The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead)

by Jesse Petersen

  “Thanks, babe,” I said with a glare toward him.

  He reached out to touch my arm and damn it, but I couldn’t stay mad at the big goof. “I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Um, yeah it is. I need your help,” The Kid insisted, louder than before. “And you’re all back and forth about it like I’m asking if you want an extra piece of cake.”

  “I would never hem and haw about cake,” I said. “Never. I’d always take the extra cake.”

  The Kid stomped his foot, a little bit of the child in him taking over. “Sarah!”

  I stared. He was seriously freaking out. Not that I totally blamed him. And I wasn’t going to be able to wave the shiny wand of my sarcasm around to distract him, or Nicole... or Dave, who was now staring at me as expectantly as the two interlopers.

  “Okay, I get it. You’re doing very important work, I support that very important work down to my very core. I want this bullshit to end as much as anyone. But the last time someone wanted to use my husband for research, they nearly killed us all.”

  “We actually killed more of them,” Dave pointed out.

  I shot a glance his way. “Because we were lucky. The government would have happily ripped you to shreds to figure out how you work. And no offense, kid, but your father was the person who ran experiments before, and that was just as terrifying an encounter.”

  “So it’s a fear of needles thing, then?” Dave teased. When I shot him a look, he raised his hands in mock surrender and shut his mouth.

  “But the difference is that the government and my father didn’t give a shit about Dave,” The Kid said with a sad sigh. “My Dad, in fact, didn’t give a shit about anyone. But I’m not him. I want to help, not hurt. I promise you, we aren’t taking Dave off to be a science experiment.”

  “Just a pin cushion,” I muttered.

  Dave slung an arm around my shoulders. “What’s a few pin pricks between friends?”

  I stared up at him. “How can you be so nonchalant about this? Hell, how can you joke about it?”

  “Um, that’s what we do under stress,” he said. “Have you met us?”

  I rolled my eyes, damn it. I had been trying so hard not to do it, but he made me.

  “You told me, not three hours ago, that you were thinking about setting up camp here for the next year, Dave. That you all of a sudden wanted to become a homebody. What happened to that?”

  “And you told me you wanted to be Adventure Sarah, riding off into the great zombie unknown. This is just about the biggest zombie unknown we’ve ever encountered, but you’re going all freaky about it,” he countered. “Things change.”

  I broke the gaze. Yeah, he didn’t know the half of it.

  I searched my mind for any final excuse besides the one I didn’t want to say out loud.

  “We only barely escaped Seattle,” I tried. “Do you really want to risk going back?”

  “We barely escaped, but only because we kind of sucked at zombie hunting then,” he said, touching my cheek with unexpected gentleness. “We’ve come a long way from there, haven’t we?”

  He wasn’t asking me about zombie hunting anymore. And I wasn’t talking about it either when I said, “Yeah, we have.”

  Nicole rolled her eyes. “Before you two go find a room, does that mean you’re coming with us?”

  Dave nodded. “Yes.”

  I tensed. So that was it. He was choosing for us, and I completely understood why. And yet I wanted to turn on him and hit him with my bitchy Sarah best. I wanted to rip into him like we were back to a year ago before this started and we were on the verge of breakup.

  If this was what Seattle was going to bring out in me, I was so not stoked.

  “Sarah, you’re with us too?” Nicole asked. Some part of me appreciated that she at least asked me for my consent.

  I sighed. “Yeah, you know where he goes, I go. And he’s determined to save the world or whatever.”

  The Kid let out a woot that echoed in the room and Nicole’s grin was almost payment enough for what we were about to do. Ok, it wasn’t at all close, but it was a start.

  “So what’s our next step?” Dave asked.

  Nicole glanced outside. “It’s getting dark and it’s not safe to fly at night. There are no lights to guide us and the attraction for zombies and… other interested parties is too much. We’ll stay here tonight and gather up whatever supplies you have.”

  “How are we going to get to Seattle on a helicopter anyway?” I asked. “Do you have gas stops?”

