EAT SLAY LOVE

by Jesse Petersen

  “Yeah you, Ugly!” Dave continued before he tapped his chest all macho-man style. “Here I am.”

  The entire crowd, including Nicole and me, seemed to hold their breath as the zombies who had turned toward Dave’s voice staggered closer to him. Close enough to touch him. I saw every muscle in his body tense, and mine were doing the same.

  The group stared at him, looks of confusion and blank despair on their rotting faces. This was followed by the usual zombie head tilting and sniffing of their air that I’d always found so doglike and utterly disturbing.

  “Oh God,” Nicole whispered as she reached up to grip my upper arm in both hands. “Oh God.”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even breathe as the zombies stared at Dave and he stared back. I kept waiting for the throng to finally wake the fuck up, dive forward, and tear him to shreds.

  Instead, the three zombies who had noticed him finally gave him one last look and then slowly, unexpectedly, turned back toward Lex on the diving board and continued their half-ass attempts to get to him.

  I staggered backward as David turned toward me. Our eyes met and I saw the same questions that burned inside of me boiling in him. Mostly they consisted of, What the fuck???

  “What is this?” Lex roared. His voice now sounded frightened and confused even though his angry expression was still pretty intimidating. “Why don’t they attack you?”

  Dave stared up at Lex and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit!” Lex was purple now, shaking his fists. He was so precarious on that diving board, I kept waiting for him to tumble into The Pit and get himself killed.

  But we weren’t going to be so lucky, damn it. I’d never won when I bought scratch tickets, either.

  “It’s true, I don’t know why they’re doing this!” Dave insisted as he stepped away from both the zombies and the very angry leader of the town.

  “Fuck that.” Lex backed down the diving board, almost like he didn’t want to put his back to the zombies… or maybe it was David who he was afraid of. “Shoot him. Shoot all three of them.”

  “No!” Dave shouted as he spun toward me. The fear that had been lining his face at the thought of zombie death now doubled. “You promised me.”

  Lex stepped down from the board and shook his head. “But you didn’t tell me you had some way to keep the monsters from attacking you. You’re not safe.”

  He nodded toward his guards and they lifted their weapons toward Nicole and me while a few others pointed their guns at Dave in the pool.

  What happened next felt like a slow-motion action sequence from a movie. Think Matrix, but only the first one before they all went to hell in a handbasket.

  At the same moment that the guards along the edge began to fire their guns at Dave, he started to run toward the gate that blocked the steps leading from the pool. I was so busy staring that I was totally off guard when Nicole dove toward me and we both toppled to the hard, concrete pool edge as bullets whizzed by our ears.

  But the guards stopped shooting at us the moment that Dave hit the gate with all his body weight. The wooden structure couldn’t take the strain and it fell, breaking into shards that flew up and around the pool edge like rain.

  The nearly thirty zombies who had been gathered on the opposite side of The Pit in a disorganized and disinterested mass finally woke up. They may be dumb, but they’re really good at what they do. You know, killing people.

  They rushed toward the now-unblocked stairway with a collective roar and started climbing over one another to reach the dismayed people above them.

  Everyone but David, of course. They continued to utterly ignore him as they staggered up the stairway around him. They even jostled him as they rushed the survivors above and didn’t seem to register that he was food. Instead, they started grabbing victims from the confused, horrified crowd.

  Screams echoed in the air around us as people were either grabbed or ran for their lives and scattered gunfire joined in on the cacophony of noise and horror.

  Zombie carnage pretty much plays out the same way when an attack starts in a group of any legitimate size. There are some people who fight, there are some who flee… there are some who shove eighty-year-olds with walkers to give themselves extra time to get away (which was well played, but highly distasteful).

  Normally I was right in the fray of all this glorious panic, but at that moment I couldn’t seem to move. I just continued to stare upward from the place where I’d landed on the ground, watching everything around me. David should have been dead. Nicole and I should have been negotiating an escape with these whack-a-doodles.

