“There aren’t any planes, there aren’t any helicopters,” I kept repeating, even as we watched a helicopter rise up over the tree ridge. It came right for us like it was real and everything. “It’s not possible,” I whispered.
“Open your eyes,” Dave said as he pulled me back toward the house. “They’re coming right now, Sarah. And they’re probably government.”
My heart stopped. It felt like it stopped anyway. Like I was frozen as I stared at the machine coming toward us. A harbinger of death and pain.
“Get inside and load every gun we have,” I ordered as I spun for the doors.
He grabbed my arm and pulled me back to his side. “What are you going to do? Shoot them?”
“Yes?” I squeaked, but it came out as a question, not a statement. It sounded super absurd, too, once it was said out loud.
He shook his head. “We’re going to be outnumbered if it’s the government in that helicopter. And unlike zombies, they fight back, and not just with teeth. They’ll have guns and tranquilizers and fucking grenades if they feel like being real bitches about this. We can’t beat them if they’ve found us, if they’ve come for us.”
“For you,” I corrected him as tears filled my eyes. “They’ve come for you if they’ve come for us.”
The government had found out about Dave’s powers when we came to Illinois to bring the cure to the border. They’d held him, albeit briefly, and taken blood. We knew they would want him after that. After they saw what he was. Hell, I think he was what they were trying to make in the first place, back in their awful laboratory on U-Dub campus: a super soldier. The only problem they would have had with David was that he still had free will. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t take him, though.
I just never thought they’d find us in the middle of Montana where we never interacted with anyone, never made friends, never made a peep like all the big, loud peeps we’d been making since the apocalypse rushed down on us and changed everything we ever wanted or dreamed.
Yet now there was a sleek, black helicopter touching down in our front yard. As it did so, I looked closer. There were bullet holes in the metal. The windshield was cracked. There were two huge dents in the doors. Wherever the thing had come from, maintenance wasn’t the top priority.
“How far can a helicopter fly?” I asked. “I mean, not all the way from the Midwest Wall, right?”
Dave jerked his gaze at me, then back to our uninvited guests. “No… no, it couldn’t. At least most of them would need to refuel.”
“So where did it come from?” I asked as the door slid open. I shielded my eyes from the late afternoon sunshine and stared as a woman stepped from the helicopter.
For a moment, I couldn’t quite focus on her face. Everything was just so discombobulated. But then I started seeing her, really seeing her, and I staggered backward, grabbing for Dave’s arm, tugging at his shirt.
“Dave, it’s… it’s…”
“Nicole Nessing,” he breathed as the former reporter and our friend moved toward us with a big grin on her face. Behind her, another figure got out of the chopper and the appearance of this one put me straight down on my ass in the snow.
“And The Kid,” I murmured. “R-Robbie!”
Two people we’d encountered since the outbreak. Two people who had no relationship to each other except for a six degrees of separation thing through us. Two people I’d never thought I’d see again since Nicole had disappeared through the wall with the cure in Illinois and Robbie had been left in an underground lab in Phoenix, Arizona.
But here they were, at my house, with a helicopter. I turned my head and promptly puked up my lunch in the snow.
#
I stared in the mirror through the dim light as afternoon began to fade to evening. I was pale and clammy, but at least I hadn’t puked again. I splashed some water on my face and felt immediately better. At least about the clammy thing. The other stuff… well, I wasn’t sure.
I loved Nicole and The Kid with all my heart, I really did. We’d all been through hell and back, albeit in separate instances, but that didn’t mean I was ready to blindly trust them. The apocalypse did weird shit to people and I didn’t like that they a) had shown up here together and b) they had a fucking helicopter.
Worse, Dave didn’t seem to have any of those hesitations. He’d just started hugging people even as I excused myself and rushed in to brush my teeth before anyone had to smell my stanky puke breath.
With a shake of my head, I turned toward the door and the people awaiting me in the living room. I would be cool and polite and wait on any judgments until I’d heard Nicole and The Kid talk.
Except as I moved into the living room and saw Nicole standing there, my eyes welled with tears and I couldn’t stop myself from grabbing her for a hug. She was laugh-crying. Craughing, I guess, and I realized I was, too.
“You look so good,” Nicole said close to my ear. “You’ve put on some weight.”
“Thanks, I guess,” I said as I leaned back to look at her.
She was wearing a leather coat, clean black jeans and motorcycle boots. Bad. Ass.
“So do you,” I said.
She stepped away and left room for The Kid. At twelve years old, he had already seen more than anyone ever should. His Dad, a true mad scientist, had signed him up for a war and Robbie had tricked us into helping them for a long time. But in the end, he had taken our side. Saved us. But…
I reached out to him and he hugged me, though he was awkward about it, like only a tween could be. When he stepped back, he was blushing furiously.
“The last time we saw you, you were in that lab of your Dad’s making serum for the cure,” I said as a ruffled his blond hair affectionately. “What happened with that?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” he said with a sigh.
I glanced at Dave and he shrugged. “I told them to wait until you got here. I think we need to hear this together.”
I smiled at him and motioned for the couch. Once we were all sitting, I leaned forward, arms draped across my knees. “So talk. First, are my parents okay?”
