“Best guess is that the keys are in the building,” Wendy said.
Zion nodded. “If not, I can hot-wire those vehicles, but I’ll need some time,” he admitted.
“We’ll give it two minutes inside,” she said in her no-nonsense tone, “and if we can’t find the keys, we’ll go that route.”
He gave her a little salute. “So how do you want to play the zombies in the lot?” he asked.
She looked over his massive wooden weapon, which still sported bits of brain and blood all over the business end.
“Guessing you’re pretty handy with that thing?” she asked.
Zion grinned. “Hundreds of crushed skulls can’t be wrong,” he replied with a smirk.
“In that case, if you want to hold them off, I’ll get the keys,” the redhead suggested.
He winked at her, giving his weapon a swing. “Let’s do it,” he replied, excited at getting to crack more zombie heads.
The two of them raced towards the small building on the other side of the lot, Zion taking the lead. He ran up to the first corpse, a middle-aged looking man in a tattered and bloody business suit. He swung hard, sending the zombie careening into a nearby car, crumpling to the ground with a wet smack.
There were several rows of cars parked closely together, a throng of creatures in the aisles.
“Run over the cars, I’ll handle them,” he suggested, and Wendy nodded, clambering up onto the first car she saw and darting over the tops of them. Some of the creatures reached up in vain, drawn by her footfalls on the fiberglass, giving Zion an easy time in dispatching them while they were distracted.
With a single blow he caved in the heads of two ghouls, crushing them against the top of a sedan. He looked up the aisle, seeing six more monsters lumbering his way. The moans grew in strength as zombies from the flanking aisles came his way, attracted by the noise of their comrades being crushed.
Zion rushed towards the six in front of him, using his blunt weapon like a jousting lance. The front edge cracked the sternum of the lead zombie as he drove it back into the others. With three creatures on the ground, he quickly delivered an overhead strike, killing one.
He quickly whipped around when he heard moans coming from behind him, seeing zombies coming in between cars from the other two neighboring aisles. He ran back, swinging his weapon like a bat, smashing the face of the creature on the left before spinning around with the weapon held high to avoid the tops of the cars and bringing it down with vicious force onto the next one.
With zombies pouring into his aisle, he hopped up onto the hood of a car. As he scrambled, a zombie grabbed his ankle, and he kicked back with his free leg to deliver a heel strike to the creature’s nose. The sound of snapping bone was loud, but didn’t free him from the death grip, so he punted the corpse again. Finally, the zombie’s skull cracked, and he wrestled his leg free from the defeated ghoul.
He looked around as he sprung up onto the roof of the car, seeing zombies coming at him from all angles. With a wild grin, he began to play whack-a-zombie, bringing his weapon down hard with gleeful overhead strikes. One after another, the zombie heads smashed, bodies crumpling all around the car.
The mass of ghouls grew so thick that the vehicle began to sway back and forth, causing Zion to widen his stance to regain his footing. He stepped back onto the trunk and leapt over outstretched rotting arms, whirling with his weapon on the downswing to catch a creature in the side of the head.
He looked back and spotted creatures heading into the lot from the neighborhood, heading towards the door of the building. “Shit,” he muttered, and then glanced back at the twenty or so left around the vehicles he’d been whacking. He shook his head in frustration, knowing he didn’t have time to deal with them at the moment.
He hopped down from the car into the aisle, a foot away from the group, and ran as hard as he could towards the building. As he reached the end of the aisle, within fifteen yards, the leader of the neighborhood zombies was almost at the door.
Zion raised his weapon to shoulder height, straight out so it led with the blunt end. He rammed it into the side of the ghoul’s head, crushing it against the wall, sending a splatter of blood against the brick. He turned to the next creature, swinging like a baseball bat, severing its head from its body to sail back towards the cars.
The zombie conga line branched out a bit, going from single file to three or four wide in spots. He swung wildly, taking out a few more zombies, killing another, and knocking one to the ground. He glanced back at the group he’d run away from, only to find that they’d begun to follow him, thirty yards and closing.
“Wendy!” Zion yelled into the door. “You gotta hurry the fuck up!”
Inside, the redhead heard him, and ran around a desk, narrowly avoiding a grasping zombie. She stumbled over the corpse of the first one she’d put down just seconds earlier.
“Don’t worry,” she declared as she grabbed a glass paperweight from the desk, “I got something for you too, just like your friend here.” She lunged forward and smashed the paperweight onto the zombie’s forehead. The glass cracked, as did the skull as she hit it a few more times for good measure. After the third strike it fell to the ground, and she tossed the bloodied instrument to the side.
Chest heaving, she looked around at the four ghouls she’d put down before staring as Zion
