EAT SLAY LOVE

by Jesse Petersen

  The others stared at me—and I swear the silence seemed to stretch out forever.

  “Honey, I think that gas gave you a little aneurism, because you cannot be serious,” Nicole finally said as she reached out and patted my hand half-heartedly.

  Kathleen nodded. “Nicole is right, Sarah. You’re talking about a military establishment here. With trained soldiers who think that killing you is a way to further their goals. You can’t just waltz in there and steal David away from them.”

  “Really?” I laughed, but there was really nothing funny about the situation. “Since August, I’ve fought zombie therapists, killed my own sister-in-law, matched wits with both a mad scientist and his annoying child, and trekked across the zombie wasteland that is the South and Midwest. And I’ve done all this to keep my marriage together. So if you think I’m going to let some soldier boys who want to play Test The Freakazoid with my husband destroy that… you are dead wrong. They’re not making my David into a pincushion to see if his zombie superpowers are transferable. I’m going after him.”

  Nicole stared at me. “Let me just save us all some time. Is this up for debate?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  She turned to Kathleen with a heavy sigh. “She’s not going to change her mind.” Kathleen opened her mouth to speak, but Nicole waved her off. “Seriously, you can save your breath. I’ve never met anyone as stubborn as this girl. Totally pig-headed.”

  “Um, thank you, still standing in the room,” I said as I stared at Nicole.

  She shrugged. “Sorry.”

  But she totally wasn’t. And yet, I kind of loved her for it in that moment.

  Kathleen shook her head in utter disbelief. “But-but we have a plan to get you across the border.”

  I nodded. “And I’m not interfering with that plan. We’ve got about two hours and I have every intention of getting David back and meeting you at the rendezvous point before our window of opportunity closes. But I don’t want to risk McCray’s surprisingly brave ass or Nicole’s chance to take credit for bringing the cure across. She has a Pulitzer to win after all.”

  “And an Emmy,” Nicole interrupted. “And doesn’t Edward R. Murrow have an award, too? I’d like one of those, as well.”

  I ignored her. “So they’ll go, and Dave and I will meet you there afterward. All I need from you guys are some weapons, the directions to the barracks where they might have David, and the coordinates for the rendezvous.”

  Kathleen stared at me for a long, charged moment. Then she sighed. “I can do the weapons, no problem. But the rest is going to take too long to explain. So I’ll just come with you.”

  Rick, the one who had been telling me about the barracks, jumped forward. “What the fuck, Katy! You can’t be serious.”

  She looked at him with a shrug. “And yet, somehow I am. Rick, you get those two to the rendezvous and for God’s sake, protect them both. That cure has to get across to John and Molly.”

  “Does that mean using full force against the military?” Rick asked.

  Kathleen hesitated for a moment and then she nodded once. “Yeah. Use full force if you have to.” She looked at me evenly. “Dave and Sarah and I will meet you there.”

  “But don’t wait for us if we don’t,” I hastened to add. I looked at Nicole. “Promise me that you’ll make my dad leave us behind if we’re late. I don’t want to risk your lives or his or the chance of getting the cure into the right hands.”

  Nicole hesitated a moment and then sighed. “You are going to owe me so fucking big time by the time this is done.”

  I laughed. “Pulitzer, remember? We’ll call it even.”

  Nicole stepped forward and then I was enveloped in a hard hug that I’d never seen coming. I hugged her back, at first out of reflex, but then out of relief and gratitude. She might be a pain-in-the-ass stalkerazzi, but she was our pain-in-the-ass stalkerazzi.

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  She nodded against my shoulder. “Get Dave back. And I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

  She pulled away and moved toward McCray. Without looking at me, she barked. “Now get going. You don’t have a lot of time and I won’t wait for your bitch ass if you’re not there in time.”

  “Gotcha!” I said. Then Kathleen and I walked out of the bunker and into the dusk of early evening.