  But instead, here we were. In five minutes everything had changed… again.

  Then Nicole was shaking me, hard enough that my shoulders hit the ground underneath me.

  “Sarah!” she screamed and her voice sounded strained, like she’d been repeating my name more than once before I woke up from my fog.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Come on,” she insisted as she grabbed my hand and half pulled, half dragged me to my feet. “Run! We have to run!!”

  Her words finally registered; this time when I looked around I actually saw what was happening around me. The zombies who had escaped from the pool were tearing people limb from limb, sinking their teeth into flesh and working for brains.

  Worse, some of the first victims of the attack were already staggering back to their feet, flesh graying and eyes sparkling red. Pretty soon there weren’t going to be thirty zombies, there were going to be three hundred. And at that point, we were pretty well fucked.

  I managed to get my feet under me and do what Nicole ordered. I ran like hell. But not away from the chaos as I think she’d been suggesting. No, I turned and headed straight for Dave.

  “What are you doing?” she screamed, but she was right on my heels despite her apparent disapproval of my choice. “Are you crazy?”

  I ignored her (very valid) question and just kept my focus on my husband.

  He was still standing at the top of the pool steps, looking around at the bloodbath with a dazed expression. There were two zombies standing right next to him, tearing and pulling at what had once been a person, though I could no longer tell if it had been male or female. They still didn’t seem to care that Dave was there.

  Me, on the other hand, they cared about. As I got close enough, one of them dropped the severed arm he was gnawing on and faced me with a primal growl that had been saying, “You are my food source” for thousands of years in the animal kingdom. I guess it was my turn to be at the bottom of the food chain.

  “Fuck,” I muttered.

  Here I was, totally unarmed, and clearly whatever was keeping Dave from being dinner was not a sexually transmitted disease because the zombies most definitely wanted me as a tasty treat.

  “Dave,” I said as I did a little dodgy dance with my zombie friend.

  You know what I’m talking about, that shuffle you do when you’re approaching someone head on and you can’t figure out which way to go to avoid hitting each other. Except my new zombie friend totally wanted to hit me. And I wasn’t the only one attempting not to get eaten in our group. Behind me I heard Nicole grunting as she swung a pretty nice high-leg kick at a zombie who had turned his attention on her.

  My voice snapped Dave from his fog and he looked at me.

  “Shit!” he barked as he finally recognized my problem and then he was in the fray. My hero, as always.

  He slammed forward and sent the zombie who was interested in me sprawling away. The thing growled, but then he saw another potential victim and was distracted as he trotted off after the screaming man who had caught his eye.

  “Are you okay?” Dave asked, his stare still even on me.

  I nodded and then cocked my head. “What about you?”

  “We don’t have fucking time for this Dawson’s Creek feelings bullshit! We have to get out of here,” Nicole bellowed as she gestured at the pandemonium around us before
she slammed an elbow into a freshly minted zombie from among the camp members who hadn’t gotten away from the initial attack. “Now, now, now!”

  Dave shook his head and all the weirdness faded from his expression. He was back to normal, all-business, get-us-the-fuck-away-from-zombies-Dave now. I had a feeling that would disappear before too long, though. Some shit had gone down and we would have to discuss it at some point.

  But Nicole was right. Here, in the middle of zombie hell, not exactly the time nor the place.

  “Come on,” Dave snapped and he motioned toward the place we’d come from that morning. I didn’t argue, anything away from the massacre happening around us was a good thing.

  We scurried up the slope that went back into the main part of the camp. Slopes are good, actually. Zombies have trouble with hills, which can be pretty damn funny to watch if you get the chance. Ultimate physical comedy, especially if they lose body parts when they fall. It’s like Jack and Jill, but with missing arms and a lot more moaning.

  Of course, you get enough of them and some of them are bound to figure it out, but still. It slows them down and sometimes that’s enough to get away, or at least catch your breath in the middle of a fight.

