Flip This Zombie

by Jesse Petersen

  We drove for another fifteen minutes through rapidly decreasing city into an ominously quiet area I’d never visited before. It was dead desert, except for a few spotty trailers here and there and some dilapidated buildings that appeared to have been damaged even before the apocalypse.

  Now why did I keep hearing the theme from Deliverance in my head?

  “Arrive at your destination in a quarter-mile, on the right,” the GPS declared and then went quiet, its job done unless we did something stupid and went off course, at which point the voice would come back on and tell us to “please turn back” or “recalculating” over and over until I wanted to scream. I’d broken three GPSes over this issue already, you know. David was starting to get annoyed by it.

  I slowed the vehicle to a crawl as we rolled up on our “destination,” though you could hardly call it that. It had once been a warehouse of some kind, but not a nice one. You know those flimsy steel siding “make-it-yourself” type buildings you used to see advertised in local commercials all the time? Well, this was one of those and it looked like it had been through hell.

  Blood slashed down the sides of the once-white metal, combining with rust to make an eerie orange-red pattern on a rotting metal canvas. The roof was half caved in and the eastern wall had collapsed against itself and sagged precariously. A stiff wind and the whole structure was bound to fall down around the head of anyone who dared take shelter inside.

  Any idiot who looked at the place would think the same. So why had we been called here?

  “I don’t like this,” Dave muttered at my side as he took the safety off his rifle.

  I shook my head slowly. “Me neither, but we’re here now. Should we check it out?”

  He gave me a half-glance but I couldn’t read his guarded expression. “I don’t know, Sarah…”

  I pursed my lips and bit my tongue so I wouldn’t say something sarcastic. I got the need to be cautious, I really did, but the more I stared at the building, the more I wanted to know who had called us here and what was waiting inside.

  “Please?” I begged as I turned to face Dave. I batted my eyelashes and tilted my head.

  He laughed despite the worry in his eyes. “Um, okay. But let’s gear up solid and stay sharp. I just…” he looked at the building with a faraway look, “have a bad feeling about this.”

  I groaned at the familiar line. “Okay, you can quote Star Wars but only because you agreed to come with me.”

  Again he laughed as we got out of the van and eased our way to the back where we loaded up on weapons, from guns to stabbing and clubbing items. I shut the van doors as quietly as possible and then we crept toward the warehouse in a slow, steady military formation we’d read about in a library book about Navy SEALs.

  Of course there was a difference between reading about SEALs and being them. One we quickly recognized when I stepped on some kind of trip wire hidden in the dust and suddenly about ten guns, all of them military grade (including one sweet cannon I totally wished I could steal without getting shot) and meant to fire multiple shots in a matter of seconds, appeared from hidden cubbies all around the warehouse. And they were all pointed at us.

  David froze, reaching back to pull me closer to his back as if he could protect me from hundreds of speeding bullets. Kind of sweet, though not particularly well thought out.

  “What the fuck?” he growled.

  Before I could respond to what was clearly a rhetorical question, the bent warehouse door ahead of us opened and a man in a lab coat and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses appeared in the entryway. He blinked a few times, like he wasn’t accustomed to the sun, and then stepped into the desert with his own weapon raised to match the others all around us.

  His was impressive, too. A fully automatic AK-47, definitely not legal before the zombie outbreak. He held it like he knew how to use it, despite his geeked-out attire.

  As he moved a few cautious steps closer, I noticed he was pretty young. Probably just a handful of years older than us. Maybe mid-thirties?

  Another thing that hit me right away was that he was clean. Not spit-shine clean like most of us, but really clean. I swear I could smell the soapy scent of his skin and the fresh detergent of his clothing even from here and it was like heaven.

  He was cute, too. I’ll admit it. He kind of had a Luke Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums (rather than Luke Wilson hyping cell phones) vibe about him that made me blink a couple of times despite the fact that he had a gun in my face and apparently had some kind of control over a whole bunch more.

