Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [88]
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said softly. As he peeled off his weight gloves, he pushed to his feet. When he opened his arms, I stepped into them without hesitation. “I’m okay, you know,” he whispered after he’d given me a rather sweaty hug for a few minutes.
I nodded, but out of the corner of my eye I looked at his right hand. On it was a scar, black tinged and gnarled, that covered both the top and palm of his hand. It marked the place where a zombie had bitten him over a month ago. If we hadn’t had a miracle serum… a cure… my Dave would have been nothing more than a roaming, mindless eating machine.
Oh, who am I kidding? He would have been a stain on the wall courtesy of yours truly. There’s not enough self-help books in the world to get over that one. Trust me, I’ve looked.
“I know,” I whispered as I pulled away with a smile I admit I had to fake. “But you might not have been.”
“But I was,” he insisted with a shake of his head as he patted off his forehead and motioned toward the dressing rooms in the back. I followed close behind.
“I know. And I guess it proved the cure worked. So now we just have to get it to the Midwest Wall.”
Dave was silent as he hesitated at the door marked MEN. His frown made my own fake smile fall. Okay, so this rumor about a wall in the Midwest, a way to cut off the zombie infection from the rest of the country… we both knew it was a long shot. But we kept moving toward it. Kept hoping it wasn’t all a colossal fake out.
If it was… well, I had no idea what we’d do then. We’d have one vial of a cure and no one to give it to. Plus, since it had taken us a month to get to Oklahoma City, we had to figure it would take us another month to get to the wall, which would put us smack dab in the middle of a Midwest winter, complete with snow, ice, and frigid temps. Fun, eh?
Yeah, sounds like a fucking laugh riot to me.
He motioned me into the dressing room without any more discussion on the touchy subject of walls, or lack thereof. Inside he had set up a portable shower we’d managed to grab from a camping supply store somewhere around Albuquerque. The shower would be cold, but it would do the job. Although since I hadn’t actually worked out at the gym we’d taken shelter in, I didn’t exactly need it. I was mostly there to stand guard.
Which I did (along with taking a couple of peeks by lamplight at my sweetie soaping up… what? We’re married!!). But pretty soon he was changed and we started toward the vestibule of the gym, with Dave loading up a shotgun as we went.
“Okay, so I’d like to get at least thirty miles today,” he said as he cocked the shotgun with one hand.
I nodded. So I’m sure that sounds crazy to you. Thirty miles in a day? In the pre-apocalypse days we would have been talking thirty minutes, maybe less. But these are not pre-apocalypse driving conditions, people. There were several things that kept us from getting much farther:
We tried to stay off main roads. I mean, big roads meant abandoned cars to move, fires to put out (literally and figuratively), and the occasional highwayman to avoid.
We tried to avoid cities. So I’d said we were in Oklahoma City, but that wasn’t exactly true. We were actually about fifteen miles north of there in a town called Guthrie. Unlike the real city, which had over five hundred thousand residents who were probably pretty much all zombies now… Guthrie rocked a little less than ten thousand. See what I’m saying?
Finally, the last reason we moved so slow became very clear as we stepped up to the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that led to the outside and the parking lot where we’d parked our big old SUV right in a pimp spot.
That reason would be the zombies.
“I guess they saw us come into town,” I said mildly as I peered outside. It was early still and the sky was dark from dawn and from the heavy rain clouds that were gathering.
Oh yeah; also it was dark because there was a crowd of about twenty zombies all