Married with Zombies: Book 1 of Living with the Dead

by Jesse Petersen

  Dave stopped giving me the look and nodded somberly. “I get what you’re saying. It’s spreading fast.”

  “I’m saying that this city is a buffet,” I said as I got up and paced the small room. “If they don’t get it under control, there are going to be more zombies than people in a pretty damn short amount of time.”

  David’s focus shifted back to the television screen, where they were now showing footage taken from the ever-filming camera at the top of the tower in Red Square at the University of Washington. It was a steady shot, so it didn’t pan as lurching zombies moved in and out of frame below. Occasionally an uninfected person ran through the scene, but he or she was almost always chased by an undead bastard or twenty.

  “If we aren’t outnumbered already,” Dave whispered with a shiver. “Maybe staying here isn’t such a hot idea.”

  I nodded. That had been my thought, too.

  “Yeah, but that means going back out into the street,” I whispered. “And facing… them. Lots of them. So if we decide to leave… then what do we do to keep from getting turned into zombies?”

  He pulled his gaze from the screen. “Well, we’ve watched a lot of zombie flicks.”

  I arched a brow, a little action I’m pretty proud of perfecting since it took me months of practice. “Are you suggesting that we can battle real zombies with horror movie techniques?”

  “Why not?” he asked with a shrug.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. This isn’t that movie Scream.”

  He frowned, clearly annoyed once again by my lack of faith in his ideas. “Well, do you have a better idea? It’s not like you can find out information about real zombies online. Anything anyone knows about this kind of stuff comes from watching movies or reading books on the subject. Fiction books, Sarah.”

  I opened and shut my mouth, unable to formulate any kind of response. Once again, to my great frustration, Dave was right. I mean, I couldn’t think of one thing I knew about zombies that didn’t come from movies.

  We used to love those flicks, sitting together on the couch in the dark. Lately I hadn’t been watching movies with him as much. With all our fighting and me working as much as I could to keep us financially afloat, it hadn’t been a priority. But I guess I had just as good a grasp on the genre as anyone. And at least if we put together a list of what we knew it felt like we were doing something rather than just sitting around waiting for the National Guard to get their act together.

  “Okay, so what do we know about zombies?” I finally sighed.

  He grinned at my agreement to take part in this little exercise even though I still had serious doubts about it.

  “Well, when someone is bitten, they turn into a zombie,” he offered. “But it doesn’t seem to be airborne or passed by any touch that doesn’t break the flesh.”

  I shivered at the idea, still more terrifying than anything to me. “And we know that from personal experience, not just movies. So score one for Dawn of the Dead; they got that part right.” I smiled though it didn’t feel very strong. “Maybe this idea isn’t so far off the mark after all.”

  “Gee, thanks,” he said in a flat tone. “So what else? We know they want to feed on live people, but they don’t seem to feed on other zombies. At least we haven’t seen that.”

  “True, the Wonderful Wilsons and the zombies on the side of the road even worked together to feed.” I was starting to get more into this little exercise and I started to wish I had a notebook to write it all down. “And we both saw the group that just got that poor reporter and his cameraman. They were almost like some kind of fucked up pack of animals from Wild America or something. But what about other animals? Or just meat like in a store? Would they eat stuff like that? Could an animal be turned into a zombie?”

  Dave shrugged. “We don’t know about that yet. I guess we just keep an eye out. If animals were infected… that could be bad. They can hide a lot better than a person.”

  I shut my eyes and tried not to think too hard about Fluffy the Friendly Terrier or Ming the Cat becoming a killing machine. To keep my mind off the subject, I tried to pull together some more information to add to our running tally.

  “It seems like a head injury stops them cold if it’s bad enough. Like with the shoe in Dr. Kelly’s head or the toilet seat and Jack.”

  “In the movies they have shotguns and other weapons,” Dave said.

  I nodded. That was very true. “Too bad we don’t have anything like that, but I guess we could try to get them if we went out. I mean, sporting goods stores carry that stuff. We could break in or maybe we’ll even find people hiding there to team up with.”

