Mitch lingered longer than Max would have liked before pulling away.

"Here goes nothing."

The front doorknob wiggled and nearly broke off in Max's hand. He bent down to see the splintered jamb and the indentation in the wood that looked like the end of a crow bar. The door swung open and he rushed inside.

"Jess, are you here?" A large knife sat on the counter and he looked for blood. "Jess!" He swallowed hard and tried not to panic. "Jessica." Jacob's bassinette was empty in the middle of the kitchen. His blue, bunny blanket lay on the floor next to it. "Jess, answer me." Max frantically searched, listening for muffled sounds or crying. The silence scared him the most. He rushed into the back bedroom and found the bifold closet doors open. The right one he promised to fix was off its track. Jess's side of the closet had been emptied. Jacob's dresser, too. Max didn't know whether to smile or cry. Jess had left him, but at least she was alive. At least his son was alive.

He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and held Jess's pillow to his face. He breathed in the smell of the strawberry shampoo he'd fallen asleep to every night for two years and refused to cry. He set the pillow down and opened the blinds. He was soaked through with sweat and the air felt stale and stagnant. Preoccupied as he was, he disregarded the car parked across the street and focused instead on the square of folded paper sitting on the nightstand. The edges were worn, the folds nearly torn from excessive handling. Max carefully opened it and read the page three times before comprehending what it said. He hadn't been the only one keeping secrets. The results of a paternity test confirmed that Jacob wasn't his son. He was Mitch's.

A flurry of knocks came at the door.

"Open up, Reid."

It was two of his bookie's men, come to collect.

He had bigger problems to deal with and pocketed the results before making his way out the back bedroom window.

Mitch backed into the receiving entrance at the rear of the Nixon Healing and Research Center. Jim Lockard, the center's maintenance man, met him at the roll up door with a gurney and a Hispanic orderly named Miguel. Mitch's phone rang for the fifth time since dropping Max off. After sending the call to voicemail, he shut it off.

J.D. barked relentlessly inside of the van. He needed to go to the bathroom and Mitch hoped for a quick drop-off. When Jim approached, he knew he wasn't going to get it.

Mitch rolled down the driver's side window. "Where's Dr. Nixon?" He closed his hand gently around J.D.'s muzzle so he could hear what Jim was saying.

"He's not coming." Jim passed two yellow envelopes through the half-open glass, one for him and one for Max.

Miguel opened the rear doors and grabbed the woman's ankles, dragging her over the van's bare metal floor. He turned her so that he could get his arms under her and transferred her to the gurney. She moaned, and after situating her restraints, he hit her with another dose of sedative. He banged on the side of the van and waved for Mitch to come help him.

"Now what?" Mitch pocketed the envelopes and stepped out.

Miguel babbled something in Spanish and pointed toward the lobby.

Jim shook his head. "Nixon wants you to take her downstairs. There was a problem earlier and this guy's too shaken up to go down there. I had hoped you were bringing back-up."

"I don't want Max here. That wasn't part of the deal."

"Then you're on your own."

Mitch slipped the collar over J.D.'s head and tightened it one notch. He lifted him out of the box and handed him to Jim.

"Fine," he said. "But I need your elevator key and you're walking my dog."

Sun reflected off clear glass panels in the main lobby atrium that was the centerpiece of the Nixon Center. Staff shuffled in and out of the Ambulatory Surgical Center and none of them acknowledged Mitch as he moved past with the sheet-covered gurney. From the outside, the woman appeared as a corpse headed for the morgue. He approached the elevator, the only way down, and pushed the call button. A pair of elderly women turned away from him. A little girl with thin, blonde hair that reminded him of Amy's, stopped and smiled at him. Her mother rushed her away when she realized what she was looking at. The elevator opened and Mitch steered the gurney inside. He used Jim's key and the car descended.