  I was pleased I didn’t cry as we walked away. Especially since I was pretty certain I’d never see that girl again.

  Kathleen led me to another bunker about a quarter of a mile away. We didn’t speak as we went because, well, what was there to say? This was a suicide mission, or it very well could be. I knew why I was doing it.

  But why she was participating was beyond me.

  She opened the doors and flicked a lantern that was hanging near the entryway. It sputtered and I stepped back in shock.

  “Shit, you weren’t kidding about the weapons,” I breathed.

  You know that scene in The Matrix when Neo has all the weapons go flying up next to him. This was kind of like that, only we weren’t dressed as well and there was more mud.

  Their collection was amazing. All kinds of guns, cannons, even hand grenades lined the walls, organized by type and size. Without hesitating, Kathleen marched into the bunker, grabbed a rusty grocery cart parked by the door, and started yanking weapons off the wall.

  “Flash grenades,” she muttered to herself as she placed each item on the cart in succession. “Tear gas canisters. Rubber bullets.”

  I shook my head. “Okay, I get that these guys are just following orders, but what’s with all the nonlethal weapons?”

  Kathleen turned to me. “Oh, these are just so we can get to David. Once we have him, then we won’t worry so much about who we hit and we’ll switch to…”

  She trailed off and grabbed for a selection of carbine machine guns. “The real shit.”

  I grinned and grabbed my own selection, including a twin of the missile launcher she’d been carrying earlier that I’d so coveted.

  “Oh, and grab a couple of shotguns,” she suggested as she turned the heavy cart toward the bunker door, “There will be zombies, too, all the way up to the perimeter of the barracks.”

  “Oh, I could never forget the zombies,” I said as I grabbed what she’d requested and followed her up an incline out into the night air again.

  The sun was almost fully set as we loaded up a vehicle. This time it wasn’t one of those souped-up ones with the body armor but something less conspicuous: an SUV, though it did have leather seats. The back ones were covered in dried blood, but still. Nice.

  Kathleen said a few words to her people. They had gathered out beside the car and were standing around looking worried. I sat with the windows rolled up and watched her try to comfort them. It didn’t seem to work very well. But it didn’t stop her as she got into the car and we rolled off into the night.

  “Hey, can you open the glove compartment and grab those night-vision goggles?” she asked after we’d rolled along in semisilence for about ten miles. And not on the road, either. Kathleen just took a straight route through dead fields and dirt yards.

  What? The zombie highway system is way different. No tolls (which made the I-Pass attached to the SUV window pretty useless)!

  My eyes went wide as I popped the glove compartment, then I held out one of the three pair of the precious glasses before I slipped on my own.

  “Just flip the switch on the side,” she directed as she did the same and then cut her headlights.

  There was a moment of total darkness (without city lights, dark is pretty damn dark) and then the world flashed into Paris-Hilton-Does-a-Porno green.

  “Sweet,” I breathed while I looked around.

  When you got past the weird color, these things really were a game changer. I could see everything clear as day, from the underbrush to the animals to the zombies who milled around in the distance, checking out the fields for hiding survivors.

  “Dave and I have been looki
ng for a pair of these for months,” I said as I pressed my face to the glass like a kid at a store’s Christmas window. “They were always cleaned out. Stupid shortages to create a false demand. It’s like this apocalypse was being run by Apple or something.”

  “Except my iPad is a coaster now.” Kathleen smiled. “And if we manage to get you two back across the border, you won’t need night vision anymore. The other side still has electricity, running water, television, even Facebook, though everything that is posted has a massive lag time so that the government can censor it.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. After so many months of living in the way-back world, I wasn’t sure I was ready to dive back into technology heaven.

  “So people just went back to their normal lives?” I asked.

  Shit, even if they thought we were all dead, didn’t we deserve some kind of freaking mourning period before everyone logged back on to Twitter?

