A Living Dead Love Story Series (56 page)

Hector nods.

Dad hands the wand over, watching patiently, completely ignoring Dane and me.

The Sentinel waves the wand carefully over the wound. He looks pro in the medical scrubs, apron, and mask Dad made them special order for him last week.

“Fine, yes, like that,” Dad says, winking at me. “Just for the next 10 minutes.”

“What are you going to be doing?” Hector says.

“Talking to my daughter, that's what!”

Dad motions for us to follow him into the office he's set up in the next room.

As I sit in one of the two chairs on the other side of his desk, I'm struck by how much this office looks like his old coroner's office back home.

“How are you kids today?” His rosy cheeks glow on either side of his new, if graying, goatee.

“Forget us. What's with you scolding a real, live Sentinel like that? You do know Hector could rip you into little pieces that would fit inside one of your desk drawers, right?”

Dad waves dismissively. “Listen, Maddy, the Sentinels asked me for help with their electric therapy program, okay? If they want to do it right, then techs like Hector need to know how to do it right. It's in their own best interest to learn, right?”

I sigh. “Yes, it is, of course, but just remember you're human, okay?”

“How could I forget?” He pours coffee from his new two-cup coffeemaker. I smile to see him adding cream and sugar in the old, cracked Christmas mug he brought from home. “It took them five days to install a toilet, for Pete's sake! It's barbaric to make a grown man go in the woods, Maddy!”

“Well, Dr. Swift, you know zombies don't actually need toilets, right?” Dane smirks, fiddling with one of the pockets on his legs.

“Yes, Dane, I know that perfectly well, but couldn't
they have installed just one toilet when they built this place? I mean, just in case?”

“I can't imagine they were ever planning on inviting humans inside, Dad.”

“Yes, well, as the first human to ever become a Sentinel, I hope to make a few more changes around here before I'm done.”

“Okay, Dad.” I groan, rolling my eyes at Dane. “We just stopped by to see how you were doing.” I start to get up.

Dad motions me back down. To Dane he says, “Son, could you go check on Hector for me, please? Make sure he's not starting a fire with the bedsheets again?”

Dane chuckles and winks at me. The doors hiss behind him as he walks back into the lab.

“Dad, obvious much?”

Another dismissive wave. “Dane doesn't care. Besides, how much can you two see of each other anyway? Twenty-four hours a day isn't enough? He can spare your old man a few minutes, can't he?”

I shrug. I really do need to spend more time with Dad. Ever since we dragged him back to the center, we're both knee-deep in work during the day. And since he still has to sleep, he's always zonked out by the time I actually have an hour or two to hang out with him around, say, three in the morning.

I smile.

“So how are you, really, Maddy?”

“I'm good, but I'm used to all this. How are you doing?”

“I'm still working with dead bodies. Only, these ones are walking around.”

“I'm sorry it turned out this way. I tried to keep you out of it. Really, I did.”

He shrugs. “I got tired of you keeping me out of it. Frankly, I'd rather have a zombie for a daughter than no daughter at all.”

“Ah.” I crack a joke, if only to not choke up. “That's the nicest thing a human ever said to me.”

We chuckle.

“You talk to many humans lately, Maddy?”

We make small talk for a minute or two, just like back home. He looks so comfortable with his rumpled lab coat and his coffee mug. I can't help but be happy to see him here. Time will tell if he'll ever be happy, but … was he ever?

Even back home, with his house rules and his concerned face, the only time he seemed really happy was when he was reminding me how scary, creepy, and unhappy the real world is. Now he knows there's a real world beyond the real world, and that's given him even more reasons to be happily unhappy.

Jingling a key chain from the top of his desk, he says, “Do you want to see how Val is doing?”

I shrug.

He stands and leads me through the lab, motioning for Dane to follow. “Hector?” he shouts, pausing before the double doors.

“Going strong, sir.”

Dad shoots him a frown.

Hector shakes his head. “Sorry. Going strong, Doctor.”

“Better,” Dad says, mostly to himself.

Dane and I follow dutifully as Dad leads us down the hall toward a green door marked Keep Out.

“Ignore that,” Dad says, sliding in his single key. It's about the same size and heft of the one I stole from Vera to escape to Barracuda Bay.

