Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) by S.P. Durnin Page B

they made on the
weekends. This puppy took skill.” Penny turned the Hammer over,
inspected it briefly, and then shoved the hulking weapon into the
waistband of her shorts. “I'll just hold onto it for a while. Start
walking.”
    Taking him by the back of his tactical
harness, Penny steered Jake back though the doorway and into the
kitchen. She wasn't quiet about it either. The sounds of their
hurried footfalls set the dead inside the first freezer Jake had
secured banging on the walls. That caused his dark-haired captor to
smile at the door.
    “Go ahead and keep bitching, you dumb shits.
You'll never get your teeth into me. You five are gonna rot in
there.” Penny kept them moving towards the cafeteria. “Shouldn't
have tried to oust Rebecca. That's what you get.”
    “Who's Rebecca?” Jake continued into the
eatery.
    Penny slapped him across the back of his
head. “You just keep moving. And shut up. You're the moron in
handcuffs here.”
    Jake frowned. “Just asking. Jeez.”
    “You want another shot in the mouth?” Penny
demanded as they crossed the cafeteria and entered the hallway
beyond.
    Jake shook his head and sighed. “You were a
cop before all this, weren't you?”
    “Now just how the fuck would you know that?”
Penny demanded, roughly jerking him to a halt in front of the high
school's trophy case.
    “Careful observation,” he replied glumly,
“And the fact you act like an over-aggressive bitch when someone's
cuffed and can't fight back. That's pretty much trademark Bad Cop
behavior. You might as well be wearing a cheap suit and smoking
off-brand cigarettes like every extra in a low-budget gangster
move. Ever.”
    For a moment, Jake thought he'd pushed the
woman too far. Penny shoved him back against the trophy case and
put her Beretta against his throat.
    “And you might want to curb that
flapping tongue of yours before it gets you into even more
trouble.” She did not look pleased with Jake's opinion of her
personality.
    Jake was unimpressed. “More trouble than
being handcuffed by a lunatic in a wrecked building, while there
are zombies everywhere? You're kidding right?”
    “You think we don't understand what's
happened? That we're just a bunch of small-town hillbillies looking
for whatever we can get?” Penny asked.
    He thought about that for a second. “Pretty
much.”
    “Thought so. You know exactly jack.” Penny
smiled. “Let's go collect the boys and get you back to the
homestead, 'pardner'.”
    “Please do. The crap-tastic Western movie
dialogue is killing me.”
    Penny chuckled darkly and shoved Jake towards
the second floor stairwell. “Keep going and stay quiet. There could
always be a zombie or two in here. Where do you think the ones in
the freezer came from?”
    “Outstanding.” Jake started clomping noisily
up to the second floor, making as much noise as he could on his way
for two reasons. One, to alert Kat that something had gone wrong
and he was in it up to his eyeballs again. Two, in the hopes
Penny's pair of companions upstairs didn't have itchy trigger
fingers. It would suck if they got spooked, jumped the gun, and
riddled him with bullets.
    Shit, Jake thought, now I'm the one
using bad Western dialogue. So much for my degree in
Journalism—58K, straight down the crapper. I should've been a
dentist...

-Chapter
Four-
     
    Ben and Jerry hadn't seen hide nor hair of
Kat, as it turned out.
    Jake smiled at that fact as he rode in the
back of Penny's eye-sore of a truck. For whatever reason, the
ninja-girl hadn't relieved them of their heads while he'd played
Twenty Questions with them in the lobby. During their brief
questioning the writer stuck to his story that he was alone, which
caused the walking Bad Hair Day named Benjamin to become a bit
irritated. Terrible haircut aside, the mullet fan was adamant about
Jake's blue-haired companion being “hotter than a new Caddy in the
projects.” That prompted Jake to share an unamused look with Penny
as Jerry laughed at