Zombie Fighting Goodness: Chapter 1 of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD, Part 2

Click here for Part 1. 

All right, zombie fans, let’s tuck into another series of excerpts, this time from GRACE AMONG THE DEAD. This first chapter, “Drugstore Cowpunching,” opens with straight-up zombie-fighting action and carries on straight into the next complication. 

As Frank Zappa said in Joe’s Garage, “You’ll love it. It’s a way of life.”

“As the corpse gravy begins to gurgle over his neck stump”

I switch hands with the panga and the hammer, slicing through the arms of the first office stooge and chopping into the neck of the second. I switch the hammer to my right hand and fling it across his temple. His head tumbles away, smacking wetly upon the floor. As the corpse gravy begins to gurgle over his neck stump I’m making a neat crater between the eyes of his buddy. He’s been bellowing something fierce since I sliced off his hands. No telling how many others have heard him. 

I turn back to the inventory. I find half a tray of Percocet. Whoever got here before me got the popular stuff. Gotta admit, nothing Big Pharma offered back in the day could give you such a good, clean happy-to-be-alive buzz like a Vike and a beer.

Beer is no longer an option, of course. At least I have something so this arm won’t keep me up all night. I grab some antibiotics on the way out, hoping I won’t have to use them, because they’re probably no good anyway. Pretty soon none of these pills will be any good. Sucks to be us.

While bagging my groceries in Zip-Locks and dropping them into the pockets of my hunting vest, I see another woman and her two orbiters groping at the pharmacy drive-through window. The loud clunka-clunka of one pulling at the emergency exit door will draw even more of Falcon’s former citizens here. 

I’ve gotten everything I need here, so I leave through the front. Stepping into the blazing, sunlit parking lot, I marvel at how often I’m able to leave the way I come in most places these days. I suppose that’s something.

Hot as it is, I’m guessing it’s already July. Unless they’re sure of someone to eat, the dead tend to sit out the hottest part of the day in the shade. Which means I have no trouble making my way back to the Big Yellow Truck. That is, until I actually get there to find your standard-issue mentally ill homeless thing in an army jacket and a Charles Manson beard pawing at the passenger side door. 

NEXT: “I can hear the shuffling, scraping approach of the others”

Grace Among the Dead Copyright © 2014, 2017 by Lawrence Roy Aiken.
All rights reserved.