Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [44]
It was The Kid who answered, not David.
“No more camps,” he whispered. Dave blinked before he looked back at him. The Kid was looking at us. “No more zombies to run from?”
I nodded, caught between my own hope and my desire not to give a child a false version of it.
“Maybe,” I finally offered weakly.
“Do you think there’s a Midwest Wall?” The Kid asked after a long hesitation.
I glanced at David. My husband didn’t believe in any of that stuff. But he was sitting quietly, so I shrugged as an answer.
“I don’t know. I’ve heard things, but we have to wait out the winter up North before we even think about heading that way.”
The Kid’s shoulders slumped. “Oh.” He was quiet for a long moment and then he surprised me by continuing, “See, I have this aunt who lives in Nashville.”
“Yeah?” I encouraged him.
He nodded. “Maybe if there weren’t zombies, she would come and get me.”
I smiled. This was another one of those times when I remembered The Kid was, well, a kid.
“My mom lived in the middle of Illinois before the outbreak and I heard my Dad ran for Chicago when all this started,” I said. “Maybe they’d come get me, too.”
Dave smiled a little. “My parents are in Virginia,” he said. “I guess they might want to get me if there weren’t any zombies.”
I laughed. “Are you kidding? You’re probably on the back of milk cartons all over the East Coast. You’re the beloved baby of that family.”
His smile fell. We’d had to kill his sister when she turned zombie a few months back, so I guess that made him the only child now. I reached out and touched his arm as an apology for my stupidity.
“I’d rather say I tried to save the world than to wish I had,” I said softly.
There was a long hesitation before Dave surprised me by nodding. “Okay, so I guess that means we keep catching for Dr. Doom in his underground lair.”
I almost squealed in delight, but Dave looked so somber about the whole thing that I couldn’t exactly feel happy about it.
“But that pulley thing isn’t going to work on a regular basis,” he continued. “It’s too limiting when it comes to hunting grounds and I don’t like that it requires one of us to be up and away from the other.”
“Hey!” The Kid said from the back.
Dave shot him a brief glance. “Others. Sorry Robbie.”
“So we need a new way to catch, I’m okay with that. Let’s talk about it some more,” I said, anxious to show him that I was totally down with working within his limits, as long as it meant I didn’t have to quit.
“What about a net gun?”
Dave and I both froze before we slid around in our seats to look at the kid. He had a candy bar in his hand, though I swear I had no idea where it had come from, and he was looking at us like we were idiots.
“And just where are we going to get a net gun from?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Maybe Army Surplus, but you could make one, you know.”
Dave blinked. “Really?”
He nodded with enthusiasm. “I read about it in the library.”
I stared. “The library? Wait, you went to the library?”
Somehow I couldn’t picture him curled up with a book like the kid from The Neverending Story. That seemed more Lisa Simpson than Bart.
He nodded like it was weird that I’d doubt him. “There’s tons of stuff you can learn in the library, Sarah. You should try reading.”
I bit my tongue and glared at Dave when he dared to laugh at the brat’s little quip. “So do you remember what book the directions were in?”
Again The Kid nodded. “Sure, it was at the Desert Sage branch of the library. You just need stuff from the hardware store.”
Dave nodded and I started accessing the GPS to give us a route to the library that didn’t include going back toward the bionic zombie. Although I could tell David wasn’t happy about the prospect of doing this, his jaw was set as we took off.
I just had to hope that in the end, our decision to keep catching zombies for a man he apparently despised wouldn’t be one he (or either