Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [52]
I guess he should have buckled up for safety like those old public service announcements used to sing.
“Shit,” I muttered as my stomach unexpectedly turned.
See, after three months of apocalypse, this kind of thing was actually rarer than it had been at the beginning. We used to see this all the time and had gotten numb to the violence and heartache of it in some ways.
But after at least a month of only finding victims who had died during a fight they’d chosen to take… well, a scene like this, a scene of a family turned upside down and ultimately destroyed by the infection… it was disturbing all over again.
“I’ve got to shoot,” Dave said softly, his lips thinned with grim determination. “I’d guess they could wake up any time.”
I nodded. There were varying amounts of time it took for a person to reanimate or change after a zombie attack. It was all based on where they were bitten and if they were killed by the attack or just injured. We pretty much knew the timetable by heart, but since we hadn’t seen the accident, there was no way to be certain how much time was left before we would be involved in a father-son game called Kill the Humans.
It’s almost like a three-legged race, but with more blood and screaming.
“Want me to do it?” I asked.
“No,” he snapped as he motioned me away. “Go take care of your precious zombie.”
I hesitated, but Dave put his back toward me as he leveled his gun on the child in the back seat. As I turned away, the car rocked from the first explosion of gunpowder.
The Kid and I both flinched as I moved toward him. The caught zombie was still snapping at Robbie, his fingers pushed through the spaces in the net so that they twitched and closed around air.
“Nice specimen,” I said with false brightness. “It should be worth a couple of showers and maybe some new shoes and some food, eh?”
The Kid glared at me. “How about something useful like grenades?”
I laughed. “Okay, we’ll ask. Though I’m not sure I like the idea of you running around with the ultimate fireworks.”
The Kid’s eyes lit up like he hadn’t thought of that before but then he sobered at just about the same time that Dave fired his second shot behind us.
“Without the thing hanging in the air, it’s going to get tougher to bind it up,” The Kid said softly, watching around me for Dave as he came over to us.
Dave’s face was pale and grim, but he managed a smile and a nod for the boy. “Yeah, but we’ll figure it out. Go get the rope, huh?”
As The Kid scurried off to get rope and a burlap sack for our “guest,” I returned my attention to David. “You okay?”
He shrugged. “We haven’t had to shoot a victim in a long time,” he said quietly. “It just reminded me of Amanda. And Gina.”
I frowned. Amanda had been our neighbor who Dave had been forced to shoot in our car during our initial escape from Seattle. And Gina was his sister. When she turned, I had been the one to take care of her (and Dave afterward), but the particulars didn’t matter. Even all these months and all these kills later, Dave was still haunted. I guess all of us survivors were, we just covered it up most of the time. But there were moments… there were always moments.
I touched his shoulder as The Kid came running back up with the rope. “There are no more sacks, sorry.”
Dave swore under his breath as he grabbed the rope. “Shit. See, we should have taken our time better this morning. We could have cleaned out some supplies from the hardware store, but we weren’t paying close enough attention.”
I winced since the comment was directed toward me, but bit my tongue. “Maybe we can figure something else out for his head. Let’s just tie him up for now.”
Dave said nothing, just unraveled the coil of rope as he stared