No, thank you. Working under the cover of darkness suits me just fine.
Rico joined me and together we squinted down a moonlit Elder Street. “You think these are the biters that can see in the daylight? Or the blind ones?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, taking his six as we moved on through the darkness.
These days, it was a crap shoot which version of deadhead we might run into. Until recently, biters were elusive. The sunlight burned their retinas, so they came out late at night, kept to the shadows, and lived off vagrants or anything else with a heartbeat. The general public, tucked safely away in their beds, behind locked doors, viewed biters as just another undesirable lurking on the wrong side of the tracks. But once Toussaint started manipulating the Z-virus, the game changed. The new breed of biters could see in daylight, making them more mobile, and the synthetic version of the virus could be transmitted by injection.
Scary-ass shit, even for a zombie hunter.
Rico pulled a quarter from his pocket and put it between his thumb and forefinger. “Heads they were bitten, tails injected.”
I scowled and slapped his hand, sending the quarter skittering across the pavement.
“There is a third option, smart guy. They could have been raised.”
“Jesus, Nighthawk. Who pissed in your Wheaties?”
“Yeah, well. You know better.”
Rico and I had an easy rhythm for having worked together less than a year. Sometimes, it was easy to forget that he wasn’t born into this shit, like me.
“Shh. Did you hear that?” he whispered. “Listen…there it is again.”
A soft, but unmistakable, cry for help drifted out of the shadows further down Elder Street. We flipped on our flashlights in unison and scanned the road. The plea came again, this time joined by a distant frenzy of snarls, groans, and moans. We followed the sound a couple of blocks south to a dumpster under siege by a large group of deadheads. A box truck from Avril’s Meats was parked curbside, maybe twenty feet away, with no driver in sight.
We took cover behind the rear bumper of the truck, as the biters pinged against the dumpster like a bunch of brain-dead pinballs.
“Do you actually have a plan, or are we winging this?” I asked.
Rico pulled his phone out of his pocket and studied the display. “Cap texted me the delivery driver’s name and number.” He punched the number into his phone.
Within seconds a muted, tinny version of Pharrell Williams Happy floated out from the dumpster.
“Hello?”
“Gary Walker?” Rico asked.
“Yes?”
“Officer De Palma, CPD. I’m positioned behind the rear of your truck. Rough morning, huh?”
The lid creaked open less than an inch and a pair of eyes peeked out. “No shit.”
The rotters keened, throwing their bodies against the dumpster, trying to claw their way inside it.
A metallic bang rang out as Gary yanked the dumpster lid closed. “So, do something already. It stinks in here.”
“We’re working on it,” Rico said, rubbing his chin. “Stay on the line.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What’s our plan, fearless leader?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
A sudden chorus of boos and jeers caused us to turn toward Race Street, where a sign- carrying crowd thronged along the Market’s perimeter fence. I’d seen the signs before. Freaking ACLU. Dead Lives Matter. Rotter Rights. Eternal Rest is Meant to be Eternal.
Rico sighed. “I see your fan club showed up.”
“Not to mention your girlfriend and her pet rock,” I said, pointing to Jade and Rip, who was filming the fray. “The sun’s not even up yet, and the ACLU just happens to appear at the scene of a biter incident, with their Dead Rights signs in hand? I don’t think so. I think Jade followed us here and called in the freaking protestors to pump up her exposé.”
Jade had been after me to work with her on an exposé about the Z-virus manipulation and the sociopolitical aspect of undeath. I’d turned her down cold. A whisperer like me can’t win a debate about the ethics of raising. And when it came to investigating the virus manipulation, Jade had no idea who or what she was up against. I didn’t want to be responsible for getting my partner’s girlfriend killed.
I smiled and waved at the protestors, making them jeer louder. That’s all we needed. A mob of bleeding-heart liberals shredded into zombie sushi (aka zushi) on Elder Street. Thankfully, the zombies were laser-focused on the dumpster.