The seconds from the lobby to the basement felt like minutes; the minutes walking down the hall where the test subjects were held, like hours. The air was thick with the unequalled stench of decomposition which burned his nose and made his eyes water. A year before, five patients with an unexplainable illness were air lifted to the center from a remote area of Haiti. Three of them were family--a father, mother, and their son. Two were male researchers sent to investigate the young boy that died and spontaneously resurrected in front of half of his village. Nixon intended to cure them, but when he couldn't, his experiment changed. Rumors circulated, but Mitch knew better than to ask for details. He kidnapped the women, took the envelopes, and whatever happened next, at least it didn't happen to him.

Max waited for Mitch's shift to start and parked on the edge of the Nixon Center parking lot. His muscles tensed and he rushed with adrenaline as if he'd just run a marathon. He pulled up his sweatshirt hood and walked through the row of parked cars, careful to avoid being seen by the cameras as he made his way to the locked, first floor security office and knocked.

"Mitch, open up." His instinct was to pound the door flat, to kick it in and drag Mitch into the hallway, but he knew better than to draw that kind of attention. He knocked again. "Mitch, you piece of shit, I know you're in there." He spoke through clenched teeth, becoming angrier by the second. Each knock was progressively louder. "Dammit!" He kicked the door with the toe of his boot and let out a frustrated growl.

"Can I help you?" A small, thin guard wearing Nixon Center blues and a pair of black-rimmed glasses stood with his hand on his Taser. His nametag said his name was Brian Foster.

"I need to see Mitch."

Brian shook his head. "I'm sorry. I can't help you."

Max checked to see that no one was watching and flashed Brian the pistol holstered at his side. "I'm not leaving without talking to him."

Brian went for his radio and Max grabbed his wrist. He spun him around easily and shoved him into the door hard enough to twist the glasses on his face. "Open it."

"I don't..."

"Before you tell me you don't have keys, realize that I know more about this place than you think."

"Is that so, Mr. Reid?" Dr. Howard Nixon walked up behind them wearing surgical scrubs and disposable booties over his shoes. Dried bloodstains spattered the sleeve of the white lab coat that appeared to be thrown on as an afterthought. He slipped the blue cap off of his head and smoothed the tufts of unruly gray hair.

Max took a deep breath and stood his ground. "I need to see Mitch." He tightened his grip on the guard.

"I wouldn't do anything rash if I were you." Nixon pointed at the mirror mounted in the corner. Max felt stupid for missing the nearest camera. "If you'll do me the courtesy of letting Brian go," Nixon said, "maybe we can help each other."

Max did as he was told and in the hour that followed, accepted a permanent position at the center, and his next off-site assignment.

Seventy miles wasn't far enough away to feel safe. Jess's phone rang; the tenth call since Max realized she was gone. His messages ranged from concerned, to apologetic, to angry. He told her he loved her. He called her a whore. He made obscure threats toward Mitch, who didn't know he was Jacob's father or that Jess had dumped that news on Max in anger. She called several times to warn him, but those calls went unanswered.

One night with Mitch, a fling she only had out of spite when Max spent their last hundred bucks on a bet, had changed everything. She never meant for anyone to know and wrestled with the decision to have the paternity test done for the first two months of Jacob's life.

The secret was bigger than any Max had kept and she wished now, facing motherhood alone and on-the-run, that she'd handled the situation differently.

It was almost midnight and Max was running on a dangerous combination of adrenaline, paranoia, and anger, having looked over his shoulder every minute since he left his apartment. He turned off his headlights and pulled into the woods using an old access road that was overgrown with saplings and ferns. The thin branches scraped along the sides of his truck and the shrill sound pierced the late night silence. He parked out of sight of the ramshackle cabin a few hundred feet on the other side of the tree line and looked for a clear footpath. An old pick-up truck idled in the driveway and the smell of exhaust choked him as he made his way through the trees. He covered his mouth to stifle the cough and took slow, calculated steps, careful to avoid the snapping and breaking of branches.

