Married with Zombies: Book 1 of Living with the Dead

by Jesse Petersen

  “Sarah,” he said, this time louder.

  I just couldn’t stop looking at her, almost mesmerized by the way she stared at me with those weird eyes. Then she smiled, blood dripping from her lips.

  “Sarah!” Dave yelled my name this time and I flinched as his voice echoed in my ears.

  “What?” I screamed.

  “Move!” he shouted, pushing me aside just as Dr. Kelly made a guttural cry and staggered toward me with remarkable speed for a woman in four inch peep-toe heels.

  I fell across one of the couches in the room and flipped around just in time to see Dr. Kelly slam into David with her full body weight. He staggered into the hallway, holding her by the shoulders in an attempt to keep her off of him.

  She swung her arms wildly, her perfectly manicured, pink nails slashing and her bloody mouth biting and twisting as she made every effort to get closer to him. The black bile substance leaked from her lips as she hollered and spit, spraying the stuff across her chest and onto David’s previously white T-shirt.

  “David!” I screamed, snapping out of my stunned disbelief as I watched my husband of five years fight for his life against what appeared to be a rabid marriage counselor.

  “Sarah, a little help!” he grunted, pushing back against her with all his might.

  And Dave isn’t a tiny guy, either. He’s just about six feet and playing video games all day instead of working has given him a bit of a tummy. The fact that he had to work so hard against five foot two and maybe a hundred pounds was terrifying.

  I stared around me, looking for something to hit her with, but the couches in the room were too big for me to lift and her chair was huge.

  “I’m looking!” I cried as I moved to her desk. Her laptop was ultra-light, her books mainly trade-sized paperbacks with no sharp edges.

  “Fuck, she’s strong,” David gurgled from the hallway.

  “She does Pilates, I think,” I said as I ripped a desk drawer open.

  Inside, a letter opener glittered up at me. I rolled my eyes as I realized the handle was printed with the words, “Dr. Erica Kelly, MS Psychotherapy, Marriage and Family Counseling.”

  I had to give it to the woman, she knew how to advertise.

  I grabbed for it and launched myself over the desk. Screaming like I was in a scene from Braveheart, I ran for her and thrust the letter opener deep into her back. It went in way easier than I expected and immediately black shit began to ooze out around the wound. With a yelp of disgust and surprise, I let go and backed up.

  Dr. Kelly let out a growling cry and released David, only to turn toward me. The letter opener stuck out of her back like the hilt of a knife, its happy gold lettering glinting in the overhead fluorescent lighting (so much for Zen). As I realized she intended to attack me next, I reached for the opener, but she was already on me.

  We fell backward, sprawling across the floor together. I pressed my hands against her shoulders just as David had, but she leaned into me with all her weight. It was like dead weight, too, extra heavy, and I wasn’t nearly as strong as David. Her snapping jaws lowered, biting, always biting as she got closer and closer.

  “David!” I grunted.

  “I know,” he yelled as he grabbed for the doctor’s hair and pulled with all his might.

  A chunk of blond softness yanked free, along with a bit of rotting scalp. David staggered back in surprise that her hair offered no resistance and hit the wall behind him, but Dr. Kelly didn’t even seem to register what had happened beyond an annoyed grunt followed by more snapping jaws that I barely dodged by turning my head from side to side.

  “Her shoe, David!” I cried. “Use her stiletto!”

  As I somehow evaded more bites, I tried to look around Dr. Kelly toward David. He grabbed for one of her flailing feet and tore her shoe off. In that supremely crazy moment, I noticed her pedicure matched her fingernails. I guess that’s what my money went to.

  Maintenance.

  But I quickly forgot that when Dave came down next to us on his knees, raised the stiletto over his head, and slammed it down.

  The heel entered Dr. Kelly’s skull with a sickening crunch and then a wet sound I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard. David pulled it free and little chunks of hair, scalp, and what I realized were brains flicked down on my chest and hands. I arched my back and turned my head to keep my face free of the disgusting rain.

