Zombies Ate My Homework came out this week, and here’s a sample of the book. NSFW, NSFC, NSFAnything. If you aren’t familiar with the Shingles series or Authors & Dragons, you should check those out too. If you dig the sample, buy the book!
Chapter Four
Todd watched the woman stagger toward the bus. She never got any faster, just kept limping along. As she got closer, Todd saw that her left leg wasn’t working quite right, like she was dragging it more than walking on it. She came to another nasty pothole and just faceplanted right there in the road, not even putting her hands out to break her fall.
“Ohhh!” came a shout from a few rows back. Todd peeked back over the seat and realized it was Hank, and he was watching the woman, too.
She just lay there in the street for a few seconds, then started to crawl forward, pulling herself along with her arms. She crawled for a couple of yards, then slowly clambered to her feet and resumed her odd shuffling limp, this time with her jaw hanging off at an odd angle. She didn’t scream, didn’t seem to be crying—she just limped toward them like an old three-legged dog.
“What’s wrong with her, Toddy?” Andy asked, and when Todd turned his face to his little brother, he saw tears welling up in his brother’s eyes. “Is that lady a zombie?”
Todd laughed because what else do you do when your little brother asks you if the woman who just died in a Prius is now a zombie shambling toward the school bus where you’re both trapped? “No, buddy. Zombies aren’t real. She’s just hurt really bad, and we need to help her.”
Todd turned to the front of the bus. “Hey, Skeevy! That lady’s hurt real bad. You oughta take the first aid kit out there and help her.”
Skeevy didn’t even look up from his phone. Todd didn’t know what the driver could be looking at, since nobody had any service, but he was sure engrossed in something. “There’s literally zero chance I’m leaving you hooligans on this bus alone. I’d so totally lose my job for that.”
“Then can me and Tarik go help her? We both took first aid last summer,” Todd called back.
“Dude,” Tarik whispered. “I so flunked that class.”
“I don’t care, man. We need to see what’s up with that lady. She doesn’t look right,” Todd said.
“No way, Todd-zay,” Skeevy called out. “The doors to the bus stay shut up tight until the guys from maintenance get here.”
“How do the guys from maintenance even know how to come find us?” Mikayla asked loudly. “Nobody’s cell phones work.”
“They’ve got GPS on the buses. When we don’t get to the museum, Mr. Moore will call that in, the district will look up our location, and they’ll send help. No worries, little buddies. You just trust ol’ Skeevy.” It bothered Todd a little bit just how much Skeevy embraced his nickname, like it was a compliment or something. In Todd’s experience, nicknames were never a compliment.
As if to prove him right, Hank called out from the back of the bus, “Go ahead, Toad. Go help the nice zombie lady. Maybe she’ll give you a kiss. God knows that’s the only way a girl will kiss you, if she’s already dead!” Hank’s cronies all laughed, and Todd felt his face turn crimson. The embarrassment was all the worse because sitting right there in front of Hank was Tiffany Tarleton, the prettiest girl in seventh grade, laughing just like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. And Mikayla was right. She was wearing a miniskirt.
Todd looked back out the window, happy to see that an ambulance was pulling up to the crash scene and a paramedic was walking over to the woman. The man had his hands out, and Todd could see his lips moving, as if he were offering to help the woman. For a few seconds, she just kept shuffling toward the school bus like she didn’t hear the man, then she stopped in her tracks, whirled around, and leapt on the paramedic, knocking him to the ground.
“Holy shit!” Andy whispered.
Todd smacked him on the back of the head. “Dude, don’t cuss. Dad would kick your butt for that.”
“Yeah, yeah, but look!” Andy pointed at the window, where the woman was sitting astride the paramedic, her face bent down to the man’s. Her hair fell over their faces, obscuring the action. “Todd, please tell me she’s real grateful and she’s giving that guy a kiss.”
“I…” Todd didn’t even have time to get the lie out before the woman turned her face back to the bus and showed them all the gruesome truth. Blood streamed down her face, even down her messed-up jaw, coating the front of her neck all the way down her dress, where pink and white flowers bloomed here and there in a field of bright red.
“Holy shit,” Andy repeated, and this time Todd didn’t smack him. When the little dude was right, he was right.
A scream ripped through the bus, and every eye spun to Tiffany Tarleton, standing on her seat looking out the open window at the woman and all the paramedic blood pouring down her face. “It’s a zombie!” Tiffany screeched.
The woman, as if to confirm the truth of what Tiffany said, lurched back to her feet and started to plod toward the bus again, zeroing in on the exact spot where Tiffany stood and screamed.
“Tiffany, shut up!” Mikayla yelled, scrambling over Tarik and running back to where the terrified girl stood, her scream fading to a high-pitched keening. Mikayla spun the smaller girl around by her long blond curls, and slapped her across the face, her open palm making a crack life a rifle.
Tiffany’s screams cut off like a light switch, and she was instantly returned to a pissy seventh-grader. “You slapped me!” she proclaimed, jamming her fists onto her hips.
“I’ll do it again if you don’t put up that window, sit down, and shut the hell up!” Mikayla raised her voice to address the whole bus. “Everybody, listen to me! You know what’s going on. We’ve all seen enough episodes of The Walking Dead to not screw this up, right? Now put up all of those windows and get back in your seats. If they can’t smell us, or hear us, they won’t even know we’re here.” Mikayla looked around the bus, then called out, “Yes, Andy?”
