EAT SLAY LOVE

by Jesse Petersen

  He shook his head. “Where do you think you’re going, anyway? You and reporter bitch and zombie boy.”

  I shrugged. “Midwest Wall.”

  He blinked. “You believe in that rot?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’d rather believe in the rot than not believe in anything. So we’re going. And you’re coming with us.”

  “No—” he started.

  “Hey,” I interrupted. “I’m not asking.”

  He looked over at me and for a long moment we held gazes. He looked like he wanted to answer; hell, he actually looked grateful on some fucked-up level. But before he could do anything, Dave and Nicole popped back through the window.

  “We’ve got a place picked out,” Nicole said as she pulled her gun from her waistband. “But it may not stay safe for long. So let’s get a move on.”

  She turned to Dave, who had moved to stand next to me. Then, to my absolute surprise, she handed over the pistol to him and all the slugs from her pockets.

  “Here. You need the guns to keep their attention,” she said softly. “We’ll go the shovel/machete/baseball-bat route. It’s quieter anyway.”

  Dave blinked and then took her gun. “Thanks,” he said softly.

  She backed away and worked on dragging poor McCray up from his seated position. Which left me and Dave to face each other.

  “I don’t want you to do this,” I whispered.

  He nodded. “I know. But it’s the only way off this roof.”

  I sighed. I knew that look in his eyes. The look that said he couldn’t be swayed. The one that said he was going to do what he was going to do and that was it. And we could argue about it and get all bitter before we split up for the first time in… weeks, or I could just give him my gun and a kiss and hope my fears were unfounded.

  I decided to go with the second one.

  Banish the doubt. You can totally walk through the zombies without dying!

  Nicole and I crouched on either side of the front door with McCray leaning against the wall behind her, checking his nails. The people who lived here had also barricaded this area, but we managed to yank the useless boards free in about five seconds and now we were ready to go out and face the world.

  Or something.

  Our eyes met across the foyer and we both lifted the weapons we’d found around the house.

  I’d gone with Dave’s abandoned shovel, partly for sentimental reasons, partly because shovels are good for so many kinds of zombie kills and even burying the bodies if you have the time (which you never do). Nicole had a rolling pin and also a butcher knife she had slung through a belt loop.

  Even McCray had gotten in on the action. He’d found a baseball bat (though the Brit insisted on calling it a cricket mallet for some reason), which he held in one fist even as he looked totally distracted from matters at hand. Seriously, he had the attention span of a gnat. I don’t think either Nicole or I had any illusion that we could depend on him if and when the going got zombie tough.

  “One,” Nicole said as she reached for the doorknob. “Two.”

  My heart started throbbing and I could hardly breathe. It was weird. I was accustomed to the zombies by now. I guess the thing I wasn’t used to was leaving Dave behind. The one time I’d done that before had not ended well.

  But there was no choice this time. Not if we wanted to survive.

  “Three,” we said together, then she opened the door.

  After all the build-up, the end result was pretty anticlimactic. The sunny fall day was pretty quiet, aside from the moans of the zombies we could hear echoing from the backyard and the occasional gunshot as Dave fired to take them down and draw them in. But in the front yard you might not have even known there was an outbreak. Well, except for the overgrown grass, sludgy sidewalk, and wrecked cars scattered up and down the street. And the bodies, of course. Headless dead who had apparently gone zombie and been slaughtered by the survivors and ones who had been so torn up in the attacks that they hadn’t reanimated at all.

  Nicole and I were equally jaded, though, so as we started out of the house, we just stepped over the detached arm still gripping a machete on the ground. I guess that hadn’t worked out for him. Or her. Too hard to tell when it was just a rotting arm.

  “Okay,” Nicole whispered. “There’s a church about five blocks up. It has a low roof we can wait on for Dave with the truck. We might even be able to see him when he makes a run for the hospital.”

