EAT SLAY LOVE

by Jesse Petersen

  I dropped my stick as I finished my sentence. “Um, open.”

  Dave glanced at me and it was furtive. Like he, too, realized that it was not okay that I couldn’t get the door open without resorting to a system of pulleys but he could do it without even making so much as a grunt. But we couldn’t discuss it because Nicole shut the engine down, locked the truck, and came around to the doorway.

  We all looked inside at the darkness. Without lights and with evening rapidly approaching, there wasn’t much to see.

  “Wish we had a lantern,” I muttered.

  Dave pursed his lips. “We did, in the SUV. Stupid jerk-off campers.”

  I ignored his pouting. “Any flashlights in that truck?”

  Nicole looked at us and then she walked away. I kept my gaze on the hospital foyer. It was the best thing. If there were zombies in there, they’d be coming soon to check us out.

  In a minute Nicole was back and she had not one, but two flashlights. I smiled as I took one. “Where did you find those? The glove compartment was useless.”

  She shrugged. “I noticed a storage box in the back when I came around and one of the keys on Lex’s ring opened it.”

  “Anything else useful in there?” Dave asked. “Like, I don’t know, a submachine gun or a grenade?”

  Nicole laughed. “No. Just a couple of screwdrivers and some work gloves. It was pretty well cleaned out.”

  “I guess Lex was more of a psychopath than a handyman,” I said as I clicked on the flashlight and shone it inside. “Ready to do this thing?”

  There was a brief hesitation and I couldn’t blame either one of them for it. I mean, the hospital was big and dark and something straight out of a Stephen King novel. Except there were real monsters lurking inside. Nicole looked like she was ready to bolt and then she shot a side-glance at Dave. The T-shirt he was holding up to his injury was soaked with blood.

  She nodded and there was resignation in her tone when she sighed, “Okay, let’s do this thing.”

  How to make friends and influence survivors (but not zombies).

  I took the gun from my waistband and made sure the safety was off. “Since I have the gun, I’ll lead. Nicole, follow behind me and be ready with that light. Dave you follow us.”

  He rolled his eyes but nodded. He probably wanted to argue since Dave wasn’t exactly a “follow the leader” kind of survivor, but my face must have convinced him otherwise. Tonight was not the night to fuck with me, that was for sure.

  I slipped through the open space between the doors and managed to get into the foyer of the emergency room, where I turned on my flashlight and scanned the area for the flash of red, hungry eyes.

  All I saw was death. Dead people still propped up in waiting chairs, sprawled on the floor and in pieces sprinkled all over the place. The stench was pretty nasty and I won’t go into great detail here because it’s damn gag-worthy. I’d just like to point out that you don’t get used to the smell. Don’t believe it if people tell you that you do.

  “Shit, if this isn’t a statement on American health care, I don’t know what is,” Nicole whispered as she stepped up next to me.

  I smiled despite myself and despite what was all around me. You can judge if you want, but you have to find humor in these situations or you’ll go freaking crazy. Er, crazier. I wasn’t so certain the crazy train hadn’t already come and gone for the three of us.

  I turned to compliment her on the quip, but my words died on my lips. Nicole had her flashlight raised, but also her annoying camera.

  “Seriously?” I said, motioning to the red blinking light that said Recording.

  She shrugged one shoulder (which didn’t even disturb the camera, she was just that good).

  “Gotta document for posterity,” she said. “And my Peabody. So, Sarah, how do you feel right now?”

  I glared at her.

  “A little like punching a blonde, actually.” That elicited nothing more than a laugh from Nicole. Guess I wasn’t that scary. I turned away from her. “Turn that fucking thing off.”

  She smiled. “No can do. Just act naturally; you’ll forget it’s here in a minute or two.”

  I wanted to argue, but decided against it. Just too much energy.

  “What about the door?” I muttered as I looked at the sliding doors, which were still jammed open. The last thing we needed was for a passel of zombies to come in behind us and mess up whatever areas we’d already cleared. That was how people became zombie sandwiches.

