The Zombie Chasers (8 page)

M
oonlight shimmered in through the glass storefront, sparkling off the polished floor. Standing by the long row of conveyor-belted registers, Zack, Madison, and Rice stared outside into the immense parking lot.

“They can smash right through there,” Zack said.

“Easily,” Madison said.

“Bet that’s awesome,” Rice muttered, fetching a shopping cart from behind the checkout lanes.

They crept up and down the towering aisles and tiptoed into the vitamin section, stocked with big white
tubs of protein powders and dark brown plastic containers labeled with all the letters of the alphabet.
Zinc. No. Calcium. Nope. Garlique…Cod liver oil. Echinacea? St. John’s wort? What is all this junk?
Zack thought.

“Ginkgo biloba! Here it is!” Zack said.

They swept clean the four rows of anti-zombie tablets into the shopping cart. As they rolled their stash to the back of the store, Zack watched Madison’s horrified reflection in the rounded glass of the butcher case. Raw chicken carcasses were on display, along with dead-eyed fish and jumbo shrimp, not to mention the slabs of flank steak and mounds of ground beef. They stopped in the dim blue perma-glow of the frozen-food section, where they spotted an elevator. They carted the ginkgo onto the lift and rose to the second floor.

Upstairs, the doors shut behind them, and Rice, Madison, and Zack gazed down the long corridor. A pale blue wedge of light shone through the thin slit of a door, slightly ajar, at the end of the hall. A placard on the door read
MANAGER’S OFFICE
.

The shopping cart wheels squeaked as they pushed
through the open door. Inside, the floor was a wide expanse of dirty beige tiles, and the ceilings were too low. In the near corner, a cheap tasseled throw rug covered the floor in front of a brown vinyl sofa, which sat opposite a big flat-screen television. Farther down the same wall, a doorway led to a small kitchen equipped with a sink, a fridge, and a couple of dirty counters. A cockroach skittered behind the microwave. The whole office was painted puke green, and it stank of sour mop water.

“This place is perfect,” Rice said, spinning around.

“You have got to be kidding,” Madison muttered.

Zack steered the shopping cart over to the desk and unloaded the ginkgo biloba. He dumped out a mountain of gray capsules on the manager’s desk and snapped one in half. A small dose of powder spilled on the desk calendar. “How much of this stuff do we need?” Zack asked.

“A whole lot, man,” Rice said, looking at his reflection in a mirror. He was inspecting the red spots covering his face. “Madison, you better help him out,” Rice said as he pulled a small prescription bottle of pink liquid and a few Q-tips from his sweatshirt pocket. He twisted off the cap and daubed at his pox with the pink, goopy cotton swab.

“This was your idea, you nasty little pock mongrel,” Madison complained.

Rice plopped down on the sofa and kicked up his feet. His face was dappled with soothing pink splotches. “Chicken pox is no joke, man. Not too long ago people died from the pox.”

“I better open a window.” Madison shot Rice a meaningful glance. “There’s a lot of hot air blowing in here.” She slid open the big window looking over the parking lot and joined Zack at the desk.

By now Zack had cracked open nearly a dozen capsules, and the small pile of ginkgo was still barely an anthill.

Rice sighed and found the remote control wedged in the seat cushion. He flipped on the television.

“This live news report is brought to you by…BurgerDog.
The burger that tastes like a dog!
” the commercial voice announced. Then the smirking animated wiener dog waddled on-screen and barked. Its head was shaped like a burger with its ears sprouting out of the bun, and its nose grew out of the flesh-colored meat patty.

“Are you gonna help us or what, Rice?” Zack hollered.

The television returned to the eleven o’clock news with breaking reports on the zombie infestation: “Welcome back, Phoenix. This is Cliff Hemmings keeping you updated on what is turning out to be, quite literally,
the
Night of the Living Dead
. And apparently we are not alone. This is happening all over the country!”

“Did you hear that?” Rice asked. “This is going on all over the place!”

“Rice, this is taking forever,” Zack complained, tapping out the contents of another pill.

Madison began to hammer the ginkgo capsules with the heel of her shoe. She kept slamming until the white ginkgo powder puffed up into the air.

“Stop!” Rice shouted. “Are you crazy?”

“What’s the problem?” she said happily, displaying
the fresh mound of ginkgo dust, like a perky game show assistant.

“Don’t you know that zombies have long-range hearing?” Rice scolded.

“Well, saw-ree,” Madison said, slipping her foot back into her sneaker.

The news broadcast cut to a red-haired reporter with a microphone.

“Hey.” Zack pointed. “It’s that news lady from the street.” Madison and Rice quit bickering and looked.

