Flip This Zombie (26 page)

“What?” I started, but Dave grabbed my hand and gave me a look. The Kid would have to put the gun down to tie one of his fancy knots, which just might give us a chance for escape.

Except… he didn’t. He pulled a handgun from one of those many magical pockets of his and leveled it in my face as he set the shotgun down at his feet. Keeping it steady, he somehow managed to get ropes wrapped around both our wrists and a knot tied.

All with one fucking hand.

“Damn, kid, you really are good at that,” I said with begrudging respect.

He smiled as he started to put the back door down. “Well, there’s not exactly a lot of TV to watch anymore. I have lots of time to practice.”

Then he was gone, the door shut and the two of us trapped behind the cargo gate. I rested my head back against Dave’s shoulder.

“So now what?”

“I don’t know,” Dave sighed. “I’m thinking. Aren’t you supposed to be the brains of this operation?”

I laughed despite our situation. “Well, let’s see, I believed a mad scientist and a crazy kid over you. I’m going to say that my brain power isn’t so great anymore. I may already be a zombie.”

Dave’s fingers found mine and he squeezed gently. “Just stay calm. We’ll figure a way out of this.”

I wasn’t so sure as The Kid got into the SUV and put it in gear just like he did it every day.

“Are you really eleven?” I called forward in the vehicle as he squealed the tires out of the parking lot and steered us back toward the highway.

“Yeah,” he called back. “That part was true. Why?”

“Well, you’re fucking driving the car like you’re in the 500,” I said as Dave and I rocked helplessly as he took yet another corner on all but two wheels. I think he might have been getting even for all the times our driving threw him around in the back of the van.

“You should have seen me following you on the motorcycle earlier today,” The Kid said with the smugness of a child who has the coolest new toy before anyone else. He
smiled at me in the rearview mirror, but his eyes barely appeared in the glass because he was so short.

I blinked a couple of times at the idea of such a thing. “
You
know how to drive a motorcycle. At fucking eleven years old?”

He rolled his eyes. “I learned how to drive when I was eight, running around in the desert while my dad worked in the lab.”

Behind me, Dave shifted. I could feel his rage, his betrayal, bubbling through his body. It made his back hot against mine.

“It’s okay,” I whispered.

He craned his neck back a little in a jerking motion. I could only see a tiny portion of his face from the corner of my eye as I strained toward him, but he looked as pissed as he felt.

“Well, I guess we’ll find out in a minute,” he said. “We’re pulling up to the warehouse.”

I craned my neck. Sure enough we were. And who was waiting for us? Barnes. He waved as The Kid slid into place in front of the old building and put the SUV in park.

Robbie got out and closed the door behind him. We couldn’t hear them, but I watched in surprise as The Kid approached Kevin. The doctor opened his arms and embraced the little boy briefly, ruffling his hair as they parted. They spoke for a moment, with The Kid motioning occasionally toward us and the car.

Kevin’s smile eventually fell and he walked up to the back of the SUV. Slowly, the hatch back glided open, sending a stream of bright sunshine in to blind us since we couldn’t lift our hands to shade our eyes. Barnes stepped
in front of us, though, and then he blocked the sun, becoming only an ominous shadow standing before us.

“Hello, Sarah, David,” he finally said as he leaned down so I could see his face. It was remarkably smug. “I do hope you’ll forgive my boy for bringing you to me this way. But this has become our only option, I’m afraid.”

“Fuck you,” Dave spat.

Kevin smiled slightly, though the slur made his eyes lose a bit of their pleasure. Apparently he still didn’t like the language, which made me want to sing any song I could think of from
South Park
if only to piss him off. “Robbie’s Dad is a Bitch” seemed like an appropriate alteration of one.

“Let’s all go inside, shall we?” he said with a gesture toward the warehouse… like he was inviting us in for fucking tea or something.

He pulled out a shotgun of his own (aw, matching father/son psychos, how cute) and motioned us out of the car with the barrel. Since we were tied, exiting the SUV took some maneuvering, but we finally managed to slowly move out of the back of the vehicle together. Back to back, we walked toward the warehouse.

Dave was in the lead, facing forward. He never dragged me, in fact we were almost in perfect tandem. Those facts made me feel more guilty than ever about not believing him… about taking the side of the son of a bitch who walked behind us, that smug smile still trained on me as he cradled the shotgun in his arms. How had I ever thought he was even remotely cute?

The Kid was in front, leading the way. I could hear the soft crunch of his boots on the gravel up ahead of us and could only imagine that poor Dave was just keeping it together having to follow the little brat.

We should have just let the damn zombies eat him back when we first found him. But hindsight is twenty-twenty, right?

Down the elevator we rode and let me tell you,
that
was an awkward ride. I’m sure you know what I mean. Haven’t you ever gotten on an elevator with just a couple of people, maybe even one of whom you know a little, but no one has anything to say? And it feels like it takes forever to get to your floor?

Yeah, it was just like that except with guns and bound hands. Oh and no elevator music, thank God.

Still, we somehow made it into the lab and as the doors downstairs opened, Dave shook his head.

“What the fuck with all this captive shit, Barnes? If you’re going to kill us, why not just get the fuck to it?”

I jerked to look at him over my shoulder. Was he nuts? I mean, I hadn’t fought for so many months just to get shot with my hands tied behind my back like some kind of mob moll in a bad
Godfather
rip-off. At least I wanted the
chance
to fight.

“I don’t like waste, David,” Barnes said as he stepped closer to us. “I like to use and re-use. This
will
be over for you soon enough. At least, I think it will be.”

“What do you mean, you
think
it will be?” I asked, hating how my voice shook.