  He slammed the shoe down again, then a third time. He just kept swinging, pummeling our therapist until she made one last whining grunt and collapsed on top of me.

  For a moment, actually probably a lot longer than a moment, we both were silent and still. He stared at Dr. Kelly, I stared at the bloody shoe in his hand. Then I squirmed beneath the weight of her now lifeless body.

  “Get her off, David, please get her off!” I whispered.

  With a grunt, he pushed her and she flipped away from me. As she flopped onto her back I heard the snap as the letter opener handle broke off against the floor.

  I was on my feet instantly, brushing at my once favorite work blouse like somehow I could wipe away what had just happened. I’d gotten the shirt on a deep clearance at Nordstrom, so it was pretty and well-made. I always got compliments on it at the office.

  But now it was ruined. The white was stained with blood, brain matter, and that black sticky substance that had drained from Dr. Kelly’s mouth as she tried to eat me.

  My stomach finally won in the war I’d been waging with it and I turned my head and vomited on the very couch where Dave and I had tried, rather unsuccessfully thus far, to save our marriage. I leaned over the arm for a long time, fighting dry heaves as I stared at my puke as it was slowly absorbed by the cushion.

  Weird. The color of the two was almost the same, a gross, thin yellow.

  Finally I straightened up and turned toward Dave. I found him staring down at what was left of the Wonderful Wilsons, half-eaten on the floor. Dr. Kelly’s stiletto was still dangling from his bloody hand.

  As I looked at him, my shock wore off enough that I could finally speak.

  “Fuck me, David! Dr. Kelly just tried to eat us! Did that really happen? What the hell?” I shouted, my voice shaking, my hands shaking, my entire being shaking as hard as I had ever shaken before.

  He turned toward me, the shoe in his hand slipping free and clattering against the floor. It left behind a bloody shoe print on the pale carpet.

  “I have no idea what that was,” he said as he pulled his stare away from the dead bodies and back toward me. “She must have gone totally crazy. Like Jeffrey Dahmer-style or something.”

  “We checked her references, right?” I asked, looking down at Dr. Kelly. Her head was half caved in on the floor in front of us.

  “Are you asking if I knew she was a cannibal psychopath, Sarah, but got lazy and just set up appointments with her for six Goddamn months anyway?”

  Dave wiped his hands on his shirt as he spoke, but it did no good. The bright red blood only smeared on his skin and absorbed into the already messy cotton, turning the vintage t-shirt a weird, splotchy pink.

  I stared at him and for the first time I noticed he was shaking as hard as I was.

  “I don’t know what I’m asking,” I said, softening my tone as best I could. “I’m just trying to figure out what the hell happened. And what to do next.”

  He shook his head. “We call 911, that’s what we do next. Though I don’t know how the hell we’re going to explain this to any normal person in the fucking universe. We just have to be honest. I mean, it was self-defense, right?”

  I looked at him and drew back in shock. Oh hell, I hadn’t even thought of that. What if the cops didn’t believe us and we ended up in jail for murder?

  “It was self-defense,” I said with more decisiveness than I felt. After all, we’d never killed anyone before. “We’ll just tell the truth and they’ll have to see we had no choice but to fight her off.”

  I looked at all the bodies scattered about the room. I just hoped
they wouldn’t think we’d taken out the Wilsons, too. What was the threshold of kills to be classified as serial killers and mass murderers? I had seen it once on TV, but couldn’t remember.

  “They’ll have to understand we had to do it,” I whispered.

  Dave reached for Dr. Kelly’s office phone, which had somehow remained undisturbed on her desk despite the struggle, but just as his fingers closed around the receiver, the door to the adjoining bathroom that was in the corner of the room flew open.

  Standing in the doorway, her breathing loud and wet through her bloodied nose and mouth, stood Receptionist Candy. She was dressed in a pink wrap dress that now gaped in the front, revealing an ample portion of what was apparently a fake tit. I knew it was fake because saline leaked from the huge gash that had been cut across the perky skin. The ragged edges, rimmed with black, told me the story before she even moved forward in a menacing fashion that almost perfectly matched Dr. Kelly’s odd, jerking movements from earlier.