  Kathleen nodded. “But it’s not really that abnormal. Think of how it was after September 11. Everyone freaked out and watched nothing but news for a few weeks, but then we went back to reality TV and petty movie-star scandals. It’s pretty much the same with this, only with way more restrictions. But most people don’t have any clue what’s going on even just a few miles away on the other side of the Wall.”

  “We’re going to change that,” I promised, more to myself than to her.

  Kathleen shook her head. “I sure hope so. If people start seeing the truth, maybe they’ll wake the hell up and start dealing with the outbreak in more ways than watching the zombie cams the government provides online.”

  “Ew,” I said as I gave her a look. “They really watch zombie cams?”

  She nodded. “Apparently they’re some of the highest rated shows on TV. Right behind football and ahead of The Bachelor.”

  “Shit, we don’t even outrank The Bachelor?” I huffed. “Jesus, that sucks! None of those people even stay together. We’ve got zombies! Death! Dismemberment.”

  Kathleen laughed. “You have to remember, Sarah, these people have no idea that they’re being so tightly controlled.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “They think the cams are live. They never see any survivors on screen. To them, they’re seeing an unfiltered view of what’s going on in the West, including heroic firefights where the soldiers clear out zombies and bravely hope to find people still alive and hiding out. But it’s all a bunch of bullshit. Produced in Indianapolis, the L.A. of the new United States. All the stars who survived moved there.”

  “Eh, depressing,” I groaned. “I love Indy, but really? The place where they run the 500 is now the heart of television and movies?”

  She nodded and we were quiet for a minute.

  “So, I get why you want to help us get over the Wall since we have the cure and Nicole’s video footage is uncensored and might help start your revolution and all. But why help me go after David?”

  Kathleen glanced at me briefly. “I was married before this all went down, too. With two kids. A dog. We were the perfect family. A teacher and an insurance agent living the dream in a cozy town just outside the city limits.”

  “Did the zombies end it all?” I asked softly. That was a story I’d heard a hundred times, and I didn’t really need to make this poor woman go into it again.

  “Well, sort of,” she said after a painful pause. “At first we battled. But then… they got our older son.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Me too,” she responded, just as quietly. Then she continued, “After that, my husband didn’t want to fight anymore. We argued about it endlessly. I was already starting to see the writing on the wall and had hooked up with people who were fighting the zombies and watching the government start its sweeps and firebombings.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She hesitated for a long moment. “Greg told me I was obsessed and an unfit parent and he ran with our younger daughter. I have no idea where they are now. I hope maybe over the Wall since he was a resourceful guy with some connections. But the zombie apocalypse didn’t save my marriage, though it seems like it did wonders for yours. So why not try to help you salvage your family since I can’t find my own?”

  I stared at her. She was so stoic as she looked straight ahead at the path before her. She didn’t reveal her feelings, even with a twitch of her mouth. And yet I felt her pain.

  “Well, thanks,” I said softly.

  She shrugged, but then she slowed the car and cut the engine. “The barracks are just over the crest and across a stream. We’ll have to walk from here.”

  We got out of the SUV and loaded up. As I struggled with the weight of all my weapons, I grunted. “This is going to be a lot easier when we have Dave and his zombie-strength thing to help.”

  She smiled at me, but there was hesitation on her face, even in the green glow of the night-vision goggles. “Do you ever worry he’ll go full zombie?”

  I didn’t stop loading, even though my hands faltered for a second. “Yes, of course. But no, too. I mean, to me, he’s just my Dave. Only like, Super Dave. And I can freak myself out about my future or I can just live every moment in the present. I think that’s what I learned in the zombie apocalypse.” I cocked my gun. “Live in the now.”

  She motioned me across a few more feet of field and then we were standing on the top of a slightly elevated area that looked down over a small building. Well, a shack was more like it. The roof was missing some shingles and one of the windows had been boarded up. The whole thing couldn’t be more than five or six hundred square feet. Not exactly the barracks I’d been picturing out of a dozen different military movies.

