She probably shouldn’t encourage him, but she’d missed him, and yes, even his comments that in any other workplace would have been bordering on sexual harassment. “I’m sorry, there’s only space for me. You’ll have to settle for looking,” she retorted, the apology as fake as her expression of sadness. “I could get used to having my own servant though,” she mused. “You could fetch me things while I’m autopsying zombie corpses.” She curled her fingers around the box and opened it to check the contents, mentally adding the numbers of gauze patches to the ones that she’d already shifted to a new cabinet.
“Is that so? And what medical expert told you that, Zachary?” she asked, lips quirked in an amused half-smile. “If you say a magazine I’ll know you read all the Cosmos left in the other room.” She kicked her feet a little, leaning further than she should have to try and reach a box of surgical gloves. “And as a pickup technique, it’s a little to overt for my taste, for future reference.” She straightened up again. “I’d rather be wooed before I’m propositioned.” Not that wooing her was difficult, she liked a good make-out as much as the next woman. But there was a little bit of hesitation in taking Zach seriously, because he was still technically a coworker.
Could it be considered a successful strategy if Zach hadn’t said anything about it yet? Her little plan to keep him from jumping in with both feet too quickly. She was going to say yes.
The question was a little out of left field, but not something she hadn’t heard before in different circles. “I believe we don’t have enough of the factors to weight it one way or another,” Talia answered. “The impossibility of it is hard to calculate when you take into account that zombies shouldn’t technically exist to begin with.” She chewed her lip in thought for a moment. “But, given the factors I have seen, I wouldn’t say I’m overly optimistic of the possibility. It wouldn’t quite be like trying to cure cancer. The bodies that are shuffling around are most certainly dead, and it’s a little difficult to come back form that. But it started as a virus, so it’s also possible that it could be reversed.” And she was rambling a little, but it was sometimes difficult for her not to when a medical question was posed.
“And I realize that was a little contradictory, but it comes down to not knowing enough to answer in a concrete way,” she added after a minute to pause.