Behind them, the first mob of zombies stumbled and crawled their way up the hall. In front of them, the second herd of toothless, drooling goons staggered down the corridor.
Zack lifted the dripping mop head out of the bucket and soaked the floor.
“What are you doing?” Zoe asked. “You’re just making it slippery.”
“That’s the idea, genius,” Zack said, mopping backward. “Nice and soapy.”
“I get it…,” Ozzie said, running up to the yellow bucket. “But we need to speed things up. We’ve got under a minute to get out of here.” He kicked it sideways.
“What the—?” Zack shouted.
The bucket tipped, and the soapy liquid spilled at the feet of the zombie stampede. The beastly brood stepped into the expanding puddle of mop water and slipped on the slick linoleum like first-time ice skaters. They pawed at the walls for balance, only to slide and crumple.
“Follow my lead.” Ozzie gripped his nunchaku and took off, sliding through the tumbling ghouls. With two quick whaps, Ozzie clobbered two of the zombies, then spun backward like a hockey defense-man, clocking two more. He finished with a well-timed reverse back flip over the last zombie and landed onto the dry floor.
Who is this kid? Zack thought.
“Ready…set…” Zack clutched the mop handle. The zombies were three feet behind them, making noises like cartoon people eating: Nom nom nom.
“Go!” Zoe lunged forward, head-hunting for fallen fiends with her push broom, while Rice raced through the zombies covering the floor. Zack used the mop to pole-vault over the reanimated slip-’n’-slimers. On the other side, Ozzie was in the clear, knocking zombies out one by one until there were none left.
“Thirty seconds until automatic lockdown…,” the voice warned them.
“Hurry,” Ozzie called out over the blaring alarm. “We can still make it in time!” He led the way through the dim crimson pulse of the base, stutter-stepping down a cement stairwell with Zack, Zoe, and Rice close behind.
“Automatic lockdown will begin in ten, nine, eight…”
Ozzie slid down the handrail and crashed into the push-bar of the emergency exit door.
“…three…two..one…”
Reaching the ground floor, they all hustled outside.
“Lockdown complete,” the robot lady announced as the door bolted behind them. They stood on a small cement staircase, staring out over a sea of motor vehicles.
“What are all these cars doing right here?” Zoe asked.
“Must be from the traffic jam,” Zack said.
“I don’t remember a traffic jam,” Zoe said.
Rice reminded her. “When you were all…” He hunched his neck and clawed at the air, making a zombie face. “In the back of your mom’s Volvo.”
In the distance, hundreds of zombie savages limped across the tarmac, gurgling their own mucus.
“Get down!” Ozzie ordered as he hit the deck.
Crawling on all fours, Zack heard an ungodly groan and peeked under a Jeep Wrangler to his right. A zombie policewoman squirmed on its stomach, scraping itself along the gravel. It jerked its head to the side and glared at Zack. Its bloodshot eyes were solid pink. The zombified female cop smiled eerily, wheezing through its open mouth. It slithered after them, wedging its body under the Jeep, growling and snorting.
“Move it, Rice!” Zack yelled as he scrambled into a run like a sprinter off a starting block.
They stopped at the last car, peering over the front of a purple Cadillac with long bull’s horns mounted on the hood. A crisscrossing death trap of cantankerous fiends lumbered past the rows of cars. Hairy-chested zombie men with earrings sputtered mouthfuls of teeth. Willowy zombie women staggered along, their veiny skin dripping from their bent and broken forearms. Little old lady zombies in bathrobes and slippers tottered next to undead cowboys in ten-gallon hats, limping in their leather boots, spurs jangling with each off-kilter step. Brains leaked out of nostrils. Skin flaked in great, disintegrated hunks. Each zombie was more revolting than the one before.
Ozzie pointed past the undead bedlam. A large army tank sat by the security fences, where more zombies stumbled in from the scrubland. “I hope you guys are feeling limber,” he said, stretching his quads and arching his back.
“You wanna go through that?” Zoe asked blankly.
“Yeah, what’s the matter?” Ozzie looked Zoe over. “You look like you’re in good shape.” He cocked his head at the boys. “It’s these two I’m nervous about.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Zack asked.
