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  Love with a Chance of Zombies

  Delphine Dryden

  Lena Stanton’s a sharpshooting zombie hunter with a hot-pink rifle and an attitude. Her latest assignment—guard bitten hero, Dr. Lucas Nye, and be ready to shoot the moment he starts to turn zombie.

  In the meantime, considering she’s the last female the man will ever see, Lena’s happy to indulge the doc in hot, steamy sex until he becomes symptomatic. What? She has to do her part to repopulate the planet, right?

  When last-minute research and a daring treatment could save Lucas, Lena has to choose. She can follow her heart and give the man a chance to live…or follow her commander’s orders and shoot to kill.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing

  www.ellorascave.com

  Love with a Chance of Zombies

  ISBN 9781419939884

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Love with a Chance of Zombies Copyright © 2012 Delphine Dryden

  Edited by Kelli Collins

  Cover design by Syneca

  Models: Elina & Christian

  Photography: idiz, kwest/shutterstock.com

  Electronic book publication March 2012

  The terms Romantica® and Quickies® are registered trademarks of Ellora’s Cave Publishing.

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Love with a Chance of Zombies

  Delphine Dryden

  Chapter One

  It felt so good, so solid and familiar against the curve of her cheek. Warmed by contact with her skin, smooth and hard. Lena knew just how to hold it, just the right touch to make it respond; knew how it would fit her body the same way every time. Comforting and exciting all at once. It never got old.

  The weapon was also hot pink, a feature that never ceased to annoy her male colleagues. She had even painted little flowers on the stock. Bonus annoyance. She was getting to be almost fond of pink, although she had always hated the color when she was growing up.

  Lena cuddled the AR-15 into her shoulder a little more snugly when she heard the crackling noises again. There, just there at the forest’s edge, she could see two of them stopping to sniff the wind. In the infrared scope they looked less human, not that she cared anymore if they looked human or not. You couldn’t care. You had to just aim and shoot, aim and shoot, never hesitating because if you hesitated you lost, and that was literally a fate worse than death unless you had the stones to finish yourself before the virus activated.

  Just aim and shoot…

  Crack!

  Aim and shoot…

  Crack!

  “Yes! You got both those motherfuckers!” The hiss of acclaim came from a few yards to her left. Lena shot a disgusted glare into the gloom of the underbrush where her newest trainee was crouched.

  “Respect, Gilford. Those were people once. It could be you out there. Never forget that, not for one second.”

  The boy made a noise of dismissal. “Did you see that big one’s head explode? Booosh! Awesome. When do I get a gun?”

  She stared at the youth for about another second then shook her head. “Jonesie?”

  “Yeah, boss?” Jonesie materialized from the darkness—all six foot four of him—with the stealth of a woodsman born and bred.

  “Take Gilford back home. Tell Watson I said, ‘Hell no.’” Turning to the boy, she nodded in the direction of the encroaching gray glow that marked dawn’s arrival. “You’re out. Go now. No arguing. If you want to talk about it, I’ll see you when the patrol gets back.”

  “Just say, ‘Yes ma’am,’” Jonesie advised before the stunned boy could respond.

  The kid looked from the soft-spoken giant to the stony-faced woman in front of him and made the wisest choice available.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She didn’t wait around to watch them go. There were still vital minutes before the last of the light-shy prey went to ground. Lena lifted her binoculars and resumed her slow scan, looking for that one last kill with the usual mix of anticipation and dread.

  * * * * *

  “We’re running out of recruits, Lena.”

  “He was making sound effects, sir.”

  Tom Watson winced, knowing how that particular behavior sat with his finest scout. “I do warn them about that, you know.”

  “This one must have been absent that day.”

  “No. Just not paying attention. He doesn’t get it. None of these new kids do.”

  She nodded. “He’s what, sixteen, seventeen? He can’t have been any older than five or six at Zero Hour.”

  “And how old were you?” Watson asked with a shrug. “Not that much older yourself.”

