The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (2 page)

I turned toward the stairs that led to the loft space and the exit we’d rigged to get up on the roof when we got here. Dave had even built a platform for us to sit on for zombie killing… and star gazing. No lights, at least on the western half of the country, really
did
lead to amazing stars when the nights were clear and cold.

I ducked out onto the steps outside the master bedroom window and climbed up onto the roof. It was slanted and slick, but I found my footing carefully and got myself onto the roof deck with little trouble. I set up my rifle on the sandbag rests Dave and I had placed there and arranged my ammo into easily accessible placements on the table beside me. Dave wasn’t in view yet and I waited, wanting to be extra certain I wouldn’t be catching him in crossfire. A lot of things couldn’t kill him anymore, but we were pretty sure a bullet to the brain would do it. Just like it did to all his zombie cousins.

In that brief moment, I looked up. No stars now, being that it was late afternoon. In fact the only things to look at in the sky were the birds flocking away from the zombies. Funny how their herds were the same. Running from predators.

Except… zombies didn’t have predators. And we’d never seen so many before, not around here anyway. What were
they
running from?

I heard a sharp whistle from below and straightened up. Our two-way radios had died a month before and we hadn’t been able to get replacement batteries yet, so that sharp whistle was Dave’s signal that he was in position, out of the way so I could snipe at my leisure.

I lined up my sights and carefully squeezed off the first shot. The rifle jerked back with the explosion of gunpowder rocketing the bullet into flight. In my sight I saw two zombies fall.

Dave’s woot echoed from below me and I grinned despite my annoyance that he wouldn’t let me any closer to the action than this. I fired again, shot after shot, dropping the zombies as they lurched closer and closer. A few of the ones near the front looked up and I could tell they had sniffed me out. I was their food source and now they were hunting me as much as I was hunting them. That fact made the air around me shift, the tension ratcheting up.

Funny how the fear of death never went away. It faded, but it lingered, like a smell you couldn’t get rid of in the kitchen, no matter how many times you sprayed the garbage can with air freshener.

My hands shook just a little, but it didn’t matter. Dave walked out from the porch at that moment. I ceased firing as I watched him move into the remaining crowd of ten or so zombies. They ignored him, as always. They saw him as one of them now. Or didn’t see him at all. Still, at night I dreamed of them one day realizing what he was. Of them tearing him apart into little shreds during one of these strange walkabouts he did with them.

I shivered and raised the rifle again, sighting in on a zombie at the far edge of the fray so that I wouldn’t be shooting at my husband. I dropped him and reloaded quickly, always keeping my eye on the crowd. Dave had pushed and herded them into a little group now. I stared at them, milling around where he had put them. Scattering but then turning back into the center when he nudged them.

He stepped back and started firing off the shotgun. The spraying blast dropped zombies in piles, three or more at a time until finally all them had stopped writhing, stopped groaning, stopped slashing, stopped moving.

I sighed and he looked up at me with a thumbs up. “Looks like we’re good,” he said.

I nodded. “I’ll come down to help you clean up.”

He hesitated and I could see he didn’t want me to. God, it was like he didn’t want me to come outside at all. But I wasn’t going to wait for him to deny me my right to help. I ducked inside and locked the window. I left the rifle downstairs, but tucked a handgun into my waistband (like a badass from some TV show) and headed outside into the brisk spring air.

Dave was already hauling zombie bodies into the big burn pile we’d created. Once a week or so, we’d burn what we’d killed. Normally it was one or two zombies, tops. This week would be a record for our time in Montana.

“So, did you notice those birds?” I asked as I caught a zombie under the armpits and dragged her toward the pile out back. She was wearing the remnants of a cop uniform, though her weapon was long gone. She still had a badge on her waistband, though. It was tarnished.

“Birds?” Dave asked, carrying three zombies over his shoulder like they were made of paper. “No.”

“They were flying away from something. They came from the same directions as the zombies did.” I looked up at the now-empty sky. “It made me think about how they run from predators together.”

“Okay,” he said as he hoisted the bodies onto the pile and we walked back to the front and the rest of our work. “So what?”

“Doesn’t it seem weird to you that after months here we get a pod of zombies roaming into our yard? Together? All coming from the same direction?” I asked as I reached for another zombie body.

He didn’t do the same, but just stared at me. “Are you saying they were herded here?”

I straightened up and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What could herd them, Sarah?” he asked, voice filled with incredulity.

I didn’t answer because at that moment I heard something. Faint. A sound that seemed oh-so-familiar, yet I couldn’t place it immediately.

“Sarah?” he repeated, his voice annoyed.

I raised my hand. “Shush, listen!”

He pursed his lips, but kept his mouth shut as he tilted his head and listened. The stillness was broken by a sound, growing louder by the moment. A sound whose name was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t find it in my post-apocalyptic mind.

Dave could. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “It’s a helicopter, Sarah!” he screamed as the noise got unbearably loud. “Holy fuckballs, it’s a helicopter!”

Chapter Two

What to Expect When You’re Expecting… Or
Not
Expecting… Zombies

“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.