[Anh Ngữ] Married with Zombie - Jesse Petersen (English)

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies
​

Spoiler: Chapter 11

Share in your activities and interests. If you’re going to kill zombies anyway, why not do it together?
In the group who greeted us, there were two zombie Starbucks attendants (probably from different Starbucks if I know Seattle), a zombie nurse (real this time, not a stripper), and at least one zombie fireman in full gear, along with a bunch of plainclothes zombies gathered around our car just… staring at us. Almost like they were waiting for us to say something.

For a minute we all stared back. I think we didn’t really believe it was true.

I mean, we’d faced off with more than one zombie at a time before, but never this many and never in such an open, unprotected place. To make matters worse, most of our weapons were still locked in the car. We’d almost certainly have to get to them at some point if we wanted to survive the battle surely to come.

“C-Could we pretend we were zombies, too?” Amanda whispered in a tiny voice filled with fear. “D-Don’t they sometimes do that in zombie movies?”

I gave Dave a side glance. “We could try it, right?”

“I guess so,” he said slowly. Then he shook his head. “Yeah, I suppose it couldn’t make things any worse.”

I slid my bag of supplies up on my arm so that it hung out of my way and then I hunched the same shoulder lower, bending partly at my waist to give myself an off-balance appearance. I kept one hand at my handgun, though, hoping the horde wouldn’t notice I was really at the ready.

Dave made a similar pose and we lurched forward as a team, making little moaning and whining sounds just like they did. Amanda followed us, her little fake zombie moans more like kitten mewls.

The zombies stared, their heads turning in that odd doglike way that was so off-putting. I think we confused them.

Okay, I know we confused them. I mean, they looked at each other with a few grunts like they were saying, “‘What do you think, Zombie Bob?’ ‘Well, I don’t know, Zombie Pete, let’s see what they do next.’”

But it seemed like, against all odds, our ruse was working. I mean, I almost thought we had it made. We were almost to the car, almost to a reasonable level of safety, or at least to a way to blast through a few of the zombies who were in the way of our freedom.

And then Dave dropped his keys.

I think he must have been trying to fish them out of his pocket in a herky jerky zombie way and they slipped from his fingers. However it happened, they hit the ground with a jangle and he bent down out of habit to grab them. But the smoothness of his movements, or maybe the fact that he was trying to get his keys out like a human would, put the kibosh on any deception the zombies might have believed.

With a roar, four of them rushed forward at once. The rest followed at a slower pace, swinging their arms and gnashing their teeth.

“Guns!” I screamed, leveling my handgun and squeezing the trigger carefully.

My aim must have been getting better because one of the lead zombies crumpled as his forehead exploded like Fourth of July fireworks over Lake Washington.

Dave fired his rifle in rapid succession and another two zombies fell to the side, but now they were closing even faster. There was no way we were going to be able to drop them all from a distance, especially since Amanda was still standing behind us, staring at the approaching horde with a blank, terrified look on her pretty face.

“Amanda, God damn it, FIRE!” I screamed at her as I reloaded my gun with shaking hands.

But it was too late for that because the zombies had reached us.

The nurse zombie went for me and I flipped my gun around as her clawlike hands swiped toward me. Swinging, I hit her in the temple with the butt.

She moaned and whined as the rotten skin on her temple split, but her teeth still snapped at me even as I pushed her away.

My arms were starting to get really tired from all this hand-to-hand combat I’d been indulging in lately, so I shook as I tried to put enough distance between us to either smack her in the head again or fire off a shot.

“No,” I whispered as the struggle began to overwhelm me. Oh shit. This was it. I was about to die, er, undie and it really sucked.

But then, just as I felt the zombie’s breath on my neck, Amanda ran up and swung the butt of her shotgun. It connected with the nurse zombie’s skull and the light went out of her eyes as the side of her head caved in like a soda can being smashed by a sledgehammer.

I panted as I pushed the body off me. “Thanks,” I said before I flipped the gun around and put a shot into the skull of another approaching zombie.

Amanda jumped in the opposite direction, hurling out a guttural war cry as she sprayed shotgun fire into the zombie crowd.

“Die, fuckers!”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the phrase coming from Amanda’s cheerleader/pretty girl voice that was far better suited to say, “Go team!”

As I fired again, I grabbed for the extra bullets I’d put in my pocket before we went inside. My hands shook as I slid one bullet after another into the cylinder. When I closed it up, I pinched that piece of webbed skin between my thumb and forefinger.

As I swore, I kicked a zombie in the chest like I’d once seen somebody do during an MMA fight David had made me watch. The zombie wore a trucker hat and a flannel shirt and was a big guy, so I assumed he had been a trucker. Or a whacked-out Ashton Kutcher/grunge fan.

Whatever, once I’d put some space between us, I shot him between the eyes. Right in the middle of the “Really?” logo on his dopey hat. Black sludge seeped out of the hole I left and stained the white fabric as he hit the ground face first with a crashing thud.

“Yeah, asshole,” I said. “Really.”

“Sarah!”

I spun to see that Dave had made it to the car and managed to get it unlocked.

I ran toward him, firing my handgun at a couple of zombies who had begun to turn in his direction like a weird herd of cattle. Rabid, flesh-eating cattle…

“I’m here, I’m covering you,” I said as I put my back to his and continued to take aim at the zombies who were coming for him as he worked on weapons.

Even as I shot, I found Amanda. Although she’d started off the day screaming like a banshee over three zombies, now she seemed to have hit a rhythm in her killing method.

She blasted her shotgun through zombie heads, taking them off at the neck when they dared to get too close to her. She’d even gotten good at swinging her gun to get herself some space when she needed to reload.

“I’m out of shells,” she called as she popped the last two into the barrel.

“I’ve got you, girl,” I promised as I put a bullet in the last zombie who was lurching toward her.

She ran down to the car, smacking a stray zombie in the throat and sending it careening backward across the parking lot. I fired off a shot as it staggered back to its feet and it fell where it stood.

Dave handed off a box of shotgun shells to Amanda and a handful of bullets to me and popped out of the car with a handgun in his belt and a reloaded rifle at the ready, but as we looked around the parking lot, we realized there were no more zombies left to battle.

“Holy shit,” I said as I looked from one of them to the other. “Did we just win?”

Dave laughed. “I think so. Nobody got bitten, right? Everyone is okay?”

We each looked down at ourselves and each other, but aside from some blood and a bit of gore splattered on us from the dead, everyone was actually okay.

“Good, we must be getting better at this,” he said with a relieved sigh.

I nodded. “We could make it a career.”

He chuckled as he took the bags of extra supplies we’d gotten into this predicament to obtain and tossed them in the backseat. “Yeah, I can see it now. Zombiebusters! Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Wait,” Amanda said. “I have to pee now.”

Dave’s eyebrows went up. “What?”

“I really have to pee.” Amanda said as she squirmed. “We cleared the store, right?”

Dave was counting up the supplies and he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Just hurry. We don’t want another horde getting to us while we wait.”

She was already running toward the sliding doors, her shotgun over her shoulder. “I’ll be really fast! Don’t leave without me.”

I frowned at her last statement. Once she was gone, I turned back to him.

“You should be nicer to her,” I whispered.

He looked up from the bags in the backseat with a glare. “C’mon Sarah. Whatever.”

I stared at him. I didn’t like this David who seemed to have no empathy. But maybe he just didn’t get where Amanda was coming from.

“No, really,” I insisted, searching for a way to explain. “I think she knows you didn’t want her with us in the first place. She’s trying really hard. And she did get to killing when we needed her.”

“I guess,” he grunted. “But I still worry she’ll slow us down at some point.”

I stared at him. How could he so coldly dismiss someone who had basically helped keep him… and me… alive?

“And what about me?” I asked. “Would you ditch me too if you had a chance?”

He didn’t look up from his cataloguing of our new supplies. “That’s totally different and you know it.”

“No, I don’t. What I do know is that you looked for a divorce lawyer online,” I said.

He froze in his spot for a few seconds, then slowly set the bags of food and other supplies onto the floor on the driver’s side of the car.

“And how do you know that, Sarah?” he asked without turning around.

I shrugged. “Because I did, too. I found it in your search history.”

He stood up from the backseat and faced me. His face was like a mask, it was so still and emotionless. I don’t know if he was trying to think of something to say, I guess I hoped he was, but he didn’t get the chance. Before we could get into it, Amanda ran back to the car.

“I’m ready.”

“Me too,” Dave said, shoving around us to open the front passenger side of the car.

Because I was upset, I stopped looking at him and instead glanced at Amanda. She was disheveled, her hair messed up and her hoodie was torn.

“Hey, didn’t you have less blood on you before you went in?” I asked.

She nodded, though her cheeks paled a little. “Yeah, um, there was a zombie girl in the bathroom. A little girl. I had to fight her.”

I sucked in a breath at the idea. “Oh my God, are you okay?”

Dave hopped out of the car and stared at her. “Jesus, we didn’t check the bathroom. Stupid!! Did you get bitten, are you hurt?”

When I think about it now, I remember that she hesitated. But at the time I was so freaked out by the fact that we’d just fought off a full zombie horde and then Dave and I said the “d” word we’d been avoiding for months.… I guess I didn’t recognize it.

“I’m not hurt,” she said as she smiled brightly and got into the car. “Let’s just go.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She shut the door but I saw her nodding through the blood-smeared glass. Dave didn’t look at me, but got in, too. So I shrugged and went around to the driver’s side and we headed back down the hill toward the highway.

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies​

Spoiler: Chapter 12

Build mutual friendships. Just be ready to end them when your friends start trying to eat you.
I lied.”

I glanced away from the road to look at Amanda in the rearview mirror and Dave lifted his head from the glove compartment, which he had been searching through in hopes he could find something of use. Yeah, it probably sounds weird, but ask yourself, how often do you go through your glove box? There could be all kinds of useful shit in there and you’d never know it.

Of course all he’d found so far were four expired insurance cards and a pack of gum that was just this side of petrified. Still I respected him for making the effort. I certainly hadn’t thought of it, myself.

“What? What did you lie about?” I asked as I slowed the vehicle to move it around another mass of cars. Several of them were on fire, broken husks of the life their probably undead owners once lived.

Amanda blinked like she was holding back tears and then she slowly began to roll up the sleeve of her hoodie. I couldn’t see what she was doing in the mirror, but I heard Dave suck in a hard, harsh breath as he looked back at her.

“Oh fuck, Amanda,” he said. “Oh shit, fuck.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw what the fuss was about. Amanda had a huge bite mark on her arm where her sweatshirt was torn. Already, it oozed the telltale black sludge of a future zombie.

“Amanda!” I cried in horror.

I looked back toward the road and my horror turned to terror. There, sticking halfway into my lane, was a flipped semi. I swerved the wheel sharply to the left and just barely avoided a potentially fatal sideswipe, but I overcorrected just like they always tell you not to in Driver’s Ed. We careened toward the guardrail with David bracing on the dashboard and Amanda just letting her body swish around limply, like she didn’t care. And I guess at that point, why should she? Her fate was sealed one way or another.

With my heart pounding, I gripped the wheel and somehow managed to steady it before we slammed into the metal and concrete of the divider. The tires screeched in protest and the car tilted painfully, but we didn’t crash.

Once I had the vehicle back under control, I glanced back at Amanda. How was this possible?

“I’ll pull over,” I gasped, hardly able to catch my breath as the reality of this situation sank in more and more. “I have to pull over so we can look.”

“No!” Dave cried, motioning around us wildly. “Look, there are about a hundred of those things standing by the side of the road. You have to drive, Sarah. We can’t stop right now or we’ll all get bitten and that won’t help Amanda.”

My breath came out as a sob as I saw the zombies. He was right. They were standing by the side of the road, flinching and writhing as they watched our car roll by.

They were hunters now, the only thing left in their infected minds was the desire to eat flesh, suck marrow from bones, and draw whatever nutrients they got from brains. If we stopped, they’d charge and there would be no keeping them out of the car. We’d run out of ammo before we’d gotten rid of half of them, especially without Amanda to help us fend them off the way she had in the parking lot.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Dave asked, his voice loud, but strangely not angry. “Why didn’t you show us this back at the gas station?”

I could see tears leaking from Amanda’s eyes in the rearview mirror. To my horror, they were grey, not clear, and not because of runny mascara or anything.

“She was so little,” Amanda said as she tightened her grip on her injured arm. “No more than five or six, probably. She had blond hair and an American Girls doll that’s just like the one my niece has.”

She sobbed for a moment, but neither of us interrupted.

Finally she continued, “She was standing in a stall all by herself and I swear I didn’t know she was a zombie until she was on top of me. I just thought I could help her and then she was on me, growling and squirming and she-she bit me.”

“Oh no,” Dave breathed. “Oh, Amanda…”

“I-I thought you would leave me,” Amanda sobbed. “I didn’t want you to leave me so I lied when you asked if I was okay and I hoped I would be somehow. B-But now I can feel myself changing.”

“Feel it?” David asked softly.

She nodded. “I want to bite you.”

“Which you?” I asked as I swerved around a group of three zombies. Their fists pounded against the sides of the car as we passed them.

“Either one,” Amanda sobbed. “It doesn’t matter to me, really. I can smell your blood and your brains. I can smell them.”

Dave stared at her. “I don’t know what to do. What do we do?”

She swallowed, but it was clear that even that simple act was difficult.

“In the zombie movies, there’s always a friend who gets turned. A-and they always have to kill them.”

Dave shook his head. “No! No, Amanda. We can’t kill you.”

