As he returned the hose to the bar, Nadia called, “Scrap-a-pap-a-pap-a-pap, it’s almost time for the Games! Are you excited? Yes, you are!” She handled Scrapper’s career and Ink was embarrassed every time she welcomed herself to a conversation of experienced managers to give her thoughts. He knew they were laughing on the inside at his wife’s presumption and ignorance. A career was built off fighting men.
The hose came loose and thumped him on the head. He blamed the kid for that, too.
The games for women were picking up in popularity by leaps and bounds every season, which was why Ink had acquired Medusa. He didn’t resent that purchase. It had paid off handsomely. Milla Gorvich only managed women in her stables, a vicious cadre of forty and the waiting list for her handful of rentals was five pages long. No one would be laughing at her for joining in the conversation. Those women fought for the same grand prizes as the men did. But kids? No one respected a manager of a kid and only a kid, and no one maintained stables of zombie children like Nadia was dreaming she might like to do one day. She expected that she would make millions of dollars off this amazing idea that no one had ever had before! The sweet fantasy world she lived in within her head was delusional outside of it. There wasn’t any profit in kids. Kids were a joke, a very expensive joke. Ink had gotten Scrapper off the dealer for cheap six months ago to stop Nadia’s whining that they needed a little one, and with every penny he shelled out on the kid’s behalf, he wished that he’d just put up with her whining instead.
The hose didn’t want to stay up and Ink fought with it grimly. He needed better stables than this patched-together place.
Nadia was now giving all the details about the costume to Scrapper, who wasn’t any more interested in yellow stripes and a matching sash than Ink had been. That zombie’s purchase wasn’t all on her. You had to fit in if you wanted to move up in this world, and Ink hadn’t guessed at the time of the purchase just how costly the boy was going to be in the long run. Nadia made it far worse than it had to be. She didn’t grasp how money flowed. It was just supposed to be there when she wanted it and she was supposed to spend it, as was her right. Nay, her duty! She had even decided how to spend the million-dollar prize from the Games already. A mansion. A flashy car. A new wardrobe. A cruise. She was going to be furious when Ink dumped the money into his private account rather than their mutual one. But he managed Samson and they were his earnings, Ink’s earnings, and that million wasn’t going to bikinis and a personal chef, or fancy stables for zombie children. Every last dollar of it was earmarked in his head, the largest portion of it for a nice piece of ranch property as close to the Hill as he could afford. Many of the richest, most successful managers lived there. Some had two stables on their grounds, and a covered rink between them to weed out the poor fighters before any public embarrassment happened in the rings. Nadia would squander the whole of the prize in a year, if that, and leave them right back where they’d started with close to nothing. Let her have the Hawaiian vacation. The rest of the prize was his.
“And it’s a real gem, Scrappy!” Nadia finished.
Ink won the battle with the hose despite never winning the war, and let himself out of the stall. Eight hundred dollars. The costume Scrapper would be wearing cost more than the kid himself. You little shit, Ink thought to the boy as he latched the door, and then he moved on to the feed room. The door was open, blocking his view of Samson’s stall. That fighter was his pride and joy. The reason Delwich Stables was a name gaining cachet was all due to the best purchase Ink had ever made.
“Are you sure he’s okay?” Nadia called, still from the doorway. She didn’t like to come into the stables and smell the shit. “What’s Scrapper doing?” Scrapper was just staring at the bright lights like all zombies did. The question wasn’t worth an answer, so Ink didn’t offer one.
He closed the door to the feed room, unconcerned that it had fallen open. The latch was broken. No matter how tightly he fixed the door in its frame, it jostled itself loose once or twice a week. A refrigerator and a freezer hummed in the little room. When he hired that street kid to clean out Apollo’s stall, he’d also have the feed room done. He hated doing the dishes and let them pile up until he ran out.
No sooner had he taken a step past the feed room than the door opened again with a creak. He turned around to close it, irritated at Nadia’s continuing singsong call to Scrapper. “Why don’t you go back to the house?” Ink suggested, jiggling the door in the frame.
