Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [16]
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