“You have to,” she cried. Her voice garbled slightly and she had to suck in a breath before she continued, “In a minute I won’t be able to stop myself from jumping forward to attack you. I’ll go for Sarah first since she’s driving and she can’t defend herself. I’ll dig my teeth into her neck and suck on her skin. I’ll bite her until I taste her frontal lobe.”

“Amanda,” I said, unable to keep the shock from my voice.

As she turned into a monster, she actually sounded so much calmer, almost more intelligent. But I guess it made sense. As her brain shut down, what was left was stronger, if only for a moment. Kind of like a person who lost their sight and could hear better.

Only soon Amanda would be gone. She wouldn’t retain any intelligence or humanity. She would be a thing. An ugly, horrible thing that didn’t remember we were friends.

“David,” she screamed. “Shoot me. Please kill me! Kill me now before I hurt you!”

He lifted the handgun that was on the center console between us. His hand shook as he leveled it on her, aiming for her head.

“Dave, no!” I cried, even though I knew as well as he did that this was the only way. Still, it was a sickening thought. Even after everything we’d already done, this was so different. “God, please… please! It’s Amanda!”

“Do it,” she moaned, but her eyes were starting to turn red. I saw the glitter of the iris in the rearview and my heart felt like it was exploding in my ears.

“Do — arggh,”

And she was gone. Amanda was gone. With a growl, she vomited black sludge across her pink tank top and she tilted her head at us. Then she smiled, her teeth greyed from the sludge and her tongue black.

“Kill it!” I screamed.

My attention was so split that this time I didn’t notice the car that was turned on its warped and twisted side ahead of me. I wrenched the wheel like I had with the semi, but I slammed against it anyway, flinching as metal ground on metal. Dave’s door split like a rotten banana as a long piece of the other car’s bumper tore through the metal panel. Dave yelped and scooted toward the middle of the seat to keep from being sliced by the shards.

“Sarah, fuck!”

I swung the wheel away from the wreckage and the passenger door tore off entirely, but we managed to break away and slide to the shoulder. But the road was just as bad there, where we bounced over glass and metal pieces from earlier accidents and explosions.

In the backseat, Amanda slammed to the side as the car careened and she let out an angry, hissing cry before she grabbed the back of both our seats and yanked herself closer.

“Oh God!” I screamed as I thought of what she’d said earlier about tearing my flesh with her teeth. “Shoot it! Please, shoot —”

Before I could finish the sentence, Dave fired the gun. At such short range, Amanda flew backward from the pressure of the blast. Blood, sludge and brains blew against the back window, blocking any view I had. Amanda, or what was left of her, slumped forward onto the floor of the backseat. She twitched once and then lay still.

“Fuck!” I cried as the car rocked, only this time it wasn’t from my shitty driving.

Now that Dave’s door was gone, the zombies along the side of the road seemed to sense our renewed weakness. Racing forward in small groups, they growled, swiping at Dave. He scootched closer to the middle console and cocked the gun he’d just used to kill our friend, firing into the crowd of them even while he reached into the backseat with his free hand to grab for a shotgun.

“Watch the road, baby!” he said. “You watch the road and I’ll take care of this. Just please don’t stop, whatever else you do.”

I concentrated on the pavement ahead of me as best I could, swerving around cars, sideswiping zombies into the highway barriers when I was able to catch them.

“What do I do?” I yelled as I looked ahead of me at the long rows of cars still broken down and abandoned ahead. “It’s so blocked up, I can’t go any faster.”

“Get off!” he barked as he tossed the empty handgun into the back and started firing off shotgun shots that made my ears ring in the close quarters.

I slung the car across several lanes toward the next off ramp, smashing broken vehicles as I went and rolling over flailing zombies as our car threw them to the ground. I gunned the sputtering vehicle up the exit ramp and hit the flipped motorcycle that was lying in the middle of the road. For a minute we went airborne and then hit the street with a crunching sound. It may sound cool or look cool when that happens in a movie, but in reality… not so much, especially since the engine started smoking the second we hit.

At the end of the exit, the way left was blocked by another overturned semi, so I roared to the right and headed into the heart of Seattle’s International District, with zombies running up the ramp after us and our car lurching and coughing from all the hits it had taken.

The surface streets were actually less congested than the highway and it was easier to move around the cars and debris scattered along our route. As I swung the wheel from side to side in an effort to compensate for the damage done to the steering, I tried to look behind us, but my view was blocked by the splattered remains of Amanda’s head. I forced myself not to puke.

“Can you see any of them?” I finally asked when I could breathe enough to talk.

Dave leaned out the gaping open side of the car and looked back toward the ramp we’d just driven up. “No. They can’t seem to make it off the highway, the exit is too steep for them to figure out.”

I let out a sigh of relief at that. With the ones behind us stuck, there weren’t any zombies, at least not where we could see them. I’m sure they were lurking around, but they hadn’t figured out that Dave and Sarah’s All You Can Eat Buffet On Broken Wheels was rolling their way yet. So for a minute, at least, we were safe.

“Look for a car dealership,” Dave said softly as he reloaded his shotgun and reached in the back for the empty handgun and a box of bullets.

I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t answer as I scanned around us and down side streets.

The International District was a funky place, with all kinds of ethnicities represented in the brightly colored shops and restaurants, though the culture with the biggest influence was Vietnamese. We had pulled into the area known as Little Saigon.

“There,” Dave said, motioning down a side street I’d just passed. I came to a lurching stop, put the car in reverse (which elicited a great deal of loud protest from the transmission) and rolled the car back to turn down the narrow side street.

Dave was right. Sheesh, I end up saying that a lot. But there was no denying that up ahead was a gaudy car lot. “Happy New and Used Cars, We Work With Any Credit!” it touted with a garish sign that swung from the paws of an enormous inflated gorilla.

“Why do these joints always try to sell cars with inflatables?” Dave muttered under his breath. “So cheesy.”

“We should try to get something new,” I said as I came to a stop and put our choking, hissing car into park.

He nodded as he handed me a fully loaded shotgun along with a bunch of shells and got out. We walked onto the deserted lot and looked around.

“All the keys will probably be in a lockbox inside,” Dave said. “Come on.”

“We should get something big,” I said. “Something that can move smaller vehicles because —”

I broke off. I didn’t want to say why. Dave seemed to understand though. I mean, it was pretty obvious that without a third person in our party, moving cars out of the way was going to be way more dangerous. We wouldn’t want to do it if we could use a big vehicle to push them instead.

We opened the big glass door that led to the showroom floor. Canned music was playing, “Highway to Hell” in muzak version and I shook my head as I looked at the convertibles that were showcased for the discriminating buyer. In Seattle. Where it rains practically every day. Awesome.

Dave motioned to a big desk in the back corner. A tall lockbox was attached to the wall behind it and that was probably filled with car keys for test drives.

I followed him, gun at the ready as he edged up to the desk. It was really tall and you couldn’t see under it, so we shouldn’t have been surprised when a female zombie jumped up from behind it and gave a roar of welcome.

She was dressed in a light blue polo shirt with “Happy New and Used Cars” blazoned across it in bright orange lettering. Oh yeah, and it was also splattered with black zombie sludge and little flecks of freshly eaten brains.

Inviting. I could tell my car-stealing experience was going to be “happy,” indeed.

Dave fired off the shot that dropped her without even flinching and came around behind the desk to check that the job was done. He fired a second one out of my line of sight, I guess to be safe rather than sorry (a very good thing during a zombie apocalypse) and then bent over the corpse.

“What are you doing?” I asked as I kept an eye out for zombie stragglers.

“Getting the box key,” he explained as he came up with a bloody key ring. “We might as well not have to waste ammo or time trying to force it. Keep an eye out.”

I did as I was told while he fiddled with a few keys, testing them in the little round lock that held the box closed. Finally, the metal door swung open to reveal row after row of keys all arranged neatly.

Dave started calling out makes and models of vehicles for my approval, everything from completely crappy shitters like our now-dead car to really nice vehicles.

I had an opinion about which one to pick, I really did, but I didn’t answer because from down a hallway toward the back of the office came two zombies. They were dressed in cheap polyester pants and ugly ties and both wore nametags, so I assumed they were sales zombies.

“Shit, I wouldn’t have bought anything from these idiots anyway,” I muttered as I fired off a shot.

One of the sales zombies flew backward as his head exploded like a watermelon. But the other leapt toward me before I could manage a second shot.

I backed up out of instinct and found myself falling backward over a low ottoman that had been placed near the sales desk, no doubt for customers to be comfortable during the wait for their terrible credit scores to be run by the fine sales crew.

I hit the ground and my shotgun skidded across the parquet floor out of my reach. The zombie was bearing down on me now and Dave swore as he grabbed for the handgun he had set down while he jimmied the lock.

I raised my hands in the hopes I could somehow hold the approaching beast off. The whole world seemed to slow to half time. He lunged over me, a ridiculous-looking zombie with a fucking goatee and an earring stuck through his gray, dead ear. Oh yeah, he also had a mullet. I was going to get killed and turned into a zombie by a guy with a mullet.

And then the strangest thing happened. Instead of dropping down and sinking his teeth into my flesh, there was a bang and the zombie let out a cry as a gaping hole appeared in his forehead. He collapsed down on top of me, but not in an attempt to kill me. The light went out of his eyes and he whined out a final breath as he died.

David raced around the sales desk and grabbed the zombie’s mullet to pull his now-lifeless corpse off of me. As I got up, we both turned toward the door. Standing there, dressed like a character from Underworld or something, was a petite Asian girl carrying a huge shotgun.

“Hey,” she said as she reloaded with one hand. “What’s up?”

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies​

Spoiler: Chapter 13

Present a united front. You against the zombies.
I think we all must have just stared at each other for at least a full minute. Dave and I were honestly pretty shocked to see another human person. If you think about it, this was the first live human we’d found since the previous afternoon when Amanda came to our door looking for Jack. I wasn’t even sure what to say to a stranger anymore.

As for the girl, well, she looked pretty unimpressed and bored by the sight of us. So I guess she didn’t have anything to say.

“Um, thanks for your help,” I finally said as I moved a little closer.

“No problem.” She shrugged like saving my life was no thing. “I saw you guys pull in the lot from the apartment above the restaurant across the way. From the looks of your car, I figured you might need help.”

Dave and I exchanged a look at her pointed statement, but then he smiled.

“Well, we did. And we really appreciate what you did for us,” Dave said as he moved toward her with his hand extended. He’d always been good with people, that was why we’d thought he’d be so successful in business. “I’m David and this is my wife Sarah.”

She didn’t make any move to shake his hand. I noticed at that point that she was wearing plastic gloves. Also a mask like the ones painters wear dangled around her neck and as we moved closer, she lifted it up to cover her nose and mouth. It reminded me of all those outbreaks of things like swine flu when people had worn those masks to protect themselves in airports or stores.

But a mask wasn’t going to do shit in this case.

“I’m Lisa,” she said, her voice a little muffled by the white cotton that now covered her mouth. There was a long pause and then she motioned us toward the door. “My grandfather owned the restaurant over there. Do you want to come up and I’ll share some of my food? It’s perishable so it has to be eaten before we lose power.”

I looked at Dave and he nodded. “It has been a while since breakfast.”

That seemed to be enough for her, because she turned and glanced around the parking lot before she headed toward the back of a restaurant that faced the car lot. We followed her, keeping our eyes peeled for zombies, but the lot was just as quiet as it had been when we approached it.

Lisa took us through the back door of the restaurant, still fragrant with the previous day’s food. My stomach growled and once again I was ashamed that I could want to eat after everything that had happened. But not ashamed enough to stop following her up the small hall that led to the main dining room.

The room was still pretty tidy with small tables arranged in a pleasing way around the room. Different sauces and salt and pepper still stood on their tops. There really wasn’t a stick of furniture out of place.

From the looks of the place, one might have thought it was just a slow day… well, except for the bodies stacked by the front door and the fine spray of sticky blood slashed across the menu display above the counter.

I flinched as I counted the bodies swiftly. Eight. All of them headless. I guess Lisa, or whoever had killed them, hadn’t wanted to take any chances with zombification. Smart. We’d adopt the same policy in time.

“This way,” Lisa said as she opened up a door behind the counter with a key and took us up a flight of stairs to another locked door. She let us in and as we got inside the foyer of a tiny apartment she bolted the door and moved a big chair in front of it.

I looked around. The place was in an older building and it had that faintly musty smell of it, along with the strong scents of a thousand meals made below. But it wasn’t unpleasant, just nostalgic and almost comforting.

“The food is in the fridge,” Lisa said as she went into another room.

We followed and soon found ourselves seated at a chipped Formica kitchen table covered in traditional Vietnamese noodle soups and dumpling dishes. I took my first bite and moaned with delight.

Lisa looked at me sharply, I guess looking for signs that I was infected, but then I thought I saw her smile behind her mask.

“My grandfather was a good cook,” she said.

I nodded as I looked at her. She was so young and so far we hadn’t seen anyone else with her. I had to hope her family was just out searching for food or helping survivors.

“He was, this is wonderful,” I said when I swallowed my bite. “Is he still here? Are there others with you?”

She arched a brow and her eyes got sad and hard all at once. “No, there’s no one left.”

I shut my eyes and tried not to think of my own family. “Oh. How did it happen?”

She swallowed hard. “Yesterday one of the tour groups that come through this area came into the restaurant around lunchtime. We make a lot of money off those people, so my family is always excited when a bus parks outside our door. But one of the men with them had a bandage on his arm. He was acting weird and eventually he collapsed. Grandpa tried to help him but —”

She broke off, but we didn’t need to hear her say it to know what had happened.

“The outbreak had already started by then, hadn’t it? The tourist turned into a zombie and he bit your grandfather?” Dave whispered.