“We should go to Hark’s tomorrow,” Nadia said. “I’m having a craving for steak.”
Hark’s Steakhouse cost an arm and a leg. Two arms and two legs, and your firstborn on top. Ink only took her there for her birthday, and that was eight months away. “No. It costs too much.”
“But, Ink,” she whined. “It’s not like we go there every night!”
He had brought this on himself. He should have known the day they met that she was going to be more trouble than she was worth. I’m a princess, and I expect to be treated like one. He hadn’t known she was dead serious. To him, it had just been a cute demand to be treated like a lady. She wasn’t from a rich family but her parents had scrimped and saved to send her to a costly private school, and unwittingly stoked a desperate hunger within their daughter to possess what all of her little rich girlfriends possessed. The most fashionable clothes. Dressage lessons. The newest cell phone. A life of ease. Two months after their wedding, she quit her job and refused to find another one. Flat-out refused and nothing he said dissuaded her. A princess didn’t work! Her old school chums didn’t have to work!
But they had gotten married to men, and in one case, a woman, who were far richer than Ink. That had been a serious point of contention between Ink and Nadia ever since. Because she didn’t work, nor did she even keep up the house. She just called a maid service and played games on her cell phone as they cleaned up around her. Ten years later, he rued the day he had ever been so dazzled by her beauty that it threw his good sense out the window. She had given him such a case of hot pants that the red flags didn’t go up until it was far too late to do anything about it.
He jiggled the feed room door some more and waited for it to open. It didn’t. Hah! At least something respected him. Then he continued on his way to Samson’s stall. A cheery hey, there, big man died on his lips. He gawked in disbelief at a horrifying scene.
Samson was there, but he wasn’t staring at the lights. He didn’t have the eyes to stare, or the lower lip to hang open and reveal his missing tooth. Stretched out on the floor, his body stopped at his neck. Everything above that point was sprayed around in the stall and on the walls.
Someone had blown his head off. Literally off. It was in a million pieces around the stall. Ink’s best fighter was no longer recognizable, except by his clothing, and the slim, very small brand on his arm of a D crossed by an I. It was splashed with blood and partially obscured by a clot of tissue.
Ink screamed. The scene didn’t change, and he screamed again.
He was shaking like a leaf by the time the cops arrived, their sirens off because there was no longer an emergency and nothing to be done. The vet had beaten them, the wings of shock carrying her over in a flash to see the impossible. Jackie’s scream at the horrific mess in the stall had been nearly as loud as Ink’s.
They had worked so hard for this. Built up Samson’s already naturally big muscles even more with training sessions every other day, given him steroid boosts, spent hours upon hours crafting the optimal diet and fitness plan. His win would lift Ink up to a new world, and the vet would ride up on his coattails, too. The vet to a Games-winning zombie would be a vet in demand. So they had given this everything they had, everything, and all for nothing.
Dead. Samson looked shrunken in his clothes, like some of his muscles had leaked out with his brain. For a second, Ink convinced himself that it wasn’t really Samson lying there. But who else could it be? It was the loss of blood deflating the body. He would get smaller and smaller unt
il he was dust.
Three days before the Games started, everything had ended. One of the cops asked if Ink had locked the doors to the stables. He felt like a fool when he had to say no. In the background, Nadia was weeping to another cop, “I told him that we should get a lock. I told him!”
She had told him that because she was worried about the zombies getting out, not anyone getting in. But she didn’t mention that part. Ink just stared at her until she noticed his gaze, and then she flushed. She’d be angry later with him calling her out on that, claim that she’d meant something else, get madder and madder as he just stared. Anything he said, she could refute. So he wouldn’t say anything.
“But who would do this?” Jackie was exclaiming.
