But to be honest, he might not even notice I was gone if I didn’t tell him. Going out and doing zombie detail sounded a hell of a lot more fun than going back to the lab to read year-old issues of Cosmo and twiddle my thumbs.
And wasn’t it better to apologize after than ask permission first?
“Yeah, okay,” I said, shoving away all the reasons to stay put and stay relatively safe. “I’d love to go hunting with you.”
She smiled and motioned me to follow her.
We didn’t go back through the lab, but down another hall and through a series of turns I wouldn’t remember later if someone paid me in chocolate to tell them about it. Finally, though, we reached a classroom, or what had once been a classroom. When she opened the door, it couldn’t have been further from that now.
It was an arsenal. So many guns. Big, beautiful guns. Tiny, cute guns. Bullets, clips, knives, machetes, pretty much anything a person might need to battle zombies… or take over a small country. I was willing to try for either at this point, honestly, I was so bored.
“Holy shit,” I murmured as we stepped into the room.
She grinned. “I know, right? Let’s load up.”
And load up we did. Aside from the pistol permanently attached to my hip, I got a shotgun and an AR-15 to strap across my back, plus plenty of ammo for both. She took a couple of glocks and a big-ass machete.
“For the close up work,” she explained as she slipped the razor-sharp weapon into a specially made holster. “Ready?”
“I guess,” I said as I followed her down a couple more hallways and out into the cool spring Seattle day. It was drizzling (surprise, surprise), but my jacket was more than enough to keep me cozy and dry.
People underestimate the value of good clothes in an apocalypse. The fact is, though, the wrong shoes, a coat that’s too puffy, gloves with fingers… all of those things can lead to a quick and sudden Death by Bubblegoose.
And nobody wants that.
That was why my jacket was light, but lined, my gloves had no fingers and I didn’t wear earmuffs so I could hear everything around me with perfect clarity.
“How big is the area that you have fenced in?” I asked as we walked through the campus, behind our lab building and toward the Husky Union Building, or HUB.
“It’s always changing,” Lisa said. “We started with just Red Square and some tents. But as we cleared out buildings, we could expand the fence line. We’d love to get the whole campus, but right now our goal is the HUB.”
“Why?”
“There’s a radio system there that used to be the campus radio station. We think we might be able to use it for larger level communications. Plus, there are some dining facilities that would make cooking a lot easier,” Lisa explained. “Oh, and there’s a bowling alley.”
I laughed. “I guess recreation has its advantages.”
“Stephen King said it best, all work and no play…”
“Of course, Jack went crazy in that book,” I said with a sigh.
“There is that,” Lisa agreed.
She stopped and motioned in front of us. There was a big, heavy chain link fence with razor wire on top of it in front of us. There was a gate section, but it was locked with several industrial padlocks.
“Wow,” I breathed as I stared. Just outside the fence, there were a handful of zombies milling about. As they caught a whiff of us, they turned and began to shamble in our direction, their moans increasing.
“Yeah, best get out there and close the gate so we don’t have to bother with them on the inside,” Lisa sighed, pulled out a fat key and unlocked the padlocks with a swift efficiency that said she really did do this every stinking day.
When the last one was opened, she swung the gate open and ushered me out.
“You lock up,” I offered as I pulled out the pistol on my waist. “I’ll cover you.”
She shrugged, but I could tell by the way she looked at me and the way she unclipped her holster, that she wasn’t sure of my skills. Damn, I hadn’t had to prove myself for a long time.
I was kind of looking forward to it.
Of course, I didn’t have to wait long. The slowly shambling zombies who had noticed us behind the fence got faster as they got closer to their first meal in what I would guess was quite some time. The first one to come into a reasonable range was a female dressed in sweatpants and a tanktop. She still had a backpack on, though its straps had long since sunk into her rotting skin to rest on her bones.
“Gross,” I muttered before I leveled the pistol and fired, putting a bullet through her forehead and dropping her.
The gunfire seemed to startle the other zombies who were coming toward us, but that didn’t slow them down at all. I think gunfire must have just been a sign to them that they were doing their job in life: eating people and freaking them out enough that they resorted to violence. It had to be sort of like instant job performance feedback to them.
Or a dinner bell.
A couple more moved together toward me, one from one side, one from the other. One had been campus security, by the look of what was left of the ragged cotton uniform and the utterly useless taser that dangled by a few threads of leather that had once been his belt.
I dropped him first, then shifted my attention to the other. Her clothing had long since disintegrated, leaving her embarrassingly naked as she moved on me. She had just been shambling when I shot the other guy, dragging the stub that had once been her foot behind her. But now she started to sprint, surprisingly fast for a rotting pile of flesh and bone.
“Shit,” I barked as I jumped back a step. Just as I fired, Lisa did the same and between the two of us we dropped the woman, right at my feet, mid-charge.
“God damn, I hate when they run,” she said, stepping over the woman with a shake of her head. “And you are a good shot, it turns out.”
“Gee, thanks,” I muttered, raising my pistol to catch a straggling zombie in what was left of a suit who had appeared from between a couple of buildings.
