Flip This Zombie (6 page)

“A call for an exterminator?” Dave asked as he flopped down on his cot with an exhausted sigh.

Drea shrugged. “I don’t know. It didn’t say specifically.”

I tilted my head in surpise. Normally messages for us were pretty fucking clear. Like, “get the fuck over here, there are zombies” kind of clear.

“Do you want to go look?” I asked Dave.

He shook his head. “Not now. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

We talked for a little while. These two had the
best
stories… and not just zombie ones. I mean ones that made us all forget zombies even for a little bit. I don’t know what Josh did before the outbreak, but Drea had owned a restaurant in L.A. that had attracted all kinds of celebrities. She had stories about famous people… well, they were pretty entertaining.

But eventually exhaustion took over and we blew out the Coleman lantern.

With the end of electricity, people had quickly returned to the schedules of the farm days, rising at dawn, working during the light, and returning “home” at dusk to turn in. Within minutes of the light going out, the other three exhaled deep, heavy breaths.

But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about bionic zombies and the Midwest Wall and a thousand other thoughts Dave wanted me to forget so I could live in the now. But the
now
sucked big time. I couldn’t just forget that and go to sleep like he could.

With a sigh, I pushed out of the sleeping bag and put on my boots. I grabbed a flashlight and finally slipped out of the tent into the night air.

P
hoenix may be warm during the day in November, but it’s brisk at night and I immediately regretted not grabbing my jacket as I used a sputtering, blinking flashlight to guide me out of the sleeping area. Pretty soon the battery would be dead and we’d have to use another precious one in our dwindling supply. With a frown, I turned off the light and headed toward the center of camp by the light of the full moon overhead instead.

It was weird how much little things changed after an apocalypse. Big things, yeah, you expected those, but the tiny shit still took me off guard. For instance, six months ago if you’d taken a stroll around the campus here at night you would have heard cars on the streets, the yells of frat boys screaming drunken boasts and making general asses of themselves, even planes flying in and out of the airport, which wasn’t too far away. Basically lots of background noise that indicated a certain kind of life.

But now other sounds were clearer. Outside the walls
of the camp, coyotes moaned and howled as they retook their territory and crickets chirped in the stillness. Humans still had a place though. In the distance I heard the light strum of guitars and the faint sounds of singing that made my heart stutter a little.

The van only had an eight track that was long dead, so we hardly ever got to hear music. I came to a stop as I left the tent area and just listened to the tones of “Come as You Are” by Nirvana, with a faint female voice singing the lyrics softly.

I shook my head with nostalgia as I strode forward again toward the big board in the middle of the camp. I found it by the campfire lights and the moon, but reading the little notes and requests was too hard without additional light, so I reluctantly turned my flashlight back on.

In the stark light of the bare bulb, the messages on the board seemed even sadder, just as they had in the church. There were plenty of faded ones looking for people who were missing. Some had been there for over a month (at least as long as we’d been coming here) and were obviously pleas for people who would never be found or at least not found
alive
. Undead maybe, but that wasn’t a good end for anyone involved.

Finally, through the mass of notes asking for specific food items and one particularly disturbing request for a sex doll and some lube (um, ew, people. Just…
ew
), I found a note addressed to Zombiebusters Exterminators, Inc (the
whole
name, no less). I pulled it from the board and examined it closely.

It was written on heavy paper, something far more expensive than the back of newspapers or cheap notebook
sheets most people used. The author had neat, even handwriting and the pen he or she used was red.

Blood red words on a stark white sheet. Gee, obvious horror music playing in the background, anyone?

Still, a job was a job and this one was intriguing:

“I am in need of your assistance for a unique task. If you can accommodate me, please meet with me. Sincerely, A Friend.”

An address followed, one I didn’t instantly recognize even after all our exploration of the dead city and its surrounding areas. Looked like the old GPS was going to get some use.

Oh yeah, GPS satellites? Turns out they don’t go down, even when most of the people on earth (or at least
this
part of earth) get eaten by a shambling horde of monsters. Just an FYI.

I stuffed the note into my pocket and headed back toward our tent, but my mind was still clouded with thoughts. Most of the time our “services” got repeat offenders. People we knew asked us to clear out a shed or wipe out an apartment building filled with the living dead.

But this… this was a whole new person (or people) with a “unique” task, whatever that meant. It could be dangerous. And not just “zombie dangerous,” but like… “don’t go down there!” dangerous.

Sadly, as I stepped back into our tent and climbed into my sleeping bag, the concept of a whole new kind of dangerous gave me a thrill I hadn’t felt in a long time.

“So you just went out into the night all by yourself?” Dave snapped as he practically ripped the passenger door of the van off before he got inside.

“Yes,” I grunted as I slammed the driver’s side door of the van and started the engine a bit more loudly than was probably necessary. “As I have mentioned to you about thirty times since we woke up this morning,
that
is correct.”

“It was a stupid thing to do, Sarah.”

With a shake of his head, he pulled out a GPS unit from the glove compartment (kept right beside a nice collection of 9mm handguns and ammo—yup, we were pretty much right out of Bonnie and Clyde now… minus the bank robberies and the Faye Dunaway hair). He jammed the plug into our ancient cigarette lighter and waited for the satellite to link up.