She seemed relieved not to have to recite those details herself. She nodded. “My Mom and my older brother rushed to help, but he got them before they knew what was happening.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I looked at Dave from the corner of my eye.

“How did you keep from being turned, too?” he asked.

She looked at him like he was accusing her of something and her glare narrowed.

“I wanted to fight them,” she snapped. “But my boyfriend forced me come up here. We bolted ourselves in and waited. We could hear them outside all night. Finally, this morning he couldn’t take the way they were clawing at the door anymore. He took a shovel from the back deck and went down to deal with them.” She swallowed hard. “He never came back. I finally dared to come down and found all these bodies. I shot some, bashed the heads in on others and stacked them up at the front door so the others wouldn’t come in.”

There was a long silence in the room. Finally, I shifted.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, though the sentiment seemed really stupid. “Uh, our friend got it this morning.”

“I saw her body in your car when I walked by,” Lisa said with a shrug. “It looks like she got shot in there, by one of you, after she turned.”

Her eyes were really difficult to read and they were all I could see with her face covered by her mask, so I’m not sure if she was disgusted with us for killing Amanda or impressed that we had the guts.

I looked at Dave and he nodded like he read my mind.

“So how old are you?” Dave asked.

She turned her glare on him sharply. “Old enough.”

“You can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen,” he pressed.

She folded her arms. “I’m nineteen. I graduated high school this year.” She shifted slightly. “I was going to U-Dub in the fall. So was Alex. He is my… well, he was my boyfriend.”

We were all silent for a moment. I guess we were each thinking about what we’d lost in the last couple of days. I had my own shit to deal with, but I couldn’t imagine being ten years younger and on my own dealing with what was happening in the city around us.

Problems or not, at least I had David to depend on. And even though I was worried about my Dad down in San Diego and my Mom, who lived a couple of hours south of Chicago, so far there was no reason to believe they had been hurt. In fact, I knew my Dad had been okay as recently as yesterday afternoon when he e-mailed me. Probably they were both just scared out of their wits and wondering about my health and well-being.

This girl had lost her entire family, her boyfriend, her dreams, and her future in about thirty-six hours. Suddenly my life didn’t seem so bad.

“We’re on our way to the border, Longview, Washington,” I offered awkwardly even though Lisa hadn’t asked. “To find Dave’s sister. If you want to come, you’re welcome to ride along with us.”

Dave nodded immediately and his hand settled on my knee under the table. He squeezed gently and I smiled at him. We might butt heads, but obviously we agreed on this point that the kid shouldn’t be left alone like this. I was glad he didn’t hesitate with her like he had with poor Amanda.

“So I’m some charity case for you?” she snapped as she grabbed the dirty plates and took them off the table.

Dave stared. “No, not at all. You’d be doing us a favor. We could use a third person to look out on the highway. And you’re obviously a good shot and can take care of yourself.”

From the sink, she eyed us for a minute, but then shook her head. “No way.”

I got up and she stiffened. I saw her hand move toward the knife block behind her and I stopped moving immediately. “Why not, Lisa?”

“No offense but I don’t know you two from Adam. You could be serial killers.”

I stared at her. Under normal circumstances I would have been right there with her about not trusting people you just met. After all, my Mom had taught me not to take rides from strangers, too.

But this wasn’t exactly “normal” anymore. Lisa was in the middle of a city basically overrun by zombies and she was alone. Not to mention a kid, for God’s sake, no matter how well she was handling herself.

“But don’t you want to get away from here?” Dave asked. “Seattle is going to be an undead town within a couple of days. You’ll be trapped if you wait that long.”

“Are you stupid enough to think it’s going to be different somewhere else?” She glared at him. “You have been listening to the news, right?”

We glanced at each other and shifted uncomfortably. Since that morning, we’d been too busy trying not to die to turn on the radio. News wasn’t a priority in comparison to battling for gas or having to kill a friend.

Lisa rolled her eyes.

“Okay, dumbasses, here’s the news flash: this thing is spreading. By now there probably isn’t even a Longview left. At least if I stay here I know where things are and I know how to get them.” She folded her arms, an immovable object.

I sat back down at the table, totally stunned for a minute. I got that the outbreak was spreading, we could see that with our own eyes, but how could it have gotten so far so fast? Could it really be true that someplace a hundred and thirty miles away could be overrun already?

I shook my head. Even if what she said was true, we couldn’t stop. We certainly couldn’t stay here. I straightened my shoulders.

“Well, I guess that’s true, but with more people in a group —”

“There’s just more chance of getting turned into a zombie,” Lisa finished with a dismissive sniff. “I mean, even your little headless friend out there you had to shoot in the end, right?” We didn’t answer, but our silence seemed to satisfy her. She nodded. “Yeah, seeing her dead in your backseat doesn’t really convince me that you two are my saviors.”

Dave clenched his fists on the tabletop and I could tell he was thinking of that awful moment when he had to kill Amanda. This bitch might not know it, but she was rubbing that in.

“Look,” I snapped, pissed off at her now. She was being a brat whether she knew it or not. “You’re crazy to stay here alone.”

She shook her head with a mocking and rather snotty little laugh. “Yeah? Well, I think you’re crazy to stay together and try to run. You almost got turned in the car dealership today, lady. If I hadn’t come along, you would have been eating your hubby here… and not in a good way. Could you have killed her, Dave?”

Dave got up and his chair rocked from how hard he’d pushed off. “Whatever, kid, you made your point. You want to stay here and rot, that’s your choice. Thanks for the help back there, and for the food. We’ll get out of your way.”

I looked at him. “But —”

“Come on, Sarah,” he said without looking away from the girl. “We’re obviously not wanted here by the little girl who knows it all. So let’s get going.”

I got to my feet and started after him, but at the door that led downstairs to the restaurant, I looked back. Lisa had pulled her mask off and she was watching us leave. Her mouth was set in a stubborn line, but I saw the question in her eyes. The fear.

But she didn’t stop us. And she didn’t call us back.

We left the restaurant in silence and started back across the street together, each of us keeping an eye out for zombies.

“I don’t get why she wouldn’t come,” I said in shock. “She’s obviously not stupid or blind. She has to know she’s dead if she doesn’t make a break for it. She won’t be able to hold them off forever.”

Dave shrugged. “Who knows what she’s thinking? Here she thinks she can control her environment. She’s more afraid of the unknown than she is of having her arm chewed off by her former boyfriend when he pops back up from the dead. There wasn’t going to be any convincing her to come. It was better to just get out of there before she decided we were too risky to let go.”

My eyes widened. “You think she might have freaked out?”

“She looked like she might be heading that way,” he said softly. “I saw her move for the knife when you got up. I wasn’t going to take the chance.”

I shivered. The idea that regular human people might try to hurt us hadn’t actually occurred to me at that point. Oh, I was so innocent then. Luckily I didn’t have to wrack my brain too hard about it because by then we were back in the parking lot of the dealership. The big fucking inflated gorilla waved in the breeze and I wanted to pop it with a big pin. I looked at the bloody show room where I’d almost lost my life half an hour earlier.

“I don’t want to go back in there.”

“We don’t have to,” Dave said. He held up a shiny key. “I grabbed one right before you got attacked.”

He motioned toward a big black Escalade that was parked nearby. “I think this is your chariot, my lady.”

I stared at the vehicle. It couldn’t be more than a year old and it looked like whoever had owned it before it got to this lot had loved it like it was a kid.

The paint was perfectly shiny, not a scratch on her. Its big size would accommodate all our stuff and even a few more people if we found any more survivors who were actually willing to band together. And it could easily push smaller vehicles out of the way if need be.

“Perfect,” I breathed. “Exactly what we wanted.”

“Good,” he said as he opened the passenger door and motioned me in. “Then let’s pull her up to our car and move everything over.”

Our car seemed small and really screwed up as we pulled the newer, fancier vehicle up next to it. Our old one was still smoking gently and I cringed at the pungent odor as I hopped down.

“You take the trunk,” I said, “I’ll grab everything out of the back.”

He nodded and went around the car while I pulled the back door open. What I saw there made me stop and stare.

I knew Amanda was back there, of course. But seeing her slumped over at the oddest angle, a big exit wound through the back of her skull, made my stomach turn all over again. I couldn’t move as I just looked down at her lifeless body. How the hell had we gotten to this?

Dave came around and stood beside me, both of us quiet for a long time.

“Come on,” he finally said as he grabbed for one of the boxes of guns that were on the seat beside her, splattered with her blood, but still intact.

I nodded as I grabbed the other box and a couple of bags from our ill-fated gas station run. At the very least, I wasn’t going to leave them and let her have died in vain.

We moved everything over to the new car and then we both looked at the old one.

“I don’t want to leave her in the car,” I said softly.

Dave looked at me. “Mandy?”

I nodded. “It seems wrong. Shouldn’t we try to bury her or something? In the end, she was really brave, she saved our lives more than once. She even gave us permission to kill her so she wouldn’t hurt us.”

Dave stared at the car for a long time. “We can’t take the time to bury her,” he said quietly. “But we could burn the car.”

I thought about that. “Cremation.”

He nodded. “It’s better than nothing, right?”

“Right.”

Dave managed to siphon some gas out of the tank of Amanda’s now make-shift coffin. Solemnly, he splashed it all over the car. I found a lighter hidden under the floor rug in the front seat from back when I still smoked… hey, I figured I might take it up again, might as well be ready. Dave pulled the new SUV away from the beater we’d been driving for four years and then I lit the lighter.

“Bye, Amanda,” I whispered as I tossed it toward the busted-up car. “I’m really sorry.”

The car ignited right away, the flames jumping high enough to singe tree branches ten feet above. I leaned away from the burst of heat and let out a sigh as Dave got out of the Escalade to stand beside me. We watched the car burn for a couple of minutes, lost in our thoughts.

And then I heard the sound. A low, echoing growl. Big, though, not the isolated sounds of the zombies like we’d heard before. I turned slightly and jerked back with a small scream.

Coming from around the back of the dealership were zombies. Maybe two hundred drooling, sludge-vomiting, growling zombies. They were a herd, that was the only way to describe them. Cattle on the stampede, and the two of us were their final destination if we didn’t haul ass.

“They saw the smoke,” I cried as I grabbed Dave and we dove for the new car. I crawled across to the passenger side from the driver’s seat and he got in and slammed the door just as a dozen of the fastest-moving creatures reached the burning car.

Zombies are dumb. There, that’s just the only thing you can say. Their brains are dead, or at least everything in their brain that makes them human and intelligent. So if a zombie sees fire, he doesn’t go around it. He goes through it. And that’s what about five of the fastest of them did.

As Dave gunned the engine and squealed out of the parking lot away from the horde of infected, I stared in horror at the flaming, lurching zombies who swarmed our old car before they started after us, completely oblivious to their searing flesh and burning clothes.

Dave pulled the vehicle onto the street between the lot and the back of the row of restaurants and I looked up. In the apartment window where we’d eaten with Lisa, I saw her face. It looked small on the second floor, watching the scene below as we rolled away.

I hoped we were right to leave her. Dave was correct, we couldn’t have made her go. Still, I figured the chances of ever seeing her again were slim to none. So I shut my eyes and didn’t look anymore until we were back on the highway.

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies
​

Spoiler: Chapter 14

Listen. Killing zombies isn’t easy. There’s bound to be fallout.
Although the road was still congested and it was slow going as we inched our way out of the downtown corridor toward the airport area fifteen miles away, we drove for a long time in total silence.

I think we were both too scared to turn on the radio after what Lisa had told us about the spread of the breakout. My brain was already overflowing with horror, I didn’t think I could take much more.

And talking wasn’t high on the ‘to do’ list, either. Both of us were thinking about scary, awful things and I’m not sure we trusted each other enough to share them.

I know, for my part, I just kept thinking about Amanda. About her innocence and her unexpected bravery… about the awful moments leading to her death. And by the way Dave’s jaw was set and the dire expression on his face, I knew he was thinking those same things, too. And maybe wishing he hadn’t been so tough on her before she died.

Dr. Kelly had once called Dave a “brooder.” She’d explained that he kept his thoughts inside and that sometimes it was better to talk them out. At the time that had elicited an eye roll from me, but I couldn’t help but think about it now as I looked at him.

Finally, I blurted out, “We had to kill her.”

For a long time, Dave’s flinch was the only answer. When he spoke, his voice was strained. “Well, we didn’t kill her in committee or something. I killed her.”

“David —” I started, kind of scared by how hollow his voice was. He sounded really fucked up. The same way he had the day he told me he was dropping out of school and we had fought for three hours.

“No,” he snapped and his sharp tone cut me off. “I should have checked the bathroom. Why didn’t I fucking check the bathroom?”

With a yell, he slammed both palms against the steering wheel. The car veered slightly and we almost hit an old truck that was angled into the shoulder, but he managed to pull the Escalade back into a straight line before he wrecked it. More than I could manage, as you already know.

He was breathing hard as he continued to drive. Carefully, I reached out and I touched his arm. He didn’t pull away, so I patted him gently.

I thought about what he’d said to me in the garage earlier that morning. About how we didn’t know what we were doing, but we were trying our best in a bad situation. I hoped those same words might help him now.

“We didn’t check the bathroom because we’re new at this,” I said.

He glared at me from the corner of his eye. “What?”

“I said we’re new at this. I mean, it’s not like they teach you how to survive a zombie attack in school.” I shivered. Maybe now they would. “We’re still learning what we need to do to protect ourselves and anyone else who rides with us. Next time we’re in a similar situation, I guess we’ll know better. We’ll always check the bathroom from now on.”

“Next time,” Dave said, coughing out a bitter laugh. “How ridiculous is it that we know a next time is coming?”

