Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [20]
David glared and I couldn’t help doing the same. After all, the guy was still pointing his AK-47 at us.
“Come with you?” Dave snapped as he looked around us in the dark and dusty building that was decidedly empty. “Where to exactly?”
With a smile, Lab Coat Guy backed slowly to the far wall of the warehouse. He picked up a big metal box with a red button and a green button on its face. With his thumb, he pressed the green button and suddenly the floor right in front of David and I opened and a platform lifted up from beneath it.
“What the hell?” Dave snapped.
Lab Coat Guy moved forward, weapon still raised and ready. “I know you have questions. Just come with me. I promise all this will soon make sense.”
Dave tensed and I could see he was about to go ape shit on this guy. I turned toward him and caught his arm, squeezing gently as I looked up into his eyes.
“We’ve gone this far,” I whispered. “And the fact that he’s asking us to do this seems like a formality. He is holding the gun.”
Dave looked down at me, then back at our new “friend.” “The second I get a chance, I’m going to punch you square in the face, motherfucker.”
Lab Coat Guy smiled indulgently. “Duly noted. Now please step onto the platform.”
We all did and with a press of his foot on another button, Lab Coat lowered us down into a dark chasm. The doors above us closed and we rode down, down, down for what seemed like forever. The darkness was complete for half the ride and then it started to change. Muted green bulbs appeared on the walls, then red ones, then white.
White light. From electricity. Something we hadn’t seen for months (I guess I figured Lab Coat’s different remotes were operated by batteries). We both blinked, shocked by the glow of the bulbs as the lift came to a stop inside a protected steel cage. Through the metal grating I saw something that nearly stopped my heart. Something that made me shake as I backed up against David’s chest and felt my knees give out just a little.
We were in a lab. A real fucking lab with glass rooms and pristine white halls and lights, so many lights!
Lab Coat Guy gave us a brief smile before he released a latch at the cage door and swung it open to allow us all entry into a sterile hallway.
Dave and I stood on the lift, just staring for a long moment before Lab Coat Guy said, “Well? Are you coming or are you just going to stand there staring?”
With a shake of his head like he was waking from a dream, Dave grasped my hand and we stepped into the hallway together to follow Lab Coat Guy down the hallway toward an uncertain future.
“There’s only one explanation for this,” I whispered as we turned at a T-intersection in the hallway and our new “friend” slid a card through a key lock. At the end of the passage, a white door opened silently. “We’ve been attacked and this is how zombies see the world.”
Dave looked down at me with a shiver at the possibility that what I said might actually be true.
“Right now we’re probably eating a Girl Scout troop,” I finished with a nervous grimace.
“Don’t be silly,” Lab Coat Guy said as he looked over his shoulder at us. “There haven’t been any Girl Scouts for months. And you aren’t zombies. This is entirely real, I assure you. And now”—he slowly lowered his gun at his side—“let me introduce myself. My name is Kevin Barnes. Dr. Kevin Barnes. And this is my lab.”
We both stared, shocked into silence (rare for us, I assure you). Finally it was Dave who looked down at me, his face pale and his eyes wide.
“I-I guess I was wrong,” he stammered. “It turns out there are mad scientists after all.”
Don’t fear change. Just fear everything and everyone else.
Dr. Barnes chuckled as he gave Dave a look that was normally reserved for silly children.
“Oh no, David. Not a mad scientist, I’m merely a scientist.”
“I’m sure that’s just what Dr. Frankenstein said right before he made a zombie of his own,” I whispered.
I was sort of shocked I could find enough of my voice for that. I was still half-convinced this