Darker Than Noir

by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith

  That’s all I’ve done, really. Not such a terrible vice, but perhaps the hours of pretending to investigate acts I’ve committed could be better spent with Stella, willingly or unwillingly, in my arms.

  I peeled open the robe of this Louisiana flower. The sight hypnotized me. If she wasn’t paradise, she would do until the real thing came along. The veil of cigarette smoke was thick in the air, forming an undulating cocoon around the two of us.

  Different music began to play in my mind. I heard the sultry, pulsating rhythm of a saxophone and a woman’s seductive, sexy voice singing to my soul. I took another drag, admired Stella from top to bottom and listened to the tender music in my head.

  Stella didn’t bother to close her robe. I waited for a breathy retort, but she only closed her eyes. I looked at her face searching for acceptance or disgust. I found neither. The room suddenly seemed as small as a phone booth. The tip of my tongue grazed her earlobe. Her only visible reaction to my probing was a sigh of resignation.

  She had nothing to say about my plans for her. A lot of talk always means lies. It goes along with the protective mask everyone wears, not just on Halloween or Mardi Gras, but year round.

  When her eyes opened, they opened slowly as if they were the counterbalanced lids of a doll’s eyes. It was a little spooky even for a man who had done the things I’d done. An odd stillness came over her. “I’ll cook up a couple of steaks, Bill,” she finally said. “I have a special spicy Cajun sauce I think you’ll like.”

  Wed Man Walking

  by Erik T. Johnson

  I. Honest Enough

  While Martin Box, private investigator, had been working late and fell asleep at his desk, zombie hordes started roaming the streets of Brooklyn. He woke on Monday to the screams of people torn to pieces in the street below him. No point going anywhere yet. In the early hours of the morning he fell asleep again.

  Someone opened his office door and woke him.

  She was middle-aged, with ashy brown hair and clear Wedgewood-gray eyes. She wore a brown Calvin Klein dress. She looked honest enough to return too much change but not honest enough to point out she had paid too little. Her face was well preserved from not laughing much. She wore strong perfume that smelled like ozone and flowers, a rosebush struck by lightning.

  “My name is Cheryl Darmstadt. Are you the famous tentacled detective?” she asked.

  “A sucker worn every minute,” he said, wiping some drool away and straightening up.

  “I need you to find my husband,” Mrs. Darmstadt said.

  “He’s probably dead—or otherwise ma’am.”

  “I know. But either way, or if he’s still alive, I want him back. And if he needs burial, I have to give him that dignity.”

  “Any idea how you made it here in one piece? It seems pretty rough out there.”

  “I brought this knife,” she said, holding up an old Ginsu. “But they didn’t look at me—I think they might just be ignoring some people. I tried to move slowly and quietly. I don’t know how it works.”

  Martin didn’t feel like fighting an undead horde. But he didn’t feel like fighting with his live-in girlfriend, the Goddess of Stomping, either. Things had been rocky between them lately.

  “What can you give me to go on?”

  Mrs. Darmstadt took some photographs out of her purse. Mr. Darmstadt was a good-looking guy: Tall, sandy hair, blue eyes like menthol candies, wearing a Jersey Shore tan, car salesman’s smile and a Kennedy’s casual blazer.

  “This helps but I’ll need a little more.”

  “I made a list of places he might be,” she said, handing him a paper. “These things—Rat-Zombies the news is calling them—they seem to congregate in the places they used to go during life.”

  Martin peered out the window. Sure enough, there was a grotesque version of the rude traffic cop who was always ticketing cars across the street, only now instead of biting the head off a driver she was biting the head off a driver.

  “Where did you last see him?”

  “He was going on some kind of spending binge,” she said. “He did that from time to time, I’m not proud of it. He was gambling, and buying things. I don’t know where he got the money.”

  “What does he do for a living, ma’am?”

  “He’s a fundraising consultant,” she said hesitantly. “Mostly for social services agencies, homeless shelters and that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t see his office on this list.”

