by Ivan Turner
Zombies! Episode 2 - Abby's Bad Day
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner
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***
What has come before:
Shawn Rudd, a high school senior in a hurry to meet up with his secret boyfriend, encounters a zombie on the streets of Brooklyn. With no hesitation, Shawn confronts the zombie, stabbing it and then bludgeoning it with a lead pipe. He then turns on the zombie's hapless bite victim, killing her with a blow to the head as well.
Investigating the crime, Detectives Johan Stemmy and Anthony Heron are confounded and chilled by the fact that the man Shawn killed had been dead for twelve hours at the time of the incident. With thoughts of zombies on their minds, they begin to investigate local gyms.
At Push Ups Fitness Center, the two detectives encounter Abby Benjamin. Abby is able to identify the zombie as Larry Koplowitz, a frequent customer of Push Ups. She gives the detectives his address.
At the apartment, Detectives Stemmy and Heron confront Mrs. Lucy Koplowitz, already a zombie by the time they arrive. She sustains two gunshot wounds which would incapacitate a normal person yet still keeps on coming. Detective Stemmy finishes her off with a shot to the head. Unfortunately, he fails to notice the child zombie, Zoe Koplowitz. Zoe bites him in the leg, thus infecting him.
Stemmy is placed in isolation and, though the surgery on his leg is successful, the infection spreads quickly throughout his body. Heron meets with Captain Lance Naughton, his immediate supervisor, and Dr. Denise Luco, a pathologist who has worked with the police on investigations before. She explains that the aggressive nature of the infection makes it impossible for them to save Stemmy.
Heron goes and sits with Stemmy through the hours of the night and when Stemmy finally passes, Heron enters the room and puts a bullet in his head to make sure that he won't ever get up. Though Captain Naughton seems unfazed by this, Dr. Luco is extremely irritated, having wanted to observe the process of turning in a victim of the infection.
In the wee hours of the morning, Detective Heron arrivs home to find his wife awake and a phone message from his doctor. Heron, a heavy smoker, had been in for a biopsy which had come back positive. So it appears that his battle with the undead will have to be put on hold so that he can battle cancer.
***
THE alarm went off promptly at 4:00 am. Martin never heard it which made Abby wonder, not for the first time, why he insisted on keeping the clock on his side of the bed. The blaring tone had startled her out of a terrible dream about the flesh eating dead. There was some buzz on the internet about zombies in New York and though she knew it couldn't be anything more than a War of the Worlds hoax, it had stuck with her.
Crawling over Martin's prone body she managed to find the button on the clock and put the buzzing to rest. Resting on top of him, now, she stared at his sleeping face. It never ceased to amaze her how stupid people look while they're asleep. A sleeping child may as well be surrounded by a peaceful and glowing halo. Sleeping children look beautiful, angelic. But a slumbering adult is stripped of virtually all of his dignity. His mouth is open and he makes frightening and disgusting noises. He drools like an infant.
She kissed him once on the cheek.
Then she smacked him on the same cheek.
"Get up," she said.
Without waiting for him to respond, she slipped gracelessly out of bed and stared at herself in the full length mirror on their bedroom door. The nightgown was not flattering but then again, neither was her figure. She was almost forty years old and letting it go. The last few months with Martin being out of work and the pressure of getting their son to and from daycare while juggling a less-than-ideal work schedule and Martin's endless array of interviews that seemed to go nowhere had taken its toll on every physical and emotional part of her. If he said anything about moving back to England today she was pretty sure she'd lose it.
Deciding that she was done degrading herself in front of the mirror, she slipped out of the bedroom and rounded the corner into the bathroom. Abby followed the same rituals as most people in the morning. She had a pee and then brushed her teeth while the water ran hot in the shower and the bathroom steamed up. Then she shed her unflattering nightgown and stepped under the glorious hot water.
When she had finished in the shower, she felt better. She always felt better after a shower. She was ready to face the day. She would be ready to face the day for exactly twelve minutes. Humming to herself, Abby ran the blow dryer over her hair. She never dried it fully because she didn't like the way it felt after being completely heat dried. The dryer just kind of sped up the natural process. She couldn't have commented on its effect on the health of her hair one way or the other. She also didn't notice any tremendous difference in the way it looked. Letting it dry naturally just suited her. It just felt better.
Finishing up, Abby wrapped a towel around her body and left the bathroom. She almost fell onto herself as she avoided tripping over her two (almost three) year old son. He was standing in the dark hallway, only the bathroom light, partially blocked by her frame illuminating him at all. Sammy looked pale.
"Are you all right?" she asked him.
He opened his mouth to answer in the way that two year olds will answer and threw up instead.
