Imprisoned by the Zombie Boyfriend I Picked Up

I yanked my hand back from him, and heat flooded my face so fast my eyes stung. Ash stared at me over the steel muzzle, while the bulge in his pants kept swelling. I turned around and ran. The lab door slammed behind me, and I locked myself in the storage room with both hands pressed to my burning cheeks. A zombie had gotten hard under my hand, and my own body had answered with a heat I did not want to explain. Two hours later, I finally opened the laboratory door again. But Ash was still hard. His gray eyes were fixed on me, and a low growl rumbled in his throat. I almost wanted to turn and run right then, but if I ignored it, I might lose the only sample I had ever caught. I could not untie his hands. He was still a zombie. That left me with one option that made my ears burn. I had no choice but to get him off by hand. "This is medical," I told him, kneeling between his bound knees. His gray eyes dropped to my hands as I opened his pants. He sprang free, thick and flushed and painfully hard, and the cold of his skin made me suck in a breath I was not ready for. I wrapped my hand around him and started to move. I had never done this for anyone, and it showed in the first clumsy stroke, too tight and then too loose. My wrist was already complaining before I found a rhythm that changed the pitch of his growl. His hips jerked against the ropes, and the chair legs scraped the floor, but he still did not try to break free. I kept going until my forearm ached and my palm felt raw, and he was still unfinished. Heat had gathered between my own legs without permission, and I hated that I noticed it. I had not touched myself in months. He has no mind, I told myself, staring at the bound man in front of me. He cannot judge you, and in practical terms he is no different from a toy. I repeated it until I almost believed it. Then I stood up, pushed my pants down, and climbed onto his lap. I sank down against him with the hard cold length of him trapped between us, and I started to move. The first grind dragged a sound out of both of us. He was cold and I was burning. Every slide pressed him against the place that had been aching since I ran from this room. I rocked until the chair scraped the floor. His growl broke into something raw behind the muzzle. I felt him jerk and then spill, hot against my stomach and the front of my only shirt. I froze on his lap, then climbed off him and looked down. This was my only set of clothes. "You have got to be kidding me," I muttered, staring at the stain. "I have one shirt, Ash. You couldn't have warned me before you—" The word that cut me off was low, rough, and unmistakably human. "Sorry." I froze, my mouth falling open in shock. Heat exploded across my face. Ash—this zombie... how could he speak?!

I found my voice again in pieces, standing there in my ruined shirt. "Do you understand me?" I asked, and he gave a small nod that still knocked the air out of me. I had called him a good boy. I had said, out loud, that he was no different from a toy. He had heard all of it. I wanted the floor to open. "Have you understood me this whole time?" He nodded again. Shame sat in my throat so thick I could barely swallow. He had been conscious when I climbed into his lap and used him. "Why didn't you say something?" He was quiet for a long time. "Hard." Talking was hard for him. He could follow everything, but the words he could push out were few. I should have been terrified. Instead my brain started sorting data, because data was safer than the heat still in my face. If the virus had left this much of him intact, the things walking outside might still be worth saving. I grabbed the communicator and tried Dr. Mercer on every channel. There was still no signal. I sighed. Then I suddenly remembered the Zombie King he had mentioned before. Ash was different from ordinary zombies in too many ways, but— But a Zombie King would not let a woman my size drag him home and tie him down. He had sat in those ropes for days, unable to break free from even a few simple restraints. Perhaps he had only mutated. I went back in because the shirt was stiffening against my skin, and I could not take notes like this. I stripped, washed the clothes in rationed water, and hung them near the heater. That left me in a bra and underwear in a lab not built for this. Cold air touched my bare stomach and the tops of my thighs. Ash looked at me once. His gray eyes dropped from my face to my throat, then to the thin fabric over my chest, then lower. He went still. I felt every place his eyes stopped. Heat crawled up my neck. I crossed my arms, then dropped them. Covering myself in my own lab felt like admitting something I was not ready to name. The ropes creaked. He turned his face away so fast I heard the muzzle tap his shoulder. A flush sat under the cold skin of his throat. His hands fisted against the chair. Lower down he was starting to thicken again. His body had not gotten the message that he was trying not to look. I was almost naked. He was still tied down. The space between us felt too small. I remembered those two hours and felt my face go hot. If he stayed like that, I would have to touch him again. This time we both knew he could hear me. That thought made my knees feel weak. I was still standing there when he spoke, each word costing him. "Down. Box. Clothes." I stared at him, then went to the basement because I had no better idea. The supply box was sitting against the far wall, Inside were clothes in my size, bottled water, and enough dry food to last. I put a shirt on fast. That was strange. I was sure those shelves had been empty last week. But the only other presence in this district was zombies. It wasn’t as if some zombie had deliberately put them there. I laughed at myself. Maybe I simply hadn’t noticed them last time, and Ash had some kind of sense that allowed him to find them. I went back upstairs and started teaching him words. Out of caution, I still did not untie him. He was still a zombie. Then one night the lab door burst inward. A rotting body came through, jaws open, heading straight for me. I could almost smell the rot on it, and for a moment I thought I was going to die there. Ash roared. The ropes snapped like thread. He hit the thing so hard its skull caved, then stood over the wreck looking at me like he did not know what to do with his empty hands. Still shaken, I looked at the ropes it had snapped. "You could break those the whole time," I said. "Why didn't you?" He was quiet. Then the words came out low. "Didn't want you scared."