The red-haired reporter spoke in a frenzied, fast-paced voice: “Here we are at the grand opening of the new fast-food chain BurgerDog. What began as a fun, family, free-burger giveaway has since turned into a wild melee of eat or be eaten. These zombies you are watching appeared out of nowhere….” As she spoke, a teenage boy wearing a soccer uniform bounded out of the zombie mayhem in the background and raced up behind the newswoman, bobbing and weaving. He gave a head-fake in front of the camera and dashed out of the frame.

“Was that just…?” Zack couldn’t believe it.

“Greg Bansal-Jones!” Madison gushed.

Mooowahhhhhaaargghhhhh!

“Did you guys just hear that?” Rice flipped off the television.

“Rice, quit messing around,” Zack said.

“It wasn’t me, dude….”

Moooowaaaaahhhhhhhaaargh!

Z
ack, Rice, and Madison listened to the hammering of their pulses. Seconds ticked off like slow minutes as they waited, transfixed, in the awful silence that followed the hollow zombie howl.

Moooowaaaaaahhhaaarrgh!
It was the unmistakable zombie battle cry.

“Where is it coming from?” Zack asked. He ran to the door of the office and looked out into the hallway. Nothing.

Moooowaaaaaahhhaaarrgh!

Bang! Crack! Pop!
The windows rattled and snapped, and the wind-chime jingle of falling glass drowned out the rabid moans.

“They’re out front!” Madison cried, racing to the window. The boys followed.

The zombie horde crowded under the blue awning, filing in through the shattered storefront.

“Quick! We have to try and go around how we came in!” Zack said.

They ran out of the office, down the hall, pausing at the slow elevator, and then raced down the cement stairwell instead.

Down the shadowy aisles of the grocery store, a pack of thirty zombies, maybe more, throttled through the tabloids. A grizzly hand pounded one of the cash registers open. Zombie pus-blood drizzled on the neat stacks of greenbacks.

The trio dashed to the back of the store and plowed through the plastic curtain strips under a sign over the doorway marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
. They jogged down the dark corridor lit up at the end by a glowing red
EXIT
sign. Zack lifted the metal bar off the back of the door. Madison and the boys peered outside.

The back lot was crammed with zombies, like a
mosh pit at a heavy metal concert. A hundred sickly eyes gazed at them crazily. No way out.

Zack slammed the door, and they heard a dull, bony crunch. The door bounced back open with a zombirific howl. A knotted, big-knuckled hand was slotted in the gap by the hinges, four fingers now fractured at the base, still wriggling. Zack and Madison pushed on the black door, as the mad-staggering flock moved toward the back entrance. Rice took several steps backward and then hurled himself, ramming his full weight into the doorjamb.
BAM!
They were safe. And the zombie hand was gone. Sort of.

Rice’s body slam had severed the zombie’s fingers, and now they were jumping around on the floor. Zack placed the bar back on the door. Madison’s mouth gaped with disgust.

“Awesome!” Rice pulled his fist down, elbow to hip. “Now we have specimens.”

“What do you mean…specimens?” Madison asked.

“I saw this one movie where zombies took over
the entire world, and these scientists needed specimens for testing at the lab.” Rice produced a Ziploc bag from his backpack and gathered the squirmy fingers off the ground. He swung the see-through bag in front of Madison’s face.

“Zack, make him stop!” Madison squealed. But Zack was already running back into the store.

“Zack!” they screamed. “Where are you going?”

By the time Madison and Rice caught up to him, he was dodging zombies and dragging heavy bags of charcoal briquettes over to the elevator.

“We’re gonna have a barbecue,” he explained. Rice and Madison stared at him blankly. “Just help me load these up.”

The zombies were closing in fast, already halfway up the food aisles.

“Rice. You have to unload those bags and bring them to the office. Okay?”

“All by myself?”

“I’ll help him,” Madison volunteered, hopping on the elevator.

“I’ll get the lighter fluid,” Zack said. “Send down the elevator when you’re done. I’ll meet you up top….” The elevator doors shut.

Zack darted down Household Goods aisle 7 and ripped open a box of black trash bags, tossing in a long box of matches. He swept a row of lighter fluid off the top shelf and into the garbage bag.

But Zack was not the only one shopping.

A deranged zombie couple thrashed at the shelves, knocking off an array of paper towels and aerosol spray cans.

The zombie woman looked like she hadn’t slept in a year. Dark bags of flesh sagged under her bloodshot eyes. Her left ear was missing, and streaks of blood poured down her neck. She wore a T-shirt that read
I’M WITH STUPID
.

Stupid didn’t look any better. Both his lips were gone, leaving a jagged bloodstained gash where the bottom half of his face should have been. His gums
had shriveled, exposing the roots of his teeth. It looked like he had just won first place in a cherry pie–eating contest.

Mr. and Mrs. Zombie advanced, wrenching forward in abrupt robotic bursts.

Zack skidded around the corner with his plastic satchel of flammable loot, but more zombies were now blocking his route to the stairwell. With no other choice, Zack scaled the shelves to the top.