  “I’m sorry to do this,” he called out. “But I do have the power to pull all these triggers at once so I hope you won’t be rash. Simply do as I say and allow me the time to explain myself and I won’t have to use this.”

  He lifted some kind of remote from his pocket that apparently operated the weapons around us, then slipped it back into his shirt pocket and returned his finger to the trigger of the gun he held.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” Dave snapped, still holding me against his back in a big old hero pose. “You called us here!”

  I stared at the guy over Dave’s shoulder, still intrigued by the dichotomy of the cute face, the nerdy jacket, and the big-ass gun.

  “Didn’t you?” I asked.

  The guy nodded. “Oh yes, I did indeed ensure that a message was posted for you at the New Phoenix survivor camp, though I didn’t post it myself.”

  “Then why the fuck are you pointing a gun—”

  “A shitload of guns,” I interrupted.

  Dave shot me a look over his shoulder. “Pardon me, a shitload of guns at us?”

  “I am very happy to explain,” the man said. “But first I have to insist that you disarm yourselves fully and come into the warehouse.”

  “Disarm ourselves,” Dave said softly, so only I could hear. “Is he nuts?”

  I looked at our captor. He didn’t have the wild look about him that some people did after everything we’d all been through. That didn’t mean he wasn’t nuts, of course, just that he was able not to show it as clearly as say… Jimmy No-Toes.

  “What choice do we have?” I asked.

  Dave looked at the guy for a long moment and I could see the wheels turning in his mind, looking for a way out of this just like he’d found a way out of dozens of other situations over the past few months.

  “Those guns might not even be attached to that remote,” he finally said.

  I shrugged, though his suggestion didn’t make me feel all that much better. “I guess it’s possible. And even if they are, he called us here so he must need us. Maybe he won’t really press the button. But do you want to test it?”

  Apparently he did because Dave lifted his gun to his shoulder and pointed it at the lab coat guy. “I don’t think so, asswipe. Instead, I think you’re going to let us back away and get into our van.”

  “Please David,” Lab Coat said. “I really don’t think that would be wise. Just come inside and I swear to you that I’ll explain everything to you and Sarah.”

  But Dave wasn’t going to agree just because the guy knew our names. Like I said before, it wasn’t that shocking thanks to our minor celebrity status in the local area. People called us by our first names all the time.

  Most of them just weren’t pointing a gun… I’m sorry, a shitload of guns… at us. Dave shook his head and started inching backward toward the van. With a grimace, Lab Coat Guy reached into his pocket and pressed a button. In unison the guns around us cocked or their safety measurements slid off.

  I flinched. Shit, that thing really did control the weapons mounted at every conceivable angle.

  “David…” I whispered.

  But to my surprise, he wasn’t paying attention to the fact that we were about to get shot. Instead, he had turned his head and was looking back over his shoulder. Past the van, into the distance. Shaking, I turned my attention to whatever had caught his eye and let out a little shriek.

  A swarm of zombies crested a small h
ill in the road we had come up to find this place. There were probably at least a hundred, some jogging, others just shambling their way toward us without any real drive or purpose. Already I could hear their groaning moans and hisses of hunger.

  “You see, the situation is deteriorating with every moment you wait,” Lab Coat Guy said as we returned our stares to him. He was looking past us at the coming zombie horde, too, and a sheen of sweat had broken out on his upper lip. “If I don’t allow you to leave, you’ll be eaten. Or I’ll have to shoot you. Either scenario doesn’t end well for you. So please, come inside and let me take care of that lot.”

  Dave looked at me and back at the horde. They were within a tenth of a mile now. I could almost smell the death on their breath.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Drop everything and run, Sarah. Go inside!”

  Within seconds, we shed our weapons in a pile at our feet and ran toward the warehouse. The faster zombies had reached us by that time and were at our heels. I felt their fingers brush my back as I rushed past the stranger who now held our lives in his hands. And then there was only the sound of automatic gunfire.

