Free Zombies! (Episode 6): Barriers Collapse by Ivan Turner

States. His father had died before they'd had the chance to reconcile and even though he'd spent months with his poor widowed mother after that, they had grown no closer. He had a few friends and was occasionally invited out. Sometimes he went and sometimes not. Either way, it depended on his mood at the moment. Before the summer, he'd joined Push Ups gym as a way of doing something with his time other than grading high school English essays. It was there that he had met Suzanna.
     
    For a long time, he had wondered what had attracted her to him. She hadn't been classically beautiful as some women were, but she'd turned the head of every man she passed. A pretty face accentuated by a figure that was toned from hours and hours of exercise pushed her well into range of gorgeous while Arrick himself was lanky and thin. He approached his workouts in much the same way as he approached the grading of those essays. It was necessary but not exciting. Maybe it kept some of the pounds off of him, pounds that would collect in his middle as he got older. Maybe it prevented his chest from sinking into his ribcage. But he would never be heavily muscled or well defined. So what had Suzanna seen in him? Even now, a month after her death, he had it narrowed down to two things. The first was that she had secretly wanted to find a good man who would be tolerant with her and love her for who she was. Not likely. The second was that she had mistaken his passive nature for timidity and felt that she could dominate him. He supposed it didn't really matter anymore.
     
    Though gone these many weeks, the repercussions of his involvement with her were still having their due effect. Suzanna hadn't just died. She'd died and turned into a zombie. And Arrick, caught between his inward nature and the chivalrous hero that lay underneath, had sat with her through her illness and fought with her after she had turned. She had bitten him during the fight. A death sentence for everyone else, the bite had meant nothing more than a few hours of terror and suffering for John Arrick. Though he had exhibited all of the published symptoms of the zombie plague, he had made a full recovery. So full, in fact, that the two officers who had shown up at his door little more than half an hour after the symptoms had disappeared had had no idea that he'd been sick at all. And he wasn't about to tell them.
     
    That was the next part of his identity crisis. Every day he struggled with the knowledge that he was quite possibly the only person in existence to have recovered from the zombie plague. That made him a coveted prize by the doctors who were working toward a cure. If only they knew about him. A month had gone by and he hadn't told them. He hadn't told anyone. He blamed the missed day of work on his chronic back problems and the fact that he hadn't called in on the medication. He'd lied to the police about not being with Suzanna when she'd died, but confessed to having seen her two days before. Though they found plenty of evidence that he had been in her apartment, they couldn't say when and, as her boyfriend, he'd been there often. Fortunately, they had never checked up on whether or not he'd been tested for the infection. The laws governing medical privacy were still in effect for the moment. Eventually, though, someone would make the testing mandatory. They'd probably lump it into the Patriot Act and call it a matter of national security. For now, though, he was safe. He didn't want to be somebody's lab rat.
     
    Or was that really the issue?
     
    One of Arrick's qualities, much to his own detriment, was that he was able to be completely honest with himself if not with anyone else. The fear of the poking and prodding was definitely real. Every time he thought about the road upon which he would have to travel if he gave himself in, he trembled with fear. But there was more to it than just the physical pain and inconvenience. There was the notoriety. He wasn't afraid of