Jailbait Zombie fg-4

by Mario Acevedo

  “He looks tough.”

  “In a vampire way but he doesn’t have what it takes to be an enforcer. Few will stick their necks out like you have to, to be one of us.”

  “Would you have done it?” I was referring to the stake and the skinning knife.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You mean it depends?”

  “No. It means I don’t want to talk about it.” Jolie plucked a stalk of grass and stuck it between her teeth. “I didn’t like getting tapped for this job, Felix.”

  “I wouldn’t of, either.”

  “There’s a lot the Araneum didn’t tell you.”

  “About what?”

  Jolie’s aura shrank to a simmer of worry.

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Is it about the zombies?”

  “No. The Araneum is in the dark about them.”

  “So it’s about Phaedra?”

  Jolie didn’t say anything, which meant yes.

  We kept quiet for a long time. Jolie took off her jacket and began a series of katas, her legs and arms becoming a whirlwind of kicking and punching.

  I made coffee over a Sterno stove, enough for Jolie and myself. I added blood. I didn’t need the caffeine or the nourishment-I was plenty jacked up on adrenaline-but the snack grounded me and softened my too-sharp senses so that I relaxed and became more aware.

  At 1:00 A.M. Phaedra put her jacket back on and clicked the fanny pack around her waist. I did a final check of my equipment. She put on her helmet and started the BMW. I climbed on the rear seat and we rode two up from the clearing.

  The Jeep remained on San Diego Avenue where I had abandoned it. Dust and scratches covered the windows and the dented body. The zombie I’d thrown aside was gone. When Jolie and I passed the cemetery, I asked her to turn off the motorcycle’s lights.

  A half mile from Ghoul Mountain, we veered off the main road to approach Deadman’s Gulch from the northeast. The BMW crossed the gullies as nimble as a mountain lion.

  We paused on a rise that overlooked Hennison’s house. Light glowed from the cracks around plywood sheets nailed over the broken windows. The gasoline tank-a military surplus water buffalo-was on a metal stand next to the garage on the eastern side of the house.

  “Step one,” she said. We were here.

  I got off the bike. Jolie turned the fanny pack to the front to get better access at her pistol and magazines.

  Now for step two. Jolie would distract the zombies while I planted the bomb to topple the gas tank into the house.

  Step three. Get into the house. Find Dr. Hennison. He was in poor shape the last I’d seen him. He might have used some of his black science to keep alive. This time I’d make sure he’s dead.

  Step four. Detonate the bomb, drop the gas tank, and burn the house to ash.

  Step five. Destroy any remaining zombies.

  Step six. Maybe the hardest part of the plan. Escape and confront the Araneum about Phaedra.

  Jolie adjusted her helmet and slugged my arm for good luck. She crept down the rise on the BMW, the engine rumbling in the darkness. Unless the zombies had gone deaf, they knew we were here.

  I searched for zombies but until they moved, they remained inconspicuous against the texture of the night. I walked down the hill with the elephant gun loaded and ready.

  A hundred feet away, a human shape walked from beside a juniper bush. Another shape moved. Then another. Within a minute, I had six zombies advancing, two carrying lumber studs fashioned into clubs.

  I leveled the elephant gun. They sensed the threat and kept their distance.

  Instead of approaching, I hustled from them. The zombies followed and bunched up one behind the other. I lowered the elephant gun and fired both barrels.

  The gun roared, the muzzle blasts brilliant as lightning, the recoil like a kick against my shoulder.

  The large slugs plowed through all of them in an explosion of slime. They collapsed in a heap of black mush.

  I made for the gas tank. I broke open the elephant gun. The ejected spent cartridges tumbled free with a whoop and loops of smoke. I reloaded and snapped the gun closed.

  Sheets of plywood fell from the windows along the back of the house. Zombies lunged through the openings toward me, Kimberly leading the charge.

  I scrambled for my target, the gas tank.

  My senses pinged. Something was wrong. Their attack was too obvious.

  A shape darkened the stars over the roof. Then another. A sharpened pole shaved alongside me and ripped my vest. The two zombies got ready to spring from the roof.

