by Avery Flynn
Upward she dug, until finally she poked through the top. Feeling a bit like a gopher on the golf course, she poked her head out only high enough to show her eyes. The view astounded her.
Bright sunlight glistened off the snow-white ground. Only a forest of clouds shaped like trees blocked them from their prize, a massive castle in the distance. No sound or movement pierced the stillness. The air smelled of cotton candy and salt-water taffy. Her lungs seemed a little tight because of the high altitude, but that she could live with in exchange for a thirty-three percent share in a golden goose. Since her father had disowned her and she’d started her company from scratch, she had a much better understanding of never wanting to eat cheap noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner ever again.
Planting her palms on the firm cloud ground, she hefted herself up and out of the tunnel. Her heartbeat raced as she stood guard, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Hell, who was she kidding? They’d just climbed a magic beanstalk and were walking on clouds. This whole event was out of the ordinary, even for her. And she’d once avoided cross-town traffic by taking a flying carpet.
Antoine hauled himself out of the tunnel, followed by Jax. A bit of white fluff clung to his broad shoulders and it took everything she had not to brush it off for him.
“Alright, let’s head toward the castle.” Antoine marched forward, his head turning from side to side as he kept a watch on the perimeter.
“Worried?” she asked.
“Not at all.” He chuckled. “Just keeping a lookout for that fat goose.”
It took ten minutes to get to the castle. The gray stone walls stretched up farther than Veronica could see. She pressed her hand against the cold, rough surface. There weren’t any doors or windows that she could find.
“Is it a wall?” Jax asked.
“No. Like the rest of this place, it’s magic.” Antoine pulled out a heart locket hanging from a gold chain around his neck. He flicked it open and held it out toward the stone. “Three you require. Three we be.”
The air shifted around them, revealing an oak door so big, a twenty-foot-tall man could walk through without bumping his head. The watermelon-sized door knob was way out of reach.
“So how do we get in?” Jax pushed against the door with both hands.
The creak was nearly deafening, but the door swung open enough for them to squeeze through into the darkness beyond.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, unease tickled her shoulders. She searched the black void for the cause but couldn’t see a damn thing. Get a grip, Veronica. This wasn’t the first dark and scary place she’d gone to hunt for treasure. It wouldn’t be her last.
At least she hoped not.
“I got your back.” Jax’s voice gave his location away as being behind and slightly to the left. “Let’s get what we need and get the hell out of here.”
They turned on their flashlights, illuminating a great hall with two doorways on each side leading to other rooms. A giant-sized side table had fallen over. Broken pieces of huge wooden furniture littered the floor. Over, under and around they went, until they reached the first doorway.
Antoine held up a hand. “Let me search the room. You two stand guard here. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
Without waiting for a reply, the older man shuffled into the room. Within a minute, all she could see of him was the beam of light from his flashlight bouncing off the stone walls.
Veronica leaned against the broken table leg behind her and faced the room where Antoine had disappeared. Jax stood on the other side of the doorway, his presence easing her nervous willies. The minutes ticked by as Antoine’s light moved in a circular pattern through the room.
She must have stared too long without blinking because her right contact began to irritate her eye. When she closed her eyes for a few seconds then blinked to rewet her eyes, the pain eased.
A soft giggle broke the companionable silence.
She turned and gave Jax a dirty look. “What’s so funny?”
His wide-eyed gaze was locked on something behind her. “I’m not the one laughing.”
Chapter 4
The urge to sprint away squeezed the air from Veronica’s lungs. But she forced herself to ignore the heebie jeebies highjacking her courage and concentrate on her training. Calm. Cool. Collected. Play it smart, and they’d all make it out of here.
“Don’t make any sudden moves.” Jax kept his gaze on the thing giggling behind her. “Slow and steady.”
Whatever was behind her sounded like a five-year-old girl who’d just sucked down a balloon’s worth of helium in one gulp. The high pitched and slightly wheezing tittering blew the loose strands of Veronica’s hair forward, making her earlobe itch.
She stared at Jax. He’d promised he’d have her back. Well, now was the time to prove it. Exhaling a shaky breath, she eased toward him. One foot in front of the other. Repeat.
“Down now!”
She dropped to her knees.
A long knife whizzed over her head.
A grunt. A thunk. Then, nothing.
Jax was beside her, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. “What was it?”
“Fuck if I know.”
She pivoted and strode with him to the humanoid body, which had crumpled to the floor. What was left of the dead man’s clothes were scraps of what might have been blue cotton, but had faded to a washed-out gray. His pants hung to the middle of his bony shins. When alive, he must have stood at least seven-feet tall, and his feet were huge.
Using the toe of his boot, Jax pushed the body over.
His knife had pierced the creature’s right eye, gone in straight to the hilt, but without spilling any blood. Veronica’s stomach heaved and she knew if she looked in the mirror her pale skin would be more than a little tinged with green. She concentrated on taking deep breaths of cotton candy-scented air.
“That’s weird.” Jax pulled his knife free.
“What about this place isn’t weird?”
“No, look closer.” He hunkered down by the body and pointed the beam of his flashlight. “He’s missing a chunk of skin under his eye. It’s almost as if it rotted away.”
