Reanimated Readz

by Rusty Fischer

  My fingers clutch tight around the stun gun as I head toward the door.

  I hear scrambling behind me, more chuckling and then, “I don’t know what you did to her, pal, but it must have been something. She came to us, Reggie 4. They never do that. She came to us—”

  I turn back to find them helping each other to their feet.

  I smirk, take two steps and stun them, both, twice in the back of the neck. I watch them drop, one by one, to the cold tile floors. I take the noose off the one guy, pull their arms behind them, and replace it around all four of their hands, cinching it tight but not too tight.

  I should have done that from the very beginning. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t thinking; I guess I was just acting. I’ll have to be more careful from now on.

  I study them for a second. They both wear belts around their waists, and little pouches hold cans of mace, the other one’s stun gun, and knives. No radios, no cell phones. I stand back up and smile.

  As I turn to leave, I spot something shiny on the floor. Keys.

  Nice.

  I slip the stun gun in my back pocket, twirl the keys around one ice-cold finger, and walk from the café. There is a crowd around the corner, and they gasp when they see me, but nobody does anything. They just stand behind the wooden barrier and gawk.

  I see butterfly girl out of the corner of my eye and she’s smiling, wickedly, like maybe I’m not so bad after all.

  I smirk and turn toward the black van. I look left while crossing the street, waiting for a second team of Relocators to speed around the corner at any moment. So far, so good.

  I turn to my right and it’s the same deal. Nothing and nobody. At least, not yet.

  I walk up to the back of the van. There are two windows, both tinted, but I can see through them in the early evening twilight. Inside, Julia is seated on a kind of metal bench bolted to the side wall of the van. Across from her, clueless, the third Relocator asks her questions and takes notes in a pad that looks a lot like the one from her messenger bag.

  I nod and look down. There is a knob on the left van door. I reach out and twist it, tight, then tighter, until it snaps off and leaves the door practically welded shut.

  There is movement inside and as the van rocks to and fro, I watch Julia’s face while the third Relocator rushes to the door, frantic to open it. He shoves and budges and launches his broad shoulder into the door panel. Nothing.

  I smile, letting Julia see me smile.

  I open the driver’s side door, slide in, and look in the rearview mirror. There is heavy wire grating between me and Julia, the kind you’d see in a cop car, only two or three times thicker.

  Sweet.

  The engine turns over smoothly, and I pull away before the crowd can react. The wheels are big and fat and make short work of downtown traffic as I take the exit going north and hit the freeway doing eighty.

  The nearest Relocation Camp is twenty miles in the opposite direction. If I can keep this pace, at least for the next hour or so, I can reach the Free Zone, where the Relocators have no say and the zombie laws don’t apply.

  Of course, that’s because no humans live there, but by the time we arrive, it’ll be okay. There will be no humans in the van to complicate matters.

  The grate behind me is steel, but mesh. I can hear Julia plotting with the other Relocator, cursing him because the only radio is up front, which reminds me.

  I find it, grip it, and yank it from the dashboard. It rides shotgun, next to the stun gun, just in case my two passengers start any funny business. I drive and drive, and keep my eyes open for a rest stop, someplace with quick off and easy-back-on access where I can stop the van, yank open the back door, and bite a couple of scumbags before I get to the Free Zone.

  Then again, I could just show up with them in the back, and let the zombies do their worst. The thought makes me smile, and I cruise on it awhile longer.

  Either way, it’s nice to be in the driver’s seat for a change. And I wonder, after so long in the Camp, how it will feel to live without bars from now on.

  I’m thinking, probably pretty good.

  I smell Julia’s breath before I hear her speak. It’s like warm coffee on the back of my neck. “They made me do it,” she blathers, grating in my ear. “The Relocators, I mean. They never believed you, not from the—”

  “The less you talk,” I interrupt, “the longer you live.”

  “Seriously, Reggie. You know I’d never do that to you, to…us.”

  “Like I said, Julia. Talk less, live longer.”

  “W-w-what are you going to do, Reggie?”