  But Dave was one step (or five) ahead of me. He tugged the doors shut with as much ease as he’d opened them (which was pretty scary since closing those things when they were locked shut was even harder than opening them).

  “Problem solved,” he whispered.

  I shrugged and turned my back on him. This stuff that was happening with/to him was going to have to be dealt with at some point, but not yet—half because I had bigger fish to fry and half because… well, I just wasn’t up for it. If I dug into what was happening with him, I might not like the answers.

  In fact, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.

  “If only,” Nicole laughed, apparently oblivious. And that was good. The last thing I needed was for her to put her tabloid mind on the mysterious case of David’s superpowers.

  “Come on,” I said, motioning to the swinging doors to the emergency room. “Let’s go.”

  I led with the other two behind me. After a deep breath (through my mouth, not my nose), I pushed into the emergency treatment zone.

  The back area was worse than the front. Blood and sludge slashed the walls; body parts and rotting flesh were everywhere, in the pools of fluids left behind.

  I shuddered as I stepped over what remained of a leg and kicked aside a few scattered fingers, still clenched like they’d been ripped off while in a fist.

  “Man, this must have been bad,” I whispered after a long, heavy pause. I said it more to myself, but Nicole answered anyway.

  “The result of mass hysteria surrounds us,” she said and I realized she was documenting for the camera. Her voice even sounded different. “Death and destruction hit this hospital on the most base level.”

  “One or more of them must have had the virus when they locked the doors,” Dave said, his voice hushed and reverent, like we were in a church. I guess it was pretty much a graveyard, though, so close enough.

  “And they might still be here,” I snapped, and my harsh tone made both of them straighten up. “So let’s not dillydally.”

  We moved forward a few steps.

  “Dillydally?” Nicole said from behind me as she peered around the camera lens to spear me with a look. “Dillydally? What are you, eighty?”

  I ignored her and instead focused on one of the drawn curtains in front of me. They created the semiprivacy within the rooms where doctors had once treated minor injuries and tried to save people from accidents or heart attacks.

  They hadn’t been expecting what had come into their hospital just a few months before. They hadn’t been ready for it.

  None of us had.

  I stood in front of the curtain for a moment. We had to go past it, but I just didn’t want to do so. I didn’t want to deal with whatever was behind curtain number one. Finally, I drew some deep breaths, threw it open, and shone my flashlight inside.

  I was prepared for many things. Dead body, sure: Zombie, absolutely, though I was hoping we could avoid that, at least until the “Dave’s been shot” situation had been taken care of.

  What I was not prepared for on any level were the two dead bodies positioned over the emergency-room bed. A man and a woman. The woman was still in her nurse’s uniform, although it was pulled up over her waist. The dead man behind her had been wearing scrubs, which he’d pulled down around his ankles along with his tighty whities.

  They had clearly been… um… well, humping.

  And in the middle of that last, desperate screw? The man had shot her in the head and then himself. The gun still dangled f
rom his cold, dead fingers.

  “Sweet!” Nicole said, startling me from my half-shocked staring. “A gun.”

  She snapped off the camera and reached around me to grab the weapon from the dead man’s hands. Of course his fingers sort of held it, the rotten flesh breaking as she tugged and finally freed the cold steel from equally cold flesh.

  “Seriously?” Dave said from behind her. The horror on his face was equal to mine. “You’re focusing on the gun in this scenario?”

  Nicole glanced at the dead couple; her expression showed a brief flicker of sadness and disgust before she wiped it away and shrugged. “Well, we need the gun more than they do.”

  I rolled my eyes. “If they don’t bother you so much, then help me roll them into the hall so we can stitch Dave up.”

  Nicole slipped the gun into her waistband, set aside her camera, and did as I asked without so much as a moment’s hesitation. With the three of us working together, we managed to get the not-so-happy couple’s supergroddy corpses out of the room. Of course we all ended up covered in gross before we were done.

  Blood. It’s just not a compliment to most outfits. Sludge, surprisingly, is. I guess everyone looks good in black.