It was the start of a very bad day.
***
ABBY was supposed to open the gym at 5:45, which meant she was due to be there at about 5:30. There was always someone waiting for her when she got there and she always let whoever it was in to work out while she sorted out the morning ledgers. This morning she didn't arrive until three minutes before six and people were upset.
Sammy was running a fever of 100.3 which isn't particularly dangerous in a two year old but they still couldn't send him to day care. When she'd told Martin, he'd been unhappy. What got her was that he wasn't even concerned for Sammy. What concerned him most was that he would have the baby for the day and have to haul him over to the doctor's office. He had a job interview with Best Buy in the afternoon. He was certain he was going to be offered the job because he absolutely did not want it. But he would have to take it if it was available because he had nothing else and they were pushing the limits of their savings.
They'd argued a bit, which made it a typical morning. Then he'd apologized, which made it very atypical. As she'd left the apartment, Abby gave him a kiss and a hug and then squeezed him in a place that made a promise for the evening. At least when he'd closed the door he'd been smiling.
The good feelings generated by that encounter had lasted seven minutes. The train was delayed and she'd gotten to her stop at 5:43. She managed to make her regular fifteen minute walk to work in fourteen minutes and called it a victory. She was greeted by a mosaic of angry faces and muttered complaints.
She didn't care for any of it.
It wasn't in her nature to explain herself to anyone, especially a group of fat bastards who thought they were doing themselves good by getting in a half hour of treadmill every morning before work. So she weathered their complaints, opened up the gym, and got everything going as quickly as she could.
There were twelve emails that had come in overnight and every single one of them demanded her attention. Of course, while she was getting things set up, the
phone rang and she knew it was her boss. She answered with a bright and cheery tone and explained that she'd been held up by her sick child. He made a rude comment but Abby let it pass. She needed the job and her boss was amicable most of the time. He wasn't usually up at six o'clock in the morning so something must have happened, leaving him looking for someone to take it out on. Fortunately, his problems were not related to the gym.
At about 6:30, John Arrick came in. Abby didn't know him very well but he seemed nice enough. He taught at one of the high schools in the area and she was pretty sure he walked it even though it was two stops away by train. She didn't know what subject he taught but she had him figured for a literature or history guy. He was very careful about the way he spoke, even damping his Scottish accent for the benefit of those around him. She had once introduced him to Martin but it seemed that it took more than a kingdom of origin to bring two people together.
Arrick wasn't a fat bastard but he wasn't exactly one of those fit characters either. In fact, he was skinny as a rail. Suzanna, his girlfriend, had once told Abby that when she hugged him she was afraid she was going to get a paper cut. She often wondered what Arrick saw in Suzanna but then again, every time anyone looked at Suzanna, they got an eye full. Suzanna was one of those people who took her body and her workout very seriously. She had no interest in being a body builder but she was well toned and very sexy. Come to think of it, Abby wasn't sure what Suzanna saw in Arrick.
The trouble with Suzanna was that she was a bitch. She and Abby weren't exactly been friends, but they were cordial to each other. They made small talk and Abby had even caught Suzanna flashing a smile once or twice. But even that had declined a week before. Two detectives had come in with a picture. They'd been trying to find out the identity of the man in the picture and Abby had known him. He'd also been a regular in the gym, a guy who was serious about his workout. He and Suzanna worked out together often and when the policemen told Abby that this man, Larry Koplowitz, was dead, Abby felt it necessary to tell Suzanna. Up until that moment, Abby was sure that Larry and Suzanna were nothing more than workout partners. She didn't know anything about Larry but Suzanna's relationship with Arrick seemed to preclude anything deeper. Apparently she'd been wrong. When she'd told Suzanna that Larry was dead, the look on her face spoke volumes. Suzanna had not appreciated Abby's noticing of that look nor the sympathy that followed. She denied any deeper relationship between her and Larry and Abby had been content to leave it at that. Now, though, Suzanna didn't even acknowledge her.
And so, Abby's morning passed uneventfully because even a bad day has some down time.
***
WHITAKER came in at around ten. He wasn't quite as high on the totem pole as Abby, but he would take over the place when she left at six. They spent an hour together going over the morning's events and the day's expectations. At 11:30, Abby decided she'd like an early lunch and Whitaker decided that was okay. Whitaker was a good kid, just twenty two years old. He barely had a high school degree but he was pretty sharp and did Abby's job almost better than she did. He seemed to like the flexible schedule and didn't have any sort of ambition at all. He lived with his dad, who worked as a janitor in a Manhattan office building. Whitaker was pretty sure he would eventually go the same route but he thought he'd try retail administration first.