  I nodded, even though I felt a little queasy when Nicole said “church.” We’d had some bad experiences with churches and zombies in the past. But that was where Dave was going to meet us and since we couldn’t exactly call him on a cell phone and change the location to someplace that didn’t make me break out in hives, it was too late to argue the point now.

  “Okay,” I simply agreed. “And Dave said he’d give us twenty minutes to get over there before he starts his, er, zombie walk.”

  Zombie walks. Those things had rocked before the apocalypse. Seattle had even broken a record for one, though I hadn’t been able to go since I had to work at my shitty job. Dave had stopped by, of course, and said it was flipping awesome. I had been so jealous at the time.

  And yet… here we were. The real thing was far less cool.

  “Hey,” Nicole said as we stepped out onto the sidewalk. She looked at me sideways. “He’s going to be okay, you know.”

  I stared at her. “Um, is this you trying to be all supportive and counseling and shit?”

  She shrugged. “I guess. You just looked worried.”

  I smiled slightly. This girl was going to make me like her despite myself. “Well, I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t think I’m going to be not worried until Dave pulls up with the truck and no zombie wounds.”

  “Um, speaking of zombie wounds,” McCray said, motioning with his baseball bat toward the corner of the street.

  A zombie stood next to a bus stop. The sign had been bent over in half, probably after being hit by a car months ago. It was rusted out, but you could still see the cheerful bus logo under the dried sludge and rust.

  The zombie was a man dressed in what seemed to be remnants of one of those “Mr. Clucker” fast-food chicken costumes. People used to wear them and stand out by the side of the road with the chicken head all smiling and stupid. It was supposed to make me want to eat chicken, I guess, but it always just made me want to smack whoever came up with the idea.

  There wasn’t a lot left of the costume after all these months. Most of the feathers had worn away, but the red, rubber cockscomb flopped sadly around his rotting, gray head.

  “Man, if it wasn’t bad enough that the poor sap had to wear that thing in life, he died in it, too,” I muttered.

  McCray stared, probably wondering if he was having another hallucination. “Damn, look at his chicken feet.”

  We all did. Part of the costume were a pair of ridiculous, clown-big, red chicken feet. Since they were made of rubber, they’d survived better than the rest of the get-up.

  “Yeah, that must have slowed him down,” Nicole sighed.

  I nodded slowly. “Poor guy. Never had a chance.”

  There was a moment of respectful silence. Okay, more like a second, and then Nicole said, “Okay, let’s kill the fucker, guys.”

  I nodded as I lifted up my shovel into death-grip mode. “Yeah, but quietly, please. Quietly, or else all of Dave’s distracting will be for nothing!”

  We tiptoed forward and then Nicole dropped down behind a big hedge that hadn’t been trimmed since hell came to town a few months before. I crouched beside her and we peeked around the bush.

  “Okay, we can wait him out,” I whispered. “See if he goes running next time Dave fires his gun.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, or we could—”

  She didn’t finish. She didn’t have a chance. Instead of waiting, McCray stepped out from behind the bushes and did a flat-footed, almost zombie-esque stride toward the corpse on the corner. The thing
noticed him when he was about five feet away and spun around. He had a broken arm that dangled at its side and occasionally a dirty feather would lightly drop from it and meander its way to the sidewalk like it was from the movie American Beauty or something.

  The zombie hissed a sound of hunger and some kind of blood lust.

  McCray didn’t even flinch. He swung his bat as the zombie launched toward him and the thing dropped on the sidewalk where our coked-up rock’n’roller, the guy who was impressed by heights and had never quite figured out what Dave and I were to each other, proceeded to pummel its head into oblivion. His shots were massive and precise and pretty soon there was another headless corpse with a bloodstain at its neck on the sidewalk.

  Nicole and I stared at McCray, then exchanged a quick glance. She looked as freaked out and impressed as I felt. Slowly, we got up and joined McCray where he waited for us at the corner. I stared, waiting for him to say something about his little “kill” moment. But he didn’t even seem to remember it.

