“Okay, but what’s that got to do with Brian?” Paul asked.
“Nothing.”
“Maybe we should worry less about Vivian and more about Brian,” BT said forcefully. “He could be hurt and you two are worried about someone’s first name.”
“Who’s hurt?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, coming up from behind BT.
“Nobody we hope,” I said “But Brian hasn’t come back from patrol.”
Mrs. Deneaux immediately went back into the shed and began to put on all her clothes as well as strapping on her pistol.
“Good idea,” Gary said. “No guarantee we’ll be coming back.”
Within five minutes, we had all our meager supplies and mini arsenal of weaponry ready to go.
“Okay, once around silently. Hopefully, he’s just holed up somewhere, getting some shuteye. If we don’t find him and the perimeter looks safe enough, we’ll call out for him. Sound good?” I asked.
I got terse nods in reply. We all knew this wasn’t good. Most folks don’t stray too far when a zombie apocalypse is going on and Brian knew enough to come back to the shed to get relief if he was tired. He wouldn’t just fail to let his guard down. We walked for a few minutes, but the only noise were the sounds of zippers striking rifles or an occasional boot scuff. Conversation was non-existent.
“Mike?” BT said, softly coming up to my side. I stopped. “Isn’t this where we met Re-Pete?”
I looked around. It was still a storage facility and everything looked pretty much the damn same, but I would bet money that this was the exact spot, with one notable exception. Ree was missing, not the blood spot he had left behind, but his body was most assuredly not present and accounted for.
“What’s the matter?” Paul asked, sensing the new tension.
“Our zombie buddy has gone missing,” I said as I scanned the lot.
“How is that possible?” Gary asked, walking over to the fence.
“Mike, he was dead,” BT said. “I saw the exit wound out the back of his skull.”
“Please don’t tell me that now they’re adapting so they don’t die from a head shot,” Paul sobbed. “Could they?”
“No, he was dead,” I said flatly.
“How can you be so sure?” Paul asked, working himself up into a fervor. “I mean, so far, they’ve become fast, they can hibernate when there isn’t enough food, and apparently, they can thicken their skulls to try to preserve themselves. Wouldn’t it make sense from a purely zombie evolutionary trait to alter the one and only way that you can die?”
“We’d be fucked,” I said. “But Ree was dead.”
“Who is fucking Ree, Mike? And how can you be so damn sure?!” Paul was yelling now.
“I named the zombie and I know he was dead because I lost contact with him.”
Paul was just looking at me with a shocked expression on his face, not grasping what I had just told him.
“It’s the zombie whisperer!” Mrs. Deneaux cackled, lighting a cigarette.
“It’s a pity those things haven’t given you throat cancer yet,” BT said.
She held up her middle finger like it was a makeup compact while with her other hand she would dab her extended middle finger on it and pretend to apply base to her face.
“That’s actually pretty funny,” Gary said.
“Wait! You can talk to zombies now?! When the hell were you going to let the rest of us know?” Paul said with spittle flying from his lips.
“Relax, Paul,” BT said, placing his arm across Paul’s chest. “He just found out last night.”
Paul might have calmed down, but it was marginal at best. His temper went from something like eating a habanero pepper to rubbing jalapenos in your eyes; neither one is a great suggestion.
“What did this zombie have to say?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, leaning up against the closest shed.
“It revolved mostly around him being hungry,” I said.
“That’s rich,” she laughed. “A hungry zombie! Who would have ever thought it?”
“What good does that do us?” Paul asked.
“That in itself, not much,” I said.
“But,” BT prompted when I hesitated with the rest of what we had discovered.
“But I can… with limitations now… I made Re-Pete do what I told him to.”
“Are you guys pulling my leg? Are there hidden cameras or some shit? Can you make them go away? Better yet, can you tell their hearts to stop beating? If they even still do?”
“Well, I could tell a few maybe to leave, but once they got thirty or forty yards away, they’d turn back around. And it seems that I can’t make them directly hurt themselves.”
“Almost like they have a failsafe switch?” Gary asked.