Here's one that should be WAY earlier in the story arc. I'm doing it now to introduce something I have planned for "Death Valley Drag".
The zombie seemed to materialize out the dark, lunging with hands outstretched and bloody jaws open wide. A rasping voice replied, "Chew on this." Then a spherical prosthesis rammed into its mouth.
Bruce dragged out the zombie's carcass with his hook, and set it next to a pile of twenty more beside the JC Penney's entrance to the Boulevard Mall. Columbus, in zombie get up, scribbled a note in his book. "That's... twenty," he said. "And we haven't even reached the corridor yet."
"If anyone's askin' me," Sydney said, "I say bugger this. It may not be as bad as the Show, but it's bad enough, and this time, we don't have the security of a casino at stake. Why not just fall back to a perimeter around the mall, bar the doors and wait for them to do the job for us?"
Bruce looked thoughtful, but Columbus said emphatically, "That would mean tying down a lot of men for weeks, when we're already stretched thin. Not to mention the damage if the zombies break out. But even that's not what worries me most. This mall is practically across the street from the hospital where the Pariahs attacked my wife and me. My guess is, Tweedle Dum launched his attack from here."
"Makes sense," Sydney said. "This place could have been like an indoor game preserve."
"Exactly," said Columbus, "and I want to know- in fact, I think we need to know- what else he was up to. Like the tripwire my wife ran into. If Clan Tweedle used traps like that a lot, if they set some of them up to kill or do serious injury instead of knocking people down, we could have serious problems reclaiming their territory. The same goes if any of the Type 2s trained to use weapons have survived. We don't know how Tweedle Dum did it. He might have kept them in a feeding pen, like the nest at the base of Stratosphere, where some of them might survive feeding on the others. Or, he might have managed to teach them to feed themselves, in which case they might not just have survived, but be roaming free. And, the Clan might have left something behind that could help us. I'm sure they left stashes of food behind, and maybe weapons. They might even have kept some kind of record of what was in their territory. I don't expect to find anything written down. I''m pretty sure they had actually lost the ability to communicate with each other in words- maybe replaced verbal intelligence with something else. The only time one of them spoke was to us, and I've wondered if even that was more like mimicry than real speech. But even without language, they might have left something concrete, like a map."
"Okay, I'm sold," Bruce said. "But why not cut right to the chase, and start where they're most likely to be?"
"All right," Columbus said, "there's an entrance on either side of Sears, which makes it the best hunting ground. So, we start there."
"Man, they don't stop coming!" Sydney exclaimed as he loaded another clip.
"Yeah, but there can't be many more of them!" Bruce said. He punched a zombie lunging over the customer service counter with his ball prosthesis and jammed an ice pick-like spike into its ear.
A radio crackled with Columbus's voice: "I think I found the Pariahs' nest. Call in the cavalry."
Within seconds, gunfire erupted at the edges of the store, as more hunters burst in to attack the zombies surrounding the counter from behind.
"This had better be worth it!" Bruce shouted as he emerged from the escalator in Sears' second floor.
"Come back here," Columbus called, not quite shouting. Bruce and Sydney followed his voice to the manager's office, where they found walls decorated like Lascaux with hundreds of odd, crude doodles, made with everything from markers to paint to what looked like blood. Columbus pointed to a corpse, still clutching a bloody 2-by-4. "This came at me as soon as I came in. There were three more already dead; it looks like they turned on each other. They didn't have the intelligence or initiative to go downstairs and kill zombies from the pen."
He waved to the wall. "Most of this is going to be indecipherable. For what it's worth, it looks to me like it's more practical than artistic: There's large groupings of one symbol, repeated over and over, and arranged in rows of ten. Those must be for counting. Then there's this..." He pointed to a large drawing in the corner. It was far from perfect, but it was hard to imagine it was anything but a map of Circus Circus.
"...But the kicker, is back here," Columbus said as he led them to a store room. "The trophy room."
The other men tensed, and Sydney looked visibly queasy as they looked inside. What they saw proved to be unnervingly sanitary: a large pile of weapons and gear, and on one wall, a whole suit of body armor, nailed up like a butterfly on display. Sydney took a closer look, and swore. "Where the * did this come from?"
"I don't know, but it couldn't have done much good," Bruce said.
"No, it was very good," Columbus said, fingering a hole in the chest. "It just wasn't good enough." The suit was remarkably light. Its outer layer was a camouflage mesh. Beneath were flexible segments of armor, like a cross between an armadillo and the Michelin Tire Man. The sleeve lifted easily in his hands. Then there was the helmet, with a visor studded with gadgets.
"I think this is a nuclear-biological-chemical warfare suit. It's five to ten years ahead of anything that's been announced to the public," Columbus continued. "My guess is, its secondary function is camouflage against sensors. If it's airtight enough to keep out chemical weapons, it could also mask the wearer from the zombies' noses. He must have been tough. That's why the armor's here, instead of in the pile. And then there's this."
He lifted a gun that looked vaguely like a crude replica of a "Schmeisser". "This looks like a pro version of the nail guns Q built for us to use in the hospital." He squeezed the trigger, and sent a tiny, needle-like projectile into the plaster with only a faint hiss. "There's two magazines under the barrel, one green and one red, I figure one for tranquilizer and one for poison, and a switch to alternate between them. This LED counter shows 175 rounds in one and 217 in the other, and they aren't even full. My guess is, the LED is what gave this guy away. All this stealth technology, and they decided to add a red light. Though the darts wouldn't have helped; there's a faint chemical scent."
"So why haven't we seen these guys?" Bruce fumed. "Where were thay when we were fighting the swarms?"
"They coulda come later," Sydney said. "They mighta pulled back. Or maybe they just had other orders."
"The most important question isn't why we haven't seen them," Columbus said. "It's how many more of them are still out there."
Krista was waiting for him when he returned to the Circus parking lot. "So," she said with a smile, "what did you find at the mall?"
He smiled and held up a too-cute stuffed duck. "Well, I got you this..."