Justin had been lying on the den’s couch for hours pretending to be asleep, waiting for the guys to crash for the evening. Butch came inside, mumbling his watch was over, and Mason stomped his way to the front porch, apparently not too happy that it was his turn for guard duty. Justin had lost track of Paxton; Paxton had been in the garage, but that was several hours ago, and now he had no freakin’ idea where he was. It was almost four in the morning.
Doesn’t anyone sleep around here?
He hadn’t heard Mason’s footsteps on the porch for some time. So, finally, Justin got the nerve to steal a glance out of the front window. The front porch’s plastic patio chairs were empty. Paxton’s truck was parked on the lawn blocking Justin’s view to the street. That’s when Justin spotted Mason, in Paxton’s truck, slouched over the steering wheel. Mason had apparently fallen asleep during his watch.
Yes!
Finally, the lucky break he had been waiting for.
It worried Justin that he had no freakin’ idea where Paxton was. But it didn’t matter. He had to chance it. Like now! All he needed to do was slip out of the house unnoticed. If he could do that, Justin figured he could disappear into the night before anyone could find him.
Justin’s bigger problem: he only had a flimsy butcher knife for a weapon. Paxton had confiscated his weapons and his pack.
I’m gonna have to run like freakin’ crazy.
He absolutely had to know if Ella was OK. Ella must be super-worried.
She’s probably pacing the rooftop by now.
She’d better be at their hideout. That’s what any reasonable person would do. But Ella really wasn’t always so reasonable.
Not so much . . .
Slowly, Justin opened the window facing the side of the house and hopped the fence to the house next door. He felt instantly relieved once he found his way to Bell Avenue. The night was super-spooky without a flashlight or reliable weapon, making him feel sorta like he was naked. He adeptly avoided any roving dark masses, which were actually roving hordes upon closer inspection. When he came upon a solitary, it was way faster to outrun it than it was to de-activate it.
An unnerving feeling rattled him as if time might be running out for Ella.
She’s probably freaking-out. She hates the dark.
He kept hearing scuffling noises behind him, but every time he ducked into a shadow to see if a horde was on his tail, he didn’t see anything except an occasional straggler far off in the distance. He felt like he was losing it, losing his nerve, which was so unlike him. So he picked up the pace.
Justin snuck to the back of their Spanish-styled house and found the rope ladder still hanging over the edge of the roof.
I told her to always pull up the ladder. Did she leave it down for me?
He climbed the ladder and pulled himself over the ledge of the house’s flat roof.
“Ella?” he opened the flap to the main tent expecting to find her. It was empty. He dashed over to the other tent, no sign of her. She’s probably in the potty-tent he had designed, complete with fancy pink curtains and pink towels for that homey look. He rushed over to it. A thud, the sound a pair of boots might make on something soft.
“Ella, you really—”
There, on the roof by the rope ladder, stood Paxton, gun pointing at him—threatening. “You think I’m that stupid, funny-boy? Hell, I ought to shoot you out of plain stupidity. Ella, you have company,” Paxton sing-songed like a Cinderella on crack character.
“Ella!” Paxton poked his head into the smaller tent while pointing the gun at Justin, “It’s the big bad wolf, and he’s famished,” Paxton continued to sing-song in a totally whacked-out tone.
Paxton went inside the tent and at that precise second, Justin took a full-bodied leap, diving into the sleeping tent, sliding to his sleeping bag, hands searching for the gun he always kept under the pillow.
Justin cocked the gun and without the slightest hesitation let off three rounds the instant Paxton turned around. Paxton’s body swayed in the moonlight, and then Paxton charged him and tripped over the camping stove. As Paxton regained his balance and stood up, his demented laugh seemed to ricochet off the cold darkness of the night splintering Justin’s eardrums.
“I’m not that easy to kill,” Paxton gloated.
Justin flinched momentarily, swallowed hard, and squeezed off three more rounds. This time, he made sure he absolutely
did not
miss. Paxton’s body seemed lifeless for a millisecond. Paxton swooned about and tumbled backward; then he fell off the edge of the roof onto the trash dumpsters below with a thunderous crash.