  I spun around as we got behind him to find that Lab Coat Guy had depressed the button in his pocket. All the guns on the turrets fired at once, hitting the zombies in one continuous shot. The living dead lurched and danced with the impact of the bullets on their chests and more importantly, heads, then fell into briefly moaning piles of sludge and goo.

  Lab Coat Guy turned toward us, his face impassive and almost bored. For a guy who had called on a pair of exterminators, he had extermination down pretty pat already.

  “Well, now that that messy business is taken care of,” he said with a sheepish smile. “Do you have any other weapons I need to know about? Perhaps hidden in a shoe or inside your clothing?”

  I frowned before I bent and pulled a knife from one boot and an old-fashioned Derringer Dave and I had thought was hilarious from the other. Dave removed the gun belt he wore under his shirt and we dropped them all at our feet.

  “Very good,” Lab Coat said with a smile. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  David glared and I couldn’t help doing the same. After all, the guy was still pointing his AK-47 at us.

  “Come with you?” Dave snapped as he looked around us in the dark and dusty building that was decidedly empty. “Where to exactly?”

  With a smile, Lab Coat Guy backed slowly to the far wall of the warehouse. He picked up a big metal box with a red button and a green button on its face. With his thumb, he pressed the green button and suddenly the floor right in front of David and I opened and a platform lifted up from beneath it.

  “What the hell?” Dave snapped.

  Lab Coat Guy moved forward, weapon still raised and ready. “I know you have questions. Just come with me. I promise all this will soon make sense.”

  Dave tensed and I could see he was about to go ape shit on this guy. I turned toward him and caught his arm, squeezing gently as I looked up into his eyes.

  “We’ve gone this far,” I whispered. “And the fact that he’s asking us to do this seems like a formality. He is holding the gun.”

  Dave looked down at me, then back at our new “friend.” “The second I get a chance, I’m going to punch you square in the face, motherfucker.”

  Lab Coat Guy smiled indulgently. “Duly noted. Now please step onto the platform.”

  We all did and with a press of his foot on another button, Lab Coat lowered us down into a dark chasm. The doors above us closed and we rode down, down, down for what seemed like forever. The darkness was complete for half the ride and then it started to change. Muted green bulbs appeared on the walls, then red ones, then white.

  White light. From electricity. Something we hadn’t seen for months (I guess I figured Lab Coat’s different remotes were operated by batteries). We both blinked, shocked by the glow of the bulbs as the lift came to a stop inside a protected steel cage. Through the metal grating I saw something that nearly stopped my heart. Something that made me shake as I backed up against David’s chest and felt my knees give out just a little.

  We were in a lab. A real fucking lab with glass rooms and pristine white halls and lights, so many lights!

  Lab Coat Guy gave us a brief smile before he released a latch at the cage door and swung it open to allow us all entry into a sterile hallway.

  Dave and I stood on the lift, just staring for a long moment before Lab Coat Guy said, “Well? Are you coming or are you just going to stand there staring?”

  With a shake of his head like he was waking from a dream, Dave grasped my hand and we stepped into the hallway together to follow Lab Coat Guy down the hallway toward an uncertain future.

  “There’s only one explanation for this,” I whispered as we turned at a T-intersection in the hallway and our new “friend” slid a card through a key lock. At the end of the passage, a white door opened silently. “We’ve been attacked and this is how zombies see the world.”

  Dave looked down at me with a shiver at the possibility that what I said might actually be true.

  “Right now we’re probably eating a Girl Scout troop,” I finished with a nervous grimace.

  “Don’t be silly,” Lab Coat Guy said as he looked over his shoulder at us. “There haven’t been any Girl Scouts for months. And you aren’t zombies. This is entirely real, I assure you. And now”—he slowly lowered his gun at his side—“let me introduce myself. My name is Kevin Barnes. Dr. Kevin Barnes. And this is my lab.”