  “This way, right?” he asked, motioning with his bloodstained bat toward the church in the distance.

  Nicole nodded wordlessly and we watched as he took off down the street, flicking shit off the end of his weapon and whistling one of his own number one tunes from the early nineties.

  “Um, I guess that’s how he survived this long,” I whispered. I was sort of afraid to say anything too loud.

  I mean, the guy had just beaten one corpse into submission without even batting an eye. I wouldn’t want to piss him off or anything.

  “Yeah, I guess we’ll have to tell Dave since he asked earlier,” Nicole whispered back.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’ll add it to the list of shit to talk to him about. If he makes it.”

  Nicole sent me a side-glance as we began walking again. “He’ll make it, Sarah.”

  I didn’t answer; it was too hard to say anything when it came to the subject of Dave’s survival. Instead I focused on what we had to do. That’s all I could do.

  McCray continued up the street and I could see that despite his occasional swaying step, he was actually paying attention to what was going on around him. Somewhere in that drug-addled brain, it turned out that our friend had a survival instinct and a killing frenzy.

  Both of which: very useful in a zombie outbreak.

  Behind us, we still heard Dave shooting and I breathed a sigh of relief every time I heard the crack of the rifle echo in the air. If he was still firing, that meant he hadn’t started his walkabout yet. The moment the shooting stopped, then I’d have to worry. And I would. Oh, I would.

  With most of the zombies distracted, it took us about ten minutes to creep our way to the church. It was an old Methodist establishment with a steeple but a new addition with a flat roof had been attached in the last few years.

  “How are we getting up there?” McCray asked as we stared at the husk of a building.

  The fire from the main area of the town hadn’t been the only one. This neighborhood had burned at some point, too, and the building looked pretty well gutted.

  I looked around. Since I hadn’t had a chance to look at the place when Nicole and Dave picked it, I had no idea. But Nicole didn’t seem worried. She pointed across the way.

  “See that rusted-out ambulance that’s right underneath the awning?”

  I looked. “The one on its side?”

  She nodded. “That’s the one. If we climb up there, we should be able to drag ass up on top of the roof. And we might even be able to see Dave run his way across the hospital parking lot.”

  I froze at the idea. Did I really want to see my husband make a mad dash through a hundred moaning zombies? Um, yeah. I totally did.

  “Let’s get to it, then,” I said as I hurried toward the ambulance. I climbed up and made a jump for the edge of the roof. McCray was right behind me and he gave me a shove that helped vault me up onto the flat surface. I popped up and offered a hand to Nicole. With McCray’s help, she soon joined me and somehow we managed to haul him up, too.

  I stared out toward the house we’d left behind. Nicole was right, I could see it through the trees. I couldn’t see the back roof where Dave was, but I could see part of the parking lot of the hospital beyond the neighborhood.

  “Shit, I wish I had a rifle scope,” I muttered as I squinted like somehow that would give me supersight or something.

  “Here,” Nicole said, and suddenly a pair of cheap binoculars were shoved under my nose.

  I stared at her as I took them. “Where the hell—?”

  She smiled. “I found them in the house and I figured we might need them for just this very thing.”

  Yeah, I was going to end up liking this girl despite myself.

  I lifted the binoculars and scanned the hospital lot. There was a tree in the way, but I had a partial view of the truck we’d driven in with, still sitting by the emergency room door less than a mile away.

  It might as well have been a hundred miles, though, since Dave had to walk through the zombies to get there.

  “Hey, I haven’t heard any rifle fire for a bit now,” McCray said.

  I froze as the image in my viewfinder began to shake. He was right. Dave hadn’t fired a shot for well over a minute. Which meant he was probably on his way down to see his zombie friends.

  “Fuck, there he is!” McCray said.

  I spun to look at him. He was standing on the edge of the roof pointing toward the hospital, but when I looked through the binoculars, I couldn’t see anything. I rushed to McCray’s side of the roof.