“It does make you wonder what the hell their actual lifespan is,” I said with a sigh. “I mean, how long can they just… run like this, dead, rotting, no brains left to power anything but basic movement and a drive to kill.”
“Yeah, that’s a whole other study,” Lisa replied. “I’m guessing it will be long term.”
“You guys are studying that here?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. If you want I can show you in a couple of days, after we clear the HUB.”
“What do you mean, show me?” I asked, jerking my attention to a zombie cluster on the front lawn of the huge HUB building.
“Hang on, let’s deal with this, first,” Lisa said.
She pulled a shotgun, but I decided to go with the AR-15. It was a superlight carbine version of the rifle and the semi-automatic quality of it made it easy to fire off a bunch of shots, one after the other, to mow down the zombies on the lawn in neat little rows of death and goo.
Lisa’s shotgun was an axe compared to my precise scalpel of a weapon, but it was just as effective and soon there were only bodies littering the lawn.
She handed me the machete from her back. “Make any end kills if we didn’t cleanly take them out,” she suggested. “You aren’t inoculated, so you want to make sure you don’t get ankle bites.”
I shivered at the reminder. I couldn’t take a chance with the serum until we knew more about the baby inside of me, but I sure knew that a zombie bite would make my day a lot worse… and a lot shorter since I doubted Lisa would risk taking me back to the lab to see if there were some kind of heroic actions to be taken to fix me.
With all that in mind, I swung as she passed by piles of zombies, slashing through soft, rotting skulls to sever brains of any corpse within snatching distance.
Better safe than zombie.
Finally we made our way through the zombie body fun run and up the stairs to the front door of the HUB.
“We had recon in here a couple of days
ago,” Lisa whispered.
I blinked. “You mean reconnaissance?”
“Just pretend you’re a soldier in this war, sweetheart,” Lisa said with a snort. “And yes. They presented a plan to clear from the top down. We can block the stairwells as we drop so that nothing flanks us and the entire building can be cleared this way.”
I shrugged. “Makes sense. What did recon say about numbers?”
Lisa smiled like I was learning or something. “Unknown on Floor 3, scattered on 2, pods on 1, ground and in the basement.”
“Shit, so two of us are going to clear all that?”
“Yeah, but we’re going to have help.” Lisa dug into her utility belt and brought out a grenade holster, filled with dangerous little bombs that made me want to run screaming back behind the fence rather than lose a hand or something from operator error.
“Um, if we blow up the building, we’re not going to be able to clear it, let alone use it.”
She rolled her eyes. “They aren’t to blow up the building, stupid. They contain serum. They’re basically gas bombs and they’re going to wipe out a bunch of these things if the testing is right.”
“If the testing is right?”
She huffed out a sound of frustration. “It’s worked on specimen, but this is our first field test. It’s going to work, Sarah.”
I stared at the grenades and my hand slipped to my stomach, almost against my will. Lisa watched the movement, recording it with an unreadable expression. Then she shrugged.
“I have a gas mask for you since we don’t know what it might do to your… zombie baby.”
I frowned. “You know, it’s one thing for Dave and I to refer to the kid as Little Zombie, Zombie Baby or whatever other nicknames we come up for it. It’s another for a bitchy stranger straight out of a bad fantasy movie to do it. So knock it off.”
She pursed her lips. “What part of me is from a fantasy movie?”
I pointed to her leather kick ass boots. “Um, exhibit A.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. But do you want the gas mask or what?”
“Yes,” I snatched it from her as she pulled it from her backpack. I settled it over my head and was immediately hot, uncomfortable and very aware that my peripheral vision was now for shit. “Um…”
“Yeah, I know. But it’s the best we have currently. The serum dissipates pretty fast according to Robbie. You should only have to wear that thing for about five minutes after we throw the grenade.”
“Five minutes?” I repeated, shifting as I tightened it. “That sounds like an eternity. I think I might be claustrophobic.”
“Then go back to the freaking lab and be support staff,” Lisa said, digging for her keys.
“No,” I shook my head and tried to ignore the echo of my voice in the helmet. “No, I’m good. But I hope you intend to cover me while I’m wearing this stupid thing.”
At that moment, Lisa raised a pistol and fired over my shoulder behind me. I turned to watch a wayward zombie collapse a hundred yards or so behind me.
“What do you think?” she snapped. “Now let’s go before we attract more living dead attention out here.”
I waved at her to open the doors to the student union building, but as I followed her, wearing my Darth Vader reject mask, I hoped I wasn’t getting myself into a mess. Or at least not a mess I couldn’t handle. Because if I ended up living dead, Dave was going to kill me.
Chapter Nine
Baby proofing your house is an important step. Babies… and zombies… get into the strangest places.
The ground floor of the HUB had once been called the Husky Den (after the mascot of University of Washington) and was mostly an eating and study area. Now you could have called it Zombie Central and made it a killing arcade. As Lisa softly shut the doors behind us, I sucked in a noisy, steamy breath beneath my uncomfortable gas mask.
There were probably thirty zombies in here, roaming around, grunting and groaning, some even still sitting at the tables, oblivious to puddles of blood and goo and a few wayward rotting limbs scattered around them. It was like they’d gotten bitten and just kept on studying. In some ways, you had to admire them for being so dedicated to their education.
