LovewithaChanceofZombies Read Free

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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