College Road Trip (Z-Fic Novella Honorable Mention) [COMPLETE]

CHAPTER 3: ZOMBIES?

There was something stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I only noticed it because it was stabbing me in my pinky toe: bright pink paper, crumpled and folded, stuck together like it was discarded on the floor in whatever ruckus Ron caused. With my free hand, I swatted away one of Ron's flailing limbs and reached down to pick up the sticky note. 

Unfolding it with one hand was a formidable task but, when it was completed, I couldn't help but smile. "Hey, Lewis. I found what you're looking for." 

He looked up, still crawling on his hands and knees like a baby searching for a mushy crumb of cereal on the floor. "What?" 

"The Wi-Fi password." I tossed the piece of paper toward him. It didn't travel very far. It caught on the air and turned, flipping over itself until it landed on the floor. I pretended that the whole move was cooler than it actually was. "It must have gotten crushed in the-- during whatever happened here, I don't know."

Lewis scrambled for it, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and settled onto his knees while he plugged in the letters. The Wi-Fi password wasn't complicated. Like everything else in this room, it was Ron's name. This time, though, it was all lowercase. I watched Lewis for a moment, feeling surprisingly calm despite the zombie clawing at my wrist. 

That was when Lynette came at us, swinging the already-shattered computer monitor like the broad side of a greataxe. 

I saw it out of the corner of my eye. There wasn't time for me to duck and I wished there had been. It wasn't because she hit me. No, it was because, when the monitor connected with the side of Ron van Hoor's head, backed by all the force Lynette could muster, it sent the zombified salesman flying toward the wall and his brain matter flying toward my face. It got in my smiling mouth. (Needless to say, I wasn't smiling for long.) 

I spat brain matter onto the carped while trying not to think about where it came from. "Hey, Lyn?" 

She looked up at me, her face splattered with droplets of black-red blood and gray-white brains. There was a chunk of bone and hair on her cheek and she was grinning wildly as if she hadn't just brained a man with a monitor. "Yeah?" 

"What the hell?" 

"What do you mean?" 

"Why did you-- you killed him, Lyn!" 

She rolled her eyes and walked between an incredibly slack-jawed Lewis and an indignant me to put the gristle-covered monitor on the flat side of the overturned desk. "He was already dead." 

"Oh my god." Lewis was pale. He clutched his phone like it was the only thing tethering him to this planet. "Now we're really in a crime scene." 

"Sure," Lynette said. It was obvious that she wasn't agreeing with him, what with her flat, dry tone and from the way that she rolled her eyes once again. "Don't even worry about it. There's no use crying over killed zombies." 

"That was a person!" 

"That was a corpse." 

"Oh my fucking god, does it even matter?" I wiped at my face again. I was Lady Macbeth, scrubbing at the stains on my overshirt. This was one of the good ones, too; I thrifted it the weekend before I moved into my dorm. There was no saving this bug-patterned cloth. "What if there are more of them? What if-- Goddamnit! Lewis, have you found anything yet?" 

"I-- I don't know! My phone is frozen!" 

"How?" 

"All the notifications, it's... I'm going to have to restart it, I think." 

"Oh, for the love of fuck..." I trailed off as I remembered something I didn't know I was forgetting: Peter was still outside at the car, presumably getting gas. I only remembered because, every time I said that, Peter would jump down my throat with some lecture about decorum, grammar, phrasing, or some bitter tincture made of all three. With a sigh, I turned to Lynette. "We forgot about Petey." 

With no regard for the implications of what was going on around her, she pulled a silver-wrapped stick of half-melted watermelon chewing gum out of the front pocket of her jorts, unwrapped it, and stuck it in her mouth. After three quick, mighty chomps, she posited her question. "What about him?" 

"He's outside, Lyn. What if something's getting him? What if there are more zombies?" 

I could barely believe what I was saying. Zombies weren't real, were they? They were supposed to be fictional or representation of racism, consumerism, or the way that the American Dream falls short. They were supposed to stay on the stage and on the screen. They weren't supposed to be here, in the main attraction of some random small town smack-dab in the middle of Dipshit, Nowhere. Zombies weren't supposed to be dead on the floor in front of me, folded over at the hips like haunted house props. 

I knew I was going to have to get used to it, and soon. This was real. This was happening. No amount of shock or denial was going to change that. 

"Well. That would suck, I guess," she said. Even though she was still chewing gum, Lynette managed to blow a thin, fragrant bubble that overpowered the stench of an un-undead Ron van Hoor. 

I looked down at Lewis, who was still trying to reset his phone with shaking hands and red cheeks. I compared his flustered demanor with my inner turmoil and outward screaming, added the continued static-ridden rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" from the radio, and came to one conclusion: Lynette wasn't freaking out nearly as much as she should have been. 

I squinted at her. "Why are you being so cool about this?" 

"Are you joking? I've been training for this my entire life!" She grinned wickedly. "You know how my dad is." 

Lynette had dropped hints here and there, during lunches, study sessions, and late-night movie viewings in the dorm room Peter and I shared. Her father was some kind of religious fundamentalist-- some extreme evangelical brand of Mormon-- and he was obsessed with the idea of a great, grand, and final doomsday. I knew all about his food storage and about the massive gun safe under Lynette's family home. I didn't know that his doomsday preparation extended to killing zombies. And why would I? That's absolutely bonkers! 

She smacked me good-naturedly on the shoulder. "Don't even worry about it. I'm going to check on Pete." 

Before I could say anything to argue or object, she was gone.