I didn’t answer. Of course there was going to be a next time. I’d already accepted that as an inevitability.

He rubbed his chin. “But some good our little learning experience does Amanda.”

“I know,” I whispered, blinking back tears.

“She was like a little kid,” he muttered.

I looked at him. “And that wasn’t your fault, either.”

“But I should have —”

I squeezed his hand. “David, Amanda was twenty-three. Old enough to be careful in this situation. So don’t take all the credit or the blame for her survival or her death. We did the best we could. It sucks, but we can’t beat ourselves up. We’ve killed plenty of people we know.”

Dave was quiet for a minute, but then he started laughing. I stared at him, hoping he hadn’t lost his mind since he was driving and I didn’t relish the idea of trying to find another car if he wrecked, this time on a zombie-infested freeway.

“I you never thought you’d be saying that,” Dave said as he continued to laugh.

I smiled despite myself. “Yeah, I guess not.”

“‘We’ve killed plenty of people we know,’” he chuckled, mimicking my voice.

I have to say, I hated when he did that, but today I didn’t take it personally. I actually laughed along with him.

“Well, we have. Let’s see, there was our debut with Dr. Kelly.”

“Who overcharged us for advice I could have gotten on a fortune cookie,” Dave said.

I giggled. “That’s as good a reason to kill her as the fact that she was going to eat us.”

“The Wonderful Wilsons,” he offered.

“Technically, we didn’t kill them,” I reminded him. “But they were posers and I think they liked to rub it in when they came out of Dr. Kelly’s office every week. I can’t be sorry for them.”

“Total posers,” he agreed. “How about Jack?”

I hesitated. Jack had been David’s friend, even if I despised him. Maybe I shouldn’t kid about him, it might be a sorer subject than my husband let on.

“Oh, come on, don’t stop now,” Dave encouraged with a wicked little grin. “I know you wanted to beat him to death in the toilet for way more than one thing.”

“Wellll,” I dragged out the word.

“Here, I’ll start.” Dave took a deep breath like he was about to confess something really bad. “Jack cheated at Halo. In fact, he cheated at all video games.”

“What?” I asked, turning toward him. “He did not.”

“He did. I caught him at it a hundred times.” He winked. “Now you.”

“Okay, he also played his music too loud on weeknights and he smelled like sausage,” I said, covering my mouth as I said it.

“Sentence: Death!” David snorted. “Mr. Gonzales is obvious.”

I rolled my eyes. “Too easy. Jackass, looked at my tits, refused to fix anything, total slumlord.”

“And I guess that just leaves us back to Amanda,” he said with a sigh.

I looked at him, still feeling bad no matter how much we both tried to lighten the mood.

“A cheerleader was mean to me in high school,” I said after a long pause. “And Amanda always reminded me of her. So I guess that’s a good enough reason for a rampage. In reality, you were defending my honor.”

He smiled. “Yeah. I’ll take that.”

“So we’re good?” I asked. “We’ve confessed our sins and said our Hail Marys and we’re okay to kill again?”

He nodded. “But now I guess it’s time to do the thing we’ve been avoiding and listen to some news. We better see what kind of situation the rest of the world is in.”

I turned the stereo dial and the awesome speakers blasted a woman talking. I looked at the display and smiled, “Heyyyy, satellite. I’ve always wanted satellite radio!”

“I know. It’s part of why I picked this one. I mean, Playboy radio, Howard Stern.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively and relief washed over me. Dave was going to be okay.

I gave his arm a light slap. “Pervert.”

I flipped the dial until it read MSNBC on the dial and turned it up as a female reporter with a lightly British accent talked in a calm and even tone.

“Officials have abandoned the city, with one anonymous source telling us it is ‘left to God’ now. But as the disease spreads unabated, with more and more undead popping up in almost every West Coast city, there are increasing questions about whether local, state, and federal forces are equipped to deal with what scientists are now saying will soon be a global plague.”

“Shit, she was right,” I murmured, thinking of Lisa walled into her tower trying to will the zombies away. I hoped she was okay even if she was a bitch.

“While officials do stand by their suggestion that people stay in their homes, they also tell those who do venture out to arm themselves and aim for the head if they come in contact with one of the infected. Those who are bitten seem to have between ten and twenty-five minutes until they are fully transformed, depending upon body chemistry and the location of the bite. There is no known cure —”

I turned the volume down. That was enough for now.

“Lisa might be right after all,” Dave said in a low, sad tone. “Longview might be no better than Seattle by now.”

I shrugged. “I don’t care. That’s our plan. I say we stick to it. At least it gives us something to aim for. Once we get there, we’ll figure out what to do next.”

He nodded and then we drove, back into silence as we both tried to figure out what the hell we’d gotten ourselves into.

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies​

Spoiler: Chapter 15

Support your partner in their interests. You never know when batting practice, kung fu movie moves, or even a poker night might come in handy during a zombie infestation.
We hadn’t even reached the airport when the sun started to set. Both of us had been watching it droop lower and lower on the horizon during the hours of dodging cars and crushing zombies along the shoulder of the freeway. The entire afternoon I kept hoping some miracle would happen and we’d somehow hit the open road and have a straight shot to Longview.

Of course it didn’t.

“We won’t make it before dark,” Dave said with a sigh.

I nodded without looking at him. “I guess we’ll have to stop.”

I sent him a side glance and saw how thin and pissed his mouth was. He wasn’t any happier about this than I was. “Unless you want to take your chances on the road at night.”

He shook his head immediately. “I thought about it. There are just too many cars and way too many zombies. I think it would be a deathtrap.”

I didn’t answer as I started looking out the car window at the area we were in. We were out of Seattle proper by now so there were no longer skyscrapers, but all the little suburbs were so tight in and crowded that we were still in the city in every way that mattered. There were still tons of people out there, tons of cars, tons of opportunities for death… and undeath.

I scanned for a place out in the hilly neighborhoods of businesses and homes for a location that looked safe. It’s funny how much you take “safe” for granted until it’s gone. How many road trips had we been on when we’d just grabbed a room at a Super 8 without even thinking about it? I even used to complain about crappy towels or cheap sheets, which drove David nuts. But I’d kill for them at this point if it meant we didn’t have to battle any more zombies to get them.

“Hmmm,” I muttered as we meandered past a part of the highway where I could see a neighborhood with homes built down on the hill below. They were squeezed close together like sardines. “Maybe a house would be a good pick. If we could break in —”

“Nope,” Dave interrupted as he eased the car toward the next off ramp. “I know exactly where we’re going to go.”

I wrinkled my brow. How did he know any better than I did where the safest place to stop was? It wasn’t like we came down here more than a couple times a year for airport runs when one of our sets of parents came.

“Where?” I asked, totally incredulous.

“You’ll see…” he teased as he drove along what was once a main thoroughfare but now abandoned cars lined the lanes.

A Laundromat to one side of the street was on fire, the chemicals within making the flames purple and blue. On the other side there was an antique store with all its windows broken out, only from the inside, not the outside. The shards of broken glass still pointing up from the frame and sparkling in the sunset were tinged with both blood and sludge.

Basically, it was a ghost town.

Suddenly on our left I saw the flashing, garish, neon lights of a sign. “Sea King Hotel and Casino.” The “K” was shorted out, so that it only buzzed faintly.

I turned in my seat and stared at David as he pulled into the half-empty lot in front of the casino and parked.

“Have you lost your fucking mind?”

He glared at me. “Um, no. Haven’t we always joked that we need to come down here and all our savings on red? It seems like this is as good a time as ever.”

“Okay, clearly this zombie thing has broken your brain,” I snapped as I folded my arms. “Yes, we talked about that, but a) that was a joke and b) it was before the world freaking imploded and monsters starting rising from the dead.”

He tilted his head. “But we’re right here. How could it hurt to look?”

“Are you serious?” I motioned toward the two story building a hundred yards across the lot. “Let’s see… it’s a public place where lots of people were potentially turned into zombies. It’s also a place where there was money and freaky looters could have decided this was their time to clear the tables. If they see us as a threat…” I pulled my thumb along my throat in a slashing motion. “You ran out on Lisa for a lot less!”

Dave scowled and his tone was a warning when he said, “Sarah —”

But I wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot. “Also, it’s a huge place, doesn’t the sign say over one hundred rooms? That means one hundred areas we can’t check. Shall I go on?”

Dave shook his head. “I know all that. But Sarah, finding that girl in Seattle made me think about other people who might be out there like her. And not all of them are going to be too scared to make a run for it. If we just had a couple more people helping us to shoot and to drive, we might have a better chance at survival.”

I shook my head. “You’re right, there may be people here, but —”

“Fuck, Sarah!” he said, gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. “Do you have to argue about every fucking thing?”

“I don’t —”

“Yes, you do.” He faced me. “For six months you’ve been telling me every single thing and every way I’ve fucked up. And I’ve let you.”

I flinched because the way he was describing me wasn’t fun. But hell, I’d been the one to have to deal with the consequences of his choices. Didn’t I have a right to question them?

He set his head on the steering wheel for a minute, drawing some deep breaths before he looked at me.

“Look, if you really think I’m such a colossal idiot, if you don’t trust me and you don’t want to go in there with me… then maybe you should just take the car and go.”

“Yes, we should take the car and go,” I said with a sigh of relief. Finally, he was being reasonable.

He shook his head. “No. I said you, not we.”

There was a long silence while I let that sink in. He wasn’t talking about taking a break. He wasn’t even talking about me looking for someplace else to stay and coming back to pick him up after he’d checked out this place and had his fill of poker tables and cocktail waitress zombies.

He was talking about us being done. Finished.

“You-you want me to leave?” I said. Well, I whispered it, really. I couldn’t seem to talk louder than that.

He reached out and his hands cupped my shoulders. “No, honey, I want you to stay. But not if we’re going to keep doing this.”

I stared at him. I’d never seen him like this. Even with Dr. Kelly poking and prodding for “honesty” during therapy he’d never been so frank.

“I know I’ve fucked up,” he whispered. “When I quit school and went off the grid it screwed up all our plans. It put all the pressure of our lives on you to bear because I didn’t know who I was or what to do anymore. Trust me, I know everything that I did wrong and I think I’ve hated myself almost as much as you’ve hated me. But you can’t punish me forever, right?”

I blinked, still stunned. He let me go and unbuckled his seatbelt with a sigh. I watched his every move as he got out and closed the door behind him. He walked around the front of the car, his gun ready as he looked around for zombies. At my door, he stopped and opened it.

“Now, are you coming or going?” he asked, holding the door open for me.

The question broke my spell. Nodding, I grabbed for my own shotgun, stuck a handgun in my pant waist and got out.

“Coming,” I said as I shut the door behind me.

He clicked the AUTO LOCK button on the door and then he reached for my hand. As I took it, he smiled.

“Good. Because this is probably going to be messed up.”

He was right. It was messed up. When we entered the building, both of us wrinkled our noses and stared in stunned disbelief. The casino had been built probably in the sixties or seventies, when Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack were swinging in Vegas and making hip, cool cats want to play their hand at roulette and high stakes blackjack while they sipped martinis and made passes at broads.

But since those times the place hadn’t been updated, so instead of being cool or even kitschy, it was run down. The once red carpet at the entryway was worn with holes and dotted with stains and it had faded to a salmon pink… except in the spots where blood had dried it.

But those updates were recent.

All the walls had black marks where things had rubbed against them over the years. The dirt was noticeable, the mold around the corners disturbing and the splashes of black sludge and flecks of flesh and brains that marred the yellowing white paint… well, they were telling.

A registration desk for guests of the hotel was off to the left, but activity with the infected had obviously continued here because blood was slashed across the wall behind the counter, including on the cracked screen of a dingy television that was half-pulled out of the wall. It dangled precariously just by its connection to the cable outlet behind it while its shredded electric cord sparked and smoked faintly.

We exchanged a brief look and raised our guns at the same time before we moved onto the main casino floor with its colorful flashing machines and big, empty tables.

To my surprise, there were still people sitting at the slot machines, pulling the handles methodically. Although they were mostly blue-haired old ladies frittering away their social security checks, there were also some really fantastic bits of trailer trash mixed in. Men with huge guts, leather vests, and two-foot-long pony tails, and middle-aged women with pierced belly buttons and huge tattoos on their saggy boobs.

I guess the place just attracted the most pathetic clientele in the city. People who didn’t care, or maybe even know, that the world was coming to an end outside these gross, dismal walls.

At least that’s what I thought. Until we actually got closer. And that’s when I realized that the little old women at the slots weren’t human anymore. Their skin was grey, sludge smeared the screens of their machines and they groaned and muttered in that zombie way under their breath even as they yanked on the slot handles with a never-ending rhythm.

“Shit,” I whispered, grabbing Dave’s arm and pointing wildly at the closet one, who looked like she had been about ninety before she received the huge bite that I now noticed on her wrinkled, dropping neck.

He stared at her and then at the others, his eyes as wide as I’m sure mine were.

“Well,” he whispered. “I guess we know now that this particular activity doesn’t require higher brain function. I wonder what else zombies can do in their spare time.”

“I don’t care about what they can do,” I hissed in his ear, still clinging to his arm. “What do we do? Should we fight them?”

He looked around the casino floor while he pondered that question and then he shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, look at how many people are on these machines.”

I followed his gesture out across the floor and counted over twenty people tugging slots.

“We have to assume everyone out there is a zombie.”

“They might not be,” I said, more as a hopeful statement than a secure one.

He speared me with a look. “Come on, Sarah. Even the biggest gambling addict would have to notice if zombies attacked the guy next to them. And if they didn’t, if they were so caught up in what they were doing that they didn’t try to fight, that would just make them better targets for the infected.”

