Flip This Zombie by Jesse Petersen Read Free Book Online Page A

asphaltstreaked with blood or ooze. Sometimes there wasn’t a “right turn” to be made thanks to a sinkhole or zombie hive.
    Or in this case, the exit in question had experienced some “unreported technical difficulties.”
    Namely that a truck with ridiculously oversized rims was turned broadside at the top of the ramp to block it off. By the rusted, bloody, sludgy look of the vehicle, this had been done months ago, maybe even at the beginning of the outbreak, perhaps in some lame attempt to keep the zombie horde from swarming into the area.
    “Apparently they thought the infected would come in buses?” Dave asked with his own chuckle as we stared at the makeshift barricade.
    “Right, like the oldsters during winter,” I said with a nod as I brought the van to a stop at the top of the exit. “Zombie Airways flew them down on a $99-each-way special and brought them all down to the resorts and condos for a break. Zombie life is
hard
up North.”
    When Dave looked at me with that little twinkle in his eye at my comment, I knew he wasn’t pissed at me anymore for going off by myself last night.
    “I’ll see if I can move her,” he said with a sigh.
    I turned off our engine and got out with a rifle in hand. I kept an eye out for stragglers while Dave tried the door on the truck. When he pulled the handle, the entire door came off in his hand. He staggered under the unexpected weight and went down on one knee as he tossed the broken piece of metal aside. It shrieked as it skidded across the asphalt and onto the shoulder.
    “What the fuck?” he snapped to no one in particular as he got back up and rubbed his wrist absently.
    “You okay?” I asked, doing another perimeter check through the scope on the .357.
    He grunted. “I guess, but what in the world would make the door come off like that?”
    He leaned down and looked at the door hinges and then stood back up. “Only thing I see is sludge. Since when does sludge cut through metal enough to rot a door off?”
    Cautiously, I moved to the big truck and looked at the evidence myself. Sure enough, the metal hinges that had held the door in place seemed to have been sheared off, eroded by some kind of chemical.
    “It can’t just be the sludge,” I said with a shake of my head, because that was the only thing I saw on the broken metal, too. “I mean, maybe the door was already damaged or they did this as a weird booby trap or something.”
    Dave looked at the vehicle absently. “Yeah, I guess.”
    “Be careful when you try to move it, though,” I added with a look at the truck from front to back. “If somebody did something to jimmy the door, maybe they did something else, too.”
    Of course there were no keys. Would it really be that easy? So instead of starting the truck and pulling it off the ramp, Dave put it in neutral and with a bunch of effort we managed to shove the hunk of rusting metal into motion, despite two deflated tires we hadn’t noticed on first inspection.
    With a lot of grunting and swearing, we guided it toward the side edge of the ramp. The big, heavy body hit the guard rail with a scrape of metal on metal and then an ominous creak and crash as the badly maintained rail gave under the strain. The truck teetered on the edge of the embankment for a long moment, and then it rolledclear down the dusty hill onto a service road below where it landed, crushed nose down, in the middle of the street.
    We stared down at it for a long moment and then we exchanged a rather evil little grin. Yeah, even after all these months it was still pretty fun to destroy property without fear of the consequences. I think in another life David and I had been anarchists.
    Sort of like zombies, I guess…
    But for now I stared at the broken, busted truck with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. Especially when I noticed that the mud flaps had those cheesy silhouettes of naked girls.
    Nice.
    “Onward,” I proclaimed as we hopped back in the van and