They were hanging outside one of the hospital boardrooms. Inside was a large wooden conference table surrounded by 10 creepers wearing dusty doctor coats. A whiteboard on wall read, “Contagion Outbreak,” with a list of options on how to deal with the threat. It would seem that none of the plans had worked.
The 10 doctors all turned and stared at the pair hanging off the window. Floyd pointed Clyde in through the hole in the window and blasted them all with the strobe light. In the darkened room, it worked perfectly. They all covered their eyes and staggered back. Floyd quickly blew their brains out, one by one.
“Hang in there, Mikki, I’m comin’!”
“I ain’t plannin’ on goin’ nowhere, Floyd!” she answered, upside down.
He made his way over to her and reached down to pull her up, so she could get her foot out of the hole in the safety glass. Now that they had a better grip on the window sill, they were able to shoot and kick the glass until it fell in. Finally, they were inside the building. Looking down at the rear parking lot below, they could see Freedom and the ambulance surrounded by a seemingly endless swarm of the undead.
“We left a bunch of grenades in the truck, didn’t we, Floyd?”
“I reckon.”
“And the two RPGs?”
“Yup.”
“And you just filled up all them gas cans, didntcha?”
“Yup.”
“And I’m guessing your transmission’s shot all to hell, ain’t that right?”
“Yup.”
“Ain’t gonna be able to fix it?”
“Nope.”
“Sorry, Floyd. I really am sorry.”
Mikki pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it out the window. It bounced off the side of the ambulance, ricocheted a few times between the two vehicles, then landed under Freedom. A few seconds later, Floyd’s beloved truck exploded in a huge fireball that sent shockwaves and shrapnel in every direction, blowing away everything within sight on the ground. Something came flying up at them and Floyd and Mikki dove under the conference table.
They heard something slam into the wood above them and go bouncing off in all directions around the room. Slowly, they crawled out from under the table and looked around to see what it was. Floyd found it first.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
Staring up at them from the chair in which it had finally landed was the new Chairman of the Board. Cement Head.
Chapter Fifty-Five
“So what’s the plan, Floyd?”
“Same as always. Kill zombies. Stay alive.”
“You wanna be a little more specific?”
“Get to the roof. Survey the area. See how we can get back to the freeway. Have to make it on foot now, and we’ll run into far fewer brain-eaters there than marching through the neighborhood streets.”
“You really think it’s all worth it, Floyd? I mean, you think this place really exists? You think we could really settle down and have a real life there? No more creepers? No more sleepin’ in shifts? No more MREs?”
“No more grenades,” Floyd added, with a smile in his voice.
“OK, I like me my grenades. But you know what I mean. Is it for real? Or too good to be true?”
“Well, the only way to find out is to get there. Don’t really have a choice now, anyways.” Floyd got more and more agitated in his rant. “We’ll find a way, Mikki, if we have to run for seven miles with just our machetes choppin’ the heads off of anything that gets in our way. I didn’t come this far to stop now! Not for no reason! No way! No how!”
Mikki had never seen Floyd so riled up before. She took courage from his determination. Killin’ zombies was sure a lot of fun, but this was a little more “fun” than even she had ever wanted. Besides, she was already runnin’ out of grenades again.
The two took the opportunity to remove their helmets and take inventory of what they had managed to pull from the truck at the last minute. Mikki still had 12 grenades (including the ones she had stuffed between her boobs) and Floyd had 10. Both had full water flasks and Floyd had a couple MRE pouches in his backpack. They had Bonnie and Clyde with four drum mags of shotgun shells each, although Floyd had spent more than a few shells in the boardroom. They each had a Mini Uzi and rifle hanging off their backs, plus as many mags of ammo as they could carry. No wonder the electrical unit had broken loose under their weight. They weren’t exactly traveling light.
Mikki picked up her copy of The Zombie Apocalypse Survival Handbook: How to Live with the Undead that she had carried since long before she met Floyd. She leafed through it and looked at some of her handwritten notes. She tossed it into a nearby office trash can.
