The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) (8 page)

“Oh my God,” Dave whispered, though I couldn’t tell if it was ‘oh my God, get it out’ or ‘oh my God, look at a baby I made’ in his tone.

“That’s her. Or him,” Nadia said, her smile wide despite the circumstances. “Huh, you said you thought you were three months along?”

I nodded. “Yeah, three months ago is when all my normal womanly fun stopped.”

She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything else about her question. “Want a print out? I think this machine does that.”

I nodded. “Please.”

She messed with a few buttons and then a picture popped out of the machine. She handed it over and I stared at it as she continued to roll her wand over my belly.

“So what do you see beyond that there really is a baby or something in there?” Dave asked.

When I looked up I noticed he wasn’t looking at the baby picture. Like, at all.

“Well, there is a heartbeat,” she said, pointing to a flutter on the screen. She turned a dial and suddenly there was a faint sound, sort of like a wub, wub, wub that filled the room. “But-”

He jerked straight. “But?”

“It is a bit slower than I would expect,” she said. “Especially given the stress you’re under, Sarah.”

I nodded. Okay, so my baby had some kind of slow heartbeat syndrome. It could be that, right?

“Does that mean it’s a zombie?” Dave asked.

Nadia shrugged. “I’m going to be honest and tell you, I don’t know.”

“Well, do you know how far alone I am?” I asked.

She stared at me for a second too long. “Um…”

“What? What is um?” I asked, my voice elevating.

“You say you noticed a shift in your cycle three months ago, but based on measurements and some other technical crap, I’d say you’re closer to four, maybe even four and a half.”

I blinked. Halfway through a pregnancy? “How is that possible?”

She shrugged. “Stress can cause fluctuations in cycle. Hormone imbalance. It’s not totally uncommon, though I’m surprised you didn’t notice morning sickness and other signs earlier.”

“So how and when will you know if that thing in there is a zombie?” Dave interrupted, his voice elevating. “I’m sorry to be a dick about it, but we’re all chatting like this is a baby and it might not be a baby and I need to know what it is.”

I squeezed his hand. “Dave, take a breath.”

He didn’t, but Nadia didn’t seem especially phased by it. “I’m going to take amniotic fluid next.” She swallowed. “There are risks involved and I admit I’m not especially experienced in it, a doctor would normally do it, not a nurse. But then Robbie and Josh can study that in the lab and compare it to zombie chemistry.”

“And then we’ll know,” Dave said.

She shrugged. “We’ll be closer to knowing.”

She put the wand away and the screen went ominously black. She flicked the machine off and said, “I’ll go get the rest of the equipment. Be right back.”

As soon as she was gone, I tugged on Dave’s hand. He sat down next to me on the bed and I leaned my head against his shoulder as I looked again at the picture of the life inside of me. A life I hadn’t exactly planned for or wanted, but there it was, all baby-ish.

“We should leave here,” he said when it had been quiet for a while. “We should go back to Montana.”

I looked up at him and I know my surprise was written on my face like a messed up prison tattoo. “What? No!”

“What do you mean, no?” he asked. “You’ve been making me drag you along this whole time. I thought you’d be thrilled when I said that.”

I lifted up the picture. To my surprise, he moved away from it like it was acid and might burn him.

“Okay, so you don’t want to look at the picture, but shit, you saw it on the screen, you can’t pretend you didn’t. There’s some little thing inside of me. And it changes everything, David. We
have
to fight for her or him. So he or she can grow up in a good world, not one where they have to be afraid of zombies.”

 “You assume it’s a he or she,” he grunted. “What if it’s not.”

“Whatever
it
is, I can’t help that I want to make a better world for it.” I wrinkled my brow. “Turns out I have motherly instincts, David. This is a miracle.”

He stared at me for a minute, but then his lips started to twitch with a smile. “The baby’s first word is going to be fuck.”

“David!” I laughed and covered my stomach. “Not in front of Little Zombie.”

“Not funny,” he said, but he was still smiling.

“Besides, I’m sure you’ll teach Little Zombie to speak like a lady,” I said. “Cause I sure as fuck won’t be doing that.”

He laughed. “Yeah, you do have a mouth on you. But I’m not calling it that.” 

“Okay, how about LZ?” He shook his head and my smile, which was pretty weak anyway, fell. “Come on, if we don’t have a sense of humor about it, I’m going to lose it, Dave. I’m not stupid, I know what it could be and what it could mean and when I think of it, it makes me want to go to sleep and never wake up. Help me out, man. Make this okay.”

He swallowed and there, somewhere in his eyes, flickered the protective instincts I knew would make him a great dad to any non-zombie children we one day had. He nodded.

“You know I’d never let anything happen to you or LZ,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said as I motioned him over. He bent to give me a kiss just as Nadia came back into the room with a bunch of other stuff. She had Nicole with her, too. A very uncomfortable looking Nicole in surgical gloves.

“Just lay flat,” Nadia said as she started wiping off my stomach with iodine. “And I’ll try to do this as quickly and safely as I can.”

Nadia motioned to Nicole and she grabbed the ultrasound wand and turned the machine back on. She pressed it to my belly and there was the image of LZ again, hanging out in my uterus, doing whatever babies did when they were hardly more than a romantic evening with too much wine when your zombie husband said, “hey, these stars are pretty great” and-

Sorry.

Anyway, Nadia pulled out a needle. A big, fucking needle and suddenly all my shit about not being afraid went out the window.

“You aren’t putting that thing in me, right?” I asked.

“It won’t hurt,” she insisted, but looking at that thing, it was hard to believe it.

Nicole arched a brow. “Chickenshit.”

I glared at her. “You want to do it?”

“I don’t have a baby in me,” Nicole said, shaking her head. “I don’t have to have huge needles jabbed into me.”

