Flip This Zombie

by Jesse Petersen

  “You saw his face, though,” I said as I stared where our little friend had disappeared. “I think he’s genuinely scared.”

  “No way.” Dave shook his head. “He’s probably just high. Or drunk. Or both.”

  “He certainly reeks of it, but I don’t think so,” I said. “Whatever he saw, he believes it’s real. Are we going to check it out?”

  Dave chuckled as we heard Jimmy coming back in the distance. “Of course we’re going to fucking check it out. We’re the Zombiebusters, aren’t we?”

  The question: What color is my parachute? The answer: Blood red, brains gray, sludge black.

  We ended up with quite a haul as pre-payment for the bionic zombie job. Two large first aid kits with actual antibiotic ointment (quite the coup because infection took down as many survivors as zombies did by this point) and a three-pack of Ramen.

  Doesn’t sound like much to you? Well, sit there in your non-zombie paradise and judge then. Trust me, that shit was worth its weight in gold and then some in the badlands.

  But neither of us was thinking about our good fortune as we slowly pulled around a few burned-out vehicles and maneuvered past a portion of a once-four-star hotel that had collapsed months ago.

  No, when we pulled into the Basilica’s half-empty parking lot, I think both of us were pondering the idea of a bionic zombie. A zombie with powers. Superpowers.

  Well, at least with a little more awareness.

  David shut the van down and both of us looked up at the imposing building. On some level, I sort of understood why idiot “pilgrims” would keep coming here despite the danger and even almost certain death (or living death).

  Every other building on this block had been flattened, so with all that destruction around it, the old-fashioned mission-style building did stand out like a beacon. The only signs that anything within its walls had changed were the burned-out cars in the parking lot and the streaked blood that stained the stucco walls on all four sides and from the base of the building to about six or seven feet high (about as high as a person could reach).

  Of course, inside was a whole different matter.

  “I hate this place,” I muttered as we got out of the van and went around the back to load up on weapons.

  Unlike at Jimmy’s hideout when we’d been lightly armed, this time we each took multiple weapons and grabbed for plenty of extra ammo, plus a big burlap bag for zombie heads. We’d been around this block a few times, we knew to be ready.

  “Well, you were always more of an agnostic,” David said as we moved through the dusty parking lot.

  The front doors of the Basilica were the same material as the stucco walls, meant to blend into them almost seamlessly. The bloody handprints that stained the walls also covered the door and were heaviest all around the handle. I wrinkled my nose with disgust as I shoved my hand into my sleeve and pushed the door open without touching it.

  “Still fastidious after all these months,” David muttered.

  “I. Don’t. Like. Goo.”

  I shot him a glare when he dared to laugh at my suffering, but quickly refocused on matters at hand.

  There was a small foyer area directly behind the doors and it flooded with light from outside for a brief moment before those same doors swung shut behind us. In that brightness I saw a bulletin board that had once touted church socials and announcements but was now tacked full with multiple layers of handwritten prayers and desperate pleas for news of lost loved ones.

  There was also a blank space where a collection box once sat. Half the note requesting funds from visitors and parishioners alike was rotting away on the wall behind the space. That box had been ripped free early in the outbreak, when people still thought money had value.

  Times had certainly changed. We used Benjamins as fire starters now.

  Once our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we moved into the main church area with extra caution because the area was so exposed and open.

  The pews that had once been so carefully arranged to face the front of the church for weddings or sermons were now overturned, broken, and in some cases, even burned. The high domed ceiling rose up above us and the stained glass that capped it sent sprays of color down across the marble floors.

  Red was the main color in the dim hall, red from the glass, the red of the torn carpet that had once lined the main aisle… red from the blood.

  Over the past few months I’d developed an abiding hatred for red. Too bad, really. It had always been my color.

  “Anybody home?” Dave called out.