  “All right,” Nicole said as she changed the bloody paper covering on the hospital bed with the efficiency of the most experienced nurse. “Sarah, have you stitched a wound before?”

  I blinked. “Um, actually, no.”

  Nicole smoothed the paper across the dirty bed and then turned to stare at me with wide eyes. “Really? Even after all this time?”

  I felt myself blushing, which was weird. But damn, she was looking at me like I’d sprouted a second head.

  “You guys are lucky,” Nicole muttered as she patted the semiclean bed. “Come on up, Mr. David, and I’ll do it. I’ve done it a few times before.” As she spoke, she motioned to a scar on her arm. “See, it’s not even that bad looking. I don’t completely suck at it.”

  I pursed my lips. It was totally petty but it kind of annoyed me that Nicole could help David in a way that I couldn’t. And that she had a cool scar she had apparently treated herself. That was badass and suddenly I felt like Avril Lavigne in all her fakeitude standing next to a real punk rocker.

  Dave had no hesitation, though. He was up on the table before Nicole had even finished her request. I held the flashlight in silence (trying not to seethe since she was saving my husband’s life) as Nicole cleaned the wound with some disinfectant pads she’d found in a drawer and then threaded a needle and started the stitching.

  I’ve seen people get their heads blown off. Correction: I’ve blown their heads off. I’ve kicked aside severed limbs like they were pebbles. I’ve stepped over rotting bodies.

  And yet the view of the needle going into Dave’s flesh was enough to make me a little queasy. I guess I hadn’t gotten over my needle thing after all.

  “You okay?” he asked, his voice almost cheerful.

  I glared at him, but before I could respond, there was a sound in the distance, down the hall deeper into the hospital itself. All three of us froze, not even breathing as we listened for the sound again.

  It came after a moment, the bang and crash of something being moved or metal cabinets being thrown open. Whatever it was, it was loud.

  “Could be rats,” Nicole said under her breath.

  I met Dave’s eyes and his lips were pursed thin and tight.

  “No,” I whispered. “I don’t think so. You keep stitching, I’ll go look.”

  Dave opened his mouth. “No way!” he insisted, almost too loudly before he checked his tone. “Come on, Sarah, that could be a zombie and you know it.”

  “I have the gun and I’ll scream like a banshee if it is,” I insisted. “Besides, if I stay here I’ll totally puke and you don’t want to clean that up, do you?”

  That shut his mouth. Dave doesn’t like puke. It makes him yak, too. He glared at me since he knew I was using his weakness against him. Whatever, all’s fair in love and zombies.

  “Keep stitching,” I ordered Nicole as I moved toward the door.

  She did just that, barely grunting as I made my way out into the hallway. It was so dark, I could hardly picture what it must have been like when there was light. I had a weird moment when I wondered if it had ever been lit. Like the hospital hadn’t existed before these dark days.

  To clear that bizarre thought, I shook my head and focused as I moved toward the sound, which continued at the end of the hall. I kept my flashlight low as I slipped along the wall, taking breaks in the closed doorways like I was on some cop show or something.

  The noise was getting louder as I drew closer and my heart leapt. Shit, it was still too hard to tell if I was dealing with one zombie or ten. And ten would be bad, by the way, in case you hadn’t figured it out. Even with two guns, we were at a serious disadvantage. Especially since I had no idea how many rounds Nicole had in her newly acquired suicide pistol.

  But then, through the eerie dark and quiet of the hallway I heard words. Real words in a raw, raspy British accent.

  “Bugger me!”

  Relief flowed through me. Zombies don’t talk. They especially don’t talk in accents (though an Aussie zombie might be fun). They certainly didn’t say “bugger,” which had always been one of my favorite swears from across the “pond.”

  But as relieved as I was, I couldn’t let my guard down. We’d just been reminded in the harshest way possible that human survivors did not equal friendly allies. If my Brit friend was as loopy as the campers (or God forbid, one of the campers) we’d just escaped, it could still be very ugly.

