Badass Zombie Road Trip by Tonia Brown Read Free Book Online

always manages to find beer money? Where is the jerkwad who let my parakeet die of starvation when I was out of town for my dad’s funeral? Huh? What happened to the dick who taped over our high school graduation with soft-core porn? Now you’re responsible?” Jonah didn’t know half of what he was saying, and didn’t care. He just wanted Dale to stay. Dale was many things—an ass, a jerk, undependable, unreliable—but he was also Jonah’s friend. His best friend. His only friend.
    “Jonah,” Dale said, very softly. “You were right, back at the diner. About me needing to face this. About being irresponsible. About everything, man. I’ve been living on borrowed time, anyway. Been running from the inevitable for far too long. Goodbye, Jonah. I guess you were a pretty good friend after all. Even if you broke your promise.” He turned to face Satan and said, “I’m ready.”
    “I’m not!” Jonah shouted.
    “You don’t get a vote,” Satan said, and advanced on Dale with those burning hands of blue again.
    Jonah tried to watch what happened next, but it was like staring into an exploding star. Satan brought his flaming palms against Dale’s chest, a move which made Dale gasp with a hollow, ugly sound. Then everything went supernova, and Jonah had to shield his closed eyes to avoid being blinded. When he opened them again, and blinked away the afterglow, Dale was crumpled on the ground at Jonah’s feet with a look of pure serenity on his face.
    “Now where to put this?” Satan asked. The blue glow was gone, and instead, in a single outstretched palm, there rested a white flame. Small and flickering, like the lit wick of a candle, the flame danced a few inches above Satan’s palm. Satan grinned as he spied a beer bottle by the side of the road. He scooped it up and slid the flame inside, where it dimmed but didn’t go out. “There. I rather think he’ll like that.”
      “Dale?” Jonah asked. But whether he was asking the body at his feet or the flame in the bottle, he wasn’t sure.
    “Sorry about leaving you with the corpse,” Satan said. “But that should teach you to meddle in the affairs of demons. Adiós, amigo .”
    Next thing he knew, Jonah was alone. The sounds of the highway crept back to him in a thin hiss, like air let out of a balloon, but he barely noticed. His entire being was focused on the image of Dale at his feet. Satan called the body a ‘corpse’. Jonah toed Dale, which only succeeded in rolling the man over onto his back, where he lay limp and lifeless. There was no way around it.
    Dale was dead.
    ****

Chapter Four
    I-80, California
     
    “Dale?” Jonah asked. He toed the body again.
    There was no response.
    “What do I do now?” he asked. But there was no one to answer.
    Jonah dropped to his knees and lifted Dale into his lap. His best friend was already growing cold, despite the warmth of the afternoon sun. Jonah held Dale to him and rocked slowly back and forth, wondering if perhaps this wasn’t all just a crazy dream. Or rather a terrible nightmare. He resisted the urge to cry aloud. What would he cry anyway?
    A classic ‘no’, as he raised his hands to the sky?
    A feminine ‘Dale’, as he wept over the corpse of his best friend?
    No, Jonah wouldn’t reduce his friend’s sudden death to a cliché.
    Instead, he gathered Dale tighter and said, clear and calm, “This is bullshit.”
    Again, no one was there to care what he thought.
    “This is bullshit!” he cried.
    The traffic agreed with honks and roars.
    Jonah looked down at Dale and repeated, “Bullshit. That’s what this is. You didn’t deserve to go to Hell. You might have been a jerk, but you weren’t cruel. Or mean. Or anything that deserves that kind of place. You were … you were just … Dale.” Jonah hugged the body of his best friend again, not wanting to let go but knowing he would have to. Eventually. A sudden and stupid thought caught him and produced a nervous little giggle. “When you