Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [84]
I moved down the hall again as he collapsed forward with a wretched howl of pain that didn’t nearly satisfy my hatred for him. He wrapped his bleeding hand in his lab coat as he looked up at me.
“You bitch, you blew my thumb off!” he said, stating the obvious in a way that no longer indicated brilliant young scientist.
“You’re going to lose a lot more than that,” I said as I trained my pistol right on his groin. “Now tell me exactly where the cure is or I will shoot pieces of you off until you do. And I’ll like it.”
He stared up at me, making little voiceless whimpers.
“Go ahead, test if I’m willing to do it,” I ground out through clenched teeth.
“In the lab,” he confirmed. “It’s the blue liquid.”
“I’m going to bring it out and inject you with it,” I promised. “So you better tell me the right fucking one.”
His eyes grew wide. “The purple liquid!” he corrected himself. “It’s the purple one!”
I smiled and then swung the butt of the pistol back and brought it smashing across his temple. His eyes rolled to the back of his head and he lost consciousness, and slumped in the corner of the hall by the door.
I pulled his key card from his waist and glided it through the reader. The door button turned green and there was the swish of releasing air as it popped open to reveal the dark lab beyond.
I clicked on the light and looked around with a sigh.
The fucker had released the guinea pigs. And they were all zombies. They were collected in the middle of the floor, ratlike creatures with glowing red eyes that hissed and growled at me.
Now it may sound silly (and in retrospect, it was pretty ridiculous to have one of the most innocuous animals on the planet standing up on its pudgy back legs and clawing at you), but one bite or even a scratch from these things and I was as much toast as Dave.
I plunged into the room, squashing the little rodents as I went, ignoring their squeals as I stomped them and kicked them across the room. There’s nothing like watching a rabid guinea pig go cartwheeling across a room with a little squeal, I’ll tell you that.
The purple vial was on the other side of the lab, already attached to a syringe for the robot arms to collect and use to nullify the infection on the guinea pigs. I reached it as the last remaining zombie pig made a kamikaze leap onto my leg. I slammed it away with the barrel of my gun and grabbed the purple serum.
As I ran past Barnes in the hallway, I didn’t stop. He’d been too sure I was going to inject him to lie and I didn’t have time to see if he was zombiefied by what I carried with me or not. I just had to trust, and pray this was actually the cure.
I ran through the twisting halls and finally found my way back to the lab where Dave and I had fought the bionics. As I skidded into the room, I looked at my husband.
He had managed to drag himself across the room and was propped up in a sitting position on the wall with his hand dangling at his side. A great idea since the blood would have to work harder to infect him. His eyes were shut, though, and I stared.
Was I too late? Had the infection spread faster… there wasn’t any standard litmus for the time, of course, just some basic guidelines. Different people, different body chemistry.
“Are you going to give me that, or just stand there and watch me go all living dead?” he grunted without opening his eyes.
“Oh shit,” I breathed, my heart finally starting to beat again. I rushed to his side and dropped down with the syringe in my hand. I was just about to depress the plunger when a voice at the door stopped me.
“If you inject him, I’ll blow his brains all over that wall.”
I turned and found Barnes in the doorway, the bloody rifle I’d shot out of his hand earlier now trained at us again. He was leaning against the frame, his damaged hand still half-wrapped in his lab coat. Not that it did him much good. He was still dripping blood across the floor and the front of his lab coat was bright with ugly red splotches.
“You didn’t kill him?” Dave asked, his voice strained.
I looked at my husband. His skin was gray and his