by Doug Goodman
“Floyd Pepper!” she shouted.
Ernest didn’t look back, but Rawls raised his eyebrow.
“The Muppet. That firefighter, Lloyd, looks just like the Muppet. You know, the one with no eyes and the Sgt. Pepper outfit.”
“Oookay,” Rawls said with suspicion, not sure what she was driving at.
She gave her impression of the Muppet’s laugh. No light bulb brightened over Rawls’ head. “Never mind.”
After half an hour of following the Wolf, Angie looked around and said, “Haven’t we been here before?”
She recognized a rock formation that seemed very similar to one they had passed before.
“We’re not lost,” Ernest said.
“Check your maps. I will check the trail up ahead for tracks. If we see our footprints, then we’ve been here before.”
At the same time that everyone stopped, Murder whined to Angie. He wasn’t the whining kind of dog, but he was also under a lot more stress than most dogs. To Murder, this may have all just been the greatest version of Capture the Flag ever invented (except with a zombie as the flag), but that still took its toll. She decided to stop and assess his health after she verified the tracks.
As she walked ahead of the Wolf, Murder barked at her. It was a loud, sharp bark. Angie sensed tension in it. Maybe their closeness to the fires was getting to him. Murder was not a veteran dog yet, though he was surely proving his worth. It was possible the wildfire was (for good reason) bothering him.
“Calm down, Murder. It’s just a wilderness fire.” The words sounded strange in her head, but how often had she said something strange to a dog? As in, let’s go find a dead guy, or let’s go track a zombie?
Angie kneeled down to examine the tracks. She started by studying the crushed leaves and pine needles under an incandescent flashlight. LEDs threw too much light on the tracks to read them easily, kind of like white-washing an image. The devil was in the shadows.
Murder barked again from behind his chicken.
Angie looked up from the trail to glare at him for misbehaving. His message had been received, and he needed to get used to fires. It wasn’t like this would be the last forest fire in Colorado.
She wondered if she had unintentionally conditioned a response in Murder when he dragged her away from the fire that had almost engulfed the Wolf. She had thanked him effusively. Maybe too effusively.
As she considered this, a shadow moved in the darkness, and she got that sinking feeling in her stomach. She couldn’t tell if there were two shadows but she hoped there were.
“Zombie!” Angie yelled as she jumped to her feet. The sound came dry out of her mouth, so she shouted again. While she yelled, Murder charged into the night. She chased him, hoping Ernest and Rawls were behind her.
In front of Angie, the dark silhouette of a bride ran, leaping over rocks and sidestepping fallen branches. Angie was amazed at how well the creature could run for an undead corpse. Its gait had a hobbling effect, like the legs didn’t quite go where they should, and the upper torso swayed like a pendulum. But it did this all so swiftly, it was able to stay upright. Angie thought of a toddler, still learning to control its faculties. Somewhere on the back of the undead woman’s head, Angie knew a wasp was half-implanted to her brain. The thought of that long stinger protruding through the base of the skull and into the brain made Angie shiver despite the heat.
The zombie came to a granite-crusted mountain drop overlooking the tops of tall pines. In the distance, a line of fire stretched along the mountainside. The zombie bride in the ragged white dress staggered left, then right. She was not stooping, so Angie presumed she was well-fed and had been lucky enough to get the right blood type.
The zombie turned and faced her, and Angie wished she wouldn’t have. Huge gashes ripped across her face. The eyes bulged from their sockets like leathery snake eggs. By the faint wrinkles in the bride’s forehead, Angie guessed the unfortunate woman had died in her early to mid-thirties. She was about Angie’s age.
Despite the horror of the woman’s face, a part of Angie noted that the woman wore an a-line wedding dress with a sweeping hemline. The dress was covered in mud and stained by blood. It had been a beautiful dress, and Angie hated herself for noticing a thing like that. How shallow are you?
