LovewithaChanceofZombies

by Delphine Dryden

  “Ask me nicely,” he suggested.

  “Please touch me,” Lena capitulated.

  His hands stayed clamped over hers, his hips pumping slowly. “Nicer than that. Be specific. Use nouns.”

  “Lucas, god dammit! Okay, please touch my clit, make me come. Please?”

  That must have been nice enough, because he finally brought his hand between them and started stroking. She’d been close for so long, hanging there at the edge, that a few strokes were all she needed. A bone-deep shudder rippled through Lena’s body as the orgasm started to take her over, and she heard Nye cry out as she squeezed his cock tighter. They came together, flesh slapping flesh, all clutching fingers and primal breathing, and Lena thought she might have grayed out just a little near the end.

  It was good, so much better than she’d anticipated, and it had been far too long since the last time.

  And after a few weeks, no matter how good it was, it would end, because Lucas Nye would be dead.

  Chapter Four

  The trouble with giving in to impulse in the middle of the day in the lab was that it left them nowhere to go afterward. Standing naked in a medical research laboratory becomes many times less sexy and more awkward after the sexual edge is off.

  Lucas cleared his throat and rubbed his hands on Lena’s thighs a few times after he slipped out of her. The caress was affectionate and friendly but hardly sensual. She didn’t try to hang on to him when he pulled away and bent to grab his pants off the floor.

  “Um,” he said after his khakis were back on.

  Lena retrieved her underwear and tank top, pulling those on first for some cover. She turned away to find her fatigue pants.

  “Um,” Lucas attempted again.

  “It’s okay. It wasn’t a date, Nye. You don’t have to see me home. I’ll just go back to my corner with my gun, and you can get back to…whatever it was you were doing before we did that.”

  She didn’t hear him until he was right behind her, his hands gripping her shoulders. “Lucas,” he reminded her.

  Lena felt a strange prickling behind her eyes, a taut fullness in her throat. “I thought you just meant I should call you that while we were doing it.”

  “No. I didn’t just mean then.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head then slid his hands down her arms, clasping hers briefly before letting them go. “May I see you to your chair, at least?”

  He offered his arm, like a dream date in an old movie. She had seen enough of them to know what to do, and she couldn’t help but smile through the odd glimmer in her eyes as she wrapped her hand around his forearm.

  “I had a lovely time,” she told him, once she was back in her chair with her gun slung over her lap. “Thank you.”

  “Me too. Are you doing anything tonight?” A smile played around his lips, and Lena found it infectious.

  “No,” she replied, “it just so happens I’m free this evening.”

  “Pick you up after work?”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  He kissed her cheek before he returned to his microscope, and Lena felt the tingling brush of his lips, the light burn from his razor stubble, long after it should have faded. She knew her edge was slipping but she really couldn’t bring herself to care. This assignment was a vacation in a way, which Watson must have also known. It hadn’t occurred to Lena that she needed one—people no longer took vacations, as such—but she had. She could feel years of tension easing from her shoulders after just a few days spent in a secure environment.

  It would be a few weeks at the soonest before Nye posed any threat, and even then the main danger from him would probably not be physical violence. Without the constant danger she was used to in the field, and with food being brought down to the lab for them three times a day, Lena’s mind was finally able to turn to subjects other than survival and her next meal.

  She didn’t like it much. Thinking more clearly about the situation was really not helpful, as there was little to like in such thoughts. The present was brutal and the future was bleak—to the extent there was a future at all.

  “What do you think will happen?” she asked Nye as that afternoon wore on. “To people, I mean, in the long run. Will we die out?”

  He looked up from his work and shrugged. “Technically speaking, genetically speaking, there are still enough uninfected to perpetuate the species. As near as we can tell, there are at least a few hundred thousand people left in the various colonies around the world. Probably a few more that aren’t in radio contact. If the uninfected manage to outlast the zombies and find a way to prevent reinfection, it’s feasible we could make a comeback. Those are big ifs, though.”

