Are We Still On For Tonight- Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse

44 Pages·2016·0.33 MB·English

by  Lafont Evelyn

Are We Still On For Tonight? Dating During the Zombie
Apocalypse
by
Evelyn Lafont

Are We Still On For Tonight? Dating During the Zombie Apocalypse Copyright
© 2012 Evelyn Lafont. All rights reserved worldwide. Text cannot be distributed
without prior written permission of the author, with the exception of brief,
attributed quotations on web and print media. For questions or permission of
usage, please email [email protected]

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance herein to real people or places is
purely coincidental.

Kindle edition: February 2012
About the Book

Not everyone who survives the zombie apocalypse should.
----
Rachel Finnikin was prepared for a lot of things. She was prepared to marry a
rich doctor. She was prepared drive a luxury vehicle. She was prepared to be a
rich lady of leisure.
She was not prepared for the zombie apocalypse to effectively cancel her first
date with Dr. Dream-Come-True.

Rachel isn’t one to let something as ridiculous as a horde of savage undead ruin
her chance of a dream future. Instead, she allows her underlying ruthlessness to
seep out as she works to survive the zombie apocalypse with every hair in place
AND make it to the restaurant by 8 p.m.
But will the doctor?
----
This novella is approximately 16,700 words. That translates to a 50-60 page
book.

