“We better find a place to hole up,” Dave said, veering off the highway at an exit that said Moon Valley Country Club.
“True. We couldn’t exactly go to the camps so clean and fresh, it would raise eyebrows,” I said with a broad grin as he started scanning up and down the street for the perfect mansion for us to take over.
Like the whole car thing, the housing situation was another of the few fun elements to the apocalypse. Before the outbreak we lived in a shithole of a one-bedroom apartment.
Since then? Well, we’d lived it up in the ritziest resorts, fanciest suites, and the mansions of the ultra-rich and famous. I don’t like to drop names but Paul McCartney has a ranch two and a half hours south of Phoenix. Just saying.
“You’re right about not being able to go to camp like this,” Dave said. “And I want to be able to talk freely about our plans anyway. If we’re going to catch zombies, that’s a whole other thing from blasting their brains out. I don’t even have the first clue how to do it without getting killed….”
His voice trailed off as he pulled into a long, circular driveway that led up to a gorgeous mansion.
Tudor-style turrets lifted skyward and although the desert winds and heat had fried the grass and landscaping, there was nothing about the place that didn’t scream “class.”
Well, except for the ridiculous knight that was “standing guard” at the front door, rusting away from exposure to the elements.
Really, rich people? Really?
We got out, loading up on weapons before we made our way to the front door. Dave tested it and we both tensed when he found it was unlocked. Most of the time, houses like this got locked down tight the moment there was danger. The ritzy owners and spoiled dogs that lived there holed up to wait for help that never came. Or if they ran, they barred the doors behind them so that their precious stuff would be waiting for them when this mess was all over. They were oddly more afraid of looters than the living dead. Go figure.
So an open door at a house like this either meant that the person within hadn’t been able to lock the door… or someone else had gotten here first. Either way, it was a danger zone until we got it cleared.
We pushed our way into the house carefully. Outside the sun was setting and inside the rooms were dim and dusty. There was a faint smell of rotting food just in the foyer. The fridge had obviously been stocked when the shit went down. Hopefully so had the dry pantry so we could restock our tack box and even get some extra supplies for trade.
Dave’s nose wrinkled at the gross smell as he gently shut the door behind us. “I forgot how much I missed electricity until that son of a bitch reminded me.”
I smiled at the memory of real lights and hot, clean water, but quickly checked myself. Now wasn’t the time for idle fantasies.
I grinned. “You know the fastest way to bring zombies so we can settle down for the night.”
Dave shot me a glare and sighed. But he wasn’t kidding anybody. He liked my games. “C’mon then and do it.”
I pointed my shotgun at an angle toward the ceiling and pulled off a shot. A few feet away from us, plaster cracked and fell to the marble floor and the echoing sound of the shot made my ears ring. Acrid smoke filled my nose and the foyer.
“And now you smell like cordite,” Dave pointed out as he swiped at the smoky air around us.
I frowned. Damn, he was right.
“I’ll air out,” I said as I stepped further into the foyer. “Hey, zombie assholes! Come and get it!”
Silence was the only response. I turned back around with a shake of my head. “I guess nobody’s home.”
“Shit!” he said. “Duck!”
After so many years together, and after so much time slaying zombies side by side, Dave and I sort of have a rapport. You know how it is… after enough time you start to “get” what a person is saying without having to clarify. So instead of asking for more info or turning to see what he was freaking out about, I dropped flat to my stomach on the marble floor.
The instant I was down, he pulled off a shot with his shotgun and then a second. My heart throbbed and my ears rang, but I couldn’t get into shocked mode, I had to act. Keeping low, I flipped onto my back and lifted my shotgun. But there was nothing there.
“Clear?” I asked, my voice weak and soft from the ground.
“Clear,” he panted.
I pushed up on my elbows and looked down the length of my body to see what he’d been shooting at. There, collapsed across the broken plaster I’d caused, were two zombies, a man and a woman. I got up, rubbing my elbow (I don’t recommend dropping down on marble if you can avoid it, just an FYI) and looked at them.
The woman was wearing a fur coat. Not kidding. A fucking fur coat. Who even owned one of those in Arizona? Apparently this woman, though it was ill-fitting on her all-but-skeletal frame.
She also had on bunches of jewels. A ruby and diamond pendant, a big honking ring on each finger (all of which looked real, not costume) and the crowning glory were her earrings. Huge droplets of diamonds.
Unfortunately, their weight had tugged at her rotting ear lobes and now they were dragged almost to her shoulders like some native woman on a National Geographic special.
“I guess she must have put them all on to escape,” Dave said with a shake of his head. “God, she’s skinny.”
I nodded. Here’s a tidbit—most zombies are not thin. In fact, quite a few of them are fat fucks. I guess it comes from the never-ending food supply right outside their door. Also, I’m not sure how digestion of their prey works for them. If you know, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.
But this lady, well, if she’d been anorexic in life, apparently she’d continued that trend in the unlife, too.
“What about the guy?” I said, turning my attention to the person half-hidden under fur-coat zombie.
“His clothes aren’t so expensive,” Dave said. “Maybe he was her butler.”