I nodded. “Okay, okay, that makes sense. So they’re all zombies.”

“I’m afraid if we fired on one, it would wake the rest of them up from this gambling stupor and we’d end up with God knows how many undead rushing us from all sides.” Dave shook his head. “With just the two of us to fight and so few weapons, I think we’d be screwed.”

“So what then?” I asked, edging away as the slot machine that the zombie in front of us was sitting at suddenly dinged loudly and dropped a payout into its bin.

The grandma zombie whined and looked down at the tokens as they clattered against each other in her bin. She hesitated, then drew one from the bin and popped it back into the slot machine to continue her run at riches. Not that a zombie would have any use for them.

“We could sneak by since they’re so caught up. I mean this one could care less we’re standing here,” Dave said with a shrug.

I should have listened to my gut, which was telling me to make a run for it and get back in the car. But Dave had scared me so badly when he said we should part ways that I was determined to prove to him that I wasn’t going to argue with him about every decision.

So instead of backing out, I said, “I guess there could be people in the back rooms like the kitchen and that kind of thing. There are a lot of areas here to search before we give up on survivors entirely.”

He nodded and I think he was relieved that we were on the same side for once.

“If we could find others… we would be safer. I mean, every time you got out of the SUV to clear out a car today, I was so scared you were going to get hurt. With one or two people to cover you…”

I stared at him as he trailed off. So all this was for me? To protect me? And a bunch of warm feelings I hadn’t felt for him in a long time swelled up in me: Pride. Love. Comfort.

It was nice. And I wanted him to know it.

“You’re brave,” I whispered.

He shrugged, but beyond his discomfort and the way his cheeks turned beet red, I know what I said meant something to him.

“Well, somebody has to be the hero like in those books you read,” he said with a dismissive shrug.

I smiled as I followed him toward a doorway that led to the kitchen in the back of the casino floor. I don’t think he heard me when I whispered, “You are.”

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
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[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies
​

Spoiler: Chapter 16

Talk openly about important issues like money, ***, and religion. They can affect your life and happiness a great deal. Especially when it comes to cults.
The kitchen door was one of those that swing in and out. David pushed it open and caught it with one hand as it came back toward him.

We peeked in. The kitchen was a large, industrial one with shining metal counters and cabinets, but it was anything but clean. The faint smell of rotting food wafted toward us from the piles of meat and vegetables that had obviously been in the process of preparation when the infection hit this part of the city. I looked at the flies buzzing around a piece of beef and my stomach turned. It reminded me too much of rotting zombie flesh. Weird because I’d lost my gag reflex when it came to them within a few hours of the outbreak.

“It looks clear,” Dave whispered as he slipped inside and motioned me to follow.

I moved into the space and started to come around beside him, but he put an arm out and blocked me, keeping me behind him.

“Just in case,” he whispered. “Now call out.”

I tilted my head in confusion. “Call out?”

He nodded with utter certainty. “If someone’s hiding in here, they might be less afraid if a woman calls for them than a man.”

I rolled my eyes but since I didn’t want to argue the concept of feminism with my husband at that particular moment, I cleared my throat.

“Is anyone there?” I called. “If you’re a survivor, please come out. We might be able to help you.”

There was no answer. I looked toward Dave with a shrug but he motioned his head as if encouraging me to try again.

“Hello?” I said, this time louder, though I didn’t think there was any point. “Is anyone there?”

Dave shrugged. “Okay, I guess —”

Before he could finish, I grabbed his arm. In the distance, I heard a sliding sound. As we stood there, it came again. It seemed to emanate from the large walk-in freezer across the wide expanse of the kitchen.

“Did you hear that?” I asked as I motioned toward the unit with my hand.

Dave nodded and we moved forward together, checking around us down the kitchen corridors and through the metal shelving for any people… or zombies… who might be hiding.

But there was nothing to be seen or found until we reached the metal doors of the freezer. I leveled my gun as Dave reached out and gently turned the handle of the fridge. He pulled the door open slowly. A blast of frigid air hit us and we both flinched back from the cold.

Inside the freezer was dark. I could see the outline of a bulb at the top of it from the light of the kitchen, but it was broken.

Broken.

“David, I think it might be —” I started.

Before I could finish a zombie rushed from the unit. If he hadn’t been so terrifying, I might have laughed at the sight. He wore a white chef’s jacket that had once been pristine, but was now covered with black vomit. His skin was blue-grey from the cold and his dark hair was filled with ice particles, including little icicles in his eyelashes that made his red pupils all the more pronounced.

All those things made him look ridiculous, but I couldn’t find it funny because he lunged so quickly at Dave that he was on him before I could fire my weapon and the two of them staggered backward and fell to the floor.

The zombie bit at my husband and it was only because David jerked his head to the side that he wasn’t turned to the ranks of the undead. I flipped my gun around and swung, crushing the butt of it against the zombie’s temple. He fell off of David and rolled away across the white kitchen floor with a furious growl of pain and aggression.

I shoved the butt of the gun against my shoulder and began to depress the trigger. But before I fired, a machete came flipping through the air and struck the zombie in the back of the skull. He whined softly and then the light went out of his red eyes.

I spun in the direction the machete had flown from to find a man standing in the doorway we had entered the kitchen from. He looked to be about thirty-five, with shoulder-length blond hair and a surprisingly serene expression on his face, as if none of this really bothered him. I wasn’t sure if it was shellshock, but it wasn’t normal.

“I wouldn’t fire a gun in here if I were you,” he said, his voice calm and smooth as silk. “The sound will bring the rest running.”

“Look out!” I cried before I could say anything else, because from the walk-in fridge where the first zombie had come, two more were on their way out, jerking toward our now-unarmed savior.

I flipped my shotgun around, taking into account what the stranger had said about not firing and swung, bringing the butt down right on the crown of the first zombie’s skull. It hit with a thunk and a splat, almost like you’d see during the “fights” in the old Batman series… only in my version the skull cracked like a melon, spraying brains, blood, and flesh in all directions.

Dave was on his feet behind me as I took care of the lead zombie. He yanked the newcomer’s machete from the skull of the chef zombie who had attacked him and with a slicing motion right out of a video game, decapitated the zombie straggler. His head bounced like a basketball on the linoleum floor before it rolled away under the metal shelving.

The newcomer nodded toward us, a smile on his otherwise calm face. “I am much obliged to you, I’m sure,” he said as he stepped into the room.

I gasped in shock because three others stood behind him. Humans! Uninfected, a man and two women. They stared at me, then toward Dave with curiously blank expressions. Apparently this guy had had back-up all the time. He didn’t need our help, I guess.

“I’ll take that,” the man said, holding out his hand toward David, who stood staring at the small group, his mouth dropped open in shock and the bloody machete still dripping in his hand.

“What?” he said with a shake of his head. The other man motioned toward the weapon and David nodded. “Oh yes, of course.”

He took the machete and casually wiped the blade on the closest zombie’s shredded shirt and then slipped it into a big sheath fastened at his waist.

“Th-thank you,” Dave finally said as he extended a hand. “You certainly saved us.”

Unlike when we had met Lisa in Seattle and she had refused our attempts at friendship, this man immediately clasped hands with David.

“Not at all,” he said. “We saved each other. And we always welcome more soldiers in God’s war against the unclean.”

My brow wrinkled. David and I are not religious people, okay. I think by now you probably guessed that. Sunday was my only day off, so I’d much rather sleep in and make pancakes than go sit in a stuffy church and get preached at by a bunch of hypocrites, but I respected other people’s right to religion. And I guess under these circumstances some people find a lot of comfort in their faith.

I figured this guy must be one of them and I held my hand out.

“I’m Sarah.”

“Sarah,” he repeated with a smile. He took my hand and held it in both of his instead of shaking it. His palms were warm and slightly humid. “My name is William Blackwell.”

I nodded as I pulled to free my hand. He let me go, but only after a slight struggle on my part.

“And there are four of you here,” I said, sliding closer to Dave and putting my arm around him without thinking about why. “That’s wonderful. We haven’t seen so many survivors since the outbreak started yesterday.”

William smiled, but I sort of felt like he was looking at a little kid who needed a complicated idea explained. There was condescension in his gaze that irritated me.

“Oh, there are far more than four of us left,” he said in that same soft monotone he had used when warning me against firing the gun.

Dave squeezed my waist and I felt the excitement move through him almost like electricity. “More! Wow, that’s wonderful. We’re so happy to have found you. See Sarah, I told you there might be people here.”

I nodded, unable to keep my eyes off the man before us. “Yeah, you were right on that one.”

William smiled. “Why don’t you come along with us? We’ll let you meet the others.”

I blinked, overcome by disbelief. “You mean, they’re here? Close by?”

He nodded. “Oh yes, many others just a few steps away.”

For the first time in days, hope swelled inside of me. Many others right here, like a camp or something! Had they come here after the outbreak or merely banded together when the attack began in the casino?

Oh, it didn’t matter. The very idea that there was a group of survivors after so many pieces of bad news and so many disappointments made me think we could make it to Longview after all. Hell, I was even starting to think we could find my parents or Dave’s.

“Come.” William motioned toward the door.

Dave and I walked toward the others and I peeked over my shoulder. William was walking behind me with a slow, steady gait while the others with him moved before us. I felt like we were being led somewhere. It wasn’t comfortable, but I was still so twitterpated with the concept of other survivors that I ignored my intuition.

We wound down some hallways behind the casino floor until we reached a back ballroom. There was a sign outside the door. You know, the kind hotels print up at conferences or for other meetings? Well, this one said, BLACKWELL TRUTH CHURCH GROUP. I frowned as one of the women pulled the door open and motioned us inside.

I suck at remembering names, but I was pretty damned certain that Blackwell was what William had told us his name was a few minutes earlier. But “Truth Church Group”? That sounded like someplace that asked for money in exchange for salvation on TV.

Before I could ask for more details, we stepped into the room and I staggered back at what I saw. At the far side of the ballroom were probably thirty people. There were women who were all dressed in mid-calf dresses and a handful of wussy-looking men with pale skin and soft jaws. There were even a few children either held in the arms of their mothers or big enough to stand in small groups of their own. Their long faces were filled with fear and doubt.

They turned, almost as a herd, as we came in. They had the same blank looks of the three others accompanying William. The ones who were now standing behind us at the door, as if guarding it, though now I wasn’t so sure if that was to keep zombies out… or keep these people in.

Immediately, William stepped in front of us and said, “Brothers and sisters, we’ve been privileged to find more sheep for our flock. Others who have survived the wrath of God’s hand and battled the unclean who wait like wolves outside these very doors.”

A murmur worked its way through the crowd and William smiled like he was enjoying his own show.

“Welcome Sarah and David,” he finished.

“Ah,” said a woman, stepping forward.

She was wearing a long dress and her dark hair was pulled back into a bun. From the size of it, I figured her hair must reach past her ass when it was down. Also, she didn’t have that blank look of the others. No, this woman looked sharp as a whip.

She shot William a knowing look as she held out her hands. “We always welcome fellow soldiers to the war. And ones with such good, Christian names. I’m Melissa Blackwell, William’s wife.”

I blinked. The bad feeling that had started in my stomach before we entered the kitchen and grown when William started talking about God and stuff was now screaming at me.

“Er, well I’m not sure about the soldiers part,” Dave murmured, his tone telling me he was as squigged out by this as I was. “Just people who were lucky enough to survive this tragedy.”

“We don’t believe in luck,” William said as he put his arm around the woman with the long hair. “Melissa and I believe in fate. The destiny Our Lord presents to us. After all, there is a reason that our church group decided to come to this place to meet at this time.”

I stared. So this group had been here at the time of the breakout? It seemed odd for a church group to decide to meet in a place like this, surrounded by vice of all kinds.

I looked around. “Was it the low rates? Let me guess, it was the table games?”

His smile, that ever-present benign smile that matched his even tone so perfectly, faltered a little at my sarcasm. “No, child, we chose this place because where better to face sinners than on their own heartland?”

“A casino,” Dave said slowly.

He nodded. “Yes, brother. This place was already the devil’s playground. And the Lord sent his vengeance down upon it with merciless precision. He turned all those who walked in Satan’s shadow into the unclean, the monsters you have seen outside.”

I shook my head. “N-No. You don’t understand. That didn’t just happen here, it’s actually happening everywhere, Mr. Blackwell.”

“Father William,” he said, turning toward me. “Please.”

Yeah, I wasn’t about to call him that. Instead, I continued with a shake of my head.

“We came from Seattle and the infestation has happened all across the city and even beyond it, if the news reports are correct.”

His face lit up and in that moment my entire body tensed. He actually seemed happy to hear that news. He turned to his followers and said, “Did you hear that, brothers and sisters! God’s vengeance is coming down in Seattle, a city of sin, indeed.”

I stared as the men and women started praising the Lord at this news. The idea that the city had been all but wiped out by this horrible infestation actually excited them and they raised their hands and waved them around.

I grabbed Dave’s arm gently to get his attention because he seemed as mesmerized as I was by what was happening right before us. He slowly lowered his head and our eyes met. In his gaze, I saw the same disgust, the same abject horror as I felt in that moment.

“David,” I whispered, watching the group start a prayer in the background. “Um… I think this is a cult.”

He didn’t answer, he just stared.

“We’re so happy to have you join us,” Melissa said to us after William’s prayer of joy at “God’s Vengeance” was finished. “I know you’ll be right at home with our flock within a few days.”

She grabbed my arm. I guess it was meant as a comforting gesture, but her nails dug into my skin and it felt more like she was holding me where I was.

