Flip This Zombie (24 page)

New problems, too. Bigger than budget cuts or the increasingly unprepared student.

I stopped at one of the classroom doors. It said
2B, MRS. PEEPLES
on the door. A perky little paper sun smiled down from near the placard, sunglasses perched on his round little sunshine nose. Tempered, fogged glass covered a big portion of the door, I guess to keep the kids from being distracted by stuff in the hall. Unfortunately, it also meant I couldn’t see shit inside. Still, there was no obvious movement from within to warn me off.

Slowly, I gripped the doorknob and turned it. Unlike the front door, it opened easily. No locks for classrooms, I guess. Inside, I looked around. Though there was a mustiness in the air from the room being locked up for so long, the familiar and comforting scent of chalk and glue still lingered in the background, taking me back to my own childhood.

Sun streamed through the big windows. They were filthy with sludge, both outside and more tellingly, in, and caked with sand from three months’ worth of dust storms, but they still provided enough light that I wasn’t totally blind. I glanced around, scanning for the teacher, even for a little kid who would make a good specimen. It may sound awful, but if it meant ending this, I’d probably take in my own mother.

The mother I currently hoped was safe behind what might be a mythical Midwest Wall.

“Mrs. Peeples,” I called out in the dusty air. “Time to come to class.”

Behind me there was a screech of a chair being pushed and I spun to face the sound. The door I’d opened then glided shut and standing behind it was who I assume might have once been Mrs. Peeples.

She was wearing a long, really
ugly
jumper-type dress that I think once had a Winnie the Pooh sewn appliqué of some kind on the front, though it was mostly ripped off with only half a honey pot and part Winnie’s little yellow leg left behind (fitting in a zombie world). Beneath it, she’d once worn a yellow t-shirt of some kind, but it was turned brown and smudged from the months of devastation.

She’d been sensible and worn little Keds with ankle socks, probably so she could chase her class around outside at recess, but sometime over the intervening months, the little thin soles had worn off, leaving her mostly barefoot.

“Gross,” I whispered as I shuddered at the sight of her dirty, bloody toes.

Some things are still yucky to me. Feet are one of them, okay?

I guess my commentary must have offended her, because Mrs. Peeples bared her teeth with a grunting roar in a tiny little voice that was almost cute except it signaled a real desire to deal death and undeath.

I yanked the dart gun from across my back and aimed just as she started toward me in a jolting, dragging speed walk. Her arms flailed around her almost like they were disconnected and her head turned sideways as she sniffed for me as these things often did.

I pulled off a shot and the dart entered her neck exactly where Kevin had told me to place it. She kept moving forward, one step, two steps, three…

Bam!

She teetered forward, her red eyes rolling back in her head, and then collapsed down on the ground between the
mess of little desks that had been tossed about during the outbreak.

I stared down at her, totally silent and unmoving. Had I killed her? Had the fall killed her? I mean, zombies are half-rotten, so they often die from head blows that would only give a regular person a hell of a headache. That’s one of their few weaknesses.

I set the dart gun down and instead pulled out my 9mm. Holding it with one hand, I grabbed the zombie’s shoulder and flipped her on her back. She stared up at the ceiling with open, blank eyes.

“Not dead,” I said with a sigh.

See, they were still red. When a zombie dies their pupils go blank and black. They don’t stay red. Red means alive and wanting your flesh.

I stared down at the living corpse. Now I just needed to get her from the classroom to the vehicle. She was light enough to carry, but I wasn’t sure I trusted the sedative enough yet to just sling her over my shoulder and hope she didn’t wake up halfway down the sidewalk.

I pulled the rope from my belt and carefully bound her arms at her sides. I’d watched The Kid make his special “Boy Scout” knots about a dozen times, but I still wasn’t so great at it. When I tested them, though, they seemed like they’d hold for a while, at least.

Still, I wasn’t sure how to carry her. Dang, this was easier when I had Dave around. He could have taken the feet, me the shoulders, and we would have been loaded up already.

But he was gone and I had to do this alone now.

I sighed and looked around. Immediately, my eye was drawn to a cart in the corner of the room. It was covered
with paint jars and other supplies and was probably normally used to disperse those things to the kids for art class.

Today it was going to disperse me a zombie.

I grabbed it and pushed it over to the body on the floor. In one satisfying sweep of a forearm, I threw the paint and other things onto the floor. They clattered and banged, sending sprays of yellow and blue and red across the once pristine white tile.

Yes, there is
some
fun in being in an apocalypse. You do get to play at being an
avant-garde
artist sometimes. For instance, the stain across the floor was a part of my Blue Period, kept forever for posterity (or until someone covered it up or the building fell down).

With a chuckle, I grabbed the zombie teacher and flopped her up over the cart on her stomach. She hung awkwardly, her feet almost touching the ground on one side and her dirty hair swinging against the floor on the other.

I got behind the cart but it wouldn’t roll no matter how hard I pushed. With a curse, I bent to check the wheels. There was some kind of locking mechanism on the dirty, damaged metal that only allowed them to turn in one direction and no matter how much I pulled on it, it was rusted in place. With a sigh, I switched sides and began backing the cart toward the door.

