Jailbait Zombie

by Mario Acevedo

  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 Reginald. 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.

  “Keep me covered. I’m gonna punch through the wall.”

  Jolie fired as I pounded a hole in the drywall and slipped through.

  Out in the hall, still more zombies continued to stumble down the stairs. We weren’t much closer to an escape.

  Jolie scrambled through the hole and stood next to me. Smoke curled from her pistol.

  The wall buckled. Dozens of grimy zombie hands broke through.

  We fired careful head shots to conserve ammo. One zombie per round. Eyeballs, gore, and bone splattered through the air.

  With every spent bullet, a sense of desperation and futility rose within me. I felt like the floor beneath was a plank that kept getting shorter and narrower.

  Jolie shoved the pistol into her fanny pack. “I’m out.”

  Zombies stepped over the bodies of their comrades. Those on the floor wiggled toward us.

  I reached into a pocket. Also empty. I had the flare gun and a couple of shells and that was it.

  The zombies plugged the exit with their bodies.

  I shoved the pistol in its holster. Jolie and I backed up until we hit the end of the hallway.

  Now it was undead versus undead at its most primitive level. Our talons
extended to maximum length.

  The stupid thing would be to charge into them. Of course, the more stupid thing was that we had come down here in the first place.

  I reached for my cell phone.

  When the bomb exploded, it would drop the gas tank right—I glanced to the ceiling—on top of us.

  There had to be another way, but I couldn’t see it. What I had, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, was a failure of imagination.

  Jolie shielded me with her body. “Do it, Felix. Do it.”

  I worked the phone’s keypad.

  No time for good-byes.

  The zombies advanced relentlessly in one colossal mass.

  I pressed SEND.

  CHAPTER 56

  Time hovered like the big clock of the universe had stopped working. The zombies, their blank eyes expressing only the cold-blooded determination to destroy us, showed nothing of their—our—impending obliteration.

  My mind’s eye could see the screen on the cell phone outside light up; the calling number displayed. The electrons would whir through the circuits. The signal would trip the logic switch: Ring or Vibrate?

  Vibrate.

  The electrons would pulse through the electric fuse, which in turn would spark the detonator. The resulting compression wave would initiate the combustion of the dynamite and blast apart the metal strut holding up the gas tank. We’d be drenched in hundreds of gallons of gasoline.

  I could feel the nanoseconds pass by, as tangible as the air flowing around me.

  A lot could have gone wrong. Maybe the cell phone didn’t receive the call. Maybe the fuse had worked loose. Maybe the battery had gone dead.

  Maybe, if and when the bomb went off, the gas tower fell the other way…or the tower dropped in place.

  A mighty concussion slapped through the hall. Plaster dust shot from the ceiling. Jolie stumbled against the wall.

  I blanked out all fear and watched the event unfold as if it were the end of someone else.

  Wood splintered and creaked. The ceiling broke open and the cylindrical tank of the gas tower crashed through the joists and ceiling plaster. The tank came to rest upside down. Gasoline splashed from around the lid and saturated the air with its vapor.

  A wave of surprise broke across the zombies. Their eyes understood their doom just as the tank broke through the ceiling, flattening them like a gigantic hammer.

  Pieces of the floor above funneled into the large hole made by the falling tower. Debris skittered through the hole and pinged off the metal tank. The smashed bodies of zombies writhed under the tank, broken plaster, and shattered wood.

  Jolie lunged off the floor. “This way.”

  She jumped on the tank and up through the hole. I scrambled after her and climbed onto the splintered floor of the main level.

  Zombies lumbered toward the stairway, still on autopilot to destroy us and ignorant of the disaster that awaited.

  Jolie and I sprinted for the front door.

  A zombie lurched across the threshold from the porch. Jolie clawed him with her talons, sinking them into his shoulder and snagging bone. I punched him in the head and leaped clear of the house.

  Jolie and I tumbled off the porch and rolled across the sand and dirt. I came to my knees and waited for the house to explode. The twisted legs of the gas tower stuck out from the torn roof. Embers and sparks whirled against the legs.

  “Where’s the boom?” Jolie yelled.

  “Right here.” I pulled the flare pistol from my pocket and cocked the hammer. I aimed through the open front door and fired. The flare shot into the house, a red streak leaving a smoky tail.

  The flare thumped as it ricocheted inside. A yellow flame flickered.

  Fire whooshed through the windows and doors. A gigantic flame twirled out the torn roof. Explosions loud as artillery boomed from within. The fire licked under the eaves, and within seconds, flames rolled up the siding and gnawed along the outside walls. Debris fell across the windows and doors.

  Zombies crawled from the exits. They emitted ugly gasps, like air venting from rotting tires. Tentacles of fire spiraled around them. The zombies sputtered and crackled and I took the same ghoulish delight as I had in the army when we plucked lice and fried them on a hot tent stove.

  The main floor gave way and the house collapsed upon itself in a roaring cloud of embers and billowing smoke. The smoke cleared and left the burning roof trusses looking like a rib cage inside a roasting pit.

