LovewithaChanceofZombies (2 page)

Chapter Two

They had called it all sorts of other things on the news at
first. The “unidentified viral contamination”. Then the
known
viral
contamination, AX-1. Then “Pollack’s Disease” after the guy who identified it.
Eventually it was just “the plague”. But the first time she got a glimpse of a
fully affected victim on the news, Lena knew what she was looking at. Before
another month had passed, so did everybody else.

Zombies.

If they had admitted it was a zombie problem earlier in the
game, she wondered, would it have changed anything? Probably not. That was part
of what made it a zombie
problem
, after all; nobody admitted it until it
was far too late to stop it. Critical mass had already been reached by the time
they attempted drastic measures. Remedies that might have been effective had
they begun sooner were useless when applied too late.

It was all for nothing. The zombies kept coming, kept
infecting the survivors. Nobody even knew where they all came from. The
remaining uninfected fought on in a void, because there was no other choice.
Not if you wanted to survive. Even if you thought the future might hold only
more fear and pain and deprivation. And Lena did want to survive, very much.
That was the only reason she’d spent close to ten years embracing all the
things she had hated most from her childhood.

It was discouraging to come face-to-face with the fact that
the last, best hope of humanity would probably die before he could fulfill that
hope.

“The admiral says you’re the best at what you do.”

Lena shrugged. “Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.”

“Rocket science,” mused Lucas Nye, the famous doctor. He was
still looking at his microscope. He’d barely looked away from it in the ten
minutes since she’d arrived. Lena thought his eye might be glued to the viewer.
“I wonder if there are any rocket scientists left?”

“If there are, I hope they’ve figured out a way to ditch
this place. Is it okay if I sit here?”

“Sure,” he answered with a wave of his hand. The king of the
lab, granting a boon.

Lena settled into the plastic chair by the door with a sigh,
laying her weapon across her lap.

“That’s an unusual color choice for a gun,” Nye remarked. “I
guess what really matters is whether or not you can shoot it, and that you know
how to stay alive and find your targets. You’re young, though. I’m wondering
how you learned to survive out in the woods. You must have practically grown up
inside the fence.”

“I’m twenty-two, and I learned it from my father. It was
Before.” There was never any need to explain that time frame. Everyone knew
what “Before” meant.

“He taught you to scout for zombies?”

Lena couldn’t hold back a laugh. It was bitter, a little,
but still welcome. Any humor was welcome. “No. He taught me—tried to teach
me—that the government was evil. That there would come a reckoning, and all the
little pissant militias like his would rise up and there would be a whole new
world. He didn’t have children; he had soldiers. I still have no idea who he
thought was going to take care of stuff like sanitation and mail delivery in
his fantasy world. It wasn’t the sort of thing you asked him.”

“He tried to raise you to be that way too, but with you it didn’t
stick?” Nye didn’t ask about siblings or about a mother. If that information
was volunteered, fine. But you just didn’t up and ask somebody. Not anymore.

“Nope. I was a nerd, so I never really fit in there anyway.
Always with my nose in a book. Then later, when he decided to get a computer, I
was always the one on the computer. I knew how to find information. That made
me useful. Man, I still miss the internet.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“Smart twelve-year-old.”

“Fucked-up twelve-year-old. Nothing’s changed, I guess.”

It was Nye’s turn to laugh. “At twelve I was picking out a
college. That was fucked-up.”

“Are you nuts? If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be… Well, you
wouldn’t be able to do the stuff you’re doing now, for other people.”

“I wouldn’t be ‘Lucas Nye, the Hero Doctor’, you mean?”

She grinned at him. “Something like that. Nice that you’re
modest about it.”

Nye shrugged and looked up at her, really looked long and
hard for the first time since she’d arrived. Lena was startled by the sudden
intensity, all aimed her way. She was surprised to realize that behind his
glasses and rumpled, poorly cut brown hair, Nye was good-looking. Downright
handsome, in fact. She’d never spent enough time with him before to see past
the disheveled exterior; now she couldn’t help but notice.

Even without the intelligence and humor behind them, his
storm-green eyes would be gorgeous. As it was, he seemed to look at her with
some secret knowledge of her soul. It was arousing, which was distracting. The
last thing she could afford. Her heart gave a flutter, a rapid double beat, and
she admonished herself sternly to get back on her guard.