“I think you’ve misunderstood,” Dave said, taking my other arm. Now I was trapped between them and neither one seemed to want to let go. “We aren’t planning to stay. Sarah and I are headed for family in Longview. We only planned to stop here for a night.”

I noticed he didn’t invite any of these weirdos to join us on our trip, even though that had been our hope when we tried to find other people.

William turned on us and the murmured prayers of the surrounding people died with a collective gasp.

“Oh no,” he said. “You cannot go. God brought you to us for a reason.”

“Look, I don’t mean to disrespect your beliefs, William, but the neon sign led us here, not God,” Dave said, and I could see he was freaked out and pissed off and trying to rein it all in.

He was doing pretty well, too. The only reason I knew what was going on in his head was because we’d been together so long.

William, on the other hand, couldn’t hide his rage as he turned on my husband with the fire and brimstone of a rabid preacher.

“Don’t blaspheme,” he snapped, his hands fisting at his sides and his eyes widening. “Or deny God or you’ll be stricken by this plague, David.”

Both of us recoiled. That sounded like a threat, not a statement. At that moment my brain exploded with possibilities. Had there been others who had refused this “offer”? Had they been left to the zombies outside? Maybe even those poor fools in the kitchen…

Dave leaned closer. “With your help, I assume,” he said, his teeth clenched.

I stepped between them and turned toward William, though I reached back to take Dave’s hand and squeezed gently.

“We wouldn’t dare question your beliefs,” I said, keeping my voice low so we wouldn’t cause a riot. These were people on the edge. I recognized it now in the wildness of their expressions. “But my husband and I have been through a great deal over the last two days and we are going to Longview to see if our family is all right. We certainly appreciate your hospitality in allowing us to stay with your group tonight, but tomorrow we intend to continue on our path.”

“Oh no,” Melissa said. She was smiling but it didn’t even come close to reaching her eyes. “You must stay with us. You see, we’ve been saved, spared from this plague and now we are called by God to draw all the survivors to us. You are part of our family now.”

I opened my mouth but William interrupted. “It is our duty to repopulate the earth.”

I swallowed. When he said that, he was looking at me. From top to bottom like he was checking out a great steak. I thought about all the shows I’d watched over the years on cults. Didn’t their leaders always… mate with their followers? They wanted to own all the children, claim all the females.

“And now,” William said, his tone increasingly menacing, “I think we’ll be taking your weapons.”

Dave tensed behind me. “What? No fucking way are we giving you our guns.”

The group that had been milling around benignly in the distance suddenly moved forward. I stared. They almost seemed like zombies, moving as a group, their eyes blank. But they were human. This was human herd mentality.

And just like the zombies, it was dangerous and terrifying.

“David,” I whispered.

He looked toward the group and his face paled. “You can’t leave us defenseless.”

William smiled. “Oh, you won’t be defenseless. You’ll be with us and that means you’ll be with God. But just remember, the Lord giveth, David. And the Lord can taketh away.”

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies​

Spoiler: Chapter 17

Plan romantic getaways. Or just getaways.
One thing I can say about the Sea King Hotel and Casino is that they had far nicer rooms than I’d expected when we walked in the door hours before. They weren’t great, don’t get me wrong, but I had some really low expectations based on the shitty appearance of the lower level. Now that we were in a room, I couldn’t complain much. It was clean with two queen-sized beds and a little desk by the window.

Unfortunately, at the moment, those rooms were our prison, so I had less appreciation for them than I would have if we’d just come to stay for a weekend excursion.

Dave handed over a cracker and a slice of cheese that he was forced to hack off with a plastic knife. Yeah, our cult-y captors had given us food, but they’d decided we couldn’t even be trusted with a steak knife. It was like the airlines, but without the instructions for what to do in an emergency. Right now, we could have used them.

I crunched on the cracker as I cast a side glance at the hotel door. I had already checked through the peephole a couple of times since some of William and Melissa’s minions had tossed us into a room (not even a suite, the cheapskates).

What I’d seen every time I checked were guards standing outside. And not just any guards, but two of the biggest followers in the group armed with wicked machetes that they held like they’d been training for this moment. The worst part was… maybe they had.

I wasn’t about to tangle with them one way or another, especially without any weapons of our own.

“Okay, are we going to talk about this?” Dave sighed.

“Talk about what?” I asked before I chugged some water from the mini-bar. “There’s so much to cover here.”

He laughed softly. “Yeah, but I meant talk about them.”

“You mean asshole and assholette?” When David nodded, I shook my head. “We never should have saved that shithead. We could have let the zombies in the kitchen get him.”

He grinned, but it was tense. “I admit the idea of watching him get eaten alive is pretty pleasant right now, but there was no way we could have known that at the time.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, you hardly ever come face to face with a genuine —” I dropped my voice to a whisper, in case they were listening outside to report back to William and Melissa about what we were saying, “— cult.”

“Yeah,” he said with a frown.

I nodded. “I guess we’ve got to figure out what to do next, as much as I’d like to pretend like none of this is happening. But we are in the middle of a zombie outbreak, we’re trying to get another hundred miles plus to your sister’s… and we’ve just been taken hostage by a crazy-ass cult that thinks this zombie thing is the hand of God. Ignoring the problem — er, problems — is clearly not going to fix them.”

“Nice summary,” Dave said as he got to his feet and brushed cracker bits from his pants. “Right now I think the zombies are the least of our worries.”

“I never thought we’d say that,” I said with a shake of my head. “But you’re right, at least for now.”

I shivered as I thought of the dead eyes of Blackwell’s followers. They were such a stark contrast to the bright intelligence of his and his wife’s. Unlike the zombies, those two knew exactly what they were doing. And if we got in the way, we wouldn’t make it. They would make sure of that.

“We have to get out of here.” I rubbed my eyes. “As soon as we possibly can.”

“I think tonight is our best chance.” Dave paced the room to the window and turned back. His hands were clenched at his sides. “I saw how he looked at you when he talked about repopulating the earth.”

I shrugged. “Isn’t that typical cult behavior? From all the documentaries I’ve ever watched on the subject, it seems like the leaders always manipulate the women into marrying them or sleeping with them or whatever.”

Dave spun around and I could see how pissed he was from the way his shoulders and back hunched. I have to admit, I kind of liked this chest-banging-woman-mine thing that was going on with him. It was sort of a new experience from Mr. Laid Back, Play a Videogame Dude.

“Well, I’m not letting that happen to you,” he said without looking at me.

I shook my head as I thought about the cult again. “The thing that bothers me is how in the world did these people get so crazy so fast? This outbreak only started yesterday.”

He shrugged, still not looking at me, but outside. “They were already crazy. I mean, you saw that sign outside the ballroom! ‘Blackwell Truth Church’… these people were already spouting nonsense. This whole situation just gives them the excuse they were looking for to carry out some kind of manifesto. It’s like Jonestown or those comet people from a few years ago.”

I swallowed. All those people in the cults he was talking about had ended up dead. And they hadn’t had an imminent threat of zombies right outside their doors to ramp up their mass hysteria.

“Well, how do we get away?” I asked. “There are guards at the door. And there’s no reasoning with good old Bill and Mel, down there.”

He turned slowly. “We aren’t going to reason. We’re just going to run.”

“How?” I asked, then looked toward the door and lowered my voice again.

He jerked his thumb toward the window and arched a brow. I hurried over to his side and looked out. The sun was pretty much down now and the world was frighteningly dark outside, but there were still some parking lot and exterior lights. In their glow, I could see that our room was just above the awning that hung over the casino entrance.

I turned back toward him with wide eyes and my first feeling of hope since our capture. “Holy shit, Dave! It’s only about what… ten feet down from here to there?”

He nodded. “And another short drop to the ground after that. I think we can make it. William took the keys to the Escalade, but I’ll at least one of these cars in the lot has keys in the ignition from when the owner was attacked. If we’re lucky, we’ll spot one right away and we can make a break for it.”

I shivered. “But… but there are zombies out there,” I whispered as I stared again into the looming darkness where real monsters roamed looking for flesh.

He put his arm around me as we stared out into the unknown abyss. “Yes, that’s very true. And it’s going to be dangerous, I won’t lie to you. But I’m pretty sure if we stay here that these crazy people are going to hurt us just as badly as any zombie could. In fact, maybe worse. I’ll take my chances on the open road.”

I nodded. His words were creeping past my fears. Worming into my brain. I had argued with him about a lot of things and a lot of decisions, but this time there was nothing to say. He was right.

“You know, I almost feel sorry for the zombies,” I mused as we stared out at the parking lot that could mean our freedom. “They kill for food… for base needs. They’re like an animal. They have no choice.”

Dave shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as pity. But you can’t blame them.”

“But this guy… this William and his wife… they know what they’re doing… they know the consequences of their threats and their teachings… but they do it anyway. And you’re right, that’s scarier than the dark. It’s scarier than any zombie.”

“So you’ll do it?” he asked, looking down at me.

I turned toward him and nodded up. “I will.”

He touched my cheek and for a minute I think we both lost ourselves. The moment felt tender and real and it broke up the horror of everything we’d been through over the last forty-eight hours.

But reality had to set back in and I was the one who backed away. “Okay, so we need some kind of rope to get down to the awning.”

I looked around for something that would serve the purpose and my gaze fell on the two beds.

“What about the sheets?”

Dave looked at the bed with worried eyes. “Um, didn’t Mythbusters once do an episode about how you couldn’t use sheets as a way out of prison?”

I laughed. “I don’t remember if they busted it or not. But I guess we’ll have to field test it again for them. There isn’t anything else and I think the drop without any kind of way to slow it might get us hurt.”

He shrugged, but I could see he was nervous. Have I mentioned Dave is a little afraid of heights? When my Mom came to visit and we took her to the Space Needle a year ago, he wouldn’t look out the window. He just stood in the shop in the middle of the dome, pretending to check out postcards. So the fact that he’d recommended climbing out a window… well, it meant our situation was pretty bad.

“I’ll go first,” I promised as I started stripping the bed. “And catch you if you fall.”

“Great,” he laughed as he threw the pillows on the floor on the other side of the bed. “I’ll remember you said that when I land on you.”

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN
Genre: Horror - Zombies
​

Spoiler: Chapter 18

Show physical affection. Nothing says ‘I love you’ like bearing the entirety of your spouse’s body weight.
Looks great,” I said as I watched Dave finish securing our makeshift sheet ladder to the radiator.

He had braided the sheets from both beds together until they were a strong, cohesive rope and the knots he used on the radiator looked as powerful as any I’d ever seen. These were the times I was glad I had married a former Boy Scout. Those rope-tying skills had come in handy more than once during our relationship.

What? Everyone experiments. Don’t judge.

Anyway, I pushed the window open as wide as I could and slung the rope out into the night. It swung gently in the breeze before it settled above the awning below.

“It doesn’t quite reach,” I said with a sigh. “But the drop is a lot less.”

I looked back to find Dave staring at me, eyes wide. He was trying to control the fear, but I could see it was hitting him hard now that the time had come to actually go out a two-story window.

I patted his arm. “Hey, it’s going to be fine. Look, I’ll go first.”

Dave tensed, but before he could argue I swung out over the edge of the window and held tightly to the sheet as I began to shimmy down.

Here’s the thing if you ever decide to rappel out a window: wear gloves. By the time I reached the bottom of the sheet, my hands were raw and sore from the friction of the cotton fabric rubbing against them.

I was so ready to let go at that point that I really had to think hard about how I wanted to land so that I wouldn’t just drop willy nilly. Luckily I hit the awning just right, with only the barest creak of the old metal, and stepped back to give my husband some room.

I looked up. Dave was still staring down at me from the window.

“It’s okay,” I called up, trying to make my voice soft and yet still let it carry to him. “It’s not so bad.”

That was a lie, of course. Dave was bigger than I was, so he was going to struggle with the pain of the descent as much, if not more than I had, thanks to his added body weight. But I didn’t think it made much sense to tell him that when the height of the drop already made him nervous. So I merely gave him the thumbs up and held my breath.

“I can’t do this, Sarah,” he finally whispered down.

“Oh shit,” I muttered to myself.

I knew he had issues with the height, but I hadn’t even thought about the possibility that he might freeze. And I wasn’t up there to help him, to push him.

“David,” I said, my voice sharp to make sure he was paying attention. When he nodded, I continued, “You can do this, babe. Look at me.”

His face was pale, but he focused on mine in the light above.

“You can do this,” I repeated. “You have to do it for me.”

To my surprise, that woke him up. He grabbed the sheet in both hands and swung out over the ledge. I could see him dragging in heaving breaths, but he started down toward me slowly.

The closer he came, the more I could see the agony on his face. Just like I had, he was struggling with the unexpected friction of the cotton on his palms. But unlike me, he didn’t make it all the way to the bottom before he ground out a curse and then the sheet slipped from his hands with a whizzing sound and he fell.

He landed at a weird angle and then went down on his backside. At first I thought he was okay, but then he started rocking gently as he grabbed his leg and bit his lip so he wouldn’t make too much noise and attract any zombies… or cult leaders… waiting around outside.

I dropped down on my knees next to him and grabbed his arm. I wanted to cry out as I watched his face constrict with pain, but I couldn’t.

“Babe,” I whispered just under my breath. “Oh, baby, are you okay?”

He shut his eyes hard and I watched him struggle to pull it back together, but then he nodded. “Yeah,” he bit out. “I’m okay. Let’s just get moving.”

I had my doubts, but Dave wasn’t waiting to decide our next move by committee. With a moan worthy of any brain-seeking zombie he dragged himself to the edge of the awning and looked down. It was about a seven-foot drop. Definitely doable, especially since we intended to dangle from the edge, but if he was already injured…

Well, we’ll just say it added a new element to the idea. But I’ll give him credit. He sucked it up, he manned it up and he hung over the side of the overhang. He drew in a deep breath and then he dropped.

