Zombies! Episode 2 - Abby's Bad Day

Zombies! Episode 2 - Abby's Bad Day

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 by Ivan Turner

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other
people. If you would like to share this book with another person,
please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it
with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it
was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to
Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting
the hard work of this author.

***

What has come before:

Shawn Rudd, a high school senior in a hurry
to meet up with his secret boyfriend, encounters a zombie on the
streets of Brooklyn. With no hesitation, Shawn confronts the
zombie, stabbing it and then bludgeoning it with a lead pipe. He
then turns on the zombie's hapless bite victim, killing her with a
blow to the head as well.

Investigating the crime, Detectives Johan
Stemmy and Anthony Heron are confounded and chilled by the fact
that the man Shawn killed had been dead for twelve hours at the
time of the incident. With thoughts of zombies on their minds, they
begin to investigate local gyms.

At
Push Ups Fitness Center
, the two
detectives encounter Abby Benjamin. Abby is able to identify the
zombie as Larry Koplowitz, a frequent customer of
Push Ups
.
She gives the detectives his address.

At the apartment, Detectives Stemmy and Heron
confront Mrs. Lucy Koplowitz, already a zombie by the time they
arrive. She sustains two gunshot wounds which would incapacitate a
normal person yet still keeps on coming. Detective Stemmy finishes
her off with a shot to the head. Unfortunately, he fails to notice
the child zombie, Zoe Koplowitz. Zoe bites him in the leg, thus
infecting him.

Stemmy is placed in isolation and, though the
surgery on his leg is successful, the infection spreads quickly
throughout his body. Heron meets with Captain Lance Naughton, his
immediate supervisor, and Dr. Denise Luco, a pathologist who has
worked with the police on investigations before. She explains that
the aggressive nature of the infection makes it impossible for them
to save Stemmy.

Heron goes and sits with Stemmy through the
hours of the night and when Stemmy finally passes, Heron enters the
room and puts a bullet in his head to make sure that he won't ever
get up. Though Captain Naughton seems unfazed by this, Dr. Luco is
extremely irritated, having wanted to observe the process of
turning in a victim of the infection.

In the wee hours of the morning, Detective
Heron arrivs home to find his wife awake and a phone message from
his doctor. Heron, a heavy smoker, had been in for a biopsy which
had come back positive. So it appears that his battle with the
undead will have to be put on hold so that he can battle
cancer.

***

THE
alarm went off promptly at 4:00
am. Martin never heard it which made Abby wonder, not for the first
time, why he insisted on keeping the clock on his side of the bed.
The blaring tone had startled her out of a terrible dream about the
flesh eating dead. There was some buzz on the internet about
zombies in New York and though she knew it couldn't be anything
more than a
War of the Worlds
hoax, it had stuck with
her.

Crawling over Martin's prone body she managed
to find the button on the clock and put the buzzing to rest.
Resting on top of him, now, she stared at his sleeping face. It
never ceased to amaze her how stupid people look while they're
asleep. A sleeping child may as well be surrounded by a peaceful
and glowing halo. Sleeping children look beautiful, angelic. But a
slumbering adult is stripped of virtually all of his dignity. His
mouth is open and he makes frightening and disgusting noises. He
drools like an infant.

She kissed him once on the cheek.

Then she smacked him on the same cheek.

"Get up," she said.

Without waiting for him to respond, she
slipped gracelessly out of bed and stared at herself in the full
length mirror on their bedroom door. The nightgown was not
flattering but then again, neither was her figure. She was almost
forty years old and letting it go. The last few months with Martin
being out of work and the pressure of getting their son to and from
daycare while juggling a less-than-ideal work schedule and Martin's
endless array of interviews that seemed to go nowhere had taken its
toll on every physical and emotional part of her. If he said
anything about moving back to England today she was pretty sure
she'd lose it.

Deciding that she was done degrading herself
in front of the mirror, she slipped out of the bedroom and rounded
the corner into the bathroom. Abby followed the same rituals as
most people in the morning. She had a pee and then brushed her
teeth while the water ran hot in the shower and the bathroom
steamed up. Then she shed her unflattering nightgown and stepped
under the glorious hot water.

When she had finished in the shower, she felt
better. She always felt better after a shower. She was ready to
face the day. She would be ready to face the day for exactly twelve
minutes. Humming to herself, Abby ran the blow dryer over her hair.
She never dried it fully because she didn't like the way it felt
after being completely heat dried. The dryer just kind of sped up
the natural process. She couldn't have commented on its effect on
the health of her hair one way or the other. She also didn't notice
any tremendous difference in the way it looked. Letting it dry
naturally just suited her. It just felt better.

Finishing up, Abby wrapped a towel around her
body and left the bathroom. She almost fell onto herself as she
avoided tripping over her two (almost three) year old son. He was
standing in the dark hallway, only the bathroom light, partially
blocked by her frame illuminating him at all. Sammy looked
pale.

"Are you all right?" she asked him.

He opened his mouth to answer in the way that
two year olds will answer and threw up instead.

It was the start of a very bad day.

***

ABBY
was supposed to open the gym at
5:45, which meant she was due to be there at about 5:30. There was
always someone waiting for her when she got there and she always
let whoever it was in to work out while she sorted out the morning
ledgers. This morning she didn't arrive until three minutes before
six and people were upset.