I edged into the hallway, with my zombie making occasional little breaths in and me grunting from the effort of pulling the cart around with dead weight. Oh and also, the burden of her body kept the fucked-up wheels from spinning freely. Basically it was a clusterfuck, but it was the best I could do.

I cursed as the back wheels caught on the divider between the classroom and the hallway and started to tug, slamming the back wheels against the low edge again and again. The sound echoed in the empty halls,
thwack, thwack, thwack
!

And then the
thwack
was joined by another sound.

“
Ehnrrrr!
”

I let go of the cart, pulled my 9mm out, and spun toward the loud burst of nonsensical sound.

“Oh fuck,” I whispered.

My gun started to shake. Standing at the end of the hallway were two zombies. Little kid zombies in uniforms. A boy in short khaki pants and a white dress shirt, and a girl in a khaki skirt with the same white shirt.

They were filthy, covered in sludge and sticky blood. The girl zombie’s face had half rotted off, revealing some of the teeth beneath her cheek. The boy’s arm was gone at the shoulder and he hunched unnaturally in the other direction, like he couldn’t adjust to the misbalanced weight.

Remember that scene in
The Shining
with the twins where they want the little boy to play with them? Forever.

Yeah, I was having flashbacks, especially when both of them turned their heads sideways at the same time and sniffed the air together.

I turned to see if I had an escape route the other way, but what was at the other end of the hall was actually worse. Three zombies. One normal zombie, probably another teacher, judging by the brightly colored soccer ball tie he had once worn. It was now just a knot at his throat with tattered threads at the end (the shirt collar that had once held it was long gone).

But the other two were something different. Not children, not normals.

These two were bigger and they had a brightness to their red eyes that spoke of some kind of remnants of intelligence.

These two were bionics.

I
swiveled from one side to another, but all my mind could think of was,
now what
? Dave’s voice echoed in my head with the same thing he always said to me when the going got tough.

Stay calm.

I drew a deep breath and leveled my 9mm at the little kid zombies first.

What? They’re smaller and easier to take care of. Also, I was fucking terrified of the bionics and I wanted to just ignore that issue as long as I could.

Of course the second I pulled off the first shot and dropped the little girl zombie, the little boy started jogging toward me. Behind me the other three roared with blood (er,
brain
) lust and as I spun toward them, they started after me, too.

“Shit!” I shouted as I made for the classroom I’d just left.

Unfortunately, the cart with my unconscious teacher zombie was half-blocking the door and I couldn’t close it. The closed door wouldn’t offer me much protection, but at
least it was some kind of barrier between me and the attacking group that now gathered at the entrance, staring at me, turning their heads to the side like confused dogs.

All three regular zombies, including the child, ignored the cart and just started crawling over it to get to me. On top, my unconscious zombie chick whined in protest about the extra weight squashing her back… literally. But the zombies didn’t care, zombies never do, they just kept reaching out toward me, grunting and groaning.

But the bionics were different. They hesitated at the cart, staring at the unconscious zombie, then looking past her at me. I’m not going to say that their eyes reflected really clear thoughts on what I was doing… or even what they should do in response, but fuck man, they were certainly a lot more lucid about the situation than the others.

I backed up against the wall as I stared at them staring at me. The windows were behind me and beyond them the yard and escape, but they were the safety kind of window that tilted in so that the kids who were all amped up on sugar wouldn’t crawl out during class. By the time I figured out the safety releases, I was pretty much fucked.

The two bionics looked at each other now. The one in front had to crane his neck a little to do it and when he did I sucked in a breath of shock. The world slowed to half time and all I could do was stare.

There, on his neck, was a brand. Three dots and a line.

Kevin’s mark for his zombies.

I could hardly believe it and I shook my head like it could clear my eyes. But the mark was still there, bright red and tinged with black against the gray, rotting skin of the zombie’s neck.

Seeing it proved everything Dave had been saying to
me all along. He
had
seen the brand on the other bionic a few days before. And Kevin had fully admitted to me that he marked his specimens with the thing.

So if both those things were true, Kevin…
Dr. Barnes
had made these horrible things. And he’d looked me right in the eye and lied about it.

He really was a mad scientist.

Even worse than that, when the bionics started shoving the biting, growling normals out of the way and began to move the cart to clear a path to me, I got a better look at the bionic in the back.

He had long, stringy hair that fell over his face, wild, wide eyes that bugged out just a little, and dirty clothes, but they weren’t rotted away by weeks or months of lack of career. He was a fresh zombie, bionic or not. And an all-too-familiar one, at that.

“Jimmy No-Toes,” I said out loud.

He jerked his head up almost like he recognized the name, but then he went back to pushing the cart. Finally, the two of them got it over the lip of the door and shoved it with all their considerable strength. The cart flew out of the way, crashing against the desks in front of me, and cleared a direct path to me.

I lifted my handgun and fired off three shots in rapid succession. Even shaking, I got all the normal zombies right between the eyes. They crumpled in a big pile while still in the doorway, but the barrier of their bodies didn’t slow the bionics down. They just stepped over them and started toward me in a steady, flat-footed walk that kind of reminded me of Drago in
Rocky IV
.