Flip This Zombie (2 page)

Despite that, downtown was where Jimmy No-Toes lived. Why No-Toes? Other than that he had no toes on his left foot, I have no fucking idea.

“Watch yourself,” David muttered as he cut the
van’s engine and looked at the burned-out building our “employer” for the day called home.

It had once been a barber shop, I guess, and Jimmy had found it hilarious to paint the old-fashioned barber’s pole with black blood and sludge from dead zombies. Most of whom
we
had killed, by the way.

I pulled my pistol from the back of my waistband as I opened up the passenger door and both of us checked around us. Guns were a great way to dispose of zombies, but the sound brought others running to check it out, so whenever possible we used other tools.

David pulled open the back of the van and I looked inside at our arsenal, collected over the past few months and tested tried and true (seriously, we should have made a stamp for these things that said
SARAH AND DAVID APPROVED!
Maybe next apocalypse, huh?).

“What does my lady prefer for today?” Dave asked as he flipped his hand palm side up and gestured to the weaponry before me like he was Vanna Fucking White.

I stared at the cornucopia of choices stacked and hung in the back of the van.

“Well, the scythe is always fun,” I mused. “But unwieldy in tight places like Jimmy always calls us to. Same thing with the chainsaw, and it stalled the last time I used it in Mesa Verde, which was almost very bad.”

David flinched at the memory. “True. How about an axe?”

I tilted my head as I examined the gleaming blade of my favorite axe. “No, not today. Just not in the mood for that, or the sword.”

Dave’s eyes lit up. “Wait. I know what you want.”

I gave him a look as he took off around to the driver’s
side back door of the van. In a second, he was back and he was brandishing the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

“I call it the home-run-you-through,” he said as he held out a heavy wooden baseball bat that had a long, wicked sharp spearhead firmly attached to the end by some kind of metal twine. “And I’m copyrighting that as soon as we find a patent office, so no trying to rip me off.”

I grinned as I reached out to take the bat. It was balanced perfectly and would do the job of both smashing and stabbing zombie heads nicely.

“You
do
know what to get a girl for Christmas,” I murmured as I put my handgun back in my waistband and stepped back to perform a few practice swings and stabs in the air.

“Oh no, baby,” Dave said as he grabbed a machete and shoved his shotgun into the sling around his back. “This isn’t half as cool as what I have planned for our first zombie Christmas.”

I laughed, but the sound faded as he shut the double back doors of the van and we faced Jimmy’s barber shop. “Want to do this?”

Dave nodded and we inched forward, ever at the ready. The door to the shop was locked, but the glass around it had been broken, rendering the lock useless anyway, even to a really stupid zombie. Dave rolled his eyes and reached through to throw the latch and let us in.

Jimmy had no toes, but I should also mention he wasn’t exactly brainy, either. Probably why he was constantly asking for our help. He could find a pod of zombies better than anyone I’ve ever met, but he was too lazy or dim-witted or
both
to do anything about it.

“Jimmy?” David called out into the dusty dark of the front room of the barbershop. “Hey, it’s ZBE, Inc!”

I rolled my eyes. “God damn it,” I whispered. “That isn’t what we call ourselves.”

He never looked at me, just kept moving forward. “It’s a perfectly legitimate shortening of our name and I think it’s catchy.”

“We have a fucking brand to maintain here, David,” I insisted. “All the marketing books say—”

I didn’t finish because off to my right I heard a faint scrape. Both of us spun toward it, weapons lifted.

“Fucking Jimmy, if that’s you come out or you’ll be shish kabob in about three seconds,” I snapped.

There was a low, entirely unzombie-like chuckle and then Jimmy himself stood up from behind a bank of barber chairs. He had long, unkempt hair and I could smell him from across the room. And it isn’t like anyone could take a long, hot, fabulous, steamy shower with shower gel and shampoo and conditioner that smelled like lilac and… oh, sorry, had a moment of fantasy there… but most of us had figured out how to freshen up in the worst of circumstances.

Not Jimmy, though I doubted he’d been much of a hygiene freak even when the world was normal.

“Nothing turns me on more than hearing you two bicker. How’s the make-up sex?” he said with a laugh.

I wrinkled my nose. “You are the most disgusting human being I’ve ever met.”

He bowed slightly, greasy hair falling over his face for a moment and blocking out the crooked, dirty teeth and the scraggly beard that completed the picture.

“Pleased for the compliment.”

“Asshole,” David muttered.

Jimmy laughed again, finishing it up with a wet, sickly cough that made me frown. As much as I disliked the guy, the fact that he always sounded like he was on the edge of keeling over worried me. There weren’t many of us humans left in the badlands, we had to do everything we could to stay alive.

“So what do you need, No-Toes?” I asked with a sigh. “We saw your note in the Sun Devil camp. It said something about a pod?”

The jovial quality to Jimmy’s dirty face faded and his bloodshot eyes went wide and, to my surprise, filled with fear. His hands shook as he gripped the back of one of the barber’s chairs.

“Y-Yeah, but this ain’t no ordinary pod, Sarah,” he said with a shake of his head. “There’s something different.”

“Different?” David said with an incredulous lift of his eyebrows. “What the hell do you mean,
different
? Zombies are already pretty
different
.”

Jimmy shook his head quickly. “But these are… bigger. And faster.”

