Monsters & Mayhem Omnibus 1

by Dan Decker

  Using fingers from his hand that held the machete, he twisted off the top of the gas pouch and tossed it toward the nestling.

  The nestling danced back and sniffed the air. It always amazed him that even the baby zampys seemed to have so little fear of humans. It was almost as if they understood that they had replaced humans at the top of the food chain.

  There was one thing though that gave him a momentary advantage. Nestlings tended to be more curious than the adults. An adult would have already attacked him by now.

  Parry waited while the little zampy continued to test the air. It took several steps to the side and returned its focus to Parry, who bit off a curse. The frickin' gas hasn't even phased it, he thought. He'd only tried it once before indoors, and it had worked without a problem.

  The original hissing sound hadn’t been too close by; otherwise, Parry would have been on their radar now and already shooting to defend himself. No, he bet the nest was far enough down the other side of the hill that he was still okay. At least he’d caught onto their presence before he’d created a silhouette against the skyline at the top of the hill. He'd been moving fast because this stretch of land had been clear last time he'd been this way.

  Parry raised both of his hands above his head and waved the machete in the air, hoping to scare the zampy nestling away, but it remained unmoved and continued to sniff the air. He felt a little foolish and was glad that nobody was around to observe his crazy antics.

  When he saw that it wasn't working, Parry lowered his hands and tried to think of something to do next. He wished that he had one of those high-powered pellet guns. Those were quiet and powerful enough to handle a situation like this. He'd have to think about making the investment.

  The last time he'd seen one of them he'd thought they were a kid's toy, but now he could see that there would be a use for one of them.

  While he was trying to decide what to do next, the nestling attacked. One moment it stood, forearms outstretched sniffing the air; the next, it had bowed its head forward, charging.

  Parry sprung to meet it, his machete already swinging down. He swiped and missed. The zampy bit his boot. Suppressing a growl, he shook it off and twisted out of the way of its snapping mouth. He took another swing and this time was able to sever its head with a clean cut through its neck.

  2

  Parry heaved a sigh of relief as he looked around to make sure there wasn't anything else sneaking up on him before he used his free hand to unzip another pocket from his vest and pull out a bag of homemade bleach wipes.

  The zampy blood carried the virus, same as their saliva, but neither alone was enough to infect a man. It was the paralyzing venom that would knock a man flat on his back for three days that gave the virus the opportunity to thrive and convert a man to a zombie.

  Half the time the zampy would have decided to just eat their victim instead. As far as Parry was concerned, that would have been the better fate, even if the rumors were true that you could still feel pain when they started to chew on you.

  There were some smugglers that didn't bother to keep things as clean as Parry, but he wasn't about to change his habits. The world had become a constantly changing place since the Denver comet. Just because the zampy virus was weak today, it didn't mean it would stay that way.

  While it would take three or more days for a man to convert to a zombie after a zampy bite, it took less than five minutes for the bite of a zombie to change a man.

  He acted as if the zampy virus was just as potent as a zombie bite because he expected that one day it would be.

  Using several fingers to hold the bag of wipes, he pulled one out and cleaned off the blade of his machete. When he was done, he inspected it to make sure that he'd got everything and resheathed it.

  The next thing he did was look at the bite mark on his boot where the zampy had tried to sink the venom into him. It had scratched the surface, and there were two very small scratches on the leather but luckily neither had penetrated to the metal. It wasn't the first time that his reinforced boots had come in handy. They'd been more than worth the hefty sum that he'd paid for them.

  Tossing aside the bloody wipe from the machete, he took out another, bunched it up and used the tip of the wad to clean his boot. That would do until he got home and could send them through a proper disinfection process.

  At one time his boots had been a natural color of brown, but they'd been cleaned so many times that he had to occasionally paint them brown again. A man with white boots would stand out like a two-year-old zombie in the middle of a chicken coop.

  Afterward, Parry wiped some sweat from his forehead as he set his backpack down on some dry grass and leaned it against a rock behind some sagebrush. He quietly tore several branches from nearby plants and used them to cover his bag.

  His moment of indecision about which way to go was gone. In for a penny, he thought. If he didn't finish off the rest of the zampys now, he risked them discovering the body of the nestling. The paternal instinct of the savage beasts wasn’t something to mess around with.

  With one down, the rest had to go. His forty pound backpack would hamper his ability to move.

  If there weren’t more than a couple of zampys, he could be quick about taking care of them so he could be on his way. But if there were more than that or if he ended up walking into something that would be much harder to deal with than he anticipated, it was prudent to make sure that his bag was hidden.

  If his anti-venom turned up missing, this would have all been for nothing. He might as well have just turned around and gone home instead of mucking with the zampys.

  Most of the village-like compounds that were in need of anti-venom reached out to contacts personally in addition to the coded shortwave radio broadcasts.

  They only paid full price to the first smuggler to show up. That didn’t mean they still wouldn’t buy the medicine and put it in on ice, they just wouldn’t pay top dollar for it any longer because chances were it wouldn’t be any good the next time they needed it, unless they had a generator that could keep the anti-venom cold.