  “Where?”

  “There,” Nicole said as she lifted her damn camera to point it in the same direction McCray was facing.

  I might have taken the time to argue with her about filming, but since I still couldn’t see Dave, I didn’t.

  “Where?” I repeated and I couldn’t keep the desperation from my voice.

  McCray stepped back and then positioned me where he had been standing. He pointed again and there, even without the help of the binoculars, I could see Dave’s small figure in the distance, just leaving the yard and starting across the parking lot.

  And he was surrounded by zombies. I couldn’t hear them from so far away, of course, but I could certainly see the way they looked at Dave with that weird cocked head. I held my breath, ready for any one of them to suddenly pounce and rip my husband to shreds before he could even react.

  But like the zombies in the pool had the previous day, they just… ignored him. They looked, they smelled, and then they went back to milling aimlessly. Some even shambled after him, slower than him so that they formed a weird conga line in his wake. A conga line of death. Cha. Cha. Cha.

  “Shit, he’s really doing it,” Nicole whispered from behind me, though I didn’t think she was talking to me.

  What we were seeing was nothing short of a miracle. Even McCray was silent as we stared at Dave, leading his group of zombies, making his way in slow and steady fashion across the parking lot to the safety of the truck.

  “You weren’t kidding about a cure,” Nicole said, and this time she glanced at me.

  I lifted my hand without even thinking and covered the vial under my T-shirt to make sure it was still there. Inside was the thing that had done this to David. The thing that had saved his ass and was currently saving the rest of ours.

  Well, it would save our asses if he could get to the truck and if he could get the truck back to us without bringing the zombies to us and trapping us on a new roof.

  “Why did you touch your neck?” Nicole asked.

  I ignored her question even though my throat closed. I always touched the vial when I thought about the cure. It was like a Pavlov’s dogs kind of response now. Cure = check to see if still have cure.

  “No reason,” I lied.

  “You have something under your shirt,” Nicole pressed, tilting her head.

  I ignored her, still focusing on David. He was almost to the truck now and the zombies still followed him or s
hambled like a herd of cows in the parking lot.

  “Seriously, I thought it was a necklace, but you don’t seem like the jewelry type of girl,” Nicole said. “So what are you wearing?”

  “Yeah, lift up your shirt!” McCray encouraged.

  “Wait,” I whispered, watching as Dave opened the truck door. One of the zombies leaned in after him and my heart just about stopped.

  But he wasn’t trying to eat Dave, and when Dave pushed him, he staggered back and then turned to wander off and join the rest of the group. The truck rocked slightly as my husband started the engine. I breathed a big sigh of relief when he rolled through the parking lot and started to head in our direction. Relief that faded when Nicole snatched the binoculars away from me and stared at me evenly.

  “Seriously, Sarah. What are you wearing around your neck?” she snapped.

  Now I could have probably smacked her with the shovel. The problem was that I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t get in a couple of whacks with her rolling pin before I incapacitated her, and there was no telling what McCray would do if I started playing Whack-A-Bitch with Nicole’s head.

  Plus, I was totally willing to beat the shit out of a zombie or a cult leader;… anyone threatening me or Dave physically was fair game.

  But Nicole wasn’t really doing that. At least, not yet. And I was still sort of stuck on “Thou Shalt Not Kill” when it came to humans who had saved my ass and weren’t currently trying to eat it.

  “It’s the cure,” I whispered. “We managed to get a sample of it out of the lab down in Arizona. That’s why we’re trying to get to the Midwest Wall. What we did for Dave, we might be able to do for anyone bitten from now on. If we could get this thing into the right hands, it might even be a way to wipe out the zombies who are roaming around currently.”

  Nicole backed away from me, staring at me in total disbelief. I could hardly blame her. I mean, I was holding the future of the world on a chain around my neck. That was a pretty big deal.