  I look up into the rearview mirror. Her eyes are like brown beacons beaming out of the dark recesses behind the wire. “You wanted a story, right, Julia? I’m going to give you one. You get to decide whether it has a happy ending or not.”

  She slides back in the dark, mouth quivering, unsure.

  But that’s a lie. I’ve already seen the sign for the Mount Crestview rest stop, twenty miles up. It’s just dark enough now; I can pull off, do the deed and get back on the highway without losing too much time.

  I wonder, idly, as I drive through the night, if Julia’s eyes will still look as cold when she’s undead.

  I mean, they couldn’t look any colder….

  ***

  The exit is empty this time of night. An hour earlier and it would have been crawling with rush-hour traffic, and an hour from now, it will be steady with folks stopping off for a quick cup of coffee from the automated vending machines.

  For now, not so much.

  I cruise around behind the building, by the picnic tables, and back the van in behind a cluster of trees. You can see it, if you’re close enough, but not until you’re right on top. I can hear Julia whispering to the third Relocator, her voice low and urgent.

  I ignore her and turn off the van.

  “Hey,” I grunt through the mesh wire grate. “Hey, you, come here.”

  Julia looks at the Relocator as if to say, impatiently, “He’s talking to you.”

  He inches forward, uncertain. I wave him closer in.

  “Closer,” I say, voice low. “I want to ask you what to do about her—”

  He’s taken the bait. The minute he gets close enough, his ear to the grate, I jam the stun gun into the wire and send a jolt of current through his brain. He slumps to the floor and before I can let Julia’s screams distract me, I leap from the driver’s seat and sprint to the back of the van.

  It’s shaking. I can hear her in there, feel her, panicking. That’s good. I wait until her anxiety has reached a fever pitch before yanking open the back door, wincing as the twisted metal scrapes against itself before finally swinging open.

  She is standing, mid-stride, eyes wide as hubcaps.

  “No, Reggie, no!”

  There is real fear in her voice. It may be the only real thing about her. I don’t waste time or prolong her pain. Hard as I hate her, it’s not worth it. Her skin is soft beneath my teeth and her blood, so young, so alive, fills my cells with life of its own.

  I have to stop myself, physically, after only a few bites, otherwise I’d devour her. It’s almost too good to stop.

  She slumps, soaked in her own blood, in the corner of the van. I use thick plastic strips from the Relocator’s belt to tie his hands behind his back and leave him be.

  For now. It takes a few minutes for Julia’s body to reboot, for her cells to die off and be reborn into something dead, but different. She comes to with a snort, her eyes already dark, her soul cooling.

  She blinks at me with recognition, then disinterest. I’m not what she wants. At least, not yet. I watch her nostrils flare as she sniffs out the human meat. She looks toward me, as if for permission, and when I make no move to stop her, she begins gnawing on the young man’s head.

  Forget the fact that he’s wearing a black ball cap. She chews right through that until she reaches flat skull. Then she chews through that as well. I wince and step
outside the van, shutting the door over but still hearing the sound of my ex-girlfriend chowing on the poor Relocator’s brain.

  She steps from the back of the van a few minutes later, still wiping the gore from her chin. She is settled now; she’ll be fine. Even so, the stun gun is behind my back, just in case.

  She eyes me warily, porcelain skin dotted with flecks of blood and brain stem juice. She looks prettier, with those dark eyes.

  “I guess I deserve this,” she grumbles. Her voice is gray and grim.

  I smile. Now she sounds like me, like all of us. “I’d say we’re even,” I grumble back, pocketing the stun gun.

  I bend down to tighten my shoelaces. When I look up, she hasn’t moved. I finish, stand, and walk past the van.

  “Where are you going?” she asks, the hint of desperation in her throat.

  “I’m going to start walking toward the Free Zone. It’s just over that hill, give or take a few miles.”

  “W-w-what about me?” she asks, but I can tell by the crunch of gravel that she’s following me.

  “Like I said, Julia. We’re even. You do what you want from now on. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t do it with a pulse.”

  The grass of the picnic area crunches beneath my feet, and keeps crunching even when I pause to tear a thin branch off the nearest tree.