  We waited for a moment to see what the call brought us. Often any loud sound brings zombies coming to check out the new food source. That was why it was better not to use guns in close quarters or to shout too loudly during a fight, because that was like setting off a “zombie goodies” beacon.

  But today Dave’s question brought nothing but silence in return.

  “I don’t see or hear any pilgrims, either. Maybe the morons finally figured out this wasn’t an oasis,” I said softly. “Stopped making themselves zombie bait.”

  “I doubt it,” he said with a sigh. “Some people never stop making themselves zombie bait. That’s why we have a job, remember?”

  I was about to come up with some kind of witty reply when there was a crash across the large hall. Both of us lifted our weapons higher as we peered through the hazy light. At some point, someone had the sense to build a sort of bunker on the elevated platform that held the altar and the sound had come from there.

  “Here we come, bionic zombies,” I muttered.

  Now when all this started, I was a normal person. Okay, a reasonably normal person. The first zombies I killed scared the shit out of me. I dreamed of them, my sleep troubled by nightmares where I was overrun, overcome, bitten and changed just like so many people I knew and loved had been. I saw them in every dark corner when I was awake, too. For at least the first month, everything made me jump.

  But over time, fear had given way to anger and my kills had gotten easier and bloodier. And then anger gave way to pure and simple job satisfaction. I mean, when I looked at a dead zombie head on a spike, I thought, “Hey, I did that. Picasso would be proud. Especially how I rearranged that eye.”

  In short, I was a proficient zombie warrior and took pride in my work, but that first thrill of emotion was now gone.

  Except for today. Now, with the idea of a newer, scarier kind of zombie out there for me to kill, my heart raced and my bat shook just a little.

  If Dave noticed my new attitude, he didn’t say anything. As we reached the altar, he merely motioned his head to the left and then to the right, indicating we should each take a side and come around the back to see what had caused the crash. I chose to go to the right and we reached the sides of the bunker at about the same time. Peering over the low wall, I suppressed a sigh.

  There was a zombie down in the bunker all right, munching happily over the corpse of a woman. The victim was unkempt, her dress ragged and dirty. The only nice thing about her was the huge diamond-encrusted cross that hung from her obviously broken neck. A pilgrim, no doubt, come here to find God like the rest. Instead she had found this.

  Her eyes were blank and dead for now, but that would soon change as the zombie ate at her freshly killed flesh and sucked at the blood that trickled from the ripped and tattered wound at her chest.

  Her killer was wearing the tattered remains of a police uniform, complete with shiny, black baton that still hung from his nearly shredded belt. I eyed it with interest because it would make a great bludgeon for our purposes now that he didn’t need it anymore.

  Dave took the lead. He vaulted over the bunker like a cat and, with a slash of his machete, took the head of the cop zombie just as it lifted its red eyes and recognized there was a new person to kill. In another hacking motion, Dave beheaded the victim of the zombie.

  “Nothing bionic about this one,” he said as he grabbed the zombie cop’s skull by the unkempt, once-blond hair and lifted
it up. The dead flesh of its scalp strained and cracked as Dave held it up to the light so we could see it better. “Just a regular, stupid zombie.”

  “Yeah, well get its regular, stupid baton, then,” I said with a nod, but before I could say anything more, three additional zombies appeared from the doorway that led to the back of the church behind Dave.

  “Oh, and correction. There are several regular, stupid zombies,” I said as I hurried around the bunker to face our enemy.

  You know that one move every girl lead makes in kung fu or horror movies? The one where she’s wearing head-to-toe black leather and she has a kicky haircut and she crouches down on one knee with her opposite foot sort of laid out and then she slices and dices… all while looking super doable?

  Well, the Kate Beckinsales and urban fantasy heroines of the world lied to us. That does not work. First, leather is hot, it stinks to high heaven, and it limits your movement. Oh, and it chafes like a motherfucker.

  Second, you just don’t want to get lower than your prey and you certainly don’t want to be all off-balance. That’s a great way to go down on your ass and have a rabid zombie on top of you.

