Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [3]
I didn’t finish because off to my right I heard a faint scrape. Both of us spun toward it, weapons lifted.
“Fucking Jimmy, if that’s you come out or you’ll be shish kabob in about three seconds,” I snapped.
There was a low, entirely unzombie-like chuckle and then Jimmy himself stood up from behind a bank of barber chairs. He had long, unkempt hair and I could smell him from across the room. And it isn’t like anyone could take a long, hot, fabulous, steamy shower with shower gel and shampoo and conditioner that smelled like lilac and… oh, sorry, had a moment of fantasy there… but most of us had figured out how to freshen up in the worst of circumstances.
Not Jimmy, though I doubted he’d been much of a hygiene freak even when the world was normal.
“Nothing turns me on more than hearing you two bicker. How’s the make-up sex?” he said with a laugh.
I wrinkled my nose. “You are the most disgusting human being I’ve ever met.”
He bowed slightly, greasy hair falling over his face for a moment and blocking out the crooked, dirty teeth and the scraggly beard that completed the picture.
“Pleased for the compliment.”
“Asshole,” David muttered.
Jimmy laughed again, finishing it up with a wet, sickly cough that made me frown. As much as I disliked the guy, the fact that he always sounded like he was on the edge of keeling over worried me. There weren’t many of us humans left in the badlands, we had to do everything we could to stay alive.
“So what do you need, No-Toes?” I asked with a sigh. “We saw your note in the Sun Devil camp. It said something about a pod?”
The jovial quality to Jimmy’s dirty face faded and his bloodshot eyes went wide and, to my surprise, filled with fear. His hands shook as he gripped the back of one of the barber’s chairs.
“Y-Yeah, but this ain’t no ordinary pod, Sarah,” he said with a shake of his head. “There’s something different.”
“Different?” David said with an incredulous lift of his eyebrows. “What the hell do you mean, different? Zombies are already pretty different.”
Jimmy shook his head quickly. “But these are… bigger. And faster.”
“Jimmy,” Dave sighed in exasperation. “What the fuck have you been drinkin’, man?”
“Naw, it’s not that,” Jimmy insisted as he came out from behind the chairs and hurried toward my husband with outreached hands. Both of us flinched at the increased stench in the air that wafted ahead of him. “I swear, dude. These ones, when they look at you… it’s like they see you.”
“Uh-huh.”
Dave shot me a look that said he thought Jimmy was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, but I wasn’t so sure. He looked genuinely afraid and not in the normal “I saw a zombie and I’m too lazy to kill it myself” way.
“So where did you see these… these… bionic zombies?” I asked.
Jimmy turned on me, his neck craning as he jerked out a quick series of nods. “Yeah, bionic. That’s right!”
“Where did you see them?” I repeated softly.
“Near that church by where the convention center used to be downtown,” he muttered and then let out a shiver.
I nodded. The governmental bombing had destroyed most of the buildings in the main downtown area, but the church, which was actually called St. Mary’s Basilica, had remained standing. Religious nuts called it a sign and kept trying to go there to pray or whatever, which of course brought the zombies there in droves to feed. They might as well have changed the name to St. Mary’s Feed Trough and started taking reservations from the zombie horde.
Would they require a jacket and tie for that?
I sighed. “Okay, we’ll check it out.”
Dave shot me a look, but my expression kept him from saying anything to me. He shook his head. “Yeah, but we’re going to need to get paid this time.”
All Jimmy’s fear fled his face and he looked at Dave like he was the picture of innocence. He had the gall to sound affronted when he said, “Of course. I always pay.”
“Six beers for three zombies is not a fair trade fucking system, No-Toes,” Dave barked. “We get paid in food, medical supplies, ammo, all kinds of shit by everyone else but you.”
I couldn’t help but smile.