  “Here’s what I don’t get. Where are the zombies still coming from? I mean, we kill them all the time, and so do the other colonies. They don’t seem to live past a few years and when they breed, the babies don’t last long. So why do we still have them?”

  “That’s easy,” Nye said. “People are stupid. Think about this—what if your dad’s little compound had survived the initial wave and was still hanging on out there in the boondocks, huddling behind razor wire? A couple dozen people with probably not enough women to go around, and supplies are scarce, how do you suppose that would work out?”

  Lena thought about it, trying to picture the belligerent, xenophobic, incurious lot she’d grown up with lingering on beyond all odds. “People would get kicked out. They’d use that punishment as a threat, and eventually they’d follow through on it,” she speculated. “They’d lose more on patrols and foraging than we do, because their groups would be smaller, and they wouldn’t have the discipline we do. Also, I think…”

  “What?”

  “No, I shouldn’t say it. It’s mean.”

  “I won’t tell,” he said cheerfully. “Go on, be mean. What the hell, it’s the apocalypse.”

  She chuckled. “Okay, good point. Besides, if the religious types had it right, the fact we’re all still here means we’re probably screwed anyway, right? I think some of the guys I grew up with—the women, too, for that matter—would just get killed because of dumb stuff. That happens here too, of course. There’s always plenty of stupid to go around. We all have our moments. But I think you’d have guys going out without enough ammo and getting lost that way, because they thought they’d be safe in the daylight. Or getting bit and not telling, and spreading it around. Even after years, they’d still think it couldn’t really happen to them. Or maybe they’d just infect the others for spite. And sometimes it would get caught in time to prevent it spreading too far, but sometimes not.”

  “And when it’s not,” Nye finished, “they all end up turned. Within a few months they’re out in the woods past our fence or somewhere similar, hoping for a snack to wander out.”

  Lena nodded. She could see it, the slow dwindling of those loner colonies, the accidents and stubbornness that would prove fatal. Their margin of error would be narrower with so many fewer people to start with. It had even happened to a few of the larger colonies, where the people knew better and were militantly on guard against it. All it took was one person who couldn’t face the truth or lacked the strength to sacrifice himself. One group had lost nearly a quarter of its citizens before an outbreak was contained, and another smaller colony had been wiped out completely, only a handful of survivors making their way to another enclave to tell the grisly tale.

  “There are only so many of those groups out there, though,” she countered. “Eventually they’ll all be turned if they’re going to turn, and then they’ll run out of food, right? They aren’t eating enough of us to survive, and they don’t seem to eat each other. So shouldn’t they have starved to death by now?”

  “Not necessarily. There are animals they eat out there. Even some plants. There’s a corner of the big farm they keep attacking where we think they’re after the hemp plants.”

  Lena snickered. Everybody knew the hemp was a vital crop, providing fibers for rope and clothing in addition to many other us
es. It had been one of the colony’s wiser decisions to start growing it. Still, one could hardly overlook the other benefits it offered, even if the variety they grew at the farm was barely palatable for recreational use. “If I were a zombie, I’d want to get high too, I bet.”

  She had wandered closer as they spoke, and now Lena looked over Nye’s shoulder at the slide he’d just placed on the microscope.

  “What are you working on, anyway?”

  “Miracle vaccine,” he said promptly. “Last-minute cure that’s been staring us all in the face this whole time. Fairy dust. Proof that unicorns exist.”

  She rested her hands on his shoulders and squeezed gently, noting they were knotted with tension. For Nye, of course, this wasn’t like a vacation at all.

  “I meant what’s on the slides? You’ve been looking at them and making notes for days.”

  “Ah. Well, this one is the AX-1 virus. You want to see it? Here, take a look.”

  Lena stepped up to the microscope and peered through the eyepiece, taking a moment to adjust the focus. Then she saw it, an image she hadn’t seen in a decade, though it had certainly been all over the news for months before then.