Sammy was running a fever of 100.3 which
isn't particularly dangerous in a two year old but they still
couldn't send him to day care. When she'd told Martin, he'd been
unhappy. What got her was that he wasn't even concerned for Sammy.
What concerned him most was that he would have the baby for the day
and
have to haul him over to the doctor's office. He had a
job interview with
Best Buy
in the afternoon. He was certain
he was going to be offered the job because he absolutely did not
want it. But he would have to take it if it was available because
he had nothing else and they were pushing the limits of their
savings.

They'd argued a bit, which made it a typical
morning. Then he'd apologized, which made it very atypical. As
she'd left the apartment, Abby gave him a kiss and a hug and then
squeezed him in a place that made a promise for the evening. At
least when he'd closed the door he'd been smiling.

The good feelings generated by that encounter
had lasted seven minutes. The train was delayed and she'd gotten to
her stop at 5:43. She managed to make her regular fifteen minute
walk to work in fourteen minutes and called it a victory. She was
greeted by a mosaic of angry faces and muttered complaints.

She didn't care for any of it.

It wasn't in her nature to explain herself to
anyone, especially a group of fat bastards who thought they were
doing themselves good by getting in a half hour of treadmill every
morning before work. So she weathered their complaints, opened up
the gym, and got everything going as quickly as she could.

There were twelve emails that had come in
overnight and every single one of them demanded her attention. Of
course, while she was getting things set up, the phone rang and she
knew it was her boss. She answered with a bright and cheery tone
and explained that she'd been held up by her sick child. He made a
rude comment but Abby let it pass. She needed the job and her boss
was amicable most of the time. He wasn't usually up at six o'clock
in the morning so something must have happened, leaving him looking
for someone to take it out on. Fortunately, his problems were not
related to the gym.

At about 6:30, John Arrick came in. Abby
didn't know him very well but he seemed nice enough. He taught at
one of the high schools in the area and she was pretty sure he
walked it even though it was two stops away by train. She didn't
know what subject he taught but she had him figured for a
literature or history guy. He was very careful about the way he
spoke, even damping his Scottish accent for the benefit of those
around him. She had once introduced him to Martin but it seemed
that it took more than a kingdom of origin to bring two people
together.

Arrick wasn't a fat bastard but he wasn't
exactly one of those
fit
characters either. In fact, he was
skinny as a rail. Suzanna, his girlfriend, had once told Abby that
when she hugged him she was afraid she was going to get a paper
cut. She often wondered what Arrick saw in Suzanna but then again,
every time anyone looked at Suzanna, they got an eye full. Suzanna
was one of those people who took her body and her workout very
seriously. She had no interest in being a body builder but she was
well toned and very sexy. Come to think of it, Abby wasn't sure
what Suzanna saw in Arrick.

The trouble with Suzanna was that she was a
bitch. She and Abby weren't exactly been friends, but they were
cordial to each other. They made small talk and Abby had even
caught Suzanna flashing a smile once or twice. But even that had
declined a week before. Two detectives had come in with a picture.
They'd been trying to find out the identity of the man in the
picture and Abby had known him. He'd also been a regular in the
gym, a guy who was serious about his workout. He and Suzanna worked
out together often and when the policemen told Abby that this man,
Larry Koplowitz, was dead, Abby felt it necessary to tell Suzanna.
Up until that moment, Abby was sure that Larry and Suzanna were
nothing more than workout partners. She didn't know anything about
Larry but Suzanna's relationship with Arrick seemed to preclude
anything deeper. Apparently she'd been wrong. When she'd told
Suzanna that Larry was dead, the look on her face spoke volumes.
Suzanna had not appreciated Abby's noticing of that look nor the
sympathy that followed. She denied any deeper relationship between
her and Larry and Abby had been content to leave it at that. Now,
though, Suzanna didn't even acknowledge her.

And so, Abby's morning passed uneventfully
because even a bad day has some down time.

***

WHITAKER
came in at around ten. He
wasn't quite as high on the totem pole as Abby, but he would take
over the place when she left at six. They spent an hour together
going over the morning's events and the day's expectations. At
11:30, Abby decided she'd like an early lunch and Whitaker decided
that was okay. Whitaker was a good kid, just twenty two years old.
He barely had a high school degree but he was pretty sharp and did
Abby's job almost better than she did. He seemed to like the
flexible schedule and didn't have any sort of ambition at all. He
lived with his dad, who worked as a janitor in a Manhattan office
building. Whitaker was pretty sure he would eventually go the same
route but he thought he'd try retail administration first.

There hadn't been time that morning for Abby
to pack a lunch so she went out. She wasn't really hungry, just
eager to be away from the gym. Once on the street she called Martin
to find out how Sammy was doing. Martin had given him ibuprofen,
which knocked down the fever, and they had a doctor's appointment
at 1:15. Martin had managed to reschedule his interview for 2:30.
Abby's parents would watch Sammy for the hour or so he would be
out. That seemed to work out well.

After that, she walked around for a while,
grabbed a sandwich that she would eat later while Whitaker was out,
and went back to work. She had a much clearer head by then, having
been able to sort out the morning's events. Sammy was okay and
Martin would make his interview. Her parents, largely unable to
care for Sammy on a regular basis, would have no trouble with him
for an hour. Some TV and some milk and all would go well. Despite
her lateness this morning, it seemed clear that she wouldn't lose
her job. She'd never really been worried about that anyway. She did
the work of two managers for the salary of an assistant. She gave
the struggling
Push Ups
the breathing room to grow without
having to sacrifice tons of necessary cash. She was sure that, if
the business ever reached the next plateau, her boss would
compensate her.