Flip This Zombie by Jesse Petersen Page A

night?”
    “Like a homing pigeon?” I asked with a laugh. “They like to stay in one area, but I’ve never seen them actually come home. No, if this was her place, I’m guessing she never left after she turned.”
    We looked around the foyer, now damaged by my shot and the blood and sludge left over from the zombies.
    “They were pretty crazed,” Dave admitted. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any come so fast and look so hungry. Maybe they didn’t know what to do to take care of themselves in life, so they just never figured it out in death, either.”
    “Either way, they’re done now.” I shut the door on our latest kills. “It’s too bad we couldn’t have caught them.”
    Dave looked at me sharply. “Yeah, they would have been perfect for your mad scientist. I bet he would have appreciated the fact that they were rich before they died.”
    I looked at him with a wrinkled brow. “You don’t like the guy.”
    “No shit, Sherlock,” he grunted.
    I cocked my head. “But doesn’t it excite you just a little that he maybe has a cure for all this?”
    Dave shrugged. “I guess I just wonder what he was doing before he was so benevolently working on a cure. He seemed pretty ashamed… or at least unwilling to tell us when we asked him.”
    I stared at him. “We
all
have things we’re not proud of from B.Z.”
    “B.Z.?” Dave sighed.
    “Before Zombie,” I said and he smiled despite himself. “Anyway, let’s check out the rest of the house and then try to figure out how to catch a zombie for Kevin.”
    “Dr. Barnes,” Dave corrected softly as he led the way to clear the house out. We’d learned the hard way to always check every room before declaring a place clean.
    I followed him quietly, but in my head I corrected him back.
Kevin
.



Profits are everything. But to get them you have to catch a zombie.

    A lthough our ideas for how to catch a zombie were pretty much… um…
lame
, we still rolled out of the mansion the next day with an action item list. This was my idea, of course, because I flipping love lists. Even in the midst of zombie hell, I still made them and checked them off. Dave shook his head at me, but whatever, I’m organized… bite me.
    Unless you’re a zombie. Then don’t.
    After a quick trip to the hardware store (with a
list
so we wouldn’t forget anything, thank you very much) we were ready to try our hand at a new offshoot of the extermination game: animal (zombie?) control.
    So here was our big plan, and yes, it is straight out of the Wile E. Coyote playbook. Step one: obtain a net (check!). Step two: set up net in a high-volume zombie area. Step three: stand near the net to lure zombie/zombies. Step four: trigger net and
voila
!
    A zombie in a net.
    Like I said, lame. But there’s really no instruction manual on catching zombies (until we wrote one a few years later, but that’s another story) and I still say it was better than the “dig a hole and cover it with sticks” idea we had discarded the night before.
    What can I say? We were tired and apparently watched too many Looney Tunes as kids.
    But now we stood in the parking lot of the once very high class and snooty Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale. Well,
I
stood in the parking lot. Dave was up on the overhang that was part of the old entrance. He’d once been afraid of heights, but after months of running from monsters, old fears were sort of forgotten. Seriously, a zombie apocalypse is practically therapy for that petty shit.
    Anyway, the overhang was made of a long, curved piece of steel and corrugated metal that was now covered in dirt and sand which obscured the sign that said SCOTTSDALE on the wall above it. The doors below, which led into the main mall, were once made of glass but had long ago been broken by zombies, looters, and people just trying to find a place to hide or sleep in this new world order.
    Two marquis stores buffered the entrance. A Nordstrom (where that rich zombie woman from the mansion