Floyd & Mikki (Book 2): Zombie Slayers (Dawn of the Living) (3 page)

The short bridge ahead was empty. On the other side was the island. It wasn’t a very big island, but travelling on foot, the two had to decide whether to go straight down the middle and save time, or take the long way around next to the water. The long way might be safer, but it also meant they had to cover more ground – and that meant a greater possibility of running into more creepers. Zombies couldn’t swim, but neither could Floyd and Mikki with the heavy load of weaponry they carried.

They decided to take the road down the middle, counting on their stinky perfume to get them through any clusters of brain-eaters. The Second Street Bridge was wide enough for eight lanes of traffic, but other than a few wrecked cars scattered about, it was pretty clear. As they walked, an interesting mix of houses and apartment buildings lined the right side of the street, while a bank, a few restaurants, and assorted other businesses stood on the left. The city planner must have been off his meds when he designed this section of town.

The sun was on its way down, but it was still light enough outside to keep any shamblers off the street. All along the way, however, Floyd and Mikki could see them. Lurking in the dark behind shop windows, inside the bank, or huddled along the sides of buildings, cuddling up to the shade. The two walked slowly and quietly down the dead center of the highway. They saw a sushi restaurant, but the thought of two-year-old uncooked fish was even less than appetizing than when it was fresh. Floyd didn’t mind sushi – as long as it was cooked right.

Then Mikki saw something that caught her eye. She tapped Floyd on the shoulder and pointed at a little shop to the left. Floyd just shrugged, not seeing what excited her so. She pointed again, whispering that he should look in the window. He still didn’t get it.

They had turned their helmet mics off to save the batteries. Fortunately, Floyd had shoved the charging cords into his backpack when they were at the roadhouse, so they were still in the packs even after Mikki blew up their truck. They had left the radios and Mikki’s iPhone Nova to charge while taking turns showering in the lifeguard tower, but there was no point wasting the batteries on a stroll down the street.

“Come on!” she yelled through the helmet, exasperated.

Mikki pulled her machete and Floyd unholstered a silenced pistol as they approached the little shop. He still didn’t get what the big deal was, but he wasn’t about to let Mikki go alone. It was an odd little store with a wide assortment of useless junk in the windows. They could see three brain-eaters inside. A couple of females and a male. All very nicely dressed, as undead fashion standards went.

Mikki slowly opened the door, which drew their attention, then she staggered in slowly, walking like a zombie again, they came to inspect her and turned away as soon as they got close to the smell. Floyd entered and shut the door behind him, then walked briskly up to her.

Immediately, the three shamblers all turned and gave an odd sort of hiss. As they headed in his direction, moaning, Floyd froze. They came up to him, cocked their heads as they inspected him, and eventually moved away, returning to a state of semi-hibernation. Mikki took off two of their heads with a machete while Floyd blew out the last one’s brains with his pistol.

Mikki pulled off her helmet and said, “Floyd! Ya gotta do the Zombie Walk!”

“You’re kiddin’ me, right?” Floyd answered, removing his helmet so he could whisper back. “You just want to make me look like an ass.”

“That’s an added bonus, but no. Did you see the way them creepers came at you until you stopped movin’? We stink worse than death, but you gotta act like ‘em, too, or it sets ‘em off. They may be stupid as hell, but they ain’t completely brain dead, Floyd!”

“They didn’t act that way when you were choppin’ their heads off on the street corner!”

“That’s because I always move
behind
‘em before I go a’choppin’. Besides, by the time they figure out what I’m doin’, their heads is lyin’ on the ground somewhere. Trust me, Floyd, you gotta do the Zombie Walk.”

“Oh crap! I know you’re probably right, but it just makes me feel stupid!”

“As stupid as you’d feel gettin’ bit? Or ripped apart?”

“Good point. So is that why you brought us in here? More freakin’ zombie research?”

“Oh, hell no! I got my eye on somethin’ much better!”

Mikki hopped over the counter and reached up to the wall behind the cash register. Now Floyd understood what had captured Mikki’s attention. There were three Japanese swords of various sizes hanging on the wall. Mikki retrieved the longest one on top and pulled it out of its finely crafted black sheath. It was a razor-sharp katana with an intricate red inlay on the handle. The sword was just like Mikki: beautiful with a wicked edge. From the moment they met, it was love at first sight. They were made for each other. Floyd was almost jealous.

