Flip This Zombie (4 page)

Within lay the food of champions. And that wasn’t saying much. Some old PowerBars (and not even in the good flavors) stared back at me. There was a bit of beef jerky and a couple of MRE rations.

God damn, I missed food.
Real
food.

Not fast food, really. I’d stopped craving pizza and burgers and fries within the first few weeks and my body had thanked me for it by leaning out. No, now I missed weird stuff. Like cereal with skim milk. Or yogurt.

I know, I know, here I was in the middle of the desert and I was longing for bacteria-laden dairy. Whatever. I still wanted it. That’s just how the brain works, I guess.

After much consideration, I chose to pull out the bag of jerky and tossed it on the driver’s seat while I put the rest of the tin back in place behind us. We couldn’t eat much from our meager collection, not until we scrounged up some more stock to replace it, which meant either making a few store runs for trade items or taking a job from one of our better-paying customers.

When I glanced toward the barber shop, I saw Dave coming back out. He no longer carried the burlap sack of heads, but he had another curiously
small
paper bag in his hand, a remnant of the fast food I no longer craved.

He threw open the driver’s side door and got in. His lips pursed and he yanked the jerky bag from under his ass and tossed it and the take-out sack into my lap.

“What?” I asked as he roared the engine almost to the point of flooding it and gunned it back toward the highway.

He didn’t answer, but his white knuckles told a pretty fucking clear story.

“What?” I repeated. “What did Jimmy say?”

“Wasn’t there,” David’s teeth never unclenched as he spoke. “Left a note saying to leave the heads by the door.”

“Ah.” I looked down at the bag in my lap. “I assume
this
is what he left for payment?”

Dave blinked. “Oh yes. Please, open it!”

I sighed as I unrolled the greasy bag and reached inside. I pulled out one small box decorated with cartoon characters.

“Bandages,” I said as I stared at the colorful artwork.

“Oh no,” Dave said, enunciating very carefully now. “Not just bandages. Sponge-Fucking-Bob-Square-Damn-Pants bandages.”

“He lives in a pineapple under the…” I trailed off as Dave’s eye twitched. “Sorry.” I shook the box. “Half-full.”

David jolted his head toward me. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” I put the box back in its bag and tossed it in the back for storage later.

There was no response from my husband for probably about five miles.

“Fucking cheapskate,” Dave finally muttered, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as he stared at the expanse of highway.

I didn’t answer, mostly because there was nothing to say. I mean, we’d have cheerfully dressed wounds for a little bit, but I doubted Dave wanted to hear that.

I stared out my window. We hardly even noticed the burned and bloody cars that had been cleared to either
side of the road anymore. They were just part of the landscape now, like the desert or the mountains.

There was only barren wasteland to our left and right. Once it had been part of a city, but now… nothing. Well, almost nothing. Off in the distance, I saw movement down on the streets and in the flattened parks. Zombies lurching around, looking to feed.

“Hey, slow down,” I said as I reached in the back for one of the rifles with a scope. “I think some target practice might do me good.”

Dave did as I’d asked, dropping our speed gradually until we were only going about ten miles an hour. I rolled down the window and balanced my gun on the ledge. Carefully I took aim at a zombie dressed in filthy doctor’s scrubs who was standing on a street corner by what was left of a bus stop. Just standing there, like he was waiting for the 5:30 to…
hell
, I guess.

I gently squeezed the trigger and was rewarded by the plume of blood that burst from the back of his head. He collapsed in a heap on the sidewalk. I kept my eye focused through the sight of the rifle and watched as, sure enough, the explosive sound of the gunfire echoing in the desert air brought zombies racing from the rubble in a wave of snarling, drooling, sludge-vomiting unison.

“They’re coming for the on-ramp,” I said mildly as I pulled off another shot and dropped not one, but two when the bullet pierced rotting flesh so easily that it maintained its velocity and killing power.

“Ten points for two,” Dave said without acknowledging my first statement. He was starting to sound less pissed now, as he always did when the killing started. We
were a bloodthirsty little pair. What can I say? That MTV Generation thing might have had some validity.

David kept the car barely rolling even as the mob of zombies panted and weaved their way up the off-ramp. On- and off-ramps, especially ones with steeper grades, always trip zombies up, sometimes literally. They just don’t have the mind power to figure them out, so it’s hilarious. Like watching really stupid chickens peck around in a fucked-up coop.

Eventually, though, a hefty portion of the zombies I’d stirred up managed to make it up the hill and rolled toward us in an undead wave of arms (and lack of arms) and unkempt insanity.

I fired off a couple more shots, this time faster since the zombie horde was closer than ever.

“Any time now, sweetheart,” I said as I reloaded and fired a few more rounds.

“Oh.” Dave said, as if he’d been distracted and forgotten he had the power to save our asses. “Sure.”

He geared the van into reverse and backed up, spinning the wheel and slicing our back bumper through the mob in one clean motion. Zombies flew backward, smashing against each other only to pop back up, oblivious to the injuries to their dead bodies. They weaved toward us again like a limping collection of drunks to an overturned beer truck.

We were facing the wrong way on the highway now… not that it mattered. You could flip donuts on the I-5 in L.A. now and not hit another car (not that we would be so reckless… oh
no
, not us). Dave geared us forward and slammed a few more zombies across our hood before he swerved around and sped off toward the camp.

I heard dragging behind us, but after a while it faded. That happens a lot, actually. Zombie grabs your bumper, you speed off, find a dead broken zombie arm still clinging to the vehicle the next day. But it’s not like zombies have insurance, so why stop for the accident, right?

“
That
was satisfying,” I said with a sigh as we angled off the highway toward Tempe. “
And
you can add more to your steering wheel killing count.”