A young, pimple-faced boy in a gas station attendant's uniform slammed the front door and took a drag off the cigarette pinched between his thin lips. He climbed into the driver's seat and tore out onto the highway with the hurriedness of someone who was late. Sparks trailed as the dangling exhaust connected with the pavement. The truck rounded the bend and one by one, the lights in the house, now only feet away, turned off.

Max took the syringe of sedative out of his pocket. Nixon insisted there be no signs of struggle and was upset to know how things had gone with the girl they'd kidnapped earlier that morning. His obvious disappointment with Mitch made it that much easier to negotiate terms for himself. Max had yet to make the connection between the infected men and the kidnapped woman, but whatever research Nixon performed in the sterile, basement labs was not something anyone would want for their sister, wife, or girlfriend.

He made his way to the side of the house, keeping to the shadows in spite of the fact that the cabin sat in the middle of acres of woods and grass. He crouched beneath a half-open window and watched. Amy Porter tied back her stringy hair and dabbed some kind of cream on her spotty, red complexion. She brushed her teeth and adjusted the button-down nightshirt riding up the back of her underwear before heading toward the back bedroom.

Max pried the screen from the window. The blue latex gloves made it hard to maneuver the pins and the whole thing crashed at his feet. He held his breath for the seconds that followed. When Amy didn't appear, he pulled himself up through the ground-level opening with the syringe between his teeth. The wooden frame bit into his shoulders as he twisted to pass through.

The uneven floors creaked under Max's steps. He moved carefully and replayed every conversation he'd ever had with Mitch about Amy. Part of him believed that Mitch thought he was protecting her, belittling how much she meant to him. Part of him knew it was embarrassment. Max had known Mitch since he was six-years-old and some things didn't need to be said between friends. Against his will, he imagined Mitch with Jess, in his house and in his bed and able to face him afterward like nothing had happened. But something had. Something more betraying and terrible and cruel than even his mind could conjure.

He entered the bedroom and found Amy, eyes closed, listening to music through a pair of ear bud headphones. She was lying on her side, arm stretched overhead. The way Jess slept after her pregnant stomach became too big for her to lie on her back. He set the uncapped syringe on the nightstand and stood over her, unnoticed. The next thing he knew, he was on top of her, pinning her down and stuffing a wadded up tee shirt into her mouth to silence her screams. He tore off her panties, wanting to take from her what Mitch had taken from Jess. She thrashed and kicked and spit the gag out twice before Max buried it so deep in her mouth that she struggled for breath. He reached to unzip his pants and something told him to stop. Whatever Nixon planned for her would be worse. He plunged the needle into her bare thigh and her body wilted. Max let her arms go and imagined Mitch's reaction to finding her, restrained to a hospital bed in the Nixon Center basement. He slipped the paternity test into the breast pocket of her nightshirt where Mitch would see it and slung her over his shoulder. Nixon said he needed a female of child-bearing age. Amy fit the criteria. It hardly seemed payback, but it was a start.

Follow Max Reid's descent into madness in Cure: A Strandville Zombie Novel #1, and Afterbirth: A Strandville Zombie Novel #2 available in e-book or print from most ebook retailers.

About the Author: Belinda Frisch's fiction has appeared in Shroud Magazine, Dabblestone Horror, and Tales of Zombie War. She is an honorable mention winner in the Writer's Digest 76th Annual Writing Competition and her novel, CURE, is the runner-up in the General Fiction category of the 2012 Halloween Book Festival. She is the author of DEAD SPELL, PAYBACK, CURE, and AFTERBIRTH.

Find out more at: http://belindaf.blogspot.com/ April Grey I'll Love Ya Forever, But...

You know, it was a marriage they said would never last.

Even I had my doubts. After all, I was a dancer-dancer, mind you, not a stripper--at the Pussy Cat A-Go-Go Club and he was this geeky post doc at his friend's bachelor party. But I became a good professor's wife. I hosted faculty teas and luncheons, kept the house spotless, made healthy meals, kept myself in shape and raised two beautiful boys-one now at MIT and the other at Cal Tech.

Still, it's supposed to be until death do you part. Death: the parting of the ways. This whole eternity thing-I never agreed to it.

