My Zombie Girlfriend

Chapter 14

Zane, for once in his life, attempted to blend in with the wallpaper.

Everyone in the living room wanted out of the living room, only there was a grisly roadblock to the front hallway in the form of Kendra's body and the blood-spattered Joey and Kyle, and Ricky, not to mention a slick puddle of zombie brains and another growing puddle of fresh blood. After Mason's suicide everyone seemed to forget the events that had just taken place two minutes earlier, and several people tripped over this roadblock, and more people piled on top of those people, and there was more screaming, both from fear and from people at the bottom of the pile being trampled.

As the crush of people pushed to the living room entrance, Zane made his way around the back of the crowd, edging along the wall when possible. He had no fear of Mason being infected. Mason hadn't been infected before, so how could he possibly rise from the dead now? As for Hunter, if Mason wasn't infected, Hunter wouldn't be infected either.

It didn't seem like this crowd was going to listen to reason – no one had noticed him trying to talk Mason down from killing himself. They'd only made it worse. Zane passed by the large front window, keeping his eyes on the grotesque pig pile forming. He could hear snapping sounds and gurgling screams now. Then a few of the stragglers pushing at the back of the crowd got a bright idea.

"Go out through the window!" called one of the sophomore football players, a redhead named Tristan. About four of the guys listened to these words of wisdom, and Zane dove out of the way, into an armchair, as five beefed-up morons hurdled toward the curtained window and crashed through it, shielding their faces with their arms.

One of them got snagged in the mint green brocade curtains and took down the curtain rod with him as he fell into the jagged glass left behind by his teammates. He screamed a few choice obscenities as the glass ripped a gash in his arm, but he managed to disentangle himself before standing and watching as his friends bolted across the lawn without him... and came to a stop in the middle of the street.

It was obvious both to the tripper and to Zane that the window had been an extremely stupid idea.

The zombies weren't the problem. There were still no zombies in sight, other than the now-un-zombied corpse of Brian Erickson. There was, however, a military tank rolling down the middle of the street, flanked by soldiers in full flak gear and carrying machine guns.

"...citizens should remain indoors with the doors locked," boomed a loudspeaker atop the tank. It was the same voice from the radio, with that impossibly calm and robotic tone. "Anyone on the street will be taken to an evacuation center. Citizens should remain indoors..."

The loudspeaker's looped message was interrupted by a clipped male voice. "Halt. Hands in the air." A blindingly bright spotlight focused on Ricky's front lawn. Zane could no longer see the soldiers or the tank, but he could hear the clicks of guns ready to fire.

The four boys on the lawn slowly raised their hands. One of them had a machete, another held a baseball bat.

"Drop your weapons."

The boys did so.

"Get down on the ground, on your stomachs."

Continuing to follow orders, the boys dropped down in the street, faces to the pavement. The soldiers rushed in, patted them down, then hogtied them and carried them back into the light. For a long moment the spotlight seemed to be shining directly into the broken window of Ricky's living room.