The Zombie Book (The Zombie Book Series 1)

by D. J. Graves

  I looked back at Derek to get his take on it. He had slammed a short blade into Finn’s skull hard and was trying to pull it out.

  “Derek,” I said in a hushed voice.

  He looked at me, then down at the bodies and then up at the open hatch. “She’s gone,”he said.

  My brow was pinch in thought. “These bodies weren’t here when we were watching cameras from the dining room. She stacked the bodies and opened that hatch while you were dealing with Will. She used him to distract you. Never before have I seen a zombie with such intelligence.”

  Derek forced the blade out of Finn’s skull with one last yank. “If there was ever going to be a smart zombie, it would be her. I’ll let the guys know.”

  “Well, I’m not stepping on these guys to close the damn thing.”

  “There’s a button on Karen’s desk that will close it.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said...now that you reminded me, I added in my head.

  Derek left the room and I walked to Karen’s desk and set my machete down. I stared down at the various buttons. I was trying to remember which did what when I noticed something not good. There was a bloody fingerprint on one button, just one. I pushed it and the hatch closed. Curious. Will wouldn't have pushed this button...Had Karen pushed it?

  “ERIN!” someone screamed over the intercom. I looked behind me and Karen was there. Her flesh was bubbling over with rot but her eyes weren’t milky dead like every other zombie I’d ever seen. They were alive and very aware! She pushed me to the floor with remarkable strength before I had a chance to aim my gun at her.

  “Karen!” I yelled at her, but she ignored me and ran for the door instead. She wasn’t interested in meat. She wanted out! If she was smart enough to push buttons, was she smart enough to open a door?

  “Lock it down!” I screamed out, hoping the boys were listening. Whether they were or not, I knew someone pushed a red button somewhere because the lights went out and I was laying in pitch blackness. I heard Karen scream and it sounded frustrated to me. Then red lights came on for only a couple seconds before blackness descended on me again, but in those couple of seconds, I saw Karen move from the door to right in front of my face. I screamed and shot blindly at her. Did I hit her? The seconds between the red lights seemed like forever, but when the red lights came back on I didn’t see her and I moved to the door, putting my back against it just as darkness came back. My ears strained to hear anything at all. If Karen wanted out, why not just leave through the hatch she opened. Or had Derek and I interrupted her escape, and then I closed her hatch.

  When the red lights came back on, I looked out for her but I saw nothing. “SHE'S BESIDE YOU!” I looked to my right and there she was, crouched near me. Then darkness again. I shot in her general direction but she tackled me down. I kept shooting even when I felt her teeth sink into my shoulder. I screamed out my pain and suddenly the red lights came back on and I could see again. Karen moved off of me. She was covered in blood with skin and meat falling from her mouth. My skin. My meat. I shot her point blank in the head.

  “She’s gone!” I shouted out.

  The lights came back on. I fell back in relief but when my shoulder hit the floor it hurt like hell. “Fuck!”

  I felt a push from the door. Someone was opening it but I was in the way, so I moved over to let them in. Derek and Gerald walked through. Derek moved to Karen and made sure she was dead, while Gerald bent down to me. He looked sad for me.

  “I’m glad I didn’t kill you,” I said and he smiled. “She bit me. Could you do me the honor of a clean headshot?” Gerald frowned and moved away. He stood up beside Derek and gestured for him to take the shot. “Didn’t peg you for such a softy,” I said. I tried to make a heart shape with my hands but failed because of the pain in my shoulder. “Hey, we’re injury buddies,” I said when I realized we were both hurt in the same spot. I laughed a little. Maybe I was going crazy. Maybe I was already there.

  “I’m sorry,” Derek said as he pointed the gun at me. I closed my eyes and took one last breath. A long moment later I felt a stab of pain in my chest and then nothing…

  15

  ...I opened my eyes.

  I was lying on my back on the gurney in the glassed off portion of Karen’s lab. Everything was clean. The bodies and the blood was all gone. I moved off the bed and found Derek standing on the other side of the glass. I was confused. I felt for my shoulder and found that it was bandaged, but still sore and I hissed in pain. I looked down at my chest, where I had felt the stabbing pain before I passed out and there was a small puncture wound...He tranqued me?

  “What’s going on?” I asked him, forgetting for a moment that the room was soundproof.

  Derek held a mirror up and I slid off the gurney and approached the glass wall. I looked at myself in the mirror with awe and horror because I looked like me, but I was deathly pale with haunting sunken eyes.

  Pane and Gerald walked in and Derek put the mirror down. The three of them looked puzzled. So was I. Pane pushed one of the buttons on Karen's desk so we could talk.

  “You’ve been infected. Why aren’t you a corpse?” he asked.

  The only answer I could give them was, “I don’t know.”

  “What are we going to do?” Gerald asked no one in particular.

  “She’s infected,” said Derek, as if that was answer enough.

  “Yeah but, what do we do with her now?”

  “She can’t be let out of there. besides the fact that she’s carrying a deadly virus in her, she could still turn at any moment. What if this is just a delayed response to the disease?”

  “Well, we can’t kill her,” said Gerald.

  I rolled my eyes because obviously not. “Someone comes along with any kind of resistance to a world-ending disease, you don’t kill them. You study them,” I said.

  “But Karen is dead and she was the only scientist here,” said Pane.

  I looked around Karen's lab; at all her books and notes, most notably the hand-written zombie book she’d been writing in since she first found out about the disease so many years ago. This room was a treasure trove of zombie information.

  “I have everything I need here. Give this room over to me and I’ll study myself. If I turn, just come in here and shoot me in the head.”

  “Sounds like our best option. It minimizes our contact with you...we can deliver your meals here,” Derek said.

  "Unless you crave human flesh?" Gerald asked me with narrow eyes.

  "No. I don't crave human meat," I said flatly. "Not yet at least..."

  “Then I can install plumbing,” Gerald said. “That is, if all your plumbing still works,” he said with a wink.

  “Gross.”

  “Sounds like we have a plan,” said Derek.

  “What about Chris?” Pane asked.

  “Christopher?” I closed my eyes and willed myself not to cry.

  Was I never going to hold him again? Was that moment on the couch the last time we'd embrace each other. “I don’t think I’ll ever touch him again.” Tears fell down my cheeks and the boys stood in silence. Nothing they could say would make this pain of loss go away. It was what it was. Derek had won his daughter and I’d lost my son.

  “We’ll watch over him,” said Derek.

  “Thank you.”

  Message from Author.

  Hey there. I hope you enjoyed my story. The next zombie book will be out in Fall 2018. If you did enjoy yourself, please feel free to share this book with your friends or rate it on Amazon. Also, you may enjoy my other works, like the Raina Kirkland Series. Thank you so much for reading this. I love you.

 

 

 
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