Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [42]
I heard him shuffling around and then felt the heavy weight of the semi-automatic in my palm. I lifted the gun and peered through scope.
The zombie was everything we’d come to expect from the living dead. Gray skin, black sludge caked around the mouth, rotting body. Only this one still managed to be different somehow. For one thing, he was bigger than your average zombie. I’m not talking Resident Evil ridiculous, of course, but this guy had been a big boy in life, bigger even than the Arnold Schwarzenegger wannabe zombie I’d lured to our net trap yesterday.
But that wasn’t all that separated him from your average, run-of-the-mill infected bastard. Unlike the other zombies I’d seen over the past few months, his pacing had a purposeful quality to it. He wasn’t just shambling aimlessly. He was waiting. Watching.
And in that moment, he lifted his head and he looked right at us. Through the high-powered scope I could see pretty good detail on his face. There was no doubt about it, he was really looking. Seeing us even though we were too far away for most zombies to notice through their rotting eyes.
He tilted his head back and let out a moaning groan that was loud enough to be heard even all the way at our car.
“Shit, David,” I whispered, my tone laced with two emotions that bubbled inside of me like boiling oil. First there was fear, intense and powerful like I hadn’t felt since that awful moment when we saw a zombie for the first time.
But there was something else, too. Excitement. My heart raced with it and my hands shook as I continued to stare through the scope.
“What is it?” he whispered.
I lowered the scope and looked at him. “I think that might be a bionic zombie.”
Strive for the four-hour work week. The rest of the time, run like hell.
Dave blinked as he looked at me. “What?”
I stared at him, overcome by the same disbelief that lined his face.
“Bionic zombie,” I repeated on nothing but a trembling breath.
With a shake of his head, Dave snatched the gun from my hand. For a moment, he hesitated, almost as if he didn’t want to look through the scope, but finally he lifted it and stared up the hill toward the pacing zombie.
I held my breath as I waited for him to say something, anything. But he didn’t. He just stared and stared through the scope. For a long time the car was silent until he finally lowered the weapon.
“Shit,” he muttered.
And that was all the reaction I got because just about the same time he finally said something the zombie started sprinting toward us. Sprinting. This wasn’t a hunter jog or half-assed run. This was a Jackie Joyner-Kersee full-on sprint (minus the dragon lady nails, of course).
Now I don’t know what came over us. I mean, we’d fought probably thousands of zombies by this point (just the steering wheel car count was in the hundreds) and we’d always won those battles, even if they were sometimes close. After all these months, though, we knew what to do. Hell, we got paid for what we do.
But I guess neither of us wanted any part of this shit until we had more time to figure it out.
“Reverse, reverse!” I screamed as Dave threw it into just that gear and floored it backward.
The poor Kid flew around the back of the veering van, crashing into the metal walls and grappling for any kind of purchase as Dave spun the wheel to turn away from the monster rapidly approaching our vehicle.
“Please stop doing that!” Robbie bellowed between grunts as he slid around the back.
We both ignored him. Right now getting away was more important. Plus, we had antibiotic cream and Sponge-Bob Band-Aids! He’d be fine.
Our tires screeched against the asphalt as Dave plowed forward, sending up a plume of smoke behind us that stank of burned rubber and dust. We tore off down the long, deserted road at sixty miles an hour.
Dave kept driving for fifteen minutes at full speed. He leaned over the steering column, silent and strained, his knuckles white around the wheel as he merely stared out at the road ahead of us.
In the back, The Kid had bundled up against one of the