“I missed a lot, growing up so fast,” Nye said after a tense
few seconds. “I never did high school, I never did dating. I never went out and
got stupid drunk and did things I’ll regret. It was all just thinking, all the
time. I never had fun. I always thought I’d find a stopping place, when I’d get
to take a break and do all that. But I never did.”

He didn’t sound resentful, just resigned, or Lena might have
taken offense. After all, she had never had those opportunities either, really,
though for vastly different reasons. “Regrets? Isn’t it a little late for that?
Is that really how you want to spend your last six weeks?”

“You’re giving me six weeks? I’m flattered.”

Lena rubbed the stock of her gun pointedly. “I’ll give you
until you’re symptomatic. And then, if I have to, I’ll blow your head off.”

Nye blinked a few times then smiled slowly.

“Well, at least we know where we stand.”

Chapter Three

They had always called her weak, called her strange. Lena
liked to read and spend time on the computer. But like all the other kids in
the quasi-military compound where she grew up, Lena had also learned to shoot
and track and survive in the woods for days at a time. “Homeschooling”
consisted of the older kids helping the younger kids learn to read and do basic
math, and listening to frequent lectures from the grownups about the evils of
the government. It was no environment for a liberally minded bookworm.

Lena had never bought the conspiracy theories, but she had
learned very early on to keep her skepticism to herself. She spent her waking
hours plotting her eventual escape from her father and everything he and his
batshit-crazy followers held as true.

They all said she put on airs, thought she was too good for
them. Now they were all dead, because when the shit went down it was Lena who
knew about zombies. The rest of them hadn’t listened to her, so within weeks
they were all walking cadavers and she was finally free of them.

It had taken her some time, of course, to think of those
events in such cold, logical terms.

In the flat fluorescence of Lucas Nye’s lab, anybody would
have looked cadaverous. Lena sat on a long table against one cold cinderblock
wall, picking at a chip in the cerise paint on her gun, thinking about where to
find a better adhesion primer and fighting to stay awake. She would have to
start bringing books to read. It had been three days of this, sitting and
watching while Nye fiddled with petri dishes and stared at computer screens.

“Don’t touch that,” Nye had said once when Lena bent too
close to a piece of equipment while doing a tour of the room to stretch her
legs. That was the first day. He had said little else to her since their brief
conversation after her arrival. Lena wondered if it had something to do with
telling him she was prepared to blow his head off. That might be the sort of
thing, she considered after the fact, to put somebody right out of the
conversational mood.

Now she was getting fidgety. She hadn’t slept well, despite
her eight hours off each night while Nye was safely padlocked in his room. The
silence was getting to her. Aside from a daily visit from one of Nye’s research
team, they were left entirely alone.

“It’s so quiet in here,” she finally pointed out that
afternoon. The room was windowless, deep in the bowels of the hospital
building, and although the onetime patients’ rooms upstairs were mostly given
over to housing, the labs and other working spaces nearby were deserted most of
the time. “There’s nobody else around. I can’t even hear any other people.”

“Usually I have a team in here.” He didn’t seem taken aback
by her sudden decision to talk. Perhaps the quiet was grating on him too. “Not
anymore, I guess.”

“It’s a long time since I was alone, you know?”

His eyes flickered away from the computer screen to scan
her. Just a glance, skimming up and down her body. But it still gave Lena a
tiny thrill to realize that Nye was checking her out.

“Me too. Too many people in the compound. And if you’re out
of the compound alone, you’re probably about to get eaten. Solitude is probably
a thing of the past for humans. We’re all on the permanent buddy system now.
Don’t you have a room to yourself though?”

Was it his subtle way of finding out if she was attached? Or
was she making assumptions that would come back to embarrass her later?

“I do,” she admitted, “but it’s not quiet. I can hear
everybody in the rooms around me.” Their little enclave of humanity had settled
on what had once been a college campus, adjacent to a teaching hospital, and
Lena’s room was in an actual dormitory. It had been constructed for efficiency,
not privacy.

Nye quirked an eyebrow, a surprisingly sexy expression.
“That could be either really torturous or really entertaining.”

Despite herself, she chuckled. She knew what he meant, and
he knew that she knew. It was one of those generally known things. Sex hadn’t
really been private in years. “Most of the time it’s just annoying. I have
enough trouble sleeping without listening to…people who aren’t sleeping. It’s
the same few people too, so even if it had been interesting at first, it would
just be boring by now.”