It didn’t matter. It had been done. Ink should have installed locks on the doors. He should have circled the building twenty-four hours a day with a rifle in his arms. It was no coincidence that this had happened just as the Games were almost upon them. Someone had decided to better his or her odds by eliminating the zombie with the best chance to win. Ink had been sabotaged. People did that in competitions, slipped sedatives into the meat mash of an opponent’s zombie, sneaked into a stall and gave a hard bash to the head to disorient them in the fight, but to drive to someone’s house, sneak into the stables, and shoot off the head of a zombie . . . that hadn’t been done. That hadn’t ever been done. Until now.
“Was he valuable?” asked the clueless cop.
“Yes,” Ink whispered. “Very, very valuable.” He swallowed a dozen more repetitions of very. No insurance agency would touch a fighting zombie, their life expectancy too low and their veterinary care too high, so the money lost in that bloody stall was lost forever.
You never asked where the dealer got his specimens, but Samson had been a beauty. Had been. That killed Ink. Tall, muscular, healthy, sometimes you could forget when you looked at him that he was vacant one soul. Ink had even imagined that he’d seen some understanding in those brown eyes under the heavy brow. They were going to get this done together. It was anthropomorphizing, of course, because a zombie didn’t understand much of anything. They followed very basic orders when the very bright light was on them, and when it dimmed or went out, they turned into rampaging beasts. In neither instance did they respond to names or speak, but still . . . still Ink had felt a presence. Ink wasn’t much to look at and Samson had been, but Ink had his mental faculties and Samson didn’t. It had evened out between them, and Ink had reveled in how Samson reflected on him, made Ink more attractive because of their association.
“Wow, looks like he won a lot,” a cop mused in the feed room, where Ink had put up Samson’s battle pictures and certificates after each win, and a framed shot of Ink, Samson, and a television reporter when Ink was interviewed after the win at Filo. Samson was such a good fighter that he barely had scars. Some fighters were more scars than skin, but not Ink’s Samson. Nothing on his face, the tiniest nick right under his chin, another hidden by his hair . . . and all of those had been received in his first battles. Samson had learned from the errors in which he had gotten those, as much as a zombie could learn. There was some creativity in his moves, and it was growing at each competition. He was such a good fighter!
Not anymore. He had been taken out mid-step to the pinnacle of the mountain. And so had Ink.
There wouldn’t be much of an investigation. He knew that, and didn’t press the cops for just what they planned to do about this. A zombie wasn’t really human, the fever wiping out everything quintessentially human in their heads, and the police force had actual murders to which they had to attend. This was only destruction of property. They lackadaisically dusted for fingerprints and wandered in and out of the stall to confirm to one another that Samson was indeed dead. One commented that he didn’t seem so big when compared to the pictures and Ink wanted to strike him. How big would the cop look if all of his blood had spilled out onto the floor?
The knacker came with a cheery whistle and a body bag. He blinked in shock when Ink told him it was for Samson, the fellow having assumed that he had been summoned for Priapus at long last.
The knacker had a big mouth. Everyone was going to know by tomorrow morning that someone had stolen into Delwich Stables and murdered one of the most impressive zombies to ever fight in the show circuit. Ink was distraught. The managers who locked their stables would congratulate themselves on their foresight and condemn Ink for his lack of it; the managers who didn’t were going to pound concrete to stores to acquire locks and express their sympathy to his face while reveling behind his back at the demise of his zombie.
He could kiss his ranch property near the Hill goodbye. The Hawaiian vacation. The merchandizing opportunities that would have skyrocketed with Samson’s win at the Games. Ink’s whole future. The old boys’ club would have had to let him in if Samson had won, and now they could keep those big oak doors at the Games stadium closed. Ink would only ever be allowed in as a treat for the post-party, and if he didn’t get another fantastic fighter, or if Medusa hit a losing streak, he wouldn’t even get that.
Oh God, had he wanted to get in there. To sit between Ivan Cantine and Milla Gorvich in those leather seats during competitions, clinking glasses and jawing about fighters in the past and fighters rising in the present. He had wanted to throw holiday parties at his new house once a year, invite the bigwigs for shrimp and champagne, rub elbows with Hollywood actors and politicians who liked to bet at zombie shows . . . people were fascinated with those who had won it big as managers, and Ink was ready for people to be fascinated in him.