“Not as satisfying as it will be when I find Jimmy,” Dave said with a snarling sneer.

“There, there,” I said with a light pat to his arm. “Next time we’ll just let old No-Toes fend for himself. That’s the only way he’s ever going to learn.”

“That or a massive ass-kicking.”

“Well, if you do that, you’ll get to practice your new karate moves, so it’s a win-win, right?”

He chuckled. “Jujitsu, Sarah, not karate. Karate is like Trix. It’s for kids.”

“Wow, that was a particularly bad pun,” I said with a shake of my head and a smile.

As the sun slowly set, he stared at nothing in particular until we left the highway. Since we’d come to Phoenix, this route had become second nature to us. Even if I closed my eyes, I knew the turns to get down the extra-wide streets to what was once the ASU campus and more specifically Sun Devil Stadium.

Of course, the zombies, the government, and the survivors had made a few alterations to the campus (and all without having a bond vote… who says the system doesn’t work?).

With over seventy thousand students, professors, and other faculty at work and studying on the campus at the
time of the outbreak, the zombies had ripped through the school like a black, drooling plague when the outbreak reached the city, about five days after its initial burst in Seattle. So while David and I were fleeing
our
city,
this
city had encountered its own version of hell just like so many others in the West.

So, the government had come with its planes and bombs and destroyed everything. Did it curb the zombies? Sort of. But I hated to think about how many survivors were taken out along with the living dead.

But those of us who were left were making our mark on the landscape now, too. As we turned down one of the more narrow streets that had once taken football fans to the parking lots near the stadium, we saw the wall.

Remember the big wall around the town in the second Mad Max movie? Well, it was kind of like that. Except without the faux-punk influences and the special kind of crazy that was Mel Gibson (who, by the way, I’d heard was turned into a zombie on like day four, though that might just be a rumor).

Constructed of debris, fencing, cars, anything that could be moved and stacked, really, had been placed around the caved-in walls of the camp to keep the zombies out and the people safe.

It worked most of the time, too. There had only been a few instances where zombies had either figured out how to scale the wall or someone infected had made it past inspection.

Dave shot me a look as the big gate (made of some kind of sheet metal siding as far as I could tell, with “New Phoenix” painted on it in bright yellow spray paint) slid open and allowed us into quarantine.

“Be nice,” he said softly as he followed the gatekeeper’s instruction to park to the left. “You pissed these guys off last time.”

“One of those fuckers grabbed my boob to pose for a picture,” I snapped as I glared at the small group of guys with their weapons ready outside my door.

David rolled his eyes. “He was just excited to meet the famous Zombiebusters. It’s your fault with all your brand building and shit. You’re Fucking Paris Hilton to these people.”

I grimaced. “No, c’mon. Make me someone cool. Let me be… Anne Hathaway or Maggie Gyllenhaal.”

“Okay, Indie Princess,” he said with a shake of his head. “Whoever you are, be
good
.”

I folded my arms. “I’ll try, but the last guy is just lucky I didn’t take off his hand.”

Dave shook his head, but I’m pretty sure he smothered a smile even as we got out of the van. The gatekeeper, a guy name Smith, tilted his head in greeting as we moved around to the front of the vehicle. We’d left the lights on—that was standard procedure so that we could be checked. Or molested. Whichever was the case for the night.

“Hello David, Sarah,” Smith said with another nod. “You know the drill.”

We did, of course. Without much discussion we showed the checkers our arms, our legs, necks, anything that was a common target for zombies. They checked out clothes, too, and if there were rips or tears, you had to lift them up to verify you hadn’t been bitten, but not yet turned. No one touched my chest, probably because I was using my mean glare. At least, that’s my assumption. It might have also been because I kneed the last guy who did it in the balls.

Once they were satisfied with our status, Smith motioned the others away. I heard them whispering about Zombiebusters as they did so and I couldn’t help but smile.

“You can park over there,” Smith said, motioning to the line of cars in the white zone past the next gate, which was just a chain-link fence. “And lock your weapons in the car.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dave said as he moved to the vehicle. “We know the drill.”

He pulled the van through to parking but I stayed behind with Smith. He was a middle-aged guy with an air of ex-military about him. Maybe first Gulf War, though we never talked about it. The fact was, we were all soldiers now. There was no need to compare war wounds.

“Any news?” I asked.

Smith had the dusk-to-dawn shift at the gate and he always heard the first whiff of anything from the badlands as the survivors rolled into camp for the night.

He shrugged. “Just the usual. People yapping about the Midwest Wall, a few new pods here and there, that sort of thing.”

He chuckled as he grabbed for a cigarette from his pocket. I noted he didn’t light it, but just sucked on the filter. Not that I blamed him. Cigarettes were valuable in trade (which I have to admit, David had thought they would be when this all started and I’d given him shit about it). You couldn’t just light up anymore.

Still, it was a shitty way to reduce the lung cancer rate.

“Oh, yeah,” he said with a laugh. “Some loons are talking about special zombies.”

I had been looking off past the second gate to see where
David had parked, but now I snapped my head around to look at Smith. “What do you mean ‘special’?”

“Dunno,” he said. My tone must have revealed something because he looked closer at me. “Just said they were different. Why?”

“Jimmy No-Toes said something similar about a pod in the Basilica,” I said with a frown. “But all we found were regular droolers.”

“Told you it was the kooks talking about it,” Smith said with a shrug. “You can’t exactly trust No-Toes.”

“That’s what David said, too,” I said softly.

In the distance I saw Dave loading up a pack for our nightly supplies. As he locked up the van, he looked in my direction with an expression of confusion. Usually I only talked to Smith for a second or two.