The building still smelled like school. That dusty, sort of wet scent that filled lots of older Seattle buildings mixed with dust from chalk boards and musty books. Nicole led us through the hallways and down a flight of stairs to a big, heavy door. There was a desk beside it and a series of electrical locks next to it that had been busted out.
“Nice security system,” Dave muttered.
“Once upon a time, it was,” The Kid said as he pulled the door open and motioned us inside. “But it didn’t really matter, did it? They still all got slaughtered and zombie-fied before it was done.”
“Thanks, that’s great,” I said, sarcasm my refuge from the massive freak-out I was trying to hold in.
He laughed as he took us down another hallway, but this one was lit.
“Generators?” Dave asked.
The Kid nodded. “Yeah, they run all day, we shut them down at night except for a couple that run refrigerated units. To conserve resources, we have a shower schedule for the people on our team. We’ll put you guys on it, too.”
I frowned. In Montana, we’d never had to schedule showers. We had a great system for heating water, we could eat and shit and whatever when we felt like it without having to raise our hands and ask for permission.
This felt like camp life all over again. Only with machine gun-wielding soldiers. Of course, they hadn’t taken our guns away… yet. So that was something.
“Are you living in the university dorms?” I asked.
“No, they’re pretty far flung from this part of campus and it seems like a risk, so we converted the classrooms above with salvaged dorm furniture. The shower was an emergency unit here in the lab. We like to keep everyone close for the safety of our group.”
“Or for monitoring?” I asked, still not completely sure if I could trust anyone in the room but Dave.
The Kid smiled. “Sarah, you never change.”
He opened the door at the end of the hallway and revealed a huge laboratory. As he stepped in, his grin doubled. “And this is it.”
“This is what?” Dave asked, staring at the brightly lit room, the back labs we could see through huge windows, the bustling people who looked up as we entered, almost in awe of us.
“Well, it’s my lab,” The Kid explained. “But it’s also where it all began. This is the lab where they invented the virus. Seems only fair that it’s the lab where we wipe it out.”
I staggered as the blood rushed to my head. This was the very lab where the outbreak had started?
“Hey, you okay?” Dave asked as he grabbed for a chair from one of the desks in the lab. He pushed me into it gently. “Put your head between your knees and breathe until you don’t feel woozy anymore.”
I probably would have argued, except for that wanting to puke and pass out thing. After a few moments, both feelings passed and I sat up straighter.
“Sorry,” I muttered. “It’s just a lot to digest.”
It was more than that, but that was the easiest explanation at the moment. Dave patted my arm gently and looked around.
“So everyone is staring at us,” he said, loud enough that the lab could hear. “I guess… hi?”
I looked up and he was right, there were at least ten people in the lab and they were all staring. I slowly stood up, ready to fight if I had to.
“Yes, sorry, let me introduce you to some of our key players,” The Kid said, motioning us to follow him. “You’ll meet everyone eventually, but I think there are a few people you’ll especially want to see.”
We weaved our way through the lab toward a back room. When Robbie opened the door, my eyes went wide.
“Oh my God, Josh and Drea?” I burst out as I hurried toward our old friends from Phoenix. Drea enveloped me in a hug first as Josh shook hands with Dave.
When Drea let me go, she turned to The Kid with a smile and a very motherly hug that he responded to with no hesitation. “Great work, buddy. You said you’d get them and you did.”
“So you guys are all still together?” I said, rather stupidly, since it was pretty obvious.
“You said to watch out for The Kid and we did,” Josh said, ruffling the boy’s hair as a greeting. “When the opportunity came to head up to this lab and keep working on cure elements, we couldn’t say no.”
Josh had been a chemist in a previous life and I could see a spark in his eyes that said how excited he was about the work they were doing. Drea put her arm around him and for a moment my fears were assuaged. The two of them had always been good people. I couldn’t imagine they’d throw us under the bus without at least looking sheepish about it.
“So you guys feel like this is legit?” Dave asked.
Josh nodded. “It is. Robbie and I oversee the production of the different elements and the mixture. We have a lot of terrific, smart people working out there, people who have risked a lot to help us. I hope you two will join us.”
“What happens if we don’t?” Dave asked, wariness in his tone.
“Then you don’t…” Drea said with a sigh. “But it will hurt our cause.”
“I just don’t know,” I said under my breath, confusion mobbing me.
“Oh Sarah, always so jaded for someone with such spectacular breasts,” said a voice with a thick British accent behind us.
I staggered around to find our old rock and roll friend McCray standing in the doorway. He was still wearing leather and he still looked like a rock god, but his eyes were clear and he had a few extra pounds on him that told me he’d lost his supply of heroin at some point.
“McCray!” I cried as I hugged him. “Nicole didn’t say you were here.”
He glanced at our reporter friend with a wink. “No? How you wound me, love.”
She blushed and I stepped back in surprise. Ah… so the two of them were an… item. Interesting since Nicole had hardly been able to stand him when we traveled together not that long ago.
