Zombies in Paradise (Love in the Age of Zombies Book 2) Read online

  Kevin was feeling awkward about their earlier encounter. “Lee, I hope you don’t feel insulted or anything. You’re really a beautiful woman and . . . ” She interrupted him with a wave of her hand.

  “No big deal,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m not offended. Still, we have a few minutes . . . would you like to do more than look?” As she said this, her hands returned to her blouse and opened it wide.

  Kevin suspected she was only teasing him, and as much as he would have loved the chance to admire her mammary glands up close and personal, he said, “For a boob man like me, saying no is nigh unto impossible, but Jake sent me down here to get you. He offered to take me to Frankfort in your boat and wants you to come with me. To the driveway I mean,” he added hurriedly.

  She laughed at that, and then walked over to the fountain and pulled out a Petoskey stone. She neglected to button her blouse, leaving Kevin to struggle with keeping his eyes off her very ample cleavage. When she brought the stone over to Kevin he examined it with an appreciative eye. It wasn’t the largest stone he’d seen, but it was an amazing specimen. The eyes were very dark, with a lighter ring around the edge. The rays emanating from the center were clearly defined, a beautiful sunburst of tan against a darker brown. The zig-zag borders of the cells themselves were nearly white, outlining each cell perfectly.

  “This one’s my favorite because of how hard I had to work for it,” she said. “I found it in the early 1980s, before the zebra and quagga mussels took over. The water wasn’t clear like it is today. Back then you could only see thirty feet or so down; now you can see probably a hundred feet. I used to snorkel just out from the shore, looking for Petoskies. One day I found this one in about five feet of water. It was hard work digging it out, and I’d already found a handful of other ones, so I was carrying extra weight. But it was worth it.” As she said this, she took it in her hands, once again admiring it. “I hand-polished this one. Over eighteen hours of polishing, but it was so worth it!” She walked back and placed it among the other lovely stones in the fountain.

  Again Kevin noted the strangeness of having a conversation about pretty fossils with a woman who was teasing him with her naked breasts. She seemed the not the least bit nonplussed, like nothing odd was happening. She caught him glancing at her breasts and smiled with a wink. Just then the Tesla came rolling up. The only sound it made was from the tires rolling over the gravel driveway. “Kevin, hop in front. Hon, you mind riding in the back?”

  “No, not at all!” she replied cheerfully as they got into the car. Kevin looked around in wonder, never having seen a Tesla up close. Everything about it looked perfect and intelligent. Jake activated a Bluetooth switch on the steering column. “Hey, this is Jake, who’s on duty today?” he said.

  “C’mon, Jake, you know Arthur hates it when you don’t follow the protocol!” said a voice in return.

  “Fine, this is Juliet-Lima-three-eight Juliet Juliet in Elberta.” He released the switch and turned to Kevin. “The JL stands for Jake and Lee, the 38JJ is Lee’s bust size.”

  A double-J cup size. My lord. A breast man’s heaven.

  “Charley-echo-one-three in Frankfort on call. What’s your situation?”

  “I’m headed over in a few minutes with a visitor.”

  “You sure the visitor is clean? You know what happened last time!”

  “It wasn’t last time, it was nearly three months ago, and you know it wasn’t my fault. But yes, I’m sure he’s clean.”

  “I checked him out myself,” Lee said.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet you did,” said the voice on the radio.

  “We’re coming over on the boat. Be there in a few.”

  “10-4. See you at the dock. Charley-echo-one-three out.”

  “Cock-a-doodle-doo out.” Turning to Jake he said, “I hate military jargon shit,” touching the screen to turn off the radio. He began to explain. “We’re very careful to keep out anyone who might be a risk. All it would take is one zombie on the loose and the town could fall. We have patrols constantly monitoring the perimeter.”

  “So you’re part of a military operation here?” Kevin asked, somewhat surprised. Jake took his eyes off the road long enough to give Kevin a hard look.

