Ashley Parker (Novella): Pinky Swear

by Dana Fredsti

  Pinky Swear

  (An Ashley Parker story)

  by Dana Fredsti

  Balancing on the rickety stepladder inside George’s Zoo Deli and Market, Luke peered out the top of the window above the store’s front doors. He’d left a piece of wood unsecured at one end so he and his three fellow survivors could lift it and check outside to see if the coast was clear.

  So far, it hadn’t been. He knew that even before he’d climbed up to check. You’d have to be deaf not to hear the low, insistent moans and the sounds of shuffling feet moving slowly down the sidewalk and streets outside the store.

  Zombies… walkers… whatever you wanted to call them. They were reanimated corpses with a big appetite for human flesh.

  And wasn’t that fucked up?

  “Are they gone?”

  Jenna peered up at Luke, brown eyes wide and hopeful. He had to bite back the impulse to snap something snarky like “Yeah, and like all the moaning and shit you hear is just people on their way to the zoo to check out the lemurs.”

  But he didn’t. Because not only would it be a lousy thing to say, but if Jenna didn’t wallop him for it, Phil would. Either way, it would hurt.

  So Luke curbed his irritation and kept his reply to a simple, “No.”

  Jenna gave a little hitching sob, doing her best to swallow the noise before it came out. Phil, her uncle, and the owner of George’s Zoo, put an arm around her.

  “Hey, you hear the one about the dyslexic devil worshipper?”

  Jenna shook her head. Phil had an apparently endless supply of jokes, good and bad, and had been pulling them out at random in an attempt to cheer her up.

  “He sold his soul to Santa.”

  Jenna tried to laugh, but all that came out was another weird little choked off sob.

  “It’s okay,” Phil said quietly. “We’ll get out of this. At least we have a safe place to stay, right? And we have plenty of food. How many places you think have a generator? Not a lot. We’re okay for a while."

  Jenna nodded, surreptitiously wiping her eyes before tears fell.

  Luke saw Jenna brush away tears and felt even shittier for his earlier impulse to snap at her. She could handle the toughest customers George’s Zoo had to offer and he knew she didn’t want anyone to see her cry. She’d seen her father die and come back, several of their regular customers torn to pieces … but she still managed to hold things together enough to help them board up the place. She deserved some patience.

  As if on cue, rotting hands slapped against the front doors, demanding entrance. Jenna and Phil looked at each other. They knew who it was.

  Aaron had just stopped by George’s to visit his daughter and brother, have a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and shoot the breeze with some of the regular customers. They’d been talking outside when one of the local homeless guys, Sod—short for ‘skeevy old dude’—had shuffled up.

  A meth-head, Sod was always trying to sell staff and customers old baseball cards or toys or whatever he’d picked out of a dumpster. With the rotting teeth and walking cadaver appearance of a long-term tweaker, Sod generally looked like shit, but he’d looked even worse than usual this time. The whites of his eyes had gone all yellow with streaks of red, breath rattling like marbles in a can, smelling as rancid as a sour milk and shit cocktail. Then he’d gone into convulsions, dropping to the ground as black fluid and blood streamed out of his mouth, nose and eyes.

  Aaron had barely finished dialing 911 when Sod had died… and then woken back up to take a bite out of Aaron’s right calf. Aaron had screamed and collapsed on the ground with pain and shock. Sod took advantage of thisand ripped a hunk out of Aaron’s neck and then turned his attentions to Sean and Jim, two other George’s regulars unlucky enough to be there.

  By the time Phil grabbed a crowbar from the back of the store and cracked Sod’s skull with one powerful swing, his brother was dead on the pavement with Jenna screaming over his prone body. Sean and Jim were bleeding from bite wounds and more fucked up dead things like Sod were lurching and crawling towards the entrance to George’s Zoo. Phil had dragged his niece back into the store and slammed the doors shut, but not before they both saw Aaron’s eyes open and watched him fall on Sean and Jim before they could run.

  The hands slapped again, plaintive moans filtering through the locked doors.