Faithful to a fault, that's my Fred.

And he wasn't buried three days when he showed up at the back door covered in dirt, and his feet, well, he had no shoes on, just socks. Wet, muddy, slimy socks! He should have told me, put it in his will or something, to bury him in shoes. I would have done it-I can be unconventional. He should have warned me, but he was always the typical absent-minded professor.

I was in such shock that I hadn't the presence of mind to shut the door on him. So now he was on my freshly washed kitchen floor, with moldering leaves and what have you, and he grunts at me.

"Huh?" I said, equally speechless. I kept that floor clean enough to eat off of and now look what he'd done.

He grunted again. Prior to his demise my Fred was a well-spoken man, and he had this amazingly plummy voice for his lectures.

"Fred, honey, I don't know what you're saying." He opened his mouth a bit wider and a few white crawly things, slugs, maggots, I don't know, fell out onto the floor. I shrieked and ran for the disinfectant and my cleaning gloves. While I was under the sink, trying to decide on straight ammonia or pine fresh, he shambled over. He was right there and tried to embrace me as I stood up with my supplies. Well, no way, I thought, though I was pinned to the sink. He smelled of soil and decaying things. Still I tried to stifle my revulsion. This after all was the father of my boys, so I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Neither could I accept letting him get one inch closer. I put out both my hands, filled as they were with cleaning products.

He grunted plaintively, perhaps at the expression on my face, and turned around moving toward the living room-oh, my white shag rug! The one that I waited years for the boys to get old enough to head off to college before getting. The one that I made everyone take off their shoes before walking on. That one!

Well, yes, Fred wasn't wearing any shoes, but that only made things worse; there was already a trail of grime across my kitchen floor. I know that Martha Stewart claims she can get out dirt from shag, but can you take the word of a jail bird?

It was time to lay down some guidelines.

"Fred, Lovey," I said as I got out some chilled wine from the fridge. I froze. I had had that wine in the fridge chilling since before his accident at the lab. The dinner I had planned that tragic night was trout almandine with green beans and rice. Healthy meals, that's what I strived for. Pulling myself together, I found the corkscrew and opened the wine. "Please sit down and have a little. I know this has been a stressful time for us both. Why, the boys lost a week from their classes, and only flew back last night. I'm sorry you missed them."

I must have been getting through to him because he turned away from my shag and came back towards the kitchen nook where I had poured us two glasses of wine. I patted the wrought iron cafe chair, hoping he'd take a seat. I only meant to sip my glass of wine, but the sight of him, and his yellowing, hard boiled eyes, upset me. I downed it and poured a second glass.

"Sweety-kins," I began, using the back of my hand to wipe away a dribble of wine from my chin. "This isn't going to work out. You know I adore you, and I'll love you always."

He moaned and the sound of it drove a cold chill down my spine. I forgot what I was going to say for a moment, while I wondered what that green and fuzzy thing was on the side of his nose. Was it growing there?

He was trying to say something, maybe that he loved me too. But did he love me enough to stop this insanity and head back to his grave?

"You know, you can't stay here. You're dead and your new home is in the cemetery. Remember? We picked out the grave site together. You really loved those cypress trees!" I tried to be as gentle as possible. "And the funeral, I guess you don't remember that, but the boys were there and all your colleagues from the University. And what would they all say after such a beautiful ceremony? It would be downright rude not to stay dead." I gulped down another glass of wine and felt the room whirl.

"And I promise to visit you every week. Won't that be grand?"

He didn't touch the wine, but grunting even louder returned to the entrance of the living room and my shag rug. I hadn't gotten through to him at all, and now my rug was about to pay the price! Where was that reasonable man I had married? Gone forever, I feared.

I didn't know how I would stop him but I ran past him into the living room and stood in front of him, wordlessly begging him to stop. But stop he didn't, instead he pushed past me and crossed my rug leaving a dank, black, oozing trail across it. But the rug was not his final destination, and he entered his study. I was tempted to shut the door behind him and lock it. But then what would I do? I had to somehow get him to understand his place in the world was the graveyard now that he was dearly departed.