Of course all that peaceful activity would end in a second as soon as they recognized fresh meat in their vicinity. Then it would be party time, not study time and the food fight in Animal House would have nothing on it.
“I’m going to throw a grenade, then we’ll head to the third floor to start clearing from the top down,” Lisa whispered, her voice slightly muffled because of my covered ears. Still, I got the gist.
She pulled the pin on one of her grenades and threw it into the center of the big, open area. The metal canister clinked as it skidded across the floor and suddenly every zombie in the damn room turned toward the noise, then the source of the noise: US. Just like I predicted, the sight of yummy human flesh and brains was way more interesting than shuffling aimlessly and moaning. The group was focused like a herd of hungry lions in a second.
“Run,” I said as the grenade exploded and started purple gas expelling into the air.
It kind of looked like something out of a comic book, but I wasn’t going to quibble over that at present. Not when the zombies were starting to move.
“Run!” I repeated as loud as I could through my mask.
Lisa did as she was told, bolting forward toward the closest set of stairs. So much for covering me. I followed, slightly disoriented from the mask. Not only was it uncomfortable, but I was starting to wonder if it was actually going to work to keep the gas out of my lungs. But it was too late for such questions now.
I glanced over my shoulder. Most of the zombies were obscured by a thick cloud of the purple gas now. How long did that stuff take to kill them?
More questions I really should have asked before we threw the bomb…
Still, there were stragglers around the edges of the gas cloud. Slow moving, but still surging toward me, snarling and overcome by blood and brain lust that nothing would stop except a bullet.
Luckily I had plenty of those.
I fired a pistol over my shoulder. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly the best strategy, but it was better than nothing.
“Hey!”
I heard Lisa’s voice through the echo of the helmet and looked up to see her halfway up the staircase, her machine gun on her shoulder.
“Don’t waste ammo,” she ordered before she started firing. Bullets zinged over my head and I bent in half, covering my helmet-y head with my hands as I scurried up the stairs and got behind her.
“Good?” she asked as I rushed past.
“I guess,” I snapped. “Nice covering, by the way.”
“You’re not dead, right?” she snapped as she elbowed past me up the stairs. “So let’s go and get up to the third floor while the zombies are confused and dying. If we’re lucky, the gas vapors will rise and that will help us on our way down, too.”
I got behind her without another word, still irritated that she’d taken off and left me with my vision restrictions and zombie baby to protect on my own. Nicole had said Lisa was a potentially sketchy person and now I’d experienced it firsthand. Made me kind of wonder what she really thought of everything… of us.
“I remember when we first met you,” I said as we moved up the stairs. I kept half an eye behind us for zombies coming up the flank, while she had her gun ready for anyone who wanted to meet us coming down.
“Yeah, well don’t congratulate yourself on that, it wasn’t that long ago,” she said. “You guys had just killed your friend and you almost got eaten by a zombie when I saved your butt.”
I pursed my lips. Okay, that was true.
“At the time, you were determined not to come out of your apartment above the restaurant, even when we asked you to join us in getting out of the city. You told us you wouldn’t be with groups of people, that you were better off alone.”
“Yeah.” She paused and fired off a shot at some
unseen thing in the stairwell above us. There was a grunt and then a zombie fell down the shaft in the staircase, spiraling downward until he hit in the basement area far below.
“But here you are,” I continued, scarcely missing a beat for our dearly departed zombie buddy. “And you’re working with a huge group. Not to mention I’ve heard you and the Colonel guy… Fenton are kind of an item.”
“Office gossip,” she spat without a hint of irony at the fact that we didn’t exactly have a Dilbert situation going on here. “What’s your point?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just wondering how you got from there to here. Why are you willing to go balls to the wall to protect a group now when before you wouldn’t even leave your house with us less than a year ago?”
“Maybe I just needed the right group,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at me. “There’s a zombie back there.”
I pivoted and sure enough, a straggler had started up the stairs. Zombies on stairs were hilarious. They made it up eventually, but it was a dragging, tripping study in the brain dead. I watched him for a minute, grumbling in what might have been zombie frustration as he stumbled up step after step.
Finally, though, the show wasn’t as fun and I fired off one shot. He hissed out a little sound of I don’t know… relief? Anger? Pain? Then he slumped on the steps, leaving a trail of goo beneath and around him.
“That will slow down the others, at least,” I said with a sigh. “If stairs freak them out, anything blocking stairs takes way too much out of them.” She kept moving up and I followed. “So you were saying Dave and I weren’t the right group.”
“God, you’re like a bulldog,” Lisa muttered under her breath. “I should have left you in the lab.”
“But you didn’t, so…” I encouraged.
“When they bombed, I had to run,” she bit out in frustration. “I didn’t have a choice but to leave the apartment behind. For a while, there was no place safe between the army and the zombies. I just ran and ran, I hardly slept. When Grant and the others found me, I had made it all the way to Capitol Hill, away from the bombing, but passed out in an alleyway from exhaustion, all laid out for a zombie buffet.”
The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) Page 7
