Your history strengthens your future. Remember that time when you killed that zombie…?
One thing about a zombie apocalypse, dawn comes at the same time as it did before. And our hospital room had no shades; they’d been ripped off during the attack, as evidenced by the bloody fingerprints all over what was left of the blind cord and the windows, so when the sun rose, it flooded right into our faces and woke us up better than any alarm clock.
Well, it woke me up. When I opened my eyes, I found Dave lying on his side staring at me, and he looked like he’d been lucid for a while.
Weird, he’d never been a morning person before. Playing video games until three A.M. did that to you, I guess.
“Hey, sunshine,” he said with a grin.
He could grin. He had no idea of all the shit going down with Nicole. But we weren’t going to be able to avoid that subject, not anymore.
“You talking to me or that horrible orb in the sky?” I grunted as I rubbed mucky sleep from my bleary eyes.
Yeah, also I’m not much of a morning person. Especially when I’ve been tossing and turning all night freaking out while my husband slept peacefully beside me. Dumb jerk and his blissful ignorance and weird zombie sleep.
“You, of course,” he said and bent his head to kiss me.
I’ll admit, when we parted, I was waaaay less pissy. I was even able to smile at him. And then I remembered our sticky little situation and pushed into a sitting position.
“Dave, we have to talk,” I started.
His smile fell and he let out a heavy sigh. “Oh, no. You’re leaving me for some football star, aren’t you? I knew this day would come eventually. I hope he’s at least on a good team. Are there any good teams left or are they all zombies now? Zombie football, there’s a new sport…”
I slugged him in the arm mostly to shut him up. “Dude, seriously, not the time for jokes.”
“There’s always room for jokes.” He laughed. “And Jell-o. Mmmm, Jell-o.”
I glared at him, partly because he wasn’t being serious and partly because he knew I liked Jell-o and when he mentioned it, I missed it. Add that to the weird list of foods I missed in the apocalypse.
“David—” I started, determined to get this conversation started whether he wanted to goof around or not.
But I wasn’t able to finish because at that same moment there was a knock on the door and Nicole’s voice called out from the hall.
“Ready or not, we’re coming in. Hope you’re decent!”
McCray’s British accent, heavy with annoyance and sleep piped in, “I don’t!”
Then the door swung open and the two of them walked inside. Nicole was pulled together. She had fixed her hair and even put on some make-up, though where she’d gotten it from I have no idea, and perhaps I didn’t want to know since it probably involved searching dead bodies. Ew, dead-lady lipstick is not my thing.
McCray was the polar opposite. He looked like someone had hit him in the face with a frying pan. Repeatedly. Dark circles rimmed his dilated eyes and his skin was sallow and clammy. His shaggy hair stuck up at weird wavy angles and his scruffy beard needed trimming big time.
“Shit man, you look like hell,” Dave said, cheerful as he swung out of the bed.
“It’s bloody nighttime, mate,” McCray moaned. “I should be fucking or asleep.”
“Or fucking asleep,” Dave laughed.
Nicole rolled her eyes at the fallen rocker. “It’s dawn, jackass. A perfectly reasonable time to start the day in a goddamn zombie apocalypse. And if you weren’t still so strung out from whatever it was you were snorting last night, you’d be fine.”
McCray glared at her, his face long like a petulant child who had his toy taken away, but said nothing else. It surprised me, to be honest. The guy didn’t seem like the type who was ever short on words.
Dave shook his head and looked around for his bloody shirt, which I’d draped across a chair in the room the night before. Now it was dry but stiff and smelly from the blood still slashed across it. Not attractive to wear, I promise you.
Before he could attempt it, Nicole held out another one. “Here, found this in a room.”
I pursed my lips. Nicole saves the day again. Yip. Ee. And yet Dave smiled his thanks before he carefully lifted his arms and tugged the shirt over his head. I brushed off my jealousy (yes, I admit, I was still jealous of the girl) and Nicole and I watched him with equal intensity. I mean, with stitches in his shoulder, that act should have made him wince.
