombie hell. You may not like to hear it, but you’re eleven years old. You’re too young to make it on your own.”
He shook his head and suddenly I saw just how determined he was in his eyes. “My mom died on the first day the zombies hit Phoenix. My dad… well, he’s a whole other story. But the point is, I’ve been taking care of myself since the first moment this started. I didn’t need a babysitter then. I don’t now. So forget it.”
Dave slammed on the brake and swerved to park at the side of the deserted road. He turned in his seat and stared at the scraggly little boy who had som
ehow taken over our van and apparently our lives.
“And what will you do if we just pull into the camp and drop you off? You know I could get that gun from you if I wanted to.”
The Kid swallowed. Hard. He stared at Dave like he was sizing him up and by the pallor to his skin I’m guessing he knew he wouldn’t win in a fight. There was a time when I wouldn’t have thought Dave would ever take it that far, but now I wasn’t so sure. He might not have been bluffing.
“Well, I guess I’d have no choice but to tell everyone what you’re doing,” The Kid said softly, and the hardness was back in his little boy eyes. “About catching zombies and cures and warehouses that hide labs somewhere, what… out past Sedona Street?”
I spun around in my own seat to look at him. The Kid had been wearing a blindfold both in and out of the warehouse, how the hell had he figured that out?”
He smiled like he was a mind reader. “I counted the turns,” he explained even though I hadn’t asked. “Point is, even if I just have a tiny clue of the location of your big, bad secret lab, somebody will figure it out. And then your doctor guy won’t be so protected anymore.”
“You little hustler,” I breathed, though once again I was impressed by The Kid. Most people didn’t figure out blackmail and extortion until they were in their teens, at least. But I guess zombie apocalypses make you grow up fast.
Dave sat for a long moment just looking at The Kid. Then he slowly faced forward again, let out a deep sigh, and put the van in gear. To my surprise, he swung it around on the wide road and turned away from the camp and back toward the Badlands.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Unless you want to put your precious Kevin in danger, not to mention our own asses, I guess The Kid is right. He holds the cards.”
I slid down deeper in my seat as I muttered to myself about jerk kids and birth control. But David was right, anyway. At this moment, we had no choice but to keep the brat with us.
“So,” The Kid said with a grin wide enough to split his face. “What are we doing now? Catching or killing zombies?”
I sent a side glance toward Dave and he sent the same toward me. At the moment, nothing was really resolved and neither one of us was in a big damned hurry to flinch first in our fight.
Before one of us could, though, The Kid pointed. “Better decide fast. Look, a loner zombie!”
I followed where he was pointing. We had turned back onto the main road that led to the highway. The overpass was about a quarter of a mile away, a big wide hill that led east or west down the 202 depending on which way you turned.
At the top of that big hill was a pacing zombie, almost like he was waiting for something. He was exactly the kind we wanted to catch since he was alone and in an area where there wasn’t much chance that something else was hiding. If we were going to keep catching, I guess a decision was going to have to be made about it.
Now.
We all stared as Dave slowed the vehicle to nothing more than a crawl. We were so far away that unless we made a big noise or did something else to draw attention to ourselves, a zombie wouldn’t notice us.
Except that I could have sworn this one did. Its pacing slowed and it seemed to turn toward us and shift its weight.
“Get me the glock with the scope,” I said softly, waving my hand in the back toward The Kid.
I heard him shuffling around and then felt the heavy weight of the semi-automatic in my palm. I lifted the gun and peered through scope.
The zombie was everything we’d come to expect from the living dead. Gray skin, black sludge caked around the mouth, rotting body. Only this one still managed to be different somehow. For one thing, he was bigger than your average zombie. I’m not talking Resident Evil ridiculous, of course, but this guy had been a big boy in life, bigger even than the Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe zombie I’d lured to our net trap yesterday.
But that wasn’t all that separated him from your average, run-of-the-mill infected bastard. Unlike the other zombies I’d seen over the past few months, his pacing had a purposeful quality to it. He wasn’t just shambling aimlessly. He was waiting. Watching.
And in that moment, he lifted his head and he looked right at us. Through the high-powered scope I could see pretty good detail on his face. There was no doubt about it, he was really looking. Seeing us even though we were too far away for most zombies to notice through their rotting eyes.
He tilted his head back and let out a moaning groan that was loud enough to be heard even all the way at our car.
“Shit, David,” I whispered, my tone laced with two emotions that bubbled inside of me like boiling oil. First there was fear, intense and powerful like I hadn’t felt since that awful moment when we saw a zombie for the first time.