  “Military? Do I look like a military kinda guy to you?!” he asked, genuinely offended. “No, I’m not stinkin’ military! But we have to have a system in place so everybody knows their job. After the dust settled, we assigned work to people. Every female has to volunteer just like the men. Most women prefer to spend time at the school or daycare, but some of them like to stand guard or patrol the streets alongside the men. Some of the guys didn’t like the idea of serving alongside women and didn’t take their job seriously until one guy fell asleep at his post. A zombie got past him, and the next thing we knew, three people got bit. One of them was the watchman’s sister.”

  “What happened to the three who got bit?” Kevin asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “The hell do you think happened? They turned. We took them to the hospital, but there wasn’t anything they could do. ” Jake replied.

  “So Frankfort really has a working hospital?” Kevin asked, his hopes soaring.

  “I don’t know about the working part—it’s really just the ER. The rest of the hospital is empty and without power. There aren’t a whole lot of injuries in town since people quit driving. But people still have accidents, get sick, ladies still get pregnant.”

  Like Michelle, Kevin thought with a pang of sadness. Jake was weaving the car down a winding gravel road, traveling roughly north, until they came out from under the tree canopy. They headed toward the water to a houseboat tied to the dock. The roof of the cabin looked almost black, and Kevin realized it was covered in solar panels. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. As they got closer he saw the name of the boat painted on the side and said it out loud: “The Girls. Do you have daughters?”

  “We don’t have any kids, but Lee does have the girls,” Jake said, glancing in the mirror at Lee with a chuckle and a smile. Kevin looked back and she was smiling as well, fiddling with her buttoned blouse as if having it on was an inconvenience.

  They pulled up near the dock and got out of the car. “Wow, that’s some kind of boat!” Kevin exclaimed. Panels covered much of the roof of the boat, which looked like it could hold about twenty people. The panels formed a canopy under which the passengers could sit or stand.

  “Are those solar panels?”

  “Yeah, they provide power to keep the batteries charged, and you can cruise along without draining the batteries if you’re not in a hurry or want to make a day of it,” Jake said as we walked toward the boat. A wind blew in from the lake.

  “He used to take passengers way out on Lake Michigan,” Lee said. “Some of them wanted to fish, some of them wanted to party, and some of them just wanted to skinny dip,” she said wistfully.

  “And somebody I know just wanted to lay out topless in the sun in the middle of the lake,” Jake said knowingly. Lee smiled at Kevin and helped him onto the boat. Jake untied the rope and stepped aboard, then they cast off.

  “Ever been in an electric boat?” Jake asked Kevin.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Oh, you’d know.” He sat in the pilot seat and flipped a switch. Other than a low hum, the boat drifted silently away from the dock. At first, Kevin thought it was caught in the current, but he realized they were moving much faster than the river current. The boat picked up speed and was soon moving at a nice clip across the water, nearly silent as it slipped away from the shore.

  The boat made such a small amount of noise Kevin could hear the sound of the wind rushing past him and the sound of the small riffling waves in the bay. He could even hear Lake Michigan waves crashing against the breakwater.

  “It’s so quiet!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s one of the great things about it,” Jake said, glancing at Kevin. “No noise pollution, no air pollution, renewable energy . . . and for some reason bot
h women and men think it’s the sexiest thing going. It seems to turn people on. Mmm-mmm, if this boat could talk!” he said, apparently remembering an adventurous trip or two.

  Kevin sat back and enjoyed the short trip. It was quite a sensation—the wind flowing over him, the sun warming his arm hanging outside the canopy shadow, watching the water rush by, all with the boat making barely a sound.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Back in Ann Arbor

  Three doors down and across the street, Don peered through the upstairs bedroom window, watching for Doc. He’d been digging in the backyard. What for? he asked himself. Why do people dig in the ground? After everyone got sick one of the teachers died because she didn't have her medicine. They said she died from something called die-beetis. After she died they dug a hole in the dirt and buried her. Was he going to bury somebody?

