Flip This Zombie - Jesse Petersen [71]
I could hardly believe it and I shook my head like it could clear my eyes. But the mark was still there, bright red and tinged with black against the gray, rotting skin of the zombie’s neck.
Seeing it proved everything Dave had been saying to me all along. He had seen the brand on the other bionic a few days before. And Kevin had fully admitted to me that he marked his specimens with the thing.
So if both those things were true, Kevin… Dr. Barnes had made these horrible things. And he’d looked me right in the eye and lied about it.
He really was a mad scientist.
Even worse than that, when the bionics started shoving the biting, growling normals out of the way and began to move the cart to clear a path to me, I got a better look at the bionic in the back.
He had long, stringy hair that fell over his face, wild, wide eyes that bugged out just a little, and dirty clothes, but they weren’t rotted away by weeks or months of lack of career. He was a fresh zombie, bionic or not. And an all-too-familiar one, at that.
“Jimmy No-Toes,” I said out loud.
He jerked his head up almost like he recognized the name, but then he went back to pushing the cart. Finally, the two of them got it over the lip of the door and shoved it with all their considerable strength. The cart flew out of the way, crashing against the desks in front of me, and cleared a direct path to me.
I lifted my handgun and fired off three shots in rapid succession. Even shaking, I got all the normal zombies right between the eyes. They crumpled in a big pile while still in the doorway, but the barrier of their bodies didn’t slow the bionics down. They just stepped over them and started toward me in a steady, flat-footed walk that kind of reminded me of Drago in Rocky IV.
I could almost see one of the bionics saying, “I must break you.”
Oh and they would, too. No fucking doubt about it. That was what they were made for.
I shot again, but my hands were shaking so hard that I only winged the front zombie (Non-Jimmy) in the shoulder. He growled as he looked down at the wound and then back to me. Okay, so that had apparently only irritated him. Shit.
I pulled for the cannon on my back, expecting it to pull free as easily as my shotgun always did.
Yeah. Not so much.
It was so heavy that it took a fraction of a second longer than I’d expected. And that fraction of a second was enough time to allow the front bionic to launch into a sprint.
I screamed as he bore down on me, but I somehow managed to barely dodge his attack by diving to my right. He smashed into the windows where I’d been standing a moment before. His heavy arms shattered what was left of the glass and sent the metal frame spiraling across the room like a deadly boomerang.
Well, there was a way out now, but a fucking monster blocked it, so not much help there. I raced for the back of the room, hoping I could get the two hideous beasts to follow me and clear a way to the door. All the while I worked to get the damn cannon from its sling across my back, but it was just so awkward.
I spun around to see if my plan was working. Fuck no. The Jimmy No-Toes bionic hadn’t come inside like a normal zombie would have. He was waiting for me at the door, his stringy hair hanging over his once ratlike face as he growled at me. The other one was right behind me, herding me like a lamb to the slaughter, I guess.
I was boned. This was it. There was no way out. Panic overtook me and I had the strangest urge just to dive under the closest desk and cover my eyes like we had done during earthquake drills in school.
But before I did something so foolish, there was the loud burst of shotgun fire from the hallway. Bionic Jimmy’s head exploded like fireworks in front of me, his black-tinged brains spraying across the room and raining down around me before he fell forward and thudded to the floor.
I didn’t have to be asked, I jolted for the escape route and whoever had been my savior.
“Human!” I screamed as I burst blindly into the hall. “Don’t shoot!”
Dave stepped out of the doorway of a classroom