The super market was jam-packed, zombies every where. They lumbered in all directions, displaying every symptom of meat-craving insanity.

A dozen zombie arms stretched up out of their sockets and grabbed at Zack’s feet. He stomped at the groping
hands and then took a flying leap over the drooling beasts below.

He landed slightly off balance, and the unsteady shelving unit teetered and swayed, threatening to tip. One false move and the thing was going to collapse. He clasped his hand around the top of the garbage bag and prepared to jump.

Just then, the whole unit tipped backward, setting off a domino effect of toppling shelves that buried the zombies in a heap of bent metal, chunky salsa, cheese curls, and two-liters.

Zack trampled down the crunching pile of junk food and zombie claws and then hid in a clearing behind a bargain bin of assorted DVDs:
Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, Don’t Look Now
.

Zack gasped, eyeing the door to the stairwell.

A tank-topped, hairy-shouldered zombie with a curly mullet stood barefoot in front of the door, wearing boxer shorts dotted with smiley faces. He squished his eyeball against the thin, crosshatched window.

Above the elevator the number two was still lit up.
C’mon, Rice, send it back down already,
Zack thought, clutching the bag. He glanced over his right shoulder.

A pretzel-legged zombie cheerleader pulled herself across the smooth linoleum with the sticky palms of her hands.
Slap, slap…pull. Slap, slap…pull.
Her legs were useless, dislocated at the hips, and a scaly red scab masked half of her face. She looked at Zack with a demented stare.

The zombie blocking the stairwell whipped its head around too fast. Its right eye sprang from the deep purple socket hole like a rubber ball off a wooden paddle. It made a sound like when you pop the inside of your cheek with your index finger. Murky orange saliva poured down the chin of the jut-jawed slob.

Ding!

Finally the number one lit up. The doors opened, and Zack made a break for the elevator.

He was seriously off balance, sprinting faster than his feet could carry him, and he caught a glimpse of the eyeball swaying by a blue stretchy tendon.

The squelching ghoul shuffled across the tiles.
Its swollen feet slogged across the floor, leaving a slippery trail of gray-green goop. Zack hit the floor, sliding chest-first, and skidded between the juicy beast’s legs, which were covered in a cruddy pus. The zombie bent suddenly at the waist, and his flabby arms swiped down. The dangling eyeball swung like a pendulum and whacked Zack behind his ear.
Aahhh, nasty!
Zack glided into the elevator, arms outstretched like a slip-n’-slime Superman. The bag of lighter fluid clanked on the closing doors, and the elevator car lifted.

His whole front now stained with zombie muck, Zack burst through the office door and dumped out the black trash bag next to the three bags of charcoal. He ripped open the tops of the charcoal bags and squeezed the first bottle of lighter fluid,
dousing the sooty black rocks.

Suddenly, Zack realized he was alone in the room. He whirled around twice before noticing two heads bobbling outside the open window behind the desk.

Perched on the awning above the crowd of zombies, Rice and Madison crawled on their hands and knees. Rice had snipped two holes in the awning with a pair of scissors from the manager’s desk, and they were each armed with a squirt gun from Rice’s backpack. They aimed their plastic pistols down through the holes and watered the beastly wrangle below them.

“Rice, what are you doing?” Zack shouted through the window.

“Watch and learn, Zack,” Rice said, blasting a zombie with a long stream from the squirt gun. “We dissolved the ginkgo in the water guns and now…”

“This isn’t working, Rice!” Madison yelled over the savage groans.

“Keep squirting!” he commanded like a little general.

“Will you two stop squirting zombies and help me in here? I have a real idea.”

“Not now, Zack!”

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.” Zack squeezed out another bottle of lighter fluid on the open bags of charcoal and carried one over to the window. Rice and Madison crawled back inside the office.

“I told you it wouldn’t do anything,” Madison said. “It just ticked them off.”

“It would’ve worked if you squirted them in the mouth,” Rice said. “She’s got horrible aim, Zack.”

“Who came up with this ginkgo theory of yours anyway?”

“I did,” Rice said proudly.

I knew it,
Zack thought, shaking his head while lugging the charcoal.

“Okay, so…who made you the zombie science expert?” asked Madison.

“I had a hunch,” Rice explained. “You know the feeling when genius strikes, and you just know something?”

Madison furrowed her eyebrows and blinked three times in a row. “Does anybody have a better idea?”
Blink. Blink. Blink.

“I do!” Zack shouted, dropping the bag on the floor, “You guys bring over the rest of the charcoal and pass me the bags through the window.”

“What for?” Rice asked.

“Just do it!” Zack ordered, and crawled onto the awning.

Obediently, Rice and Madison carried over the remaining two bags to Zack.

He edged cautiously around the border of the canopy and poured out the wet black charcoal, forming a boundary around the snarling horde underneath the awning.

Zack looked out at the Volvo parked well past the zombie danger zone.