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

she opened the door, it couldn’t have been further from that now.
    It was an arsenal. So many guns. Big, beautiful guns. Tiny, cute guns. Bullets, clips, knives, machetes, pretty much anything a person might need to battle zombies… or take over a small country. I was willing to try for either at this point, honestly, I was so bored.
    “Holy shit,” I murmured as we stepped into the room.
    She grinned. “I know, right? Let’s load up.”
    And load up we did. Aside from the pistol permanently attached to my hip, I got a shotgun and an AR-15 to strap across my back, plus plenty of ammo for both. She took a couple of glocks and a big-ass machete.
    “For the close up work,” she explained as she slipped the razor-sharp weapon into a specially made holster. “Ready?”
    “I guess,” I said as I followed her down a couple more hallways and out into the cool spring Seattle day. It was drizzling (surprise, surprise), but my jacket was more than enough to keep me cozy and dry.
    People underestimate the value of good clothes in an apocalypse. The fact is, though, the wrong shoes, a coat that’s too puffy, gloves with fingers… all of those things can lead to a quick and sudden Death by Bubblegoose.
    And nobody wants that.
    That was why my jacket was light, but lined, my gloves had no fingers and I didn’t wear earmuffs so I could hear everything around me with perfect clarity.
    “How big is the area that you have fenced in?” I asked as we walked through the campus, behind our lab building and toward the Husky Union Building, or HUB.
    “It’s always changing,” Lisa said. “We started with just Red Square and some tents. But as we cleared out buildings, we could expand the fence line. We’d love to get the whole campus, but right now our goal is the HUB.”
    “Why?”
    “There’s a radio system there that used to be the campus radio station. We think we might be able to use it for larger level communications. Plus, there are some dining facilities that would make cooking a lot easier,” Lisa explained. “Oh, and there’s a bowling alley.”
    I laughed. “I guess recreation has its advantages.”
    “Stephen King said it best, all work and no play…”
    “Of course, Jack went crazy in that book,” I said with a sigh.
    “There is that,” Lisa agreed.
    She stopped and motioned in front of us. There was a big, heavy chain link fence with razor wire on top of it in front of us. There was a gate section, but it was locked with several industrial padlocks.
    “Wow,” I breathed as I stared. Just outside the fence, there were a handful of zombies milling about. As they caught a whiff of us, they turned and began to shamble in our direction, their moans increasing.
    “Yeah, best get out there and close the gate so we don’t have to bother with them on the inside,” Lisa sighed, pulled out a fat key and unlocked the padlocks with a swift efficiency that said she really did do this every stinking day.
    When the last one was opened, she swung the gate open and ushered me out.
    “You lock up,” I offered as I pulled out the pistol on my waist. “I’ll cover you.”
    She shrugged, but I could tell by the way she looked at me and the way she unclipped her holster, that she wasn’t sure of my skills. Damn, I hadn’t had to prove myself for a long time.
    I was kind of looking forward to it.
    Of course, I didn’t have to wait long. The slowly shambling zombies who had noticed us behind the fence got faster as they got closer to their first meal in what I would guess was quite some time. The first one to come into a reasonable range was a female dressed in sweatpants and a tanktop. She still had a backpack on, though its straps had long since sunk into her rotting skin to rest on her bones.
    “Gross,” I muttered before I leveled the pistol and fired, putting a bullet through her forehead and dropping her.
    The gunfire seemed to startle the other zombies who were coming toward us, but that didn’t slow them