  He smiled. “We’ll put it on the to do list.”

  I laughed because my ‘to do’ list is legendary around our house. I love crossing off the stuff I’ve done. It drives Dave crazy because he’s much more fly by the seat of his pants.

  Dr. Kelly once said we needed to find a way to respect our differences and use them to our advantage. Turns out we only needed to kill her in order to make that a reality. I wish we’d known that months and thousands of dollars ago.

  “As far as weapons go, until we can find a place that carries guns and ammo, we can look around the house for stuff that might work. So far we’ve done pretty well with using what was available,” I said.

  “We have,” he agreed. “That shoe idea in Dr. Kelly’s office was pretty sharp. So was using the toilet seat on Jack.”

  I blushed. Dave hadn’t complimented me in a long time and I felt positively girlish now. “Thanks.”

  “We should also see how much food we have that’s non-perishable and portable,” he said. “Even if we decide not to go, but stay here for a while, we’ll have to ration. And we should eat the perishable stuff first since we have no idea if we’ll be losing power or something soon.”

  I swallowed hard. I hadn’t thought about that, but it was a possibility. The government could shut the lights down if they got it in their heads. Or if there wasn’t anyone left to mind the power plants… well, they’d shut themselves down at some point.

  I’d learned that disturbing tidbit from the Discovery Channel, though, not zombie movies.

  “I’ll start the oven and cook a frozen pizza for dinner tonight. And I’ll start sorting food and make a tally of what we have,” I said, moving toward the kitchen. But before I’d gotten into the other room, there was a knock at the door.

  Dave and I froze and I slowly turned back to face him. He stared at the door and then at me before he looked around the cramped living room for some kind of weapon. With a grin, he found the wooden baseball bat that had been propped up in the corner unused since Dave dropped out of graduate school and quit his school softball team.

  I smiled at his choice. “Zombie movie classic,” I whispered. “Nice.”

  I looked around for my own weapon and my gaze fell onto our wedding photo. It was a big one my Mom had insisted we buy from the photographer. An eleven by fourteen monstrosity of us standing in front of a church with rice scattering in front of us. We looked happy. We were happy.

  I pulled the photo down and turned it so that a corner was ready to be used as a bludgeon.

  “And once again, very creative,” he encouraged.

  I smiled, then cautiously moved toward the door.

  The knock sounded again, this time louder.

  “Dave? Sarah? It’s Amanda!” came a voice from the hallway.

  My mouth dropped open. I mean, I knew I’d had to kill Jack in the bathroom, but I hadn’t really thought about facing his live-in girlfriend, Amanda, after I did it.

  I moved on the door, but Dave grabbed my wrist. “Sarah, if Jack was a zombie, it follows that she might be bitten, too,” he whispered in a harsh, low tone that hardly carried.

  I jerked my hand away from the door and stared at it. He was right. I hadn’t been thinking about my safety, just my rapidly increasing guilt.

  “Please, if you’re there let me in!” she said from the other side. I
could hear she had been crying and was just barely holding it together now.

  I inched forward and put my eye up to the peephole. Fuck, it was too hard to tell if she was infected. In the wavy image, I could see her clothing was caked with blood and her brown hair was falling out of its usually sleek ponytail. She’d clearly been through something, but both Dave and I were also coated in blood and we were still rational humans.

  “Amanda, have you been bitten?” I asked, taking the risk of letting her know we were home and still had tasty brains for hungry zombies.

  Dave slapped at my arm lightly, but I ignored him.

  “What?” she sobbed. “Please, Jack went crazy and I crashed the car and cut my arm all up on the glass. I can’t find him now and the TV is really freaking me out.”

  My heel bounced on the linoleum, a nervous habit of mine, as I stared out at her. She looked around the hall, huddled up as small as she could make herself. She looked scared, that was the one thing I could see for sure. The girl wasn’t the brightest bulb and her taste in men sucked, but I still sort of liked her.