  “Holy fuck!” David cried as he backed away, leaving the phone receiver to dangle from the desk. The sound of the dial tone pierced the air around us with a constant beep, beep, beep that was now our horror movie soundtrack. At least it was better than Muzak Miley.

  Candy stumbled into the room, her gray mouth working and spewing black sludge just like Dr. Kelly’s had. Blood stained her chin, her hands, even her clawing fake fingernails as she moved toward us.

  “What the hell?” I screamed as I grabbed for Dave’s shoulder.

  More moans echoed to our right and both of us swung our gazes toward the sound.

  The Wonderful Wilsons were starting to get up, first Mrs. Wilson with her slashed, chewed throat that dripped blood and then Mr. Wilson, who didn’t seem to notice that Dr. Kelly had all but gnawed off his right arm, which now dangled by just a little bit of sinew and shattered bone.

  “Run, Sarah,” David said as he grabbed my hand and made for the door. “Fucking run!”

  Put the small stuff into perspective. It’s better to be wrong and alive than right but eating brains.

  We sat in the car with the doors locked, the panting noise of our matching breathing the only sound either of us made for a long time.

  “We should turn on the car so we can listen to the radio and see if there are any bulletins,” David said beside me. “I’m starting to think this might not be an isolated incident.”

  I nodded but when I lifted the keys to the ignition I couldn’t fit them in the hole because I was shaking so hard. I tried once, twice, and finally David caught my fingers and helped me guide the keys into place.

  “Thanks,” I whispered without looking at him as I turned my wrist and the car roared to life.

  He reached out to turn on the stereo and we were greeted by the sounds of the CD in the player. My annoyance, forgotten for a while, returned tenfold.

  “Jesus David, fucking Whitesnake,” I snapped as I turned in my seat to glare at him. “Who listens to that eighties-butt-rock shit anymore, let alone buys it in CD format? You realize you actually had to go out into the world and spend money on this, right?”

  “I like Whitesnake,” he said, and his angry expression probably matched my own pretty fucking well. “It’s not like I kept my taste in music a secret from you when we got married. It’s not like —”

  “Oh no, you’re right! You didn’t have any secrets when we got married, did you? You were totally honest and look how well it’s worked out.” I interrupted with a wave of my hands. “I mean you told me you wanted to work in the finance industry… oh wait, you bailed on that, didn’t you? You told me I could go back to school once you finished your MBA, but no you decided against that, too —”

  “I’m not doing this right now. Put the car in drive,” he snapped.

  His tone pissed me off as much as the things I was saying to him did. I glared. “No. I think it’s about fucking time we take Dr. Kelly’s advice and talk this out.”

  “Dr. Kelly is dead! Her advice means shit now!” he shouted as he folded his arms.

  “Just because she tried to eat us doesn’t mean she was wrong,” I countered, even though I’d really been fighting her advice for months now… not that I was going to admit that to him or anything. “I mean, she made some very good points over the past few months about the —”

  He looked past me and his eyes widened. “Drive, Sarah! Drive!!”

  At first I figured he was just making that face to distract me from the argument because Dave isn’t about confrontation, but I turned to look over my shoulder anyway, if only to call his bluff.

  Only for once it wasn’t a bluff. Rushing through the garage toward our car was the missing security guard, Mack. At first I was relieved. I was pretty sure he had a taser, which was better than anything Dave and I were packing (I think I had some gum, he might have had a pocketknife, but I wasn’t sure). We could just tell Mack what had happened, he could phone it in, we’d fill out some paperwork, and it would be fine.

  Except the closer he got, the more I noticed he was lurching like something out of the “Thriller” video. His gray skin and bloody face were enough to show he had been stricken by whatever insanity had turned Dr. Kelly into a ravenous cannibal and her secretary and the Wonderful Wilsons into moaning monsters.

  “Shit,” I muttered as I threw the car into reverse and pressed the pedal to the floor.

