Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [58]
Dave’s lips thinned. “When I looked through the sight, I saw some kind of mark, Sarah. I’m not making it up. It just didn’t click with me what it was until I saw the brand here today and remembered the guinea pigs.”
I shook my head. “That’s crazy. Kevin has told us more than once that all his lab assistants were killed during the initial weeks of the outbreak. And he hasn’t had any live specimens to work with, that’s why he needs us to collect zombies for him. So why would a crazy, jacked-up mutant zombie be running around in the world with his mark on it?”
Dave ground his teeth. “Well, maybe he fucking made it, Sarah. Maybe he’s been making them all along. He is a mad scientist.”
I threw up my hands. “Scientist, Dave. That’s all. You just don’t trust him because you’re jealous for some weird reason and because scientists are what started the outbreak. But that’s not his fault—”
He stared at me. “Do you want to be naïve or are you that badly injured?” he snapped. “I. Saw. The. Marking.”
I struggled for an explanation. “That thing was far away and seeing it freaked us all out. Are you sure you didn’t just imagine it?”
He backed away even farther, the chasm between us suddenly uncrossable. “I didn’t imagine it. I saw it.”
But I’d looked at that thing for a long time, too. And I hadn’t seen it. My head was too cloudy and pained to try to figure that one out.
“I don’t know,” I sighed as I rubbed my eyes. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense, Sarah,” he said, folding his arms and staring at me. “If only you pay attention.”
I opened my mouth for what I hoped would be a stinging retort when the door behind Dave opened and Kevin stepped back in.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, but I wanted to check Sarah again,” he said with an apologetic smile.
Dave snorted. “I bet you do,” he snapped, but he stepped away regardless and let Kevin in between us.
He checked my eyes and took my pulse, his hands cool and clean against my skin. “Better now,” he reassured me as he stepped away. “But I’d give it a day or two before you start capturing zombies again. I have two specimens to work with in the interim.”
Dave’s jaw dropped open like it was on a hinge and he stared at Kevin blankly. “Wait, go back out and catch more zombies?”
Kevin nodded, his own expression just as confused as my husband’s. “Of course. I realize there was a little accident today and I can understand how that might throw you off, but I do hope you’ll continue to bring me infected things to work with.”
“You are fucking batshit crazy,” David roared, pushing forward.
He grabbed Kevin by the stark white lapel of his lab coat, smudging it with blood and sludge as he slammed him against the door and held him there.
“We aren’t going out again. I’m done. And she’s sure as hell done. We’re done.”
There was silence in the room for a long moment and then the sound. A sound I knew all too well. The sound of a Colt .45 being cocked between the two men.
And I knew for a fact that Dave wasn’t the one holding it.
Partnerships don’t last forever. The zombie apocalypse just might.
I edged over to the end of the bed and slowly found my feet. When I got up, I was greeted with an entire war’s worth of explosions of pain in my head and all through my body, but I fought through it. Oh, and also through the waves of nausea that came with it (you didn’t want to see beef jerky and breakfast bars come back up, especially together, I assure you) and managed to wedge myself between the two men. One thing was for sure, if they made me, I was going to puke on both of them just to teach them a lesson.
Jackasses.
“Stop it,” I said, placing a hand on the .45 Kevin held and turning it away from Dave and me. “Stop it both of you. You’re acting like schoolboys on a playground except the guns are real. Shooting each other will get us nowhere.