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Alan Parrish is too. fucking. old. for this shit.
He’s faced everything he thought life could throw at him: all the hazards of the jungle, both in the actual jungle and in suburban New Hampshire; traveling back in time and de-aging to go through the delights (ha) of growing up from twelve to thirty-eight a second time; but also the true joy of falling in love with Sarah Whittle, a love that starts out as a sweet childish crush and grows until it envelops them both.
The last twenty-two years have had their own threats. His Great White Hunter has become America’s schoolkids—schoolkids!—turning guns on each other. Terror has taken the form of planes shattering buildings instead of giant mosquitoes avoiding all attempts at swatting. Sometimes it seems like the only positive thing is that the scientists finally found a cure for cancer.
Of course, that got screwed up as well, which is why Alan’s backed up against his garage door, brandishing the shovel he was using to dig out some particularly pervasive weeds at a zombie. Eradicate one disease, get a whole new and interesting one. What do the kids say? Stuff goes viral on the internet. Well, this virus is one that the world is glad doesn't gets spread by internet.
At least it’s only one zombie. A stampede of those would surely be harder to contend with than lions and tigers and bears, oh my.
“Sarah!” he hollers again, his throat hoarse. The zombie reaches for him. Alan bats it away with the shovel. It’s still pretty fresh; the shovel doesn’t deter it much. “Sarah, I need you!”
Hasn’t he always needed her, though? To roll the dice, to free him, to love him. To hold him in the night when the drums beat in his head and his breath condenses jungle-hot in his lungs, strangling him from the inside out.
The garage door begins to ratchet up behind him, and Alan takes a hasty step forward, swinging the shovel low and hard at the zombie’s knees. It crumples long enough for him to step back again, ducking instinctively to avoid beaning himself on the door.
“Sorry, honey, I was in the bathroom,” Sarah says, flipping the switch so that the garage door begins trundling down again. “I did tell you not to go outside alone.”
“I was trying to keep the garden under control.”
Sarah’s stern expression softens. She understands his dislike of an overabundance of growing green things. “Well, next ti—Alan!”
The zombie’s hand, reaching under the door, tugs mindlessly at Alan’s pants leg. Alan brings the shovel down, severing it, just before the garage door jams up on the zombie’s elbow. He pushes it out with the shovel and flicks the hand after it, and the door closes.
“Who do we call for this, again?” Alan props the shovel against the wall. He’ll need to decontaminate it, thanks to the coagulated blood, but right now all he wants to do is go inside and have a beer and chill out. Sweat has popped out on his forehead that has nothing to do with gardening in the summer heat. He strips off his thick garden gloves and tosses them into the corner with the shovel.
Sarah already has her phone out. “I’ll do it, it’s fine,” she says.
Alan goes ahead of her into the house, through their kludged together decon chamber. Thick plastic forms a tunnel between the garage and the kitchen. He squirts hand sanitizer into his palms and rubs them together briskly, doing his forearms as well, checking carefully for any splashes of blood. He uses the mirror to check for any grazes or scrapes in places he can’t see.
The other thing that’s in the decon chamber is one of those newfangled virus checking things. Alan pokes his finger into it, wincing at the bite of the tiny needles, and waits for the light to go green. When it does he pushes the button that clears the machine out for the next person to be tested.
Sarah’s hand pushes through the plastic, handing him the handgun that’s the last piece of their decon equipment. Alan takes it and passes through the second barrier into the kitchen. Sarah didn’t get anywhere near the zombie, so he won’t have to use the gun, but if the little light on the virus testing machine ever turns red...
He loves her, and she loves him, and if the dice ever roll that way, they’ll do what they have to.
Alan sees the green glow through the plastic and a moment later Sarah joins him in the kitchen. Alan puts the gun back in its place—a spring-clip mounted on the nearest cabinet—and opens the fridge, hunting out a frosty-cold beer, cracking the top, and taking a long drink.
It’s only then that he realizes his heart’s going like a jackhammer and his breathing isn’t any better.
“I think you better sit down,” Sarah says, hooking a chair out from the table with her foot. Alan sits gratefully. “The nearest disposal team said they’re twenty minutes away, so I shot it through the doggy door.”
Alan gapes at her. “Jesus, Sarah! What if it had grabbed you?”
Sarah shrugs. “I was the one with the gun. It was the one lying on the concrete trying to figure out which way was up.”
“Still...”
“Look.” She reaches out and covers his trembling hands with hers. “I wanted to report it to the disposal team as a confirmed non-liability, okay? We took the target training course for a reason. I put it down fine, no sweat.”
Alan’s heart is not exactly comforted by this, either as a physical thumping entity or as the more abstract location of his feelings for Sarah. “Couldn’t you just have let it go and let them hunt it down? A zombie oozing blood from one arm probably can’t get that far unnoticed.”
“Yeah, but if I did then the disposal team have to seal the street off for at least an hour while they track it down and put it down and then do paperwork or whatever. This way they can just bag it, tag it, and go.” She gives him a knowing look. “You forgot the Shepherds are coming for dinner, didn’t you?”
Alan has forgotten, at least temporarily in the heat of the zombie attack. If getting lurched at by one zombie while he was digging in the front garden counts as an attack, anyway. He’s pretty sure the kids who go out there taunting zombies just to get videos for the internet wouldn’t count it as one. “They bringing the kids?”
“‘Kids’.” Sarah rolls her eyes. “Peter’s, what, thirty now?”
“Yeah. He had his birthday in the middle of that national park he works at.” Alan takes another drink of his beer. His hands are slowly losing their shakes. “Must be nice not to mind being surrounded by trees and wildlife.”
“If you don’t want to hear about it, ask Judy to talk about digging around inside people’s guts instead. You know she loves sharing stories from the hospital.”
“Ugh. What possesses anyone to want to be a surgeon?”
“I don’t know, but I have a little slicing and dicing you need to do right here, if we want the salad to be ready by the time they get here.” Sarah nods to his beer. “Finish that, then go wash your hands and I’ll assign you some vegetables.” She gets up and returns to where she’s been slicing cold chicken and ham. Alan drinks the rest of his beer slowly, watching her hands’ slow but sure movements. She has bad hand days sometimes, when the arthritis bites deep. He’s glad today wasn’t one of those, glad her hand was quick on the door switch and on the gun trigger. Her hair is finespun gold and silver in the late afternoon light slanting through the kitchen window.
He loves her, and today she has saved his life once again.