“Look, it’s a lot to take in, I know,” Nicole said, waving McCray off like she’d deal with him later. “And you’ve had a long flight, plus Sarah I know you’re not feeling so great. Why don’t we show you your rooms? You can rest tonight, meet a few more people, and talk about things. Tomorrow morning, when we have a full day to get started on our work, I think your minds will be clearer.”
Dave looked at me and I shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”
“Sure,” Dave agreed. “Let us absorb everything and we’ll start fresh tomorrow.”
McCray laughed as he draped an arm around Dave’s shoulders. “Excellent. Then come along, my little zombie friend. We’ll show you to your humble abode above stairs.”
Dave and I laughed as we let him lead us through the lab and up a couple flights of stairs to the old classrooms above, but there were still lingering doubts in my mind. Doubts I wasn’t sure would ever be erased.
#
Dave smoothed the sheets over the old dorm bed we’d been given and patted the flat surface for me to climb in. Instead, I sat down next to him to rest my head on his shoulder and for a moment we were quiet, even though I was pretty sure he had as many thoughts racing around in his head as I did mine.
“It’s like reunion central here, isn’t it?” he asked.
I sighed, lifting my head from his shoulder and lying down on the narrow mattress.
“Yeah, there is that. Doesn’t it seem weird that there are so many people we used to know, hang out with, fight next to in this one place?”
“While you were brushing your teeth, McCray was talking about that. He called us catalyst people. He said we’re the kind of couple who change the people we touch, so it makes sense that a lot of people we’ve met would all sort of find each other to work toward a goal.”
“Shit, that makes us sound like cult leaders,” I muttered as I flopped back on the pillow.
“Naw, we have experience with cult leaders, we’re much more awesome than that,” Dave teased. “Look, I’m willing to give them all the benefit of the doubt, at least for now, that what they’re
selling us is really what they want. To cure zombieism. To use my… thing to make the world a better place.”
“Yeah, and like Nicole said, it isn’t like we have a ton of alternative choices. If they want to fuck us over, we’re a little bit trapped now.”
He rubbed his chin as he stared down at me. “So are you okay?”
I wrinkled my brow. “Um, yeah. Why?”
“You’ve just been a little more quiet than usual. Not my normal snarky Sarah. McCray has been lining up shots you would normally take all day long.”
I shifted. Here was an opening to tell him what was really bothering me. I opened my mouth to do it and… I just couldn’t. Not right now when everything else was so heavy and confusing and distracting.
“Do you really think we should be doing this?”
“Doing what? Staying in this room together?” he teased. “We are married Sarah. And when a man and a woman love each other very much-”
I swatted his arm gently. “You know what I mean, ass-hat. Should we be here in Seattle, working on something so dangerous, whatever the motives of our friends turn out to be?”
He stared at me and the teasing in his eyes faded. “Since when are you afraid of danger, Supergirl?”
“You already almost died and got kidnapped playing a part in this whole find-the-cure pyramid scheme we’ve got going here. I don’t know if I’d call it fear, I just don’t want to risk losing everything again. You haven’t had that happen to you yet, you don’t know what a number it plays on you.”
“Everything is you and me,” he said as he ignored the other bed and took a spot on the narrow mattress beside me. “Just you and me, right? For better or worse. We’re not going to lose that, I can promise you.”
“But you can’t promise it, Dave,” I said softly. “You can promise we’re going to love each other and I believe it. But you can’t promise you’re going to be okay anymore.”
He touched my chin. “I promise you all that. And I keep my promises.”
He smiled and then he closed his eyes, not even waiting for my response. I lay there for a while, listening to his breath going only out not in, and only once every so often. Zombie Breath, I called it.
“David?” I whispered.
But he was already asleep.
Chapter Five
Go with the flow. There’s a lot you won’t see coming when it comes to zombies.
Morning came just as early as always, even though our world had changed, once again. I guess we should have been used to it, but I wasn’t really. I felt discombobulated, sick, and for the first time in a long time, like I just wanted to wake up and have things feel normal again. Only I wasn’t sure what normal was anymore.
Dave, on the other hand, seemed to thrive on the new reality. He’d been up before the alarm went off and downstairs in the lab while I was still muttering and swearing in bed. Morning people were even worse when they had a touch of zombie in them.
I pushed through the doors into the main lab area. A few people lifted their heads, there were some nervous smiles (I guess people did that to the wife of the Big Zombie), but then it was business as usual.
Dave poked his head out from one of the back rooms and grinned. “Hey, there you are!”
I smiled, a forced expression. He was just a little too gleeful about all this even while I was hesitating my ass off. Weren’t we supposed to be so in tuned to each other’s moods and shit? Wasn’t that our thing? So why wasn’t he doing the thing with me now when I kind of needed him to look me in the eye, get all gooey and say, “I can sense you’re not totally on board, let’s have a latte and talk.”
Okay, everything except the nonexistent lattes.
“Come back here, you’re never going to believe this,” he said instead with another of those ‘world-saver’ grins.
My stomach turned as I walked toward him. You’re never going to believe this was never exactly a good thing to hear in the middle of a post-apocalyptic crisis. Trust me, this is just the truth.
