Dead Men Don’t Talk

The dame walked into my office like she was fleeing from the apocalypse itself. Of course, with the zombie outbreak having torn the city a new one, most people had that haunted look in their eyes these days. But there was something about the way she carried herself, the tattered evening gown streaked with blood and grime, that told me she’d seen some serious shit go down.

“You’re Nick Blades, the private dick?” she gasped out between ragged breaths.

I gave a curt nod, motioning for her to take a seat across from my desk. “That’s what they call me. And you are?”

“Samantha. Samantha Wilkins.” She collapsed into the chair, her piercing blue eyes pleading with me. “My husband…he’s been murdered. And I think the living dead had something to do with it.”

I tried not to visibly react, having learned to keep my poker face on lockdown whenever zombies entered the picture. The outbreak had started a couple months back — just a few isolated cases at first, but it had spread like wildfire, turning the streets into a war zone.

“Start from the beginning, doll,” I said, reaching for a cigarette to calm my nerves. “And don’t leave anything out.”

Samantha took a steadying breath and launched into her tale of woe. Her husband Frank had been a bigshot executive at ZymCore Pharmaceuticals. Apparently, he’d discovered some deep corruption in their labs — illegal testing, creation of biological weapons, that kind of ugly shit. When he’d threatened to blow the whistle…