  How do I know this? Well, I’ve tried some stuff since the outbreak, okay? Might as well learn from my mistakes.

  Anyway, instead of making the pretty movie move, I jumped down from the elevated altar with a cry and smashed the baseball bat down on the crown of the first zombie’s skull. There was a wet, satisfying thud as his rotting head disintegrated and he fell at my feet.

  With a tug, I freed my bat from his broken brains and turned on another, which was lurching toward me. His torn and bloody priest vestments flopped around his arms and the wooden rosary around his neck swung as if he were directing a rather passionate sermon. I set my legs and raised my bat over one shoulder.

  “Sarah steps up to the base, Sarah swings and…”

  I hurled the bat around and cracked the zombie straight in the temple. He gave a pained and faint growl as he staggered backward, bounced off the wall (leaving a trail of sludge behind him), and fell to the ground where he lay still and silent.

  “Home run!” I said, lifting my arms in victory as I turned to find David finishing off the third and final zombie with a swinging thwack of his machete. “The crowd goes wild!”

  “It was a foul,” he corrected as he gathered up the head of the zombie he had felled and tossed it in the sack with the others.

  So you’re probably wondering why take the heads. Well, about a month before, Jimmy No-Toes and some of the other “clients” who frequented our extermination service had gotten really weird about wanting to verify our kills. So we started bringing the heads back in order to collect our full payment for the jobs we did. I hadn’t developed the stomach for head removal and collection, though, so that fell to my husband.

  I wrinkled my nose as David moved to take the heads of the two zombies I’d killed. I turned my face so I wouldn’t see him hack and muttered, “Foul my ass.”

  He arched a brow at me as he tied off the sack and flung it over his shoulder like a really screwed up Santa Claus. You did not want this guy coming to your house Christmas Eve, that’s for sure.

  “You really want to argue with the ump?” he laughed. “That’s how you get thrown out of a game. Now, why don’t we clear the rest of the building?”

  I shrugged as I folded my arms with what I admit was a bit of a childish pout. “What’s the point? There are no bionic zombies.”

  “Did you really think there were?” Dave asked as he shot me a look from the corner of his eye.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Jimmy seemed so… so… honest about being afraid of whatever he saw here. There are a lot of ways you could describe that guy, but honest isn’t normally one of them. I guess it just caught my attention.”

  “I still say he was drunk… or stoned,” Dave said with a shrug as he motioned me deeper into the church. “Actually, I’m going to ask him to pay us the second half of his debt with whatever he’s been smoking. Sounds fun.”

  For the next twenty minutes we didn’t talk much as we cleared the rest of the big building. There wasn’t anything else to be found, though. As we returned to the van and reloaded our stuff, I shook my head.

  “It’s never been that empty,” I mused as I stared up at the pristine building amidst collapsed and ruined hell.

  Dave nodded. “Yeah. Normally we find a couple of lurkers and a half-dead pilgrim per trip.”

  “It’s kind of creepy,” I whispered.

  He patted my arm as we finished loading up. “Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe the pilgrims have finally gotten the message that it isn’t safe. If they stopped coming here, the zombies would have to find somewhere else to go for their buffet.”

  I continued to stare at the building even as I climbed into the van for the return trip to Jimmy’s hideout. “Maybe. I mean, I hope so. But there’s something just so off about it.”

  Dave turned in his seat to face me. “Come on, Sarah, you aren’t letting yourself get all caught up in Jimmy’s ghost… er, zombie story, are you?”

  I shrugged. “Why can’t it be possible that there are different kinds of zombies? That maybe there are ones who are stronger?”

  “Because the zombies were made by people and those people are all long gone. Those… those creatures are just lumps of empty flesh that can’t… die like they’re supposed to. They don’t evolve or think or feel, they just feed. You know that.” He turned the key and the engine roared to life. “Or at least you should after all this time.”

