They never fucking stop. And so I never fucking stop. I just run and run and run…
“Sarah?”
With horror movie slowness, I turned and there was David, my husband, my partner in crime and fighting for our lives. He smiled at me, only as his lips pulled back his gums were black. His teeth were beginning to rot. His eyes were red-rimmed and focused on one thing. Eating me.
And not in the porn movie way.
“Stop running,” he said, his voice garbled with infection and transition as he reached for me.
I sucked in a breath and sat up, but as I did so my forehead collided with something. Something metal that I smacked into hard enough to make my vision blur.
“Fuck!” I grunted as I reached up to touch my head.
Already the knot of a bruise started to throb just under the skin. Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked around. I willed my heart to slow down. There were no zombies near me. No reaching hands, no frigid breath, no clawing fingers straining to tear and pull at flesh. Just a dim room filled with dusty gym equipment, including the treadmill I had apparently fallen asleep on.
“I knew I was on a treadmill,” I muttered as I ducked my pounding head from under the bar of the machine and pushed to my feet.
“Did you say something?”
It was David’s voice coming from the other room. Not garbled by infection, though. Just plain old David. I smiled as I moved through the entryway to a weight room. The lack of power made the other equipment in the gym useless except as very uncomfortable beds, but the weight sets still did their job. No juice required.
“Nope, just dreaming,” I said. “Nightmaring, I guess, is a better description.”
I tilted my head as Dave braced himself on the weight bench and pressed a bar filled with weight plates… a lot of weight plates… over his head
“Need a spotter?” I asked as I stepped closer.
“Nope,” he grunted. “I got it.”
Dave’s face was red with strain and sweat rolled down his cheeks to drip on the dusty mat below him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and even more sweat collected on the muscles of his chest. Yeah, you heard me right. My once unemployed, gamer husband with the little beer belly now had ripples of muscle on his chest. He was even starting to get some abs.
Hot.
He held the bar above himself, suspending it as his arms shook ever so slightly. With another grunt, he eased the bar back into place on the rack. Once it was steady, he reached up to wipe the sweat away from his brow with the back of one gloved hand. His gaze came over to me slowly.
“So what was this one about?” he asked as he set his hands back in place and pressed the heavy bar upward again.
This time I counted the weight plates and blinked in surprise. He had to be pushing over 350 pounds. Pretty impressive since I don’t think he’d ever topped out over 250 before the zombie outbreak that had changed our lives, and ruined my sleep, forever.
“Sarah?” he asked, his voice strained as he held the bar above his head.
“Huh?” I shook my head. “Oh, just the usual. You know… getting chased by a horde of drooling zombies.”
He lowered the bar again and this time he ducked under and sat up on the bench. He grabbed for a dingy towel that he’d draped across another nearby machine and wiped himself off before he said, “And was I in this one?”
I turned away a little. Dave knew about my dreams. Only because sometimes I talked in my sleep, though. Nothing like screaming out, “Dave, please don’t eat me!” to let a guy know you’re thinking about him.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said softly. As he peeled off his weight gloves, he pushed to his feet. When he opened his arms, I stepped into them without hesitation. “I’m okay, you know,” he whispered after he’d given me a rather sweaty hug for a few minutes.
I nodded, but out of the corner of my eye I looked at his right hand. On it was a scar, black tinged and gnarled, that covered both the top and palm of his hand. It marked the place where a zombie had bitten him over a month ago. If we hadn’t had a miracle serum… a cure… my Dave would have been nothing more than a roaming, mindless eating machine.
Oh, who am I kidding? He would have been a stain on the wall courtesy of yours truly. There’s not enough self-help books in the world to get over that one. Trust me, I’ve looked.
“I know,” I whispered as I pulled away with a smile I admit I had to fake. “But you might not have been.”
“But I was,” he insisted with a shake of his head as he patted off his forehead and motioned toward the dressing rooms in the back. I followed close behind.
“I know. And I guess it proved the cure worked. So now we just have to get it to the Midwest Wall.”
Dave was silent as he hesitated at the door marked MEN. His frown made my own fake smile fall. Okay, so this rumor about a wall in the Midwest, a way to cut off the zombie infection from the rest of the country… we both knew it was a long shot. But we kept moving toward it. Kept hoping it wasn’t all a colossal fake out.
If it was… well, I had no idea what we’d do then. We’d have one vial of a cure and no one to give it to. Plus, since it had taken us a month to get to Oklahoma City, we had to figure it would take us another month to get to the wall, which would put us smack dab in the middle of a Midwest winter, complete with snow, ice, and frigid temps. Fun, eh?
Yeah, sounds like a fucking laugh riot to me.
He motioned me into the dressing room without any more discussion on the touchy subject of walls, or lack thereof. Inside he had set up a portable shower we’d managed to grab from a camping supply store somewhere around Albuquerque. The shower would be cold, but it would do the job. Although since I hadn’t actually worked out at the gym we’d taken shelter in, I didn’t exactly need it. I was mostly there to stand guard.
Which I did (along with taking a couple of peeks by lamplight at my sweetie soaping up… what? We’re married!!). But pretty soon he was changed and we started toward the vestibule of the gym, with Dave loading up a shotgun as we went.
“Okay, so I’d like to get at least thirty miles today,” he said as he cocked the shotgun with one hand.
I nodded. So I’m sure that sounds crazy to you. Thirty miles in a day? In the pre-apocalypse days we would have been talking thirty minutes, maybe less. But these are not pre-apocalypse driving conditions, people. There were several things that kept us from getting much farther:
We tried to stay off main roads. I mean, big roads meant abandoned cars to move, fires to put out (literally and figuratively), and the occasional highwayman to avoid.
