“Thirty minutes, forty minutes, what does it matter, Sarah?” he asked as he reached for my cheek to brush a tear away.
“There is a cure, David,” I whispered.
“It’s a pipe dream,” he grunted, his voice already strained.
“No! No, it’s not. We saw it work when we watched Barnes test the guinea pigs. He made a cure, maybe to protect himself and the kid, maybe to just fuck with the zombies, I don’t know. But it is here… somewhere. And if I can find it before you turn, I could save you.”
“No way.” Dave shook his head. “Even if that shit would work on me, and there’s no guarantee that it would, that asshole is armed by now, Sarah! He’s not going to just let you take his cure and come back here to me. And he’s definitely not going to let us waltz out of here even if you can find it.”
I grabbed his shirt and pulled him close for a quick kiss. “I’d like to see him try to stop me. Now lay here, stay still, and like you always tell me, stay calm. I will be back.”
He reached for me as I pushed to my feet. As he stared up at me, I couldn’t help but notice that his pupils were dilating rapidly. That his skin was getting pale already.
“Sarah, if it takes longer than half an hour, you have to run. Just leave me, okay? Leave me and run!”
“I promise,” I said as I bolted for the door that had swung open when I blew the control panel in the observation panel.
I lied.
* * *
There were guns in the dining hall area and that was close enough to the guinea pig lab that I headed there first.
What? I was crazed, not stupid. I needed weapons since I was pretty fucking sure I was going to encounter Barnes again before this was all played out.
I stared for a second at the key card slot that would allow me in and then kicked it. The mechanism shorted out and the door popped open at the same moment that a high-pitched alarm began to whir over and over again from the speakers strung throughout the hallways.
Ignoring the annoying sound, I burst into the dining hall and grabbed what I needed. Two handguns, ammo. I could have taken a lot more, but I needed to be fast. Five minutes had already bled away from the time left for Dave to stay Dave and I wasn’t even close to where I needed to be to save him.
I loaded as I made my way down the hallway, doing my best to remember just the right twists and turns to find the lab where we’d first seen Barnes’s guinea pig zombies. Not an easy task considering we’d come to it from a different direction and that on my fake-ass “tour” I’d been suffering a concussion. I broke open more than a few wrong doors before I finally made a last turn down a hallway I hadn’t visited yet.
And at the end of it was Dr. Barnes himself, leveling a rifle on my chest.
“You son of a bitch,” I growled as I moved down the hallway in long, certain steps, my handgun trained on him evenly. I have to be honest, at that point, I didn’t give a shit about getting shot.
“You’d best stop right there,” Barnes said, but his voice shook in a rather satisfying way.
I did what he asked and took a quick glance at my watch. Fifteen minutes were gone. Dave had fifteen, twenty at the outset before he’d be gone from me forever.
“Listen to me,” I growled, accentuating each and every word. “I know those fucking guinea pigs are in that lab behind you. And so is the cure you used on them. And I’m getting it. Even if I have to put a hole in you.”
“You want that cure so badly, you’d get shot for it?” Barnes laughed.
“For David, I’d do anything,” I snapped. “Just like he’d do anything for me. Unlike you with your wife and your poor kid, I actually give a shit what happens to him. So I would suggest you put that rifle down and let me pass.”
He stared at me a long moment, sizing up the situation and working out a judgment of what he thought was going to happen. Finally, he smirked.
“Or what?”
I didn’t answer, I merely depressed the trigger and prayed the element of surprise would work for me.
It did. I hit his hand, blowing his gun away just as he pulled his own trigger. A huge hole blew through the wall beside him as his thumb went flying off his hand and bounced down the hallway toward my feet.
I moved down the hall again as he collapsed forward with a wretched howl of pain that didn’t nearly satisfy my hatred for him. He wrapped his bleeding hand in his lab coat as he looked up at me.
“You bitch, you blew my thumb off!” he said, stating the obvious in a way that no longer indicated brilliant young scientist.
“You’re going to lose a lot more than that,” I said as I trained my pistol right on his groin. “Now tell me exactly where the cure is or I will shoot pieces of you off until you do. And I’ll like it.”
He stared up at me, making little voiceless whimpers.
“Go ahead, test if I’m willing to do it,” I ground out through clenched teeth.
“In the lab,” he confirmed. “It’s the blue liquid.”
“I’m going to bring it out and inject you with it,” I promised. “So you better tell me the right fucking one.”
His eyes grew wide. “The purple liquid!” he corrected himself. “It’s the purple one!”
I smiled and then swung the butt of the pistol back and brought it smashing across his temple. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he lost consciousness, and slumped in the corner of the hall by the door.
I pulled his key card from his waist and glided it through the reader. The door button turned green and there was the swish of releasing air as it popped open to reveal the dark lab beyond.
I clicked on the light and looked around with a sigh.
The fucker had released the guinea pigs. And they were all zombies. They were collected in the middle of the floor, ratlike creatures with glowing red eyes that hissed and growled at me.