“Not helping,” I insisted but then I sucked in a big breath because during the bitch exchange with Nicole, Nadia pressed the needle into my flesh.

“Huh,” I said as I watched it disappear into me and appear on the screen near the baby. “That actually doesn’t hurt much.”

“Don’t hit it,” Dave said, waving his hand around near the screen. “I don’t think it wants to get poked.”

“Stop backseat driving and let Nadia do it,” Nicole said, motioning to Nadia.

She was sweating as she maneuvered the needle into place and then started withdrawing a little fluid from the sac where the baby was housed. Slowly, she withdrew the needle and then set it aside with a huge sigh.

“Sorry if I hurt you,” she said.

I smiled at her. “You did great. Though I’d work on the sweating if you’re going to do that again.”

“I hope I don’t have to do it again. Um, see, I was a veterinary assistant before the outbreak,” she admitted, apparently driven to confession now that she had finished her work.

“I thought you said you were a nurse,” Dave said, tone flat.

“Yeah, I figured that would make you less nervous. But I do have medical training, I was almost a vet, and I have experience doing procedures. I’ve even kept my dog, Duncan, safe since the outbreak. He lives upstairs with me and helps Lisa and her guys patrol the area.”

I stared at her. “Okay, so you’ve kept your dog alive. Great.”

She blushed. “Look, we all do the best we can with the skills we have.”

“And she’s been great,” Nicole interrupted. “She has stitched people up, kept us all healthy. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

“And you didn’t poke the baby,” Dave said. “That’s something.”

“Thanks,” Nadia said with a sigh. “Okay, I’m taking this sample over to Josh and Robbie.” She handed me a cloth. “Just wipe off and you can come out when you’re done.”

She left, but Nicole lingered at the door, watching us. She had always been a little hard to read, probably due to journalistic training or some silliness like that. Right now was no different.

“What?” I asked as I swabbed the gunk off my stomach. There was a little bulge there that I’d been ignoring for about a week when it had just appeared magically.

“Nothing,” Nicole said, raising her hands like she was surrendering.

“They’re all freaking out aren’t they?” Dave asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, having you is one thing. But this? They don’t know what to think, what to do about the possibility of genetic alteration of a fetus.”

I sat up and pulled my shirt down. “Gee, tell them welcome to the club.”

“Are they going to force us to stay here?” Dave asked. “I mean,
seriously
. You know these people. You keep saying they’re on our side, but could the pull of a zombie baby or a half-zombie baby or a
whatever
baby make them put us in a cage?”

Nicole seemed to ponder that for a minute. Probably too long, really, but I guess you had to appreciate that she was really considering the question.

“Robbie and Josh and the lab rats, I don’t think they’d make anyone stay, though they would hate to lose the research opportunity that your being here offers them. They really do want to create a cure and they
really
think you’re the key.”

“Which may be true,” Dave said. “But what about the others?”

“The military guys, it’s harder to say. I think most of them have good intentions.” She shrugged. “But can I promise you no one will go rogue on you? No, I can’t.”

“Who would go, if you had to hazard a guess?” I asked. I hopped down from the table.

“The guy who you met with earlier this afternoon, Colonel Fenton? He’s hard to read. And he and your friend Lisa… well, they are more than friends if you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“I’m not telling you that either of them is dangerous,” Nicole insisted.

I nodded. “You’re just letting us know that we want to make sure we stay safe. I get it. And I appreciate it.”

And I did. Even though, as we followed her out into the main lab room, with all the lab rats now staring at me the same way they had been staring at Dave, I wasn’t sure if I felt better knowing the real score or worse.

All I knew for sure was that I was going to find a way to keep an eye on Lisa and the Colonel. For the sake of my husband, myself and even for LZ. Because until I knew otherwise, I was about to become a mother and nobody was going to fuck (sorry, LZ) with this mother.

Chapter Eight

Ready, Set, Eat Brains

The next three days passed like molasses. Even though everyone liked to stare at me, whisper about me when I came down from the bedrooms into the lab, as far as I knew, none of my results were in yet. Apparently medical bureaucracy, like cockroaches, Cher and us, had survived the apocalypse just fine.

Actually, I think the wait was based more on the fact that everyone in the lab was so focused on Dave. Having a real, live semi-zombiefied person around… well, it was like Christmas for the nerds. They had him run on treadmills, then ran tests. They drew blood. They tested how long he could hold his breath, how much weight he could bear, how hard he could punch.

And Dave ate it up, becoming the center of the universe, just like he’d been born to take on the role.

Now I love the guy, don’t get me wrong. But sitting in a lab on day three since our arrival, watching him go over numbers and tests with Robbie and Josh was mind-numbingly boring, even if he did look pretty hot with his shirt off and sensors stuck all over his chest.

I got up from my chair across the room from them and said, “So I’m going to get a drink, anybody want anything while I’m out?”

My question was hardly registered as they all huddled around their computer monitors, looking at data together.

“Guys?” I repeated.

Dave glanced up finally and spared me a rather dismissive look. “No, thanks babe.”

I sighed as I pulled the door open and stepped out in to the main lab. I weaved my way through the computers and tables with beakers filled with mysterious chemicals and pushed through a pair of swinging doors in the back of the room. Down a short hall was what had obviously been a break room when this was still an active facility.

The military guys hadn’t included this room, or our bedrooms above, in the areas hooked up to the generators, so there was a little battery operated lantern hanging by a hook next to the door that I grabbed as I stepped inside.

I clicked the switch and set it on the counter next to the fridge. When I opened it, I was greeted by a stale, ozone scent from the warm fridge. They had removed all the real food, transferring what meager portions of it that was left to a fridge in the lab that was kept running at all times. The shelves were still full of bottled waters, sealed flavored beverages and soda. Lines and lines of soda.