I laughed at the mere idea of someone having a butler. Then again, it was a gloriously overpriced house before the zombies had significantly affected home values in the area. It’s a bubble you just don’t want to see burst, I promise you. It’s waaaaay worse than subprime mortgages.
“Why the hell are they still in the house?” I asked as Dave kicked the front door open. We lifted the woman with effort and heaved her onto the drive. Tomorrow we’d kick her out of the way of the car, at least. Maybe.
He shrugged as we returned for the servant. “I have no idea. Most of them got a clue when they got turned and started out in the world looking for food. But this lady sure looks like she belongs here. Do you think she might have come home at night?”
“Like a homing pigeon?” I asked with a laugh. “They like to stay in one area, but I’ve never seen them actually come home. No, if this was her place, I’m guessing she never left after she turned.”
We looked around the foyer, now damaged by my shot and the blood and sludge left over from the zombies.
“They were pretty crazed,” Dave admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any come so fast and look so hungry. Maybe they didn’t know what to do to take care of themselves in life, so they just never figured it out in death, either.”
“Either way, they’re done now.” I shut the door on our latest kills. “It’s too bad we couldn’t have caught them.”
Dave looked at me sharply. “Yeah, they would have been perfect for your mad scientist. I bet he would have appreciated the fact that they were rich before they died.”
I looked at him with a wrinkled brow. “You don’t like the guy.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” he grunted.
I cocked my head. “But doesn’t it excite you just a little that he maybe has a cure for all this?”
Dave shrugged. “I guess I just wonder what he was doing before he was so benevolently working on a cure. He seemed pretty ashamed… or at least unwilling to tell us when we asked him.”
I stared at him. “We all have things we
’re not proud of from B.Z.”
“B.Z.?” Dave sighed.
“Before Zombie,” I said and he smiled despite himself. “Anyway, let’s check out the rest of the house and then try to figure out how to catch a zombie for Kevin.”
“Dr. Barnes,” Dave corrected softly as he led the way to clear the house out. We’d learned the hard way to always check every room before declaring a place clean.
I followed him quietly, but in my head I corrected him back. Kevin.
Profits are everything. But to get them you have to catch a zombie.
Although our ideas for how to catch a zombie were pretty much… um… lame, we still rolled out of the mansion the next day with an action item list. This was my idea, of course, because I flipping love lists. Even in the midst of zombie hell, I still made them and checked them off. Dave shook his head at me, but whatever, I’m organized… bite me.
Unless you’re a zombie. Then don’t.
After a quick trip to the hardware store (with a list so we wouldn’t forget anything, thank you very much) we were ready to try our hand at a new offshoot of the extermination game: animal (zombie?) control.
So here was our big plan, and yes, it is straight out of the Wile E. Coyote playbook. Step one: obtain a net (check!). Step two: set up net in a high-volume zombie area. Step three: stand near the net to lure zombie/zombies. Step four: trigger net and voila!
A zombie in a net.
Like I said, lame. But there’s really no instruction manual on catching zombies (until we wrote one a few years later, but that’s another story) and I still say it was better than the “dig a hole and cover it with sticks” idea we had discarded the night before.
What can I say? We were tired and apparently watched too many Looney Tunes as kids.
But now we stood in the parking lot of the once very high class and snooty Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale. Well, I stood in the parking lot. Dave was up on the overhang that was part of the old entrance. He’d once been afraid of heights, but after months of running from monsters, old fears were sort of forgotten. Seriously, a zombie apocalypse is practically therapy for that petty shit.
Anyway, the overhang was made of a long, curved piece of steel and corrugated metal that was now covered in dirt and sand which obscured the sign that said SCOTTSDALE on the wall above it. The doors below, which led into the main mall, were once made of glass but had long ago been broken by zombies, looters, and people just trying to find a place to hide or sleep in this new world order.
Two marquis stores buffered the entrance. A Nordstrom (where that rich zombie woman from the mansion the night before once shopped, no doubt) and possibly a Crate and Barrel, although I couldn’t tell because all the letters on the sign had crashed to the ground during the bombings and now the shell of the building was only left with a capital C, two of the letter a, and one lowercase r to identify it.
“You know, I think I’d shop at a store called Ca-ar!” I shouted up to David. “What do you think it would sell?”
He shot me a look over the ledge. “Sarah—”
“Something Norwegian, I bet,” I continued.
“Sarah…” His tone was a mixture of annoyance and amusement.
“Like Ikea.”
He leaned a little further over the ledge and his glare silenced me. “You know, just because I can manage heights now, doesn’t mean I like them. Stop distracting me.”
I shook my head, but obeyed. I had to focus while I made another patrol scan all around the area anyway. The mall itself was half-collapsed, so I wasn’t too worried about it, especially since the last half an hour of our being here shouting at each other hadn’t brought out any zombie mall-walking groups looking for an easy meal.
Behind me, a few zombies roamed at the edge of the deserted parking lots. Most of them hadn’t seen us yet (their eyesight, not so good. Must have to do with the rotting), but when I checked through my rifle scope it seemed like one or two were shambling toward us rather than aimlessly in circles. I could only hope we’d get set up before they came roaring into our space. If we weren’t, we’d have to kill them and the noise and distraction of that would probably bring more coming.
