Floyd & Mikki (Book 1): Zombie Hunters (Love Should Be Explosive!) (28 page)

They heard something slam into the wood above them and go bouncing off in all directions around the room. Slowly, they crawled out from under the table and looked around to see what it was. Floyd found it first.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

Staring up at them from the chair in which it had finally landed was the new Chairman of the Board. Cement Head.

“So what’s the plan, Floyd?”

“Same as always. Kill zombies. Stay alive.”

“You wanna be a little more specific?”

“Get to the roof. Survey the area. See how we can get back to the freeway. Have to make it on foot now, and we’ll run into far fewer brain-eaters there than marching through the neighborhood streets.”

“You really think it’s all worth it, Floyd? I mean, you think this place really exists? You think we could really settle down and have a real life there? No more creepers? No more sleepin’ in shifts? No more MREs?”

“No more grenades,” Floyd added, with a smile in his voice.

“OK, I like me my grenades. But you know what I mean. Is it for real? Or too good to be true?”

“Well, the only way to find out is to get there. Don’t really have a choice now, anyways.” Floyd got more and more agitated in his rant. “We’ll find a way, Mikki, if we have to run for seven miles with just our machetes choppin’ the heads off of anything that gets in our way. I didn’t come this far to stop now! Not for no reason! No way! No how!”

Mikki had never seen Floyd so riled up before. She took courage from his determination. Killin’ zombies was sure a lot of fun, but this was a little more “fun” than even she had ever wanted. Besides, she was already runnin’ out of grenades again.

The two took the opportunity to remove their helmets and take inventory of what they had managed to pull from the truck at the last minute. Mikki still had 12 grenades (including the ones she had stuffed between her boobs) and Floyd had 10. Both had full water flasks and Floyd had a couple MRE pouches in his backpack. They had Bonnie and Clyde with four drum mags of shotgun shells each, although Floyd had spent more than a few shells in the boardroom. They each had a Mini Uzi and rifle hanging off their backs, plus as many mags of ammo as they could carry. No wonder the electrical unit had broken loose under their weight. They weren’t exactly traveling light.

Mikki picked up her copy of
The Zombie Apocalypse Survival Handbook: How to Live with the Undead
that she had carried since long before she met Floyd. She leafed through it and looked at some of her handwritten notes. She tossed it into a nearby office trash can.

Floyd had one more thing to add to the collection they were piling onto the boardroom table. He unzipped his jacket, pulled out something, and threw it on the table. It was the Hello Kitty doll he had turned into Oh Hell Kitty.

“What the hell?” Mikki’s face lit up.

“I didn’t want you to lose everything again,” Floyd explained.

“Damn, Floyd! In the middle of getting’ our asses kicked, you still thought of me?”

“I always think of you, Mikki. I can’t get you outta my head. Before I met you, I only had myself to think about. I didn’t have no responsibilities and didn’t want none. I was really good at stayin’ alive, and that’s pretty much all I did. Stay alive.

“You taught me somethin’, Mikki. What good is not dyin’ if you never
live
? You taught me how to
live
. You’ll probably get us both killed someday, maybe today, but I’ll always be grateful to you for that. I’d rather go out with guns blazing and you by my side than die in my sleep bit by some damn zombie rat!”

“Oh, Floyd,” Mikki said with tears welling up in her eyes. “That’s gotta be the sweetest thing anybody’s ever said to me! And I gotta thank you for something, too, Floyd.”

“What’s that, Mikki?”

“For lettin’ me…be me. Ain’t nobody never done that before. Everybody wanted to use me, judge me, or change me. You never did, even when I pissed you off.”

“Which was often!”

“That’s right, Floyd. Ruin the moment.”

They both laughed. Floyd gave her a big hug. She hugged him back. There was nothing sexual about it. It was much deeper than that.

Neither one said it. Both pretended it wasn’t true. But both knew it was. There was no way they were getting out of this one alive. It was two little people against a million or more rejects from hell determined to initiate them into Club Undead. This was Floyd and Mikki’s final stand.

Mikki gave Floyd a soft kiss on the mouth. Floyd kissed her forehead gently, then she placed her head on his shoulder as he held her firmly.

“You know what we gotta do now, right, Floyd?”

“I reckon so, Mikki. I reckon so.”

