Flip This Zombie (3 page)

“Still fastidious after all these months,” David muttered.

“I. Don’t. Like. Goo.”

I shot him a glare when he dared to
laugh
at my suffering, but quickly refocused on matters at hand.

There was a small foyer area directly behind the doors and it flooded with light from outside for a brief moment before those same doors swung shut behind us. In that brightness I saw a bulletin board that had once touted church socials and announcements but was now tacked full with multiple layers of handwritten prayers and desperate pleas for news of lost loved ones.

There was also a blank space where a collection box once sat. Half the note requesting funds from visitors and parishioners alike was rotting away on the wall behind the space. That box had been ripped free early in the outbreak, when people still thought money had value.

Times had certainly changed. We used Benjamins as fire starters now.

Once our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we moved into the main church area with extra caution because the area was so exposed and open.

The pews that had once been so carefully arranged to face the front of the church for weddings or sermons were now overturned, broken, and in some cases, even burned. The high domed ceiling rose up above us and the stained glass that capped it sent sprays of color down across the marble floors.

Red was the main color in the dim hall, red from the glass, the red of the torn carpet that had once lined the main aisle… red from the blood.

Over the past few months I’d developed an abiding hatred for red. Too bad, really. It had always been my color.

“Anybody home?” Dave called out.

We waited for a moment to see what the call brought us. Often any loud sound brings zombies coming to check
out the new food source. That was why it was better not to use guns in close quarters or to shout too loudly during a fight, because that was like setting off a “zombie goodies” beacon.

But today Dave’s question brought nothing but silence in return.

“I don’t see or hear any pilgrims, either. Maybe the morons finally figured out this wasn’t an oasis,” I said softly. “Stopped making themselves zombie bait.”

“I doubt it,” he said with a sigh. “Some people
never
stop making themselves zombie bait. That’s why we have a job, remember?”

I was about to come up with some kind of witty reply when there was a crash across the large hall. Both of us lifted our weapons higher as we peered through the hazy light. At some point, someone had the sense to build a sort of bunker on the elevated platform that held the altar and the sound had come from there.

“Here we come, bionic zombies,” I muttered.

Now when all this started, I was a normal person. Okay, a
reasonably
normal person. The first zombies I killed scared the shit out of me. I dreamed of them, my sleep troubled by nightmares where I was overrun, overcome, bitten and changed just like so many people I knew and loved had been. I saw them in every dark corner when I was awake, too. For at least the first month, everything made me jump.

But over time, fear had given way to anger and my kills had gotten easier and bloodier. And then anger gave way to pure and simple job satisfaction. I mean, when I looked at a dead zombie head on a spike, I thought, “Hey,
I
did that. Picasso would be proud. Especially how I rearranged that eye.”

In short, I was a proficient zombie warrior and took pride in my work, but that first thrill of emotion was now gone.

Except for today. Now, with the idea of a newer, scarier kind of zombie out there for me to kill, my heart raced and my bat shook just a little.

If Dave noticed my new attitude, he didn’t say anything. As we reached the altar, he merely motioned his head to the left and then to the right, indicating we should each take a side and come around the back to see what had caused the crash. I chose to go to the right and we reached the sides of the bunker at about the same time. Peering over the low wall, I suppressed a sigh.

There was a zombie down in the bunker all right, munching happily over the corpse of a woman. The victim was unkempt, her dress ragged and dirty. The only nice thing about her was the huge diamond-encrusted cross that hung from her obviously broken neck. A pilgrim, no doubt, come here to find God like the rest. Instead she had found this.

Her eyes were blank and dead for now, but that would soon change as the zombie ate at her freshly killed flesh and sucked at the blood that trickled from the ripped and tattered wound at her chest.

Her killer was wearing the tattered remains of a police uniform, complete with shiny, black baton that still hung from his nearly shredded belt. I eyed it with interest because it would make a great bludgeon for our purposes now that he didn’t need it anymore.

Dave took the lead. He vaulted over the bunker like a cat and, with a slash of his machete, took the head of the cop zombie just as it lifted its red eyes and recognized
there was a new person to kill. In another hacking motion, Dave beheaded the victim of the zombie.

“Nothing bionic about this one,” he said as he grabbed the zombie cop’s skull by the unkempt, once-blond hair and lifted it up. The dead flesh of its scalp strained and cracked as Dave held it up to the light so we could see it better. “Just a regular, stupid zombie.”

“Yeah, well get its regular, stupid baton, then,” I said with a nod, but before I could say anything more, three additional zombies appeared from the doorway that led to the back of the church behind Dave.

“Oh, and correction. There are
several
regular, stupid zombies,” I said as I hurried around the bunker to face our enemy.

You know that one move every girl lead makes in kung fu or horror movies? The one where she’s wearing head-to-toe black leather and she has a kicky haircut and she crouches down on one knee with her opposite foot sort of laid out and then she slices and dices… all while looking super doable?

Well, the Kate Beckinsales and urban fantasy heroines of the world lied to us. That does
not
work. First, leather is hot, it stinks to high heaven, and it limits your movement. Oh, and it chafes like a motherfucker.

Second, you just don’t want to get lower than your prey and you certainly don’t want to be all off-balance. That’s a great way to go down on your ass and have a rabid zombie on top of you.

