Zombie Baseball Beatdown

It scared the heck out of me.

  CHAPTER 27

  We pedaled down the highway toward the meatpacking plant, thick green rows of corn blurring past on either side.

  We sweated buckets.

  “Do you think we’ll see more of those zombie cows?” Joe asked.

  “I sure hope not,” I said.

  “You got to admit that last one was pretty awesome, though.”

  “You might like the idea of living through the zombie apocalypse,” I said, “but this is serious. The best thing that can happen is that Milrow will have everything fixed—they figure out the problem with their meat, and we just go back to living our regular lives.”

  Miguel snorted. “Don’t count on it. I’ll bet you a hundred of Larry Max’s dollars that there’s a whole pile of zombie cows running around out there, and Milrow isn’t doing any fixing of anything.”

  “Larry Max?” Joe asked.

  “The lawyer, right? Lawrence Maximillian. Larry Max.”

  “Larry Max.” Joe nodded thoughtfully. “That’s got a good ring to it. Like Duke Nukem. Larry Max. If he had a couple of bazookas, you could totally make him into a video game character.”

  I started imagining a combination of Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Spider Jerusalem: tons of muscles and tattoos, bald with shattered red-and-green glasses, smoking a cigar, and packing a pair of wide-barreled bazooka pistols that blew up cows.

  It actually sounded kind of awesome. Joe was clearly thinking along the same lines. “Larry Max—Zombie Cow Killer,” he boomed in his best deep movie voice. “I’d totally play that.”

  A car was coming up the highway.

  “We’d better get off the road, Zombie Cow Killer,” Miguel said. “Someone’s bound to see us if we get much closer to the plant.”

  “Back in the corn?” Joe asked. “You remember what happened the last time?”

  “Quit being a baby,” Miguel said as he steered off the road. “I thought you liked hunting zombies.”

  “I at least want to see them coming!”

  “Don’t be a wimp,” I said. “The only way we’re going to learn anything is if we go around the back side of the plant, where the manure lakes are. That’s where we saw the poop zombie attacking that cow.”

  “Plus, no one in their right mind would go near a sewer lagoon,” Miguel said.

  “Exactly. It’s a perfect place to hide zombie cows.”

  “Rabi’s going first, though, right?” Joe said.

  “No. For that comment, you’re the one who’s going in first,” I said.

  “We’re all going together,” Miguel said, and grabbed Joe by the shirt and dragged him into the corn.

  “Hey!”

  But Joe didn’t fight hard, and pretty soon, we were all hacking through the greenery, finding our way more by smell than anything else, gagging as we got closer and closer.

  Eventually the lagoon appeared in front of us, a huge lake of liquid cow poop. On the far side, corrals stretched far into the distance, full of mooing cows.

  “Well?” Joe said.

  “We need to go around and get closer.”

  We started skirting the edge of the manure lagoon, trying to stay out of the muck and holding our breaths against the nauseating stench.

  “How many cows you think they got out here?” Joe gasped.

  “You do the math,” I gagged. “If the average American eats x pounds of beef every week, and Milrow is supplying beef to seven states, which have a combined population of p… You end up with fifty-two times p times x pounds of beef per year, then you just have to divide that by the average weight of meat you can cut off a cow, call that m, and—”

  “Forget it, I’d rather count.”

  It added up to thousands of cows, whichever method you used. We covered our faces with our shirts and kept working our way around the lagoon, headed for the corrals on the far side.

  “Mr. Cocoran was the first zombie we saw, and he was around here. And then there was that other one—”

  “Whoever that was.”

  “—so I’m thinking that the zombies probably started somewhere out here in the feedlots.”

  We got closer and closer to the corrals. The cows were jammed in like sardines. They stank and they were nasty, but…

  “I don’t see anything weird,” Joe said.

  “Keep looking,” Miguel said.

  We climbed up on one of the corral fences. Flies buzzed around the cows. Tails flicked. They were covered with poop and eating out of long troughs of grain. Cows as far as the eye—

  “Whoa.” There it was, buried in the middle of all the other cows. Another corral.

  “Come on,” Joe said. “Let’s go take a look.”