I walked into the back room and screeched to a halt. Nicole was standing at a table, looking over some kind of map and next to her was a girl I recognized. A girl Dave and I had met in Seattle right at the beginning of the outbreak and never thought we’d see again.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, hardly looking up.
What the hell was her name? Her family had run a Korean restaurant in the International District, she’d been all badass when we bumped into her, but she wouldn’t leave with us. I could picture it all but couldn’t remember her name.
“It’s Lisa,” Dave prompted. “Remember from the restaurant way back last year?”
I snapped my fingers. “Lisa! Of course. Wow… you’re here?”
She looked up again, all annoyance. Yup, same girl, only now she had a kicky short haircut and leather pants. Right out of a novel, all she needed was a magical tattoo and a soul mate and she would have been a bestseller.
“I could ask the same of you,” she said with a put-upon sigh. “I wouldn’t have placed money on you two making it out of the neighborhood alive, let alone having anything to do with the cure. But what do you know? Miracle of miracles, you’re our saviors somehow.”
I bit my lip, trying to hold back a string of snark that would blister the ears of every person in the lab.
“Well, it’s nice to see you, too,” I finally managed with great difficulty. “But what a small world.”
“A lot smaller since we got an eighty percent mortality/zombie rate,” Lisa said with a roll of her eyes.
I was both impressed with her sarcasm skill and annoyed by them. Was this how people felt with me? No wonder Dave had wanted that divorce a year ago. But I was an old dog, it was hard to learn new tricks. Especially when snarky served me so well.
“I meant what a small world that you’d end up here where we’d see you again. How did you go from locked in a restaurant downtown to up here in the U-District working at the lab where the outbreak started?”
Lisa glanced at me briefly.
“They bombed down there,” she said, her voice flat and emotionless even though her eyes were deep fathoms of grief. “I barely got out with my life. And the city was in chaos at the point. It was ugly, I’ll just say that. But eventually I got found by a group of soldiers who had been abandoned to die in Seattle.”
My eyes widened. “The soldiers here at the lab?”
She gave one curt nod. “Eventually we came here to try to figure out if we could do something about the outbreak. We were here when Robbie and their crew got here with way more information and experience. Now we do what we can to protect them.”
I drew in a breath. I’d seen a lot of shit since escaping the city and heard a lot more from survivors over the months. But I was always impressed by those who came out on top. All of our survival stories were unique and powerful. I should totally write a book about them if we get out of this alive at any point.
“So have you had your blood tests?” Lisa asked, shaking her head in a way that said the subject of her survival was closed, probably permanently.
“Oh yeah, that’s our next stop,” Dave said with a nod.
“Blood tests?” I repeated with a quick glance at Dave. Nice that he was setting these things up for me without saying anything. “What blood tests?”
He raised a brow at my terse tone.
“No biggie. We just need to head over to Robbie and let him get a bit of our blood to run some standard tests, as well as some slightly un-standard tests. Actually, I’m sure he’ll want to take tons of mine, but for you it sounds like just a vial or two.”
I clenched my fists at my sides. Standard tests.
“I just don’t see why it’s necessary,” I insisted.
Lisa and Nicole looked at me from the table in a weird, ‘why are you freaking out’ way.
“After everything, are you scared of needles, Sarah?” Nicole laughed. “That would be hilarious. Headline: Biggest Apocalypse Badass Cries at Sight of Needle.�
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“It’s not needles,” I managed through clenched teeth.
“Then let’s go,” Dave insisted, placing a hand on the small of my back to guide me toward the door away from the others. “See you ladies later.”
“Bye,” both of them said at once before they returned to their map of the campus. I could hear them talking as we left about clearing buildings and something about the schedule of perimeter patrols.
We moved back into the main area of the lab and I felt myself starting to lean back against Dave’s hand, dragging my feet so we wouldn’t have to go to the other lab room. Dave glanced at me and I felt the pressure on my back increase as he gently shoved me toward wherever we were supposed to be.
“What’s up with you?” he asked, trying not to draw attention to us by smiling at people we passed.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said under my breath and through my clenched teeth.
“Why?” he asked and I could hear the tension and annoyance in his tone despite the calmness of his expression. “Sarah, it’s just what they do here when they have new people come. We aren’t any different. You’re being paranoid.”
He ushered me into a room and shut the door. I bit my lip as I saw needles in sterilized containers and vials already ready. Our names were marked on them with a red Sharpie. The “h” in my name had dripped a little and it looked like a bloody wound.
“Why do they do it?” I asked. “Why do they need to get my blood?”
“To limit the spread of disease, not zombie stuff, but regular stuff. To see the impact of the way we’ve been living. And yeah, they’ll probably use it for tests on other things like the virus and the inoculation and all that shit.” He folded his arms. “You’ve never been freaked out by tests like this, Sarah, so why are you completely losing your shit?”
“I don’t like needles,” I tried, pathetically weak.
He arched a brow. “Sarah.”
“I’m not losing my shit,” I insisted. “Okay, I’m not.”
The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) Page 4