Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [87]
by Jesse Petersen
Have you ever felt like you were on a treadmill, but no matter how fast or far you ran, you never dropped those pesky last fifteen pounds? Yeah, welcome to my life. Only I’m not trying to lose weight (okay, I’m a girl, I’m always trying to lose weight), I’m trying to lose the slobbering, moaning, growling group of mindless zombies that always seems to be on my ass.
Every fucking time I look back over my shoulder, it seems like they are right there. Their feet pound on the pavement, their clawing fingers (complete with long, dirty, dead person fingernails—um, manicure people!!) reach for me, trying to give me one scratch, one bite, one little nick that spells certain death… living death… for me.
They never fucking stop. And so I never fucking stop. I just run and run and run…
“Sarah?”
With horror movie slowness, I turned and there was David, my husband, my partner in crime and fighting for our lives. He smiled at me, only as his lips pulled back his gums were black. His teeth were beginning to rot. His eyes were red-rimmed and focused on one thing. Eating me.
And not in the porn movie way.
“Stop running,” he said, his voice garbled with infection and transition as he reached for me.
I sucked in a breath and sat up, but as I did so my forehead collided with something. Something metal that I smacked into hard enough to make my vision blur.
“Fuck!” I grunted as I reached up to touch my head.
Already the knot of a bruise started to throb just under the skin. Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked around. I willed my heart to slow down. There were no zombies near me. No reaching hands, no frigid breath, no clawing fingers straining to tear and pull at flesh. Just a dim room filled with dusty gym equipment, including the treadmill I had apparently fallen asleep on.
“I knew I was on a treadmill,” I muttered as I ducked my pounding head from under the bar of the machine and pushed to my feet.
“Did you say something?”
It was David’s voice coming from the other room. Not garbled by infection, though. Just plain old David. I smiled as I moved through the entryway to a weight room. The lack of power made the other equipment in the gym useless except as very uncomfortable beds, but the weight sets still did their job. No juice required.
“Nope, just dreaming,” I said. “Nightmaring, I guess, is a better description.”
I tilted my head as Dave braced himself on the weight bench and pressed a bar filled with weight plates… a lot of weight plates… over his head
“Need a spotter?” I asked as I stepped closer.
“Nope,” he grunted. “I got it.”
Dave’s face was red with strain and sweat rolled down his cheeks to drip on the dusty mat below him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and even more sweat collected on the muscles of his chest. Yeah, you heard me right. My once unemployed, gamer husband with the little beer belly now had ripples of muscle on his chest. He was even starting to get some abs.
Hot.
He held the bar above himself, suspending it as his arms shook ever so slightly. With another grunt, he eased the bar back into place on the rack. Once it was steady, he reached up to wipe the sweat away from his brow with the back of one gloved hand. His gaze came over to me slowly.
“So what was this one about?” he asked as he set his hands back in place and pressed the heavy bar upward again.
This time I counted the weight plates and blinked in surprise. He had to be pushing over 350 pounds. Pretty impressive since I don’t think he’d ever topped out over 250 before the zombie outbreak that had changed our lives, and ruined my sleep, forever.
“Sarah?” he asked, his voice strained as he held the bar above his head.
“Huh?” I shook my head. “Oh, just the usual. You know… getting chased by a horde of drooling zombies.”
He lowered the bar again and this time he ducked under and sat up on the bench. He grabbed for a dingy towel that he’d draped across another nearby machine and wiped himself off before he said, “And was I in this one?”
I turned away a little. Dave knew about my dreams. Only because sometimes