  He jumped up on the fence and started balance-beaming along its edge. When Miguel and I hesitated, he laughed. “What? Just don’t fall off.”

  I climbed up onto the fence rail with him, trying not to teeter. It gave me a good view across all the corrals, an even grid of fences separating one group of cows from the next for acres and acres. By following the fence lines, we could get deeper among the corrals and never have to get down with the cows. Joe took off and Miguel and I followed, carefully balancing along the wooden rails, looking down at all the mooing and stinking cows on both sides of us. I wondered what they would have paid to be us, up here on the fence rails, instead of stuck down there—

  My foot slipped.

  “Whoa!”

  A hand grabbed me and steadied me out.

  “Pay attention,” Miguel said. “You’ll get smushed down there. If you fall into a corral, some big old cow will stand on you and won’t even notice he’s doing it.”

  A few minutes later, we made it to the corral we’d seen from a distance, buried deep among all the other, more normal ones.

  It was completely different from all the rest. This one seethed with hungry, angry cattle. They screamed and slammed into one another, fighting and biting. Instead of quietly shoving their faces into feed troughs, they circled and fought in the corral like schools of crazed sharks, showing milky-white eyes and blood-smeared mouths.

  “Well, Joe,” I said. “You got your zombie cows.”

  Joe was staring with awe. “Dang. There’s a lot of them.”

  “You got your phone with you?”

  “What?” Joe seemed dazed by the sight of something even more insane than his comic books. “Oh. Yeah.” He fumbled in his pocket and came up with the phone. He fiddled with it and started snapping pics. Then he just turned it to RECORD and swept the camera over the cows. “We can totally YouTube this.”

  Joe zoomed in as a zombie cow tore into the flank of another. That one squealed and bit back. The other zombie cows bucked in response, setting off a chain reaction of biting and thrashing and feeding. It was like watching a pond full of starving alligators.

  “Eat Milrow beef,” Miguel said in a bright TV-commercial voice. “If it’s good enough for our cows, it’s good enough for you.”

  Even though it was horrifying to watch cows chewing on one another—or maybe because of it—we all cracked up.

  We were so busy laughing that we were caught by complete surprise when a real zombie—I mean a human zombie—popped up in the middle of the zombie herd, like a manure-covered jack-in-the-box.

  It whipped around to focus on us and bared its teeth hungrily.

  “Gah! What’s that doing there? Sleeping?”

  “BRAAAAAIiiiiiinnnsssss!” the zombie howled. It started trying to climb over the cows.

  We made a move to run, but then remembered we were all standing on a four-inch-wide rail of fence, five feet above the ground. We started balance-beaming along the fence as fast as we could—which wasn’t very fast.

  “Hurry hurry hurry!” I knew the zombie was going to catch us at this rate.

  “Hey, where’d the zombie go?” Miguel asked.

  I spared a glance into the zombie cow corral. The pop-up zombie had disappeared into the herds again. It was creepy. One secon
d it had been there, now it was gone. All that was visible was a sea of cows. It was almost like I’d imagined seeing it—

  “GNAAAARR!” The zombie bounced up right beside us and lunged for our legs.

  “Jack-in-the-box zombie!” Joe shouted as he danced madly, trying to keep from being yanked down into the corral.

  “Get going!” I shouted as we danced and hopped and skipped, and the zombie made grabs for our legs. It was like some kind of Dance Dance Revolution game, trying to dodge the zombie’s swiping hands. Jump, land, forward, back, skip dodge, shuffle forward…

  The zombie swiped at my ankles. I jumped its swing and landed, barely balancing. It swiped again. “Whoa!” I back-shuffled and kept going. I was getting good at this. I could actually see when it wound up for a swing, so I could plan—

  My foot slipped. “AAAAHHHHHhhh!” I piled over the side.

  “Rabi!” Miguel and Joe shouted.

  I landed in manure. All around me, cows started backing and shoving away as I climbed to my feet. At least I hadn’t landed in the zombie corral.

  Jack-in-the-box zombie glared at me through the fence. It banged against the barrier a couple of times, then tried to jam its head through the rails. It was a lot feistier than Mr. Cocoran had been.