“Isn’t this a powder keg?” I muttered to Rico. “What am I going to do? Pull Hawk and blow out the brains of twenty biters in front of a news crew? How long do you think it would take for that clip to show up on CNN?”
Cap, and a couple of suits I didn’t recognize, arrived on the scene. Director Dickhead followed several steps behind, wearing his usual tight-lipped snarl. A swarm of officers moved in, and posted themselves along the perimeter of the market to hold the protestors at bay.
“Who are the other two guys?” I asked Rico.
“The guy on the left is Kevin Shoemaker, the Safety Director. I don’t know the guy on the right.”
Perfect. Yet another talking head. The situation was going from bad to worse.
The delegation moved in and stationed itself alongside us, behind the bumper of the box truck.
“What’s your status?” Cap asked.
Rico pointed at the dumpster. “Vic’s still taking cover.”
“Why haven’t you gotten him out yet?” Dickhead asked, crouched last in line at the far end of the bumper, not even bothering to crane his neck for a glimpse at the dumpster. The weasel-wussy douchebag.
“Perhaps you’d like to volunteer to go get him,” I said, shifting my gaze to the frenzied horde.
“I’m here in a decision-making capacity, Nighthawk. I’m not an operative.”
“Then let’s hear your plan, Director. With the media here, I’m guessing you’d rather I not open fire and paint the market Zushi Red. Who’s the new guy?” I asked, nodding at the sweaty, pale-faced stranger plastered beside him.
Sweaty guy, whose eyes had been squeezed closed, whipped his face toward me and cut loose. “I’m Milton Cahill, the city’s public relations manager. And dispatching those…creatures…in the public eye is completely out of the question.” His words would have carried more conviction if his teeth hadn’t been chattering.
“Okay, Milty. What’s your plan?” I asked.
Milty’s eyes darted from me to Dickhead, then to Cap, next to safety guy, and finally to Rico. When he had everyone’s attention, Milty leaned forward, and kept his voice low as he filled us in.
“I say we load those things into the box truck, drive them across the bridge into Covington, and let Kentucky deal with them.”
I snorted. “Seriously. Who called this guy in? Catch and release is not an option, here. Next?”
After throwing a devious glance over his shoulder, Dickhead leaned in close. “We could corral them into the truck and then shoot them through the sides so the press can’t film it.”
“No good,” I said. “You can’t be sure you’ll hit them all in the head.”
Cap murmured, “What if we drive the damn truck into the river and just leave them there?”
Milty’s eyes went wide. “Are you crazy? The EPA would have a field day.”
“This isn’t rocket science,” I said. “Why don’t we drive the truck somewhere private and destroy it—like with C4 or Napalm? Or a javelin missile?”
The safety director stared at me slack-jawed. “Gee, we’re fresh out of Napalm and missiles.”
“No problem. I’ve got—”
“Moving on,” Rico said, his eyes shooting daggers at me. “How ’bout we lure them into the truck with a trail of meat, Hansel and Gretel style, then drive them to Ziegler’s Scrap Yard and crush the whole mess into a two-by-four Tonka Truck.”
“Hello? Remember me?” yelled dumpster-diver Gary,
through the open phone line. “That’s my truck you’re talking about, and roughly $4000 worth of meat.”
“You want out of that dumpster or not?” Rico asked.
“Wait a minute,” Milty said. “You’re forgetting something. Whether the media films you taking down these deadheads or not, they still know the deadheads exist. They’ve got film of them mobbing the dumpster. You can’t just blow these creatures to bits, or crush them into one big zombie cube. They were people once. They need to be identified, humanely dispatched, and properly interred.”
“Sure, Milty,” I said, with a nod toward the dumpster. “Why don’t you go ask one of those creatures for his driver’s license?”
Cap massaged his temples. “Whatever we do, we can’t leave them here. The market’s going to open soon.” With a quick glance at Dickhead, he announced, “I’m calling the ball. De Palma, Nighthawk, wrangle those biters into the back of the meat truck and take them to the precinct. Back the truck up to the delivery entrance. We’ll herd them into a holding cell using catchpoles, and leave them there while we figure something out.”