As Dave reached over to take my hand, Nicole smiled. “Yes, John and Molly are fine. They’re still running the resistance over the wall and they’re making a lot of progress.”
My eyes narrowed. “But?” I encouraged.
Nicole’s smile fell. “Okay, so after we got through the wall, all we could do was run for a long time. The government was relentless, trying to get to us. They cleared hideouts, they made arrests and put innocent people in prison and on this awful reality show that is basically a death sentence.”
I shook my head. “Shit.”
Nicole nodded. “But somehow your parents managed to get everyone to a safe haven. Plus…” She cleared her throat. “The agents had more to deal with than us pretty soon. There was an incident at a zoo over the wall.”
“At a zoo?” Dave repeated.
“Yeah, they were displaying zombies,” Nicole wrinkled her nose in disgust. “And it backfired on them. Big time. The point is, they started having outbreaks and the system over there is starting to breakdown. Not only is the zombie outbreak knocking at their door, but thanks to your parents, the underground reports are starting to go more mainstream. People are beginning to realize that they’re being lied to. They’re rising up.”
My eyes felt so wide that I worried they might actually fall out of the sockets. “I-wow,” I stammered, unable to think of anything more coherent.
“That’s great, well, mostly great except for the zombie reality shows and zoos, which are just disturbing,” Dave said for me.
“Yes to both,” Robbie said and stuffed a cookie in his mouth that Dave must have gotten out of the pantry to celebrate our guests.
“But it doesn’t explain how you ended up back on the West side of the wall or how you two got to each other,” Dave said.
“Thank you,” I said, nudging him. “My brain is so overloaded I couldn’t say that exact sa
me thing.”
He patted my leg. “That’s what I’m here for, completing your thoughts.”
“Gross,” The Kid groaned. “Stop being gross.”
Dave shook his head. “Trust me kid, someday soon you won’t mind so much. But explain anyway.”
Nicole shrugged. “With everything going on, the corruption, the zombie threat coming there, we knew we had to get someone back on this side. Someone to continue our work. So I went.”
“You volunteered to come over?” Dave repeated in disbelief. “What about your Pulitzer or whatever?”
“Won’t win it until I can do the full expose of how we all saved the world or whatever,” Nicole said with a shrug that totally dismissed how killer she was being at present. I hadn’t always been sold on her, being a tabloid reporter and all once, but I was a Nicole booster for sure now.
Except, of course, for that little piece of doubt that lingered, a nagging curiosity regarding why she was here.
“And that’s when she found me,” The Kid chimed in.
“That’s a big jump,” I said. “Explain that.”
“Well, during our travels you’d talked about Robbie and the lab and the mad scientist-”
“My dad,” Robbie said as he folded his arms in true tween dismissiveness.
“Yeah, whatever,” Nicole said. “So I headed straight for Phoenix to find him. We needed him for… well, we just needed him. I wasn’t exactly thinking I’d find a six-year-old.”
He glared at her. “Twelve. I’m twelve. And I’ll be thirteen next month, if I survive that long.”
I flinched at the jaded quality of that statement, but I was too overwhelmed by everything else to make any comforting attempts at lies to make him feel better.
“The point is, six, twelve, twenty-three, we found Robbie,” Nicole said. “And took him back to our base.”
“Base,” I repeated. “What?”
She ignored my question. “Since then we’ve been working on the final stages of the cure. The real cure. For everyone.”
Dave had left his hand on my leg while everyone was talking and he squeezed it in shock, hard enough that it hurt and I jerked away from him.
“What?” we asked in unison.
Dave swallowed. “I don’t understand, a cure for everyone?”
“Sure you do,” Nicole said softly. “That was why you brought the serum to the wall, isn’t it? That was what we’ve been doing this for, right? To cure everyone. Or at least to wipe out the zombies.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “But I didn’t think we’d actually do it.”
I looked at him in surprise. “You-you didn’t?”
He shook his head, staring at me but I could see he wasn’t really seeing me in that moment. “No, I didn’t. I mean, it’s impossible to think that the two of us could make that happen.”
“Well, the two of you are paramount,” The Kid agreed with a frown. “But, um, you aren’t saving the world all by yourself, you know.”
Nicole was looking at Dave with much the same expression I guessed was on my own face: surprise, concern… but then she had all the details I lacked. All the ways to prove to him that we actually had made a difference.
“We have a lab, a larger one than the one in Phoenix,” she began.
The Kid grinned. “It’s awesome. Way more advanced for my work.”
I almost laughed because it was suddenly ludicrous to picture a pre-teen whose voice hadn’t dropped working in a lab on a zombie cure. I mean, I knew that was what he’d been doing down in Phoenix, but still… shouldn’t he have been listening to bad teen rock and riding his bike around the neighborhood toilet papering houses and generally being a little shit?
“Robbie and the other researchers have taken what you brought us,” Nicole continued. “And they’re on the verge of a breakthrough. A two-stage solution to that pesky zombie problem.”
She smiled like she was on an infomercial and I reached up to rub my suddenly throbbing head. It was so full of information that I felt like it was going to explode. I would almost welcome it, except I really wanted to know what was going to happen next.