Angie didn’t have time to charge because the bride attacked her, reaching with dirty, pale arms. Murder grabbed the zombie by the ragged hemline. Angie reached for her gun, but couldn’t pull it out from under her brush coat. The zombie hissed at Angie. Venom strung like saliva from her teeth. Angie finally got out her Magnum and fired. She missed, only nicking a piece of the bride’s ear.
Murder let go of the dress and backpedaled toward Angie, who nearly fell over him. The zombie ran for the nearest clutch of woods, disappearing into a thicket of bushes at the entrance to the tree line.
Angie heard the click-clacking of metal legs punching the ground and knew Ernest and Rawls were close.
The bushes shook, and a giant form rose above the foliage as the bride ran past. It snarled at Angie, who fired her gun in tandem. The muzzle flash lit up the bear’s face as if it were the patron saint of death. Murder attacked the bear’s rear leg. The bear swatted him like he was a rat terrier. She heard a whimper as Murder landed against something hard.
The bear stepped toward her, and Angie fired again. The black bear stood at least six feet tall when it reared up on its legs, though to Angie it seemed like ten—and at least five feet wide. But what scared Angie the most was the size of its claws, which were handcrafted by God solely for rending flesh from bone.
The bear gave a roaring moan. Angie kept firing. She was distantly aware that she was screaming at the bear.
The animal reached out and struck her. Her capacity for measuring strength did not apply to bears because it was not strength that hit her but Power with a capital P. With Power she had never known, the bear swiped at her again, flinging her in the air and slamming her on her back and knocking the wind out of her. Her head slapped against a boulder, and there was a crack. For a few seconds, she lost control of the world. All she saw were giant pines staring down at her. She didn’t see the bear turn and run away, gouging a trail of destruction through the woods.
From afar, Angie heard signs of struggle and anguish. Ernest and Rawls were fighting something. Not very quickly, she realized it was the bride. It had taken advantage of the moment and ambushed Ernest and Rawls.
Angie sucked air back into her lungs, then pushed herself off the ground, stumbling to her feet. She did a quick assessment of her body. Neither her back nor her chest hurt as much as she would have expected from a bear attack, a product of both the backpack that had been between her and the ground and the adrenaline pumping through her veins. Angie reached up and touched her hardhat, sure she would find it covered in her blood. There was no blood, just a giant crack. The sound she had heard was not her skull splitting, thankfully, but her hardhat hitting a boulder.
She couldn’t believe the zombie was still there. She assumed it had fled the other direction, but it had backtracked. It had now knocked Ernest down and jumped on top of him, its jaw snapping at Rawls and Ernest.
Angie fell into the scrum and tried to pry the zombie off of Ernest. In the shadow of the night, Angie had forgotten about the wasp. The giant bug atop the bride’s head turned its large head slowly and looked at Angie. It was like looking into the eyes of a tiger about to pounce. It was all Angie could do to not let go and kick herself away from the segmented body.
The bride sunk her teeth in Ernest’s bite gear, where his exposed neck would have been. When that didn’t work, the bride wiggled and twisted in Angie’s grip, scratching and punching and flailing. Angie didn’t know which side of the zombie’s head was more disturbing, the disfigured face or the giant bug hitching a ride on the skull. She pushed her gun up against the zombie, but she was still shaken up by the bear attack. Her hands felt like blunt objects being controlled from miles away. At best, they fumbled
with the gun.
The creature bit Rawls but got only the padding of his bite gear. Angie, however, was not wearing hers. She’d never felt so unprotected as she did when the damned thing pushed the other two away then lunged at her. Angie lifted her gun, put it between her and the zombie and fired. Pieces of silk and flesh burst from the back side of the bride.
The dead woman fell backwards on top of Ernest. While still attached to the body of the bride, the wasp turned its insidious black-and-red jaws on Ernest. It grabbed hold of his cheek and began to twist. Ernest screamed in a way people weren’t supposed to, like he was being devoured. His cheek bulged outward like a volcano ready to erupt from his body.
While Angie tried to get her legs to cooperate, Rawls watched in disbelief. A horrible ripping sound came from Ernest as his cheek was purged from his face. Angie fired, missing. The bride pushed off and ran away, its body teetering and tottering as it vanished like a ghoul into the smoke and pines.