  Dylan, the part-time counter help, looked up from his men’s magazine. Normally clean-cut except for a wild mop of dark hair, Dylan hadn’t washed or used deodorant in days. He grinned, a piece of lettuce stuck between his front teeth. “Guess your dad’s here for dinner, Jenna.”

  Jenna gave Dylan a stricken look and ran into the depths of the store, vanishing behind plastic crates and stacks of wine boxes. Dylan smiled and went back to his magazine.

  Luke took a step towards Dylan, fists clenched, but Phil stopped him with a hand on one shoulder. “No point,” he said. Luke knew he was right, but still…

  Dylan had gotten ahold of his mom on her cell phone the first night … and heard the sounds of her being ripped to pieces along with his brother. Something in Dylan’s mind had fractured, turning the formerly sweet kid who’d have punched himself in the face before hurting Jenna, into a borderline nut job in the space of two days.

  Luke’s fists slowly unclenched. “I’ll go check on Jenna.”

  Phil nodded. “Yeah. I’d appreciate that. Maybe check the door into the garage too, make sure it’s still okay.”

  “Right.”

  Luke checked the back door first. It led into the garage of the apartment building next door and above the store. They’d pushed the large trash, recycle and compost bins in front of it, piling up crates as well to keep those things from pushing it open if they figured out there was food on the other side. Luckily it opened inwards. If it’d opened towards the garage, Luke doubted a few plastic bins would keep the zombies out. Everything was still in place, though, and so far as far as Luke could tell, the garage wasn’t a popular zombie hangout.

  He went to check on Jenna next, finding her at the back of the store in what they jokingly called ‘the atrium.’ The size of a small elevator, the space was enclosed on all four sides with a four foot by four foot sliding glass window leading in and out of it. The walls ended two stories up and the top was open to the sky other than a wide meshed screen. They’d stuck a couple of folding chairs, an upside down crate serving as a little table.

  Luke pushed aside the plastic to find Jenna seated on one of the chairs, staring up at the rapidly fading light. “You okay?” he asked, sitting down across from her. He remembered to breathe through his mouth. The smell filtering down from outside was foul.

  “I know he can’t help it,” she said. “But it still sucks.”

  “Dylan, he doesn’t…” Luke searched for the right words to excuse the inexcusable. He couldn’t find any.

  Jenna gave a sad smile. “Yeah.”

  The sudden sound of footsteps on the roof had them both on their feet in an instant. Luke stood so abruptly that his chair tipped over backwards with a painfully loud clatter.

  If some of those things had gotten up there, maybe from the three-story apartment that butted up against the store, man, they would be so screwed.

  “Hey! You guys dead or alive down there?”

  Jenna and Luke looked up to see a guy dressed in what could only be described as informal SWAT gear crouched down on one side of the atrium ledge. He looked as carefree as someone out for an afternoon stroll. Luke eyed him warily. What the hell was this dude doing on the roof?

  The stranger grinned. “Well, you’re not jumping up and down trying to eat me, so I’ll guess alive. How many of you are there?”

&nbs
p; “Who wants to know?” Luke knew he sounded truculent, but this guy could be – and probably was – a total nut job. Who knew what he might do?

  “Name’s JT,” the guy said cheerfully.

  Luke and Jenna exchanged glances. Jenna gave a slight nod.

  “There’s four of us,” she said.

  “Why are you on the roof?” Luke had to know.

  JT – if that was his name – shrugged. “Easiest way to move around outside and stay alive. There’s a shit ton of zombies out here, and more headed this way.”

  Jenna blanched. “More of them?”

  JT’s grin faded.

  “Sorry. That’s my bad. I’m leading them away from my team.”

  “Well, that’s just great,” Luke snapped. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”

  “The police are going to be sending rescue teams, right?” Jenna looked at the stranger with huge hopeful eyes.

  He shook his head. “They’re in the same sinking boat with everyone else. Shit’s really hit the fan big time. This stuff’s gone global.”

  Jenna gave a choked sob. Luke almost echoed it, his heart dropping into his Doc Martens.

