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

followed the GPS system’s insistent directions that we take the next exit, then turn left.
    We drove for another fifteen minutes through rapidly decreasing city into an ominously quiet area I’d never visited before. It was dead desert, except for a few spotty trailers here and there and some dilapidated buildings that appeared to have been damaged even before the apocalypse.
    Now
why
did I keep hearing the theme from
Deliverance
in my head?
    “Arrive at your destination in a quarter-mile, on the right,” the GPS declared and then went quiet, its job done unless we did something stupid and went off course, at which point the voice would come back on and tell us to “please turn back” or “recalculating” over and over until I wanted to scream. I’d broken three GPSes over this issue already, you know. David was starting to get annoyed by it.
    I slowed the vehicle to a crawl as we rolled up on our “destination,” though you could hardly call it that. It had once been a warehouse of some kind, but not a nice one. You know those flimsy steel siding “make-it-yourself” type buildings you used to see advertised in local commercials all the time? Well, this was one of those and it looked like it had been through hell.
    Blood slashed down the sides of the once-white metal, combining with rust to make an eerie orange-red pattern on a rotting metal canvas. The roof was half caved in and the eastern wall had collapsed against itself and sagged precariously. A stiff wind and the whole structure was bound to fall down around the head of anyone who dared take shelter inside.
    Any idiot who looked at the place would think the same. So
why
had we been called here?
    “I don’t like this,” Dave muttered at my side as he took the safety off his rifle.
    I shook my head slowly. “Me neither, but we’re here now. Should we check it out?”
    He gave me a half-glance but I couldn’t read his guarded expression. “I don’t know, Sarah…”
    I pursed my lips and bit my tongue so I wouldn’t say something sarcastic. I got the need to be cautious, I really did, but the more I stared at the building, the more I wanted to know who had called us here and what was waiting inside.
    “Please?” I begged as I turned to face Dave. I batted my eyelashes and tilted my head.
    He laughed despite the worry in his eyes. “Um, okay. But let’s gear up solid and stay sharp. I just…” he looked at the building with a faraway look, “have a bad feeling about this.”
    I groaned at the familiar line. “Okay, you can quote
Star Wars
but only because you agreed to come with me.”
    Again he laughed as we got out of the van and eased our way to the back where we loaded up on weapons, from guns to stabbing and clubbing items. I shut the van doors as quietly as possible and then we crept toward the warehouse in a slow, steady military formation we’d read about in a library book about Navy SEALs.
    Of course there was a difference between reading about SEALs and being them. One we quickly recognized when I stepped on some kind of trip wire hidden in the dust and suddenly about ten guns, all of them military grade (including one
sweet
cannon I totally wished I could steal without getting shot) and meant to fire multiple shots in a matter of seconds, appeared from hidden cubbies all around the warehouse. And they were all pointed at us.
    David froze, reaching back to pull me closer to his back as if he could protect me from hundreds of speeding bullets. Kind of sweet, though not particularly well thought out.
    “What the fuck?” he growled.
    Before I could respond to what was clearly a rhetorical question, the bent warehouse door ahead of us opened and a man in a lab coat and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses appeared in the entryway. He blinked a few times, like he wasn’t accustomed to the sun, and then stepped into the desert with his own weapon raised to match the others all around us.
    His was impressive, too. A fully automatic AK-47,