Floyd had one more thing to add to the collection they were piling onto the boardroom table. He unzipped his jacket, pulled out something, and threw it on the table. It was the Hello Kitty doll he had turned into Oh Hell Kitty.
“What the hell?” Mikki’s face lit up.
“I didn’t want you to lose everything again,” Floyd explained.
“Damn, Floyd! In the middle of getting’ our asses kicked, you still thought of me?”
“I always think of you, Mikki. I can’t get you outta my head. Before I met you, I only had myself to think about. I didn’t have no responsibilities and didn’t want none. I was really good at stayin’ alive, and that’s pretty much all I did. Stay alive.
“You taught me somethin’, Mikki. What good is not dyin’ if you never live? You taught me how to live. You’ll probably get us both killed someday, maybe today, but I’ll always be grateful to you for that. I’d rather go out with guns blazing and you by my side than die in my sleep bit by some damn zombie rat!”
“Oh, Floyd,” Mikki said with tears welling up in her eyes. “That’s gotta be the sweetest thing anybody’s ever said to me! And I gotta thank you for something, too, Floyd.”
“What’s that, Mikki?”
“For lettin’ me…be me. Ain’t nobody never done that before. Everybody wanted to use me, judge me, or change me. You never did, even when I pissed you off.”
“Which was often!”
“That’s right, Floyd. Ruin the moment.”
They both laughed. Floyd gave her a big hug. She hugged him back. There was nothing sexual about it. It was much deeper than that.
Neither one said it. Both pretended it wasn’t true. But both knew it was. There was no way they were getting out of this one alive. It was two little people against a million or more rejects from hell determined to initiate them into Club Undead. This was Floyd and Mikki’s final stand.
Mikki gave Floyd a soft kiss on the mouth. Floyd kissed her forehead gently, then she placed her head on his shoulder as he held her firmly.
“You know what we gotta do now, right, Floyd?”
“I reckon so, Mikki. I reckon so.”
He handed Mikki her helmet and put his on. They completed a mic check, organized their weaponry, and prepared to meet their fate. Mikki looked at the plush Zombie Kitty, then stuffed it inside her jacket and zipped it up, one last time. Floyd and Mikki, Bonnie and Clyde, Oh Hell Kitty—everyone was all ready to go. Ready for anything.
The dark windows on the building cast even the outer rooms into semidarkness. The inner rooms were even darker, as all lights had long since been demolished by the patients. The electricity was still on, however, so when the two slowly opened the boardroom door, they could see tiny pinpoints of dim light from LEDs in various equipment piercing the blackness.
It didn’t take long for the fun to begin. Floyd and Mikki slammed their backs together in the middle of the hallway as they each started blasting in opposite directions. It was like a mandatory government-ordered Diversity Training seminar, only Floyd and Mikki weren’t very tolerant. Zombies of every size, sex and color lined up in the halls to come greet them. One by one, headless body after headless body dropped to the floor.
“Follow me!” Floyd ordered. He walked slowly forward with Mikki backed up against him. He had seen an emergen
cy exit floor plan on the wall that indicated he was facing where the stairs should be.
Moving down the hall, still back to back, they came to a nurse’s station. The area was wide open on their left, so Mikki pivoted around to Floyd’s side as they continued toward the stairs with their backs to the outer wall. They received a warm welcome.
Four nurses, a doctor and about a dozen patients turned and started moaning. Floyd only fired two rounds and called, “Cover me!” though the mic. He dropped to one knee and switched out drum mags as fast as possible. Predictably, Mikki sent a grenade into the pack of creepers out for a stroll at the far end of the nurse’s station. The two Zombie Hunters received a shower of zombie body parts as Floyd stood up again, ammo replenished.
Mikki flashed her strobe light back down the hallway behind them and took out another couple of creepers that had entered the hall. Clyde spit fire and lead pellets as Floyd moved ahead down the hallway. They made it down about another 20 feet when Mikki said, “Floyd, you gotta see this!”
