Praise for Married with Zombies
"…Fun, original and oh so brainy." --Rachel Gibson, NYT bestselling author
"An entertaining journey through an apocalyptic landscape of relationship issues, pet peeves, and zombies. Make sure to pack your shotgun and emotional baggage." --S.G. Browne, author of Breathers: A Zombie’s Lament
"Gory. Sarcastic. Zany. Pitch-perfect for the zombie fan." --Mario Acevedo, author of Werewolf Smackdown
“Married with Zombies is super fast-paced, crazy funny, and even a little romantic. (Not in a hot, steamy zombie sex way… but in a cute, romantic comedy way!) This is an absolute must read for everyone! I had never read a zombie book before this one, I figured that so wasn’t my thing… Um, it is. Jesse Petersen will make you an instant fan of all things zombie!” --The Bookish Brunette
“Overall, I think that this book is zombie-licious! There was action, suspense, and relationship tension with a humorous angle. David and Sarah’s journey offers several different reactions to the crisis that gives a sense of realism to the fantasy. I would recommend adding this book to your zombie apocalypse preparation kit.” --Dark Faerie Tales
Other books in the Living with the Dead series:
Married with Zombies
Flip this Zombie
Eat Slay Love
THE ZOMBIE WHISPERER
By Jesse Petersen
THE ZOMBIE WHISPERER
Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Petersen
All Rights Reserved
EBook Edition by IGLA
27 West 24th Street, Suite 700B
New York, NY 10010
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental
Chapter One
Bringing Up Zombie
We call it Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana. Okay, I call it Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana and Dave calls is by its real name, Tranquil Springs. It sounds nice doesn’t it? Like a bit of a throw-back to a fifties utopia that never actually existed. Sometimes I found myself looking for the milk man to deliver fresh to our door.
Of course, he’d be a zombie, but whatever.
The name was part of why we ended up landing here after roaming around through Wyoming and then up to Montana. Dave said that a place called Tranquil Springs just couldn’t have zombies.
He was right in some respects. It was the very end of winter here. April, to be precise. I know that’s Spring to most people, but up in the high elevations we still have freezing temps and snow that melts off as it gets up into the forties during the day. And then it spits back up in storms at night to replenish the ground cover.
Just for your information, though, some of the books written before the zombie fiasco were right. Zombies don’t really care for snow. It makes them sluggish and easier to kill and that means less of them in this tiny ghost town. So, yay us and yay for winter. I hated shoveling, but I hated zombies even more.
The door to our rambling three-bedroom ranch house opened and Dave pushed in, carrying a bunch of firewood. More than he should have been able to carry, for sure. But then, Dave wasn’t really normal anymore. I was coming to accept that. I even liked some of the benefits of his “special powers”. Super strength came in really handy a lot of days.
“This will keep us going all night and into the morning,” he said as he set the logs into the wood box next to the big fireplace in the living room one by one. The box was built into the wall and made life a lot easier. The rich people who had built this place really thought of everything.
Of course, we’d still found them roaming around undead in the paddock where the horses used to live when we got here a couple of months ago. Slam-Blam-Thank-You-Ma’am and we’d claimed ownership to their little piece of mountain heaven.
Yes, sadly, it was as easy as that for us nowadays. Zombies were just… a part of life now. An annoyance like mosquitos.
Really badass mosquitos that sometimes swarmed your car and tried to eat you. But that was another story entirely.
“Um, hello?” Dave said as he flopped down next to me on the couch and picked up the book he’d been reading before he went for more firewood.
I shook my head. “Sorry. Lost in thought.”
He put the bookmark back between the pages and looked at me with that same sweet and concerned expression he always had nowadays. Like he knew something I didn’t know. He was in the zombie club now, and I felt it.
But I had a secret, too.
“So what are those deep thoughts, Sarah?” he asked. “Because I can see you’re gnawing on something.”
I arched a brow, a move I had been working on for months. It’s funny how you get obsessed on some things when you don’t have bad reality television anymore… just a bad reality.
“So is reading minds a new zombie power?” I asked, probably a little more sarcastically than I should have.
He pursed his lips. “Nope. Just know you, that’s all.”
“Yeah, you do,” I admitted and settled my head back against the rich, smooth leather of the couch. “Okay, it’s just that we’ve been here in Montana for a while now and it’s been pretty nice. Just a few zombies here and there, but you found that almanac and you know that a real thaw is coming within the next couple of weeks. And you know that means they’re going to be on the move again. So do we stay here, where we have a trek to get to supplies?”
He stared at me with this ‘what the hell’ expression I still wasn’t particularly fond of. “What do you mean a trek? The people who lived here before the outbreak were at least semi-prepared for being locked down. Their pantry has some good basics that we can stretch and we can add to that with the game in them there hills.” He pointed out the window to the snowy mountain in the not-so-distance. “We could probably stay here a year or more before we’d really have to think about our next move. Who knows what could happen before that point.”
