Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [57]
Dave was right, of course. But I clung to the hope that maybe it wasn’t some kind of nefarious thing that had kept the doctor from sharing his invention with us.
“Why didn’t you give it to us, Kevin?” I asked, trying to ignore my throbbing head and sore body to concentrate on the very important answer.
He shrugged. “I hadn’t been able to test it on a true live specimen, just like the cure for the infection,” he explained with a sheepish shift. “I wasn’t certain it would work until the moment I injected your specimen out in the van. I certainly had no idea how long the drug would be effective or what was the proper dose.”
I looked at Dave. He was leaning on a piece of equipment in the room, just staring at the doctor. And although Barnes’s explanation made logical sense to me, Dave remained angry.
“Can you give us a minute?” I asked as I reached out to take David’s hand.
Kevin hesitated and then nodded as he backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. Once he was gone, I looked at my husband evenly.
“You okay?”
He shook off his angry glare to look at me with worry. “Me? You’re the one who lost consciousness.” He squeezed my fingers gently. “It scared the shit out of me, Sarah.”
I nodded. “Sorry, I’ll try not to do it again.”
When he smiled slightly, I continued, “You know, you can’t be so hard on the guy. I can understand not wanting to give us something that might not work and having us get hurt when we depended on it.”
Dave stared at me for a long moment before he shook my hand off and backed away a step. “Gotta defend him, eh Sarah?”
“No!” I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender mostly because I was too fucking tired and hurt to argue about this. “I mean, he could have told us and offered us the opportunity to try the stuff out in the field. He should have. But come on. The guy was a lab rat before the outbreak, and now he hasn’t had human interaction for months. He isn’t so great at it if you haven’t noticed.”
Dave shrugged. “He seems to do just fine when it comes to interacting with you.”
I stared in total disbelief. “Is all this piss and vinegar because you’re jealous of Barnes? Are we on the fucking Bachelor now?”
He didn’t answer for a long time, long enough that the answer was pretty clear. It would have been kind of cute if his fury didn’t interfere with our mission and maybe even put our lives in danger.
“Do you remember the pattern that was painted or dyed into the fur of the guinea pigs?” Dave asked.
I blinked. The stupid concussion made me woozy and now my husband had apparently changed the very important subject that I didn’t consider closed by half.
“Huh?”
“In the lab when we first came here, did you happen to notice the pattern in the guinea pig fur?”
I tried to think. “Yeah, I guess. Something with some dots and a line, right?”
He nodded. Looking around, he moved closer and dropped his tone. “I noticed something today when I put the zombie down on the table. There was a brand or something with the same pattern on it waiting there for him.”
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered with a shake of my head.
“He might be listening,” Dave said, just above a breath, and motioned around the room wildly.
“The zombie?” I teased.
Dave glared at me. “The fucking doctor.”
I sat up a little straighter and was rewarded by a burst of pain through my skull.
“So what?” I snapped in reaction to the pain coupled with annoyance at Dave’s paranoia. “So he marks his test subjects, it’s probably how he keeps track of them. Dudes have done it on farms for years.” Oh wait, there weren’t farms anymore. “Or… they used to.”
Dave leaned in closer. “Okay, then why did that… that bionic zombie we saw yesterday have the same marking as Kevin’s guinea pigs?”
I stared. “What?”
“It was on his neck,” Dave said softly.
I wracked