It didn’t, and from her pinched expression, it appeared that Nicole noticed his lack of pain as much as I did.
I frowned. I had to talk to Dave about this and soon. He seemed oblivious to her suspicions, and that could prove as dangerous to us as the drooling monsters outside the hospital. And probably inside the hospital, if you wanted to be honest about it.
But there was no way we could have any kind of open forum on the subject with Nicole interrupting every ten minutes and watching my hubby like a hawk. Or a zombie. Or a hawk zombie. Actually that was a good name for a band, but I digress. As usual.
“Look,” I said. “I think we need to do an area search for supplies. We need guns, or at least ammo for the few weapons we already have.”
Dave nodded. “Yeah, and we need more food and gas for that monster of a truck.”
Nicole stared at us evenly. “Good idea. So I guess we’ll be spending another night here in the Hospital of Horrors.”
I shook my head. I wanted time alone with Dave, not to keep living out my nightmares by spending another evening in the gorefest of a hospital. All we had to add were scary clowns and I’d be pretty much certifiable.
“I have no intention of staying here,” I said with a shudder. “And we won’t have to if we split up to do our search. In teams of two we’ll cover twice the ground and could be on the road by noon if we work hard.”
“I shouldn’t even be up at noon,” McCray whined. “You people are bloody barbarians.”
I ignored him. I needed to get this done and his irritating interruptions weren’t helping.
“Why don’t you take McCray and search here in the hospital since he has more knowledge of the building?” I suggested. “And Dave and I will do the surrounding area.”
Nicole’s eyes went wide and she moved toward me. Lowering her voice, she hissed, “You are not leaving me alone with that asshole. I’ll go with Dave.”
I shook my head. “No!” I snapped, far louder than I’d meant to. Then I stepped back and slipped my hand into David’s. “We go together.”
He smiled down at me. “Sounds like a plan to me. Are you okay with staying with Nicole, McCray?”
The rocker had apparently zoned out because he was staring at the pattern of linoleum on the floor like it could tell the future or something. But when Dave said his name, he lifted his head with a start.
“What?” he bellowed. “Yeah, one bird or another, makes no difference to me.”
Nicole glared at us, then at him. She was outnumbered and she knew it.
“Charming,” she growled. “Fine. We’ll meet back here in two hours and compare what we’ve found.”
With that, she grabbed McCray by the collar and hauled him out the door. There was no denying how pissed off she was. On one hand, I couldn’t blame her. If our positions were reversed, I would have wanted some one-on-one question time with the half-zombie guy, too.
But our positions weren’t reversed. Instead, I was married to Mr. Zombie Properties and I wasn’t about to let anyone, especially some skinny little reporter, hurt him.
I tossed on the clothes I’d worn the day before, though I made a major mental note to grab some new ones the first chance I had. Running, fighting, and nearly dying sort of gave clothing an… odor, let’s call it. Eau D’Terror by Estee Lauder would maybe be the way I’d market it, though I doubt anyone would want to wear it. I certainly didn’t, though I had little choice in the matter.
“Okay,” I said as
I tugged my tangled hair into a scrunchie in my pocket. “Ready to do this?”
Dave waggled his eyebrows at me. “Sure you don’t want to just get back into bed and tell them we couldn’t find anything?”
I stared at him. “Not that I don’t appreciate the horniness, but seriously? Um, death, destruction, zombies, no guns… oh and our little friend suspects that maybe you got bitten by a zombie. Just FYI.”
Dave stared at me and the eyebrow waggling came to a sudden halt. “What?”
“You heard me.” I folded my arms.
His eyes went wide. “Okay, which little friend. I’m guessing McCray wouldn’t notice if a zombie was biting him, so I’m assuming you mean Nicole?”
“Ding, ding, ding!” I said with sarcasm dripping from every syllable. “Give the man a cigar.”
He smiled, but only slightly. “Do you have any cigars? I bet they’d be worth bank in the camps right now.”