How do I know this? Well, I’ve tried some stuff since the outbreak, okay? Might as well learn from my mistakes.

Anyway, instead of making the pretty movie move,
I jumped down from the elevated altar with a cry and smashed the baseball bat down on the crown of the first zombie’s skull. There was a wet, satisfying thud as his rotting head disintegrated and he fell at my feet.

With a tug, I freed my bat from his broken brains and turned on another, which was lurching toward me. His torn and bloody priest vestments flopped around his arms and the wooden rosary around his neck swung as if he were directing a rather passionate sermon. I set my legs and raised my bat over one shoulder.

“Sarah steps up to the base, Sarah swings and…”

I hurled the bat around and cracked the zombie straight in the temple. He gave a pained and faint growl as he staggered backward, bounced off the wall (leaving a trail of sludge behind him), and fell to the ground where he lay still and silent.

“Home run!” I said, lifting my arms in victory as I turned to find David finishing off the third and final zombie with a swinging thwack of his machete. “The crowd goes wild!”

“It was a foul,” he corrected as he gathered up the head of the zombie he had felled and tossed it in the sack with the others.

So you’re probably wondering why take the heads. Well, about a month before, Jimmy No-Toes and some of the other “clients” who frequented our extermination service had gotten really weird about wanting to verify our kills. So we started bringing the heads back in order to collect our full payment for the jobs we did. I hadn’t developed the stomach for head removal and collection, though, so that fell to my husband.

I wrinkled my nose as David moved to take the heads of
the two zombies I’d killed. I turned my face so I wouldn’t see him hack and muttered, “Foul my ass.”

He arched a brow at me as he tied off the sack and flung it over his shoulder like a really screwed up Santa Claus. You did
not
want this guy coming to your house Christmas Eve, that’s for sure.

“You
really
want to argue with the ump?” he laughed. “That’s how you get thrown out of a game. Now, why don’t we clear the rest of the building?”

I shrugged as I folded my arms with what I admit was a bit of a childish pout. “What’s the point? There are no bionic zombies.”

“Did you really think there were?” Dave asked as he shot me a look from the corner of his eye.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Jimmy seemed so… so…
honest
about being afraid of whatever he saw here. There are a lot of ways you could describe that guy, but honest isn’t normally one of them. I guess it just caught my attention.”

“I still say he was drunk… or stoned,” Dave said with a shrug as he motioned me deeper into the church. “Actually, I’m going to ask him to pay us the second half of his debt with whatever he’s been smoking. Sounds fun.”

For the next twenty minutes we didn’t talk much as we cleared the rest of the big building. There wasn’t anything else to be found, though. As we returned to the van and reloaded our stuff, I shook my head.

“It’s never been that empty,” I mused as I stared up at the pristine building amidst collapsed and ruined hell.

Dave nodded. “Yeah. Normally we find a couple of lurkers and a half-dead pilgrim per trip.”

“It’s kind of creepy,” I whispered.

He patted my arm as we finished loading up. “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe the pilgrims have finally gotten the message that it isn’t safe. If they stopped coming here, the zombies would have to find somewhere else to go for their buffet.”

I continued to stare at the building even as I climbed into the van for the return trip to Jimmy’s hideout. “
Maybe
. I mean, I hope so. But there’s something just so
off
about it.”

Dave turned in his seat to face me. “Come on, Sarah, you aren’t letting yourself get all caught up in Jimmy’s ghost… er,
zombie
story, are you?”

I shrugged. “Why can’t it be possible that there are different kinds of zombies? That maybe there
are
ones who are stronger?”

“Because the zombies were made by people and those people are all long gone. Those… those
creatures
are just lumps of empty flesh that can’t…
die
like they’re supposed to. They don’t evolve or think or feel, they just feed. You know that.” He turned the key and the engine roared to life. “Or at least you should after all this time.”

I frowned as I stared out the window in silence. Part of me knew that Dave was right. That I was just letting myself get worked up by a drunk with a vivid imagination.

But part of me still wondered, as we turned away from the church and crossed over the shambled tracks of what used to be the Metro, if what No-Toes said about bionics was possible.

And what would happen if it was.

W
hen we pulled back up to Jimmy’s barbershop a short while later, things were almost back to normal. Or… whatever the closest thing was in the zombieverse. I won’t say I was totally convinced that the bionics didn’t exist, but I was well on my way to putting them out of my mind.

“Want to wait here?” Dave asked as he put the pistol he’d rested on the dashboard back into his waistband and reached in the back for the burlap sack of heads.

I shrugged. “I guess I can start thinking about food while you make the drop.”

Now normally we didn’t split up, but David was armed and this was merely a swap job with Jimmy. In and out.

Still, I put my own 9mm in reach on the dash as David exited the vehicle. As he walked up to the shop door, the bag of heads swung at his side in rhythm to his step and dripped sludge behind him like a surreal telling of Hansel and Gretel (I guess that would make Jimmy the witch and would explain why he was dressing the part).

When Dave disappeared into the shop, I reached behind me and grabbed an old tin box we’d taken from a military surplus store we’d found a while back. When I opened it, I groaned.