He looked at me and there was a tightness, a sadness around his mouth. “We may know a great deal about how the zombie body functions, but very little about the mind. For all I know, those poor souls are utterly aware of everything going on around them, their minds intact and unable to stop themselves as they dive into their victims and roam the earth in rotting hell.”

I squeezed my eyes shut at the nightmare Barnes painted. My stomach turned and I barely kept my food from earlier in the day down. I really wished I hadn’t eaten his crappy croissant.

“Now, move,” Barnes said, the softness in his voice gone as he pressed the side of his gun against Dave’s chest and shoved him.

Dave snapped forward with a rather feral snarl, dragging me behind him as he rolled up on Barnes.

“Hey!”

All of us stopped and turned because it was The Kid who had spoken. He held his gun level to Dave’s face and he said, “Let’s just go to the room and we’ll talk this all out there. Okay?”

Dave was tense as a board as he shook his head in disgust, but he followed The Kid, forcing me to back along behind him, my eyes once again on Barnes.

“Is he your real kid or is this one of those ‘New World-New Family’ deals you see so often in the camps?” I asked with an even glare for Barnes. I still couldn’t believe they were related, no matter what Robbie said.

He stared back at me evenly. “Oh, he’s very much of my own flesh,” he said with a smile. “Don’t you see it in our eyes?”

I shook my head. “I guess I never looked closely enough.”

He nodded. “Well, that was your mistake, I suppose. One of many I’m sure you’re reviewing in your head right now and kicking yourself for them.”

I didn’t get to respond because we moved into a room. This wasn’t a place I had seen during my tour of the facility the previous day. But then, as Barnes had said, that
had been my mistake, too. I had been willing to believe that what he showed me in those first dozen or so rooms was true and had never guessed that it was all a manipulation. He’d made the gamble that I’d give up when so many rooms he showed me were anything but sinister.

Stupid me, his bet had paid out at least double. But then, I’d never done so well in Vegas anyway.

The room was big, with bright lights above that made the sterile white walls all the more painfully stark. I blinked as I looked around. There was a big window on one side of the room that looked into a lab. On the other walls were large doors, but they didn’t look like they opened on hinges, but rather slid up and down.

Barnes backed up to the door and lifted his shotgun to his shoulder. “Now, Robert, please do untie Sarah and David. And don’t try anything, you two, because I
will
shoot you without hesitation.”

I bit my lip, glaring at the doctor as The Kid unlooped the ropes around our wrists. Once we were able to break apart, Dave and I turned to face each other, each rubbing our raw wrists and looking at the other. There was no need to say much, we’d been together long enough to read something of the other’s mind and mood.

Neither of those were filled with very positive thoughts. As the door we’d entered slammed shut behind Barnes and The Kid, I reached out to take Dave’s hand. I shook my head.

“Sorry. This is my fault.”

His brow wrinkled and he stared down at me. “Not likely. The only one at fault here is that prick and his brat. They were the ones who preyed on your desire to find some kind of hope in the future.”

I dipped my chin as heat flooded my cheeks. “Yeah, well, so much for that, huh? I mean, I should have stuck with your way and only trusted what I could see around me. See where hope got me?
Us
?”

“Hey.” He lifted my chin with his finger. “I
like
that you have hope. When you believe there’s a future out there… it kind of makes me think that maybe there could be. There can only be one cynical jerk in this partnership and it’s me.”

“Very sweet,” came a voice from the speakers that were mounted around the room.

We both looked at the big window that faced into the adjoining room. Barnes was now sitting at a desk behind the glass, holding a microphone as he stared in at us.

“Where’s The Kid?” I asked.

“Still worrying over him even though he’s entirely capable of taking care of himself?” Barnes asked, and I thought I detected a hint of surprise in his tone. “He went out to collect the specimen you caught for me, Sarah. And by the way, thank you for that.”

“Thanks for almost getting me killed with your freak machines, asshole,” I snapped as I took a long step toward the glass.

Dave caught my arm and held me steady so that I couldn’t waste my energy going for the window.

Barnes shook his head. “I didn’t actually intend for my… what did you call them?” He seemed to ponder for a moment. “Oh yes, I remember now,
bionics
. I like that name. But I didn’t intend for my bionics to attack you in the school. I had hoped to drag our partnership out for a while longer before you learned the truth. Perhaps even to find a way to convince you to come around to my way of thinking.”

I burst out a grunt of disgust and turned my back on the glass.

“Sarah, if you did decide to join me, we could be a remarkable team,” his voice continued behind me. “You are like a warrior woman from some extinct tribe. Think of what we could do with my brains and your brawn and, may I add, beauty. What do you say? Join me?”

I spun around to face him. “I would rather gnaw my own arms off.”

His brow arched through the glass and then he shook his head. “Well, it may come to that eventually, I’m afraid.”

“Aside from wanting to fuck my wife,” Dave snapped as his hand came to rest at the small of my back protectively, “what the hell are you thinking, Barnes? Were you involved in the zombie research? What the hell are you doing creating bionics?”

Barnes settled back into his chair and steepled his fingers in front of him.

“I wish I
had
been involved in the initial research. I’d heard about it, though it was deeply classified. But there are always whispers in the scientific community. But the research was in Seattle and I wasn’t able to get a transfer. They kept me here, working on other war elements. Like making soldiers stronger. Faster. More obedient.”

I blinked. “Making them bionic?”

“In a way.” Barnes shook his head. “What I told you about the plague hitting the city and us being in lockdown was true. When the alarms went off, though, I insisted that Robbie be brought down to the safety of the lab.”

“And what about his mother?” I asked softly.

“Let the bitch rot,” he snapped, his anger brightening
his face in a rare display of his emotions. “She was sleeping with some army major anyway. A real man, she called him. I enjoyed watching her try to claw her way into the facility.”