Married with Zombies: Book 1 of Living with the Dead

by Jesse Petersen

  A car alarm screamed in the distance. Normally I’d ignore it or just be annoyed by it, but today I looked toward the sound with a shiver. Car alarms took on a new meaning for a long time after the outbreak. I mean, something had to have set them off, right? But that day, in the misty dark of the industrial LED lights, I didn’t see anything moving.

  “Sarah, look,” David said. He was motioning toward the elevator and his face was long and pale and sick.

  I moved around the car toward him and instantly saw what he did. Another vehicle was smashed against the back wall nearby, its front end caved in and coolant fluid dripping into a greenish pool on the concrete floor.

  “Isn’t that Jack and Amanda’s car?” I whispered, thinking about our next door neighbors.

  They were about our age, and while I wouldn’t call them friends we were cordial and had copies of each other’s keys just in case we got locked out or needed someone to grab the mail during a vacation.

  Sometimes the guys got together to play Xbox or something, normally when I worked late since I didn’t care for Jack and his loud, obnoxious personality. He was a burper and farter… and he thought it was hilarious. Yeah, super classy guy.

  “It looks like it,” Dave said as he reached back and took my hand. “Come on.”

  After he pushed the ‘up’ button, the elevator seemed to take forever, but finally it opened with a ding that echoed in the garage. David peeked inside first and then pulled me in behind him. As I reached for the third floor button I noticed blood smeared across the number. With a little groan, I pulled my hand inside my sleeve before I pushed it.

  Dave shook his head with a nervous laugh. “You’ve got it all over you now, I don’t know how covering your hand can help at this point.”

  “Me neither, but I’d rather not rub it all over me regardless,” I said as I leaned back against the metal wall and folded my arms.

  “Too late,” he said, motioning behind me.

  I straightened up and turned to see I’d leaned right into a large smear of black sludge like the kind the people around us were vomiting when they were… infected or whatever was happening to them.

  “God. God!!” I said.

  Okay, I whined it. Whatever, cut me some slack. All I wanted was a shower and to wake up from this disgusting dream and have everything just be normal again.

  The door opened and like in the garage, Dave stepped out first. He looked around and then motioned me into the hall behind him as he dug for his house keys in his front pocket. With a few half-jogging steps, we reached our door. He let us in and immediately flipped the deadbolt behind him.

  With a sigh of relief, both of us looked around our seven-hundred-square-foot apartment. I’d never loved the piece of shit more. Every problem we’d ever had with the place was forgotten in that instant and I wanted to get down on my knees and kiss the floor.

  “You know what this is, right?” Dave said, his voice happily keeping me from making out with the linoleum square in front of our door.

  I looked at him. “What?”

  “Zombies.”

  He nodded as I stared at him with what I’m sure was an incredulous expression. He actually looked serious.

  “You need to lay off the movies, dude,” I snapped as I shook my head. “Zombies? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “No it isn’t!” He actually sounded offended that I’d doubt his brilliant deduction. “It makes sense. Or at least as much as anything can based on what happened to us today.”

  “David —” I drew his name out with frustrated annoyance.

  He moved toward me with a frown. “Fuck, Sarah, our therapist tried to eat us. So did about ten other people since then. We saw things I never thought I’d see in my life. What else could it be but zombies?”

  I stared. Apparently the stress of the day had broken my husband’s brain or something. At the time I just couldn’t accept that the stuff of cheesy movies was real.

  “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” I said, grabbing for the remote to turn on the television.

  On the screen scenes of smoky downtown streets greeted us. I sighed in relief. At least it looked like the television was going to give us more information than the radio emergency broadcast had on the way home.

  “Will you watch?” I asked as I tossed Dave the clicker. “I have to pee and I want to get out of these bloody clothes. Then you can change and I’ll watch.”

