Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [10]
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