GRANDMA? Part 1 (YA Zombie Serial Novel) by J.A. Konrath (i wanna iguana read aloud .TXT) 📕

That wouldn't be too bad. But knowing the Cubs, I had a much better chance of being smothered by swimsuit models.

As my lungs burned and my brain screamed for oxygen, I heard a roar in the water. It grew louder and louder, until it blotted out all thoughts about girls in bikinis.

Well, all girls but Jaclyn Swedberg. It was hard to stop thinking about her. My Dad had a Playboy with her pictures in it, and she was maybe the hottest babe ever.

In fact, as far as last thoughts went, thinking about Jaclyn Swedberg wasn't a bad last thought to have.

Then the roaring sound was practically on top of me, and when I realized what it was I became even more panicked.

No, Josh! Don't…!

Then there was a THUNK! as the boat hit Grandma. But any momentary relief I felt from being free was countered by the 40 hp motor spinning a propeller inches away from my face. It missed my nose by less than an inch. Blowing water in my face.

I swam away from it, almost getting scalped, and then popped to the surface alongside the boat, gasping for air.

"Randall!"

Josh killed the engine, and the boat coasted into the shore—

—right next to Phil the zombie.

I swam to the ladder next to the motor and pulled myself onto the boat, just as the Phil was climbing onto the bow.

"Josh! Reverse!"

Josh pulled the throttle back and gunned it. I fell forward, onto my hands. But so did Phil, falling right off the boat, and into the lake next to Grandma.

"Slow down, brother," I said between breaths as we reached the middle of the lake. "You did good."

"Grandma got run over by a bass boat," he said, singing it like the reindeer song.

I laughed, enjoying the moment of not being chased, and shut my eyes. My breathing slowed down and the sun warmed me up. My foot was throbbing, but it felt really good to be alive.

"Uh, Randall?"

"What?" I said peeking open one of my eyes.

"Do you think they know how to swim?"

"Who?"

I stared at the shore line and I saw zombies. Elderly zombies, standing there, watching us. Dozens of them. Maybe even a hundred.

Then they all jumped in the lake and began to swim towards our boat.

Northern Wisconsin

FIVE HOURS EARLIER

The most stereotypical redneck you could imagine held a lightning rod in the palm of his three fingered hand. How this came to occur is an interesting story (to the parties involved.)

Each of the fingers was actually a thumb that he'd gotten fresh from a buddy who worked at the local funeral home.

"They already dead, they don’t need 'em no more," Einsten reasoned, and paid the mortician thirty bucks each, even though the skin on one was slightly darker than his, so people always thought that  finger was dirty.

Einstein would've been happy with his original set of fingers, but he'd used the chainsaw wrong when he tried to make an automatic beer launcher swimming pool and decided if he had more thumbs he could get a better grip on that chainsaw or any other thing that looked like it needed more thumbs on it.

Since all of his thumbs worked, he considered himself a scientist—after all, he'd sewn them on himself and used steel screws to secure them to the bone. A damn fine job considering he'd done it all under the influence of Jack Daniels Tennessee Whiskey. Then he'd used fishing leeches to get the blood flowing to his new appendages, a trick he learned from the TV show E.R. He went through two bottles of penicillin to fight off infections that damn near killed him, but the end result was something to be proud of.

"Look, Debra!" he bragged to his wife when the last fever broke. "If man's only advantage against other animals is a thumb, well I am triply advanced!"

"If you're so smart, how'd you cut off all your fingers in the first place?" she countered.

He told her to shut up. That showed her.

He called himself Einstein, only because that was the only person he knew that was a genius like himself. His real name was Rupert.

Einstein would perform his experiments in a barn located on the far left of his wooded acre. His wife wanted no part of his "genius experiments". Whenever she used those words, she made air quotes with her fingers and rolled her eyes.

Einstein sometimes wondered why he married her.

Oh, yeah. The big boobies.

Ralph, his bestest buddy who'd been with him since they was fetuses, always supported Einstein's experiments. Ralph thought Einstein was brilliant, called himself his assistant, and would often volunteer as a guinea pig. Though most of Einstein's genius experiments ended up as enormous epic fails, he always had the will to try another.

When his automatic beer launcher swimming pool failed, Einstein got back to his genius experiments as soon as his hand healed. Ralph always complained that he needed to get on the roof of his barn, but he didn't have a ladder long enough to reach.

Einstein went to work.

"Why doesn't he just buy a bigger ladder?" Debra asked.

He told her to shut up. That showed her.

The inside of Einstein's barn looked like a redneck Frankenstein's laboratory. Striped-down wires, and cords knotted all over the walls and ceiling. Tables full of mechanical and laboratory stuff. Lots of tools, Tractor parts. An aquarium full of leeches, which fed off of a very unhappy looking carp. Occasionally electricity would zap in the background just like the movie Frankenstein, but it was always due to something shorting out or a wire frying.

"That barn is a fire hazard," Debra would nag.

He didn't bother to tell her to shut up that time. Because he was looking at her big boobies.

Einstein also had posters of guns on the walls, and had a 12 gauge shotgun hidden always at the ready in case a bear wandered in. Or a duck.

Ducks were tasty.

His other guns were in the house.

Einstein had been working all night for