Her heart hiccupped. Those were rumors, old wives’ tales. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Look for yourself.”
That was the last thing she wanted to do, as evidenced by her roiling stomach, but she still ended up squatting beside Jax looking at the dead creature’s face. Torn, puckered ashen skin circled a one-inch-in-diameter hole directly underneath his eye socket. Quarter-sized purple sores dotted his face and exposed skin. Ragged teeth poked outward from his gaping mouth.
“It can’t be.” There had always been stories. Her cousin Lulu had whispered the tale to her late at night as a test of pre-pubescent courage. No one ever had experienced an actual sighting–well, and lived to tell the tale. The proof, however, lay dead in a heap at their feet.
She glanced up at Jax.
“Zombie,” they said together.
Somewhere out in the darkness another giggle sounded.
Then, another.
They snapped off their flashlights.
The world turned inky black.
She strained in an attempt to pinpoint the zombies’ location by hearing but that information remained elusive. Fear settled in her stomach like a bad Mexican dinner, making her queasy and clammy.
“We have to get Antoine and get the hell out of here,” Jax whispered.
God, yes. All she wanted to do was run screaming for the beanstalk. But they couldn’t. She squeezed his forearm. “Agreed, but we need to be smart about this. We can’t attract their attention.”
“I know you like to make a plan for everything, but we have about two minutes before we’re lunch,” he snarled.
If they went into ninja mode, it could work. “Brunch, it’s only ten thirty in the morning.”
Jax looked like he was barely restraining the need
to shake her senseless. “This is not the time or place for semantics. What’s the plan?”
“Zombies are attracted to shiny things, movement and sound. So, stay low and move slow. Once we’re inside the room, we can pick up the pace to find Antoine. He’s still using his flashlight so it shouldn’t take long to find him. We have to find him before they do.”
Another set of giggles rang out. This time, closer.
Sliding his fingers between hers, Jax squeezed her hand. “Let’s do this.”
Smooth as a freshly swept ice rink, they stood and slunk toward the door. With each step, her eyes adjusted to the darkness, revealing a strange world of giants and their belongings. Half of a ten-foot chair tilted against one wall. A cracked coffee cup, nearly as tall as her stood like a lonely sentry in the hall. Distracted by all the oversized scraps of giant life, when she stubbed her toe on something solid, she pitched forward.
Jax wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her securely against his body before she could land on the hard, stone floor. “I got you.”
Something heavy scraped across the floor behind them, the sound echoing up to the high-vaulted ceiling. Footsteps sounded–not soft and careful like theirs, but clomping and clumsy. A trio of snickers followed.
She couldn’t judge in the cavernous space’s darkness how close the zombies had gotten or how many there were. At least three. Probably more. All the zombie speculative research she’d read hypothesized that they traveled in packs of ten to twelve. Technically brain dead, they didn’t move according to any logical pattern, instead being drawn to light, sound and movement, forever pushed onward by a hunger for brains and other internal organs. The giggling was a total new one to her.
Securely on her feet again, she and Jax tiptoed through the open doorway, searching for Antoine’s ray of light.
“Come on, Antoine, where are you?” she mumbled to herself. Her pulse jackhammered in her throat.
In the vast gloom, a faint glow appeared in the distance.
“There!” she said.
Springing forward as one unit, she and Jax hurried across the booby-trapped floor, scurrying over broken furniture and under what little remained standing upright. She clasped his hand, tethering herself to the safe reality of Jax even in the midst of all this madness.
Out of nowhere, a gangly, twelve-foot-tall zombie appeared in front of them.
His bottom lip hung by a skinny sliver of skin that wobbled when he reached out a hand with only three fingers toward them.
Goosebumps marched up Veronica’s skin. The scream escaped her mouth before she could remember her warning to Jax to stay silent.
It bounced off the walls and set off a series of giggles from the room’s hidden nooks and crannies. His compatriots’ noise distracted the zombie, who swiveled his head, toward the noise. But only for a moment before he returned his empty gaze to them. What had been a high-pitched giggle became lower, heavier. The zombie swiped his shriveled tongue across his gaping mouth.
Jax whipped out a sharpened expandable baton and, in one fluid motion, brought it down against the zombie’s neck. The blade sliced through its rotting flesh like a knife through warm butter. The head tumbled off, landed on the floor with a thud and rolled away into the shadows.
“He’s all laughed out,” Jax said.
Veronica fought to push away the fear threatening to blind her to everything else. “What about the others?”
“We just have to hope they come at us one at a time.”
“Then we kill them?”
He turned and grinned. “That sounds like my kind of plan. Let’s get Antoine and get the fuck out of here.”
Sticking to the shadows, she hustled through the obstacle course of giant-sized wreckage, following Antoine’s beam of light fifty yards ahead.
She grabbed the spongy-gripped garden shovel in her tool belt. At seven inches in length, to do any damage with it she’d have to get into close quarters with Mr. Tall, Dark and Dead but it was much better than the alternative.
Holding her breath with every step and exhaling only once she’d made it from one safe spot to the next, she made her way through the debris. Damn, what she wouldn’t give for a nice pair of night-vision goggles. And a bazooka outfitted with one big-ass silencer.
