Flip This Zombie by Jesse Petersen Read Free Book Online

and headed back toward our tent, but my mind was still clouded with thoughts. Most of the time our “services” got repeat offenders. People we knew asked us to clear out a shed or wipe out an apartment building filled with the living dead.
    But this… this was a whole new person (or people) with a “unique” task, whatever that meant. It could be dangerous. And not just “zombie dangerous,” but like… “don’t go down there!” dangerous.
    Sadly, as I stepped back into our tent and climbed into my sleeping bag, the concept of a whole new kind of dangerous gave me a thrill I hadn’t felt in a long time.
    “So you just went out into the night all by yourself?” Dave snapped as he practically ripped the passenger door of the van off before he got inside.
    “Yes,” I grunted as I slammed the driver’s side door of the van and started the engine a bit more loudly than was probably necessary. “As I have mentioned to you about thirty times since we woke up this morning,
that
is correct.”
    “It was a stupid thing to do, Sarah.”
    With a shake of his head, he pulled out a GPS unit from the glove compartment (kept right beside a nice collection of 9mm handguns and ammo—yup, we were pretty much right out of Bonnie and Clyde now… minus the bank robberies and the Faye Dunaway hair). He jammed the plug into our ancient cigarette lighter and waited for the satellite to link up.
    “I don’t get what you’re freaking out about,” I said with a heavy, put-upon sigh. “I got up,
in camp
.”
    “How
silly
of me,” Dave said, his voice laced with the same blunt sarcasm he’d used last night with the idiots who’d been talking about bionics. “There’s just
nothing
dangerous lurking around in camp.”
    I shook my head. “Okay, I know it isn’t perfectly safe. But shit, it’s not like I put on some flip-flops and headed out into the desert to do some zombie skeet shooting. Chill.”
    He folded his arms and flopped back against the seat without further comment. Ah, pouting. Still hot in the living dead universe. Or not.
    I ignored the silent treatment as I snatched the GPS from the dash and entered the address from the note we’d been left in camp. After a couple more seconds of load time it started a “route to” sequence. I put the van in gear and eased it into the line of vehicles heading out of the camp and into the new day. We were a ragtag little group,too, consisting of everything from fancy, high-end sports cars to beaters.
    Both of these extremes were totally useless, by the way. A sporty car looked cool and all, but it did nothing unless you intended to keep it on the highway and scream along like a bat out of hell.
    The beaters were useless, too—always breaking down, needing special parts and attention. And they were
weird
, honestly. After all, one of the coolest things in an apocalypse was that you could have any ride you want—and trust me, David and I had tested that theory multiple times (oh, the Jag, don’t get me started on the Jag—
heaven
!) before settling on our awesome van. So why anyone would
choose
to ride in a Gremlin with a window taped shut or a lopsided pickup whose floorboards were rotted through was beyond me.
    Eventually we got out of the camp and after about twenty minutes of driving down the highway, Dave seemed to perk up. He sat up and clicked the GPS off its stand. Flipping buttons, he looked at the turn-by-turn route info while I drove.
    “Take next exit, then turn left” the bland, computerized female voice ordered.
    I stifled a laugh. The whole GPS unit thing had never been a perfect system, even before the world went to hell. I mean, we’d been led astray by them a few times on vacations and ended up God knew where (once, I swear it took us to a cult compound when we wanted to go to Olive Garden).
    But in a zombie reality, it was even worse. The unit now gave directions to places which no longer existed on roads that had been riddled with bombs or still had