  I frowned as I stared out the window in silence. Part of me knew that Dave was right. That I was just letting myself get worked up by a drunk with a vivid imagination.

  But part of me still wondered, as we turned away from the church and crossed over the shambled tracks of what used to be the Metro, if what No-Toes said about bionics was possible.

  And what would happen if it was.

  Who moved my cheese? And my shotgun?

  When we pulled back up to Jimmy’s barbershop a short while later, things were almost back to normal. Or… whatever the closest thing was in the zombieverse. I won’t say I was totally convinced that the bionics didn’t exist, but I was well on my way to putting them out of my mind.

  “Want to wait here?” Dave asked as he put the pistol he’d rested on the dashboard back into his waistband and reached in the back for the burlap sack of heads.

  I shrugged. “I guess I can start thinking about food while you make the drop.”

  Now normally we didn’t split up, but David was armed and this was merely a swap job with Jimmy. In and out.

  Still, I put my own 9mm in reach on the dash as David exited the vehicle. As he walked up to the shop door, the bag of heads swung at his side in rhythm to his step and dripped sludge behind him like a surreal telling of Hansel and Gretel (I guess that would make Jimmy the witch and would explain why he was dressing the part).

  When Dave disappeared into the shop, I reached behind me and grabbed an old tin box we’d taken from a military surplus store we’d found a while back. When I opened it, I groaned.

  Within lay the food of champions. And that wasn’t saying much. Some old PowerBars (and not even in the good flavors) stared back at me. There was a bit of beef jerky and a couple of MRE rations.

  God damn, I missed food. Real food.

  Not fast food, really. I’d stopped craving pizza and burgers and fries within the first few weeks and my body had thanked me for it by leaning out. No, now I missed weird stuff. Like cereal with skim milk. Or yogurt.

  I know, I know, here I was in the middle of the desert and I was longing for bacteria-laden dairy. Whatever. I still wanted it. That’s just how the brain works, I guess.

  After much consideration, I chose to pull out the bag of jerky and tossed it on the driver’s seat while I put the rest of the tin back in place behind us. We couldn’t eat much from our meager collection, not until we scrounged up some more stock to replac
e it, which meant either making a few store runs for trade items or taking a job from one of our better-paying customers.

  When I glanced toward the barber shop, I saw Dave coming back out. He no longer carried the burlap sack of heads, but he had another curiously small paper bag in his hand, a remnant of the fast food I no longer craved.

  He threw open the driver’s side door and got in. His lips pursed and he yanked the jerky bag from under his ass and tossed it and the take-out sack into my lap.

  “What?” I asked as he roared the engine almost to the point of flooding it and gunned it back toward the highway.

  He didn’t answer, but his white knuckles told a pretty fucking clear story.

  “What?” I repeated. “What did Jimmy say?”

  “Wasn’t there,” David’s teeth never unclenched as he spoke. “Left a note saying to leave the heads by the door.”

  “Ah.” I looked down at the bag in my lap. “I assume this is what he left for payment?”

  Dave blinked. “Oh yes. Please, open it!”

  I sighed as I unrolled the greasy bag and reached inside. I pulled out one small box decorated with cartoon characters.

  “Bandages,” I said as I stared at the colorful artwork.

  “Oh no,” Dave said, enunciating very carefully now. “Not just bandages. Sponge-Fucking-Bob-Square-Damn-Pants bandages.”

  “He lives in a pineapple under the…” I trailed off as Dave’s eye twitched. “Sorry.” I shook the box. “Half-full.”

  David jolted his head toward me. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” I put the box back in its bag and tossed it in the back for storage later.

  There was no response from my husband for probably about five miles.

  “Fucking cheapskate,” Dave finally muttered, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as he stared at the expanse of highway.

  I didn’t answer, mostly because there was nothing to say. I mean, we’d have cheerfully dressed wounds for a little bit, but I doubted Dave wanted to hear that.