We tried to avoid cities. So I’d said we were in Oklahoma City, but that wasn’t exactly true. We were actually about fifteen miles north of there in a town called Guthrie. Unlike the real city, which had over five hundred thousand residents who were probably pretty much all zombies now… Guthrie rocked a little less than ten thousand. See what I’m saying?
Finally, the last reason we moved so slow became very clear as we stepped up to the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led to the outside and the parking lot where we’d parked our big old SUV right in a pimp spot.
That reason would be the zombies.
“I guess they saw us come into town,” I said mildly as I peered outside. It was early still and the sky was dark from dawn and from the heavy rain clouds that were gathering.
Oh yeah; also it was dark because there was a crowd of about twenty zombies all gathered at the windows, climbing up on top of each other, growling and pawing the glass until they streaked it with sludge and blood and… goo of an undefined nature. Which is more disturbing, by the way. Definable goo is way better. Trust me, I’m an expert now.
“I guess they did,” Dave said with a long-suffering sigh. He turned toward the check-in desk where we’d left a pile of our shit when we entered the gym last night. There were all kinds of guns in a big mass there, including a super cool multi-shot cannon.
“Well,” he said with sigh. “Rea
dy to do this?”
I grabbed two 9mms and slipped clips into place in a smooth motion that had taken months of practice to perfect.
“Fuck yeah. Ready as I’ll ever be.”
With a half-grin in my direction, Dave flipped the flimsy lock on the glass door and let the horde in.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I can’t say enough good things about the team of publishing professionals who have made creating the “Living with the Dead” series such a wonderful experience. From Jack and Alex in Publicity (who listen to my suggestions and never sigh so I can hear them), to Lauren Panepinto, who designed my kick-ass covers, to Jennifer Flax, who makes the ship go to everyone else who lurks about behind the scenes making my life easier. And then there is Devi Pillai, editor extraordinaire, who talks to me about food on the phone and laughs at my jokes. Awesome.
I also want to acknowledge all the zombie fans who have responded so positively to these stories and shared their excitement (and links to my website) far and wide. I feel like I have my own little zombie posse with you guys around and that’s pretty damn cool.
Finally, I have to acknowledge my parents. Daddy, I’m sure if I survived a zombie apocalypse it would be because you taught me everything I needed to know (though I’m sure zombies weren’t what you had in mind while teaching me to be a crack shot). And Mom, you have put up with the strangest family possibly in the universe. Thanks for being the “normal” one. Well, normalish, anyway.
Table of Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome Page
Dedication
Extras
Meet the Author
A Preview of EAT, SLAY, LOVE
1. Do what you love and the zombies will follow.
2. The question: What color is my parachute? The answer: Blood red, brains gray, sludge black.
3. Who moved my cheese? And my shotgun?
4. Be proactive… and ready to run if proactive backfires.
5. Don’t fear change. Just fear everything and everyone else.
6. Expand. Why stick to just killing zombies? Or killing them just one way.
7. Profits are everything. But to get them you have to catch a zombie.
8. Don’t forget the little people. Even when you want to.
9. Strive for more. More zombies, more fighting, more profit…
10. Strive for the four-hour work week. The rest of the time, run like hell.
11. Think win-win. You probably won’t get it, but think it.
12. Protect your brand… and your ass.
13. Partnerships don’t last forever. The zombie apocalypse just might.
14. The seven habits of highly effective zombies. Hint: Most of them involve eating your brains.
15. Dress for success. Also arm yourself for it.
16. Building relationships is building business. Also you sometimes need other people in order to kill all the motherfucking zombies.
17. Rich dad, poor zombie.
18. Profits aren’t everything. If you can get out with only your ass intact, that’s pretty good, too.
19. Do fight unwinnable battles. Sometimes they’re worth it.
20. Fake it ’til you make it. Just make it.
Acknowledgments
By Jesse Petersen
Copyright
BY JESSE PETERSEN
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
Married with Zombies
Flip this Zombie
Eat, Slay, Love
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Jesse Petersen
Excerpt from Eat, Slay, Love copyright © 2011 by Jesse Petersen
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
First eBook Edition: January 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-17987-4
Table of Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome Page
Dedication
Extras
Meet the Author
A Preview of EAT, SLAY, LOVE
1. Do what you love and the zombies will follow.
2. The question: What color is my parachute? The answer: Blood red, brains gray, sludge black.
3. Who moved my cheese? And my shotgun?
4. Be proactive… and ready to run if proactive backfires.
5. Don’t fear change. Just fear everything and everyone else.
6. Expand. Why stick to just killing zombies? Or killing them just one way.
7. Profits are everything. But to get them you have to catch a zombie.
8. Don’t forget the little people. Even when you want to.
9. Strive for more. More zombies, more fighting, more profit…
10. Strive for the four-hour work week. The rest of the time, run like hell.
11. Think win-win. You probably won’t get it, but think it.
12. Protect your brand… and your ass.
13. Partnerships don’t last forever. The zombie apocalypse just might.
14. The seven habits of highly effective zombies. Hint: Most of them involve eating your brains.
15. Dress for success. Also arm yourself for it.
16. Building relationships is building business. Also you sometimes need other people in order to kill all the motherfucking zombies.
17. Rich dad, poor zombie.
18. Profits aren’t everything. If you can get out with only your ass intact, that’s pretty good, too.
19. Do fight unwinnable battles. Sometimes they’re worth it.
20. Fake it ’til you make it. Just make it.
Acknowledgments
By Jesse Petersen
Copyright
Flip This Zombie Page 21