  I use the branch as a walking stick and strike out for the Free Zone. She follows, not closely, but just to my left. I smile. Maybe that’s all I wanted, after all. To get, to have Julia back. I would have never bitten her if she’d played nice, but maybe in the back of my mind, when she called to interview me, I knew she wouldn’t be nice.

  Maybe, the whole time, I knew she would do this to me. And I knew I could beat her, for once, at her own game.

  And I knew that, when I did, we’d be together forever.

  And now we are, for better or worse.

  And I’m glad she’s just a little behind and to the left, so she won’t see me smile for the first time since Mr. Croft showed up at my family’s door….

  Project Z

  A Reanimated Readz Story

  By

  Rusty Fischer

  There are three cages. Cage 1, Cage 2, and Cage…well, you figure it out. Cage 1 is full of the rowdy, rough–and-tumble, real zombies. We call them the Thugs because, well, that’s how they act.

  They’re still vaguely human. They can talk, mostly, and dress themselves—though not well, judging by their tendency to wear their shirts inside out, the tag in front, and read the instructions on a can of brains—but you wouldn’t want to cross their path in the middle of the night without being in a shark cage, let’s just put it that way.

  Cage 2 has the Fugs. We call them that because well, they’re fugly. Most are homeless, probably. Some just got out of prison, more than likely. Others are skanked-out, skeevy drug addicts fresh off the corner.

  They pick them up on the street, I suppose, clean ’em up, put ’em in the standard fug pajamas—thin and white with blue stripes—and stick ’em in Cage 2.

  Me? I’m in Cage 3. We call ourselves the Drugs, because that’s what we take: drugs. I don’t know what they are, the drugs we take. They’re supposed to stave off the infection that wiped out the rest of our town so we don’t end up in Cage 1 with the Thugs.

  It means, okay, technically we’re still the living dead but we’re more living than dead. Our hearts still beat, a little—we still have to breathe, a little. You cut us, we still bleed. The drugs aren’t supposed to stop us from becoming full-fledged zombies like the Thugs, but just delay it.

  I’m not sure how well they work. I’ve been here two weeks, give or take, since Faraway Falls got infected, and I feel like crap frozen over. Look like it, too. There’s no mirror in the cage but back in my room there is, and man, I’m waiting for Hollywood to call me up any minute. We’re talking gray skin, black eyes, hollow cheeks. I must have lost twenty pounds since I’ve been here.

  The buzzer rings, and the Thugs go wild. That’s what they do, stupid Thugs. Shaking the bars of their cages, rattling the rest of our bones, drooling and mewling in that way they do because they know that blood is about to be spilled.

  There are four of them in their cage, each more disgusting and depraved than the rest. I shudder to think that, one day, I’ll be like them, too. But not now. Now I’m still conscious and coherent and can at least put my shirt on right side in.

  And the Fugs, well, they just kind of cower. Knowing what’s coming next. What’s coming? Me. I’m next. I look at the rest of the Drugs in the cage—kids like me, really. Classmates from my old school: the jock, the actual thug, and the Goth chick.

  We’ve been here, together, in this place, whatever it is, ever since our school got overrun by zombies a few weeks ago. Why we survived and no one else did, well, we’re still trying to figure that out. No one here will tell us.

  They nod and step aside. My turn.

  I move to the front of the cage and clench, then unclench my fists. I’m cold in my sweatpants and tank top, but wearing more doesn’t make me any less cold. The doctor in charge here says it comes from inside. No sense putting on clothes to cover the outside.

  Besides, I was always a little “husky” before, so it’s nice to wear a tank top and not be self-conscious about my moobs and baby-fat belly. Now they’re all gone, replaced by lean, hard muscle.

  I roll my head around and listen to the tendons crack in my neck; the Fugs shrink back in their cage. Technically, you’re not supposed to move beyond the square in the middle of the warehouse floor, the crooked one made out of red tape, but I always drift a little bit over toward Cage 2 just to spook the Fugs a smidge.

  “Conner,” says Dr. Creed, who’s in charge of our cage. Shoot, he’s pretty much in charge of this whole place. “Play nice.”