He handed Mikki her helmet and put his on. They completed a mic check, organized their weaponry, and prepared to meet their fate. Mikki looked at the plush Zombie Kitty, then stuffed it inside her jacket and zipped it up, one last time. Floyd and Mikki, Bonnie and Clyde, Oh Hell Kitty—everyone was all ready to go. Ready for anything.

The dark windows on the building cast even the outer rooms into semidarkness. The inner rooms were even darker, as all lights had long since been demolished by the patients. The electricity was still on, however, so when the two slowly opened the boardroom door, they could see tiny pinpoints of dim light from LEDs in various equipment piercing the blackness.

It didn’t take long for the fun to begin. Floyd and Mikki slammed their backs together in the middle of the hallway as they each started blasting in opposite directions. It was like a mandatory government-ordered Diversity Training seminar, only Floyd and Mikki weren’t very tolerant. Zombies of every size, sex and color lined up in the halls to come greet them. One by one, headless body after headless body dropped to the floor.

“Follow me!” Floyd ordered. He walked slowly forward with Mikki backed up against him. He had seen an emergency exit floor plan on the wall that indicated he was facing where the stairs should be.

Moving down the hall, still back to back, they came to a nurse’s station. The area was wide open on their left, so Mikki pivoted around to Floyd’s side as they continued toward the stairs with their backs to the outer wall. They received a warm welcome.

Four nurses, a doctor and about a dozen patients turned and started moaning. Floyd only fired two rounds and called, “Cover me!” though the mic. He dropped to one knee and switched out drum mags as fast as possible. Predictably, Mikki sent a grenade into the pack of creepers out for a stroll at the far end of the nurse’s station. The two Zombie Hunters received a shower of zombie body parts as Floyd stood up again, ammo replenished.

Mikki flashed her strobe light back down the hallway behind them and took out another couple of creepers that had entered the hall. Clyde spit fire and lead pellets as Floyd moved ahead down the hallway. They made it down about another 20 feet when Mikki said, “Floyd, you gotta see this!”

He turned and understood at once what she was referring to. OK, from now on, he would never say or think he had seen everything, or that a situation couldn’t get any weirder. Two clean cut (for zombies) brain-eaters were shuffling down the hall in their direction. Both were males wearing white, short-sleeved shirts and black ties. Both had black name badges. One said “Elder Gonzalez” and the other read “Elder Haster.” Under the names, both badges read, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”

“Mormon zombies,” said Mikki, stating the obvious. “Insert your own joke here, Floyd.” Two shots later and Mikki sent the two missionaries to that great Mormon Temple in the sky.

They made it to the stairs just as a new crowd of shamblers was gathering, coming at them from all angles. Neither Floyd nor Mikki bothered firing behind them as they sprinted up the wide stairs. No sense wasting ammo on what couldn’t follow them. They needed to focus on what might lie ahead.

Reaching the landing, Floyd peered around at the next flight of stairs. It led up to another floor, then presumably continued up again from there. He looked back to wave Mikki up ahead of him.

“Oh, you gotta be shittin’ me!” he complained. “I thought brain-eaters couldn’t climb stairs!”

Mikki turned to see what he was talking about. ‘Well, technically, they ain’t climbin’,” she said.

“I don’t care what you call it. It looks like climbing to me!”

Predictably, the zombies made it to the stairs and stopped, confused, but the ones behind kept pushing forward, knocking the front row down. They might not be able to figure out how stairs worked, but they could walk up a slope just fine. And if they fell down, they could crawl. So the first line went down and the next wave simply walked over them, up the slope. If they fell down, they would crawl as far as possible while the next wave walked or crawled over them. They weren’t fast, but they were persistent. And this was a big floor with a lot of medical staff and patients.

Of course, the creepers could have taken the wheelchair ramp up on the other side of the building, but their attention was on the two humans. Mikki dropped a grenade and shouted, “With love from Floyd and Mikki!” She knew the sound of the explosion would bring every creeper in the area down on them again, but she didn’t plan to stick around to give them a reception. She knew Floyd would agree.

The two started running as fast as they could up the stairs as the grenade went off behind them. Floyd pulled the Mini Uzi off his back and threw Clyde over his shoulder by the strap as he ran. He fired the tiny machine gun into a crowd of brain-eaters on the next floor as Mikki hit them with the strobe light to back them up a bit, then Floyd turned right and took the next flight of stairs up. She was going to fire as well, but there was no need. Floyd had cleared a wide enough path.