He had stayed in that chair because he did not want me afraid. I looked at his empty wrists, then at the wrecked hall, then at the way he was still waiting to see if I would run. "Okay," I said, and I meant it even though my hands were shaking. "No more ropes. You saved my life, and I am not tying up the person who did that." The muzzle stayed on that night.他主动要求带着，以免我害怕。 By morning I had locked the shutters, cleaned the hall, and started teaching him letters with a children's reader from the staff lounge. He learned fast, faster than the speech, his cold finger tracing A and B and the shape of my name. What he wanted most, I did not expect. Whenever the lesson drifted, he pointed at old magazine pages, the ones with couples holding hands, kissing, rings held between two fingers. "This," he said. "Want know this." Human courtship. So I explained it like a lecture. People start with hands, I said, and then they kiss, and if they mean to stay they give a ring. He listened without blinking. Then he looked at my mouth and said, "Show me." I should have said no. But for some reason, I hesitated, then unfastened the steel muzzle with my own hands as if possessed. His mouth was right there, human and unmarked, colder than it had any right to be. I leaned in and pressed my mouth to his. The first contact was clumsy, more press than kiss. Then he learned the angle from me and kissed back with a focus that made my thoughts slide out of order. I kept repeating that this was courtship research. My body did not care about the protocol. I was wet before the kiss broke, and I hated how easy that had been. His hand found the waist of my pants, then the heat between my legs, and he watched my face the whole time he touched me. I came apart on his fingers with my forehead against his cold cheek. He did not stop there. He went to his knees on the lab floor and put his mouth on me. The first pass of his tongue was ice, and the shock of that cold tore a sound out of my throat. I gasped and pushed at his head. He did not need to do this. This was past data and into something I had no protocol for. He lifted his mouth just enough to speak. "You helped me. I want you happy too." He went back down, and the cold stubborn rhythm of it pushed me over again until my knees gave and he had to hold my hips. For a second I thought he would take more. He was hard against his own pants, and when I reached for him he caught my wrist and shook his head. "No," he said, and it looked like it cost him everything. I did not understand him then. I was still shaking when he lifted my left hand and slid something onto my finger. It was a ring, too cold and too sure of itself. I did not know where he had gotten it. The thought that something was wrong flickered and died under my own exhaustion. A human and a zombie had no future. He was only imitating. He did not understand real love. The pickup team was coming, and when they arrived this would end.