In the Dead: Volume 1 (6 page)

“
Nadia,” he said softly.

She didn’t look away from the screen. “Look, the symptoms are flashing across the bottom of the screen. Red eyes, graying skin, black drool or vomit…”

“
Nadia,” he said, this time louder.

“
That totally sounds like that guy outside,” she said, still staring at the screen in utter disbelief. “Shit… he was a zombie?”

“
Nadia,” he said, this time sharp. “He bit me.”

She didn’t stop staring at the screen for almost a minute, but he knew she’d heard him. He could tell by the way her shoulders hunched and then stiffened, by the way her neck got red and her hands started to shake.

Finally, she faced him. Her skin was pale and sticky, her eyes wide and filled with tears. “That isn’t funny.”

He held up his hand so she could see. “Nadi, I’m not laughing.”

#

The blood was rushing to Nadia’s head and ears, roaring and making everything around her seem distant and echo-y. Maybe this was a dream. That was it. She was just having a really screwed up dream, maybe brought on by eating too close to bedtime.

Except that when Randy reached out to touch her, he felt real. And the echoing distance faded and left reality behind.

“
You okay?” he asked.

She blinked. Was he really asking
her
that after telling her he’d been bitten by that…
thing
outside? After hearing what would happen if that
thing
was really a zombie?

“
Let me see it,” she said. Her voice sounded weird. Sort of broken and soft.

He swallowed hard and then lifted the hand that wasn’t touching her arm. His hand was tanned. Somehow that was the first thing she noticed. In Seattle he’d been pale and his hands soft from working at the firm. Now they were rough and brown.

Except for the gash across the top. There were definite teeth marks that broke the skin and dragged, almost like the man outside had twisted in an attempt to get more…
food
, she supposed was the driving force when he’d attacked Randy. Not that motives really mattered to her.

No, what mattered to her most was that the skin around the bite wasn’t pink or red or even pale from loss of blood. It was grey, with black-tinged edges that seemed to be spreading from the source of the injury like a poison had been put there and killed the skin.

“
Randy,” she said as she looked up into his face. He was pale and his skin was sticky with a cold sweat.

“
I know,” he said, just as softly before he wrapped his arms around her and drew her against his chest. She could hear his heart through his shirt as they stood in horrified silence in the middle of the cottage. Only she could have sworn his heart sounded… slower.

But that was just her wild imagination.

Randy sighed. “Nadia.”

She nodded against his chest.

“
Baby, you’ve got to go.”

She jerked back and stared up into his face in surprise. “What?”

He tilted his head. “You heard the news report as well as I did. You know what’s going to happen to me and you know there’s no stopping it.”

“
We could call the ambulance,” she insisted, trying to get out of his embrace, but he held fast.

“
Phones are dead,” he reminded her.

“
Then we’ll get in the car and drive to the hospital,” she insisted. “The news has to be wrong, they have to have a treatment for this.”

He shut his eyes. “It takes thirty minutes to get to the closest hospital, Nadia. And I’m not going to last that long.”

She flinched. “What do you mean?” Her voice barely croaked past her lips.

“
It’s like the reporter said.” He let her go now and backed away, but now Nadia found herself wanting to stay close, to hold him like it would stop him from saying what he was going to say next. “I feel super hungry and I can…”

He stopped and turned his face.

She stepped closer, but he moved backward so she stopped. “What? What else, Randy?”

“
I can, um, smell you. Smell your blood,” he admitted on hardly more than a whisper.

Now Nadia stepped back as horror overtook her. “This can’t be happening.”

“
But it is. And in a short time, I’m not going to be able to control what I do and who I am,” Randy said. “I can feel that already. So I need you to go. I need you to run now. As far from the Pacific Northwest as you can get. I need to know that you got away from me… from this Outbreak, or whatever it is”

Tears filled her eyes and Nadia made no attempt to quell them. They slid down her cheeks as she reached for Randy, but didn’t touch him. He didn’t let her. And that told her too much.

“
Please don’t make me go.”

“
Nadi, I’ve dragged you into my mess for far too long,” he said. “I ruined your life when I took you from Seattle and made you a fugitive like me. But I’m not going to kill you. And if you leave here and I know you have a chance, that will make this… well, I wouldn’t say easier. But better, somehow. Please, do this for me.”

Nadia stared at him for a long moment and seriously considered ignoring his order. At least they’d be zombies together.

“
Please,” he repeated.

She nodded, though she didn’t remember wanting to agree to this madness. She grabbed for her keys, her wallet and her cell from the table, she had to believe there would be service at some point. She moved toward the door. She wanted to hug him, to kiss him, but his lips were graying and she didn’t think he’d let her. And maybe if she touched him, he would lose his mind and attack her.

“
Randy,” she said. “I’m going to Vegas. Karen lives there. I’m going to Karen’s. If you’re ok… well, try to meet me there.”

He looked up at her. His eyes were wide and dilated. He was gasping for breath and it killed her.

“
Okay. Now go. Please!”

She ran out the door, hardly able to see thanks to the tears in her eyes. At a full sprint, she rushed to the front of the house and the SUV that was parked there. The vehicle was the last remnant of the life she had shared with Randy in Seattle. She clicked the auto-unlock and grabbed for the door. Before she could get in, though, she heard barking.

She turned and watched with a stupid smile as Duncan rushed around the house and bounded toward her.

“
Duncan!” she sobbed and let the animal hop into the car. He climbed over to the passenger seat and sat there, perched on the leather he was never allowed to sit on and drooled at her.