  “No, we’re going to an airstrip not too far from here and switching to a small engine plane,” Nicole explained. “That will take us in to Seattle.”

  I bit my lip. No more arguments seemed necessary. I had actually run out of things to say, which had to be a record.

  “Well, get your pilot to come inside,” I said with a sigh. “I’ll warm up some homemade chili since we’re going to have to eat it before we go anyway. We have a lot of packing to do.”

  “Homemade? Really? You have homemade chili?” I heard The Kid repeat as I headed for the kitchen.

  “With venison,” Dave said with an enthusiastic nod.

  I couldn’t manage a smile at how excited and childlike the two of them sounded at the prospect of a meal that had long ago gone the way of the dodo. I could only think about what we were about to do, and know how very badly it could turn out.

  #

  The helicopter jolted as we eased in for a touchdown at the Billings airport the next morning. I clutched my half-full airsick bag and groaned as the remnants of my breakfast rolled in my stomach. As much as anything, it just sucked to have wasted the food.

  “You okay?” Dave asked as our pilot Brian slid the doors open and hopped out ahead of us.

  “I’m fine,” I reassured him as I tossed the bag off toward the bushes next to the airstrip. “It’s just been a while since I was in the air in anything, I guess. And it certainly wasn’t a helicopter.”

  “It’s common,” Brian said as he motioned us toward the small plane parked on the tarmac that would take us the rest of the way to Seattle. “Helicopters fly differently, lots of people puke in them.”

  I smiled at his retreating back, appreciative of his attempt to make me feel better, even if it was delivered in short, gruff tones. He seemed like a nice guy, but something about him made me uneasy. Maybe the fact that he talked and moved like military, even though The Kid and Nicole kept telling me he could be trusted.

  We moved across the field toward the plane and Brian opened up the door with a hook that had been left on the tarmac, probably when they landed.

  “It will take me a few minutes to get the systems up and ready,” he explained. “Meanwhile, cover me.”

  I sighed as I pulled my pistol. Of course there were zombies here. There were freaking zombies everywhere.

  “Toward the terminal,” Nicole said, the picture of calm.

  I turned in the direction of the big terminal building and sure enough, there was a zombie, still dressed in the remnants of his pilot’s uniform, staggering toward us. His moans and groans echoed in the still, cool air.

  Nicole leveled her pistol on him, but Dave placed a hand on the barrel.

  “Wait,” he murmured. “If we shoot, it will only bring more of them. Let me deal with it.”

  She shrugged as he pulled the machete from the sling I’d made for him a month or two back (etsy had nothing on me). He walked toward the thing, no hesitation, no worry. The pilot zombie didn’t care, of course. He didn’t even seem to notice Dave as he sliced with the blade in one, smooth motion.

  The zombie held still for a moment, and then slowly, comically, his head rolled back away from his body and hit the cracking tarmac below him. His body hit the same ground shortly thereafter and he twitched once before he lay still.

  As Dave turned back and started toward us, The Kid took three steps back. Dave looked at him as he reached us.

 
; “What?”

  “So that’s what it looks like,” Robbie whispered.

  Dave walked toward him. “Hey-”

  But before he could finish, Robbie sidestepped him. “Just… don’t touch.”

  I spun on the boy. “Look, he isn’t going to hurt you, okay? You know that. You also knew what was going on with him before you came here. That’s why you came here in the first place, right?”

  “Yeah, I just didn’t know what it would look like. I’m going to check on Brian,” The Kid said with a shiver before he ducked into the plane.

  Nicole and I looked at Dave. He was pale and his frown was deep as he stared up where the kid had gone into the plane.

  “It’s okay,” I tried to comfort him, but he didn’t react.

  “And he knows what’s going on,” Dave muttered, almost more to himself than to us. “He knows what I am and why I am this way and he still backs away like I’m a monster. Think about what other people will do, even if we do save the world.”

