Zombie Fighting Goodness: Chapter 1 of GRACE AMONG THE DEAD, Part 3

Click here for 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.”

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

This pisses me off just as much as if he was alive and begging cigarettes and change instead of gobstopping mouthfuls of soft tissue from around my collarbone. Seriously, get your booger hooks off my goddamned truck! 

I jog up to it. It moans loudly as it senses my approach. I slash and hit it in two clean motions. 

I leap to the chrome runner and pull at the passenger door. I’m sure I didn’t lock this. I thumb the button on my remote and yank the door open.

“Please?” says the woman from the floor in front of the seat.

“Goddamn it!” I can hear the shuffling, scraping approach of the others. I slam the door and run around to the driver’s side. 

I pull myself up into the cab and start the engine. “Sit up and put on your seat belt now!” I’ve already got the truck in reverse so I can bump the walkers shambling up behind us. I roll over them twice before spinning a tire on one. I’ve got more coming in from the front. Five, now seven. Twelve.

I plow into the thickest part of the ghouls, knocking them down upon one another before reversing into another three following too closely. There’s some bumping and dipping in the back. An  industrious Bubba in crusty, gore-blackened overalls has clambered up into the flatbed. The woman next to me shrieks.

“Do that again and I swear to God I’ll feed you to them.”

Her eyes bulge, brimming with tears. “I’m…I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be sorry. Be quiet.” I turn around to see more raggedy, chewed-over once-people pulling themselves into the flatbed. I let my foot off the brake, coaxing the truck over the ones I knocked over. I reverse again to make those on the tailgate fall face-forward into the flatbed. I stop to let some more climb up. No one wants to miss the lunch wagon.

“Your eyes still open?” I ask my stowaway.

She whimpers.

“Good. Make yourself useful and count the ones I finish off.”

NEXT: “Leaning forward, trying to hold on, trying to get at all the living, breathing, meaty goodness in the cab”

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