“The two of you don’t exactly look like you play a lot of sports….” Ozzie let the insult hang in the ripe-smelling air.
“Whatever, dude. We were doing just fine before you showed up,” Zack scoffed.
“All right. All right. Everybody just be cool.” Ozzie grabbed his nunchaku off his pack. “And don’t get in my way.”
Ozzie approached the brain-dead frenzy, swinging the nunchaku slowly.
The zombies’ bulging heads rotated toward them as they entered the shambling footslog of the living dead. Ozzie sprang into action and unleashed a furious attack, clearing a path for the rest of them. The only sound was the whizz of wood whipping through the air and the meaty thwacks of serious skull trauma courtesy of Ozzie’s dazzling nunchaku freestyle.
The brainsick psychos dropped to the concrete in ones and twos. Zack, Rice, and Zoe bobbed and weaved across the runway, dodging flailing zombie limbs. As soon as they reached the clearing, Rice and Zoe raced for the great black tank. Zack was about to follow when he saw the last zombie shuffling toward Ozzie.
Colonel Briggs stood before his son, missing an arm. Blood spurted out from the bony nubbin of his shoulder as if it were a ketchup squeeze bottle.
“Dad?” said Ozzie, losing his grip on the nunchaku. They sailed through the air, clattering on the cement. “Your arm!”
The zombie colonel waggled his dismembered limb by the wrist like a caveman waving a club. Ozzie froze as his father raised his good arm, preparing to clobber his son with the severed appendage.
Zack charged from a standstill and tackled Ozzie to the ground. The colonel lost his balance, falling to the pavement with a thud. As the zombie arm whiffed by their heads, the boys rolled out of danger and scrambled to their feet.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ozzie gave Zack a shove like a chest-pass without the basketball. “I said don’t get in my way!”
“Fine,” Zack said angrily. “Next time your dad wants to play T-ball with your head, I’ll let the two of you bond.” He rubbed his collarbone, sore from Ozzie’s shove. Ozzie stood still, looking back at Colonel Briggs, who was on the ground, slithering toward them. The colonel’s zombutated arm crawled next to him like the Addams Family’s pet, Thing.
Ozzie glared at his old man, his eyes welling with tears, as the massive herd of zombies started to shift in their direction, about to trample over his dad.
“Come on—let’s go!” Ozzie’s voice cracked a little.
And with that, they raced to the armored tank, friend and foe, as the zombies stumbled relentlessly toward them.
CHAPTER 6
Ozzie sat in the driver’s seat, studying a row of primary-colored buttons. He twisted the throttles and hit the green one that read DRIVE ACTION. The tank rattled and rolled forward, plowing through the zombie-laden perimeter.
Zoe sat behind the periscope lens for the turret cannon. Zack sat next to Rice on the seat bench bolted to the wall. Black-and-white curlicue cables drooped down from the low ceiling of the cramped tank. The rear hutch was filled with hydraulic valves and nozzles, black handles with little red trigger buttons, and vents and compartments plastered with orange caution stickers and warning labels.
“Here, take these and go up top.” Ozzie reached back into the crawl space compartment and pulled out two sets of night-vision goggles. “Try and spot the highway.”
“Sweet!” Rice took the headgear and strapped it
on. His ears sprouted oddly from the elastic headband. He grinned, looking a bit dweebish.
Zack put the headgear on and climbed up through the turret hatches, scanning the landscape. The tank was headed straight for a steep hillside, where a barrage of zombies stumbled down the craggy slope, wreathed in a lime-colored mist. They pulsed and throbbed in the night vision’s green neon flare.
Zack ducked his head down through the hatch. “Hard left, Oz!” He popped back up as the tank swung left, nearly sideswiping the zombified foothill.
“That was close.” Zack wiped his brow.
Just then a zombie, looking as ragged as a homeless person, bounded at the tank and rode up the giant rolling tread as if it were a conveyer belt. The rabid hobo raised its limp-wristed arms, Z-shaped, and let out a wretched snarl.
“Zack, watch out!” Rice yelled over the tank’s loud rumble.