  “Oh, he had an office but he usually worked from home. So I didn’t include it there.”

  “Do you know the address?”

  “You know, I don’t. He just moved his office so I don’t know exactly where it is.”

  “What’s that perfume you’re wearing? It smells nice. I might want to get some for my girl.”

  “That would be hard. My husband got it for me—he says it’s a very rare exotic formula of some kind.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “I imagine it is. Again, I don’t know where he got the money for it. Speaking of, what would you like for payment?” she asked.

  “It’s going to be like finding a party balloon at a funeral,” he said. “Normally I’d charge an arm and a leg. But you’re keeping me busy and I need that right now.”

  II. Zombies Arise

  It was a hot day but Martin changed into his thick black suit, thinking it would provide better protection against bites if one of those things attacked him. He exited the office without incident though the streets were full of ratz biting everything they could find—cars, lamp-posts, fleeing people, each other. He passed one that had teeth growing through its foot, pinning it to the sidewalk. It slobbered mournfully and swiped at Martin with telephone-cord-long claws.

  Martin slammed his Glock down on the thing’s head until it fell limp. Then he snapped one of its five-foot long teeth out of its spurting gum and pulled it from the ground. It would make a good weapon.

  He was headed to Darmstadt’s office. He’d looked him up in the phone book and then compared the listing to an old Yellow Pages that was propping up his window and found the address had remained the same. If his wife didn’t want him to go there, that’s where Martin was going first.

  According to the directory it was only about nine blocks away. A small ratz with dagger-like fangs came scrambling at him on all fours and Martin speared its head through a Mets baseball cap. While it quivered in a pool of blood, a gang came shambling over, dragging knuckles and teeth, some with corpses skewered on their long fangs and moving with difficulty. Martin fired a few rounds—he was not a great shot—hit once, missed several. Eyes stung with sweat, he ran, slammed into a ratz who almost bit him on the hand, fired a shot—split the forehead—and ran again.

  In an alley, he concentrated and two tentacles telescoped out his tear ducts. These were the side-effect of an earlier trans-dimensional case he’d been involved in, and he knew how to use them to a limited extent. Mostly they were a prop to draw in business.

  The tentacles pulled him up along the side of the building. He couldn’t see with eyes full of tentacle but heard rat-zombies gathering below, breaking their bones against the bricks, biting at air and themselves. Martin dragged himself over the edge of the roof. The tentacles withdrew and he saw through a skylight he was on top of a Buddhist monastery.

  A monk in a saffron robe was seated in full-lotus pose, in tranquil meditation on a zafu cushion. The rest of the room was littered with stripped-clean bones and bloody bodies. Suddenly the monk looked up and saw Martin. He waved and smiled cheerfully, then gestured for him to come down.

  Martin looked to see if anything was moving near the monk but it seemed safe. In the alley, the band of ratz kept coming like junk mail. They were swarming over each other to climb the building. Some had forced the weaker ones to lie on top of each other on their sides, and others were scrambling up the ladder their long teeth made. Martin hit the flight of stairs leading from the roof to the lower floors, locking t
he door behind him.

  It was a simple meditation hall, painted in bright Tibetan colors and strung with colorful prayer flags and images of the Buddha throughout. It smelled like the inside of an old shoe in the stomach of a dead warthog.

  “What happened here?” Martin asked, tooth at the ready.

  “Please, sit down on my cushion—it’s not messy,” the monk said. “My name is Wilbur.”

  Martin didn’t move and the monk stood up.

  “I don’t know precisely what went on here. I was in deep Samadhi and when I opened my eyes, there was all this carnage.”

  “You’re telling me you just sat there quietly with these people being slaughtered right in front of you…”

  “No, friend. I’m telling you I don’t know precisely what went on here. But I know that people arise, people change, people pass into nothing. Similarly, zombies arise, zombies change, zombies cease,” the monk said. “This is just nature.”

