Free The Zombie Whisperer (Living With the Dead) by Jesse Petersen Page A

swung open behind me. I turned and watched Lisa step into the room. In the dim light of the lamp, she looked super pale and a little ghostly. Creepy.
    “Hey,” she said.
    I nodded as I took a swig of Coke and cringed. As soon as we saved the world, I was getting a cold diet soda. With ice. And a beer, baby or no baby. And some nachos.
    “Hey,” I grunted, mostly to stop the wandering of my mind, which was making me hungry and irritated. “Haven’t seen you around for a while.”
    In fact, as I thought about it, it had been almost two days since I saw Lisa last. She was hardly ever in the lab, I never saw her up in the sleeping quarters or even in the big classroom they had converted to a makeshift dining hall for the rest of us.
    “Well, I have shit to do, Sarah,” she said as she grabbed a water. She tossed the plastic lid into an old recycling bin (something that made me laugh, saving the earth was taking a backseat currently to saving the world) and swigged the bottle in a few long chugs.
    My eyes widened, “Crap, I guess. What are you doing anyway?”
    She set the empty bottle aside and looked at me evenly. “I don’t know if you can handle it, Sarah.”
    I frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “Well, everyone tells these ‘Sarah is a Badass’ stories around the campfire, but all I’ve seen you do since you got here is sit around waiting for Dave to take tests and for someone to tell you if you have a kid or a thing in your belly. I’m not sure a pampered princess like yourself is up to even hearing about the shit I do on a daily basis.”
    I knew she was baiting me. I mean, you couldn’t be much more obvious. And yet, despite that, and despite the fact I didn’t trust this girl as far as I could throw her, I couldn’t help but fall right into her trap.
    “Okay, dude, seriously,” I started as I set my can down on the counter next to her empty bottle. “Don’t start on me. You think I
want
to sit around in the lab all day, waiting on someone to tell me if I play a role in the world-saving business or not? Do you think I want to be the errand runner and drink fetcher and possible mother of a zombie hoard? C’mon.”
    Lisa leaned a little closer, like she was trying to examine me in the light. See if I was serious.
    “Okay,” she finally said with a half-smile. “So do you want to do something more interesting?”
    “Like what?” I asked, my interest so piqued that I couldn’t maintain a cool, whatever façade.
    “Come out past the perimeter with me,” she said. “I could use a hand or two outside.”
    I hesitated. I wouldn’t have even a few months earlier, but now things were different. There was a kid to think about. If I got hurt, so did the baby. There were new motherly instincts reminding me I was killing for two now, not just one.
    But the one thing I knew I could do was handle myself. Hell, I’d seen pregnant women in the camps doing hard work and battling zombies. Why was I different? I had a baby inside me, I wasn’t made of glass or anything.
    Of course there was also the Dave thing to consider. He was so uber-protective of me. He had been before the baby thing, he was even worse now. If he thought I was going to go out into the zombie wild, he would shit a brick.
    But to be honest, he might not even notice I was gone if I didn’t tell him. Going out and doing zombie detail sounded a hell of a lot more fun than going back to the lab to read year-old issues of Cosmo and twiddle my thumbs.
    And wasn’t it better to apologize after than ask permission first?
    “Yeah, okay,” I said, shoving away all the reasons to stay put and stay relatively safe. “I’d love to go hunting with you.”
    She smiled and motioned me to follow her.
    We didn’t go back through the lab, but down another hall and through a series of turns I wouldn’t remember later if someone paid me in chocolate to tell them about it. Finally, though, we reached a classroom, or what had once been a classroom. When