Bovicide, Zombie Diaries, and the Legend of the Brothers Brown

  * * *

  For someone with ten zombies after him, Clarkson thought he was doing all right. He’d leapt into a nearby evergreen and swung around its branch to land atop the Tree, where the undead couldn’t reach him and he could survey the action.

  The Team had a clear space around them as the nearby zombies turned west toward the vampires. Mitchell stood to the south of the cleared area, eyeing the zombies for treachery and ready to use his scythe if necessary. Skylar and Truman were behind him, trying to spot the Browns.

  From atop the Tree, Clarkson did: Thomas was watching the carnage with delight from over by the tree line; Richard was struggling through the horde on the west of the Tree, approaching the Team; and Harold was… oh dear… standing in the open to the north, smiling an evil little smile at the Team’s backs.

  Clarkson, driven by a protective instinct he hadn’t known he possessed, rushed to the aid of his friends. Actually, “friends” was probably too strong a word, but they weren’t trying to kill him, which was close enough for now. They could work on the rest later.

  In one smooth motion, Clarkson dropped to the ground by the Tree, grabbed the propane tank, and hurled it at Harold while shouting, “Hey, deadbeat!”

  The former publican saw the propane canister an instant before it thumped him into the ground. Truman, hearing the snap of Harold’s bones behind him, spun. In a second he’d dropped to one knee, readied his sidearm, and squeezed the trigger. A single bullet spun through the cold night air and punctured the propane tank atop Harold Brown.

  “Oh yeah!” Clarkson shouted. Then he started running, because the zombies were grabbing at him again. As he ran, though, he noticed the absence of a loud bang or the sound of a zombie king exploding into hundreds of fiery bits, so he glanced over.

  The canister on top of Harold was spewing gas, but utterly failing to detonate or even catch on fire.

  Still, Harold wasn’t moving. That was one Brown taken care of.