“I don’t get what you’re freaking out about,” I said with a heavy, put-upon sigh. “I got up,
in camp
.”

“How
silly
of me,” Dave said, his voice laced with the same blunt sarcasm he’d used last night with the idiots who’d been talking about bionics. “There’s just
nothing
dangerous lurking around in camp.”

I shook my head. “Okay, I know it isn’t perfectly safe. But shit, it’s not like I put on some flip-flops and headed out into the desert to do some zombie skeet shooting. Chill.”

He folded his arms and flopped back against the seat without further comment. Ah, pouting. Still hot in the living dead universe. Or not.

I ignored the silent treatment as I snatched the GPS from the dash and entered the address from the note we’d been left in camp. After a couple more seconds of load time it started a “route to” sequence. I put the van in gear and eased it into the line of vehicles heading out of the camp and into the new day. We were a ragtag little group,
too, consisting of everything from fancy, high-end sports cars to beaters.

Both of these extremes were totally useless, by the way. A sporty car looked cool and all, but it did nothing unless you intended to keep it on the highway and scream along like a bat out of hell.

The beaters were useless, too—always breaking down, needing special parts and attention. And they were
weird
, honestly. After all, one of the coolest things in an apocalypse was that you could have any ride you want—and trust me, David and I had tested that theory multiple times (oh, the Jag, don’t get me started on the Jag—
heaven
!) before settling on our awesome van. So why anyone would
choose
to ride in a Gremlin with a window taped shut or a lopsided pickup whose floorboards were rotted through was beyond me.

Eventually we got out of the camp and after about twenty minutes of driving down the highway, Dave seemed to perk up. He sat up and clicked the GPS off its stand. Flipping buttons, he looked at the turn-by-turn route info while I drove.

“Take next exit, then turn left” the bland, computerized female voice ordered.

I stifled a laugh. The whole GPS unit thing had never been a perfect system, even before the world went to hell. I mean, we’d been led astray by them a few times on vacations and ended up God knew where (once, I swear it took us to a cult compound when we wanted to go to Olive Garden).

But in a zombie reality, it was even worse. The unit now gave directions to places which no longer existed on roads that had been riddled with bombs or still had asphalt
streaked with blood or ooze. Sometimes there wasn’t a “right turn” to be made thanks to a sinkhole or zombie hive.

Or in this case, the exit in question had experienced some “unreported technical difficulties.”

Namely that a truck with ridiculously oversized rims was turned broadside at the top of the ramp to block it off. By the rusted, bloody, sludgy look of the vehicle, this had been done months ago, maybe even at the beginning of the outbreak, perhaps in some lame attempt to keep the zombie horde from swarming into the area.

“Apparently they thought the infected would come in buses?” Dave asked with his own chuckle as we stared at the makeshift barricade.

“Right, like the oldsters during winter,” I said with a nod as I brought the van to a stop at the top of the exit. “Zombie Airways flew them down on a $99-each-way special and brought them all down to the resorts and condos for a break. Zombie life is
hard
up North.”

When Dave looked at me with that little twinkle in his eye at my comment, I knew he wasn’t pissed at me anymore for going off by myself last night.

“I’ll see if I can move her,” he said with a sigh.

I turned off our engine and got out with a rifle in hand. I kept an eye out for stragglers while Dave tried the door on the truck. When he pulled the handle, the entire door came off in his hand. He staggered under the unexpected weight and went down on one knee as he tossed the broken piece of metal aside. It shrieked as it skidded across the asphalt and onto the shoulder.

“What the fuck?” he snapped to no one in particular as he got back up and rubbed his wrist absently.

“You okay?” I asked, doing another perimeter check through the scope on the .357.

He grunted. “I guess, but what in the world would make the door come off like that?”

He leaned down and looked at the door hinges and then stood back up. “Only thing I see is sludge. Since when does sludge cut through metal enough to rot a door off?”

Cautiously, I moved to the big truck and looked at the evidence myself. Sure enough, the metal hinges that had held the door in place seemed to have been sheared off, eroded by some kind of chemical.

“It can’t just be the sludge,” I said with a shake of my head, because that was the only thing I saw on the broken metal, too. “I mean, maybe the door was already damaged or they did this as a weird booby trap or something.”

Dave looked at the vehicle absently. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Be careful when you try to move it, though,” I added with a look at the truck from front to back. “If somebody did something to jimmy the door, maybe they did something else, too.”

Of course there were no keys. Would it really be that easy? So instead of starting the truck and pulling it off the ramp, Dave put it in neutral and with a bunch of effort we managed to shove the hunk of rusting metal into motion, despite two deflated tires we hadn’t noticed on first inspection.

With a lot of grunting and swearing, we guided it toward the side edge of the ramp. The big, heavy body hit the guard rail with a scrape of metal on metal and then an ominous creak and crash as the badly maintained rail gave under the strain. The truck teetered on the edge of the embankment for a long moment, and then it rolled
clear down the dusty hill onto a service road below where it landed, crushed nose down, in the middle of the street.

We stared down at it for a long moment and then we exchanged a rather evil little grin. Yeah, even after all these months it was still pretty fun to destroy property without fear of the consequences. I think in another life David and I had been anarchists.