  Nicole shrugged. “We’ll just start a campaign or something. Zombie-People are People Too. We’ll get awesome videos on YouTube. It will be fine. Now come on, looks like Brian is starting the engines.”

  She climbed up into the plane and Dave and I followed. But as he closed the door and latched it, I could see he didn’t feel any better.

  The trip didn’t help either. On a small plane, we were talking a five hour trip. And me without my Kindle or my Angry Birds. Of course, there were other things to keep us entertained. Like the way The Kid kept watching Dave out of the corner of his eye as if he might zombie out at any moment. Or like the view out the window.

  Over Yellowstone, we saw great zombie herds half-dressed in their summer clothes, roaming amongst the buffalo in the heavy snow. In Northern Idaho, it was a still-smoldering city that greeted us.

  It was weird. We knew the zombies were down there. We fought them all the time. We knew the cities had burned, had been bombed, we’d been witness to that too. But from the air, it was worse. It was stark proof that our universe had been materially changed. It was stark proof that even if we ‘saved’ the world, it would never be the same again.

  Dave shut his eyes and refused to look after a certain point, but I kept staring, soaking every bit of carnage in as we moved closer and closer to Seattle.

  And when we reached it?

  “Oh my God, David,” I murmured, grabbing his jacket sleeve to force him to look out the window.

  We came in from a northern approach, flying directly over the city in a route the National Guard would have once shot us down because of. Thanks to Brian, we had the best view anyone had ever had of what happened here less than a year ago. A year that felt like a lifetime.

  Many of the downtown high-rises that had once surged into the cloudy sky had been burned all the way to the street by the bombings. Others were partially demolished. The few that remained were nothing more than skeletal remnants of a life we’d once lived. The glass was broken out of them, they listed to the left or right from impact.

  Even the Space Needle, a once proud vision of the future in the 1962 World’s Fair, was obliterated. The top part of the tower, the swirling, space-like disk, had broken off and the column of metal that once held it was bent over in half, teetering gingerly on God knew how little metal.

  “Jesus,” Dave breathed as he leaned over my shoulder to look. “It’s all gone.”

  “They bombed Seattle by the end of the first couple of days,” Brian said around his headset. “Downtown was hit the worst. We’ll be landing at Boeing Field, it’s closer than the old airport. From there we’ll take a helicopter. You’ll see that some of the areas outside of downtown weren’t hit as hard.”

  I suppose it was meant to make us feel better. It really didn’t. I reached out to take Dave’s hand and we were silent for the rest of the journey.

  Chapter Four

  Spare the Shotgun, Spoil the Zombie

  Less than an hour after our arrival in the city we had fled the summer before, the helicopter landed in the middle of what students used to call Red Square on the campus of University of Washington. They’d used red bricks when they built it, hence the name. Although during the outbreak, where this had been ground zero of the attack, news reports had shown it running red with something else.

  But now, surprisingly, it was pretty free of any remnants of the zombie outbreak. The winter rains had washed the brick clean and someone had tidied up the bodies over the months.

  Dave reached up to help me down from the helicopter as Brian cut the engines and did whatever pilot-y things were necessary. I stood next to The Kid and Nicole and Dave and looked at the campus. Aside from the emptiness and a few broken windows here and there, it didn’t look much different than it had when I attended UW years ago.

  “They didn’t bomb here?” I asked in wonder as I stared at mostly pristine buildings, including the big library in the square. It hadn’t even been touched.

  “No,” Nicole said as she motioned us to follow her. “I don’t know what other experiments were going on here under the guise of university projects, but judging from some of the things we’ve heard since our arrival, disturbing them was apparently seen as a bad thing to do.”

  “Something worse than zombies?” Dave asked in disbelief.

  Nicole shrugged and I shook my head. “Awesome.”

  She led us through the winding paths of the campus, but I noticed she didn’t have a gun out (unlike me, Ms. Always Prepared). She wasn’t moving like she was worried about stray zombies or even looters, either.

  “So what’s up with the nonchalance?” I asked as I moved to walk beside her. “Are you trying to get bitten to become a test subject?”

