ZOMBIE BOOKS

ground floor windows.  Doors had massive bolts running through them that connected to pipes stretched across the frames, effectively anchoring the doors.
I waited with heated anticipation at the uncovering of the secret entrance, the password, armed guards in BDUs, and a poorly lit passageway that led to a command center with maps and canteens, and a stock of weapons and food.  Instead…
“Molly!” the cowboy hollered.  “Open the gah damn door!”  A steel door opened unceremoniously to reveal our hostess.
When I heard the cowboy call a woman’s name, I pictured someone young, army pants, tight tank top stretched over a large perk chest, ponytail, and a pistol drawn and ready.  What I found was an average woman in her forties.  She wasn’t thin, or fat.  She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.  No gun was visible, and her hair had been cut extremely short.  Honestly, I felt a little let down.
“We’ll come on, boys!” she bellowed.  “I ain’t standing here all day.”
Yeah, she wasn’t at all what I hoped she’d be.
“Molly, you beautiful creature,” crooned the cowboy.  “If you called to me a hundred times a day like that I still couldn’t get enough.  When are you going to admit that you are madly in love with me?”
“Duck,” she said, “I’d sooner sleep with Dave here, than ever have feelings for you.”  Her smile was big, bright, and venomous.  At that moment, I kind of liked her.
“Wait,” I said, “Your name’s Duck?”
“Cute kid,” Molly says as an afterthought.  “Where’d you find him?”
“Hidin’ under a railcar, waiting to be eaten.  And what’s wrong with Duck?” he asks, sounding wounded.
“Cowboy sounded cooler,” I admitted.
Molly laughs heartily as she bolts the door behind us.  “Duck?  Cool?  Ha!” She put an arm around my shoulder and led me into the building.  We were in a large storage room, filled with wooden crates, pallets, and packing equipment.  The biggest of the items in the room had been pushed up against the roll-up doors.  Our guide led us to a stairwell.  It was a metal set of stairs that wound up to the top level and was suspended from the ceiling.  There were four levels before the last set of stairs took you to a pair of doors.  On the first landing was a stack of packages.  The second and third flights of stairs had been removed and replaced with a ladder that reached the third landing.  Molly stopped and pointed at the ground floor.
“Roll-ups are the weak points,” she started, “so we padded those.  If they get in and reach the stairs,” she says pointing at the boxes on the landing, “these are for slowing the horde while we get up the ladder.  Once we reach the upper landing, ladder goes up and zombies are stuck down here.”
“Then you run,” I say.
“Hell no!” Duck replies.  “Then we hunt!”
“There are a couple of escape routes from upstairs,” Molly interrupts, “but Duck’s right.  We mean to kill as many zombies as we can before we go.  In here, they’d be fish in a barrel.”
We climb the ladder and I get a better view of the floor.  She’s right, I decide.  No humanoid could cover the expanse from the first landing to the third without a ladder.  It would be cherry picking from here.
“So it would be just, pow pow pow,” I say, imitating the shooting of a rifle.
“Kinda,” Duck responds.
“You just shoot them in the head, right?” I ask, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“Kid, you ever seen one of them die?” Duck asks.
To this point, I hadn’t.  I shook my head and looked at Molly, confused.
“This ain’t the movies, kid,” is all she said.
As we made our way up the stairwell, Duck filled me in on his favorite pastime: Zombie killing.
“Think of their heads as just a melon with teeth.  Their brains ain’t workin’ anymore, so shootin’ those don’t do no good.  Shoot,” he says with a laugh, “I shot one in the head eight times and she jus’ kept a coming.”
“She?” I asked, a little shocked that he would commit such an act on a woman.
“You think them parasites only come with a dog between their legs?”  He laughed hard and shoved me a little.  “There’s plenty of kittens out there that want what’s in your head, and I don’t mean in the fun way,” he added in a mumble.
“Duck!” Molly scolded.  “For heaven’s sake!  Do you always have to be like this?”
“It’s who I am, dear,” he replied unapologetically.  “She wines,” he whispers at me, “but she loves it.”
I can’t help but smile when she responds, “The hell I do you old perve.”
Molly pulls a key from her pocket and unlocks one of the doors at the top of the stairs.  It opens to a windowless, sheetrock hallway.  We take the first door on the right and enter what looks like a break room.  The center of the room is filled with several tables pushed together and circled with chairs.  A whiteboard hangs in the wall but it looks unused.  There’s a bathroom to the immediate left, and two doors further down the wall.  The right wall has a single door, and a glance reveals a locker room.  There are two men sitting at the table, playing cards and chewing on toothpicks.
“It’s ‘bout friggin’ time, Duck,” one of them responds without looking up from his cards.  The man is bald, with a short beard that starts just above his ears.  His opponent has short hair and a very youthful look.  Neither one notices me standing there.
“You know me, Peter,” Duck responds with a grin.  “I do love to hunt.”
“Yeah,” says the younger one, “we know.  What’d you catch?”
“Found a deady wanderin’ out the Spokane road, but old Dave here bashed him in before anything could be done about it.”
“Good work, Dave,” replies Peter.  “Wood, I call.”
The younger one lays a weak hand that is easily defeated.  Peter smiles and looks up at us.  “Who the hell is that?” he asks, scowling