The undead vagabond pounced off the grooved tread, and Zack leaned away as the stringy-haired beast fell hard on the desert floor. Phew!
Zack panned across the horizon just over the moonlit gloom of the foothills. He spotted a cement overpass that looked as though it looped onto the freeway. The boys ducked back down into the tank.
“The highway’s right up there, Ozzie,” Zack told him. “Dead ahead.”
Back inside, Rice looked around, sniffing the air, like a kitten watching a flying insect. “What’s that smell?” he asked. “Do you smell that?”
“You mean Zoe?” Zack snickered.
Rice sucked in hard through his nostrils. “It’s BurgerDog,” he declared finally.
Zack breathed in the rotten hot dog flavor, too. Rice was right. “Are you sure it’s not the one in your bag?”
“The baggie is airtight,” Rice confirmed.
“Wait a sec….” Zack climbed back up through the turret hatch.
He gazed out into the predawn night. A dome of blue neon light bloomed off the side of the road up ahead.
Zack activated the zoom function on his night-vision goggles.
A gigantic revolving BurgerDog dachshund twirled slowly above a highway rest stop. A trickle of smoke rose from the kitchen in the rear. The parking lot was piled up with abandoned vehicles. Head-on collisions and fender benders were logjammed at odd angles throughout the lot. Smashed windshields were smeared with rancid sludge. The front of the fast-food place was trashed. A small fire blazed at the self-service pump, where a car had barreled into one of the gas tanks.
“Arf!” A tiny dog bark echoed through the eerie stillness. Zack listened again. Was he hearing things? “Arf! Arf!”
Twinkles?
“Ozzie, pull this thing over!” Zack yelled from above. Ozzie veered the tank off the highway, pulling into the post-apocalyptic junkyard. ZOMBEEZ! was scrawled in the grimy film on the side panel of a Ford pickup. The blacktop squirmed with squiggling clusters of desert rodents, all vying for strewn scraps of burger meat.
Rice and Zoe climbed out the hatch after Zack, while Ozzie hopped out of the driver’s hole. They jumped down and ran through the floor of squealing vermin toward the BurgerDog entrance, where Twinkles was barking up a storm.
“Ugh!” Zoe exclaimed as a rat ran over her foot. “I wish I wore my Uggs!”
“Twinkles!” Zack yelled, and ran toward the pup.
Ozzie stopped dead in his tracks and pointed at the ground. “Snake…”
A BurgerDog-stuffed zombie rattlesnake snapped its gangrenous fangs at the stubborn mutt.
Twinkles growled, defending his half-nibbled BurgerDog patty from the zombified serpent. The puppy put his head down near its front paws, raised his hindquarters, and wagged his tail. “Arf!” He thought they were playing.
Hissss…kchaaa. Tsssss! Apparently, the zombie snake did not.
Suddenly, the bulge in the middle of the snake sprouted little scraggly feet and claws, ripping out through the innards of the reptile. It was a hideous reversal of consumption and digestion, rebirth and undeath—the food chain gone kooky.
“Sick,” Rice said, entranced by the unnatural disorder of things.
The zombie snake thrust its wide, jawless mouth over the rat hatching from its belly, busy eating the same meal for a second time.
Twinkles gagged, yacking up zombie hot-dog burger meat. Zack swooped in and snatched up the pooch. He scratched Twinkles behind the ears. “You shouldn’t have eaten that….”
The puppy swiveled his head around, squeaking out sad little whimpers.
“What’s the matter? You miss Madison?” And it was then that Zack looked up and saw what was making Twinkles squeal.
A zombie truck driver lumbered out from behind his tipped eighteen-wheeler. Then a BurgerDog drive-through worker rose up behind a smashed red convertible, his potbelly drooping ogrelike over his shredded trousers. More and more zombies appeared out of the wreckage. Half-dead road-trippers and junk-food eaters, slime-slathered soccer moms and grease-soaked gas station attendants, all moaning for brains. The rest-stop zombies stumbled through the rat-infested parking lot, casting their demented gaze upon the little dog’s rescuers.
“Dude,” said Rice. “I think we just got put on the dollar menu.”
“Retreat!” Ozzie shouted.
They took off in a mad dash for the tank.