I went over the side as fast as I could and let go, landing with a jarring hit on the ground, but I wasn’t hurt. Dave, on the other hand, sat on the ground, holding his leg as silent tears streamed down his face.

“Shit,” I whispered as I put my arm around him to help him to his feet. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

He nodded silently. “Let’s go, we just have to go.”

I let him brace on me for support and we started in a limping run across the parking lot.

There are times in a marriage when one person has to give a little more for the other one. I knew this was my day and for once I didn’t bitch about it.

As Dave bit his lip in agony at my side, I scanned the lot for a car that had keys in the ignition. Anything, any piece of shit would do. I no longer cared about satellite radio or bucket seats. I just wanted to get Dave into a car where he wouldn’t have to put weight on his fucked up leg and get us as far away from here as I could.

We were about halfway across the parking lot when I heard a roar behind us. I looked over my shoulder while we continued to run and I was shocked to see that it wasn’t zombies who made the sound.

From the door of the casino, the members of the cult were rushing out toward us, their wild charge led by William. His blond hair streamed out behind him and with the light behind him he actually did look like a messenger of God, sent to deal with sinners like us.

“Run, baby,” I urged Dave. “Run!”

He limped as fast as he could, but I could feel him slowing down with every step as he fought the pain of his injury. I looked back again and the cult members had erased half the distance between us. They were carrying machetes and knives and one even had a sword.

They were going to butcher us when they caught us. And I was terrified by that prospect. I can admit that now, hell, I would have admitted it then. I could hardly breathe as I pictured all the awful things they would do before we died. It was worse, I think, because we had survived so many zombies only to probably get killed by a bunch of freaks who were twisting the Bible for their own purposes.

But just as they started to close the final distance, close enough that I could see William’s bright eyes sparkle in the parking lot lights, a horde of zombies broke from the trees on the left side of the parking lot.

I almost came to a stop at the shock of seeing them attacking as a group. There were too many to count. Probably even more than there had been when we burned the car in the International District back in Seattle. They rolled from the trees in a gray, sludge-sprewing, limping wave, growling with hunger and pain.

I had never been so happy to see them before in my life. Their appearance distracted the cult and they turned toward the galloping horde to let out a war cry.

“Purge the unclean!” William bellowed and he charged toward them.

“Run!” Dave whispered. “Go, go, go!”

I shook off my surprise and started booking it across the parking lot again. One of the zombies broke toward us and caught up to us pretty easily since we were slowed down by Dave’s injury. I pushed my husband behind me and did the thing you always see at some point in zombie movies.

I went all kung fu on his zombie ass.

I sucked at it, too. The thing they don’t tell you in all the zombie movies is that zombies are a bit… squishy. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. They are the living dead, after all, and their flesh is rotting away slowly but surely.

So when the first zombie reached us I did a straight kick into his abdomen. I expected him to fly backward a la The Matrix, but instead my foot sank into his flesh, almost like it was landing in really squishy quicksand.

The zombie and I stared at each other for a second, our twin expressions of confusion probably pretty comical. But then he bared his teeth and growled at me. Black sludge rolled down his chin and his red eyes glinted in the parking lot lights.

“Oh hell, no!” I grunted, then I pulled my leg away from his spongy stomach and instead did a big high kick across his chin.

That rocked him back and he staggered away into a parked car. His back hit the side mirror and to my shock it pierced his rotted skin and went straight through until it bulged out through his shirt, the mirror perfectly outlined though the plaid fabric.

“Ew,” Dave and I both said together.

The zombie grunted and tried to pull away from the mirror, but he was stuck. I shook off my disgust and surprise. This was our opportunity! I grabbed Dave and we started running again. The zombie roared behind us and I glanced back to see a few more breaking away from the main group that was fighting the cult.

“Car, we need a car,” I muttered. Without any other weapons, that was the only way out.

“There!” Dave said, his voice strained as he motioned a row over.

I hurried in the direction he’d indicated until I saw the car with the big wad of keys dangling from the ignition. It was sitting under a light and the keyring was fluorescent green, but I still patted Dave’s shoulder as I threw the door open and shoved him into the passenger seat.

“Good eyes.”

I hurried around the car, trying not to be entirely appalled by the vehicle. So Dave and I had owned a shitty car. Mid-90s-style sedan, no frills beyond a CD changer. It was rusty and loud and it smelled like cheese fries when we ran the heater in the winter.

But that car looked like a luxury model when compared to this. An early-80s-model boat, later Dave told me it was a Chevy Caprice, it was this awful shade of blue… at least where the cake of dirt and the red rusty spots were cleared a ****

As I got in, I sort of thought that this was the kind of car the owner probably just left the keys in all the time. I mean, who would steal it?

I slammed the door shut and metal ground against metal with a grinding, crushing sound. But I’d done it just in time because not one but three zombies hit my side of the car at the same time. I let out a really girly scream as they clawed at the big car’s windows, smearing them with blood and sludge as they drooled on the glass and tried to dig their way in.

My hands shook as I turned the key and the massive V8 engine roared to life. I pulled out of the parking space in reverse with my foot to the floor and swung the wheel, sending the zombies on my side of the car flying through the air. It was very satisfying to see them soaring across the parking lot, bouncing off cars and poles.

For a minute Dave and I looked at the scene around us. I had turned the car toward the battle being waged between the cult members and the zombies. We stared, silent, as the humans swung their blades, lopping off zombie heads just like we were watching a video game.

But occasionally the zombies got their points, too. A few clung to the necks of the living, biting and clawing at live flesh with the zeal of a rabid animal.

I craned my neck and found William in the fray. He was slashing at a group of zombie children, hacking them to bits with a joy that was a bit frightening. Then he turned toward our car lights and stared at us. His expression was angry and bitter. He scowled as he started across the parking lot toward us. I was about to throw the car into drive and get the fuck out of there when a zombie stood up on top of a van next to the “prophet.”

With a growl, he jumped and landed squarely on top of William. They fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs and clawing fingers. The zombie dug his teeth into the preacher’s flesh without hesitation. William’s screams were faint through the glass and I shook my head. I guess God hadn’t protected him after all.

“Look,” Dave said.

He motioned toward the entrance to the casino. Standing there, watching everything unfold, was Melissa Blackwell. She stared as the zombie devoured her husband, draining his life and damning him to walk the earth as the undead.

But before I could feel too sorry for her for what she was seeing, she turned around and went back into the casino, ushering the women and children who stood around her back inside.

“It looks like the Blackwell Truth Church has a new leader,” Dave said with a shake of his head

I thought of Melissa and her sharp, intelligent eyes and strong grip on my arm earlier in the night.

“God help them,” I murmured as I pulled around in a big circle and headed out into the dark night and all the uncertainty that faced us.

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN​

Genre: Horror - Zombies​

​

Spoiler: Chapter 19

Admit when you’re wrong. It doesn’t fix a busted leg, of course, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless.
Under normal circumstances, the park we pulled into near the airport probably would have been a very dangerous place. It wasn’t well-lit for one thing. The light we’d parked under barely flickered and two of the others were burned out entirely.

Because of its proximity to the airport, it would normally be filled with jet noise all night and all day, which meant the neighborhood wasn’t exactly prime and ended up attracting a bad element that led to a high crime rate.

But tonight there were no drug dealers to be contended with, there was no one lurking in the shadows hoping to take a car or a life… or at least no one who could actually be blamed for their intentions. I was sure there were plenty of zombies outside, but they didn’t know any better.

Outside wasn’t my problem, anyway. We had plenty to deal with within the four doors of the car.

“Climb into the back if you can,” I said softly as I turned the engine off.

Dave flinched as he unbuckled his seatbelt. He turned sideways with a sucking sound of breath through his teeth and looked at the seat. Because the car was so low, it was a long seat but it wasn’t very high. He shut his eyes briefly and then dragged himself over the top and into the wide backseat. He managed to bite back most of his sounds of pain and cursing, but there was no doubt his leg was in a bad way.

Once he had settled in, I slid to the passenger side of the vehicle and opened up the glove compartment. We had been able to take nothing with us in our escape, so all I could do was pray I’d find something of use.

The glove box matched the car in that it was big, old, and dirty, but there were some cheap cigarettes and a lighter right in the front of the pile. I pocketed the lighter for future use.

When I dug around further, I came up with a small bottle of whiskey, which I passed back to David without a word. Whether he used it for pain relief or we kept it to clean future wounds, it was a good find.

“Hey, look at this,” Dave said from the back.

I turned in the seat to see that he was holding up a GPS unit. I shook my head in surprise. “With such a shitty car… who knew?”

He looked at it. It was so brand new that it still had the plastic seal over the display screen, but there wasn’t any packaging with it.

“It was hidden under the seat, so it could be hot. Either way, it will come in handy if the satellites are still linked for the system.”

I remained silent. The word if implied they might not be. If that was true it meant that in less than three days an outbreak that had started in Seattle had basically wiped out the United States and maybe the world.

The hugeness of that was overpowering. It rose up in my chest and stole my breath, but I had too much to do to freak out, so I put it from my mind and kept digging through the cavern of a glove box.

I pulled out papers and other junk until I got to the back of the compartment. My hand brushed something cold and metal and I smiled. Hidden behind everything was a small-caliber handgun and a half-full box of bullets.

“Lookie here,” I said, holding them up with a grin as wide as any child on Christmas morning.

“That’s great!” Dave sighed with relief. “At least we’re not totally unarmed, though that thing isn’t going to have much effect unless you get a clean headshot.”

“There isn’t much ammo, either,” I conceded as I tossed the weapon on the seat beside him and climbed into the back. “But it’s better than nothing. Now let me see your leg.”

He hesitated before he lifted the injured leg into my lap. I rolled up his pants and sucked in my breath through my teeth with a hissing sound. Dave’s calf area on his right leg was one big bruise, swollen and ugly.

“Damn,” he murmured as he flopped his head back against the seat. “That looks even worse than it feels.”

“It looks bad, but I’m not sure if it’s broken,” I said as I felt along the bone. He winced with every touch, but I didn’t feel any obvious fracture. “It could just be a deep bone bruise.”

He nodded. “I sure wish we had some ice to reduce the swelling.” He motioned to the bottle of whiskey with a half-smile. “And for this.”

I grinned at him, but I didn’t really feel much happiness. “I wish we had a lot of things.”

He shut his eyes. “So let’s just assess here. We have one small-caliber handgun with what… maybe twenty shots?”

I nodded as I rested my head against the seat the same way he was. “And no other supplies of any consequence.”

“Right.” He looked down. “And my leg is jacked, broken or not.”

“Plus it’s dark and we can’t get on the highway until we’re able to see better in the morning for navigation. And there might be… strike that, there are definitely zombies around here whether they’ve noticed us yet or not.”

I shivered. I was trying to keep my voice calm, but there was no softening the bald facts.

He was quiet for a long time. So long, in fact, that I started to think he’d fallen asleep or passed out from the pain. But finally he turned his head and looked at me.

“Sarah, I’m sorry I let you down.”

I drew back at his voice and his words and stared at him. “What are you talking about? You didn’t let me down. You’ve been awesome since this happened. And you saved my life more than once.”

“And put it in danger,” he said as he rubbed his chin where two days’ worth of scruff was present.

“It isn’t your fault that a zombie plague is upon us,” I insisted.

He rolled his head on the seatback to look at me. “Maybe not, but tonight you didn’t want to go to the casino. You had a million good reasons not to do it, but you did anyway because I was so insistent. If I had just listened to you in the parking lot instead of being obsessed with checking the place out then we’d still have the Escalade and our supplies and I wouldn’t be hurt.”

I shrugged. Yes, all those things were true, but I guess all of Dr. Kelly’s lessons about marriage and partnership were beginning to sink in because I wasn’t pissed about them. Six months ago, I would have reamed him for the mistakes we’d made today. Right now I was just happy we still had our heads and each other.

“You don’t know if all that is true,” I said. “Even if we’d done what I wanted and tried to find a house to hide in for the night, we still might have encountered totally crazy people or been swarmed by zombies or gotten injured and lost our stuff some other way.”

“But what if —”

I interrupted him by covering his hand. “We can play ‘what if’ until morning, but it won’t change a thing. We both made decisions, and a lot of them we made together. Remember what I said before… we’re new at this. I guess we’ve learned something for the next time.”

Dave laughed through his obvious pain. “No casinos.”

I chuckled with him. “A valuable life lesson one way or another. I don’t want to end up a granny zombie tugging a slot machine handle until the end of time.”

His laughter faded. “But before the attack, Sarah —”

I shook my head. “No, what you said to me before we went into the casino was right, even if I didn’t want to hear it. I think it’s time to stop looking back and second-guessing and hating ourselves, not to mention stop punishing each other. From now on, let’s agree to move forward.”

I extended my hand to shake on the agreement and he hesitated for a minute before he grabbed my hand and shook. “Agreed.”

He smiled and I had the craziest urge to just kiss him. Kiss him like we were kids in high school making out in the backseat of this crappy car in a park in the middle of nowhere. I leaned in and he did, too, but before our lips met he straightened up and looked out the front window.

“Wow,” he murmured, “Zombie jogger.”

I craned my neck to see what he was looking at. I couldn’t help but giggle. A hugely fat zombie was creeping his way down the jogging path in front of the parking lot. He was dressed in a green velour tracksuit and had a lime headband straight out of eighty-five. Actually, it might have been purchased at the same time as our crappy car first rolled off the assembly line.

“Wow is right,” I agreed as I leaned back slowly. “It looks like fashion was undead for that guy long before he was.”