I bit the inside of my mouth. “A year? Jeez, David, I didn’t think we’d hang out that long in any one place ever again.”
As I got up and started pacing around in front of the fire, he watched me, obviously confused by my attitude.
“What do you mean? Do you have somewhere to be?”
I glared at him briefly. “Yes, so many appointments in my day planner, you know.”
He shrugged at my sarcasm. “So do you really want to start rambling down the dangerous highway, bumping into crazies and zombie pods? Do you really want to resort to clearing houses one by one to find old Campbell’s soup, but only in flavors you don’t like and never knowing where we’re going to sleep at night?”
I swallowed. When he put it that way, it sounded stupid. It was stupid. But despite all that… I kind of liked the road. Despite every horrible thing he’d just described, the apocalypse had brought out something adventurous and free-spirited in me. My own little zombie benefit without zombie side-effect.
“We figured out how to not get a divorce, found a cure for zombie-ism and quite possibly saved the world when we were roaming around aimlessly on the road, so it wasn’t all bad,” I pointed out.
He stared at me for a minute and then he grinned. He was cute, I just want to say that.
“Okay, okay, I will grant you that point,” he said with a shrug.
I smiled in triumph. “Thank you.”
Apparently he wasn’t done, though. “But it’s been a few months since we ‘saved the world’ by turning over the cure across the border and we haven’t seen any benefit from it. Not a soldier or a flier dropped to say, ‘we’re coming to get you’ or anything. Just saying, we may have fallen short on that save the world part.”
>
I thought about that for a minute and tried not to dwell too long on my parents and our friends who had been left behind the wall. We’d last seen them being chased by government agents who were more than ready to kill them. If the world hadn’t been saved, that left some pretty heavy implications for them and their safety.
“Maybe that means we should try again,” I suggested.
He rolled his eyes and pushed to his feet to join me, probably hug me, which I could use at that point with all those dark thoughts in my head. But before he could, there was a shrill beep, beep, beep that filled the air.
I jerked to attention. “Perimeter alarms!”
Dave had set up some motion detector perimeter alarms up to a generator when we first got here. They were the only electric-driven thing we had left and sometimes I just stared at the little green light on the speaker that alerted us, mesmerized by power-driven color. Now they were going crazy, beeping one after another, flashing red madness.
Dave shook his head and moved for the arsenal of guns we had in every room of the house. He pulled the gun case in the living room open and started yanking out weapons. He tossed a few to me and we started loading.
“All of them are alerting,” he muttered, almost more to himself than to me. “All seven alarms. It means…”
I looked out the big picture window with the view of the mountain in the distance. It also currently provided me a great view of a shit ton of zombies roaming their way onto the property all the way across the snowy, muddy lawn.
“It means there are a lot,” I said, pointing at my view. “See?”
Dave slammed the action on the shotgun in his hands shut and let out a stream of very creative cursing. “What do you think? Twenty?”
“Twenty-five,” I said as I did quick math in my head.
“I guess Spring has Sprung.”
“Aw, the zombies are blooming early,” I agreed.
He laughed, but then he gave me the ‘let the grown-ups talk’ look again. “Um, I should probably do this myself.”
I stifled the urge to roll my eyes. That was something I was working on, the eye rolling, because I’d read in a self-help book, (yes, I still read self-help books), that it could undermine a relationship. Didn’t really want to do that with Dave, not anymore. Even if he did drive me slightly crazy every once in a while.
I drew in a deep breath, tried to find my center and said, “David, sweetheart, we’ve talked about this.”
He nodded. “I know. And it’s nothing to do with you being a badass. You are a badass. It’s just that they don’t come after me. I can make the clean kills without endangering myself.”
It made sense, I know! With Dave’s zombie benefits, the other zombies didn’t even acknowledge him. Versus if I went out there, they’d come after me in snarling, drooling, biting, clawing droves. But still… we’d been fighting zombies together forever so it sucked to suddenly be benched over and over again like a crappy quarterback who had outlived his prime.
That was football, right? I’d kind of forgotten already.
I shook my head. “At least let me go up on the roof and snipe.”
He seemed to ponder that option for a minute. A minute too long, really, and then he waved me off like he was granting me some wonderful opportunity.
“Fine, fine if you want to,” he said. “Just be careful. And if anything gets weird, duck inside and lock the doors.”
“I’ll go straight to the safe room,” I promised.
A lie. If shit went down I would stand at the front door and kill everything in sight until my last breath left my lungs. Well, I thought I would. Maybe I wouldn’t anymore.
I didn’t get to ponder that thought, though. He gave me a quick kiss before he slung his weapons, including a machete, into places where he could easily reach them and headed out the front door.
I turned toward the stairs that led to the loft space and the exit we’d rigged to get up on the roof when we got here. Dave had even built a platform for us to sit on for zombie killing… and star gazing. No lights, at least on the western half of the country, really did lead to amazing stars when the nights were clear and cold.