  As the vehicle squealed backward, Mack seemed to recognize, even in his disturbed state, that he was losing a potential meal. He sprinted forward in that awful heaving way and lunged at the car.

  I flinched as he grabbed the edge where the windshield met the hood and clung there, his gnashing teeth snapping against the glass and then lower, where he began to gnaw the hard metal of the hood. Even when a few of them snapped off, leaving bloody shards in his grey gums, he continued chewing, like he wanted to eat the car… or eat through it to get to us.

  “Go!” Dave cried, snapping me out of my horrified interest in Mack’s dental health.

  Somehow I managed to slam the car into drive and take off in a cloud of burning rubber toward the exit.

  Mack was a big guy and it seemed like his weight was even more offset than it had been when he was normal, so as I careened around a corner and sped toward the gate to the outside streets, he slid.

  His face was awful as it hit the front windshield, a twisted, pained mass of something inhuman. And yet I felt very little sympathy as I burst through the yellow gate arm and sent him flying off somewhere into the distance.

  Slamming onto the city streets, both David and I sucked in deep breaths of relief. He pushed a button and got the stereo off the CD and back to the FM station. Just as we’d hoped, the emergency three-beep system was in effect, something instituted after 9-11 to give out info in an emergency.

  Beep, beep, beep, then a pause before the facts we so desperately needed piped through the crappy speakers.

  “Good afternoon,” came a flat, female voice that sounded like it had been fed plenty of Prozac. “Your attention, please. There has been a chemical or biological emergency. Please stay in your homes with the doors and windows locked until further instructions become available. Only call 911 in a true emergency.”

  We held our collective breath but instead of elaborating, the system clicked back into three beeps and then the same message repeated. David hit the stereo power button hard enough that it snapped off and rolled under my seat. At least the annoying repetition ended.

  “Great. One more thing broken,” I muttered. He opened his mouth to argue but I shook my head. “It’s the least of our problems.”

  “They said biological or chemical,” he said as he rested his head back against the car seat and stared at nothing in particular. “I hope whatever’s causing this isn’t floating around in the air.”

  I nodded but didn’t answer because the thought of what David said made my skin crawl and my blood grow cold. Watching someone we knew turn into a raving lunatic willing to kill and eat another p
erson was bad enough, but what would it be like to know it was happening to you?

  “Okay, we need a game plan,” I said as I moved up the freeway ramp going north toward our apartment. “What do we do now?”

  David stared at the stereo display, dark now after his tantrum. “We go home.”

  I glanced at him, able to do it while driving because for the first time in five years there wasn’t any traffic to pay attention to during my merge.

  “Go home?”

  He nodded as he stared past me toward the cityscape, rising up beautifully with the sparkling waters of the Puget Sound behind it. It looked so peaceful. What a lie.

  “That’s what they say to do and I think it’s our best option,” he said. His voice sounded like he was numb. I was, too. “Actually, I think that’s our only option for the moment.”

  I stared at him for a moment and then I nodded. “Okay, home it is.”

  We drove in silence, our normally forty-minute drive made short by the lack of people on the street. Okay, that wasn’t true. There were people on the street, but they were no longer driving or human. A few straggling… things like Dr. Kelly and Mack roamed the edge of the highway. Crashed cars littered the side of the street. In the median, we watched as two creatures gnawed on the legs of a highway patrol officer. Eventually David closed his eyes and I kept mine straight ahead on the road.

  We’d seen enough, I guess.

  Our apartment, just north of what they called the “U-District,” was shitty. The cost of living in Seattle is fucking ridiculous and since David hadn’t been working, at least in a traditional sense, we couldn’t really afford something better.

  Our neighborhood was dingy, old, and had its share of homeless druggies and girls who turned tricks in the alleys. But we did have the security of an underground garage, although after our last garage adventure… well, I don’t think either of us felt safe as I rolled the window down and reached out to enter the code that sprung the gate open.

  I snatched my hand back in and hit the window control in rapid succession so that it rolled up, then we moved into the gloomy garage. I parked in our assigned space and we glanced at each other before we each unlocked our doors and stepped out into the cool air of the underground facility.