Todd turned to see his little brother turned completely around in their seat, up on his knees as he leaned over the back of the seat. “What if they’re fast zombies? What if they don’t work like they do in the movies?”
“We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Mikayla said, sounding very adult for a girl who was still too short to ride all the rides at the amusement parks. “But we know about this stuff, so we’re not going to do the stupid crap we see people do in the movies, right?”
Andy nodded and raised his window with a firm click. Then he pressed his face to the dirty glass and watched as the woman continued her slow march to the bus. After a few seconds, the paramedic sat up, then got to his feet, and Todd saw exactly how much damage had been done to the man. His throat was completely gone, and his uniform shirt was at least as covered in blood as the woman’s dress. He moved better, probably because he hadn’t broken half the bones in his body in a car crash when he died, but he still walked with that funny lurching limp that the woman had. And he was heading for the bus, too.
Todd looked left and right, checking that all the students had their windows up, but when he looked back to the right, he saw Skeevy sitting sideways in the driver’s seat, his head leaned back so his ponytail dangled out the window, puffing on his vape pen and blowing cherry-scented smoke up toward the roof of the bus.
“Skeevy!” Todd hissed, but the driver didn’t respond. “Skeevy!” Todd whispered louder, then noticed that the only adult on the bus had his feet on the lever that controlled the door, flipping it open and shut with a loud squeak every ten seconds or so, while his hair dangled down the side of the bus, twitching back and forth like a fishing lure for the undead, all the while jamming out to something on his candy-apple red BOOMer headphones.
“Son of a…” Todd grumbled as he slid out into the aisle and ran to the front of the bus. He stopped right next to Skeevy, tapping him on the shoulder. Skeevy just slapped his hand away. Todd did it again, harder this time, and Skeevy slapped his hand away and flipped him the bird.
Todd thought about just letting the zombies get the idiot bus driver but decided that no matter how much of a douche he was, he didn’t deserve to get his throat ripped out by the living dead. So, he reached out, grabbed the blond high school senior’s feet, and yanked them off the door lever. Skeevy’s feet dropped to the floor, which made him sit up, and he dropped his vape pen on the floor. When he bent down to pick it up, his ponytail slid back into the bus, just a few seconds before the woman hit the side of the big yellow torture chamber with a hollow thud.
“Dude, what was that for?” Skeevy asked, looking a little pissed.
“Close the window, Skeevy,” Todd said, very proud of himself for keeping calm so far.
“Dude, you’re the passenger. I’m the licensed driver. That means that I make the decisions about what happens in the driver’s seat. So you don’t get to tell me to close the window, how fast to drive, or even where to pick you up. You got that? And you sure as…heck…don’t get to touch me. If you do it again, I’m going to have you suspended for a week. How would you like that, Mr. Assertive?”
“Skeevy,” Todd started, trying to hold on to his calm in the face of the increasingly close thuds along the side of the bus as the female zombie, hearing Skeevy’s rant, moved closer and closer. “Skeevy, I’m sorry I touched you, but you really need to close your window. There’s something really weird going on out there, and it looks like…oh, screw this.” Todd finally got frustrated with staying calm and upon hearing a new thump at the back of the bus where the paramedic finally joined his maker, just clambered over Skeevy and slid the window shut, latching it just as the woman’s blood-covered fingers slapped the glass.
“Dude! You do not get to invade the driver’s personal space like that. I’m sorry, Todd-o, but that’s going to be three days off the bus. Now what was so all-fired important that you had to get all up in my grill like that?”
Todd, back on his feet and standing between Skeevy and the door of the bus, just stepped aside and pointed. “That.”
Outside the door was a dead paramedic, nothing but a gaping wound where his throat used to be, slapping at the door trying to get in. He left bloody tracks wherever he touched the panes of glass in the door, and the streaks of red started to make seeing difficult.
“And that,” Todd said, pointing to Skeevy’s window, where two female hands smacked the glass without rhythm, just tapping a crimson concerto of zombie hunger less than six inches from the tip of Skeevy’s beloved ponytail.
“Dude…” Skeevy drew out the word, so it sounded more like “duuuuuuuuudddddde,” and Todd just nodded.
“Dude,” Todd said, trying very hard to speak a language he knew the bus driver would understand. “There are zombies trying to catch a ride on the school bus. We have to be quiet so they will go away and leave us alone.”
Skeevy nodded, moving his face almost all the way to the window to look at the ruin of the woman’s body who stood outside his bus, her once-environmentally conscious mind now full of nothing but hunger. The driver took it all in: the mindless face, the blood covering her jaw and dress, the hollow, empty eyes, and he turned back to Todd.
“Dude, there are zombies outside my bus,” Skeevy whispered.
Todd just nodded, then whispered back, “We have to be very quiet, so they don’t want to get in.”
Skeevy nodded, then split the air with a high-pitched scream that sounded more like a tortured cat than a terrified high school senior. When his resolve broke, fully half the bus cut loose with shrieks of terror and screams for help at the top of very well-developed young lungs.
Then the real trouble started.