  He grunted, his displeasure with my dismissal of his theory obvious as he took a seat on the couch. I gritted my teeth at the blood he smeared on the cushions when he flopped back, but decided against starting anything. I was too grimy and gross and uncomfortable for it. I’d just have to put Resolve on the cushions and scrub them while he changed later.

  I walked to the bathroom and closed the door behind me. It was a cramped space so I edged in, dropped my slacks, and sat down on the toilet, only to sink into the water. With a yelp, I got back up and dragged a towel from the rack.

  David had left the seat up… again.

  I rubbed the water off my ass as I muttered a whole lot of choice names about the doofus out in the living room. As I turned to hang the towel back on the rack, I caught my reflection in the mirror behind me. With a groan, I leaned closer to the mirror to examine myself.

  My hair, which is normally a light brown, was caked with blood so that it had a ruddy hue. To be honest, it wasn’t a bad color for me. If we ever had money again, I figured maybe I’d dye it a similar shade.

  The state of my outfit pissed me off more. My once-white shirt was smeared with sludge and dirt and brains. It was totally ruined. There was no way I was going to get dried blood out of white linen even if I pre-soaked from now to the end of time.

  “Damn it,” I muttered as I started to unbutton the blouse, but as I got to the second button, I froze. From behind the shower curtain came a faint but undeniable scraping noise.

  I swallowed. Once again, the scraping echoed in the tiny room. There was definitely something behind the curtain. I prayed it was a cat that had gotten through the window. Or an opossum. A rat.

  Anything but what I thought it was.

  I grabbed for the closest thing there was to a weapon in the room: a hard-backed copy of one of the Dr. Phil love books. I’d given it to David when we started therapy months ago. It had sat on the back of the toilet tank ever since. I don’t think he’d cracked it, which annoyed the hell out of me, but it was pretty heavy and had sharp corners, so I held it up as I grasped the edge of the shower curtain and threw it back.

  Standing in the tub, staring at the tiled back wall as he swayed gently back and forth, was our neighbor, Jack. That’s the guy whose car we’d seen in the garage earlier. He turned with sort of a sluggish boredom toward me and I suppressed a squeal of surprise.

  Whatever biological or chemical thing had been released on our city had obviously affected him, too. His body, already hefty from eating too much junk food and playing too many video games, now leaned at a weird angle and his soft gray skin looked clammy.

  He stared at me for what seemed like forever and then his mouth opened and he vomited sludge all over my green bathmat before he moved in my direction.

  “Shit,” I groaned. “Why couldn’t you be a cat?”

  I didn’t wait for him to answer that rhetorical question. I swung my book and hit him square in the forehead. His rotting skin split, covering Dr. Phil’s picture with a layer of gooey blood and chunks of flesh.

  Jack blinked at me, almost like a confused gorilla in a zoo, and then continued to lurch toward me. Unfortunately… or I guess fortunately for me, he no longer had the wherewithal to step up and over the tub ledge. His legs caught on the smooth surface and he tottered off kilter and fell forward.

  Out of pure instinct and a hefty dose of luck, I flattened against the back wall as his bulky body careened past me. His already shredded forehead hit the thin bottom seat of the toilet with a clang and he let out
a whining groan.

  I don’t know what came over me as I looked down at our fat, piece of shit of a neighbor lying half in my toilet, the offending seat Dave had left for me still flipped up overhead. I certainly didn’t think about what I was going to do, I just did it. Dropping down, I started slamming the toilet down against his skull.

  “Put. The. Toilet. Seat. Down. David!” I accentuated each word with a crushing bang of the seat.

  I didn’t stop until I heard Dave’s voice outside the door.

  “Did you say my name?” he called from the hall, breaking me away from my furious spell and forcing me to stare down at the mess I’d made.

  The toilet was cracked and covered in blood, along with brain matter, some loose flesh and I think part of an ear, although it was so mangled that I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to lean closer and look.

