Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [24]
Dave stared at him. “What do you mean might be?”
“I haven’t yet had a chance to test it on human subjects. Ones who are currently infected. That is why I require live specimens.” Barnes stared off at the cage again. “I’ve done some work on the heads of the deceased zombies in order to study brain chemistry and other elements, but—”
My eyes went wide as I thought of all the times we’d been told to bring back “evidence” of our kills by the people who had hired us. And that fact didn’t slip past Dave either.
“Wait, what?” Dave asked, his eyes narrowing until I was pretty sure he couldn’t see out of them at all. “You did work on heads? Is that why so many of our clients have been demanding we bring the heads of the zombies back? To give to you? Exactly how many people know about your little lab?”
Barnes stood up and I watched as his hand slid over to touch the AK-47 that now rested on his desk top. I got to my own feet, hoping to defuse the situation if it escalated.
“No one!” Barnes insisted.
“Yeah, right.” Dave snorted. He leaned forward in an increasingly hostile pose. He can be a bit caveman at times. And not a Geico, go-bowling caveman, either.
I pressed a hand to his chest. “Honey, he might not be lying.”
“Bullshit,” Dave snapped.
I pushed harder to hold him in place. “Think about it, doofus! The camps are like Perez Hilton’s damn blog. Gossip and rumors fly through there. If someone knew about the lab, especially people like the ones who hire us, we would have heard about it. Someone would have tried to use the information as leverage.”
Dave’s expression softened slightly. Caveman could be reasoned with, you see.
“Yeah, maybe,” he grunted.
Barnes was nodding wildly. Apparently he didn’t want any kind of escalation with my husband, either. “I knew I couldn’t trust any of the ones who have brought me the heads with this secret. After spending just five minutes with most of them it was clear to me that none had the skills or the mind power to collect zombies themselves. I soon deduced they were all using your services to bring me what I desired.”
“We were the middle man,” I muttered with a shake of my head. “Son of a bitch.”
“Just from hearing about you,” the doctor continued, “and by observing you a few times from a safe distance, I could see you two were the clear leaders in killing zombies.”
“So why not just call upon us out in the open?” I asked. “Why go through the whole ruse of calling us here for a job and then taking us hostage?”
Barnes nodded. “I would have treated you with more respect, not to mention skipped the rather expensive trouble of using one of those idiots to post the note to you at camp, had I not heard more than once about David’s cynicism about… well, anything that implies hope. I had to assume you wouldn’t come had I made my true intentions clear.”
My husband and I both flinched. Apparently we’d been a bit transparent, even to the morons who hired us.
“You might be right about that,” Dave admitted, full of Grumpy-Pants irritation.
“I thought the only way I had any chance of obtaining your assistance was to show you what I’ve done here. To prove to you through your own experiences that I wasn’t a quack making false promises.”
Dave nodded slowly. “I guess that makes sense. For a mad scientist.”
Barnes exhaled a long breath. “If only I could test this serum on some human subjects, I would know for certain if it has the potential for curing these… things, or at least halting their desire to kill. And I’ll also be able to see its effect on the human brain, which is considerably more complex than a rodent’s.”
“In most cases,” I said with a faint smile.
Barnes laughed in response. It sounded rusty, but then I guess it was since he’d been alone for so long.
“True,” the doctor said with a slight nod. “I must see if the brain is damaged irreparably by the full