Read Zombies! Episode 3 - Love Bites for Free Online

a tremendous weight off of his
chest. Shawn was not a fighter. He was not in a gang despite the
fact that two of the guys he'd grown up with had joined. He still
saw one of them on occasion. The other one was dead. The day he'd
seen that zombie, something inside of him had just sort of switched
on. He didn't know whether it was righteousness or self
preservation. What he didn't tell anyone, not even the detective,
was that killing the zombie had been automatic. He'd done it
without thought. But killing the victim…the woman…that had been a
conscious decision. He'd actually taken three seconds to think
through the consequences of smashing her head in with the pipe. And
he'd done it anyway.
     
    His conversation with Heron had been short.
There'd been some kind of something at a hospital and they'd made
him head of a zombie task force. Shawn had laughed when he'd said
that. Another part of the façade. Zombie Task Force sounds
like comic book ridiculousness to the average person but when
you've actually seen one, fought one, it sounded like a
dangerous freakin' job.
     
    "I'm going to get you out of here, Shawn,"
Heron had said.
     
    "Don't do me no favors," Shawn had replied,
regretting it as he said it.
     
    Heron had scowled at that. "You're going to
be doing all of the favors for me. And you're going to start with
dropping that gangland attitude. Trust me, you don't pull it off
nearly as well as you think. The next thing you're going to do is
report to me anything that's going on between kids and
zombies."
     
    "What the hell's that supposed to mean? What
are kids gonna do with them ?"
     
    The detective had shrugged. Shawn remembered
his other two meetings with this particular cop. The first had been
at the site of his arrest. The cop had been there with a partner,
each very different from the other. This guy, Heron, was cool and
confident. Later, when he'd come to see Shawn in jail, that
confidence had gone. His partner had been bitten and his world had
been shaken up around him. The confidence had come back during this
third meeting, though. And it had brought an edge with it.
     
    "Kids do stupid things," he'd said. "Some
teenaged idiot will think of something that will catch on with the
rest of you teenaged idiots and I want to know about it."
     
    "So I'm like a narc?"
     
    He'd thought about that, made a show of
weighing the simile in his head before answering. Then he'd nodded.
"I've already arranged to have the charges against you suspended,
which means you'd better hold up your end of the bargain. It'll
take a few days for the paperwork to go through and then I'll get
in touch."
     
    It had taken two and a half weeks to run the
paperwork. Shawn had awakened every morning in jail wondering if
that day was going to be the day they let him out. At least it
wasn't like being in prison. He'd heard some pretty scary stories
about prison. The lockup was a little easier. Hard criminals didn't
stay there for long and the petty ones weren't really dangerous. He
could tell that his stay was very extended. The guards there
got tired of seeing his face and their abuse, albeit verbal, was
starting to get nasty. He wondered just how long he'd had before it
got even worse.
     
    But all of that was behind him now. Now he
was free of jail, free of school, and free to see Marcus. He'd
already decided that he'd do what Heron asked him to do. He did not want to go back to jail only to wind up in a federal
prison. If he couldn't find some juicy information, he'd be the
idiot that made up the fad. Whatever kept him a free man.
     
    Leaving the school, he took a different route
to the trains. It was too late to avoid his friends, which was a
necessity, but that wasn't the real issue. He was actually afraid to go past the spot where he'd met the zombie. Truth
to tell, he was afraid just to walk down the street. As much as
he'd hated the jail, he hadn't realized just how comforting those
four walls had been for him. He looked at the