  “Gaarrghghg!” it growled.

  We both stared at each other. The zombie bared its teeth and drooled. “Brrraaainnsss.” It jammed its arm through the rails, clawing for me.

  I backed out of reach and ran smack into the side of a cow. The cow bolted and ran into its buddy, and that one bumped into another cow, and suddenly all the cows were freaking out—a huge sloshing wave of panicking cows, each one slamming up against the next, all of them looming over me.

  “Get out of there!” Joe yelled. “You’re going to get crushed!”

  “I can’t! This stupid zombie…”

  The zombie grabbed for me again. There was no way I could climb the fence with it standing guard. I wished I had my baseball bat. I totally would have socked it.

  “Use the other fence!”

  A cow bashed into me, hurling me toward the zombie. I barely dodged snatching hands. As I leaped back from the zombie, searching for an escape, I got trapped between two more cows. Hot hairy hides smashed me, pressing tighter and tighter.

  “Uhgh…” I couldn’t breathe. My ribs felt like they were going to crack. I realized I was going to be smushed to death by a bunch of dumb cows.

  What a stupid way to die.

  Suddenly the cows parted, and I was free again, gasping.

  “Rabi! Use the other fence!” Joe and Miguel shouted. They were pointing along the fence to a corner of the corral.

  Still gasping, I started to run, dodging and weaving between the cows, trying not to slip in manure and get trampled. Just on the other side of the fence, the zombie kept pace, growling and looking for a way through to me. A cow blocked my way. I slid under it like I was stealing home, plowing through manure and missing hooves by inches. Came out on its far side and scrambled to my feet.

  “Come on, Rabi!”

  Ahead of me, Miguel and Joe were waving from the corral’s corner. The perpendicular fence was lined with some kind of automated feed-trough system. If I could make it there, I was pretty sure I’d be able to climb back on the fences and also stay out of reach of the growling zombie beside me. I put my head down and ran.

  A new surge of cows came surging toward me. A tidal wave of thousand-pound animals, galloping and mooing.

  I put on a burst of speed. I didn’t have time to climb the fence. I’d be crushed by the cows before I got up and over the troughs.

  Instead, I dove.

  I tumbled underneath the feed troughs just before the cows rammed up against them. Wood fencing crackled and snapped. The cows mooed hysterically and the metal troughs screeched and bent above my head. From where I crouched down in the muck, all I could see was trampling legs and hooves. For the first time in my life I was glad I was small. If I hadn’t been able to duck under the feed troughs and take shelter—

  A bony hand grabbed my ankle.

  “Yow!” Jack-in-the-box zombie again. It’d managed to shove an arm through the fence and grab me. I tried to kick it away, but it was latched on like a pit bull.

  “Brrrrrrrrains!” the zombie growled as it dragged me toward its mouth.

  Suddenly a cow stepped on the zombie’s arm. Bone cracked. I yanked my leg away hard, but the zombie didn’t let go. Instead, the arm tore apart right where the cow had stamped on it. The whole thing came free, but with the zombie’s hand still latched to my ankle.

  The zombie howled at its lost hand and jerked back to its side of the fence, growling and shaking its head like a rabid dog. I tucked myself deeper under the feed troughs as I tried to pry the fingers of the severed hand off my ankle. The fingers fought me, but I finally tore the hand free and flung it out into the middle of the corral.

  Now one-armed, my jack-in-the-box zombie friend was still trying to grab for me, but with only one remaining hand, I figured it wasn’t as dangerous. I waited for a gap in the stampeding cows….

  There!

  I popped out from under the feed troughs and hauled myself up and over the metal rim, to kneel in the ground corn feed, gasping for breath.

  Miguel and Joe were waving for me. “Come on!”

  But something wedged in the trough caught my eye. A Milrow smiling cow logo…

  Without thinking, I reached into the trough and pulled it out of the feed. It was a Milrow ID badge with Mr. Cocoran’s face on it. And another thing, shiny. What the—?

  I shoved my hand deeper into the feed and yanked out… a big plastic sack with a bunch of injection needles in it.