  Unfortunately, hills didn’t really slow down humans. Unless they’re really fat (and most of the fatties hadn’t been able to get away from zombie attacks and were the living dead already—yeah, Zombie Weight Watchers was going to catch on big time someday). However, now that the bulk of the zombies were still behind us, partying down with the campers who had come to witness our “punishment,” humans had become our biggest problem.

  As we scampered up the hill, a small group of about twenty people who were left up in the “village” part of the camp, the ones who apparently hadn’t figured out all living dead hell was breaking loose, stopped their various chores and stared at us. There was a brief moment of stunned quiet and then there were twenty guns pointed at us.

  “You’re supposed to be in The Pit,” one of the women snapped as the group as a whole rushed us.

  “Look, look—” Dave started, his hands raised.

  My heart lodged in my throat. It seemed like every time we almost escaped these people, things got worse and worse. Annoying, to say the least.

  But then a few of the people looked past us and down the hill. The wind was blowing toward us, blowing away the sounds of the chaos, but there was no avoiding seeing it when you actually looked.

  “Zombies!” the same woman screamed and her dirty face twisted with horror and fear.

  The three of us were instantly forgotten as the bulk of the remaining villagers started down toward their friends and neighbors. Some of the sharper ones ran away, too. “No man left behind” didn’t really apply in postzombie existence. Well, at least not normally. Dave and I still seemed to practice it, sometimes to our detriment.

  “Come on before they remember us,” Dave said.

  “The zombies or the people?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” He grabbed my hand and started pulling me through the twists and turns of the camp.

  Okay, so he had told me to pay attention earlier that morning. I’m sorry to say, I hadn’t. Too worried about The Pit, you see. Thank goodness he was on top of it, because he seemed to know exactly where he was going and how to get there in the quickest and least-attention-grabbing manner.

  Pretty soon we were back to the entrance of the camp. There were two gates. We were at the first. Beyond it was the small collection of vehicles we’d seen when we came in earlier. Beyond that was a second gate.

  Unfortunately, the entire area was crawling with guards, at least one for each of us, and unlike zombies, guards could think. Also, they could shoot and we’d already been shot at more than once today. It was starting to get really old.

  Dave pursed his lips as we all flattened against one of the tents so that we remained out of sight of the guards at the inside gate.

  “We need a car if we’re going to have any chance to make it the hell out of here,” he whispered.

  I peered around him. Shit, they were really heavily armed. “Well,” I began, “we could try—”

  But before I could finish, there was a voice screaming through the quiet at this end of the now-almost-deserted camp. Nicole’s voice, to be more specific.

  “Zombies!” she screamed, and I swear if I hadn’t been looking right at her, face as calm as could be, I would have thought she was truly terrified. “Oh God, help, they’re everywhere!”

  “What the hell are you—”

  But before Dave could finish the question, Nicole reached up, covered his mouth, and motioned to the guards. They were abandoning their posts, running into the camp like crazy people. All we had to do was keep to the shadow of the tent where we’d been hiding and poof, we were free!

  “Nice,” Dave whispered as Nicole lowered her hand and motioned for the gate and the cars beyond it.

  I nodded. “Yeah, good thought.”

  “Sometimes it’s the simplest things,” Nicole said, but I almost thought she was blushing at our compliments. “But we don’t have time for this. Let’s get a car and get the fuck out of Dodge before the zombie thing gets contained and these freaks start looking for us.”

  Without another word, we all rushed forward. The gate was unlocked and we were able to get into the place where all the group cars were parked. Unfortunately, our SUV was not among them.

  “Fuck,” Dave muttered as we searched. “I really liked that car.”

  I nodded. “And it had all our awesome weapons and GPS and stuff, too.”

  Of course, this wasn’t the first time we’d lost a vehicle, our weapons, nearly our lives, but it was more and more annoying every time. You just don’t know, until you’ve lived through your own apocalypse, how much you come to depend upon that kind of stuff. The car becomes your home, your sense of normalcy.