“Didn’t we just leave this party?” Mikki asked as they found the same greeting on the next floor.

“It’s hell to be popular,” Floyd answered, spraying bullets into the throng.

“Yeah, well, I hate paparazzi,” said Mikki, throwing another grenade.

They did this six more times on six more floors as they ran. Even with all the weight they were carrying, it was amazing how adrenaline and several hundred zombies could motivate you to keep moving. Susan Powter would have been envious. Floyd and Mikki were in top physical shape, but they were both ready to collapse by the time they reached the door to the roof. The stairway had narrowed by then from about 15’ wide to 4’ wide. Floyd hit the push bar and they were on the roof, ripping off their helmets and wheezing, doubled over, trying to catch their breath.

Floyd coughed violently as Mikki gulped in ragged gasps of air. Floyd turned around and looked for a way to bar the door. Of course, he found none.

“This day…just keeps…gettin’ better…and better,” he sputtered. “Help me drag this over to the door!”

Dropping the helmets and weapons, Floyd and Mikki stumbled over to grab the wires from the fallen electrical box and pulled as hard as they could. It was heavy, but they managed to drag it over to the door. They pushed as hard as they could. It got to within a few inches of the door and stopped, but that should be enough to keep the creepers inside. Mikki grabbed one of the live wires and shoved the sparky end into the opening.

“Zombie bug zapper,” she explained. “So what now, Floyd? There ain’t no buildings we can Spider-man over to this time.”

“I’m thinkin’, I’m thinkin’.”

He could see the 710 freeway from here, but no way to get there. The ground below was already filled again with wall-to-wall brain-eaters. The whole damn city had come out to greet them, the sounds of eerie moaning wafting up to them from below. Apparently, there hadn’t been this much entertainment in the area for a while, and everyone was coming out to join in the festivities.

“You still got them holy cards stuck in yer bra?”

“Sure do.”

“Might wanna pull one out and pray for rain.”

“Rain?”

“Drop a few of these electric wires and we could fry the whole mob, if they were wet.”

“Yeah. You’re the one who’s always tellin’ me you don’t think it works that way.”

“You got a better idea?” Mikki just shrugged, so Floyd continued thinking out loud. “I used to have me this fish oil spray. Covered my scent. Confused the hell outta the brain-eaters. Couldn’t tell I was human. Maybe if we could find somethin’ like that we could just walk through them all and make it to the freeway.”

“Yeah, and maybe monkeys will fly outta my butt. We’re on the roof, Floyd. Face it. We got nowhere to go.”

“Well, like I said. Pray for a miracle.”

“Better think o’ somethin’ quick, Floyd.”

Unfortunately, there was no time to pray. The creepers had made it up to the door. The Zombie Zapper worked great, but only for one zombie at a time. The two heard a large zap, a short whiny moan, and a thud as the body dropped. Then another zap, another unearthly squeal, and another thud.

But then, other sounds started coming. The sounds of pounding on the door. The sounds of desperate, ghastly moans. Suddenly, the door budged. Only an inch, but it was an inch closer to open than it was before. Then another scrape as the door pushed the large electrical box further away. Then another.

Mikki put her helmet on. “Well, Floyd, it’s been nice knowin’ ya.”

“You too, Mikki.”

“Too bad Cement Head isn’t here to see this. He woulda loved it.”

“I’m sure he’s lookin’ up from Zombie Hell, eager to see us again. Finish what he started.”

The door opened farther, just enough for the creepers to start pouring through. Mikki threw a grenade into the opening as Floyd opened up with Clyde on the first wave that got out. The explosion from the grenade had the unfortunate side effect of blowing the door open farther. Soon, a pile of bodies was shambling out onto the roof from the narrow opening in the door.

Floyd and Mikki took turns blowing away zombie heads as they popped out of the door, which sent the brain-eaters on the stairway into a frenzy. The familiar ghastly howl filtered in with the moans, while the crowd below on the ground heard and joined the chorus. It was like a demonic choir singing in off-key harmony.

Whenever they got low on ammo, Mikki would throw another grenade. That would wipe out a batch and give them time to reload. Even so, Bonnie and Clyde were soon empty. They dropped the shotguns next to the empty drum mags on the roof beside them and pulled out the Mini Uzis. The two flipped the switch to single fire, making literally every shot count. Another few mags, another few grenades, and soon they were on their last magazine for the Uzis as well.