The farther they traveled into the room, Antoine’s illumination grew from a thin ray to a large swath of light. Only a few more feet and they’d be there.
“Why hasn’t he called out to us?” Veronica whispered, seeing visions of Antoine running from reanimated corpses. “Tried to find us? He had to have heard me scream.”
Jax shrugged. “We’ll find out in a minute.”
She dashed from their hiding spot behind an oversized book to a still-upright chair. Antoine’s light crept around the corner, illuminating a human-sized bloody handprint on the chair leg. Refusing to contemplate who had made it, she peeked around the curved wood.
A lone figure, too tall and thin to be Antoine, stood with its back to her in the flashlight’s golden glow. Zombie.
Stringy dishwater blond hair flowed to the middle of her back. A faded, floral print dress covered the zombie’s ashen skin. When she turned, clumps of snow white stuck between her rotting teeth.
Antoine!
“Don’t worry, love. It’s not me,” Antoine said from above her.
He perched like a cat on the seat of the huge chair, his shirt askew but he was otherwise unharmed. Relief rushed through her. She climbed the chair, Jax hot on her heels. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I am. I conjured a fluffy rabbit from my trusty hat.” Antoine held up a black top hat, which he collapsed and stuffed in his knapsack. “I then scurried up to safety. I’ve been watching your progress. Excellent swordsmanship, Jax.”
“We can talk about that later. Right now let’s get the hell out of Dodge.” Jax hopped from the chair to another piece of upended furniture. “If we can stay up here, I don’t think we’ll have any problems. They don’t seem to be climbers.”
“Brilliant, my boy. Brilliant.”
Feeling more confident by the second, Veronica stood up and looked down to where Antoine had abandoned his flashlight.
The female zombie stared right at her, smiled and giggled.
“Shit.”
Ignoring the nervous shake in her left hand, Veronica pivoted around to take a look at what had Jax’s attention. From the top of the chair, she could see all the way to the door. Everywhere she looked, zombies moved like mice through a crowded maze of giant-sized broken furniture and debris.
There were hundreds of them.
Chapter 5
As soon as they got down the beanstalk, Jax was going to kill Antoine. Slowly. Maybe with a spoon.
The zombies milled around below them, banging into each other and the furniture like bumper cars made out of rotting flesh.
There was no way in hell his mentor hadn’t known a horde of zombies was a possibility. The man researched everything to death–no pun intended. Antoine’s little secret had risked Veronica’s life. That was not acceptable. Anger burned a hole in Jax’s gut. “Okay, spill it, Antoine.”
“What do you mean?”
“About the zombies. What are their weaknesses?”
Antoine had the decency to look sheepish, his bushy white eyebrows raised. “Well then, they move more slowly in the daylight hours.”
“That’s why you insisted we leave at the crack of dawn.” The steel in Veronica’s voice did not bode well for Antoine once they made it down the beanstalk.
“Quite right. The undead are hungry at all times but especially once the sun sets. As I’m sure you’ve deduced, they’re attracted to light and noise. They don’t have the brain function to pick a leader, but instead have a pack mentality, attacking–as a group–whatever is unlucky enough to find itself in their path.”
Jax glanced down at his watch. “Noon. We have plenty of time, but I don’t feel like pushing it. Let’s go.” The zombies were everywhere in the g
loomy space, but they kept their attention focused only on what was directly in front of them. “It doesn’t look like they climb very much. If we can jump from chair to chair, we can get to the door but once we’re in the hallway where there isn’t as much furniture, all bets are off.”
“We’ll figure something out.” Veronica moved up beside him, hesitated for a moment and then sailed over the open space between chairs. She landed easily on the next chair.
Antoine huffed and puffed before launching himself across the chasm. His feet touched the edge and he wavered. Jax held his breath. Even as pissed off as he was at Antoine, he’d throw himself to the stone floor before letting the zombies make dinner out of his mentor.
Veronica ran to the edge, wrapped her fingers around Antoine’s forearm and yanked him forward.
Antoine stumbled before regaining his balance and giving Jax a thumbs up.
The man must have nine lives in his back pocket. Jax set his jaw and raced across the wood chair. He whizzed over the abyss, refusing to look down or consider failure. Hanging in the open air with nothing between his toes and the zombies below, a single image overwhelmed him. Veronica first thing in the morning, stumbling blindly to the coffee pot, her eyelids at half-mast and her long ebony hair tangled. The most gorgeous woman in the world. The rubber sole of his boots landed with a light thud on the neighboring chair. He wobbled and went onto one knee.
“Smooth move, Mr. Stud Archeologist.” Veronica held out a hand, offering to pull him up.
“I aim to please whenever I’m on my knees.” He took her hand, but stood on his own power. “And when I’m standing up.”
She rolled her brown eyes, but her cheeks developed a distinctive pink tint bright enough to appear even in the dim light. “Let’s go.”
And they did, forming a conga line of determination to survive, brains intact, until they reached the doorway. The good news: the hallway, though lacking in furniture to run across, was practically deserted. The bad news: it wasn’t totally empty.