I ducked out onto the steps outside the master bedroom window and climbed up onto the roof. It was slanted and slick, but I found my footing carefully and got myself onto the roof deck with little trouble. I set up my rifle on the sandbag rests Dave and I had placed there and arranged my ammo into easily accessible placements on the table beside me. Dave wasn’t in view yet and I waited, wanting to be extra certain I wouldn’t be catching him in crossfire. A lot of things couldn’t kill him anymore, but we were pretty sure a bullet to the brain would do it. Just like it did to all his zombie cousins.
In that brief moment, I looked up. No stars now, being that it was late afternoon. In fact the only things to look at in the sky were the birds flocking away from the zombies. Funny how their herds were the same. Running from predators.
Except… zombies didn’t have predators. And we’d never seen so many before, not around here anyway. What were they running from?
I heard a sharp whistle from below and straightened up. Our two-way radios had died a month before and we hadn’t been able to get replacement batteries yet, so that sharp whistle was Dave’s signal that he was in position, out of the way so I could snipe at my leisure.
I lined up my sights and carefully squeezed off the first shot. The rifle jerked back with the explosion of gunpowder rocketing the bullet into flight. In my sight I saw two zombies fall.
Dave’s woot echoed from below me and I grinned despite my annoyance that he wouldn’t let me any closer to the action than this. I fired again, shot after shot, dropping the zombies as they lurched closer and closer. A few of the ones near the front looked up and I could tell they had sniffed me out. I was their food source and now they were hunting me as much as I was hunting them. That fact made the air around me shift, the tension ratcheting up.
Funny how the fear of death never went away. It faded, but it lingered, like a smell you couldn’t get rid of in the kitchen, no matter how many times you sprayed the garbage can with air freshener.
My hands shook just a little, but it didn’t matter. Dave walked out from the porch at that moment. I ceased firing as I watched him move into the remaining crowd of ten or so zombies. They ignored him, as always. They saw him as one of them now. Or didn’t see him at all. Still, at night I dreamed of them one day realizing what he was. Of them tearing him apart into little shreds during one of these strange walkabouts he did with them.
I shivered and raised the rifle again, sighting in on a zombie at the far edge of the fray so that I wouldn’t be shooting at my husband. I dropped him and reloaded quickly, always keeping my eye on the crowd. Dave had pushed and herded them into a little group now. I stared at them, milling around where he had put them. Scattering but then turning back into the center when he nudged them.
He stepped back and started firing off the shotgun. The spraying blast dropped zombies in piles, three or more at a time until finally all them had stopped writhing, stopped groaning, stopped slashing, stopped moving.
I sighed and he looked up at me with a thumbs up. “Looks like we’re good,” he said.
I nodded. “I’ll come down to help you clean up.”
He hesitated and I could see he didn’t want me to. God, it was like he didn’t want me to come outside at all. But I wasn’t going to wait for him to deny me my right to help. I ducked inside and locked the window. I left the rifle downstairs, but tucked a handgun into my waistband (like a badass from some TV show) and headed outside into the brisk spring air.
Dave was already hauling zombie bodies into the big burn pile we’d created. Once a week or so, we’d burn what we’d killed. Normally it was one or two zombies, tops. This week would be a record for our time in Montana.
“So, did you notice those birds?” I asked as I caught a zombie under the armpits and dragged her toward the pile out back. She was wearin
g the remnants of a cop uniform, though her weapon was long gone. She still had a badge on her waistband, though. It was tarnished.
“Birds?” Dave asked, carrying three zombies over his shoulder like they were made of paper. “No.”
“They were flying away from something. They came from the same directions as the zombies did.” I looked up at the now-empty sky. “It made me think about how they run from predators together.”
“Okay,” he said as he hoisted the bodies onto the pile and we walked back to the front and the rest of our work. “So what?”
“Doesn’t it seem weird to you that after months here we get a pod of zombies roaming into our yard? Together? All coming from the same direction?” I asked as I reached for another zombie body.
He didn’t do the same, but just stared at me. “Are you saying they were herded here?”
I straightened up and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What could herd them, Sarah?” he asked, voice filled with incredulity.
I didn’t answer because at that moment I heard something. Faint. A sound that seemed oh-so-familiar, yet I couldn’t place it immediately.
“Sarah?” he repeated, his voice annoyed.
I raised my hand. “Shush, listen!”
He pursed his lips, but kept his mouth shut as he tilted his head and listened. The stillness was broken by a sound, growing louder by the moment. A sound whose name was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t find it in my post-apocalyptic mind.
Dave could. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “It’s a helicopter, Sarah!” he screamed as the noise got unbearably loud. “Holy fuckballs, it’s a helicopter!”
Chapter Two
What to Expect When You’re Expecting… Or Not Expecting… Zombies
The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) Page 1