Mikki tossed a grenade and yelled, “Push!”

Floyd joined her in pushing as hard as he could against the electrical box. This time, whether it was due to desperation, adrenaline, or divine intervention, they managed to slide it all the way against the door to keep it shut. The two took literally just a moment to breathe before taking stock of their remaining ammunition. Floyd still had a couple of slug mags and Mikki had a couple of anti-armor mags, so they loaded Bonnie and Clyde up again.

“Mikki, remember when you said we had our ‘Aw Shit’ moment?”

“Yeah, Floyd.”

“We were wrong. This is it.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Floyd took a drink of water from his flask and looked around again at the area below him, while Mikki drew a huge heart and their logo on the door. Soon the pounding against the door resumed. Once more they heard the door give way. Maybe just a quarter of an inch, but it moved.

“Floyd?”

“Yeah, Mikki?”

“We only got a few bullets left.”

“I know Mikki.”

“Remember your promise? The one you made when we first met?”

“I remember.”

“Save the last bullet for me, OK?”

“I’ll save the last two bullets for both of us.”

“Alrighty, then.”

Mikki looked up all around her. Not a cloud in the sky. Remembering Floyd’s suggestion, she closed her eyes and prayed quietly. “Saint Margaret? If you’re up there, can you please send a little rain? I mean like a whole lotta rain?”

Mikki opened her eyes. Nothing. Just a big, beautiful, blue sky and a happy, smiling sun laughing down at her. Stupid sun.

Mikki pulled her sniper rifle off her back and looked through the scope at the area below them. There was a motley crew, if ever there was one. Creepers in pajamas, creepers in business suits, black creepers, white creepers, Asian creepers, men creepers, women creepers, cop creepers, prostitute creepers. Looks like the city had finally met its diversity goals for integration. Everyone was finally equal. Equal in undeath. No more prejudice anywhere. Except against the living.

She looked through the scope at the horizon. The nearest buildings were clearly too far away. None were nearly as tall as the one she was standing on, anyway. The 710 freeway was so close, yet so far. They would never make it there.

Wait a minute! Something caught her eye. Was that a cloud? No, too small. And too dark. Was it a bird? A plane? Superman? It was definitely something though. No, two somethings. What the hell were they?

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The pounding on the door had resumed with a fury. The creepers shove the door open about half an inch. Floyd didn’t even bother trying to push the big metal box back against it.

“Hey, Floyd!”

“Yeah, Mikki.”

“Can zombies fly helicopters?”

“I don’t think so Mikki. But then, I didn’t think they could climb stairs, either. Why?”

“Well, if it ain’t creepers, somethin’s sure as hell comin’ our way!”

Floyd grabbed his binoculars and looked in the direction Mikki was facing with her rifle. He saw it too. Soon, he could even hear it above the dreadful moaning and howling.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

“Maybe so. But not today, Floyd.”

The two ran to the electrical box at the same time, pushing as hard as they could. The doorway had opened a few inches and they severed more than a few zombie fingers as the door slammed shut again. They scrambled to pick up their discarded weapons and stuff the empty magazines into their backpacks.

They still couldn’t believe it to be true. Maybe it was a mirage or some kind of mutual hallucination. It couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t be. But it was.

“Floyd and Mikki!” their names came clearly over the loudspeaker.

The two looked at each other, then started waving their helmets in the air at the two approaching black helicopters. As the aircraft came nearer, the pair could see the side doors were open and several heavily armed men in some sort of bluish urban camouflage were inside.

One helicopter hovered just past the edge of the building while the other one landed. Four armed men jumped out and ran over to Floyd and Mikki as the loudspeaker announced, “We are from New California Haven! Come with us!”

There was a loud grinding sound as the door pushed open, despite the heavy electrical box. Zombies began pouring out of the opening, tripping over the bodies of their comrades and getting up again to shuffle towards them. The four new arrivals blew them away with a stream of well-aimed machine gun bullets.

“Go!” one of the men ordered.

Floyd and Mikki ran to the helicopter, followed closely by the four men, who kept firing as they backed up. Everyone jumped inside and the aircraft rose up, out of reach of the stream of zombies pouring out onto the roof.

Just before they pulled away from the building, Mikki pulled a grenade from her bra, pulled the pin, kissed it and tossed it over the side of the helicopter. She had just enough time to yell, “With love from Floyd and Mikki,” before it blew a group of creepers back to hell.