I rolled my eyes. “Come on,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s start looking for supplies. We can talk Nicole and obtaining tobacco while we search.”
He didn’t argue, just followed me into the hospital corridor. I pulled the gun from my waistband as we entered the hallway, though I had only a couple of bullets left. We were pretty much screwed if anyone was around looking for trouble… or brains. Or both.
But the corridor was clear, aside from, you know, the rotting dead bodies. And within a few minutes, Dave had pried open the emergency doors and we were back outside in the cool morning air.
I shivered as I rubbed my arms absently. “Still need a jacket.”
“Noted,” he said as he took a side-glance at the truck we’d parked at the entrance the night before. “That thing really is a gas guzzler.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we’ll probably need to switch off at some point. But for now it’s what we have. Oh, my life for a hybrid. Or a solar-generated car would be even better.”
He laughed as we crossed the parking lot, still half filled with rusting cars and sludgy pools of goo. If push came to shove, we’d search the vehicles, but that kind of thing rarely went well. Cars = smelly bodies, rotting crap, and often zombies.
For now we just kept going toward the neighborhood we could both see in the distance.
“Maybe we can work on that technology when we get over this zombie thing,” he suggested.
“Oh yeah, we’ll just cure zombie-ism and then get to work on the energy crisis.”
I rolled my eyes, even though I found myself reaching up for the vial around my neck. Still there.
“Look alive,” Dave said as we reached the edge of the neighborhood behind the hospital. “Or look for dead, I guess is better.”
I did as he suggested. The area was clearly middle class, with neat rows of houses before us. We were entering from the back, so all I could see were dirty swimming pools and knee-high grass, but it was clear that these homes had once been the very nice residences of proud inhabitants.
Now… not so much.
“Which one?” I whispered.
Dave looked up and down the row. “If only we had a crystal ball to see which one of these families had weapons and dry goods.”
“Maybe we can invent that after the zombie cure thing and the car thing,” I snorted. “Look, that one there has a swimming pool and right next to it are some fake plastic deer. Want to try that one?”
Dave gave a shudder as he looked where I was indicating. The lawn ornaments had faded with the weather, but they were definitely plastic deer.
“Creepy, so why not?” he muttered as we moved that way.
“Be careful of the grass,” I whispered. “Good zombie cover, especially for the legless ones.”
Dave nodded. Since he didn’t yet have a weapon, he kept close to me as we made our way to the edge of the lawn. We needed to solve that problem pretty quickly, though. One gun and two people generally equaled one zombie snack and one crying survivor.
We both scanned the area and finally he waved at the perimeter of the house.
“Shovel,” he whispered. “That will suffice as a weapon for me, at least until we find something more deadly. Not that I don’t trust your ample shooting skills, my dear.”
“Thanks, but I totally understood,” I whispered as we entered the grass. “Besides, I don’t want to have to cover your cute ass anyway.”
He stifled a laugh and kept right on my heels. I kicked in front of me as I entered what had once been a lawn but was now closer to a jungle. I had to try to clear out some kind of path through the dense growth as we made our way slowly but surely to the house. Somehow we made it, though, all in one piece and with no zombies in sight.
So far.
Dave swept up the shovel as we got to the cracked patio pad. There was a rusty barbecue on one side and some rotted furniture on the other. Since half the chairs were covered with sludge, I was guessing survivors were out the question.
We both stared at the sliding glass doors. Normally glass windows in shops and glass sliding doors were the first to go, either broken by rabid zombies trying to reach their prey like they were shopping in the supermarket freezer section or by survivors trying to get away (and basically dooming themselves by leaving an opening for the zombies). By some miracle, though, these windows were still intact.
Still, the glass was covered with bloody handprints.
“Are those inside or outside?” Dave whispered.
I stared at the glass. We needed to know the answer to his question, but I really didn’t want to touch it.
“Come on, Sarah,” he whispered behind me.
