Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [18]
“Please?” I begged as I turned to face Dave. I batted my eyelashes and tilted my head.
He laughed despite the worry in his eyes. “Um, okay. But let’s gear up solid and stay sharp. I just…” he looked at the building with a faraway look, “have a bad feeling about this.”
I groaned at the familiar line. “Okay, you can quote Star Wars but only because you agreed to come with me.”
Again he laughed as we got out of the van and eased our way to the back where we loaded up on weapons, from guns to stabbing and clubbing items. I shut the van doors as quietly as possible and then we crept toward the warehouse in a slow, steady military formation we’d read about in a library book about Navy SEALs.
Of course there was a difference between reading about SEALs and being them. One we quickly recognized when I stepped on some kind of trip wire hidden in the dust and suddenly about ten guns, all of them military grade (including one sweet cannon I totally wished I could steal without getting shot) and meant to fire multiple shots in a matter of seconds, appeared from hidden cubbies all around the warehouse. And they were all pointed at us.
David froze, reaching back to pull me closer to his back as if he could protect me from hundreds of speeding bullets. Kind of sweet, though not particularly well thought out.
“What the fuck?” he growled.
Before I could respond to what was clearly a rhetorical question, the bent warehouse door ahead of us opened and a man in a lab coat and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses appeared in the entryway. He blinked a few times, like he wasn’t accustomed to the sun, and then stepped into the desert with his own weapon raised to match the others all around us.
His was impressive, too. A fully automatic AK-47, definitely not legal before the zombie outbreak. He held it like he knew how to use it, despite his geeked-out attire.
As he moved a few cautious steps closer, I noticed he was pretty young. Probably just a handful of years older than us. Maybe mid-thirties?
Another thing that hit me right away was that he was clean. Not spit-shine clean like most of us, but really clean. I swear I could smell the soapy scent of his skin and the fresh detergent of his clothing even from here and it was like heaven.
He was cute, too. I’ll admit it. He kind of had a Luke Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums (rather than Luke Wilson hyping cell phones) vibe about him that made me blink a couple of times despite the fact that he had a gun in my face and apparently had some kind of control over a whole bunch more.
“I’m sorry to do this,” he called out. “But I do have the power to pull all these triggers at once so I hope you won’t be rash. Simply do as I say and allow me the time to explain myself and I won’t have to use this.”
He lifted some kind of remote from his pocket that apparently operated the weapons around us, then slipped it back into his shirt pocket and returned his finger to the trigger of the gun he held.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Dave snapped, still holding me against his back in a big old hero pose. “You called us here!”
I stared at the guy over Dave’s shoulder, still intrigued by the dichotomy of the cute face, the nerdy jacket, and the big-ass gun.
“Didn’t you?” I asked.
The guy nodded. “Oh yes, I did indeed ensure that a message was posted for you at the New Phoenix survivor camp, though I didn’t post it myself.”
“Then why the fuck are you pointing a gun—”
“A shitload of guns,” I interrupted.
Dave shot me a look over his shoulder. “Pardon me, a shitload of guns at us?”
“I am very happy to explain,” the man said. “But first I have to insist that you disarm yourselves fully and come into the warehouse.”
“Disarm ourselves,” Dave said softly, so only I could hear. “Is he nuts?”
I looked at our captor. He didn’t have the wild look about him that some people did after everything we’d all been through.