Wasting no time, Justin reloaded the gun and grabbed a spare backpack (he always had one ready) and a crowbar from his weapon’s supply.
Holy Shit—Holy Shit!
Apparently, Ella hadn’t made it back to their hideout. He quickly checked inside of the house; who knows; maybe she had decided to lock herself in one of the bedrooms. He felt a painful jab in his heart when he didn’t find her in the house.
That only left a couple of possibilities, either she had stayed at Best Buy, or she was trapped somewhere between here and there. Or, or . . .
Dude, don’t even think it. She’s alive—waiting for you to get off your ass and save her!
It was almost dawn, and that was the only freakin’ thing he had going for him. The Zs would be in zombie-slumberland soon, buying him priceless time. An intense fear hovered around him like a chick’s cheap perfume that clung to the insides of his nostrils and just wouldn’t go away.
As Justin made his way to the Best Buy, he found it difficult to control his vivid imagination. It was working freakin’ overtime. He had just killed a man, a human, in cold blood for no other reason than to save his beloved Ella. What had become of him? Then again, why hadn’t he killed Paxton or Nate before? “Because,” he retorted, “I’m not a murderer!” Yet he had just murdered a non-zombie.
Suddenly he knew, knew it like an ESP type thought, that he only had a few precious minutes to get to Ella and knowing that intensified his already panicking thoughts. Justin broke out into a full run, his heart randomly skipped beats, and he sprinted and hurdled his way there, ignoring the tears clinging to his cheeks.
It sounded like he could actually hear Ella’s cries in the night. Had he reached his breaking point? Her cries so real he expected to find her behind each vehicle he came upon. It was like when he closed his eyes he could see her huddled in a ball—scared to death.
At one point he actually yelled out at the top of his lungs, “I’m coming, Ella!”
Uh, ye-ah, bad idea,
he realized instantly, alerting a mini-horde window shopping at the Toys R Us. He easily outran them and snuck inside the back entrance of the Best Buy store.
Ella’s not here . . .
A commotion outside startled him. He rushed to the storefront’s still-standing shattered glass windows to get a view. In the twilight of the morning, he saw a massive horde groaning about doing their creepy hokey-pokey dance near the shopping cart island. It was definitely a bizarre site. Usually about this time of the morning
they
were settling down for their
not
so long winter’s nap, he smirked. A pitiful scream pierced his ears.
Ella?
Where is she?
At risk of alerting the massive horde he yelled, “E L L A!” At that precise moment, it suddenly dawned on him that the horde congregating by the shopping carts was where he had left Ella. Had she stayed there the entire night? How could she even be alive?
“I’m coming!” he opened the store’s front doors to get a better view of the parking lot. At which point, he heard a series of pops like a zillion pop-rock candies sizzling and zizzling at the same time as the ghoulish-heads twisted without moving their bodies, looking for the source of the yell.
Seriously, now I have to deal with exorcist-zombies too?
As if just ordinary, rotting, oozing, rank Zs aren't bad enough.
How do I think up this stuff anyway
? He struggled to find his sanity and tried to turn off his freakin’ imagination.
“Over here you slime-balls,” Justin wailed, brandishing his arms. “Ye-ah, see ya, smell ya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” he rambled on, flailing his arms to get their attention. He certainly did get their attention, and the horde twisted and jerked and gawked towards him. While the horde was busy doing the Monster Mash—towards him, his panicky feeling of fear for Ella intensified.
Technically it would be dawn any minute, but Justin had a peculiar feeling that
they
weren’t like vampires.
They
wouldn’t suddenly all collapse to the ground, not after he had antagonized them—not when food was within their reach. His Z-COS definitely needed a revision.
That
he knew for sure. The rules of the game were changing. The Zs were changing: evolving.