  The door Martin had come through burst open and ratz poured out, snapping at each other. Martin raised his gun.

  “Don’t bother,” Wilbur said. “How many mosquitoes have you killed in your life? Plenty, right? But how many are left? They still bother you. Better to take a different attitude toward mosquitoes than to keep killing them.”

  “I don’t want to die. I just want to get to 13th avenue.”

  “But you will die,” the monk said. “It’s just the way things are.”

  The ratz saw them and began loping forward, impeded by their teeth and other bones that had grown through their skin and were sticking out all over like they’d fallen into a pit of spears.

  “Go now,” Wilbur said. “That door there—will get you to 13th avenue.”

  “Come on with me,” Martin said, dashing for the exit.

  “No. Wherever I am is the same,” the monk said as the ratz enveloped him. “There are just the same phenomena at all times and all places.”

  As they bit and tore at his flesh, Martin heard him say in a calm voice:

  “Whatever you are seeking, it has arisen, and it will change and cease.”

  III. The Little Echo

  Darmstadt’s Fundraising Consultants office was over a pet shop. A man who’d gone insane was cowering in shredded newspaper in the window as though he was for sale. Martin had made it there in short time, hidden by the smoke blown from burning cars and fallen trees bitten to the ground by ratz.

  He picked the lock to the office and looked around. It was a small room with file cabinets and a desk and stacks of grant proposals for soup kitchens and workforce development programs and home-delivered meals for seniors, written on behalf of various non-profits. But underneath the desk-blotter was a single sheet of a woman’s personal letterhead with a nearby address, and the name Charlise Johnston. He put that in his pocket and kept searching.

  The file cabinets seemed pretty standard until he noticed a little echo when he closed one of the drawers. He pulled the cabinet away from the wall and found a man-sized hole that led to another room.

  Inside was a $32,000 IBM infoprint printer/scanner and boxes of counterfeit bills. There was also a drafting table. On top of it was a pair of very thin, translucent, skin-looking gloves. In a corner of the room was a large spray can, like the kind exterminators use, with the words VENENUM 8.1 written on it in red letters. Martin kept as far away from it as possible and didn’t touch anything.

  IV. The Chalkboard

  Martin hotwired a Yamaha and took the least gory, corpse-littered streets he could to Charlise Johnston’s condo on Shore Road, facing the Verrazano Bridge and New York Harbor. The wind whipping his face smelled like blood.

  In front of the condo, ratz had climbed the electrical poles to eat birds and pulled them down. Two were tangled in the wires before the door, devouring each other’s rotten hands and cooing uncontrollably. Using the ratz-tooth like a lance, Martin knocked the things down for good and quickly picked the lock, then crammed the tooth diagonally across the door to fortify it.

  The apartment was neat, upper middle-class, and he could tell the person who lived there didn’t have a lot of time for her own life because it was furnished solely with pieces from catalogs: Restoration Hardware, Pottery Barn, and Williams-Sonoma, with Impressionist prints from Art.com.

  Every room was lined with bookshelves loaded with chemistry textbooks, including some written by Ms. Johnston. Apparently she was a big-name in neuropeptide and genetics circles. There was also a heavily thumbed-through and underlined copy of Mein Kampf, several books on the Manson Family, and a privately-printed, early 19th century edition of The 120 Days of Sodom.

  In the bedroom, there were dresser drawers open, a few outfits layed on the bed, shoes missing from a shoe rack in the closet.

  The kitchen had Whole Foods Market bags and organic cleaners and an island with cutlery for every culinary purpose, though some of the knives looked too big for cooking. One wall had a blackboard inset and written in large chalk letters: BARKALOO CEMETERY- MONDAY 3 PM.

  It was 2:45.

  V. Screw Slayer

  Martin heard an overpowering wave of metallic, humming, buzzing, piercing, echoing, sustained discord. He turned the Yamaha into a street full of electric guitars, thrown all over the pavement and blocking the way. Big tumbleweeds of guitar strings rolled here and there, dripping with guts.