Ernest clutched at his cheek helplessly.
Murder walked up as the zombie fled, looking like a dog who had met death on more than one occasion.
Angie patted him on the head and apologized. “Sorry, baby. I should have listened. Thanks for trying to warn us.”
Angie bandaged Ernest’s face and called in to the wildland firefighters. She was impressed at how well the radios worked. They arranged for the firefighters to pick them up at the roadside above them.
Rawls stared at them with the quiet finality of watching a man die.
“We’re okay,” Angie reassured Rawls. “We survived.” He wanted to say more, but any movement with his jaw made his cheek hurt like hell.
“We never should have gone in like this,” Rawls said. “It was a mistake. They should have sent more people. They should have sent an army of cops in with guns.”
“It’s not your fault,” Angie said, wincing in pain. The adrenaline was wearing off.
“I’m not saying it’s my fault. It’s their fucking fault. Animal Control. They should have known better. They’ve been after these damn things for how many years? And they still haven’t gotten control of them?”
“The only way to control them is to get rid of their source. To get rid of the dead,” Angie said.
“Maybe that’s what they should do. Instead of paying people to risk their lives for fifteen bucks an hour, maybe they should put the money into digging up every grave in America and burning its fucking corpse.”
“Maybe,” Angie said. She had lost interest in Rawls. Not that she didn’t sympathize with his frustration, but because she was thinking of their battle with the zombie.
Ernest grabbed Rawls by the arm.
“Being…overdramatic,” Ernest said to Rawls in short, painful bursts. “Me…fifty searches. First time…bitten.”
“I think that damned thing led us into a trap,” Angie said.
Rawls nodded. “Outwitted by a mindless bug.”
Angie was sure Dr. Saracen would argue that point, but to her it was moot. They had been tracking a zombie, and it led them to a bear. On purpose.
“Predators are advantageous killers, meaning sometimes they wait until something unfortunate happens to their prey. The moose calf stuck in mud so that it cannot defend itself is devoured by wolves, or the seal pup that is trapped on an ice flow is targeted by killer whales. If we aren’t careful, this zombie will use any disadvantage on our part—like a bear sleeping nearby—to kill us.”
Ernest started to say something, then winced. “Damn…hurts to talk.”
“Then stop talking,” Angie said. “One other thing: she was alone.”
Ernest pushed himself up off the needled floor of the mountainside. Holding his cheek in one hand, he pulled out the tablet in the other and wrote, “You guys got to go after her. Every minute could mean the difference between life and death. With that wall of fire, don’t think she left the girl far from here. Possibly earlier tonight.”
“So how do we find the girl?” Rawls asked. “I mean, no offense, but we’re all here because we were trained to find zombies. Unless Murder can track a person. Can he?”
“He hasn’t been trained for that,” Angie said. “I have other dogs that could, but it’d take me at least half a day to get them here. The idea was that Murder could track the wasp to its lair, or at least get us close enough to find it.”
A hopeless silence fell over them. After a minute, they hiked back up the mountainside to the road where the firefighters would pick them up.
“Hey, what’s that over there?” Rawls pointed to the cliffside on the mountain face ahead of them. Large black boxes were swinging back and forth in the air.
Angie said, “Those are what you asked for, Rawls. A way to stop the zombie invasion.”
They took the scenic route, crisscrossing back and forth alongside a steep slope next to the cliff. In the distance, flames scratched at the sky. As they came up next to the boxes, Rawls reached out and touched one of the chains. It felt stiff in is hands with the weight of the box and its inhabitant. The chain led eight feet up the side of the cliff, then wrapped around a boulder.
“Those black boxes are coffins,” Angie said. “I heard the ritual goes back to China, but that people were doing it in rural areas where pouring concrete over a grave wasn’t fiscally viable. The idea is that if a wasp gets in there, the corpse will fall out and be irreparably damaged.”
“Just cremate me,” Rawls said.