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Chapter 1

“No. No way. No. I cannot believe this!” I stared down at the jagged edge of my
once-perfectly manicured index finger and felt my brain squeeze tight in
frustration.
“You sonofabitch. Do you know how much this manicure cost? How long it
will be until I can find an experienced manicurist who is alive and able to fix it?”
At the sharpness of my tone, the flesh-eating cadaver stopped moaning and
reaching around the chair I held between us. Even dead, he could tell he’d really
messed up. But his pause was short-lived and he immediately began trying to
chomp down on my head again.
“Oh, no you don’t, John. You are not going to get away with this.” I looked
to my right and saw the umbrella rack along the wall we derisively called
Executive Row—an outlying region of real-walled offices lining the main
corridor that allowed the executives in charge of this part of the cubicle-dense
office to oversee their employees in cubicle land. Conveniently, it held an
umbrella that one of these people-munching bastards must have brought in a few
hours before the world fell apart.
I grabbed for it while keeping the wheeled office chair between John and
me, not once taking my eyes off his cloudy-eyed, gnawed on face. After some
blind groping, I felt the wooden surface of its handle. I closed my hand around it,
raised it up with the sharp metal side pointed down, and thrust deep into John’s
eye and through the optic nerve hole. He dropped like a bag full of last season’s
Manolos while the resulting explosion of eye goo and blood spatter added a
Pollock-esque design to the umbrella’s dark blue polyester surface.
“That’s better than you deserve, John,” I lectured, wiping my hands
together and holding up my ruined manicure as evidence of my former
manager’s misdeeds. “I should have made it last longer.” I pushed the chair
aside, stepped over John’s blood-covered chew toy of a body, and craned my
neck to look down the hallway on my right. All clear—time for me to leave.
Unfortunately, I was paying so much attention to the hallway that I missed the
stealthy movement of the now-undead office assistant, Mary, as she reached for
my unguarded left shoulder.
It wasn’t until I heard the shlocky suction sound of Mary stepping on
John’s head, crushing his jaw and getting her foot stuck in the bile from his wet,
mutilated mouth that I even knew I was in danger. I turned and watched as she
struggled to free her foot from John’s face. She’d be stuck for a couple of
seconds, so I crept backward into her office to look for an instrument to use for
her final death.
It was ironic that John and Mary were now trying to eat me since, like me,
they had been among the survivors. Apparently, we were immune to the
biological warfare chemical sprayed by … well, I don’t know who the hell
sprayed what the hell. What I do know is this:
I came to work on Thursday, as I would any other day, except that I came
looking really, really hot. I had a date later that night and no time to change
between work and meeting the young doctor who’d be buying my arugula dinner
salad at Le Boeuf Grande, the exclusive, new French eatery by the water. I wore
a little black dress with a Hermes scarf and a small red jacket, intending to
remove the jacket and scarf for the date so my cleavage would be properly
displayed. In honor of the momentous doctor date, I’d treated myself to a
manicure and blow-out at my favorite salon the day before.
Sometime around ten, while on the phone with a client in London, I
realized that the normal noise of office life—calculator and keyboard clicks,
muted conversations, doors opening and closing, staples stapling, and papers
shuffling—had been replaced by the sound of airplanes. Dozens of them. It’s no
surprise to have airplanes in the area since there is a small private airport nearby,
but these planes were so loud and so close that I couldn’t hear my client. Then,
the phone line began to crackle. I mentioned to him that I was having trouble
hearing him due to an abundance of planes in the area and weirdly, he said that
he was having the same problem on his end. The hairs on the back of my neck
stood at attention as I wondered if there was a terrorist attack commencing on
my little city in Florida and London. I looked above my cubicle wall at the floor
to ceiling windows facing the city to get a glimpse of the imminent disaster.
Instead of open sky, the area was filled with different types of airplanes.
I glanced around and saw everyone on the eighth floor standing slack-jawed
in their cubicles, staring toward the windows. I heard a splat and turned my head
from my coworkers in time to see a viscous, green-tinged fluid hit all the
windows simultaneously.
I dropped the phone and stood, trying to look beyond the planes
surrounding the building, and saw billowing clouds of green infusing the air,
falling all over the city. It was like our ocean side metropolis was being readied
to play Oz’s Emerald City. The silence in the office around me was ominous, as
was the continued splat of the liquid hitting the building.
Then, one by one, most of the people around me began coughing.
I grabbed my throat, readying myself to fall into a hacking, phleghmy fit
like everyone else, but whatever was making them cough wasn’t affecting me,
Mary, John, or Eloise in the department next to ours. I looked around, unsure
what to do, and made eye contact with Mary.
“What do you think that green stuff is?” she asked, as if I would know more
than she did, even though I was standing in the same building, watching events
unfold at the same pace.
“Does it matter? It can’t be good,” I said, drawing my eyebrows together
and pointing out the coughers as an illustration of the ensuing not-goodness. She
ran into her office and got the first-aid kit—an OSHA-required box that held
bandages and rubbing alcohol but, as far as I knew, no cough syrup or
antibiological warfare serum.
She started walking around the office, asking the coughers if they needed
anything—water, soda, coffee. None of them could answer her or even bothered
