Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [34]
Dave snorted out a laugh as he started to climb up onto the van. “Don’t kill him, Sarah,” he called back to me.
I decided not to deny what The Kid was saying because it would just take too long. “What do you mean, do you get a cut? Why would you get a cut?”
“It’s my zombie you caught.”
I stared. “What do you mean your zombie? It was chasing you, it wasn’t your pet.”
He ignored me. “And it’s my idea that you’re using to tie it up. So I should get a cut.”
I shut my eyes and slowly counted to ten in my head as I tried desperately to remember that this was a child who was probably pretty traumatized by everything he had seen and done in the months since the outbreak. But when I looked at him again, all I saw was brat. And snot-nosed brat at that. Gross.
“No way,” I sneered.
The Kid got to his feet, sending empty candy wrappers to blow away on the breeze as he folded his arms. “Yes way.”
Above us, Dave sighed. “Am I going to have to separate you two?”
I glanced up at him. Although he had a joking tone to this voice, his face was tired. I frowned. Clearly I was creating more stress for him than he needed and over what? Some bratty little kid who would be gone from our lives before sundown. It wasn’t worth it.
Without another word, I turned my back to him and grabbed a long coil of rope from the back of the van. Positioning myself near the thrashing zombie, I gave David the thumbs-up signal.
“Ready!”
With the dead weight of the zombie in the net, Dave had to work a little harder to ease the netting down toward me slowly, but after a lot of grunting and swearing, he had gotten the net even with me, but still slightly off the ground.
The zombie hissed and growled at me, pressing his face against the net so hard that the fabric bit into his rotting flesh and left raw hash marks across his cheeks and lips that would never heal.
“Settle down, buddy,” I said as I tried to catch his lurching form to start the rope around him. He kept moving and flinching though, so I couldn’t tie him up.
“Fuck!” I said as he gave me the slip another time. “I need another set of hands.”
Dave stared at me and I stared up at him for a minute before both of us slowly turned toward The Kid.
He had moved to the front of the van and was now leaning on it nonchalantly, one ankle crossed over the other. He smiled as I looked at him.
“What’s my cut?” he asked, enunciating each word with a smug smile.
I shook my head. This was why I didn’t have kids. Finally I growled, “You can have twenty percent of whatever we get for the zombie.”
“Fifty,” the kid snorted.
Dave’s cackle of laughter was the answer. “No way. We caught it, we’re driving it and loading and unloading it. Twenty-five.”
“Thirty,” The Kid said without even hesitating or blinking. “And ammo.”
I bit my lip and nodded. “Fine. Now come here and help me.”
To his credit, once the deal had been made, The Kid hopped to it. He ran over, dodging the straining, clawing fingers and gnashing teeth of the zombie, and grabbed one end of the rope.
“Okay, first we need to pull his arms tight,” I said. “And then wrap him up with the rest of the rope and tie it off.”
To my surprise, there was no debate or argument from The Kid. He just swept his side of the rope around the infected creature in the net and we hurried to wrap the rope around him so that his arms were now fully bound at his sides. Around and around we went, trading sides to bind the creature up until he was bound like an old-fashioned play about a girl tied to a railroad track by Snidely Whiplash. Mwahahaha…
“That looks good, now tie him off,” Dave called from above as we swept the rope around the zombie a final time.
By now he was squirming like an angry caterpillar forced into a cocoon. He still snapped at us through the rope, black sludge pouring from his gray lips as he gnawed at the netting.