  But the fact that there were like thirty soldiers present, patrolling the perimeter, told me it wasn’t your ordinary Unibomber-esque hovel.

  Kathleen flattened down almost on her belly and then we started a quick crawl across the rest of the distance. Let me tell you, no one on TV or in movies ever lets on a truth about a belly crawl. It hurts!

  Sticks and twigs kept poking me through my T-shirt and some kind of prickle plant itched like a son of a bitch. Oh, and dirt kept dragging into the top of my boot until I could feel it shifting around in my sock.

  Basically, it’s annoying and dirty and superslow. But after about five horrible minutes, we managed to cross the last couple of hundred yards and lay together within fifty feet of the circling soldiers.

  Kathleen looked at me and in the green glow of the goggles she indicated a few brief actions with a few hand motions. I hoped to God I was reading them right and nodded.

  Everything that happened next was a blur. Kathleen threw a flash bomb. I closed my eyes as it popped off; the explosion of sound made my ears ring. When I opened my eyes, the soldiers were staggering around from the blinding combination of light and sound and fury.

  I burst forward, praying no one was going to be aware enough to shoot me. I shoved past the blinking guards, some of whom seem to recognize I was there. A few grabbed for their guns, but none of them was okay enough to actually aim or fire at me, and I wasn’t about to stick around long enough to let them get over the flash. I skidded to a stop and kicked in the door to the shack with my steel-toed boot.

  In these situations, you really only have a second to take in everything. Luckily, I’d had plenty of practice, though always with mindless zombies, not thinking humans. But still, all those zombie battles were a pretty fertile practice ground for now.

  Time seemed to slow as the door popped open and I flew inside. A quick scan of the room showed Dave tied to a chair straight across from me. A man in an officer’s uniform was positioned in front of him, half-turned in his chair to face the door and all the sound and chaos outside.

  I drew my pistol and fired, hitting him between the eyes. There were two more guards, each at the door. I kicked one, sending him flying backward while I punched the other.

  Kung fu movie awesome, right?

  But kicking and
punching don’t really hold people off like they do in those movies and these weren’t super-soft-skull zombies, so they came back pretty quickly and pretty pissed and also armed with submachine guns.

  Luckily, I also had guns. My pistol took out the first, but before I could swing on the second, he grabbed my arm and flipped me around so that I was on my back, staring up at the business end of a machine gun.

  “Hold still,” the soldier said with a scowl. “Or I’ll plaster your brains all over the floor, orders or not.”

  I stared up at him. Well, this hadn’t gone well. And now all that running and hiding and hoping and battling had turned out to be for nothing. I hadn’t saved Dave, and I had probably just killed poor Kathleen if she hadn’t figured out my plan had gone to shit and booked it back to her people (and somehow she didn’t seem like the “abandon ship” kind of friend).

  Basically, it was a clusterfuck. But before I could manage a good, solid cry before I was taken into custody and probably turned into a pincushion for the government, there was a quite zombie-like roar from across the room.

  Both the guard and I turned our gazes toward David just in time to see him go all “Hulk Smash” on the ropes that were looped around him, tying him to the chair. He tore through them like they were nothing, and the soldier paled as he swung his weapon toward Dave instead of me.

  I didn’t really think; I just reacted. One swift upkick and I sent the machine gun flying just as the soldier started firing. Bullets scattered up into the ceiling as the gun went spiraling away and hit the ground too far away to be of any use to him.

  He stared at me, then at Dave, and then backed up toward the door. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said, his voice cracking.

  Dave took a long step toward him. “Then you better run. RUN!”

  The man dove out the broken-up door and into the night, past his comrades who were all starting to come out of their flash bomb fog (uh-oh) and into the dark. I was guessing he wouldn’t be back.

  I turned toward Dave as I got to my feet. He was grinning at me.

  “Hey,” I said as I hurried to his side and enveloped him in a hug. When I pulled away, he was still looking at me with that goofy expression. “What’s that look for?”