Inside the study I found him tearing through his desk. He slipped a vial of some grey-green concoction into his coat pocket, and then continued to throw papers on the floor. His study was the one place in the house where I wasn't allowed to go while he was alive. After his demise, it had taken me hours to collect and sort his papers, but I didn't complain about this new mess. I can be noble.

With a happy grunt, he found his research journal. It was his habit to have two sets of notes, one in his study for him to pour over at night and the second one at his lab. I smiled and nodded--maybe he just wanted some reading to take with him?

He brandished it at me. I read the cover, "Immortality Project." I sighed. Poor, poor Fred. I usually spent the time when he was talking about his work figuring out the dinner rotation or the week's grocery shopping in my head. Had I known, I would have told him what a dumb idea it was.

Immortality? Who would fund something like that?

"Is that it, Fred? You wanted to tell me what you had been working on? Well, I understand. It all went wrong, horribly wrong. You're dead now, and it's time to head back to Shady Elms. I'll miss you, but I'll come by every week with fresh flowers. You'll see that being dead isn't too bad."

With a howl he rushed forward and lifted me up in his arms. I shrieked, and then I kicked and pushed against him, but to no avail--he was walking on my beautiful shag again--this time headed for our bedroom. Now I didn't have just one filthy path to clean but two. I had to admire his strength though; lugging me around like that should have thrown out his back, but here he was carrying me without a moan or even a grunt.

I've always been careful with my husband's feelings. Scientists are like artists, sensitive, but he just wasn't getting the message. Something dropped off of him and wiggled itself down into the shag. I screamed and pounded my fists on his all too solid back, enraged that not only would I have to get it cleaned but fumigated as well.

But just when you'd think it can't get worse, it did. He crossed the threshold of our bedroom and I realized that he was about to violate the pristine ambiance of our bedroom.

"Put me down, Fred. I'm not going to make love to you. No, means no!" He ignored me. Crossing the pale pink and beige carpet of our bedroom, he tossed me on the bed like a sack of turnips.

"Please, in the name of all that is holy, there are 400 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets on this bed."

Sex, great sex, had been the mortar of our marriage. In the bedroom together, we were frenzied, exotic animals pounding out our differences, but I draw the line at necrophilia.

I opened my mouth to tell him no one last time, but he grabbed my jaw. With surprising deftness, he unstopped the vial I had seen him put into his pocket, and poured the stuff down my throat.

It was as if liquid nitrogen had been poured into me, instantly freezing my mouth, jaw and neck. I felt it slide down my throat into my stomach, and an intense iciness enveloped my torso and spread through my limbs.

The only heat remaining to me were my tears pouring down the sides of my face. As my vision faded, Fred leaned over and mouthed some words.

I can't be sure, I can only hope, but I think he said, "Trust me."

Well, maybe Martha was right about getting dirt out of shag....

For more stories and information, please visit : http://www.aprilgrey.blogspot.com and www.aprilgreywrites.com Michelle Kilmer and Rebecca Hansen EXCERPTS FROM THE SPREAD:.

A ZOMBIE SHORT STORY COLLECTION.

Written by Michelle Kilmer and Rebecca Hansen ***

THE PRICE OF CONVENIENCE.

After the healthiest snack he could find at a mini mart a snack pack of apples and grapes Paul was back to his delivery route. His health had not improved and he was looking forward to finishing early. When he checked his clipboard for his final stop, he felt like going home immediately instead: it was Thea Mathes.

"I have to get rid of this route," Paul said to himself as he pulled his vehicle to the curb. Before he had even loaded his hand truck with her groceries, Thea was at her window watching his every move.

Even if Paul could forget about this crazy woman, her doormat would remind him whose house he was at. It read "Wipe your feet three times before you hit the chime!" As he did, he could swear that Thea was counting. What would you do if I only wiped once? He wanted to ask her.