He turned and understood at once what she was referring to. OK, from now on, he would never say or think he had seen everything, or that a situation couldn’t get any weirder. Two clean cut (for zombies) brain-eaters were shuffling down the hall in their direction. Both were males wearing white, short-sleeved shirts and black ties. Both had black name badges. One said “Elder Gonzalez” and the other read “Elder Haster.” Under the names, both badges read, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”
“Mormon zombies,” said Mikki, stating the obvious. “Insert your own joke here, Floyd.” Two shots later and Mikki sent the two missionaries to that great Mormon Temple in the sky.
They made it to the stairs just as a new crowd of shamblers was gathering, coming at them from all angles. Neither Floyd nor Mikki bothered firing behind them as they sprinted up the wide stairs. No sense wasting ammo on what couldn’t follow them. They needed to focus on what might lie ahead.
Reaching the landing, Floyd peered around at the next flight of stairs. It led up to another floor, then presumably continued up again from there. He looked back to wave Mikki up ahead of him.
“Oh, you gotta be shittin’ me!” he complained. “I thought brain-eaters couldn’t climb stairs!”
Mikki turned to see what he was talking about. ‘Well, technically, they ain’t climbin’,” she said.
“I don’t care what you call it. It looks like climbing to me!”
Predictably, the zombies made it to the stairs and stopped, confused, but the ones behind kept pushing forward, knocking the front row down. They might not be able to figure out how stairs worked, but they could walk up a slope just fine. And if they fell down, they could crawl. So the first line went down and the next wave simply walked over them, up the slope. If they fell down, they would crawl as far as possible while the next wave walked or crawled over them. They weren’t fast, but they were persistent. And this was a big floor with a lot of medical staff and patients.
Of course, the creepers could have taken the wheelchair ramp up on the other side of the building, but their attention was on the two humans. Mikki dropped a grenade and shouted, “With love from Floyd and Mikki!” She knew the sound of the explosion would bring every creeper in the area down on them again, but she didn’t plan to stick around to give them a reception. She knew Floyd would agree.
The two started running as fast as they could up the stairs as the grenade went off behind them. Floyd pulled the Mini Uzi off his back and threw Clyde over his shoulder by the strap as he ran. He fired the tiny machine gun into a crowd of brain-eaters on the next floor as Mikki hit them with the strobe light to back them up a bit, then Floyd turned right and took the next flight of stairs up. She was going to fire as well, but there was no need. Floyd had cleared a wide enough path.
“Didn’t we just leave this party?” Mikki asked as they found the same greeting on the next floor.
“It’s hell to be popular,” Floyd answered, spraying bullets into the throng.
“Yeah, well, I hate paparazzi,” said Mikki, throwing another grenade.
They did this six more times on six more floors as they ran. Even with all the weight they were carrying, it was amazing how adrenaline and several hundred zombies could motivate you to keep moving. Susan Powter would have been envious. Floyd and Mikki were in top physical shape, but they were both ready to collapse by the time they reached the door to the roof. The stairway had narrowed by then from about 15’ wide to 4’ wide. Floyd hit the push bar and they were on the roof, ripping off their helmets and wheezing, doubled over, trying to catch their breath.
Floyd coughed violently as Mikki gulped in ragged gasps of air. Floyd turned around and looked for a way to bar the door. Of course, he found none.
“This day…just keeps…gettin’ better…and better,” he sputtered. “Help me drag this over to the door!”
Dropping the helmets and weapons, Floyd and Mikki stumbled over to grab the wires from the fallen electrical box and pulled as hard as they could. It was heavy, but they managed to drag it over to the door. They pushed as hard as they could. It got to within a few inches of the door and stopped, but that should be enough to keep the creepers inside. Mikki grabbed one of the live wires and shoved the sparky end into the opening.
“Zombie bug zapper,” she explained. “So what now, Floyd? There ain’t no buildings we can Spider-man over to this time.”
“I’m thinkin’, I’m thinkin’.”