  The room he was in was a closet of some kind at the end of the hallway. I slipped closer and carefully lifted both my gun and my flashlight. As the light hit his back, I expected him to turn on me, but he didn’t. He just kept slamming doors open and closed and dragging boxes off the shelves like a wild man.

  “Shit, fuck, bother!” he burst out, running both hands through wild, shoulder-length brown hair.

  “Hey!” I snapped.

  My voice startled him and he spun on me. The light hit his face and I saw a brief glimpse of pale skin, wide eyes, and a heavy shadow of beard on his chin.

  “ ’ello,” he said, calm as if we’d just bumped into each other in a mall. “Wish you’d put that light out of my face. It’s a bit bright.”

  “If you make a move, I will shoot you,” I promised as I very slowly did as he asked.

  “All right, all right,” he said, blinking as the light moved from his eyes. “You don’t have to freak out, little bird.”

  I scrunched my brow as I got a fuller picture of the closet. It was a medicine closet apparently and the boxes he’d been throwing around were empty but had once held painkillers, antiseptics, and blood thinners. There were pill packets all over the floor, some open, some shut, and the half-drawn drawers contained more of the same.

  There was also a pistol on one of the shelves, but the Brit made no move to grab it. In fact, he didn’t even look at it.

  “What you doin’ here?” he asked me as he reached into his pocket.

  I braced myself in a wider stance and raised my gun level with his face as I prepped for a weapon to come out of that pocket.

  “Hey!” I snapped.

  “Don’t worry, just getting a ciggy,” he said, holding up a cigarette with a curious nonchalance. “Want one?”

  “No.” I bit out. I had quit smoking the year before, though I seriously wanted one now.

  It had been a long fucking day. A visit to Marlboro Country sounded like heaven at present.

  “Sarah?” came Nicole’s voice from down the hall. “You okay?”

  I kept my gun trained on the Brit. “Yeah. I found someone down here.”

  “Zombie?” Dave’s voice replied, thick with worry as it scuttled closer. In my mind, I could almost see him racing toward me, my knight in shining armor.

  “Not a bloody zombie,” the Brit answered loudly enough that his voic
e would carry to my companions.

  The scuttling stopped abruptly.

  “Look, I’m going to lower my weapon,” I said softly. “But if you move for that pistol on the shelf, I will kill you without hesitation.”

  The Brit blinked and his gaze moved over to the shelf. With a nervous, high-pitched laugh he said, “Forgot I had that. Damn.”

  Both my eyebrows went up as I slowly lowered my own gun. How could you forget your gun, especially in these times? Of course the closer I looked to this guy, the more I was starting to realize he might not even remember his own name.

  His pupils were dilated and his skin was pasty and sticky. He was on… something. I probably didn’t want to know what considering how many choices he must have had in the hospital. I mean, despite the fact that he hadn’t been able to score in the closet we now stood in didn’t mean he didn’t have some luck elsewhere.

  Suddenly Dave was at my side with the pistol Nicole had taken from the corpses leveled at our new friend.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked in the low, dangerous tone he had somewhere perfected over the months of badassery. Beyond hot, I admit it.

  The Brit leaned back against the closest shelf and gave Dave a bored and cocky look. Apparently he was not as impressed by my husband’s tone as I was.

  “Who am I? You can’t mean that. Who the hell are you?” he laughed. “Have you been living in a hole for the last few years?”

  Dave wrinkled his brow and I lifted the flashlight to examine our new friend’s face a bit closer. Apparently we were supposed to know him, though I have no idea how. There weren’t many survivors left, sure, but we didn’t exactly have a census or something.

  Yet.

  But we didn’t have to wonder long. Nicole solved the puzzle pretty quickly.

  “Colin McCray?” She stepped around David and stared at the Brit with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Is that really you?”

  “Now there’s a bird who knows where it’s at,” the Brit, apparently Colin McCray, grinned. “At your service, love.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively. “In more ways than one, if you know what I mean.”