  “Looks like bullets,” she noted. The comparison hadn’t really occurred to her before.

  “Now look at this.”

  Lucas slid the zombie virus slide into a different position, made some other changes, and the image blurred a moment then re-sharpened. Lena was staring at two slides now, a side-by-side comparison.

  “Am I supposed to see something?” she asked after several seconds of peering at the magnified blobs. “It looks the same as the first one.”

  “Look more closely,” Nye said, and turned a dial on the microscope’s side.

  Lena pressed her eyes back to the scope and blinked, adjusting the focus again until the image sharpened. He had increased the magnification.

  “It still looks— Oh, wait. Okay, these are maybe a little smaller, and the squiggly stuff in the middle of the bullets is more…more squiggly?”

  “The structure of the protein is a bit more compact. It’s rabies, by the way, that second slide.”

  “You’re shitting me.” Lena stared at the slides, stunned by the comparison. “They look so much alike. Isn’t there a rabies vaccine? It almost seems like—”

  “Tried it. It was one of the first things they tried, actually, the same techniques used for rabies vaccines.” Lucas nudged her out of the way again, seeming proprietary about his microscope and unwilling to give it up for too long. “First the newer recombinant form, which uses another virus as a delivery method. Then the old-fashioned way, which used infected nerve tissues that had been dried to weaken the virus. Neither of them worked. Or rather, they shortened the duration of the active stage of the virus in the test subjects, but the end result… It wasn’t helpful.”

  Something in Lena instinctively recoiled at the way he said it, and she knew she would likely regret it, but she felt compelled to ask.

  “Wasn’t helpful, how?”

  Nye hesitated. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You really don’t want to know.”

  “Now you have to tell me. Nothing could be worse than not knowing.”

  “Are you sure about that?” he challenged. “Tell me, what would be the worst thing? As a professional, out there in the wilderness trying to kill these things, what is your worst nightmare about them?”

  Lena’s stomach clenched. But she had asked, and pushed, and deserved whatever answer she got as a result. “That they get smarter,” she said at last. “Cunning. That they can delay gratification and really start hunting us, working together, instead of just charging as soon as they get the scent. I have nightmares like that.”

  Just about every night. Other nights, she dreamed that the spread of the virus became airborne and the attacking zombies sneezed them all to death.

  “Then you’ll be relieved to know those test subjects were all terminated.”

  “Jesus. Did you actually see any of them?”

  Nye nodded, swallowing hard. “That’s all classified, by the way. Or at the time it was. Nobody to enforce that now, of course. Unless you want to give somebody the screaming night terrors, though, best keep it to yourself.”

  “Predator zombies,” she murmured. “I’ll have the screaming night terrors, for sure.”

  “I’ll protect you,” Nye offered with a sultry smile. He swiveled on his stool to face her, putting a hand on her waist as if it belonged there.

  “I can’t stay with you all night,” she reminded him, but she allowed the caress. “I have to lock you in there, remember?”

  “Tough to forget.”

  His jaw clenched, marring his expression. It made him look hard and a little dangerous, and Lena shivered at the sight. Hard and dangerous were what she liked, what she was used to, but the bitterness that followed from him tugged at her heart.

  “I’m not going to run. I know what the stakes are, Lena. You’re not even going to have to shoot me, you know. I’ve already got a pair of syringes in a case in my room, ready to go as soon as the symptoms kick in. That little cocktail will be much less painful than a bullet. Less cleanup for everyone too.”

  “Hey,” she soothed, “it’s okay. Nobody thinks you’re going to try anything, Nye. Watson just doesn’t want people to panic. I’m protecting you more than I’m protecting them. Watson trusts you enough to let you stay when anybody else would be out the gate. If I didn’t trust you too, I wouldn’t have let you screw me.”