  Poor Jack was most definitely dead, his red eyes now dark and no longer clouded by a desire to eat me. Or at least the one still in his skull. I’d crushed the other one sometime during my tirade.

  I stared down at the seat again. I still really had to pee. I mean, bad. See, when I get nervous, I have to go and honestly, was there anything to make you more nervous than being attacked by flesh-eating, infected humans?

  I’d been holding it since we killed Dr. Kelly and now my bladder screamed at me. The apartment was a one bed, one bath so if I wanted to go… this was it.

  And at that point, I have to tell you, bodily functions were starting to win out over being disgusted or disturbed by dead people on my floor. With a grunt, I shoved Jack’s fat body out of the way. He hit the tile face down with a splat that sent droplets of all kinds of gross flying everywhere.

  I flipped the upper toilet seat back into place. Although it wasn’t covered in as much blood as the rest of the toilet, I didn’t exactly want to sit on it, so I braced myself against the sink and the wall, sort of hanging over the seat as I took care of my business. I flushed, and to my surprise our toilet actually disposed of most of the body parts and blood without backing up. After a second courtesy flush, all evidence of the attack spun away to the sewer.

  Well, except for the blood, brains, and body on my floor, of course.

  With a grimace, I pulled my pants back up. In the small bathroom, Jack’s dead body blocked most of the floor. Gingerly I stepped up onto his squishy, out-of-shape ass and balanced there as I washed my hands with steaming hot water and probably half the bottle of liquid soap. When I was finally satisfied that I’d cleansed myself, or at least my hands, of all my sins, I went back into the hall.

  Dave was standing in the living room now, leaning over the back of the worn easy chair as he watched the TV screen. The speakers were turned up so loud that I guessed he hadn’t heard my vicious clash in the bathroom.

  At least I hoped he hadn’t heard me battling against our neighbor and just left me to it while he checked out the sports scores which were still oddly scrolling along the bottom of the screen on the highlighted runner.

  Hey, the Mariners won.

  “Babe,” I said, calling him by an endearment for the first time in so long I couldn’t remember when.

  He turned toward me with an expression of surprise, although I wasn’t certain if it was because I called him babe or because I was covered in even more gore than I had been the last time he saw me moments before. I motioned toward the bathroom. He stepped closer and peered in at Dead Jack and then back toward me with wide eyes.

  “I think you might be right after all,” I said with a nod. “Zombies.”

  Talk out your big decisions. Hear both opinions before you decide if you’re going to flee the city or hole up with Campbell’s Soup and CNN.

  Dave continued to stare at the mangled body on the bathroom floor, which was pooling with blood and mung now.

  “So you killed him with what now?”

  “I tried that Dr. Phil book at first,” I sighed as I looked at the offending tome, lying next to Jack’s lifeless body, its pages caked with fluids and unidentifiable mush. “And I finished off with the toilet seat. Just so you know, you left it up again. That drives me crazy.”

  “Sorry,” he said, his voice flat and emotionless.

  He gave an absent nod as he pulled the door shut. It was weird how quickly all this was becoming normal, commonplace.

  “Come on, we have to watch this,” he said as he motioned to the television. “It’s like all hell is breaking loose… literally.”

  I’m sort of sad to say that I pretty much instantly forgot about the man I’d just brutally killed in the bathroom. I moved to the couch with David and we sat close together on the edge of the cushions.

  CNN was the station he’d chosen. An anchorman sat at the desk, his face long and serious as he spoke in that weird, droning voice that I guess they must teach them in journalism school.

  “The outbreak is thought to have begun in a high-security laboratory housed on the University of Washington campus and has spread with enormous speed throughout the city. Attacks by the infected have been reported all across the greater Seattle area, which contains close to four million people. We go to local reporter Henry Greene for more.”

  The screen switched to another man in a bad suit who was standing near the famous Pike Place Market. Its iconic sign blinked as dusky darkness began to settle over the troubled city.