Now it may sound silly (and in retrospect, it was pretty ridiculous to have one of the most innocuous animals on the planet standing up on its pudgy back legs and clawing at you), but one bite or even a scratch from these things and I was as much toast as Dave.
I plunged into the room, squashing the little rodents as I went, ignoring their squeals as I stomped them and kicked them across the room. There’s nothing like watching a rabid guinea pig go cartwheeling across a room with a little squeal, I’ll tell you that.
The purple vial was on the other side of the lab, already attached to a syringe for the robot arms to collect and use to nullify the infection on the guinea pigs. I reached it as the last remaining zombie pig made a kamikaze leap onto my leg. I slammed it away with the barrel of my gun and grabbed the purple serum.
As I ran past Barnes in the hallway, I didn’t stop. He’d been too sure I was going to inject him to lie and I didn’t have time to see if he was zombiefied by what I carried with me or not. I just had to trust, and pray this was actually the cure.
I ran through the twisting halls and finally found my way back to the lab where Dave and I had fought the bionics. As I skidded into the room, I looked at my husband.
He had managed to drag himself across the room and was propped up in a sitting position on the wall with his hand dangling at his side. A great idea since the blood would have to work harder to infect him. His eyes were shut, though, and I stared.
Was I too late? Had the infection spread faster… there wasn’t any standard litmus for the time, of course, just some basic guidelines. Different people, different body chemistry.
“Are you going to give me that, or just stand there and watch me go all living dead?” he grunted without opening his eyes.
“Oh shit,” I breathed, my heart finally starting to beat again. I rushed to his side and dropped down with the syringe in my hand. I was just about to depress the plunger when a voice at the door stopped me.
“If you inject him, I’ll blow his brains all over that wall.”
I turned and found Barnes in the doorway, the bloody rifle I’d shot out of his hand earlier now trained
at us again. He was leaning against the frame, his damaged hand still half-wrapped in his lab coat. Not that it did him much good. He was still dripping blood across the floor and the front of his lab coat was bright with ugly red splotches.
“You didn’t kill him?” Dave asked, his voice strained.
I looked at my husband. His skin was gray and his lips were starting to tinge black. We had moments, maybe even just seconds before he was gone.
“Let me do this!” I screamed at Barnes. “Don’t you want to know if it works on humans?”
The doctor chuckled. “Oh, it does. I’ve tested it many times before. On both fully infected subjects and on those who haven’t yet turned. It was the long-infected subjects I hadn’t played with yet. Do you know what happens once a person goes full zombie?”
He didn’t wait for me to ask.
“It turns out they lose most of their brain cells almost instantly. So if I wait for you to return him to normal until after he’s become the living dead, then I get to watch you both suffer.”
I stared at him. Barnes looked perfectly serious and my stomach dropped. The idea that Dave could be saved, but would still be irrevocably compromised, made my hands shake.
“Why?”
“You ruined my research,” he said and then he lifted his hand. “And you took my thumb. And I have worked too hard and for too long to give it all up for—”
He didn’t get to finish. As he started into what looked to be a long, villainous monologue that wouldn’t end until Dave did, there was the explosion of rapid gunfire behind him.
Barnes’s eyes went wide with shock and disbelief before he tipped forward and landed face first on the floor. The two holes in the back of his head told the story.
Behind him was The Kid, holding a smoking gun. Tears streamed down his face.
“Fix him!” he demanded, motioning to Dave with the barrel of his gun. “Hurry!”
I jammed the needle into Dave’s arm and depressed the plunger. He sucked in his breath and stiffened beneath me. His head began to twitch and he grimaced as whatever I’d put into him moved through his bloodstream.
The Kid lowered his weapon and we both watched. Waited. Finally, Dave opened his eyes. And they were green, not black. Not red. Not filled with a desire to overtake and feed.
“Hey,” he said, and his voice was normal, not strained anymore or garbled by growing infection.
“Hi,” I whispered as I moved toward him.
“I’m okay,” he said softly.
With a sob, I dropped down and hugged him as hard as I could. “You’re okay.”
Fake it ’til you make it. Just make it.
We stayed at the lab for over a week. Long enough to bury Barnes (for The Kid’s sake, if nothing else) and ensure that the “cure” that had saved David wasn’t temporary.
But after lunch on the seventh day, The Kid took us up the elevator and we all stepped into the bright, warm sunlight. Dave and I stared as Robbie motioned toward the same SUV we’d been carried in just a few days later.
“Take it,” he said softly. “You earned it.”
I spun on The Kid with a gasp. “Take it? What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “You can’t stay here forever.”
Dave nodded as he clutched his still-bandaged hand against his chest. The wound was slow to heal, but it was healing.
“That’s true, but when we leave you’re coming with us.”
Robbie looked at us, looked at the SUV, and I could see a big part of him wanted to do just that. But another part, a part that was more man than boy, hesitated.
“There’s a lot of dangerous shit in this lab.” He smiled as he looked at me. “Sorry, language. And there’s a lot of good research that can’t just be stopped.”
I stared at him. “And you want to keep that research going?”