There hadn't been time that morning for Abby to pack a lunch so she went out. She wasn't really hungry, just eager to be away from the gym. Once on the street she called Martin to find out how Sammy was doing. Martin had given him ibuprofen, which knocked down the fever, and they had a doctor's appointment at 1:15. Martin had managed to reschedule his interview for 2:30. Abby's parents would watch Sammy for the hour or so he would be out. That seemed to work out well.
After that, she walked around for a while, grabbed a sandwich that she would eat later while Whitaker was out, and went back to work. She had a much clearer head by then, having been able to sort out the morning's events. Sammy was okay and Martin would make his interview. Her parents, largely unable to care for Sammy on a regular basis, would have no trouble with him for an hour. Some TV and some milk and all would go well. Despite her lateness this morning, it seemed clear that she wouldn't lose her job. She'd never really been worried about that anyway. She did the work of two managers for the salary of an assistant. She gave the struggling Push Ups the breathing room to grow without having to sacrifice tons of necessary cash. She was sure that, if the business ever reached the next plateau, her boss would compensate her.
At half past noon, she went through the door and saw that all was normal. Whitaker was at the front desk reading a Fitness magazine. She didn't know why he bothered. Everyone knew he cared as much about fitness as he did about the Spanish Civil War. If he had his druthers, she was sure he'd be reading a Sports Illustrated or a Maxim.
The place was pretty empty at lunch time, which wasn't always the case. One treadmill was going, a woman she didn't recognize giving it a go. She wasn't really dressed for a workout and Abby guessed that she was one of those free trial kind of women. She was a bit older than Abby and a bit more overweight. She had the look of a wife and mother whose husband has suddenly developed a wandering eye. Going to the gym was an effort at getting it to wander back where it belonged. Besides her there was no one except Karl. Karl was a beefy guy whose muscle was well hidden beneath his round frame. He came to Push Ups twice a week at lunch time and always worked out with the weights. He was currently doing half curls with thirty pound dumbbells.
Abby took over at the front desk and Whitaker disappeared into the back storeroom to inventory some cleaning supplies. He left his magazine, which Abby perused absently. She hated the gym when it was empty. There was nothing to do.
There was a bang and when she looked at the clock it was 12:51. She'd been daydreaming. Looking around for the source of the bang she saw Karl sitting on a bench, holding his foot. He'd dropped one of the weights. She came around the counter and went to him right away. The woman from the treadmill was gone. Abby hadn't even seen her leave.
"Karl?"
His head was down and he was gripping his ankle because he was afraid to grip his foot.
Whitaker came out of the back and looked at them. "What happened?"
"Got dizzy," Karl said. "I almost passed out."
"Your nose is bleeding, man," Whitaker said. Abby, now sitting next to Karl with an arm over his shoulders, couldn't see his face. When he looked up, she could see that there were red rings around his nostrils. It looked weird for a nosebleed. It didn't drip, just sort of coagulated around the rims.
"Do you think you broke your foot?" Whitaker asked. "I'm gonna call an ambulance."
"Wait, don't do that," Abby told him. "Just go in back and get me the wheelchair. It'll be quicker if I just push him over to the hospital."
The hospital was only two blocks away and she was right. An ambulance would be there quickly enough but then they would have to examine him, load him up, and bring him back. She could walk him over in less than five minutes.
But Whitaker didn't seem to like the idea. "I kind of need you here, though, Abby."
She looked around as if to accentuate the fact that they were alone in the gym. "I'll only be an hour. Call it my lunch hour."
"Um, you just took your lunch hour."
She got up and went to the back, smiling at him as she went. "Then we'll call it your lunch hour. I even bought you a sandwich."
She came back out with the wheelchair and gingerly helped Karl into it. Whitaker stared in silence as she got a feel for the chair and Karl's weight and then pushed him out the door, pausing only to grab her hand bag.
***
THE ER at Sisters of Charity was newly renovated. It didn't look like a place for sick people at all. The floor was standard industrial tile and the chairs were molded plastic but the plastic was form fitted so that even the most finicky of emergency room patrons would be comfortable while nursing their vomiting children or bleeding finger
s. At the back of the room was a wall of bullet proof glass with four windows and matching speakers. Two of the four stations were currently open, each with an administrative assistant sitting behind it.
They checked Karl in and gave him some tissues, the kind with lotion in them, to staunch the nose bleed. He used the tissues to pinch his nose but the queer behavior of the bleed required him to change tissues often and the pinching didn't seem to help. They put some ice on his foot and the two of them sat in the waiting room watching a flat screen TV that put the twenty year old set Abby had in her living room to shame.