“Jimmy,” Dave sighed in exasperation. “What the fuck have you been drinkin’, man?”

“Naw, it’s not that,” Jimmy insisted as he came out from behind the chairs and hurried toward my husband with outreached hands. Both of us flinched at the increased stench in the air that wafted ahead of him. “I swear, dude. These ones, when they look at you… it’s like they
see
you.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dave shot me a look that said he thought Jimmy was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but I wasn’t so sure. He looked
genuinely afraid and not in the normal “I saw a zombie and I’m too lazy to kill it myself” way.

“So where did you see these… these…
bionic
zombies?” I asked.

Jimmy turned on me, his neck craning as he jerked out a quick series of nods. “Yeah, bionic. That’s right!”

“Where did you see them?” I repeated softly.

“Near that church by where the convention center used to be downtown,” he muttered and then let out a shiver.

I nodded. The governmental bombing had destroyed most of the buildings in the main downtown area, but the church, which was actually called St. Mary’s Basilica, had remained standing. Religious nuts called it a sign and kept trying to go there to pray or whatever, which of course brought the zombies there in droves to feed. They might as well have changed the name to St. Mary’s Feed Trough and started taking reservations from the zombie horde.

Would they require a jacket and tie for that?

I sighed. “Okay, we’ll check it out.”

Dave shot me a look, but my expression kept him from saying anything to me. He shook his head. “Yeah, but we’re going to need to get
paid
this time.”

All Jimmy’s fear fled his face and he looked at Dave like he was the picture of innocence. He had the gall to sound affronted when he said, “Of course. I
always
pay.”

“Six beers for three zombies is
not
a fair trade fucking system, No-Toes,” Dave barked. “We get paid in food, medical supplies, ammo, all kinds of shit by everyone else but you.”

I couldn’t help but smile. Yeah, my baby was an ass-
kicker. Gotta love that in a guy. Jimmy didn’t seem to, though. His face darkened with fear again and just a touch of anger.

“I don’t got nothing else,” he insisted.

Dave moved forward. “Look, you little looting scum, I know you keep finding pods because you’re hauling all over gathering up shit to trade at the survivor camps. You can’t say anything that’s going to make me believe otherwise. And this time I want payment up front or no killy the zombies, bud.”

Jimmy shot me a look as if he hoped I might take his side in all this, but I just shrugged as I flicked a piece of lint off the blade at the end of my baseball bat. Finally his shoulders slumped.

“
Fine
,” he said. “I’ll go get you some shit now and I’ll give you some more when you come back with zombie heads.”

Dave smiled, ignoring Jimmy’s muttering of all kinds of slurs as he turned on his heel and headed toward the doors that led to the basement area where he kept his stash.

“Nice,” I muttered when he was out of earshot. “Very brawn, not brains of you.”

“He’s finally fucking cracked,” Dave said with a shake of his head. He paced around the cramped barber shop restlessly. “Bionic zombies? And thank you, by the way, for encouraging him with that little label.”

“You saw his face, though,” I said as I stared where our little friend had disappeared. “I think he’s genuinely scared.”

“No way.” Dave shook his head. “He’s probably just high. Or drunk. Or both.”

“He certainly reeks of it, but I don’t think so,” I said. “Whatever he saw, he believes it’s real. Are we going to check it out?”

Dave chuckled as we heard Jimmy coming back in the distance. “Of course we’re going to fucking check it out. We’re the Zombiebusters, aren’t we?”

W
e ended up with quite a haul as pre-payment for the bionic zombie job. Two large first aid kits with actual antibiotic ointment (quite the coup because infection took down as many survivors as zombies did by this point) and a three-pack of Ramen.

Doesn’t sound like much to you? Well, sit there in your non-zombie paradise and judge then. Trust me, that shit was worth its weight in gold and then some in the badlands.

But neither of us was thinking about our good fortune as we slowly pulled around a few burned-out vehicles and maneuvered past a portion of a once-four-star hotel that had collapsed months ago.

No, when we pulled into the Basilica’s half-empty parking lot, I think both of us were pondering the idea of a bionic zombie. A zombie with powers. Superpowers.

Well, at least with a little more awareness.

David shut the van down and both of us looked up at
the imposing building. On some level, I sort of understood why idiot “pilgrims” would keep coming here despite the danger and even almost certain death (or living death).

Every other building on this block had been flattened, so with all that destruction around it, the old-fashioned mission-style building
did
stand out like a beacon. The only signs that anything within its walls had changed were the burned-out cars in the parking lot and the streaked blood that stained the stucco walls on all four sides and from the base of the building to about six or seven feet high (about as high as a person could reach).

Of course,
inside
was a whole different matter.

“I hate this place,” I muttered as we got out of the van and went around the back to load up on weapons.

Unlike at Jimmy’s hideout when we’d been lightly armed, this time we each took multiple weapons and grabbed for plenty of extra ammo, plus a big burlap bag for zombie heads. We’d been around this block a few times, we knew to be ready.

“Well, you were always more of an agnostic,” David said as we moved through the dusty parking lot.

The front doors of the Basilica were the same material as the stucco walls, meant to blend into them almost seamlessly. The bloody handprints that stained the walls also covered the door and were heaviest all around the handle. I wrinkled my nose with disgust as I shoved my hand into my sleeve and pushed the door open without touching it.