At the roadside, the large Freightliner fire truck was waiting. Dave McAuliffe was with them. He, too, was dressed in firefighter gear.
“How are you, Ernest?” McAuliffe asked when the truck stopped.
Unable to speak, Ernest made a rolling of the eyes and head motion to indicate he was in pain but would survive.
McAuliffe took a long lingering look over them. Adrenaline and hope had evaporated from their bodies. They slumped on their legs.
“We should call it a day,” McAuliffe said. “Bring in another team. I’ve got about a hundred people on their way to search this area. Now that we know she is here somewhere, we can concentrate the search. Six to eight hours, we’ll have the zombie and the girl.”
“It won’t do any good,” Rawls said. “We found the zombie. We think it’s trying to lead us away from the girl.”
“And?”
“And we need to find a girl, not a zombie.”
“Yes, and no. You need the girl, but the zombie can still get you there. You don’t need to know where the zombie is. You need to know where the zombie was. You can fluctuate the algorithms on the Wolf for that. Don’t you remember that from your training?”
Rawls lit up like carnival lights. He turned to the Wolf and began programming it. “That’s right. If we assume we need to find where the zombie was ten hours ago, I can plug that in here.” Suddenly a new scent signature appeared on the Wolf’s screen. To Angie, it might as well have been a seismometer’s readout.
“The problem is, we need to know where to start,” Rawls said. “The zombie was leading us around in circles.”
“I can help with that,” Angie said.
Ten minutes later they were back at the convenience store. The firefighters had replaced Angie’s bandage on Ernest with something more professional-grade and given him some Benadryl to counteract the reaction to the venom. Ernest’s face was bright red. The EMTs teased him, calling him the “Red-Headed Stranger.” He then waited to be med-evaced to a hospital.
Angie looked for Lloyd, the Muppet-faced firefighter, but he had already redeployed into the field. She was disappointed, having hoped to see him again.
Ernest took Rawls by the shoulder and showed him his tablet. It read, “Be careful out there.”
“I will.”
Ernest commanded Rawls’ attention, looking him in the eye. Then painfully he said, “Do whatever she says.”
Angie shook Ernest’s hand. She was glad to have earned their respect. It hadn’t come easily, but did anything else in this field?
“We’re looking for the girl’s tracks and the bride’s tracks. If we can’t find the girl’s but we can find the bride’s, then we need to go back farther. Be careful not to step on the path.”
“How do I know what to look for?” Rawls asked.
“Remember the hearts?”
Rawls shook his head. “Sorry. It’s been a long couple of days.”
“It’s okay. I’ll walk you through it. I did this before we got started.”
Angie pulled out a notepad and showed him some sketches of two pairs of shoes. One looked like a slipper, with only an imprint for the heel and an imprint at the sole. The other was a sketch of a small tennis shoe with lots of lines. There was a heart in the middle of the shoe. The heart bubbled to one side in the way that only girl’s hearts can do. It was a skill Angie had never been able to master as a kid but tried to recreate on her notepad.
They hopped from side to side down the trail, covering the ground fast. Murder and the Wolf followed behind them. Murder watched their exercise curiously while he mouthed his chicken.
“Hey, I think I found it,” Rawls cried out. He fell to the ground gently pulling aside pine needles and twigs. A little dirt heart poked out of a spot of soft ground.
“Maybe we will be lucky yet,” Angie said.
Smiling, Rawls configured the Wolf and prepped it for search mode. Angie leaned against a tree and tried to control her breathing. The firefighters had given her some ibuprofen after they checked to make sure she wasn’t too damaged to continue. Not that she would have listened if they told her to stop. Thinking of Sarah trapped in a lair with wasp larvae opening their mouths and—no way was Angie going to sit aside and let that happen. To hell with her ribs and her lungs. She already had one dead girl in her head. She didn’t have room for two.
“I don’t care how brave or ballsy you think you are,” McAuliffe had told her before they left. “That fire has turned direction in the time since we picked you up. In a few hours, I’m forcing you to evacuate, even if that means I have to drag you out of here with my bare hands.”