But there was something else, too. Excitement. My heart raced with it and my hands shook as I continued to stare through the scope.
“What is it?” he whispered.
I lowered the scope and looked at him. “I think that might be a bionic zombie.”
Strive for the four-hour work week. The rest of the time, run like hell.
Dave blinked as he looked at me. “What?”
I stared at him, overcome by the same disbelief that lined his face.
“Bionic zombie,” I repeated on nothing but a trembling breath.
With a shake of his head, Dave snatched the gun from my hand. For a moment, he hesitated, almost as if he didn’t want to look through the scope, but finally he lifted it and stared up the hill toward the pacing zombie.
I held my breath as I waited for him to say something, anything. But he didn’t. He just stared and stared through the scope. For a long time the car was silent until he finally lowered the weapon.
“Shit,” he muttered.
And that was all the reaction I got because just about the same time he finally said something the zombie started sprinting toward us. Sprinting. This wasn’t a hunter jog or half-assed run. This was a Jackie Joyner-Kersee full-on sprint (minus the dragon lady nails, of course).
Now I don’t know what came over us. I mean, we’d fought probably thousands of zombies by this point (just the steering wheel car count was in the hundreds) and we’d always won those battles, even if they were sometimes close. After all these months, though, we knew what to do. Hell, we got paid for what we do.
But I guess neither of us wanted any part of this shit until we had more time to figure it out.
“Reverse, reverse!” I screamed as Dave threw it into just that gear and floored it backward.
The poor Kid flew around the back of the veering van, crashing into the metal walls and grappling for any kind of purchase as Dave spun the wheel to turn away from the monster rapidly approaching our vehicle.
“Please stop doing that!” Robbie bellowed between grunts as he slid around the back.
We both ignored him. Right now getting away was more important. Plus, we had antibiotic cream and Sponge-Bob Band-Aids! He’d be fine.
Our tires screeched against the asphalt as Dave plowed forward, sending up a plume of smoke behind us that stank of burned rubber and dust. We tore off down the long, deserted road at sixty miles an hour.
Dave kept driving for fifteen minutes at full speed. He leaned over the steering column, silent and strained, his knuckles white around the wheel as he merely stared out at the road ahead of us.
In the back, The Kid had bundled up against one of the van walls, his knees pulled up to his chest. He was picking at one of his ratty shoes without looking at either of us.
Which left me. Shaking. Stunned. And wanting to talk about what I’d seen so bad that I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I finally turned toward David.
“It was bionic, wasn’t it?” I whispered.
He jolted, almost like he’d forgotten the rest of us were in the vehicle with him. For the first time, he lifted his foot a little from the gas pedal and we slowed down to a more reasonable speed for the school zone we were curr
ently streaking through.
Although, to be fair to Dave, the school had burned down weeks ago, the only kids left there were probably zombie monsters, and there were no cops to ticket him for going sixty-three in a twenty anyway.
“I don’t know,” he said. His voice was shaking a little and he drew a breath to steady it. “Maybe not. I mean, maybe it was just a coincidence that the… thing was bigger and that it only seemed like it was… um… aware of us.”
I stared at him. “Are you that jaded? That blind?”
He glared at me. “What do you mean?”
I expelled a breath of frustration. “I mean that people in the camps and on the street have been talking about bionics for a couple of days now, but you said you could only believe what you see.”
“That’s true, Sarah,” Dave snapped. “It’s crazy to chase rainbows just because someone told you there was a leprechaun with a fucking pile of Lucky Charms at the end.”
I slammed my hands on the dash with enough force that it stung. “There is a motherfucking leprechaun, David! You just saw it. Just like you saw Kevin’s cure in the lab a couple of days ago. And yet you still doubt both of those things. You’re still looking for excuses as to why they aren’t true. Why? Is it because you’re scared?”
He slammed on the brake and in the back The Kid grunted pathetically as he slid on the metal van floor and sort of smooshed against the back of our seats.
Dave ignored his renewed whines and spun around to face me.
“Yes, I’m fucking scared, Sarah. And if you aren’t then you’re delusional and crazy. That thing back there, whatever it was, if it really is some kind of new breed of zombie that has even a fraction of higher brain function or greater strength… it means more of us are going to die.”
“Not necessarily!” I said, but my tone had no strength to it.
“Yes, necessarily,” he bellowed. “The only reason we have any chance against the horde now is that the zombies are stupider than Paris Fucking Hilton. They can’t figure out tactics or find ways to work together on any real scale. So we have an advantage. If they start to think, even just a tiny bit, the advantage goes out the window.”
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