The Smoky Corridor

92

Zack had never seen anything so gruesomely hideous!

Pettimore’s zombie stood nearly seven feet tall and had splotches of scraggly matted hair poking out around vein-riddled islands of scalp. His face was a skull wrapped in drum-tight skin. His fang-toothed smile cut across his cheekbones and crept up toward his ears.

But the worst parts were the bulging eyes. The dead and empty eyes popping out of their sockets.

Zack stepped backward.

“Stay back, Zip,” he said without taking his eyes off the blank eyes staring at him.

Drool dribbled out between the thing’s teeth. A drop splattered on the floor. Zack thought he heard it sizzle when it hit. Like battery acid.

The zombie was dressed in a tattered blue uniform—mostly shreds and threads. Zack could see his rippling leg muscles, the curling claws at the tips of gangly fingers and toes.

The jaw creaked open and Zack smelled sewer gas.

“You are trespassing,” the thing said, his voice deep and rumbling.

“No … I just came … to get my friend.…”

“You came to rob my master’s gold.”

“No, like I said—”

The crouching thing hopped forward.

Zack leapt back.

Suddenly, from the far end of the tunnel, all the way back at the entrance, he heard a thud.

The zombie heard it, too. Hesitated.

“Jennings?”

Snertz.

The zombie perked up his ears.

“Where are you? I’m gonna kill you so bad.…”

One hundred yards away, a flashlight swirled around.

Phlegm rumbled in the zombie’s massive chest. “Slay anyone I see sliding down the chute,” the thing muttered. “Slay them and gorge on brains!”

In a blur of blue, the zombie started running up the tunnel, back toward the root cellar.