Mikki was more excited than if she had found a whole box of hand grenades (well, almost). She started waving the sword around, getting the feel of it. Floyd told her she wasn’t supposed to swing it like a baseball bat, but she told him to hush. She was in heaven, enjoying her new toy. She might not be skilled in the Art of Swordplay, but she could do some serious injury with it to any walking corpses they ran into. Besides, she didn’t have to get as close as she did with the machete.

“Hey, watch it with that thing!” Floyd shouted as he jumped out of the way. You nearly took my ear off!” He quickly donned his helmet again. It protected his nose from the stink of his clothes and protected his ears from Mikki’s new plaything.

“Oh relax, Floyd! I know what I’m doin’.”

“Clearly, you
don’t
know what you’re doin’. You need to slice zombies, not your partner!”

“No shit, Sherlock! I’ll try to remember that. Here!” she tossed a shorter version of the sword to him. “Floyd and Mikki, Samurai!”

“More like
Ginsu Mikki
, if you ask me.”

Mikki stuck her tongue out and blew him raspberries. Floyd pulled out the sword she had thrown to him and played with it a bit. The tag said it was a
wakazashi
, not a katana. It was a little shorter, so he was less likely to hit Mikki with it in a battle, but it was still plenty long enough and the blade was thicker. All the better for decapitating any nearby brain-eaters.

The middle-sized wakazashi was light, efficient, and deadly. It sliced through the air with ease, and the blade was sharp enough to sever any zombie extremity it was likely to come across. This wasn’t just some cheap tourist letter opener; this was one fine piece of cutlery. Floyd tried bending the blade carefully to find it had decent flexibility and strong resilience. It would take a lot to break or seriously bend it.

“OK, I’m sold. Let’s pay for it and get out of here.”

“Not so fast, this is our lucky day! Maybe.” She reached under the counter and pulled out a shotgun.

“We got two of those,” Floyd reminded her.

“Yeah, with no shells. Will these fit?” She plopped a box of spare shells on the counter. “This is the only box I can find and it’s half empty. I reckon some must be in the gun itself.”

Floyd inspected the box. “Well, it’s a start. Yeah, they’ll fit. How many we got?”

After emptying the box and the store gun, they had 14 shells total. Not enough to even fill the drum mag halfway, but it was 14 more shells than they had before. They decided to give Mikki the slug mags and Floyd took all 14 shells. He felt a lot better with a few shotgun shells in Clyde.

After loading Bonnie, Mikki put the anti-armor mags in a side pocket of her jacket, with the extra slug mag in a different pocket. Then she dropped her machete, moved her combat knife to the right side on her belt, and tied the katana sheath on her left.

A Japanese Sword Master would have been appalled that she wore the sword with the blade edge facing down, rather than up. However, there weren’t too many Japanese Sword Masters around, and she wasn’t likely to run into one anytime soon. She thought about putting it on her back, but she had too many weapons strategically placed there already.

“What are you doin’ now?” Floyd asked, as Mikki propped up one of the headless corpses in a chair.

“Target practice,” she answered. She swung the katana up over her head and brought it down hard like an axe. It buried itself in the corpse’s right shoulder and got stuck.

“I told you, it ain’t no baseball bat, and it ain’t a machete. You can’t chop it like a hatchet. You gotta pull it through the air when you swing so it slices through the flesh. Watch.”

Floyd raised his wakazashi and brought it down at an angle. The blade sliced neatly through the shoulder and the corpse’s right arm flew off.

“Nice!” Mikki said. She tried again at the left arm and this time she was successful. She picked up the severed arm and held it out to Floyd saying, “Thanks, Floyd. Let me shake yer hand!”

“Ha, ha.” He said dryly.

“Hey, Floyd! This creeper was in the Navy.”

“How can you tell?”

“Cuz he ain’t got no ‘armies’!”

No arms. Floyd got it. He wished he hadn’t. He groaned aloud, then started laughing, against his better judgment. The joke was way funnier than it should have been.

“Well, then, this one was in the Air Force,” he countered, pointing to the corpse who’s head he had ventilated with his pistol.

“How do ya figure?”

Pointing to the big hole in her skull where her brains used to be, Floyd said dryly, “Cuz she’s an ‘air’ head.” Mikki and Floyd both groaned and laughed loudly, as Floyd continued. “And that one’s a Navy Corpse-man.”

Now they were both laughing way too hard. Absurdity had taken over and the pair had temporarily lost all touch with reality.