  She half-grinned at me. “No, but man, that would be a story to write, wouldn’t it? Zombie outbreak from the point of view of someone freshly bitten? Pulitzer!”

  “The Pulitzer doesn’t even exist anymore, numnuts,” The Kid muttered from behind us.

  Nicole ignored him and continued, “Anyway, I don’t have to worry about zombies here.”

  “Why?” I asked. “And how? Oh, and, um, are you crazy? We have to worry about zombies everywhere.”

  Nicole stopped and motioned around them. “Hear how quiet the campus is?”

  I stopped too and listened. “Yeah? So? Like eighty percent or more of the population was wiped out. That will make it pretty quiet.”

  “But no zombie sounds either?” She lifted a brow. “That’s because they’re outside the fence.”

  “The fence?” I repeated.

  “There’s a big fence that surrounds a portion of the campus now. It was put up by the military forces that were left over after the bombings to create a safe base, I guess, since it wasn’t about to contain the zombies by the time they built it. But the result is… well, it was pretty easy to clean out the few left within the perimeter and take over. We can even expand as we clear the buildings.”

  “Okay,” I said, still totally uncertain. I mean, a fence? Really? That was going to be our big savior here, some chicken wire? “But don’t you think you might get breaches?”

  “There are people here whose jobs it is just to walk the line, checking for weak spots. And the snipers help.”

  Dave caught up to us and he looked as confused by all this as I was. Good, because I liked it better when we were on the same page.

  “Snipers? Perimeter checks? That sounds like a military base sort of thing,” he said. “Are they still here?”

  We turned a corner and there was a big building just across the walkway. In front of it were a couple of guys dressed in full military regalia and carrying machine guns.

  “Oh shit,” Dave said and started staggering back.

  Out of pure instinct, I threw myself in front of him as we both skittered away like crabs in a tank. Except just like crabs, there was nowhere to go and we were going to end up cooked.

  “Hey, hey,” Nicole said, following us. “It’s okay.”

/>   “How can it be okay?” Dave snapped. “The fucking military is fucking going to fucking make me into a fucking pincushion right before they dissect my brain.”

  “Wow, so many f-bombs, babe,” I said. “Nice. And Dave is right. How can military be okay?”

  “They were here when we got here,” The Kid explained. “But they weren’t affiliated with anything anymore. The government abandoned them. They’re just survivors like us.”

  I eyed the men, who were watching us now with interest. Yeah, they were survivors, but we’d encountered plenty of survivors with ulterior motives before. Cults, separatists, Nicole and Robbie, at different points… the list went on and on. So I wasn’t ready to just run up and start handing out the hugs.

  “You sold us out before,” I said, looking from one of them to the other. “Both of you sold us out for various reasons. So how do I know we’re not going to go in there and find General Asshole waiting to take David away?”

  Nicole’s gaze got all hurt, but Robbie seemed less emotional about the whole thing. “Selling you out was so six months ago,” he said with a shrug. “Live in the now.”

  Dave rolled his eyes. “Encouraging.”

  Nicole sighed. “If we’re selling you out, you’re already screwed, aren’t you?” she asked. “I mean, you’re stuck within the perimeter of the campus, behind a fence that’s patrolled by soldiers. You could run, but you wouldn’t get away.”

  “This is not inspiring my trust, Nicole,” I said as my breath became short with just the images she was creating.

  “I told you, we’re on your side, we’re not selling you out, we’re not working as part of some government conspiracy,” she continued. “And since you don’t exactly have a lot of other options, why don’t you just come inside and let me prove it to you?”

  I shot Dave a look and for a minute we held eyes. All this awesome unspoken communication went between us and finally he shrugged. The shrug told me everything.

  “Okay, why not?” I said, reaching out to thread my hand through the crook of his elbow.

  We followed Nicole and The Kid up to the door. The two military guys didn’t make any moves. One actually smiled at us as we went through the door. A good sign, but I didn’t put my guard down.