Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [30]
I asked for it. With a wet, hollow grunt, a zombie burst from the bushes. He was holding a human hand in his teeth like a dog and I flinched. I guess we’d been too late to help his latest victim.
As the hand dropped from his mouth, he looked at me and I stared at him. He was no “little guy.” This guy had been big in the world before infection. Maybe even a bodybuilder or something. He was tall and broad-shouldered and once his chest had probably rippled with muscle.
I say once because the thing about death is that your muscles and tissues break down. This is true for zombies, too (though they do seem to top out on rotting after a week or ten days—again, don’t know why and please don’t tell me). With this guy, the decomposition had resulted in his muscle fibers drooping and pulling until they ripped away from the bones. Now they hung from gooey, fleshy hunks of meat like an ill-fitting shirt.
“Oh, buddy,” I said with a cluck of my tongue. “Not a good look for you.”
The zombie tilted his head with a questioning whine and smelled the air like they sometimes do. His rotting lips spread tightly against his teeth and he let out another groaning wail.
“Well come on!” I said, using a voice like I’d use with a puppy or a toddler as I started backing toward the front of the mall. “Come and get me.”
I didn’t have to ask twice. The zombie lurched out of the bushes, oblivious to the fact that some of the hard, dead branches had stuck in his legs and now tore loose and stayed in his flesh like weird porcupine quills as he walked. If it wasn’t so gross, it would have been pretty comical.
At first his movements were slow, but as I got further out of his reach, his hunter instinct kicked in and he began a herky-jerky jog.
That was it, all I needed to get my ass moving. I took off toward the front entrance, shouting, “I’ve got one!”
As I careened around the corner, I looked up. Dave was standing on the awning, one hand on the pulley mechanism to launch the net up around the zombie and one hand balancing the shotgun against his thigh, ready to take the shot if I needed him.
“Fuck, he’s a big boy!” Dave screamed back down at me.
I jogged toward the netting, and only once I reached it did I flip around so I faced my quarry again. He was pretty fast for such a big dude and was already just fifteen feet away.
“Get ready!” I urged.
“I’m on it,” came the reply from above in Dave’s most tense voice. He was not happy about this and I knew it.
But it didn’t matter, at least not for now. As I waited for the zombie, barely inching back to entice him with little shuffles, the big lug stepped onto the net.
“Now!” I screamed.
Up above I heard Dave doing something, but the net didn’t budge. It didn’t move even as the goliath of a zombie strode toward me like fucking Godzilla to my helpless Japanese city.
“Any time, dear,” I cried, my wide eyes glued on the monstrosity reaching for me straight out of some 1930s horror movie.
“I triggered it and—”
Dave hadn’t finished the sentence when the big infected creature stepped off of the net. The moment he was clear, the pulley system whizzed into life and lifted up to catch nothing but air. It kind of reminded me of those arcade claw machine things with the cheap stuffed animals I’d tried to win as a kid. Only I didn’t die when I didn’t get one.
“Shit, there’s a delay in the mechanism,” he called down.
“You think?” I called back as I started to run again. “Reset and I’ll try to bring him around for a second pass.”
I jerked from one side to the other as I tried to determine the best way to go. I was pretty sure I could get the big brainless monster to follow me, then all I had to do was make a big circle in the parking lot until Dave was reset and we’d try another—
Before I could finish the thought there was a wet thunk and suddenly the blade of a machete stuck out of the zombie’s head right between his eyes.
The massive bastard teetered for a moment, his rotting eyebrows knitted together like he had a question on the