LovewithaChanceofZombies by Delphine Dryden Page B

meant. The good doctor was fucked indeed.
He had three, four, maybe six weeks at the most before the first symptoms began
to crop up. And at that point, for the good of all the uninfected, he would
face a choice. He could commit suicide or ask to be shot, or he could be turned
out of the compound and mourned as dead. They had learned early on that the
hard way was the only way when it came to bite victims. Very few people chose
option number two.
    Nye had a short reprieve before his death sentence would be
carried out. But even with his near-legendary abilities, there was no way short
of a miracle he could manage a cure in such a short time. Not when it had
eluded all the remaining scientists and medical minds in the world for nearly a
decade.
    “We’ve agreed to give him access to his lab until he’s
symptomatic,” Watson said grimly. “And it’s going to remain classified until
that time. No reason to rob so many people of what they think is their last
hope, at least not until there’s no other way. So he can’t go into the regular
quarantine.”
    “Which means he’ll need a personal guard,” Lena deduced.
    “And conveniently, my very best girl just pulled a bit of a
blunder in the field, summarily dismissing a bright young recruit like Gilford.
She’s burned out. Needs a cooling-off period, obviously. Little change of
scene. Doing some community service in the lab, maybe.”
    Lena’s laugh was short and harsh. “Then after we shove Nye
out the gate, everybody realizes I was a hero on a hush-hush mercy assignment.
I get it.”
    “You can say no.”
    “No, I can’t.”
    Watson smiled. “Of course you can’t.”
    “When do I start?”
    “As soon as you get there. I recommend a shower first. No
need to make the poor doctor suffer any more than necessary.”
    With a sigh, Lena shouldered her shocking-pink weapon and
her duffel full of equipment, already heading for the door. Tom Watson’s
chuckle followed her.
    “Guard him well, Lena.”
    “Aye-aye, sir.”
    Of course she would guard him well. She would never say so
out loud, but she needed heroes just like everybody else. Like so many others,
she thought Lucas Nye might well be the last, best hope for humankind’s
survival. Not to mention the number of lives he had saved just by being one of
the few trained doctors left in the world. He wasn’t just a hero to most of the
people in their compound, he was more like a minor deity.
    So if anybody was going to have to shoot Nye if he turned
into a zombie ahead of schedule, it was sure as hell going to be her and not
some disrespectful little asshat like Gilford.

Chapter Two
     
    They had called it all sorts of other things on the news at
first. The “unidentified viral contamination”. Then the known viral
contamination, AX-1. Then “Pollack’s Disease” after the guy who identified it.
Eventually it was just “the plague”. But the first time she got a glimpse of a
fully affected victim on the news, Lena knew what she was looking at. Before
another month had passed, so did everybody else.
    Zombies.
    If they had admitted it was a zombie problem earlier in the
game, she wondered, would it have changed anything? Probably not. That was part
of what made it a zombie problem , after all; nobody admitted it until it
was far too late to stop it. Critical mass had already been reached by the time
they attempted drastic measures. Remedies that might have been effective had
they begun sooner were useless when applied too late.
    It was all for nothing. The zombies kept coming, kept
infecting the survivors. Nobody even knew where they all came from. The
remaining uninfected fought on in a void, because there was no other choice.
Not if you wanted to survive. Even if you thought the future might hold only
more fear and pain and deprivation. And Lena did want to survive, very much.
That was the only reason she’d spent close to ten years embracing all the
things she had hated most from her childhood.
    It was