Free Zombies vs Polar Bears: Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse, Book 5 by E.E. Isherwood

avoid
doing again.
    His mom excused herself to talk to Jason, leaving him and Victoria
on their own.
    “Just like old times,” Victoria said with a sad smile
as they sat down under the leafy canopy. “You and me against
the world.”
    He looked back to his mom. “But now we have to take care of
my mom. I thought I'd lost you both when that Arizona jumped for the
boat.”
    She laughed. “That's what you're going with?”
    “What?”
    “Arizona?” We're calling it an Arizona zombie?”
Her head was cocked sideways, daring him to agree.
    “Well technically it's an alpha zombie, but yes.
Whoever discovers new species of animals gets to name it.” Once
again he felt his science teacher would be proud he was putting her
guidance to good use. He felt an inner tension start to let go.
Things were getting back to normal with Victoria, his rock. Getting
out of dangerous scrapes was preferable to dwelling on the death of
his father. The only thing that made it seem less shocking was that
so many other people were also dead. It broke his heart, as it would
for any child, but it did not break his soul. He couldn't take time
off to grieve when the forest could reach out and grab him at any
second…
    He looked around, wondering if he imagined that as part of an
elaborate sixth-sense. But all he saw were the hungry faces of young
and old spread among the trees.
    “It was scary, whatever we're going to call it. If every
zombie was as smart as that one, we'd all be dead already. You and I
wouldn't have ever made it out of the tank room. Normal zombies
suddenly seem pretty stupid, don't ya think?”
    He tried to remember Ms. Bunting's science class. He wasn't a
model student, but she made things interesting, so he listened more
than he might have otherwise. They had a unit on crossbreeding of pea
plants by some geneticist who figured out that certain
characteristics are passed on to successive generations. The Arizona
had displayed several characteristics in one package, like it had
accumulated them from somewhere. But without breeding…
    “Ugg.”
    “What?” Victoria answered.
    “I just had a horrible thought.” He shook his head.
“Do you think the zombies can...breed?”
    He thought of a book series which involved zombies doing “it”
with their victims, but something that terrible couldn't possibly be
real. It was an unlikely possibility...but one he had to admit he
couldn't discount out of hand.
    She gave him the “did you hit your head in the shallow end
of the pool again” look.
    “I know, right. It's horrible. But how do you think that one
zombie got all those skills? It could climb, jump, swim,
and...whatever that smell trick is called. It had to get those from
somewhere. But...”
    “But zombies don't have baby zombies.”
    They sat together, side by side, until Victoria snapped her
fingers. “What if it wasn't a zombie at all? What if it was a
human disguised as a zombie? That would explain how it did all those
things. Maybe when it fell in the water all his makeup washed off and
that's why he had to disappear.”
    “Hmm.” Liam thought about it. It did make a lot of
sense. Then he thought about another zombie book he'd read a long
time ago. There was something about it that applied to this
situation…
    “Or, I read about people who went crazy in a zombie plague
and started to act like zombies, even though they were still human.
They gnawed on other humans, behaved like zombies and even mingled
with them. I forget what they were called, but they basically took
pretending to a whole new level.”
    “That would make more sense than thinking a human put on a
zombie costume to attack us for no good reason. He may have really
thought he was a zombie, and we just happened to be at the wrong
place at the wrong time.”
    He wondered about that. It was more frightening to think that
something as cunning as an Arizona in how it approached, could also
be cunning in how it selected its prey in the first place. If it