Justin stood in the front of the store as long as he dared, yelling for them to come and eat his brains. Meanwhile, he frantically scanned the parking lot for Ella. He didn’t see her anywhere, just a pile of shopping carts, other than that the lot was pretty much empty. He swore he heard her crying out for him. A thought appeared—flashed in his head: She’s by the shopping carts?
That’s sorta weird.
He kept peering back and forth from the Michael Jackson wanna-be backup dancers to the stack of shopping carts. The first rays of the morning sun glinted on the storefront’s spider-webbed-shattered window nearly blinding him, and he backed his way into the store as the first wave of Zs approached the front entrance and—him.
Justin backed up too quickly and stumbled, and he flipped backward over a down shelf. “Holy Shit, Holy Shit!” Like a hundred of them staggered their way inside. Justin found himself numb with fear; here he was—the bona fide Zombie Expert caught without a POA: Absolutely no freakin’ “Plan of Action.” He pulled himself up from the rubble of the trashed store.
“JUSTIN!” It was definitely Ella and not a hallucination.
The front window finally gave way and a maelstrom of glass rained onto the horde as
they
stormed inside. From out of nowhere, an overzealous Z nosedived him and latched onto his foot. Justin kicked it away then fumbled and stumbled his way backward landing on another pile of plastic-packaged products, still unable to get on his feet.
The whole horde of Zs began diving at him like some zany dive-bombing birds. Suddenly an old commercial flashed in his mind, “Gotta get away.”
Uh, ye-ah—like right now!
He gathered his courage and a spark of an idea streamed through his head like one of those airplanes, spraying “GEICO” in the sky with colored smoke and all.
That its!
Simple words his father often said when Justin had a super-bad day: “When something seems impossible—there’s always a simple solution.” Justin simply ran out the back door, jammed it closed with his crowbar and snuck around the side of the building.
Easy-peasy!
Justin scrammed to the shopping cart island and noticed what looked to be a ring of shopping carts, like a half a dozen or so arranged to create a small circle. “That’s freakin’ ingenious.” He ran to the carts, hearing sobs coming from under the tarp.
“Ella?” Justin scanned the parking lot. A slowpoke mini-horde rambling from the opposite side of the building had never made it to the store and was now ogling Justin. Ella has to be under the tarp, but he paused for a second afraid of what he might see. Visions of bite marks covering her body flooded his mind. “One, two three, GO!” He yanked the tarp off.
“Justin!”
“Ella!”
Ella jumped into his arms. Time stood still, but only for a millisecond. A new wave of Zs approached. With Ella still clinging to him, he managed to bend down and grab her bat and started swinging away at each one, smashing in their liquefying-bulbous brains.
“Only five, no big deal,” Justin managed to say between his brutal de-activating swings in an attempt to comfort Ella.
“You came back for me! I knew you would,” she exclaimed, her big, brown eyes brimmed with tears.
“Like, you didn’t think I would?” he said lightly. His instincts kicked in.
Something isn’t right.
Then he heard the most spine-chilling groan ever. It must have lasted an entire minute.
“Justin, what—what kind of zombie—” Ella turned around searching the parking lot.
“Justin,” she whispered, “What
is
that?”
Her eyes couldn’t possibly get any bigger. He had never heard anything like that in all of his zombie days. But whatever it was—it was definitely
not
a good thing.
“Hide behind the carts!” he shouted. Justin searched the lot. He didn’t see any other Zs in the lot, although he could still see shadows of the mega-horde temporarily trapped in the Best Buy; the horde was still obsessed with pounding open the store’s back door that he had retrofitted with the crowbar. All the horde had to do was turn around. Justin wasn’t so worried. They could easily outrun the mega-horde—if he could get Ella to run.
Uh, maybe I should be worried?
The long bellow of a moan seemed to shroud the early morning with an eerie surreal-like-feeling, the sound much closer now. Is it coming from behind that building? The Cheese Cake Factory? He saw a shadow flash by. The shadow seemed huge, briefly blocking out the rising sun’s glare, then the shadow disappeared as he squinted into the sun, realizing that the light was playing tricks with his eyes, causing the approaching z-shadow to appear way bigger than it actually was.