“I used to feel the same way,” he said. “I had a room at the
end of a hall, so only one neighbor…but it was Jip Chambliss.”

“Ouch. Not much sleep for you then.”

Jip Chambliss was a notorious womanizer, though Lena
couldn’t deny that, in a sense, he was also a hero. In his way, the man who
occupied the primary watchtower at the front gate was as big a celebrity as
Nye. Women didn’t mind at all being pursued by the tall, rangy sniper who had
scored so many legendary zombie kills. He had as many notches on his bedpost,
she suspected, as on his gunstock.

“He rarely sleeps alone,” Nye confirmed.

“So you weren’t always in the room down here, that—”

“No. They moved me after the bite. So I’d be closer to here,
contained in one building. Also no windows, although it does have a shower and
a toilet. I think it may have been the interns’ and residents’ break room at
one point. Anyway, nobody will see me this way. It all supports the story that
I’m spending a few weeks on a research project out at the big farm.”

He didn’t even get to spend his remaining days sleeping in
the room that had been his home for several of the last ten years. The reality
of just how short a time Nye had left suddenly struck Lena in a way it hadn’t
before. Their greatest hero. If it could happen to him…

“Now I sort of miss old Jip and his lady parade,” Nye
remarked. “He was always trying to fix me up too. If I’d realized how short my
time was going to be, I probably would have taken him up on it a few times at
least.”

Lena listened to the regret in his voice and could tell from
the way he was eyeing her that he was considering the obvious potential in
their situation. She was considering it too.

Lena was young, unattached, apparently healthy. She might
well be the last woman Nye ever saw. Nye was a hero, and he had only a few
weeks left. Time was short, babies were precious and Nye had never fathered
one. They would be in no danger of contamination yet. The virus was known not
to transmit sexually until the carrier showed symptoms. How people had
discovered that little tidbit was a gruesome story in itself.

She watched the idea play around Nye’s face, her gaze never
leaving him. Lena knew she was blushing, could feel the heat rising in her face
and in other places too. Had this been on Watson’s mind all along, when he
assigned Lena to this task? He had hinted broadly over the past few years that
she should find a partner. Women who could get pregnant were generally expected
and encouraged to do so. It was one of the many usually unspoken assumptions of
life post-apocalypse—repopulation was a priority. Lena had never felt like the
time was right, never met a man who felt right for more than a dalliance.

Nye hadn’t done it, as far as she could tell, because he was
always working, always busy, never taking time out to engage in social
interaction. Lena knew a few girls he’d been with, but although they reported
favorably for the most part, she got the impression Nye had remained distant,
treating the process as a physical necessity more than a pleasure. He hadn’t
wanted to get involved.

“You can say it,” she finally blurted, tired of the staring
contest that was making her feel wobbly in the knees despite being seated.
“It’s okay.”

Nye tipped his head to the side, a smile curving his lips.
“What, no wooing? No seduction?”

“From me? Or from you?”

“Well, I meant from me. But if you’d rather…”

“No, no,” Lena assured him. “That’s okay, I’m good.”

He stepped around the table he’d been working at, approached
the table where Lena still sat and stood a scant ten or twelve inches away from
her dangling feet. “So do you think Watson was trying to play matchmaker?”

Lena nodded. Up close, she could see the strain around Nye’s
lovely eyes. She could also see that his dark eyelashes were longer and thicker
than hers. Her heart beat faster still, almost as fast as in the middle of a
raid.

“Yeah. I guess.” She wished she could think of something
clever to say, something that might make her sound—and feel—smarter. Not as
smart as Nye, maybe. But smarter than she felt right now, which was pretty damn
stupid.

“You’re okay with that?”

What could she say? That it would be an honor? That it was
her duty? That she’d been checking him out on the sly for the past three days
anyway?

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then.”

He leaned forward, bracing his fingers lightly against the
table to either side of Lena’s lap. She had just enough time to think,
You
mean right now?
before he followed through with the motion and landed a
kiss.

It was a little harder than she was expecting, maybe a
little harder than he’d intended. There was a gasp, a click of tooth on tooth,
an awkward shuffling of lips and head angles.