Zoe screamed as a massive swarm of undead rats gathered up fast around their feet. Her cell phone clattered on the blacktop. “My baby!” She stopped, looking back, as the hissing, squealing rodents engulfed the wireless device.
“Forget about your stupid phone, Zo!” Zack grabbed his sister by the arm, pulling her away from the carpet of squirming fur.
They quickly climbed up the hull of the tank and hopped inside. The tank rattled and started to roll, and as Ozzie pulled the vehicle back onto the highway, Zack listened to the bony squish and squeal of zombie rats caught in the gears.
“Got everyone?” Ozzie called back.
Rice did a quick headcount. “Aye, aye, cap’n!”
“Arf! Arf!” Twinkles barked, trying to lick Zack’s face.
“You’re welcome,” Zack told the black-and-white pup. And the tank merged onto the four-lane freeway filled with the living dead limping on bent and twisted limbs, shuffling across the blacktop.
CHAPTER 7
Finally, they were back on Zack’s, Rice’s, and Zoe’s home turf.
For more than two hours, Ozzie had steered the tank through the desert night, waxing autobiographical. Zack had met Ozzie only a few hours ago, and he already knew the kid’s entire life story.
Martial arts training. Jungle safaris. Scuba diving. He could drive a tank. He knew kung fu. What else was there? Could he fly a plane? Zack wondered if he could fly without a plane. It seemed possible if he had a little superhero cape.
The tank rumbled to a stop next to a yellow sign that warned: SLOW! CHILDREN AT PLAY.
They climbed out of the tank and hopped down in the crosswalk. At the end of the street, a curtain of shadow dropped down the front of Romero Middle School as the sun rose over the horizon.
Everything seemed fine. The parking lot was full of minivans, as neat and pretty as a car dealership. The flower beds and bushes lay untrampled in the bird-chirping quiet. The exterior of the school was intact except for a single broken window and the burnt-rubber tread marks of a getaway van. The tire tracks swerved across the lawn. Maybe Rice’s parents actually got away, Zack thought. Or were the Rices devouring Zack’s mom and dad this very instant?
“Mom!” Zack shouted as they approached the school building.
“Dad!” Zoe called.
“Arf!” Twinkles barked.
Ozzie breathed deeply through his nose. “I love the smell of zombies in the morning.”
The five of them cast long shadows on the stone steps as they reached the main entrance. They cupped their hands against the window glass, staring inside the lobby of the school.
WHAM!
A putrid zombie arm shot straight through the windowpane, grabbing Rice by his pock-spec
kled face. It was Senora Gonzalez, their Spanish teacher. The senora reached through the armhole of jagged shards.
“AHHHHHHH!” Rice jumped back, and his glasses fell on the cement step. “I can’t see!” He squinted, grabbing at the air in front of him like a zombie.
Senora Zomzalez glared at Rice with a wild-eyed scowl. “Adios, Arroz!” the zombie gurgled moistly. Its grunts steamed up the window as it tried to gnaw through the pane of glass.
Zack picked up his buddy’s glasses, and Rice put them back on. “Aw, man, they got a crack.” Rice shook his finger at his former teacher. “No es bueno, Senora G. Es muy mal.”
“If we go in there, we’re gonna need to find some weapons first,” Ozzie told them.
“What about the equipment room off the soccer field?” Zack suggested.
“It’s probably locked.” Rice pouted.
“Locks are not a problem,” Ozzie said casually, and so they hustled around to the back of the school.
Across the football field, two zombie lacrosse players were hobbling around, cradling eyeballs in the pockets of their sticks and whipping them at each other four at a time.
“Ewww!” Zoe shrieked.
“Shhhh!” Rice shushed her to a whisper. “Zack, will you please tell your sister the first rule of zombies?”
“Don’t let the zombies bite you, Zo,” Zack said. “Oh, wait, you already did!”
“No, the other rule…” Rice waited, but Zack stared at him blankly.
“Zombies are attracted to sound, bro.”
“That’s not a rule, that’s a fact,” Zoe said. “You don’t know anything about zombies. I, on the other hand, have firsthand experience.”
Undead Ahead Page 3