Gary’s voice squawked through the open phone line. “Who’s going to pay for all my meat?”
“How the hell should I know?” Cap snapped. “File an insurance claim.”
I didn’t have the heart to correct Cap, or to tell him that most of the losses I’d submitted to my insurance carrier would eventually circle back to his desk for payment one day. Property and Casualty adjusters hate zombies.
Erring on the side of caution, Cap expanded the perimeter around Findlay Market, forcing the media off the block and out of video range. After Rico rolled up the delivery truck door, the two of us unwrapped USDA Prime rump roasts, and blazed a trail of bloody cow flesh to lead the rotters toward the truck. The scent of fresh meat slowly coaxed the biters away from the dumpster. As the sun peeked over the horizon, the last of the deadheads followed the stench of blood, clinging to the shadows to avoid the light. I lifted the dumpster lid and helped Gary scramble out. Rico, perched on top of the truck, waited for the rotters to funnel inside, then rolled the door closed behind them.
The three of us climbed into the cab of the Avril’s Meats truck and headed for the 51st Precinct, with twenty deadheads vacuum-packed into the rear cargo hold.
When your day begins like that, you’d like to think things can’t go anywhere but up.
But this was a day in my life, folks. What were the odds?
5
Meatbag Melee
Gary Walker wasn’t a happy camper, but who could blame him? He’d spent his early morning hours barricaded inside a dumpster, hiding from a horde of the undead. He drove his box truck through town, toward the 51st, picking bits of lettuce and cigarette butts out of his hair and flinging them out the window. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he stunk worse than the deadheads we’d corralled into the back, so I hugged the passenger door, cranked down the window, and hung my head outside. It could have been worse. Poor Rico was sitting right next to him.
“Who’s going to explain this to my boss?” Gary whined as he pulled into the precinct’s parking lot. “All that meat. And the truck. We can’t haul food in it anymore. It’s ruined.”
Gary switched off the engine, and I opened the door. Rico shoved me out so hard, I almost face-planted onto the blacktop.
“Your boss can get a copy of the police report in a day or so.”
“This isn’t over,” Gary said. “The city’s going to pay for this.”
Rico glanced at me and shrugged. “Maybe we should’ve let the biters eat him.”
Gary’s face blazed. “Just unload those bastards and give me back my truck.”
“Sorry,” Rico said, taking the keys from Gary’s hand. “Right now, it’s evidence. We’ll get it back to you when we’re finished processing it.”
“Perfect. Just perfect. It better come back clean,” Gary yelled. “I’m talking decontaminated, fumigated, detailed. The whole nine yards.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t use it anymore?”
“Not for hauling food, but it still runs.”
Rico waved down a squad car on its way out of the lot and asked the officers to take Gary home. I held back a laugh as Rico opened the rear passenger side door, shoved Gary inside, and walked away before the badges realized they were transporting a human dumpster. Rico whirled around, and grabbed another officer on his way inside the precinct.
“Hey! See that truck? Make sure nobody messes with it. And no matter what you hear going on inside, don’t open it.”
As we entered the door of the 51st, different smells invaded my nose—the tang of burnt coffee, the spicy marinara of Ricardo’s Pizzeria next door, and the ghostly hint of stale cigarette smoke that permeated the old oak desks from decades past. Disparate as they were, those odors always made me feel at home, as if I’d found my tribe.
Rico and I threaded between the desks and hiked down the long hallway toward Cap’s office. When we rounded the final corner, the large, empty space outside his door struck a nerve. Cap’s secretary, Miriam Miller, had called that area her office for twenty-five years, before she was murdered a month or so ago. In fact, her death was tied to the Z-virus manipulation case we’d been working. Miriam, a graying, persnickety battle-axe, had been totally devoted to Cap, and vice-versa. Walking past that vacant space every day had to haunt Cap.