He could see the 710 freeway from here, but no way to get there. The ground below was already filled again with wall-to-wall brain-eaters. The whole damn city had come out to greet them, the sounds of eerie moaning wafting up to them from below. Apparently, there hadn’t been this much entertainment in the area for a while, and everyone was coming out to join in the festivities.
“You still got them holy cards stuck in yer bra?”
“Sure do.”
“Might wanna pull one out and pray for rain.”
“Rain?”
“Drop a few of these electric wires and we could fry the whole mob, if they were wet.”
“Yeah. You’re the one who’s always tellin’ me you don’t think it works that way.”
“You got a better idea?” Mikki just shrugged, so Floyd continued thinking out loud. “I used to have me this fish oil spray. Covered my scent. Confused the hell outta the brain-eaters. Couldn’t tell I was human. Maybe if we could find somethin’ like that we could just walk through them all and make it to the freeway.”
“Yeah, and maybe monkeys will fly outta my butt. We’re on the roof, Floyd. Face it. We got nowhere to go.”
“Well, like I said. Pray for a miracle.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
“Better think o’ somethin’ quick, Floyd.”
Unfortunately, there was no time to pray. The creepers had made it up to the door. The Zombie Zapper worked great, but only for one zombie at a time. The two heard a large zap, a short whiny moan, and a thud as the body dropped. Then another zap, another unearthly squeal, and another thud.
But then, other sounds started coming. The sounds of pounding on the door. The sounds of desperate, ghastly moans. Suddenly, the door budged. Only an inch, but it was an inch closer to open than it was before. Then another scrape as the door pushed the large electrical box further away. Then another.
Mikki put her helmet on. “Well, Floyd, it’s been nice knowin’ ya.”
“You too, Mikki.”
“Too bad Cement Head isn’t here to see this. He woulda loved it.”
“I’m sure he’s lookin’ up from Zombie Hell, eager to see us again. Finish what he started.”
The door opened farther, just enough for the creepers to start pouring through. Mikki threw a grenade into the opening as Floyd opened up with Clyde on the first wave that got out. The explosion from the grenade had the unfortunate side effect of blowing the door open farther. Soon, a pile of bodies was shambling out onto the roof from the narrow opening in the
door.
Floyd and Mikki took turns blowing away zombie heads as they popped out of the door, which sent the brain-eaters on the stairway into a frenzy. The familiar ghastly howl filtered in with the moans, while the crowd below on the ground heard and joined the chorus. It was like a demonic choir singing in off-key harmony.
Whenever they got low on ammo, Mikki would throw another grenade. That would wipe out a batch and give them time to reload. Even so, Bonnie and Clyde were soon empty. They dropped the shotguns next to the empty drum mags on the roof beside them and pulled out the Mini Uzis. The two flipped the switch to single fire, making literally every shot count. Another few mags, another few grenades, and soon they were on their last magazine for the Uzis as well.
Mikki tossed a grenade and yelled, “Push!”
Floyd joined her in pushing as hard as he could against the electrical box. This time, whether it was due to desperation, adrenaline, or divine intervention, they managed to slide it all the way against the door to keep it shut. The two took literally just a moment to breathe before taking stock of their remaining ammunition. Floyd still had a couple of slug mags and Mikki had a couple of anti-armor mags, so they loaded Bonnie and Clyde up again.
“Mikki, remember when you said we had our ‘Aw Shit’ moment?”
“Yeah, Floyd.”
“We were wrong. This is it.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Floyd took a drink of water from his flask and looked around again at the area below him, while Mikki drew a huge heart and their logo on the door. Soon the pounding against the door resumed. Once more they heard the door give way. Maybe just a quarter of an inch, but it moved.
“Floyd?”
“Yeah, Mikki?”
“We only got a few bullets left.”
“I know Mikki.”
“Remember your promise? The one you made when we first met?”
Floyd & Mikki (Book 1): Zombie Hunters (Love Should Be Explosive!) Page 27