He nodded. “Someone has to.”
“Honey, you’re so young,” I whispered. “We can’t just leave you here.”
The Kid smiled at me, wry and knowing and suddenly I felt like the child.
“I-I always knew what he was doing,” he said softly.
“You did?” Dave asked in disbelief. “He sort of implied he kept you away from the worst of it.”
“He tried, but man, adults are stupid sometimes.” Robbie laughed, but his voice cracked. “Even my so-called brilliant dad. He thought he was sheltering me, but I hacked into the surveillance camera logs months ago.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. What The Kid had seen… I couldn’t imagine.
He shrugged. “No, I’m sorry.”
“Why?” Dave asked with a confused shake of his head.
The Kid looked out over the desert.
“I should have stopped him before… I just… I was just too afraid of being alone. That no one would care about me. But then you two came along and I almost got you both killed.”
Dave dropped down and looked at Robbie evenly. “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be a zombie and Sarah would probably be dead. We owe you everything.”
The Kid gave a crooked smile. A child and a man all in one. Born in death and undeath.
“Come with us,” I pressed.
“Naw,” he said, kicking at the dirt. “Somebody’s gotta stay and somebody’s gotta go.”
“Why?” Dave asked.
The Kid dug into his pocket and withdrew something. When he held it out, I reached for it, figuring it was car keys, but instead he plunked a purple vial into my palm.
“Take this. I synthesized it this morning. You’ll need it when you head for the Midwest Wall. Maybe the government left over there can use it to re-open the border. Maybe they can work out a way to spread it to all the zombies left.”
“What makes you think we’re going to the Midwest Wall?” Dave asked as I carefully put the vial in my pocket.
The Kid grinned. “You still want to save the world, right?”
I stared at the precious vial and then I stared at Dave. What The Kid said was right. If we were going to get this thing really distributed, then someone did have to stay and someone had to go. But shit, we couldn’t leave him alone, no matter what he said.
“I’ll stay,” I said softly.
Dave flinched, but he didn’t protest, even as he reached out to take my hand.
Robbie was the one who leapt forward. “No! You two are not breaking up!”
I blinked to clear the tears from my eyes. “No, but I’m not leaving you alone here, either. So unless you have a better idea…”
There was only silence for a minute, but then The Kid smiled. “Hey, who were those people in the library? The chemist and the girl.”
I shook my head, but then I remembered what he was talking about. “Josh and Drea?”
“Yeah, that’s them. If he really studied chemistry, he could help me more than you.” The Kid chuckled. “Moron.”
“Hey!” I said with a laugh, but then I thought about what he had said. Dave and I had figured we might call on Josh and Drea to help us one day. And this one was as good as any. “You’re right, though.”
“So why not let them in on this shit?” Dave mused. “And they could stay with The Kid while we go to the Wall.”
I nodded. It was the best solution. The only solution since the last thing I wanted to do was lose Dave. Again.
Robbie nodded. “As long as they don’t treat me like a little kid, I could live with that.”
“You are a kid,” I reminded him, but I ruffled his hair while I did it.
Robbie smiled up at me. “I’ll be waiting for them,” he said, then he turned and started back into the warehouse. “Better get to it.”
We watched him go and waited until we heard the hum of the elevator inside fade away. I stared at David, still stunned by the fact that I’d almost lost him, almost lost everything. But he was whole. Or at least so far.
But we both knew full well we’d just have to wait and see if that was going to change at some point.
“So,” I said
softly as I reached for his hand. “Do we still want to save the world?”
Dave grinned as he opened up the driver’s side door and waved me in. He shut it and leaned in through the open window.
“It’s about time we did something,” he said. “And I think world saving has a better health plan than exterminating.”
Then he came around to the passenger side and pulled out the GPS. I watched as he entered in Chicago, IL, into the system, our ultimate destination after a quick pit stop to the camp and our friends.
And I put it in gear and we rolled.
extras
meet the author
A Facebook application once told Jesse Petersen that she’d only survive a day in a zombie outbreak, but she doesn’t believe that. For one, she’s a good shot and two, she has an aversion to bodily fluids, so she’d never go digging around in zombie goo. Until the zombie apocalypse, she lives in the Midwest with her husband and two cats.
Find out more about the author at www.jessepetersen.net.
introducing
If you enjoyed FLIP THIS ZOMBIE,
look out for
EAT, SLAY, LOVE
Book 3 of Living with the Dead
by Jesse Petersen
Have you ever felt like you were on a treadmill, but no matter how fast or far you ran, you never dropped those pesky last fifteen pounds? Yeah, welcome to my life. Only I’m not trying to lose weight (okay, I’m a girl, I’m always trying to lose weight), I’m trying to lose the slobbering, moaning, growling group of mindless zombies that always seems to be on my ass.
Every fucking time I look back over my shoulder, it seems like they are right there. Their feet pound on the pavement, their clawing fingers (complete with long, dirty, dead person fingernails—um, manicure people!!) reach for me, trying to give me one scratch, one bite, one little nick that spells certain death… living death… for me.
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