I squirmed but I reached out to touch the glass. Of course, goo came out over my palm when I pulled it back. Gross. I fucking hated goo. Still. Forever.
“Looks like both inside and out,” I sighed as I looked closer at the smeared glass in the dim morning sunshine. “Want to try a different house?”
He shrugged. “I would guess pretty much anyplace in this neighborhood is going to have zombie friends waiting for us. Might as well be here as anywhere else.”
“Good point.” I wiped my hand on my already dirty shirt and once again swore to find both Handi Wipes and a new outfit ASAP. Have I mentioned the dislike of the goo? Yeah, it’s a failing in a zombie apocalypse. I’m aware of that. But it’s not exactly like you can find a good therapist out here. We’d killed our last one so I’m sure we were on a list somewhere anyway.
Dave lifted the shovel and reared back. I grabbed for his elbow.
“Hey, hey cowboy, whatcha doin’ there?”
He stared at me, shovel still poised. “Um, breaking and then entering.”
I shook my head. “After all this time, haven’t we learned to try the door first? Might as well not bring zombies running like crazy if we don’t have to.”
Dave rolled his eyes, but he lowered the shovel slowly. “Fine. You never let me have any fun.”
“I know,” I said as I reached for the gooey door handle, “I’m mean that way.”
With a deep breath, I tugged the handle; to my great surprise, the door slid open on its rusty tracks with only a slight extra tug thanks to the sludge that had molded it shut.
“Huh,” I said. “Did not think that would work, to be honest.”
“Me neither,” Dave said as I stepped over the threshold and entered the dark house. “Be careful, please. Unlocked doors are never a good thing.”
“Neither are locked doors,” I whispered. “We’re in a zombie apocalypse.”
Thanks to the colder weather, inside the house was cool, but the air was still musty and close. There was a faint odor of rotting food and death all around, a wonderful combination that seemed to be the air freshener of choice now. Febreeze, people. It’s never the wrong choice and there is plenty of it now that the world has ended.
“Dead dog,” Dave said, his voice flat as he looked into the living room area.
“Eaten or just dead?” I muttered without looking. Did not want to see dead dog, thanks. Actually, I was
pretty topped out on all dead things.
“Looks just dead,” he said.
We crept into the dining area and through to the kitchen. It was quiet and still, but there was not going to be any guard-letting-down. The second you do that, the zombies come. Might as well be superstitious about it and maybe avoid them all together.
“Oh, reusable bags,” Dave whistled as he shifted his shovel into one hand and grabbed a couple of them with the other. They were from a local grocery chain and had flowers on them that spelled out “Love Our Mother.”
“Great, so it’s a green family of zombies. At least they were worried about the earth,” I said as I took the bag he held out to me. “Want to start with those cabinets and I’ll work on these?”
He nodded and took one side of the kitchen, opening cabinets and clearing out any food we could use, along with big knives and any medication and first-aid materials. I did the same, but the pickings were pretty damn slim.
“I’m guessing someone hid out here after the outbreak,” Dave said as he turned away from the last cabinet on his side of the kitchen.
“Yeah, why?” I asked, absent as I threw open each drawer in the hopes I’d find something more useful than faded Christmas hand towels and aluminum foil.
“Well, all that’s left in the cabinets is diet food,” he said.
I turned to find him holding up some bars with “Lose Weight Fast” scrawled across them in bold red letters. They had been stacked next to some empty bags of cheese poofs and candy wrappers. I wrinkled my nose.
“Looks like they went off their diet in the end.” I sighed as I closed the last drawer and looked in my bag. I’d managed to get some batteries and aloe, but that was about it.
“Well, it’s the end of the world,” Dave said with a shrug. “Why not let yourself go?”
I frowned as he tossed the diet bars into his bag. “You’re taking those?”
He nodded. “They’re mostly carbs. Eat enough of them and you’ll still live.”
“Is that really living?” I muttered as I turned to leave the kitchen. I hadn’t made it two steps, though, when a movement from the laundry room made me stop.
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