“You have to give him credit for having a workout, though,” Dave said. “I mean, he’s doing something.”

I laughed and Dave smiled as he reached out and locked the door next to him. I did the same.

“Why don’t you rest your head on my shoulder and try to sleep?” he asked as he slipped the handgun from my fingers. “We’ll take turns keeping watch. Not that Zombie Jogger seems that interested.”

I wanted to argue with him that he should try to rest since he was injured, but I kept my mouth shut. Whatever I said to him, however much he denied it, it was obvious that David felt guilty about the situation we were in. Maybe standing guard for a few hours would help him get over that. Plus, I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open. Since I’d be doing most, if not all the driving the next day, I had to rest.

So I put my head on his shoulder, snuggling down as his arm came around me and he held me. The seat was big and surprisingly comfortable so before long I was sleeping, but I won’t tell you about my dreams. They were far too vivid and terrifying to share.

And when I woke up, the reality wasn’t much better.

Nơi tổng hợp, chia sẻ và giải đáp thắc mắc về Thành ngữ tiếng Anh
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8099/
Trợ giúp dịch thuật (tiếng Anh)
http://bachngocsach.com/forum/threads/8020/​

 

[Clarkdale]

LIVING WITH THE DEAD
MARRIED WITH ZOMBIE
by JESSE PETERSEN​

Genre: Horror - Zombies​

​

Spoiler: Chapter 20

Find creative ways to have fun together. Looting is really underrated.
Dawn sent rays of sunshine flooding into our car and I stretched my back as I looked down at Dave’s pale face.

“Well, we’re alive,” I said as I smiled at him in the hopes he would smile back. “That’s step one.”

He nodded, but I could see how much he was hurting. He hadn’t been able to elevate his leg much last night and I doubted he’d gotten more than an hour or two of sleep. I mentally added getting painkillers and sleep aids to the running ‘to do’ list in my head.

“Yeah, thanks to your good shooting in the middle of the night.”

I shrugged. Although the night had been surprisingly quiet, we had encountered a couple of zombie incidents. There were half a dozen or so bodies scattered outside the car as a testament to that fact. I was definitely becoming a better shot through all of this.

“Still, it was better than we thought,” I offered.

He leaned forward in his seat. I reached back and began to rub his back. He let out a sigh of contentment as he said, “Whoever would have believed that being attacked six times and having to kill things in the middle of the night would be better than we thought?”

“The world, she is a-changing,” I muttered.

He nodded, his gaze distant at that thought. “Yeah. You know, I think we’ve got to find a sporting goods store and a grocery today before we get back on the road.”

He shifted and I massaged harder even as I found the GPS on the seat next to us with my free hand.

“The grocery store has to have a pharmacy, too. We need supplies for your leg,” I added as I turned it on. We both stared at the loading screen. There was a bar across the bottom that said, “Searching for link-up…”

Slowly a red-colored bar inched across the bar, filling it up as the system searched for communication from the wider universe. We waited, neither of us breathing, to find out if we were all alone in the world, or if it was still possible that someone was out there.

When the screen turned blue and it said, “Link-up found. Where do you want to go today?” I could have cried. It was a slender reed of hope, but it still existed.

I used the “Search Points of Interest” function and quickly accessed all the local sporting goods stores. I figured we’d need weapons before food and other supplies.

“The first listing is Bingo’s Sporting Depot. It’s less than a mile from here,” I said.

“Sounds good,” Dave replied.

I started to climb over to the front seat, but Dave caught my belt loop and pulled me back. “I can’t do that again, it hurts too much. I’m taking my chances with the zombies and getting out.”

“Let me come around and cover you, at least,” I said.

I hurried to get out of the car and was greeted with a burst of cool morning air. There was a light, low fog all around that made the vacant parking lot and far-too-quiet park even more eerie. I made a quick scan for zombies, then rushed over to his side of the car and helped him step onto the asphalt. Gingerly he put his weight on his leg and we both breathed a sigh of relief when he was able to bear the strain.

“You may be right about the bone bruise,” he said as we limped to the front seat and got him settled in.

I hoped that was true as I took the handgun and went around the back of the car. Last night it had been too dark to check for supplies, but since I was already out, I was going to go all the way. I checked in every direction probably a hundred times before I used the key to open the trunk and looked inside.

There was both a baseball bat and a tire iron inside and I grabbed them both in one hand. In addition there were some blankets and a first aid kit. I swept them all up and slammed the trunk shut.

The sound brought a rustle in the woods to my right and I spun to face it, holding my shaking handgun as a defense against the potential onslaught. There was shuffling and movement through the brush and trees and then a cat rushed from the darkness with a hiss.

I tensed, thinking of my conversation with David the first day this started. Was it possible this was a zombie cat? Just because we hadn’t seen a lot of animals since this started didn’t mean they weren’t out there… waiting.

But the tabby simply sat down in the middle of the parking lot and began to clean her leg with long, luxurious licks. It was like nothing in her world had changed. From her bored demeanor, at least it seemed like she hadn’t been chased by zombies for two days. Which probably meant animals were uninteresting to them. Whatever the horde wanted, they only found it in humans.

“Lucky you, kitty,” I muttered as I let out a huge sigh of relief.

I climbed into the car and shut and locked the door. Dave took my additional supplies and the gun and we buckled in. He held the GPS as I pulled out of the lot and back onto surface streets.

The turn-by-turn directions kept us busy for a little **** I had to navigate around cars and bodies strewn everywhere, so the “time to destination” increased rather than decreased as we puttered along, but finally we pulled into another huge parking lot in front of a sporting goods store. It wasn’t one of the big box ones, but it would do as long as there were weapons to be found within.

“Maybe you should stay in the car,” I suggested as I looked at the big building rising up ominously before me.

Dave turned toward me, the baseball bat gripped tight in his hands. “Are you nuts? There’s no way I’m letting you do this alone. At the very least, I’ll push the cart so you can have your hands free.”

I stared at him. He could stand and walk slowly, but in a zombie attack I was terrified he wouldn’t react in time. What if I couldn’t help him?

But I could see from the firm set of his jaw and the determination in his eyes that this subject wasn’t open for debate. And in all honesty, I would have acted the same way if the situation was reversed.

With a sigh, I motioned for him to open his door.

We crossed the parking lot slowly, taking our time both to accommodate Dave’s injury and to keep an eye out for any infected who were lurking around. I actually saw a few on the outskirts of the lot, but they didn’t seem to be aware of us as they lurched and moved around like confused dogs or lost children.

The doors to Bingo’s Sporting Depot were automatic, but someone had turned off that function at some point, so I had to push the heavy glass and metal weight apart, wedge myself in, and then shove with my back to get us inside the store and out of the dangerously open area of the parking lot.

Once we were inside, I was overwhelmed by sensory overload. It wasn’t that the place was a big store, but there was a lot of inventory. Enough that the areas with racks and fixtures were almost too tight to walk in.

“I don’t like this,” I whispered. “We won’t be able to see or move much if we get off the main walkways.”

Dave nodded and looked around above at the brightly colored signs hanging from the ceiling that labeled where all the different equipment was located. There were golf areas, team sports, stuff to boat and fish… but tucked in the back, in a special area was a sign that read, HUNTING AND GUN SUPPLIES.

We smiled at each other as we grabbed a cart from the front of the store and made our way to the back. As we passed by racks of clothing, I pulled off a few shirts for me and for David, as well as a new pair of hiking boots, the really expensive kind that I never would have paid for before the attack.

To be fair, my Keds were soaked with blood and I was going to need something heavier duty if we encountered more roadblocks on our way to Longview.

Finally we reached the back corner of the shop and entered an area that was partly enclosed, sort of like a shop within a shop. Also known as Mecca. Behind the counter were racks of shotguns and rifles and in the glass case there were handguns. It all seemed to glow beautifully in the fluorescent lights and we stared at it for a long time with matching dopey grins on our faces.

“I’ll get ammo,” Dave finally offered before he limped off toward the shelves, using the cart as a walker.

As he did so, I looked at our weaponry options. Shotguns had proven themselves more than useful already, but in closer quarters I thought a 9mm handgun would be helpful, too. I laid a few shotguns on the counter and then dropped down to open the lower cabinet with the handguns. Just as I feared, the rack was locked. I sighed as I grabbed for one of the shotguns and bashed open the glass with the butt of it.

Immediately an alarm began to squeal in the background. I winced as I sent a look toward David.

“Sorry,” I mouthed.

He shrugged as he wheeled the cart toward me and loaded up the weapons I’d already set out.

“You know, William may have been right about one thing,” he mused as gun after gun went into the cart.

I tilted my head with a frown as I handed him another shotgun. “Zombies: scourge of God to cleanse the world?” I asked.

He flashed me a quick grin. “Well, that remains to be seen. But I mean he might have been right about loud sounds like the blast of a gun bringing zombies to investigate. We might want to get some sharp and blunt weapons for close-quarter fights just in case. Save the guns for just clearing the highway.”

I shrugged. “That boat of a car certainly has enough space for it. Why not?”

He glanced around. “We haven’t seen any activity here, human or infected. Do you want to split up?”

I tensed. We hadn’t done that since the outbreak started. I guess my face must have showed my feelings because he reached out and grabbed my hands.

“Just to save time, Sarah. We still need to hit a grocery and then get on the road.”

Of course, his logic made perfect sense so I nodded. “You take the cart.”

He smiled as he moved off in one direction through the store. I headed in the other, checking through the aisles as I went.

In the golf section I got a big, heavy driver and tucked it under my arm. Then a second baseball bat from the sport section. The one David had at present was made from ultra-light aluminum, but this one was solid wood. When I tapped it against my palm it made a satisfying thud that I could almost imagine hearing when dealing with a zombie’s rotting head.

I moved back toward the front of the store. At the cash registers there was a soda cooler and some power bars and other snacks. I grabbed some bags and loaded up with a bunch of each. Just as I was finishing up, I heard a sound behind me. I turned, expecting to find Dave waiting for me with our cart.

There was a person behind me, but I’m afraid it wasn’t my husband. To my surprise, a pale-faced girl zombie stood in front of me. She was wearing a Bingo’s nametag that read CINDY. Or at least it would have if there wasn’t blood splattered across most of it.

Oh yeah, and she was missing an arm.

“Shit!” I yelped, dropping everything in my arms as she lunged toward me with a grunt and a whine.

She caught me before I could get any one of my many weapons in hand and we staggered toward the cash register together. I fell across the countertop, my hip hitting the edge with what I knew was bruising force.

Cindy the Zombie gnashed her teeth at me and I kicked upward, hitting her squarely between the legs. Unfortunately, her being a girl and all, the action didn’t faze her. She only tilted her head at me and growled louder.

“David!” I screamed as I shoved her back with all my might, which wasn’t much from the odd angle I was lying at.

Luckily for me though, because she didn’t have an arm, she was off-balance already and she fell off of me and slid across the linoleum floor with a groan of whatever was the emotionless version of disappointment. But she moved right back for me, crawling across the floor with her jaws snapping.

In the distance, I saw Dave maneuvering his cart toward me. He had to lean on it for support, but he was making pretty good time considering his bum leg. Still, he wasn’t going to make it before the girl hit me again, so I bolted, jumping behind the cashier desk like it was a bunker in a World War II simulation game.

The zombie lunged behind me and ended up lying across the counter making little biting faces at me as she pushed herself up on her tiptoes and slid as close as she could in my direction.

I don’t know what came over me, really. I guess it was instinct… or maybe the faint, but wholly unpleasant memory of my days working in retail when I wished I could kill snotty holiday shoppers like I now killed zombies. Either way, I hit the cash out button on the old cash register and the drawer flew open.

It smacked Zombie Cindy right in the temple, breaking her rotting flesh and sending a light spray of tissue and blood across the countertop. She roared her pain as she glanced up at me with annoyance on her face.

Yup, that was just as satisfying as I’d always thought it would be during all those years ringing up ill-tempered shoppers.

I didn’t wait for her to recover from the blow. There was a fixture rod sitting behind the counter and I grabbed the light metal with both hands.

“Sorry, Cindy,” I muttered as I raised it over my head. “This is the cash-only lane. We don’t accept gnashing teeth as credit.”

I slammed the fixture down, smacking the confused and angry zombie right at the base of her skull. She whimpered, though her movements slowed and I smashed it down a few more times until she twitched and then lay still.

Just as I finished, Dave got to the front of the store. He slowed his pace as I dropped the bloody rod and came out from behind the counter. I wiped my hands off on my shirt and then looked down at myself.

Once again, I was covered in blood and brains and all kinds of disgusting mung that I don’t even want to talk about. With a grunt, I peeled off my t-shirt and turned it inside out to wipe off my body as best I could.

Grabbing for the nearest rack, I replaced it with a new “Just Do It” t-shirt from the Nike rack and then gathered all the items I had been forced to drop in the struggle. Oddly, I was mostly irritated that the cold sodas were probably all shaken up now and we’d have to be careful opening them.

Dave remained silent the entire time, just watching me as I put myself back together.

“Sarah, are you okay?” he finally asked, his tone wary.

Of course it’s not every day you get to watch your spouse beat the shit out of a zombie. Well, except by then I guess it was.

I shrugged as I stepped over the dead zombie and headed for the door.

“I think Dr. Kelly was right after all,” I said as I dropped the items I’d grabbed into his cart and wedged the double doors open again. “You don’t have to spend money to have a good time together. Look how much fun we had today and we haven’t spent a dime.”

Dave shook his head. “Well, technically, I think that’s because we’re looting.”

“Potato/Potahto,” I laughed as we moved into the parking lot. “Whatever it is, it’s free.”

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