Inside are two doors. One is a cell, the other clear Plexiglas. Val is in the cell, strapped to a bed. She turns her head toward us, blonde hair no longer spiky but extra greasy instead. Though her eyes blaze a healthy, angry yellow, her mouth is covered by a thin leather strap locked tight at the back of her head.

“We had to muzzle her,” Dad explains. “I can't imagine why, but she kept trying to bite me.”

“She didn't, did she, Doc?” Dane says with a mock-worried expression.

Dad slaps his shoulder.

I roll my eyes, though it's nice to see them getting along. Dad was always Team Stamp, after all.

“How is she doing?” I say. “I mean, really doing?”

Dad frowns. “She's not taking to the therapy as well as Stamp, obviously. Frankly, I'm not sure she'll ever be completely Zerker-free.”

“Is that what this is for?” I turn to the second door, the Plexiglas one that fronts the second mobile spray tanning booth from the Cabana Charly's warehouse.

Dad looks at it regretfully. “I suppose so. I was against the Sentinels moving it here when we left Barracuda Bay, but apparently they're trying to isolate the avotoxia chemical and use it in some kind of anti-Zerker weapon.”

Dane nods toward Val, who's suddenly gone quiet. “Are you sure you should be sharing trade secrets in front of her, Doc?”

Dad smirks as he hustles us both from the room. “Val? Look where she is. She's not getting out anytime soon.”

Published 2014 by Medallion Press, Inc.

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is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.

If you purchase this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

Copyright © 2014 by Rusty Fischer

Cover design by James Tampa

Edited by Emily Steele

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN
 9781605426501

To Martha, as always . . . for always.

E
ven from down
the hall, through the supposedly soundproof walls, I can hear her, shaking the bars of her cage, gnashing her jagged yellow teeth, wailing as if she's in pain.

I wince, subconsciously slowing down as I approach Dad's lab. Well, it's not really Dad's lab, as the Sentinels are always so quick to remind us, but that's how I look at it anyway. I mean, he's the only one qualified to study Val in the first place, so Dad's lab it is and Dad's lab it shall be and the Sentinels can lump it for all I care.

It's nearly midnight, and if we were back in Barracuda Bay, he'd be sacked out by now. But Sentinel City—at least, that's what he calls it, and now it's stuck with the rest of us—has a kind of Vegas feel. Since we zombies don't sleep, there's always as many folks roaming the halls at 2:00 a.m. as there are at 2:00 p.m. And since the place is short on windows, you pretty much never know what time it is anyway.

Sure enough, as I rap on the frosted glass in the middle of the lab door, I hear a quick, “It's open,” in between Val's shrieking.

I step in to find the lab brightly lit, as always, the smell of fresh coffee filling the air. Dad, lab coat unbuttoned over his crisp blue shirt and gold tie, leans against the counter across from Val's cage.

He is studying her carefully, the way he did dead bodies back in Barracuda Bay, where he was the coroner for Cobia County. I wonder what he thinks now that he's studying live ones. At least, re-alive ones. From the inquisitive look on his face, I think maybe he likes them a little better. Or maybe, like me, he's just trying to make the best of a crap situation.

I stand there, half in, half out of the door, just watching her scream at him. Dad's face is placid, as if he can't even see her, let alone hear her. Then I let the door shut behind me, and Val starts, as if she thought this was just a private performance.

I smirk. It's kind of nice to see the ice queen flinch. Moment of shock over, she returns to form, coiled evil at five feet nothing. Val's eyes are Zerker yellow and piercing and, even though I know the bars are three inches thick and solid steel, I shiver and wince and can't even front that I'm not freaked to the bone just being in the same room with her.

She stops screaming, pacing, fanning her fingers out from her cold, dead hand and rubbing them along the bars casually, as if it's the coolest place to be. I avoid her glare, hating myself for looking away but unable to stare back at so much hate.

In the next cage, Stamp leans against the bars as far away from Val as possible. His eyes, yellow too with a tinge of black, are half closed in boredom, as if he's heard it all before, ad nauseum, and doesn't really care if it ever stops. He offers me a weak smile and waves one finger, as if he doesn't want to draw any more attention to himself than that.

I smile, wriggle a finger back, and turn away. “Dad?”

He looks at me, eyes pleading. “Maddy, what are you doing here?”