It lands with a thud against Rudy’s temple, but he doesn’t even flinch. Dane does, though, grabbing it with a free hand, breaking it against the bar like something out of Road House, and shoving the pointy end right under Rudy’s exposed throat. Most Zerkers are so strong and old and leathery and tough, it’s like trying to jab your way through a rhinoceros’ hide. But Rudy is a young Zerker, meaning fresh. The broken bottle slides into his throat so far that half of Dane’s hand goes missing, then pops out the other side of Rudy’s skull, bits of brain and gore sticking to the jagged edge as goo gushes like an oil well from the back of Rudy’s head. The guy keels over, pawing at the bottle top sticking out of his throat as Dane inches away. Rudy dies—again—with a confused look in his yellow eyes, hands reaching out to us as what’s left of his brain short-circuits from the inside out.
“Poor Rudy.” I frown, looking around the deserted club.
“Poor Rudy? Dude almost turned me Zerker!”
I shrug, looking for any signs of Stamp. “You would have pulled out of it.”
“Not without that flying bottle trick.” His eyes are all gooey and grateful. I think I like it better when they’re hard and black. “Here!” He finds a service exit under a blinking red sign and steps over several damp wooden crates as we find ourselves in some back alley. There is no one left: none of the Zerkers Val turned, no Val, certainly no Stamp.
There are voices around the corner, hundreds of club kids squawking and texting and complaining to the Spartans’ bouncers at the same time. Then sirens in the distance.
Dane says, “Come on,” even though I’m two steps ahead of him.
In the club’s lot we see the empty space where just a few minutes earlier Stamp’s Jeep was parked.
We skirt the crowd, taking another back alley to reach the car in the back of the Cuban restaurant.
“Witch!” Dane opens the driver’s door so roughly the hinges crack. It’s not even his own car!
“So what was that?” I say.
He tears out of the parking lot, over the curb, and into the street.
Cops pour in from the other direction.
“A setup,” he seethes, speeding through stop signs and past shocked pedestrians. “I should have known better than to follow just Stamp. I should have been following Val.”
“Well, how? We didn’t even know where she lived until recently.”
“Exactly my point.” He slams his large palms against the shiny steering wheel and stops short of running over a big blue mailbox on the next corner. “I’ve gotten lazy, letting Stamp run around town at all hours, not even knowing who he’s hanging out with. I should have been following him weeks ago.”
“You said you wanted to trust him.”
Dane turns on two wheels at a nearby corner and roars onto the interstate, passing cars at an unsafe rate of speed and trajectory.
“Yeah, well, look where trust got us,” he says. “Stamp’s missing and I don’t even know who took him.”
“Val took him.”
“I mean, I don’t even know who Val is. That’s my point.”
“She’s a Zerker. And she outsmarted us. All those kids missing for months now. And we were totally stumped.”
“I was stumped,” he says, focusing on not killing us in downtown traffic. “I should have told you about those kids, about Rudy and Wendy. I should have made you come with me to check them out. I was stupid. I thought after what we’d been through, it would be the Sentinels coming after us, not the Zerkers.”
I grit my teeth and hold on as he flies from the highway, dipping into the same industrial neighborhood we’ve been staking out.
“There’s his Jeep,” I blurt as Dane screeches to a halt in front of Val’s warehouse loft, nearly sending me flying through the windshield.
The neighborhood is deserted at this hour.
We get out of the car, the engine still running, and carefully approach the silent warehouse.
“Looks dark,” I say.
“See what I mean? We’ve been set up.”
“But why? What’s her game? She could have taken Stamp anytime over the last few weeks. Why tonight? Why now?”
He tries the warehouse door, yanking it six ways to Sunday and ringing the bell half a dozen times.
No one’s in there. We both know it. We’re just trying to do what we can to avoid getting back in our car and driving away.
Away without Stamp.
Dane turns to me, his jaw flexing and dark eyes flashing in the beam of a random street lamp. “I don’t think it’s Stamp she wants.”
“Then who?”