  “Amanda, I’m going to open the door, but if you try to eat us, I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “What?” her muffled voice elevated to a squeak on the other side of the door.

  “Sarah,” Dave sighed from behind me.

  I turned on him. “I killed her boyfriend. I should at least let her in and we can see if she’s… zombiefied or whatever.”

  He shrugged. “I guess we can manage to murder one more acquaintance if it comes to that.”

  I hoped it wouldn’t as I slipped the lock free and opened the door.

  Don’t discuss your relationship problems with friends. Your zombie problems are another story entirely.

  Amanda fell into the apartment more then walked in as the door opened, but her stumbling motion seemed too smooth to mean she was a zombie. I think she was just freaked out and seeing other people she knew gave her permission to lose it a little.

  As she sat on the linoleum square in front of our door and sobbed, I nudged her feet out of the way and shut and locked the door behind her.

  Dave and I watched her from a safe distance. She was crying so hard, I kind of wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t want to end up undead so I stayed near him, picture frame at the ready, and Dave looked like he was about to pop a fly ball over the wall at Safeco.

  Once her tears subsided, Amanda looked up at us and our positions and weapons seemed to register with her. Her brow wrinkled with confusion.

  “What is going on with you two?” she sniffled as she moved to get up.

  “Hey, just go slowly,” Dave snapped as he lifted his bat in a menacing fashion.

  Amanda’s eyes widened but she slowed down as she pushed to her feet against the front door and stared at us. She was wearing a tank top and there was blood smeared both on it and on her arms.

  Just like she’d said, I saw a small cut on her bicep, but it wasn’t ragged or tinged with black sludge like the bite marks I’d seen on the other zombie victims. Her long cotton cargo pants covered her legs too much to say for sure about ankle nips, though.

  “Can you roll your pant legs up to your knees so I can get a look?” I asked, feeling kind of like a cop checking for pot. “Slowly.”

  “Come on, you guys —” she started with a Valley Girl pose of annoyance.

  “Just do it,” Dave said. “We’ll explain everything to you once we check you.”

  She was pissed, there was no denying that, but she bent over and pulled her pant legs up one after another. She had a stereotypical “pretty girl” tattoo of a daisy chain around her ankle, but no visible signs of a bite.

  Dave lowered his bat carefully. “Okay, but we’re going to keep an eye on you, so just stay back a bit.”

  She folded her arms. “Have you two gone nuts? You’re talking about eating people, killing people, hitting me with a bat!”

  “You can’t be too careful with zombies roaming around, Amanda,” I explained with a shrug.

  “Zombies?” She stared at us with a blank expression that I’m sorry to say was pretty much normal for her. The lights had always been on with Amanda, but I’m not sure she was home much. “What are you talking about?”

  Dave stared at her with an expression of both intense annoyance and utter shock. “I thought you said you were watching TV.”

  She shifted and her cheeks colored with pink embarrassment. “They were talking about chemicals and infections and I got confused and freaked out. I tried to find something else to watch, I mean tonight is supposed to be American Idol, but every channel is playing the same show, so I just turned it off.”

  Dave rolled his eyes and paced across the apartment. As much as I disliked Jack, David hated Amanda. He told me time and again that she was too stupid to be my friend. But she kind of reminded me of a cute puppy. You couldn’t blame her for being dumb as a rock.

  And that might be insulting to rocks.

  “Okay, Amanda, let me give you the crib notes,” I said with a sigh. Dave was going to be no help here. “Sometime earlier today something bad happened at U-Dub. Really bad. It turned a bunch of people into zombies.”

  “Like movie zombies?” she asked, blinking at me with empty disbelief.

  “Exactly.…” I looked at Dave and he shrugged. “Well, we think so, anyway. So far they seem to work the same way. Our marriage counselor tried to eat us and we killed her by bashing her head in. That’s pretty much just like the movies, right?”