A million dollars, a winning fighter, stables and a private rink, all of that would have covered up his humble face and humble background, made silk out of a sow’s ear. Cantine was nothing to look at and Gorvich wasn’t either, Bayder had horrific breath and body odor, but all of them had gorgeous young things at their sides, escorts and hangers-on who climbed into their beds to bask in the largesse of success and hope some of it rubbed off. Those in the old boys’ club gave to charities and had their names written up in the paper for their generosity. Everyone celebrated them for the slightest of reasons, jockeyed for their opinions, pivoted around the axis they created. And that had almost been Ink.
Gone. Just gone.
Ink was going to have to start from scratch, save up for a new zombie and doping regimen, put off his dreams indefinitely. The money Samson had brought in covered all the extras Ink enjoyed, and now those were gone, too. His country club membership, where some of the bigwigs golfed, shopping at the ritzy market that they did rather than the discount, the fancy car he had leased to make Delwich Stables look more successful than it was . . .
The cops, the vet, and the knacker went away in time, leaving him in the ruin of his life. He went back to the house and stood there dumbly in the living room. Nadia sniffed her hair suspiciously to see if the shit smell was clinging to it. It was, because she grimaced. Then she said, “Well, at least we still have Scrapper.”
His fists clenched until the nails bit into his palms. He didn’t hit her. He had never hit her. He didn’t have the right. She had never pretended to be anything other than what she was, a vain, shallow, and selfish woman who wanted to move up in the world so she could have even more resources with which to be vain, shallow, and selfish. He hadn’t understood the warning when she described herself as a princess, but that wasn’t her fault. It was his fault for thinking with hot pants.
Nadia sniffed her clothes and grimaced again. He had lost interest in getting into her pants several years ago. What was in there no longer held any charm because of who she was, the actual person he hadn’t wanted to see for so long: a spoiled brat of a kid hidden in the voluptuous body of a woman. That wasn’t attractive. But by the time he’d really started to consider getting a divorce, Samson was winning and he didn’t want to split his earnings in half and give her alimony, too. He would have lost the little stables he had, and he loved those more than he hated her.
He didn
’t know what to do, so he just kept standing there. Looking at the carpet, looking at his wife, looking out the window, looking but not really seeing.
When Nadia checked her shoes, she knocked part of the Prince Charming costume off the coffee table. She bent down to retrieve it and he gripped his fists even tighter. There would be no more eight-hundred-dollar costumes, or any costumes. Ink would get rid of Scrapper altogether. They couldn’t afford him now. No more expensive haircuts or clothes for Nadia to model to her wealthy friends. She was too foolish even to realize that Samson’s winnings alone had let her have those things. She was a princess, not a treasurer. But her little gravy boat had just beached itself on shore and she was going to whine, oh God, was she going to whine when her card wouldn’t cover one of her ten-buck coffees or fifty-dollar thongs. She wasted so much, and evidence of it was everywhere to mock Ink. More clothes than one woman could wear in three lifetimes stowed in every closet of the house . . . the big plastic bags of random shit from Scrap Me Later in the corners, intended for scrapbooking that she never did because it was too tedious . . . all of the music in a pile on the bookshelf from her singing lessons that she’d quit when the instructor didn’t fall over himself for her voice . . . She was in for a rough time. Ink was in for a rougher one, because she was going to blame him.
Nadia bent over again for the hanger. Ink stared at her ass, but he was really seeing an array of crusty old Cantine’s gorgeous minxes. The guy brought them to every show, a trio of women who were rarely the same as the trio at the show before.
Ink wanted one of those women, or the whole trio. It didn’t matter to him if they were vain, shallow, and selfish. He wasn’t marrying them. They wouldn’t be around long enough to get comfortable. At Filo, the trio had been a lithe brunette with a round face and perky breasts, a dark one who wore a shirt so tight it had to be cutting off her circulation, and a redhead who had sat in Cantine’s lap and twiddled her slim fingers through the shock white toilet seat of hair that framed his head.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 45