He shakes his head, walking toward Stamp’s Jeep. “I don’t know. That’s my—Shit!”
“What’s your shit? I thought you said we couldn’t—Oh, shit!”
We see the note on Stamp’s windshield at about the same time. It’s written in some trampy red lipstick and takes up most of the glass. It says:
If you ever want to see Stamp alive again, be at Splash Zone by 3 a.m.
Val
P.S. Bring your swim trunks!
“Splash Zone?” Dane strips the gears in poor Chuck’s car as he backs away from the warehouse and throttles toward the interstate.
“It’s that cheap-ass water park on International Drive by the outlet mall,” I say.
“You mean … the one with the sharks?”
14
Splash Zone
Splash Zone is deserted at this hour, but the stadium lights surrounding the two-acre water park are all on. It’s on the butt end of International Drive, one of the tackiest and most popular tourist strips on the planet, and at three in the morning the only things open are a few random truck stops with an attached diner or two. All are a few blocks away, and nobody eating there is exactly Splash Zone material, if you know what I mean.
It costs eight bucks to park, but the four guard stations are closed.
Dane picks one and blasts right past, cracking the black-and-yellow gate arm into splinters. We jostle over speed bumps, our teeth rattling.
“Where the hell is she?” He rounds the thin strip from the guard stations and enters the ginormous parking area. It looks empty all the way ahead to the huge wave sign announcing Splash Zone Family Water Park. A blinking neon-blue sign beneath it says, Home of the Hourly Shark Feeding!
There are no other cars in the parking lot, but that doesn’t mean anything. She could’ve parked around the back.
“How the hell do we even get in?” Dane says, gunning it across the middle of the lot.
“There.” I point to the entrance gate.
Dane stomps on the gas, forcing me back in my seat, but only for about five seconds. We slide to a stop next to a darkened ticket booth and nearly smash into it. Apparently Dane’s worried the brakes too hard this night.
“Why do I feel like I should be wearing a tuxedo and bringing you a corsage?” Dane says as we leap from the car.
We test the first gate and find a linked chain threaded through the rusty metal bars.
“It does feel strangely familiar,” I gush, helping him yank the chain apart. He’s always been more limber than me and never more so than in an emergency.
We push the massive, creaking gate open just enough to squeeze through.
I follow Dane inside the park, trying to block out the mental image of Barracuda Bay’s Fall Formal and what happened last time someone kidnapped Stamp and focus on what’s in front of me.
Splash Zone is a water park—slash—aquarium featuring the usual slides and gushers and slushers and arcades and penguin-shaped, chocolate-covered ice cream bars. Dane and I kept saying we’d go, we’d surprise Stamp and make a day of it, just the three of us, but we never did.
Now here we are, about three in the morning, and I don’t think it’s to eat ice cream and ride the water gushers. But Splash Zone isn’t just fun and games. It’s got live animals, hence the penguin ice cream bars, and flamingos in a pond. But there is also a chance to swim with the dolphins. A
nd, in a special steel tank, there are sharks. Real, live sharks that, as the entrance sign announced, you can feed by hand every hour on the hour.
And maybe it’s just the pessimist in me, but I can’t imagine this night ending without sharks involved.
The park is built around a giant lake, where fireworks explode at night and ski shows entertain during the day. You know the kind, with girls in bikinis making pyramids out of each other.
Dane and I race around the empty park, but we don’t know where to go or what to do or, frankly, who to do it to. There are pink slides where daytime customers can pop out of flamingo mouths. There’s a kiddy pool with the water still running. The arcade sign is still blinking, though all the machines are dark.
And no Stamp anywhere. Not even Val tripping us as we pass.
We pause by a concession stand, and I’m glad we don’t have heaving lungs drowning out clues of where Stamp could be. But the silence in the deserted park is deafening.
Until we hear the urgent shuffling.
Dane looks behind him, but there’s nothing.
Same with me. I creep away from the pink molded plastic of the concession stand and peer around a corner. Nothing. No one.
The footsteps are closer, closer until finally from behind a dolphin merry-go-round a security guard clomps forth.