A multitude of voices drifted out of Cap’s door, Dickhead’s being the most familiar. “Before we put the bastards down, we need to learn as much about them as we can. Are they the sighted variety? Or the sun-blind kind? How the hell did they all end up in—”
“A meatbag mob?” I asked, finishing his sentence as we entered Cap’s office. “That’s a good question.”
It was standing room only. Kevin Shoemaker and Milton Cahill had snagged the two crusty red chairs across from Cap’s desk. Director Dickhead stood behind the chairs and Rico filed in beside him. I copped a squat on Cap’s credenza and did my best to bring everyone up to speed.
“It was hard to tell what kind of biters they were at first, all clustered around the dumpster in the dark. But once the sun came up, it didn’t take long for those bad boys to start lunging for the shadows. They’re definitely the sun-blind variety. And freshies too, judging by the minimal amount of decomp.”
Shoemaker, the safety director, squirmed and ran his hand across the top of his shiny bald head. “As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t make a bit of difference what variety they are. There’re twenty of those monsters and they need to go away quickly and quietly.”
“Yes. Quietly,” Cahill echoed. “Those creatures are a public relations nightmare.” He leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “The ACLU and the media will be all over this. Those creatures were people, once—not so long ago, according to you, Ms. Nighthawk. They had lives, and families, and names. We can’t just blow them up, or smash them to smithereens. What would the public say if we annihilate them without at least attempting to find their next of kin?”
I tilted my head back and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe we should put their faces on milk cartons.”
Rico smothered his laugh with a cough. Cap shook his head at me and sighed.
Dickhead scowled and moved toward the door. “I’ll be leaving now. Since these biters are the original, garden-variety kind, I have no interest in what you do with them or how you do it.”
“You should,” I said, as he walked past me. “Zombies aren’t social butterflies. They don’t seek each other out, go clubbing, or hang out with their BFFs. They’re eating machines. The fact that twenty of them horded together should interest you. This was no accident.”
Dickhead stopped in his tracks. “So, you think this…this cluster…is related to the Z-virus manipulation?”
“It’s too soon to tell, but yeah. It could be.”
Cap glanced at his watch. “That truckload of biters has been parked outside for the last half-hour while we’ve been kibitzing about
public opinion. Milton is right. We’ll check them for IDs when we put them down. Do our best to notify the next of kin. We sure as hell can’t leave them in the cargo hold. De Palma, back that truck up to the door. We’ll grab some catchpoles and guide them into the holding cells.”
It’s a good thing I wasn’t calling the shots. I’m an act now, think it through later kind of gal. Plans suck. They almost never go smoothly. I’d have driven the deadheads to the closest bomb disposal facility and C-4’d them into bite-sized zushi bits. Problem solved. Failing that, I had to agree that we couldn’t leave them in the truck. Cincinnati in May can get toasty. In another couple of hours, the early morning sun would morph into an inferno. The stench of twenty baked deadheads would have the entire precinct blowing chunks. Cap’s hastily conceived plan was low-tech and high-risk.
Nothing new there.
We filed out of Cap’s office, grabbed some catchpoles from the equipment room and headed for the parking lot, making sure to turn on all the lights inside the precinct. We wanted these biters to be as blind as bats once they got inside.
I pushed through the precinct door into the parking lot and let out an involuntary groan. The officer Rico had enlisted to guard the truck stood in front of it with his arms outstretched, holding back a throng of media. The truck rocked back and forth behind him, bouncing on its tires. Shrieks and growls rang out from inside it. The sight of Rip Sacca, shoving his mic closer to the truck, made my heart drop.
Jade’s voice rose above the din. “Ms. Nighthawk, is it normal for zombies to cluster like this?”
“No comment.”
“Back off,” Rico snapped. “This is an active scene, Ms. Chen. You all need to give us some space.”
Corpse Whisperer Sworn Page 4