to indicate that they heard her. I was about to search my desk drawers for cough
drops when it got worse.
Much worse.
One at a time, the coughers began disappearing from sight, falling to the
floor, twitching and tearing at their throats. Soon the air was filled with the
sound of hissing, scratchy, desperate breaths. I turned to see my cubicle mate,
Tony, beginning to dig his fingers into his neck as if performing his own
emergency tracheotomy.
As all the coughers finally dropped to the floor, it made those of us
unaffected even more nervous and obvious, since we were the only ones left
standing. Looking over the expanse of low, gray cubicle walls, I made eye
contact with each of the unaffected, finding my own expression mirrored in
theirs—totally frightened and unsure what to do. We were frozen.
John looked confused. He kept taking his hands out of his pockets,
furrowing his brow, pointing at the ceiling and opening his mouth, shaking his
head, closing his mouth and putting his hands back in his pockets. Mary was
definitely not going to accept what was happening and distracted herself with the
mundane…like first-aid kits. Soon, the air grew heady with the scent of copper
as my coworkers bled out from their failed alternative breathing plans.
I briefly wondered if I should call the young doctor to make sure our date
was still on, but decided to wait until everything settled down before I made a
personal call. At this point, there was really nothing left for us to do but survive
until we could get to safety. After seeing how many planes were in the sky and
how much of the green liquid they had spit out, I assumed that “safety” was
going to have to be a relative term.
I looked down and considered trying to help Tony. He had blood bubbles
coming from his throat—a situation I really didn’t know how to fix. I mean, it’s
one thing to walk him through opening a client account in our new system and a
whole ’nother to help open his throat to challenge the traditional breathing
paradigm.
Mary cried loudly, running from desk to desk, picking up every phone and
tapping the hang-up buttons over and over again, screaming that she needed to
call emergency services. It was spooky listening to the rattled breaths of the
infected combined with the clicking of buttons and an increasingly frantic,
“Hello? Hello? I need 9-1-1!” as Mary tried to reach a world that was likely
caught in the same cycle we were.
John walked away from the window and grabbed Mary’s arm to calm her
down. She freaked out and hit him in the head with a receiver. Of all the weird
things I’d seen this afternoon, that really took the cake. For some reason, seeing
a supposedly normal person hit another was worse for me than any weird cough-
inducing mystery gas or self-administered tracheotomies.
I looked away from John and Mary and the blood dripping from John’s
forehead, and glanced back at Tony. The bubbles in his throat had died down to
a running stream of blood and his chest was no longer moving.
Because he was dead.
I looked at Alex in the cubicle across from mine and saw that he looked the
same as Tony. They were dead. All dead. I grabbed a plastic bag I’d brought for
my morning granola, emptied it, put my fingers inside it and reached my hand
down to Tony’s blood-soaked neck, searching for a pulse. There was none but I
couldn’t tell if that was because he was really, really dead or because the plastic
bag was interfering. I wasn’t about to touch him without some protection, so I
shrugged and dropped the bag, which fell on top of Tony and left a smear of
blood on his new, polyester work shirt. I started to rise when his hand suddenly
lifted from the floor and grabbed my wrist with viselike strength. Relief washed
through me. He’s alive, I thought. But fear clenched my belly as he started to
pull my hand toward his mouth. Which was open. And making chewing
motions.
I struggled to get my wrist out of his grip, but Tony wasn’t giving it up. He
kept bringing it closer and closer to his drooling mouth. Just as his teeth grazed
my skin, I snagged a letter opener from my desk and stuck it in his arm. He
didn’t even pause in trying to bite me and since no blood flowed from his
wound, he didn’t even lose his grip.
Time for a rematch. I pulled the letter opener out of his wrist and was
aiming for his cheek when I accidentally rammed it into his right eyeball. I heard
a crunch as it slipped easily through the eye and into the back of his socket. That
apparently did the trick. His hand went limp, the loss of tension sending me
backward onto my ass.
Not wishing to remain at eye level with the newly departed and revenant, I
scrambled back like an awkward crab, jumped up, and looked around. I could no
longer see any survivors, but I sure heard a lot of moaning. And lip smacking.
The hungry kind.
Then, heads began popping up, making the office look like a life-sized
whack-a-mole game. I watched as my obviously dead coworkers, their necks
ravaged, rose and looked around. But it didn’t seem like their milky, unfixed
gazes were actually seeing. Instead, their heads were cocked, as if listening to a
high-pitched frequency, like a dog whistle for the undead. Their noses twitched
as though they could smell, too—though who knows how people who can’t
breathe are able to smell.
I joined them in looking around the maze of cubicles and made eye contact
with Eloise. She looked like she was about to shout something across the
department. I slowly lifted my finger to my lips and shook my head. I turned to
find John and Mary but they’d disappeared.
I heard movement behind me and knew that Alex had risen as well. I
struggled to make my breathing quiet, which is not the easiest thing to do when
you are right in the middle of a nightmare. My back started to feel very warm as
I imagined Alex sneaking closer to me and getting ready to bite. But I didn’t
need to worry, because with an audible crack, the heads of my former coworkers
simultaneously turned toward my department and looked at the small alcove to
the side of Mary’s office. As one, they ran past me, their movement lifting the
hairs on my head. It was like watching a pack of women who saw the next