  He flinched at that, his lips tightening to a fine line. After a moment, he loosened his grip on her waist, rubbing his fingers over the spot he’d been clenching. Lena hadn’t even noticed it until he let go, but now she wondered if there would be a set of finger-shaped bruises there by tomorrow.

  “Do you want to know a secret?” he asked. “It’s about being a hero.”

  “Sure.” She resumed the gentle, stroking pressure on his shoulders, rolling her hands over the knots. Nye bent forward, relaxing just a little into the touch. His hair fell in front of his eyes, hiding them from Lena.

  “It sucks balls,” he said, and she couldn’t help laughing, a sharp, too-loud sound in the nearly silent lab.

  “That’s inspirational. Should we put that on your monument? They’re talking about a statue, you know. I don’t know if anybody still knows how to carve one though.”

  Nye shook his head, eyes still downcast. “See, that’s what I mean. Statue? Holy shit. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to live up to that kind of stuff? I know I have to set a good example, act like I’m okay with taking one for the team. I’m not remotely okay with any of this, Lena. I don’t want to die. I’m not even sick. The bite barely broke the skin, it’s already mostly healed.”

  Her hands stilled. “But it did break the skin. You know what that means, Lucas.”

  “Of course I know what that means. And I’ll be a good boy. Take myself out when the time is right. Hell, I’ll even leave all my lab notes in good working order and leave a will and everything. But it fucking sucks that I have to. Because I want to scream and punch things. I want to go out, find the fucking inhuman slime that did this to me and rip that monster to shreds, one small piece at a time. I wasn’t ready to go, I still had things to do, dammit! It isn’t fair.”

  Lena slipped her arms around him, pulling him close until his face was resting against her belly. Stroking his hair, she tried to think of anything to say that might help. But nothing came to mind, because everything Lucas had said was the truth.

  Finally, unable to offer anything else, she gave him the only thing she could—herself.

  “You know what? You’re right, Lucas. I do need protection from the night terrors. I think I’ll spend the night with you after all.”

  Chapter Five

  Lena did the right thing—because in her way, she felt as bound by that hero’s code as Lucas Nye did—and told Watson of the slight change in plan. She wasn’t surprised when he gave
his blessing.

  She arrived back at Nye’s room with a duffel bag, dismissing the guard as she tapped on the door. Nye answered, grinning when he saw the luggage.

  “I’ve never had a roommate before. Good thing this place is bigger than my room in the single guys’ dorm.”

  Lena snorted. “I’m not exactly moving in. I just thought it’d be more convenient to have a toothbrush and a change of clothes.” She didn’t own much more than that, anyway.

  She moved into the room, looking around for the first time. She’d seen it from the door, of course, on the previous nights when she’d locked Nye in. This was the first time she’d actually entered it, however.

  “Damn. I bet you wish you’d known about this before. Nobody had claimed it?”

  Nye chuckled. “It didn’t look like this. Watson and my team, the people who know about this, they fixed it up for me. I think it used to be the on-call room, but we just used it for storage and the occasional shower.”

  The space was a vast improvement on a dorm room, despite the lack of any windows. It was at least twenty feet square and had been fitted with furniture that Watson and the medics must have pilfered from a furniture store or one of the college offices. There was a table with a few chairs near the sink, a somewhat-tatty leather couch and a glass coffee table in the middle of the room, even a television with a DVD player below it on a shelf. Along the far wall, a hospital screen had been set up. Lena assumed the bed was behind that.

  “The shower and everything are through there,” Nye pointed out. He had clearly already availed himself of the shower, as his hair was still wet, and he’d changed into a pair of loose plaid flannel drawstring pants. Lena had to remind herself not to stare at the tempting patch of taut skin below his bellybutton, the dark trail of hair arrowing down into the waistband, the lean crevices in front of each hip. He was in good shape. Most people were these days. Nobody wanted to be the slowest person in the bunch. The slowest person was the most likely to get eaten.