  I chuckle, watching the nearest Fug pee his pants.

  Dr. Creed eyes me warily. “You’re getting a little too good at this, Conner,” he says, scratching his trademark goatee. “I’m going to have to move you in with the Thugs if you get any better.”

  He winks. It’s an old joke. Nobody wants to be a Thug, not even the Thugs.

  “Maybe if you’d come up with a more humane way of feeding us brains,” I say, bending over at the waist to touch my toes. I hear my spine crack with the effort. You have to be alert, after all. Some of these Fugs are pretty fast. “I wouldn’t have to get so good at this.”

  Creed nods toward one of the guards by Cage 1. “I think you like being good at this, Conner. I think it suits you.”

  As the guard unlocks the cage and reaches in to grab a Fug, I look back at Creed. He takes a step back.

  “I think you’re right,” I growl.

  I can smell the Fug’s fear from the middle of the square. He’s big, but greasy and fat. Part of the smell isn’t just fear, but the street. Sweat and urine and grease and smoke and booze ooze from his pores as he stumbles next to the guard, trying to stay as close to him as he can—for as long as he can.

  His pajamas are ill-fitting and already yellowed under his massive armpits. I crouch low and wait. This guy looks like a runner. He blinks, twice, sweat dripping down the furrows of his—yep, there he goes!

  He tosses off the guard and plows through Dr. Creed, racing toward the massive warehouse doors and kicking off the cheap plastic flip-flops they gave him as he goes.

  His bare feet slap against the cold concrete floor as he tries to make his escape, either forgetting or unaware of the half-dozen more guards just outside the warehouse door.

  I take the shortcut, right past the Thugs’ cage, and catch him just before he reaches the doors. Not that he could get out, anyway. They bolt them every time we have one of these cage matches, but still.

  I grab him by the meat of his right arm and kick out his left leg. He lands on his back with a sickening thwunk-splat as his fat head hits the warehouse floor and splits wide open. The smell of blood fills my nostrils and I’m on him, instantly. I know we�
�re supposed to kill them first. That’s the humane way to do it, or so says Dr. Creed.

  But I’m hungry. It’s been two days since I’ve fed and I can smell his brain seeping through the crack in the back of his skull like the bulge of a tube inside a popped tire. I kneel on his neck and ignore his greasy, fat hands as they tear at my tank top and pound on my arms.

  I reach for the hole in his skull and pry one gray finger in, deeper, deeper, cracking it open even wider and kneeling down until my teeth can find purchase in the thin bone that stands between me and dinner.

  Or is it lunch? Breakfast? They’ve blacked out all the windows in the warehouse so it’s hard to tell. He squirms beneath me, punching, kicking, but I barely notice. Besides, as one of the near-dead, I hardly feel the pain of his fists in my neck or his knees in my back.

  The hole is bigger now, the one in his head. My fingers and teeth do their work until at last I can tear away a giant chunk of his brain, about the size of a chicken wing, and gnaw it as blood and clear liquid drip onto his pajama shirt.

  I watch as his eyes go glassy, a bloody bubble forming between his thinly parted lips as he chokes on one last word. One fist pounds in vain on my left hip as the bubble pops and his lids close and the word dies with him. I chew more slowly now, reaching in with two expert fingers to drag an even bigger chunk of brain out through the ragged hole in his skull.

  Only when the Fug is dead, only when his brain is sizzling on the tip of my tongue, its pure electricity filling my cold, almost dead cells, do I hear the roar in the vast warehouse.

  It washes over me in waves. The grunting and groaning of the Fugs, the clanking of the bars as they rattle them to and fro, the stamping of their feet. They yell at me, cursing me for taking their friend.

  I look up to face the three cages. Only the Drugs I spend most of my time with are silent. They eye me warily and I wonder, idly, if I look quite as bad as them.

  Chip Wailing, from my old PE class, with his greasy, dead curls and the cleft in his chin even sharper now that he’s about twenty pounds lighter as a near zombie, still wears his letterman’s jacket, though now the white sleeves are stained with blood from his own cage matches the last few weeks.