“What are the stages?” Dave asked.
Nicole raised a finger. “One, airborne extermination.”
His eyes went wide. “Airborne?”
She nodded and I could see how bright and filled with excitement her eyes were. Nicole was trying to Edward R. Murrow it, but she was a little more Maury right now, all excited and smarmy since she knew more than we did.
“We’re fairly confident we can do a mass drop,” she explained. “That should exterminate up to seventy percent of the current zombie population.”
I blinked. “Good God, that will take out thousands, hundreds of thousands in one fell swoop.”
She nodded. “That’s our hope. Imagine if they weren’t out there roaming the countryside. The danger level would drop. We’re also in final stages of a development of a personal spray that survivors can carry for face-to-face combat. It’s just coming up with the system to discharge the spray.”
“You can’t just use regular spray bottles?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. And yes, it did sort of undermine the relationship because I wanted to slap her suddenly.
“It’s not exactly like there are factories working over here,” she explained. “So we’re cobbling together the parts. It’s not going to be retail friendly, that’s for sure. Speaking of which, if there are any spray bottles in this house-”
“Yes, of course, take them,” I said. I could definitely live without them if it meant killing some zombies.
“Still, so airborne and personal devices are your two stages,” Dave said with a whistle. “That’s great.”
“No, airborne and personal defense are all part of stage one,” Nicole corrected him.
I felt my brow furrow. “So what’s stage two?”
“Inoculation,” The Kid said with a proud smile. “We have reason to believe we could dose out a cure that would keep people from being turned, even if they’re bitten. So they’ll be injured, maybe killed if the attack is bad enough, but not reanimated into zombies. We know that one will work thanks to Dave’s results.”
“That’s great,” Dave breathed. “God that would end this on every level!”
Nicole nodded and everyone in the room looked so damn happy. But I couldn’t help but have a niggling hesitation, a question that I couldn’t keep to myself. There was no way I could just kumbaya my way into blissful happiness that everything was going to be okay.
“It is great, don’t get me wrong. I totally support wiping out the zombies and everything,” I said, folding my arms. “But how did you find us?”
Nicole smiled. “You talked about Montana a couple of times when we were together heading toward Illinois. The state pretty much has no people left so before we left we stared doing analysis of some satellite imagery we tapped into from the government grid. We found lights. And that took us to you.”
Dave leaned back. “Wow. Impressive.”
“Big Brother can be useful when you know how to use him without him figuring it out,” Nicole said with a shrug.
I tried not to ponder too deeply the fact that the government could have found us at any point through our light usage. There were other thoughts that were more important.
“Okay, so I get the how,” I said. “But why are you here? If you have your big boy lab and your whatever, why would you come find us?”
The Kid and Nicole exchanged a look and in that moment I knew I wasn’t going to like the answer. Not even a little.
“Because we need your help,” Nicole said slowly.
The Kid stood up and waved her off. “We need Dave’s help, actually, to complete our work.”
I swallowed as all eyes in the room shifted to my semi-zombiefied husband.
“You want us to come to Phoenix,” I said softly and my voice shook a little. Phoenix, where I’d almost lost Dave, in more ways than one.
“N
o,” Nicole said and cleared her throat like she was about to say something that would stick there. “We need you to come back to Seattle.”
Chapter Three
When you travel, make sure you bring enough for zombie to do. A busy zombie is a happy zombie.
I was blinking. Just blinking. Over and over. Until I felt like I had a tic in my eye. But I couldn’t stop. In my head, my brain was screaming Seattle and that translated to: pain, fear, death, divorce.
Well, maybe not the last one. Close to divorce, but not quite. Either way, Seattle meant a lot of bad things to me. We’d barely gotten out of there. My stomach turned when I thought of going back, hell of even going near that city I had once loved and vowed to stay in forever.
“Seattle?” Dave repeated through my fog. He sounded like he was checking his emotions, trying to feel out our unexpected visitors before he really reacted.
Or maybe he was just as numb as I was at the prospect.
“Yeah, we moved the lab up there,” The Kid said and he broke his gaze from Dave to look at his feet. “There were a lot of motivations for the move and they’ll all be clear once we get there. The point is, we’re up there and we need you.”
I turned away. My anxiety for the whole “Seattle” thing was growing by the second. For a whole host of reasons. Some of which, I wasn’t about to go into. Not with anyone.
“Um, I don’t know,” I said as I shook my head. “This is a lot.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Nicole said, her voice filled with shock.
I stared at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, am I supposed to jump at the chance to go back into the genesis point of a zombie outbreak? I didn’t get the crazy person memo, can you send it again? My fax number is 1-800-fuckthis.”
Nicole rolled her eyes. “I just can’t believe you, of all people, would hesitate to finish what you started. You risked everything to get that cure across the border and now that you are so close to seeing it all pay off, you hang back and say, ‘I don’t know’?”
Nicole had done this stupid voice when she said the last part. My voice, I guess it was supposed to be. Not exactly endearing. And yet Dave smothered a laugh. Traitor.
The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) Page 2