  “Oh my God,” Amanda said, reaching out to pat my arm awkwardly. Her eyes had filled with tears. “Marriage counseling? Are you guys okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I found myself saying, too tired and weirded out to be guarded.

  Dave moved toward us with a scowl. “Look, that’s not the point. The point is that we got attacked by zombies in this therapist’s office, later in the parking garage of her building, and then Sarah found a zombie in the bathroom here at our apartment.”

  I glared at him and he shut his mouth. I think he was so pissed about Amanda’s cluelessness and maybe the fact that I’d just outed we were in counseling that he’d momentarily forgotten just who I’d bashed to death with a toilet.

  We were all quiet for a minute and then I noticed Amanda’s cuts were bleeding. The blood made weird little trails down her arm. It was gross, but at least it wasn’t sludge.

  “Let me get you a towel,” I said.

  At first I moved for the bathroom, but then I stopped. If I opened the door in there, Amanda would see Jack’s body and I wanted to ask her some questions before I revealed anything so horrifying to her.

  Checking myself, I went to the kitchen and grabbed a dish towel instead. I wet it lightly and brought it back out to Amanda.

  She smiled as she took it and started wiping off her cut. As she carefully bound the wound, I decided to broach the subject of her dead boyfriend.

  “So you said that Jack went crazy, right?” I asked as I motioned her toward a chair. “What happened exactly?”

  Her makeshift bandage secure, Amanda nodded, sniffling as she took a place on the chair. I found a box of tissues and handed her a few. She wiped her eyes as she spoke, streaking mascara across her face until she looked like a Disney-animated raccoon.

  Raccoons carried rabies, right?

  “Okay, so we went to the Gas Guzzler right up the street,” she began. “Jack had been drinking and wanted more beer, so I drove.”

  I rolled my eyes. How charming on a Wednesday afternoon when the rest of the world was working or spending time with their family… or killing their zombie therapist across town.

  Not surprisingly, Amanda didn’t seem to notice my reaction to the beginning of her story.

  “I stayed in the car while he went inside. He was in there for a while and when he came back he was all upset. He said some homeless freak bit him and then went over the counter at the clerk.”

  I shut my eyes for a minute as I pictured Jack’s red eyes
and his black mouth before he tried to get to my brains in the bathroom.

  “I wanted to call 911 and take him over to the hospital because the bite seemed pretty bad to me. Almost like it got infected right away, but he got all mad at me for saying that and told me he just wanted to go home and drink his killer headache off.”

  “Headache,” Dave breathed. “Not good.”

  Amanda tilted her head, still not getting it. “So I did what he said. But when we pulled in the garage, he started acting weird. He grabbed for the wheel. I got nervous and I hit the gas when I meant to hit the brake. We swerved and smashed into the wall.”

  “Yeah, we saw your car downstairs,” I whispered.

  “He was still trying to grab me even after the accident, so I ran away. Jack usually yells, he never hits. I thought if I just let him calm down, he’d be sorry later. But he followed me upstairs.” She shivered. “I locked the door before he got in, though, and he didn’t have his key. He pounded for a little while before he gave up. I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Did you happen to have our house key in your car?” Dave asked with a sigh.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess we did. Why?”

  I shook my head. “Before I get into that, can you tell me how long it took from the time Jack came out of the Gas Guzzler to the time he tried to attack you in the car?”

  She shrugged. “About ten minutes.”

  Dave set the bat down. It was pretty clear that if Amanda hadn’t turned yet, she probably wasn’t going to. Lucky girl. I was kind of surprised, honestly. The week before I wouldn’t have given Amanda five minutes in a hypothetical zombie attack.

  “So what do you think happened to Jack?” Amanda asked, looking at her bandage job. To my surprise, it was still perfectly tied. It seemed our little Amanda had some talents after all. I never would have figured it.

  “Okay, here’s the thing, Amanda,” I said as I took a deep breath. “When zombies bite a non-infected human, it changes them into a zombie.”