  “Thanks, Roger,” Reporter Henry Greene said as he looked straight into the camera without even blinking. “There are several reports I can update you on. First, there were rumors that one of the infected managed to board a flight to San Francisco. This has been confirmed by the FAA just in the last few moments. It seems that the plane is now running entirely on autopilot as the crew and the roster of passengers have apparently been stricken by this infection mid-air. The Pentagon is now debating whether to shoot it down over an area of low population rather than allow the flight to land as planned on its auto-nav system. We should have more on that developing situation within the hour.”

  “God,” I whispered, trying hard not to think of those poor people trapped on the doomed flight.

  I’d never really liked flying. That was the one bonus to barely scraping by, if we wanted to get somewhere, we drove or took the bus. Now I guess it was an even better idea. More room for escape in those modes of transportation.

  “In addition, several fires have started in the downtown area and we have heard that…”

  The reporter stopped as his never-wavering stare suddenly flicked away from the camera and instead moved off in the distance. His eyes widened slightly.

  “Uh, Ken…” he said, clearly talking to a producer or the camera man. “Ken, do you hear that noise? What is th — oh my God!”

  The camera spun and looked up the steep hill in the distance. The shaking lens was off focus for a minute, then it auto-corrected and both Dave and I gasped at once. There was a huge group of people standing at the top of the hill just a block from the market.

  Okay, not people. Zombies. They were growling and lurching and that was the first time we ever saw them run in a herd. They rushed down toward the market en masse, their cries and grunts audible even from the distance.

  “Christ, Henry, run!” the man behind the camera said, his voice muffled since the mike wasn’t pointed toward his mouth.

  The reporter was already a few strides in front of him, running toward the partly enclosed market. The camera bounced almost like it was shooting a really low-budget “handheld” horror movie as the cameraman followed, but before they’d gotten too far another mob of growling creatures began to flood from the open stalls in front of them, crowding toward the two men as sludge poured from their lips and bared teeth.

  “Oh no —” the reporter whispered, his voice strangely soft and calm as he faced what could be nothing but his ultimate demise.

  But then the voice cut away and the screen switched back to the CNN reporter at the anchor desk. He was now almost as gray as the zombies were and he stared at the camera with
a disbelieving and utterly horrified expression.

  I would assume that wasn’t something they taught in journalism school.

  “We — we’ve obviously had some technical difficulties, folks,” he finally said as he shook himself awake from his stunned fog. “But I assure you we’ll work to keep you updated on the situation with local coverage on the ground and try… well, we’ll try to get back with Henry shortly.”

  Dave’s eyebrows lifted with disbelief. “Yeah. Henry’s a zombie, dude.”

  I nodded. “We now go to Zombie Reporter Henry Greene on the scene,” I answered, mocking the CNN reporter’s cadence. “Henry want brains.”

  Dave didn’t laugh, but he smiled, which was about as good as it was going to get at this point. The reporter continued to drone on in the background, telling us all to stay in our homes and remain calm.

  I shook my head at the idea of doing either of those things. “Did you hear what he said about Seattle?”

  Dave rolled his eyes at me. “Um, that we’re at the heart of a zombie plague. Yeah, Sarah, I got that.”

  “No,” I snapped, irritated by his defensiveness. “I meant what he said about how many people are in this area. Four million, David. Four million people.”

  He kept watching the screen, reminding me of so many times I’d tried to talk to him but his video game was more important. Or his show. Or whatever.

  “So?” he said.

  “So!” I repeated with a wave of my hands that finally got his attention again. “We’ve already seen how fast this thing, whatever it is, is spreading. Think about it… if it started at U-Dub sometime today, that’s miles from where Dr. Kelly’s office is… um, was.”

  He nodded. “I guess.”

  I continued without slowing down. “Hell, someone infected got all the way to Sea-Tac, through security and boarded a plane before anyone caught it, which probably means they were bitten right at or even in the airport which is what… twenty miles away from the university?”