Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [83]
“There is a cure, David,” I whispered.
“It’s a pipe dream,” he grunted, his voice already strained.
“No! No, it’s not. We saw it work when we watched Barnes test the guinea pigs. He made a cure, maybe to protect himself and the kid, maybe to just fuck with the zombies, I don’t know. But it is here… somewhere. And if I can find it before you turn, I could save you.”
“No way.” Dave shook his head. “Even if that shit would work on me, and there’s no guarantee that it would, that asshole is armed by now, Sarah! He’s not going to just let you take his cure and come back here to me. And he’s definitely not going to let us waltz out of here even if you can find it.”
I grabbed his shirt and pulled him close for a quick kiss. “I’d like to see him try to stop me. Now lay here, stay still, and like you always tell me, stay calm. I will be back.”
He reached for me as I pushed to my feet. As he stared up at me, I couldn’t help but notice that his pupils were dilating rapidly. That his skin was getting pale already.
“Sarah, if it takes longer than half an hour, you have to run. Just leave me, okay? Leave me and run!”
“I promise,” I said as I bolted for the door that had swung open when I blew the control panel in the observation panel.
I lied.
* * *
There were guns in the dining hall area and that was close enough to the guinea pig lab that I headed there first.
What? I was crazed, not stupid. I needed weapons since I was pretty fucking sure I was going to encounter Barnes again before this was all played out.
I stared for a second at the key card slot that would allow me in and then kicked it. The mechanism shorted out and the door popped open at the same moment that a high-pitched alarm began to whir over and over again from the speakers strung throughout the hallways.
Ignoring the annoying sound, I burst into the dining hall and grabbed what I needed. Two handguns, ammo. I could have taken a lot more, but I needed to be fast. Five minutes had already bled away from the time left for Dave to stay Dave and I wasn’t even close to where I needed to be to save him.
I loaded as I made my way down the hallway, doing my best to remember just the right twists and turns to find the lab where we’d first seen Barnes’s guinea pig zombies. Not an easy task considering we’d come to it from a different direction and that on my fake-ass “tour” I’d been suffering a concussion. I broke open more than a few wrong doors before I finally made a last turn down a hallway I hadn’t visited yet.
And at the end of it was Dr. Barnes himself, leveling a rifle on my chest.
“You son of a bitch,” I growled as I moved down the hallway in long, certain steps, my handgun trained on him evenly. I have to be honest, at that point, I didn’t give a shit about getting shot.
“You’d best stop right there,” Barnes said, but his voice shook in a rather satisfying way.
I did what he asked and took a quick glance at my watch. Fifteen minutes were gone. Dave had fifteen, twenty at the outset before he’d be gone from me forever.
“Listen to me,” I growled, accentuating each and every word. “I know those fucking guinea pigs are in that lab behind you. And so is the cure you used on them. And I’m getting it. Even if I have to put a hole in you.”
“You want that cure so badly, you’d get shot for it?” Barnes laughed.
“For David, I’d do anything,” I snapped. “Just like he’d do anything for me. Unlike you with your wife and your poor kid, I actually give a shit what happens to him. So I would suggest you put that rifle down and let me pass.”
He stared at me a long moment, sizing up the situation and working out a judgment of what he thought was going to happen. Finally, he smirked.
“Or what?”
I didn’t answer, I merely depressed the trigger and prayed the element of surprise would work for me.
It did. I hit his hand, blowing his gun away just as he pulled his own trigger. A huge hole blew through the wall beside him as his thumb went flying off his hand and bounced down the hallway toward my feet.