Orthodontics in the Zombie Apocalypse

1. Officer Roadkill (2/2)

Red and blue lights flash brightly enough from behind to give me a seizure. Thank goodness I'm not epileptic like my brother. Poor Charles; he could never watch the opening to Marvel movies and always had a hard time during fire drills in school until he graduated.

I pull over in front of the police car still parked at the side of the road and roll down my window to greet the cop. I toss my thick curls back and prepare to play dumb, just as my mother always told me to do in these situations.

"Hello, officer," I say glumly. "I am so deeply sorry for speeding! The road was empty, so I didn't think— OH MY GOD!" I shriek, almost loud enough to send cracks through my windshield to match those on my window. I instantly begin rolling up the cracked window and slam on the accelerator as the inhuman thing begins reaching for me. Hunger lights it's eyes. They're ugly, bloodshot eyes, with the whites turned yellow and small veins irritated and enlarged. It smacks against my half-closed window and latches on as I speed with a voracious zeal down the fractured pavement, trying in vain to shake this former cop off.

A deer chooses the exact moment that I look away at the not-cop to jump out in front of me. We don't even have deer around here! I swear quite audibly and slam on the breaks, happy that I took into account the rules of survival from my favorite zombie movie and have my seatbelt secured. Officer Undead isn't as fortunate, however, and flies in a satisfying arch several yards ahead, leaving his fingers behind; stuck in the mostly-closed car window.

Unscathed, but looking a bit flustered, the deer frolics quickly across the road. I swear, it was glaring at me.

The wiggling of four greenish phalanges in my peripheral vision reminds me of the other situation at hand. I turn to face the amputated fingers that squirm with unnatural life, desperately trying to free themselves of the rubber and glass prison.

I release a skull-shattering yowl and poke them out, one by one, and quickly close the window the rest of the way. The rest of the zombie-cop begins to erect itself from the streak of blood it left behind on the pavement. As it limps towards me on one normal leg and one twisted backwards, I notice a disgusting red mark through a rip in its uniform on the left calf where bone pokes through.

I take several breaths and hit the gas without thinking. I'm sure Officer Roadkill left a dent in my beloved cranberry car on impact. When I watch him rise again in my rearview mirror, I switch gears and back up, with a very uncomfortable jostling as I go over him, then I switch back to 'drive' and floor it over him once more.

I stare at my window with both sadness and disgust. The unattractive spiderweb cracks my mother left are now covered in a layer of blackish-crimson from the outside. I can only imagine what my front bumper looks like.