  Zombies staggered out of the gloom toward the burning house. They must’ve been summoned by that collective consciousness, from their immolated undead comrades crying out for help. They halted on the edge of the inferno, confused by what to do next.

  Jolie shot from the darkness on the BMW. She herded the zombies toward me.

  I found one of the steel poles and used it to jab the zombies over the edge of the foundation and into the pit.

  It was burn, baby, burn. I hummed “Disco Inferno.”

  Zombies tumbled in, only realizing their fiery destruction at the last second.

  Jolie and I patrolled the area for evidence of zombies and our fight. We tossed zombie parts and spent ammo shells into the pit. We destroyed all the clues we could find, including parts of the cell phone I’d used to trigger the bomb.

  The fire burned hot as a crematorium. Flesh and wood would be reduced to ash, and metal—especially the psychotronic diviners—into one pool of slag.

  Jolie asked, “What are the authorities going to say about this? Was it mass murder, suicide, an accident, or all the above?”

  “Who cares?” I answered. “Anything as long as it’s not about zombies and could be traced to us.”

  Satisfied that we’d destroyed all trace of zombies, I climbed on the BMW and we rode around Ghoul Mountain.

  The fire bathed the facing hills with a yellow light. A glow illuminated the quilt of smoke hovering over the house.

  Daybreak was another two hours away. Dogs barked at the rumble of the fire and the smell of smoke. Porch lights came on. People silhouetted themselves against windows and doorways.

  The first of the red and blue emergency lights flashed up the road from Morada. Sirens yowled in the night and the dogs barked harder.

  Two police cruisers zoomed by on the dirt road, the second car enveloped in the dust from the first. A minute later, fire trucks trundled by at high speed.

  We joined the confused parade of vehicles barreling up and down the road between the fire and Morada.

  Cops in reflective vests guided those of us coming down the hill to side streets away from the convoys of fire trucks and ambulances.

  Abundance Boulevard was a carnival of red and blue lights and emergency vehicles going east, west, and in circles.

  Minute by minute, we drew farther away and I relaxed. Jolie dropped me off at my Toyota.

  Her aura bubbled in pleasure. “That was fucking amazing. Who knew killing zombies could be so much fun.”

  “We were almost killed.”

  “Adds to the spice. We get major bragging points for this fight.” Jolie gunned the BMW, popped a wheelie, and circled my Toyota.

  We drove west and onto the forest road toward Phaedra’s hideout. Nguyen’s Buell motorcycle was still parked where he’d left it.

  We hiked up the slope to the morada.

  “Seems quiet,” I said.

  “I’ll bet Nguyen’s sleeping,” Jolie replied. “It’s about what he can handle.”

  My skin tingled, not from picking up clues but from the lack of them. “We should hear something.” A conversation. The rustle of clothing.

  The air smelled of pine, nothing unexpected.

  Too bad I was out of ammo. A full magazine in the pistol would’ve comforted me.

  My talons and fangs sprang out. I put my senses on hypersensitivity. Still nothing.

  I levitated to hide my footfalls in the grass. Jolie followed my lead.

  We halted outside the morada door. Nothing.

  I reached to open
the latch and the door swung free.

  I looked in.

  The sleeping bag remained inside the bench. Phaedra’s camping gear and belongings lay across the floor. Empty bags of blood were scattered like candy bar wrappers. Phaedra wouldn’t know about vampire housekeeping—leaving evidence like this of our feeding was bad practice—but Nguyen should’ve told her.

  Where were he and Phaedra? Did they leave in a hurry?

  Where to? How? His motorcycle was still close by.

  I called Phaedra’s number. Her voice mail picked up and I left a message.

  I felt a sinking despair. If Nguyen and Phaedra were in trouble, I had no idea where they were or how to help.

  Sunrise approached. Jolie and I couldn’t do anything but hide.

  CHAPTER 57

  Were Nguyen and Phaedra safe? I knew he would take care of her. Provided he could.

  I shut the door of the morada and retreated to the darkest corner for protection against the sunrise.

  Jolie scooped up the bags of blood in case there was any left. They all had neat punctures and had been sucked dry. “Phaedra must’ve found her appetite.”

  Morning light trickled through the cracks in the door.

  Jolie cursed. “I hate feeling so goddamn vulnerable. A one-legged midget could bust through that door and we’d be helpless because of the morning light.”

  She curled next to me and we tucked close to each other under the sleeping bag.

  At a quarter of eight, long after the sunrise, we got up and tidied the morada. I found the hawthorn stake discarded in the dirt of one corner. I couldn’t believe Nguyen had been so careless or that he’d been so rushed to leave that he had left the stake behind.

  Carefully, so I wouldn’t touch the silver veins, I picked up the stake.

  “Has it been used?” Jolie asked.

  “I can’t tell.” Vampire blood would’ve turned to dust and become lost in the dirt smudging the wood and silver.

  The leather pouch was inside the sleeping bag. I tucked the stake into the pouch and dropped it in my backpack.

  “Seen the knife?”

  “I’m still looking.” Jolie pointed to gold bits of macaroni and costume jewels around a smashed cigar box. “You know what this is about?”