  Weird, I thought, but I didn’t have time to puzzle about it because the pop-up zombie had finally figured out that all it needed to do to get me was climb the fence. And even one-armed, it was managing it.

  “Gaahahaghghag,” it growled as it hauled itself up.

  “What are you doing, Rabi? He’s coming!” Miguel and Joe shouted.

  Clutching the badge and the bag, I clambered up the fence, barely beating the zombie to the top. It tried to bite me as I heaved myself up, but now I had the advantage. I kicked it in the head, and it plunged back into the zombie cow corral with a shriek.

  Joe and Miguel cheered. I teetered over to them, and we quickly balance-beamed our way out of the corrals, leaving the shrieking zombie far behind. At last, we all jumped down beside the sewage lagoons.

  Safe.

  “I thought you were dead,” Miguel said, grabbing me.

  Joe started to hug me, then pulled back. “Dude. You’re a mess.”

  “Did you get it on video?” I panted. “Did you get it? Do you still have the phone?”

  “What phone?” Joe asked. But when he saw my panicked face, he laughed. “Quit worrying. I got the whole thing.”

  “What’s that you found?” Miguel asked me.

  “Mr. Cocoran’s Milrow badge. And a bunch of needles. I don’t know what they are.”

  I wiped the dirty badge off on my filthy jeans and studied the picture. Mr. Cocoran looked a lot better in his company photo than he had the last time we saw him. His title was on the badge.

  “ ‘SuperGrow technician,’ ” I read. “What’s that?”

  “Remember my uncle said something about them giving the cows some kind of special growth drugs? To make them fatter.”

  We studied the syringes. Each one was labeled, too. “Milrow Bovine Growth Supplement, ten percent. Varacal, five percent. Torox, eight percent. Penicillin, twelve percent. NutriProtea, twenty percent…” The list went on. “Dude, what is all this stuff?”

  “All the junk they put in the cows, I think. You know, to SuperGrow them.”

  “They’re already plenty big for me,” I said.

  “Not for Milrow. Every pound of meat on the hoof means more cash for them,” Miguel said.

  I was trying to figure it out. Was there a connection here? “
So, Mr. Cocoran was one of the guys who injected the cows with all these weird ingredients? He’d give them these drugs.…” It didn’t make sense. “So did he make the zombies?”

  “Maybe he just got ambushed by one that was already out there,” Joe said. “You got to admit, if you were going to write an origin story for evil, these feedlots would do the trick. Evil monsters always come from nasty places like nuclear waste dumps and swamps. Check this place out. I mean, seriously. It’s perfect.”

  We looked out at the seething masses of cows. Even the nonzombie ones were disgusting. The ground was covered with waste, and so were the cows, and there was nothing but reeking smells and flies and rot. Seven states’ worth of beef, all penned together, acre after acre, festering…

  I could imagine it, all right. Maybe one weird cow had been out here, getting more messed up and crazy from eating nasty stuff, mutating in these corrals. Or maybe it had gotten infected with some kind of twisted bacteria that lived in the manure gunk. Or maybe there’d been untested chemicals in Cocoran’s syringes that had made the cows go bad. Or maybe it was all those things, mixed together.

  It was so sick and nasty in the feedlots that you could imagine a thousand different things going wrong.

  Whatever had caused it, Mr. Cocoran had paid the price.

  “Uh-oh,” Joe said, grabbing both of us. “Looks like we’ve got company.”

  A bunch of guys in gray jumpsuits like the ones we’d seen at the baseball field were coming from the direction of the meatpacking plant. You could see their heads above the fence lines as they moved down lanes between some of the corrals.

  We ducked down.

  “Do you think they saw us?”

  “Be hard to miss us, the way we were all up on top of the corrals like that.”

  But they weren’t coming toward the sewage lagoon, where we were hiding. They were headed somewhere else. I peeked up over the fence, craning my neck to see where they were headed. “What are they up to?”

  “Who cares? Let’s get out of here,” Miguel said. “We got your evidence. Let’s go.”

  “I want to see what they’re doing. These are the same guys as the ones who grabbed that cow off the baseball field.”

  “The cleanup squad.”