  JT frowned. “Look. I might be able to help, but you’ll have to wait at least a few days, maybe longer. Trust me when I say this is one of those ‘the good of the many outweighs the good of the few’ situations.”

  “Why should we trust you at all?” Luke wasn’t ready to cut any slack.

  “Because I’m one of the good guys. So are the people I’m working with. Mostly.” Then, “You guys have enough food to hold out for a while?”

  “We’ll be okay for a few days,” Luke said, purposefully vague just in case this guy was scouting for potential caches of food and supplies. “But we’ll need to get out of here soon.”

  “I’ll do my best.” JT stood up, flexing his knees as if warming up for a run, and turned to leave.

  “Hey!”

  He stopped, and turned back, looking down at Jenna, who stared up at him with fierce hope. “Promise you’ll come back.”

  JT nodded slowly, as if considering something.

  “Okay. Yeah. I can’t say when, but I swear I will do my best to come back.” He turned to leave, then stopped again. “Unless I’m dead. And then you probably wouldn’t want me to anyway, right?”

  More moans rose, the sound muffled by the fog. JT looked out over the roof.

  “I gotta go meet my team. But first I’ll see if I can get some of these deadheads away from your front door.” He flashed his carefree grin and then bounded away with a war whoop that must have been audible for blocks.

  “Wow.” Jenna’s expression could only be described as hero-worship.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Jenna,” Luke cautioned. “Even if he’s on the level, the odds of him staying alive out there? Not good.”

  Jenna didn’t answer. She was too busy staring up at the foggy sky like a kid waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

  Luke didn’t believe in Santa Claus either.

  * * *

  “Tell me again why we’re doing this?”

  I looked at JT, who sat across from me. He wore his trademark red paisley bandana by way of a hat and a blue tank top that said “I flexed and the sleeves fell off” on the front.

  Typical JT.

  What was atypical of my hyper, free-running pal, however, was the focus with which he studied the San Francisco city map spread out on the cafeteria table between us. He held a highlighter in one hand, using it to mark a path from USCF – our current location -- to the southwest tip of the city, out by the zoo.

  “Because I made a promise.”

  I snorted. “What, did you, like pinky swear or something? Because I’ve made promises before and unless you pinky swear, I don’t think they count.”

  “I don’t do pinky swears,” he said. “The size of my pinky is enough to intimidate normal men and women.” Before I could deliver another retort, he continued, “In my world, a verbal promise is the same as a signed contract. If you don’t want to help, I’ll go by myself. Not like I haven’t parkoured the shit out of this city before, right?”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. But here’s another question for you. How do you expect to get them back here?”

  JT shrugged. “Not sure yet. But better to try than let them starve to death where they are, right?”

  “What about asking for help?”

  “I did. I asked you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I meant, like, asking Colonel Paxton. Like, helicopter borrowing type help. It’s not like helping rescue survivors isn’t part of our mission statement, right?”

  JT cocked his head to one side and considered my words. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t think about asking Scary-Ass mo-fo Paxton ‘cause I kind of assumed he’d say no.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I have to say, I’m kinda surprised at this unexpected jellyfish backbone of yours. I mean, for someone who’s not afraid of barreling through streets and up walls onto roofs like a monkey on angel dust while in the middle of a full on zombie apocalypse, you’re pretty much being a wuss when it comes to Paxton.”

  JT regarded me unapologetically over the map. “Did I mention ‘scary ass mo-fo?’”

  He had a point. Paxton was, as far as I could tell, an honorable man, but when it came to ethics, he was definitely a “needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few” type person. I’m more Kirk than Spock on this issue, so it’s not surprising we’d butted heads when Lil and I had gone rogue, so to speak, to rescue Lil’s cats without permission. We’d brought back valuable Intel along with two overweight felines, but Paxton had threatened to have us locked up if we did anything like it again and I had no doubt he’d been totally serious.

  Which meant if I wanted to help JT – and I really did because I had to do something that made a difference to someone, somewhere, or I’d go crazy – I needed to talk to Paxton.