  He couldn't remember whether or not the Sullivan compound generated their own electricity. He doubted that they did.

  He bit his lip as he stared down at his bag. The refrigeration capsules that kept the anti-venom cool were hidden at the bottom of his bag in what appeared to be cans of food.

  If another smuggler came along and tried to rob him, he had another ice pack at the top of his bag with vials of watered down red corn syrup. So even if his bag was found, he should be okay.

  It was against the unwritten order of things to take anything other than the anti-venom. Being caught without the other necessities was the difference between life and death. Smugglers could be cold, but most weren't murderers.

  He'd even helped himself to the goods of others, but he always left their ammo and other supplies.

  There was another hiss followed by a multitude of squeaks from below the hill and he brought up his rifle. The hiss wasn’t any closer than before but given that there were a bunch of baby zampys—what else could the squeaking be?—down there as well, Parry could plan on at least two full grown adults, if not more. He’d never heard of a zampy colony forming in less than two weeks, but he wasn’t about to take the chance that it was something else.

  I hope they don’t have any frickin' bonded zombies, he thought. That had caught him off guard the first time that it had happened. He'd heard that zampys would sometimes bond a zombie but hadn't believed the story. It had seemed a ridiculous claim, but the first time a zombie had charged him after he'd just finished cleaning up a zampy nest, he'd learned the hard way.

  He should have taken the claims more seriously. The zampy threat seemed to always be evolving and what wasn't true the day before seemed to turn out as fact more often than not. It was a long time before anybody out west even realized that there was a connection between the two.

  The initial zombie infection had moved faster than the grow
th rate of the zampys, and for the first couple of years after the meteor, the connection hadn’t been apparent. It wasn’t until later on, once the first wave of zombies had been stopped at the Mississippi River, that the zampy infestation started to spread out and it became evident that the first zombies had been created by a virus spread by the zampys.

  Crawling on all fours, Parry moved towards the top of the hill and was careful to keep his rifle out of the dirt. He’d just cleaned it last night and hoped to make it at least a few more days before he had to clean it again. He normally employed an old hunter’s trick by putting some masking tape over the muzzle, but he’d been in a hurry this morning and had forgotten it. Perhaps that was for the best anyway, he got tired of cleaning off the sticky residue left by the tape. He’d just have to be more careful.

  When he had almost reached the top of the hill, he looked back over his shoulder to check on his bag and make sure that one of the creatures weren’t sneaking up on him. He was careful to inspect all the nearby brush for the dark glistening eyes of the nestlings.

  It would be just his luck to have one of those little suckers sneaking up on him when the adults started to attack.

  The zampys were silent. Unless one of them was upwind and close enough for him to pick up on their stench, he wouldn’t see them until it was time to pull the trigger. This was why he always kept his finger outside the trigger guard of his rifle when he was moving. If a zampy were to surprise him, he’d have less than a couple of seconds to send a round through its chest.

  Why couldn’t it have been zombies? he thought. At least then I would have had plenty of time, even if there had been a dozen down there.

  The sagebrush covered ground was still except for a slight breeze that Parry was happy to still feel blowing towards him from the other side, putting him upwind of the Zampys, assuming of course that there weren’t any coming at him from behind, which was a distinct possibility. At the thought, he looked back down the hill, even though he’d just cleared the area.

  What was that?

  Parry focused on a small tree where he thought he saw movement. It had looked like he'd seen blond human hair for a second there but as he stared at the place, he almost dismissed it as a trick of his imagination. He had after all seen it from his peripheral vision.

  He’d skirted his way around several zombies earlier; perhaps it was one of them. He’d been so busy trying to avoid the last one that he couldn’t remember the color of its hair, or even if it had been male or female. The brush was more than fifty feet away. That would be plenty of time to handle a zombie, assuming he didn’t get too busy dealing with what was in front of him.

  Making a note to keep an eye on his rear, he turned his attention back toward the zampy nest and crawled the rest of the way forward. He peeked his head over the top. The other side of the hill was mostly covered in sagebrush as well, though there were a few trees and shrubs.

  At the bottom of the hill was a river that had willow trees growing on either side of it. Parry eyed the place where he crossed on the rocks that he used as stepping stones. He doubted that they’d occurred that way naturally, but he had never given it much more thought than that. He'd just assumed that this was a well-kept secret by the people that lived in the area.

  Hidden paths like this had sprung up all over the place when Weston had shown up and started killing people.

  Parry scanned the ground on the other side of the river and took note of four zombies that were moving in the brush. They were heading away from him, which was also the way he was headed.

  He sighed.

  Zombies, of course, there would be more zombies ahead too. He just hoped they weren’t bonded to the zampys. If he had to, he’d put the zombies down, but he didn’t like to do that. He believed the zombies could still be treated and that one day they’d recover.