  While Don had been looking in a new neighborhood, Matey, his only friend, had heard a sound and ran to check it out. After he ran between the houses and started barking, Don peeked around the corner. He saw a man with a shovel acting scared, but it didn’t look like he had anything to hurt Matey with. Don was relieved. If something happened to Matey, he’d be all alone again, and he didn’t want to be alone. But he didn’t want to be with people, either. People made fun of the way he talked and acted sometimes, and that wasn’t good. People were mean. Mean people deserve to get in trouble. Mean people deserve the gymnasium.

  Don knew he wasn’t the same as everyone else, but he wasn’t stupid. He had a job and he even drove a car. He’d even been in love and had spent a lot of time pretending his hand was his girlfriend. He liked doing that. He was good at it, too, even though he had to do it in secret. He got in a lot of trouble the one time he got caught.

  He let out a low whistle and Matey came running back to him. They hurried down the street and between two houses so the man in the yard wouldn’t see them. He didn’t want the man to see him. But he wanted to see the man. So he’d gone into this house and upstairs to look out the window at the house where the man was. But after a half hour of seeing nothing, and having Matey whining the whole time, Don went back downstairs and to the school, making sure he was never in sight of the man’s house.

  He pulled the keychain from around his neck and unbolted the door. Once he and Matey stepped inside, he closed it with a bang! He had to make sure it was closed tight. He used to forget to do that sometimes, until the night one of the rotting crazies got in and very nearly bit Don. Don didn’t want that to happen. No sir. He’d seen what happens if you get bit, and it was mean. He saw it in the gymnasium.

  Walking down the hall to Ms. Tracy’s empty classroom, Don watched Matey. Matey sniffed the air and scouted ahead. If something was inside, Matey would let him know. But Matey acted fine. Don went inside Ms. Tracy’s room and closed the door. He still thought of it as Ms. Tracy’s room, but it was also his room.

  He liked his bedroom. That’s what he called it, his bedroom, because that’s where he slept. But it wasn’t like the bedroom he had when he was a kid. This bedroom was a big school classroom. It even had a sink. All of the desks were gone. They were the first things Don burned when it got cold. But it was decorated with some things he found in houses. The window sills had toys he’d found, naughty toys people hid in their bedrooms. They were in all different colors like red and blue and green. They were pretty. Don liked to look at them especially when the sun was shining on them. They looked like his peter except his peter wasn’t blue or red or green. Or as big. Some were made of plastic, some felt like jelly and were clear. Some of them were long and fat and some were little and skinny.

  When Don decided to go see a man about a horse, something his dad used to say when he left for work, he’d always go into the bedrooms and look for naughty stuff. He knew where to look. Tucked in a closet or under the bed or sometimes out in plain sight. He didn’t know how people used some of the toys, but he knew they did secret things with them, and so he liked them because he did secret things, too. He found lots of DVDs but the TVs and DVD players didn’t work. He found a lot of books, too, but when he was doing his secret thing he didn’t want to read. Reading didn’t make him feel wicked. Wicked was what the teachers called him when he got caught in Ms. Tracy’s room.

  When he was doing his secret thing he liked to look at the pictures in the magazines. They made him hard. They made him feel good. And he learned a long time ago not to make a mess on the pictures because the pages got ruined.

  He liked looking at the photos of the naked ladies. Some of them had big titties and some had small titties but he liked the big titties the best. And some of them were bent over with their bottom pointed at him. He could see where his peter was supposed to go. He had only put his peter inside a woman once but didn’t like it. He still liked looking at the ladies though. Especially when he was doing his secret. Some of the pictures had men in them, and their peters were hard too. And a lot bigger than his. But he didn’t pay much attention to the guys unless he was pretending it was him in the picture.

  Months ago, after everybody got sick and the kids were put in the gymnasium, the teachers and the principal got scared and were yelling at each other in the break room. Don didn’t like them yelling so he climbed the stairs to the balcony in the gym and watched. There were a lot of kids in there and some teachers, too. He felt sorry for them and after a while he didn’t want to watch anymore.