  Damn.

  I heaved a sigh. “You want me to talk to Dad for you?”

  “Would you? He’s always liked you best.”

  “Fine,” I grumbled. “But you’re coming with me. And I need more coffee first.”

  “ “ “

  JT gave a slight mental sigh of relief when Ashley left the table to get a cup of java to go. He liked Ashley. The girl was smoking hot and a veritable zombie-killing machine, but her level of sarcasm sometimes made his look normal and reasonable. Not an easy thing to do. And since they’d returned from San Diego, she’d been worse than usual.

  One of the reasons he’d asked Ash to help him was because she’d seemed… well… lost ever since Lil’s Mom had turned up. Looking after Lil had been the one thing Ashley could hold onto after the search for Gabriel had ended with a possible cure for the Walker’s, … and Gabriel’s death. Not even a Sophie’s Choice type thing either. Just a real fucktard stepping in to make the world a shittier place by taking out one of the good guys for no other reason than vengeance. JT wished the guy was still alive so he could kill him, even though Ash had done the job herself.

  At any rate, he was pretty sure her current ratcheted ‘goes to eleven’ level was an emotional buffer to keep from being hurt by anything else. He also sensed that trying to talk to her about it would be pointless. No, the girl needed a good old-fashioned rescue mission: to get out there, save a few people, and kick some zombie ass.

  Zombies. They’d gone from the ginger-haired stepchild of the pop cultural monster world, to the belles of the Horror Ball, to the probable end of the human race. And didn’t that just suck? Unless, of course, Professor Fraser, Dr. Arkin and her associate Dr. “Crazypants” Albert could perfect that vaccine they were working on.

  According to Ash, there was at least a decent chance they could whip something into shape that would bolster people’s resistance to the zombie virus. JT wouldn’t mind that, although he’d prefer the full on immunity plus enhanced senses and abilities that wild cards like Ash had.

  “Ready?” Ash returned, a to-go coffe
e cup in each hand. “Black, right?” She plunked one down in front of him. The kind of thoughtful gesture he hadn’t seen from her in a while.

  JT gave himself a little mental pat on the back. Yup, a good old-fashioned rescue mission was just what the doctor ordered.

  * * *

  “You’re asking for a helicopter to fly you across San Francisco on the off chance these people are still alive, and then bring them back here to take up our resources?”

  JT and I sat near Colonel Paxton and Simon in the first floor briefing room, Paxton at his usual place of power at the head of the large conference table. JT had the map of San Francisco spread out in front of them.

  “Yessir, that’s about it.”

  I could tell JT wanted to punch Colonel Paxton in the chops even though he kept a big smile on his face. Or maybe I was just projecting my own violent urges here. I definitely wanted to hit him.

  “Isn’t our job to find survivors and see that they get to a secure facility?” I stared at Colonel Paxton coolly, then added, “Or is that just something we’re telling the surviving media for good press?”

  Yeah, if there was a Geiger counter for sarcasm, it’d be doing that clicking shit right off the charts. I didn’t care.

  Paxton matched my cool look and lowered the temperature to arctic. “Yes, Miss Parker, that’s part of our mission.”

  Unfazed by the polar chill, I leaned in and said, “Then let us do this.”

  “Point of fact, Miss Parker,” Paxton replied, “is that one of our helicopters is currently being utilized for just those purposes across the bay in Marin, and the other is ferrying supplies from our base at Big Red. There won’t be one available until tomorrow morning.”

  I turned to JT. “So we make our way there on foot, see if your peeps are still alive, and then call for extraction.”

  “Works for me.”

  Simone frowned.

  “JT, you do realize Ash and the rest of the wild cards have enhanced night vision. So what might be easy for them could be a fatal stumbling block for you.”

  “I’ve got great night vision,” JT said with a shrug. “And I know San Francisco. Part of the challenge – and the fun of free running - is practicing in all types of weather, night and day. No offense, Ash, but I can run circles around you when it comes to getting from Point A to Point Z.”