  I fired the elephant gun. Once. Twice. The blasts engulfed the zombies and they plopped into the ground, their guts streaming behind them.

  I ran and reloaded the elephant gun. A first wave of zombies tromped over their fallen comrades.

  Jolie BMW’s roared through the darkness. She zoomed alongside the zombies, close enough that they turned toward her. She stood on the motorcycle pegs, leveled her pistol in her left hand, and blasted away.

  Zombie heads exploded like rotten cantaloupes.

  She fishtailed through the dirt, leaving the surviving zombies a disorganized mob, not certain whether to go after her or me.

  I fired the elephant gun, reloaded at vampire speed, fired again, and again and again.

  I had fired so fast that the spent cartridges were still looping smoke in the air when I stopped. The blasts echoed in my ears.

  Jolie circled for another strafing attack, and in the wake of her high-speed pass, she left zombies in squirming piles.

  I proceeded to the gas tank and fastened the bomb to the bottom of a leg closest to the garage. The bomb would sever the leg and the weight of the gas tank should drop the tank through the garage and into the bottom floor.

  I turned on the cell phone. The screen flashed.

  I went to the porch. Jolie waited, having ditched her motorcycle and helmet.

  Guns at the ready, we entered the lab. Shelves and equipment littered the floor. Discarded heads and empty canisters lay in puddles of oily liquid. The heads rested on their cheeks, the lifeless eyes clouded and empty, the skin gray and gummy.

  Jolie kept her.45 pointed at the heads. “Where is everybody else?”

  “I don’t know.” I put my hand on the floor and kept still. I felt the tremble of bodies moving below. Hennison?

  We went through the top floor room by room but no zombies or the doc. Jolie stood with me on the landing to the bottom floor.

  Below us, a coil of tubing and cable unraveled down the stairs. The tubes and cable went through crude holes punched in the walls. A light shone from a wide door in the middle of the hall.

  “Seems too quiet down there,” Jolie said. “It’s a trap. One wrong move and we’re zombie chow.”

  “Who goes first?” I asked.

  “I’ll do it.” Jolie tensed her legs to leap.

  “Hold on. If it’s a trap, how about neither of us goes first?” I rolled a cart from the lab and pushed it down the stairs. The cart clattered a few steps, spilling surgical tools and bottles, then tumbled end over end. When it crashed against the bottom, a curtain of mist sprayed across the threshold.

  The odor burned my nose like acid. My eyes watered.

  Garlic oil.

  Clever, that trap would harm no one but a vampire.

  Five zombies leaped from around the corner and surrounded the cart. They banged on the metal cabinet like enraged baboons before realizing their mistake.

  I got two with the elephant gun. Jolie finished the rest with her pistol. I whisked a tarp from the floor, covered my head and arms, and bounded down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 54

  I landed on top of the zombies, not levitating so I hit them with all my weight.

  They collapsed beneath me and I sprang away. The fine mist of the lingering garlic oil stung my nose and eyes. I reached clean air before shedding the tarp. I searched my pocket for another coup
le of cartridges for the elephant gun. The pocket was empty. No problem, I had plenty of ammo. I searched another pocket. My fingers poked through. The pocket had been sliced open. I tapped the other pockets, anxiously searching for more ammo.

  We were getting deeper into the lair and losing our advantages by the second. Jolie landed beside me.

  I asked, “How are you fixed for bullets?”

  “Down to half. Sure are a lot of these fuckers.”

  I threw away the elephant gun, drew my.45, and went through the door in the hall.

  Banks of lights clamped to the ceiling illuminated with a brightness and heat as intense as a summer sun. The dirty humid air smelled like a polluted swamp.

  Rows of aquariums sat on metal shelves, containing human parts instead of tropical fish. At the bottom of one aquarium, bubbles spewed from a plastic clam, a tiny frogman trapped inside its pearly jaws. The bubbles frothed around livers, spleens, and kidneys.

  Pairs of eyes bobbed in Mason jars. As we walked in, the eyes followed us as if they had nothing better to look at.