  Every day Don did his job, even though nobody else was doing theirs. He kept cleaning the halls with the dust broom, cleaned the windows with the blue spray, and scrubbed the toilets even though they weren’t getting dirty. The others did the cooking, but wouldn’t let Don have a turn. They used to cook soup or chili, but they didn’t want to run out of meat so they mostly ate canned fruit and vegetables. When it all started there were eight people, three men and five women, but eventually one of the men and four of the women disappeared. Don found the man hanging from a rope in his room. He wasn’t sure what happened to the women who were gone but didn’t really care. Now there were only three of them left besides Don.

  There was his pretty friend, Ms. Tracy, a guy teacher named Craig, and the principal, Mr. Lockhart. Don didn’t like to be around the guys too much because they made him feel dumb, using big words he didn’t know and asking all kinds of questions. Don didn’t like to talk much. So he usually kept to himself. But Ms. Tracy was nice to him and talked to him when nobody else would. He liked Ms. Tracy a lot.

  At first, the teachers all slept in their home rooms, but after a while they moved into rooms across from the bathrooms. The guys were in one room and Ms. Tracy was in the other. Don slept by himself in the janitor’s room. Sometimes he liked to go into Ms. Tracy’s room when she wasn’t there. It smelled like her and made him feel good. After a few months of sneaking in when she wasn’t there, it started making him hard, too. So when Ms. Tracy walked in and found Don with his pants down, she got mad. She called the other guys and they all started shouting, telling Don he was bad, he was wicked, and made him promise never to do it again. Don promised he wouldn’t do it again, but he didn’t mean it and got mad that they were mean to him. He didn’t know why they were so mad. He hadn’t hurt anybody or said any bad words or done anything in front of them.

  Once, long before the whole world got sick, a mom saw him rub himself after he got hard and she was a tattletale. Mr. Miller, the health teacher, came and had a talk with him. Mr. Miller told him that other guys got hard too but it was a secret and not to rub it in front of people and not to talk about it. It was a boy secret. Girls have girl secrets and boys have boy secrets. So that’s what Don called it when he got hard and rubbed himself: doing his secret. So if the other guys did it too, why were they so mad at him when they found him doing it? He couldn’t figure it out.

  At one point, Don found a stack of magazines in the bottom of the dumpster outside. This was still before everyone got sick. That’s where he got a lot of the magazines with pictures of naked women and men. Don li
ked looking at their big-girl titties, but it didn’t take him long to learn that a girl’s secret must be between her legs just like his was, because most of the pictures showed a woman playing with their secret, or men putting their secret inside the woman’s secret. And even though Don didn’t know exactly why they did that, he liked how big and hard the pictures made him.

  But after he got caught in Ms. Tracy’s room, things got worse. They weren’t nice to him and wouldn’t talk to him. They left him out of everything and looked at him with mean eyes. He didn’t like that. As time passed he got more and more angry about it. He felt like being mean right back. Finally one afternoon, right in the middle of his secret, he got mad, pulled his pants up and went to the cafeteria. He found Craig making coffee. He grabbed one of the heavy skillets and hit Craig in the head. Then he dragged Craig’s body up to the gymnasium balcony and threw it over. The kids and teachers below made a lot of noise.

  He felt a little bit bad about what he had done and went to tell Ms. Tracy, but she wasn’t in her room. He could smell her though and it made him hard, so he decided to finish his secret and pulled out his hard peter. That was when she walked in. She started yelling at him and he got mad and pushed her. When she fell, part of her shirt got caught on the edge of the desk and ripped. Where it tore, he could see one side of her bra with her titty in it. He wanted to see them both, so he pushed her down and tried to open her shirt more. She was kicking and yelling but he didn’t care. He felt real strong and real hard. And since she caught him doing his secret, he wanted to see her secret too. He started tearing off her shirt, but she fought and scratched so hard he finally banged the side of her head real hard against the floor and she stopped fighting. Then he pulled down her pants and looked at her panties. They were a lot smaller than he expected and on her bottom were words that didn’t make sense: It ain’t gonna spank itself! What did that mean? How could something spank itself? He didn’t like what it said so he ripped them off and ripped the rest of her top off. Then he looked at her, lying there only wearing a bra. It was lacy and he could see her nipples through it. That made him get extra hard. It made him want to rub himself.