season’s handbags being put out at Macy’s.
They ran together, organized and tight, right to the alcove where,
apparently, John and Mary were hiding. Because Mary had hurt John, he was
bleeding, and I guess the undead coworkers smelled it. I turned slowly, trying to
remain undetected, and watched as they descended upon my as-yet still-alive
coworkers. The zombies (yeah, let’s go ahead and get that word out of the way)
surrounded them and began … there’s no delicate way to put this … feasting on
this lo-carb snack. John and Mary tried to fight back, but from their position,
they were at an extreme disadvantage. I couldn’t say that wasn’t fitting since the
jerks had run away to hide and left me as zombie bait. I couldn’t see exactly
what was happening because cubicle walls were in my way, but from the
crunching, slurping, and chewing noises drifting through the air, it didn’t sound
good.
Not knowing when I’d get another chance, I decided to take advantage of
the zombies’ focus on John-and-Mary fricassee and get out of the building. As I
was about to sneak away, Eloise, the kindly call center grandmother, freaked out.
I don’t blame her, really. She started screaming and ran down the side of her
department, toward the common area. The zombies, including those busy eating
Mary and John, stopped what they were doing and turned toward the powerfully
tempting noise of fresh, free-range food. Then, as if sharing a form of silent
communication, they ran after her.
With Eloise as their new distraction, I mistakenly assumed the coast was
clear. I grabbed my purse and sneaked away from my cubicle toward the main
artery of the floor—and the elevators. What I didn’t know was that those of us
who were seemingly immune to the effects of the gas were only immune while
we were still alive. And that’s how John caught me off guard. I was walking
slowly—slinking is a better word—past the supply area. I’d reached the doorway
to Mary’s office when John, his neck bloody and chewed, cords of sinew and
muscle draped over his shoulder like a useless scarf, his right forearm missing,
caught up with me and grabbed my shoulder. I whipped around, knocking his
uncoordinated, newly zombified body back, and grabbed a wheeled office chair
that had been pushed into the corridor. I put the chair between us and John
bumped into it at the perfect time to ruin my nail, for which he got the very
serious punishment of umbrella to the eye.
Now it was Mary’s turn to try and eat me. And I no longer had a convenient
office chair to push between us. I backed into Mary’s office, reaching behind me
as I worked my way to her desk. She had disentangled her foot from John’s
mouth, and although her Mary Janes were now covered in gore, bits of bone, and
a few of John’s teeth, she was once again moving toward me. For a moment, I
was transfixed, staring at her shoes. She loved those things, and the squeaking
noise they made each time she stepped onto the linoleum in our kitchenette
didn’t seem to bother her at all. Covered in body mush, she sure had found a way
to stop the annoying squeaking.
She wasn’t moving as quickly as most of the first wave of zombies, but I
didn’t know how much time her learning curve would give me. As I patted
around her desk in search of an object to prolong my life while hastening her
death, my wrist brushed against her glass candy jar. God, I hated that thing.
Usually she kept hard candy in it, stuff that was easy to walk away from. But it
seemed like every time she heard I was going on a diet, she would suddenly fill
it with chocolate. The most passive-aggressive weight-loss sabotage ever.
I picked up the large glass jar in both hands and cracked it over her head as
she closed the distance between me and her mouth. The bitch’s hard-as-hell head
broke the jar and she was showered in Jolly Ranchers as she blinked her milky
eyes and paused from the force of the impact. Only broken shards remained, the
largest of which I held in my hand. Quickly, without letting myself get too
squicked out by it, I jammed the glass in her eye, since that move had been
working so well for me this morning. She crumpled onto a pool of shiny,
multicolored hard candy.
Resenting Mary’s passive-aggressive attempts to ruin my weight-loss
efforts were one thing (and if I was honest about it, I’d already paid her back
months ago by pouring sugar in the no-carb lemonade mix that she stored in the
office kitchenette), but killing her wasn’t as cathartic as I thought it might be.
I gently tugged my Hermes scarf over my nose to block out the sweet, stale
smell of old hard candy mixed with the coppery stench of blood and turned
around to look for a weapon I could carry with me through the building. I
opened her middle desk drawer and found a steak knife, the most important tool
in an Atkin’s dieter’s office arsenal, a letter opener, and a Swiss army knife that
she used to cut her nails at her desk while taking calls. I scooped up all three and
put the letter opener and Swiss army knife in the pocket of my blazer. That left
me armed with the steak knife, whose serrated edge still had bits of meat lodged
in it from Mary’s last low-carb lunch.
I was about to close the drawer when I noticed a folder that said “Annual
Raises.” I took out the folder and looked at the paper inside. It was a list of all
the people in my branch—all men except for me—their salaries and the raises
they were going to get at the annual review. Although I was new to the area, I
was not new to the company, so I should be receiving a raise, too. I wanted to
see what it would’ve been.
Naturally, I found that not only did I make less than all the men in my
office—some with less experience than me—but I was also approved for a much
lower raise than the others due to my consistent tardiness, tardiness that was
often caused by my investment in looking like marriage material every day,
something Mary and her round-toed shoes would know nothing about. I kicked
Mary in the head one more time. Women have to stick together—that she would
try to keep me underpaid for coming in late when my male coworkers never
showed up on time made me want to kill her all over again.