And then Lena realized her legs had gotten wrapped around
Nye’s waist, and he was cupping her ass and rocking against her as she returned
his kiss. They had overcome awkwardness through sheer force of lust. Nye was
already hard, and the rhythmic pressure of his cock was a straining, nagging
frustration. The tough seam of Lena’s pants rubbed her clit almost painfully.
She whined and clenched her legs around Nye’s trim hips anyway as his tongue
swirled over hers.

He was the first to back off a little, turning the kiss into
a nibbling, teasing exploration. Lena had half expected a cursory, practical
fuck with no prelude at all. She hadn’t been expecting this playful approach.
It was more arousing than she could have dreamed. Nye kissed like a hero too,
she decided. Whatever that meant.

It was chilly in the basement, and Lena had on a plaid wool
shirt, a t-shirt and a tank top. Nye peeled each layer off carefully,
methodically, making only teasing brushes against her breasts as he worked.
Lena was squirming and eager for a firmer touch by the time she sat before him
topless. She arched her back shamelessly, hoping he would take the hint.

Nye just shook his head and smiled, his eyes sleepy with
want now as he traced his fingertips in featherlight circles around her
nipples. “I want to savor this. I want to take enough time to appreciate it.”

“We can do it more than once,” she pointed out, a little
chagrined at her own neediness.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, almost as though just now
noticing—as though he were surprised to realize it. “So beautiful.”

His mouth on her nipple was a moment of sheer bliss. His
flickering tongue was heaven, condensed down to a single point of pleasure that
spread quickly throughout her body. Lena reached down between them and grasped
Nye’s cock through the soft, worn twill of his trousers. Her fingers mapped the
length of him, caressing the muscular contour of his erection where it bowed
against its fabric confines. Groaning, Nye leaned into her touch and bit down
lightly on her nipple, pulling an answering sound from Lena’s throat.

“Take your pants off,” he ordered, and Lena slid off the
table and started to comply before hesitating when she considered his tone. She
was supposed to be in charge of the situation, in charge of Nye. Her
perspective was out of whack, knocked askew by hormones on the rampage.

“Maybe I should tie you to a chair or something first,” she
suggested with a cockeyed grin. “Just while I’m unarmed, of course.”

Nye’s smile was wicked. “Kinky. Maybe later. And it would be
you
tied up, not me. Now get your pants off.”

She unfastened the oft-repaired button on her fatigues and
slipped them off as smoothly as Lucas slipped from the “nerdy but hot” category
in her mind to the “arrogant but hot” one. Nye wasted no time in shucking his
own clothes, the button-down pulled off along with the t-shirt, and the
well-weathered, loose khakis practically removing themselves once he unbuckled
his belt.

“You’re not wearing any underwear,” Lena pointed out. It
seemed more polite than just gawking at his penis without speaking. The meaty
column of his erection bobbed gently as he moved, pointing toward her like a
divining rod.

“That means you’re overdressed.”

“Oh.” She plucked at the waistband of her panties, struck
with sudden shyness. Was it worse to be naked, or worse to stand here in the
decidedly unflattering cotton panties that had once been blue but were now only
sort of bluish-gray?

Lucas Nye’s hero doctor penis is staring at me.

After a second, Lena realized she had it backward, and in
fact she was staring at Lucas Nye’s penis. Why it should fascinate her so much
more than the phalluses of less famous men, she wasn’t sure. It was a
nice-looking penis, however, and certainly worth admiring. She had just never
expected to see it.

“Shit,” she whispered, closing her eyes. She reached for the
waist of her panties again with trembling hands then shoved them down and off.

“Hey, wait,” Lucas said, stepping close and taking her hands
in his. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go too fast.”

“No, it wasn’t that,” Lena squeaked. The dauntingly famous
penis was brushing against her hip and lower belly, grazing her pubic hair. She
wrenched her gaze up to meet Lucas’ eyes. “I just got a head full of how
strange this all is, all of a sudden. I’m okay now, really.”

I’m okay with standing naked in Lucas Nye’s laboratory.
About to have sex with him, hoping to catch pregnant with his only child before
he dies or goes zombie. They’ll write stories about it one day. “The Hero
Doctor’s Lady” if I live a good, respectable life after this, or “The Hero
Doctor’s Whore” if I screw up. Crap, what are the odds I won’t screw up?