  And once again, that was gone for us.

  “Just pick something,” Nicole hissed with a quick look over her shoulder. “Zombies! Freaks with guns! Focus!”

  “All right, all right,” Dave muttered. He scanned the area until he found the big-wheeled truck that Lex had been driving when the group picked us up the day before. He grinned. “You know, if that little bitch is going to steal my baby, I think I have to return the favor.”

  He motioned toward the truck and we were each about to open one of the doors when the sound of a handgun cocking echoed through the air. All of us froze and slowly we turned to face the person who had gotten to us just moments before we made our escape.

  And who was it but Nicole’s boyfriend, Ryan? He was holding a bloody Colt .45 that was leveled right at us. Well, at Dave to be more specific.

  “Y-You stop,” he stammered. His hands were shaking. “You stop right there.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Nicole sighed. “Don’t you have better things to do than stalk me?”

  The boy blushed almost purple, but he actually lifted his gun higher. “Back away from the vehicle.”

  Dave did step away from Lex’s truck, but he didn’t stop there. Instead he stalked right toward the kid who was holding the dangerous weapon leveled right at my husband’s head.

  The motion shocked all of us, including Ryan, who didn’t even make an attempt to stop him as he stared.

  “Hey,” he finally whimpered, but Dave had already reached him.

  In one swift motion he pulled the handgun from the younger man’s fist and then swung it. The handle connected with Ryan’s temple and the boy crumpled unconscious at Dave’s feet.

  “Told you I’d get you back for smacking me,” Dave said with a smile. He sunk the gun into his waistband and turned back to us. “Now let’s go. And be sure to buckle up.”

  We swung into the truck, Dave driving, Nicole in the front seat beside him, and I in the back. He grinned as he gunned the truck’s big engine a couple of times and then floored it.

  We hit the outside gate and burst through the chain link like it was n
othing. There were two guards sitting outside in the shade and both of them jumped up as we careened past them. Their faces were almost comical with shock as they watched us fly by. It took them a few seconds before they started firing at us. They were halfhearted, though, and not even close to hitting us or the truck as we screamed down the dirt road and out of range.

  So once again, we had gotten away from deranged survivors and rabid zombies without a scratch on us.

  Or so I thought, until Nicole’s eyes went wide and she barked, “Shit, Dave! You’re bleeding! You’ve been shot.”

  Get out of your own way. Try to get out of the way of stray bullets, too.

  I jammed myself up into the narrow space between Nicole and Dave in the front seat of the truck and looked where she was pointing. Sure enough, the left shoulder of Dave’s black T-shirt was soaked. I reached out to press my hand to the stain, praying it was water or sludge or pee or anything but blood.

  But when I pulled back my palm, it was coated in dark, sticky redness that I’d come to know all too well since the outbreak. And to think… I’d been a bit squeamish about stuff like needles before the zombies attacked. Silly, silly Sarah….

  Dave glanced over at my bloody hand, but his face was surprisingly calm considering I had his, you know, life source all over my fingers.

  “David, stop the truck,” I said, trying to remain as calm as he seemed to be. It was a struggle.

  I kind of wanted to smack the doofus for getting hurt… again and scaring the shit out of me… again. I mean, it was all about me, right? No.

  Well, crap.

  He didn’t answer and I gritted my teeth. “Dave, please stop.”

  “I can’t stop,” he insisted as he continued to drive at the same breakneck speed.

  Superdangerous considering (a) we were on the highway and it was littered with destroyed and abandoned vehicles that he was dodging like we were in a video game and (b) he’d been FUCKING SHOT.

  “Stop the goddamn truck!” I bellowed, forgetting calm and politeness.

  “No. Those weirdos could be after us any second. We have to get as far away from here as possible,” he said, and it sounded like he was gritting his own teeth at this point.