  A naked and legless human torso lay pinned with cabinet-maker’s clamps against a picnic table perched at a slant with a car jack. Stitches held the arms to the shoulders. An assortment of feet sat alongside on a workbench as if they were shoes to try on for size.

  The top of the head was open, the cap of skull hanging off to one side. Wires and small colored cables were strung from the empty skull to a battery of cheap-looking electrical gizmos as if this were a kit from Popular Science.

  As a vampire I’m an expert in corpses, dining regularly on the blood of the innocent and guilty, ripping the flesh off the bones of my enemies, etc. And having seen an alien hoodlum pull a prosthetic robotic eyeball from his head, in short, I’ve witnessed plenty of freaky ass, capital A-S-S, shit in my short undead existence.

  But this house outside Morada, Colorado, took the cake. And the icing. And the creamy filling.

  Jolie noted the bloody handprints smeared across the walls. “Hennison?”

  “I hope so. If he’s lost this much blood, he’s close to biting the big one.”

  Where were Reginald and Sonia? Maybe this was yet another trap?

  Zombies dragged their feet on the floor above. Three, maybe four zombies gathered for another attack.

  Jolie and I followed the streaks of blood to a second lab.

  Another naked body lay on the table, feet and crotch toward us. It was a man, obviously. Tubes and wires draped from incisions in the arms, the legs, and the torso. Three ragged holes marred his chest, one by the sternum, the others closer to the left shoulder. Gunshot wounds.

  The needles on the gauges of the adjacent pumps and electrical console twitched. A row of laptops presented black screens, and blinking power lights indicated sleep mode. This had to be the main reanimation lab, where Hennison created his zombies.

  I kept my pistol ready and I advanced, my senses at maximum gain.

  I stepped around the table to examine the face. As I got close to see over the chest, I discovered there was no head. The neck had been neatly sliced from the shoulders.

  I started to ask myself who this man was when my foot dragged through a pile of clothes on the floor. Heavy shoes, black trousers, a white shirt and lab coat soaked with blood. Hennison’s clothes.

  This corpse belonged to Hennison.

  What happened to his head?

  I tripped on something.

  Something hairy and decayed.

  Cleto’s head. Hennison had abandoned it to take parts from the canister.

  He had mentioned refining the reanimation process so that even Reginald could do it. Rather than die, Hennison had himself decapitated to preserve his living brain and escaped. He would get another body later.

  Where had he gone?

  There was another door at the back of the lab. Dirty footprints led across this threshold.

  I took one side of the door, Jolie the other. I signaled that she kick the door open and I’d rush inside first. With fingers poised over triggers and our fangs at combat length, we did the silent count head bob. On three, she kicked the door off its hinges and I rushed inside.

  CHAPTER 55

  Reginald was hunched over a small cart. Sonia shoved clothes into a Pullman suitcase. The two psychotronic diviners sat on a table next to the suitcase.

  Reginald’s lab coat was still bloody and stained from yesterday’s fight. Sonia wore a gold leather jacket over leopard-print leggings and gold stiletto-heeled pumps. The jacket was unzipped midway and her enormous breasts seemed ready to launch themselves like weapons.

  Tools, instruments, and dozens of jars and bottles were crammed into a metal shipping container.

  Seems these two were ready to escape. And Hennison?

  At this angle I couldn’t see much of Reginald’s face. With him being a zombie, I really couldn’t tell what he was feeling, but he acted annoyed.

  Sonia gave an exasperated groan like Jolie and I were a sudden nuisance.

  The cart emitted a whirring noise, various clicks, and a rhythmic sucking, like the action of bellows.

  “Step aside, Reginald,” I ordered. “Is that Hennison?”

  Reginald stood. By his feet sat Hennison’s head on the cart. His complexion resembled the skin of a frozen, uncooked chicken. His neck was clamped inside a ring suspended over the cart. Lights blinked along the neck ring. Servos, tubes, and wires ran into his neck stump. Blue reanimation fluid bubbled from a gallon-size glass bottle by his right ear. By his left ear, a piston slid back and forth inside a clear plastic cylinder in time to the sucking noise. The servos under his neck clicked to animate his face.

