Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [17]
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.
Sort of like zombies, I guess…
But for now I stared at the broken, busted truck with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. Especially when I noticed that the mud flaps had those cheesy silhouettes of naked girls.
Nice.
“Onward,” I proclaimed as we hopped back in the van and followed the GPS system’s insistent directions that we take the next exit, then turn left.
We drove for another fifteen minutes through rapidly decreasing city into an ominously quiet area I’d never visited before. It was dead desert, except for a few spotty trailers here and there and some dilapidated buildings that appeared to have been damaged even before the apocalypse.
Now why did I keep hearing the theme from Deliverance in my head?
“Arrive at your destination in a quarter-mile, on the right,” the GPS declared and then went quiet, its job done unless we did something stupid and went off course, at which point the voice would come back on and tell us to “please turn back” or “recalculating” over and over until I wanted to scream. I’d broken three GPSes over this issue already, you know. David was starting to get annoyed by it.
I slowed the vehicle to a crawl as we rolled up on our “destination,” though you could hardly call it that. It had once been a warehouse of some kind, but not a nice one. You know those flimsy steel siding “make-it-yourself” type buildings you used to see advertised in local commercials all the time? Well, this was one of those and it looked like it had been through hell.
Blood slashed down the sides of the once-white metal, combining with rust to make an eerie orange-red pattern on a rotting metal canvas. The roof was half caved in and the eastern wall had collapsed against itself and sagged precariously. A stiff wind and the whole structure was bound to fall down around the head of anyone who dared take shelter inside.
Any idiot who looked at the place would think the same. So why had we been called here?
“I don’t like this,” Dave muttered at my side as he took the safety off his rifle.
I shook my head slowly. “Me neither, but we’re here now. Should we check it out?”
He gave me a half-glance but I couldn’t read his guarded expression. “I don’t know, Sarah…”
I pursed my lips and bit my tongue