Disappearance at Devil's Rock Read Online Free Page B

seen it yet?”
    Tommy shakes his head no.
    Luis groans. “Jesus, you’re such a movie wuss. Just watch it. There’s a zombie that looks totally like you in it. I mean, it’s the seventies version of you. So weird. You have to see it. Even if you don’t see the whole movie, YouTube that zombie.”
    Tommy: “YouTube search what? Tommy zombie ? Luis is a dick ?”
    Luis: “That’s a different movie.”
    Josh: “Hey. A school would be good place to hide, fight off zombies. Lots of supplies there.”
    Tommy: “It’s okay. But you can’t stay there all the time. You keep a bunch of small bases, right? Spread out the supplies. Don’t rely too much on one place. Living inside a fortress, that’s a mistake. You need more than one place. I’d make this rock one of my bases. Definitely. It’s up high like your stairless house, and you could hear and see the zombies coming from like a mile away.”
    Luis: “So where’s your emergency escape route from the rock?”
    Tommy: “Just slide down that tree over there like a fireman’s pole. It’s better than jumping out a window. And the rock would be easy to defend. We could lure them into the split, yeah? Stab them in the head with long spears.”
    Luis: “If there’s a big herd, they’d fill up the split and they’d keep coming right up against the rock, crush into each other, and wash over this thing like a tsunami, man. Just like in World War Z and Walking Dead —”
    Tommy: “That wouldn’t happen in real life. They can’t herd through these thick woods. It’d slow them down big-time.”
    Luis: “Yeah they can. They wouldn’t have to stick to the trails, either. They’d stumble into the easiest way out here.”
    Tommy gingerly probed his scabbing leg wounds. “Nah. We’re high enough that we’d see them coming, hear them coming, too. We’d be all right . . .”
    Josh didn’t like horror movies like Luis did, and he wasn’t newly obsessed with zombies like Tommy. Those two had totally ignored his school suggestion for the apocalypse, and he felt dangerously out of their conversation loop. Which pair of the three friends was best friends and which one was the third wheel was always the unspoken fear, the unspoken competition. Tommy and Luis kept going back and forth, rapid-fire, like they’d rehearsed this zombie give-and-take without Josh. Maybe they had. Josh scrambled to stay relevant, to come up with something clever to add.
    Josh said, “It’d be too cold out here at night.”
    Tommy: “We could keep a fire going—”
    Luis: “Outdoor fire. Might as well ring a bell, send invitations to the zombie barbeque.”
    Josh: “Mmm. McRibs.”
    Luis laughed. Josh exhaled.
    Tommy: “The cold would help, actually. Cold is good.”
    Luis: “Fuck that. Living out here in the cold would blow donkey balls.”
    Josh: “Zombie donkeys?”
    Tommy: “I’m talking about the zombies. They’d totally freeze up. They’re not alive. No body heat, right?”
    Josh: “So you’re saying they’re what—like lizards? Cold-blooded? They need to sun themselves on rocks or something?”
    Luis laughed again. “Zombies getting a tan. Hot.”
    Tommy: “Winter hits and it’d be zomb-cicles everywhere. Wait them out until everything freezes, then you could take them out so easy.”
    Luis frowned and furrowed like he was considering a great wisdom. “They didn’t freeze up in Dead Snow —”
    Josh: “What the fuck is Dead Snow ?”
    Luis: “Nazi zombie movie in—Finland. I think. I don’t know. Some icy-ass country. The Nazi zombies didn’t freeze and ran through the snow and everything. But they came back to life because of a shitty curse or something stupid.”
    Tommy: “No