“
Good,” she muttered as she got into the car and shut the door. She locked it and started the engine. “I’ve never traveled well alone.”

The dog barked his response and she backed up the sandy drive way and peeled out on the road that led to the highway a few miles away. In the rearview mirror, she looked at the cottage and her heart stuttered.

Randy had dragged himself around the house. He was shambling toward the car, his body limp and lifeless even as he moved toward her. She reached up and flipped the mirror so that she could no longer see and then floored it away from the cottage, away from the life she’d once known, and away from the love of her life.

The Treehouse

“
You can’t just shoot an eight-year-old boy,” Robin said as she watched Carl point his rifle at the kid in the tree a few hundred yards away. The oak rose from a field of wheat and the boy in question clung to one of the bigger branches. “There may not be laws anymore, but there are morals.”

Carl turned toward her and blinked a few times. “You want to talk to me about morals when there are zombies roaming the nation, killing everyone?”

Robin sighed. This was a conversation they seemed to have at least once a day. Sometimes she thought she just didn’t have anything in common with Carl at all. Of course, they’d only met a month before. And they’d only teamed up because they were two of the few survivors left in the world. And he’d had canned beans. And she’d had energy bars.

It was a match made in heaven.

Except for this one little thing.

“
Have you ever seen a zombie climb a tree?” she asked, folding her arms in challenge.

That made him stop. He lowered the rifle and lifted his eyes skyward as he pondered that question

“
If you have to think that long, then the answer is no,” Robin said as she drew her 9mm from its holster at her waist. “So why don’t we just roam on up there and see if the boy is a zombie before we just splatter his brains all over the branches, hmmm?”

He sighed. “Fine.”

Robin stared. The wheat field hadn’t been harvested or treated in any way since the Outbreak, so it was now overgrown and wild. The greenery was almost to Robin’s waist. It was the perfect place where zombies could be laying in wait, maybe even with their legs severed. She’d seen people grabbed by the ankles and get turned from one little scratch on a calf. She hated shrubs and brush. Where were all the landscapers in this apocalypse? Hadn’t any of
them
survived?

“
Sure you don’t want me to just shoot him after all?” Carl asked with a smirk.

Robin glared at him, then took the machete from its sling across her back. With a sweep of the blade, she started clearing a path toward the tree and the boy in the branches. Carl had a blade, too, but he stayed behind her, meandering in the path she’d created.

“
So you’re not going to help?” she asked over her shoulder.

He laughed and it was a pleasant enough sound. She actually liked his laugh.

“
You wanted to do this, I figured you’d take the lead.”

She would have glared at him over her shoulder, she
really
wanted to, but safety was more important than letting him know how annoying he was being, so she kept her eyes on the overgrown wheat in her path.

She was almost instantly glad she did, because one more sweep of her machete revealed the torso of a zombie hidden in the brush. A living torso, of course. A woman wearing what was left of a flowery dress. She had been injured at some point, her legs were gone, but that didn’t stop her. She dragged herself forward with the bloody stumps of her arms and growled at Carl and Robin in hungry bloodlust.

Robin sighed and then smacked her machete into the woman’s skull with a wet thunk. The zombie whined softly, then the light went out of her hungry, red eyes and she was still.

“
It’s weird,” Carl said as he watched Robin step on the woman’s rotting back to yank the machete from her skull. She wiped it on the wheat next to her.

“
What’s weird?” Robin asked. “There’s so much to pick from, you’ll have to be more specific.”

“
Like six months ago, if I had seen half the body of a woman inching toward me, I would have freaked out,” Carl explained as he stepped over the fresh corpse. “But now, it hardly registers.”

“
It’s called desensitization,” Robin sighed. “We’re just becoming better killing machines, less distracted by our… um…
enemy
?”

It was hard for her to think of the zombies as an enemy. The word implied some kind of animosity and the zombies didn’t really have any. They didn’t feel anything except for a primal drive to attack and devour. Robin couldn’t really hate them, though she knew plenty of people who did.

Like Carl. But then Carl had watched his entire family, including a baby sister, get destroyed by the Outbreak. Robin hadn’t.

She swiped away the last bit of brush in her way and crested the little hill where the big tree rose up over the field below. With a sigh, she looked at Carl.

“
I know you don’t want to do this, but can you just keep an eye out for the zombies while I’m looking up in the tree.”

Carl gave a put-upon groan, like she was asking him to do something so hard, but he nodded. “Sure. I’ve got your back. And once you’ve realized the kid is a zombie and we’ve put him down, then you can apologize for wasting my time.”

“
Wasting your time?” Robin laughed. “What, do you have a meeting to get to or something?”

Carl rolled his eyes, but Robin trusted him to have her back. They might not always see eye-to-eye, but in the short time since they met, he’d proven he was a good protector. And that he trusted her to be one, too.

Sort of.

Robin looked up in the tree. They weren’t directly below the boy, that would be suicide if he did turn out to be a zombie, but even from the angle, she had a good look at him.

He was naked except for a dirty pair of what had once been white underwear. His skin was dark from the sun and peeled around his shoulders like he’d had a sunburn that was fading. His hair was long, dark and dirty and she could sometimes smell the child when the wind turned just the right direction.

But he didn’t smell like death to her. Just like he needed a dunk in the river and a bit of soap and shampoo. They had plenty of that in the duffle bag attached to the motorcycle and sidecar they’d been using to tour the good old U.S. of A. Or what was left of it anyway.