THE UNDERTAKERS: Night of Monsters by Ty Drago (Part One)

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                                                                         Part One: The Twins

Next time your parents gripe about rush hour traffic, tell them to try driving an old yellow school bus through a roadblock of animated cadavers in the middle of the night.

Seriously, tell them.

“Left!” I screamed. “Go left!”

“I'm trying!” Dave “the Burgermeister” Burger yelled back as he tugged furiously at the heavy steering wheel.

The bus obeyed, though so sluggishly that he might as well have been trying to steer a humpback whale. All the times I'd been inside one of these big, ugly, yellow giants — with their high square windows, rows of hard plastic seats, and filthy, rubber center aisle mats — I'd never imagined now hard it was for the drivers to, well, drive them.

Some vague, half-conscious corner of my mind wondered if, just maybe, that was why most school bus drivers were so grouchy all the time.

I mean it couldn't be the kids, right?

Of course, none of them had ever tried steering a bus while the living dead charged your right flank, their sheer numbers as deadly and relentless as a rotting tidal wave.

Welcome to my world.

There had to be fifty or more, all grasping, decomposing hands and snapping, yellow teeth. And these weren't the slow, shuffling, empty-headed zombies of George Romero fame. No, these were Corpses — capital “C” — and they were fast on their feet and knew exactly what they meant to do.

They meant to kill us.

And this freakin' bus was too freakin' slow!

From way in the back, I heard Helene Boettcher call out at the top of her voice, “Here they come! Everybody, hold onto something! Now!

Jammed three deep onto those molded plastic seats I mentioned earlier, ninety-six kids started screaming.

At that moment, despite the Burgermeister's best driving efforts, the tidal wave of animated dead hit us — hard. Our school bus shuddered with the impact, its windows rattling. Dave, his foot heavy on the accelerator, made a final desperate bid for the open parking lot ahead. If we could just get that far, maybe it would give us some breathing room.

Maybe.

Then the bus suddenly tilted to the left. Gasping, I grabbed onto one of the steel poles mounted just behind the driver's chair, and looked back toward the rear.

Helene had fallen against the back of the seats. Around her, the kids where sobbing and hanging on for dear life — as faces appeared in the right-side windows. Dead faces. Some showed rotting skin pulled tight across decaying bones. Others were bloated from trapped gasses, their milky eyes seeming to bulge from their sockets. All sported savage, grinning expressions of pure, predatory hate. Their collective weight pressed against the bus, lifting it off its wheels. A hundred hands clawed at the windows, already breaking through the glass.

There's so many of them! Too many of them!

“I knew this was a bad idea,” Dave muttered.

Then Helene did something I'd never heard her to do before, something that I think scared me even worse than the mob of animated cadavers who were right now overpowering this huge vehicle like jackals bringing down a wildebeest.

She screamed.

“Oh my God! We're going over!”

And I knew, with awful certainty, that we were all going to die here.

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⏰ Last updated: Jun 04, 2013 ⏰

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