  Well, he thought, only those that still had a glimmer humanity if their eyes. The longer a person was a zombie, the more that disappeared. Last week, he’d been forced to put down a zombie that had been crawling on all fours because it had lost its legs. It looked like one of those that had frozen during the winter but had started kicking again once things had thawed.

  Despite his reticence in killing zombies, he did have a rule: if a zombie got within ten feet, he’d kill it, no questions asked. Two bullets to the chest and one to the head once it was down and just to make sure he always cut off the head.

  He’d heard rumors of headless zombies but that he didn’t believe. There wasn’t much known about how the zampy virus worked, but it was apparent that it needed a functioning host to thrive. How the zombies were able to survive frozen in the winter, he didn’t know, but remove the head and you had a corpse, of that much he was certain.

  Until he learned that he wasn't.

  A smuggler learned to expect the impossible or he ended up dead.

  The zombies were wandering away from the zampy nest, but that wasn’t any indication of whether or not they were bonded to the zampys. There wasn’t much intelligent communication between the two, but if the zampys had created those zombies, they’d come when called.

  Unless he was willing to turn back and take the risk of the zampys hunting him, he’d just have to take the risk of having to deal with them as well.

  He fixed the position of the zombies in his mind and searched for the zampy nest. It took him several moments to locate the most likely area.

  There were several large rocks at the base of the hill that was about twenty feet away from the river. Zampys tended to like to keep something at their backs, and the way the boulders were placed seemed an ideal location.

  There was another pile of rocks that could have been a good contender, but he had a good enough view of it from his place on the hill to see that there wasn’t a nest there.

  He glanced behind him toward the place where he had seen the blond hair. There wasn’t a zombie as far as he could see, so far so good. The tree looked the same, but something about it struck him as odd. The vegetation at the bottom didn’t look as thick as it had before.

  He cursed under his breath as he scanned the rest of the area again, hoping to find signs of other vegetation that looked out of place. Nothing popped out, but there were half a dozen places within ten feet that could have hidden a person. If the blond hair had belonged to a zombie, it would already be heading his way, lumbering along. They didn't bother to hide. Lay in wait, yes; hide while moving? No.

  That meant it hadn’t been a zombie. His assumption had been a mistake. Whoever was following him knew what they were doing, and they were staying out of sight.

  He was all of the sudden aware of how exposed he was at the top of the hill. He’d become so focused on the zampys on the other side he’d neglected to remain under good cover as he moved up this side. Whoever was behind him knew he was there.

  Given the fact they hadn’t just stayed put and waited for him to move on, he was becoming concerned that he was being hunted. Was it one of Weston's men?

  If so, the idiot might just come out and arrest him. Some of Weston's men were slow studies and hadn't picked up on the nuances of dealing with the living dead and their makers out in the wild.

  The last thing he needed was some haughty lawman causing a muck of things and breaking his distraction from the zampys. They'd both wind up dead in that scenario.

  As he considered his options, he wished he wouldn’t have left his bag hidden below. If he needed to make a run for it, he didn’t want to lose his bag.

  He had enough ammo filled magazines on his person to handle whatever lay ahead or behind, assuming he wasn’t attacked by a zombie mob or more than a half a dozen zampys.

  If there wouldn’t have been zampys close by he might have just tried speaking to whoever was following him. Seeing if he could call their bluff by showing that he knew they were hiding in the brush.

  Instead, he was now faced with the challenge of dealing with foes in front as well as behind.

  He lowered his h
and and released his pistol from his holster and brought it out, careful to keep from making a clicking sound by keeping a finger over the releasing mechanism. If he was attacked from the sage brush, he didn't want to be stuck with only his rifle available.

  Some of those bushes were just too frickin' close.

  He resisted the urge to look back at where he’d hidden his bag. Whoever was back there had been following him long enough that they would have seen him hide it. Looking back now would make them suspicious he was onto them.

  He grimaced as he set his pistol on the ground in front of him, hoping to keep it from getting too dirty. A little dust shouldn’t affect the operation of his Glock, but he preferred to keep it clean anyway. A clean weapon was one he could rely on. The hairs on the back of his neck felt like they were standing on end, whether it was his imagination or a legitimate sign, he couldn’t decide.

  It was possible he’d imagined the blond hair. When he’d last looked at the vegetation below the tree, he’d been at a different vantage point. That could explain the difference in the fullness of the brush he’d been worried about.

  He exhaled and pushed the thought away. His instincts told him he was being followed. It was safer to act as if he was.

  After checking the placement of his elbows, he brought up his rifle and looked through the Triton sight down at where he believed the nest to be and waited for something to happen, either in front or behind.

  On a normal encounter if one of the Zampys didn’t show its head within a few minutes, he might try making some noise to get their attention, but he couldn’t afford to do that today with the zombies just ahead and the stalker on his tail. There was only so much that a man could deal with at any one time.

  It would be ideal if he could handle each of these problems individually, but life didn’t often work out that way. He almost took out one of his grenades and set in on the ground for easy access as well, but then thought better of it. That would be a last resort if the situation demanded a drastic action.