I can tell right away—from his askew hat and bloody tie—he’s no longer living but freshly reanimated.
“Zerker,” Dane says through gritted teeth as we instinctively crouch together.
The groaning guard sees us—or more than likely smells us—and quickens his shuffling. The thing about Zerkers is they’re mean. Especially at first.
Older Zerkers like Bones and Dahlia from back home, or Val now, or even Rudy Ortega and Wendy Schmaltz have had a while to settle into their Zerker tendencies. The frenzy in their brains has calmed, and once they’ve eaten human flesh, they’ll eventually repose into the bad guys they’re destined to be.
But for awhile there, say the first 24 hours after they’ve been bitten, or turned, Zerkers are badass hombres.
Like us, they feel no pain. They don’t need to breathe, so they can’t run out of steam, and they’ll run on bone stumps if their feet fall off. They’re the zombies authors write about and moviemakers portray: hungry, soulless, angry, confused. But mostly hungry. The worst part is, if it wasn’t for Zerkers, zombies would have a much easier time. But no, every few months or so, some random Zerker loses it, chomps on the neighbor, starts an infection, and boom—zombies everywhere get a bad rap.
And that makes a 175-pound, six-dollars-an-hour security guard who’s just been turned into a Zerker your worst. Frickin’. Nightmare.
I look around for something to defend myself with—a fire alarm axe, the bar off a kiddy swing set, a discarded Popsicle stick—but there’s nothing.
Dane drags me to the nearest gift shop. With one thwack of his boot, he sends the front door’s glass cob-webbing and smashing to the ground.
We stand back as the white, frosty shards rain to the concrete.
The guard hears it and turns.
We’re inside, tossing shelves and stuffed orcas.
Dane finds something he obviously thinks will snuff out a newly reanimated zombie with the least effort. He’s smiling, hands behind his back so I can’t see his big discovery.
I’m thinking a medieval sword or a spear studded with shark’s teeth or one of those tridents that Poseidon dude uses—now that is some Zerker-killing mojo right there. Then he tosses me whatever he’s been hiding.
I catch it and immediately roll my eyes. A brass dolphin statue?
“Hold it like this,” he says, palming a granite base and wrapping his fingers around the dolphin’s thin tail.
I have to admit, it does look pretty lethal the way he’s holding it.
“And jab it like … this!” He uses a stuffed manatee to make his point, spearing its defenseless nose with the tip of the dolphin’s snout (beak?) until the poor manatee’s stuffing lies all over the floor at our feet.
Glass crunches behind us.
I turn, instinctively doing as Dane says and shoving the dolphin’s beak into the guard’s face.
Teeth crunch and tongue tears until the statue is wedged in the guard’s jaw so tightly it won’t budge. His mouth is wide open, the underside of the base poking out as his fingers claw at the statue. His yellow eyes widen, and thick goo gurgles out around the statue.
The guard backpedals through the broken glass. His anxious attempts to rip the brass statuette from his mouth only shove it in deeper.
It should’ve been a kill shot. And it would’ve been, except for the tiny little fact that, like zombies, Zerkers are already dead. He could live like that for days. Weeks.
It’s knock out the brain or keep fighting the Zerker.
“Throw me another one.” I sigh.
Dane does but shakes his head. “Okay, fine, but don’t do that anymore. We can’t lug brass dolphins all over the park all night!”
The guard tosses his head to and fro, desperate to dislodge the dolphin from his cracked and crumbling dentures.
Dane sneaks up behind him, knocking over a stack of postcards in the process, and shoves his own dolphin’s beak into the Zerker’s right temple, unleashing a geyser of black goo.
It does the job. Down goes the guard, never to rise again.
Dane wipes gore on his black jeans and looks up at me, hands on his knees. “She must have turned the security guards,” he says, overstating the obvious.
I cluck my tongue. “It must be nice to have no conscience. You can just turn random, innocent people like Rudy and Wendy and security guard guy here into your own mobile army. Forget Rudy’s parents or Wendy’s boyfriend or this poor dude’s family.”