  We both stared, shocked into silence (rare for us, I assure you). Finally it was Dave who looked down at me, his face pale and his eyes wide.

  “I-I guess I was wrong,” he stammered. “It turns out there are mad scientists after all.”

  Don’t fear change. Just fear everything and everyone else.

  Dr. Barnes chuckled as he gave Dave a look that was normally reserved for silly children.

  “Oh no, David. Not a mad scientist, I’m merely a scientist.”

  “I’m sure that’s just what Dr. Frankenstein said right before he made a zombie of his own,” I whispered.

  I was sort of shocked I could find enough of my voice for that. I was still half-convinced this was all a fucked-up dream brought on by too many beans and Pop-Tarts. Was this what scurvy did to a person? I’d have to look it up in one of our medical books as soon as I woke up from this whacked-out dream.

  “Please, come in,” Dr. Barnes insisted as he passed through the door his key card had unlocked. “I’ll try to explain everything to you.”

  We followed him. I guess we were too numb and curious to do anything else. Inside we found a tidy office, sort of like what you used to find at a clinic before you went into an exam room. There was a big desk near the back wall with a computer on it. A computer that was on and working! Instantly all my little geek-centricities kicked in and I longed to check e-mail and see what was up with I Can Has Cheezburger.

  Of course, those things didn’t exist anymore, computer or not.

  In the back of the room and along the left wall were banks of windows, but built-in blinds were lowered between the panes of glass to keep us from seeing what was on the other side.

  The room was cool, probably half from being underground and half from the air conditioning pumping through vents hidden somewhere in the room. Air conditioning! We hadn’t felt that in months (again, old vans have their advantages and disadvantages).

  Soft light glowed from a desk lamp beside the desk and some kind of instrumental music drifted out of the computer speakers.

  It was all like a weird oasis from what was just above us.

  Dr. Barnes took a place at his desk and motioned us to sit across from him. As we sank into the seats and stared, both of us too stunned to do much else, he smiled.

  “You must have a few questions.”

  Dave snorted as a response, but Barnes ignored his interruption.

  “Let me begin at the beginning. You see, this warehouse was o
nce owned by a government facility for which I worked.”

  Dave shifted in his chair as we shot each other a look. Governmental lab. Sort of like the one at the University of Washington where all this shit started.

  “Making zombies, were we, Doc?” I asked softly.

  Barnes’s face paled at least three shades and I thought he might pass out right then and there. He was filled with righteous indignation when he sputtered, “Of course not!”

  “Then what were you doing way out in the desert in a warehouse obviously designed to look like a nothing hole?” Dave asked, his brow arching.

  “We—well, it was classified,” the other man stammered as his eyes darted away from us. “And it really doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “Doesn’t it?” I asked as I folded my arms. “Damn, I don’t want to find out there’s something worse out there waiting to be unleashed on us.”

  Barnes hesitated. “Well, if there is, it wasn’t something I was involved in before the infection. And whatever I did before, there’s no longer a government to work for, at least not out here. I’m no different than you two now.”

  Dave opened his mouth to argue, but I jumped in instead. “So how did you survive the outbreak?”

  The doctor’s frown deepened. “When the infection began, a few of my assistants and I were downstairs in this lab. An emergency lockdown procedure was triggered at the first whiff of those things hitting the city and we were trapped with only satellite television to tell us the story of what was going on just twenty feet above us.”

  I flinched. As bad as it had been to be a part of the outbreak, I could hardly imagine being physically trapped somewhere, only able to watch on monitors while all the horror unfolded just above you. It must have been like a bad movie… except you couldn’t change the channel.

  “But after a couple of days, the television stations from around the world slowly broke out and then died. Even the military links failed, which is when we all recognized just how bad it had gotten.” He sighed.

  I tilted my head to look at him. If this was an act, he was very fucking good at it. Like “I’d like to thank the Academy” good.