Life After the Undead (Completed)

PART 3: The Mad Scientist .1

Melissa's P.O.V.

"What did you do before this?" I asked.

Evelyn and I were sitting in her kitchen and waiting. Once she had realized that I was uncomfortable upstairs watching the death she had ushered me down to the main floor. She had made me tea, handed me a bowl of ice cream and the two of us had been sitting in silence ever since. Not for lack of trying mind you, Evelyn just didn't like answering questions.

I jumped whenever a scream was heard, but Evelyn seemed unfazed by it. I should have been accustomed to death as well, I had been around it enough but the dying screams of those Drifters still made me nervous and somewhat sick to the stomach. You would have thought that the zombies would have gotten them all by now.

Evelyn looked up from her teacup. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She had been deflecting all the questions I had been asking her, answering with one word curt response. If I had to guess, I'd say that Evelyn didn't know how to make small talk. Maybe she had lost the ability during the apocalypse, but something about the uncomfortable look on her face told me that she had never been very social before either.

"I was a scientist," she said with a proud tilt of her chin. "For the government."

I nodded. I had gotten a sentence there. "Doing what?"

Evelyn ignored my question and got up. She put her teacup in the sink and then looked out the window. "I think it's safe to go out now," she said walking away from me and toward the stairs.

"Safe? You let the zombies out! It's not safe!" I cried after but Evelyn didn't listen to me. I listened to the sound of her feet as they pounded up the stairs and sighed to myself.

There was no stopping her, she was going to unlock the house and the zombies were going to get in. I quickly got up and began to look for a weapon just as the house began to shake again. The window shutters went up, the doors unlocked and Evelyn came back downstairs.

She said nothing to me as she walked back through the kitchen and to the back door. She made no comment about the kitchen knife in my hands, in fact she ignored me entirely to stomp out of the door.

"Alright guys, away from the moat and back into the compound!"

I knew it was Evelyn talking, in her own reprimanding voice. But I couldn't believe that Evelyn was going to demand that they return to their cage and expect them to go. I crossed to the door, brandishing the knife in front of me, to see that the zombies were all shuffling towards their compound, not a single one snapping or snarling at her.

I waited until all the zombies were back in the compound and for Evelyn to shut the door behind her before walking out of the house to join her. She was leaning over the cage, staring down into what I had always known as the hole. I stood with her, leaning over to see what is was she was looking at, and found that what I expected to be down there was not there at all. It wasn't holding cells, or just a muddy hole, but a very extravagant training course.

There were walls to climb over, barbed wire to go over, doors to open, automatic guns to evade, the place was better than a police or army academy. The zombies were shuffling back and forth, opening doors while one stood right in the middle watching her.

This one was a tall male, used to have black hair. He wore a faded tie-dye shirt covered in rips, gunshot residue and blood stains. His worn mud covered jeans were skinny so I guessed he was hipster. That meant if he had shoes they'd be something pretentiously long and skinny. His skin was sallow and hanging off his cheeks, there were rips on his neck and his arms, looking like scratch marks or knife marks. Blackish brown blood leaked from his wounds and from his mouth. His white eyes never moved, but stayed fixated upon Evelyn.

"Don't look at me like that! You got a whole bunch of fresh flesh!" she snarled down to him.

My mouth was hanging open in shock, I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. Firstly, what the hell was Evelyn training these zombies for? And secondly, why the hell was she talking to the zombie like it understood her?

She shot a glance at me and took in my horrified stare. She straightened and put her hands on her hips as she stared back at me. "What?"

I pointed down to the zombie arena and asked very strictly: "What the hell is that?"

Evelyn looked down again and then back to me as if I had asked her the stupidest question in the world. "That's a zombie. I named that one Paul. He's a smart bugger that one, he's been here six months. Most zombies only take three months to train."

I blinked my eyes and then scowled at her. "I meant that! What are you training them for?"

Evelyn looked back down and for the first time fell silent. There was a lengthy paused before she said: "I don't know... it's just a fun experiment that I do in my spare time."

"What are you a mad scientist?" I asked.

"Yes," Evelyn replied in a tone that told me she was being completely serious and I was slightly concerned.

That was the moment that I decided the Shady House wasn't worth it. Safety and being able to avoid zombies would never be worth it, not if that meant having to deal with Evelyn. The woman would never trust us with the codes, and the house was probably booby trapped and set up to explode if someone other than Evelyn tried to use the computer.

That was going to be it, the end of my obsession with Evelyn and her amazing house, until something collided with my head and the world blurred into a fuzzy black dot.