It would be a pain in the ass if nothing else. Really, the best scenario was if we could just get one or two zombies coming at us rather than a crowd.
But that didn’t happen very often.
“Okay,” Dave said as he scootched to the edge of the awning and swung himself down onto the roof of the van. “I think we’re all ready up there.”
After he joined me on the ground, we backed up and looked at our handiwork. I’d love to say it was a really well put-together thing, destined to become the gold standard for this shit, but it wasn’t. The whole system was pretty shabby, but it was what we had.
I sighed. “So basically I’m going to try to get one of them to stand on the net and then you’re going to drop the weight and pull them up over the pulley system you created with that tree and the awning.”
He nodded without looking away from the trap. “You’re right except that I’m going to lure the zombie and you’re going to launch the pulley.”
I turned toward him. “What? No way!”
He grunted in that non-committal caveman way. Okay, so David can be a little protective of me. Even now when he knows I’ve got the chops for zombie killing, he still tries to shelter me. I love the guy for it, but it drives me nuts, too.
“There’s only one way to solve this,” I said with a sigh as I held out my fist toward him. “Rock-Paper-Scissors.”
“You want to Rock-Paper-Scissors for your life?” he asked after a slight pause.
I nodded. “We’ve done it for worse.”
“Oh. My. God,” he began, but I shook my head.
“No arguing. Time’s a-wastin’ and zombies are a-comin’. Now let’s go, best two out of three.”
Ten minutes later, Dave was back up on the roof and I was standing beside the net, staring up at him as I shielded my eyes from the bright sun.
“So I’m just going to try to loop one in, okay?”
He nodded. “I’ve got my rifle ready though, just in case you need coverage.” He hesitated. “Good luck. Be careful.”
I gave him a little wave. “Thanks, babe.”
With a deep breath, I turned back toward the parking lot. Now I just needed a zombie. Surprisingly, a zombie was going to be the hard part.
I stared out across the big lot. The slowly shambling zombies were still, well, shambling, but they were still too far away to get to them without attracting the attention of the five or ten more just aimlessly staggering around farther out.
I set my rifle down so it wouldn’t weigh me down when I had to run and checked in my waistband to be sure my 9mm was still there. The knife in the sheath at my thigh would also have to do, though I hated the idea of a close-quarters fight with one of the infected.
With that done, I started walking around the perimeter of the mall. And to draw the attention of any zombie/zombies lurking around without making too much noise, I began to whistle. First I whistled a little Killers, then some Bon Jovi, but it wasn’t until I moved on to 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” that I heard a faint rustling in some overgrown desert shrubbery around the corner from the mall entrance.
“More of a hip-hop fan, eh?” I asked as I edged closer. “C’mon, little guy. C’mon out and let Auntie Sarah have a look at you.”
I asked for it. With a wet, hollow grunt, a zombie burst from the bushes. He was holding a human hand in his teeth like a dog and I flinched. I guess we’d been too late to help his latest victim.
As the hand dropped from his mouth, he looked at me and I stared at him. He was no “little guy.” This guy had been big in the world before infection. Maybe even a bodybuilder or something. He was tall and broad-shouldered and once his chest had probably rippled with muscle.
I say once because the thing about death is that your muscles and tissues break down. This is true for zombies, too (th
ough they do seem to top out on rotting after a week or ten days—again, don’t know why and please don’t tell me). With this guy, the decomposition had resulted in his muscle fibers drooping and pulling until they ripped away from the bones. Now they hung from gooey, fleshy hunks of meat like an ill-fitting shirt.
“Oh, buddy,” I said with a cluck of my tongue. “Not a good look for you.”
The zombie tilted his head with a questioning whine and smelled the air like they sometimes do. His rotting lips spread tightly against his teeth and he let out another groaning wail.
“Well come on!” I said, using a voice like I’d use with a puppy or a toddler as I started backing toward the front of the mall. “Come and get me.”
I didn’t have to ask twice. The zombie lurched out of the bushes, oblivious to the fact that some of the hard, dead branches had stuck in his legs and now tore loose and stayed in his flesh like weird porcupine quills as he walked. If it wasn’t so gross, it would have been pretty comical.
At first his movements were slow, but as I got further out of his reach, his hunter instinct kicked in and he began a herky-jerky jog.
That was it, all I needed to get my ass moving. I took off toward the front entrance, shouting, “I’ve got one!”
As I careened around the corner, I looked up. Dave was standing on the awning, one hand on the pulley mechanism to launch the net up around the zombie and one hand balancing the shotgun against his thigh, ready to take the shot if I needed him.
“Fuck, he’s a big boy!” Dave screamed back down at me.
I jogged toward the netting, and only once I reached it did I flip around so I faced my quarry again. He was pretty fast for such a big dude and was already just fifteen feet away.
“Get ready!” I urged.
“I’m on it,” came the reply from above in Dave’s most tense voice. He was not happy about this and I knew it.
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