“No! No!” Mikki protested. “We’re both wrong. They was all in the Marine Corpse!”

“And now they’re all in the Ghost Guard!”

They doubled over laughing. When Floyd could finally catch his breath, he said, “Alright, Ginsu, let’s head out.”

“You know I ain’t gonna let you keep callin’ me that, right?”

“Mikkijitsu?”

“I don’t think so.”

“And what you gonna do about it if I don’t stop?”

“I love you Floyd, but let’s just say there are a few parts of your body that you don’t really need.”

“I can think of at least one part you won’t cut off.”

“Maybe not, but you don’t need all 10 fingers to pull a trigger. I’m just sayin’.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get the point. Can’t take a joke, can you.”

“If you’re ever actually funny, I’ll let you know.”

They continued down the street. There were quite a few shamblers along the way, but they were all dormant, hiding in the shadows. Mikki desperately wanted to try a little katana practice on their heads, but she knew that now was not the time.

Less than a mile later, they made it to the next bridge. The bridge that would get them out of Long Beach without walking for miles through the middle of Zombie Residential. The bridge that would take them to the next stage of their journey. The bridge that had completely collapsed into the water below it.

“Damn, Floyd. Now how do we get off of
Gilligan’s Island
?

“Looks like we walk, but it’s a long way back and around.

“Remember that movie
Escape from New York
?”

“Yeah, it’s a classic. Saw that a while back, why?”

“This is like
Escape from Long Beach
.”

Floyd laughed and said, “I reckon so, Mikki. I reckon so. Only we ain’t got no Snake Pliskin to help us out.”

“Awww, who needs that pansy?”

The two pondered their situation. They could proceed on foot around the mini-maze of waterways, but that would take them into a more populated part of the city. No doubt the residents would love to meet them, but Floyd and Mikki weren’t feeling very sociable at the moment. They could walk along the beach, but that would take them farther south, which meant they would then need to travel farther north. Without transportation, that would take forever.

Floyd was really missing his Freedom right now, but once the transmission broke, it was just a lovable hunk of scrap metal. He had gotten a lot of good use out of that truck, and it had saved his life more than once, but life moves on. A great many people had lost a lot more than that over the past two years, so it was hard to complain.

“Turn around, Floyd,” Mikki instructed.

She dug into his backpack as surreptitiously as possible, so as not to draw the interest of the locals. She pulled out the little tourist map. Just as she thought. She looked around a bit to get her bearings, then told Floyd her plan.

“Why cain’t we grab one o’ them boats over there, Floyd? Gotta be one of ‘em with a key in the motor or somethin’. According to this here map, we can head out to the ocean, come around this little wall here, and come back up. Looks like this area here is pretty empty. Bunch of large oil tanks or somethin’. It sure ain’t residential. Maybe even pick us up a truck or somethin’.”

Floyd looked at the map and then at his surroundings. The plan would work if they could get a boat, but the sun was going down and the boats off to their right were berthed in a residential pier dotted with brain-eaters in every area of shade. They would all be getting really active really soon.

“I don’t know, Mikki. There’s an awful lot of those brain-eaters around. We go pokin’ around the boats, they’re gonna know we ain’t one of them. I don’t think our stinky perfume is gonna help in that case.”

“Then we gotta find a way to get rid of ‘em.”

“NSS.”

“NSS?”

“No shit, Sherlock!”

“There you go stealin’ my line again!”

“No, I stole the initials. Besides, it’s a good line. Ya know, those were the first words you ever said to me. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, you was bein’ such a dumbass! I swear, Floyd, when I first met you, I thought you was the biggest, dumbest, redneck hick doofus I ever met. With your red flannel hunter shirt and all your little plastic paintball armor and shit.”

“And now?”

“Now I
know
you’re a big, dumb, redneck, hick doofus. But you’re
my
big, dumb, redneck, hick doofus.”

“What about you? With your pink cowgirl boots and football helmet. I thought you were a psychobitch from hell who would stab me in my sleep.”

“Well, you was right about the first part. We’ll see about the second when you’re sleepin’.”

Mikki used her binoculars to survey the area. “We need a distraction. That tall building there. Just far enough away, but not too far. You see? The red one.”

“You got a plan, dontcha, Mikki?”

“Yep.”

“You gonna tell me what it is?”

“Nope.”

“Would I approve?”

“Nope.”

Floyd let out a big sigh and said, “Alright then, let’s go.”