“She’s a Zerker, Maddy. What’d you expect?”
I ignore him and keep walking, feeling ridiculous but much safer with my pointy dolphin beak held high.
We go deeper into the park, expecting Zerker guards to pop out from every water fountain, picnic bench, or restroom. Splash Zone is huge, by the way, and full of the dripping of hoses and tanks and drying slides.
There are no footprints to guide us, no spiky Stamp hair to follow, just this endless, giant water park and the smiling faces of stuffed dolphins and penguins and sharks staring out from every snack bar and gift shop window.
We walk purposefully to clear each area in turn. First the kiddy slides, then the food court, then the arcade, and then the seal show. We expect to find Stamp at every one.
We don’t. Not yet. We’re walking toward the starfish pond when I hear slapping behind me, like flippers or wet socks.
I look back.
Behind us waddles a dolphin trainer, still stuffed in her neon-blue wet suit and black flippers. Her skin is cement gray, and her eyes are yellow. Blood’s mixed into her seaweed-green ponytail, which rasps across her rubber shoulders with every step.
“Maddy,” Dane shouts, but he’s too far away to help.
Dolphin trainer flounders toward me.
I crouch behind the nearest turtle shell—shaped trash can and take aim at her knee. The minute she pops into view, I kick out until my shoe connects in a bone-crunching snap.
Dolphin trainer goes down. She’s still too fresh to be able to speak but well past feeling anything like pain. Her expressionless eyes look past me, a fiery yellow but blank and dead inside. Dry blood cakes her teeth as she looks around, openmouthed.
I know I can’t feel, that I’m not supposed to feel, but still my heart seems hollow when I think about what’s about to come.
What they never show you in the monster movies is how hard it is to kill someone—something—that still looks human.
A vampire has fangs. No problem: stake through the heart.
A werewolf has fur. No worries: pop a silver cap in that ass.
Frankenstein has bolts on his neck.
A mummy has miles of TP.
But a zombie?
/> How do you kill a humble security guard? Some missing kid from your own hood? A cheerleaderrific dolphin trainer who probably grew up running a petting zoo in her backyard every summer just for fun?
“Maddy!”
The dolphin trainer spots Dane and growls, her shattered kneecap tearing through the blue rubber of her suit as she struggles to stand.
“I know. All right,” I shout, madder at him than I am at this poor stranded Zerker. “Just—I got this!”
Images of undead footballers and reanimated cheerleaders and Zerker Home Ec teachers back in the Barracuda Bay High gym flood my mind as I yank the dolphin trainer’s ponytail back and shove the dolphin beak through her left eye, digging deep until I’m sure her brains are permanently scrambled.
I yank the statue out and watch her writhe on the concrete, right flipper kicking in a chlorinated puddle until it stops. Forever.
“What’d Val do? Turn everybody left in the park?” Dane huffs, standing next to me with an arm over my shoulders.
“That’s what you get for working overtime,” I say humorlessly, taking no joy in wiping an innocent woman’s gray matter off on my own black jeans.
We walk on now, gore under our fingernails, smelly water beneath our feet.
Overhead a speaker squawks, and Val’s voice bellows, “Warmer, kids. You’re getting warmer.”
Dane looks up immediately, as if perhaps Val is a fairy-zombie-mother floating above and he can knock off one of her wings with his brass statuette. Of course that witch is safe, probably in some invisible DJ booth, noshing on some innocent security guard’s cerebellum while we stumble around looking for Stamp.
“We should split up,” I say. “You go find her. I’ll go find—”
“No damn way.” Dane speeds up a little. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you at the end of this ride, and I’m not letting you go it alone anymore. That’s what got Stamp into this mess in the first place. We abandoned him.”
I nod and follow him. I wonder if he’s right. If we’d be here now if we had tailed Stamp 24/7 since we got to Orlando. But how? How do you protect someone who doesn’t want to be protected?
And what kind of Afterlife is it when all you do every day is look over your shoulder for the next Sentinel, the next Zerker, the next random thug to hunt you down?
A Living Dead Love Story Series Page 32