  Some long-haired kid had broken the window of a music store, dragged the guitars out into the street hooked up to wireless units, and was letting ratz chase him through the guitars that were all connected to amps in the store and on the sidewalk. The sound was deafening and chaotic, as feet, teeth and claws stomped on the necks of Les Pauls, Strats, and all manner of guitars. The strings snapping and fretboards grinding into the asphalt made Martin dizzy and he lost control of the bike, skidding over a BC Rich Bich and crashing into a Marshall JPM1 stack—which reverberated with a hell of an offended squawk.

  "Woah man!" the kid said. "You okay?"

  He was understandably out of breath, having just used fancy footwork to trick several zombies into tripping over some mike stands.

  "What're you doing," Martin said, rising unsteadily. "Trying to get killed?"

  "Makin' the music in my head, man, music for the end of the world. Screw Slayer, this is the real deal," the kid said. "Watch out!"

  Martin turned, dazed, to find an old grandmother ratz leaping at him from the top of the Marshall. Reflexively his tentacles came out—this time through his heart—and the ratz bit into them and tore out chunks of sweet-smelling greenish flesh. Martin quickly fired into its head and the thing collapsed in a windbreakered heap.

  "Woah, Praise Satan!" the kid yelled, giving Martin the devil horns salute, and jumped over a headless Gibson Explorer, leading a bunch of ratz through a maze of speaker cabs and wah pedals.

  Martin felt his tentacles retracting slowly into his chest and a new, sharp but subtle kind of pain. It was like having a sealed envelope full of pins sewn under his skin and then having the envelope open and the pins spill out into his veins. It was like getting paper cuts inside and feeling a lung expanding where a lung should not be.

  He was not far now, and he ran on foot.

  VI. Something Really Bad

  The streets were mostly on fire and the trees were burning, leaves of smoke whipping high past the tops of apartment buildings and TV antennas and obscuring the stars which were just beginning to appear in the summer sky. There was almost nobody screaming anymore.

  It was a slim chance that Darmstadt and Johnston were going to be at the rendezvous site, but everything was a slim chance—and there they were.

  They were sitting in front of an old revolutionary war tombstone, neatly necking like lovers in a G-rated movie. Next to them were a few traveler’s bags. They were acting as though people's bones weren't busting out through their bodies like earrings through ears and nobody was digesting anyone else. Martin snuck up without them even noticing.

  They smelled strongly of ozone and r
oses—like Mrs. Darmstadt's “luxury” perfume. The scent was almost as overpowering as an avenue full of feedbacking guitars.

  "You two have a lot of explaining to do," he said, and they both startled.

  "Who are you?" Darmstadt asked.

  "Detective Martin Box. Your wife hired me to find you."

  Charlise stared, wide-mouthed.

  "Well, here we are," Darmstadt said, grinning like a car salesman."But you won't be for long."

  "Why are you so sure of your safety?" Martin said.

  "Because, we've got the scent that keeps those ratz away."

  "So that's how she made it to my office unscathed. But have some pity on a man in his last moments. Since you both obviously know so much more about this apocalypse than I do, maybe you could share it with me?"

  "I don’t see why not," Johnston said. "Honey?"

  "Sure," Darmstadt said. "It goes like this: Charlise here is quite a chemist. And she's been working on a little something to share with the world for awhile. You know how really good things, like chocolate, are bad for you? Well this is like something really bad that's bad for you. It’s called Venenum.

  “I printed us up some money and we sprayed it with the special sauce. Then I got around to distributing it as fast I could, dropping it on street corners, gambling, and going on a spending spree. And you've seen what it's done to people—like greed, only gnarlier.

  “This perfume we're wearing keeps them away, makes us invisible to them. But not you."

  "I know enough about people not to ask you why you did it," Martin said. "Obviously you intend to take advantage of your effective invisibility to steal and plunder your way across the country at your leisure. But is there a way to undo it?"