  “Twelve. Old enough.” It was the set of her face, not chronology, that told the story of her experience. The name “Zero Hour” might have been assigned retroactively by the survivors who pieced together when and where the plague had first struck, but any survivor past a certain age could never forget the months following that fabled hour. A quick, clean disaster would have been kinder than the slow, lingering, hideously painful death of society they had witnessed.

  The world had changed forever at that single point in time, but they hadn’t realized it right away. Now they dated everything from Zero Hour, but it was those nightmare times afterward that really counted. The times that had slowly killed the last vestiges of hope.

  “I’ll send him down. The farms can always use another hand, or maybe we can find a use for him over at the mayor’s office. I might need to rethink assigning new recruits to you for training, but that’s an issue for another day. I have a new short-term assignment for you anyway. You need a breather from the field.”

  “Sir, he went ‘boosh’ when I took out a morning straggler with a clean hit,” Lena protested, “and that was after I’d warned him to show more respect. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same. I’ve been in the field with you and—”

  “Lena.”

  “He had no sense of decency. He thought it was funny.”

  “Stanton! Simmer down. The kid was a jackass. I agree with you. I’m not putting you on a shit detail.” Watson looked more amused than irked.

  Theirs wasn’t quite a military operation, although it certainly bore similarities to that kind of organization. Still, most of the scouts treated Tom Watson like their commander-in-chief, and given his background before Zero Hour it was really no surprise. He had been a retired admiral, and now he was the closest thi
ng this little pocket of humanity had to a general. He was also the closest thing most of his scouts had to a father. Nick Cochrane was the duly elected “mayor” of their colony, but Watson was seen by most as the man in charge.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Lena looked down at her toe, scuffing it along a deep crack in the green linoleum.

  “You’re still wired up from patrol,” he scolded, but not very harshly. He had been there. He understood. Lena knew that. “I’ll cut you some slack. Are you ready to listen to me about this now?”

  She nodded, chagrined. She could tell he was right—she felt the lingering tension clinging to her body. The hyper-vigilance that meant survival out in the field usually just meant acting like a jerk once inside the safety fence. You had to learn to shift gears. It was part of the job. Rolling her shoulders looser, she raised her eyes again as Watson continued.

  “Okay. Ironically, given the tone of this conversation, I picked you for this because I trust you to have a little finesse and judgment. As well as a little compassion. I was right to think that, I hope?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You know Lucas Nye?”

  “The doctor? Of course. Everybody knows him.”

  It was a community of fewer than a thousand people, living in close quarters. There weren’t many doctors, and even fewer who actually seemed to hold the title legitimately. Nye had been near the end of his residency when Zero Hour came. That was close enough for most people.

  More importantly, Nye was a genius. He had been a superstar even before the plague, starting college at fourteen and going on to publish all sorts of papers, winning grants and conducting complex studies in epidemiology and virus research. He had even done some consulting for the CDC. He’d been courted by the finest research facilities in the world. If anybody could figure out a cure for this thing, the rumors went, it was surely Lucas Nye.

  “Well, they don’t know what I’m about to tell you, you got that? Classified, nobody hears this unless I tell them. Still sure you’re ready?” At her nod, Watson continued. “Nye was at the poultry farm last week, taking some blood samples. They think the chickens may have bird flu or something. Because we needed something else to worry about. Anyway, his truck got a flat on the way back, about a mile from the gate. They radioed for help but it was already close to sunset, and you know all the activity the farms have been getting lately.”

  “Crap. They got hit?”

  “Just a small group, luckily. But fresh and alert, really dangerous. The driver and Nye took out all of them, but one got too close and landed a bite before he died. Lucky for Nye it was on his ankle, not anywhere near his brain. That might buy him a little more time. Few more weeks. Maybe.”

  “Fuck.”

  Watson nodded agreement with Lena’s crude but undeniable sentiment. They both knew what a bite 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 discouraging to come face-to-face with the fact that the last, best hope of humanity would probably die before he could fulfill that hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “He taught you to scout for zombies?”

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

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

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

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Smart twelve-year-old.”

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

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

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

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

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

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