  He stared from dark, bruised sockets. His eyes searched for me and I could tell his head strained to face me. The wheels under the cart rotated and it pivoted so that Hennison could look at me straight on.

  “This is…not a good…time…for me,” he said, his voice halting and mechanical. “Could you…come back…later?”

  “No can do,” I replied. “I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

  Hennison sighed and his face wrinkled like a deflating balloon. “I’m not…in a very…good…position…to negotiate…am I?” The cart inched crab-like so he could face Jolie.

  She said, “No.”

  A plastic drinking straw angled from the front of the cart to his mouth. His lips reached for the straw and drew the tip close. He sucked on the straw and a gurgling sound came from three cans of Red Bull connected to a plastic manifold.

  For a decapitated head sitting before his executioners, Hennison certainly seemed calm.

  Son of a bitch was up to something.

  Sonia held up a sweater. “You think you have problems? Look at what Mr. Mad Scientist expects me to wear. Do you know what this is?” She shook the sweater in one hand and whined, “An irregular.”

  Reginald sprang for me, whirling about with a meat cleaver. I gave him three quick shots in the chest. A fourth in his head at near point-blank range flung his brain matter against the wall like a bowl of black pudding. His body flopped against the table and dropped to the floor.

  Sonia raised a revolver from behind the sweater.

  Jolie capped her with two well-placed shots in the chest. Silicone gel sprayed from Sonia’s jacket. She dropped the sweater, grabbed what was left of her boobs, and shrieked.

  Jolie aimed at her face.

  Sonia let go of her left boob and covered her nose. “Leave this alone. It finally looks perfect.”

  “Too bad.” Jolie fired.

  Sonia toppled backward and slumped to the floor, a mass of bleached hair covering what was left of her face.

  Hennison darted forward on the cart. He rammed Jolie’s shins and she jumped away, more surprised than injured.

  The cart raced through the door and into the other lab.

  An electrical cord spooled out the back of the cart. Midway into the outer lab, the cord went taut and the pronged end popped from an electrical socket next to Regi
nald. The cart slowed. Hennison rocked his head in a futile attempt to keep up the momentum. The cart wheezed to a halt.

  I grabbed the electrical cord and pulled it hand over hand. As I reeled him toward me, Hennison kept repeating, “We…can…talk.”

  I knelt beside him and spun the cart to face Jolie and me.

  “One shot,” she said.

  “Lacks irony,” I replied. I studied the mechanisms keeping him alive.

  “You…don’t have…to do this. I have…money.”

  “I don’t need money. I need revenge.” I disconnected the tube supplying the reanimation fluid from a central fitting under his neck. I unhooked the tube pumping the Red Bull and attached it to the central fitting. Red Bull gurgled through the manifold and the neck tube. Hennison’s servos clicked like berserk crickets. His face contorted in spasms.

  He gasped and coughed. He chattered uncontrollably as un-diluted caffeine went straight into his tissues. The lights on the neck ring flashed faster and faster and one by one went out. His skin turned puke green. His eyes bugged out. With a final zombie “ghaw,” his tongue, black as a tire, extended between eggplant-purple lips.

  Dr. Hennison was dead.

  “Better make sure,” Jolie said and ventilated his skull with her pistol.

  She asked, “What about the psychotronic diviners?”

  “Leave ’em. The bomb will destroy them.”

  Now to escape.

  While Jolie and I had taken care of Hennison, zombies swarmed into the outer lab. Their lusterless eyes gazed at us. Pus and blood oozed from their sores and out of the corners of their mouths.

  I shouted, “Give it up. Your boss Hennison is dead.”

  There was no reaction from the zombies. They pushed into the room and bumped against one another.

  The zombies separated into three files to advance along the walls and down the middle of the room. They moved slowly and deliberately as if they had all of eternity. Which they did. So did I, but I didn’t want to spend it here.

  Their bodies filled the room and blocked the exit. We couldn’t afford to waste ammunition by fighting our way through the lab. I’d make a shortcut to the hallway.