A/N: Welcome to my new fanfic based on Z Nation!
I sat up slowly, tiredly. Emily wasn't in the cab of the truck. I opened the door and jumped out.
"Emily?" I called out, softly at first. I called out again, a little louder. "Emily?" No response still. Now, I called out frantically, as loud as I could. She could probably hear me if she was a mile away, given this open land. "EMILY?!"
I looked in the bed of the truck. She was there, laying on her side. I got very worried, because she had been laying there and had not responded. I jumped up into the bed and gently shook her.
"Emily?" I said again. Suddenly, she turned towards me quickly. But "she" wasn't Emily anymore...
"No..." I murmured as zombie Emily growled. In my shock, I stepped back and fell over the side of the truck. I landed hard. A sharp pain coursed through my body, and I winced with the pain. I could clearly tell I had broken a bone in my leg. There was no escape...The Z leaped down from the truck. "Don't do this..." I said.
Suddenly I felt a slap on my cheek and the Z disappeared. "What the?" I said out loud.
"Dammit, Michael, wake up!" I heard Emily's voice.
I shot up very suddenly in a cold sweat, breathing heavily. Emily was holding me tightly. "Thank god." She muttered.
"Did you slap me?" I asked.
"Yeah, I had to wake you. You were...shaking and muttering incoherent things. I thought you were having a seizure or something. You had me worried sick." She replied, with a soft look in her eyes.
"For once." I muttered jokingly, and she responded with another slap. It was clearly playful, but still hard. "Ow! Hey!" She just grinned widely. Emily was always harder, more rough, more gruff, than necessary. But that's what I loved most about her. Her attitude meant our survival.
She was a hardcore Marine who'd served two tours of duty in Afghanistan when this all happened. She'd saved me from joining the Z's when they attacked my college in northern Wisconsin, and we'd traveled together after that. We gradually grew attached to each other.
"So you wanna tell me what happened?" Emily asked after a moment.
"I dunno if I should..."
She grabbed me and pinned me against the seat, a furious look in her eyes.
'There we go. That's the Emily I know.' I thought. I don't know why I loved her seemingly bi-polar attitude. There was something about the way she went from "I love you" to "I'm going to put a bullet through your brain" and back that made me love her more than any other girl I had dated before.
"You're going to tell me, and you're going to tell me NOW." Emily hissed.
"Okay, okay. It was a really remote place. Practically a desert, nothing around for miles. I woke up in the back of the truck and you weren't there. So I went looking for you and I find you, or what I thought was you, in the back of the truck. I tried shaking you awake and suddenly you were a Z. And you attacked me. I fell off the side of the truck and broke my leg. You were...about to..." I trailed off.
Emily gave no response, just had that damn sympathetic, soft look in her eyes. Honestly, I hated that look. I hated her worrying about me. A badass girl like Emily who toted an 50-cal machine-gun around with her shouldn't have to worry about some insignificant guy like me. But she did, because she loved me. I was the only person who could make Emily not look like a massive jerk. And she was still like that around me, sometimes. When she met me, her first words were, "I hope your life was worth saving, prick." It sounds rude, and it probably was meant as such at first, but after a while it became Emily's way of displaying affection. Usually.
"Well, I don't look like a Z, do I?" She grinned, slipping an arm around me.
"No." I replied, a small smile returned.
"The only time you and I are going to be Z's is when we grow old and die together. For now, we've got my 50-cal, you with the M14 I gave you, and just about every grenade and blade we both can carry. If anything's going to stop us, it's going to need to be a Z the size of a Titan." She continued, kissing me lightly on the cheek.
"Yeah, I guess you're right. So, uh, good morning?" God dammit, why did I have to be so awkward?
Emily voiced my frustration at my previous sentence in her own way. "Good god, boy, you are so awkward. You just love ruining our moments, don't you?" She said, retaining her smile but rolling her eyes. She moved up into the driver's seat.
I smiled back, quite sheepishly. "Yes, dear, you are always right." I joked as I climbed into the passenger seat of the truck, and we were soon off on another apocalyptic road trip.