He followed Mikki over to the building. They walked a little fast for the undead, but they mimicked the zombie walk as best they could. A couple shamblers came over to investigate but turned right around when they got close enough to the horrid smell. Fortunately, Floyd and Mikki were almost getting used to the stink by now.

It was odd walking around the middle of Zombie Town without blasting everything in their way, but it was also extremely fortunate, considering how little ammunition they had. So far, the Swamp Juice hadn’t worn off.

“Son of a bitch,” Floyd commented. “Zombie bar mitzvah.”

Sure enough, a small group of zombies wearing black with yarmulkes and prayer shawls were congregated inside a small shul. Several of them had been teenage children. Apparently, the undead had no respect for any religion. Floyd wasn’t Jewish, but the scene still made him a bit sad. No time to dwell on it, though, so he kept moving.

The building Mikki had referred to was four stories high and housed a number of small office buildings. Mainly lawyers, immigration attorneys, insurance agents, and a land title office. It was pretty empty. No doubt people weren’t very interested in buying land or applying for US citizenship once the infection spread, and the insurance agents probably didn’t have medical policies to cover the undead, even after Obamacare was repealed.

“Wait here, Floyd. Watch my back.”

Mikki went inside, poked around a bit, and then came out. They moved to the next office and the door was locked, so she pulled a bobby pin out of her hair, jiggered the doorknob, and it opened right up.

“I didn’t know you could pick locks,” Floyd said.             

“Just promise you won’t call a cop on me.”

She disappeared again, found the door on the opposite side of the room was open, and entered into the hall. Floyd didn’t like her to be out of sight like that, but at least she had her mic on.

“What are you doin’ Mikki? I don’t like when you’re out of sight and we got guests waitin’ outside to join our little party here!”

The sun had gone down and the last bit of light was just over the horizon. It wouldn’t last long. The shamblers were starting to wake up and a couple of them were headed towards Floyd. The got within two feet of him before turning around, swiping at the air around what was left of their decayed noses like they were under attack by bees. Floyd thought it was ironic, being snubbed by a zombie for his stink. They didn’t exactly smell like roses. Despite his own powerful aroma, he could tell it started smelling like rotten eggs around here.

“Mikki, this sewer stink ain’t gonna last forever, ya know.”

“Almost done.”

Floyd was relieved to see her finally reenter the room. She joined him and led the way out, walking slowly, shuffling her feet, and looking behind her occasionally. They were about a hundred feet away, but she still had a clear line of sight to the building. She stopped Floyd, had him turn around, and pulled the flare gun from his backpack.

“What are you plannin’ to do with that?” Floyd asked.

“This,” Mikki answered.

She aimed at the doorway she had left open and fired into the building. The flare gun wasn’t terribly accurate, but then, it wasn’t made for target practice. It was supposed to be fired straight up into the air. She aimed high, but the projectile still hit the ground about 20 feet in front of the building. It skipped and bounced along before landing just inside the doorway.

Suddenly, the entire building exploded, catching the attention of every zombie in the area. Calling all creepers! Like moths they came, attracted by the light from the flames reaching high into the sky, hissing and howling as they converged on the area. Floyd realized that the rotten egg smell hadn’t come from the brain-eaters, but from gas lines Mikki must have opened in the building.

As Floyd and Mikki stood motionless, the brain-eaters all shambled on by them, heading for the light. As the shamblers in front got close to the flames, they stopped, but the ones following behind did not. They kept coming, driven by their hatred of anything bright. The sun had set completely by this time, so the building lit up the darkness for miles, drawing them all in. The ones in front got pushed closer and closer until their dry clothes and rotted flesh were consumed in the fire. The crowd was so thick that the flame jumped from one corpse to the other. Like dry tinder. Floyd and Mikki backed away from the Zombie Barbeque before they could be caught in the conflagration. Meanwhile, every other brain-eater headed straight on into the flaming crowd.

As a pack of creepers shuffled past the pair, Mikki sang into the mic, “Eve’ry day I’m shuff-el-in’!”

Floyd laughed and responded, “Oppa zombie style! Op op op op, oppa zombie style.”

After briefly joining the laughter, Mikki said, “Well, that went better than I expected.”

“I should have known you’d find a way to blow somethin’ up. Gas line, right?”

“Yep. That oughta burn for a while. Eternal flame.”

“So that was your plan?”

“Yep.”

“Mikki?”

“Yep?”

“I approve.”

“Alright then.”